twisted devotion || Yandere!DAZAI/READER

[22] Yosano Akiko

You take a step back. Shock must have been evident on your face, the wrong type of shock, because Yosano uncrosses her arms and sighs.

"Did you really think I didn't know?" She says, "I thought it was obvious I knew when I told you about how Dazai and I were affiliated with them once."

What do you say? What to do? Do you agree with her? There's a torrent of newer questions that rise to your throat like vomit. Unpleasant questions, questions you didn't even know you knew how to pronounce, questions that were shaped like a foreign language, questions that were dark, murky, and abyssal. You shake your head and feign a wan smile, a smile that smelt of desperation and uncertainty.

You feel your chest constrict again. But this time, you're careful to regulate your breathing before it spirals out of control, breathing as though you were carrying a cup full of water, the surface tension creating a dome shape over the top. A jiggle and it would simply spill over. You stay perfectly still, smiling at her as though you were preparing something innocuous, before it drops.

"You alright there?" Yosano asks, unsettled by your silence.

"Yes, thank you," You say, with sincerity. Something akin to rage blooms in your chest at the thought of another you existing in the same Earth as you: this was what the moon must have felt like, its blood competitor acidically releasing red waves of light like sulphur.

"You just look...surprised."

You shake your head, "It's just that the scales have fallen off my eyes."

You turn around and don't take the lift; it would be too quick for you to recollect your thoughts. Instead, you take the spiralling staircase to the ground floor, your thoughts pounding against the walls of your head, it squeezes out any space left for you, leaving you on the edge of yourself, watching from outside in. You felt like you were watching yourself walk down the stairs from behind, as a ghost, as a zombie. You make yourself downstairs before collapsing onto the floor, onto one of the stairs, cradling your head into your hands.

Just who were you? Where are you?

"(first name)? What's wrong?" Yosano's quick to your side, rushing down the stairs with her shoes clicking against the tiles, "I know it's a harsh reality, to accept we were in our respective dark places, but it's gone. We're not there anymore."

"It's not that," You say, not looking up, "You wouldn't understand, Yosano. You just wouldn't."

"Then tell me," She says, sitting on the stair next to you, "I have ears."

"It's something you genuinely would not understand," You try to reason.

She huffs, "I've been in the Great War, seen atrocities beyond words, and you think I won't understand your problems?"

"That's the thing, Yosano," You say, with a tone of finality that she can't find in it in herself to dispute; a tone of hopeless damnity, a heretic chant in your words, a hush of despair between each space between the words, "It's something out of this world. I'm not from here."

XX

How do you deal with the reality that there's another you in the same world? Not your siamese twin, not your monozygotic twin, not your gothic shadow; no, but another you, a doppelgänger?

Would you have been able to identify this doppelgänger had you run into her on the streets? Or would you have reeled back in shock as to how different you looked in your eyes, as opposed to mirrors, mirrors that offered alternatives?

You ignore the calls you've been getting from Dazai and turn on the television back at home, unable to bring yourself to work when your mind was a spinning mess. You're mindlessly switching through the television channels when a flash of beige catches your eye: Dazai.

Another corpse?

"A jogger makes a grisly discovery: the scent of death overpowering what remnants of spring sakura blossoms, is right there, underneath the fallen branches, a shallow grave. Ability detectives are on the scene as of now, investigating the case."

The cameras cut to a blurred image of a body, pixelated beyond recognition. You take your notebook out and click a pen mindlessly.

"The body has been identified as female; the genitalia had been completely brutalised, being completely torn apart by rat teeth. Traces of honey and peanut butter were found by medical examiners, suggesting that the victim had died from the flurry of rats that ate her flesh; it is hinted that she had been alive the entire ordeal."

Corpse found with vagina ripped apart by rats. X/XX/XXXX

You turn the TV off and the silence is deafening. Everything was silent. The only noise is the humming of the television and the noise of your notebook pages being flipped.

You pause.

Was there a pattern you were missing?

When you first met Dazai, the corpse had been decapitated.

When you had lunch with Dazai, the corpse had been filled with garbage.

When you had been in the art museum with Dazai and held his hands, the corpse had their eyes gouged out and their hands severed.

When you had cooked for Dazai, the corpse had their jaw missing.

When you had sex with Dazai, the corpse had their genitalia torn apart.

Was there a connection between what you were doing?

What was Dazai doing, as a link between these deaths?

A rising panic that shrieks in your chest, a plangent howl, a symphony of agony and crashing brick that falls on your chest like an avalanche, triggered by a cry, orchestrated by distorted Berlioz in a fit of madness. But the noise of the pages flipping rang more loudly than all that tumult of destruction in your head.

The puzzle pieces began to fit together to create a bloody mural, a mural filled with bodies sewn together in a cynical Renaissance, dancing in shape around you like cartoon birds, mocking you like vultures, before swiping in for the kill.

The DNA that was found on the scene that belonged to you. The strand of hair.

Was it possible that this killer, this God of annihilation, was you, all along?

You rush out the house, fingers scrambling across your phone screen to call Dazai. You figured something out; it was just up to him to verify the dark, grisly secret. If it were true. If it were true that he didn't love you this entire time, but another you, a darker you, a you that was capable of murdering another human being.

But as you step outside, you can already see him rushing towards the dorm, his arm waving at you and a smile on his face. So unknowing of the new darkness you held within you like a cyst, a closed fist, ready to sucker punch him back into his destructive past.

"Yo, (first name)—"

BANG!

A piercing pain that strikes your neck. You can see a flood of blood shoot out like it had been squeezed out. A great fan of blood that drenches the front of your entire body, pouring out incessantly. Something lodged in the column of your throat. It feels as though your neck had been spliced clean open, in half, like a knife to an apple.

You crumble to the floor like a pile of wet clothes. Your head throbs and your vision's dimming, a hand placed on your neck in a desperate attempt to quell the apoplectic bleeding.

"Hang on there, (first name)," You can hear Dazai calmly say, though in his words there was a tint of utter despair and horror. A despair that had its own calm. A familiar despair that suggested this was something he had already witnessed before, "I'm gonna call doctor Yosano and everything's going to be alright. Don't be stupid and die on me, okay?"

Your head tilts forwards, as though you nodded.