Chapter Text
Fyodor is praying at the altar when their world, at last, completes its noose.
Death comes in the sound of an open door. Dazai—and it must be Dazai, because who else would it be—enters with soft feet, steps barely sounding. They don’t open their eyes but can see, with striking clarity, the shift of shadow across white marble. It catches something heavy in their heart.
“Oh well would you look at you,” Dazai’s voice comes, sweet and airy, “just like a sitting duck.”
A numb point of pressure has built on their forehead, where its rested against their knuckles, hands knit. Their elbows hurt from hours of being pressed against the altar’s hardwood. Fyodor unfurls slowly, lifting their head, straightening their aching back, returning their arms to their sides before twisting around and opening their eyes.
“Hm,” they say, somewhat in agreement.
Dazai’s lips curl. “How uncharacteristic.”
“And yet,” they return, “you’re here.”
That is to say: do not act surprised that I am simply waiting here to be taken, when you have already expected me to be so. You would not be here if you did not. Of all the places they could be, they are here at the most obvious of them all: the closest church to Meursault. Had they any intent of not being found, it would be laughable to find them here.
Dazai doesn’t answer. He’s still wearing that godawful prison uniform, frayed and dirty and bloodstained. The sight makes Fyodor’s skin itch under their matching wear. Will they be allowed a shower, before the execution?
“Are you here to take me out?”
Two meanings.
Dazai grins. “Of course!”
“Oh?” Fyodor tilts their head. “Escort me, then, I won’t resist.”
It’s a pry for confirmation more than anything.
“Ah,” Dazai says, sounding very nearly apologetic, “I’m afraid you won’t be leaving.”
Fyodor almost smiles. That’s confirmation. It’s a shame about the shower. They would have liked to die in clean flesh, but that’s alright.
“Oh?”
“In interest of good sportsmanship, I mean.” Dazai makes this vague gesture with his hand, shifts weight from his left leg to his right, and manages to embody a lovely image of flippant uncaring.
“Good sportsmanship,” Fyodor repeats, raising a brow, amused.
“Of course!” Dazai nods, eagerly, “It’s me you’ve been playing, y’know! Not them! Even if your ability interferes with normal methods, they’ll find some way, even if they have to eradicate your matter. No no no, I can’t let something like that happen. It’d just be rude. Wouldn’t it just be so rude not to take your life myself?”
Fyodor can’t help but laugh, incredulous. He’s really this considerate? It’s ridiculous. It’s disproportional. It’s utterly absurd. How completely meaningless.
“Hey! Don’t laugh.” Dazai frowns, miffed. He walks closer, up a step to the altar, until Fyodor could reach out and touch him. They do not attempt to leave. Another step, and they’re truly crowded. His body cages them against the altar, bone of their spine against its hard edge, and in the span of a blink, there’s a knife to their throat. “I only have a knife on me right now, but...” he smiles, “I could choke you too! Take your pick, I’m fine with anything.”
“Nothing too elaborate, then,” Fyodor says.
“No time for it, I’m afraid. Terribly sorry, I would have loved to give you something pretty.”
It’s not as if this isn’t pretty. Sunset bathes the pews in thick, heavy gold. Splinters of pink and orange filter in through the stained glass windows. Red. This place is full with what, to Fyodor, unveils itself as divinity. It has soothed their bare, aching feet and aching palms, and aching everything. Their plan has failed, and they could live if they so chose, but they have not; Fyodor will find in death the same salvation they sought to bring others. They could drown in it, this liquid color, they could find absolution in the heaviness of this moment.
In a test, they search for Dazai’s free hand with their own. When their fingers nudge against his, he takes their hand without hesitation, and their palms press together.
Yes, Fyodor could find absolution in this.
“I didn’t realize you liked me so much,” Fyodor says, eventually, and it’s the truth.
“Hm?”
Fyodor lifts their head and meets his black-abyss irises. Dazai startles, this little jump of his shoulders and widening of his eyes, and it takes catching a glimpse of their own reflected face for Fyodor a moment to puzzle why. Their lashes are still clumped unevenly with wetness. He has never seen them cry before.
They smile.
“You plan to kill me here because you don’t want me to die alone.”
They can barely feel the details of Dazai’s hand against theirs, only the molten heat of it. Their extremities have been so numbed by overwork and October chill. They’ve barely had feeling in their feet since Dazai nearly drowned them. It feels forever ago.
“Maybe,” Dazai answers, and stupidly, some chemical blooms in Fyodor’s chest. It burns.
