Cirque de Sentimentalité - YANDERE!DAZAI

YAMASHITA PARK AND THE SEAGULLS

Yamashita Park truly lived up to its glory: a plume of red roses and the salty air from the waterfront greeting you. Your bandaged hands are still sore and throbbing, heat emanating from the wounds as they pulsed uncomfortably. They're shoved in your pockets as you blankly stare at the waterfront, orbs of light ephemerally playing on the surface of the water, like blinking scattered stars. The temperature of the water is lukewarm: not too cold and not too hot.

"What are you thinking about?" Dazai asks, and you don't answer. You instead lean against the railing of the waterfront, back pressed against the cold metal as the wind blew your hair from behind.

"Why did you ask me about heroin?" You finally break the silence, and Dazai chuckles.

"Why didn't you give me a response?" He fires back playfully. You shrug.

"I didn't know what to say."

The two of you stand in silence, seagulls shrieking above with the voluptuous flapping of their white wings. You tilt your head back and stare at the white birds: how you wondered what it was like to be able to fly. You close your eyes and refuse to see the world for what it is: broken, needing a factory reset, annihilated. This world was a disordered dream. As you close your eyes and breathe in the salty air, Dazai takes his time to admire your side profile. The gentle fluttering of your eyelashes, the deadly shape of your lips, the concave of your cupid's bow, the curve of your nose.

'You're beautiful,' He thinks to himself. 'You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.'

He doesn't say those words out loud. He knows that it will only distance you farther from him, when you're already so far away from him. You're liminal, cusping, in between, emerging, undecided, transitional, experimental, a start up, in your own life. Despair weaves you together like thread and needle, pulling the two sides of you together: death and life. You are a Romantic hero in the literary sense, for you seek victory over life and over death; you will strive to, as Mary Shelley once said, "penetrate the recesses of Nature." And your slow dance of the bodies had proven to do so.

"I can feel you staring at me." You say, your eyes still closed. Dazai smiles and turns his gaze upwards, where he follows your example and closes his eyes.

"Just admiring the view."

You slowly open your eyes. "The view? There's nothing to see here."

"You're here, are you not?" He simpers. He receives a curious look.

"You think I'm the view?"

"Of course."

You blink. "That sounds like something Joker would say."

A curl of hatred begins to blossom in Dazai's heart. He's not new to this feeling–he's had his fair share of feeling this, but this? This felt new. It was boiling hot, it seared his heart, it rendered him helpless and a slave to his emotions. He controls his feelings with a smile, eyes closed as to hide away the burning hellfire in his gaze.

"You and Joker seem close," Dazai says, level-headed as ever.

"Joker, Mizu and I share one factor. We're all orphans from the war," You say. You then turn to him, leaning an arm on the railing. "You know, you remind me a lot of Joker. You and he would be like Yin-and-Yang."

"How so?" Dazai tilts his head.

"You told me once you worked for the Port Mafia. You told me once you worked for the slums. I don't know much, but that's not a very happy past now, is it?" You say, tilting your head to the side. "Suffering, I believe, is something of the mark of the soul. You're no machine. Machines do not suffer. You suffer because you're too human. You're caught up in your past, just like I and Joker are."