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Dazai’s hands are an afterthought.
When he wanders around Yokohama, he watches. How hands hold, let go. Intertwining — a mom’s hand against her daughter’s, a high school couple roaming around the seashore, a group of friends casually touching each other. Intertwine, let go. It’s the brush of skin against skin, he considers, that he finds particularly interesting. How the skin wraps itself around the body and keeps it warm. Keeps it close, keeps it away. Always away.
The skin is the liminal space between the possibility and the act itself. It buzzes with outcomes, and Dazai has yet to find a situation he does not want to decipher. Categorize it, discover how it fits together like one would combine puzzle pieces. He places one piece next to the others, carefully assesses it. It’s better if you look from afar, Mori would say. Then you will be able to see it for what it is.
Here is the thing, for him — things are always what they are. The sky is always blue, no matter how you look at it. Hands are meant to hold. The shell of a man is always roaming around the city when the sky turns fiery orange. Hands in his pockets. Afterthought. Not a part of the picture. There are only so many things you can pretend when dusk arrives, and Dazai is getting way too old for this.
How many wars can a person endure before everything unravels? He doesn’t remember when, exactly, he became this.
In the car, at missions, every song on the radio is about love, and he does not have the energy to tune it down. The night thinks of love, they say, and Dazai wonders if it also thinks about leaving his dead body in a dumpster for some unknown person to find. Dealing with the aftermath, as usual. Is it really solving if you are just trying to pick up the pieces? A face on the rearview mirror that he can’t make sense of. There used to be someone — something, not there. Something, out of reach. He doesn’t remember when he became this.
Picture this: there is a couple having dinner on the better side of the city, a full-course meal and red wine, classic music in the background, blinding smiles. Pearly teeth that never sunk on the skin and watched it as bled, while he bleeds out on an unassuming alley, and Dazai wonders if this is how it goes. A stain on the history of better things. Better lives, better part of the city. He never once took someone for a nice dinner and now he waits for his wounds to heal themselves as if they owe him anything. Pick his scars. Torn apart at the seams. A picture you can only see through the reflection in the mirror, from afar. The couple goes home, warm and barefoot against the kitchen tiles, furniture they know by heart. Dazai goes home, jagged and sizzled edges, back pressed against the wall and wishing, not for the first time, that he could sleep forever.
Hands stained red from pressing against his right side. Yosano can not hear from this; she would tell Fukuzawa, and he is not yet ready to face kindness again. Dazai is almost sure that there was supposed to be a gathering tonight, at the Agency. An all-night barbecue, treats and kisses to everyone. Whisky, because he saw it in Fukuzawa’s office. No point in wondering if this was meant to be an invitation or not. Alcohol is useful on some very particular nights, but not very much on any others. It does not serve its purpose if it stops being a way out and becomes a reminder. Kindness is a foreign concept, locked away in memories that are starting to fade in his mind, and Dazai knows that there is no point in trying to keep them alive. It’s dead.
Was he born with sharp objects pointed inward? Knives against his neck, needles under his skin? Was the weight of a semi-automatic always on his hand? One would assume.
There is no reservation to miss. Atsushi will be worried, and Kunikida will lecture him about the importance of spending moments with his co-workers to properly enhance the successfulness of partnerships, but Dazai stays still against the wall. There is no rush. No urge. Just quietness, settling silence, a night to bury. He wonders how many graves he still has to dig in this lifetime, and the thought settles over him like a promise. Dazai doesn’t particularly know if there will be someone to dig his, when the time comes. He doesn’t dare to hope.
Faintly, he remembers that the only dinner date he has ever had consisted of stolen goods from the nearest convenience store, rooftop of a building, and quietness settling over them like a blanket. They skipped the part about interests and family and hobbies because Dazai was terrible at small talk, and there is no point in that, not for them. Pack of cigarettes in his pockets because that was the only way they knew how to trade stories. No fancy napkins, classic music. No hands. Not like this. Their teeth sinking until he saw red. When you have wanted to be wanted all your life, it feels like you are always waiting for someone to find it draped all over you, smeared over your face, red like a fruit pie torn apart with a knife. Pomegranate spilling over, arils all over the place. All over the place. Ravine in the shape of a man.
Dazai would have carved his name on the alley with a buck knife, if he had one. His life no longer an afterthought.
One beat. Another one. Another. The line connects, and Dazai breathes into the speaker. Braces himself for the impact. Wishes for it to come, in fact, because he hasn’t learned quite what this means, and something shifts and wills itself alive inside his body.
