Chrysanthemum Garden [Dazai x Reader] ✓

14. Glass shards

"Down the corridor, then turn," Father's voice answered upon being asked where I could find the toilet.

The anticipated time that I'd be freed from the secluded basement came and I no longer called it my bedroom after having moved to the floor above.

Father was busy moving what furnished his former office into my old bedroom upstairs, bare feet slapping the wooden planks of the floor as he took various trips to and fro "my new bedroom" and the stairs leading down; besides an ancient mattress and a blanket that required a wash, there wasn't anything that he needed to worry about, yet, he made it his obligation to carry with him the various boxes of tablets and bottles of unknown chemicals into the shelves of the new room, and sweeping the floor was made a priority so that I was no longer in the welcoming company of rats and other pests.

I was rewarded for my reverence that day, said Father, and he claimed that "a child such as yourself shouldn't be subjected to sleeping in a cellar where the absence of wine was noticeable by the presence of other chemicals."

Without supervision, I could've used this opportunity to escape – the only chance I had to succeed without having to kill for my freedom – but I was scared of the outside. I didn't know what lay beyond the horizon of grass and the sandy road where no car ever drove by, and I was too scared to wander off on my own.

My current surroundings in itself were unknown to me, and my habit of relying on touch to acquaint my mind with invaded territory prevailed then as I ran my hands down the wall to scrub my skin against the decaying, peeled wallpaper.

There were only occasions when my blindfold was allowed off; I was often asked to sit on a wooden stool in the basement whenever such happened, so that I could watch Father prickle my arm with a thin needle, extracting a crimson liquid into small tubes for analysis. Blood. Father alluded to having some obsession with blood.

"Blood is interesting, you know? It runs everywhere in your body – like tiny red men running a marathon to keep you alive!"

He grabbed a scalpel and rubbed it sharply against his arm where several other browning lines were already present.

"I've got blood too! And this is called bleeding," – he squeezed the reddening wound and let the fluid paint his arm. "When we bleed too much we die. Without blood, you'll die too."

I looked at the hole over my vessel on my arm and watched the blood spread across a small squared tissue he provided for me. "Are you trying to kill me?"

He did not answer, and I took his silence for the (at the time) dreaded answer; my lack of being able to read expressions did not cooperate with my understanding of his response, so I relied on analysing sound as I'd been doing for those past five years.

He was awfully quiet.

He diverted his gaze to the blood samples he'd collected with an enthusiastic sigh. He ripped a label from a creased adhesive sheet reluctantly, a second longer than usual.

I concluded he wanted me dead but didn't want to admit it aloud.

I concluded I was the target of a slow and painful homicide, but as the idea grew on me so did my liberalism to accept death; I had nothing to lose, so what if I died? I was still young, inexperienced in life, unregistered in legal files, so my death would not even tally a single pen-stroke on Japan's death count.

No one would care if I died now...

Nature calls, though. Father said if I hold in what I need to let out, I could develop a bladder infection.