Chrysanthemum Garden [Dazai x Reader] ✓

30. Name

The moon sat highly and proud in the sky during that summer night, bringing along with it the bleak breeze of patience.

A freshly brewed cup of coffee was placed before me, offered by Lucy who was still working at the cafe below the Agency. She charged me nothing except a nice (genuine) review for the beverage; she seldom seemed to receive compliments for her coffee-making skills, for she smiled gleefully and adopted a pink tint to her cheeks whenever I offered even the tiniest good review.

The bell above the entrance chimed and she lifted her head, alerted, confused as to why a customer had walked in so close to closing time; she bade me a brief farewell and rushed to the door, assisting the night-owl as was expected while I entertained myself by staring down at the coffee beneath my chin.

It'd been a couple of weeks since the incident at the care home. The nightmare I watched every night of decent sleep about dropping Father's beloved photograph was no longer; in its place was a new episode whose subscription I could not cancel, even during daylight hours - I was afraid of idle thinking or falling asleep because of it.

I saw Mother die every day.

Grasping a jacket that wasn't my own, I always shut my eye as her body dropped to the grass beside me; her bones shattered, her limbs twisted in oddly uncomfortable directions, and her eyes gouged out of their sockets.

In that dream, I was never satisfied with just that; Mother's harness was violated by my own hand as I reached for her blade and dug it deep in her chest, carving on her skin a tally of how many times she'd laid a finger on me aggressively until she had no more skin left.

I hated that mirage of me. I didn't want to wear the cloak of a bloodthirsty murderer... If I'd done something different, would anything have changed? Would I be dead if I kept that window shut? Would she be alive if I'd never caused that fire?

The knife or my impotence - which of us is guilty for her death?

I was told her body had been brought back to the city for a burial service no one attended.

The Agency put me under lifted house-arrest restrictions, prohibiting me from stepping further than their office by day or Dazai's apartment (my current temporary home) by night without supervision; this cafe was an exception, but Mother's grave wasn't. Neither was visiting Dazai at the hospital; his wounds had been stitched up and several bullets removed from his flesh.

During the two weeks I spent at the Agency, I'd acquainted with the faces of petty pickpocketing thieves that used rush hour to their advantage, and I sat through revised reports of "perfect-murder" criminals; no crime was impossible for the Agency to solve, the same way how I didn't question their extensive knowledge about my history.

But there were no reports about me; [Y/N] [L/N] had no spotlight on the stage that was their monitors or paper-based databases. I was not a background character either;

I was an actor - a disguised deceiver - sitting amongst the audience, watching a show where curtain call escorted criminals away to prison. But I did not hide my true nature; I turned to the people beside me in the audience and told them clearly that I too was a criminal like those we'd seen - probably even worse...

"The act of killing is a crime directly invoked against the law," - Kunikida announced one day, provoked by my confession as he flicked through several pages in his notebook. "Murder, more specifically mass murder (genocide), is not an activity in which a detective should engage in. With that said, [Y/N] cannot become a detective."

"I beg to differ," - Kyouka disagreed, raising her hand for permission to voice her opinion. "I don't think we should hold a past she wishes to forget against her. Segregationist talk is an activity which a detective should not engage in. With that said, [Y/N] can become a detective."