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It took around ten suicide attempts before Dazai realized he doesn’t like dying alone.
In the past, Dazai had a spot he would frequent every time he planned to take his own life; it had something to do with the careful routine it created around the event. A bit ritualistic as to force his brain to learn this is the place death happens, keep yourself contained within these walls— just like as a kid, you correlate each knee to the stomach with apologizing for being alive. But just as children grow out of whimpered apologies, Dazai, too, grew out of self-containment.
Not every attempt was clean, and not every attempt was quick. This was evident in the blood splattered against every wall and glistening against each shard of glass, but death by nature isn’t pretty. Every part of a living being resists it. Makes for frayed ends and ripped edges to every life. The only certainty given is that he would somehow wake up and find a mark tallied into the side of his skin, counting each sin against nature he’s committed.
Not sure why it hadn’t clicked before then, but on that particular attempt, as Dazai flinched awake to the dust invading his lungs, he understood that destruction was a team game. Empathy gets worn thin when it bleeds out of you enough times, and this void in his chest was consuming him. Emptiness feels like an understatement when he’s waking off decay from under his skin. The hollowness was startling; the life changing kind of startling. Death changing kind.
So, no more dying alone.
It was promptly followed by a series of double suicides, triple suicides, quadruple suicides— and so the list goes on. Piles of bodies and faces he barely remembers. And through it all, he finds he was right. It is better that way. Less lonely.
When you hear about immortality, it’s coveted as some unattainable gift that turns a lucky person into a god amongst men. Because, as living beings, if you don’t fear death, then you shouldn’t fear anything at all. It’s an ability so powerful that the counter-effects are barely shown any thought— what cost could possibly outweigh the gift of outrunning death? Putting curses and mythology aside, what they won’t tell you is that, when you die, you come out of it less than you were.
Probably to be expected with an unnatural rebirth like that; the Earth rejects your very beginning.
So, at the age of fourteen with a life so full of death that he’s nearly drowning in it, Dazai is prompted to join the Port Mafia. Mori finds him, like he does in every life.
A change of pace, Dazai told himself. Didn’t know how long this not-dying thing was supposed to last, and maybe being with other ability users would allow him a place to feel normal. There was a childish idea badgering him that he’d be more connected to humanity by slumming it with the rest of nature's most unfortunate ‘fortunate souls.’ That’s what Mori would call him. Fortunate.
“You have been given an abundance of life,” Mori chimed, overly-theatrical, “but you lack direction. Do you crave a purpose, child?”
Blink.
“No, not really.”
Looking back, it was a little funny. It must’ve been one of the only times Dazai had managed to surprise Mori, but only because they didn’t know each other yet. Not in any of the ways that mattered.
The memory was less amusing when he remembered the time that followed.
To test his ability, and with very little complaint from Dazai himself, Mori had killed Dazai over a hundred times over those first few weeks. One-hundred and forty-seven, to be exact. He only knows because he’d counted up the number of tally marks his skin seared into itself after a year in the mafia.
Every time Dazai got pushed down on that metal operation table, he was just content there was someone else in the room. Made burning through lives easier, on Dazai’s part.
However, the doctor didn’t factor in repercussions to the torture— evident enough in the medical experiments Dazai was subjected to.
One time Mori had ripped Dazai’s body apart and carefully laid out glass shards in the mess of his organs to test a theory about his healing properties. Must have been the doctor in him that made him so recklessly curious. The glass was all jagged and pushed into places they shouldn’t be, but Mori didn’t care much for pain meds. Not for Dazai. The doctor seemed to be under the delusion that Dazai was a masochist for pain. He wasn’t.
Any minute movement shifted the glass shards deeper into his flesh, and it took him biting through his tongue to suppress the scream.
Pain, so much pain.
Every twitch stabbed him open, and Dazai almost reached for the blade to finish the final step himself. When Mori took mercy on him, Dazai hadn’t made a noise as the scalpel sliced his neck open, leaving him to bleed against the table. The silence carefully trained.
