Archive of Our Own

Dazai likes to think he has escaped it.

Most nights, he lies on his futon, flat on his back and looks up at the fan spinning in the dead center of the ceiling. Without fail, the thought will visit him. On some nights, it arrives with a phantom sting all over his skin. On other nights, it comes with a deep restlessness in his fingers, twitching to close around a blade. But he likes to think the base urge has gone now. He has accepted he will always think of it in quiet moments like this. It’s what he signed up for the day he let himself give up those many years ago, as a kid, before Chuuya, before Odasaku, before anyone, when all he had was Mori quietly filling him with the darkness he carries around till date and a piece of sharp metal, sterilized over a flame from a fire he started out of twigs and newspapers outside his home- his container. 

But still, the itch for it has disappeared, he thinks. 

The room is dark. The walls seem to shoot up imposingly around him. Plain white, not a single piece of art hanging on them. Behind him, the curtains on the window flow with the circulation in the room. He looks at the dancing shadows from the curtains jutting across the floor from the side of his eye. He's too lethargic to shift his eyes away from the ceiling. The fan keeps spinning. He never switches the fan off, not even when he’s leaving the house. His electricity bill comes out exorbitant at the end of every month but he doesn’t care. There’s nothing he hates more than heat sticking onto his skin, refusing to let go no matter how much he tosses or turns. 

During the heavy summer nights that arrive at the halfway point of every year, he brings out a second electric fan that stands next to the futon, blowing air not at him, but directly above. He's never sure if it helps, but it’s all about the mental satisfaction of having a second fan. 

He hates June. He hates the weather, he hates his birthday, and he hates how six months of the year have passed him by and all he’s done is lay on his futon every night staring at the ceiling. 

By precedent, he knows the thought will visit him tonight. The day was bad, it wore heavy on his shoulders and by the time he came back all he could think of was the old smooth shard of metal he hid under his mattress back in the container years ago. But he postponed the thought for later, it wasn’t the time, he told himself. By now, the thought was materializing itself next to him; an apparition gradually cementing itself in his periphery. He can feel his pulse thrumming against the pillow, each beat slightly faster than the last. 

Sadness is comforting, unlike the heat, he thinks, as he runs two fingers over the faint ridges on his legs under his pajamas. He drapes his right leg over his left. The phantom wounds sting a little. He doesn’t mind it.

‘’I don’t need to do this anymore’’ he nearly lectures himself. He thinks of his container again, all the lonely nights spent with his leg bent on the low bed as he stood in front of it.

He thinks of what it felt like. He remembers a specific night, where the memories remain clear still. All the emotions, the urge- he remembers it so well he can almost feel it returning. but he stops himself. I’m only thinking about it, he convinces himself. It’s just a thinking exercise, he shifts uncomfortably in the futon, I’m not doing anything wrong by thinking about it. 

But he imagines the ritual as it used to be- how he stretches the skin taut with his thumb and middle finger, how he takes a deep breath. It always stutters. When he brings the blue-edged razor to his skin, he stretches his bottom lip over his teeth, holding it in place with his top lip. His body always loosened along with the force routed to his fingertips as he pressed it in. After he lifts the razor, he looks up momentarily. The sting, it always felt like it was singing. 

When he looks back down at the neat lines he watches blood seep through the thin cuts, pooling in intervals. He gambles with it, waits for the pools against the cut to become big enough to almost start running down his legs and dabs it off with cloth the instant the blood starts to make its trip down the curve of his knee. He does this, again and again, until it stops pooling around the lines. He cleans it up and slowly limps his way to bed, razor hidden in between the pointer and middle.

He followed the routine nearly every night back then, when he needed something else to keep him afloat. It got worse after Odasaku’s death. During the two lost years he spent wandering around Japan, before he found himself where he is now, he carried that metal shard with him everywhere despite knowing he was risking an infection every time. But it didn’t matter to him. At times, when he stretched a patch of his skin with his fingers and was about to sink the razor in, he’d even imagine contracting sepsis through a sheer stroke of luck and dying an agonizing death. He deserved it, that’s what he believed. He still believes it, but he’d never say it out loud anymore. 

The heat is stifling tonight. He knows it is because of the bandages wrapped around his body more so than the fan not doing its job, but he glares at the spinning fan regardless- a silent reprimand to an object that cannot receive it. He turns to his side and his eyes fall on his bandaged arm, lying limp next to him. His eyes x-ray beyond the bandages. He imagines the lines of scars beneath them, the memory of it so potent it still conjures up a clear image in the back of Dazai’s mind- angry and red, then scabbed brown, then a disgusting fleshy pink, all faded to something a little darker than his skin now. He’s sure if he removes the bandages now the scars wouldn’t be so much scars anymore than they would be an afterthought of the violent mess it once was all over his skin. But all of it was his fault. He couldn’t blame these wounds on stealthy criminals crouching around the corners of Yokohama looking to take out a Port Mafia executive. Not anymore.

He used to be a criminal himself, he knew the inherent thirst for status that comes with indulging in crime, shifting from petty to the more heavy duty stuff, albeit all of it remaining underground- how it was a supposed easy shot at getting to the top by executing the youngest of Mori’s underlings all those years ago. He remembers Chuuya being a common target. The pretty, red hair called for attention. Dazai wrinkles his nose at the thought.

It was never an easy shot, Dazai didn’t allow himself to be taken out by bumbling thieves that liked to stick their hands in cookie jars. He was determined back then, if he had to die it would be by his own hand. 

Yet however, the wounds from those various assassination attempts were different. He didn’t cover those with bandages. Atsushi always seemed to skirt around the subject until he finally came out and asked one day, “Dazai-san, why are you wrapped in bandages like that?” 

He had frozen then, momentarily, before regaining his composure and shooting back with a diversion, “I must keep my hands sealed, Atsushi. I hold the power of god in them” He grinned after. His face had never felt so tired holding a smile up. 

Atsushi addressed him with all the confusion in the world, and then the conversation was forgotten. 

But everything within him had churned in disgust when he said it. He had thought of Chuuya, with an actual god sealed within him. He never doubted it, there was something about Chuuya that drew him in the second they were introduced to each other. He’d never say it to the man’s face, nor did he ever when he had the chance, but he thought- and thinks- of Chuuya as his own personal god. If there was another reason he had to keep his hands wrapped up, it’s because he’d never want to accidentally sully Chuuya no matter how strongly he pretends to dislike him. The pretense was necessary. He thinks it would kill him if Chuuya knew how often he thought of removing his hat and running his hands through his hair still. “Stupid hatrack” He used to say. But all he really wanted was for Chuuya to let his hair out so Dazai could pretend to accidentally touch it. “Out of my way, slug” he would have said, “or I’ll keep getting your hair all tangled” 

Pretense. It seems that’s all Dazai is. He is still staring at his arm when he realizes the last time he showed any real vulnerability around a person was when Odasaku’s dying body was in his arms, bubbling out hot blood through his clothes. He couldn’t do much else then, but his begging was worse. When Atsushi saved him from the river, the first time he met his new protégé- not that he’d want Atsushi to become anything like him- the sorrow of failing yet again was dragging his body down, almost as if he were still in the river. But when he remembered there was a stranger watching him, he wiped the look of incredulity off his face quickly to slap on an exaggerated scowl, simply to telegraph how annoyed he was at being saved but there was still a kernel of truth in it. But that was nothing close to the vulnerability he had expressed clutching at Odasaku, begging him to not leave somehow, as if it was in his control at all. 

His arm is stinging again. He often wonders, during these nightly zone out sessions, how his body remembers in such impeccable detail what the sting of a cut feels like (and why it supplies the feeling back to him even when his skin remained completely unmarred) but never retains any warmth from a touch, a graze, a kiss. Try as he might, he can never recall what a hug really felt like- not in the same way he can concretely feel his skin stinging the way it used to when he did not bandage it up and let his clothes shift against the healing wounds. Sometimes, the phantom sting of a new cut was so vivid he nearly had to check himself, if they had somehow spawned on his skin, like they belonged there in the first place and their absence was an anomaly. 

Perhaps it's static shock, he’d offer an explanation to himself. Simply friction of cloth against skin. Perhaps it's that. He did not want to believe his body was asking for the pain again, he wasn’t an addict. 

The idea of it stung more than the real deal; the idea that he may really be addicted to this. What ‘this’ was, he doesn’t know yet, but he knows it’s not a good sign that he hasn’t gone a day since the first time he sunk a razor into his skin without thinking about doing it again. Whether he gave in to the thought or not was a different matter- he hasn’t for a long while now and he intends to keep it that way. 

However his body, or brain, never seems to respect his intent. Dazai turns again on his back and closes his eyes. Tonight, the impulse is soft- a gentle hand pulling his eyelids shut. A cold lady with her arms around him, he sinks into her. He sinks and sinks. 

▽

It seems almost impossible some days- to keep on going. 

Dazai is in his futon again, eyes trained fixedly upwards but he was focused on something else. A scene from the day plays out in his head, Atsushi sitting next to him, while he rolled around in his office chair. 

“Dazai-san,” Atsushi started, but then stopped. It caught Dazai’s attention. 

It didn’t sound chiding, as it would be if it were a precursor to tell him to stop playing around and work. 

“What is it, Atsushi?” 

Atsushi fumbled his words. Dazai swiveled around to meet his eyes. “What is it?”

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to ask” 

“Then you must ask to find out, Atsushi-kun” 

Atsushi laughed politely, or in hindsight, perhaps it was nervousness. Dazai is finding it harder nowadays to read people. The fog that has settled in his head does not seem to lift, and it is getting in his way more than he’d like to admit. 

“You were in the Port Mafia, right?” 

He misses the days where his past was shrouded in anonymity. Of course Atsushi would figure out he had been involved somehow with the mafia. Often, Dazai tries to look for signs within him that signal something has changed- if he thinks about Dazai any differently. But the fog remains, and all he can see is a smudge of yellow and purple without any nuances behind it. 

Dazai raised an eyebrow, “Why are you asking?”

“Do you regret leaving?” 

“Do I-” he paused, “-regret leaving?” 

Atsushi nodded.

Dazai didn’t know how far he could give him a reply without betraying at least half of what he holds so close to him- all of the anger, the hatred, even the love that accumulated in his years with the Port Mafia that remained unexpressed in the pit of his stomach. surely if he were to utter the phrase “It’s complicated” he’d expose all of it, the raw gaping wound that bleeds from his middle whenever he’s reminded of the things he has done, and also the things he hasn’t, for fair measure. He knows it’s ugly. He knows Atsushi would turn away aghast if he knew any of it. He’d never look at him the same- with the muted respect yet childish insolence that Dazai has so come to cherish.

So he decided to cop out. 

“I’m afraid that’s above your pay grade, Atsushi” 

“Ah, of course, i’m sorry” Atsushi shook his head and went back to filing papers, or whatever inane task Kunikida had him assigned to. 

Does he regret leaving? The question wafts around in the air above him. More so, it buzzes around the room like an insistent fly, hellbent on survival. The occupant of the room wants to kill the insect. He finds he cannot quite get his hands on it.

Dazai has never liked labeling how he felt beyond the primary terms supplied to his vocabulary. If sad is how he felt, then that’s what it was. Not anguish, not grief, not despair. He was- merely and simply- sad when Odasaku died. He did not spend time labeling the intricacies of it. He did not spend hours upon hours untangling the perpetual knot in his throat everyday- people would have called it grief. To him, it was something unnamed to pummel down layers deep within himself. From his throat to his gut, until he couldn’t feel it anymore. One more into the growing arsenal of undetected hounds gnashing their teeth inside him. 

So was it regret he felt, the night he escaped the mafia? He remembers every physical sensation in his body that night. A while after Odasaku’s death, the night before he was supposed to join Akutagawa on a mission, he decided to leave. He wasn’t in the container, and decided to camp out in one of the rooms in the main building instead. He had nothing to take, nothing holding him back here- everything that did, he could kill. He cringed at his reflex solution of killing. Perhaps this is what Odasaku meant, he mused to himself, turning his evil into good when neither mattered in the end. If one day, his knee jerk reaction to nuisance wasn’t sadistic, he knew he’d have fulfilled Odasaku’s dying wish. The idea of salvation propelled him forward, from his bed to the door. He'd open it, and never have to shut it himself again. 

Chuuya walked by the moment he cracked the door open. Dazai stopped in his tracks. He didn’t notice him. From the open sliver of his door, he watched Chuuya march down the corridor, with the angry little gait he adopted when he was particularly irritated, until he turned the corner. His red hair left a faint glow in its absence. 

