Generations of Rain || Dazai Osamu/Reader

19. coffee.

"Do you want to stop by a cafe?" Dazai asks you, one hand on the steering wheel. You remember the last time you went to a cafe and how you ruined the day by vomiting into a toilet bowl, and your skin crawls at the potential for it to happen again.

"Which cafe?"

"The same one we went to. Or would you prefer Uzumaki?"

You hum. "Whichever is more convenient for you."

"The same one it is then." He turns and turns on his blinkers. The rumbling of the engine is comforting, almost like music; it filled the empty silences with its stagnant and sturdy purrs.

The sakura blossoms have long been displaced by their branches, their pink petals flooding the streets like a tide. In its place were replaced by sunflowers, hydragneas, irises and lavender: Flowers of the summer. A combination of their fragments make you dizzy, and you lift a hand to wipe the sweat off your brow the moment you step outside the car.

You're sitting in the same place as last time. Maybe in a better world you have reminsced on how better you are now, but utopia isn't a place that can ever exist, and so your better world is nowhere. Instead you sit down and feel nothing but a craving for coffee; there is no relief or glee. You merely want iced coffee.

"Are you going to get an orange juice this time too?" Dazai asks, looking through the drinks menu. You rest your chin on your palm and shake your head.

"No, I'm thinking of an iced coffee." That makes Dazai look up from the laminated menu.

"Really? What happened to your go-to drink?"

You drum your fingers on the circular, wooden table. "My tastes have moved on. I want to try something new."

"Iced coffee? You want an americano or what?" He slides over the menu to you enthuastically, almost as if happy you were shedding your old, worn out carapace.

"I'll just get (fav coffee)."

The waitress places your orders and the moment she walks away, Dazai leans in.

"What did you and the counsellor talk about~" He sing-songs, as if that would charm you enough to spill the beans. "Tell me, I'm itching with curiosity."

You hum for a second, debating if you should tell him. Sometimes it was best to keep somethings to yourself, not out of malice, but simply for the sake of it. But this is Dazai you're talking about, your anchor, part of your blood—and so you steeple your fingers together and begin to talk.

"I'm no longer angry at Odasaku anymore," You say, your voice starting off as a tremour. "At least, a part of me has calmed down."

Dazai listens as though raptured by your words, as though he was blessed with this holy grail of words. He has martyred himself in your name, and now is witnessing it bearing fruit. He barely acknowledges the waitress when she returns with your drinks.

"Why be angry at someone who loved me? As you said, his final words were: Thank you for loving me. How could I be angry at that?" You say. "But at the same time, I'm holding a grudge, the same old grudge from before."

"Why can't you let go of this grudge?" Dazai asks, his drink long forgotten as he intensly stares at you. You take a long sip of your drink and ponder, before the realisation hits you like a train.

"Because it's comfortable. It's easy," You say, your voice airy and breathless. "It's easy to be angry at someone who caused you pain. But at worst, the anger just makes the cycle of hate worse. And how could I do that to Odasaku? How could I besmirch his name like that, when he's loved me?"

Dazai leans on his palm and smiles at you. It is a smile that has been dredged up from the most frail parts of his heart, his most vulnerable, and you tunnel-vision on it because the smile beckons you to crawl inside of him and find him where he is most ruined, and heal him from there. It is a sacred thing that you are privileged to see.

"And so there's that," You lean back on the straw chair and stretch your arms over your head, casually yawning as though you haven't split open Dazai's heart with your words. The sunlight pours over you like liquid gold, the shade simply darkening its blinding light. "That's all I'm telling you."

"What is this, One thousand and One nights? Arabian nights? Are you my Scheherazade?" Dazai playfully pokes at you with his straw. You let yourself smile.

"Will I have to tell you my stories so you don't execute me?" You jokingly retort back.

What you don't know is that it isn't One thousand and One nights because he has already fallen in love with you, and he does not need one thousand and one stories for him to see the beauty within you.

It was a strange thing, Dazai thinks, how easy it was to love you. There were so many facets to you that he loved, how three dimensional you were, how you were the model of a human being, because what is being human if not suffering? You made suffering almost holy to him. Everything about you radiates holiness. He loves you as himself. The love itself cannot be described easily, because it is with everything he is: To explain his love would mean explaining himself, and Dazai is a stranger to his own identity. He loves you dangerously, and his heart is dangerous, and not just another organ; it is another thing, like a crimson fist clenched tight in his chest.

Hope flourishes in him like a flower in Hell. Like a poppy in a field of blood. He has not abandoned hope, not just yet, because what is love if not the inability to abandon hope?

XX

The two of you get back in the car when Dazai's phone rings.

"Can you pick it up for me?" He asks. You take his phone out of his pocket and notice it is from Kunikida. You press accept and bring it up to your ear.

"Hello?"

"Dazai, come to the Agency n—"

You cut him off. Something in his voice raises goosebumps on your skin, as if his words were sleet ice. "This is (last name), what's the problem?"

"The terrorists. They want you."