Chuuya had never imagined himself in a white coat. Blood on his hands was nothing new, but usually, it wasn’t his job to stop it from flowing. Yet here he was—kneeling in the mud of a makeshift field hospital somewhere in France, pressing gauze against a soldier’s mangled leg while the low hum of distant artillery shook the canvas walls.

It had been Dazai’s idea, of course. “Why fight when we can save lives instead?” he’d said with that infuriating grin, like he’d already decided for both of them. Chuuya had scoffed at the time, but deep down, he’d agreed. Killing was easy. Keeping someone breathing when death was clawing at them? That was harder. That was worth something.

Their days blurred into a steady rhythm of chaos: carrying stretchers through smoke, sewing jagged wounds under the dim glow of a single oil lamp, listening to the guttural cries of men too young to be here in the first place. Dazai moved through it all with a strange calm, his hands steady no matter how bad it got. He teased Chuuya between patients, cracked jokes that made the orderlies roll their eyes, but his eyes… they were always watching, calculating, measuring whether the man on the cot would see morning.

Chuuya hated how much they needed each other here. Dazai had a way of pulling him back when the blood and the screams got too loud, a way of making the weight on his chest feel lighter, if only for a moment. And Chuuya, in turn, kept Dazai grounded—reminding him that even in a war like this, there was no room to give up.

They weren’t soldiers. Not really. But in this hell, with bandages instead of bullets, they were fighting their own war—one heartbeat at a time.