Suddenly, Dazai felt all the air in his body leave. He imagined a balloon popping- the air rushing out with an urgency and noise only parallel to Chuuya’s annoyed stomping. His enthusiasm dwindled. Salvation didn’t sound so bright and shiny anymore, not when Dazai realized he’d be leaving the only other thing he had ever found bright and shiny when he left the Port Mafia. Chuuya would never know it, and has not to this day, but Dazai spent that entire night in sheer agony- suddenly, he did have something to take, something that was holding him back, something that he wouldn’t kill the way he would waste anyone else.

His head ached in confusion, his hands twitched with restlessness. He could never ask Chuuya to leave with him. He knew what the Port Mafia meant to him- unlike Dazai, Chuuya was saved by it. It gave him something to be loyal to, and as much as Dazai loved to paint the likeness of Chuuya with an obedient pup, he knew he could never ask him to renege on his sworn allegiance. 

Things like loyalty and oaths never meant much to Dazai. He knew all of it was putting on airs, flimsy phrases meant to sound grand and imposing, but it did nothing for him. They could be broken as easily as someone’s wrist in a sharp twist. But to someone like Chuuya, who treasured these very things above everything, betrayal would be a cardinal sin. 

It was convoluted thinking then, that led Dazai to the mafia’s armory. He walked softly, not wanting to be caught by anyone. He had come to know this room well over the years. He glanced at the corner where the guns were kept, light softly reflecting off the sleek gun metal. For a split second, he considered loading a round into his preferred revolver and unloading it into his head. Just for a second. He shook the thought off as quickly as it came. 

He padded over to the bombs. The mafia sure was impressive, he thought. Their stockpile of weapons never failed to earn an appreciative pull from his mouth. 

A car bomb was what he wanted. A simple magnetic bomb that would attach to the underside of Chuuya’s car. One with a timer. He knew Chuuya’s schedule down to the second. He knew when he got up, how long he brushed his teeth, when he went out for breakfast, what he ate, he knew all of it. It was with this sheer confidence and pride in knowing his partner- his heart lurched thinking of Chuuya as his partner. He quickly convinced himself it was out of distaste- and his habits so well, that he set the bomb to detonate at 8:27 a.m.; exactly three minutes before Chuuya fumbled to the garage in his post-sleep haze that Dazai had always secretly looked forwarding to seeing everyday. During the mornings when he pondered why waking up, getting out of bed was even necessary, he thought of Chuuya half-asleep, face still puffy, ambling around the corridors in the building and his urge to see him always overshadowed his disillusionment with life. He always told himself that urge was simply born out of a desire to poke fun at his dozy, yawning state instead of the desire for something more tender than he would ever admit.

If there was anything he’d miss, it would be those slow mornings. With Chuuya barely awake, head resting on the meeting table when it was just the two of them, with the morning sun slanting in, lighting Chuuya’s hair into an inferno that burnt Dazai alive every time he snuck a glance. Those were the only times Dazai could almost let himself admit he loved him. Just almost. 

He was grateful to Chuuya for being a man of rigid structure, with as much rigidity as the mafia allowed him. He knew no harm would befall him. Not a single piece of his blown up car would touch him. He'd be too far away still, but he’d notice the explosion. He was banking on it. He needed Chuuya to notice it as it happened. 

The idea occurred to him within minutes of wondering how he could leave Chuuya without a word, without making him feel betrayed. He could do something so offensive, so terribly vile even for him, that Chuuya would instantly write him off. If Chuuya instantly turned on him seeing what he did, wouldn’t he then be relieved he’s gone? It would save him the ache of being left by his partner, it would be replaced with anger which Dazai had the notion- the terrible misconception- of being easier to deal with, but it made his own guts turn inside out, thinking of purposely making Chuuya so angry that he’d forget what his defection really meant. If he had more of his wits about him, he’d have come up with a better plan, something that didn’t involve destroying something of Chuuya’s, something without so much risk. But Dazai was, for the first time, finding it hard to think. He did not know at the time his deficiency in critical thinking would continue on as a cruel punishment for what he was about to do, for leaving Chuuya. 

Dazai screws his eyes shut. Tonight, the fan above him seems to spin with the force of a hundred tornadoes. 

He does not regret leaving the Port Mafia. he is closer now to salvation than he ever has been. But he regrets leaving Chuuya. He regrets not calling his name out that last time he saw him that night. He regrets not letting him know the truth. He imagines the conversation in his head. 

“Chuuya” 

He’d turn around, first surprised that Dazai had called him by his name and not a silly nickname, and would then regard him with suspicion. “What do you want, shithead? Why are you hiding behind that door?”

Dazai would walk out, and make his way slightly ahead to Chuuya. He’d stop, a breath away from him. Chuuya would not step back. He had never stepped back.

Dazai would say quietly “I love you. I’m so sorry for everything”

And he would immediately turn on his heel, and run the other way. If he strained his ear, he would hear Chuuya frantically asking him to wait, loud pleas to know where he was going. But he would not stop. 

He’d keep running the other way, no matter how desperate the calls behind him got. 

△

I wish I were dead, Dazai thinks. In his head, the thought is quiet but he’d scream the pity out of himself if he could. 

Yet another scorching night in a string of summer days and he is sick of it. It is the middle of June, and the sun isn’t taking any prisoners. Coupled with the sweat clinging to all of his skin and the pounding headache that has been steadily growing through the day, he wonders if he should take a shot at those poisonous mushrooms again. 

But he remembers how he had spent the next week doubled over in nausea and decides against trying it again. It’s the inconvenience of far fetched suicide methods he hates, more than the actual ridicule of them. He could rationalize absurdity, but no amount of thinking can explain the very real pain he feels when he ends up walking out alive anyway. Blunt force trauma from frozen tofu, folding within yourself in an oil drum. The tedious calculations needed to figure out how many mushrooms would really be needed for it to be lethal. Just one? He hadn’t known, and then paid the price for it. 

The volume in his head oscillates wildly from maximum to tinny whispers. Dazai has a talent for living within his head and he especially likes retreating into it in moments like these- when his shoulders feel heavy with fatigue and there is no one around to stay wary of. He steps out of his self-induced fugue state once in a while and the noise of his environs assaults him all at once, every time. 

The first fan spinning angrily above him, with a rhythmic creaking that seems to grow louder the more he focuses on it. He imagines it falling on top of him, still spinning somehow and slicing his face to bits. He blinks the thought away. The continuous plaintive hum of the second electric fan turning slowly next to him. The rough staccato of his head shifting against the cloth of his pillow. The sound of his teeth grinding against each other when he moves his jaw. The long, shrill whistle of wind flowing through the gaps in his windows. The distant cacophony of cars close to piling up upon each other in the late night rush. His eyes remain closed; he bemusedly thinks if handling the visual, along with the sheer audio, information would cause a misfire in his brain right now. 

He imagines it- a neuron firing out of sequence. Its neighbors follow suit. An electric storm takes over his brain. He seizes. He will not stop seizing. His lungs stiffen and his airway gets obstructed. His heart loses its rhythm. He will, soon, be found dead by cardiac arrest. An ironic naturally caused end for the man who flirts with death himself as often as he can. 

Of course, it’s not that simple. If simply opening your eyes when already overly saturated with auditory stimuli could cause death, however improbable it may be, he’d have hired people to crash cymbals outside his house every night himself. Dazai almost wants to laugh at how fast that train of thought wriggled out of his control, but his mouth does not make any move towards a smile. The tiredness that has made a home within his bones pulls the corners of his mouth down still. 

He can never remember in concrete detail what he focuses on when he’s locked away inside himself. The second he snaps out of it, the memories are gone. He never minded it, but he suspects whatever he thinks of is a little more pleasant than when he’s coldly aware. 

The air felt thick with memories during the day. it was all he could do to get out of bed in the first place and drag himself to work. His dreams were heavy with sharp glinting things. White latex gloves snapped onto cruel hands, the shift of laboratory coats, the metal clang of laying down on a cold surgical table- the images don’t let up in their chase after him the whole day. He feels something impending crashing within him. His nose is stuffy tonight, and he feels the back of his throat stinging. It almost feels like the start of a cry, Dazai thinks. He runs through the checklist. His eyes are hazing over, one second focused and the next not. His head is on the verge of throbbing- the specific concoction of pain and numbness that only arrives moments before a cry begins. 

Then his body starts shaking. 

Ah, he thinks, I'm about to cry. The tears in his eyes spill over and as a reflex his hands go straight to his face, covering it whole to muffle out the sounds. It didn’t especially matter, Dazai could wail as loud as he’d like but he remembers his sobs pinging off the metal walls of the container and amplifying it, so his hands remain on his face. 

I wonder why the body hurts so much when you cry, he muses. Mentally, he’s sure it hurts just as much as well but he has long checked out of logging what sort of emotions brew storms in his head on a regular schedule. What would keeping track of those emotions do anyway? So he could remember later? He decides against it and instead focuses on every physical sensation that floods his body that moment. 

It's quite mechanical. from his head to his toe, his muscles are tensed. His legs are curled up in the duvet, occasionally kicking against the futon when a particularly harsh cry forces its way out of his throat. there is a tightness in the pit of his stomach that does not loosen. His eyes are heavy, screwed shut as if to force the tears inside but they slip through on their way out regardless. He feels the tear tracks down his cheek- they leave a faint sting in their wake. 

Dazai floats out of his body. He looks at himself in the third perspective, as if he were a specter looming ominously above his own body. The kind of scene you’d imagine playing out between a soul recently departed looking down in horror at their newly cold empty flesh. Dazai feels cold and empty. He may as well be dead. The thought causes a pang within his chest. If it was one of desire or terror, he tries not to dwell on it. Instead he dwells on the harsh way his hands now claw at his arms that are wrapped around himself. If he had the strength to tear through cloth and skin, he would. He imagines the red scratches he will find on his skin after this, once he has broken out of this crying spell. 

As another sob wracks through his body, he tries to figure out why he started crying in the first place. It is a funny situation- his body was doing the feeling for him. If he had no sense of touch or movement, he’d have never known he was crying at all. His head felt void. He could lie there and identify all physical signs of an impending cry - the lip curling, the heart squeezing, the skin flushing- but at the base level, he felt the same. 

He plays with the thought of having no emotions for a second. He didn’t even cry when Odasaku died in his arms. But then a faint image of Chuuya crosses his mind and he knows from the way his heart leaps alive that he still feels things. The specifics of what those things actually are, are still debatable. 

Squeaking, halting noises involuntarily come out of his mouth while he tries to calm down. He bites down on his pillow in a fit of desperation. His cries sound like a kicked animal. He feels like a kicked animal. Humiliation makes his face flush hot. 

He’s tired. He’s so, so tired. He thinks there is no reason at all for this show of tears after all. Perhaps it's the exhaustion that he can’t- won’t- feel. Perhaps it's the lack of deep, dreamless sleep for days now. He has almost lost count since the last time he slept well. (He hasn’t. Dazai has been counting the days down since he was a child) 

Lately each time he dozes off- willingly or not- he is shown a reel of blood and guts each time. almost as if it were a taunt saying, this is who you really are, isn’t it? Why can’t you handle seeing it? 

In the stories he reads and the movies he watches, he sees characters jolt awake from a nightmare after a pivotal point- their brain sparing them further torture. That doesn’t happen for him. The nightmares are endless. The reel of blood soaked scenes unspools and unspools each night and each time he wakes up, he feels ten times older. 

Often he sees a sprawling chasm filled with bodies with their bones sticking out. Some have brains leaking out of their cracked skulls. Others have eyeballs popping out from their sockets. Some have all their nails ripped off, others have no limbs at all. And in the dream he knows he is responsible for all of it. The bodies were his doing. He was the one who split their heads open, and dragged them here to rot. 

Sometimes it’s people he knows. People he knew. Atsushi with death glazed eyes staring right at him, accusatory. Kunikida with his hand posed over his heart, blood blooming out of a gunshot wound that came out of Dazai’s favorite beretta from his Port Mafia days. Ranpo tangled up in a rope hanging from a perch, knotted in the way only Dazai knows how. Yosano stabbed with a scalpel, ability nullified before she could save herself. 

There's Chuuya. over and over and over again. Chuuya with his head almost gone, Chuuya with his legs almost gone. Chuuya who is not even Chuuya anymore, just a pile of skin slipping off to reveal a metal frame and a blackhole spinning within. Chuuya riddled with bullet holes. Chuuya crucified. Chuuya on fire. Chuuya drowning. 

Each time he sees him in a dream, he says nothing. He does nothing. If there are other people around, dead or alive, he laughs. He celebrates. He says “I knew this would happen someday.” He finds it a bit silly- the fact that he falls into the pretense of hating Chuuya even within a dream, but they’re always so vivid he never realizes what’s happening until his eyes shoot open. 

