Chapter Text
“Yokohama,” Gen’emon murmured, holding the acceptance letter to the feeble morning light as though checking for counterfeit. “I’ll be damned, Osamu. The city people are willing to entertain your indulgences.”
One. Two.
“They probably think he’s a nutcase and want to study him,” Elise drawled from her perch on their sofa’s last surviving armrest. “I heard Yokohama National has a thriving medicine and lab sciences program.”
Three, four, five.
Dazai plucked the letter from his father’s hands and pocketed it. “It’s a nice university, Elise,” he replied coolly, “something far, far beyond your reach. Didn’t you fail Social Studies again?”
She gasped. “That’s irrelevant and you know it!”
“Is that so? What’s relevant, then? The fact that you,” he held a finger up, “got in trouble for making a classmate cry for the third time this year? Or that time you punched Kyuusaku Yumeno and Dad had to get saké with the principal for a week to make sure your sorry ass didn’t get expelled? Or…”
“Osamu,” Gen’emon pinched his nose. “Let it go.”
Dazai hummed, clearly satisfied he’d gotten his bit. “She started it.”
“She’s twelve.”
“Maturity is arbitrary, Father. There’s youth in the exterior, yet a withering rot inside. Her soul is black. Like tar. Or crude oil.”
Elise stepped forward. “I’ll show you crude, bastard—”
“No you will not.” Tane Tsushima appeared from the kitchen, grabbed the struggling imp by the hair and dragged her back. “Language, Elise, seriously. We can’t keep going to Principal Mori’s office every week. And Osamu,” she called over her shoulder, “behave. We’re willing to pay a lot more than is wise for you to write your little stories, and there’s still time for us to refuse.”
Six.
Dazai sighed. “Yes, Mom, I know, I should’ve done something in science, there’s no scope in literature, I’ll end up homeless doing freelance work—”
“Don’t talk back to your mother, Osamu, if you know what’s good for you,” Gen’emon interjected, eyes narrowing at his daughter—who, standing behind her mother, seemed very interested in the inevitable argument about to break out. “Take her to bed, Tane. I’ll talk with him.”
Tane and Elise stalked upstairs sporting similar scowls. Gen’emon walked to the fridge and pulled out a few beers at an infuriatingly luxurious pace, as though hoping his blasted son would miraculously disappear when he turned back around. He did not. Gen’emon looked positively dismayed.
“Well?” he barked. “Get out. Take a walk, just—out of my sight.”
“I thought we were discussing my allowance.”
“We’re not discussing shit. Tane’s been on my back all month about letting you go and I swear, if I hear another word of it out of either of your mouths, I’m planning a retreat to Mount Nakui.”
“Fine by me.” Dazai turned before his father could respond, though he could distinctly hear him mutter something along the lines of ‘not one hot meal in this house in peace since the bastard’ and ‘don’t know why I come home on the weekends’ as he grabbed his coat and slunk off into the night.
He counted the cracks in the snow-frosted pavement. One, two, three, four, five. The road broke off, and that was it. No. Not good. He turned back, passed his house by a block, then turned around and tried again. Eight this time. Good.
He sighed, the February chill misting his breath. Nanbu was a frozen lake this time of year—frigid, beautiful from afar, and perfectly capable of dragging one down to its crushing depths should they get too close. Dazai wondered, not for the first time as he looked off into the sleet-crested woodlands, what it would feel like to drown in such a way.
He rubbed his hands together in an effort to stave off the fine tremor that ran through them. It always did. He was starting to suspect it had very little to do with the cold. Though, with the way his fingers were starting to go numb regardless, the cold wasn’t exactly helping.
Aomori, Dazai remembered belatedly, was arctic. Not brisk or nippy, but a proper, bone-deep affair that now bit through the thin soles of his boots and worked its way up his ankles. His hand went to his neck, warm and tellingly bare. Why was it warm? Was he working up a fever? He hadn’t worn a scarf. He hadn’t worn a scarf, and he was certain he was standing in sub-zero temperatures. His legs seemed to have forgotten they were an extension of his body, and he stood there, feeling the cool, telltale prickle on his scalp that meant it had started to snow. He was going to die here, frostbitten and alone, his prone body preserved until spring.
