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Dazai trapezes back into his life with a wink and a smile. “Suicide is back on the table, baby!”
“Oh darling,” Fyodor says.
Dazai holds the smile, although it feels like puppetry on their face. Their skin feels like cracked porcelain; a midnight draft shivers coldly over them from the door’s open slip to the outside cemetery. Fyodor tilts his head at them; he looks like a reaper in the light of the oil lamp on his desk.
Dazai breathes in sharply. “Yes sweetness?”
Fyodor crooks a brow at them. “Sweetness? We’re not together.”
“You called me darling first!?” Dazai tries to pull their face into a pout but can’t. They feel lightheaded by the entryway. They wonder if Fyodor was surprised by their sudden appearance. The two of them haven’t so much as spoken in years.
“I call everyone that,” Fyodor dismisses easily.
It’s true.
“You probably call people darling when they come to you to bury a body,” Dazai says.
Fyodor stands abruptly from behind his cluttered desk of candles and rosaries and municipal paperwork, tucking away a death certificate without a second glance. He slips on his cloak from the hook on the wall and continues past Dazai on soundless footsteps, through the door. He doesn’t look at Dazai until Dazai wordlessly follows him outside, like they’re sure he knew they would.
For the first time, Fyodor smiles.
“Absolutely,” he agrees.
He already knows what Dazai is here for.
The world outside is dark with night, but Fyodor’s eyes are moon-bright, skin star-pale. He stands in the grass path worn thin by mourners.
Do they come to him like a priest? Dazai wonders aimlessly. They can imagine it so clearly: lost souls asking where their friend’s grave is; where they themselves should be buried; when somebody died; what they should do. Dazai themself is much the same, and were it not for the maple-sugar thickness of the nostalgia between their teeth, they’re sure they’d feel something approximating shame.
They felt so overwhelmingly, crushingly bad until they came here, but once they passed the threshold of the cemetery, something slowly started falling into place within them. This feeling in them hasn’t gotten any less crushing, only more pressing, softer and sweeter.
“We never technically broke up,” Dazai points out.
Fyodor laughs. Dazai wonders if he’ll ask something like: You came all the way here at quarter past one in the morning to get back together with me?
But what Fyodor says is: “Pick a grave.”
“Hey,” Dazai says.
“Hey what?”
As if Dazai could have left him yesterday. He’s unchanging as headstones around him, the mausoleum of a wealthy family’s dead infant daughter, the statue of an angel in Dazai’s periphery. They know this cemetery like the back of their hand even now. They once climbed up the apple tree and from its branches, onto the granite roof of the mausoleum, where they then pulled Fyodor up with them; they and Fyodor used to play here as children, haunt it as teenagers. Fyodor is its director and groundskeeper now, and Dazai is something else entirely.
Somehow, Fyodor still matches Dazai so well. Or maybe it’s the reverse—Dazai still matches Fyodor.
It’s hard not to laugh. “Pick a grave for what?”
“That’s your choice,” Fyodor says uncaringly.
Their eyes flick over the dark, dewy grass; the air is thick and wet with fog; they feel it in the fabric of their button-up. For a split second, they almost don’t want to look at him. What are they feeling? “I thought you’d be a little more hesitant.”
Fyodor scoffs. “Since when am I hesitant?”
“Levelheaded,” they try.
Fyodor eyes them sharply. “Say what you really mean.”
“I thought you wouldn’t want to do this for me,” Dazai confesses.
“You should know better,” Fyodor says simply.
He has more faith in Dazai’s ability to ‘know better’ than they do.
They wave their hand vaguely at the limestone and the wildflowers. “You’re going to be doing this until the day you die, right?”
How does Fyodor manage it? They think it again. His body has always been so fragile, his constitution so weak. How does Fyodor, his lamblike ex manage the duties of a graveyard groundskeeper? The maintenance of the landscape, the flowers, the gardens, the grass kept to manageable length, the saplings rooted out from where they’ll uproot a corpse. Something presses up in their chest like ivy.
