𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫&𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 | bungou stray dogs

atsushi nakajima: a cat's death, followed by the end of the world.

edited: ✓ | 5/25/2020

trigger warnings: death, gore.

I remember this was one of the fluffier pieces of angst I wrote. ^^

—

Everyone dies at some point. That alone is a sad fact. We as humans can undermine this by seeking the joy in being understood; how blindly we turned to savagery and love at the chance that there is a choice in whether or not we get to die alone, but at the end of the day, those who fill such a fragile spot in our lives will disappear.

This is all humans are good for. We live, and then we die alone.

Your eyes flutter open. A raincloud rumbles in the sky. Light patters of raindrops wash the streets, and the blood splotched on your cheeks begin to dilute as they run down the side of your face.

A cleanse.

The rainwater fills the hole in your chest. Quite literally. Sodden flesh sinks into the rising water, quietly, peacefully, forgivingly; something in you curls away when you let out a light breath of air from your mouth, arms and legs sprawled out as if you were making futile angels in the rain. The world spins around you, softening like the air above a crackling fire, before it becomes smarted with a slash of black, twisting but disentangling across the dusky sky like one thousand dark snakes.

You had lost.

You could taste the cusp of death on your tongue, smarting but cruelly sweet, toppling into your mouth: A kiss of death.

You are going to die.

You had clawed yourself into the dark alleyways of a street. Its calm, undisturbed silence had been penetrated by your bloodied body, wherein which you were ensconced by the fleshy grey. Nursed back into a lonely womb.

You can't go!

You could.

You're going to die!

You were.

Please, don't go! At least, let me come with you.

You did. You didn't.

PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME!

Sorry. "I'm going to have to." Love kills; in this case, your blood whetted devotion shall kill you, and the body that fails to nurture that grief will also be killed. Even the tinge of a farewell in your voice is covered by a soft, tender veil of love as if even the most raucous of his screams had ignited a bubble of hot poison to burst in your loins. You cradle the wound of your chest, far too fatal for even Yosano to heal, your fingers sinking into the torn, marred gore there. Then the smile drops.

The rain wipes down your tears, unable to cope with the screeching wail in your throat. A horrific cry: Laden with fruits of the Forbidden Tree in Eden, whose mortal rage elicited death from its vicious anguish; thereby infecting the once-flourishing Eden with a parasitic miasma. Eve, in this variation of the myth, dies alone with snake venom underneath her immaculate skin, unable to face Adam at her sin; knowing you are leaving your lover in this paradise is no paradise at all.

The instincts of a wild cat are to die alone; it dictates, against your own crumbling will, to perish between the corner of an alleyway and a trashcan as opposed to the warm arms of your lover.

Through the searing pain, you still kiss him with a dying breath. You looked and looked at him through the flickering shadows of your mind, as clearly as though you were brimful with him, as though you had devoured him. You knew, as clear as the puddles pooling around you, that he loved you more than anything he had ever lived through: milk and silk, tea and rice, honey and pastry, once preceded by blood and bruises, by stings and sores, by pain and fear. Your fingers clench as if you were holding his hair. Your eyes water as if he was crouched between your legs, begging against the sensitive skin of your torn neck to stay with him.

Oh, moon drunk monster. Won't you cry again, for the echo, for the echo? You call out his name, weakly; inadvertently, his name kills your bloodied throat.

A cat dies in that alleyway. Its fur bleeds red into the rippling waters.

—

A whisper, tenderly held by the evening breeze, strikes Atsushi's ears so clearly that he collapses onto the ground with his tiger-paws clenched around his head.

"Atsushi?" Dazai asks. He crouches down, wondering as to why his colleague was abruptly grief-stricken with the proclamation of victory, but his silent question becomes answered by the pale, polluted misery that fattened the black pupils. The ripples of his tears give the illusion of melted gold in his gaze, mingling and swirling with the harsh overtones of lavender.

The softness in Atsushi's eyes only makes him look deranged with tenderness at the mere sight of your face.

"I—I have to go," He scrambles to his feet. Victory? At the expense of what? This city, this loneliness? A fool's victory is no victory at all; just a mere trick conjured by the blistering mind of a blithering idiot. The skies above glowed with overlapping shades of amber, sapphires, and amethyst, but no more did he see them as the gates to Hell as opposed to the flowering firmament.

The weight of your death snaps his spine so easily that he might as well have died in that alleyway too. The world crashes down on his shoulders. The walls swallow him whole, and much like the shade had done to you, it brings him in and quickly envelops him, shutting out the rest of the world from his lonely howls, in which the echo doesn't mimic him back. A heart-splitting scream. A guttural sob. A pitched wail.

He calls your name. Atsushi screams his beastly canticles as if that would bring you back from the dark tunnels of the underground. Passing through the Torii, passing through the windchimes. The rain goes straight through him. Your body feels so far away from him.

He says your name one last time—a long, shaking scream. Your silence is an inevitable destruction that cracks his eyes—tears pour from the wound, and he clings to you, blood and sweat and all, fingers painfully clutching you to his own chest as if he would happily split it in half for you.

Atsushi lolls his head back—the water smooths back his hair, droplets landing on his forehead like gentle, repetitive kisses.

This is it. Inevitable destruction. The sky could just split open right now and throw Hellish creatures at him, but he would still remain seated with his eyes closed, waiting for death to snatch him too.

How pathetic it was for him to be alive and someone like you to die.

This city feels like a pyre—it burns, it burns, it burns—it takes everything that was good for him and reduces it to ash. It became clear to him, as if his blurring vision had been his salvation all this time, that he was nothing but what the Orphanage had said he was. There had been an element of truth to their abuse in that he was a monster, a disastrous creature, a thing that should have died in the womb: Therefore, the question is answered, he had been the monster, and you, the victim, who had been solicited to the haunting approach of his howl, moulding you into the angel that he had seen before him.

Desperately, desperately, he curls his body over yours, your face pressed against the side of his neck.

Both you and he shall be dumped where the dandelions decay. A stray cat and a beaten tiger. All the rest are blood and tears.