And when he wakes up, his face is damp and his hands are trembling. And his skin supplies him with that familiar phantom sting again, but with stronger intensity. So strong that he truly believes he must have found a blade in his sleep and performed some sort of fucked up penance, until he has the courage to force his eyes open and check again to see relatively undisturbed skin. And each time, he doesn’t know if that feeling in his gut after checking is relief or disappointment. 

It feels like his heart is seizing within his ribcage. He clutches his shirt tight, almost as if he were trying to reach into his body cavity himself. He chokes on his sobs as he tries to stuff them back inside. There was no need for all of this, he thinks. If his body wanted to make a point it should have simply shut down. Fainted. A coma. Anything but forcing him to cry. 

He waits it out. And still funnily enough, there is none of the characteristic relief after crying. He doesn’t feel any different than before. He rolls over and closes his eyes. 

Everything is so empty, he thinks. All of this is so empty. 

▽

He wonders if the sensation will ever leave him. It seems to grow day by day, like an infection spreading across his skin. It greets him when he wakes up. It tires him out till he falls asleep. It keeps him company every waking moment in between. 

Something in his head keeps saying, it’s easier to just give in. It’s easier to stop fighting against it. It helps you, Dazai. You need this help. 

He presses his ears against his pillow in an attempt to stop hearing that voice. It sounds suspiciously like Mori. 

It is his birthday tomorrow. He has consciously been counting the hours, the minutes down all day. With each cycle around the clock, his hands become more restless. A cold shiver runs across his body. He wraps his blanket tighter around himself. 

He turns 23 in fifteen minutes. It will be 9 years since his first, most serious mistake. Since the failed suicide attempt that caused things to fall through. What started it? Dazai ruminates on this thought over and over. Why did I do it? Why did I fail?

He prizes his memory, it never fails him. But he wishes he could forget everything that led to him on Mori's table, bandaged and drugged. It was around his birthday then too, but nothing enthused him about being fourteen. It was a pointless age. There are no pivotal achievements to be made at fourteen. He remembers how steeped he was in ennui even back then. 

And boredom led to festering thoughts. Dazai knew, more than anyone, that listlessness was a silent killer. As he got older, despite his despair at the fact, he understood how any emotion could turn lethal if twisted the right way. Even happiness, especially happiness. 

But turning fourteen brought misery, more than he could tolerate. There was no warmth at home, nor within anyone else. He only hoped death would warm him up. But it didn’t take him, and instead left him at the steps of a non descript clinic. When Dazai focuses, he can still see the contours of the shabby exterior. But his mind was fuzzy with sleeping pills, so the journey of reaching there and getting his stomach pumped by a shady looking doctor eluded him completely. That encounter was the catalyst. He shivers slightly. 

Dazai tries not to regret things. If he does, he pushes it far down until he can technically say he holds no proper regret. But the one glaring mistake that tugs at his brain is not taking those extra two or twenty pills to get the job done when he was fourteen. 

If he had done it right back then, he wouldn’t have been laying on a thin, lumpy cotton futon in a dark sweltering room, almost a decade later, stewing in everything he has done wrong. 

He turns on his stomach and closes his eyes. His arms curl around his pillow and he tries to drift off to sleep. But the sensation comes back with a vengeance. It starts with a prickling at his thighs. His mind summons the memory of his blade. The sting laces its way up his body, resting at both his arms. His hands become so restless he can’t stand to keep them still, yet he forces himself to hold onto his pillow tight and not make a single move. 

The pain seems to intensify with every second. 

Perhaps pain was the wrong word. Dazai would not call himself a pedant, specificities outside of missions mean little to him, but it irked him to call something like this pain. Was it pain if he wanted more of it? When you take away the inherent undesirability from pain, is it still pain to him? Physically, not a lot fazes him anymore. By that definition, pain has lost almost all of its meaning to him. But the caustic bloom of metal against skin holds all of the world’s meaning to him still. 

Yet he cannot indulge in it. He has no qualms about slicing the skin off another person, he can handle being that type of sick. It does not matter in the end, there is no cosmic justice unilaterally branding him evil. He wouldn’t care if there was something of the sort though- something that confirms all the sin born out of his taped up hands. No one lives free of sin anyway. 

But Dazai knows, and he hates himself more for it, that inflicting that pain upon himself brings with it another type of sickness. He has lived with that sickness all his life, but he’s turning 23 tomorrow and he still has not made peace with it. He craves the hurt all over his limbs yet is equally repulsed by it. He hates pain, he hates being in pain, yet he seeks it out when he can. It’s not evil, somehow he’d find it easier if it was morally reprehensible- he knows how to rationalize depravity. but nothing about this is so cut and dry to him.

He imagines all the places his skin is stinging an ugly blistered pink. He imagines all of it covered in harsh, dark scabs. He imagines them falling off and leaving the flesh underneath raw and itchy. He can feel all of it as vividly as if all of it was really happening. It eases the urge a bit, but not by much. Not enough to let the tension seep out of his body. 

Now, the discomfort climbs its way through his windpipe. It sticks in there; it feels like something is lodged in his throat. He can’t tell if it’s all psychosomatic or if something is going wrong. He would not care if he dropped dead choking on a mysterious blockage in his esophagus in the next fifteen minutes. In fact, he would be glad if it happened before midnight. His plan never involved turning 23. 

With his eyes still closed, he lets go of his pillow with one hand and blindly reaches out in front of him where he knows he has left a bottle of sake opened earlier. He traces the tatami bordering his futon until his finger hits glass. He opens his eyes just slightly, not even enough to squint, to check the bottle. He does not like his sake at any temperature but chilled, but with the heat beating down through the walls the bottle is barely warm. An uncomfortable mildness, slightly above room temperature. He takes a swig and frowns. The flavor is muddied. He hates it. The alcohol does not wash down the sticky feeling.

He feels pathetic.

How many nights has he laid here and gone through this routine- sipping down whatever was closest, and hoping to god it knocks him out for a while? He knows, but he doesn’t want to think about it. So he takes another generous sip, and hates it even more. Sometimes, he thinks, one night when he reaches out for these various mysterious bottles laying around him, he will find his hands around something spoiled, poisonous, toxic, and he will ingest it all in one go. He will not care then, he wouldn’t care now. He just wants it to be over. 

He glances over to the blue rimmed clock on the wall next to him. A minute to midnight. 

He smiles. There is no better way to welcome a new start than with bad sake.

△

It is getting worse. 

He can tell, others can tell, and that scares him more than he would like to admit. It’s eating him alive, the frothing emptiness in the pit of his stomach. He is nauseous all the time. His legs are so weak, he can barely stand. 

Today he wobbled while getting up from his chair, just imperceptibly, but it was enough for Ranpo to catch onto. He was chewing on licorice, gaze trained onto Dazai’s face with an expression Dazai could not read anymore. He could tell. Things are getting worse. 

As he walks towards his futon, his legs shake more than they did when he was in the office, it’s as if his body is finally acknowledging the weakness he has been feeling all day. He shucks off his coat and loosens his tie. It is warm in the room again. He checks the fan’s settings and turns it to high. It violently shudders as it speeds up.  

Taking the next step is almost painful. If Dazai didn’t know any better, he’d think his whole body has fallen asleep. Cemented nerves. Bad circulation. 

But it was none of that, he knew. He lets himself fall with a loud thud on the mattress. He winces at the thought of his neighbors below. Dealing with a noise complaint at this time of night would be too much of a pain. 

He finds it hard to move his fingers. He nearly starts laughing, but he doesn’t. “So this is what it means to be paralyzed with want,” he murmurs, “too literal, isn’t it?” 

At this point, he knows he’s fighting a losing battle. One of these days, soon, he will end up giving in. He knows it will feel like a weight has been lifted off his shoulders. He knows but he still wants to try. 

It's not the record of staying clean that matters to him, it's more about the effort of the routine after. the cleaning, the disinfecting, the wrapping. He doesn’t want to do all of it, so he doesn’t want to hurt himself yet. 

But he thinks of the little reprieve he would feel after and wonders if the moment’s relief is worth it. 

His resolve is wavering. He closes his eyes and tries to induce another blank fugue state, but all he can see are flashes of memories he never wants to think about again. He tries to push them back. Soon, he realizes there may not be any space to push things down into anymore. 

He remembers being 16, alone in the container, arm stretched out and a blade in the other hand. It wasn’t the kind he was used to. His hands were not as steady as he’d preferred them to be. 

He had heard a knock right then, though it was more of a short rhythmic bang against the corrugated metal. He had dropped his blade on the floor in shock. No one was supposed to be there, no one was supposed to be able to come close in the first place, and surely someone looking to assassinate or kidnap him wouldn’t knock first. 

But who knew? 

So he had made his slow way to the shutter. His legs felt just as weak then as they do now. He had not known what or whom to expect at the other side of the door, but he still remembers something glimmering beating inside him hoping it was Chuuya. 

But it wasn’t. Mori had been standing there, a flurry of long black coats and ties, an overwhelming presence and Dazai almost shut the door on him right there. He furtively glanced behind Mori. Was someone else there? when had he become so queasy? 

But he had held the door open. “Mori-san” 

“Dazai, traps like these will not do if you aim to keep intruders away” Mori held multiple flat bombs out, with their triggers all off. Dazai gritted his teeth. He knew. 

“What do you want?” 

Mori bumped him aside and walked in the dark, mildewed room. 

“Why do you live like this, Dazai?” The snark he used on the word ‘live’ unsettled him. 

“What are you here for?” Dazai repeated.

Mori had not replied. He had walked around the small space for a bit. He looked too big to be in there. Dazai was not used to anyone else other than him in the container. Often, it had seemed like the metal box adjusted to him instead of the other way around. He hated the place but it suited him. He didn’t belong anywhere else. He deserved to live on toxic grounds. If he were to die, it wouldn’t even cause a lot of trouble; not in the same way it would have if he had a real place. There, he was transient. One less commitment to staying alive.

Mori had halted midstep. He made a questioning sound, turning high in tone towards the end. Alarm bells had started ringing in Dazai’s head.

“You’re still running after death.” Mori’s tone was grave. 

Dazai could not reply. 

Mori bent down and picked something up off the floor. It glinted dimly in the low light. Dazai’s heart plummeted through his body. He had dropped the blade earlier. He didn’t hide it. 

Mori ran a finger along the sharp edge of the blade. “This is dull. I taught you better” 

Dazai froze. He did teach him better. Back when he was 14, still bound to Mori's surgery table. 

The timeframe of Dazai’s playing memory winds back. 

He had not known who Mori was then. All he had known was that this was a man offering him a way out. 

“You need help, don’t you?” The man had said. 

“I want to die” Dazai’s words had come out slurred and thick. The anesthesia had not worn off yet. 

“You can die, just not yet. I need something from you first” The man’s tone was casual. Dazai had not known what that meant back then. 

“But meanwhile,” he continued, “I can show you something that’ll help” 

He had drawn out a scalpel from the pocket of his laboratory coat. He ran a finger down the sharp side of it, the same way he did two years later in the container. Even through the drugged haze, Dazai could clearly see the sudden drop of blood from a thin straight line on Mori's fingertip. It looked like it hurt. Dazai wanted to feel it. 

“Now look,” the man had said, tone turning serious, “You cannot die yet. you’re one of my dolls now. I don't care what happens to you after, but for now you will listen to me.”

“This scalpel is yours. do with it what you will. Hurt yourself when you cannot take it anymore. But you will die only when I tell you to, not a second before. Do you understand?”

Dazai had nodded then. He had just wanted the strange doctor to stop talking, his voice felt like cotton being stuffed into his ears. But 16 year old Dazai, standing before Mori in the too-small box, and 23 year old Dazai, clutching onto his pillow so he doesn’t do something stupid, both knew their biggest mistake was nodding on that table. He should’ve picked up that scalpel and stabbed the man. Sliced at him until he was a pile of skin. Anything but nod. 

But Dazai wasn’t born a killer. That reflex only came soon after. 

He thinks of Mori's words now. “Hurt yourself when you cannot take it anymore”. He wonders if he would have started doing it himself if Mori had never shown him. Has he carried around this urge his whole life, or was Mori to blame for it- the question ate at him. It doesn’t matter, he argues with himself, who or what is at fault doesn’t matter. 

‘Aren’t you always at fault?’ there it was, the prickling voice in his head that has been plaguing him for weeks. He cannot get over how its low rasp resembled Mori’s. Perhaps it’s intentional. Perhaps that man will never leave me alone, Dazai thinks.

