Letters from the Underground // fyozai

vii. sin

notes:
• Post-mortem stain: a bruise-like staining of the skin, due to the gravitational settling of blood in vessels after the circulation has ceased.
• Lefortovo (Лефортовская): a high security prison in Moscow, Russia. It is infamous for strict detention conditions.
• art is by ares!

warnings:
• visual hallucination depiction
• themes of child abuse and trauma
• panic attack depiction
• self harm depiction
• mild gore + death :]

—

Fyodor has learned two new things this week. One of them is that cats—or a specific cat, loves the sound of the cello. The second is that playing it for someone other than himself does not feel nearly as bad as he had expected. In fact, it felt nearly magical how fulfilling it was to see her settle next to him and quietly let the resonance of notes soothe her into a rest.

He smiled in amazement at how quickly the practice eased its way into his routine, falling into days where his habits are all the same but with a little more warmth to them, courtesy of the new company. Everything he did in his apartment remained unchanged, except that the lingering air of a morgue instead of a home was no longer there.

The only inconvenience in this development—or so he'd like to think—is how eerily often Maria's eyes flicker into the image of the ones they resemble so much—the eyes that hold the conviction that the sun will never rise again, Dazai's. It wasn't even the eyes only; at times, even her mannerisms seemed to mirror those of the man whose shadow lives alongside her in Fyodor's apartment now.

And at other times, Fyodor wakes up to her curled up on the other side of his bed, but the silhouette she paints on the wall when the sunlight greets her; it does not resemble a cat, but a man. A man that now plagues Fyodor's mind every morning despite not having seen him in almost three years.

So he blinks his sleep away as he stares at the shadow from where he lays, pondering the man. He is so lost in his reverie that he does not notice how the sun shifts, and with it the shadow. It drifts ever so slowly until its edge grazes Fyodor's fingertips, and he suppresses a faint gasp as he had half expected the shadow to rupture in flames upon contact.

But Fyodor knows the shadow is not there, and so he does what he does every time he sees it: ignores the implications of its owner being the only man in the world who would live past his filthy touch. Just as he ignores the stir in his abdomen at the mere threat of exploring that thought. Something violent as a storm and obscure as an ocean.

The poets would be perplexed by Dazai Osamu and his winds.

—

July 5th, 2012

Fyodor Dostoevsky,

I've been weighing your questions since the moment I received your last letter, until now.

What is a friend, you say? I have not had many, but I haven't had none either. The one that comes to my mind is a man whose front porch I can only describe as the most comfortable place for a nap that I've ever found in my life. You and him share the same affinity for acid-sharp words and apparent apathy.

I often wonder how different my circumstances would've been if I hadn't written to you when he passed, or whether I would be alive at all, to begin with. If I had lived long enough, I certainly would've agonised over fulfilling his dying wish to me, abstract as it fucking was.

Instead, I regularly rest against his gravestone and wonder if he can be happy for me despite my lack of attainment; "Can't leaving the mafia be enough?"