A Fatalist's Sorrow | Akutagawa Ryūnosuke One-Shots

04 | the girl who should have died

WARNING; themes of suicide + death. Please skip this one if reading it will upset/trigger you ;-;

You felt like you were on a tightrope.

You were balancing on a tightrope and those voices, those voices, that whispered in your head and bruised the soft flesh on your bones, were making you more and more unbalanced, more unstable. If they kept at it you knew you were going to fall. You would be a falling girl with nobody to catch you.

Those voices bit harder than the razors that still lay, untouched, in the bathroom cupboard, hidden behind the pills, the dozens and dozens of pills, your mother's pills.

Some days you just wanted to escape. Escape. You could have an easy escape, given a cutting edge, given a bedsheet, given a view on the skyrise.

Any of these could help you escape. Any of these could make you fall into the soft, velvety arms of darkness.

The blades forgotten, you left the house - not home, it was never home - and started walking. You walked and walked, blindly, lost in your own eternal twilight, until you became a blot on the sky, a shadow on the rooftop of a dingy old building.

It was a different world up on that rooftop. It was the perfect hideout, the perfect escape. It was a world trapped in time, a world nobody remembered, a world in which nobody would miss you. Not like anyone would anyway.

The wind sounded sad up here, whistling an empty tune as it skirted the slate grey tiles, the same, everyday. A bluish fog encased everything else, gothic and eerie, the city merely a circus of silhouettes below. It was just you, the air, the sky. Cloudless tonight, bruised a dark shade of purple. There were no stars. Not a single one in the sky.

Even the stars had abandoned you.

You looked down into the fog, swirling around the roof like leering faces, ghostly, reaching out with deceptive smiles and open arms - deceptively open, arms that promised to catch you, but arms you would fall straight through and hit the ground instead.

But they sure were welcoming. You could fall right into those arms...

"I wouldn't do that, if I were you."

You'd felt yourself swaying for a moment, swaying forwards, but the voice had made you jump, backwards this time, away from those arms, those smiles, those sweet whispers, sad wind.

You jerked around.

There was a shadow, a shadow you hadn't noticed before. It was leaning against the chimney breast, long and thin, a silhouette with no face that clothed itself in black. Then the shadow moved and a man stepped out. As long and thin as the shadow had been, skin as pale as moonlight, eyes as dark as the unlit sky.

He was looking at you with an intense black gaze.

"Well you're not me, so don't tell me what to do," you replied stiffly.

His lips twitched, coldly. "Oh but you and I are mirrors."

This man was making no sense. "Are you high?"

"Very high," he said in a bored tone, indifferent, uncaring. "Hundreds of feet off the ground. That's one nasty fall. Might kill yourself."

You felt sick. "That's not funny."

"No, it's not. But you're not going to fall."

You turned away from him. Why were you listening to this shadow anyway. "We're all born to die," you said, shrugging. "Why does it matter if it happens a little sooner?"

You felt a presence then, right behind you. So close your back felt hot and sweaty from the heat of human contact. "Only the weak die," he breathed against your ear. "The weak die and give way to the strong. Throwing your life away like that is a waste. It's unnatural."

"I'm unnatural," you muttered, digging your nails into your palm. Your voice dripped with acid.

"All the strong ones are."

You fixed him with a seething look. "Who the fuck even are you?"

"That doesn't matter."

"Just... just leave me alone," you bit at him, turning around to face the dizzying drop again. Those arms... those tempting arms.

A hand grabbed your waist, holding firm. "No can do," he hissed, the words fanning over your neck. You tried to pull out of his grasp, swinging your hips to shake him off, jerking this way and that. "Don't-" He started, but it was too late. You pushed him off at the same time as stumbling forward. Your feet tangled with air and your stomach gave a sickening lurch and then you were falling.

Wind gushed past, screaming in your ears, clotting out the rest of the world around you.

You didn't scream, didn't struggle. It was a silent descent. You just let yourself fall.

A falling girl with nobody to catch you.

Not even those arms, those faces in the mist. They just grinned as you passed them, letting you fall into the circus.

You squeezed your eyes closed, falling, falling...

And then you weren't. Because you felt a strange kind of warmth embrace your body, warmth and darkness.

Black velvet.

You embraced the shadows.

-

You weren't expecting to wake up.

You weren't expecting to be able to feel your chest rising and falling with short, shuddering breaths.

You weren't expecting to hear the pulse of your heart beating on the monitor, beating, for everyone to hear, for everyone to know you were alive.

Why

Alive.

Living.

Breathing.

Didn't

Why were you still alive?

You

You jolted up and screamed. You screamed when you realised you were in a hospital. The air was thick, thick in your lungs, thick with loss and heartache. Ghosts lingered in the corners of the room, silent, staring at you with envy.

Oh how you envied them.

Let

Because you weren't one of the ghosts in the room. You still had air in your lungs. Rotten air in your rotten lungs. Air you didn't want, air that felt like poison in your bloodstream.

Me

"No, no, no, no," you started moaning, clutching at your head, clawing at the wires hooking you up to the machine.

You sobbed, clawed, moaned. Screamed until your voice was raw. "No, no, no, no, no, please, no, please. I'm supposed to be dead, I'm supposed to be dead, why am I not dead? WHY DIDN'T YOU LET ME DIE?!"

Die

"The weak will die. Die, and make way for others, make way for the strong. You can be strong, [Y/N]. You can get stronger if you choose to live."