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Dazai was fine. Each breath he took was crushing in the way he saw his stomach expand with the force of his moving lungs. He was plump and full and utterly disgusting.
Hate. Hate. Hate.
He knew it would happen. He knew it needed to happen, the bloating and heaviness, everything needed to happen. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t foolish or sick. He just wasn’t ready. He wasn’t prepared to see his swelling abdomen, his ribs were still visible but he could feel the way his stomach grew with every piece of food that passed his mouth.
Fear. Fear. Fear.
He should have told someone. He really should have but the nauseating thought of being seen as anything but perfectly healthy was… disturbing to say the least. If he did he would just needlessly worry the people who tried so hard to get him where he was. And for what? To tell them that he found comfort in the waters that nearly killed him? That he missed not only the body but the erasure of his feelings?
Numb. Numb. Numb.
Dazai looked down at the chicken on his plate. Brown with seasoning and soaked with oil. He stared and stared until it morphed into the table. It fell through the floor and right into Earth. The worms ate it and not him, Dazai would never even think about putting that disgusting piece of carcass in his body.
He let his eyes trace the ceiling and the walls and everywhere but what was in front of him. The plate was empty. He hated it, he missed the days when he would starve like it was nothing. He missed not caring about all the damage he was causing. He missed the ghost he used to be.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Dazai stared at the glowing white numbers on the scale. The twisted numbers stared back. He got off the piece of glass and stepped back on in frantic motion. He was searching, yearning for something to tell him anything but the truth. That he had gotten fat , that he had gained .
Dazai stepped on the wretched scale one last time, this time holding his breathing and refusing to look down. Something in him broke when he saw the hideous truth, The number was big. Bigger than he’s ever been and somewhere deep down he should be slightly proud of the fact that he’s healthier than he’s ever been but it was all happening too fast.
He was barely surviving one day and then a month later he was the heaviest he’s ever been. He should have agreed when Chuuya wanted to throw the scale away, it was too tempting with all its beautiful lies and harsh truths. He could add weights to his pockets all he wanted but the look in Chuuya’s eyes stayed the same back then.
Now they were happy. They were content, having dinner together every day did wonders for their relationship and not constantly fighting about food has caused them to grow closer than ever. So why? Why does he still feel this crude emptiness and this animalistic sorrow? Why does it have to be him?
He could still remember when he was seven and had no idea what a calorie even was and now he was so obsessed with them that he could barely breathe. He wished he could go back to the moment he first learned he was sick. An earth shattering moment for most but it caused him comfort to know that there was something inherently wrong with him and not everyone went through what he did.
It was easier to ignore the burn under his skin when he was playing for the other team. When his hands were bloodsoaked and his skin grey. When he was a walking skeleton and a breathing tragedy.
He missed when he could go days without eating. He craved the hunger pains and water for dinner. He so deeply wanted to go back but no one would let him. Once he reached rock bottom and clawed his way back to the summit no one was going to willingly let him go back to that flurry of hatred and death.
He didn’t just miss the feeling of seeing the scale go down but he also missed being empty. The emptiness was reassuring. He was used to being hollow, an unfillable hole. He wanted to be better in the same way he wanted to live. He didn’t think they were the same thing. He was alive when he was thirty pounds lighter and he was alive when he was two pounds lighter. They all felt the same.
Every day blurred together in his memory until he couldn’t tell when the sickness ended and he began. The doctor had said he was severely underweight and it was a miracle that he was even alive, he had to be lying. He had to be because Dazai was perfectly fine.
He went on a few diets but so did everyone, he was just a little more extreme, more controlled than what other people liked. They said he looked like shit, that he needed to eat. They just wanted to ruin him and look at him now, sitting on his bathroom floor his eyes glued to a number far too high.
He was becoming just like everyone else, unrefined, sloppy. He needed to get his skin to stop crawling and his insides to stop moving. He wanted to die but he refused to die heavy. He would only die when he was skinny enough for his body to give in.
He wanted to lose again, he needed to. He wouldn’t stop until he was thinner than he was before.
Run. Run. Run.
At first, it was hard, people kept offering him food and he couldn’t bring himself to dim their smiles. They never used to do that before, maybe they realized how broken he was back then and they were now deluded into thinking that they could somehow fix him.
He needed to be stronger, he needed to be thin. He couldn’t handle being like this but he couldn’t stop. He craved the reassurance of the scale going down. His old habits were the guiding hand that led him back into the darkness time and time again but he couldn’t refuse their call, not when they knew him better than anyone else.
Control. Control. Control.
The days were distinct and blurry, he separated them with the scale. The number below his feet traveled with him in the back of his mind. An old friend, a bad habit, everything was the same in its comfort.
