mother, mom, ma | d.fyodor/o.dazai

15. even when they're bloodied, mom?

"Rescue her how?" Atsushi asks.

"Either kill her, arrest her, or make her join us," Dazai says. "Those are the only three options we have."

—

Mom's side of the family was always good to you.

Grandma was traditional, but she raised the four of her children with love, conscience, and hard work. Mom was the oldest, meaning that she would have to help out with the chores and other household domestic tasks. She was good at it; you think it trained her to take care of your house without dad being around.

You don't remember dad at all. Mom said that he was always busy to visit you, but you didn't believe it—not when you saw you were relying on government benefits to keep you going. But mom filled you with a love that was so full and real that it filled the absence dad left behind. You imagine him to be a typical salary man, but in bouts of revenge did you imagine him as something unrecognisable: something dead on the side of the road as road kill, half eaten and half crushed and half forgotten.

Why had he left us alone?

"None of it is your fault," Mom would say, petting your (hair colour) head. "It's mine."

You turned to mom when dad's absence got too much, but who did she turn to?

"(first name), help your old grandma with the miso paste!" Grandma shouts from the rooftop of the house, her curly hair akin like an afro, eclipsing the sun above her. You affirm with a wave and climb up the stairs to the rooftop, where there are dozens of clay pots filled with fermenting soy sauce and miso paste. They were covered with a thin muslin fabric to assuage the heat of the furious sun, white gold scorching the landscape as you shielded your eyes with your hands.

"What do you need help with, grandma?"

"Help me move these smaller pots to the kitchen," She hands you a small pot, the size of your head, and you obediently, and carefully, make your tread back down to the kitchen.

"What're you doing with that pot?" Mom asks, looking up from her magazine.

"Grandma said to help."

"Oh, that old woman," She clicks her tongue and snatches the pot from your hands. "Ordering around young people like you when you should be having fun."

"There's nothing really to do here."

"Go read a book. Do something," She would say. "Do something that betters you."

You finish writing. You set your pen to the side and close your eyes, focusing all your mental strength to the back of your head.

You think you're broken and nothing can fix you, so corruption fills you in places where morals and virtue should have been. You stare at the wall before you, dazed and only half aware, before your burner phone rings.

Who could be calling you?

You carefully bring the phone under your hair and against your ear.

"Hello?"

"Yah, (first name)!"

You nearly drop the phone, scrabbling it in thin air before regaining your composure.

"—as such a tedious task tracking your number down, but there's nothing Ranpo can't do!" Dazai continues to speak, and your hand clenched into a fist on your lap.

"What do you want?"

You walk out the room and into Fyodor's violet crystalline room, where he was playing the cello almost sorrowfully. You lean against the doorframe and let the music sink into the phone.

"Is someone playing an instrument?" Dazai asks.

"Yeah," You say. Your words make the music come to an abrupt stop, purple eyes flickering to your direction as you walk closer. You hand the phone to him.

"Ah, if it isn't you," Fyodor smiles. He sits with his cello leaning against his lean thighs just as you observe your environment. "Manipulate? Perhaps, perhaps not. (first name) is a pearl in my hand, and I roll it around, just to watch it glow crimson. Where it lands on the lines of my palms are up to my meticulously planned destiny."

A pause.

"Oh? Join the Agency?" His voice lilts in intrigue, and he hands the phone back to you. You hold it, the phone lingering in your palm before placing it back against your ear.

"Hello?"

"Would you be interested in forgetting your crimes and joining the Agency, before it's too late?"

"You can do anything," Mom's voice echoes in the back of your head. Your eyes widen and your head snaps up straight. Your consciousness, once a foggy, bleary barren place, was now beginning to bear fauna and fruit. "Do something that betters you."

"But this is bettering me," You say out loud, eyes glazed over. Fyodor tilts his head slowly to the side at your sudden outburst, his half-lidded eyes gleaming in curiosity at your musings. "I'm finding who I am."

"You're finding out you're a terrorist," Dazai says. "Not the way I would go."

"I don't know. You don't know who I am," You say, removing your phone away from your face. "Goodbye."

You snap the phone shut and stare at Fyodor.

"You turn down the prospect of good," He says. "Why?"

"I think you already know."

He smiles. "I do. But I would like to hear it from you."

You stare at him. His gaze is oddly cold, like a cold climate where everything gets older faster; the frost breaks down the consistent structure of the walls, slows electrons in their ceaseless circulations. You remember the winter nights spent with mom: the blinding whiteness of winterse. The whiteness and the sharp edges of the light in exile. Such whiteness only exists only in eyes, in order to create a framework for the darkness, of which there are decidedly more. You break eye contact.

"Because the answer can only be found in violence," You say, holding your other arm. "If mom died in suicide, then the answer is also held in mortal sin."

"Excellent answer, little mouse," Fyodor praises you, his voice uncomfortably gentle and smooth. It felt like a voice from darkness, and even when you died, that voice would never cease to whisper. It was rapacious, clingy, immortal. You stiffly nod, before clenching your phone by your side.

This was the right thing to do, right?

Right, mom?