𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇 𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 | dazai osamu *EDITING

cliff

edited: ✓ | 5/19/2020

trigger warnings: gore, mafia business, brief mention of suicide.

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How desperately I wished to be killed with desire. / I killed a part of you / so you could go on. / I raise your body in me / fill gaps of where love has left holes. / How I mourn; / how I grieve; / how I would destroy myself for you; / so don't come back home, / my love, / you belong somewhere else.

The wind is painfully cold on your nape, carelessly tousling your hair and ensnaring stray leaves in their glided threads. Yet you cannot move, you cannot claw your way out into the light, because every time you do, the world turns upside down and sends you digging deeper into blood and bloated entrails. He is there, just a graze of a fingertip away from you, but you know that whatever he has become will ignite your flesh like a match to an oil spill.

A flower, borne by darkness: If people acknowledge you as a flower, of course. You would close your eyes and see the distinct shape of a flower: Its fleshy petals, its fragile neck, its genitalia; but then it would disappear in the tar-blackness of your eyes as though it had never existed.

Or, you were just simply never made to exist.

You were born into the Mafia. Pure Mafian blood, eyes sharp for killing, words scathing for interrogations, hands moulded to fit the handle of a knife in your delicate palms, wrist designed to minimize the recoil damage as much as possible. Never had you tried to escape, never had you tried to defy what was programmed into you since you were unfathomably young.

A flower born out of blood.

In reality, you were an angry dog: Brutally biting and ripping away at those who came to close to you. You were afraid that if you let others too close, they would memorize the texture of your skin, the colourless nature of your blood, your hubris-filled eyes; you were afraid that they would start vivisecting you as a springboard to make human life something worth investigating.

The more you hurt others, the more real you felt.

This side of you wanted to devour him. You knew nothing but the insatiable nature of your appetite. You wanted to spill blood for him again, wanted to pour life into the honey-red word of love. You wanted to indulge yourself with what stood behind that façade of his. You wanted him back in the shadows, where he would drown in despair knowing that all the blood surrounded him was his doing.

"Aah, it's been awhile, hasn't it?" Dazai greets you, jovially, waving his hand at you. How your heart ached for him. "You seem healthy. Come back to die with me?"

"It has. And no," you reply. Your lips curve into a very weak smile, and in the darkness of the dim grey sky, Dazai sees a flicker of contempt. "I hope the Agency is treating you well."

"Oh, very. For one," He puts a finger up. "There isn't Chuuya—ew, gross; and second..." He puts his hand down, and an ineffably forlorn smile twists his face. "It's what a friend would have wanted."

The fact that you've indirectly made him mention his friend's name immediately imbues poison in the air. Your presence alone, to him, brought a rush of skin-prickling memories. Even if whatever moments were spent were good in that abysmal hell, he couldn't help but think that the entire organization was a gold-glided cage.

"I'll be going now. Don't want to be ambushed by your fancy-hat colleague." He waves his hand as he brushes past you, his coat briefly touching yours. Like an ephemeral, spring breeze; like a staggering ember on a depleted candle, he whirls past you and then he's gone.

You can't bring yourself to look back. How much you wished to grab him by the arm and break him until he couldn't find his way back home; how much you wished to gag him with your name, how much you wished to kill him. But in the end, all you could do was fall farther and farther into this self-imposed inferno, exaggerating the acts of bloodshed to conceal the shame in anguishing. You knew you were meant to die in this organization when you found yourself, unconsciously, smiling simpering as you tore a family apart with a knife and cupped your cheek with a blood-soaked hand.

You were destined to die.

He wanted to die; you were destined to die.

You were never given a chance to live.

Gravity pushes you down, down, down, until your own bloodlust and existence were beginning to exert a tremendous pressure in your head, so much so that the blood was thundering in your ears felt like you were drowning in the bottom of an ocean. All you can do is shout and scream, but the shape of his name merely forms into a large bubble—and it pops before surfacing.

Yet, you couldn't change anything. You couldn't do anything but destroy more and more because that was what you were designed to do. All you could do was fill out the hole Dazai left in the neat tapestry of this organization. But you would never be him. Not even with the part of him that is dead that you cradle in your heart will be enough to fill the gap.

You suffer. You despair. You slice. You kill.

But you would keep out of Dazai's way. If it meant that he would be happy, even in a world without you, even with the indifference and hostility of this frenzied world, even with his internalized agony, you would keep out of his way.

Oh, how you wished you could jump off this cliff right now.