Work Text:
"Odasaku," Dazai says, letting his head hit Oda's shoulder as he whirls around, boneless, "can I come to your place?"
"Are you drunk?" Ango asks.
"No," Dazai says.
"Yes," Oda says. Dazai flings his arms out in an impressive show of balance for someone who is absolutely drunk, walking a few steps backwards. It's a straight line, which is something of a feat, the soles of his dress shoes scraping across the asphalt, stray stones skittering away.
"Could someone drunk do this?" Dazai asks, and spins like a child pretending to be an airplane.
"You could," Oda replies, and Dazai frowns faintly. He takes his arms back in, then stretches them out in front of him like a cat before he looks away.
"How can you tell?" Ango asks. He adjusts his glasses, squinting a little at Dazai under the yellow streetlights as though it would help him tell Dazai's level of inebriation.
"He thinks more," Oda offers, and Dazai looks at Oda with his eye wide for a split second before his expression is replaced with that of a particularly offended cat who has just failed to make a jump and is now being laughed at.
"I do not," Dazai says. He reaches up, snagging the sleeve of Oda's jacket between his fingers and waggling it back and forth. Oda lets his arm go limp, letting it flap willingly under Dazai's touch. "Odasaku. Odasaku, I do not."
"Okay," Oda agrees. "Maybe you think more deliberately."
Dazai gives Oda's arm one more petulant flop before he lets it go.
"I still want to come over to your place," Dazai says. "Which has nothing to do with me being drunk."
The thing is, if Oda lets Dazai into his home, god only knows what havoc will result from that. Dazai is a whirlwind, and Oda knows that and accepts it, but that doesn't mean he wants to put the centralized disaster in the middle of his crappy apartment.
Oda also acknowledges that this is about the third time Dazai has requested this, so there's only so many more times he can decline before Dazai's just going to override his protests and break in.
"Fine," Oda says. "You can come over and sleep off your hangover."
Dazai brightens visibly, and Ango rolls his eyes, also visibly.
"Then I'll be going home," Ango says, and adds, a little firmly, when Dazai opens his mouth, "alone."
"You're no fun," Dazai says, but it isn't accusative. He falls into step next to Oda, waiting patiently for Oda to take the lead even though Oda is well aware that Dazai knows both where he lives and how to get there.
"So you've said," Ango says, wryly. "Then, I'm off."
Dazai waves him off, amicably, with a bright smile that he doesn't let fall until Ango has fallen out of sight. He drops his hands into his pockets, after that, gazing up at the sky.
"Wow," he intones. "There's more stars than usual."
"That's because you're seeing double," Oda says, because even the sketchiest back alleys of Yokohama are far too brightly lit for anyone to see all that many stars. He glances up at the sky and sees nothing but the brightest ones. Anything less is pushed into the background noise of the universe, destined to never be seen even by the few people who bother to look up in the depths of the city.
"There's only one Odasaku," Dazai says, and turns his gaze to Oda. With one eye bandaged, it redirects all the intensity to his visible eye. It would be discomforting, if Oda wasn't used to it by now.
"How many street lamps are there?" Oda asks, and can't quite keep the amusement from his voice when Dazai looks ahead of them and squints.
"Too many," Dazai says, waving his hand carelessly. "I don't want to count."
Oda knows that Dazai, from that glance, knows exactly how many street lamps there are. If Dazai's seeing double, it's hardly a barrier between him and his level of understanding; Oda is sure he'd be able to figure out reality from drunken blur in an instant.
He accepts the lie, though, because Dazai probably doesn't want to count. Probably didn't even intend to, when he looked at them. Oda thinks Dazai must operate on a level where he doesn't even consciously think about the things he knows – he can infer them automatically, the same way Oda can tell instantly when he's overslept, or what ingredients have been changed up in curry.
"Hey, Odasaku," Dazai says. "How did you really know how drunk I was?"
Oda blinks. "It's just what I said. You do everything deliberately, all the time, but it's more deliberate the more you drink."
There's always a split instant where Dazai selects his own reactions, slides a mask on over his own face. Oda doesn't want to do him the disservice of assuming anything Dazai does is a lie – he isn't sure if Dazai even knows what parts of himself are a lie – but he knows that that mask is firmer, the more inebriated Dazai is. The further Dazai gets from his own thinking, the stronger he clamps down on it. He doesn't let himself escape.
"You're the only one that's noticed," Dazai murmurs, voice dropping to match the quiet background noise of Yokohama.
"Huh," Oda says, because he can't imagine he's the only one that noticed, given the kind of people Dazai tends to hang around with, but he's not going to correct him, either.
Dazai seems to be chewing on this information in his own way, gazing into the road ahead without seeing any of it. He's still nimble; he never trips over a crack, he can always tell the second Oda's body moves to make a turn and follow along. He takes in all the information around him without even having to think about it.
Oda knows a lot of people are envious of Dazai's intellect, but Oda mostly just feels sympathy. Even Oda can't reach him, where he's locked away. He knows better than to try. He'll just stay put right where he is for the times that Dazai can let himself drop down to a realm filled with normal humans.