“Yes,” Fyodor confirms.
“Mm.”
Fyodor begins walking again, tracing his pale and ghostlike fingers along the edges of inscriptions. He speaks softly like a wraith. “University didn’t work out?”
“Let’s not talk about that,” Dazai answers, following almost without meaning to.
Fyodor hums. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
“I think I took advantage of someone,” Dazai admits.
That brings Fyodor to a slowly drawing pace, leisurely, like Dazai isn’t raw and tender as a morning glory. The space between them spans an entire world and nothing at all; Dazai can quicken two steps and touch him. After a horrible, lingering moment, they realize that Fyodor is not going to address what they said directly.
Instead, they simply say: “Choose a plot, Dazai.”
Do you do this often? They imagine saying. The thought of him leading the grieving around with a hand and a soft word, right to what will become their grave, sticks under their tongue in a vivid and viscous way.
“For what,” they say.
Fyodor shrugs.
He draws them steadily westward through the quiet paths, and Dazai counts which headstones are new. They read fragments of inscriptions and each one rings like a memory. Empty plots marked in spring flowers.
As a child, Dazai used to haunt the funeral home, until Fyodor drew him here; they’d gotten together under the grove of apples and plums. It was moon-bright. The blood on Dazai’s knuckles is red in their memory, having scraped themself on the blushing roses and their bramble of thorns; their heart used to beat in such a dull, watercolor rhythm. They feel it pulling thinnly through them now, too, a pink and mirrored feeling, too intangible to touch. They were so unendingly miserable. They imagined Fyodor burying them. They imagined suicide by carbon monoxide, by train. They did not want to be there anymore.
I want to tell the entire world, they thought back then: I don’t want to be here anymore.
“Let me show you a secret,” Fyodor promises like a whisper, like back then.
“A secret?” Dazai asks.
Fyodor brings him through the blossoming apples. And under their luminescent petals, through the filter of the mist…
there lays an open grave.
“They allow you to keep open graves?”
“Who said anyone knows about it?” Fyodor’s voice is unambiguously amused. He is always happy when he takes people aback, and none moreso than when he manages it with Dazai.
It clicks in Dazai’s mind. They’re incredulous despite themself. “Doesn’t the township inspect the cemetery?”
“Yes,” Fyodor says dryly, “but I’m the groundskeeper, who schedules the inspection; and I’m the inspector, that writes the report; and I’m the counselor on the town board, which reviews each of those affairs.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Dazai stares at him.
Fyodor smiles. His eyes are happy as a fairy. “You thought moving into and fully living in a cemetery would make me a better adjusted member of society?”
“Okay well,” Dazai says.
“Well?”
The grave is a proper six feet deep. The dirt of its digging is piled up to the side. The entirety of it is empty, except stray flowers.
It’s at the cemetery’s outskirts, where it almost joins into the forest, which is in itself a wild orchard. It’s spring, and everything is thick with flowers; the dandelions and clovers at their shoes; the blossoms above them. Their mouth tastes like nectar. They feel floaty, and lightheaded. They think about becoming Fyodor; they think about the word ‘exes’; they never broke up, they simply fell out of sync, for all that that’s possible for people like the two of them.
Not for the first time, Fyodor looks beautiful.
Dazai shifts weight unevenly between their legs and presses their heel into the grass. They feel the softness of the ground, its dug-up instability; they’re standing on the loose and hazardous ground by the grave’s ledge.
They lead,
“Soooo... Do you come here often?” With an unmistakable, bad flirtation.
Fyodor looks at them impassively for a full and flat second, before stepping closer, and then closer. He leans forward, so close they could touch him, reaches out, and—
pushes Dazai over the ledge.
.
.
.
Dazai hits the packed dirt hard enough for the impact to knock the air out of their lungs.
