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Stained glass windows paint the sunlight in a thousand shades of violet and red.
A faceless crowd stares at him kneeling, knees aching where they're digging into the cold marble floor.
There's a presence behind him.
He's shivering.
He jolts, falling forward when the sound of a whip cracking against the ground echoes through the cathedral.
Atsushi makes no sound. He is here for his penance after all. He deserves this.
Though his arms and legs aren't bound, though the exit is in sight, as his shirt is yanked off his shoulders, he makes no move to run.
And with the first bit of flesh torn he only cries quietly with his head downturned as the choir sings of his sins.
…
A sleep-deprived mind is one which bleeds nightmares into reality even when awake. Images flash and overlap - of blood splattered across white marble and a cruel psalm sung with stinging mockery instead of sweet devotion - as Atsushi stumbles his way through crowded streets on his way to the Agency.
“Morning, Atsushi-kun!” Dazai chirps when he enters the office, a broad smile stretched across his face.
Atsushi isn’t used to finding the expression so grotesque.
“Morning,” he mumbles in return. rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He falls into his chair and slumps against the desk.
“Another bad night?” Dazai asks, his concern far more genuine than his false joy could ever hope to be.
Atsushi nods.
Nightmares have been a constant since he was a child. Lately, though, they’ve begun to feel more like dark premonitions of his own demise than memories of a fractured childhood seeping through the cracks of his subconscious.
“You could go home, you know?” Dazai tells him, laying a cold palm between his shoulder blades, the pressure a welcoming tether to reality. “I’ll cover for you with Kunikida.”
Atsushi shakes his head, or makes a motion as similar as possible with his head burrowed in his bent arms.
“It’s worse when I’m alone.”
“I see,” Dazai says in vague acknowledgment. His hand remains a gentle presence on Atsushi’s back, tracing up and down in miniscule circles. Atsushi peeks out from the nest of his arms to watch him fish out his phone and type out what appears to be an urgent message if the way his thumb rapidly taps at the screen is anything to go by.
“What are you doing?” he asks but receives no response. Not that he’d expected one. He asked because in the momentary silence the choir had begun to sing again.
Dazai grins in lieu of an explanation and drops his phone onto his desk with a clatter that makes Atsushi jump as the memory of a cracking whip descends upon his memory in a violent lash.
“Sorry,” Dazai murmurs and sounds genuine for once even though that particular word above all is one he’s rarely uttered without a substantial dose of mockery.
“It’s fine,” Atsushi shrugs as the remnants of his nightmare flicker and fade.
Normalcy pulls him into a pleasant haze which spills over into the afternoon as he watches Kunikida looking over reports with mechanical precision, Ranpo lounging on the sofa, finding something intricate in the chipped paint on the ceiling that the rest of them wouldn’t bother noticing, Kyouka filling out her report but glancing at Atsushi every so often with poorly concealed worry - the buzz of the office is as comforting in its monotonous repetition as the hum of waves coming from a three-hour-long YouTube video on nights so painfully sleepless that he resorts to self-help advice from the internet - which is to say it does little to aid his aching head.
“Kunikida-kun!” Dazai shouts all of a sudden, shattering the mirthful quiet and making Atsushi wince at the frankly impressive volume his voice is able to reach as he draws out the syllables of Kunikida’s name in what can only be described as a whine.
“Yes, Dazai?” Kunikida responds from his desk, calm like a teacher would be with a relentless fourth-grader.
“Do you happen to remember the call that came in yesterday?” Dazai asks, wide eyes blinking slowly and with exaggerated innocence.
Kunikida pauses, shooting a warning glare over the rim of his glasses. “I thought we agreed to settle that privately.”
He casts a pointed glance Atsushi’s way, likely thinking he won’t notice in his sleep-deprived haze. But Atsushi notices. It’s instinct at this point, to be hyper aware of his surroundings even when he’s on the verge of collapse.
“What?” Dazai tilts his head in mock confusion. “I don’t remember. Did we really agree not to talk about the orphanage?”
Kunikida shuts his eyes, letting out a sharp sigh to express his annoyance.