“Because you don’t want to die alone,” they say.
You do not want me to die alone because you would not want to die alone yourself. Dazai would not want to die in some cold, formal, underground execution chamber, surrounded by strangers who hate him, and thus, he is attempting to spare this for Fyodor.
Dazai blinks, then smiles. “Guilty as charged.”
It’s really just so, so terribly—
Fyodor knows how to make this proportional, how to make it even and level and fair. In death, at least, Fyodor knows how to exchange sincere niceties. Dazai is offering them a kind death. They know how to repay that. How to make it right.
Fyodor’s weak heart thuds violently within its cage of flesh and bone, ba-thump. Dazai’s knife kisses cold on the skin of their throat. They swallow, and the bob of their Adam’s apple against it draws blood.
“Alright,” Fyodor decides, “let’s find a way to die.”
For the first time, Dazai falters.
“What?”
“You have been looking for a person to die with for some time now, no?”
“...Well, yes, but...”
Fyodor waits patiently. Dazai does not speak.
“But what?”
Still no answer. Fyodor guides the blade away from their throat, and taps Dazai to give them room. They push themself onto the altar behind them, legs dangling over its edge. Like this, Dazai is below them, if only just barely. They trace a numb finger through the mess of his hairline and feel the phantom sensations through their worn nerves.
“Why are you hesitating?”
This snaps him from his stupor, at least. He steps back and draws a hand to his chest and pulls this mock-tearful face. “T-this is just so sudden! A girl’s heart is delicate! It can’t take such things!”
It’s an imitation. He’s mimicking romantic leads from TV dramas.
Fyodor doesn’t entertain it.
“I want to die. You want to die. You are going to kill me regardless; we are already halfway to a double suicide.” Then, although surely there’s no need: “It’s simple logic.”
Because it is. It only makes sense.
“...I suppose it is,” Dazai answers, eventually. There’s an odd note to his voice. Something fragile, and hopeful, and disbelieving. Something like awe.
Dazai sucks in a breath. Politely, Fyodor pretends not to notice its shake.
“Is that a yes?”
One heartbeat, two, three, four. Fyodor counts it in their neck. Sunset makes autumn foliage of the church, and among that, Dazai’s cold brown skin resembles the fallen oak leaves that would collect in Fyodor’s lap when they’d rest under dying canopies. Fyodor would trace a numb finger down their smooth surfaces and become wretched with envy. The quiet is so gaping it nearly swallows the ever present ring of their ears.
“Well,” Dazai says, and smiles, bright like he’s been charmed, “how could I possibly reject a passionate proposal like that?”
-
In some divine joke, their first stop after leaving the church is Meursault’s transfer building. It cuts a brutal shape against the shoreline, high walls of flat concrete, water lapping at its base. Dazai picks the locks and Fyodor directs them to the storage rooms for confiscated inmate possessions. Fyodor locates their hat, cloak, and cross, which is really all that’s important for them, but Dazai...
Dazai finds his coat, and the rest of his clothes, but lingers rummaging around for minutes and minutes on end. Even as Fyodor sinks exhausted to the floor, Dazai paces around and checks and rechecks again and again with obviously rising...anxiety? Antsiness.
Eventually, “What?”
“What what?”
“Must you be obtuse?”
“...My book’s missing.”
“Your book?”
“The Complete Suicide.”
“Ah,” Fyodor says, words clicking into place and tying with the image of something small and red. Fyodor had never seen Dazai without it until Meursault. “It’s special to you?”
Dazai’s lips press thin. It’s enough an answer as anything.
He must have had that book right up until being stripped down in this building. Fyodor slides their gaze from the messy floor to a distant window. The world is dark and starry, twilight’s kiss barely clinging to the sea’s horizon line, but when Fyodor looks and looks and looks, they can almost make out the jut of Meursault stranded in the waves.
How surreal, to find themself outside it after so, so, so, so long spent in that glass cage, losing reality to its monotony, and monotony to the world built in Fyodor’s skull.
“I doubt we’ll find it,” Fyodor tells Dazai, after another half hour of fruitless scouring.
“This is extremely upsetting,” Dazai replies without a beat, “I am incredibly, extraordinarily, super super super super super upset by this. I am actually going to cry.”
He says it like a joke. He’s digging his nails into the flesh of his neck. He won’t cry, but it isn’t a joke.
Fyodor makes a mental note to attempt locating it, sometime in the future, maybe. If they are alive long enough for that. They may be successfully dead within half a month.
