Chapter Text
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred days.
Profession: none, or ‘starlet.’
Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?
Why are you hiding, darling?
(I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze,
I cannot get out, said the starling.)
Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?
What make is the magic carpet?
Is a Cream Cougar the present craze?
Where are you parked, my car pet?
Who is your hero, Dolores Haze?
Still one of those blue-caped star-men?
Oh the balmy days and the palmy bays,
And the cars, and the bars, my Carmen!
Oh Dolores, that juke-box hurts!
Are you still dancin’, darlin’?
(Both in worn levis, both in torn T-shirts,
And I, in the corner, snarlin’.)
Happy, happy is gnarled McFate
Touring the States with a child wife,
Plowing his Molly in every State
Among the protected wild life.
My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?
L’autre soir un air froid d’opéra m’alita:
Son félé - bien fol est qui s’y fie!
Il neige, le décor s’écroule, Lolita!
Lolita, qu’ai-je fait de ta vie?
Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,
Of hate and remorse, I’m dying.
And again my hairy fist I raise,
And again I hear you crying.
Officer, officer, there they go -
In the rain, where that lighted store is!
And her socks are white, and I love her so,
And her name is Haze, Dolores.
Officer, officer, there they are -
Dolores Haze and her lover!
Whip out your gun and follow that car.
Now tumble out, and take cover.
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.
Ninety pounds is all she weighs
With a height of sixty inches.
My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.
Lolita , Vladimir Nabokov
I.
“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don’t.”
Rich wooden doors are shut tightly. Warm yellow lights are flicked off for the night. The hall is empty and devoid of daily foot traffic.
Beyond, heavy breathing pierces the silence. Sharp gasps and small mewls, low groans and quiet whispers reverberate through the mind and bang echoes around empty rooms.
All is placid and silent, still and cold and dark, beyond the locked door where love is made.
Dazai clings to the love he so graciously receives each night, euphoric in his gasps, muscles tensing and fists clenching and releasing to claw at another’s back.
No one else beyond the door will ever know how good it feels to be loved. To be held so thoroughly and filled with love so completely, it reaches up to his top and leaves him so full that nothing else can fit.
No one else will ever know the ecstasy that is given to him with the heat and the exhaustion and the stickiness that will cling for days after.
No one else will ever be loved as he is loved, desired and wanted and lusted after, for what is the difference but word choice? There is no difference at all, if it fills Dazai up all the same inside, and remains long after all the other things that fill him these nights.
It feels good and wanted and wonderful and validating, all the same as when it sometimes feels instead like it’s disgusting and painful and cloying and suffocating and sticky in a way that can never be washed off, even if he peels all his skin off in the process.
It’s wonderful, it’s good, it’s so good, as the squeaking of metal ceases and the weight above him settles down and multiplies. The bed frame makes a final sound of squeaky relief as a weight settles upon it and depresses it down, and Dazai wonders if perhaps he has made a squeaky little sound of his own.
Some nights, the absolute best part is after, when he is held and kissed and caressed and loved and cherished. He is beautiful and wonderful and desirable in the arms of a man who has loved him so.
Some nights it is the worst, to lay hot and wet and sticky and stuck to the arms of a man who has used him up.
Tonight it is good. So good.
If someone walked behind that door, they would not know, but Dazai so wishes they would. Wishes the whole world could know how much he is loved and how good he feels, filled with an ecstasy that keeps away the cold darkness that will consume him again in the morning.
This is love. This is love. Dazai so loves to be loved. This is what love is.
When he wakes up in the mornings, he is cold again, and filthy, covered in a grime he never remembers to wash off before drifting to sleep in the arms of the man who loves him no matter how many times he promises himself he will next time.
-
Dazai has always known that that is what love is. Love is a fire that burns white-hot, and when you get too close it scorches your skin and leaves you blistering. Inevitably, he was all but a moth when he saw flame, craving the light and warmth that lured him in, and caught too close to the flickering fingers of heat every time, left scorched and peeling.
Somedays, after a night full of love, Dazai is almost sure the metaphor is true, for his skin really does flush red and radiate heat, peeling off and begging to be scratched away. He is filled with the need to pull his skin away and replace it with something new and soft that has never felt the touch of flame. Something pristine and ignorant to the burn of fire.
After nights like that, Chuuya is usually the one who finds him in the morning, asleep on the floor with his skin rubbed raw from scratches that must have gone on for hours.
Chuuya is always kind and pulls the bandages that keep Dazai’s skin away from the world back around his raw arms. Usually, no more aid than a disinfectant salve and bandages is needed for nights like those, nails always kept too short to do forms of more major damage.
