Chapter Text
“Your voice, it’s different. I’m different.”
While sleeping, Dazai had suddenly appeared in a foreign place.
Belatedly, he realised that he couldn’t see. Had he been blindfolded and kidnapped while he was sleeping?
His arm hair rose, his pupils dilated. Every bone in his body screamed ‘danger!’ Dazai didn’t understand: his mind was calm, but his very existence trembled. This shouldn’t be happening, he thought. His mind ran, trying to find reasons. What was happening?
Maybe it was because his sight had been taken, forcing his other senses to cope with the loss—Dazai noticed that the air felt like…it didn’t exist. It was too light. He couldn’t feel it against his skin as he moved. It was odd. The surface he stood on was equally nameless… It was too soft for stone, smooth like ice, but his feet did not freeze, nor did he slip.
The temperature was the worst though: neither too hot nor too cold. Unnoticeable. Average, even. Perhaps an omen for anything but average. The entire place smelled as if it hadn’t seen the light of day in centuries, moist and rotten. The stench was pervasive, but the presence of something so aggressive felt like a blessing in a place so otherwise numb and quaint.
There was no way he was going to die in this stinky place, all alone too at that!
Dazai picked up his pace, moving aimlessly to find something—anything.
Then, a strange thought came to him; perhaps it wasn’t that he was blind, but that everything else wore the same face, perhaps there was nothing else to see. What would your eyes tell you, when there was nothing to see? Not even a void, nor a light—just an absence so profound it couldn’t be described. What was nothingness if not the absence of everything?
This place was too quiet, too foreign–it was too weird.
Dazai wanted to escape, now.
“Dazai!”--Chuuya! A familiar voice beckoned to him, and a smile graced his lips. He felt as if a beautiful bouquet of sunflowers and daffodils had bloomed where his heart was. Ofcourse, the doggy would have found him even here. Dazai’s pupils relaxed and he felt giddy, despite the horrific situation–And why wouldn’t he? Chuuya was here, after all!
Glad to find Chuuya, in a place so bizarre and wrong, brought a comfort Dazai wasn’t ready to admit. He instantly went to wrap himself around the little slug but—Something was wrong.
Why wasn’t Chibi pushing him? Or yelling? Why was he so… quiet…?
Finally, Chuuya spoke something,
His voice was foreign, bizarre and oppressive,
“g—-ewwalmkss1212322 eswded12332t—--------” It burned in his ears like scalding hot water. It flowed in his ears like heavy lead, and his skull rang.
‘Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!’ Dazai’s pupils dilated, his hands shivered. Was the man he was embracing even Chuuya? He instantly leaped away, his heart thrashing violently in his chest, trying desperately to dig its way through flesh and bone.
Why was EVERYTHING SO WRONG?! What was going on?!
All of a sudden, everything was too loud. Foreign voices screamed and wailed in his mind, and he too joined them. Together, they sang a cursed symphony.
Suddenly, a hitch escaped his mouth, and it was too raspy, too crude, too weird! it wasn’t his!
He stared at his hands—no, not his hands. Wrong. Too long? Too short? They didn’t belong. They weren’t his. The body wasn’t his. Was he an imposter? An alien? A parasite–a shell of who he was before? Now, he could no longer be deluded into believing himself as human—no, he was human—no, he wasn’t.
He was just a crude remain of what could have been.
He wasn’t a human. Not any longer.
The thought was too cruel, and Dazai found that he couldn’t live with it, nor did he want to.
If he were the remains of things left, he’d rather not remain at all.
He brought his hands upwards, and ten delicate fingers wrapped around his neck and squeezed, again and again, more violently than the last, until he helplessly dropped, gasping, with agony and despair in his heart. He had tried. He really had, but he couldn’t die.
The daffodils that then bloomed in his heart shriveled. At least they wouldn’t leech at him again. Despair was a harsh teacher, but all she wanted for you was to learn. She stood like a parent patiently awaiting the return of a rebellious child, beckoning Dazai into her embrace.
Who was Chuuya? Who was he?