Dazai sighs long and airy and rolls his shoulders. His neck. Stretches out his arms above his head and yawns. Looks at Fyodor, still resting on the floor, cloak drawn around them. “Are you able to walk?”
“Enough to leave. Probably.”
“Hmmm...” Dazai glances around. The place is made of concrete, all whites and prison grays. It is stylized exactly like Meursault. “I mean...I doubt they’d like...look for us here of all places. We probably wouldn’t be found if we stayed the night...”
Fyodor grimaces. “You really wanna stay the night here?”
“God no. Holy shit, I am so fucking done with prison.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Fyodor says, pulling themself into standing. “Good riddance.”
-
Fyodor wakes first feeling like shit, and second, still feeling like shit, but this time also noticing that Dazai is slipping out of bed. It was that noise and the shift of the mattress that woke them. It takes several seconds to pull together their sluggish, disjointed thoughts and remember what lead them here: the prison break, Nikolai’s death game, the fail of the Decay of Angels plan. The Book, again—again again again again again—out of their reach, but this time for good. Dazai.
They drift back to sleep.
The next time they wake, it’s to the scent of coffee. The time after that, to Dazai singing obnoxiously loud through the walls. Several times after. The final, time, though, it’s to Dazai incessantly poking their cheek.
“Hmnnng,” they groan. Everything hurts.
“We slept at one in the morning,” Dazai says. “It’s three in the afternoon.”
“Oh dear,” Fyodor says, prying their eyes open. “That’s quite late...”
They sit up with some struggle, first cataloging the state of their body. All things considered, it is not doing so badly as they thought it might, after everything it’s gone through in these past few games. The mattress is a little lumpy, but not bad. It was an abandoned apartment that they and Dazai crashed in last night, just one of many abandoned apartments, occupants having fled, or turned into vampires. Now that the vampirism is cured and over, Fyodor reckons the original owners must either be dead or have come to their senses far from home, stranded and confused.
Oh well.
They straighten, dangle their legs over the mattress’s edge, ignore Dazai, and close their eyes. Entwine their hands and press their forehead to their knuckles. Breath in, and,
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever.” Their voice maintains a steady murmur. “Amen.”
And, of course, next...
Fyodor unfolds their hands. Takes their right and brings their thumb together with their index and middle. Folds the other two down. Brings it first to their forehead, then chest, right shoulder, left shoulder. They may no longer be anything resembling Eastern Orthodox, if they ever were, between their mother and her family, and their own innate knowledge of and understanding with God, but they will not let go of this.
“...In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
When they open their eyes, Dazai is staring at them. They stare back for seven heartbeats.
“Something you wanna say?”
“I’ve never heard you pray before.”
“I hardly shout my prayers,” Fyodor scoffs, rolling their eyes. “I prayed every day in prison, you simply couldn’t hear it. I told you I did, remember?”
Dazai frowns, just this slight indent of his mouth, slight furrow of his brows. “Hm.”
Fyodor frowns back. “Did you think the way I talk is for, what, aesthetic?”
This becomes another silence. In the span it takes Dazai to reply, Fyodor catalogs the room: the mess of blankets, the dust on the dresser and old blood on the door frame, the distant lingering scent of coffee. Dazai himself. Hair still damp from a shower hours ago, simple gray button up dress shirt, bolo tie nestled neatly in its collar, brown pants, bare feet. The lack of earrings feels oddly conspicuous in a way it never was in Meursault. They study him studying them.
“...I suppose,” Dazai says, “I thought it was an extended metaphor.”
They don’t talk much after that. Fyodor stands up, staggers under the weight of their vertigo, then takes a shower because they’re still wearing prison clothes and it’s disgusting. They find fresh dental supplies in the cabinets. Clean themself. When Fyodor returns to the bedroom amaranth bruises are beginning to mottle across their paper-skin where they’ve scrubbed, and they’re feeling slightly less like skinning themself alive. If they could dissemble themself into pieces and boil each one in holy water they may just do it in a heartbeat. Nikolai would do it if they asked; Nikolai would do anything for anyone if asked in the right way, at the right time. Pointless, pointless; Fyodor will be dead soon.
It’s such a bone deep rot that seems to have festered in their human, human body. All things return to Eden in the earth.
Fyodor picks through the closet and dressers and clothes themself. They find Dazai in the kitchen.
He blinks at them. Or rather, at the long black dress nipping at their heels and cuffed at their wrists. “I didn’t know you wore those.”
“They are,” Fyodor says, surveying the kitchen for something appropriate to ingest, “exceptionally warm and beautiful.”
