The Wild Geese || DAZAI OSAMU/CHUUYA NAKAHARA

[十四] STANDARDS, SET.

You don't answer any more questions after that; you close up like an oyster: the secrets, a cancerous pearl within you. Getting more out would mean the death of you. Off your face is a look of death; you are abject terror personified.

You walk off the Port Mafia HQ with your hands in your pants pockets, the document in your sock pricking against your skin with every step you take. It is March and its spring winds should be refreshing. But you find them annoying, the breeze tickling your cheeks in a way that makes you scratch them off your skin.

You don't go back to your room. You would rather die than sleep in there again. That room was polluted with spilt virginal blood, polluted with barbaric cruelty, polluted with nightmares of hands groping you in places you've long detached yourself from. Mori had, in effect, beaten the very necessary human elements of compassion and empathy out of you through meticulous strokes, clearly delineating the path your life would ultimately take. 

You walk to a nearby park, cigarette in hand. Hot breath mixes with smoke and rises above your head like a thought bubble. The park benches were clean of litter: typical Japanese fashion, to never leave behind human traces that one was there. They were like lost ghosts in a way—they left behind nothing of value that connoted they were once there. You take a seat on the brown bench and take a drag of the cigarette, thinking about the conversation you have had with two men: Dazai Osamu and Chuuya Nakahara.

It was strange—you had expected someone as stitched tightly together as Dazai to never break composure and to find revenge in a more subtle, malicious manner, but he must have seen red when you had admitted you had snitched on those kids. Your nose was beginning to sting with future bruises. You rub it with your fingers and flinch at the burst of pain that explodes behind your eyes. You sigh.

Chuuya Nakahara was a fresh breath of air. He had no connections to your past, he simply knew of it as someone looking in the glass dome, like an eye peering into the frosty poetic landscape of a snow globe. He had listened to you with keen interest gleaming in his eyes, and had accepted that you were, in fact, as fucked up as you thought you were.

As if that would change anything, if he thought regardless.

You dip your head down before falling to your side on the bench. The world falls in tandem, tilting it vertically. The trees cling onto the corner of your eyes, swaying lightly in the March breeze, the rustling singing of their leaves hanging in the air like loose musical notes. You take your last drag of your cigarette, hitting the brown part of it, before flicking it expertly out of your fingers. It lands on the ground and you watch it fall like a piece of dominoes to its side.

Who cares if you were raped in this park at night. It wouldn't be your first time.

You let out a wretched chuckle at the thought of that. You close your eyes and slowly but surely descend down the steps of sleep, the murky black swallowing you until all that was left of you was the cigarette butt.

—

You wake to someone shaking you awake. You grumble something and swat their hand away, before the shaking becomes more violent. You snap at them.

"What do you want?" You're met with two-toned eyes: Purple and gold, staring back at you with fearful curiosity. You roll your eyes. "Oh, it's you."

"What're you doing out here? It's dangerous for a woman—!"

"Yeah, yeah," The morning sun bares its teeth on your face and you bring a hand up to shield your face from its exposing rays. Once your eyes have gotten used to the sudden brightness, you reach into your pocket. You pull out a cigarette and clench it between your teeth, not yet lighting it. You stare at Atsushi as he stares back at you, standing in front you. "Well? Get on with it."