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Death is the indulgence of mercy.
This manor is a bird's nest, a layered round, coarse land with silk in the form of feathers crumbling down his chest.
He could feel it, that terrible nesting. What loathsome creatures, digging through the surface of his skin. Expunging the ideogram itched straight into his ether.
Breakfast was a silent affair, the sterile, clear cup filled with water and his doctor just in sight. They were sitting apart from one another, and Dazai has memorized the precise way the man scribbles his notes to be just near illegible. He is no longer a kid, not truly, 12 is old enough to speak in depth about medical importances. Mori imperiously layers this into him without speaking, though he begrudgingly admits the man to be wealthy with knowledge, it doesn’t make his personality anymore tolerable.
“Is there something on my face?” Dazai laughs, “You’re looking at it so seriously!”
This was a common occurrence, and he was no longer bothered by it. Mori would spend long hours staring into his eyes, piecing together what he believes may solve some sort of puzzle.
“Ah, nothing I guess. You just look so cute!”
Served on their plates first was regular eggs and meat, Dazai had a special taste for the more American traditional style meals; and Mori hardly ever refused him. An unspoken truce was between them at this, some type of deal or silent service. Dazai wouldn’t kill himself yet, and in the meantime, Mori would spoil him. Not that he had the capacity to fully understand the pleasures of it.
Ceramic scrapes against the table as he stabs his fork into a piece of the meal. “Don’t you know how creepy you look? Seriously, I should just die by this fork for that.”
Briefly he considers it, Mori raises an eyebrow disapprovingly. It would be funny, if humor was shaped in the spiral of blood and guts. For Dazai it is.
“Ah, apologies. I was under the impression that you didn’t care.” The clinking of silverware dislodges any words in his throat as Mori chuckles, slicing into his meat.
“Have you miraculously started caring, Dazai?”
“That’s a troubling thought.” He says, appetite running away from him.
“Why would I ever care about anything at all when death is so near?”
Romanticizing the sweet taste would be an understatement, though Dazai isn’t sure he can look forward to anything, he’s certain death is something he can’t quite let go of. At first, Mori had admitted to him that he thought he couldn’t understand it, the permanence of dying; unaware that it’s the only appealing thing to Dazai.
Erasing every step he’s taken, every step he will take.
They share their food in silence for another minute longer, because Mori simply can’t come up with a rebuttal, and Dazai knows this.
“What good does caring do anyways?”
Each bite of meat reveals how stringy and overcooked it actually is, it bothers him to not have the choice of choking just yet. With a sigh, Dazai gingerly rubs the side of his face usually covered in bandages, protecting his glass eye. “You only lose more things that way. If you care.”
Apparently he’s said something amusing, because right as he takes a bite of the softer eggs, Mori giggles. “Well, you’re partially correct.”
As a doctor, Dazai knows there were things he’s seen, the scum of the earth and below that. He wonders where he would be placed in the pecking order of bad people by moral standards. Probably at the bottom..
“Caring can bring you lots of opportunities, and strip them away at the same time. For you, I suppose, it would be better to stay away from that feeling. Can’t you imagine what it would be like?”
It was exhausting to play chess all the time, but the games never stop in Mori’s presence, and Dazai can tell by the tone of his voice he’s expecting a very specific answer; or looking for one.
So he focuses on the yolk and spreads it out like brain matter after a bullet. “I care about knives. And I care about dying.”
“Don’t you believe it’s less about dying and more of what comes after?”
Dazai’s stare becomes rigid, so much so that anyone looking at a distance could believe both his eyes had been replaced by fake ones. There was nothing in them, nothing but the void he can’t quite swallow. The void that houses a demon, or was carved by one.
“I don’t care, I just want to die. When will you kill me?”
Mori snorts and goes back to eating, ignoring the question because he once promised Dazai he would never lie, but that doesn’t mean he won’t twist his words.
The conversation drops off after that, both of them unwilling to forward the subject. And when Dazai can’t stand to eat anymore of the halfway appalling food, Mori stands to clear their plates. They can’t pretend like this forever, he knows that, Mori knows that. Part Mafia and part “family”, there was something scratching underneath the door to their skeletal closets. He plays patient, and Mori plays doctor, and sometimes when the urge hits he plays victim, and Mori plays.
