Work Text:
It had started in the rain.
Dazai stares at the mirror in front of him. Breath fogs up the glass, but his chest is so tight he can barely stand, his fingers clenched onto the bathroom sink. The film of vapor swirls and pulses against him until it twists itself into something more tangible. It’s a face. Dazai covers his eyes desperately, wishing that whatever he’s heralded into his life somehow would turn and leave.
The heaviness in the room swells and fills his throat, and when the fog finally clears he sees very plainly the indentations of fingernails on his neck, blood beading up from the shallow marks.
He slides to the floor. The cracked linoleum tiles of his apartment floor suddenly seem very interesting. He ignores the bass crashes of thunder that resound from outside.
The rain will stop. It has to.
He was drunk when it happened. He didn’t break in time, and the thick mist had obscured his view. How was he supposed to know what the wet thud was against his windshield?
He felt ashamed for having hit an animal, but it had run out in front of his car on the lonely road where Dazai had decided to drive down. Fewer chances of getting into an accident that way, or so Dazai had supposed. The glass of the windshield was cracked, and it fell down like the rain outside.
Goddamn deers.
He threw open his door to inspect the damage, unearthing the old flask of whiskey from his pocket and draining it, disregarding his sobriety even further. The old stretch of road was desolate, so no one heard his noises of inebriated disbelief when he stepped out to find a very bloody human boy on the ground. “Shit!” he had shouted. “Shit- what the fuck?”
The kid was tragically ginger and wearing what looked like extremely uncomfortable pajamas. The clothes were white- his face was red. He wasn’t wearing shoes, only socks. The left sock had a hole in it. Dazai screamed. No one came running.
His intention was to drive himself off the secluded drawbridge a few miles ahead of him. It was a storm, surely no one would have questioned a poor soul slipping on the road, a loss of traction that ended with him floating down the river or trapped inside his car. The world had a sick sense of humor. He had planned to end his night with a suicide, not a murder.
Dazai couldn’t find a single solitary piece of goddamn identification of the body, so into his trunk it- or he (Dazai couldn’t quite tell) went, panic clouding his mind with a ferocity. He gunned the engine and drove, sending the car off the drawbridge. He vomited immediately after. Clearly not the best course of action. He walked the five miles back to his apartment, stumbling all the way. Call it a premonition, but the shrieking he heard that night wasn’t from his own mouth.
Potentially dangerous. Dazai looked at his computer and slammed it shut. He had a name for the body now. He wasn’t sure he was relieved. Nakahara Chuuya was apparently not sane, hence the running out into the middle of the road. Potentially dangerous. Dazai rubbed at the welts on his throat. His Devil wore white pajamas and no shoes. His Devil had murdered his parents and ran for it. The crime Dazai had committed was mowing over a convict. It was disgustingly ironic. The rain outside kept falling.
“I hate you,” came a voice from behind Dazai, who cracked open another beer solemnly, half-listening and half drifting. “I’ll strangle you.”
“Isn’t one case of parricide enough for you?”
He was crazy. He was arguing with nothing. Dazai had been threatened on multiple occasions. That was fair. He was, in his own humble opinion, a bit of an ass. But ghosts were different. Devils were different.
Dazai lifted his beer in a frenzied toast to his loose grasp of sanity.
“Knock yourself out kiddo. Your bones are at the bottom of a river.”
The lights flickered. Potential threat. There was a sound like breaking glass, like the cracking of a windshield.
“ Dazai Osamu,” a voice like a storm barked. “I hope you know how to swim.”