parasite [YANDERE!O.DAZAI/READER]

FIVE: THE MOTHER.

"Come, it's late," You outstretch a hand and Dazai blindly takes it, as if your beauty was making everything heady and dizzying. "It's cold outside. You come sleep here for the night. You'll have your own room, just across mine, in case you need anything."

"Convenient, just in case I get scared by what goes bump in the night," Dazai says jokingly, and you chuckle. It was times like this that confused him–you were a monster, a blood-hungry parasite, and yet there were times you acted so human it was impossible to decipher where the schism was drawn.

"Yes, of course," You say, and lead him up the stairs.

"The dress," He says, rubbing the fabric between his index finger and thumb. "It's not yours, is it?"

"It is not. It is my mother's," You say, not turning around to speak to him. You continue climbing the stairs.

"Why'd you decide to wear your mother's dress?"

"Why not?" You finally reach the top of the stairs and turn around, and in the impending darkness does your face seem as though it was glowing, like moonlight was seeping out of you. "I inherited it after she died."

"What happened to her?"

You grab his hand and drag him to his room. You don't need to tug that hard; he seemed completely content in being dragged around by you, into the deeper darkness.

"She was burnt at the pyre with a wooden stake to the heart," You say. "Quite the spectacle, I must say."

Dazai imagines the scenario: A woman with a face that resembled yours if you stared at it through a glass pane, with a bleeding heart penetrated by a wooden stake, imitating that of those Luzon bleeding heart birds. He can't imagine tears, but he can imagine the rope that bound her to the pyre before the fire was ignited. Great ribbons of vermillion and red roaring and rising hungrily to the top before the entire body was consumed and charred black once the fire had its fill of vampire flesh.

"Were you there?"

"I was hiding in the crowd," You say. "With a hood over my head," You turn around and gesture to a door. "Your room. Sleep tight, don't let the vampires bite."

"Oh?" Dazai chuckles.

"Me, of course," You say, with a hand on your chest and a proud smirk on your lips. "Might come biting if you...smell too good."

You close the door. Dazai stares at it before entering his own chambers for the night.

His room was relatively similar to yours when you had welcomed him for a tarot card reading: There was a large bed in the middle of the room, with strings of pearls hanging on the wall, made of black velvet. There was a dead bird in a cage by the open window, its legs up in the air and feathers fluttering to the ground: a final cry for help unheard in this haunted chateau. He picks up one of the feathers and brushes his finger against the soft barbs, staring at the open view outside. There was a fireplace in front of the bed, its content a murky black that indicated it was once lit. That makes a flare of jealousy sprout in Dazai's chest. Surely that meant you had invited others into this room to spend the night? But that makes him halt in his steps to the bed.

Did he truly feel desire for a monster like you?

Desire in itself is empty, a hollow tunnel; in other words it merely indicates direction, but never destination. Destinations, in any case, always remain phantasmagoric and unclear; the closer one gets to them, the more enigmatic they become. There is no way to appease desire. The only answer to truly "appease" it is go towards it. But towards what?

You.

A howl sounded outside. An aria of a stray dog. A shiver involuntarily crawls down his spine. He takes off his beige coat and hangs it by the coat hanger by the door, and climbs into the bed. The duvets are heavy and loud in their rustling, but they are comfortable.