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The photograph remains beside his Bible for six consecutive nights before Fyodor finally acknowledges that this, too, has become ritual.
It was not an intentional ritual. Nothing so vulgar as conscious devotion. The placement had occurred accidentally the first evening; a careless setting down of paper atop dark wood amid scripture passages and unfinished notes written in the margins of theological texts. Yet each night afterward, when he extinguished the candles and prepared to leave the desk, he found himself unable to move it elsewhere.
Now the two objects exist side by side with grotesque intimacy.
Holy scripture worn with use.
And Osamu Dazai.
The juxtaposition feels almost deliberately sacrilegious.
Rain murmurs softly beyond the cathedral windows of the safehouse apartment, the sound muted by heavy curtains and stone walls. Darkness gathers in the corners of the room as presence: dense, unmoving, eternal. Fyodor has always preferred darkness for this reason. Light reveals. Darkness consumes. It smooths the world into abstraction and permits the comforting illusion that nothing exists beyond thought itself.
Unfortunately, Dazai exists regardless.
Even here.
(Especially here.)
Candlelight flickers against the silver edges of the photograph. Dazai is not looking at the camera. That is the first cruelty.
The image had been taken candidly during some forgettable encounter with the Agency, stolen unknowingly amid movement and conversation. Another figure had once occupied the edge of the frame but has since been cut away with surgical precision until only Dazai remained. Preserved forever in monochrome stillness: head tilted slightly, coat hanging loose around narrow shoulders, one hand buried lazily inside his pocket.
Alive.
That is the second cruelty.
Fyodor studies the photograph the way devout men study icons with the terrible concentration reserved for things capable of destruction.
His gaze catches first upon Dazai’s hair.
Chestnut curls, perpetually disordered, softening only slightly where they brush against the pale bandaged length of his neck. The strands never seem entirely tame; even in stillness they appear unruly, carrying the impression of movement, of fingers dragged carelessly through them hours earlier. Fyodor has seen rain collect briefly there before darkening the curls nearly black.
Then the skin.
Dazai possesses the peculiar pallor of something grown beneath moonlight rather than sun, a whiteness so fragile it borders upon translucent. Veins linger faintly beneath his throat and wrists like delicate cracks beneath porcelain. He looks less alive than preserved.
Perhaps that is why the bandages appear so natural upon him.
White wrapped over white. As though injury and body had long since ceased being separate concepts. Fyodor’s eyes drift lower.
Moles scattered carelessly across Dazai’s face and neck; small dark marks like imperfections left intentionally by a distracted creator. Others likely overlook them entirely. Fyodor has memorized each one with the precision of prayer. The mark beneath his eye. Another near his throat, partially obscured by bandages. Tiny points of darkness interrupting.
Evidence of humanity.
He despises how long he spends looking at them.
And then the eyes. Not truly brown. They are darker than that: black hollowed nearly empty, carrying the strange flatness of deep water at midnight. Eyes devoid of light in a way that unsettles instinct immediately. Most people mistake Dazai’s smiles for warmth because they lack the courage to look carefully at his gaze.
Fyodor has always looked carefully.
That is the problem.
Because beneath the theatricality and careless humor exists something profoundly vacant. Not emotionless; rather, A man who feels too much and has consequently hollowed himself into absence for survival. Beautiful things abandoned by holiness possess a unique sort of tragedy.
Perhaps that is why Fyodor cannot look away.
Only after tracing these details does thought descend deeper, past physicality into the far more perilous territory beneath. He lowers his gaze toward the open Bible before him, though the words refuse to settle properly in his mind.
Abilities are mankind’s original sin made manifest.
This belief has shaped the architecture of his existence for years. Humanity reached greedily beyond the boundaries established by God and was punished accordingly, not with fire or flood, but with corruption woven directly into the soul. Abilities distort. They separate mankind from divinity by granting power never meant for human hands. Every gift is merely another form of decay.
Fyodor understands this with absolute certainty.
Or he had.
Then came Dazai Osamu.
No Longer Human.
An ability that nullifies all others through touch alone.
The contradiction is almost blasphemeous.
Fyodor’s fingers still sometimes ache with the memory of it.
Once-only once-Dazai had seized his wrist. Necessary proximity. Fleeting contact. Less than a second.
Crime and Punishment vanished instantly.
