Chapter Text
“Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five!”
~.~.~
“… Four! Three! Two! One—”
White.
~.~.~
“Thank you for your services!”
~.~.~
No, not white.
He’s burning his senses in light.
~.~.~
“What did I lose?”
~.~.~
Is it the sun? Why is he staring into the sun?
A fiddly attempt at suicide. He must be hurting himself again. The worst damage will burn his retina. Render him blind. It’ll be enough to get him out of work.
Maybe not by his boss’ standards. Mori has other reasons to get rid of him.
~.~.~
He can see again.
Before him, his fist hovers loosely mid-air. Quite the lousy fist-bump. Especially with no one to receive it. But alas, it is not a fist-bump. He opens his palm. Finds he is holding three copper coins.
“Thank you for your services!”
He lifts his gaze beyond the pebbled pavement.
A father bows politely to an operator. The operator opens the barrier so that a daughter can dismount an oversized teacup and unite with her father.
These surroundings are antithetical to his mafia base. Light bulbs blink with too high fluorescence, the smell of hot popcorn is slathered too greasily. The only thing this place has in common with the Port Mafia is that children are restrained under metal bars.
The rides and booths and fairy floss are saturated by neon and rainbows.
Dazai Osamu stands at the heart of a carnival.
Back to work. He thinks. If it’s not dying then he’s probably working. Though getting back to work is harder it seems. As soon as he tries to walk, he faceplants into the pavement.
A flood of feet parts either side of his body. Children shriek and giggle over him.
He’s grazed his chin. It’s a nasty sting. He prefers it over staring into the sun. He hisses between his teeth, heaves himself onto his elbows and— He’s not wearing his clothes (for the sake of urgent clarification, he is not naked. Just what he’s wearing right now isn’t his clothes). Instead, what he finds around his arms are the sleeves of a tan trench coat and the clothes inside the coat a similar palette of brown. It’s all a size too large. At least he can still feel all his body’s bandages underneath them. Though his face is too bare for his liking.
He turns his head over his shoulder. Finds the culprit behind his fall — long beige trousers (also not his) that flop over his heels. A few paces behind, someone else groans on the ground. Sounds like a similar victim. Dazai refocuses his gaze to his fallen companion and sees
White.
On the hair of the boy’s head.
The kid looks less than ten, drowning in a pair of black, adult-size pants. He wipes his brow with an overhanging white sleeve. As he pushes himself onto his knees loose items spill out his clothes.
Dazai whips around to swipe the loot.
The boy jolts. Falls back on his bum.
It’s a cracked cell phone, coin purse and two orange admit-one tickets — yet to be hole-punched. Dazai pockets these into the trench coat he wears. “Was that your phone?” He asks.
The boy fails to blink.
“Are those your clothes?”
The boy swivels his head left to right.
Dazai springs onto his feet, bandaged arms saluting the human-humid air. “Yippee!” He cheers. “Let’s follow me!”
The boy follows him out of the carnival.
They’re finally back on the quieter and paler streets. Dazai can’t wait to die. They’re definitely in Yokohama. The mafioso recovers the mental map of his city turf after glancing at a street sign. Though, he doesn’t remember the streetlights lining the road being so tall and… updated. He much preferred the ghostly romance of the vintage lamp posts. Their ember-lit caskets and spear-head tops that would efficiently impale you if you fell over one from the height of a bus. Chuuya always did accuse him of being disgustingly dramatic. Dazai didn’t even have the chance to mourn his beloved lights. He would have only seen the lamp posts recently. He frequents this street all the time. He would have last seen them…
He can’t remember.
He swishes to the right. Causes a sequential thud. The boy behind had followed too close and was slapped by the tail of the tan trench coat. He’s fallen on the pavement again. His head of white hair sink in his oversized shirt collar like a tortoise retracting into its shell.
“Oops!” Dazai intones joyously despite his fault for the injury. He resumes prancing along the street. Peels his gaze to the side.
The boy scrambles on all fours and immediately returns to his position one step behind, within the danger zone of being slapped by the coat a second time. It’s enough to know he’s incompetent. He wouldn’t last half a second in the Port Mafia. Not only that. Even just a kid with parents would know not to follow the instructions of a stranger so attentively.
Something slips from Dazai’s left arm. His bandage is loosening. He pushes it back up inside the sleeve whilst peering to the streets ahead, as far as his naked eyes can see, only to find every vintage lamp post replaced.
They’re sitting in a bakery café now. A bakery café that was an arcade a few days before. Or sometime recently. Dazai still can’t remember. As he and the boy sit opposite to each other in a booth, he fiddles with the cell phone. He had dug though the pockets of tan trench coat but found nothing that hadn’t been taken from the kid.
It’d be nice if he died by now. The two orange tickets slip out his pocket. He stuffs them back in.