Some time later, Dazai flinched awake with Mori already standing over him with a darkly curious loom.
“Can you feel them?”
Death scrambles the brain. Takes a second to reboot.
“What?” he asks, brain muddled and words slurred.
“The glass shards, Dazai-kun. Are they still there?” Mori repeats with impatient urgency.
Dazai shifted around sluggishly to prompt any potential pain. Nothing.
“Don’t think so.”
Mori had almost immediately pushed him flat again to open him up. He remembers it all being excruciating, but the memory is fuzzy. Dazai doesn’t feel pain like that anymore. Whether that’s because of dulling repetition or bodily decay, he doesn’t know.
Once Mori had managed to peel his insides open to the world, he sifted around and confirmed in awe, “All gone.” Despite his desperate cling to consciousness, Dazai could still hear what Mori said to him ringing in his ears even now.
“Your ability is marvelous, Dazai. Your body is magic.”
The warmth it spiked spread all the way through the tips of his fingers down to his toes, fighting off the blood-loss induced numbness. It was the first time he’d been regarded as more than a monster— the first time someone looked at the corrupted mess of his body and felt something other than disgust.
Magic, huh.
It made him valuable, it made him unique. It— it made him fucking belong. A genuine smile was plastered onto his face, but it was nearly impossible to see through the blood bubbling on his lips. When the scalpel went straight through his neck for the second time, Dazai barely registered the warm gush, just clasped on to that giddy flutter in his chest.
To this day, it might be one of the only times Dazai died with an emotion even resembling happiness.
The only thing more foreign to Dazai than permanent death was being seen. It seemed insane that he’d found people trust his mask more than his true face— whenever he didn’t have the strength to fake his usual persona, people thought his vulnerability was an act. A manipulation tactic. Maybe it has to do with the immortality brewing in him. His natural state is the antithesis to humanity, it only makes sense that it would serve to unsettle. Being seen was an unattainable dream Dazai had never bothered reaching for until Odasaku reached for him. It’s one of the only clear memories he has.
Ango narrowed his eyes at Dazai and worried his lip between his teeth. Debating something, obviously, from the way his gaze flicked from Dazai’s face to his drink and then back again.
It took about three more seconds before Dazai’s patience dissipated completely. “What could you possibly be thinking about so hard, Ango-kun? You look like you’re halfway to popping a blood vessel.”
Dazai had strutted through the doors of Lupin with rope burn circling his neck and blood on the collar of his shirt. It wasn't uncommon for him to wander into the bar after a failed attempt; there was something particularly lonely in only grazing death with your finger tips. Made him a man desperate for company, no matter where that landed him. He had found Odasaku to be amusing as well, so there were always worse places to be.
“I just,” Ango stopped himself short and swirled the glass in his drink for a few seconds. His hesitation had to be a testament to what he was about to ask or how inebriated he was; Dazai guessed it to be a mix of both. “Why do you do it?”
Barely swallowed the sigh. It was a common line of questioning, and not one he found particularly interesting. People in this line of work didn’t get it, and Dazai didn’t expect them to either. Being a spectacle was an unfortunate constant for him.
Before he could swing in with a scathing retort, Ango interrupted again, obviously caught up in his own self-inflicted debate.
“You— you can’t… can’t die, Dazai. And you’ve told the two of us a million times how much you hate pain. And I’ve been thinking about it for a while and it…,” Ango gestured vaguely with his glass. Dazai had half a mind to smash the thing and jab it right through Ango’s femoral artery; maybe then he’d get the point. “It just doesn’t make any sense. The rationality of it.”
Rational. Dazai's lip quirked into a pale imitation of a smile.
“Do I come off particularly rational to you?”
Oda, always more in tune with the sharpness of Dazai’s edges, put a firm hand on Dazai’s shoulder. A gentle warning, if he’s ever gotten one, and attempted to redirect the conversation. “Let’s talk about someth—”
Ango interrupted to ask, “What’s your theory, Oda?”
