Chrysanthemum Garden [Dazai x Reader] ✓

9. A gambling game

Golden threads of light made their way through the window - I had accidentally left the curtains wide apart from earlier - and disrupted my rebellious eyelids who refused to drift away from one another to face the light of day.

Stretching my arms, I sat my body upwards, letting the loose pyjama shirt drap off one of my shoulders as a result of having undone the top button during the night due to discomfort.

When I reached for the eyepatch on my bedside table, my hand accidentally brushed against a glass container, and once I managed to adjust the cotton patch to my eye, I looked back at the article I had touched:

On the wooden surface sat my familiar bottle of chloroform, exactly as I remembered: the corners of the labelled sticker were peeling off slightly due to constantly being slipped in and out of my pocket, and the amount of liquid stored inside seemed to have remained at the same level it had had before it was confiscated from me - I suppose it's safe to say Dazai did not use any of it in some sort of suicidal attempt.

But why had he return it? Had I absentmindedly told him exactly what he wanted to hear?

I wasted no time questioning the person who knew nothing about the case (me) and rushed from bed, putting on the clothes the bag he had brought home the previous night contained inside; they were the right size and it felt as if he'd gone on shopping trips with me often enough to have my exact measurements carved deep in his memory - not to mention they appealed to my taste just about right, more than those I had been provided by the Mafia.

I looked in the mirror once I was done dressing. It reflected someone beautiful.

But the person before the mirror was not beautiful.

The person who was now dressed in newly supplied clothing, hair combed only with the aid of the fingers and a patch covering the eye which posed a threat to the city was not beautiful.

Someone who at birth committed crimes could not be considered a good nor a beautiful person. Someone who killed others because of orders was not a good nor a beautiful person. I wasn't a good nor a beautiful person, despite being told that -

"You've got a good heart. I wish I had been born with the same good nature of helping and saving people like you, [Y/N]."

Dazai's voice rang vividly in my head, giving me the hallucination that he too was standing in the room looking in the mirror beside me and lecturing me about what traits and qualities he had picked up about me - he was wrong about his understanding of me though.

Someone who killed people could never come to terms with ever helping them.

'Dazai,' I called out as I stepped out of the open bedroom door, but, unlike last time in the dark, I did not spot his body spread comfortably across the couch with his book grasped between his slender fingers. 'Dazai...?'

I clutched the bottle of chloroform I plucked from the bedside table and looked around the flat, knocking at the door I figured to be the toilet and waiting for several minutes in hopes he was perhaps inside and unable to respond; after a handful of minutes and absence of any sort of noise, I pushed the door open and saw no life inhabiting inside the little bathroom except for a motion-sick spider crafting a web by the topmost corner of the walls.

But no sign of Dazai.

Checking over and over again in every possible inch of the flat - even places where not even half of his body may have been able to fit - I found no traces of his identity left behind, and could only assume he may have left earlier to work.