The nights where the scratching and clawing tore open still-healing cuts all along his forearm were always the longest, demanding much more care than his partner-turned-caretaker expected to give in the morning.
Chuuya would never know what crawled underneath Dazai’s skin that he was so desperate to get out, frantic in the kind of way that makes a person look mad, consumed by one thought alone that held on and would not release until morning came, like the myth of turtles that only let go when lightning struck.
All he knew is that something was always eating away at Dazai from the inside out, like a thing already dead. It was so easy to think that, when everyone around insisted it was true, including the corpse himself.
Chuuya would never understand that this was just love. Dazai really was a dead thing, a hollowed-out corpse, but the love his doctor gave him filled him up so there could be no room for any maggots to feast upon him. When his skin crawled, and he tried to scratch it off, that was just the after-effects of scorching love. It was good. It meant the carrion-eating scavengers couldn’t get to him.
The people around Dazai could not understand. They told him he was all wrong. They told him love did not burn. They told him he was human.
When Dazai recounted stories of nights he spent high and delirious with men he couldn’t recall the name of, his beloved Odasaku never looked at him with anything but a face twisted up and ugly. With his straight nose scrunched up, his brows furrowed, his mouth curved downward in a frown, Dazai could not make the emotion he displayed. So skilled in logic and prediction, yet left adrift when it came to anything human. He could not understand why Odasaku looked at him like that.
That face appeared the most when Dazai mentioned Mori. Tipsy and loose-lipped at their favorite bar, any face Odasaku had been making before would always melt into that confusing frown when that man was brought up.
Dazai was an enigma that spoke only in abstractions when you wanted specifics, and only in details when you wanted a full picture. Whenever the topic of the Port Mafia boss came around, Dazai could bear his heart out perfectly fine; only, it all came out in metaphors and allusions, analogies that twisted and turned and made the entire story incomprehensible. Nobody understood a single syllable of the rambling tales that spilled from high or drunken lips. Nobody but one, that beloved Odasaku who could always parse through the walls everyone else believed were indestructible.
“Ohh, tell me more about your day, Odasaku! I’ve got somewhere to be after that I really don’t want to be. Kill some of my time, please? Your job is always so interesting!” Dazai had said one night, teetering precariously on the high-top bar seat.
“I really didn’t do anything else today,” Oda had insisted for the third time that night. Already, he had recounted all the stories he had for Dazai for the day. “What are you avoiding so much anyway? I’ve never known you to be afraid of anything.”
Dazai ceased his wiggling atop his chair, falling still and serious.
“It’s not anything I’m afraid of,” he shook his head, the one visible eyebrow furrowing, “I just don’t want to. I had such a busy day today, you know. I’m tired.”
He sighed leaning over to rest his head on the bar top, tracing his finger around the lip of his whiskey glass.
“I’d rather listen to you than do most things anyways,” his lone red-tinged eye flickered back toward Oda, meeting his gaze. Part of it was obstructed from the way a small smile had made him squint. Only Oda saw that kind of genuine smile from him.
Oda didn’t respond, instead continuing to make eye contact with Dazai, silently urging him to continue and answer the actual question.
Dazai picked up on it and sighed, “It’s really nothing exciting, Odasaku. Just a routine late-night recon with the boss to go over details of today’s missions.”
A darkness settled in Dazai’s eyes every time Oda was allowed to peek just a bit into the sordid affairs of the mafia boss and his demon prodigy.
He knew it was never recon.
He said nothing, allowing Dazai the small peace of mind. It was the least he could do.
-
Some days it felt like those little mercies Odasaku afforded him were the only thing keeping Dazai breathing air, keeping him from going batshit insane, really going off the deep end in a way that couldn’t reverse.
Nights after conversations like those, those little olive branches felt entirely like they were the only thing he had.
Sitting there in a bar, knowing later he had to meet Mori, the ability to not speak of it was all he had left.
Truly, the anticipation was much worse than the event itself. Dazai could get himself so riled up and worried beforehand he felt sick, Mori always said. It was psychosomatic. Something he needed to get over.
Really, what was there to dread so horribly? It was just love. Mori never made it hurt. Except when he did. But that was beside the point.
If it hurt, he didn’t notice. If he lost a little of himself with every kiss and became a little more empty every time he was filled, he didn’t see it. Except when he did. But that was… whatever. There was not much to lose anyway.
He was high half the time regardless. Nerve endings worked almost as weirdly as memory retention at that point.