“The orphanage?” Atsushi questions. He hates how his voice falters and catches on the word even though it’s not supposed to have any control over him anymore. It’s in the past. It means nothing.
“It’s closing down,” Dazai informs nonchalantly. “The building is scheduled to be demolished in a few days so it’s supposed to be empty but reports have been flooding in of people hearing noises in there, seeing shadows in the windows - the general agreement is that it’s haunted.”
Atsushi grimaces. “Haunted?”
“I don’t buy it either,” Dazai assures. “But it’s strange that so many people claim to have seen and heard things in an allegedly abandoned building. And seeing as there’s been previous, uh, suspicious activity in this particular orphanage…well, Fukuzawa agreed that it might be worth looking into.”
Suspicious activity.
Atsushi shudders as memories flood through his body like the remnants of an electric shock.
“You want me to go?” he asks because Dazai has clearly brought this up with some greater agenda in mind. Atsushi doesn’t like the direction this particular plan is taking, whatever it is.
“I do,” Dazai nods where Atsushi thought he’d deny it, evade the question, and then somehow trick him into going anyway.
He’s not the only one surprised if the sudden silence in the room is anything to go by.
“I think, ghosts or not, there are things in there you need to face,” Dazai tells him, and when he turns to him Atsushi has to force himself not to flinch.
There are a hundred truths that linger in the eyes of Dazai Osamu when they’re unguarded, when they’re bleak voids which can refract no light because the darkness within is much too overwhelming.
“The past lingers if it’s not absolved,” he continues and his voice is its own barely recognizable mimic, worn out and resigned. “These nightmares aren’t a new development, are they? You just can’t hide how they’re affecting you anymore.”
Atsushi nods. He feels like he’s confessing to a crime.
He’s been doing his best to conceal just how deep the deterioration of his mind runs, and how it’s been steadily getting worse since he’s joined the Agency.
“And it’s not just the nightmares,” Dazai goes on, eyes sharp, breaking past Atsushi’s ribs to peer into his very soul. “You’re getting more miserable by the day.”
He might not have put it quite so harshly, but Atsushi isn’t a good enough liar to deny it.
“Dazai,” Kunikida warns, but to Atsushi his voice sounds like distant static. “There’s better ways to do this.”
“We don’t have time for better ways,” Dazai snaps and Atsushi jumps. He can’t remember ever hearing Dazai sound so openly hostile. “Look at him and tell me you don’t see it.”
Eyes, numerous pairs of them, turn to stare at him, and Atsushi wishes he could shrink beneath their gaze and make himself easier to behold, wishes he could erase the dark circles beneath his eyes that’ll cause them to worry and somehow conceal the bone-deep exhaustion lingering in his eyes that’ll undoubtedly disturb them.
“Still,” Kunikida says, sounding uncharacteristically hesitant. “This isn’t the way. It’ll only do more harm.”
Dazai leaves his side then, and Atsushi sways with his sudden absence though he hadn’t been leaning on him at all.
“He’s not ready,” Kunikida insists.
Dazai glares at him, eyes narrowed and startlingly cold. “That’s not the point. No one is ever ready. It still has to be done.”
“You are asking him to relive his most painful memories.”
“He’s reliving them anyway!” Dazai shouts. Silence falls after that and for a prolonged moment of tension it’s deafening. “All the nightmares, the flashbacks - his past is haunting him either way. This way at least he gets some agency in the whole ordeal. He gets to choose how to face it. How to resolve it.”
“And what if he can’t resolve it?” Kunikida challenges, arms crossed, gaze bewildered beneath the guise of subdued anger. “What if he’s not the winner of that confrontation?”
Atsushi feels an awful but familiar numbness settle deep in the marrow of his bones. He’s cold but can’t feel it. In pain but unable to register where it’s coming from.
“But this way I’m not either,” he mutters and hopes it’s only in his head that he sounds slightly deranged.
Kunikida’s gaze snaps to him. “What?”
“If I don’t go,” Atsushi clarifies, chewing at his dread until he can swallow it down for long enough to grit out the words, “then I’m not the winner or the loser. I’m not weaker than my past, but I’m not stronger either. I’m just…nowhere.”
