Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter forty-nine

Dazai POV

The storage container was cold when I woke up. It was disorienting in a way that things often become when you are given a brief reprieve from your day to day life and returned to it, everything feeling just as real but shifted somehow. Off in a way that you can't fully comprehend or explain.

Though the summer nights in Yokohama always seemed to hold a bit of warmth for passersby on the street, none of that ever seemed to reach all of the way out here, to the heart of the landfill. And on the rare occasions that it would, I would often find myself wishing that it wouldn't, the summer heart always seeming to gather through the day into something entirely insufferable. But most days any warmth from the day was often long since gone by the time that I made it back to the blasted storage container at the end of the day, cooled off into an almost comfortable lull of chill and warmth that only grew colder as the night grew older.

It made me miss the cabin. Falling asleep to the gentle stream of water keeping out the sounds of the night. The warmth of a proper bed that didn't leave my skin crawling with some unsaid horror every time that I removed myself from it. I didn't even want to think about the person that had slept next to me all those nights, the quiet sounds of their breathing as they slept, slowly pressing against me in the night. Sometimes, most, it was much easier not to.

Giving up on the notion that any more sleep would come to me, I pulled myself out of the rough bed and reached blindly for the dark coat that I had hung from the side of it. Draping the thing across my shoulders as I have always done, I let myself take a small bit of pleasure at the warmth that it provided. Something that was almost immediately nulled by the knowledge of just what the coat was. Of who it made me. What I had chosen to allow myself to become in the act of returning.

Of who had given it to me and guided me to this.

Standing in the middle of the storage container, dressed in full mafia attire as I always was these days, I made a decision. Locking away the memories of the past week in a part of my mind that I refused to touch, I piled everything about what happened then onto a pyre that I had made for the boy I used to be, sighing as the mental flames burned brightly like a forgotten funeral.

Suddenly, the cold had become much more bearable.

—-

The underground cells of the main Port Mafia building were just about as comforting today as they had been the day prior. Cold and dark in a way that light could never seem to hope to reach, the screams already echoing off the walls despite the earliness of the hour. Though it could very well be seen as late for some depending on how long the torture specialist had been down here at work. The sense of it all seemed to sing sweetly in my bones, washing away the ghost of a boy that I should have let remain just that, a ghost.

I've become very adept at a number of things during my time with the mafia. Torture was, without a doubt, one of those things.

Though I didn't particularly enjoy the action, as might think, but that stemmed more from my lack in taking much joy from anything tht has to do with continuing the futile pursuit of living. I could understand though, that it had a tendency to almost been seen as something of an art form to those that practiced it and were particularly skilled in it. None of the specialist wore the same empty gaze that I've held for two years now, the one that only grows darker as time seemes to pass on without me. They all found a vertical level of joy in their work, tending to look upon me with haunted gazes as I did their jobs better than they could ever hope to do so and didn't even seem to care that I did so.

Sometimes, in the dead of the night, I thought that it might be for the better that I didn't.

The small rush that I got from being good at something, even acts of such profound violence, had died out sometime during my first year with the doctor. Not too long after he had used that very feeling to convince me to stay.