Cirque de Sentimentalité - YANDERE!DAZAI

SONG OF SOLOMON

You don't return to the circus. Instead you buy a snack from a convenience store and eat it while sitting on the curb, your elbows resting over your knees. The lemon drop mingles with the riceball you're currently eating, but you find yourself not minding it at all.

Maybe the lemon drop was a symbol for Dazai: you had started to soften, and by softening, you had let Dazai slip under your skin. Maybe you'd let him start a toxic codependent relationship with you. You don't know. Maybe. It was all maybes, all the time. After the war, you lost most of your decisiveness, because leadership reminded you that you had to be cold and calculating and ruthless. And ruthlessness wasn't your strongest forte.

You blankly stare at the people walking past you, a myriad of different types: teenagers with their short skirts, women with their manicured nails, men with their jeans and scruffs.

What is real life these days?

Life just felt like a numb patch of reality–the same kind of feeling you'd get when you'd sit on your foot for too long. Asleep. Something along the lines of that.

There's the thing about being an orphan though–you don't have to live up to anyone else's good expectation of you. You can be whoever you like.

What were you even thinking of? You sigh, crushing the rice ball plastic wrapper in your hand and dropping your head. You see an ant cruising on the stone pavement, and you resist the urge to stomp on it. It walks in circles, as though lost in its own tininess, and you give it mercy by standing up and walking away.

The sun is setting rapidly. Your hands are still sore and you know you'll be in for a talking from Mizu when she sees them, and the thought of returning to the circus brings a sense of newfound dread.

Would you prefer to be with Dazai than the circus?

Not necessarily. The circus knew of your dark past, your ragged past, your torn-apart past.

You remained a mystery to Dazai. To have him truly accept you would mean you would have to explain everything to him, from top to bottom, from beginning to end. And that would take days, weeks, years. And even then it would be like speaking backwards: How do you convey your pain into words, when words seemed vacant and empty? Pain. How do you make someone else feel pain just by saying the word 'pain'? At least with Joker and Mizu and Naja, they knew what it was like to be alone. They knew what it was like to wander without a purpose in the world. But with Dazai, you were in one of those carnival mirror houses, where you would smash yourself against a glass thinking it was a way out. There were too many versions of you to explain to him, too many parts of you to collect. And you were no bounty hunter.

And even then, how would he explain his not-so-happy past to you without experiencing the same thing? He would have to bring something solid, something that actually proved his despair, something that showed he was alone, just like you.

It was just too complicated.

All history is written backwards. Yours certainly was.

Your phone rings. You check the grey screen, and you're not surprised to see that it was from UNKNOWN. You press the answer button.

"Hello?"

"Hello, this is Atsushi."

You blink. You had been expecting Dazai. "Oh. Hello."

A pause. "You sound like you've been expecting someone else."

You sigh, almost hopelessly. "You got me. I was thinking it was Dazai who called."

Atsushi reciprocates your sigh. "He does talk about you a lot."

"Does he now?"

"All the time. You're the only thing occupying his head, I think."