Removing his hand from Dazai’s shoulder, Oda shrugged to take another sip from his glass. That piqued his interest. Dazai was genuinely curious.
“Yeah, Odasaku. What’s your theory?” The glint of Dazai’s smile only served to make the older man sigh.
There was hesitation before Oda relented and sat down his glass to consider his next words.
“You do it because you’re an addict, Dazai.” The sly smile slipped right off his face. Didn’t feel all that funny anymore.
Dazai stared into the murky pool of his glass as Odasaku continued speaking.
“And death. Well. That’s one hell of a drug to be hooked on.”
The edge of Chuuya’s smile forms a guillotine that bites Dazai’s neck with enough force to send his head rolling.
Dangerous, beautiful creature. He’s destruction pulled from clay and shaped into a man, and Dazai can barely hold himself still long enough to keep his hands from wandering into places bound to get them burned.
Self-destruction is a team game, and Chuuya’s one hell of a partner.
Even at their first meeting, Dazai found the kid who held a gentle slaughter in his eyes and thought weapon. Immediately tried to impale himself over Chuuya’s edges in some semblance of a beautiful death, which Chuuya obliged him with more than once. However, not much more than that.
Chuuya fucking hates him, and it’s the easiest fire Dazai’s ever walked into.
“Would you just figure out how to die so you can leave me the fuck alone? I’m about to have arsine poisoning just from being around you.”
Dazai stumbled out a laugh.
“Well, it’s not from lack of trying.”
Chuuya hadn’t known then. Not really. While Dazai doesn’t believe anyone will grasp it in its entirety, he had given Chuuya a truth.
Had let Chuuya spot the gash along his shoulder, deep enough to hurt but not enough to kill, and let the boy walk him into his home. Had let him take out a box with the words FirstAid scrawled along the top like there was any aiding the kind of wounds that fester under his skin. Had let him flinch as he unrolled the bandages along Dazai’s arm to reveal the silver tallies underneath. When you hate yourself, the best kind of self destruction is letting people see what you really are.
Chuuya whispers, “What the hell,” but Dazai’s head is buzzing with look look look. Vulnerability is a practice in skinning yourself alive and forcing someone to bear witness.
“Every time I die, I come back with a scar along my arm. One for each death.”
The boy with the god trapped between his ribs doesn’t look away; he’s bearing witness.
“But,” Chuuya stumbles. “There’s hundreds of scars here, Dazai.”
This was the type of honesty that buries its teeth in your throat and shakes you from your body. Makes you ghost over the events of your life with an omnipotence you’d give anything to unlearn.
The events of Dazai’s life are clicking into place behind Chuuya’s eyes like a shitty stop-motion picture, and Dazai does nothing to ease it. This is what he wants. All that grief and empathy that overflows out of Chuuya is being forced back down his throat, and Dazai feels light enough to fly. The bitterness he holds towards Chuuya is born out of envy; Dazai wishes it found a way to weigh more than his admiration. Cruelty is a familiar bone to chew on— this isn’t.
Looking at the same scars Chuuya is so entranced by, Dazai says, “I’ve always wondered what would happen when they run out of space.”
“Are you trying to find out?”
Dazai turns to him with the ghost of a smile thinking it was Chuuya’s sick idea of a joke, only to find his stare hard and evaluating. Something twists between his ribs and can’t help but think of the places they start and finish.
He’s never been very good at recognizing beginnings, but he knows hard ends like the back of his hand. One of them is here.
The two of them, both gods in the senses that matter to most; that’s the start.
“Yes.”
Dazai has been rejected from the world— spit up and fucking reborn— enough times to know where he sits on all things holy. Every time he dies and lets his soul dissolve into the universe, nature refutes his entry. Something in Dazai is fundamentally unnatural, broken, disgusting, rotten, inhumane— the world refuses to let him in. His immortality is the curse to forever be bound with the knowledge that he is alien even to the earth that birthed him. He’s been spit from the fabric of the universe but too vile to swallow back in. Rejection is fatal in a way death would never be; belonging and peace are a dream Dazai grazes with only the tips of his fingers.
