MONSTER || YANDERE!D.OSAMU

10. BRIDE.

Dazai opts to take a bath in your bathtub. The hot steam rises up from the water like a bowl of soup. The back of his head is cradled by the rim of the bathtub, where he blankly stares up at the lined ceiling, where the light was shining on, oblivious to his internal inferno.

Water is elusive: the skin is waterproof to its advances, and it escapes from the direction you're trying to push it against. If anything, anything can be alive in water.

Your body can be re-animated in water. He can feel the curves of your torso in the water as he sways his hands, the inner thighs that was a gate to a little triangle of heaven, the column of firm flesh of your neck, the damp convexes of your cheeks—all if he closes his eyes hard enough and replays the past in his head, the sloshing noise of water deafened by his ineffable desire for you again. Dazai's not creative, so he sticks with what he has in his memories to bring you back to life, like Victor Frankenstein if he was interested in mind games.

But again, it's all in his head. It's been lost to the unforgiving folds of the past. He may think the past is manageable if he doesn't think about it, but you've made that much harder in a world where you still exist, just outside of arm's reach, grazing on his fingertips. Your back's turned to him, your delicate back, a back that he once drew shapes and lines and imagined wings on them, flickering like a dragonfly waiting for rain, like the angel you are.

Dazai sighs. He slides his head underwater. His dark brown hair flows around his head like a silky halo.

Love is as strong as death. The bible says that: Song of Solomon. He was so in love with you that it could only be told through the lens of death: he would kill for you. Dazai's no stranger to blood, but what he is a stranger to is doing things for justice. And keeping you safe, no matter what, always in his victincity, is justice worthy.

A knock on the door.

"If you spend another minute in there, your fingers are going to get wrinkly," You say. Your voice is lightened by the thickness of the wooden door and the water that fills his ears. He lifts his head up and shakes the water out of his hair.

"I'll be out in a minute, belladonna," He replies.

"Alright. I have dinner prepared, if you're hungry."

He's never really been hungry in his life. And it was strange; hunger was the universal language, and hunger was defined by food. Yet the only moment he had genuinely hungered for someone was when you were sprawled across his futon, legs slightly spread open in your deep sleep, mouth slightly agape as your eyes twitched underneath the thin lids. It had made shivers raze down his spine at the sight.

And that night, he had woken you up and fucked you straight into morning.

"I'll always be hungry for your cooking," He says, a teasing lilt to his voice, concealing the heavy melancholy that was threatening to break through, like a needle. You huff.

"Yeah, sure. Get out."

He towels himself dry and hangs the towel around his shoulders, his spare clothes smelling faintly of your laundry detergent, layered with dust. There are crease marks streaking down the fabric. That makes him falter—you haven't touched them, you haven't reminisced on them, you haven't unfolded them and folded them again, as he did with your clothes in his apartment.

"Aren't you a familiar sight," You say, drily. You're sitting on a chair by the dinner table, side dishes spread out across the table surface with a steaming bowl of rice sitting opposite of yours. "Come eat."

He takes a seat by your dinner table. "This is all a very familiar setting."

Your chopsticks click together as you look up at him, wordlessly, raising an eyebrow at him when he hesitates sitting down. He smiles, almost sadly.