They argue about you. Not cruelly — or rather, not only cruelly — in the way that Dazai and Chuuya argue about everything: as a form of communication that evolved in the absence of softer options.
Dazai has, somehow, in the space of one afternoon, convinced three separate merchants, a city official, and a moderately large stray dog that you are his devoted spouse, Chuuya is your tragically overworked manservant, and all three of you are visiting from Kyoto on pilgrimage business.
The paper lanterns are still burning when Dazai finds you in the garden, ink-stained and barefoot on the veranda stones. He doesn’t announce himself. He never does. He just folds himself down beside you like he belongs there — like you are a room he has always had the key to — and picks up the brush you set aside without asking permission.
He leaves notes. Not letters — notes, tucked into the sleeve of your haori, slipped under the lacquer tray, folded inside the book you were reading. Jokes, small, minute observations, flirting.
Chuuya has killed men cleaner than this. He knows how to make it fast, humane even, if such a word applies — but the Port Mafia’s patience has a shape, and sometimes that shape is time, and tonight you are waiting with him in the dark of a Yokohama alley while he does something slow and ugly that his face goes completely blank for. He doesn’t look at you while he works. Afterward, he washes his hands in the gutter water and says nothing, and you understand that this is the part he has never shown anyone, and that showing you is not the same as asking you to be okay with it.