Mori just plays.
That was if Dazai knew the word ‘victim’, the man had gone to painstaking lengths to keep it from his vocabulary should he ever get curious.
Then again, it wasn’t like he could conceptualize the term, anyhow.
Dazai was something neither human nor animal, an empty mass of space couldn’t identify him, either. He was comparable to the lung-crushing force of a black hole, the pulse of his heartbeat in tune with the sound of gravity caving.
“I just want to die.” Whispering, he imagines the fork in his hand in his heart.
“Why do you care so much that I live?”
Mori is busy wiping his hands free of water, but Dazai can hear the humming noise he makes from the dining room. Their house was gothic styled, old, probably from the 50s. Predictably quiet most days, and uncharacteristically loud on others. “It would be a waste for you to die now.”
It makes sense to Mori, but he can’t quite grasp the truth in it. It bores him. “I’ve worked hard in raising you, Dazai. You’re going to be valuable to me, and after your use is through, I may discard you.”
It’s not a lie, Dazai knows, Mori renters the dining room to straighten the table cloth and brush crumbs from his hair. Those fingers only seasoned doctors have trail down his neck to where the bandages begin, Mori smiles. “And I can rebuild you from any sort of wound you inflict on yourself.”
_______
12:15A.M. is an odd time for any considerably young child to be awake. So it was a good thing that Dazai wasn’t so young.
He lays against the tattered cot in Chuuya’s organized room. That ash, so prevalent within his irises, long since rendered into smothered pieces of flesh. It’s all he can be, neatly arranged by limbs and teeth, gnashing against a mattress that wasn’t his own. Strands of fire tickled his rosy nose, orange mixed with gold, burning a lustrous strip of a star down in the night. Dazai refuses to say a word, his ribcage disastrously breaks apart to accommodate his insatiable appetite for nothing in particular, afraid— if he knew the word, of swallowing Chuuya past any conceivable reach.
“I can feel your eyes on me, piece o’ shit. Why aren’t you sleeping?”
The bark held no bite, that was often the case for the smaller man. Just teeth and a mouth muzzled shut. At least, in the Port Mafia’s eyes that was the case. Dazai knew different, of course, years of experience led his introspection to observation, eyes on the wall of Chuuya’s thoughts. No, this was no dog, but a lamb still. As he came, and as he will go. “Chibi is so mean to me sometimes.” He giggles, abruptly, peeling apart further across bitten sheets.
Chuuya pays him no mind of course.
Cold fingers, fingers molded to sew wounds or play piano, dug across the notches of Chuuya’s spine. They do nothing but scar, but take, hollow out or make anew. Dazai could be God if he were not just a boy. Chuuya grumbles, his voice is faraway in time, surpassing it. “Fuck off with your bullshit tonight, I don’t want to take care of you.”
The space between his ribs widens regardless, Dazai scuttles closer to bind himself to it. A leech, molded into his face, draining the vibrancy from sun-lit hair. “Yeah yeah. Mmaaa, you’re pretty bitchy tonight aren’t you?”
That earns him a hard slap, the echo of it creaks the frame, springs up the bed like putty. Still, they both don’t move, a wolf and his teeth poised against the rabbits legs, having no heart to bite down. Dark, Burnett tresses swirl across reddened skin, beneath thousands of freckles were the tenure of scars placed by years of this too. Sixteen and breathing silent air as if tomorrow gravity and depravity will undo them.
Chuuya doesn’t attempt to speak again, his chest evens out into a tentative lull of sleep. Leaving Dazai to focus on his Shepard heart, wildly pattering through his sternum. Abstract things were so baseless most times, but he feels his own heart works in discordance with the one against him, thrown off beat by such force. It’s eaten, as all else, by his bloodied, empty lips. A frozen ice pours over him in the shadows, nose sharply inhaling citrus and sandalwood, so distinctly awfully Chuuya that it burns away every flayed part of him into a menagerie. He is only a collection of what others have given to him.
If death is the indulgence of mercy.
Then life is the indulgence of man.
Dazai sinks slowly into fitful sleep, pitifully grateful he’s not human.