In contrast, Chuuya’s godliness lies in strength so big it threatens to tear him open. The world made a god with enough humanity for it to flow out of his pores, and it desperately craves his return. At every point, his body tries to fall to pieces like nature is attempting to enact an early decomposition to return him back to soil. Chuuya belongs so wholly to death that he is surrounded and filled by it; Chuuya belongs so wholly to humanity that he slips through fissures in people's hearts they didn’t know they had. Fits into the gentle hands of the universe like a child folds into the imprint in their parent’s mattress.
That’s the hard end.
Chuuya is hellbent on stopping the deaths altogether, but it’s a pipe dream. There must be mercy in him because Dazai tells him as much. His partner has come to the conclusion that each death makes Dazai lose more of himself to the ground beneath him. Goes stir crazy every time he finds evidence of another attempt, and Dazai thinks caring like that must be an impossible burden.
Dazai hears a lot of Let me see and When did you get that one, but Chuuya’s overly pragmatic when it comes to issues. Chuuya rarely talks to him about the dying because he’s too focused on finding a solution to make the suffering stop. He sees a break and always uses his hands to soothe out the cracks, but this is a fissure hands can’t fill.
It comes as a surprise when Chuuya finally uses his words. A dog learning the command Speak— it’s funny.
“You’re disappearing, aren’t you?”
They’ve been sleeping together for weeks. Some twisted part of Dazai is convinced that it’s somehow part of Chuuya’s plans towards rehabilitation.
“What?” Dazai asks, incredulous. “Like defecting? I can't see much of a point in that.”
The grip Chuuya has on his forearm is bound to leave crescent moons in its wake. However, Dazai can’t look away from the watery whirlpools locking him there. There’s a distant thought that it’s Chuuya’s attempt to drown Dazai into him; an even more distant part of him believes it’s working.
“Stop trying to purposely misunderstand me. You’re disappearing.”
It’s not a question this time, but Dazai has a penchant for bruise-pressing.
“In the only way I know how.”
Chuuya doesn’t say anything more. Only breaks the trance between them to turn off the light and curl his body around him, breathing steadily into the skin of Dazai’s back. The embrace isn’t crushing, but it’s strong enough that Dazai would have to fight to break it and every ounce of tension on Chuuya’s muscles scream Don’t go.
It’s not enough.
An immortal man with a deathwish walks into a bar of gangsters— and this is beginning to sound like the start to a bad joke. An immortal man with a deathwish walks into a bar on the far side of town that’s filled with low level grunts from local gangs. These men have undoubtedly never seen a bullet bury itself between someone’s eyes or had to fight until they drank down their own blood like medicine. Their exposure to violence begins and ends with the drugs they drop on a dying man’s doorstep.
Today, Dazai will grant them the chance to change that— to become the killers they so desperately believe themselves to be.
He waltzes up to the bar and buys them all a drink. Watches unamused as they all elbow each other and smile over it. They see him as a child, which is good when they further assort that with powerlessness. To them, he isn’t a threat. Dazai wheedles his way into their heads with little issue.
“I have a proposition for you. Would you like to know what it’s like to take a life?”
The reaction is instantaneous, and there’s a smile he has to fight down.
“Who says we haven’t already,” someone says at the same time one of the others prompts, “Who did you have in mind?”
Dazai answers the second question.
“Me.”
Little convincing is needed when he’s offering himself on a silver platter to aid their bloody path to glory.
There’s one more round of shots for the road— for courage— before they haul him out of the bar and in the opposite direction of civilization.
With the amount of liquor in his system, they’re having to haul him like a ragdoll while they stumble down the street. At one point, slung across the shoulder of a man barely big enough to carry him, Dazai spots something shiny glittering on the pavement. He hastily shoves the other guy off him to grab it off the ground— twirls it between his fingers to find it’s a coin. Just fifty-yen, but Dazai is starting to feel like it’s his lucky day.
