𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇 𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 | dazai osamu *EDITING

sparrow

published: ✓ | 6/1/2020

trigger warnings: character death, angst in general.

A completely new chapter! This was written in the span of three hours, something I'm somewhat impressed by.

—

A sound of something breaking.

It is not the heart.

You have heard the heart shattering. The heart is, metaphorically, the most fragile part of the human body—you split it open and let another dwell in the thrumming ventricles; you let it sink into the flesh of another as they lock you in their arms, much like you would do to a wounded, bloodied dove in the marbled curve of your hand, its fervent heart fluttering against the fragile skin there. Any unwarned movements would send a rip down the eggshell membrane; it shudders within the fleshly pustule.

Even then, knowing that he had such a delicate thing, and I say 'thing', for it was a deplorable chrysalis dangling within your ribcage, he breaks it as though you had a spare one lying about behind it.

A sound of unfamiliarity. After all, you had never been confronted with the possibility that he would break it.

I say that the shattering noise had not been the heart breaking, because that was the noise of the wine glass and ink bottle crashing onto the floor as you swept it all off the desk. Your phone follows—the screen ocellated with craters as it smashes against the wall.

The noise of your heart breaking had been a quiet, muffled crack, much like the noise of a common sparrow's wing being twisted backwards.

The calm before the despair, where the hysterical, plangent scream was beginning to brew rapidly within the bruising breast.

He had died with a single bullet through his head. Nothing more, nothing less—the beholder of your heart gone, like seafoam, like the penetrating tip of a finger jabbing the stoic surface of the lake: A dip, coterie of ripples, the whisper of a dying droplet.

This tale was supposed to take you where he went. Devotion was supposed to let you follow his lead.

Had that meant nothing?

Laboured breathing. Your actions are stiff, jerky; your fingers shake and an intolerable chill sink past the gooseflesh and into the bone, cutting through the preserved marrow.

With every step you took, dropping the coat and scrambling through the dim veil of a late afternoon, it felt as though the earth had begun to open up a fissure for you to drop into.

"YOU FUCKING IDIOT!" You had screamed into the air. The pain no longer gave you pleasure, nor did it cleanse, as cathartic pain itself sounded, but more so had it stripped your vessel clear of feeling anything at all. Like the bursting smart of numbness after ripping off a band-aid; that split second prolonged as the pulsating bruise within your chest spread—and later would you realize it would embed deeply into your joints, your eyes, your muscles. "OH MY GOD! YOU FUCKING IDIOT!"

Met with the worst pain that not even Dazai could imagine, you howled in agony through your tears, clawing at the grass around you and cursing every God twirling about behind the clouds. Even when your eyes were blinded with tears, reducing your world into nothing but a swirling nonsensical kaleidoscope, you could imagine with a cruel vividness the look that must have been on his face when he was seconds away from death: The look on his face—similar to that of a child about to melt into tears—had begun to sear into the private darkness of your eyelids.