A doctor would’ve known what to do. A diligent son who’d kept his mouth shut and studied medicine would’ve known what to do. Could he have been that son? Could he have—
He shook his head. You are not dying a ten-minute walk from home. He abandoned whatever was left of his dignity in the snow and trudged back up the path that led to his house, despite the ever-helpful images of necrosis his brain supplied, goading him to just lie down, it would be so quiet, so still.
Tane descended the stairs like a vengeful apparition the moment he’d made it into the entryway, shoulders sagging as the warm air wrapped around him in a welcoming embrace.
“Don’t track mud into my house, Osamu,” her lip curled like she’d stepped in something unpleasant and it’d followed her home, “and have dinner with your father. There’s soup at the table.”
Dazai toed his boots off at the genkan, hung his coat and shouldered past his mother, making a beeline for the heater in the living room. Heat rolled off it in waves that dried the wet snow in his hair, settled over his hands and finally quietened the protests of his jack-rabbiting heart. Only when he was certain he would retain all his limbs did he step back, place a hand—warm, normal, with tips that he could feel—over his chest and let out a breath. Then in. Out. Eight times.
The vicious snap of his father unfolding the local daily was his cue to move. Dazai sat across from him at the dining table, fingers drumming on the tempered glass in tandem with the headache currently building behind Gen’emon’s eyes.
Dazai picked at his soup. Crab; his favourite. His mother must’ve had an agenda.
“So,” Gen’emon started, skimming the copy of Kahoku Shimpō less out of interest and more out of an aversion to looking at his son, “you’re sure about this?”
“I’ve packed. Mostly.” Did he? He didn’t remember sorting his light and dark clothes. He didn’t remember packing all his books, even though he’d checked and rechecked them enough times to sort them alphabetically. Maybe classes had already started and he didn’t know. Would he have to withdraw? Come back?
The thoughts came unbidden, creeping up his throat and wrapping themselves around it, and Dazai shoved them down with a mouthful of crab.
He swallowed, hard. Gen’emon lowered the paper, took a look at him, and resolved to leave it alone—like most things with his son. He sighed.
“What I’m trying to say is you’re going off to study—” his father grimaced like the word itself might put a seal on it, “literature. That’s your goal?”
Dazai paused, pushing a stray carrot around in his bowl while he contemplated whether to entertain the jab. It had been like this every time his father came home from Hachinohe, a month of cat-and-mouse that started with an interrogation about his motivations and ended with ‘Osamu, don’t you care about what happens to your sister when you don’t get a job?’
He settled with: “I don’t know what you’re implying.”
“Don’t get clever with me. The last time we let you go alone somewhere was that school trip and we had to drive down there and bring you back heaving into a paper bag—”
“I was nine, it was a zoo, and that chimp was laughing at me—”
“That is not the—” Gen’emon rose, as did his voice. Then he stopped. Dazai watched the argument die somewhere behind his eyes, replaced by the heavy math of a man calculating whether it was worth undoing all his goodwill from prayer in favour of strangulating his son.
The thought clearly wasn’t appetizing enough, because he sat back down with a groan. “You know what? Go to bed.”
Dazai blinked.
“You heard me.” Gen’emon went back to his paper. “If your mother asks: you’re having an early night, we discussed everything, and the next time I see you it’d hopefully be in November. And that’d still be too soon.”
“Really feeling the love, Dad.”
“Go.”
Dazai shrugged innocuously, ignored the way his father’s fingers twitched around the neck of his second beer, and went upstairs. A certain twelve steps, never thirteen, because thirteen was a terrible number to end on, incomplete and foreboding, and Dazai had no use for it.
He lay in bed, surveying the contents of a room the cleanliness of which his mother had questioned for the better part of a decade. Desk pushed into a corner, drawers—overindulged with ancient knick-knacks he’d hoarded just in case—barely closing; his suitcase by the bed, books and clothes spilling out like innards. And worst of all: a seasonal infestation by the name of Elise standing in the doorway, arms crossed.
“Room’s a mess,” she announced cheerily, kicking his suitcase in greeting. A miserable, dog-eared copy of The Sun Also Rises fell out. Dazai winced. “Mom would have a fit.”