In Roman myth, you drop a coin at the feet of the dead so they can pay to cross the River Styx into the afterlife— maybe this was the piece he was missing. Dazai smiles something wild as one of the gangsters lumbers over to snatch him up again and pockets the coin. They must have some misconception that Dazai was having second thoughts and trying to escape because the hold was relentless this time.
By the time Dazai wakes up from being knocked out and driven into the middle of nowhere, he’s held down on the table with a man at each limb. Their techniques at restraint are pathetic, but he’s not too fussed about it— Dazai won’t try to run either way.
When they realize he’s awake, they snicker to themselves like wolves that brought an unknowing lamb to slaughter. Their desperation to prove themselves as predators disgusts him.
“Well, get on with it,” Dazai says. Their hands press his limbs harder against the table.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
This whole thing was a bad idea, but Dazai could’ve told you that before he even left his apartment today. Desperation makes people play stupid games, and these men are further proof of that.
The mess of their hands are clumsy, uncoordinated, and painful to the point it’s overwhelming. There’s a knife digging into his side and a cigarette burning down his leg, but Dazai came for death not torture. Elbowing off the grip on his arm, Dazai grabs the gun from the belt of the man closest to him and clinks it between his teeth. Relief accompanies the explosion of a bullet in his head.
When Dazai flinches awake again, the room is dark. The whistling of wind echoes between the cracks in the walls. He is alone.
Dazai peels himself off the table covered in blood and brain matter and alone. In an empty haze, he makes his way onto the street to find its devoid of any life besides the birds overhead. He is alone.
There’s lead weighing down every step forward, but he’s relearning the art of walking it off. Not really sure where he’s going, Dazai wanders towards the sound of people like a moth to a flame and finds himself at the back entrance to an arcade. He has a vague memory of Chuuya and him visiting places like this. They don’t do that anymore.
Trudging along the side of the building, Dazai is planning to pass the place by until he spots it: a machine that reads Supernaturally accurate fortunes here at only 50¥ per reading!
Pinches at the coin in his pocket, considering. Maybe he deserves to give this thing a second chance at purpose.
He flips it twice and then pushes it through the coin slot. With crackling music playing through the small speaker, the machine racks as it tries to force out a slip of paper through the century-old opening, and Dazai has to fight to pull the rest of it out from its death grip.
He looks at the fortune and laughs.
The humor in it is so bitter it leaves his mouth sour. Dazai rereads it over and over as if he thought it would eventually be replaced with something less sadistic.
‘Rejoice! Your life will be long and prosperous.’
Wipes a finger right over the middle of it and tries to slur it into something he has the strength to hold in his mouth— something more manageable like be-long. Presses the slip against his palm hard enough to stain it to the skin it rests on. Your life will belong, he whispers to himself like the beginning of a prayer.
Dazai rips off the other ends of the paper so it reads his self-made prophecy and keeps it clutched between his hands, holding it close to his heart. It’s a promise the world will never keep to him, but he grips it like a lifeline.
Your life will belong.
From then onward, the slip of paper became a permanent fixture of his wardrobe. The fortune feels like proof of something, and this seems much more likely to grant him access to the afterlife than fifty-yen. Even in its second form, Dazai holds out hope that the coin is keeping its promise to get him across the River Styx.
“This is fucking pathetic,” Chuuya hisses. He says it because he’s angry and in pain and exhausted, but dying makes every part of you an open wound.
There’s blood pooled under him, and this injury will kill him.
With the expression of a martyr and the shoulders of Atlas, Chuuya takes a shaky knee right into the crimson puddle surrounding Dazai to slowly wrap bandages around the wound over his femoral artery. It’s fruitless; they both know. Chuuya does it anyway.
“I fucking hate you,” Dazai spits, and he almost means it.
