Generations of Rain || Dazai Osamu/Reader

8. human.

"I'm sorry."

You're both sitting on the living room floor, legs crossed over over the short-legged table in the centre of the room. You're staring into blank space as you say this, your shoulders lax and limp as your head swirls with a maelstrom of words: Yet all you can purge out of you are those two words. Dazai doesn't say anything for a while, before he sighs.

"I'm worried for you."

"Don't be," Your response is automatic, mechanical. Your voice sounds more like it belongs to a creature that has the face of a human being crudely taped over it: it comes from a dark place within you. "I can take care of myself."

"You clearly can't," Dazai says, his voice solemn. You smile weakly.

"Maybe."

The two of you sit in stifled silence. But this silence is smeared with screams, the echoing aftermaths of a throaty scream. It rings in the air. You tilt your head up to face Dazai when he starts to speak again.

"It's good you have other feelings than sadness," He says. "How long has it been since you experienced anger? Panic?"

"A while," You confess. You nibble on your lower lip, before lifting a finger to peel at the skin there nervously. You affirm that with a, "A while."

He leans backwards, propping himself up by his hands on the ground behind him. There's a slight smile on his face. "Remember when we went to your bar? Odasaku and I."

Your lips crack into a small smile, before a mournful giggle resonates in the air. "Of course I do."

"Let me get us some water," Dazai says, his knees cracking as he stands up to head towards the kitchen. He returns with a jug of barley tea and two cups. He pours the translucent amber liquid into the cups, before—

Clink!

The clear cry of a glass hitting the table. Dazai looks up from his crossed arms and up into your (eye colour) gaze. You're wearing your bar uniform: a blue striped shirt with a black apron tied over it. A sweep of the cool air-con air slightly ruffles your hair as you place his drink down.

"A whisky for the suicidal young man?" You playfully say, and Dazai takes his drink without a word, but smiles at the tone of your voice. Odasaku is drinking his whisky peacefully beside him, and you wring your hands in a dark blue towel as Dazai begins to tap on the ice sphere in his drink.

"What a rotten day," He says, his words ending in a sigh. "I failed to die again, as usual."

"You tried?" Odasaku asks, placing his drink down. Dazai indignantly spins on his stool to face him.

"Of course I have!" He clicks his tongue. "I'll have you know I tried hanging myself, but the branch was shot off by some enemy troop."

"Pity," You say, your voice dripping with sympathy. What a strange thing to have to accept: that your boyfriend's colleague was a suicidal man. "Say, why do you want to die so bad?"

"I wonder if there's any value in life," Dazai says. He tugs on a stray piece of string that hangs from the gauze wrapped around his head. "It's difficult to see through the lens of my eyes."

You wipe down the counter in silence, deep contemplation, before placing the towel onto its hook by your side. "I don't know. I kind of understand your predicament."

"You do?" Dazai quirks an eyebrow.

"If I were to be the demon prodigy of the Port Mafia, a vast underground organisation, with that much pressure on my shoulders, I'd have a difficult time seeing past the loneliness and alienation from others," You say almost casually, polishing a glass with your eyes reflecting on the transparent surface. "I get where you're coming from. Do I condone it? Of course not."

"Why would it matter to you if I died?" The brunette asks, almost surprised at the thought. You look at him quizzically, before tilting your head at him.

"Any friend of Odasaku is my friend. Besides," You place the glass down. "If I was in your shoes, I would have surely turned into a madman. Or madwoman. Whatever you prefer. Anyways, I commend you on living this far."

Dazai feels as though an earthquake has shaken underneath his feet; his roots are upturned, soil erosion, trees dismantling and falling over. His heart beats erratically in his chest, and he swallows the lump in his throat. He would have turned himself inside out to try and explain, or in Dazaiesque fashion, escape what has happened within him: you affect him in ways he can't quantify or contain. All he can do is measure the effect, and the effect is that you, his friend's girlfriend, make him out of control.

So he tries to regain control by telling himself that you're a madwoman, too.

No one has ever tried to understand his pain; everyone was below him, or everyone was above him. There was no middle ground. He was isolated in his own abandoned class, with no one to turn to. He was effectively, truly, and utterly, alone in this lifetime. He longed to die in a ditch, alone and forgotten, with no traces of his existence left behind. Burn all the photos of him, erase all traces of data that the Port Mafia has on him; leave him as a dead dawn in a world full of peaceful sunsets.

But now? He thinks there's a chance of being remembered.

He avoids your sundial-wise gaze. It is blinding to see. It's a risk to stare at you; human beings go insane without a little shade. And in the colourful kaleidoscope of your lens did he know he was a human being. Which was a difficult thing to come to term with: How do you accept that you are the very thing you clinically watched from a distance?

"Are you okay, Dazai?" You wave a hand in front of his face, and he blinks out of his stupor. "You're staring at me."

"Just thinking." He simply responds, before finally taking a sip of his drink.

"I've never seen you do that," Odasaku says, his baritone voice soothing and curt. Dazai turns his head.

"What?"

"I've never seen you speechless," The red-head shrugs. "It's a first."

Dazai gathers his drink in the pouch of his left cheek, before swallowing the searing liquid down his delicate throat. "I guess that's the effect real human beings have on me."

"Real human beings?" Odasaku echoes. Your back is turned, cheerfully attending to another customer now. Dazai wistfully stares at the small of your back, the round back of your head, tied apron, the sunny shade of your voice dancing and intertwining with the light music of the quiet bar. You're chatting with what seems to be regular customers of your bar, your laugh like sunlight and how it gets inside of him, like fishhooks or the suicidal hunger he kept like a thorn within him. And for some reason, he wants to keep you that way: clean, untouched by dirt, away from this world that fed off people like you, like leeches and parasites and lice—and maybe not destroying the thing he likes, resisting that impulse, to destroy it because he can't bear to watch it corrupt and fall apart by itself, is the highest expression of fondness.

"Human beings untouched by dirt," Dazai says. His voice is strangely full, as though bursting at the seams with some foreign emotion he can't quite identity. "Human beings that are human."

"You must see everyone as monsters," Odasaku comments. He places his drink down and also turns his gaze to your back. You're leaning against the counter and replying to some humorous comment. "Or unlike human."

"Not quite," Dazai says. His profile is perfectly immaculate, the lean curve of his nose tipped with a drop of cruelty, as if it was cruel to be that beautiful. "I've seen men and women take turns at being human. But never be one."