But he knows what the voice says is true. It is his fault. All of it was. This wasn’t self pity. It was a fact as cold and hard as ice. 

Hurt yourself when you cannot take it anymore. 

He cannot take it anymore. 

▽

There was no one who pointed out his fixation on suicide more than Chuuya. Of course, people noticed. People still notice. Kunikida yells at him on days he gets late, either because he got carried away crafting a poisonous guarantee for painless death all night, or because he was having trouble with tying a slipknot that morning. But it was nothing more than a joke here. 

With Chuuya, it was something more. 

He realizes he was scared of Chuuya. In some deep microbial part inside him, he was terrified each time Chuuya brought it up- that he would say this was the last time, that he had had enough, that he deserved to feel this sick for all the sickness he inflicted upon others. There is something to be said about the exhaustion born out of depression- if that is what Dazai has- not for the person suffering with it, but the people around him. He has always been vehemently against the idea; it caused a sick sort of rumble within his lungs. He remembers Yosano mentioning off handedly once to him, during an equally bad time, in a low murmur, “You know I have antidepressants in the infirmary as well? I'm not just useful with a scalpel.” Dazai had laughed then, dramatically, exaggeratedly, “Of course not, Sensei, I'll be fine with sake and a woman.” He had been disgusted by himself for letting it show to that point. 

But the fear was still there, amplified by Yosano’s quiet suggestion. That he is tiring everyone out around him by merely existing within their orbit, bringing them down, spreading his sadness like germs. 

The fear was worse around Chuuya. Chuuya, whom he couldn’t corrupt with his disease, whom he didn’t want to exhaust with his own dramatics, who had a short fuse already which could become even shorter if Dazai didn’t snap out of it soon enough. He had often imagined the moment Chuuya would put his foot down and say enough, that he wouldn’t stick around to endure more of Dazai’s selfishness, his blatant bids for attention when he didn’t want to pick up a knife. And he imagined how he would react after, if he’d laugh and brush it off, if he’d apologize and then take out his guilt on his arms, if he’d simply do nothing again. It scared him. It still scares him even though the threat is gone. 

He wonders why he was always more conscious of his self-destructive tendencies around Chuuya. it’s not like he cared what he thought about him. Yes, he deserved to feel this sick, Dazai already knew that. It wouldn’t make a difference if Chuuya knew it too, yet Dazai always flinched when he would hear him go “You stupid waste of space, you wasted more bandages last night, didn’t you?”

He always knew somehow. Yet the words were always harsh. A lot of the times, Chuuya would throw in interesting concoctions of insults, calling him a misfit, deranged, other words Dazai had never been called before. But strangely, they warmed him. There was a touch of rage to all of Chuuya’s sentences, as there often would be back when they first teamed up, but there was also the slightest hint of concern. And Dazai knew, for all the observing of the human psyche he has indulged in his whole life- and Chuuya was human, he was more human than most people he had met- that this was genuine. and that scared him more than he will ever admit. 

Concern was exhaustible. Dazai had never meant to run it out of Chuuya, so he tried to skitter around the topic. But he was dogged in his persistence- pointing it out when Dazai sounded off, asking him about his bandages without reservation. Dazai never gave him a straight answer- the longer he wasted on questions like this, the quicker Chuuya’s patience would run out. He did not want to see the day that happened. 

He didn’t think about Chuuya himself though. Dazai was so wrapped up in his own selfishness he refused to see Chuuya’s questions for what they were, instead of all the unfair apathy he projected onto them. He still cannot decipher them fully, he hesitates to even say he wanted to help. He cannot imagine Chuuya ever really wanting to listen to him, full honesty, nothing held back. Perhaps it was out of obligation, maybe he was put up to it by Mori but he could not let himself think the concern was of his own volition. If he fell for it, how stupid would he look? If Chuuya said, finally, after everything, “Sounds a bit dramatic” How would he bear the humiliation? 

“Why do you do it?” Chuuya had asked him one day. 

Dazai instantly knew what he was talking about. It felt like the carpet had been swept underneath his feet and he had landed face first on cold ground. The implications behind the word 'why' chilled him to the bone. 

The two of them were seventeen then, and as much as apparent dislike crackled between them whenever they were within close proximity of each other, there was something else growing too. Dazai did not have the word for it. He knows close to everything about anything, but words had always failed him when it came to Chuuya. He never knew how to describe what it was that had been unfurling between them those last two years, yet he thought about it constantly. If this was partnership, Dazai didn’t feel too unpleasantly about it. But being seventeen, Chuuya started thinking more about the why’s and how’s of things instead of the natural assumptions that Dazai wanted him to conclude himself. Because they’d all be wrong. If Chuuya were to assume things for what they looked like, they would all be bait Dazai set to keep his curiosity at bay. He could never know the truth. 

“Do what, chibi?” he spoke lightly, but the weight of it was heavy in his chest. 

“I fucking hate when you do that” and being seventeen, Chuuya sweared more than he did at first. Dazai liked it, he liked how cusses would slide off his tongue. But this one had a bitter tang to it that put his guard up instantly. 

“Do what, chibi?” he taunted. He forced himself to smile. 

“You’re fucking insufferable. Sometimes, I think ‘maybe this guy actually needs some help’ and then you open your mouth and I realize, you don’t want any help, do you? You like being like this” 

Dazai felt a flare of anger rise inside his ribcage. “You don’t know what you’re talking about” But there had been something pathetic about it. He didn’t deserve to feel angry. 

“I think I do” Chuuya huffs. “You’re not fooling anyone, Dazai”

“I wasn’t fucking trying to” he snaps. Dazai rarely sweared for some reason, but Chuuya was the only one who could drag it out of him. He hasn’t sworn out loud in the last four years, not since he left. 

“Why do you do it?” he had repeated the question. It was clear he wasn’t going to drop it. 

“Look, chibi, I'm not particularly keen on discussing this with you. Let it go.”

Dazai’s rare show of genuine frustration did not deter him though. He wondered if Chuuya could see behind that frustration, if he could see the terror that washed over him every time Chuuya looked at him in that specific way, like there was something wrong with him. 

“You’re hurting. you are, don’t deny it. I don't have the patience for that right now. We don’t have the best track record as friends-” Chuuya had bit his lip after using the word friends. Dazai could not tell if it was out of mockery or something else- “but seeing you try so hard to be something you’re not is sickening”

Dazai felt his throat close up. 

Chuuya asked once more, “Why do you do it?”

Dazai remembers the way he felt that second still, a deer in the headlights. He was a fast thinker, but things seemed to slow around Chuuya and he never hated that fact more than he did at that moment. He started running calculations in his head- all the outcomes, the outcomes of those outcomes, the consequences of each thing he might say rippling across the future. 

Where would being honest get him? He was loath to receive pity from anyone, especially Chuuya. He didn’t want any of that, he needed someone to reach into him and tell him he’s not irreparably damaged somehow without giving him the piteous routine. That he still has a chance. that he will not carry around this emptiness forever. Chuuya wouldn’t do that for him, no matter how much he secretly hoped he would. He'd shrug and say ‘okay’, he’d laugh and tell him to suck it up, say ‘It’s not that bad, I've been through worse’. 

And that was the simple truth at the bottom of it. Chuuya had been through worse. It was not his place to pick up the pieces and reassemble them to build a version of Dazai he has always wanted to be. 

“I'm fine. Old habits die hard, that’s all it is,” Dazai laughs, and then tacks on as a quiet afterthought he hoped Chuuya would brush off, the most vulnerable he will ever be in front of someone else, “but not the only thing having a hard time dying.” He wanted to laugh again, make it sound like a dark quip. But he kept quiet after one look at Chuuya’s expression. 

Chuuya stamped out his cigarette on the arm of his chair. That had been new too, Chuuya smoking. Dazai had always wondered when he started. He had never seen him smoke when he first joined the mafia, but close to a year later Chuuya would occasionally light up a cigarette whenever Dazai was around late at night. In Chuuya’s room poring over mission plans, or in the lounge when no one was around, he never smoked around anyone else. That was something else Dazai had noticed. 

He wanted to feel special for it when he first noticed the habit but he quickly realized it was probably because of Chuuya’s lofty ideals of his image, his reputation and not because of some unspoken tenderness. Chuuya had quickly climbed the ranks, nearly as quickly as him, and perhaps he thought people would brand his smoking an unsightly habit for a kid. Because that is what they still were, they were kids. And Dazai had read enough and seen enough to know seventeen year olds shouldn’t be doing the things they were doing ideally, not drugs, not cigarettes, nor tearing people apart at the limbs for that matter. He had found it funny that Chuuya cared what others thought. Who was anyone to judge a kid for smoking in the mafia of all places? He was sure they all had done worse much younger. But, although he had taken silent note of the fact that either Chuuya trusted him enough to bare his bad habits out in front of him or he didn’t give nearly enough of a shit about what Dazai thought about him, he never said anything, and Chuuya continued smoking in relative secrecy. 

He took out another slim cigarette from the packet. Dazai, begrudgingly, could not tear his eyes away from the way Chuuya’s gloved hands flipped the lid of the packet open with his thumb, the way he fished out a cigarette with two graceful fingers, the way he held it loftily in his hand as he lit it with a lighter nearly as red as his hair. He took a puff. And even more so begrudgingly, Dazai had realized he wanted to breathe the smoke out of Chuuya’s mouth right then. He winced the thought away. 

“Dazai,” Chuuya’s tone sounded terrifying. It was kind, imploring. Dazai had been extremely discomfited. “I need you to live.”

“Wh-” Dazai could barely get the word out.

“Don’t ask me why. It kills me that you still have to ask why.”

“I don’t understand”

“You don’t need to. All you need to do is live” 

“Why are you telling me this?” There was no bite in Dazai’s voice. He was confused. This Chuuya in front of him, with his vogue cigarettes and zero anger, confused him. 

“I noticed. You’re not that hard to read when you get miserable.” 

Cold fear wrapped around Dazai’s body. “What?”

“When you go into your darker moods. You become chirpier, you overcompensate, and it’s the fakest fucking shit i’ve seen in my life. And that means something, coming from me” Chuuya took another puff. The sardonic humor in what he had said didn’t escape Dazai, but it tore at his heart in the way he wants to tear at his skin five years later. 

But Chuuya had mistaken his misery, his need for apparent overcompensation, for something else. He didn’t know which was better or worse. 

“I understand. You have your own shit to deal with. But don’t, for a second, think the only way you can deal with it is doing that,” Chuuya vaguely gestured towards Dazai’s bandaged arms peeking through his dress shirt with the hand he had been holding the cigarette with. Flecks of ash fell on the floor between them. For a brief second, Dazai wished the ash from Chuuya’s cigarette burnt him on his bare skin instead. 

“I know it’s not a switch you can just press on and off,” Chuuya sighs. “and I know it gets better sometimes and worse other times. All I'm asking is, for those other times, be honest. With yourself and with me.”

“I appreciate the concern, slug,” he wanted to add something snarky, to diffuse the sudden tension between them- whether it was imagined or not, he hadn’t known, his mind was too busy keeping afloat through the deluge of sheer want for Chuuya that had hit him that moment, but instead he quietly added, “I’ll keep it in mind”

Chuuya had glanced at him appraisingly then. “Is there something else getting you so desperate?”

“No,” Dazai mumbled. 

Now, as he reflects back on this night in his futon, he wishes more than anything he had said yes that night. 

△

Slowly the voice in his head changes from Mori to Chuuya. Slowly but surely, the ugly grating timbre is changing to something more explosive, but comforting. Warm. Familiar.

But nothing the voice says serves any comfort to Dazai. 

The voice says, “You said you’d never do it. You said that to me,” The fake Nakahara Chuuya in his head speaks with an entitlement the real one has never carried in his tenor. Dazai would know, he spent years secretly listening to every word, every breath he made. 

‘I never said any such thing,’ he argues back in his head.

He can tell what kind of night this is going to be already. Some nights, his brain is quiet but his body is roaring- either in pain, or jitters. Other nights, his body is quiet but his brain is running a million miles a minute, throwing thoughts and memories at him until something sticks and he agonizes over all of it. On rare occasions, both parts would act up. These are the worst nights, and that is what is happening tonight. He knows, through experience, he will not be able to sleep anytime soon. The fake Chuuya scratches at the walls of his skull and his limbs are heavy with pain, a slow, dull throbbing ache that moves through his body like thick honey. 

