Your head feels like something is pounding against it from the inside, and your entire body hurts. It felt as if by waking up, you had broken the very tenuous bubble above you—and your agony slid down your blood like molten hot lava. Though was it really yours if it vanished as fast as it formed?
Your limbs didn't seem to co-operate with you; they fall back on the bed when you lift it up, experimentally and strenuously, as your eyes flitted weakly from the ceiling to the wall to your feet.
'Where am I?' Your head throbs even harder at that question. You try to sit up—you put a hand to your head and audibly groan at the sparks of pain that electrified your body. Your throat closed up when you tried to cry out—a vicious cough throbbed through your lungs.
But realization slowly pops over you. You sprint downstairs, feet skidding and sliding against the floorboards as you raced down the carpets. Everything was a blur to you. The wallpaper knew of your plight and remained apathetic to your running. You miss a step and you're thrown down the staircase, each collision against the harsh wood eliciting stunned stars to swim in your vision. You roll into a heap at the very last step, before you look up.
You think you have mastered this house. You've looked into every crook and nanny, encountered the consequences of your selfish actions, battled through the personifications of your own trauma, met face-to-face the face of a Bodhisattva that pinned you down in the dark thorns of your mind, looked straight into the heart of darkness of this place and came out the other side. You have solved a mystery that no one had ever bothered to solve, leaving it to rot in the decrepit nightmare of suicides under this roof. You have found a key to the core of this house, twisted it, and walked into Bluebeard's lair.
Yet it turned a back to you, lurched you off, slapped you in the face, and trampled upon you. This house is a bad dream in it itself.
You can see a very familiar body underneath the chandelier. The weight of it has crushed and penetrated the rotting floorboards, glass, and crystal shards spat all over the floor. You cautiously walk towards it, circle around the dome of the chandelier before something in your stomach churns.
Putting a hand to your forehead, you let out a wail at the sight. You swallow the threat of vomit edging your throat before sprinting forwards and grabbing an arm desperately reaching out, limp against the floor. You grabbed an arm, specifically your arm, and yanked—yet it remained unmoving. A sickening crack snapped in the air, and the arm remained stiff and cold.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," A smooth, velvety voice called out. Your head turns to the direction and a man's standing on the top of the staircase. He makes a move to step down, but freezes in his tracks when your throat lets out a squeezed, hurt noise, like a deer caught in a beartrap hearing a wolf coming closer and closer... A flash of fear, before dissolving into resignation, across his face. "Your body's crushed; your ribs have most likely pierced your inner organs. Give or take a few minutes and you'll be pronounced dead from internal bleeding."
He says this all so casually, so coolly, as if he was talking about the weather.
When he walks closer to you, his nearness paralyzes you; his nearness meant wounds, his closed parameters meant acceptance of your own fate. You back away.
"Why me?" You croak. "Why? Let me go. Let me go!"
He tilts his head at you, wavy brown locks falling over his unsettling too perfect face. "Then go," He steps over your corpse. "But the reality outside is different to our shared one. Once you go through that door...it's a separate reality. The only me is me now. Take that as you will, belladonna."
A cold, souring twist in your stomach sucks the life out of your knees, and before you know it, you're buckling under your own weight, before stumbling backward and onto your bottom. He hurries over to you, half in concern, half in distress, but you put your arms up to wall yourself off. Dazai watches you cry, break down into little pieces in your own arms, let out the most heart-wrenching sobs that it sounded like you were choking on your own cries with every breath. You bring yourself closer, gather up the fragments of yourself as close to your center as much as you can before Dazai comes in and began to nip away your shell, the layers, peel back the echoes of your cries to get to the crier.
"Why are you so upset, darling?" He coos, bringing your arms away to cup your cheeks, the hot curved surface of your cheeks, burned from your tears. "You only need me now. This world was too cruel for both you and I. Someone as precious as you don't deserve to suffer." And then he takes his arms far away from you and slots himself between the vulnerable front of your body, puts his mouth against yours, and smiles into your lips when he could feel hot tears burn down your cheeks. His tongue pressed against yours. Glides over your molars, before you can feel his hands on your jaw. Dazai swallows whimpers from your throat like nectar: a single note of your despair profound and sexual on his tongue. When you put your hands on his chest and push him away, the force sends you stumbling backward. He looks at you with the hoarse lust of honey, dark and decadent hazels eyes, shadowed by long lashes. You press the heel of your palms against your eyes.