Chuuya doesn’t stop his attempt to wrap it— he doesn’t even blink. Dazai’s acid mouth is expected, and somehow that makes him angrier.
“I fucking hate you.”
Cloth will do nothing to stop a river, and Chuuya’s not even bothering at a tourniquet to slow it. The eyebags hang heavy on Chuuya’s face, his breath whispering in his chest. Death is lapping at Chuuya’s heels, but Dazai knows today is not the day he answers it’s call.
The only thing lapping at Dazai’s feet these days is hellfire.
“Y’said that the first time.”
Dying makes a weapon out of him; it is instinct to survive by means of skin under your nails and blood on your tongue. Chuuya can’t understand what it’s like when the world wants to cradle Chuuya back into the earth with tender hands. He can’t understand the festering agony that comes with inflicted permanence.
“And I’ll say it the next time,” Chuuya stumbles in his task, “and I’ll say it the time after that, and I’ll say it the time after that, and— who knows! Maybe the time after that. I’ve got all the time in the world to find out.”
Continuing to wrap the red-stained bandage around his leg with a reverent tenderness, Chuuya grits, “It’s pathetic.”
Dazai doesn’t think those words are targeted at him anymore, and that’s worse.
Trails off with the words, “I fucking hate you,” against his tongue.
Flinching awake from death’s cradle, Dazai finds Chuuya still sat next to him, watching with eyes blown wide. Every time he dies, Chuuya is half-convinced this is the one he won’t walk back from, and it’s evident in the thinly veiled relief worming its way through his features. Even as his stomach starts to untwist, Chuuya doesn’t speak.
Dazai kisses him because it’s the only thing he can imagine hurting worse than silence.
There’s sick dried against the skin of his cheek that Dazai tries to scrub off along with the lingering grip of death. Heroin overdose, almost never pretty.
And it might have been fine, the imperfect part of his deaths, if he didn’t find Mori standing at the doorway to the room. The look on the man’s face freezes him in place, filling every vein in Dazai’s body with ice.
He’s ready to rip the eyes from Mori’s sockets just so he doesn't have to see the way their pinpoints narrow on him. There’s a disgust there that he knows he’s not faking. It is not a plan at psychological abuse— this is Mori’s truth. And he’s living it.
Dazai’s novelty has worn off, and that’s its own sort of death. Sears another count right across the skin of his arm.
Moonlight filters through the stained glass windows with just enough strength to bathe the dust in the room red.
His mother is sitting on a chapel pew with her fingers drumming against the oak beneath them, and it shocks Dazai still before he moves to sit beside her. Her curtain of hair blocks any view of her face. There’s a dreadful twist in his gut when he realizes he can’t remember what it looks like.
“Did you come here to repent, boy?” Her voice comes out distorted, laced with crackles and fluctuations unnatural to the human body. Dazai swallows and watches the thrum of her hands; he drinks it in like air in hopes of erasing the unease in his chest. Clings to a vapid message he heard about mothers making monsters disappear.
“No.”
She turns to him now. His mother has no face.
“Then why did you come?”
Impossibly, the red-illuminated dust in the room still hasn’t settled, and its gentle dance implies it never will. This must be a place devoid of gravity and reason.
“I’m scared,” he admits, and the voice that leaves him is a child’s.
His mother cannot make expressions, but every part of her body reads understanding.
“Don’t be. The devil will comfort you when you need it.”
This place must be devoid of god, too.
“Why would he do that?”
Her fingers never stop tapping; Dazai never looks away.
“Because he knows that love and kindness are much more hateful than brutality will ever be.”
As dust weaves through his hair, Dazai reaches to still the ha—
Dazai flinches awake with sweat dripping down his face in Chuuya’s bed. There’s an arm and a leg slung over the side of his body and breaths ghosting along his neck.
The erratic rise and fall of his chest must’ve alerted Chuuya enough to wake him because he mumbles a gruff, “Go back t’sleep.”
He tries, but the distorted voice of his mother is the only thing he can hear.