How inconvenient, to want.
“What do you want,” Chuuya mutters, almost asking, almost stating a fact. Almost as if he knows. Funny enough, Dazai doesn’t think that he does. If Chuuya knew, it would set him on fire.
“Chibi,” Dazai mutters, and the streets are full. Rush hour. The summer air is dry, fueled with static anticipation, and people walk around from one place to another with a certainty that seems almost out of place. A kid cries out to her mom, ice cream cone in hand. Dazai takes a turn to the left.
Chuuya sighs on the line. “Dazai, stop fucking calling me. I’m serious.” Dazai thinks that he sounds almost resigned, with no promises of threats or excessive yelling, and this is not something he knows how to navigate. Venom, raw, he can take it. Thinly-veiled annoyance, maybe. But outright silence doesn’t sit well with him, not when it’s Chuuya. It’s too loose, too open for interpretation, and Dazai is not sure if he wants to keep that up. It’s an all-consuming, cacophony of things he does not want to hear. He has yet to stop taking the parts he remembers and stitching them back together to create a creature that will do as he says and wants him back. It’s been too long, now, and he knows that his memory of fiery eyes and a sharp tongue are not entirely committed to the truth of what exists right now.
“Chuuya,” he starts again, standing alone in one of the forgotten parks of the city. It’s soothing. Calm as the sea before a thunderstorm, as the sunlight casts shadows on the trees and paints them with a muted sense of stability. Reassurance. If Dazai tries hard enough, he can almost pretend that there isn’t a storm building up under his skin. “Do you remember that time when we fought on a rooftop?”
Smoke twirling in the air, hazy against the night sky, pitch-black. Abandoned city, abandoned building. They climbed the stairs in silence, tried to push the door open until Chuuya decided to explode it. Always like this: if there is something on your way, make it disappear. Dazai leaning against the railing, empty streets covered in blood, bodies retrieved. It was not always that they could escape from Mori’s claws like this, so Chuuya smoked. One after another, then another, fire consuming what was once perfectly rolled paper, burning, burning, burning. Dazai wondering, not for the first time, if it would feel like colliding against the ground. Moving, before death settled on his lungs as he died a bittersweet collapse, back when he wanted to stain himself and everything else that moved.
He ended up punching Chuuya instead. On the ribs, close enough for his wound to protest. Ended up pinned against the dusty floor, breath knocked out of him. Yet another thing that they never mentioned in the morning.
Chuuya breathes, slowly and steadily on the speaker, as if he is trying to recall. Dazai waits, anticipation working through his system faster than he predicted. There is no plan, this time. No scheme. He wants him to remember. Needs him to, in all truthness, because there is no way to explain. Dazai won’t look for it. Won’t try it. He wishes he could gut himself open like a fruit that has gone bad so he could explain, so he could show , instead of having to speak into existence.
“Yeah,” Chuuya settles on saying, seemingly bored. “I remember, what about it.” And no, Dazai doesn’t think he does. He doesn’t, not the way Dazai remembers it. Because it was not the diving point for him; no turning back. Drowning. Not everything feels like something else. They used to stare at the billboards in the better parts of the city and never once did they think that one day it was going to be them. What they were had to be buried in the night, hidden from the story of better things. He doesn’t remember. Dazai wants to scream at him.
“Tell me about it,” Dazai mutters, instead. “Tell me.” Plea disguised as an order. Mori would open his arms again if he ever listened to how his words faltered towards the end. But Mori is not here. There are only the trees, lightened up. Roots under his feet and tying him to the ground, stillness.
Chuuya puffs air through his nose, almost as if he finds it funny. Uncanny, certainly. He is not prone to laughing unless he is drunk and high out of his mind, cigarette in hand. He hums in that way of his, low and twisting something in Dazai’s senses, the driving force of nature. Godlike.
Dazai doesn’t know what to make of him.
“More than anyone, Dazai, you should know that explaining is an admission of failure,” Chuuya states, voice lazy and unpreoccupied. “And I fucking hate losing, you know that. I won’t let you trick me into this, so figure it out on your own,” he adds, a sense of finality in his words. As always. “Don’t fucking call me again.”
The line disconnects before Dazai can open his mouth.
History repeats itself. Somebody says this. Everything in the world started with a yes — a molecule said yes to another and life was born. But before history, there was another history, then another. The universe started on some inconvenient morning and yet it never started. It was always there; it never began.
