Chuuya Nakahara didn’t ask for much in life—just a good knife, dry socks, and clients who didn’t piss themselves at the first sign of a snake. He’d been doing this long enough to know the type: city slickers with expensive boots, zero instincts, and a desperate need to prove they were more “in tune with nature” than they really were. So when some overly chatty photographer-slash-content creator slid into his inbox asking for a private survival guide through the Amazon rainforest, Chuuya almost deleted the message on the spot.

Almost.

Because the guy—“Dazai Osamu,” he said, like he expected the name to mean something—was offering a ridiculous amount of money. Enough to make Chuuya squint at the screen, reread the digits, and then mutter a reluctant “fuck it” before replying.

He’d expected some pampered narcissist with a drone and a death wish. What he got was worse.

Dazai showed up at the rendezvous point looking like he’d just walked off the set of a fashion shoot. Wide-brimmed hat, smug grin, camera slung carelessly around his neck, and zero sense of self-preservation. Chuuya watched him hop out of the boat and immediately step into ankle-deep mud like it was nothing. When he laughed it off—“Whoops, guess nature likes me already!”—Chuuya knew this trip was going to kill one of them.

Still, a job was a job. And Chuuya was damn good at his.

He’d spent years surviving in the worst conditions Earth had to offer—blistering heat, jungle rot, monsoon rains, predatory wildlife, and worse: idiot influencers who thought filming themselves eating bugs made them rugged. But this guy didn’t even pretend. Dazai didn’t eat bugs. He asked too many questions. He flirted with danger like it was a game. And somehow, somehow, he always managed to get the perfect shot, standing too close to the edge of cliffs or crouching near venomous snakes like he wasn’t seconds from being front-page news.

What really pissed Chuuya off wasn’t Dazai’s recklessness—it was the fact that Chuuya kept catching himself looking. At his hands when he adjusted the camera. At his profile outlined in the hazy jungle sunlight. At the grin that made even the hellish humidity feel lighter.

Stupid.

Chuuya wasn’t here for that. He was here to get the job done: keep Dazai alive, get him his damn footage, and get paid. That was it. No babysitting. No flirting. No letting that stupid, smug bastard get under his skin.

Easier said than done.

Because somehow, between the mosquito bites and the machete swings, the nights filled with the low rumble of howler monkeys and the ever-present threat of things that slithered in the dark, Dazai started to feel less like a client and more like... something else. Something complicated. Something irritatingly charming. And maybe, just maybe, someone who saw more of Chuuya than most people ever did.

Chuuya didn’t trust it. Didn’t trust him. But when Dazai looked up at him with a glint in his eye and said, “You make surviving kind of fun, y’know that?”—Chuuya didn’t snap back like he should’ve.

He just turned away, muttering something about mosquitoes, and told himself it was just a few more days.

He could survive anything. Even Dazai Osamu. Probably.