PIED PIPER | dazai osamu

24: heartless: a face to a memory.

Just when his pain had begun to alleviate, Mori's deeds had ripped him open again and again; all at once did the shame of his negligence and the recollection of his failures unfold before his eyes and, seized by a certain flame of determined destruction, he could not help but mumble his problems to the orange-haired man beside him by the bar, lips pressed to the cold, glass rim.

"How old did you say this kid was?" Oda asks. Dazai presses his palm to his forehead.

"Same as me."

"So fairly young."

"Yep. Would you believe that?" Dazai tosses his head back, his neck muscles straining from the extreme angle. "Mori takes advantage of a child's mind."

"Have you not done the same with Akutagawa?" The curiosity of a caged bird was in his voice. His eyes, caught and webbed by the mono-amber lights, echoed in the bitter hypocrisy of his friend; then they closed for a moment, as though to hide his cynicism. But when they opened, the mist of far-away dream passed through his iridescent eyes. "Every time I see him, you're always berating the kid."

"I don't love Akutagawa," Is his flat answer. For a moment, a hideous sense of humiliation fell over him, but then it was blanched away by the thought that Akutagawa strived for his approval—Mori's doing was nothing short of destruction. Dazai's was one of creation. "He performs to get something. But here, it's like if Mori broke her legs to stop her from performing to get something."

His companion blinks. But that small movement is a clear indicator of his acknowledgement. "Hm."

"Do you not believe me, Oda?" Dazai smiles strangely. "This isn't one of my acting schemes."

"I find it hard to believe you're doing this out of love," Oda admits. There is a heavy tone that struggles to be let free from his lips, and Dazai recognizes this sort of hesitance as something akin to danger—Dazai was aware he was a sinister, strange child, and Oda, with his numerous foster children, was quick in identifying a certain darkness that came from love. How could he not? Oda and his love for literature; Oda and his familial love for children; Oda and his filthy environs of child exploitation and human trafficking. "Are you—"

"Let me say it plain: I love someone, and I failed at it," He murmurs. "I looked at her and felt this inevitable sadness and the staggering unhappiness that would come in talking to her. But I still did. It wasn't attraction at first sight—I've already experienced enough of that with prostitutes," The boy then lays his head on his folded arms on the counter. "I know what I can do to help. But I'm...I'm...afraid that it would worsen it."

Oda frowns silently. "It?"

"I don't know how she feels anymore. The lines have polarized into myself and Mori's (first name)," He then rocks his chair back. "People are familiar with the idea of adopting certain characteristics from others when they spent time with each other—that, but no longer does she see me in her."

"Do you see her in yourself?"

"That's the problem, Oda," Dazai showed no sign of emotion when he spoke. The quiet words, fluttering past his lips, seemed more like a whisper than a muttered saying. "I don't anymore. It's been taken away from me."

The two drink away their problems, with the older man escorting Dazai out of the bar with an arm slung over his shoulders.

Whenever Dazai woke up (and I would say whenever instead of when—there was no consistency to his bizarre sleeping schedule), he would despair at the lack of sense and purpose in his life. But today was a strange day—he woke up at 6 AM with his mouth tasting bitter from the alcohol, clothes wrinkled amongst the crushed duvets of his never-made mattress and popped out of his sleepy bubble with a hefty sigh.