blood money || YANDERE!Chuuya Nakahara

Five: The Cigarettes.

The words of Chuuya Nakahara have been incessantly ringing in your head like church bells on a biblical Sunday afternoon.

"Rejoin the Mafia," You murmur to yourself with a scoff, "My ass. God, I need a cigarette."

You head towards the nearest convenient store and walk past the shelves chock full of sweets and biscuits and other snacks, packaged in blinding colours and inviting swirling fonts. You dismissively pick one up: a Tohato caramel corn package, lighter than blood in colour, before putting it back down. You head towards the counter.

"Hello," You say to the staff member, "Can I get two Marlboro Reds?"

"Of course! That'll be 1140 yen," She says, picking out the two boxes and scanning them. You hand her your credit card. It...declines?

"Can you please try again?"

It declines again. She shrugs and gives you an apologetic smile, obsequious in nature.

"That's weird," You say, pulling out your wallet again for cash, "I swear I had a couple thousand in there. Well," You hand her a wad of cash, and she apologetically hands you back your card. The light was red, indicating that the card was invalid. You slide it back into your wallet and pocket the two cigarette boxes, "I'll phone them from the office, I'm so sorry for the inconvenience."

"I'm so sorry for our system!" The worker exclaims, "It must be our fault; our system fouls our customers sometimes."

"It's okay, don't apologise," You awkwardly wave off her willing attitude, "Don't worry."

You leave the store a tad bit more unsettled than before. You shake out a cigarette from the box, snap it against your hand, and light it with a lighter with a hand cupping the embers. The end lights up. They say smoking is one of the most dangerous hobbies in the world; cigarettes are a bit like a gun without the bullets. You point it at your head, pull the trigger—and you might just end up dead. But it feels like home. You blow the smoke out the corner of your mouth after inhaling it down, feeling it slowly unfurl in your lungs like a curled claw. You lean against the wall and sigh, the stick between your fingers smoking and dropping flickering ashes down onto the floor.

You flick a bit of ash off your top when it lands on the fabric.

All sound drops out. The ambient noise of your circulatory system provides a hum, your heart beating faint and fast. Oh no. You could hear a breakdown coming in; you clench your teeth and feel the cigarette crush under your teeth, closing your eyes and feeling the sweat bead on your brow.

You glance up.

The entire street is covered in corpses. Some are naked, some are clothed; some have bags over their heads and their expressions are imprinted against the fabric by the blood coming out of the orifices on their faces. They are mounted over each other, with arms and legs sticking out, branching out like trees, where people once stood and walked but are no longer there.

Are you hallucinating?

Everything moves in slow motion. Cotton fills your head.

You're the only person in this street. You steady your heart by calmly dropping the cigarette and stomping on it, crushing it with the heel of your shoe. The twisting arms push into your vision like thorny branches, like a Christmas wreath, wrapping around your point of view. A flesh wreath, covered in blood and viscera. Lives that you have taken.

You look at the setting sun.

"I have killed many." You admit to yourself. A shameful admission. An admission filled with certainty.

You are snapped out of your schism by your own admission. You are back in reality. The corpses are gone and are replaced by walking people, some of which are staring at you and the morbid admission you have just made. Must be another mentally ill person, they think to themselves. Some little ones are glancing at you, holding their mother's hands; they register your odd state with childish unease.

You knock out another cigarette out the box and start smoking again.

XX

You arrive back home with a sigh, dropping your bag on the floor and immediately retreating to the floor where your futon was. You lie down, unbothered to even change clothes, and stare at the decrepit ceiling. The ceiling fan is off; it is utterly silent in the room tonight.

Who to tell about your problems? How to break it to a psychiatrist, "Hello, I have been a contract killer, mass murderer; and now I'm seeing the consequences of my actions. I think I might have PTSD. Help me?"

The only way to cope with this would be to be quiet about it. Or look up symptoms of it in your own personal time. You don't think you deserve help. Not when you've been a killing machine in the past, not when you're guilty. Guilt is guilt; it can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood. But what you do understand is that it hurts, and it hurts like a son of a bitch. Your soul finally howls, after years of laying dormant, and your heart aches for what you've done. It twists and churns and aches with every pump of blood that you've shed, with every word you've said in the past, with every bullet you've fired in the past.

But what does guilt do but only worsen itself?

Alone, you stare at the shadow of a lone moon. A cigarette hanging from your lips, ashes like fireflies as they rained down below. The loneliness doesn't leave, and you're tormented with numbness: guilt.

You might as well start sleepwalking too, while you're at it.

"Wouldn't that be funny," You sneer to yourself, the smoking cigarette between your fingers, just on the cusp of your lips, "If I started to do that."

Your heart aches so much that your fingers are chilling, your fingers are shaking and you're nearing a sob. You swallow it with a smile to yourself, a faux, crazed smile, and hollow your cheeks for another breath of smoke. You let it consume you, let it turn you inside out, let it run wild in the planes of your lungs.

Maybe if you joined back, you wouldn't have to think of these possibilities. Maybe if you went back to the point of where it hurt, it would lessen the hurt, because you're not actively escaping the pain. It would be like giving up the fight between you and a whirlpool; you let it come to you in waves, and you close your eyes, don't hold your breath and let it completely consume you.

You go to sleep with a cigarette burning in an ashtray that night.