𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐜'𝐬 𝐬𝐥𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐰𝐚𝐥𝐤 | dazai osamu

0: it begins, all with the sense of endless woes.

Tears slip down your cheeks.

How did it come to this? What's going on? What's going to happen?

Your hands, violently shaking and bloodied, desperately claw to the small orb of light at the end of the tunnel. The grime that clings to your sweaty skin makes you whine, makes you wince—but with your doe-like legs, you know that dragging yourself is the only way out.

You don't know what's at the end of the tunnel. There could be more pain, more suffering—the light could blind you, scorch you, punish you. Maybe it was better in the dark, maybe people like you flourished better in the dark, where your dreams would be the night sky gleaming through the slots on the storm sewers.

Was there really nothing for you? Was your birth just a coincident rather than months and seconds of planning? Was your existence really condemned to be chained down here?

And yet, and yet...despite all the uncertainties, you reach out, in hopes of touching something, in hopes of feeling something other than your nails raking down the dark walls. You want to feel rainwater freshly coming down, you want to feel your clean hand for once, devoid of blood that not even the Port could cleanse it. You want to shed this skin and throw it away. You want to be outside of yourself.

Why did it always end like this? Why did you always have to suffer?

"Don't go," You croak. A mirage of the man you know blemishes your vision. "I don't want to be alone again."

But it was your fault, wasn't it? Hadn't you murdered so many innocents, hadn't you wiped out what remnants of yourself remained in hopes that you wouldn't flinch at the prospect of killing, at the thought of lying, hadn't you escaped when Mori had given you the chance to retire—would things be different then?

Would you have been less lonely as a result?

But the thought pains you—the fleeting thought that you had a paradise just a hair-width away from your fingertip brings such an agonizing explosion of regret to your chest that you can't bear the thought of moving on and facing forwards. The bright orb at the end of the tunnel...it just means one thing, doesn't it?

"Dazai," His name is like balm to your dry tongue, like ancient honey to your gaping wounds. "Don't leave me here. I don't know what to do."

But the man is just as lost as you are. His eyes are devoid of light. They are just brown. There is nothing pleasant beyond the façade that he presents to the world—only a cesspool of monsters squirming and raging behind his boyish smile. Something not human at all, and yet he offers a smile for you; just for you, reserved only for the ones that he loves with a mature, possessive ardour, reserved for the ones that elicit delight behind his semi-translucent mask, evident through the flesh and the eye that betray a smile whenever you part your lips to speak to him.

Your world of a dark tunnel slips away when he hums, and it is revealed that you are in his bed, his lonely bedroom, with his lanky arms wrapped so tightly around your waist that it hurts to breathe, his chin propped on the top of your head while your senses are flooded with his cologne. His clothes, silky and velvety, smooth the edges of your overflowing emotions as you bitterly let out an incoherent sob, the faint sterile scent of his bandages exacerbating the burn behind your eyes.

Does he know you are broken? Does he know that he is a free man relishing in your girlish ruins, the image of which you considered yourself as just a performance in his head rippling over his memories like a film, or did he just accept you as you were?

Rotten work is not rotten work for him.

I'll be just fine, Dazai; leave me be.

A pause. To which his lips curve, and a curl of genuine softness unfurls in his eyes as though a fresh blossom had twirled in the serene spring air.

Why should I?

And then he enclasps you in his bandaged arms. 

Quietly, you resign to your death at the love brimming on his flesh.

You were not destined for such love. This sadism, this parasitism. Why? 

Simply, you were made to disappear.

The neon lights of the Red-Light district outside cast a pinkish light, disillusioning your sight into believing his chestnut hair was a shade of dark cerise. Dazai can feel the tremors slash through your shoulders; his grip tightens until all you can think of is Dazai, Dazai, Dazai. Da-za-i. Dazai Osamu. Osamu Dazai. 

He is your only tether here, the only tether to the realm of reality, caging you in from escaping into your sleepwalking nightmares.

Eyes that gleam with burnt-out stars flutter open, galaxies of his secrets strewn across the dark mahogany canvas. Not one of which is unwrapped by you. His spoonerette, his beloved, his lover—girlfriend sounded too colloquial for his tastes, the light of his loins.

"I'm not going to," He mutters. You are so easily moulded in his arms: Tender, mysterious, pure, and yet feral, dangerous, passionate. Dazai has loved you since he had laid eyes on you for the first time, since he had been threatened by the barrel of your gun when he had probed the soft insides of your mind, smashing open shell after shell of everything you had tried to hide.

Not that you didn't let him. But you were afraid he would make you more human whenever you were confronted with your own mortality.

"What will I do next?" You ask. Still hell screams its protest in your heart. He sighs.

"Save yourself from this nightmare," He is just as lost as you are, merely reciting words from one of his friend's novel that he had picked up a few days ago in Lupin.  But he hopes that you can pick up on the faint trace of conviction in them, the painful sting that came from the thought of you leaving him and this rotten Cocytus. "And maybe then, life will have its worth."