He isn’t a dog. He is certainly not stupid.

Because he isn’t stupid, he can see that Dazai doesn’t quite hate him as much as he says he does. Dazai is fascinated. Chuuya can tell in the way Dazai looks at him sometimes like something he can use (like some kind of experiment he’s conducting) and it makes his stomach churn because he wants to be useful, but on his terms. Not because Dazai decided he was useful. Chuuya can decide his own usefulness.

Dazai keeps his distance at first. After being taken from the beach with a knife in his back that he wants to stab Dazai with and poison coursing through his veins, the next time Chuuya sees Dazai is in passing in the hallway of one of the Port Mafia’s skyscrapers. There’s another, younger kid with Dazai who looks a bit lost and scared. As they pass each other, Chuuya feels Dazai’s gaze on him and he turns to look back so that they lock eyes.

The look is fleeting enough that it’s only that — them looking at each other, observing. Chuuya hopes that Dazai will stay with Mori and that kid and do whatever it is that annoying smart kids do. He’s fine training with Kouyou even if learning proper fighting technique hurts, and even if Golden Demon stabs him more often than he’d like to admit.

He still refuses to use his fists on anyone but Dazai, but he won’t hesitate to use them on Kouyou’s Ability or anything that isn’t alive, like walls. The training area gets destroyed that way, but the Mafia apparently has money to build it back up over and over again so it looks like Chuuya was never there at all.