![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
humandispel) wrote2024-10-17 09:07 pm
permissions post
DAZAI OSAMU
— bungo stray dogs —
Certainly, people are sinful and foolish. But what’s so wrong about that?
"His eyes remind me of a burnt black cat. His build reminds me of a burnt black cat. His presence reminds me of a burnt black cat."
IC Permissions.
Background.
One of the employees of the Detective Armed Agency, an independent organization consisting of ability users who are licensed to use firearms and other skills in order to take on cases to protect Yokohama. Dazai appears to be a frivolous and useless mentor, but he does have the sordid past of being a Port Mafia Executive.
Despite his outspoken desires to die, in truth what he is searching for is a reason to live.
(You will always be a monster, there is no turning back from it. But what type of monster you become is entirely up to you.)
Personality.
Ask his friends and colleagues who Dazai Osamu is to them, and you will get an unanimous answer: he is a waste of space.
Do not ask help from him, they would say, for he is an office worker’s worst nightmare. All day he lazes around, unmotivated to even take a gander at his paperwork. He disappears from time to time, but you will always find him eventually - tangled on a net set aside in a river, or buried in someone’s lawn. Women might find him attractive, but the illusion dissipates the moment he requests for a lover’s suicide. His only contribution is his role as a bandage wasting device.
This is exactly what he wants you to believe. A tailor-made clown, constructed to fit in any situation. Give them an overt display of misdirection and most would miss the split second of a sharp gaze. Before you know it he is all but a goofy grin. And Dazai thinks, this is the kind of person they are, this is how I could use them.
Dazai is not a good person. Cruelty is imprinted on his mind until it becomes the very blood that pumps in his veins. He remembers every dimension of its taste - on how violence is their currency, how it is their foremost means to survive. It has been eighteen years of that sensation in his head. And outside of that: the numbness, the hollow echo of your shell in realizing you feel nothing at all. Some say that the nightmares never leave you - that the souls you have taken will always haunt your memory because all humans have a conscience, there must be something that makes them look back and regret their choices.
He has not felt any of those in a long, long time, and he thinks that is when he becomes no longer human.
He covers himself in layers of masks and bandages, and hopes that nobody would ever find out what is underneath. He fears the day he manages to take a glance at a mirror and see what he has suspected all along - that his heart is empty, that he is too deep in the abyss to grasp at any thread of salvation or at any chance of finding a reason to live. The thought of it alone is enough to drive him to claw his chest out, to drive his skull through concrete and perhaps by then, finally, he shall know peace.
And yet, there is something else. A small shimmer manages to seep into your world and it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s realizing how spicy curry can actually be, how much cigarettes stink and maybe that’s why people can be so fond of them. Odasaku radiates benevolence that shouldn’t even exist in this world, and yet here it is. By the time he figures it out, it has been all too late - and for the first time, he realizes what loss truly means.
You’ve gone soft, a former associate tells him. The truth is that he has hidden it all away under the reason of purpose. Because no matter how far he has come away from his past, no matter if he’s gone legal now, it never really goes away. Anger knows so well on how to use your capabilities. It waits to be used because he has something to protect now, and that only makes him deadlier. It’s so easy to think and go back to that eighteen year old instinct, on how to murder in the most painful way possible.
(His blood is black, mafia black - more so than anybody else in this city.)
But things are different now. He sees his co-workers and the agency he now calls his home, and to them he is still the same, even when they discover the truth: their useless bandage wasting device.
Dazai is not nice. He’s too used to the dog eat dog world of the underground. He doesn’t know how to give compliments or words of comfort. When he tries to express such thoughts, it comes out differently - rough and exaggerated and all of it screams fake.
Yet fake is better than nothing, better than the gnawing sense of emptiness and boredom that used to plague him. Perhaps the day shall come where this play pretend to be a goofball and a strange, strange mentor becomes his reality.
Dazai is not kind. His comrades are also his pawns, and the battleground can be simplified as a game. Brutality seeps into his words and his methods. Some days he forgets everything save the realization that everything is a void, that he is nothing but a soulless and heartless void. Some days - on too many days - he wishes for nothing but to die.
But he’s trying.
Perhaps his salvation will come from strays.