Chuuya Nakahara had grown up between velvet curtains and the scent of sawdust, his childhood echoing with the creak of stage floorboards and the soft hum of lighting rigs overhead. The theater was in his bones—more home than the cold hallways of his father’s estate, more familiar than the sound of his own name. And unfortunately, so was Dazai.

They’d grown up in the same wings, shadows of their fathers—who co-owned the place with the kind of strained camaraderie that came from old debts and older rivalry. Where Chuuya had taken quickly to the grind—hammering flats, adjusting rigging, climbing catwalks like he was born for it—Dazai had drifted in like a misplaced script, always smirking, always late, and always somehow still the center of attention. A born saboteur with a headset.

Now, years later, not much had changed. The two of them were still working crew, still locked into the rhythms of a life backstage: painting sets at midnight, holding ladders steady in dead silence, arguing in whispers during rehearsals because Dazai always had to push a button, flip a switch, or mutter something insufferable just loud enough to get on Chuuya’s nerves. They moved like two halves of a whole production—clashing constantly, but somehow syncing in all the right moments.

Chuuya liked to tell himself he was only still there out of responsibility—loyalty to the theater, to his father, to the legacy of it all. But the truth was harder to admit. He loved it. The quiet right before a show, the buzz in the pit, the rustle of the curtain before it rose. He loved being part of the invisible magic, the machinery that made someone else’s story come alive. And maybe—though he’d die before saying it out loud—he didn’t hate having Dazai beside him, smirking over a lighting console, making everything ten times harder than it had to be, and still pulling it off like it was effortless.

The theater was their battlefield, their sanctuary, their prison. They’d fought in the wings, stolen props from each other, sabotaged cue sheets, and shared dinners on the back steps in quiet, exhausted truce. No one really knew where one of them ended and the other began anymore. They were legacy kids, crew rats, a backstage cliché. And if Dazai ever left, Chuuya would probably never admit how wrong the place would feel without him.

But he didn’t have to think about that yet. Not when the next show was in tech week, and the scaffolding still needed reinforcing, and Dazai had just “accidentally” knocked over a bucket of paint right in front of the director. Again.

Chuuya sighed, grabbed a mop, and told himself—again—that this was just a job.

Even if it felt like the whole damn story revolved around them.