“You don’t have anything to prove,” Kunikida tells him, sounding like he’s pleading. “There’s no need to be stronger than your past. Or to know that you’re weaker. Neither matters. What matters is the here and now.”
“Even if the here and now is constantly getting interrupted by the past?” Dazai interjects. “He can run away. Pretend none of what happened before exists. But the nightmares will persist. The past won’t die, no matter how long he ignores it. It will haunt him for the rest of his life.”
“I don’t think reliving it is going to make it any better,” Kunikida argues. “If anything, reminding himself of past events will only make the memories more vivid.”
Atsushi stands. The screeching scrape of his chair against the floor is piercing.
The numbness persists but is swayed just slightly by something like determination, something that comes to life when he glances at Dazai, at his for once unveiled eyes and all their compassionate shadows.
“It doesn’t matter what either of you thinks, though,” he concludes. “I want to do it. I want to go.”
“Atsushi, you don’t - ” Kunikida tries before he’s interrupted by an uplifted hand. It takes Atsushi a moment to realize he’s the one who interrupted.
“I know,” he assures. His conviction slowly finds its strength to shove that veil of nothingness aside so he can lift his eyes and meet Kunikida’s in a way that feels steady and certain. “But I’m really, really , tired. And if Dazai-san thinks there’s even the slightest chance this could help me, I’m willing to give it a shot.”
Kunikida’s expression softens considerably. He heaves a sigh that sounds a lot like an admission of defeat.
“Alright,” he nods. “But only if you’re sure.”
“I am,” Atsushi says and finds that he means it.
He’s been haunted his entire life, be it by bloodthirsty beasts or memories of monsters much less fantastical, more human, but no less cruel for it.
The orphanage, that place of echoing screams and endless misery, has always been at the source of the darkness that follows him. It’s always been far too mortifying to face, too painful to remember. It follows him, every waking hour and through every nightmare, seeps like ink into every available crack in his subconscious to stain his memory.
Selfishly and just a little childishly, Atsushi wants all that suffering to end so he can rest, if only for a little while.
Dazai parks a decent distance away from the dilapidated orphanage and steps out of the car, Atsushi following suit, his stomach in coils and a lump in his throat that’s already making it hard to breathe.
In no apparent rush, Dazai leans against the front of the car and looks out at the building awaiting them, sitting in a field singed by the summer heat, lonely and looming.
Atsushi joins him, mirroring his pose, and tries to breathe rhythmically through his nose.
“Don’t linger longer than you need to,” Dazai repeats as he has a thousand times on the way over. “Even if it means running out after five minutes.”
“I know.”
“I’m guessing what people are reporting is some straggler looking for shelter in an abandoned building,” he continues, and he’s said this already too. “Let them be, if that’s the case, alright? There’s only four days left until the place is demolished anyway. Might as well let them keep a roof over their head for a few more days before they’re chased out.”
“I know.”
“I’ve asked someone to join you.”
That’s new. That feels like a trap, considering it wasn’t mentioned until now when they’re already here and Dazai knows Atsushi has no room to refuse and nowhere to run.
On que, stepping out of shadows he must conjure himself because they surround him even at high noon, when the sun is scorching and bright, he makes his presence known with a quiet cough.
Dazai grins broadly but it’s a little taut around the edges.
“Akutagawa! How kind of you answer my request!”
Akutagawa gives him a half-hearted glare. “You don’t make requests. You give orders. And I obey those.”
Dazai’s grin falters and can no longer regain its former cheeriness no matter how hard he tries. “Whatever the case,” he shrugs. “Thank you for coming.”
If Akutagawa is at all as surprised by this bout of genuine kindness as Atsushi is, he doesn’t let it show. His eyes traverse Dazai’s face for a long moment before they flicker away. Dazai’s smile falls entirely.
Turning his eternally intense stare to Atsushi, Akutagawa frowns. “You’re shivering.”
Atsushi feels himself flush, half-angry and half-embarrassed.
“You would be too, if you were me,” he grumbles.
