Every summer, like clockwork, Chuuya Nakahara found himself back in that same suffocating field, sweat sticking his shirt to his spine and raspberry thorns scratching red lines across his arms. It wasn’t punishment, not officially. Not detention. But it might as well have been. The program had a name—“Youth Character Development through Agricultural Engagement”—but everyone just called it what it was: The Bad Kid Farm.

You didn’t end up there unless you messed up. Skipped too many classes. Fought one too many kids. Got caught stealing, or talking back to the wrong adult. Chuuya’s rap sheet was a mix of all three. So here he was again—same sunburnt hills, same awful bus ride, same itchy gloves. He hated it. Hated the endless sun, the bugs, the hollow speeches about “responsibility” and “redemption.” He hated the other kids too, all trying to act tougher than they were, all thinking they were something just because they’d screwed up worse.

Then came the new guy.

He didn’t look like much at first—lanky, pale, with this bored, half-lidded stare like he was already planning his escape route. Osamu Dazai. He said his name like he was someone important, like you were supposed to know him. The supervisors didn’t like him. Said he was lazy, uncooperative, strange. Chuuya didn’t like him either. Until he did.

It started with an offhand comment, some smartass remark Dazai made when the heat was particularly brutal and everyone’s tempers were about to snap. It made Chuuya snort. Then they got paired for picking. Then came the conversations, always laced with sarcasm, always teetering on the edge of a fight but never quite going over.

Dazai wasn’t like the others. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t trying to prove anything. If anything, he looked like someone who had already given up. But there was something about the way he moved, the way he watched people—quiet, calculated. Chuuya caught him once lying in the tall grass with his eyes closed, face turned to the sun like he could disappear if he stayed still long enough. Another time, he found Dazai writing something in the dirt with a stick. A poem, maybe. Or a plan.

They didn’t talk about why they were there. Not really. But in the silence between raspberry bushes, under the hum of bees and the burn of the sun, something unspoken started to settle between them. Not friendship. Not yet. But a pull. A curiosity.

Chuuya hated the farm. Hated the rules, the heat, the endless repetition. But that summer, for the first time, it wasn’t unbearable. Because Dazai was there. And whether they were arguing, competing to fill their buckets faster, or lying in the shade pretending they didn’t have thorns in their hands and dirt in their shoes, Chuuya felt something shift. Like the summer wasn’t just punishment anymore.

It was something else. Something he didn’t have words for yet.

But he knew one thing: this wouldn’t be the last summer he spent with Dazai. Even if he had to end up here again to make it happen.