Graveyard • Dazai x Reader

15: The Tiger

When you woke up, it was raining again. The clouds outside are a dark, menacing kind of grey, the kind that means the storm is yet to come though it was already pouring.

Dazai had given you the spare room to sleep in after your conversation last night, making sure you were comfortable and leaving you alone once you'd settled in. Laying in the room at night, blankets weighing down on you as the moon cast haunting shadows against your walls, you felt nauseous. You could almost imagine being back in your own room at the Port Mafia, back when Dazai was still there and he'd close your door just as he had now, locking it in the past as you were left with the names of the dead staring back at you. Back then, it wasn't the moonlight manipulating shadows of the tortured to dance around you as your heavy eyelids shut, but your own mind not letting you forget. For Dazai.

Now in the morning, though the sun wasn't out, the light of the day makes all the ghosts disappear, but it doesn't erase your uneasiness. Your situation may be different now, but the memories are still there as if painted into your skin, an uneasy familiarity making you feel sick.

How many times in a room had you stood there as you did now, dressed, ready and shaking waiting for Dazai, after a date with the Grim Reaper?

You look out the window, mind without an idea as to how the day might play out, and lingering on the memories of Dazai's words last night. The air is damp and suffocating, bringing you no relief, and you wish you could free yourself from everything you were currently living.

Everything was necessary.

"...Everything will make sense again. You just have to behave."

You sigh, head turning when you hear a light knock at your door and heart dropping into a dangerous flutter when you see Dazai at your door in similar attire as you had seen him that day in the café, beige overcoat a jarring change to your memories of him in black.

"Good morning [f/n]! Ready to go?" Dazai greets you cheerfully and with a lighthearted smile on his face, though you can't discern any real joy in seeing you in his eyes, none of the day's light able to pierce them. His gaze is a calculated kind of cold, and for some reason you prefer this to the brief, quizzical looks that held every answer you hoped for but could never figure out. The coldness is something you knew how to read. Happiness wasn't.

When you do nothing but stare at him, a pattern you had picked up years ago when you had begun to fear his reactions, Dazai walks into your room and gently placed a hand on your back, pushing you to move with him.

"Now now, don't look at me like that! Let's go, we don't want to keep Atsushi waiting do we?" He says as you are pushed out of your room in such a way that you can't tell if you are moving against your will or if Dazai's light touch is enough to make you more than willingly follow. You glance up at Dazai, tracing the lines of his face with your eyes, memorizing the way his waves bounce as he talks, the slight flutter of his long, dark lashes...

"Atsushi?"

"The weretiger. Didn't I tell you I'd answer your question? Surely you want to meet him, so I called Atsushi super early and told him I was giving him a super important mission and to wait for me at the agency's favourite café!" Dazai chuckles, probably at the image of making his subordinate wait anxiously while he stood here with you without any real rush of arriving on time, but you don't laugh along with him, instead repeating the name of the person Akutagawa had insisted you ask about, because names were everything to you.

Atsushi.

You look down at your hands as Dazai takes you through the living room and to the front door, handing you your jacket. With an uncomfortable flash of pain in your temples, the room goes dark for a second, and all you can see is blood dripping from your hands, and the ghostly glow of the spider lilies at the corner of your eyes. When you blink, wincing, it all disappears, and your focus returns to Dazai holding the door open for you, the wind of the pending storm outside ruffling his hair and changing his playful smile into a sad one, like he was remembering something bittersweet.