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Dazai shuts the door behind him and slides down it to the floor with a heavy exhale, releasing the weight of all of today's bullshit with a breath. He’s filled with a dull ache he distantly registers as hunger, but eating feels like an insurmountable task. Besides, the burning ache is familiar and welcoming, plus, he’s gone far longer without food and is still alive. With a wistful sigh he wishes he could survive on nothing at all.
He sheds his coat and heads to the shower, noticing a knife on the table on his way there. He wants to use it so badly, but he knows red seeping out from his bandages if they reopen would be too noticeable, and he’s too much of a coward to cause himself any real pain aside from the slow, soft comfort of starvation.
He stops in front of the mirror, unwrapping his disgusting, dirtstained bandages oozing with the salty scent of sweat. He’s sure the rest of him reeks too. He stares at his arms, covered in angry red, purple and black bruises from today. A couple green ones from earlier in the week, too. He knows he bruises so easily because he doesn’t eat enough. And what he does for work definitely doesn’t help.
Maybe he could forgo the bandages one day, but for now, he doesn’t want anyone thinking him as weak once they see how easily the slightest brush colours his skin with bruises. It hides his weakness from everyone, including himself, and not seeing, not knowing (out of sight out of mind) , protects both him and everyone else. Besides, they’re part of his beloved aesthetic now.
The shower is likely hot enough by now, he prefers them scorching hot so he can feel the layers of grime singe off his skin. He lumbers into the shower and the water adds weight to his leaden shoulders.
For a while, he stands still under the water, head hung low watching the water rush between his feet as it races to the drain. He contemplates the pros and cons of turning this into a nice, refreshing bath with the toaster in his kitchen. At that, he sinks to the floor of the shower. He can do that tomorrow, right now he’s too tired to leave the hot comfort of the shower for the cold, stale air of his apartment.
Coldness that seeps into his bones like an unspoken truth.
After finally bringing himself to scrub his limbs and leaving the shower, he strolls to the balcony, the burning of hunger twisting and gnawing on his insides all the while. He turns on Mitski and pulls a menthol cigarette from his beige robe. Normally, he prefers jazz, much like Kunikida (who he tortured with the knowledge that they shared something in common) but today he’s in much more of a Mitski mood.
“I don’t smoke
Except for when I’m missing you”
Chuuya, hand against Dazai’s heart, his breath on his cheek as he taunts Dazai.
“Ha!” he says. “I won!” The smile brightening his face heats Dazai’s cheeks, Chuuya’s first victory in the arcade somehow shared when Dazai sees his face.
The burning, empty ache twisting in his stomach matches the one pulling at his heart. He swallows the newfound dryness in his throat, putting out his cigarette before he skips the song.
“I am hungry
I have been hungry
I was born hungry
What do I need?”
Chills run down Dazai’s back as Chuuya draws close, their lips almost touching.
“Because I care about you.”
His voice is barely audible, so quiet that Dazai wonders if he’s imagining it.
“What?” Dazai finally asks, but not before an oppressive silence.
Chuuya leans back, flushed face tipping back into a too-loud laugh, shattering the quiet surrounding them.
“Don’t make me say it again, bastard!”
This draws a halfhearted chuckle out of Dazai.
Neither of their smiles are real, masks riddled with cracks of insecurities and uncertainties.
Dazai’s chest burns with a Chuyya shaped hole.
All of Dazai Burns .
“I am something
I have been something
I was born something
What could I be”
“Because I’m not human!” Chuuya snapped. “I’m nothing more than a weak, pitiful vessel for a God!”
“If you’re not human, with all your emotions, that beautiful whirlwind of chaos, then what am I?”
Dazai steps closer.
“If you’re not human, neither am I.”
“There is a light, I feel it in me
But only, it seems, when the dark surrounds me”
Dazai swears, tears welling in his eyes. The hunger burns with a new intensity, not just gnawing, but chewing, clawing, stabbing at his insides. It takes all he can muster to not keel over in pain.
He tells himself he’s happier with the agency, and in a way, he is. But something in him burns bright and painful with longing, an extension of himself, a double in darkness, soukoku .
He leaves from his spot on the balcony.
He knows Chuuya’s apartment code.
Another pang, this time he’s unsure if it's his stomach or his heart burning with pain.
He walks to the bedroom, chest heavy.
He barely dares to even think it; would Chuuya even want to see me?
“There is a dream that I sometimes see
That only appears in the dark of sleep”
He collapses onto the bed, not bothering to take the robe off, and is unable to sleep. Every time he closes his eyes he sees Chuuya, smiling, Chuuya , laughing, Chuuya, angry yet fond, Chuuya, smirking that godawful grin or Chuuya , crying out broken and abandoned.
“I am waiting
I have been waiting
I was born waiting for that something
Just one something
I was born something
I was born”
He never wanted to live more than he did during his time with Chuuya. Not just Chuuya, but Odasaku, even Ango.
And now they’re gone. He’d pushed one away and killed the other. Killed many in the search for something even when he found it, he didn’t even know he found it.
He doesn’t know what he is, but he knows no human would do what he’s done.
Maybe he was born this fucked up.
“There is a light, I feel it in me
But only, it seems
When the dark surround me
There is a dream and it sleeps in me”
Dazai had never been so good at something before the mafia. After the mafia, even. The way he could twist hearts and minds to do as he pleased, even to kill each other. The way he could hold and take life in his own hands.
“Keeps me awake every night
Crying, ‘Set me free’
And I wake every night
Crying ‘Set me free’”
He wakes up many times that night. From the deaths yet to happen, from the deaths he could’ve stopped, from the deaths he was responsible for. Panting, kicking, screaming, the nothing, the inhuman, burning, burning, burning in his chest, killing everything in sight.
Eventually, he tired himself into a deep slumber.
He wakes up to his phone ringing from the pocket of his pants, abandoned at the foot of his shower. After fishing around inside the pocket for a while, he realizes it’s Kunikida calling.
“You’re late.”
With that, Dazai’s sullen burning chills.
Maybe he’s found that something again.