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Dazai likes warmth.
He likes warm spicy curry on a winter afternoon, he likes sitting in front of his tiny heater and letting it warm him and the apartment up, he likes the slight burn of alcohol as it slides down his throat and warms his body.
All of those things though, pale in comparison to the warmth of a hand.
The warmth of a hand that would run its fingers through his hair when it was proud of him, the warmth of a hand that would give him tea when he hadn’t slept in a while, the warmth of a hand that would’ve held him together if he couldn’t do so himself.
The warmth of a hand that was currently 6 feet beneath the dirt and had long since been drained of the warmth it once had, frozen over with icy cold.
Dazai would still hold the hand, despite how the ice would burn and leave his fingers numb with frostbite, but he can’t, because no matter how close 6 feet truly is, it has never felt like a farther distance than when it’s between him and the man that hand had belonged to.
He sits at the man's grave and simply stares at it, stares at the poorly packed soil that’s sunken into itself with time, at the words written on the stone that were done by someone so inexperienced it’s a miracle they’re even legible, at the flower that sits atop the soil of the grave, having died and decayed over the years.
He remembers what the hill used to look like, bland and dying, the grass slowly turning yellow from the tree above it stealing any and all sunlight. It’s no longer dying, instead it thrives with flowers planted all around. Dazai would much rather have his friend back than a nice hill to visit his grave on.
He leans back against the grave and lets his head rest upon its stone, while his eyelids close and he begins to doze off, not sleeping, but instead that dreamlike state you get when you’re not fully asleep but not awake either.
Dazai dreams of what the hill used to look like, what it looked like the night Odasaku died, he remembers it clearer than almost anything, as if it had happened only moments ago, it always feels like it’s only been moments ago.
~~~
Bodies are heavy, Dazai thinks.
He’s killed many people, and seen their bodies afterwards, but never has he been the one to carry them away, it’s always a clean up team, or the police, or in some cases no one at all.
Dazai struggles to hold Odasaku’s body up, constantly having to readjust him so that he won't fall. Dazai doesn’t want him to fall.
As Dazai lifts Oda’s leg back up, he’s forced to feel just how cold it is. Even from behind the cloth of his pants, Odasaku’s cold body sends a chill down Dazai’s spine. It makes him want to gag, Odasaku shouldn’t be this cold, Odasaku’s never been this cold before. Though Odasaku has never been dead before either.
He’s supposed to be warm, Oda was always warm. He was as if someone had taken the very concept of ‘warmth’ and personified such a thing. The cold did not suit him well. Odasaku being cold felt as if the sun had frozen over.
Ever since Dazai had reached down towards the body back at the ballroom and hauled it onto his back, ‘a piggyback’ one of his orphans would have called it, and began the long trek to Yokohama’s only public graveyard, he had tried to convince himself everything was fine.
Dazai is a demon, a doll, a puppet. His only purpose is to carry out orders and do it well. He doesn’t feel emotions, he’s not supposed to.
If such a fact were true, he would have left the body there, before returning back to Mori and awaiting orders, a new mission to carry out, paperwork to complete, it doesn’t matter. Either way he would be back at the port mafia, continuing on with his ‘life’ and hanging off of Mori’s each and every word. As he’s supposed too.
But Dazai didn’t do these things. Dazai picked up the body, took it all the way to the only place he could think too, and now he’s setting it down while eyeing the shed he’ll have to steal a shovel from.
Dazai is not a doll, he is not a puppet, he’s just as human as the rest of them, despite how much Mori and himself wish it weren’t true. He doesn’t want to face such a fact, but he doesn’t have a choice.
As Dazai sets Odasaku’s body down, leaning it against a nearby tree, he feels. As Dazai picks the lock of a nearby shed and steals one of its many shovels he feels. As Dazai uses the shovel to begin digging a hole, a hole where his one and only friend will rest, he feels.
He feels so much and it hurts, he hates it with every bone in his body.
He feels the rain beating down on his back, the dirt being flung at him from where he’s digging, the wooden handle of the shovel he can barely hold right and the salted tears spilling uncontrollably from his previously stone cold eyes.
When the shovel drops the sound it makes is silent against the torrent of rain hitting the ground alongside it. The grave is not finished, Dazai knows this, yet he couldn’t bear to keep digging.
