Generations of Rain || Dazai Osamu/Reader

2. clawmarks.

It's a sunny day when Odasaku proposes to you. With a knee on the ground, the diamond ring gleaming under the brilliance of the sun and the blue, enormous sky. Wisps of clouds are slowly moving along, lackadaisical in their right.

"Will you marry me?" His voice is steady as always, never once betraying the emotions that are swarming in his head; but you've been with him long enough to know that he's nervous, but confident in your answer. You can barely speak over your sobs of joy, before answering with a gleeful,

"Yes."

When he slides the ring onto your finger do you pounce into his arms, nearly toppling him over in your burst of glee. But he quickly takes all of you with sturdy arms wrapping around your figure. You admire the ring that he has bestowed before you. You're wetly giggling, tearful in happiness, the entire moment frozen in time before—

"(First name)?" A knock comes on the bathroom door.

You silently turn your head to the direction of the sound. Your hand is still held up in the air, the diamond glowing with a haunting echo on your finger under the flickering light. You put your hand back underwater in the bathtub, sinking even further down before words come out in the form of bubbles.

"What?"

"You've been in the bath for some time now," A pause. He must be checking the clock. "For 2 hours. Are you okay?"

You nod, before realising he can't see you. But he must have sensed it, for he replies with a,

"I'm going to pop in the Agency for a bit," He says. "Do you mind?"

"Not at all." You reply. You can hear the retreating footsteps, before they come back towards you. He always does: Dazai always came back to you.

"Please take care of yourself," He says. "While I'm gone."

"I'll try," You feel like you're a ghost, doing ghostly things, ghosting around the house like a trapped soul in a haunted house, looking for a self that was no longer there. "I'll try."

"Thank you," He lets out a sigh of relief at your words, and finally, the front door closes behind him with a click. Silence falls onto the house like a blanket. You could never bear the silence; it was always a thing between you and Odasaku that the silences were filled with either you or Dazai's cheerful chattering, while your husband listened on. Scarcely did he comment, simply gazing on with a simple happiness at his wife and friend getting along.

But now the silence, the quietness, is the reason why all these images awaken in you not so much desire as sadness—a vast and inexplicable nostalgia. Perhaps nostalgia was the wrong word; after all, nostalgia was simply the past without the pain. There was no pain in the world when Odasaku was in the world, but now...now? There was an abundance of pain. Too much of it.

The scenes of happiness existed once. You can't believe that it happened, now that you're in the gutters, because they feel as faraway as the stars. The stars burn in absolute silence at your grief. And the happiness will never return. They are gone; they are in another world, another planet, a place that is the past for you. You are now dead; or at least, feel a part of yourself dead, and the memories of happiness are far off on some distant horizon, an apparition, a puzzling reflection come to haunt you, something you are afraid of and which you have come to love without hope. It is almost like dead magic; and magic is hope in the face of inevitable decay.

No more of that nonsense.

You sink into the bathtub with your heart suddenly racing. You writhe in agony, water splashing over the sides of the tub as you bite down on your lower lip, before a strained cry of pain escapes your throat. You claw at the side of your face, from the top of your forehead to the bottom of your cheek, while your other hand holds onto the rim of the bathtub, nails scraping on the porcelain surface.