Chapter Text
Atsushi knew life was tough, he’d experienced it first hand. After he was tossed out on the streets, and left to rot, the ground became his closest friend. It’s where he often ended up, even now.
To say that Dazai had saved him was not a lie, but an understatement. Without the bandaged brunette and his desire for a clean suicide, Atsushi would’ve surely starved to death. He was thankful they met that day, despite the circumstances, and all that followed after.
He vividly remembers the tea of rice Kunikida had (very reluctantly) paid for. It was delicious, to say the least. However, even after the numerous bowls he’d consumed, there was a feeling. Small, and insignificant. Nothing more than a passing thought, shoved off as fear of the tiger that stalked his every move.
The tiger he soon discovered within himself. This truth did nothing to ease what was assumed terror, now under the term ‘anxiety’. It knawed at his stomach, and ate away at the hours better spent asleep.
At time progressed, Atsushi buried himself in work. It was an attempt to escape the rabbit hole that was making sense of this new feeling. This proved useless, though the weretiger’s resolve didn’t waver. Despite how terrible this feeling was, he wouldn’t shun this burden onto another, lest it be nothing more than adjusting to his new life. The notion of bothering Dazai with something as minor as ‘feeling off’ made Atsushi shudder.
No, he would handle this alone. Whilst the agency is the family he never had, they couldn’t help him with everything. Some journeys were better shouldered alone.
It was this mindset that led him down a path of intensive research, both into human psychology and the mannerisms of his animal counterpart. Now with a side dish of purely meat, the feeling seemed to disappear.
Those long, torturous weeks of feeling so empty were over, and he was better— that was what he believed, for a while.
It happened on a boring, but altogether normal, day. Roughly a few weeks had flew by at that point, with Atushi stuck in the office with paperwork; agreeably the worst part of his job. That was, until Dazai stumbled in, clutching at a wound. It made quite the commotion, and obviously the brunette was struggling for conciousness.
Of course, Atsushi felt an immediate sense of worry— what happened, and would the other be okay? But in amongst those, what stopped the agent as he leapt up to assist the other, was a thought so truly vile that attempting to voice it caused him to gag.
He looks so delicious...
It didn’t stop there. Thoughts like that were only the beginning.
He hated himself.
On a night where the company-issued apartment he called ‘home’ was vacant of all life but his own, lights off and stomach churning at the lack of dinner, his thoughts spiralled.
He hadn’t been this low in a long, long time, and it was crushing. Only this time, alongside the self-loathing, it’s coupled with a crippling disgust. “I’m a monster.”
His voice cuts through the air sharply, too loud in the suffocating silence. And perhaps he really is.
Curled into a ball, pressed against a corner and attempting to almost disappear from reality, Atsushi lets out a broken sob. He hasn’t changed much at all, despite how desperately he tells himself it’s not true.
He’s still the same, frightened child, hiding behind the pretense of a stronger individual.
That marks the first night of many Atsushi goes hungry, a countdown to something possibly much worse than just starvation.