They’re going to bruise. The skin aches. The bones of their spine, the curves of their shoulder blades, something is going to bruise. A strange feeling fills them, and they can’t speak; they wonder what expression is on their face, but can’t feel it. They’re not making any expression at all. The strange feeling is made of grays. The sweetness and the dirt, the open, cold earth.
It’s ridiculous to push anyone living into an open grave for the dead; even moreso when it’s a hidden one, even moreso when you then look down at them like that. They’re not shocked; how could they be surprised? Not surprise, but maybe disbelief; not disbelief, but maybe something larger and softer.
They look up at Fyodor, looking down at them.
He always makes this feeling in them.
Fyodor smirks down at them. “You were saying?”
This strange feeling. They don’t think before they speak.
“Bury me alive.”
Their colorless voice.
That’s what they’re choosing the plot for. This is the plot they choose.
Fyodor kicks dirt into the hole. Specks of small stones hit Dazai sharply.
As usual, Fyodor shows no concern. He provides no protest. There is no freak-out, no burst of dramaticism, except for Fyodor’s natural, calm dramatics. For all an observer could tell, Fyodor doesn’t care at all.
But instead of kicking down more dirt, or shoveling it over, Fyodor lowers himself tenderly. He carefully, creakingly traverses the steep wall.
His boot steps with full and gentle weight onto Dazai’s chest, rib cage.
“You’re light as a feather,” they crow, teasing, and it’s true; Fyodor is very light, even with his full weight standing on Dazai’s limp form. “You’re a skeleton. Are you sure you shouldn’t be laying down here with me?”
“...” Fyodor just kneels.
His weight shifts, knees to the dirt, until he’s bracketing Dazai’s rib cage. He leans down. Dazai doesn’t flinch, but thinks they should want to. Dazai almost opens their mouth. But there’s nothing to say.
Fyodor’s cold lips press to Dazai’s forehead.
“I thought we weren’t together,” they say, pointlessly.
“Well,” Fyodor reasons, like a secret and a joke, “we never broke up.”
This feeling, the nostalgia and the sweetness, something soft and cold, whatever makes the opposite of warmth. The world is made of blacks and grays and opalescent pinks.
This isn’t the proper way to do things. It can’t be. But when has Dazai ever cared? A great apathy ripples in them. Their watercolor heart. The grave is so comfortable, earth like clay, even the stray tree roots, even the stones pressing bruises, each one like bedding. Their body is so heavy, they couldn’t move it if they tried. Even Fyodor, with his weightless weight, can pin them in place. It’s nothing physical, but they wouldn’t so much as be able to move a finger.
This ivy, rosy feeling.
Dazai bursts out laughing.
They reach up, and press forward, and pull Fyodor down. They press their forehead to his. Fyodor’s silky hair is cold on their cheek. He smells distantly of lilacs.
“I belong here,” they laugh, words sweeter than they thought would come from them tonight, but just as hopeless. They didn’t miss this. “I definitely belong here.”
The period they spent away.
These dreamy, unreal places. Time doesn’t exist at all. Fyodor’s aching, familiar touch.
“Whatever you say,” Fyodor says.
“I’m glad you’re still the same person,” Dazai says, into his ear, and Fyodor shudders.
And then Fyodor laughs. It’s louder this close, with rasping undertones. “You’re going to take that back in five minutes.”
“Probably,” Dazai agrees, still laughing.
Fyodor is a strange an unusual person, but in the end, he’s much like Dazai.
How will the burial go? They’re not planning to die tonight, and Fyodor will not kill them; but how will the earth feel, when it has piled its weight on them? How will they breathe through the dirt and the blossoms? Will Fyodor dig them up again, will he kiss them when he does it? They imagine their hand breaking through the soil, his lips pressing to its knuckles, fingernails. They’d feel the touch, even if they couldn’t see the action; their world would be cold and dark and comforting, more enveloping than a coffin. Fyodor says something quietly, but Dazai can no longer listen.
In their memory, the cut of a rose-thorn bleeds red, and Dazai counts their curses. Fyodor lays a hand over their eyes, and they know they are six feet under.