Chapter Text
He finds himself on the edge of the roof.
Below him, dizzyingly far away, little cars with their little lights take their occupants home through the evening downpour. They leave behind dry patches as they pull out of their parking spaces— it’s just started to rain. Less lucky, pedestrians sheltered by their array of umbrellas form two undulating ribbons of color up and down the sides of the street as they rush home.
Dazai finds himself less lucky as well; no umbrella and waging war with the scant inch between the tips of his shoes and the right-angled edge of the concrete roof. He’s become soaked through over the last fifteen minutes. The rain has washed away the sticky air and sweat, and plastered his shirt slick to his skin.
The feeling beneath, however, remains untouched by the rain. It’s an empty thing, sizzling like broken down motel lighting, taunting him into sawing through the sheetrock to figure out what’s gone wrong with the wiring this time; to get it to fucking stop .
You’re disturbing the customers, he’d say if he could put a gun to its temple and face it.
You’re the only one here, it’d say and it would smile and buzz away happily.
It crawls around under his skin; it’s alive, like a hive of bees or an active wire in a puddle. It’s angry, and it’s dangerous when provoked. He spent a large chunk of yesterday trying to get it gone . He’d drunk enough to pass out, but it had simply dulled to a polite reverberation in the background that had made his hands shake and his breath come out funny and uncontrolled. He’d clawed at it, tried to dig and find it. It had remained elusive, so he’d found a blade sharp enough and gone to cut it out.
That, too, had failed, but in the interim— where he’d sat with his back against the bathroom wall, covered shamefully in his own blood, and asked himself exactly what the fuck he was doing— he’d unearthed the closest thing to silence he’d found in a long time.
Now, the feeling is victorious. It presses inwards, shorting out his breath and leaving him with the phantom touch of hands across his skin. It divorces his mind and his body, it separates his mouth from his nose from his eyes. His tongue is leaden, his body sinks. The innocuous hum, the near silent jitter; it builds and it builds until his blood sings to him, until his mind screams at him. He stares down at the cars and the pedestrians and the tiny yellow dots that mark the center of the road and wonders how nice it would feel for it to just stop .
He closes the gap and lets the soles of his shoes peer out over Yokohama.
Somewhere in the city, Kunikida snaps at an elevator door for closing on him early. He probably clenches his fists as he does it, gripping tightly to the papers he most certainly has sandwiched under his arm in order to give his anger more limbs with which to gesticulate. When he gets off the elevator and storms into his apartment, he’ll throw those papers down onto the table and fume silently to himself over a cup of chamomile; seething because he had only just slipped through and been unable, due to those selfsame papers, to hold the doors for the businessmen just behind him.
Somewhere farther down, Atsushi is probably anxiously watching Kyouka try the pickles he’s been brining for the last month; the first pickles he’s ever made with the first bits of time he’s ever had to himself to ponder what he actually enjoys doing. They’re probably huddled around the table in the middle of their shared kitchen where Kyouka will utilize the skills she’s picked up after thirty-five kills and a life carved by the knife to assure Atsushi in as little words as possible that the pickles, actually, were just fine but could use more garlic.
Dazai’s not actually sure what the President does when he goes home. He’s pretty sure Fukuzawa lives somewhere just outside of the city, somewhere nice enough to warrant the hellish commute. Ranpo probably swings by on the weekends. It might be close to nature, a little wooden house, perhaps, tucked away between the trees and the ferns. In fact, Fukuzawa might even be in one of those cars down below—
No, it’s well past seven now, at least. He’ll have already left.
Dazai experiments with a little rock forward, just to see what his body does. The ground, so far away, swims up at him and his body takes an involuntary stabilizing measure; he swings his arms out to the side. It’s the perfect response embedded into his muscles after thousands of years of human evolution and despite his distaste for all things automatic, it doesn’t fail him now.
It’s ironic, given the circumstances.
He’d decided years ago that he’d never jump off a roof during rush hour. There’s too many people around, and the risk of someone watching a body hit concrete at its terminal velocity is too great. No , he’d thought then when he was young and rash and okay with collateral damage, jumping off a roof is an activity best done at night.
Now, of course, he understands that there’s not just the question of who finds the body— but also when . It’ll most likely be sometime in the morning. Perhaps, someone on their way to work? Or, worse, a student on their way to school. That, too, would be entirely unacceptable.
There are no good options, of course. Good options tend to be few and far between when it comes to the question of how one kills themselves in the least intrusive manner possible. What is he meant to do, exactly? Throw himself off the roof in front of a specific person he’s picked out based on how likely watching brain matter splatter against concrete might affect their psyche in the long run? He’s not sure how he’d evaluate that, let alone how he’d find the individual.
