materialized: (pic♯17644388)
chuuya nakahara ([personal profile] materialized) wrote in [community profile] etrayalogs 2025-04-06 01:07 am (UTC)

[ Chuuya lifts the fedora off of his head. It's a predictable question, now, because he knows Dazai better than most people. Dazai is loud, annoying, he wants to die, and Chuuya hates that part of him more than anything - he can't stand it. He can't stand him. He can't stand that part of him.

He traces the inside rim of the hat, looking down at it, and he does pause to consider. Chuuya doesn't need to consider the question, no, not when it's one he's been confronted with so many times before. He doesn't need to, but here and now, talking like this, he considers the ramifications of it once more. He thinks on how much has been lost. He wonders what might have been with so many people - people that helped him, people who hurt him, those loved and hated and who didn't really matter at all. People who are still here, and people who slipped away from him as easily as water he'd scooped with his hands, dripping between his fingers and the gaps between the hands he'd pressed together.

Randou. Verlaine. The Sheep. The Flags. His men.

Dazai.

He traces once, twice, and there's this faraway feeling, something nostalgic and painful, like a longing for home. It comes and goes, slipping through his fingers and the gaps between his hands, and he places his hat back on his head.

The answer is obvious. ]


... Mori-san wasn't their leader. I was. If they got caught in the crossfire, it was 'cause I didn't protect them.

[ That's how all this nonsense started. It started because he failed them. It started because they were caught in the crossfire. It could even b said that Mori had given him the opportunity to save them by working with him. He'd saved him, because otherwise Chuuya might never have seen all the fractures running through them.

H wasn't a leader at all, really. ]


The Boss once told me what it meant to be a leader.

[ And there's a knowing look, one that comes and goes quickly, one that says that he suspects Dazai receives the same lecture - that he has the same understanding of how that man works. ]

Let me ask you the same: Would you destroy everyone around you to save a single person you cared for? If it were one single person versus the lives of dozens, hundreds, of others who matter to you, would you still choose to save them?

[ Chuuya isn't the brightest of the Port Mafia members. He's relatively simple in his way of thinking. He runs on emotion, he can be impulsive, he's hardly a strategist - but that's why they worked well together, why they still do. But he runs on emotion, and he cares too much, and they've both seen it. Seen how far a man will go for a single person. How far a person will go for an organization, for a city, how much those people will give up of themselves.

So of course he's thought of that too. ]


You really think you're better than him?

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