"I can't do this," You whisper. "You're only doing this because I'm the only company you've had in years. Don't play with me like that."
His eyes turn darker as if the little orbit within him had turned its back towards the sun and into the cold, cold embrace of the moon. Real dark is quiet and tense and thick—his gaze hooks onto yours like claws to a fabric and pulls, drags you into not his soul, but into the abyss of his own netherworld, his eternal alienation, the rhythm of his cruelty. Something in him cracks; breaks free from the rigor mortis of his isolation in death—Dazai pushes your softness onto the couch. He pins your wrist into the soft velvet cushions. He fits himself over your own body, sensitive bits and skin brushing against each other like jigsaw puzzles. Wildly, he pursued the shadows of your doubts, pupils blown out to soak the sight of your kiss-swollen lips, meek eyes, crumbling composure, with his irises a thin ring of gold.
"Everything I've done, up to your murder, was choreographed to perfection," He says—no, he whispers against your lips. "To make you fall into me. I wanted you to break into me. Tireless choreography..." His eyes soften into that of intense affection. "Have you heard of a ghost feeling warmth before? I needed you, I need you."
A hot tear slides down the corner of your eye. He tenderly puts his lips onto it, as if attempting to seal the wound alone with the heat of his kiss. You think about struggling—you think about grabbing the spoon in the kitchen and gouging his eyes out or ripping a floorboard off the skeleton of this house and smashing his head with it—but then you're hit with the burning realization that he's right:
no one wanted you.
No one bothered to do so much for you, no one wanted you as horrifically as he did. No one loved you as much as he did. Tanizaki may have cared for you, but would he have cared enough for you to go searching for you?
Your parents never loved you. The Bodhisattva that they worshipped didn't love you, they loved the potential of you, they loved a fantasy of you.
Dazai senses the struggling slipping out of your body. He sighs pleasantly into your ear. The hoarse, husky noise makes your knees knock together, trapping him in into the open hurt of your wound. The ways the wound seduces, he thinks, how it promises a deeper connection. And the blood of love welled up in his heart like a slow, drawn-out pain when he looks at you, the darkness in your eyes betraying the submission, the fear, the shameful decadent joy of being accepted. And Dazai relishes in it. You were too soft for this world. No one deserved you as much as him, the poor him that suffered so much in his own life, only to find someone who seemed to look straight into him, hold the cry of darkness in your palms, and gently pressing a kiss to it—yes, you had to die in this haunted house tomb, a place suitable for someone as precious as you.
Your brain gives up. You collapse fully into him, let the pieces meld into liquid gold in his hands. You shiver when his hand slides into your bra. His lust like a snake gliding through the dark, soft canyons of your body; your back should have never be turned to him, yet you let your neck bare to the serpent in the garden of Eve—the Evil had always been there with you, there had been no point in attempting to contain yourself.
A hoarse cry that sends Dazai into a frenzy, bursting with ecstasy. Your corpse, abandoned, under the crushing weight of his lust.
The house may have been haunted, but you had been steeped in tragedy—death. Having spent so much time attuned to the hallways and puzzles of this house, the way horror and disdain crept into your blood, sent it running away—yet you were always back to the beginning. The house and the mind. You had been the inadvertent occupant of your mind, wandering and disdain looking at the damage that time had done to you—how were you any different to this haunted house, this seemingly liminal place that echoed and bounced like you in the darkness of your own brain?
Your eyes fall close, and you smile, sweetly, brokenly, into Dazai's lips, just as his hands slide down the curves of your body, down to the naval, and slips his fingers into his bride—the Bride that Bluebeard loved, the Bride that he would let rot inside of him, like the whispered words of a Saint in Inquisitors' dreams, like Persephone and Hades reincarnate.
Yes, you think, his lips swallowing yours, taking in everything you could have to offer, I'm happy.
You let yourself be immersed in the dark again. But this time, you're not alone.