He’s digging a hole to place his best friend in, a hole his friend will never be able to climb out of. Once he covers this hole in dirt he will never see Odasaku’s face in person ever again. He’s not ready to say goodbye, he doesn’t think he ever will be.
Dazai hadn’t cried when he heard the gunshot, when Oda first hit the floor, he hadn’t even cried when he finally went limp in Dazai’s arms, spilling his last words to him. But now, as he prepares Odasaku’s final resting place, he cries.
Dazai clutches his stomach as he’s racked with heavy sobs. He curls in on himself as he fights to stay standing.
All his life he had pretended to be strong, he had pretended to be some ‘demon prodigy’, the port mafia’s youngest executive in all of its history, one half of Double black, he had pretended to be anything but the frail, scared kid he was.
Odasaku had seen through all that, he had looked at Dazai with kind eyes and touched him with gentle hands, hands that never strayed too far from where they should. Dazai had kept up the act then, trying as hard as could to not let him in, despite the man's many attempts to be there for him.
Now that Odasaku’s gone, Dazai can’t keep up the act. Who knew it would only take the man’s death for all his dreams to come true?
Dazai sinks to the ground, sitting inside the half dug grave and he cries. He wishes he had done this when Oda was still around, would the man have held his hand? patted his back? whispered to him false comforts until his tears subsided? It doesn’t matter now, he’ll never know.
As the rain slams down on his back, heavier than before, and his tears stream down his face, Dazai can’t tell where the rain ended and the tears began. He thinks it’s better that way.
All things must come to an end though, and after what could have been hours or just mere minutes, Dazai wouldn’t know, the crying subsides. His eyes are red rimmed and his throat is dry but there are no more tears.
Numbly Dazai stands and picks the shovel back up off the ground, before plunging it into the dirt, then putting all of his weight on the end just to get it back out. He repeats the process what could have been a hundred or more times before Dazai finally deems the hole big enough, and places the shovel down on the floor.
He struggles to climb out of the newly dug grave, if this was any other scenario Dazai would have joked about digging a staircase to get out, but it wasn’t, and so he didn’t. Once he’s out though, he once again comes face to face with Odasaku’s body, rigor mortis having fully set in by now, and is overcome by a wave of disgust. It bears the appearance of his friend, but none of what made him the man he was. Dazai doesn’t want to look at it a second longer. He can’t bear to shut it away forever. He dreads the idea of touching it. He wants nothing more than to cling onto it like some unwelcome parasite.
It doesn’t matter what he wants, only what he has to do, and Dazai knows that he has to bury Oda, to at least give him that. He lifts the now stiff body, and drags it over to the entrance of the grave. As he stares at his once warm face, a face that in his final moments had looked at him with such, Dazai doesn’t want to say love, doesn’t want to admit that not only has someone loved him but that they’re already dead, had looked at him with such fondness, he makes a choice.
Flipping the poor thing over, he struggles to wrench the classic tan trench coat Odasaku had always worn off of the freezing cold corpse. But finally, with minimal damage to the jacket, and no damage to the body, absolutely no damage to the body, Dazai can repair the jacket, will repair the jacket, but the thought of desecrating Odasaku’s corpse like that, even by accident, sickens him, he manages to get it free.
He doesn’t dare wear it, the coat belonged to a good man, should only belong to a good man, Dazai is no good man, and he has not yet begun trying to be. He leaves the coat on the ground, and climbs inside the hole.
It’s a struggle but he manages to lift the body down into the grave, and gently lowers it onto the floor. He looks almost peaceful lying there, if he tried hard enough, Dazai could even pretend he’s only asleep, that the next day he’ll wake up and come back here to find Odasaku alive and well, ready to head over to the bar so they could hang out.
He reaches out, towards Oda’s wrist, and rests two fingers right where his arm meets his hand, and waits.
He waits.
Nothing.
No pulse, not even a weak one.
