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Dazai is miserable.
The gaping hole in his chest that is all-consuming and all-powering only grows bigger each day. It leaves him crying motionlessly and staring at the ceiling for hours while his body decays.
He feels like his skin is a costume he puts on.
He lies in his futon for hours, not quite sleeping, but not quite awake either.
He simply exists within the confines of the four walls of his agency dorm. He stays in his futon where it is warm and safe. In his futon, his limbs are not weighed down by water that soaks into his paper and lace body and increases the weight of his mass. Here, he does not have to wear the mask of a human.
A porcelain doll that dances until it bleeds and tears at its joints and then falls limp when its strings are cut.
He’s miserable. He knows nothing of misery. He’s still miserable.
He lets sleep take him again.
He dreams of light, jazzy music drifting through a bar with a warm interior and a cat that always seems to be there.
He dreams of a sharp whiskey that burns his throat in the best way possible and cools his soul in a refreshing sip.
He dreams of the warmest smile he’s ever felt that burns straight through the mask and then somehow burns even further.
He wakes up. He’s miserable.
His hair is frizzy and textured like straw, dry and untamed. His skin is oily in a way that makes him want to literally peel his skin off of his body while also dry in a way that has his skin flaking away. He’s sweaty and disgusting and he probably smells like shit.
Vodka, whiskey, brandy, sake, and even a bottle of wine surround him. They’re all empty.
He’s coping.
He’s miserable and unaware.
He’s empty and deserves nothing and shouldn’t be alive.
He’s struggling.
He’s crumbling apart.
He’s not going to make it.
He’s tired.
He’s been sleeping for hours.
He’s exhausted down to his bones and his muscles spasm each time he tries to move.
He is weighed down by his consciousness and his body and his growing terror.
The world is nothing. The world is everything. The world is his responsibility. He’s alone.
He’s alone in his room.
Odasaku is there with him.
No, he’s not.
Dazai won’t make it. He really can’t. He wants to stop.
His chest is empty and his limbs are heavy and his mind is so rotten that he wishes and prays to any deity out there for reprieve from his body and mind and nonexistent soul.
Anything would be better than being himself because his chest is so heavy and empty that he can’t breathe. He knows this is an oxymoron, but so is he.
A demon straight from the deepest, darkest depths of Hell working for an organization like the ADA? A monster of hundreds of crimes and murders and horrible atrocities working on the side of the light? A thing like Dazai with people like the ones at the ADA?
It doesn’t make sense. It is an oxymoron. He is an oxymoron.
His mind wanders in his frozen state, hazy with liquor and broken like glass. He’s lost count of how many times he has ended up like this over the years.
His unraveled bandages reveal the extensive scarring of his arms and neck. The scars are rough and painful to look at. He doesn’t really feel much about them. He’s heard of people feeling shame, embarrassment, sadness, regret, and even joy from looking at their scars, but he’s never felt anything for them. Maybe once, a long time ago when he was more of a person and less of a thing, he felt pride when he looked at the rows on his arms. Now, there are just too many to keep count, to care about, to feel for.
So he doesn’t.
He lets the pain consume him. It envelops him like a painful but loving hug.
He falls asleep, letting a dream wrap around his pliant mind and turn him into a wisp in the wind and an ember in the fire.
Hide.
Hide all the bad things.
Trap them under a smile and white teeth.
Smile with your eyes.
So no one sees the thing that’s rotting underneath.
Keep it quiet.
Keep it hidden and silent.
Feel the pain.
Burning through your body.
Keeping you sane.
Fire rages bright.
Burning down around you.
Bringing so much light.
Then the cold.
It numbs the pain.
And hurts in a different way.
You are breaking.
Just wait another day.
Consuming. Taking. Feeling. Breaking.
Your fingers are broken.
Shattered like ice.
Once.
Twice.
And finally; thrice!
Your thoughts are drowned.
The water is all around.
Quiet.
Be silent.
It’s watching and waiting.
The shadow in the room.
It follows closely.
The thing on the moon.
Your thoughts and worst fears.
It’s coming for you.
It knows.
Run!
Hide!
Never, never, never fight.
It’s stronger.
It’s bigger and you will break.
You will fall and suffocate.
Stop.
Wait.
Beg.
Pray.
Help. Help. Help.
No one will help. The world is dark. There is no light.
You are blind.
When Dazai wakes up, his fingers are numb with the cold. His body is burning. There’s a shadow in the corner of the room that shouldn’t be there.
