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The motion of a single finger. That’s how worthless the human life is.
The lifeless body drops onto the floor with a cold thud. Dazai’s ears are still ringing, he lowers his hand and lets the gun fall.
“Kneeling as man, lying as corpse, huh?” he mutters to himself, then looks up at his subordinates, who only came along to hold the guy down, so they could save Dazai the trouble.
“Get rid of the body, and clean up the blood. No one needs to know what happened.”
Both of them give a quick “Yes, sir” and Dazai finds amusement in the way they almost sound scared. He feels as though he has no more reason to stick around any longer. Drawn-out steps carry him out of the warehouse.
The cold air of the unforgiving winter night hits him when he makes it out, it stings his lungs and gives him a meaningless thrill that only lasts as long as the shadow of a second. He sighs. The port is quiet for the most part. The only thing he hears is the rustling of his subordinates back in the warehouse, and the soft blur of noise coming from the sea meters away from him.
The sea.
A fleeting thought, as permanent as it is fleeting, crosses his mind. It’s easy to dismiss, though, because it’s winter, and it’s night, which means the water might as well be ice with how cold it is. If he fails, that’s even more of a bother, to walk all the way home with wet clothes. He’s good for now, he thinks. Maybe sometime else.
A thud comes from within the warehouse, one that’s louder than the rest of the noise, and he has half a mind to call out to his subordinates to do their job properly, but with his attention being drawn back to the fact that there’s a corpse in there, the corpse of someone he killed, he chooses to walk away and out of the port. To wherever.
The guy he killed was....no, there’s no point in talking about that. All meaning had disappeared when he pulled the trigger anyway. Maybe it was even earlier than that. Significance was lost back when he killed his first victim.
“So why,” he thinks, “why did I kill him then? If it means nothing?” Supposedly he was a traitor to the Port Mafia. It was necessary. So what? Who the fuck are the Port Mafia anyway? Who is he, to have so much power over the guy, so much as to kill him? It all falls back to the same thing. It’s meaningless, so why think about it? His guilt is always short lived, no matter the amount of blood shed. At least there is guilt, he thinks sometimes, if it weren’t there, there’d be no difference between him and a soulless husk.
The guilt doesn’t last. What lasts is the disgust.
He keeps his right palm turned away from himself, not wanting the hand he held the gun with to touch his body. There’s a marked feeling within his hand, like it’s painted with red paint, to tell the people around him; This is a killer’s hand. Whether it was a knife or gun he held, no matter what it was, it always leaves the same feeling. Dirty. His hands are always dirty.
This belief of being dirty, and wanting to rid his hands of the weapon’s mark comes with the price of his hands being destroyed.
He washes his hands like never before, everytime he takes someone’s life away. His hands bleed around his knuckles when he flexes them too much, his skin tears apart in tiny patches all around. Starting from his wrist going up, his skin becomes more red compared to the rest of his body. His hands dry up incredibly easily and they burn like they’ve been set on fire once he tries to apply hand cream.
He’s heard countless comments like “ “Your hands look like a corpse’s hands.” from Chuuya, but it changes nothing for him, as if ridiculing comments from one moron could shake his beliefs of what's clean and what’s not. It’s not something that he controls, it’s the result of being a murderer.
Right now, his right palm is dirty.
He thinks about going home, and he thinks about washing it for minutes after minutes. He thinks about how bad it’ll feel, he thinks about cutting his hand straight off. It would be easier, right? So he wouldn’t have to feel water running down his fucked up skin again, he wouldn’t have to feel anything at all.
Walking among Yokohama’s streets, he feels as a ghost haunting the area. The shops around him are all closed, no one remains around while a hollow sense grows in his chest. This hollow sense only lasts a few minutes though, as it is shattered when he spots someone, a man, sitting on a bench on the side of the street. He’s approaching the bench with the way he’s headed, and he makes no attempt to get away from it.
The gap between him and the bench gets smaller and smaller, until he can see the man clearly.
He has blond hair, which seems to be tied from the back. The suit he’s wearing is light colored -contrary to Dazai, who’s almost wearing all black- and there’s something like a red ribbon around his fingers he keeps fidgeting with.
He doesn’t think too much about the man, but on a whim, just as he’s passing in front of the bench, he stops walking completely. His abrupt cease of motion causes the man to look up at him with confused eyes. Dazai doesn’t know why he stopped walking, but he won’t try to fill the gaps now. He feels as if starting to walk again would be too tiring.
He chooses to turn his head towards the man and gives him the smallest smile, with no effort to put any emotion behind it.
“We both seem lonely, don’t we?”
The man scoffs softly.
“May I join you?” Dazai asks, hoping the man didn’t notice the tone of desperation highlighting his words.
“Sure.”
“Hoarse,” Dazai thinks. “His voice is so hoarse.”
The man moves to the side to give Dazai some space, and Dazai quickly sits down next to him. The bench is cold, like everything else. He lets his eyes close when silence starts to pass. His eyes burn, and he doesn’t know why. He starts thinking about who this man might be, and why he’s sitting here this late at night (or is it early in the morning now?).
He feels no sense of fear, or anything for that matter. He doesn’t want to hurt this stranger, and he doesn’t care if the stranger wants to hurt him. He could easily take his life to protect himself. He already killed one person tonight, what’s two? What’s a thousand, if it’s Dazai who’s killing?
The sound of the man clearing his throat causes Dazai to open his eyes. When they turn to look at each other, their eyes meet. For the first time, Dazai realizes how miserable he looks. He wonders if the man sees the same thing on his face.
“Why are you here? Walking the streets at this hour?” The man asks, it’s supposed to be a light question to ease whatever tension between them, but it drips with his broken voice.
“I killed someone tonight.” Dazai says, almost putting no thought behind it.
The man smiles at first, and it’s a smile that only blooms pity. Then, as if he’s unable to believe the situation, he laughs, only a little.
“Me too.”
Dazai finds a sick comfort in that answer.