He thinks back to Chuuya a couple years ago saying “I know it’s not a switch you can just press on and off” but before he can complete the thought, the voice says, ‘so what? Just don’t fucking do it. It’s that simple’

And he hates it. He hates hearing words so cold in Chuuya’s voice. It was never as if Chuuya had spoken to him particularly gently, but still there was never true animosity towards him the way he hears now. But this is all in his head, he keeps reminding himself. 

He clenches his jaw so tightly a shock of sharp pain runs through his scalp. 

‘You know that’s not how it works’, Dazai relayed back to his own skewed conjuration of Chuuya. 

Chuuya had never explicitly asked him to stop hurting himself. Not even once, but he could see it hurt him on some level, through the way his brows furrowed, and how he had to close his eyes for a couple seconds to calm down on the days Dazai was extra touchy about people getting too close. He was, in a way, glad Chuuya never asked him to stop. He knew he never would- Chuuya was strict with interference. But he also knew he would never have been able to uphold that request if it had ever been made, and that extra layer of guilt to the tangle of emotions he was trying to sift his way through back then would’ve made everything a lot harder than it already was. 

Yet he wishes he had taken on Chuuya’s offer of being honest with him. At the time he knows he would never have been able to, but he still wishes that for just one night, instead of resorting to unlooping his bandages and giving in, he had gone to Chuuya instead. He doesn’t know what he would have said, what he would have done. But he wishes he had found out when he could. He wishes he had taken his help when he had the chance. His heart blindly aches for Chuuya, for everything he did and didn’t do. He wants to talk to him. For the first time in months, a desire stronger than his want for pain builds inside him. 

“Chibi,” he says out loud. He feels a little silly instantly, for talking to a man who cannot hear him, who probably never wants to hear from him again. He whispers his name into the stale, baked air of his room and wonders if the air will carry his words to Chuuya somehow, if he’d receive it if it could. But something within Dazai unknots when he says the name out loud so he continues, noting how the imitation in his head has gone quiet as well.

“I think if you had ever told me to stop, I would have given it an honest chance” and those words are true. Dazai would have tried, the way he has been trying all this while. “But-” his voice cracks, emotions running through him like quicksilver from what he is about to admit, “-I’m tired of it now, all this fighting. I have always been tired of it. I fought with you nonstop, I fought with myself even longer. and I'm fighting with myself again, but there is nothing to be proud of in what I'm doing. I’m not happy about not hurting myself” 

Shame prongs through him like scorching heat and he almost starts crying again from how low, how pathetic he feels but he doesn't. He holds it back and starts talking again, “You’re not here anymore to be disappointed in me.” 

The phrasing was an unconscious mistake, because it’s not as if Chuuya isn’t here. It’s more as if Dazai isn’t there- he is the one that left first. 

“I'm struggling,” Dazai rasps out. It’s harder to speak now with his throat closing up, choked by tears threatening to come out. But he uses the whole force of his concentration to keep all of it hidden still, even though there is no one to hide it from. 

“I don't deserve to struggle. I miss you, and I wish there was a way I could let you know that I do, but I know how angry you’d get if you heard me say that.”

Dazai suddenly thinks of the waitress in Café Uzumaki, her brutal shutdowns to his double suicide offers. He was glad for it. He's glad everytime the women refuse. Not because he doesn’t want to die, but because they are not who he wants to die besides. But he continues propositioning women anyway. He cannot understand why himself- but he knows it was a good way of keeping the ADA off his back in a way. Driving Kunikida insane was a fair toss up if his other option was scrutiny- but he hasn’t approached anyone in a couple weeks since it started getting bad again. When he used to, the only pleasure he would get out of it was when the woman would react in a particularly Chuuya-esque way. He realizes he has an affinity towards redheads. That's all he would remember about them afterwards, not their face, not their body, not their name nor their voice.

“I know I'm being selfish. But-”

But the voice in his head decides this is an opportune time to pipe up, ‘You are’ 

Dazai sucks in a breath, and tries to finish his sentence as best he can before he digs his nails as hard as he can into the skin of his arms. His bandages are off tonight. He has had his eyes resolutely fixed away the entire time. 

“-but Chuuya, I tried really hard.”

▽

He knows, the moment he opens his eyes in the morning, he can’t keep doing this any longer. It has been four, five, years since he left the Port Mafia and he is still tempted to listen to Mori’s one, short command. 

‘Hurt yourself when you cannot take it anymore,’ the phrase is on a loop in his head playing on a scratchy vinyl, skipping and restarting for the amount of time it has been on. He wonders, if in some convoluted way, the only reason he hasn’t been successful in a single suicide attempt thus far is because of what Mori said after that command, forbidding him to die until he was told he could. 

He is tempted to try again to test it out. Something orthodox, quick, tried and true. But he looks around him and sees nothing that might serve his cause tonight. 

He feels surprisingly blasé for all the undoubtedly real anguish his body signals he is feeling somewhere inside. The feeling is there but it does not reach him. Yet he is well acquainted with these sensations, more so after the steady slip of his clutch around the prospect of getting better. This is what anguish feels like, his fingers are tight in fists and his ankles are sore from tension. There is something unpleasant, sickening brewing in the pit of his stomach and his windpipe is on fire. Each breath he takes is ragged and cold and it’s all he can do to stop himself breathing forever. 

The summer heat settles on his skin but he feels chilly. The shivers run up and down his spine, leaving an uncomfortable sting across his body, not similar to how breaking his skin feels but still every bit of perceived pain in his body propels him towards finding something sharp tonight for the first time in years.

It’s the most intense game of tug of war inside him after a long time. There is always some sort of conflict pushing and pulling against the contours of his mind but tonight, he can barely breathe from the effort it takes to regulate the friction coursing through him. On one side of the rope, there’s restlessness, there’s pain, there’s bone-deep exhaustion- all of which would go if he just gives up. The ugly, violent impulses seated in his reflexes stretched taut, all relaxed, if he lets go. The singular pleasure from his perpetual numbness would be insurmountable, he already knows that. But on the other end, there's anger, there’s terror, guilt, from himself but also from others. Chuuya’s silent disappointment (and perhaps fury, but Dazai does not want to think about that) if he somehow found out what he wants to do, Atsushi’s skittering anxiety, Kunikida’s judgment, Ranpo’s look of bitter confirmation- all directed at him. 

But he cannot go on any longer like this. With each morning he resentfully wakes up, he reaches a new level of low he thinks he has never hit before, and the fact that he may continue to go lower nearly convinces him on the spot he has no other choice but to cut away at himself until he rises back up again. Yet for all the torment he is being put through, there is still a small part of him holding onto Chuuya saying, “but, don’t, for a second, think the only way you can deal with it is doing that.” 

It’s the antithesis to Mori's command, and a powerful one at that. It keeps him rooted to the center of his futon where he is dutifully sat; the Point Nemo of his room where there is nothing dangerous within reach. He pulls his knees up to his chest and rests his head on them. his body feels heavy with lethargy. The constant buzz in his head slows to a mild current, but the newfound silence is not pleasant in the least. It leaves his thoughts wandering, jumping from here to there and Dazai finds himself nearly panting from exertion. He has a base amount of energy he can expend on shutting certain urges away without it getting in the way of anything else, but it is demanding more and more relentless focus now. Thinking about it tires him out even more. He drops to his side, knees still held in the same position. 

He thinks, ‘I could cry now’. This is when people cry. Hopelessness laps like waves through him. It is a constant barrage of his heart sinking, his fingers going numb, his limbs stinging for attention. He thinks of Akutagawa and his steely determination to not cry, of how it made him want to draw tears out of the weak boy, the pain he subjected him to and the pain he subjected himself to afterwards. Of course, one deserved it and the other one didn’t. He thinks of God, and the one trapped inside Chuuya. He has never considered praying before but he is tempted to join his hands together and plead, ‘please, just let this end'. But no god will be listening, not to him, so he keeps his hands where they are. 

After minutes, or perhaps hours- time dilutes in impossible ways when he isn’t paying attention- he gets up and walks to a small chester. One of the few pieces of furniture apart from his futon and electric fan in the room. Dazai never notices how bleak it really looks, until it is pointed out to him. A woman had once laughed seeing the place, and Dazai played off the vacant look on account of having recently moved in. Of course, that wasn’t really true. Two years in and he simply hasn’t found the drive to fancy it up. It has a window, it has a shower- more than he had had in his container and that was all he needed. The lack of furniture may be startling to anyone else, but it is comforting to Dazai. There's not much to clean or maintain as such, nor will there be much of a hassle for the agency should he succeed in death one day and leave his room uninhabited- not dissimilar to his motive behind the container as well. A pang of guilt runs through him for setting up his life that way, even now, in the hope that it will end soon. 

He stares at the chester. His legs feel steadier than they did before. He doesn’t want to consider the possibility that it is because he’s closer than he has been in months. The white of the wood is scratched and dirtied, which is surprising considering Dazai avoids it like the plague. He can’t even remember the last time he looked at it head-on. His eschewal of the seemingly innocent white drawer was a necessary precaution. But now, he bends down, trembling, and curls his hand around the last knob. He keeps it there for seemingly forever- panic rises to his throat like bile. 

He is hoping it is locked, through some miracle, and the key has been destroyed; a fairy looking out for him, locking everything he has stored his sharp things in, but he pulls on the knob and it slides open with a stuttered creak. Disappointment silently joins the panic. A misbelieving scoff leaves his mouth before he can stop himself from reacting. He is choosing this, there should be no place for disappointment. But he knows, in the same way he knows Fukuzawa is going to call him into his office tomorrow, that this disappointment in himself will only increase from now on. He doesn’t care. Nothing makes a difference anymore. 

The drawer is mostly empty, save for one corner. There is one yellow handled drop-point blade, he still remembers what it felt like in his hand. A chisel-point, black and matte. a penknife. a plastic box of razors. a scalpel. He closes his eyes, he feels his nose stuffing up. He wonders what Fukuzawa will say tomorrow. his ability fascinated and terrified Dazai both. The president can tell what his subordinates felt, to some extent, and it haunts Dazai. How far could he sense? If it was just a matter of life and death, is Dazai safe from scrutiny or does the desire to die come under the prerequisites? He listens for the slow hum of Fukuzawa’s ability within him but finds everything has gone quiet, if not in anticipation then in protest. 

He picks up the scalpel and holds it gingerly, like he’s scared of it- and he is. Anxiety takes center stage in his head over the pit of sadness in his gut, and he almost wants to put the blade back and lock it all away. But undeniably, there’s a distinct strain of relief already flooding through him, the kind that marches through his body after the first, second, third swipe. He smiles at the prematurity but it comes out forced. His face feels like hardened gum. 

He stares at the metal in his hand, like it was a burbling baby he has never met before. Mori’s face whipsaws its way through his memories, his white hospital gloves, the way he held his scalpel, poised, like he was ready to cut Dazai if he spoke out of turn. He remembers Mori commanding him to slice the inside of his thigh in front of him the first time he botched the torture of a target, his first and last mistake, and he nearly cries out with shame from the memory. He wants to move, he wants to unwrap his bandages, he wants to silence his own head, but he stays planted next to the drawer until his knees are sore from balancing. He doesn’t even realize he’s shaking until the scalpel falls from his hand with a soft ping. It scares him, how easily he zones out now, how hard it is to remember what he was thinking about. His sharpened vigilance is dulled, like the knives in the drawer from disuse. 

He slides the scalpel off the floor into his hand, and he finds himself wishing the sharp side had somehow nicked him in the process, to see if that minute pain was enough to whip him back into lucidity. During field days in the ADA, looking for rogue ability users, scouting for people, he wonders if there might still be old enemies lurking around the corners. If they're armed with blades that will cut through him as easily as he wants to cut through himself. He knows when he stops caring about that possibility, stops swiveling around in public to check if he’s being followed, he is in trouble again. And he has been in trouble for a while now- the temptation of the blade in his hand grows even further. 

There's a poisonous ease in the way Dazai slips the bandages off of his arm, with speed born out of years-long practice. But his hands have gone numb; he cannot feel the textured cloth through his fingertips as much as he can feel the slow build of agitation under his skin. He looks at his bare skin properly for the first time in months, maybe a year. It helps that he can bandage himself up with his eyes closed, and still have it wrapped neatly. He has never had to look at his body more than necessary. But now, he focuses on the way his skin is dimpled from how tight he wrapped his bandages on the last time- he feels a sick sort of pleasure when he realizes the lack of proper circulation to his arm had gone unnoticed to him, like his body is used to it. His scars have faded, only vaguely pink hues left from what once was, shiny and wrinkled on the deeper scars. The unpleasant urge of wanting to cover it in scabs all over again twists inside him. In low light they’re barely visible, just a dusting of parallel shadows all over his skin. He hates the way it looks. It reminds him of how something is wrong, yet how he refuses to acknowledge it, how even his scars have faded into something non descript yet his problems- if they can be called problems, he thinks derisively, haven’t. 