Dazai does another experimental rock forward, disappointed when his arms swing out to stabilize his body again. No matter how much he wills them to remain by his sides, human biology kicks in the moment the ground dances below him. Raw fear is, and will always be, a far more handsome option than logic.
If not the roof, he’s not sure what else there is to do.
He’s out of medication— he threw up the last of the sleeping pills into the toilet last week— and while he’s got a couple of guns stashed around the apartment he could use, he’s concerned about Mrs. Yuichi from down the hall hearing anything and investigating. He’d have to leave the house to buy rope if he wanted to hang himself, which takes energy he doesn't have right now. Then again, he’d also have to leave if he wanted to buy more medicine. In all honesty, it would make sense to two-birds-one-stone the whole thing and knock out his groceries, too, while he’s at it, just in case he doesn’t end up following through.
He steps back from the edge; one step, then another. He finds solid footing— as solid as footing can be in a rainstorm— and lets his legs fold in on themselves. He scoots back under the overhang for one of the air conditioning boxes and fishes for a cigarette with leadened, clumsy fingers.
There’s another method, one he doesn’t like so much because it hurts. For someone so unsympathetic towards living, he’s made surprisingly unhappy by pain. It serves a purpose, of course; to quiet the noise . Aside from that, he has little desire to suffer without cause.
The damp cigarette is surprisingly amenable to being twirled between his fingers. There’s no possible way it’ll dry out entirely in this weather, but the waiting gives him something to do.
He lets his head thump back against the air conditioning box— it, too, feels far too heavy to hold— and watches the clouds close their eyes and cry. The ghostly hands grip his thighs and his waist and remind him, cheerfully, that even deep in the recesses of his mind, he’ll never be entirely alone.
—
“Do you still wear the coat I gave you? ” Mori asks, and for a single second, all Dazai can feel is the dry warmth of a hand on his throat. It presses in lightly, gently, a reminder.
He says, “I burned it,” and Mori simply smiles as if he knows Dazai hasn’t.
Dazai goes home and takes it out anyway, mouth dry, fingers clumsy. He thinks his reaction is entirely too dramatic for a piece of cloth, but he cares more about unearthing the bomb than he does about mitigating his reaction to it.
The coat is buried at the back of his closet, layered carefully between pieces of tissue paper and preserved like a museum piece in its box. He’d stopped wearing it four years ago, but a strange sentimentality had always remained. He removes it carefully, as if it might fall apart.
It won’t. It’s a sturdy coat. Anything less would have been an insult.
Dazai peels apart the fabric and finds himself enveloped in the way the world smelled then. The way it felt. He runs his fingers over the buttons and the stitching. He breathes in past the lump in his throat and holds it.
Mori had always smelled new, expensive, polished. The coat, Dazai has a sneaking suspicion, has lost all its scent. And yet, he holds his breath again and when he closes his eyes, he can feel soft hands against his jaw and can taste something familiar, sour and bitter, on his tongue. He keeps a secret.
He opens his eyes and looks back down at the coat. After a moment of contemplation during which he counts fifteen stitches under his thumb, he puts it on.
The fabric is slightly tighter than it had been when he was younger— he’s grown , he thinks uneasily. The sleeves are slightly too short and the material over his back taught. He’s not sure why this alarms him as much as it does, and he’s thrown off by the unpredictability of his own reaction.
He sits on the couch, seams in the shoulders of the coat protesting. He lays carefully on his side and wraps it tighter around himself. He pulls part of the lapel up and over his nose and mouth, and holds his breath a second time.
The hands pat his head, proud of him, praising him. They unravel the bandage around his neck and trace a nail across the mottled skin there. They do it gently, and even though he becomes argumentative, they do it kindly. They point out the broken buttons on the front of his shirt that he hadn’t ripped and softly tease at the skin underneath. That had been humorous, at the time. Smooth, steady hands push aside the shoulder of his shirt. Large, soft hands hold firmly onto his hip. Something warm and wet presses against his jaw. Something warm and wet presses against his thigh.
He lets go of his breath and his eyes open of their own accord. His own hands, cold with the nails bitten to the quick, are shaking where they’re gripping at the coat. He sits up quickly.
He sits up too quickly.
A seam in the left shoulder strains a final time and the stitches pop. He struggles out of the coat, heart hammering in an unintentional way. He tries so hard to be gentle to it. He hunts for the ripped seam with frantic fingers, and upon finding it, holds it to his cheek, to his lips, as if somehow he might heal it with a breath.
It does not heal. It is inanimate. He has ripped it.
