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“I found a new method recently!” Dazai cheerily announces, light with the knowledge that Fyodor won’t mind.
They never do, after all. This time is no exception.
They glance at him with the slightest turn of head, but don’t so much as pause in pruning potatoes. They’re doing it from a chair around the round, picturesque kitchen table. “Oh?” There’s a smile in their voice. “Pray tell?”
Dazai leans against the chair across from them, but doesn’t sit down. “Yeah!” He says. “It uses the train track, and is really very fast! I didn’t think it could be done, but it’s actually really fast and very sure! There’s no stopping a train in the middle of nowhere.”
Fyodor reads between the lines instantly. “Now that’s one of your best methods yet,” they decide.
Dazai grins. “Right?”
Fyodor sets down the potato to the cutting board, but not the knife. They count it on their fingers: “Quick,” they say, “painless as is possible, outdoors, somewhere beautiful, a very low chance of failure all around, and you don’t even need someone else’s help for it.”
“Ah ah,” Dazai says, “keyword is need - that’s true! But you can actually help with this one.”
Fyodor laughs. It’s a light sound that isn’t mocking, but sometimes feels like it is, because in a way, everything Fyodor does most of the time is mocking. “Come closer.” They gesture Dazai closer with a motion of the knife; Dazai leans across the table. “There we go,” they say, brushing some hair from his face, and - “in your dreams.”
They flick his forehead.
“Owww,” Dazai boos, even though it doesn’t hurt.
Fyodor isn’t particularly impressed, but neither are they unkind. “You know that’s always been my answer.”
Dazai sighs. Breathes back in.
The air tastes like steeping chamomile between his teeth. It’s thick as peach syrup. The kitchen is strung with herbs and rosaries; the crucifix Dazai stole them for their sixteenth birthday hangs over the wooden beam of the ceiling. A bread basket of jewel red apples and pomegranates, a wall of sharp knives, a set of teacups on the counter—it’s truly Fyodor’s place. A small, single-bedroom on the outskirts of the middle of nowhere. They never gave him a key, but only because they knew he could pick both the deadbolt and knob lock.
“You’re perfect,” Dazai sighs airily, but only in the way of wind through willow boughs at night, “except just one thing.”
Fyodor’s pink mouth quirks. They’re pale in the half-light of the evening. “Oh?”
“Oh yes!” Dazai draws back from his lean across the table, and circles around to Fyodor and twists their silky black hair around their fingers. He tips them back onto the hind legs of their antique dining chair, and they glare sharply; their eyes are the red of the pomegranates in the bread basket and twice as gleaming. Dazai keeps smiling.
“Careful,” they warn, “it’s antique.”
He tips the chair even further, into a mockery of a dip in dancing. “You’re smart,” he lulls, "beautiful, charming, funny, skilled, kind when you want to be..” he leans downward, so close his hair brushes against their cheek, “understanding of my ‘mental illness’ and matching it yourself, you’d never call anyone to institutionalize me, you aren’t.. suicidist!”
“Pfft.” Fyodor doesn’t even pretend not to laugh.
“Hey!” Dazai protests. “It’s a serious academic term, you know! Suicidism!”
Fyodor raises their hand with the knife and presses its dull iron point against the denim of Dazai’s jacket over his chest. Fyodor presses, ever so slightly, drawing it up to his neck, and Dazai, accordingly, leans back away and gently touches the chair back onto four legs.
Fyodor hums. “Did I say it wasn’t?” They bring hair behind their ear. And then, “It sounds like an edgy middle-schooler’s idea of language.”
“I know right!” Dazai complains delightedly. “It could be the name of someone’s cringe OC.”
“Oh absolutely,” Fyodor agrees.
The scent of their rose perfume. They’ve been wearing the same kind they made themselves since they were fourteen. It’s always this. Ahhhh… “This is it,” Dazai hears himself say. “It’s this. This is why I always come back to you.”
“Hm?”
It’s overwhelming, almost.
He remembers: Fyodor behind the thrift store counter. He didn’t go to high school with them; they didn’t go to high school at all. While Dazai skipped half his classes, Fyodor was home-schooled. They could sometimes be found like a prince in a tower in the woods (yes, really!) where they hung out doing seemingly nothing but reading the bible; if not there, then they’d be self-studying in the library, or very occasionally, stalking random thrift stores in the downtown area. They themself felt like a second-hand find, an inherited earring, rare and gleaming, their lightless and secret smile.
But more often than not, they’d be at home, where Dazai could not follow.
Their appearances were rare enough as to make them almost a gamble; and every time, they’d smile at him. They weren’t like anyone else he’d ever met. That sheer, mirrored understanding.
He feels overwhelmed with it. “You’re perfect,” he says again, “just save one thing.”
“Aha?” Fyodor crooks a brow. “I thought it was two.”
“You won’t assist me in killing myself.”
“And I won’t die with you,” Fyodor agrees.
Dazai couldn’t understand it. To a degree he still doesn’t - how Fyodor can be so much like himself, and yet not at all; how their worship of death can be so devoted, and yet not pursued. They won’t die with him because they simply don’t want to;and they won’t assist him in dying for the purely logical fact that it’d overcomplicate things for them! Find someone else to get charged with murder for you, they laughed. It won’t be me.
“I used to beg you.”
They finally place down the knife with a small clinking clatter. They sound amused. “Like you ever stopped?”
“Stop that’s embarrassing,” Dazai grimaces. It’s such a teenager thing to do. He’s not a teenager anymore.
Fyodor laughs. They stand up slowly, but for how slow it is, it still feel abrupt, and like something Dazai wasn’t prepared for. They’re such a slow moving person after all, creaking like an evergreen. “There’s no way you’re embarrassed.”
“No,” Dazai admits. It’s true; he’s rarely embarrassed over anything, and frankly isn’t embarrassed over this, even if he should be.
Fyodor leans against the table and pushes into Dazai’s space, caging him very nearly against it. He abruptly feels the tight and heavy pressure of his bandages. Ahhh, he thinks. Fyodor is really always so…
“Come on darling,” Fyodor says, and kisses his forehead. “Tell me about this fantasy of yours.”
Chamomile and roses, their cold and soft touch. Dazai hums, feels the vibration from his chest to his teeth, and tastes the confession on his tongue.