He knows how the bandages really look to others, like there are active wounds underneath them still but in a way, there are. If they elicit more worry than necessary, he’d remove them- he would try to- but fortunately no one ever seems to point it out anymore. Chuuya once did, and his thinly veiled concern saved him during some dark nights, but everything is written off as an antic now. He is glad for it, that is how he intended things to be. 

But still, he is ashamed of the bandages yet he cannot go without them- such a glaring sign something is not right, no matter how hard he tries to write things off as dramatics. He has often contemplated going without them before, save for the ones on his neck that hide perpetual bruises from various nooses and hands, and keeping his sleeves down but he always ends up rethinking it in the end, putting them back on before stepping out of the house. It has been his crutch since he was a child. He feels unreal without them, fluid, unrooted without the weight of the cloth around his body holding him down. 

And now he’s bare again, and his head is swimming, but he forces himself to focus. He knows how easy it is to lose control when unfocused if there is a weapon in your hand. 

He picks up the scalpel from where he left it next to him and holds it upright, staring at it once more like it might come alive and wriggle out of his fingers. But it doesn’t, and he pushes the whisper of dismay aside. There is something inside him screaming at him to stop, but the scales balance out when Mori's voice fills his ears like cotton. He cannot breathe. He lays it parallel to his arm, his fingers trembling, and wedges it in lightly. Instantly he feels his body relax. His shoulders drop, his knees relax. ‘God’, he almost wants to laugh, ‘this is so pathetic’.

He finally takes a step off the ledge he has been stuck on for months.

He does a long swipe, deep but nowhere near how he used to. He feels the familiar tell-tale numbness creeping in, covering everything in gauzy white. ‘This is what I wanted,’ he thinks, ‘I asked for this’. He doesn’t do a second swipe, or a third. He doesn’t even look at his arm. He just closes his eyes and does his best to memorize everything going on in his body- the sting indisputably real this time, the empty feeling through his lungs, the looseness in his limbs, the sudden quiet in his head. It's pleasant. 

He floats out of his body again, sees the scene like a spirit above, the same way he steps out of his body when he cries. He feels none of the pain or the relief, just looks at things as they are. He cannot recognize his hand as his own. He cannot feel the cold metal of the scalpel through his palm. It’s disorienting- he wonders if a second cut will bring him back to his body, but he finds he cannot move his arm from where it lies limp in fatigue. The thoughts are slow and thick in his brain, and he welcomes the change of pace. He doesn’t dwell on anything that crosses through his mind. He lets the words and images pass. Little else matters now, nothing can torment him anymore, not when he can use a scalpel again. A smile slides its way onto his lips. He ignores the salt from his eyes sliding through his lips.

△

Dazai gets sent home from the agency offices five hours early. It hurts his pride, but he is grateful for Ranpo’s quick order when he sinks into his futon. A violent rumble of nausea overtakes him and he tenses his whole body to keep himself from retching. 

He cannot remember the last time he ate. At least, not a full meal. There are open digestive biscuit packets strewn about the floor, and he reaches for a crumbly packet with a single biscuit left inside. He doesn’t know how long it has been there but he doesn’t care either. The biscuit is soggy when he bites into it and his stomach turns. He forces himself to chew it to mush and swallow it down. He lies back down and his stomach begs for something more but he doesn’t give it anything. 

This is how it’s been for a while. He wakes up, he goes to work and barely ends up working, he sleeps through the rest of his time spent alone. The blinds are down permanently. He doesn’t have the energy to eat anymore. He is dimly aware of the cycle he is stuck in- he doesn’t eat because he’s too tired, he continues to remain tired because he doesn’t eat. But he doesn’t have the energy to break out of the cycle either so he keeps calorific biscuits in stock, nibbling away at a couple throughout the day to put the rats jumping in his stomach to rest. It’s not starvation, he has tried that before and hated the pain so much he moved onto finding a simpler way to die, but he is teetering on the edge of his habits turning into something more. He reads the Complete Guide to Suicide over and over again, almost obsessively. He tabs the parts he has not tried yet, highlights parts he finds interesting, and relishes in the smooth glide of the nib over the soft paper. His eyes blur and he loses focus after a couple pages each time. When he’s desperate, he brings out the scalpel to jolt him back into wakefulness. The days are long and empty but before he registers the newly settled chill in the room, The leaves are reddening to hail the arrival of autumn and he puts his electric fan away for next June, if he’s still alive then.

The absence of the added hum from his summer fan unnerves him. There is a weight sinking into his skull that he cannot shake and he wonders if his brain is overcompensating for the silence with gray noise. It’s all he can hear, and while he is grateful for it muffling his thoughts he does not appreciate the steady build of a headache in his temples. He doesn’t know the cause- there are too many- so he doesn’t try to address it at the root. He ambles to his feet and shuffles his way to the drawer full of medicines and pops an Ibuprofen instead. The slow walk back from his white set of drawers to his futon is excruciating. He cannot remember if he’s been on his feet nonstop the past couple days. He cannot remember much of anything, but he writes off the brain fog as a side effect from simply working too hard somehow and stashes that into his lineup of excuses to get him out of extra work later. 

He doesn’t avoid the drawers with such vehemence anymore. The black hole in his chest trying to forget there are sharp objects in the last drawer has closed up now, like a badly healed wound. He breathes easier these days, or at least he thinks he does. Yet oftentimes he wakes up gasping for air in the middle of the night- he can never remember why afterwards. His nightmares come and go, but he doesn’t remember and agonize over them now- and he realizes he perhaps just doesn’t care to notice anymore. If he stopped breathing any second, if the strain of it got too much for him, it wouldn’t matter, so he doesn’t notice. the thought fills his body with a warm glee. 

The blinds, for some reason, are drawn up today. He doesn’t remember when he put them up, if he had at all or if someone had come in and done it for him, but he enjoys the warmth of sunlight falling on his face for once and ignores the blinding red of the back of his eyelids. Morbidly the thought involuntarily passes into his head, ‘if i died just like this it would be okay’. He feels no pain save for the slowly subsiding headache. The moment is dipped in honey and he wonders if he could make it last forever if he didn’t move a single muscle ever again. Unconsciously, he starts holding his breath but the venture proves useless in a minute regardless, and the enchantment of the scene is broken. He sits up with a groan. The nausea almost dizzies him and he contemplates finding food, but he imagines the process- chewing and chewing, attempting to ignore the inevitable ash that will coat his mouth, swallowing and feeling it slide down his windpipe- and it doubles the sickness in his stomach. Instead he leans back on his wrists to take the pressure off his torso and takes a deep breath in. The stretch of his arms brings the familiar sting across his skin back, but this time, and for a while now, it’s real and not an imagined way from his brain to remind Dazai of what he so painfully wanted. He can’t help but feel a little satisfaction each time he stretches and feels older scabs fall loose. It was a feeling he had missed- he has the courage to admit now- and not even the pathetic incrimination of his satisfaction could stop him from feeling it. 

It is a short lived gratification though. He rolls up the sleeve of his coat and his shirt in one go, bunching it thickly at the junction of his elbow, and stares at the ladder of scars running up his forearm. It's red and angry. His fingers twitch to touch it but he doesn’t move his other hand. He anticipates the disgust he will feel at what he has done to his skin, the sensation made real through his fingertips, so all he does is stare. In quick succession the memories behind each line run through his head and he shrinks away from his own arm. He drops it and quietly rolls his sleeves back. Guilt rears its ugly head and he tries not to make contact with it. It’s an awful contradiction; the mix of appeasement and bitter self reproach leaves him sick. 

He wants to lie back down, bunch the covers over him and block out the light, and sleep the sickness away. But he knows, like he knows most things, sleep will elude him now. As he often does during moments like this, he retreats into his own head; so far in, he cannot feel the sunlight on him anymore and it suits him better. He remembers Odasaku saying to him, over a shared drink, that his mind dances. There was nothing he could say to him then. But now, he thinks of the way his thoughts leap from one to the other leaving each chain of relation stretched thin. It was a frenzy, a pathetic attempt at jilting the million other things flowing through his head at all times. ‘Calling it a dance was incorrect’, Dazai thinks, ‘don’t insult dancing like that.’ He thinks about Odasaku more now than he ever has. He still tries not to ruminate, years and years of trying to handle the feeling of real, undeniable grief makes it easy for him to graze each thought with nothing more than a light touch, nothing that will make the feeling concrete. But it is getting harder to not push against it, to poke the bubble he has wrapped himself in. 

It is progress that he can admit that the knot in his throat is grief. Yet he finds he is not grateful for this little bit of headway. He cannot predict emotions, least of all his own, so living in relative purposeful ignorance of the specifics of what he feels has always helped him out. 

Though even feeling is relative. He does not understand sadness in itself- he doesn’t feel it- but he feels his limbs go heavy and his stomach drops and he knows he is sad, in whatever capacity he feels it. He doesn't understand anger, but he feels his face go hot and his fingertips sizzle and he knows this emotion is fury. His body relays to him what his heart cannot. Now, he feels sick, he feels tired, there’s a constant unpleasant flutter in his chest like his body was warning him of something. This is hopelessness, and he hasn’t felt any different for weeks. It's easier to map out how things might go when emotion is not a factor, predictions only second to Ranpo, but now emotion clouds him- restlessness, loneliness, shame, anger, hurt, like vultures circling over him. 

Dazai realizes he has not visited Odasaku’s grave yet this year. His death anniversary is soon- and he should go. but at the moment, with a brain so sluggish he can barely register the pain coursing through his body, he tries to think of something else. Anything else at all.

▽

Dazai wonders what Chuuya is doing now. It’s late, and the wind bites his skin, the warmth of the sun leached out of the air by this hour. He idly thinks of summer again and how he wanted to emulate this chill with his fans for all those months. It is the ideal temperature for drifting off in bed, maybe freezing to death if he went out with no cover. He shuts the window and his wind bitten face droops in relief. 

If Chuuya hadn’t changed his routine, he would be eating dinner right now. Dazai tries to guess what it might be. It’s a cold night, and Chuuya hates the cold. He wouldn't want to be out somewhere to eat so it would have to be something he could make himself. He had a large repertoire of recipes he could make, it was something Dazai secretly, resentfully admired about him, often dropping by at night under the guise of wanting to irritate Chuuya just to eat his food. But Dazai thought he knew, somehow, why he was really there on certain nights- there was always enough food for two. 

He remembers how surprised he was, a genuine shock, not his manufactured version to keep appearances up, when he first found out Chuuya could cook. He had decided to crash in on Chuuya’s night when he saw him stooped over the kitchenette in his room. The place was fragranced with spices. The bubbling question of whether he was any good accompanied the surprise soon after- he even remembers making a snarky comment, trying to goad Chuuya into giving him a taste of whatever it was he was making- but his curiosity was satisfied a couple minutes later when Chuuya slid a bowl of curry toward him, steam still rising in faint tendrils. 

“I’m not doing this to prove you wrong, stupid. You rarely yap your mouth when you’re eating, it’s easier for me.” Chuuya twirled his spoon in his hands, his own bowl in front of him. He was sat directly across Dazai, and the image of the long tablespoon spinning between his fingers with quick elegance has still not left him. 

He had said something annoying in response, something along the lines of, “Chuuya! I didn’t realize you were so kind!”. He could tell the insincerity was dialed up so high it defeated the point of the insincerity itself, but he didn’t have the heart to perfect his façade that moment, not when his first homemade meal in years was in front of him. And it was good, it was amazing. If there was anything he remembered with utmost clarity from that night, it was the sheer bliss he felt when he had his first bite. He had wanted to ask Chuuya then, how he had made the curry the exact level of spicy that Dazai liked, when no amount of specifications to restaurants could get it right, but instead he had said, “Hey this is edible! Not bad, Chuuya” 

It irritates him now, the way he reacted. It wouldn’t have killed him if he had been a little honest. It wouldn’t have tipped Chuuya off on anything. It was not a declaration of love, saying he liked his cooking, and he’d want to try it once more. 

But perhaps it was. Dazai thinks about making a meal for someone else, not for the sole purpose of survival but for company. It makes him weak in the knees. He wouldn’t have been able to, he still can’t regardless of the fact that he won’t cook for himself either. But there’s something pleasant in the way his legs wobble just slightly when he imagines Chuuya eating something he made just for him. Suddenly, he wants to cook. He hasn’t walked towards, let alone looked at the long counter slabs of his kitchen in a while. Weeks, if not months of not having a proper meal and the thought of feeding Chuuya one day propels him to the stovetop faster than the deterioration of his own stomach lining. There’s something pathetic in the gesture, Dazai can feel it. He has no guarantee he will ever see Chuuya again, no guarantee that he will even want to talk to him if he does, so where does he get off cooking for a man who will never taste it? It doesn’t matter in the end, Dazai prefers doing this to lying listlessly trying to think about nothing. 