He stands, body wobbling as his vision swims like he’s underwater.
The bottles of various liquors and alcoholic beverages around him are mostly emptied.
He wants to smash them on the walls and walk on broken glass so his outsides hurt like his insides.
Dazai looks at the singular window in the wall of the room. It’s covered with thick black curtains that block out any light and leave the room looking as though it is the stroke of midnight no matter the actual time of day.
Even though Dazai can’t see the outside, he knows exactly what lies outside the window. It’s autumn. Dazai doesn’t have such a thing as a favorite or least favorite, but he likes autumn. Of all the seasons, autumn speaks to him the most. The best thing about autumn is the leaves. They’re bright, vivid, and sharp. Red, orange, and yellow flutter slowly for a moment before bursting into true color violently without much notice.
In winter, the colors are so numb and faded that Dazai feels a little too empty to bear. The weather of winter reminds him of blood against snow and tears against cheeks.
Spring is so fresh and new that Dazai feels that it’s a shame for something like him to exist for yet another beautiful new birth of life. Beyond that, the same overused, recycled colors in the air and on the trees makes him sick with envy and boredom. He’s bitter down to the bones.
The searing heat of summer reminds Dazai of birthdays nearing ominously, wisteria trees sweeping down, and hands, hands, hands. Summer makes him sweat and itch under the bandages. Summer makes him ache with old pains. Summer makes him burn with agony as the heat beats down against his second skin of paper wrappings.
Autumn is so much more. The colors are never bland or dull, they’re full of life like the first drag of a good cigarette, late nights at Bar Lupin, and people like Odasaku, Chuuya, and everyone at the Armed Detective Agency.
Autumn’s colors may be predictable, but they’re so vibrant that he can’t even hate it. Autumn smells of smoke and laughter in the air. Even when the cold of a coming winter stings his nose, it’s still beautiful. The colors are so bright that they burn his eyes a little. Most of the colors he sees are faded due to his partial blindness and his general depressive state, but autumn always looks so bright he might be on fire.
Autumn is far away from heat and birthdays and sickeningly-sweet nostalgia that makes him sick to his stomach. Autumn is the real new beginning, when everything is near the bittersweet edge of death that Dazai so craves.
Autumn is alive.
Autumn is fire in the palm of his hand.
Autumn is dying.
Oh, how Dazai wishes to be swept away in the autumn wind to become nothing more than a breeze in someone’s hair, a leaf being tossed along by the world, a thought, passing through a person’s head for a mere moment before disappearing.
Dazai walks into the bathroom.
Staring at the mirror, he sees the gaunt fill of his cheeks, the dark bags under his dull brown eyes, the brittle texture of his unwashed hair, and the sickly pale pallor of his drained face.
He runs a bath and then peels the clothes off of his body, dropping them to the ground with disdain.
The bandages come off methodically, slowly, carefully, lovingly. Dazai loves himself.
Dazai loves himself the way every person should.
He is smart, capable, good-looking, and he tries his best.
Dazai misses the burn of acid in his throat and the taste of vomit on his tongue. He wishes he had eaten something so he could throw it up.
He sits in the bath. The water is freezing hot. The water is boiling cold.
Dazai is very tired. He has slept for hours.
The oxymorons haunt him.
He wants to die. He wants to stop living. He wants to live happily. There’s a steady ticking in his head like a clock. There’s a shadow in the corner of the bathroom. It should not be there.
He is alone except for the menacing shadow in the corner and Mori’s looming silhouette on the wall and Chuuya’s captivating reflection in the mirror and Odasaku’s affable smile everywhere that follows him around. He is isolated.
Dazai scrubs at his face, desperate to take the pretense he has built off of his face. His lies are peeling again. It feels so disgusting.
His eyes feel dim and sunken and wrong. He scrubs them and splashes water on them and scratches them.
He submerges himself in the water. His body feels purified.
His eyes hurt. He is numb. Gone. Broken.
He is broken and used and wrong and shattered and empty, empty, empty like the hole in his chest and the void in his stomach and the thing in his head that haunts his dreams.
He will never be free.
Fire follows.
Ice chases.
A voice beckons.
A figure begs for mercy.
A name lingers over his shoulder.
A dog growls menacingly as a threat.
A hand squeezes, pressing against his flesh.
There is bruising on his skin.
Flowering in hues and shades and tints and tones of purple, blue, and red.