Somebody must have thought of this once, Dazai considers. They said it all started with an explosion, a bang. It’s weird for something to experience existence while dwelling in ever-lasting darkness, something intangible and inexplicable. But the truth is always an inner contact if you are willing to seek it. Imploding. Perhaps everything in the universe started with a thing that was too contained in itself to care about the consequences of setting the domino pieces in motion. Gone with a bang. Out like a light.
History is a little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of. Fuck him. Dazai would slit his throat open, if he was still that kind of person.
They won’t tell anyone about it. About a building as tall as the ego of the man who built it, the washed-out version of a prison that still ties Dazai’s hands behind his back, at times. About the badly lit hallways of the compound, velvet carpet on the floor, doors opening and closing on both sides of it. Pressing his forehead against the glass, willing, not for the first time, for it to break and let him go. Rooms full of weapons, carefully chosen by other weapons — walking ones. Meetings went wrong, the mess that were the silent bloodbaths. The times they met with the high-ranking military men, government officials on the other end, shaking hands and glistening eyes. Sanitizers on his arms, no painkillers. Bisturi along the lines he made himself. The quiet girls slipping out of the rooms, not older than fifteen, makeup ruined. Hands banging against the door, pleas unheard dying out in his throat. Blacked out on whisky at sixteen years old. Mori’s tight-lipped smile over a shoulder, almost as if he was capable of kindness. They won’t tell anyone. It’s not on the history books — or anywhere, for that matter. Closed casket.
Gone with a bang, out like a light. Dazai wonders if they were not able to find him, or if he was just being left alone. The fact that he can’t decide on an explanation leaves a sour taste in his mouth.
Shadow over his desktop, the setting sun. At this time, his coworkers are starting to leave the Agency; the coat hanger gets progressively emptier as soon as the clock hits five, and they mutter their goodbyes and see you tomorrows that Dazai never pays much mind. Ranpo chews on his chocolate, rummages through his cabinet for more bubblegum. At times, if they are both feeling up to it, they settle on a chess match before heading back to the dormitories. Depending on Ranpo’s mood, it’s quiet; in others, they try on conversation that often leads them both to nowhere, and Ranpo dismisses him with a wave of his hand when the game is over.
It’s odd, to see yourself so clearly. Dazai wonders if he spent his whole life wasting time when looking at mirrors; sees bits and pieces of himself in everyone, and yet. Self-recognition through the other. And yet. Fingers walking through the air, reaching out in the ever-lasting darkness. It’s been a while since he has dared to hope. Dazai sees himself through cracked glass and the shards are all over his body, now. Always there, never began. God, how he hopes that it never began. Because to admit that would mean that he was once a yes and now he was ruined, and there was, perhaps, a time when he wouldn’t be. And how inconceivable, to entertain the possibility of being without ache looming over his days, how naive, how childish, to hope, to want for things when he knew perfectly that they would never come.
Alone in the empty room, left to wander to the sound of his footsteps and the low rumbling of his thoughts. He could go home, from here — home, as of now, is a one-story room in the Agency’s dormitories; empty fridge, one mattress, walls bare. Home, as of now, as of always, is a place he never went. As long as he roams around, he could always think soon I will go home. You don’t have a home until you leave it, and when you have left it, there is no way to go back.
Home. Being offered tenderness feels, more than anything, the very proof that he has been ruined.
As he watches the skyline when the night settles, the city glows with life, moving and buzzing and breathing all at once, a functioning organism stretching above the green valleys, under the bridges, taking up every street and every corner Dazai knows like the palm of his hands. Dazai knows that the shadows are lurking around the corners, eroding the edges. A city they tear apart and build up again from scratch, eagerly trying to pull back together what is left of it, on opposite sides of a spectrum he doesn't have a name for.
Dazai knows history. It goes like this: gone with a bang, out like a light. There are many names in history, but none of them are theirs.
Summer melts everything away and now there are dried leaves on the surface of a swimming pool. Pulse steady, stuck on his throat — he would have the water needed to fill the pool in order to get rid of it. Maybe, Dazai thinks, the chlorine could wash his soul clean. Blood stains are gone, finally. Climb the stairs backward, out of the pool, far away from the bottom of the pit. This is how we bring him back.
If he stays around for long enough, Dazai could rewrite his whole life and this time around there would be so much love that no one would be able to see beyond it.
Until then, he drives his body into things like a crash test car. Volatile, fast, merciless. Tonight, by the freeway, he finds himself in the lobby of a forgotten motel, just outside the city. The keys dangle in unison behind the counter while a woman stares at him, bored. He offers her his best smile, leans in to talk to her. Third door on the second floor.
