blood money || YANDERE!Chuuya Nakahara

Three: The Nightmares.

You go to sleep that night filled with unsavoury dreams: nightmares.

Your dreams are revealing. They're teeming with things breaking apart, like avalanches, glaciers, and porcelain, all shattering before you, and you just can't help shake off the feeling that you'll be alone forever, that the breaking apart will never be mended, that the changes are permanent and what made you today. Maybe you'll have someone by your side telling you that what you did was justified, or what you did was wrong; that's fine. You just need somebody near you. No pity, just someone there for you.

Tonight your nightmares are filled with glaciers shattering apart. Blood pours out like water between the schism, like a blue laceration, staining and dyeing the seas a dark, dark red. You stand in the ruins of your girlhood and watch as everything becomes red: red like the periods you've never had the chance to properly celebrate, red like the blood of the lives you took without much question. The latter always haunts you the most.

You live your past life out again and again in your dreams, in succession. Sometimes they're in chronological order; sometimes they're just moments of horror captured in a still frame like you had just paused a movie, or stopped time.

One particular memory you had come to dream of was that of killing a pregnant woman. "Prove your worth", Mori had claimed. And thus you had gotten out of the car, shot her point blank in the forehead, and calmly entered back into the car. You had felt nothing when he showered you with praise, calling you a "girl of ice." But now it came to haunt you; sometimes you saw her in broad daylight, her face twisting and her body coming towards you like an apparition; and then she was gone, as though she had never existed in the first place.

Post traumatic stress, you would argue, over and over. Not that you'd ever admit it to anyone but yourself.

There's something wrong with you that you can't necessarily understand, something fundamentally difficult to unknot about yourself, as if you were always conjoined into someone else; and now that you're alone, you are living a life of separation.

You sing in your dreams. You sing and sing and sing, and cry out for help, but nothing but more blood comes to choke you. There's nothing for you but blood. Maybe this was the life you were destined to live out, and you were currently in a parallel universe, a wrong world, living out a life you weren't supposed to be living. It certainly felt like it.

You wake up in a pool of sweat. Swears come flooding out of your mouth. The clock reads 3:48AM, the sight of the red numbers blurring in your eyes like a hazy fog. You could feel the stickiness of your thighs from the sweat, the dampness of your pits and the moisture on your upper lip. Your tongue furtively swipes over it: salty. You throw the futon sheets off your body and air your flat out by opening the windows; the spring air does little to assuage the heat burning inside you.

You had desperately tried to burn all bridges, but the bridges were made of titanium steel and all you had was a matchstick.

You swallow the lump in your throat and massage your forehead, feeling your temples throb as if a parasite was within your head, banging against the walls of your skull. You squeeze your eyes shut and let out a heavy breath. Not again. Not again.

Never again.

At least, that's what you want to believe.

"Maybe I'm not supposed to be here at all," You say to yourself, flopping backwards onto your pillow. The ceiling fan turns slowly, as though contemplating your words, "Maybe I'm supposed to go back."

The ceiling fan continues to rotate.

"Yeah, I don't know," You turn to your side and watch the number of the time blur and dissolve, before turning the clock around to face the wall, "I don't know at all."

You know that if you try going to sleep again, you'll just dream of Mori, you'll just dream of more corpses shaking around you in a manic, frenzied, hysterical dance, mocking you for what you've done. Did you deserve it? Absolutely. But did you like to be reminded you deserved it? Absolutely not.

You know for a fact that the nightmares will only continue if you went back, but at least it would stop the calling of your name in your dreams that you needed to go back.

You wondered if Dazai felt the same.

No, he had a friend, he had Odasaku. Had. You had nothing. Have nothing. No one. He had a purpose to keep going, to be on the good side, but what did you have? A handful of broken memories and blasphemy for what you've done as a child.

You could feel a breakdown coming. You could hear it, like the mournful howl of a train horn: loud, plagent, and screeching against its metal railings. You block it out with your own screams in your head. A haunting loneliness that poignantly stands out in the silence of your flat, like a piscine scent of a fish market.

You curl up into a ball and stare into your pillow.

XX

"Are you sure my rent's gone up?" You ask the landlord again. He seemed furtive to see you, as if nervous of an incoming wrath. Though you would never do that; you've lost all your rage a while ago.

Your memory began when Mori had picked you out from the rest of the orphans; the rest was darkness. And ever since that light shone on you, it had always been nothing but emptiness within you. Emptiness that would be filled with corpses, like linings to an intestine. When you are not fed love from a silver spoon, you start to lick it off of scalpels. You, specifically.

"Unfortunately," He says. He watches you with pitying eyes as you sigh, rubbing a temple with your fingers before meagerly offering a smile.

"Alright. I'll see what I can do," You say, with an uncomfortable smile. You're smiling a lot more than before, you think to yourself; smiling was such a foreign concept to you. Even chimpanzees smiled, and that was when they felt threatened; did you feel threatened by others?

The answer was yes.

You're walking towards the municipal subway station with a vacant look in your eyes, lost in the maelstrom of thoughts that were occupying your mind. How do you deal with this heightening rent? You were already barely surviving, chin deep in waters; you would not be able to pay this month's rent without sacrificing food. Even then that wouldn't be possible, because you were scarcely eating but the bare necessities. You chew on your lip. You're hungry.

"Oh?" A voice cuts through your thoughts, "Well, if it isn't (last name)."