A bad week— worse than usual— and Dazai has died enough times for full portions of skin to be blocked out with an armor of raised white lines. His body is so full of the sensations of death and dying that five showers isn’t enough to wash it from him.
Chuuya finds him, like he always does, empty and alone. His partner pushes the hair out of his face to get a better look at what he’s working with, but the gentle gesture is enough to set every part of him aflame. Chuuya’s humanity is a spark, and Dazai’s body is made of oil.
It hurts.
Dazai says as much, but he’s not sure he’s even understandable through the hiccups in his breathing and the tears streaming down his neck. The bubbling mess of him is enough to startle Chuuya into action on instinct. He moves, jolted, to set his hands over the issue in any way he can make it stop and finds himself stumped into hovering awkwardly around Dazai. Eventually, Chuuya pulls Dazai’s head against his chest and holds it there. And that hurts worse. Burns so bad it curls him further into the fire.
The only thing keeping him afloat is knowing he’s not the only one over an open flame. He clings to it with a desperation unnatural of a man void of survival.
Chuuya proves his pain when he admits, “If I could kill you and you would stay dead, I would do it.”
That dries the tears from his eyes and replaces it with a corrupted seed of hope. The things Dazai needs will always come at the cost of everyone else— it’s the reason he’s fucking alive.
“Really?”
“If it meant I could stop your suffering, I’d do it a thousand times.” Ever the martyr. Dazai wishes he could appreciate it with anything other than sinister desire.
To twist a situation to your advantage, you must know your opponent, and Dazai has been sleeping in his bed nightly.
Whispers, “I’m tired, Chuuya.”
“I know.” He chokes on the words like Dazai’s presence is a tangible hand against his throat. Noose, maybe.
Dazai looks at Chuuya for a few seconds. Drinks in the red of his hair and the strength in his posture. The first three words that come to his mind when he thinks of Chuuya are strong, human, alive.
A sickening giddiness rises in his chest. Sticky and bleeding over his lungs as he pushes out his next words.
“You know, you could try. It could be nice.”
Chuuya’s eyes-widen, a mouse caught with its tail in a trap.
“How could it ever be nice?” comes out quiet.
Dazai tends to believe that concepts like remorse and empathy escape him more than most. By the anguished vulnerability on Chuuya’s face, that might be an understatement.
“You’d get to be the last person to watch the light leave my eyes.” And the light in your eyes has always been one of my favorite parts about you, Dazai thinks, and it sticks in his throat like rocks.
“I don’t want to kill you, Dazai,” Chuuya states like a question. Voice wavering right over his name.
“…But?”
“I hate you,” he says in lieu of an answer. The statement holds truth— Chuuya’s not prone to lying— but it’s ultimately irrelevant here; it means nothing to the situation at hand. Hate and love lay at opposite ends of a double-edged sword so heavy it threatens to crack the ground you walk on.
If his relationship with Dazai was a place, it would be a battlefield filled with every corpse Dazai has ever created from himself. It’s because of this that Chuuya’s face goes soldier-hard with muscle memory. Battle after battle, and Dazai won’t stop dragging him through each one.
“How will you do it? Kill me, I mean.”
There’s no hesitation when Chuuya replies, “Quick. Always painless and quick.”
“I trust you.”
He’s surprised with the weight of which he means it.
“You’re killing me,” Chuuya spits reflexively. Vitriol on his tongue like the words were pulled from his mouth on that instinct to survive. The one Dazai doesn’t have.
Getting too close to a wounded animal gets you bitten, but pain is relative when you’ve died as many times as him. The whole idea of immortality mocks nature, grief, and humanity. Feels like his existence is a permanent reminder of what wrong looks like. (‘ Look class, he bleeds red but the body keeps count. The marks mean he’s not one of us.’ )
“I know. I’m sorry, and I wish that apology meant anything.”
The gritted smile Chuuya shoots him is strained, doesn’t come close to his eyes.
It’s dreadful.
