twisted devotion || Yandere!DAZAI/READER

[6] The Night

You are almost never alone in Yokohama; almost everywhere you go, there is bound to be someone watching. Thousands of people, people that made Yokohama the second-largest city in Japan, are tucked into the city's dark crevices, lit up by neon lights that shone a cast over their face: a veneer of the city's luscious facade, concealing a murky, black water history behind; people that pushed the city's cogs into one piece of machinery, people that bustled around the streets like lice to a scalp.

Decaying. All of them—decaying.

Yet Dazai Osamu felt alone.

Rotten and rotting to the core.

He looks up at the second, more significant scarlet moon; he feels its salty redness wash over him in slow, frothy waves—it illuminates the hazy clouds around it in its brilliance, spots of where crevices should be now replaced with lazy, undulating waves of a blood wash.

He's not too unfamiliar with those terms. After all, he could still feel an unpoetic warmth on his hands where there shouldn't be; he could feel the cold gunmetal of a Russian pistol in his hands, unflinching in its harsh recoil. He could feel the bandages, the expensive German cloth of a mafia boss, the whiskey, the cigarettes, the dead dawn forever lost in his eyes, barred within a cold capsule of a time lost; the corpses dancing around him in a feverish mania, their bodies like serpents in their venomous harmony, forever mocking him for his deeds.

Yes, what an unfamiliar sight it was, to see a blood moon.

Given the thousands of people who traipsed through the streets each day, it was oddly deserted at night; a liminal space: stoplights in its blue arrows pointing to a gaping maw of darkness, faintly illuminated by amber lights of lampshades; fluttering signs waving at the sterile stars from the light breeze, potted plants dully wilting in his presence as though he sucked life out of them; empty cars parked on the desolate roads of Yokohama. Though the plants and decoration served no purpose; the only flourish here were the stars and the twin sister moons high up in the air, forever unattainable to the human touch. It could have been the totalitarian state of George Orwell's 1984, except it lacked the stench of boiled cabbages.

He finds himself in front of the hotel you were sleeping at, and wonders what you were doing; a part of him hopes that you were still up, gazing through your window and into the neon lights of a city quietened down; the other part of him hopes that you were tucked away into your bed, away from this corrupted world, sleeping away the burdens that he had put on you by simply weaving you into his sphere of orbit. He wonders what it would feel like—he already hailed you as his saviour, his Virgin Mary—you were so beautiful to him, so pure, so untouched and other worldly.

To love you was to love an outline.

He takes a step back at his own revelation, shaking his head; brown curls fall over his forehead in his fervour and his expression scrunches into that of fierce denial. No, it was not. You were a human being. You were just like him, in flesh and blood. He looks at the lobby for comfort, but the lobby was empty, filled only with the bleak anonymity that pervaded the entrance of every estate in his heart.

He could cry.

He could cry.

One, two, three.

A smile that swallows all the mess he's made.

One, two, three. Lights up.

A smile that burns through mirrors and renders itself useless: Dracula in style.

"Dazai?"

He turns around, alarmed, afraid; you stare at him with a thin coat wrapped around your body, eyes wide at his personal lunacy, yet that dissolves into a look of acceptance that nearly brings him to his knees,