parasite [YANDERE!O.DAZAI/READER]

TWENTY SIX: THE LOVERS.

When you wake up, you're standing with a crowd of people surrounding you. All of them have mirrored your appearance: A cloak, the hood drawn over the eyes, swaying by your ankles. You take it off and let it rest against the back of your neck, looking around.

It is the same place where they burnt your mother. It must be the year 1910, when she was sentenced to death for vampirism and terrorism. Let ruin end here, you think to yourself. 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here', Inferno (Dante). Let this be the final time you see something as infernal as the death of your mother. Let things settle into rust and ash. Let you find honey, where there was once a slaughter. Let you find lilacs, where there was once a tiger's maw. Let you heal, for once, instead of using other humans' blood as a poultice for your own eternal bleeding. You were always bleeding, licking at your wound, howling for help; but like the 52-hertz whale, the frequency of your cries went unheard, and instead all people got was another dead body in their hands.

"(First name)?"

You look at the direction of the voice: up. And there, tied to the pyre, was your mother, who fondly smiles down at you despite her bondage to the sticks and wood. You can't reach up to untie her, so you're barraging past people's shoulders to get to her, and the more you gain ground, the more imminent the fate of her burning seems to be.

"Don't come any closer," She says, gently. "We have many things to talk about, don't we?"

"I missed you," Is all you say, collapsing onto the ground and breaking into inconsolable sobs. All this time you were just a pained femme fatale, alone and hurting in the pentacle that was being at the top of the food pyramid. You were hurting, you were broken, but you had to keep pushing on, not for the sake of yourself but for the sacrifice your mother made to save you. "I missed you so much."

"It's a shame they burnt me alive," Your mother says, an inkling of sympathy in her voice. "I would have taught you how to become old."

"But we don't grow old. Not with human blood."

"I suppose I've grown used to being around humans that do grow old to be saying that," She says, laughing. And this is not one of her silvery, whispery laughs; it is a deep laugh that came straight from the heart. You smile faintly, through your tears pearled down your cheeks. They hung like drops of resin, flammable and dangerous. "Have you fallen in love yet?"

You open your mouth but hesitate. She sees your hesitation and says,

"Love is a very human emotion. It's something that we learn into a relationship, not something we are born with. I suppose vampires like us can never love, not when we have such primal hunger, but there's always a chance that the lion will stop for the lamb."

You frown. "But you told me all your life that the lion cannot stop for the lamb."

She nods. "I have. And it is true. But love hinders the lion. You think it can hold the lamb without scarring it? No, it must learn to declaw itself."

"Are you saying I have to mutilate myself for love?"

"Isn't that what love is?" She wryly says. "Love is just a mutilated form of hunger."

"I met a man...He knows of my vampirism. And he loves me..." You trail off, trying to find words for him. "But my hands are too bloodied to hold him. I can't love him."

"Yet you held him. Yet he's been held," She says. "Isn't that enough for him?"

"I don't know," You say, hanging your head. You sounded defeated, as if you were too confused about the boundaries between hunger and love. "I don't know anymore. I don't even know if I'm dead or alive."