parasite [YANDERE!O.DAZAI/READER]

EIGHTEEN: THE HISTORIES.

"Sakata wants to speak to you."

That is what Dazai says as you emerge from the shadows in front of his dorm, your eyes closed and hair dangling before your face like an opaque veil. He swore he could hear organs play as you manifested before him, their cries like the voice of God. Ominous and seductive, you delicately push your hair behind your ear and finally open your eyes. Eyes that seemed to swallow him whole: a specific invention of darkness, made only to bloom in the dark like a Queen of the Night Flower, selenicereus grandiflorus, a cactus whose flowers bloomed and released a powerful aroma that could flood an entire garden.

"Did he now?" You slowly say.

"He said he would give back your mother's tooth if you allowed him to," Dazai says. By the sound of his voice, he didn't sound too happy, as though meeting him meant that he would be chopped liver. An outsider, staring into the bubble between two fated killers, lovers more like, with his hand on the domed cool surface begging to be let in. And he was used to feeling like this, to feel like an outsider; he had felt it all his life. Always excluded, always let down.

"Interesting," You say. "I'm not interested in him. But I am interested in getting that tooth back."

"What does it mean for you if you get the tooth back?"

You chuckle. But the sound itself is inherently sad. Like the quiet tinkling of wind chimes, alone in an opera room. Echoing on itself, reverberating forever on its own cries.

"I suppose the book hasn't told you the relationship between my mother and I."

"Neither have you. You simply told me how she died," Dazai points out. You nod, before gesturing to his door with your head.

"Let's talk indoors. It's getting warm out here."

He turns around and unlocks the dorm room, the key jingling as he pockets it. The door groans on its hinges as he opens it. He flicks on the lights before stepping aside and letting you in.

"Ladies first," He says playfully, and you chuckle. You step into his dorm and it is almost like a different realm from the world you are so familiar with. Where you came from was always a place of darkness, fibres and roots clinging onto incipient madness and insanity from your cursed bloodline. Here, the darkness is out in the open, as if Dazai had acknowledged it, whereas you hid it as a way to lure prey in. People wanted to know about darkness and how it swallowed light. They were like opposite moths, you supposed.

"Tell me more about yourself," You say, sitting down before the stumpy legged table. "I want to know more about you."

"That itself can be a declaration of love, you know," He says, sitting down with one leg propped up.

"What do you mean?"

"Learning of my past can be devastating. You may never see me the way you have seen me before," He says, pausing. "Are you sure about this?"

You blink. Slowly. Letting your eyes flutter shut for a second, before opening them to Dazai's lovely face.

"I've told you mine. What's yours?" You say, focusing on the way he stiffened.

"It's a long story. A long story with no happy ending," He says. Dazai crosses his legs. "Do you know about the Port Mafia?"

"The underground organisation? I've heard of them from the news."

"I was an executive there. It was a dark era of my life. I was hopelessly lost, with no way out of the darkness that enshrouded me..." The brunette trails off, eyes behind a wall, as if he was watching himself build walls the way he always has when it comes to his past. But they come crumbling down when you reach over and place a hand over his. Your touch annihilated him. Broke him down and rebuilt him into someone he could recognize in the mirror. Your touch healed him–which was the opposite of what you were bred to do. But you did. Perhaps that was how you managed to capture so many men underneath your claws; you had a soft quality to you that could only be procured by unspeakable violence and blood. "I had a best friend there who was the only one who I could confide in."

"What happened to him?"

"He died," Dazai bluntly says, his face turning vague once more. "From a gunshot wound."

"I'm sorry I asked. I always ask, I'm too curious," You say, a smidgen of sadness in your voice. "I drive people mad."

"You do. But sometimes a little madness is needed to retain sanity," Dazai says. "That's what I learned from the Port Mafia. If you continuously remain sane...well, you might as well be God. And that's with a capital 'G'. There has to be a prelude to breaking. Otherwise, you'll never know when you're sane or mad."

"So you were in the Port Mafia...What made you get out of there?"

"I deserted them. I found that I could no longer bear the title of executive, knowing that my best friend's last words were to save people. From being the harbinger of death and fear to this...is quite the honour."

"Is it an honour?" You tilt your head. "I quite like being a harbinger of death and fear."

"Yes, that's because you need to be in order to survive," Dazai says. He turns his head so that he's facing the window, where a light rain begins to fall. "For me? I was just lost. Alone from the get go."

A pause. A quietness that's appreciated by the both of you, a silence that was a gap between the end of a conversation to a new one.

"Well? What about you?" Dazai smiles. "What's your history?"

"It's complicated," You say, leaning your chin on the heel of your palm, fingers tapping against your lips. "My mother and I were close. My father was never in the picture: She exsanguinated him after giving birth to me. I think she thought of him as disposable," You pause. "I think I went a little mad when I lost her."

"What was she like?" Dazai thinks you're becoming more and more alien the more you speak of your mother: more and more three-dimensional.

"Everything good. Everything the opposite of what we're supposed to be," You say. "She was kind and soft to me. Her love neglected pride and horribleness the way fire neglects the sounds of what it burns. She and I are alike in a way. A part of her lives in me. She's duplicated herself in me, by continuing on our cursed bloodline. But it ends with me. Tragedy is bound to happen because of Vlad the Impaler, and I don't have the loveliness of my mother to sacrifice myself to let it happen. I suppose I wanted to wait for her to teach me how to live old."

"Did you...did you love her?" Dazai quietly asks, his words fluttering out of his mouth like a hoard of monarch butterflies that have survived migration.

You smile sadly. "I love...I loved her enough to see how God intended me to see her," You pause, then add, cheekily, "And that's with a capital 'G'."

He laughs. And that noise is like the softness of falling rain, just like the one outside. A noise that passed through everything and into your heart. The noise captured in the cavernous valves of your heart, where the noise sunk into the fleshy walls and remained there as forgotten words.

"I want to speak to Sakata," You finally say once his laughter dies down. He smiles.

"I figured. You should, if you want the tooth back."

"I need that tooth back. It's like closure. Proof that my mother existed before, in the past, in my memories, in my dreams," You say. "Also, the way I have seen you before you told me of your past is no different than how I see you now."

"And how do you see me?" He asks curiously.

"Like how I see the full moon," You say. "I've seen you plenty of times but every time you appear before me I never fail to hush, and let you shine. You glow for me."