parasite [YANDERE!O.DAZAI/READER]

ONE: THE VAMPIRE.

A/N: In this fanfiction Bram doesn't exist. Hope you enjoy!

"Two more bodies found desiccated by the river," Atsushi reads from the daily newspaper, his gloved fingers clenching the inky papers tightly as his two-toned eyes flickered up from the lines of writing. "Again."

"From where?" Kunikida asks.

"The police don't know," Atsushi replies, but after a short second does he add that, "But they think it's from the mansion. You know, the mansion."

"The mansion...the one up in the South?" The blond asks, and Atsushi nods.

"Yes."

The door to the Agency opens. The two men look at the direction of the noise, and find that Ranpo had arrived, with a large brown paper bag being wrapped by an arm. He was sucking on a lollipop, a bright cherry red as he popped it out of his mouth.

"It's a vampire," He plainly states after taking a seat on one of the chairs. He spins around, before coming to a stop. "It's a woman."

"A vamp–how do you know?" Atsushi blurts out.

"Bodies desiccated, wrung dry of blood, up in the Southern, so-called cursed mansion?" Ranpo clicks his tongue. He licks the side of the lollipop. "It's just textbook vampirism."

"A vampire?" A new voice enters the conversation. Dazai flings himself onto a chair with his legs straddling the back of the office chair, in his voice a teasing lilt as though disbelieving of Ranpo's theory. "Now that's something incredibly superstitious, even for your tastes, Ranpo."

"Well, do you have any other theories to counter mine?" Ranpo playfully asks, to which Dazai puts up his hands in surrender.

"Not at all. I agree with you–it's just very difficult to believe there's a vampire roaming with us humans."

"Then let's go arrest this vampire." Atsushi stands up, but Dazai dismissively waves his hand.

"Are you hearing yourself right now, Atsushi? Arrest a vampire?" He chuckles warmly, the noise rumbling throughout his chest like ripples. "That's like asking what the colour of water is."

"Well, we can't just stand around and do nothing!" The white-haired male retaliates, to which Dazai smiles. A strange, mysterious smile that told Atsushi that something was up his sleeve. His honeyed eyes told no tales, like the seductive eyes of dead men.

"Of course not."

–

You roll up the newspaper and swat at the Arabesque cobwebs that hung in the corner of the room, the spider long gone from its silky canopy. The room was small, with a small ancient round table on the left side, with a large, Queen-sized bed on the right. On the table was a deck of Tarot cards, and you had shuffled them for so many decades that they were losing their colour and print. They told the same fate over and over again, for decades: Death.

You believed it; you've been killing for decades now.

Your mansion, decrepit and dilapidated, was located in the heart of a forest; it was located in the kind of woods that enclosed and then enclosed again, like a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another; the intimate perspectives of the wood changed endlessly around the interloper; the little ones walking towards the mansion towards an invented distance that perpetually receded before them. Little ones with too much curiosity in their minds–curiosity for curses, curiosity for the unknowns that spelt out their deaths in unacknowledged hieroglyphics.

The two notes of a song of a bird in the still air. Your maiden and delicious hunger winded into a song. You shuffle the tarot cards boredly, before throwing them down and kicking off your velvet chair. You impatiently hop down the stairs, and put your hand on the top of the gargoyle's head. You're stumped as to what you should do today.