To be fair, what the substance of the day that ran through his veins was greatly varied how those nerve endings felt; if the poison, for instance, were lysergic acid diethylamide or a methamphetamine, it could feel electric, every light brush against his skin lighting him up in a feeling of euphoria that was strong enough it threatened to veer on the side of too much, if the dosage were just right. Ever the skilled doctor his lover was, the dosage was always just right, save for when it was not intended to be. If instead, the choice poison were morphine, or arylcyclohexylamine, or perhaps even carfentanil, if Mori really wanted to err on the side of near-overdose, left most touches feeling ghostly and ethereal. His mind was far too out there, his body too lost from the control he usually kept on such a tight leash.
No matter what had lived in Dazai’s veins and altered the feelings of the body he sometimes inhabited the night before, the day after was typically the same: Pounding headaches, a sense of lethargy, soreness on every inch of the corpse that refused to begin the decomposition process.
On the outside, at least.
The real, true constant, that permeated every single morning-after, no matter how the night had gone hours before, was the regret. The deep-rooted feeling of loss and of failure and of an emptiness that never ever filled, no matter how convinced his beloved doctor made him in the nocturnal rituals. No matter how desperate, how wanting, how needing Dazai could have been the night before, he could always count on the feeling that he had lost some game again in the sunrise.
Sometimes there was an in-between period, a god-given stillness between the exhausted sleep post-bliss and the lucidity that rose with the sun. Sometimes, as his consciousness first drifted out of slumber, he could have something even better than the nights. Sometimes, in the crepuscular light of dawn, Mori would hold him close, and Dazai would stay within those arms and not try to wriggle away, and the blankets were warm, and his wonderful doctor’s side was comfortable and sweet-smelling, and all felt still and loving and, for a moment, maybe even enjoyable.
When feelings like that arose, Dazai tried as best as he could to forget that the sweet smell was a honeytrap that smothered him and made him sticky all over again with whatever it was he spent hours trying to wash and scratch off in his own “room”.
Dazai learned early on that sometimes, it was good to be brainless. It was freeing to stop thinking, to stop predicting, to stop worrying about what came next, and to lock out all thoughts in exchange for an ever-fleeting warmth.
“I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again–and 'oh, no,' Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure–all would be shattered.”
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
II.
“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.”
Maybe the beginning of the end had started when Chuuya began to grow weary of Dazai’s antics.
It was a slow burn, at least, to Chuuya’s credit. A kid can’t really be blamed for an inability to care for and cope with a close friend constantly at threat of suicide or overdose or anything else. A seventeen-year-old shouldn’t be blamed for getting tired of the constant feeling of responsibility for the life of someone he worked with out of necessity.
It wasn’t always necessity, though. At the start, Chuuya and Dazai despised each other in equal measure; always fighting, always shoving, and always going out of their way to inconvenience each other. As the months went on and the atmosphere around them changed, their relationship did too.
They came to understand each other better, to listen, to know without trying what others couldn’t begin to. Mori was right- he always was. They were perfectly matched.
Where Dazai had an intellect that seemed to defy all logic and an ability to predict and plan as if he saw the future, he completely lacked any and all ability to understand the inner workings of the people around him. Emotion, sentiment, motivation, and all other factless facets of the psyche were foreign territory for Dazai, beyond his comprehension.
On the contrary, Chuuya was a man who felt intensely and constantly, always a flare of conviction and emotional reaction to most situations. Though intelligent in his own right, his ability to plan and strategize was a far cry from Dazai’s.
The result was this: a perfectly matched duo designed to pick up the other’s slack in all forms; perfectly suited to be strong where the other was weak, and vice versa.
The unfortunate side to this strategy, tragically, was that their personalities diametrically opposed each other. Like they were created simply to clash on any subject under the sun.
As fifteen-year-olds, both at the height of their immaturity (despite Dazai’s attempts to claim he was much too mature for his age), their contempt for each other was more real, genuinely not wanting to spend time together. When you put two teens alone in a room together, though, eventually they have to start talking. That was the methodology Mori abided by.
Like most methods Mori used, because he was always right in Dazai’s eyes (no he’s not he’s not always right he can be wrong he just-), it played out in due time. Dazai was isolated, Chuuya had lost dear friends, and both were the same age, the right gender for attraction, and adequately pretty for their standards. (Chuuya was more than just pretty- he was gorgeous. Pretty can’t be the only word- that’s practically an insult, even if Dazai didn’t mind insulting him).
Regardless, those factors did their job. In an environment full of violence and hastiness and adults who treated them like peers, it wasn’t really a far reach for that tension to turn into hate-fucking. That wasn’t what Mori had been going for, but… actually, who cared what he’d been wanting from it?
