Generations of Rain || Dazai Osamu/Reader

14. words.

The time you return home the TV is broadcasting news; news about today's events. You slip off your shoes and sit on the living room floor, pointing the TV remote towards the television and switching onto a channel where you and Dazai were distantly in the background, sitting in the backseat of the ambulance.

Something something terrorism, something something something. You let the words enter one ear out the other, blankly staring at the female announcer who was dutifully saying words that seemed like another language to you.

"Are you okay, Dazai?" You finally speak over the buzzing of the television. He's sitting next to you, across the table, with his elbow propped on the low surface. He turns to you, chocolate locks sticking to the side of his face from the thin layer of sweat.

"Why do you ask?"

You frown. "You shot someone. You killed someone."

"It's not my first," Dazai admits. You look away at that admission.

"Still. Are you okay?"

"Are you okay?" He rebuts. "You were held hostage. You're the victim here. How're you holding up?"

You don't answer for a moment, and Dazai feels a bead of sweat trickle down the side of his face. He reaches over behind him and turns on the fan, before turning back to you. You're staring intensely at him.

"Thank you."

Dazai blinks, and smiles. "At what?"

"For protecting me."

"You shouldn't be condoning the way I handled that situation," Dazai turns his face to the direction of your voice, but he's met with moon-strained (Eye colour) eyes. "I'm surprised you're not angry at me."

"You did it to protect me." And those words are enough to make Dazai's heart beat just a little faster. "Thank you."

His heart lifts like the angels are singing; a chorus of celestial perfection. The Holy Grail, the unblemished organ, the final aspiration on Mount Carmel, where Elijia confronts the fake prophets of Baal. He has a lot of feelings towards you: a long spectrum acquired from a long chain of events. You're kind despite the Hell around you. The universe is indifferent to your pain, but you choose to be kind and gentle instead of jagged and sharp.

He knows perfection cannot be possible; it is simply a never ending goal, a pursuit that has a snail trail of blood and corpses. But under the moonlight, in this small dorm does Dazai think you're the impossibility of perfection. Your spreading corruption that lightens his world like a candle in a black room. His voice hitches when you blink at him curiously. He can't get words out, he can't untangle the knot his heart's tied in; he's speechless at your acceptance of his violence, as though a lamb had witnessed the wrath of a lion and still chose to lay beside it, between its mighty bloodied paws.

"You're staring."

He snaps into reality. The words came out of his mouth before he could even process it. "You're just so beautiful."

"Don't say stuff like that," You huff, turning your face back to the TV. "Don't."

"I'm sorry," He's not sorry. They say time heals, and part of it was true. Time was a great deadener. People forget, get bored, get old, go away. But the gaping hole that Odasaku had left Dazai had simply grown around it, the hole unclosing but simply remaining stagnant. The only thing for certain about his pain was how complicated it all was, like a string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle. And thus he does, looking at your profile in the corner of his eye.