Work Text:
contrary to belief, even dazai comes across things they don’t know how to deal with. not everything can be drowned in a river, or lost down a sink drain with their blood, or swallowed down with pills.
but sometimes it can be channeled out with art.
between the time they left the mafia and joined the ada, playing the violin till their fingers bled was a commonplace. sketching the faces of strangers and people they wanted to be strangers took over the need for suffocation, and writing down their accounts of nihilism and what it felt like to die, to be so close to something, and have it slide right out of your fingers was a good replacement for stuffing their body with pills.
these works were never shared. of course they weren’t, who could believe the demon prodigy of the port mafia was a writer? the youngest executive in mafia history an artist? someone who grazed the parts of people that made them most human?
even after joining the ada these things were still practiced. taking up residency in an old backroom office and storing their things there. it was easy to slip away, painting abstractly until they created something. sometimes it was faces, memories, splashes of blood.
dazai’s mother was a pianist. no one ever knew that. but sometimes, late at night when dazai couldn’t sleep she would play. the days where dazai allows themselves to dwell on the sound of the echoing piano always end in the closest thing dazai has to tears.
if dazai wasn’t such a coward, maybe they would take up piano. try and replicate the smooth arpeggios and scales their mother played with such ease.
but dazai is a coward. scared and lonely and filled to the brim with memories much better off forgotten.
so, they sit, in the dust filled backroom of the ada, painting with a intensity that scared even mori. when faces inevitably come up that force them to face their past, the painting ends up in a pyrotechnic glory, and they end up in the bottom of a river, praying to whatever god would still pity dazai that no one finds them.