Makes him think about that stupid fortune he had gotten. If this power had been given to anyone but him— if this life had been given to anyone but him— Dazai thinks they might’ve been able to do something great with it. There’s something so inherently unnatural about having an addiction to death, and it’s funny, the way this habit is killing everyone else. Everyone but him.
“I can pretend.”
Guilt. Shame. Those emotions hold less weight than they should and Dazai’s sorry. He really, truly is. But it’s not enough. Selfishness is woven through his DNA, and Dazai wishes Chuuya would take. It’s the only way he’ll ever pay the debt he’s owed.
“Don’t forgive me.”
Chuuya grits his teeth and flexes his hands open and closed. Nervous tick. Setting Chuuya on edge runs the risk of setting him on fire. Says, “Okay.”
Slow to stand, Chuuya moves towards the back of the cramped apartment to open a black box.
“What are you grabbing?”
He knows what it is; his heart is racing at the sight of it— the only noticeable sign that Dazai’s alive at all.
It’s in a misguided attempt to steer this sinking ship into more familiar waters that Chuuya tries for lighthearted. “The morphine you stashed in the back. You’re dumb as shit if you think I hadn’t noticed it.”
Chuuya gently pulled Dazai’s head down until it was comfortably sitting in his lap, eyes facing each other.
“Even upside down you’re pretty.”
He grabs a curl of hair that fell into his direct line of sight. Twirled it between his forefinger and thumb.
“Dazai.” Chuuya grits out the name between his teeth with enough force that it comes off as a prayer.
My vices have made a monster out of me; they will make a mourner out of you. His cruelty has no bounds.
“You can go whenever you’re ready.”
Chuuya flinches like he’s been slapped but doesn’t make any move to pull away. Dazai’s words always shape themselves like bullets, and from how close they’re sitting, the range is point-blank. “I hate you,” he spits. “This is fucked up.”
Battlefield.
“It’s okay.”
There’s desperation furrowing between Chuuya’s brows that he catches easily, faces only inches away. Dazai can’t wait to put a knife through the neck of that hope.
“You’re not empty, you know. I can see it, that— that something is there . You’re full of things you just can’t name. Doesn’t make you empty.”
Pulling his head down by his neck, Dazai kisses him only long enough for Chuuya to kiss back before stopping. Tries to hold onto the feeling of it branded against his lips for as long as he has left.
“Chuuya, I am empty.” Nameless. Dazai drags his head back until they’re inches apart. “Look.”
Chuuya tries to choke down a whimper but it catches in his throat. Tears are building up along his eyelashes. Kid-like grief. The kind of grief that consumes you but you can barely understand. Mom isn’t coming home kind of grief and a Why? kind of echo.
“You see it, right?” That void goes unspoken.
Chuuya doesn’t move, barely even breathes. You can only tell he’s not turned into a statue from the tremor of the syringe in his hand. The way it clinks in his grip.
Dazai nudges the hand to his vein and smiles. A genuine one.
There’s tears falling from Chuuya’s eyes into his, sliding across his face and into his mouth. Tastes like the beginning of a storm.
“Don’t smile like that. Not now.”
“Sorry,” Dazai mutters but it catches between the relief in his teeth as the needle eases into his vein. Not sincere enough (never sincere enough) to outweigh what’s happening here.
“I don’t forgive you.”
It’s gritted, the way he spits the words, but Dazai can still make out that broken, damaged love swirling in his eyes even as the world starts fuzzing to pieces.
He thinks he says, “Thank you,” but with the lead-weight of his tongue, Dazai isn’t sure it’s coherent. All he can focus on is the dazzling blue and the rain dripping down his skin.
It’s nice.
When Dazai flinches awake— reborn — three hours later, the room is empty.
Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty—
A laugh bubbles in his throat and out of his mouth with enough force to bounce off the walls. Seems like the whole house is reverberating from it, and the sound echoes back into him. The thrum of it feels like the beginning of a poltergeist.
Dazai Osamu, the haunting of his own home.