The Wild Geese || DAZAI OSAMU/CHUUYA NAKAHARA

[十六] MONSTER, IN ACTION.

You spend the rest of the day idly chatting with Dazai, who seemed to take your admission of guilt earlier seriously—the closest thing he will get to an apology.

It's not in your nature to apologise. That was like expecting a lion to behave in a chicken coop. It will kill, regardless.

At last when night rises from the horizon and the sun sinks down the vast blueness of the sea, turning her head to the West, does Dazai finally conclude the conversation with a slight smile on his face. Stars freckle the night skies in clusters, their light illuminating the clouds wafting like breath. The salt in the air becomes more intense in the night as if the sky had summoned the water into air; it becomes heavier and almost palpable on your tongue. You turn away from the dark navy sea, almost tantalising and beckoning you to join its depth, with a deep and heavy sigh.

"I'm not driving you home," You fish your car keys out of your pockets. "Find your own way home."

"I wasn't going to ask for a ride, anyways," Dazai chuckles. "Had my fill of you today. Exceed that limit and it becomes unhealthy for me."

"Unhealthy my ass, I should just kill you right here and then," You say without the weight of someone who was murderous. You sounded worn out, tired, and in need of a cigarette. "Get moving."

You haul your ass into your car and stare at the claw marks that had been left behind on the steering wheel back when Mori had first called, culminating in a mental breakdown. You trace your fingertips over it before grumbling under your breath. It was always in your nature to ruin things, score marks over things, possessive as you are because everything from you had been taken away from you. Everything imaginable: From childhood to adulthood. You take a deep breath, bite back the stream of screams perched under your chin, and turn the keys to the car on.

You drive off into the darkness, away from the beach, away from drownable waters.

—

You always come driving back to the Port Mafia HQ by default. As if it was wired into you; and in a way it was, it was simply fucked into you. You pull up into the parking lot and sit in your car for a few minutes, finger tapping on the steering wheel as though waiting for something.

That's what you were always doing: waiting. Waiting for something to happen. That's why you had busied yourself with the underground when you had initially defected—at some point in your life, you were waiting for things to get better by itself.

All your progress was ruined like a house of cards from a single phone call.

You sigh, pressing your forehead against the steering wheel. It's strange: They say that the mind forgets but the body remembers, but the truth was, for you, both remembered everything at the same time. How the body remembered how he touched you, manhandled you, created you; how your mind rejected his touches, his manhandling, his creation. The raised hackles and the lowered voice. The baritone lull of his voice that made your tongue stiff, even to this day. The shadow, the ghost, the trace. A second nature: A memory so deep both the mind and the body will remember. You could remember every syringe that had been injected into your left arm's forearm, every blood pressure clamp, every medication he forced down your throat: Morphine, Oxycodone, Paracedemol, Codeine, Aspirin—all to handle the sheer amount of pain your juvenile body went through.

You look up. You can see yourself again, child-like and small, standing in the headlights of your car.

A surge of rage that bubbles at the sight. You stomp your foot on the gas pedal angrily and the car immediately roars to life. Had the apparition been a real person, you would have steamrolled her; hit her so hard her head detached itself off the body like a test mannequin. You phase through her and nearly hit one of the other cars parked in the space.