“You’re probably right,” Akutagawa allows with a softness he’s only recently allowed to seep into his tone, usually when they’re alone, pretending they’re not walking each other home after a joined mission.
“Well,” Dazai claps him on the shoulder when it becomes apparent, much to Atsushi’s mortifying embarrassment, that neither he nor Akutagawa would have broken eye contact unless they were interrupted. “My job here is done, so - ”
Atsushi snags him by the arm before he can slip away.
“Why is he here?”
“I didn’t want you going in alone. Could be dangerous,” Dazai shrugs.
“Yeah, but why him? Why didn’t you go with me? Or literally anyone else? Why him ?”
“Oh, it’s fine, feel free to talk about me like I’m not here,” Akutagawa says wryly but Atsushi ignores him in favor of glaring at his mentor.
Dazai grins at him, all innocent and unassuming, his eyes glinting with amusement. “But you two work so well together. If there’s real danger lurking in there, why shouldn’t I send my two best fighters to check it out?”
A pause, one that lingers uncomfortably as both Atsushi and Akutagwa go still. Akutagawa’s eyes grow wide. His breath catches and he conceals it clumsily with a cough.
Atsushi loosens his grip on Dazai’s arm.
He has nothing to argue with, no matter how much he hates it. He and Akutagawa do work well together. Despite the part of him that will always despise causing harm to another person, fighting with Akutagawa has always brought with it a certain undeniable thrill. And when it’s over and the adrenaline subsides, there’s something oddly comforting, a growing familiarity in catching their breath together, exchanging remarks that would have one think they hate each other even though they just fought like they felt the exact opposite.
“Fine,” he mutters, looking away, but not quickly enough to miss the pointed teasing tilt of Dazai’s smile.
“You boys have fun,” Dazai says with a little wave, though they most certainly will not.
As he drives away, Atsushi directs his gaze to the orphanage. He feels his confidence already faltering.
“You don’t really want to go in there, do you?”
Atsushi jumps. He hates how silent Akutagawa is. It makes it so easy to forget he’s even there.
“What are you talking about? I asked to be here. I want to do this.”
“You don’t,” Akutagawa decides but doesn’t elaborate. Instead, with his usual flare for the dramatics, he turns on his heel and begins walking towards the orphanage, his coat billowing behind him in a phantom wind. Atsushi rolls his eyes.
The floorboards of the porch are rotted, creaking with every step towards the equally rotting panels of the gate.
It was so cold, the night he arrived. The wind was howling, bending the trees surrounding the clearing so violently some of them snapped and fell, adding to the tumultuous noise of rumbling thunder which echoed as dark clouds collided, bleeding icy rain onto the flooded porch.
Atsushi knelt in the water and stared up at the gate. He had woken up here, curled up, soaked through to the bone. He couldn’t remember how he got here. Horrifyingly, he couldn’t remember anything up until that moment, that storm. Nothing but his name and the knowledge that he had been abandoned. Why and by who, he didn’t know.
The gate opened, rusted hinges wailing loud enough to overpower the storm and a white-clad figure stepped outside to crouch before him.
Atsushi never learned her name but will always remember her face, kind and compassionate as she asked him his name, gathered him up in her arms and ushered him inside where he was wrapped in a towel and offered torn but dry clothing.
She tucked him into bed and even the single flimsy sheet she covered him with seemed like the softest silk when paired with gentle hands smoothing it down and tucking him in, fingers running once through his damp hair and a gentle voice bidding him goodnight.
There were other children in the room he was in, four of them, their names long forgotten, who sat up in their beds to stare at him, wide-eyed and curious about the newcomer with blood dried beneath his nails.
“Weretiger?”
Atsushi shakes his head to dispel the arisen memories.
“Sorry.”
“You don’t have to go in there,” Akutagawa says.
Atsushi breathes sharply through his nose in an attempt to keep the anger at bay. That specific brand of anger that’s only his, which awakens in the form of claws and razor-sharp teeth, stirring even when dormant, waiting for a chance to pounce.
“I want to,” he reiterates through gritted teeth.
