Dazai’s best friend was control.
He learned this lesson very early, that if he could not control he would have nothing. Whether it was people, himself, his self destructive tendencies. And the world was greedy, they would take and keep taking. So he learned to control what they took. He controlled what they saw.
Control meant safety. It meant isolation. It meant locking himself in his bathroom for hours and refusing to leave until he could keep a smile while his sink dripped pink. It meant not flinching when Chuuya would hit him, not breaking his gaze with the business end of a pistol. It meant having to win a drinking game to get a second chance, and even then he pretended.
Control meant he would carve a place deep within his ribs where no one would reach, where all of his monstrosity could mix with his bile and the tears he swallowed. Control meant holding back the ocean with hands the size of a fifteen year old. Control meant not admitting why you blew up your lover’s car after running away because the one person who you didn’t need to control the first time around died. Control meant holing yourself up spending hours playing god to bring that friend back. It was addictive.
And oh did Dazai love addictive things.
He watched his coworkers laughing, smiling at ice cream and allowing themselves to be angry. They had no control. If Dazai was fifteen he would have said these people were aimless and weak. It was a very common misconception that Mori, himself, or his parents had raised a boy like him. If he had been raised by anything human, he would not have carved such a deep cave. But rather, control carved a space for itself.
Naturally, there were two types of people. Those who would respect his need for control, veiled as chaos, and others who were willing to break him in half to release what he had sheltered and let fester so deeply. Half rot, half man. Half man, half dog. Half dog, half devil.
Unfortunately, Jouno was one of these people. Who loved to touch Dazai’s palm and call him a religion. Who loved to dismantle every part of his sense of control until Jouno was the control. Until he would carve out dazai’s heart with his teeth, and Dazai would let him. That was control.
There was Jouno, who was so much like him- a mirror, a reflection that he would always see in his minds eye- a man so much like Dazai that trying to say his own name made him nauseous. And there was only one thing Jouno loved more than taking control: breaking it.
Screaming into my pillow and kicking the couch