Graveyard • Dazai x Reader

18: Lies

The story Dazai orchestrates for you constructs itself in the visual of a doll house being used as the setting of a shadow puppet show. His words become the shadows, they are the demons and the monsters that roam when the moon conjures what the sun can not. They are faceless people, but they each are characters of the dark world Dazai has painted for you.

The house is the cage they're all stuck in, filled with little details pertaining to each shadow but ignored by everyone else.

He describes them and they dance until he describes their death. The only shadow that keeps on pushing through the house and it's doors is Dazai's.

"Everything I've told you these past few days has been for you. I meant it when I said I'd save you. That I'd finish what I started." Dazai had started his story with those words, not immediately beginning with the answer to your question, nor addressing anything else. He spoke to you gently, but his voice had always been a force and it moved you.

You could feel the way your attention was pulled as if there really were strings attached to you that you couldn't see; the way his words created waves that made you lose your footing and pulled you under their current, only to have you wash up on the shore that is him.

There was no stopping it.

There was never any stopping it.

Already you had forgotten your fury against his abandonment of you and treatment of Akutagawa, your watering eyes staring wistfully instead at the man next to you, a great sorrow encapsulating you.

"I never forgot you, but I wanted to." He confesses, and there's an innocence to his sadness, to his torment, of a child that saw this world of horrible shadows and could never look away again, watching the demons consume everyone around him.

You are there reminded that all demons and monsters were created in the likeness of people, and all people can become them. There is a point where the words become interchangeable.

You wonder if that is now.

Who is Dazai?

"You wanted to forget me?" You whisper in response, more as a way to tell him you're listening rather than an actually question.

Dazai then gives you a light smile and a half-hearted chuckle, leaning in a bit, running a bandaged hand through his dark hair and tilting his head so he's looking down at you. His eyes focus and defocus, and you can see within them that he's reliving certain memories and only now realizing their significance.

Though perhaps that was true.

"Let me tell you about who I was when I met you. And who I was when I left." Dazai says, and that's when the images begin.

As you listen, you feel as though you're a little girl again, back in the orphanage you had buried in your memories, reading books against a cold, stone floor and playing with dirty dolls in their rickety, wooden dollhouse, watching as they become their own beings against the dark lighting of the orphanage.

Suddenly you're just a child listening and repeating words of horrors, words of loss and unimaginable pain.

Suddenly you're alone, and you want nothing more than to reach for the man next to you.

The infirmary walls around you don't look the same, a blue glow haunting the periphery of your vision, lightbulbs flickering and the blankets of the bed you'd been sitting on turning from a soft cotton to a hard, sandpaper texture under your tensed palms. You want to be pulled out of these memories, but Dazai's story is far from done.

Your skin crawls as he describes how he'd been treated in the Port Mafia, your heart hollowed out and feeling his pain, because it had been your pain too.