@takaisuru asked: “ you ever meet somebody so great , you find yourself wondering … what’s the catch , here ? that’s how i felt when i met you . ”
His first instinct was to tell Dazai he was wrong. There wasn’t anything about him that exuded greatness. The high praise his friend said unapologetically did not feel deserved. His imperfections made a mockery of his ability’s name. There were so many aspects of Oda’s heart he felt compelled to change, all to become the good man he needed to be.
However, Oda managed to keep that all in. It wouldn’t have been fair to unload something like that when Dazai was reaching out to him like this. He swallowed his protesting down with a drink. Instead of selfishly making the matter complicated and leaving Dazai in a bind after speaking so authentically, Oda confessed to the hatred he felt towards the disconnect in their perceptions…
“Sometimes I wish I could see what you see.”
…Only sometimes. Specifically in moments such as these, where Dazai was somehow already able to see the person Oda longed to be. Whenever Oda looked in the mirror, all he saw was unfinished work.
Normally, out of the constant looming fear of cursed vulnerability, the older of the two would have kept his eyes straight ahead. His eyes would have stuck to the same stain on the bar wall he always stared at when Dazai and Ango chatted with one another. His expression would have remained muted. He would have yieled everything. Oda wouldn’t have even met Dazai’s gaze as he poked and prodded with metaphors and banter.
But tonight was a different story. Perhaps the alcohol delivered him a bit of liquid courage. Or maybe it was because this topic felt a lot more relevant in comparison to talks of various forms of suicide, death, and oblivion in general. That possibility felt a lot more likely. He looked to his fuzz buddy with a thoughtful look. The lull in conversation was filled with other bar patrons mingling in the night. It filled up the tense atmosphere as Oda worked to maintain his composure.
“When we first met, I couldn’t imagine the person I would come to know… It wouldn’t have been possible.”
The youngest executive of the Port Mafia’s reputation was much darker than a former hitman’s. Dazai’s enemies were fated to an early demise by his hands, regardless of whatever morality they possessed. But that wasn’t the charm his friend carried with him. It was something he doubted Dazai could see. And how could he? Oda couldn’t fault him for being so blind to it. The emptiness he consistently experienced must have covered it from his own eyes. No one could have possibly accounted for his friend’s sentimentality, playfulness, and clever antics he let loose during their time together.
No one could have foretold that Dazai Osamu would be able to bring a feeling of belonging to Oda’s seemingly bleak existence. Surprises like that, such as his children and the beauty of the written word, were what made life worth living.
“You’re better than anything I could have thought up.”
The final admission was spoken in a whisper. It almost couldn’t be heard over the ice clinking in their glasses.
“What was that? The echoes of a compliment softly spoken in the twilight of a bar?” Dazai cups a hand behind his ear, fraught with a joviality that makes itself evident by the faint glimmer of his visible eye. “Odasaku, if you keep this up, I might just blush to death. It really happens, you know. I read it in one of Mori-san’s medical books before. But it’s been difficult to pull off, given that I’m difficult to fluster in the first place.”
‘ I couldn’t imagine the person I would come to know. ’ Those words spoken by the other man spin around Dazai’s brain like candy floss. As much as he’d be hesitant to outwardly admit, he had changed a great deal since befriending Oda Sakunosuke. Oh, how he’d hate it if Odasaku knew the him from his earliest days in the Port Mafia. Odasaku wasn’t there when he age 15 and desperately raiding Mori’s cabinets for something — anything — to take off the excruciating edge of living permanently. Odasaku wasn’t there on that day, where he possessed a gun and kept shooting at the body of an already dead man, just because he found a sick entertainment in the way the deceased man moved, as if he were dancing along with the rounds of bullets. Surely, people talked within the crooked organization and surely Odasaku must have heard tangents of such horrifying incidents. After all, his reputation was earned and not nearly as mythical as one might initially be lead to believe. Surely Odasaku must have known and perhaps thought of Dazai to be be a monster. Dazai entirely believes himself to be a monster, beyond human comprehension. A lonely, lowly thing.
But then he made friends and started to feel a little more human ( whatever that entailed, he did not know fully. )
Dazai was, first and foremost, attracted to Odsasku’s absurd existence as a whole. A member of the Port Mafia who refuses to kill. A member of the Port Mafia who cares for orphans and keeps them as far away from a life of crime as humanely possible. A member of the Port Mafia capable of making the act of using guns look like art. A member of the Port Mafia who likes curry way too spicy for Dazai’s more sensitive sensibilities. A member of the Port Mafia who never shunned him or in any sense, but took on everything he had to offer and more in the same wry, deadpan manner he approached anything and everything else. A member of the Port Mafia who wants to be not a killer or buried in riches and glory —- but a writer.
This was the man Dazai was proud to consider a friend.
“In any case,” the executive continues, now picking up his drink to tap against Odasaku’s own glass. “I’m still wondering what the catch is here. But I try not to question it too much, because I’m that content with living in the present, with you. Imagine that.”
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