Double Black

i want to eat your pancreas

A/N: This work contains mentions of suicide and mental illnesses, especially EATING DISORDERS. Please avoid reading if you decide this is not for you. Title is a reference to my favorite go-to cry hours anime movie of all time!

He was dissociating.

If Dazai had to find a word for it, albeit not being very sure of the real meaning of it in a psychological context, it would be the word 'dissociation'.

He's been like this since yesterday. The extreme feeling of numbness, as if he was really detached from the rest of the world. Disconnected, abandoned, confused. A whole bunch of adjectives he could carefully pinpoint from the dictionary, and yet somehow they all described negative emotions.

He couldn't really focus on anything. His eyes were constantly trained on one thing or the other, but he wouldn't be able to tell what the object was, although he's probably been staring at it for hours on end; losing track of time, losing all reason, losing his sense of self.

Really, was there a point to this?

To existence itself? 

It was a question that used to plague him quite a lot when he was younger. Barely turned fifteen, he'd found himself contemplating the matters of life and death far too frequently as compared to anything else. He'd always been in a constant turmoil.

The feeling of being too much, the feeling of never being enough; the feeling of just 'being' in general. 

It was really uncomfortable, although that was a discovery he made after things had already started to change back then. For the first fifteen years of his life, he had no direction. No sense of self, feeling inhumane every day when he woke up in the morning; his life had no meaning. He was told he was already far too intellectually capable for his age.

There wasn't anything he'd like to study. But... Reading up on death, the science behind it, the methods which one could employ to ensure their own departure by their own hands, all of that has always been so incredibly fascinating to him. He'd thought and considered a lot of methods over the years.

But his avoidance to pain made things really difficult in this regard.

Hence, back then, seven years ago, he'd come to the conclusion that maybe poison was the best way to do it. It was around this time that he'd become acquainted with the boss of the Port Mafia, Mori. The doctor had promised him a potent poison if he just carried out one simple mission for him.

It was this mission that changed his life forever.

Or rather, the person he met during said mission. He'd been forced to do multiple unnecessary tasks with this annoying kid; Nakahara Chuuya, King of the Sheep, they called him. Dazai's first impression had naturally been that the brat was loud and annoying.

He wasn't wrong, of course. Chuuya was still really annoying. But Chuuya was also bright, and so full of life. He was vibrant, vital, and very, very important to Dazai. Things had come to be so over the last seven years, after a hell lot of bullshit, really. But all this time, Chuuya has always been so beautiful. 

Loud, in a way that drowned out the voices in Dazai's head.

Besides, he sparkled. In a way that made Dazai's eyes focus on him. Even on days like today, if nothing else, Dazai could at least concentrate on Chuuya's voice. Discern the words that he spoke, and lace them all together in order so as to allow his brain to decode the meaning behind it.

Dazai was sure that Chuuya had his fair share of problems as well. Of course, he did. For a kid who's been on his own ever since he came to consciousness, as someone who's been with the Mafia since he was fifteen; of course, Chuuya had his own set of emotional baggage. And not that Dazai would ever admit it to his face, but he was glad that it was him who got to see all these parts of Nakahara Chuuya, the gravity manipulator, that others would never see.