𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐜'𝐬 𝐬𝐥𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐰𝐚𝐥𝐤 | dazai osamu

i. a chilling gripe of sorrow.

You put the heel of your hand to your eye, massaging the sore socket there, feeling the eyeball twitch underneath. Your head is pounding, and your heart feels like a relentless ghost, hammering and shrieking its woes against the gilded cage of your alabaster ribs. It throws itself against the plush cushions of your lungs, the nacre of your bones, painfully sending a dull ache to flush throughout your body with every breath you took.

Curling your fist onto your bosom, it doesn't alleviate your sorrow. The deteriorating state of your heart, projected onto your crumbling home, makes your coworkers wrinkle their nose at the sight whenever they invited themselves in to either drop off mission files or reports. They would cross their arms over their perfectly ironed suit and tilt their chin up just the slightest to give that subtle snobbish-but-too-afraid-to-fully-commit gaze and ask: You're one of the executives in the Mafia—why not rent out a house like Nakahara and Dazai?

"What's the point?" You mumbled to yourself, sneering at the tiny print on the label of the bottle. Just some ordinary vitamins to start off the day, but at this point, you felt like trying to take more vitamins was like slapping a hello-kitty band-aid on a laceration. "Nothing will change."

"This house is a shithole, (last name)," One of them flinches when he sees a large crack spanning across the ceiling, coughing out dust as though it was a hair-width away from collapsing. "You deserve better than this."

"I deserve better for killing people?" You laugh, drily, before flopping back onto your bed with a defeated furrow to your brows. Automatically, your body curls to burrow into the sheets again, a minuscule twitch in your back that catches the attention of a man who was lying there. A bandaged arm moves from his stomach, stretching it out into the air (much like how a cat might do after a long nap) before he scratches the tousled mess of brown hair with a peripheral glance to the clock.

"Who were you talking to?" The man groggily asks. He relinquishes any time-strict duties that were nagging in his head in favour of your warmth, bringing you closer and moulding his body around yours with a purr. The late morning sunlight casts a webbed light across the cream blankets, the olive curtains doing nothing to protect the air from sweeping the room.

"Nobody."

Dazai hums. The man traces imaginary shapes into your flesh with his finger. The executive brings his hand to your face, turning it just the slightest so that his gaze pierced you down in his embrace.

Your eyes are so dull. Like a corpse's eyes, minus the opaque, milky quality that a dead man has, minus the frozen eyelids of rigour Mortis; on the contrary, when he found you during work hours, your eyelids would twitch from the amount of caffeine in your system. Mori would ask, rather humorously why you would drink cheap, shit coffee when there were better options; but the answer would always be that if the outcome made you more productive, it didn't matter what brand it was.

Empty and cold, and yet, holding onto a sliver of hope for a future. It sometimes scares him, just the slightest, that you could so pitilessly throw yourself into a plume of destruction and human annihilation, but still come out as though you had nothing to lose. How could someone not have anything that they valued in? Sure, Dazai had Oda—and there as a subconscious hope in Dazai that he was also something you valued. But you walked right past him, like a ghost, as if he didn't matter at all.

It hurt. But if he voiced that out loud, he would succumb to the human idea of being able to love. He shouldn't be allowed to love. Not when all the ideas he promoted were inhumane. Cold. Brutal. Ruthless. He would be a hypocrite for wanting to be loved but trying to gain that through killing himself.

He rests his cheek on his knuckles, propping himself up by the elbow as he stared down at you. The wine-sweet event on a fine, autumn afternoon, where the honey-coloured leaves glided down and figs bloomed. Dazai stares at you with the cunning madness of the insane, only tethered to reality by the lariat of his absolute adoration for you.

He was in love. He was obsessed—he wanted to know more about you, he wanted you to himself only—he wanted to sink his teeth into your flesh and wonder if he would become Adam biting into his Eden-red apple in Paradise Lost, he wanted to replicate the love of a wolf for a lamb it doesn't eat, he wanted his existence to meld into yours. How do you express such love to someone who only sees one colour of the world, how do you express such dedicated, passionate ardour for someone who he would kill for? How do you unmask that desire, that hunger, that death?

And yet, you are so far away. You slash the throat of a man and come out bloodied and new, like a newborn, but more and more broken. You shatter under what Mori wants; you break under the pressure of your own mind. Your body cannot support the weight of your sadness, this guilt, this depression. Your body does not recognize the hunger that Dazai has, you cannot whet it either—like you had never had it anyways.

But with no hunger for others, how are you a person? How do you reject the notion of wanting, wanting something beyond want; how do you survive in knowing that you will never desire anything at the level of pure necessity?

"What are you staring at?" You ask. He loves you—he sees you as his lover, and yet, you reciprocate that affection with a tepid nature—not that he minded. If anything, just the fact that you showed the slightest of attention to him gave him the hope that there was more to unearth in you.

Dazai hums—the bandage that was wrapped over one eye unravels, piling onto the mattress dainty. "Nothing at all."

And he was correct—at least, partially: Nothing because there were no monsters squirming and raging behind your cold eyes, but rather, a cynical twist in that you saw humans as monsters because of how corrupt everything was around you. And what were they caused by? Humans.

For a second, you wonder why he loves you with such a maniacal drive. But then that thought disappears when he drops his head back onto the bed. Dazai smiles that brass smile of his, that smile that was the veil of his controlled delight, that smile teetering on the edge of a phase of frenzy, bordering the shadow of decency that respected your boundaries. He knows you like the back of his hand, he knows you better than he knows himself; those nights spent crying in his arms, wailing about the blood that flooded your mouth and melded you into a new person, those nights where secrets were spilt and reasons were thrown out the window.

You think you love him. Not because he is emotional support, but because there is no life worth living in those eyes—you might as well be looking in a mirror when you stare at him; a mirror that showed two opposite images, and yet, so strikingly identical. We are one of the same; how will we survive if separated?

His eyes paralyze you into their depths. Something from within calls your name, and you think that he is salvation.