Dazai closed his eyes, not bothering to sit up. He treated his sister’s intrusions like a forest ranger would a bear’s—lie down long enough and maybe she’d take a whiff, pronounce him dead and move on. It scarcely worked.
“Hey. Fishbrain.” She kicked his bed this time. “Get up. I need you for homework.”
An eye peeled open. “So that’s what you’re here for. I was starting to wonder if you’d grown a heart in that terrible, vacuous cave in your chest and come to say goodbye to your brother.”
“Ew. What’s vacuous?”
“Never you mind.” He pushed himself up and let his sister drag him the rest of the way to her room. It had gone through a series of changes since last year, the most dramatic of which was the systematic purging of anything pink. Her worst victim was the bedding, the princess-themed throw pillows and sheets shoved somewhere under the floorboards and replaced with a mass of pale brown that reminded him of the specific colouring of mulch after first snow. The walls had survived, though Elise insisted they were a dusty rose, idiot, not pink, are you blind?
Elise sat cross-legged on her chair with all the regality of a queen considering her court jester. “So,” she started, flat, “you’re really going tomorrow.”
“I’m supposed to be going in March, yes, which starts from…” he passed a theatrical glance at her wall clock, “tomorrow! How astute, Elise. Maybe we can finally move on to bigger things like weeks and months. I know it’s scary, but—”
“Just shut up for once in your life.” She spun her chair away from him. “Nobody in the city’s gonna read your stupid stories, you freak, so shut up.”
“The admissions offices in half the universities at Yokohama seemed pretty interested.”
A pause. “Well, I won’t be reading them.”
“I wasn’t counting on it, sweetie; you can barely read at all.”
“I said shut it!”
He let that sit for a moment; let the tension bleed out of her shoulders like it usually did after she was certain she’d had the last word.
Her voice was quiet. Wrong. “Are you not even coming back for Obon?”
Dazai slowly sat up with the focus of a lion tracking a quarry. That was odd. He tried to peer around the back of her chair to get a look at her face, and she turned it further away, fidgeting with something in her lap.
“Are you kidding?” He blinked, incredulous. “Of course I’m coming home for that. We’ll get a few weeks off in August.”
“Oh.” Her hands stopped twisting. “Okay. ‘Cause I didn’t want to help Mom in the kitchen alone. Whatever.”
He grinned at the furious flush that crept up her face at that. “Right. Whatever.”
“It’s true.”
“Uh-huh.”
Her brows furrowed in a way that indicated she was on the verge of a tantrum, but could not let their mother know she was awake. Instead, practicing exemplary self-control, she threw her history textbook at him. “You’re stupid. And you were supposed to help.”
He caught it, laughing. “Right, right. Come here.”
She made her way to where he was seated on the floor and sat down between his legs, the way she used to when she was a limpid six-year-old and would ask him, wide eyed, whether he could make her a princess in one of his stories. He wrapped an arm around her, and she came, with much resistance, to rest her head beneath his chin.
“Now, the Meiji Restoration…”
***
The train for Hachinohe left at eight.
Dazai watched his father leave for work—a commute that would have been, frankly, unnecessary if not for the fact that winter had slicked their roads with black ice and the God-fearing, office-going men of Aomori did not dare pull their cars out onto them.
The station in Nanbu was less a building and more a mournful afterthought, a wind-blasted platform with a ticket machine that wheezed and coughed like a dying man. Dazai sat down at a bench and counted the tiles between himself and the yellow safety strip near the tracks. Eleven. That’s bad. He shifted himself and his suitcase a little closer. Ten, now. Should’ve been eight. Maybe I’ve done it wrong.
He was considering getting up and moving to another bench when Tane nudged him. For reasons utterly elusive to him, his mother had an intrinsic ability for knowing when he was too deep in his head.
“You’ve got all your things, then?”
“No, Mom,” he smiled, “I’ve left my phone, my wallet, and all identifying documents. I’m going to Yokohama to start over as a fugitive.”
He ran through it internally regardless—phone, wallet, ID, all there—because his mother also had the intrinsic ability of causing most of his agitations.
