The Wild Geese || DAZAI OSAMU/CHUUYA NAKAHARA

[十二] GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY!

You lied.

You don't follow Chuuya up. In fact, you don't even return.

You stumble into the bar that the man had introduced to you, crashing through the doors, and ordering an entire bottle of whisky. You're replacing the pain in your chest to a pain in your throat, letting the liquid burn you, let it clean your throat where the dirty words of your confession seared, the guilt that came from spilling so much of your thoughts out making your shoulders curl into each other.

You start to hum, tipsy and play with the condensation of the ice before the bartender puts down another glass.

"What?" You slur. A warm space that accompanies you. You notice the grim look, the brown hair. You wordlessly pour that glass with gin.

"What're you doing here for?" You ask. "Coming back to the scene of the crime. You won't find anything."

You take another heavy swig of the drink.

"Tell me what it was like," Dazai says simply. "Your version of the Port Mafia."

You chuckle. "Oh, I see how it is. You want to see any sort of justifiable reason," You put your head in your arms. "Listen, I told you everything. Now I don't want to talk. Leave me alone."

Dazai doesn't say anything.

He had been informed of what Fukuzawa had been told, and the raw intensity of the words that came out of his mouth only punctuated its genuine message: I want to be hurt. That was the only message that was evident in your words. Dazai was still angry at your confession—he knew that Mori knew of the children Oda was housing, yet he could have never expected it was the pretty woman that he had met once before, the pretty woman that had brought him and his friends chestnut cake, the pretty woman that was so aloof yet gentle in her own way—only to betray him in one of the worst ways he had ever imagined.

I betrayed your best friend. I got him killed.

Yet when he thought about it, he could still see that sort of childish hopelessness to you. And then it came to him—you were still unspeakably young at that time, at that time when you snitched on those children, and it was years after years of ruinous abuse, and he knew how fucking dirty Mori could get knowing how he treated Elise; if she was a figment of his abilities, it made him sick knowing how you were a real life person, a real, breathing person, and he had taken advantage of your terrible disadvantage and disposition of inferiority.

"I feel bad, I really do," you quietly say. "And that's not me begging for your forgiveness. I realised that ages ago."

You look blearily at the label of the drink.

"I wanted Mori to look at me again. I felt empty when he stopped using me. My entire childhood was based on him. I told Mori, thinking he'd start treating me better, just like that man did with his kids, but then he used it as leverage against me, Oda, and you, even if I didn't know it," Your voice gets wobbly. "You know he put it over my head and said that if I didn't listen to him, they'd die? They'd become his new victims? That they'd go through the same things I did. 'You won't be special anymore, (First name).' And then he blamed it on me when I didn't do shit to them directly. It's pitiful, and I don't have the right to cry. But I do regret it."

He pours himself another glass of gin without saying a word. Part of his heart hurts, watching you, knowing that you were just another abused child under Mori, and knowing how you harboured no deep resentment for his former best friend, but jealousy, agony, some sort of juvenile hell knowing you weren't worth loving than those children.

Fundamentally, you were different to his enemies knowing that you didn't hate the essence of kind-hearted people like Oda—you simply didn't understand the parameters beyond Mori's twisted amusement park of sexual abuse.

"If you're wondering why I haven't tried to kill myself after I did that shit, don't worry, I did. I gave myself three Fs," you say, chuckling humorlessly, stroking a scar on your wrist with your index finger. "I self-harmed, got hooked on cigarettes and some other shit. I stole from Port Mafia because I wanted to experiment with drugs. And then finally, I ran away, lived in some shithole slum with a bunch of stray dogs, got a job in some unknown underground organisation, and I grew up," You say. "My life's been a constant chain of events of Fs. I'm guilty. I do feel guilty."