Deny. Deny. Deny.
Sitting in chairs hurt again. His tailbone dug into the cheap plastic and his spine was bruising with every minuscule movement. He loved the way his knees stung with bruises that never seemed to disappear. He felt the weight of the world dropped from his shoulders when no one spared him a glance when he didn’t eat lunch. There was no point in hiding what everyone refused to see.
Look. Look. Look.
The dull ache behind his eyes was blinding sitting under fluorescent lights. The way his heartbeat thrummed in his ears was a symphony of success. He had measured his heart rate, being worse than before was so much better than having a full stomach. Before he barely grazed 60 bpm before shooting back up when he had decided that gaining weight was worth the misery it brought. He was wrong, he always was.
Below 50 bpm was dangerous. It would ring alarm bells in the head of every doctor he could think of. But they didn’t know.
No one knew that when he reached down to pick something up he stumbles after, they didn’t notice that he wasn’t their perfect little pity project anymore, that he could stomach more than exactly eight bites without needing to purge. Hell, they didn’t even know that he was drowning in his trench coat. Or… they didn’t care. He wasn’t ready for that thought yet so he swallowed a laxative and left agency, he scattered pieces of his heart on every uneven step.
Give. Give. Give.
Colors swam in Dazai’s vision, darkness dancing dangerously close to his world. He just needed to get up, his bedroom was a trap. Water cups, cans, and pill bottles were cluttered around the floor. He didn’t move much anymore. The treadmill stood innocently in the corner of the room, its outline taunted him with possibilities and numbers.
He should have burned the rice cake he ate, at least sweat out the water he drank but he didn’t. Or rather he couldn’t. His limbs were weak and shaking, his hair was poking his eyes and his clothes didn’t sit right. He was right. He wasn’t perfect anymore.
The glory days were over, running was out of the question and even propping himself up left him dizzy and nauseous. His dream was bitter but he was so close, he could brush his goal weight with his fingers, and he could see it smiling and waving in the distance. He was going to make it if it killed him.
End. End. End.
Death was a dance Dazai knew well, he memorized the steps and synchronized them with the being he could only dream of. The walk to the agency left his body shuddering and heaving but calling out sick would only work for so long so he took deep breaths that hurt his lungs and walked through it.
Dizziness was an old friend coming back for seconds at the dinner party, each time piling more and more into its bottomless stomach. It ate. And ate. Its stomach filled instead of his and the most surreal comfort he found was in the hole in his chest that grew larger with every bite it took.
It feasted off of him, eating at his humanity and hollowing out his emotions until he was nothing like he was never even a person but a disease sent with skin and bone. The desire he harvested grew moldy and rotten with age but he never got rid of it.
He would pretend he did, sometimes when he was feeling lonely in his empty dorm he pretended to get better. Plates would be set neatly on the table and he would shove down a bite of life. It would sit heavy in his mouth until he spat it out, rice mixed with saliva and shame weighed down his hand. Spit soaked through the napkin and he knew he was already dead.
Break. Break. Break.
The play ended and the mask of health came off and shattered. He wasn’t new to the brevity or smirch that stained his every interaction. He should run away. Become a new person who isn’t so wrong. He would die no matter what he decided to live with. Whether it was hunger or shame he knew he couldn’t handle either. Maybe that’s why he was a shell of a person. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t stand his own reflection.
He was gifted in starvation. He was a master at replacing meals with exercise. It wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t supposed to be. He knew the repercussions, he understood the risk but he also coveted the reward. So was it really so bad when he would wake up early to take the long way to the agency? Was it really horrible if he didn’t want to live if he wasn’t skinny?
He took the plumpness in his thighs as an insult and the roundness of his face as warfare. He would ready his tanks and polish his guns so when reality kicked in it would already be too late. He wanted it to be too late.
Care. Care. Care.
He was taking his bpm every day now. When he forgot the squeezing in his chest would force him to remember. He was in the 40s now. He could practically hear his heart begging to stop, to just rest after all those years of pushing his body to the edge and then dragging it back.
He had trouble breathing now.
The agency noticed. Maybe they always knew. Their concerned stares scorched his brain. Their care scarred his body and ate away at his mind. He was running from their questions and memorizing their tells. He was cornered with only lies and diet pills to save him.
They gnashed their teeth when they told him to just admit it, their spit flew when he didn’t eat their lunch. Love was an empty feeling. Hunger was akin to love and death. He never knew the fear that most held close to their hearts before but looking in Yosano’s cold eyes as she told him to go to the infirmary he understood it.
He could practically feel their hot breath on his neck when he refused, empty eyes searched for the door. An escape, a reprieve, anything to let him go back to the numbing routine of starving and running.
