Revelations {BSD/SKK}

8: Thirty-Six Hours

Trigger Warnings in end notes

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After the thirteenth time reliving the torture Dazai begun to feel numb to even the impossible, searing pain. He began to tune it out - it was excruciating, but it was still fundamentally just pain. He was experienced in the ways of pain.

Every memory ended in the same way: Mori would announce it was time for Dazai to forget, and then his body would fall unconscious. He'd only hover in the darkness for a few moments before waking up in another memory. It seemed endless. The fourth time fingers had pushed under his skin Dazai had realised that Mori could have done this hundreds of times. There was no way of knowing - he didn't remember any of it.

After that realisation, Dazai had begun to visualise how many scars there were on his body. With a number in mind he started to figure out how many cuts on average Mori was making each 'session'. It was a decent enough distraction from the pain that Chuuya had said he wouldn't feel. Liar. He began to divide, pain-addled mind struggling through the calculations. How many sessions would it take for all the scars to be made?

It was a struggle. The pain was distracting, unusual for him but then he'd also never experienced agony quite so intense before. His mind threw up numbers such as forty three and Dazai quickly stopped trying to work it out, but the reality of such a number had already sunk in. Still he tried to scour it from his mind. It was better not knowing, than to be faced with a number like that.

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"How very bold of you Nakahara, trespassing on my property. What, come to steal more of my subjects?"

His body didn't react to the name because to this Dazai it wasn't anything familiar yet, wasn't a name he cared about. For the first time in what must have been at least ten hours Dazai truly fought against himself, trying desperately to get his limbs to move the way he wanted them to. They stubbornly refused. His body was shuffling through papers, organising them into files to be placed in too-large cabinets.

At first the paperwork had been a nice reprieve from the same surgical table, the scalpel and the impossible pain. It had been at first a little odd to feel the presence of clothes on his skin, the slight scratch of fabrics after hours and hours of cold and nakedness. As he had appreciated the mundane of it Dazai had also wondered what was about to happen that would make Mori wipe his memories of such an ordinary task.

At first he'd assumed he was to see a confidential paper that wasn't for his eyes. Now he was starting to think it was something involving Chuuya, because of course Chuuya had been making a mess of his life all along. That was just typical.

The door to Mori's study was open and words drifted to Dazai's waiting ears, even as his body continued diligently shuffling papers.

"Bastard. Why were you sniffing around last night, huh? You stay the fuck away from me and I don't break your incredibly crushable bones. That was our deal."

That voice. The desperation that came with hearing it hit Dazai with the force of a physical blow. Despite knowing it was useless he struggled once more against his body, silently pleading as though it could make some kind of difference. Anything.

If he could just walk into Mori's office everything would be better, everything would be fine because Chuuya would understand what was happening - he'd have to understand, it was Chuuya - and he'd know and he'd break the spell, he'd make it all stop and Dazai would wake up back in his own body with Chuuya right there. And Chuuya, Chuuya would tell him he did well and give him a fluffy blanket and probably make him something nice to eat and-