The phone screen is badly damaged. He can’t even read the time. The kid likely crushed it after he first fell. Dazai holds the pixelated rectangle up to his nose. Squints at the list of phone contacts. He’s quick to find his own name. He doesn’t recognise any other. As he forcefully punches in the keypad, he feels his bandages unravelling again. Needless to be concerned. They’re mostly covered by the clothes he wears anyway. Not even he can see what’s underneath. But still, with elbows balanced over the table, each forearm propped upright, he pinches out loops of white cotton, tightens them around each wrist. He pulls and yanks at his bound spirals, the vessels in his arms satisfyingly strangled.
It’s taken ten blocks for the boy sitting before him to thaw out of his gawking stare. Now his gaze is glued to the brightest attraction of the café — the glass cabinet filled with gourmet sweets. The swollen pastries and their glossy lids are picturesque enough to untether anyone’s temptation to drool down their tongue. Dazai clasps the boy’s coin purse inside the pocket of the trench coat. It has the substantial weight in it. Even the three copper coins found in his fist could afford a shortbread or tiny cupcake from the kiddie section.
The boy’s head of white hair stays fixed towards the edible luxuries. He grips his oversized white shirt. He scrapes the skin underneath. He tries to wrench the organ in his tummy, as if the pain in doing so would be more bearable than the current living churnings he suffers inside.
Upon being watched, the boy glances over to the seat opposite to him.
Dazai turns his head to look out the window.
The mafioso formulates a ratio as he returns to walking outside. One thud and sniff for every ten steps. By this point, the boy has fallen over so many times his shirt and skin have scuffed grey. That makes one-hundred-and-eighteen steps since they left the bakery café. Accumulating so many injuries at such a fast rate, Dazai is bewildered by the boy not figuring to adjust his walk. All it takes is to tie the waistline. Or if knots are too hard, the kid can hold up the pant legs. Even ditching the pants altogether would be acceptable with the white shirt hanging as low as a gown.
One-hundred-and-twenty-nine steps in and the predicted ungraceful thud from behind ceases to be heard.
Dazai sighs, exasperated. He swivels around.
The boy had already fallen nine steps ago. Since then, he has not moved from the ground.
The man stands over the waxy hair. “Get up.”
From the footpath, the boy lifts his forehead. He listens. He lodges his fists under his chest to heave himself but his arms are legs. Legs of a wonky table. And all collapses back into a heap of discarded property.
Dazai waits for him to try again.
The boy remains motionless.
The boy speaks. “Maybe I should stop trying.”
Dazai swoops the boy off the ground and slings him over his shoulder. He carries the body like a burglar running from the bank. A child kidnapper. His thin frame isn’t ideal for weightlifting. Yet over his stick limbs and spine the boy feels featherlight. They are bones carrying bones. A crooked pair.
The mafioso passes by an alleyway, a storefront a few steps down fleeting by his eyesight. Its window is dim but his vision snatches three stools. Filed in single line across the counter. And his mind fills in the rest of the picture of swirling wooden grain, bobbing round ice, warm overhanging lights. The three stools are occupied.
Ango. Dazai. Odasaku.
The bar is still here. The man is comforted by this golden glow of memory and wants to call back his friends.
But Dazai hasn’t stopped. He carries the kid across the street.
~.~.~
Dazai can’t stare into the sun even if he tried. He spins on the rooftop of a medical centre the horizon he scans is smothered ill by smoke. Even the sky has a ceiling. It’ll make it harder to ascend past it. To meet his lifelong wish.
He pushes up the sleeve of the trench coat to attend to the messy bindings of his forearm. He undoes a twisted loop, rips a length, re-ties the wrist’s shredded ends to make a white butterfly. The spare length is then wound under his fringe, folded over his right eye. His right eye healed a long time ago. He could ask himself whether it still hurts. But he feels his strands of hair tangle with the knot he makes behind his head, their duct-tape tear at the back of his scalp. Now his panorama of Yokohama is halved by dark. For the first time today or half of today, he feels more like a usual self, someone’s usual self. Someone peppy to die.
Dazai spies the crammed building blocks. The roads jammed with traffic. The grinding cavity that is Yokohama is pierced by the five sore thumbs of the Port Mafia’s towers.
His alien home.
On the rooftop, the mafioso smuggles the boy between two walls stacked out of wooden crates. Just as he’s about to drag boxes to cover the entrance, the boy falls again. But not because of his oversized clothing.
“Please.” The soiled child whimpers at Dazai’s feet. “Don’t leave.”
Dazai does not react to the gesture. Only spectates from where he stands. Offers no consolation to a speck below the boulder.
