Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter twenty-six

Chuuya POV

The bathroom door was open when I woke up the next morning. The light was still on, just barely filtering through the slight opening in the door. There was no sound anywhere in our small hotel room, no quiet footsteps or the sounds of anyone moving about.

For some reason that didn't sit right with me.

During long missions Dazai is always the first one up, most likely not having gone to sleep the night before. He always took the night shift, keeping watch to make sure no one tried to come into our room when they shouldn't. Everytime that I would wake up during a mission, it would be from the sounds of the shower going, the younger teen brushing his teeth, the boy packing everything while I still slept.

But never to silence.

Never like this.

Something heavy settles on my chest as I scramble off of the bed, nearly tripping over the bags that I had thrown onto the floor carelessly last night. My body was no longer slowed from sleep, but something akin to dread. I saw my hand on the bathroom door knob more than I felt the cool metal beneath my fingertips pulling it farther open with a slow tug of my arm.

I couldn't tell the moment that my heart stops, that my breath violently catches in my throat. I couldn't tell when I finally let go of the door knob, because there was a body on the floor. There was a boy laying in the middle of the bathroom floor, the tiles around him stained red.

A boy with bandages on his skin that looked too much like someone else.

The boy had black hair crumpled together in odd chunks, almost as if someone poured glue on it. The bandages decorating the body looked all but drunkenly put on, gaps of skin peeking out hazardously from beneath them in ways that it shouldn't. The boy's shorts were hanging low on his hips, revealing the thin and orderly rows of scars at the hip bone that would normally be covered by clothes and properly worn bandages. Despite the changes I still knew who it was.

Dazai.

Laying on the floor, covered in his own blood like it was some kind of blanket.

I could feel my breathing growing ragged as I looked down at the scene that the other teen had created while I slept. I knew that the other boy did things like this, everyone did despite never having seen it for themselves. A never ending assortment of bandages donning the teens skin, the occasional favoring of one arm over the other, it could only mean so many things. But it had never been this bad.

I shook my head violently, trying to trick my body into regaining the ability to move.

It could always be this bad and I just wouldn't know. I don't care enough to know. I pick fight-real fights-with the other teen when I'm angry and never let the younger boy explain, only let my hate of him grow as some kind of justification for how I ended up here.

How would I know if this, waking up in his own blood like this, was the other teen's normal or not. I don't even know where he lives to check on the younger boy if it is, though he knows where I live and always pries the bottle from my hands when I'm too drunk to know to quit.

Falling to my knees by the boy, I noticed in faint horror that there was blood on my, on my knees, my hands, my bare feet. His blood. My vision shook at the sight, but I ignored the feeling of drowning that wanted to take over. This wasn't the time to be worried about myself.

"Dazai," I mumbled, shaking the other teen's shoulder slightly, watching in mute horror as the blood from my hands stained the previously clean bandages there.

"Dazai," I said again, a little louder this time. "Come on, wake up."

The other teen still didn't move, but at least being this close I could see the younger's light breathing, the only proof that the other was still alive.