He looks at what he has in the fridge and it is not much at all. Vegetables in their last leg and a pack of old pasta, alongside a bottle of readymade store sauce. Frozen shrimp, canned crab, half opened bottles of coffee that have probably soured. He doesn’t remember when he bought any of it, if he had bought it at all or if Atsushi had surreptitiously handed him a full grocery bag when he wasn’t in his right mind, but the convenience of the choice available to him fills him with the warmth of gratitude. There’s wine in the cooler, merlot, the dry kind Chuuya likes. He had bought it the year he left, in a fit of maudlin yearning, imagining one day he might share it with him despite the very real truth that Chuuya will never want to sit at a table with him again. It’s been sitting at the bottom of the cooler like a black hole, horizontal and untouched because he isn’t a wine drinker, never has been. He thinks the only time he’d appreciate the taste was if he tasted it off Chuuya. He feels guilty for the thought almost instantly and busies himself anew.

He fishes out the bottle and uncorks it. He’s surprised he even has a cork opener, he wonders if there are other things in the house he doesn’t even know he has. Curiosity gets the best of him and he takes a small sip straight from the bottle. He can almost hear Chuuya’s protests- “Dazai, you idiot, what are you doing?”- the phantom sound of his voice feels better than the wine resting on his tongue. 

He takes the rest of the ingredients out, starts on the sauce while the spaghetti boils and adds a splash of the wine, perhaps a bit more than he intended at first. He smiles imagining Chuuya would prefer it that way. The smile catches him off guard, and the fact that it shocked him makes him feel awful to the bone. His hands still and he watches the bubbles in the pot rise and pop. He is suddenly possessed by the urge to topple the boiling pot over and scald himself everywhere, thrust his hand into the lick of flames along the burner, but he stands very still. There's something in the back of his head telling him he needs to drain the pasta as well but he is scared to move. Once again, as he always does when it comes to this, he wants to laugh at himself, at how easy it is to want to hurt. He swallows it down and slowly goes back to finishing the task at hand. The effort is herculean, doubled by the steady dampness of embarrassment in his gut, but when he lays the table for the first time in ages, something akin to achievement joins the tangle in his head. 

He can barely eat it though. The pasta is gummy and the sauce too salty for his liking- it is abysmal, like everything else he has ever cooked in his life, and every forkful brings forth a new intensity of nausea. It's only expected, but it doesn’t make dealing with it any easier. He rests his head on the cool wood of the table and looks at the empty seat in front of him. It hurts to imagine Chuuya there but the image comes up unbidden, him scowling, cigarette between his lips, hat askew on his head. It is enough to feel less alone. He ignores his reflex of projecting something harsh coming from Chuuya. He doesn’t want to think about what he might say if he were really here. He doesn’t want to predict anymore. Instead he revels in the comfort of the memories of every meal they had shared back then. 

He understands now sharing a meal you made with someone is the quietest kind of admittance- it is trust, it is comfort, neither of these things Dazai thought Chuuya felt for him. He wants to think he was wrong, but he stamps out the flutter in his chest as soon as it starts. Of course he wasn’t wrong, he has never been. 

Perhaps Chuuya was having curry now across the city, unaware Dazai was thinking of him. Curry would be a suitable choice; warmth on a cold night. If he was, would Dazai cross his mind? Would he somehow be aware of this cloying act served on Dazai’s table? Is Chuuya thinking of that same night they first ate together? He doubts it. but he would like to be wrong- for just this once. 

△

The steaming water massages Dazai’s shoulders into dropping, tension seeping out along with the chill in his body. It takes all the strength in his limbs, and there’s not much left, to not slide down and sit on the cold marble underneath the spray. He leans against the wall as a compromise, body too weak to stand up by itself but pride too intact to give into the weakness. 

Showers are a scary ordeal. At times like these, he understands Akutagawa's aversion to them; the vulnerability terrifies him. His skin laid bare to the room terrifies him. The access to things that can hurt him- that he can use- terrifies him. He is still foggy headed from half an hour ago, when he turned to his scalpel once more, trying to chip off some disillusionment along with skin. He finds it funny- the sort tinged with sadness, the only kind he feels- how his mind steps out of his body each time he picks up something sharp, the same way everything goes quiet when he shoots to kill. At first, he hated it. He wanted to be present for the lick of pain. And then, he figured it was better off this way. He loathes to think the airheadedness is his body’s way of implying this too is something he does not need his full focus for, just like how with shooting to kill, he has done it so many times there is no need to use his acumen where it is not needed. But there’s something different about it, it feels more like a possession rather than a forfeit of awareness. He never feels in control of his body when he goes to hurt himself. at the most, his will extends to where and when but nothing else. It is not an unfamiliar feeling, not being in charge of his own body, but he had external factors that he could blame it on back then. He doesn’t now, he is the only one to blame. 

He looks at his arms now; an ugly palimpsest of pain, scratched and reworked over and over again. He is lucky the bathroom is heavily steamed up. Facing his own bad choices head on fills him with cold sickness. 

But after he tries his best to push all thoughts of it away, he likes how the hot water makes him feel. A calming sensation, something he imagines to be light blue and sweet on his tongue, washes over him and for a brief second, he is reborn. He is someone without blood on his hands, with no need to lie and mask, someone who could call himself human without any prickling disgust creeping up his spine. He carries no shame, no hesitance, and no wounds. He keeps his eyes closed, and allows himself the pleasure of enjoying this moment. A small reprieve, but it is all that keeps him sane. The peace breaks when the heat washes over his open wounds a certain way, intensifying the sting enough to make him take in a sharp breath through his teeth to stay steady. But he cannot say he hates the feeling. His head is silent for those few seconds. 

He stays in until he notices his fingertips pruning. He towels himself dry, avoiding pressure where the skin is broken and inflamed. Today, it wasn’t just self-inflicted. The ADA has nasty run-ins too- he had forgotten how much it hurt to get slashed with the intent to kill. Though, under all that pain - and he consciously tries to not think this- he wishes the enemy had been successful. 

He wraps the towel around himself and pads his way to the bundle of his clothes. He wants to forgo the bandages today. the thought of having to wrap them around his body all over again makes his shoulders ache, but he knows he won’t be able to. He looks for fresh rolls in the mirror cabinet, pointedly ignoring the reflection in the mirror itself. He notices he is running out of bandages and he makes a note of buying more later. He takes what he has now and sits on his futon, towel still wrapped around him, to unravel them slowly. He starts with his left arm, looping it around from the inside of his elbow all the way down to his wrist and then back again, fastening it with a clip. He repeats this with his right arm, gentler because this arm remains relatively untouched. He is tempted to close his eyes and rely on muscle memory, but he forces himself to look. This is punishment too, he thinks, atonement for atonement. 

He moves onto his legs. First his thighs, where he stands up and hikes his leg, bent at the knee, up on a chair instead. He starts as high as he can, and ends the loop above the junction of his knee so he can still move quickly if needed. He wraps them tightly, hating what he sees while bandaging them. He loops the gauze around his knees to his ankles slowly, knowing what comes next. He clips them, takes his final roll and walks back to the small mirror in the bathroom. It is the only mirror in the whole place, and he is glad for it. 

He doesn't necessarily hate his appearance. He doesn’t think he’s all that bad to look at, at least with his clothes and gauze on- there has to be something working for him after all, if women weren’t running away from him screaming despite his best efforts at eliciting a funny response. But he still does not look at his reflection, save for these moments, when he bandages around his neck. He pauses and looks at the faint bruise around his neck that will never heal, because he does not want it to. It is a part of him, as much as the bandages are, but he hates it all the same. He often feels a rope around his neck, the same way he feels the sting of a cut even when there’s nothing there. It is another sensation he can perfectly recall at will- the pressure against his larynx, the looseness of his spine, the numbness rising from his fingertips to his shoulders, the slow fade out of his surroundings almost like it is the last shot in a film. He aches to feel whatever comes after that but it never works. The wrong sort of rope, miscalculated distance, weak beams, unbearable friction, getting interrupted- it’s always something. The slimy thought that he may just be subconsciously sabotaging himself creeps in, but he sweeps it away. He apprehensively raises his hand and feels the skin around the bruise. It is rough and mottled, and it supplies him with that same shiver of disgust he predicted he would feel.

Slowly, he wraps his hand around his throat and before he realizes what he is doing, he squeezes. Lightly at first, but he quickly builds pressure, hard enough that he can feel his palm aching in protest. He wonders cynically if he really could die from this. pass out perhaps, but does he have a shot at death? He tightens the pressure around his larynx, rerouting all the strength from his body to his hand, until he starts to see black spots in his vision. It starts to blur and he gets giddy- he doesn’t know if it is from the lack of air or the familiar sensation of getting dangerously close to something. He feels himself going lightheaded but his body’s survival instincts kick in right then and he removes his hand from his throat with a gasp. It is a surprise his body has any survival instincts left at all. He would have laughed at the fact if he weren’t so occupied with gulping down air, retching, trying to soothe the new ache in his throat. 

He feels surprisingly numb. He expected some sort of shock, or disbelief at himself- his one rational side battling with the other that constantly craves for it to just end. But it’s all quiet, he knows himself well enough by now. He silently wraps the bandages around his neck, resisting the urge to wrap it tightly out of grace for his throat. 

Once he is done- he doesn’t even check this time if it is wrapped neatly at the back- he steps into his clothes and heads straight for his futon. He had wanted to try to cook again, remembering the whisper of achievement he had felt the last time despite the undeniable failure of it, but he abandons all his plans for the night now. He feels his stomach turn, hunger pangs suddenly making themselves known, but he ignores it. He does not even reach out for the biscuit packet a few feet away from him. 

Instead he bundles up the blanket over him and clenches onto it tightly, resisting the urge to ruin the bandages he just wrapped, resisting the urge to give into intense shame.

▽

Ranpo pulls him aside to a quiet corner in the agency corridor, and Dazai’s first reaction is fear. His second is confusion. Ranpo settles him with a look that makes Dazai think his whole brain is laid bare for him to read, and he is flipping carefully through every page. 

“You know, the agency does not need you”

Dazai splutters. 

Ranpo repeats. “It does not need you. We’ve gone weeks without you before.”

“What's your point?”

“You’re nowhere as smart as I am, but even you would never seriously ask me such a pointless question. You know what my point is.”

And Dazai does. He respects Ranpo, perhaps the most out of any of his colleagues though he will admit he leaves far to be desired when being subtle. 

“I'm not going to take a break,” Dazai says.

“You’re not performing at your best.”

“Ranpo-san”, he laughs, his best imitation of something light hearted and flippant. “i don’t need to perform my best, I’m fine as is. Have I ever failed at something despite being injured or incapacitated?” He hopes he doesn’t hear the desperate conviction in his voice. 

Ranpo stays silent, no doubt predicting the rest of this conversation in that second. Dazai doesn’t try to break free of the natural path Ranpo assumes this conversation will go. “A break is no fun anyway. I would lose the pleasure of skipping out on work. Ah, Kunikida-kun would have no way to release all that stress he carries around. How tragic.”

Ranpo continues staying silent. Dazai reads him, sees him signaling “Cut the act”. He signals back, “There is no act”. Dazai comes up with a contesting point, Ranpo shoots back with a rebuttal, Dazai anticipates it and has a response ready, Ranpo predicts it and turns it back onto him and so on. An endless spiral of debate, each argument already poised. Counters to that argument poised. Counters to that refutation ready as well. But no words are spoken between them. The whole thing happens through a quirk of the eyebrow, a shake of the head, a flare of nostrils. If anyone were to see them, they would think they both had telepathic abilities. Dazai’s mouth twitched upwards at the thought. Not quite a smile, but Ranpo grins, thinking the same thing. Dazai likes talking to him, he likes the feeling of fanning out every response that can be made and someone laying it all out in return as well. He feels understood with Ranpo, or as close to it as he can get. He understands the constant argument that goes on inside his head, the never ending discourse about absolutely anything brought up to him. He spends a long time, sometimes unwillingly, thinking about things- big things like death and morality but also the more mundane things like which book he should read next, which pen he should use on what paper. But small things become big things after all and he is paralyzed. He hates the cliché of the mind being a prison but he cannot say he doesn’t get it. 