Akutagawa shakes his head. “You don’t.”
“Why would I be here if I didn’t want to?” Atsushi demands and allows himself to shout to lessen the growing pressure in his chest.
Akutagawa doesn’t deign to respond to his outburst in equal measure. Instead, tone as cold as the depthless voids of his eyes, he says, “You spend your life doing what other people want. Forgive me for being skeptical of your ability to make objective decisions, especially on matters such as this one.”
“You’re one to talk,” Atsushi snarls. It’s mean, cruel, and all the other horrible things he isn’t supposed to be. “Everything you’ve ever done has been to earn the approval of someone who barely cares if you live or die.”
Cruel. Unnecessary. Not what he’s supposed to be like.
But Akutagawa doesn’t flinch away from all the ugly dripping like venom from Atsushi’s lips. He quirks a brow. “Have I ever denied that?”
Atsushi himself falters, but the disembodied anger persists, drags more vile words from his mouth when all he wants to do is crawl into a corner and repent. “You won’t hate yourself less just because you’re aware of all the reasons you do.”
Akutagawa shrugs. “I know.”
Atsushi wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, to tear his stillness apart and dig into what’s underneath. He wants him to stop being so quiet, so calm in his eternal suffering, looking down on Atsushi like he’s lesser than just because his anger writhes instead of sitting still, lashes out instead of cutting inward.
“Just because you know how to live with it, doesn’t mean you’re better than me.”
“Know how to live with what?” Akutagawa asks, the tilt of his head a motion learned, and Atsushi knows well who he’s copied it from, that mocking twitch of his lips and the taunting narrowing of his eyes.
The blood on his hands. The past, digging its claws into his throat. Everything he has and hasn’t done, has and hasn’t become.
“You know what.”
“I do,” Akutagawa nods. “Just like I know you don’t want to be here.”
“Enough with that!” Atsushi snaps. “I know what I want. I certainly know better than you.”
“Oh, really?” Akutagawa asks but it sounds more like a threat, and now there’s an edge to his voice, the neutral raspy softness gone, replaced by something equally quiet but so much harsher. “Am I wrong, then, when I say I think you’re only here because Dazai decided you should be?”
Atsushi says nothing.
“Did he look at you? Offer up all his suffering on a platter and show you how similar it was to your own?” Akutagawa questions, encroaching on him, his words daggers, Atsushi’s faltering heart their target. “Did he make you feel like he was the only one who understood what you’ve been through? Hm? Do you think he’s the only one who could possibly know what’s good for you?”
Atsushi says nothing.
“I know why he hates me,” Akutagawa continues. A ray of light catches the darkness of his irises, a single weakling glimmer as he looks out at the field, finding something in the distance that makes a solemn smile bloom on his lips. “Because in the end, despite all his best efforts to mold and reshape me, I ended up just like him. Just as miserable. It might be for a different reason, but I walk the line between life and death just like he does. And sometimes I want to fall over to one particular side of that line as much as him.”
Atsushi can say nothing.
“He wanted so badly to prove to himself that not everyone leading the life we lead would end up like him. He wanted me to be everything he wanted to become but failed to. But in the end, all he got from me was a spectacular failure.”
Atsushi can feel nothing.
“Dazai-san cares,” he argues, weak, futile, childish in the face of what Akutagawa has just told him.
“I’m not saying he doesn’t,” Akutagawa shakes his head, still so infuriatingly quiet and subdued. “But does damaging something because you care too much about it lessen that damage? He cared. He found a child he saw himself in and wanted to eradicate that reflection. To turn that child into a man who’d know nothing of the monster he himself was turned into. And he made that child into a monster that might be even worse. But it’s fine because he cared, right?”
Atsushi can’t move.
“Dazai-san is a different person now.”
Akutagawa nods, letting out a bitter chuckle. “Maybe he is. But it’s not about having you evade his fate anymore. You’ve already done that by ending up on the side of what he’s chosen to call “good” from the beginning. Now, it’s about you accomplishing something different, but also something he himself will never do.”
Atsushi can’t breathe.
