Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter twenty-three

Dazai POV

The light bulb hanging from the ceiling of my shipping container flickered lightly when my eye preyed open late the same evening of the Sun Rise Auction. The cold bit at my skin despite the fact that it was the middle of a warm summer day, sending a shiver down my bare spine. The scent of iron hung in the air, a familiar scent for this space, but today it was much stronger than how it usually was. My slender body was curled up on the dirty, cold floor, my arms and chest bare of anything but my own blood.

After the fight with Chuuya I called my driver, having the man pick me up from the lobby of mafia headquarters. The ride had been as quiet as it's always seemed to be when I rode alone with the other man, without the noise of the smaller teen that I'd grown accustomed to on the way to most jobs.

But the silence was more one sided than it had been in months. Then it had been since Chuuya officially joined the mafia, since he became my partner.

It was just that the other man in the car couldn't hear the conversation that I could.

Voices ran through my head, voices that weren't mine and yet seemingly betrayed all of my darkest thoughts, all of the truths that I always tried my hardest to forget. They whispered these things to me, screamed them at me at the top of their nonexistent lungs.

They said these things so much that I had no choice but to believe them more than I believed myself.

Each and everyone of them was screaming at me by the time I finally made it to the heart of the junkyard, to the place that the mafia boss had given me to live in for the past almost two years. They were loud enough, persistent enough that in a moment of weakness, in a lifetime of it, I gave into them.

I'd told Chuuya all those months ago, on our first mission together back when he was still with the Sheep, that I'd try. That I'd give living a try. I'd told him this because he'd managed to make the idea of living, the act of it interesting again. He was something wild, all but feral, and above all else, honest, and I'd told him that I'd try.

I also told him that I wouldn't promise anything more than giving it a shot.

The skin on my arms stung as I dragged myself up from the ground, a wince that I normally wouldn't have released escaping from my lips. Last night I'd done something that I hadn't really let myself do since the shorter teen became my partner months ago. I'd dug the blade that I'd gotten from Kouyou deep into my skin, deep enough that I'd passed out after only a few cuts. I hadn't been aiming to kill my self, but I wouldn't have been disappointed if it'd come to that.

Staying alive, wanting to live, those are two things that I've never been too familiar with. My self preservation skills are more lacking than that of a small child's that hadn't had any reason to have to develop them just yet.

But despite all of that, despite every fucked up thing that had happened to me since joing the mafia, since I'd been born, I'd been trying. I'd been trying even if it was only because the other boy had been just interesting enough to warrant it, even if it just was to keep Chuuya alive a little longer like he'd been doing for me. I had been trying for the first time in two years to stay alive, to try to want to live. It'd been months since the doctor had had to patch me back together from the mess that he caused me to make.

I had been trying.

And yet, pulling myself up from my dirty floor and onto my thin bed, I couldn't find it in myself to want to try anymore, to see the point in it.

The voices were quiet, but my thoughts were bitter enough to poison the silence.

How pathetic is it, to live for someone that hates you?