Chuuya was fun, exciting, maybe even exhilarating, a whole new feeling from the one Dazai reveled in from Mori. It wasn’t love, it wasn’t love, it wasn’t allowed to be, but it burned just as white-hot. It burnt and stung, but it never made his skin feel blistered and boiled and peeling off as real love did. Whatever it was, for which Dazai had no name, it was fun and time-consuming and it filled him up inside. The scathing looks Mori would burn into them when they were caught too close or touching too softly excited Dazai, letting him teeter on a vicarious tight-rope of infuriating one or another.
Dazai didn’t know when he and Chuuya’s relationship began to change. There were plenty of notable points in the span of their interactions that could have contributed to the shift of casual sex for the sake of convenience and close age to that of physical closeness that was actually craved through a deepening connection. It took an embarrassingly long time for someone as smart as Dazai to realize something had changed, and changed a while ago. It no longer felt the same- fast and rough and full of sharp edges, a hard game of tug-of-war that left both covered in lingering marks. At some point, it stopped being called stress relief and convenience, petty arguments that ended in pushing towards the closest closet to vent all that frustration out through a clumsy and hot rendezvous (ones that left the main thought in Dazai’s mind the day after a question of how Chuuya managed to hold him up like that with such a size difference- though maybe the wall helped. And Dazai’s lack of nutrition.)
When it began to be something else - something warmer, something kind and genuinely wanted and something more than ‘for the hell of it’ - Dazai couldn’t say.
All he knew was that one night, seventeen years old and laying sticky but cooling down on Chuuya’s comfortable bed sheets, it was not what it had been. When they were fifteen, he would have pointed the business end of a pistol at the head of anyone who could have tried to say that there would be a time where he and Chuuya genuinely held each other. But suddenly- there they were. The sudden realization sent adrenaline and cortisol zooming through his blood, a hilarious juxtaposition to the state of the boy pressed up against his side, who snored softly, already soundly asleep.
What really disturbed Dazai was not even the fact that Chuuya had an arm slung over his waist as the ginger dreamt against his side- it was that Dazai was letting him. That Dazai was lying there and not minding- that he enjoyed it- and that he wanted to fall asleep like this… every night.
It terrified Dazai, the sudden realization that this quiet moment of solace felt miles better than any morning wrapped up in Mori’s bed. He had spent nine years of his life understanding that he would never have anything else as good as what Mori gave him. Nine years of being told that he had already been given all that there was, and even if there were more, it was a commodity that he did not deserve. Nine years of knowing that love burnt and ever getting anything more would set him on fire and burn him up for good.
As Dazai laid in the placid night, dark and still, with a boy his own age asleep by his side after a night of sex that he’d wanted and liked, he noticed that his skin was soft, and his breath came steady, and he was not burnt at all.
~
Following that night, the time that was spent with Chuuya was leagues more fun- finally, they could actually talk like peers without shouting, though petty arguments lingered.
Also following that night, Mori’s touch scorched him worse than ever before.
Everyone knows of the phrase “ignorance is bliss”. Nobody knows, maybe, how deep and far that phrase can really go.
How easy it is to fall into that natural state of learned helplessness, complacent and accepting of a painful reality when you have always lived in it. It’s simple to not yearn for more when you have never experienced more. It is easy to accept what plagues you when you have never lived without it. How hard it is to go back to all of that when you are finally graced with a taste of something more.
Dazai did not know how much he did not want what Mori gave him until Chuuya began to give him something different.
He had had sex with plenty of other men before Chuuya and after Mori- but somehow, that was beside the point. All those other men felt so inconsequential, so minimal they didn’t really need to count. They were not as good as what Mori gave him, only desperate chases of intimacy when his dear doctor would not give it to him.
When Dazai began messing around with Chuuya, it was like getting hit with a sledgehammer- the realization that it could have always been this way.
When Chuuya did something that made Dazai’s mind freeze and begin to float away, eyes grow vacant and movements slow to a stop, the ginger stopped too. He stopped, and he looked at Dazai, and he asked him “what’s wrong?”
It turned out, that sometimes sex isn’t fun when the other person isn’t having fun with you. Sometimes, you only want it if you’re sure the other person wants it too. Sometimes, you don’t like it when the other person turns unresponsive and stops participating.
These ideas were Chuuya’s approaches to sex that Dazai had hardly ever entertained before. It bewildered him, the first time Chuuya had stopped to ask him if he was okay, if he didn’t like it, and why he looked only half present.
It bewildered Chuuya even more that Dazai found such concerns so foreign. That when Chuuya had asked, “you know you can say no, right?” In a way that had been intended to be rhetorical and obvious, Dazai had just looked at him with disbelief in his eye and simply said,
“Oh.”
~
“I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.”
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov