The Wild Geese || DAZAI OSAMU/CHUUYA NAKAHARA

[五] LILITH NARRATIVE, CLEARING.

A/N: Sexual abuse TW. It gets gnarly and worse as the story progresses, so this is your stop point if you're sensitive to that. Happy reading!

—

You're in the Yokohoma art museum, hands in your pockets and browsing mindlessly through the rows of paintings. A mix of foreign and local paintings, a section in construction for a rising-artist, a large semi-circle room with three paintings and a single bench.

You take a seat awkwardly on the bench.

You can hear the chatter of excited duos on dates, a class of art students displeased at crooked line of sorts, a group of children pinching each other under the flared dress of their mothers. The trail that led back to you was smudged, bordered off, salted: you are at the end now and no one seemed keen enough to follow you. Every few breaths you glance to each side, eyes scanning the delicate paintings hung on the wall. For anything human: a receipt, a torn button, a discarded wrapper of a snack.

The cushion next to you dips.

"I didn't take you as an art enthusiast," The voice admits. One sniff of the cologne immediately warned you. You blink.

"Nor did I," you say. "Yet here I am."

The two of you sit in silence, staring straight ahead, unbothered by the distance between the both of you.

"You left more scars on me that I would have liked."

"How many did I put on you?"

"Two."

You snort.

"Tell me what you know about this painting," You ask. Dazai looks at where you were looking: A painting of a half-nude Goddess leaning towards a rock, her presence emanating a golden glow against the dark blackness of the cave; an eye peering at the viewer, a green snake circling her arm before its jaw unhinged just before her ear, a blurry, dark bird hovering over her head; she sat on a wave of colourful blankets, their design antique and so laden with precious stones it almost seemed God-like.

"The painter liked Femme Fatales," Was all Dazai said. You stare at the painting, then back at him.

"You didn't betray me to the police," You say with such a heavy tone that it sounded, to Dazai, like the rusty grunt of steel doors closing: a Mediaeval sound, concealing its torturous madness within. An Iron Maiden.

"I didn't," He says—and he's surprised at how he sounds surprised at that fact, as if it was some sort of definite course of action he should have taken; yet it never crossed his mind. "I didn't."

"Why?" You finally blurt out.

Dazai hums, leans backwards on the bench, his eyes never leaving the half-nude woman on the painting. The longer he stared at it the more it seemed like the woman was staring right back into him, into his essence, nodding at whatever biblical nonsense the Snake was saying into her ear. The Lilith narrative, the scar of before-Eve a precedent to womankind, a history recorded, the wound closed over, darkness from light. He takes a moment to reflect, untangling the tightly knotted ball in his chest, his eyes never straying away from the snake in her ear.

"I was afraid of telling the police," He begins. "It's very dangerous. Anyone who has survived from you will know. I am afraid," He then looks at you, the after-image of the Goddess burned into his retinas now projecting onto your face, before dissipating into swirls of blue and colours of not-yet colours: Phosphene from the absence of his heart. "Of people finding out about you. There's a danger in stirring people like you up—people like you are hidden under the thick depths of others, and to understand why you are means everyone else will have to place themselves into the void: and they will wring out blood. And people will see you as a scientific experiment—blood, pus, excitement, violence. I thought that because you had reached such a nothingness of your existence, you would effectively burn the people around you into replications of yourself."