Gone.
The sensation had been horrifying in its closeness. One moment Fyodor carried the familiar weight of his ability beneath his skin, that ever present hum of something unnatural residing inside flesh; the next there had been nothing at all.
Silence.
Complete and catastrophic.
For one terrible instant he had stood stripped bare before the world: merely human, merely mortal, exactly as humanity had originally been intended before corruption entered creation.
Relief. Relief had filled him.
The realization sickens him even now. Because Dazai’s touch had not felt like destruction. It had felt like absolution. Fyodor closes his eyes.
The room seems smaller tonight. Saturated with the awareness of another person despite the certainty of solitude.
He thinks of Dazai laughing.
The artificial laughter offered carelessly to others; the bright, foolish performance stretched over emptiness like silk draped across a corpse. No, Fyodor sees through those expressions effortlessly. The sound he remembers escaped unexpectedly months ago in an underground archive lit only by candlelight and dust-heavy chandeliers.
Dazai had said from across the chessboard, “you’re much less frightening than people say.”
Fyodor, without glancing up from the game, lied smoothly: “And you are far uglier than your admirers insist.”
A pause. Then laughter. Sharp and sudden enough to feel torn unwillingly from somewhere genuine. Fyodor has never recovered from the sound.
His eyes open abruptly.
The photograph waits beside the Bible in perfect silence. Slowly, he reaches toward it. The corners have softened from repeated handling. He notices this immediately and despises himself for noticing.
Dazai’s expression remains caught halfway between amusement and exhaustion. Others would fail to recognize the fatigue hidden beneath his posture, the strange vacancy lingering beneath those dark eyes. But Fyodor understands him in ways that feel increasingly indistinguishable from violence.
There exists no loneliness more profound than being understood by someone equally monstrous.
His thumb brushes lightly against the image. He imagines Dazai stepping into a church. The thought alone feels dangerous.
Dazai beneath candlelight. Dazai standing before gold painted saints with boredom resting lazily across his face. Dazai touching rosary beads and reducing sacred objects to mere wood through the annihilating force of his ability.
A man who erases curses through contact.
Fyodor wonders sometimes whether Dazai himself realizes the enormity of what he carries within his hands. Probably not. Dazai treats his ability with the same careless indifference he treats his own existence, joking casually about death while possessing something terrifyingly close to divine judgment at his fingertips.
He nullifies corruption.
He returns the world briefly to silence. And still he remains irredeemable. The contradiction consumes Fyodor endlessly.
If abilities are sin, then what is the man who erases them?
If Dazai’s touch restores humanity to its natural state, then why does that touch feel so profoundly unclean?
Questions without answers fester inside the mind like infection.
Fyodor rises abruptly from the desk.
The chair scrapes softly against old wooden floors. Rain continues beyond the windows without interruption, steady as breathing. He crosses the dim room slowly, one gloved hand covering his mouth as though attempting to contain thought itself.
This fixation is becoming dangerous.
Not really physically. Violence between them has always been inevitable. Fyodor accepted that long ago.
The true danger lies elsewhere.
Obsession necessitates vulnerability because obsession grants permanence to another person inside you. Every thought begins curving unconsciously toward them. Every silence fills itself with their imagined presence. Dazai infiltrates the mind the way damp infiltrates ancient cathedrals: gradually, invisibly, until everything begins smelling faintly of ruin.
At the far end of the room stands a mirror.
Fyodor looks into it.
Pale face. Hollow eyes. Exhaustion carved delicately into sharp features until he resembles less a man than the memory of one. Candlelight flickers weakly across the glass.
For one impossible moment, he imagines Dazai standing behind him. Not touching; present. Fyodor closes his eyes immediately. Still, the imagined presence remains. Of course it does. Dazai has always excelled at haunting things.
Slowly, Fyodor crosses himself.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
The prayer dissolves into darkness unanswered. His gaze drifts once more toward the desk. Toward the photograph beside the Bible.
Toward the man with chocolate curls and corpse pale skin and hollow eyes dark enough to swallow light whole. Toward the man who nullifies sin with his hands while embodying it perfectly everywhere else.
A false idol.
Fyodor stares at him for a very long time.
Then, with a care nearing dangerously upon reverence, he turns the photograph face down beside holy scripture and extinguishes the candle.