𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇 𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 | dazai osamu *EDITING

scars

edited: ✓ | 6/1/2020

trigger warnings: mention of suicide, gore, death, scars.

This is based on the headcanon that Dazai has scars underneath his bandages from missions and suicide attempts. This is probably the fluffiest thing I've ever written on my time spent on Wattpad LOL.

—

Heartache.

At some point, we all go through this phenomenon.

It thins the heart tendons until it throbs unbearably with every breath, straining the valves and ventricles; and even if you were copulating with a loved one, sinking your breath into their skin and wanting to end up on the other side of them, it feels as if it's not enough. The flesh defines you, but you want to be closer. Split me open with a knife. It made sense that there were poets and whatnot spilling verses of this invisible hopelessness to alleviate the inferno within their ribcage because it felt like you were being strangled from the inside.

For you, it felt like your insides were crying, hurtling out blood tainted with pleural fluids and swirls of black in which the words you wanted to say had shrivelled up and rotted. There was a murder in your chest: Gruesome, ruthless, unbearably sad; it seemed to assemble some sort of crime puzzle that hung a sense of malaise in the air.

Staining your shirt, a brilliant red, before disguising itself into a mere wet water stain on the sodden fabric. But the ache remains, burning and flickering, in the corners of your eyes and every nook and cranny of your atriums.

The shadows on the walls dance irregularly and you find that they were a lot darker than usual. Was it a trick from the sentimental moonlight or just the dimness of this room? The AC hums—a microphone for the booted demons and ghosts outside.

A man rests against your breast. He breathes against the soft skin there, the vagrant scent of your perfume and flesh entrenching him; he won't outright say he loves you, but he does. (Love is a pain so sharp that it renders all others a dull throb—if he had outright said he loved you, he would feel as though the pain that he had nursed in his heart would simply break him like brittle glass.) His arms that encircle you fold the flesh, carefully, slowly—he sinks into you like a voice to a frozen lake. The windows, painted shut, bear the pattering of the rain outside. His smile is unbearably soft and unknowingly, the ache in your chest spirals into something even more painful.

"It's okay," Dazai says. His voice is mellow and baritone. Accompanied by the darkness, it rings loudly. A warm blaze. Your eyes focus on the pale face curtained by hazel locks of hair. When you inhale deeply as to compose yourself, you get a mouthful of his cologne clinging onto his vest. The heat that radiated from his body seemed something more like a dream, like a nonsensical, jarring home within a dream, where you found a sliver of comfort in the delirious bouts of sleep and consciousness. "Are you okay?"

Your eyelids drop when his bandages begin to unravel, wearily swaying in the slight breeze of the fan. The skin of his neck was lighter in tone compared to his face, but the same paleness served not for a fashion sense but for wading into an unwanted memory lane during the bouts of self-hatred.

You blink away the fog away from your eyes. Tears. They melt under his fingertips when they trace over the curve of your cheeks.

"Oh. Yeah." At first, you don't recognize the voice, but quickly realize that the clawing in your throat is caused by vibration of your words. The coarse noise sends a shiver down your spine and it chills your blood in your veins. "I'm fine."

A chilling howl, somewhere deep in the fissures of your bones, spreading across your entire skeleton that instinctively makes you curl up to his warmth. An aria of love.

Dazai, secretly delighted that you found a sliver of comfort in his presence, brings your shattered pieces closer until the slow, regular rhythm of your heart rumbled across the planes of his skin. The softness of your flesh, seeping through the fabric of his bandages, was enough to quirk a smile on his lips.

"You don't act like it," He teases. Your fingers run through his hair, unknotting the tiny tangles the stood in their way. But they pause midway and rest on the back of his neck. "It's okay to be tired of acting all the time."

"I know that," You pinch his cheek playfully when his own fingers reach up to stroke a scar on the side of your neck; it branded you with such a sickening backstory that makes him despise the Port Mafia even more. He could still vividly see the wave of blood bursting from your neck where the knife had cleanly slit through, how your blood was like a garish hair gel as he frantically tried to compose himself, how it had nearly killed you as your head lolled on his shoulder when held you. "But that's up to me to decide."

"Of course," He chuckles. His fingers don't leave your neck. "But we all need to rest at some point."

"Mhm." You're falling into a haze of confusion when you find that there were no sexual undertones to his touch—and that very thought burns you alive. The fact that someone wanted you beyond what you could offer as a woman made you want to curl up and weep.

Your eyes flicker to the scars once more on his own skin, and he immediately catches on as though you were a hook to his eye.

A cracking moment of vulnerability. Discordant but comforting in a twisted sense.

"It's rather strange. To think that everything I would have never wanted to lose always ends up getting lost," SUICIDE SUICIDE SUICIDE SUICIDE SUICIDE. "You'd think that that would deter me from wanting things, but it only worsened it."

"I understand," SMOKING CUTTING NOT SLEEPING CIGARETTE BURNS TRIGGERING MURDER SUICIDE. "I really do."

If you love something, you will never lose it; even the simple memory of it will remain true to you.

A chain of thoughts rattles noisily in your head. How he had gone through the abuse, the torture, the pain, in being misunderstood and dismissed. Though the scars that littered your skin, neck to toes down, signified some sort of connection to Dazai Osamu, there was nothing but a vague outline that you could deduce from him. And so, the thought of being unable to emphasize and connect with another human being, especially with someone whom you love more than anything else, brings a wave of excruciating agony to crash down and sweep away your organs.

But you're wrong.

You understand this man just as much as you understand yourself. You realize that the one person in the world who loves you isn't the one you thought would be, and this is because how he defined himself was not that different from how he viewed himself.

He had come to realize this when he was on the cusp of losing you. When something precious and irretrievable is lost, we have the feeling of being awakened from a dream. God knows who he would have flown to if this egg-like world of his had been broken from your death. This oxidizing world would have meant nothing if you had been the one who Death had chosen.

His hand cups your neck. You stare down at him. He stares up at you, with his cheek pressed against your bosom, and the raw, loving smile on his face makes you fall apart.

How you loved him so. Much like one falls in love with the whitened nature of a scar, remembering, with a crude fondness, the memory behind it.