“Couldn’t be me.”
“Mm.”
“Honestly if I wore anything but a suit regularly I’d just kill myself lmao.”
Yes, Fyodor has noticed. From what they know, Dazai hasn’t been wearing anything but suits since he was thirteen. Even now, his presentation is excessively put-together, so very proper, with well combed hair and neat trimmed nails, wrinkles pressed from the fabric of his shirt. It’s the sort of appearance that people don’t look at, and think, oh that man is a walking mess. He probably has a complex about it.
“You’ll just kill yourself regardless.” Ah! There are canned beets in the cabinet. The easy to open kind. Fyodor tries to open them, fails, tries again, fails again, and gives up. Their hands are not only violently shaky, but also incredibly weak today, it seems. A wonder they managed to bruise themself in the shower. “Dazai-kun, open this.”
Dazai does. Fyodor eats breakfast.
“I’m never eating prison food again,” they sigh.
“Well I’d hope not,” Dazai says, mock-affonted. It’s a suicide joke. Fyodor huffs a laugh and Dazai grins back.
“That being said, if we want this all to go smoothly until the end,” Fyodor says, “we’d best be off to a pharmacy.”
“Oh? Sure sure, gimme a sec.” Dazai goes back to the bedroom. He comes back wearing socks, and having found a black vest to fit over his dress shirt, and wearing that brown coat of his. It’s a marginally less domestic look than the one Fyodor woke to.
Fyodor pulls on their cloak, and hat, and with that, they’re both out the door.
The pharmacy is a wreck, like most things in, well, the world, but Fyodor finds at least a quarter of what they need. A few more trips to different places, and they’re up to half. Fyodor downs fifteen pills by five PM. Dazai doesn’t ask, and Fyodor doesn’t answer. It takes much of the afternoon. By evening...
“Aughhhh,” Dazai groans, splaying himself out on cracked pavement, in a patch of dying sunlight. They are in the outskirts of a town that is really far too close to Meursault for comfort. “We need to get out of France.”
“To clarify,” Fyodor says, “we are completely slipping away, yes? I do not need you undermining me.”
“Yes, yes. Promise. I won’t be contacting anyone and giving away our location, or whatever. Believe it or not I’m actually not superrrr eager to, what, call home and be like, ’heyyyy besties guess what? Happy news: Fyo-kun agreed to kill themself with me so you’ll never see me again! Take this as my resignation! Don’t worry I already set everything up so you can handle yourselves without me! This is just a goodbye, thank you for taking care of me!’ No no that’d be a terrible idea there’d be this big unnecessary effort to prevent it and I’d have to hear Atsushi-kun cry. Can you imagine that? Cry. Over me. I mean yes I’m very cool and fun and awesome and all but like, ugh. ’Better to just disappear without a trace in the confusion of,” he makes a vague hand motion, “you know, and for them to get goodbye letters after I’m gone.”
“I’ve already started erasing our tracks,” Fyodor replies easily, and feels this sharp delight spark in their stomach. Somehow, it takes them entirely off guard. They have never worked together with Dazai before. Playing against him is so so so so incredibly fun, too, but oh, working with him, having someone they can just trust to do it right, without instruction, that is entirely new. “You handle leaving ambiguous false trails. I’ll plan our course. How do you feel about Venice?”
-
Their first morning in Venice sees Dazai and Fyodor up at roughly the same time, if only because Fyodor went to sleep several hours earlier. Dazai is going through some ten pairs of earrings that he pilfered from somewhere and attempting to figure out which one suits him best, and Fyodor is brushing their hair, and they are talking about what sort of suicide they want.
“A suicide in somewhere beautiful,” Fyodor proposes, “perhaps. I don’t really care.”
“It has to be cheerful!” Dazai looks at them brightly, practically sparkling. The current pair he’s trying is this deep garnet which matches the red-brown-black of his eyes but not the blue stone of his tie. “Our suicide has to be happy and energetic and cheerful!”
“...I suppose it may be nice to feel serenity?”
“Heighten your standards!” Dazai gives this long-suffering sigh. “Your standards are so absurdly high for everything else you know.”
I already was picky, Fyodor doesn’t say, I was planning to die after the completion of my plan, you must know. You were the one who stopped it.
“Hm...”
“It’s your last moments, Fyo-kun,” Dazai says, like Fyodor doesn’t know this. He gives another sigh, this time more airy, dreamy. He looks out the window and morning sunlight catches on his eyelashes, on the garnet of his earrings. Fyodor watches them move with the twist of his head, bumping against his jaw. “I, for one, refuse to die miserable. I will be very happy.”