Of course he doesn’t have a pulse, Odasaku’s been dead for at least 2 hours now, Dazai watched the light leave his very eyes, he’s spent these last 2 hours feeling the icey cold of his body against his back, watching as his muscles stiffen and his body begins the first stages of decomposition, to still believe he was alive after all that Dazai would have to be just as brain dead as Oda is right now. But he’d hoped, somewhere deep down, he’d hoped it wasn’t real, that he was just asleep, or playing some really mean prank, or even injured, just as long as he was alive.
He isn’t alive though, and he never will be again.
Dazai can feel the tears behind his eyes, the sob crawling up his throat, and refuses to let any of it out. There’s no point crying over this anymore, no matter how much he wants to, and god he wants to, he wants nothing more than to collapse right here and now, sit there sobbing into Oda’s dead body, but he can’t, and he won’t, not anymore, never again.
He gives Odasaku’s face one last look, holds his hand one last time, and god, the thought of this being the very last time he’ll ever be able to do that makes him want to end it right here right now, but he doesn’t. He climbs out of the grave, taking the shovel with him, and fills it in.
He grabs dirt from the pile that had grown at the foot of the hole and tips it back into its rightful place in a daze, reveling in the repetitiveness of the task, the way that as long as he doesn’t look back at what’s inside said hole he’s filling, he can pretend nothing’s wrong, he’s just doing some random mafia job or something like that, not that he’s burying his best, and possibly only, friend in the ground.
Soon the grave is filled, the pile of dirt is gone, and Dazai’s finished with his lackluster attempt of leveling it, and he’s left alone, staring at a patch of dirt. It isn’t right, Odasaku deserves better than something this ugly, but there’s not much Dazai can do. He looks around the graveyard, and something catches his eye.
In the distance, just outside the entrance to the graveyard, he spots a bush of red camellias, surrounded by other similar flowers, some sort of city sanctioned garden. It’s not the best, but he thinks, if Odasaku were still here, he’d like it.
Quickly he runs over to the bush, and rips one of the flowers off of its stem, before hurrying back to Oda’s newly made grave. He knows it’s technically dead now, and that it likely won’t grow into anything anymore, but he shoves the stem into the dirt, right in the center of the grave.
Dazai smiles, a sad grief-filled smile, but a smile nonetheless. Yeah, Oda would like this.
He picks the trenchcoat back up from where he’d left it on the ground, throws it over his shoulder, and starts heading down the hill, making his way ‘home’. Once he’s reached the gate, he turns back around one last time.
I’m sorry it had to end like this, Odasaku.
~~~
Only a few days later Dazai had come back, carrying a giant rock in his arms. He’d stolen it from some fancy rock garden, it was the closest to a proper gravestone he could manage.
He’d sat there by the grave badly carving out Oda’s name until sunset, and until after that too, it was only at midnight when he’d finally left, taking the unfinished stone with him. He’d returned the next day, and the day after that, until finally the stone was finished, until it read what Dazai’s able to see it read right now:
S . Oda
1985 - 2008
“A good man.”
Dazai’s hand reaches out for the flower, he leans in to touch one of the rotted petals, the red colour barely even visible behind all the gross brown that has covered it. Before he can do so however, he hears footsteps running towards him, and a voice calling out.
“Dazai!” It’s Atsushi, because of course it is.
By the time the boy reaches the top of the hill, Dazai still hadn’t bothered to get up, staying in his spot staring at the grave. He meets the kid’s eyes though, and can see the slight confusion that swims in them. He probably hadn’t thought of Dazai as the kind of man to frequent a graveyard of all places, though not many people do.
“Kunikida asked me to find you.” He rubs the back of his head, as if he’s nervous, which he probably is to be honest. “He said he needs you to fill out your report for the last case you two did.”
He stops there, taking a moment to really look at their surroundings, at Dazai. “Are you okay? You just- nevermind it’s nothing.” Dazai laughs, bracing himself against Odasaku’s grave and standing up.
“I’m doing just fine, Atsushi. it’s nice to know you care though?” He fights the urge to laugh at how his face quickly turns red. “I-... I do. I’m glad you’re alright.” He smiles at Dazai, something nice and warm, like all of the kid’s smiles. That’s clearly all the ‘emotional’ talk the kid can take though, as he runs off, heading towards the exit, and presumably from there, the Agency.
Before Dazai goes after him, he takes one more look at the grave.
“You were right Odasaku, this side is more beautiful.”