Chapter Text
La lune est un fruit un peu rance, la vie est une maladie.
Ceux qui rêvent ont bien de la chance, les autres ont des insomnies.
This was the story of a man who found life horribly painful. Some might call him suicidal, other might say he was an addict. None of these things were completely wrong, but the truth was, he was just trying to find a way out of the misery that had haunted him for the past twenty two years.
Dazai Osamu only wanted a single thing from life: the sweet release of death. And this only thing, life never gave him. It was getting to a point where the simple thought that he was existing made him sick.
He could not think of one reason to keep walking this earth, but of so many to just lay beneath it forever.
The man worked at a café. As much as he wanted to die, he still had to make a living. So every day, before his shift, he’d put on a charming smile – Dazai was after all a charming young man – and served lattes and homemade cake to students and tourists and businessmen.
Dazai did not care much, but there were a few regulars there, like this man with dark brown hair that was covering his eyes. He would always sit in a corner to write his crime novels. There was also this surgeon who always popped at random hours before her shifts, this redhead with the fedora hat and the quiet teenager that had black hair that ended in grey.
Sometimes he’d wonder what it would be like to be them, live a normal life and not want to rip off his own skin.
The café was always lively, mostly thanks to his coworkers. Fukuzawa-san owned the place. He looked strict and scary but was the kindest person he’d ever worked for. They shared a common love for cats and sometimes fed the strays in the back alley together. Kunikida Doppo was in charge of their small bakery. Dazai would find amusement in annoying him in every possible way. Edogawa Ranpo, despite being paid to do work, was mostly found sitting with that one polar novelist talking about mysteries. Fukuzawa-san for some reason really liked his employee and just let him be. Finally, Tanizaki was a college student working there part-time. His hair somehow reminded Dazai both of a fireball and of that one fedora boy.
Dazai felt great discomfort in life, but working there certainly was not the biggest of them all.
Nakahara Chuuya was twenty when he first stepped foot in the Stray Dogs café. He needed somewhere to finish his assignment that was neither his tiny apartment nor the university library. This place served coffee, had a decent amount of sockets and was close to the bridge that lead him home. So he stayed there. And came back.
It turned out, whenever Chuuya had a particularly challenging assignment to write, he would end up at the café. More often than not, a tall dude covered in bandages – how edgy – would give him his order. And this man sucked at his job because he happened to always have it slightly off. It was like that waiter – Dazai, he later learned – had a natural ability to irritate him.
Yet, for two years, he kept coming back. The coffee was good, the pastries too and the place quiet enough.
Until the incompetent bastard stopped taking – and missing – his orders. In fact, it seemed he had disappeared from the café entirely. Maybe he had taken another job. Chuuya and him never really had an actual conversation. He had a feeling it would not go well anyway. So he just accepted it and went on with his life, sometimes writing assignments and sometimes just scribbling random verses on his notebook.
In a few weeks, the waiter had completely vanished from his thoughts.
That was until one evening, while he was driving home – near the shore, for once – he saw a silhouette on top of the bridge he was usually driving over. The silhouette, which clearly belonged to a man, was standing over the edge, fifty meters over the ocean.
And there were bandages floating in the wind.
This was the story of a man who wanted to die. But perhaps it is more fitting to say it was the story of a bridge.