“Is that not a waste for you?”
“Ehhhh,” he says, “well maybe it’s a shame to cut a good time short...and maybe the thought of doing so has stayed my hand before, but...” he shrugs.
But he knows that happiness, or at least, nonmisery, will end eventually, regardless of who what ultimately cuts it short, is that it?
“Perhaps,” Fyodor says, “we could...”
Together, they run through a list. Dazai laments the lack of his suicide book. Fyodor downs dolls out their daily dosages and makes morning tea with some help. They go outside to drink, and...
“Oh boy,” Dazai says.
They arrived here under the cloak of night. The dark concealed not only them, it washed details from the whole world, hid unsightly things under its black brush. The canals are full of corpses. The air is thick with rot. It’s not an unfamiliar scent. Fyodor walks to the canal’s edge, and doesn’t blink. Many of the corpses are being eaten. It’s not a terrible thing, it’s only death. The problem is those who remain: around them, Venice is fearful with the living. There are those who slink in the shadows, pale faces wandering through doorways and trembling under bridges. There are unofficial cleanup crews, uncoordinated, trying to find purpose in moving bodies from one place to another and identifying them.
What a mess.
“There is one condition I should mention,” Fyodor says, as they settle themself by the water. “You will need to be touching me. I may not die, otherwise. My ability, you see.”
“Of course!” Dazai sits beside them; Fyodor doesn’t look at him, but feels the warmth of his thigh against theirs, even through the fabric. “I’ll touch you. I was already planning on it. I would touch you if you had no ability at all. It’d be lonely otherwise! I’ve been seeking a double suicide for years, you know.”
He nudges their hand. Finally, they look at him. His eyes are crinkled with a smile when he takes their hand and presses his palm to theirs.
“Of course,” Fyodor murmurs. “Ah...I suppose we could try...”
from there it is a list of methods: twenty methods for asphyxiation, six involving blood loss, eighteen involving poison. So on, so on. When Fyodor decides that they won’t accept suicide via poison-in-tea unless they get to drink it with jam, Dazai beams.
Says, “See, now you’re getting it!”
Fyodor laughs and teases him a little, and neglects to mention that really they only added that stipulation because of Dazai. He must already know.
That perfectionism of his, Fyodor thinks, may draw this whole ordeal out.
-
Their first attempt occurs nine days after they make the pact.
They’ve left Venice by then, because they cannot stay in one place for long, not when they are still so desperately being searched for. They end up in Tirana, Albania, which managed to escape the worst of the apocalypse. They plan it the night previous.
Fyodor visits the Et’hem Bey Mosque in morning, and is quite awestruck, though Dazai doesn’t seem to understand why. Dazai picks kadaif for lunch and afterwards, Fyodor dozes several hours in a patch of shade while Dazai acquires the needed items. They daydream about Nikolai, draft and redraft their last message to him. When evening descends, they make back towards their hotel room. Dazai hesitates in the threshold of the door, so Fyodor takes his hand and kisses the corner of his eye and calls him very sweet things until he smiles back and squeezes their hand and doesn’t let go even when they’re pressed against each other on the couch and dying. Their position gives a lovely view of the city in sunset and Fyodor points out hints of Soviet architecture; Dazai asks if it makes them nostalgic; they don’t answer that, but ask if Dazai has ever been to Russia. He gives them a rather odd look, which Fyodor takes a moment to realize is because, oh yes, they had talked in Russia before, the two of them. Dazai spent some couple weeks there during his years underground. Fyodor knows this.
Fyodor loses consciousness first, expecting not to wake.
They do wake.
“Sunset faded into the wrong color,” is the first thing Dazai tells them. “It was French violet not cyber grape. It was supposed to be cyber grape.”
“Oh my God,” Fyodor groans.
“You see what I mean.”
“I see what you mean, sure.”
“So um—”
“Painkillers, please.”
Dazai gets them painkillers, uncharacteristically meek. It’s something like midnight. Fyodor takes the painkillers with raspberry tea and crashes on the bed. Dazai lays next to them, and they both stay there atop the blankets for several hours longer, bodies half curled. Fyodor is completely and utterly exhausted, but seems to be in one of their sporadic spells where sleep refuses them no matter how hard they try. If they’ve slept at all, they are unable to perceive it.
“Hey Fyodor-kun?”
They don’t reply.
Dazai shifts beside them. Fabric ruffling against fabric. The mattress indents with his restlessness.
“Fyodor-kun.”