Stern frowns and collapsing stars wash through the steadily growing crowd around him. He would tell them to stop, say he’s fine and lie with an old overused excuse, but he was tired and he couldn’t catch his breath. His lungs heaved and he…
Oh-
Oh.
He was really going to die there. Surrounded by the people he promised to protect and the hate he stabbed himself with. Someone grabbed his shoulder, and with every delicate shake he drifted further and further away.
There wasn’t a fight. No big explosion. Nothing that marked the end. Only a speck of dust and spilled ink identified Dazai’s last conscious moment. His heart stuttered and waned, and his lungs stumbled and froze in their cage.
He had been waiting for that moment his entire life. Waiting for the relief, the confetti, and the banners. All the people he killed should have been waiting on the sidelines, shouting and celebrating that the evil bastard finally kicked the bucket.
Instead, there was nothing. He was empty. He was weightless and useless. Maybe he was supposed to realize something, have some euphoria or regret. He felt nothing.
Logically he knew he was dead and realistically he was upset but he just couldn’t manage to feel anything. The last stretch meant nothing in the end. He meant nothing in the end. And when he turned the last page there was no finishing paragraph, no significant lesson or goal he accomplished. There was only his thoughts and mistakes to keep him company.
Please. Please. Please.
A gasp. Lungs groaned with expansion and deflation. A heart pumped blood. Dazai’s eyes fluttered open only to see a sad smile on Chuuya’s face, the face he hadn’t seen since he revisited his habit.
“Look who finally decided to wake up,” Chuuya’s voice was filtered into something small and sad by the furrow of his brow and tenseness of his shoulders.
Regret tasted bitter on his tongue. So did the distant memory of what he used to cherish so much. Chuuya couldn’t love him into health. He couldn’t cure whatever the fuck was wrong with Dazai with a gentle touch but oh, how Dazai wished he could.
It would be so much easier if he didn’t care how he looked just because Chuuya thought he was pretty. It would be blissful if the only thing on his mind was love and not hate. Dazai’s eyes which were once so rich and charismatic were now empty and dark, like all the light had been sucked out of him.
He didn’t want Chuuya to see him, a mess of protruding bones and failing organs.
“What’s the damage?” Dazai asked with a cheesy grin on his face that only made Chuuya turn away, no doubt hiding the sorrow in his eyes.
“You died.” Chuuya sighed, his voice tight and strained, “You actually died. Right there at your fucking desk.”
Dazai didn’t flinch at the harsh truth. He didn’t sway with Chuuya’s tone or expression. Instead, he hid his feelings with the familiar numbness that came with hunger and want.
“You were gone for sixteen minutes,” Chuuya continued when Dazai didn’t react, “I thought-”
Chuuya’s voice cracked with the strain of never knowing what to say, his eyes blossomed with tears he refused to shed. Dazai could read him easily, just as he could when they were still fine and Dazai was still good.
“When the weretiger called me I thought you were gone forever,” Chuuya admitted, those soft words stabbed through Dazai’s eyes and took him somewhere else.
Somewhere with daisies and sunshine where laughter came easy.
“And you can’t…you can’t keep doing this.” With a shaking breath, knuckles turned white with pressure, and still, Chuuya continued, “No one’s going to let you do this anymore,”
“But-” Dazai rushed to defend himself, every word he tried to speak bubbled and simmered but never boiled over.
The loneliness disappeared when Chuuya grasped his hand, callouses scraped against blisters and blood.
“No. You’re not doing this. I’m not doing this.” A subtle glimmer infested Chuuya’s eyes, its dim light growing stronger with every word, “We aren’t doing this anymore, no more ignoring and no more dodging. No more.”
The spitfire gave out, hatred ran thin, and everything Dazai had been holding onto for the last few years fell away into the sand. The ocean that once called to him whispered goodbye with the receding tide.
“Okay…okay” Dazai didn’t have any more fight in him, the light was waning but he could tell Chuuya could see it.
The screaming that had once consumed his mind quieted, if only for a moment Dazai could breathe.
A comforting smile, and Chuuya graced his body with a sturdy hug. Arms surrounded his frail form and he didn’t need the emptiness, he was content with the foreign joy he felt spreading through his heart.
They didn’t talk about the tremors that racked Dazai’s body or the tear stains on his shoulder. They didn’t talk about the heaviness in the air or the fear of uncertainty clinging to Dazai’s every movement. They would. One day when the wound was healing and the dust had settled they would sit down and acknowledge every lie and unspoken rule. But for now, in the fluorescent light of the infirmary Dazai didn't need the darkness he once craved, he just saw the light refracting in Chuuya’s eyes.