The Wild Geese || DAZAI OSAMU/CHUUYA NAKAHARA

[十八] DARKPLACE, EXPOSED.

Your phone rings in your pants pocket.

You dismissively wipe your tears off your eyes and pick up the phone without checking the caller name, your voice hoarse and deep. "Hello?"

"You gotta come back," Chuuya says on the other side. "We've got our rat."

"Rat?"

"The traitor," Chuuya says, with a twinge of impatience. You can hear his foot tapping against the floor. "Y'know, how they got inside the first place?"

"You deal with it, I don't want to do anything at the moment," You grumble under your breath, closing the playroom door behind you. It clicks shut. You remain quiet for a second, and Chuuya finds your silence disquieting and uneasy. Like it was utterly deafening, the split second of a hollow silence after a crazed scream. "On second thought, I'll come along. Are you at the interrogation dungeons?"

"Yeah, hurry up." His voice echoes and bounces off the slick walls. You huff, before hanging up. Your gaze automatically travels down to the floor as though you were conditioned to find footsteps leading to where you were supposed to go. In a way, you were—you were always told what to do and how to feel as a child by Mori. It was not surprising that this habit followed you through adulthood.

But instead, you're met with a pair of transparent mary-jane shoes once again. Your eyes traverse upwards and they meet the stone cold gaze of your past self. Piercing, unlit eyes.

Where would she take you now, where would she lead you?

This HQ was an extension of your head; every memory made in your mind was associated with something here. Your foundations were built on the corpses you have killed for this organisation. Whatever you found would dredge up whatever suppressed memory you had stored in your head. And at its core: Mori, was your heart. The hard stone of a cherry pit, surrounded by malleable, sweet flesh.

You were considered sweet at some point in your life. But you've soured, evolved to deter predators away from you like a poisonous plant. But as such, people still find ways to subvert the plant, find healing elements to it. You had a soft side. It had floated to the surface when you had decided to buy those chestnut cakes for Atsushi, as gratitude for not turning you away from his home when you needed it. But it is a rare sighting, because you've learned that life is circular: you live the same slow circles of joy and misery over and over, unable to crack the cycle, never learning.

Not you. You've learned to crack it ages ago when you were smashed open, like a mallet to a walnut. You've learned to exist in the margins, like some sort of wretched monster, watching from a third party in, how people lived their lives. You've learned to remember every lesson, every failure and success, every bit of joy and misery, and because you remembered everything, hope had died for you. You were effectively hopeless. You were a deadman walking. You were evidence that it is possible to completely wipe off hope in the human mind, the very thing that keeps one going during their darkest time.

You only had yourself to get through your darkest times. And that was enough for you.

You watch as she exits your room, and you follow her. She walks down the long hallway, past the portrait of you and Mori, and outside. The salty air of the Port ignites a need for a cigarette within you. Seagulls shriek above your head, the flutter of their wings, the squawk of their insatiable hunger.

The child version of you walks past all the loaded shipping containers and into a grey, black unmarked one. Then she disappears. You stare up at the imposing height of this shipping container, before grabbing the black handle and sliding it open.

Inside is Dazai. He looks up from his book, just as surprised as you are.

"What are you doing here?" You say, taking a step back. You have to rub your eyes to make sure he's not just a figment of your imagination, before he chuckles.