“...”
“I know you’re awake.”
“...”
“Fyoooooodorrrr-kunnnnnnnn...”
“...What?”
“I want to watch the sunrise.”
Fyodor peeks open their eyes. Light is showing through the curtains. Even at this angle, they can see some color. They grasp for a phone and check the time. Sunrise is just starting. They look at Dazai, face soft and gray in the beginnings of morning, and sigh.
“Go do it, then?”
“I’m really tired, though.”
“Uhhuh.”
“And like,” Dazai adds, “it’d be like...like admitting defeat.”
They frown at him, raising a brow. “It’s a sunrise, Dazai.”
“No no Fyo-kun you don’t get it,” he says, “it’s not just a sunrise. It’s my arch nemesis. My enemy. My ex, even. We’re exes! I don’t even remember the last time I watched a sunrise. Or saw one in full at all.”
Fyodor regards him carefully, then hums.
“It’s not like I’m not awake when the sun rises,” Dazai continues. “Hell, typical work hours in the mafia went from like, 10PM to 7AM, but...”
A brief silence.
“You can’t remember ever seeing it as a teen,” Fyodor fills in.
“I never looked up.”
“...”
“...”
“...so either I’ll be awake and outside but I just won’t look at the sky, or I’ll be inside and not be able to bother. I’ll be laying around trying to convince myself to go to sleep because I have work in an hour, or I’ll be gaming, or reading, or, well. Sleeping. I just...want to see it normally, I guess. Like my coworker, right? Ex-coworker, now, I guess? It doesn’t matter. Kunikida-kun goes to sleep at 8PM and wakes up at 4AM. Can you believe that?”
“Mhm.”
“...”
“...”
Fyodor sighs, sitting up and shifting so their back is rested against a build of pillows. “I don’t think I’ll be sleeping tonight.”
“I don’t think so either.”
“I’ll probably crash around noon. I may collapse.”
“Okay.”
“...”
“...”
Fyodor lifts themself out of bed and into the bathroom. Dazai follows suit. Fyodor does their teeth and washes their face and brushes their hair. Dazai does the same, but also puts on moisturizer and trims his nails. Fyodor’s hands are too shaky today to safely use a knife, so Dazai cuts them apples for breakfast. He fills a kettle for tea and puts it on the kitchenette stove. Fyodor sits on the couch and watches the movement of his arm, half dark in hazy morning shadows.
“...Remind me again,” Fyodor says, soft, when Dazai joins them on the couch, “why you want to die?”
“Because I never stopped!” Dazai grins at them.
They give a flat look back. Something visibly unamused, even in this lighting. “Try again.”
“...Because I can’t bear living..?”
This gets an even flatter look. This time, Fyodor says nothing.
“Oh come on,” Dazai says, “you go first.”
That’s easy enough. Nonetheless, Fyodor chews the words in their mouth before speaking. Tastes the texture of each sound on their tongue.
“I’m awash with sin,” Fyodor says plainly, “and I was planning to die after my plan was completed, regardless, but it failed. Now, added to the inherent sin of living is this... irreparable, pointless, disproportional wrong that is completely unable to be righted. Death will give me absolution.”
For a moment, just a moment, Fyodor looks at Dazai and hates him. Their plan would not have failed had he not made it. But Fyodor cannot hate Dazai in the same way they cannot quite hate humanity. It’s the same way that one does not hate the statement 1+1=3, but simply knows its inherent wrongness. October has almost come to its end, and Fyodor shivers.
“Oh okay,” Dazai says, sounding entirely unsurprised, “well...hmm... So I’ve wanted to die for a long time, you know. I stayed alive these past four years because I promised my friend I’d be good, and I can’t be good, if I’m not alive. I didn’t promise to be some...neutral nonexistent entity—”
That is most certainly a jab at Fyodor. They send him a sour look. He gives a sarcastically cheerful one right back.
“—unlike,” he coughs, “someone, oh boy, I wonder who that could be... Oh who knows... anyway! I think I’m good enough now to say I’m good! So the promise is fulfilled, so now I’ll just kill myself.”
“That is not actually a reason.”
“Fine,” Dazai says, rolling his eyes. “I suffered, and I’ve suffered so much, and I’ll suffer again, and I don’t want to suffer more. Is that good enough? It’s really not complicated.”
That’s a note of dishonest condescension. On the stove, the kettle begins to scream.
Fyodor scoffs, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“What a coincidence,” Dazai replies, light and sharp as a knife, “when you spoke, I thought the exact same thing.”