The Wild Geese || DAZAI OSAMU/CHUUYA NAKAHARA

[二十一] MEMORIES, IN TRAINING.

When you defect, you immediately go underground for years on end. You were 16 when you defected—an age bracket nearing adulthood. And that meant abandonment.

Why fear abandonment if you abandoned yourself first? It certainly gave you more control over your fate.

You become a contract killer, with a hefty bounty over your head: 10 million Yen. You become a shadow, a figure being played by light, a dissolution between darkness and light; you become someone completely devoid of sex and pleasure. You become a walking moai statue, made of stone and completely apathetic to the faces and tourists around you.

You carry out tasks by small organisations and whet your blade sharper and sharper with every kill, until you ultimately master the art of killing to its full capacity. Every mission was easy for you, and you garnered a hefty amount of black feathers in your bloody escapades.

You changed numbers, and only spoke through an agent who was willing to help you organise your murderous spree. You would grow out of this agent, as kind as she was, as you grew older. You could trust no one.

Since your defection you have always felt like an outsider, like you didn't really belong, and now, without the presence of Mori, it all made sense. But from a different angle, for the most part, it didn't really bother you. You got used to it. You were so cold, so indifferent to other people's feelings now. Their pain. This was your doing—you have locked your heart away from the prying eyes of the people around you, because trauma is a fickle thing; it skewers and distorts the world around you into a dog-eat-dog jungle, capable of restarting the cycle of abuse if it decided to.

Have you heard of a fish called muskellunge? The muskellunge is endemic to the fresh waters of Northern New Jersey of America, and they are cunning, very clever predators of the pike family. They are also known as 'muskies', and these fish live in the hard-to-reach spots of freshwater lakes. They are so vicious that not only do they feed on other fish but attack and eat ducks, muskrats, and other warm-blooded vertebrates. You were exactly that: a hard to find killer, cold blooded and predatory.

You were a prized, saint, idol, model figure for those who were new or jaded to the killing scene. They idolised your ability; your apathy; your dull, cold eyes that have seen too much; your lack of sensuality; your capability for extreme violence that bordered on personal sadism; your consummate ability to deceit and lie through your teeth while looking at someone straight in the eyes. And there's a freedom in this apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Look at yourself. You were a walking danger to society. Yet you were revered in the underground scene.

You remember how you had grown up with the help of a few men and women who were in the same situation as you: Abandoned by society and ultimately alone. You trusted no one, but found slivers of help here and there. After all, you are fallible, as much as you hated to admit, but you were fallible in your younger years—you could learn more. Become more vicious.

You take up any and every mission you can from the underground, growing into your twenties, until Mori has you captured in his jaws again.

And that is the story of how you came to be.

—

You wake up with March sunlight seeping through the greasy windows of the room, shuffling out of your blankets with your shoes by the side of your bed. You slip them on and immediately light a cigarette, still hunched over the side of the bed.

"Fuckin' hell," You curse under your breath, puffing out smoke with every staccato inhale. "Fuck everything. Fuck this shit."

The morning smells like spring, and you walk out of your room when you see the familiar mary-janes in your peripherals. You follow it with a slight eagerness to your steps, a bounce in your pace as though excited about what she would reveal next. It was the only thing you looked forward to: the static of water speaking your name, the radio saying repeated gibberish of your past, the psychotic delusions that revealed who you were before you had defected. Parts of you, suppressed and contained, like fossil fuel underground.