Chapter Text
The first thing that registers is the dull ringing in his ears.
The sound is familiar, 9mm, close range, someone is shooting a pistol somewhere in the blurry red mess around him.
Dazai knows most people are exhilarated by the sound of gunshots, it’s a natural human response, whether you’re at the end of the barrel or not, normal people are supposed to get a shot of adrenaline, fear or excitement, for running or hunting.
He wonders now if thats the sensation his body is feeling, but the shaking, the shaking feels wrong, he tries recall if it was always like this, he doesn’t know where exactly to pin the sensation down in his mind, it’s all too distant for him to grasp.
His nerves continue to jolt, ricocheting through his body as if the bullet was shot from somewhere deep within his chest, a bone deep shaking he couldn’t find the energy or will to try and halt.
The shuddering extended right down his arms, feeling naked and cold. cold? that can’t be right, Dazai Osamu doesn’t get cold, he knows that. He can’t be cold, he’s not supposed to feel anything, however this only drives him to focus on the incorrect sensation with a morbid curiosity, like hes observing his body from a distance, fuzzy feelings of a creature somewhere below him trying to simulate the correct physical response to emotions it cannot posess.
His arms, yes, dazai can see one ahead of him, he tries to focus on that, working on slowly drawing himself out of that fuzzy numbness, but the arm there is not his, definitely not, not with yaht long expanse of his usually white laden skin exposed, where is the rest of him? what is it covered in?>
He keeps following the foregin stump down until he recognises something more familiar, the source of that ugly sound clutched in his rotten extremities, a Type 54 pistol.
It’s not Kunikida’s, Dazai knows that, not only because he knows those fingers that are allegedly his would not be able to hold it, but rather simply because it’s not Kunikida’s gun of choice.
Kunikida is a detective, so his notebook always summons a Walther P38, because that is the gun kunikida thinks of when he thinks of a gun a detective would use, a foreign relic from those american spy movies Ranpo despises.
Dazai doesn’t know why this is something he knows, he doesn’t remember when he let that fact plant itself in his mind, however in this state he only has the energy to find it amusing, such knowledge is oddly domestic for a stray like himself, he wonders when he let himself get that bad.
But a Type 54 ‘blackstar’ is not a detective gun, it’s a chinese copy of the soviet style Torakev TT-33. A standard issue port mafia handgun.
A weapon so soaked in blood that it is almost comedic.
and soaked in blood he is, his fingers are all but glued to the pistol with gore and viscera, blending it into his wretched body like it has always been there.
The end of the barrel is buried into the maw of a concave lump of shattered bone and gore, an upper class middle aged man, of course Dazai knows this body better than his own, but the face has been mangled beyond recognition by the beast looming over its spoils, the body shakes with him, jolted about unnaturally by the repetitive pulling of the trigger as the empty barrel ricochets against its rotted husk.
He keeps looking then, down the corpse and back up his own shattered remains, the viscera is soaked into him so thickly and wholly that the deep black of his coat had turned red.
Dazai knows already that the coat is unsalvageable, he’s destroyed plenty just like it enough times in the past to know that he’ll be peeling it’s torn and soaked remains off of his skin for days.
A distant feeling in Dazai’s mind writhed and twisted with a sickened glee at the thought that Mori was not going to be pleased that he has so thoroughly ruined his pretty new suit already.
He keeps bathing in that thought, and it soaked his skin down to the bloodied knees of his dress pantsthat stuck to the polished wood of the desk like he was glued to it, like it was home.
Dazai was all but drowning happily in this abbysal dread before the hands came to wrench him out, a soft grip tears into his shoulder and all of a sudden every sound rips through his barrier of static and everything is wrong again.
The noise was unbearable, there must have been about thirty or so people in the room now, how long had they been there? had they seen him sat on the desk? Dazai cant think through all this noise, he needs to think, to focus, but he doesn’t know who is touching him, and he doesn’t know what they’re saying to him, he just wants it to go quiet again.
Someone is screaming, a godawful yowling sound, wet and hoarse and childlike in its lack of restraint.
He wants nothing more than for them to shut up, he wants nothing more than to make them stop touching him.
He couldn’t bring himself to move or complain when he felt the cruel hands that tore him from his dream delicately wrench the gun from his grasp and wrapped their arms tightly around his body, like he was some kind of delicate prized ceramic thing, a doll fallen from its shelf.
Dazia’s hands are folded up to his face then, and only when he feels his contorted skin with his naked fingers does he realise where all that screaming is coming from.
Then finally Dazai lost grip on his lucidity and dropped into the kind watery abyss of unconciousness.