“I don’t want to go back to the orphanage,” the boy continues. “Please don’t take me back. I’ll do whatever you ask and you don’t need to pay. The grown-ups at the orphanage… they don’t want me to come back.” The boy clasps his hands over his head.
An elephant tied down by a peg is least able to run.
“Don’t take me back,” he pleads again. “… Though they also said there’s nowhere I can go… that I should—” The boy’s breath quickly fades.
Dazai shuffles from foot to foot as he continues to play with the cracked cell phone.
The wretched thing on the floor remains at his disposal.
The fumbling over the phone gradually diminishes, the mafioso bending down to the wounded animal. In a hush, he beckons, “Atsushi Nakajima.”
Upon his call, the head of white hair rises from the ground. And only now does Dazai allow himself to see the damage he didn’t prevent. The boy’s temples rubbed raw to the cheekbone. The forehead cross-hatched in leaden red. The graze on Dazai’s chin is a mere trace in comparison and his head bound by bandages attempts to search beyond the other’s cuts and bruises, the concave underweight cheeks. There is a face smaller than his own and from this stranger’s face he sees
Light.
Bursting purple and yellow in the boy’s irises. No one could be forgotten with eyes in such an explosion.
Dazai faces the phone screen towards him. “I don’t know who you are but some version of me listed myself as your number one contact. Something tells me I need to take care of you.”
What is Odasaku like when he speaks of his kids? His warmth swells with the slightest smile.
Dazai imitates his friend’s face now. “Our goal today is to take you home. And don’t worry, it’s not the orphanage.” He turns off the phone, lays it flat across his lowered palm.
The boy splashes in his overhanging clothes, his purple-yellow eyes gaping. “You’re giving this… to me?”
“It’s yours after all.”
Upon the gesture, the boy’s already broken face scrunches inwards, brimming with a gratitude for someone — likely to be the first ever to speak to him without delivering shame or punishment. It’s this teary-eyed wonder, which cracks Atsushi’s forehead, restores deep red ooze across his scabbed wounds. “Th-thank you! Sir!” Atsushi cries.
“Now stay quiet for a few minutes. Good boy.”
The mafioso closes the wall of crates. Leaves just enough gap so it is not completely dark for the boy huddled inside. Walks across the rooftop. Dazai must exploit every opportunity in this current situation including that kid. He’ll demolish another hundred brains to achieve whatever he needs. Our goal today is to take you home. Atsushi’s a fool for believing he’s been offered such great wonder from the cosmos.
The mafioso steps onto the ledge. He leans over.
The toes of the black work shoes he wears but doesn’t recognise peek over the rooftop’s edge. He teases the seven-storey expanse of nothing if he were to shuffle just a little closer. If he were to fall, he would likely land between the white broken lines of the road. There’s also the comical chance of hitting the hood of a passing car. Like colliding trajectories. On the same timeline. How delicate would the music be for his bones to ring like fine china. Refine to crystal along the ash felt strip. His organs blossom so far they scatter up the sidewalks. Shrapnel made of roses.
The Port Mafia executive standing atop the seven-storey building longs for his lifelong wish to die.
It's a long drop. The gap between the road’s white lines seem so far. But the man decides he’ll get there as soon as this current mess is solved.
The door to the rooftop blasts from its hinges. “DAMN YOU, DAZAI!”
The sun is masked from the sky. Dazai strains it into his cheeks. “Ah, theory tried and proven!” He sighs with relief and turns around. “I knew you would find—”
“STOP BEING AN ASS TO MY SCHEDULE!” Another man booms from the other side of the roof. “I HAVE BEEN WAITING FIVE HOURS FOR YOUR REPORT AND YOU DARE NOT TO SHOW UP AT WORK SO I MADE THE KID FETCH YOU AND EVEN THEN I HAD TO USE THE EMERGENCY GPS TRACKING HIS PHONE.”
“So, it really does work.” Dazai glances to the fort of crates. “I’m not sure if I would call this an emergency. Maybe an invasion of privacy?”
“YOU’RE THE ONE WHO INSTALLED IT AFTER HIS THIRD KIDNAPPING—”
The sheer force of the man’s tantrum almost makes Dazai winded enough to tip over the building. The mafioso notes the blond ponytail. The rectangular glasses. The crisp ironing of the beige suit vest. He finds he doesn’t know this man either.
The stranger has marched up to him at the ledge. His neck boils with so much red Dazai contemplates whether he is at risk of assassination then and there. “What’s wrong with your face?” The blond man scrunches his nose so his spectacles droop crooked. “Did you whack it while wasting away your productive hours?”
Dazai picks his fringe over the eye patch. “I think it’s a stye.”
