Of all the things Chuuya expected Dazai to have yet another hyperfixation on, the manga he is currently reading is certainly and most definitely the last.
This wasn't exactly the case, of course— Dazai had merely picked up the light novel said manga was based on from the bookstore on the way home one afternoon, the telltale silhouette of the young protagonist on the cover catching Chuuya's eye for a split second before he literally covered his mouth and focused his entire gaze on his laptop. Twitter minimized, spreadsheets open. He almost had a heart attack.
The next day saw Dazai falling into that rabbit hole faster than Chuuya himself had when he first got into the series. He was proud of himself for being past that phase now, so watching Dazai completely engrossed in every chapter brought a lot more satisfaction than he expected— of the "perverse payback" variant, that is. There is some "pure friend pride" in there, too, but definitely more "he had it coming".
Before long, Dazai was already caught up with all the volumes, and was now bugging Chuuya to get into the series, too. "You'll like Kashimura," he insisted, shaking his arm until it made them both dizzy as hell. Window's closed, fan's out of order.
Chuuya let Dazai rest in his bed with him that night, deciding he didn't mind the must and the lack of ventilation for once. He also let Dazai have the bottom bunk permanently, too, ever since— tall beanpole needs more legroom, after all.
He didn't tell Dazai his favorite character is Tsushima, of course. The idiot would either get a heart attack, or the weirdest love epiphany ever. Or spontaneously combust.
At least he didn't have to hide his real desktop wallpaper anymore. Always having that spreadsheet window open made his vertigo worse than it already is.
As time passed, Chuuya and Dazai spent more and more time discussing the series at length— about Tsushima's gray morals, Kashimura's loyalties, and everything in between. They ended up butting heads a lot due to preferring different source materials, but Chuuya slowly came to realize how much he was learning about himself over the past few months, and he was only prouder and happier for it.
It was why he made TaintedSorrow in the first place— he still had a lot of things to say, and Twitter was definitely more short-term memory-friendly than LINE BLOG.
The last thing he expected was for Dazai to follow his fan meta account, some two months and three hundred followers in. "He has really cool ideas," came the gushing reason, complete with cheeks vividly pink in excitement. It was the middle of winter, then, but Chuuya opened the window that very instant; once was more than enough.
Deciding last minute to not have his two accounts follow each other way back when was definitely the best thing he had ever thought of, by far.
He tapped on the follow button under Dazai's watchful gaze, making a mental note to clean out anything incriminating that very same night. It took a grand total of two hours.
Chuuya's finger hovered over Dazai's fan account— Humanixer . He didn't think much of this one international follower with a weird-as-heck name at first, but the Japanese was way too fluent for him to not suspect anything— as if it were desperately calling out to him, "Notice me!"
Then everything suddenly clicked into place: Human plus Nix, which apparently means "to cancel" or "to end".
Ningen shikkaku.
It brought Chuuya down on his knees, clutching his mouth and his sides in uncontrolled laughter as he realized what an idiot he was for not noticing his greatest fan is sleeping in the bunk below him, ohgods —
"You had me at 'Hello'," Dazai's bio read, short and sweet, the roundness of the English vowels foreign on his own tongue. More like "You had me at 'Hell'," Chuuya snorted as he followed back, hoping the overly-tall shit would remain none the wiser at this game of deception they both played. Otherwise, he'd get a heart attack or spontaneously combust the next time Dazai lovingly calls him a little shit, and he'd never recover from it.
He's definitely staying offline for a few days, at least. No sweat— schedule some tweets then make like a proverbial tree after. Hopefully Dazai doesn't do anything stupid by then, like outing his fan account to him or something, because he's not letting the idiot live it down after all that embarrassment he brought him. Right.