The thing beneath his skin wakes.
The coat does not smell like Mori. The coat smells old. The coat smells like blood and like sweat. He sees it plainly now and feels all the more sorry for it. He lays back down on his side and bundles the coat to his chest.
He wishes he could put it on again and that it might draw the crying thing out, like a poultice. He wishes he could shove it inside himself and mop up the spill, he wishes he could rip it to shreds and use it in place of his bandages. He wishes, in a moment of infernal fantasy, that he could eat it, consume it whole and have it live inside him forever.
The deep set longing for that warmth, that comfort, the hands , sets upon him like a fever. Gripped by it, he buries his face into the fabric and takes a gasping breath, as if he might molecularize it and inhale it. That it might set into his lungs and cover him from the inside out. He digs his own hands beneath his shirt and presses them against his stomach where the ache , the craving , is the strongest, but it is not the same— his hands are cold and sweating and serve only to make him shiver as he traces the raised lines on his skin.
He lies on the couch as the daylight flees the sky and the small rooms of his apartment grow dark. He breathes through the coat and lets the rotten singing in his blood sink him further and further into the cushions.
He asks for it to stop, but it refuses. He begs for quiet, but it has always cared little for his desires. In a last moment of desperation, he opens his mouth and screams against the coat. It does nothing except tear at his throat.
He falls asleep with blood and something sour on his tongue.
—
The door to the roof remains closed, but there’s a soft thud on the east corner near the energy meter, inaudible to anyone who isn’t listening for the exact noise, a few minutes later.
“Should have known you got up to psycho shit in your free time,” Chuuya says as he rounds the corner; scathing, short, and slightly perturbed. “You know, most people get sick when they sit out in the rain. So they don't."
His presence is a gunshot on a sunny day.
Dazai gives the sky a lazy smile. “I find it rather relaxing, actually. Chuuya should join me— might work better than that meditation he’s been trying lately.”
“I’m not going to join you,” Chuuya says witheringly, which feels significantly more weighty than most likely intended.
“Suit yourself.”
Dazai can’t recall the last thing he said to Chuuya before he left. He’s not even sure he said goodbye. He simply packed up and left and tossed his phone in the trash on his way out the door.
And now this ... somehow this is the first time they’re seeing each other since then. It feels all too casual. He thinks that it is marvelously unfair of Chuuya to just appear like this with no advance warning. He thinks, there should be buildings coming down, maybe the sun should implode, something needs to happen to rival... this.
Instead, Chuuya is still silent, which Dazai finds— second to surprising— to be supremely irritating. His presence is a stain against the night sky. Even without looking at him, Dazai feels the weight of his existence, seven years worth of life swinging in at him like a baseball bat from the left side. He refuses to flinch. He will not bow to it.
“Did I misunderstand, then? Has the chibi come here for something other than my company?” Dazai asks, finally, if only because he simply cannot stand the quiet anymore. The buzz has collected at his wrists and neck; clawing at the skin to be let out. It makes him impatient and more than a little agitated. He twists the cigarette into the space between his pointer and middle finger.
“Well, I mean, I’d die before I willingly endure your presence,” Chuuya says mildly. “So do with that what you will.”
“You have no idea how remarkably apropos that is.” Dazai laughs. “Tell me: why are you here, then?”
The rain has painted Chuuya’s hair down flat, some of the shorter sections are stuck to his forehead like open wounds. His shirt is already dripping, and his pants are well on their way.
Chuuya says finally, with surprising honesty, “Would it shock you if I said my Dazai-senses were tingling?”
It doesn’t.
“I make a lot of people tingle, chibi, but coming from you? Such honeyed words I’ve longed to hear.” Dazai simpers, instead of saying anything of value.
Chuuya’s lip curls. “That’s gross.”
“I’m debonair, at my core.”
“You’re a fucking issue is what you are.”
The rain pelts down and beats against the roof of the building like a drum. The clamorous silence has him on edge.
Dazai lets his head loll around to the side. He blinks at Chuuya. “Something in me doubts, now of all times, Chuuya’s come just to throw poorly constructed insults at me.”
Time changes a lot of things, one of which is apparently Chuuya’s ability to keep a straight face. He stares back at Dazai with something unnamable painted across it. Dazai finds himself uncomfortable when faced with such a blank page; he is so used to being the better reader.
“What are you doing up here?” Chuuya asks, finally.
Dazai says: “I think you know how this conversation is going to go.”
“And I think you have the opportunity to take it somewhere that might surprise me,” Chuuya says, and after a moment of consideration, he parks himself under the awning of the water meter across from Dazai. “You owe me that much, don’t you think so?”