This is another part of him shaped by Mori, another influence he can never seem to shake. Logic as a virtue has been drilled into him, though it holds a vice grip over him now. He has been trained to move fast, but think even faster with an internal exchange of views constantly unfurling within him. It is exhausting but with Ranpo, it feels less so. Instead, he feels grounded; his thoughts don’t control him, he is in charge of them now. He brandishes them like a blade, in defense, trying to shake off this newly concerned Ranpo- at least, Dazai thinks it’s concern. 

The mental standoff ends with Ranpo handing him a lollipop. The wrapper says it's orange flavored. Dazai’s stomach twists with intuitive nausea, but he accepts it. He is sure his distaste didn’t escape Ranpo, but he ignores it, looking at Dazai with his eyes cracked open just slightly- enough to see hints of something bordering care. He instantly thinks he is deluding himself, seeing something that he merely wants to see. but the moment the thought crosses his mind, Ranpo clicks his tongue and says “Dazai, not everyone is an enemy.”

He walks away, leaving Dazai holding his orange flavored lollipop limply. He knows Ranpo left this unsaid, “You’re your only enemy now.” He unwraps the lollipop and sticks it in his mouth. For once, he isn’t worried about something given to him being poisoned. 

△

It started with Ranpo, and then it was Yosano. She comes back with her rattling bottles of antidepressants. He laughs and refuses again. Then it was Kenji and Tanizaki, Naomi close behind. They offer to take him out for yakitori, and he goes. The aspect of free food dials his appetite up a little. but when he settles down in the small izakaya they frequent, he realizes something is off. It’s a wonder he didn’t notice before. They are quiet, looking at him the same way Ranpo did those couple days ago. it unsettles him. He finishes a small portion to be polite and extricates himself out of the situation. He uses a woman as a distraction. 

Kunikida comes next, except he is not as forward as the others. Instead, the harsh edge in Kunikida’s voice when he tells Dazai off disappears. When Dazai falls asleep at his desk, he only wakes up when he wants to. Kunikida doesn’t yell the sleep out of him anymore. Sometimes he catches him looking at him with his eyebrows knit tight together, the way he looks at his schedules when they don’t line up and he cannot figure out what to do. But he doesn’t say anything. Nor does Dazai. 

Atsushi and Kyouka call him to their dorm. He has never been inside, despite living next to each other. He toes off his shoes and looks around. There is something peaceful about the apartment. There is a similar lack of furniture, but the place doesn’t feel as empty as his. It's somehow convivial. His hackles are raised. 

“Dazai-san!” Atsushi smiles at him. Dazai flashes back the perfect copy of it. 

“Atsushi-kun, Kyouka-chan, very cheerful looking place.”

Atsushi lets out a nervous laugh but his usual anxiety is offset by a certain motive today. Dazai cannot read it, not until Kyouka hands him a crépe silently. Atsushi starts,  “Dazai-san, if something is wrong lately then-”  

He knows where this is heading. 

“Atsushi,” Dazai sounds harsher than he intended, “I don’t want to have this conversation” 

Atsushi makes vague panicking gestures. He is saying something, but Dazai can’t hear it. He focuses on the blood rushing in his ears. He made a mistake coming here. He doesn’t even understand why he’s so angry, or if what he is feeling is anger at all. He zeroes in on every sensation passing through his body to see if he can pinpoint what this torrent of emotion is. His heart feels like it is beating hard, but slowly, like during the couple disoriented seconds after he wakes from a nightmare. He loses his ability to control his heartbeat right then. His gut is churning, in the vaguest way. It could be the lack of solid food for the past couple days- not out of some form of self punishment, he just doesn’t care enough- or it could be an infliction of sheer embarrassment. His palms are tingling the way it does when he feels the urge to get violent. He is tired of this pity. He looks at Atsushi and sees a flash of red. but he reels it in. He doesn’t want to be that person anymore. He puts on a new mask. 

He forces himself to sound cheery. “Kyouka-chan, thank you for the crépe. I’ll eat it back home. Atsushi-kun, I'm taking my leave now. We’ll talk tomorrow.” He doesn’t explain, he can’t bear to. He knows adding some repartee about death calling his name in the form of a pretty woman would bring some sense of normalcy to this situation, if he joked about that being the reason he’s leaving, but the ache of knowing that he really might try tonight keeps him silent. 

He sees Atsushi’s trembling, crushed face and feels suddenly exhausted. He is lucky his trip back to his place is hardly a second away from here. 

He closes the door on them, trying not to slam it. He is aware of how selfish he is being at the moment. If they somehow excommunicate him tomorrow, he won’t even bat an eye. It will be his own fault. Stepping into his own dorm feels like a slap in the face now. He keeps the crépe in the fridge and glides to his drawers. 

Tonight, he knows it is going to be an exercise of restraint. When he unwraps his bandages and sets the blade against his arm, it takes every ounce of willpower to not slash at his wrist. He has tried bleeding out to death before, letting some artery leak out all the blood in his body, sometimes through his own will and sometimes because of injuries. He does not want to try it again. So he pushes away all the sharp, jagged information that bubbles up unsolicited from his rereadings of the Complete Guide to Suicide and instead, he cuts until he can barely keep his arm up. 

He feels like he’s walking through some terrible scene in a dream as he cleans up and rewraps his arm. He can’t think straight and his eyes are drooping from vertigo. His body is limp when he thuds onto the futon. He doesn't know what to do from here. 

He wonders what changed in the Agency. He knows he wasn’t making things obvious. He wasn’t moping around either. It wasn't hard to guess where the evening would have gone if he had stayed at Atsushi’s. Atsushi’s confrontation, an evasion, Kyouka's bluntness, more evasion. It would have left a rock of guilt churning in the pit of his stomach, but it doesn’t matter in the end, there’s one now too but for different reasons. 

Life gets more and more incomprehensible. He spends nights walking around Yokohama, sometimes traipsing through the busy market streets where he’d blend in, other times slinking through dark, empty alleyways. He sees people bent over in dark corners surrounded by heaps of trash, syringes held shakily in their hands, bodies trembling. He sees stray dogs sleeping on the sides of pavements, unmoving even when a car comes too close for comfort. He throws away the biscuits he has shelved for months. He returns to drug addled areas and finds a guy who sells sleeping pills that aren’t found through any legal channels. He finds it funny that he’s paying for something so trivial now. He had lorded over the country’s most lucrative drug lords just a few years ago. But regardless, he keeps the sleeping pills zipped in a small pouch in the chester. one night in a now-rare moment of lucidity, as he turns over the pouch in his hands, he realizes it is the same brand as the one he attempted to overdose with at fourteen. 

He doesn't know how low this spiral goes; each time he thinks he has hit the lowest of what humans are capable of feeling, he goes lower. He vaguely remembers thinking the same thing months ago. Perhaps that was it, he is exempt to this human limit as well. He convinces himself it doesn’t matter. If he is swallowed by this hole of emptiness one day, he will welcome it if that is what lets him die. He is obsessive in fine tuning his act again. He didn’t realize it slipped, just fractionally, but it slipped. There could be no other reason for everyone continuing to look at him like that, full of pity and something else he has never been subjected to before. He cannot put a finger on it, and it scares him. not knowing what the people around him are thinking, not being able to predict, paralyzes him into his brain working overtime. For the first time in years, he becomes strangely reminiscent of the person he was in the Port Mafia, head sprinting a million miles a minute. He realizes this and finds he does not care anymore. 

Days slip through his fingers. It feels like one long bad dream that he constantly aches to wake up from. Time flies by and he can’t help but think he is being left behind. He goes on, cementing himself further within the Agency, tightening the screws of his smile every time he suspects someone observing him a little too long. After a while, the faint air of worry fades when they are all together. Kunikida goes back to jolting him awake every day. No one backs him into a corner again. 

He is lonelier than he has ever been. Not even his two years underground can compare to the crushing weight he feels now. It wasn’t exactly a lie he answered with, when Kunikida asked him what he did before joining the Agency. loafing around in bars, maintaining a steady state of drunkenness that wasn’t too far gone but was potent enough to keep him unaware of the flow of time, unlearning the impulse of wielding a knife at the throat of anyone who stepped on his feet- he spent those two years silently and alone. He talked to the bartender every now and again, but he kept his eyes sheathed for anyone else. 

But now, he talks, he laughs, and he does all the things he didn’t do all that while. He flirts, he mingles, he jokes but the loneliness is infinitely worse. He never realized how insulating sadness can be. It builds upon the wall Dazai has always placed between himself and others to an almost impossible degree. He cannot climb it now even if he tried. In spare moments, he looks around the office at the focused faces of his members there and feels nearly helpless about the isolation eating away at him. It's worse that he is surrounded by all these people, good people, yet he cannot shake off the listlessness he has carried around forever. “Hey,” he wants to call out, “am I still human to you? Do I have a reason to be here?” 

But of course, he stays quiet. 

He is tired of all of it. He longs for something new, any feeling other than exhaustive boredom. He puts himself in risky situations, at the cost of the agency’s patience with him. He continues walking around the city at nights and gets into fights. He is amused at his own lack of combat skills every time, but he keeps going for the thrill when he ends up winning anyway; he plays dirty. He learns how to use people’s physique against them. He surprises Kunikida once by flaunting his recent skill during a surprise ambush by a civilian riot group. The rush of that wears off eventually too and he is dipped in apathy all over again. The cycle repeats, finding something new, getting bored, finding something again, getting bored. 

He is sitting holding new knitting needles in his hand, wool and manual in his lap, when he finally comprehends Odasaku’s premonition for him with proper clarity. This loneliness will never leave him. He can never close this festering black hole no matter how hard he tries to find something to stitch it shut. An abrupt spell of laughter takes over him and he sets his needles down. Through it, he is glad the needles themselves aren’t too sharp or he wouldn’t have set them down at all. That thought makes him laugh harder; the fact that he had that thought at all. He laughs for every pathetic thing he has done to try and snap himself out of the fog, for every hurt he has turned towards himself, for every hurt he inflicted on others. He is still not one for regret, but he suddenly wants to dial in Chuuya’s number and whisper a soft apology into his voicemail. 

No, he knows now he cannot escape this sadness. If he is condemned to continue living, then he shall live alongside it. A swell of acceptance crests inside him, but bitterness laps by it. There is no meaning to this misery nor is there any escape; the struggle is worthless and he wants to make that bitterness concrete on himself. Making peace with this will take time, he thinks, and time is something he wishes he never had. He wishes for a lot of things, but the one overarching theme of escape does not go unnoticed to him. 

But he wishes for someone then, someone he can lay all of this bare to, whom he can be honest with about his wanting to die without turning into a comedy, about his failure of that want, without fearing apathy in return. Anything unlike the way Dazai himself would respond were someone to tell him the things he wishes he could tell someone. 

He wishes for Chuuya. 

The revelation rips a sigh out of him, laughter having died down somewhere along the way of his nebulous yearning to belong somewhere, to someone. yearning. despair. It feels all the same now. Dazai lacks the energy to think through these emotions like the usual academic ordeal they are. Though, of course, he cannot just switch it off, much like his ability, his brain is always on. With a sinking certainty, he knows he will resort to the one thing that really switches it off, if only for a few minutes. It doesn’t matter that everything comes rushing back, volume turned higher, afterwards- he convinces himself it doesn’t matter. 

He makes his slow way to his drawer of blades again. Everything feels heavy, like the air is weighing on him, pressure increased to crush him down flat. He fishes the scalpel out and his hand knocks against the small pouch with a rattle. He picks it up as well, ignoring the screeching urge in his head to knock them all down dry. He keeps them an arm’s reach away. a middle area between going through with it or saving it for a worse day. The thought of a worse day makes him grip the blade tighter. 

There is an air of finality when he breaks his skin tonight. He lays down in lieu of cleaning away the pooling blood before it stains. He can’t be bothered to, so he focuses on the sharp pain instead. His head slowly dulls into a buzzing quietness. He lets his eyes slip close in spite of the uncomfortable vulnerability he is shrouded in. He enjoys the blankness imposed upon his brain while he can. He does not think about the sleeping pills waiting for him right next to him. He does not think about the fact that he may be stuck in this cycle forever; no escape in sight. He does not think about the disappointment coursing through him either. He opens his eyes and looks up at the fan, dutifully spinning still, not switched off despite the deep winter chill outside.  

The sting focuses itself into something searing and he realizes he never had escaped this urge in the end. He was wrong after all. He sits up and picks up the pouch, unzipping it and dropping the pills into his hand, relief pulling at his heart. He just deluded himself into thinking the urge had disappeared. He slides the pills down his throat.