Hyacinthus orientalis.
Forgive me, I'm filled with regret.
Hydrangea macrophylla.
I'm sorry, please don’t turn me away.
Lycoris radiata.
This is the end, death awaits, beckons, calls.
Spider lilies bloom in his skin.
The scars ache and his limbs twitch and spasm with memories of old wounds. His head is pounding.
The flowers surround him and consume his body as though he is a field of flowers. He is buried in the dirt beneath the flowers, forever silent as they grow from the remaining nutrients in his body, killing him slowly. He’d rather be a flower than a person.
A rose, perhaps. Blooming in all seasons, even autumn, living in all colors. Sharp and dangerous enough to keep most away. Beautiful and free under the sun and the sky and the clouds and the rain.
Alive without the burden of sentience.
He surfaces, breathing in the air deeply and fully as it fills his lungs. The water slides down the slope of his nose and clings to his eyelashes, dripping down from his hair, which looks black from the water.
The water surrounding his arms is slightly pinkish, red swirls delicately like paint in water around him. It’s red like the leaves outside. Autumn is calling his name.
Dazai steps out of the water and watches as the droplets fall from his skin down to the ground with gravity. He feels like a droplet of water; forever falling further into the abyss, horribly powerless against his own weight, and desperately clinging to something long gone.
He takes a soft white towel and brings it to his skin, allowing the remaining droplets to be soaked into the towel as if they were never there to begin with. There’s a bit of red staining the white of the towel. The warm colors of the trees in the cold outside are calling him. Once he’s dry, he grabs a few rolls of bandages from the cabinets under the sink and starts wrapping his body. He covers the scars on his arms first, as they’re the most grotesque to him. He doesn’t want to see his body.
His body is a fleshy prison, and Dazai wants nothing more than to be free of it.
After his arms comes his legs, especially his thighs, which have marks upon marks of all different kinds. There are neat, white rows against his already pale skin, gory bites from the Port Mafia dogs that disturb the order of the scars, and rough, brown patches that are eye-catchingly dark.
Then he wraps his neck. Many of the scars there look almost like bruises, and the odd placement of the white scars on his neck make him look like a doll that was pieced together.
Once this has been done, Dazai wraps his torso. His stomach and chest are covered in bullet wounds, surgery scars, bite marks, white slashes, burn scars, and so much more. He wraps his torso three times. Although it isn’t a part of his body that is likely to be exposed, wrapping his torso several times will make the jutting of his prominent ribs less noticeable and the hollow sink of his stomach less discernible. He wouldn’t want anyone worrying about his weight.
Then Dazai wraps his arms, legs, and neck again. Twice more for the arms and neck and once more for the legs.
The sadness is overwhelming. It looms over him like the shadow of a monster under his bed, a man with a scalpel in his hand, and a demon with glowing red eyes that greets him in the mirror with a smile and a finger caressing his cheek.
Dazai’s sadness is so big that he feels he is trapped underneath, slowly crumbling as its weight begins to take its toll on him.
He begins to pull his clothes on. He starts with the beige pants he usually wears nowadays. His pants don’t quite stay on him unless he wears a belt, so until he tucks his shirt in, he has to hope that his pants will stay clinging onto his hip bones, which also stick out from under his skin. His collared shirt is next. He tucks the ends of the shirt into his pants and then fastens the belt around his waist. He had to make another hole himself because the belt was too big to be snug against his dangerously thin waist.
His bolo tie goes on, snug under the collar of the shirt and shimmering in a way that makes people trust him.
Like a robot, he picks up the brown vest, slipping it over his head and pulling it down on top of his shirt, careful not to disturb the purposeful placement of his bolo tie. Once he’s sure that the vest is smooth and perfectly positioned, he leaves the bathroom. He grabs blue socks that match his bolo tie and slips them onto his feet, making sure they cover the ends of the bandages on his ankles and rest under the ends of his pants so that he can feel some peace of mind.
Dazai grabs his beige trench coat, which hangs near the front door of his agency dorm and is perfect for autumn weather, and pulls it on. His phone, which he rarely uses, goes in the right pocket of his coat.
He breathes in air and breathes out apathy so naturally that he thinks he may not be breathing at all.
He paints pride across his body, wearing his coat like a shield.
As the Earth rotates slowly on its axis, Dazai is alive.
The world exists to spite him.
Dazai opens the door.
Autumn beckons.