At some point, they have to stop meeting like this. Dazai knows, he knows. He is just selfish like that.
If Chuuya tidies him up after cutting him in half, absolutely no one has to know. It’s a game that was etched into his mind a long time ago: don’t give it a name, you will ruin it. The first one to speak it into existence loses, and don’t give him that face, he is not the one to make the rules. That’s just how things work, he knows it’s like this. Dazai knows things only exist as long as someone names them, and it’s better off to leave this nameless thing gutted in an alley than to give it something. When you give it something, it wants more. It always wants more; he knows at least this. He had to.
Wings to a stone, gravity tuned out just for him. The fact of his pulse on his throat, warm hands and warm lips on every patch of skin, there, there, tying him to the Earth, real. It’s real; it isn’t. It’s a teenage idiosyncrasy, at best. Boys do these things, everyone would say, they need to get it out of their systems, for God’s sake, they are just fooling around. And everyone could see the way Chuuya’s muscles worked during training, how his throws were impeccable, how his kicks would always hit the right spots in the Wing Chun dolls, how his hand wouldn’t falter when he slighted throats open, a fine line. Beautiful, Dazai would think, because what else he would think, anyway. Skin barely keeping him inside, tiptoeing around the line between life and death, human and God, and Dazai has never wanted to ruin someone more.
Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.
It’s hot, tonight. Midsummer dream, sticky and slow, crystalized in amber. Dazai doesn’t remember his name anymore, but his eyes are wide open instead of sealed shut. You could drown in those eyes, he considers, watching as they flick towards his direction. Pupils blown wide, the brown circling around the edges of black. Luring him in, and he would. He would drown in it, bottom of the pit, jump right in. When morning comes, he would stare at the mirror and see the patches of skin turned red, purple, blue. A wound he wanted. Weird, to want to be marked. Weird, to want to be wanted so fiercely.
He realizes, now, the dull pain under the scars and over the fingers, the crisscrossed map of scars on both of their bodies. Residual pain, far from being subverted. There was a time when Dazai wondered if his life would ever amount to anything other than roaming around in the darkness, if he was able to see the light without turning his gaze away. Look at him, now — eyes wide open as he stares into a black hole in form of a man, letting himself be pulled in. Pulling him closer, hands intertwining and not letting go. It feels good; to be moving, to let it happen, to see. He bites his lip with enough force to draw blood to the surface. The sin is, as all things, not necessarily the wanting; it’s the wanting more.
It’s almost enough to forget that they built this house knowing very well that it won’t last. How does one stop regret without cutting off their hands? Tomorrow morning, he will worry. Morning comes, Dazai will slip out of the room in silence, find his way back to the lobby and back to the city and back. A rush of blood to the head, back, back, back.
But this is how we bring him back. Blood stains on his skin. Down the stairs, into the pool, towards the bottom of the pit. Maybe, Dazai thinks, the chlorine could wash his soul clean. Pulse steady, stuck on his throat — he would have the water needed to fill the pool in order to get rid of it. Summer melts everything away and now there are dried leaves on the surface of a swimming pool.
What does he want? His life to be told, bundled with episodes of this — swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood on the first four knuckles. Seizing his hand, pressing it to his own bloodied mouth.
What does he want, standing on the curb, hands in his pockets. Dazai can’t punch himself awake; he carries grief on himself like instant death pills. Needs someone to get it out of his system, at times. He stands on the curb, hands in his pockets, and waits.
“You better have a fucking good reason to be here,” Chuuya states, floating down next to him. He looks older, somehow — there are lines around his eyes, a set of determination in his jaw. Tired confidence, as if he lost the ability to stop bullets with his hands. Dazai would know, he has seen the scars on his chest. It happens, sometimes; even to the God of fire.
“I am here to apologize,” Dazai prompts, watching as the sun turns fiery orange above them. Chuuya snorts at him, leans against the wall of some innocuous building. He carries this expression, sometimes; almost as if he doesn’t believe he was still there, wasting his time on Dazai of all people, but he is there. Always there. Despite their attempts to keep it away, still there. Waiting. “About on the blood on your mouth. Sorry.”
The rest goes unsaid. Afterthought. Chuuya rolls his eyes at him, but pulls him in all the same. Gravity tuned out, the brush of skin on skin. Keeping it close.
Dazai couldn’t get the boy to kill him, but he wore his jacket for the longest time.