“He can’t face his past,” Akutagwa says, a note of finality in his voice. “And it’s eating him alive. He’s forcing you to face yours, not because he has any guarantee it’ll help you, but because it’ll shove you as far away as possible from the path he’s walking. All Dazai has ever wanted is to remain an anomaly.”
Atsushi doesn’t know what to say.
His rage, always directionless, now loses its target entirely. It sinks and settles in the shape of something heavy in the pit of his stomach and then rises again to form a lump in his throat. His eyes burn. His chest heaves.
“I - ” he tries, voice catching, pushing strained past the tightness in his throat, “I just wanted the nightmares to stop.”
“Is facing this place going to make them stop?”
Atsushi shrugs, uncertainty welling up inside his chest, a familiar shivery tightness that makes it that much harder to breathe.
He sways forward, memories surging, overflowing, flashing like lightning - the crack of a whip, the persistent hum of electricity, footsteps always echoing, even in the dead of night, and screams in the dead of night that fall on deaf ears, pleas unanswered, blood dried, cuts scabbed over, itching. Stained glass windows, letting light fall upon the battered remains of a starved body small and bent out of shape, lying forgotten under the stairs, unfair beauty glimmering prismatic and divine even as hell unfolds below.
His knees hit the ground and he feels the rattle of the impact in his jaw.
“It’ll kill me,” he gasps. “It’ll kill me if I remember.”
“So don’t.”
“But then it won’t go away! Don’t you understand?” Atsushi pleads, weeps, all the ugly, shameful things he’s not supposed to do. “I can’t live with this - this shadow following me around. But I -...I’m not strong enough to turn around and face it.”
“So don’t,” Akutagawa repeats. Atsushi looks up and finds steel eyes already settled upon his shaking form, holding no judgment for his pitiful state, not bothering to notice it at all.
“What other choice do I have?”
Akutagawa crouches down to his level and his gaze is so firm Atsushi feels himself settle just looking at its unshakable force.
“Let it burn.”
…
The heat is almost unbearable.
Old wood bemoans the hellish flames carving it hollow, eating out the rot and spitting out ashes that flutter, merging with the plume of smoke which shadows the sky.
Though the air’s ashen taste coats the inside of his mouth, Atsushi inhales it with greed. He reaches a hand out towards the raging flames devouring the remnants of the prison of his innocence and lets it lick at the tips of his fingers.
The fire glints off of Akutagawa’s teeth, bared in a rare smile.
“I didn’t think you’d take it literally,” he says, voice rougher than usual as the smoke invades his lungs, though the intermittent coughing does nothing to dissuade his smirk. “But I admire the dedication.”
“I don’t understand what I’m feeling right now,” Atsushi confesses, feeling like he should whisper before this spectacle of light and destruction unfolding in front of them. With every groan of the collapsing building, he can feel his chest expanding, shoulders dropping some of the eternal weight they carry.
“Well,” Akutagawa says, breathing a huff of almost-laughter through his nose, “It’s not every day you commit arson for the first time. It’s alright to be confused.”
“Oh,” Atsushi says in wonder. “I guess I did commit arson.”
He laughs, then laughs harder at Akutagawa’s bewildered expression at the sudden outburst.
He laughs, then feels it catch in his throat and stick, tasting bitter.
His next laugh is a sob, and his ever-widening smile a pained grimace. His tears, hot as the flames devouring his childhood, drip down his neck as more maniacal noises slip past his lips beyond his control, laugher and weeping merging into a singular expression of what must be insanity clawing at his mind and memory.
Relief stings like guilt, elation burns like terror, and panic wells up in the center of it all, stealing his air.
He thinks he might be screaming. Or maybe that’s the ghost of his youth, pleading not to be forgotten, yet yearning to be set free from the confines of mismatched memories, nightmares, and flashbacks.
And he lets it burn.
There’s a patch of grass by the road not yet caught in the flames and Akutagawa settles there, leaning against a surviving tree to wait for their pick-up. Vaguely, he wonders what Dazai is going to say when he sees what they’ve done.