Dazai does not think so, actually.
“You’re not supposed to be here.” he says, shortly.
“What— on the roof? I’m absolutely allowed on pretty much any roof I want.”
“With me.” Dazai cocks his head. “Does Mori know his loyal dog is out beyond the fence?”
“I don't have a fence, jackass.”
“It was an expression.”
“Get more creative, then, because it was a dumb expression.”
Dazai finds himself more than a little surprised. Chuuya’s got his mouth quirked like he knows what he’s doing, which is particularly maddening given that four years ago Chuuya would have stormed off after a single dog-related comment. Like any good sportsman, Dazai reassesses his opponent.
Chuuya’s not gotten any taller, which isn’t a surprise. His clothes are different, though; his coat looks like it might be lined with silk, which is a particularly egregious expense for someone like him. The band around his neck looks purposeful now, a sharp departure from looking like an emo teen with a particularly stunted taste in fashion.
Dazai says, graciously, “You look nice.”
Chuuya raises an eyebrow. “Flattery isn’t going to get you anywhere, you know that, right?”
“I was being genuine—”
“You’re never genuine.” Well, that was unkind.
“Chuuya asks me to call a fork, ‘spoon !’ He thinks me an idiot. He thinks me—”
“Not even sure you can spell genuine.”
“I can spell a good many things. Your captivating beauty, however, has eluded my orthographic sensibilities from the day I laid my eyes upon—”
“Oh, shut the fuck up.” Dazai ceases talking abruptly. Chuuya’s face has flushed slightly and his lips are pressed together. He watches Dazai for a long moment before finally breaking. He snorts and says, “Do you really think saying all that —” He gestures loosely to Dazai. “— is going to work? Again? Look, I sure as hell don’t know what you’re trying to get me to do, but do I know that I want you to shut your mouth and cut it out.”
He’s unsure what to say to that . “I’m not—”
“And don’t lie to me either. I hate liars.”
“Chuuya must hate me then.”
“Well, you know, there’s a surprising answer to that.”
Around them, the rain pounds into the rooftop and the city’s streetlamps flick on, one after another like the little light is being chased down the street. Dazai feels a perplexing sympathy for it.
“Why are you here?” Dazai asks after they spend some time listening to the water where it’s overflowing the gutters. They've been repeating the same question, he thinks. Going around in circles, staring each other down.
“I asked first,” Chuuya says, and Dazai can’t help but smile.
"No, you didn't," he says.
"I really did." It would be playful except for the fact that Chuuya's looking at him like he can't choose between a knife or a gun.
“Always so argumentative.” Dazai sighs.
“And you can’t ever answer a question directly, can you.” Chuuya says, softly. His tone is entirely inappropriate for the situation, and causes the nasty buzzing to resume its chorus at the base of Dazai's throat this time. There is such a fervid something behind Chuuya’s voice that Dazai finds himself without words for a long minute as he attempts to piece it together.
The sorry, hungry thing under his skin writhes and screams. He wishes they were seventeen again and that he could lean over and punch Chuuya as hard as he could in the arm. Chuuya would gripe and groan and be hardly disturbed; he might even make a joke about how weak Dazai is.
Now, Chuuya’s gaze pins Dazai, sharp enough to be concerned for the integrity of his own exterior.
“I’m not going to speak to you about what you want,” Dazai says finally, tired of struggling with the puzzle in front of Chuuya; flashing a glimpse of the cards in his hand.
Chuuya, chivalrously, doesn’t look. He stands, instead, rain sloughing off his ruined coat and onto the sodden floor, and shrugs.
“I have no idea why I came, then,” he says, before turning and heading for the edge of the roof.
Dazai watches him hop up onto the lip with a growing bubble of what might be jealousy in his stomach.
“Couldn’t stay away, huh, chibi?” he jokes, but the moment the words leave his mouth he feels that he, too, has woefully miscalculated their weight.
Chuuya’s stare makes the words shrivel shamefully and crawl back down his throat. “Didn’t have much of a choice, did I.”
And he falls off the side of the roof with hateful, horrible ease.
—
He cannot put a name to the thing in his skin. It lives there as he goes to work. It crawls through him as he answers phone calls and lets Kunikida yell at him for not doing his paperwork. He drags it on the bus with him, through the grocery store, into every meeting. It festers quietly beneath the surface; it’s an untreated, infected wound he refuses to care for.
He does not know how to fight it. He doesn’t think he could fight it. He doesn't even think fight is the right verb. Fight implies continued effort, something he's not sure he has, let alone something he wants to give.
He is the rotten thing, and he is ever so tired of being.