She swatted him. “Same as ever. You get it from your father.”
“Yeah, but won’t you miss me?”
“Absolutely not.” She said it with the piercing conviction of a prophet. “Elise remains the only headache for a while, which is…still unideal, but at least you won’t be there to influence her.”
“I’ll have you know her personality is uniquely hers. Regrettably. She could actually use a little of my influence."
Her lips quirked at that. “I’ll tell her you said that.”
Dazai considered whether to tell her no, that he had a very prized and very fragile glass bookshelf at home that he would hate to see damaged in a temper tantrum—when the train to Misawa screeched to a stop, spraying snow through his hair. He stood. Two minutes late. I thought I’d read the schedule wrong.
He sneezed out a snowflake. “I think that’s mine.”
Tane put her hand on his shoulder, squeezed, and pushed him towards the crowd gathering at the platform. “Don’t come back too soon, alright?”
Dazai was practically jostled onto the train. He looked back and saw his mother catch his eye through the window and turn away, wrapping her shawl tighter around her trembling shoulders. One, two, three, four steps before she turned the corner and vanished. His breath misted the cool glass.
The crowd thinned as everyone took their seats. Dazai was left standing as he looked, conflicted, at the mountains growing impossibly smaller with every dull clack of the rails. A strangeness tugged at his chest. Shame. I was getting used to this place.
The ride to Misawa and his subsequent flight to Haneda was a blur. Dazai, contrary to even his beliefs, was not afraid of flying. Perhaps it was that he fell asleep almost immediately after they’d hit the air, or the comforting knowledge that if something did happen, there was absolutely nothing he could do to stall death anyway.
Dazai peeled his sweater off and looked at himself in the mirror of the airport washroom. It was a nice mirror, backlit, and the boy inside it seemed to be living a better life than he did. A gaunt salaryman passed him like a shadow.
He leaned down and rested his head on the smooth—and disgusting, definitely disgusting, teeming with all sorts of things he couldn’t name because he’d picked literature, not biology—countertop. He didn’t remember the last time he’d been this far from home at all, let alone by himself. His father had been right to worry.
His fingers tightened on the edge of the sink. Am I making a mistake?
“Hey, you. Need a tissue?”
Dazai straightened, and something gruffly shoved a handful of crumpled paper towels to his chest. Dazai looked up. Around. Then down. Oh. There he is.
He had never seen eyes so blue.
Something about the way he was looking at the other guy apparently warranted concern, because he glowered, shoulders tensed as though for a fight. Dazai instinctively stood back. The last thing he needed was to get into a physical altercation during his first hour in the city and be brought back home in a box because Lord knew he could not defend himself against a fish on land, and his father would complain, his mother would cry, and Elise would get his room—
He willed himself to focus. “And who may you be?”
“Tch. Doesn’t matter.” He walked over to the sink beside Dazai’s and splashed his face once, twice, wiping it roughly on the hem of his shirt. Gross. “I just landed here and thought, oh, let me help the poor fella that missed his flight. Might fix my karma.”
Dazai blinked languidly. “I just landed here too. From Aomori.”
The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve. Dazai was getting a gnawing feeling that talking to him was becoming an increasingly terrible idea. “Aomori, huh? Nice place. I’m from Kyoto, but I flew in from Sapporo with friends. My sister’s getting my stuff couriered right now.”
“That’s nice. Where are you headed?”
“Yokohama first; get settled in and stuff. Might head back to Kyoto sometime after and say goodbye properly.”
Yokohama, huh. Dazai was afraid to ask.
The guy’s phone rang, and he ran a hand through his fiery hair—a juvenile colour Dazai thought was, at best, bold—and turned his back onto him. “Yeah, yeah, Shirase, I’m at terminal two. I’ll catch up.”
He shot a look at Dazai over his shoulder as he walked off. “See you around,” he called, “maybe. Probably not.”
Dazai watched him flow seamlessly into the sea of arrivals, that shock of red hair swallowed by the glow of all the other peculiar passengers Tokyo housed. He slowly loosened his grip on the paper towels he’d been holding to his chest and took a breath. Two. Eight.
“Probably not,” he echoed, binning them. “That’s right.”
***