The silence grows heavy as Atsushi slowly pieces himself back together with visible effort. He sits in the grass, knees drawn to his chest, counting his breaths.
Akutagawa lets him.
It’s when the quiet has dragged on for a while that he knows to count down the seconds before Atsushi finds it uncomfortable and comes up with something to break it.
“Your cough,” Atsushi says quietly, evading the subject of the building they just set on fire clumsily but with enough desperation in his eyes that Akutagawa lets him off the hook for now. “What’s causing it?”
It takes him the span of a baffled blink to process the question.
He can’t remember if anyone has ever asked him that before, aside from one of the Mafia’s faceless medics who was ordered to find out what was preventing him from performing his tasks to the fullest. What made him so difficult to utilize.
“Pleurisy,” he says. A condition he now knows the name of but would much rather keep just a nameless ache in his chest. Knowing its name means knowing what it does. And that means counting down the days with an acute awareness that each one might be his last. “That’s what it started as. Caught it when I was a child. It’s curable but given my unique upbringing, there weren't really many opportunities for proper medical care. So it festered and got worse. Shitty air, overexertion and lack of care. And now my lungs are so thoroughly fucked up that treatment won’t fix them.”
“Are you dying?” Atsushi asks, shaken for an entirely new reason. The bitter smile Akutagawa offers him does nothing to mend that fact.
“Mm,” he nods. The thought used to terrify him. Now, it’s just another of many hindrances. An addition to the list of reasons why he’ll never become what he wants to be. “Have been for twenty years. It’s a surprisingly slow process.”
It’s not exactly humor but it serves to take some weight off of what he’s saying. Even still, and despite his near-instinctual denial of the fact that he’s dying, the words feel leaden in his mouth now that he’s saying them out loud.
Claims of a shared burden being easier to carry turn out to be false. Because the endless depth of emotion which crosses Atsushi’s face when he processes this harsh truth is a pain so sharp that his illness is but a pinprick in comparison.
Atsushi looks like he’s mourning him. But Akutagawa is alive, watching his death be grieved before it’s even happened. And that is a feeling more nauseating than any past dismissal or cruelty could ever be.
“Does Dazai-san know?”
Akutagawa feels the impact of that question profoundly. He shrugs. “Probably. I never told him explicitly but he had to have known. I remember him being scolded by the boss for looking so heavily into every detail of his subordinates’ pasts. He claimed it made them easier to utilize - knowing the ins and outs of their strengths and weaknesses.”
Atsushi looks away from him to silently process.
He does that a lot, Akutagawa has taken note. He’ll pause when something is difficult to process, retreating completely into himself to digest the information, and will refuse to speak until he’s let the information properly settle.
Akutagawa tends to be more brash so it’s a refreshing quality. Even endearing, perhaps.
“Was I right?” he asks when he sees Atsushi start to squirm in the silence again. “About letting it burn.”
Atsushi leans back on his arms and shuts his eyes. The not-so distant flames dance along his features, one half of him cast in its light, the other engulfed in shadows. He sighs.
“I think so,” he murmurs like it’s something shameful to confess. “I…I think I feel better knowing that it's gone. Knowing that I’m the one who made it go away.”
“When Dazai left the mafia,” Akutagawa says because he has an inexplicable urge to, “he left his coat folded in front of my door.”
Atsushi blinks at him, a gentle coax to continue. So he does.
“I thought about burning it. I was so angry at him for leaving me… unfinished .” He wipes a hand across his face like that’ll rid his expression of its openness. “But I couldn’t bring myself to do it in the end.”
“This coat?” Atsushi asks, taking the hem of it between his fingers.
“This very one,” he confirms.
Atsushi goes quiet again, processing. He keeps tracing the edge of the coat.
“Atsushi?”
“Hm?”
“Will you burn it once I’m gone?”
“Can I keep it instead?”
The fire roars in the distance. Smoke rises high, masking the stars and newly risen moon. Atsushi’s eyes glisten with tears that have yet to stop falling, and his expression is carved open, every twisted dying remnant of terror he’s just set ablaze in plain sight for Akutagawa to see.
“Yeah,” he says. “You can keep it."