Generations of Rain || Dazai Osamu/Reader

Epilogue. generations of rain.

At some point in Dazai's life, he wanted to die. So desperately that his shoulders shook with it.

There is a certain beauty of the doomed. Missing men and women are never forgotten, and they do not have to try to be perfect: They simply are, not because of their attributes, but simply because of the fact they were missing. Their cold faces staring back at you from the missing posters, their names forever immortalised.

But after he met you, there was a reason to keep going. Keep persevering. There were no Gods out there, Dazai thought, but there were Shinto shrines. And they have aligned the stars to make him so that you would love him. This is a gift. And it came with a price: Odasaku's death. But your resurgence was proof that grief did not spoil the flesh of the fruit.

In a pre-(first name) world, he believed he was simply an artificial string of characters, each taking their turn in a world of bloodshed and violent Hellfire. BLAM. The cry of a gun. Everything was dead to him. Even the rising dawn was dead like a corpse, rotting at the edges; he could find no beauty in a world that was so hostile towards people like him, and he would wander from one point to another in the dark, groping for the next point where he could rest before wandering in black once more.

But then he found you. He found you in the debris and destruction of Odasaku's death, and his life had gained a purpose: To protect you. He occasionally still thought about suicide. And you cannot blame him—it is a self defence mechanism that he had acquired in his time of utter solitude. But when you smiled at him and opened your arms, he fell into it so sweetly like a wasp to honey. And then he decides that he cannot die just yet: this good life just tastes too sweet for him.

He is not simply just in love with you; he quite literally has merged with you. You two had invented a language that only the two of you could decipher, like the blind to braille; you two had imitated each other's habits until they became natural; you two had unravelled each other until the ribbons had been knitted together so tightly there was no gap; you two had stared into the abyss of each other's horribleness and forgave it.

My love, my love, my precious, forever mine for eternity.

A little fall of rain. A thin drizzle.

"Dazai?"

"Yes, belladonna?"

"Close the window. It's raining."

Generations of rain, falling, with no one to listen to, but the two of you attentively watch it fall, so sweetly and gently, making the memories more intimate. A weeping cloud. A bleak breeze. All night under the unknown rain does Dazai find himself in your arms, just like how the rain finds solace on a leaf, slowly dripping down, fusing with the soil...

A/N

The idea of Dazai finding a reason to live/be happy has been haunting me ever since I read No Longer Human. There's a brief moment where Yozo (No longer human's main protagonist) experiences brief happiness after he weds his wife, and I wanted to expand on that. What if he found someone to live for, what if he found someone that understood him in a way that he didn't even know himself? What if someone needed him just as he needed someone? What if he had a reason to hold on to life, and not just end it all?

This has been my passion project to talk about grief and forgiveness and how we can move around it; how my own experience with grief and trauma has allowed me add another dimension to my writing. At least, I hope so.

Thank you for everyone who has stuck with this book since the beginning; I see you. Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you again in another book! <3