𝐇(𝐀)𝐔𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 | yandere! dazai osamu

4 / 15

Morning had come faster than you had expected. It felt though as if the night and the day were seconds apart.

But these trivial thoughts were dismissed when you woke up on the floor with clothes that weren't yours.

The scratchy sensation of the old clothes tickles your skin, and it isn't pleasant when you realize that your head burnt and crackled like static. You take a deep breath in—only to flinch when the pounding perforation of your skull starts to set in. Your throat felt dry, and your head spun. Quickly clutching a hand to your head, you scramble up and realize that in the sunlight, the dolls in front of you almost look...angelic. The mannequins were dolled up with clothes that glowed in the light and the puppets' wood glimmered. Their smiles weren't so diabolically stretched—there were no shadows to manipulate their smiles. Under the sun, they looked beautiful, pure, new.

You clumsily twist the knob and this time, the door opens and lets you through. You peer down the hallway.

The night was cruel, and the house looked like a monster in its darkness. And yet during the morning, you realize how...sad it is.

The wallpapers were peeling off, revealing wooden planks and spiders inside. Olive green curtains were shadowed by insects and their cobwebs, algae, and fungi spreading on said fabric. The wood was black and rotting, each creaking softly whenever you shoot an apprehensive look. The dress around your legs sways with every step, and you find yourself marveling at its strange beauty contoured by the sunlight. You could see dust airborne in the air, frozen in stasis.

You stumble to a room where it was slightly open, only to be met with the white harsh tiles of a supposed bathroom. The bathtub was grimy, stained with brown. The sink was moldy, and the ventilation fan above the cracked window didn't even spin anymore from the dust accumulated. Your nose wrinkles at the faucet before you sighed in relief when water poured from the faucet.

After plunging your hands in to wash your face and rub the gunk out of your eyes, you step out and looked around.

"Oh, where did those come from?" You hum at the sight of piles of books next to the doorframe, each cover glimmering with dust and just a tad darker than your normal primary colors. One pile, the one on the very top had a gold plate shining in front, with what you presume to be the letters of the title on it.

Crouching down, you deftly swipe a finger over the smooth metal.

"The Face of Another by..." You squint your eyes to see the tiny letters at the bottom. "Kobo Abe?"

There was no blurb at the back, nor any illustrations. Only when you did flip through the yellowing book, hundreds and hundreds of letters and words spilled out as if they were desperate to be read. The paper felt damp and thin as if it was prone to disintegrate if you turned the page too hard.

"Gross." Coughing into the crook of your elbow, you grimace at the poignant smell of rotting paper and disintegrating ink. The quiet flipping of the pages was halted when a thick piece of card was stuck inside. You raise an eyebrow, before pulling it out.

"...Evil envies innocence and vice versa." You blankly stare at the ink, before flipping it over. Nothing. Deciding to bring the book along, you jam the card in the pages and stand up to push the library door open.

You had a schema of how libraries, especially old ones, looked like. They had fraying curtains, lines and lines of books with their spines greying with dust, carpets that were beginning to blacken, and tables the shade of mahogany gleaming under the sunlight. A student here and there writing something on paper, a cup of coffee sitting by their work. Seeing as the windows outside were cracked and shattered, you had expected a bountiful amount of light to stream through.