Work Text:
If love could kill, Dazai would have been dead seven times over — as his love for Chuuya is a case so severe, so encompassing in its spread, that there’s no remedy. He has been doomed to meet his end at Chuuya’s mercy with no salvation or hope.
There’s the not quite life before and the life after.
A waiting game for a finale, grand and pompous, charged with expectations to which their every encounter adds, since the very first time they touched. Dazai finds it ironic that even though he’s the only one in this world who is immune to the overwhelming pressure of the For The Tainted Sorrow, he’s also the one who crumbles under the gravity of Chuuya’s gaze the most. Every time they are together he is ground to dust and reborn anew, never the same as before their shadows touched, an occurrence so common and so mundane at this point, it takes four years of separation between them for people to be able to pick up on it.
Dazai seeks the relief of death like Sisyphys longs to abandon the boulder, with a sense of routine that comes in knowing that the things you do — won’t lead you where you want to be, but they are also the only things you can do. Life for Dazai is a burden that he bears with fatigue so similar to the one Atlas must feel while holding the sky, as every second that passes feels like centuries of divine torture. But if it is what allows him to leave even a trace of himself in Chuuya’s mind, he shall hunch his shoulders to endure the weight of it, for he is here to stay until the end.
Dazai remembers being a kid and feeling pure and full before the first set of hands touched him in a way that made him want to simply stop being.
Stop feeling.
Stop.
He remembers the half-whispered arguments justifying the human nature. How they left him desperately wanting to not be human anymore, hoping that the metamorphosis would lead to freedom. It only led to the numbness embracing him in a gentle cocoon.
There was a life before and not quite life after.
The years of it last for so long — he mistakes the indifference to the world and himself as the proof of his wish-come-true. He is no longer human and so he seeks death. Because the world is an unbearable place for creatures like him. Even though he never met others akin to himself.
In a constant noise of existence, the thrilling hum of death rattle is the loudest and most exciting sound he hears and feels. From the first childish hesitant cut to the gurgling noise of drowning in an estate pond, to the first ever blast of a gun that misses him, as he thinks, by luck, but is actually meant to cut the rope he's hanging from, to the clean splash of blood from a cut aorta of his grandfather; Dazai chases death like a man possessed and is greatly upset when people stop him before getting the so so so desired relief.
He tells everyone who’ll listen that the death is his one true love, that he wants to go all the way with her, not just fumble over the clothes as teenagers his age do. That he hears her voice and it makes him feel things.
Then he meets God that looks like a boy with hair so bright it blinds him, eyes a color that makes sky gray in comparison, attitude so harsh Dazai feels the so-longed tickle of excitement just by poking at him as if he got hands on one of Mori’s scalpels.
It is the most twisted turn of fate that the God in his most corrupted form bears the voice of death, the one which Dazai listened to, as a lullaby, in his not quite life before.
Dazai did not need convincing to devote himself at the altar of Chuuya’s being, but hearing him roar in a sky, descending to his arms like a fallen angel, makes Dazai overcome with a need to possess the right to its truth.
There is a life-as-a-devotee before and the life-as-a-preacher after.
There’s also no one else in the whole wide world whom Dazai will allow to join his religion.