Dazai shivers, rather violently, when a gust of wind tears down the street. It's not exactly warm, at this hour, and Dazai never wears that overcoat of his when they're drinking, these days, so it must rip right through his suit jacket.
Oda doesn't even think about it as he takes his coat off and drops it on Dazai.
Dazai grips it automatically, arms crossing over each other to hold it in place on his shoulders, and turns a bewildered look onto Oda.
"Odasaku?" he asks, his voice smaller, coming from further away. It makes him seem younger – no, that isn't right. It makes him seem more like the age he actually is. Eighteen is barely an adult, for anyone outside of the Port Mafia.
"You were cold, right?" Oda offers, because there's not much else he can say. It was a spur of the moment thing. If he'd offered it, he's sure Dazai would have rejected it, claiming that Odasaku should keep it himself, or that Dazai was willing to commit suicide by catching a cold, or something.
"I guess I was," Dazai replies, and sounds genuinely puzzled about it, like he hadn't even noticed his own body's reactions. Like he'd been so far away in his mind that he'd left the physical realm completely behind.
Dazai pulls the coat closer around him, like he's doing his best to leech any remnants of warmth out of the fabric. It's not that warm of a coat. Oda really just gave it to him on impulse.
Still, it lasts until they get to Oda's place. It's not exactly nice by any standards, but it's home, and Oda lets Dazai inside and follows after him.
"Wow," Dazai intones, looking at one of the cracks in the plaster.
"You don't have to stay the night," Oda says. "I know it's pretty crappy."
"I've lived in worse," Dazai offers, nonchalantly, shrugging one shoulder up. "And those places didn't have Odasaku in them."
Odasaku doesn't really know what to say in response to that except to be quietly overwhelmed by the implications in that statement.
"Glad to be of service," he offers, instead, and Dazai just hums a little laugh in response. Dazai watches him, catlike, leaning back against the kitchen counter, his fingertips still gripping onto Oda's coat like a lifeline.
"I'll sleep with you," Dazai says, decisively, when Oda has one hand on his singular spare blanket. Caught rather off-guard, Oda straightens, looking at Dazai. Dazai makes eye contact for a brief second, and then – pointedly; deliberately – looks away.
"It's not a very big space," Oda says. It isn't quite a denial. It's a plausible out that he knows Dazai won't take, if Dazai's gotten this far.
Dazai seems to come to a conclusion of some sort. He steps over to Oda, letting his hands fall for the first time since Oda'd given him the coat. It stays on his shoulders like it was meant to fit there.
"I'm not drunk," Dazai informs him, and Oda thinks that's a pretty odd statement to say up until Dazai kisses him, and Oda's brain sends off several alarm bells. Dazai still tastes like alcohol; he keeps his eye open until Oda raises his hands, plants them on Dazai's shoulders, and kisses him back. Dazai melts into him, sagging into his grasp until Oda is pressed back against the wall with an armful of mafia executive.
"Oh," Oda says. "You're not drunk anymore."
Dazai can tell that Oda isn't quite keeping up, so he lets his head fall onto Oda's shoulder and speaks into his collarbone for a moment, his breath too warm on Oda's skin.
"Because Odasaku is a good person," he murmurs. "If I was drunk, you'd think you were taking advantage of me."
Oda doesn't think anyone has ever managed to take advantage of Dazai in his entire life, but – yeah, that's probably the protest he would give, in all fairness. He's kind of touched Dazai thinks he's that good of a person.
"Dazai," Oda says, gently, and Dazai looks up at him. "My walls are really thin."
Dazai doesn't pout. He just absorbs this with a faint nod. He's still looking through Oda, fixated on something Oda can't get a glimpse of.
"That's fine," Dazai says. "Just keep kissing me."
Despite this command, Dazai is the one to kiss Oda again – and again, and again, and again. He winds up settled into Oda's lap while Oda sits on the half pulled out futon, back still against the wall. Dazai seems a little subdued: Oda thought he might still try and get whatever it was he was intending to get, tonight, but… Maybe that really was just an intense makeout session.
Oda can respect that.
Dazai does make a pretty picture every time he pulls back – red lips and an uncharacteristic flush across his cheeks. It's not that Oda's never thought of him as attractive before, it's just that Dazai's in such a league of his own that Oda couldn't hold onto the thought for very long.
It's always lonelier at the top, Oda thinks.
"I'm still staying the night," Dazai says, quietly, and Oda reaches up to ruffle Dazai's hair. Dazai looks briefly offended by this, but after a few seconds, he leans into it like a cat.
"Yeah," Oda says. "I'm not making you leave."
Dazai doesn't. He kisses Oda again until the dark of the room and the lateness of the hour start to drag even the Demon Prodigy's limbs into a heavy, saturated stillness. He winds up passed out on Oda's shoulder, still half in his lap, fully dressed, with Oda's coat tucked around his shoulders.
Oda maneuvers him enough that they can both be laying down, and Dazai stirs just enough to roll definitively back into Oda, to tangle his hands into Oda's clothing like a lifeline.
"Odasaku," Dazai murmurs. "Thank you."
"For what?" Oda asks, but gets no answer save for Dazai's rhythmic breathing.