twisted devotion || Yandere!DAZAI/READER

[7] The Lunch

The hotel room is dark.

Now the moons had fully risen and shone straight into your room through the screen the window and its sills so that dappled shadows fell with scrupulous distinction on the bed, the walls, and your hand, like a distant lover, enlacing their light with your fingers before sliding away, falling victim to the heavy clouds sprawled across the velvet darkness of the skies. Inside looked like an electronically lit room with pale pink lights; diluted blood.

You woke instantly and immediately, with no residue of sleep in your eyes, as though this was the proper time for you to wake despite it being past four. You were too wakeful to stay in bed, yet your body's languorous weight seemed to strap you down in erotic boredom, like drowned Ophealia, like a Renaissance of cynical vanity.

Damp with darkness. The smell of sterile sheets rising like heat from the ground. Rustling silence.

It was so dark that your hand became entrenched in shadows. You brought it up to your face, and upon the lines of your palm being blotted off in black, you brought it back down to your side and let out a heavy sigh. You felt as though you were lost within the shadows, melting away into tenderness in their soft darkness, melding into one and many.

One and many.

You thought of your family: would they remember you as a fugitive? Would they regard you as one of those Japanese people who simply disappeared to escape shame, to escape exposure? Would you become a never-to-be-found wanted poster?

Would you even be remembered as one, as (last name) (First name), instead of (Last name), amongst the faces lined up as sheep in a butcher, ready to be submitted into the machine of society? Would you be remembered as one individual? Rather than simply a facet of a branch of the masses?

Then your mind wanders to Dazai, the gentleman from the Armed Agency, who let on more than you knew, who gently took you under his wing before dropping you out the nest with that test. When you closed your eyes, you could see Dazai in the darkness of your eyelids, forming in the shape of imaginary colours; Dazai shaped gaps and Dazai shaped silences now occupied your mind, the melodic lilt of his voice echoing in the dark chambers of your lonely head.

You think you hear his voice calling out to you, but there's no one there.

Would you be forgotten too, by him?

Your throat tightens up with a foreign sensation, of your heart racing and your mind spinning. You clench your eyes shut before scrambling to the wardrobe beside your beds, filled with limp pillowcasings and plastic and crawled into the corner, your back faced against the world like Atlas, and feel your heart open and close, open and close under the fist of your hand, like a low drum's crescendo trapped in the cages of your chest.

Open, close, open,

Close.

XX

You're shopping at a grocery store the next morning before the store's intercom announces your name unexpectedly:

"Will (last name) (First name) please come to the reception area to pick up their boyfriend? Thank you."

You fumble with the item you were carrying at the announcement, feeling your neck flush and prickle when passerbys curiously stare at your bewilderment, coming to the conclusion that you were, in fact, the person being called by the intercom. You place the item down and take a deep breath, regaining your composure before robotically walking towards the reception area, where you're met with a very happy brunette waving at you.

"Yah, (first name)!" He says, close-eyed and grinning. His long legs are crossed and his arms are bandaged. Were they always bandaged? Or had you just seen them?