The man shudders as if in physical pain. “At… your age?” He hushes in a gasp. Fumbles for the pen behind his ear. “I should note down the risk…”
Just as easily deceived as the kid. A flash of brightness. The same home city made unfamiliar with faulty memory. And Dazai’s world is swamped in gullibility. With less work to take complete advantage, the mafioso can steer this conversation in any way he wishes. He’ll extract the intel and confirm everything that has happened to him and Atsushi today. He grins at his secured success. Claps his hands together. “About that repor—”
“YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING WASTE OF BANDAGES! THE BANE OF MY PROFESSIONAL EXISTENCE!”
He didn’t mean to step back onto the landmin—
“GIVE ME YOUR REPORT! TELL ME YOU’VE FOUND SOMETHING BY NOW!”
Dazai can’t afford to lose his repose. He hasn’t located a gun on the man’s person to snatch and flip authority. Of course, guns aren’t the only way. He studies the stranger. The blond man with glasses has just stormed out of his office, abandoned his assumably essential work just to find him. This man yells at Dazai, unarmed, no caution whatsoever. This tells enough of this man’s supposed relationship with him.
“It’s all delicately calculated work,” the mafioso soothes, hands raised in innocent surrender. “You’ll have to trust me when I say the report will be done at the right time… Kunikida…” He identifies the superior after scrolling through Atsushi’s text messages. “—san.”
Poor choice of honorific, apparently. Dazai’s assessment slightly hit off the mark. The initial revulsion isn’t a surprise. He’s well accustomed to such an expression whenever he executes practical jokes to spoil Chuuya’s wine session. When someone sees Dazai it’s either revulsion or fear. Predominantly fear. But what clouds over this stranger’s face shortly after is much less familiar, muddled in the same shade of the other two faces at the bar. The look this stranger gives him is now of concern. A distant, unwelcome amount of concern.
“… You’re loopier than usual,” the man remarks cautiously. It’s not an accusation but an attempt of searching as if he suddenly needs to diagnose Dazai while hoping to see nothing wrong. His concoction of trust and suspicion is nasty poison. How do you cope when someone is too close to the guise?
Dazai drops his hands into his pockets. He rocks back on his heels.
You peel away the guise before they can. “I may have forgotten today’s work,” Dazai releases with as much truth necessary.
And it works. The unaccustomed clouds of concern diminish at one crumb of honesty. Dazai slips the guise back on undetected.
“I don’t have time for this, Dazai,” the blond man grumbles. Averts his attention to scan the city view. “Didn’t the President request you personally to finish this case quickly? We can’t afford any more victims.”
There it is. The intel he needs. “Victims?” Dazai echoes carefully.
“Yes, victims! That’s what they are.” The blond man raises two fingers to rub his temple. “Imagine if all you did was open your eyes and suddenly…”
Dazai leans closer. “Suddenly?”
“You were years—”
A phone trills and a high-pitched screech shrills even louder. The stack of crates crash. The dead dust in the storage erupts. The two men turn around as a cracked cell phone skitters across the rooftop and flaps like a screaming fish out of water. The man with the blond ponytail sees this. His gaze trails to the toppled crates.
A boy rolls out of the makeshift fortress, spluttering nose-deep in his collar.
The blond man sees this. The oversized white shirt, black pants, belt and tie. He sees the boy’s white asymmetrical fringe with the black streak along the side. And those eyes. The rectangular glasses almost pop off the man’s face completely. “… Ki—?” He sputters. He stops. He whips back to the other man he has been talking to, the elevated height of the ledge the man stands on, the trouser pants rolled at the cuffs.
And suddenly… you were years—
The stranger flicks a notebook from his pocket. “Doppo Poet—”
Dazai strikes the man’s neck with his elbow.
The notebook’s pages flap like a pigeon, its sleeve like a paper plane shot by a missile as it somersaults over the rooftop and down the windowpanes of the seven-story building. Neither men have time to discover whether its meticulously kept contents collapse between the broken white lines of the road below. The blond man’s ribs hit the cement, his head dipping over the ledge. He refocuses and pales. Half of his body hangs over the wonderful drop.
“Apologies but I can’t let you do anything hasty,” Dazai sneers sweetly. Secures his heel between the man’s shoulder blades. Twists the man’s arm backwards.
A popping of joints and the blond man grunts, the look on his face now what Dazai is better accustomed to. Dazai sees it blotched black across the victim’s face like nauseous ink. Sickly sin staining his eye to his ankles. It’s the look that the youngest Port Mafia executive is gifted as someone suspects the being festering in the bandages, the look propelling him closer to take his lifelong wish.
But before the gift can grant him death, the greyish-green eyes behind the rectangular glasses unexpectedly flash. Something black and miniature slips out the stranger’s unrestrained sleeve. Meanwhile, Dazai has made the mistake of rolling up his trousers, exposing an ankle, and Kunikida thrusts the taser.
Indeed.
It is more painful trying to stay alive.
~.~.~