“Unspoken”
— in which Dazai’s kiss contradicts his words.
(or reader tries to move on, fails and Dazai picks up the pieces)
Shin Nakatani was nothing like Osamu Dazai, you concluded.
Perhaps that’s why you were sat in the corner of some grubby bar, listening to his proclamations of self acclaimed greatness whilst you sipped at a (now bitter) beer, refusing to make eye contact with the man.
Osamu Dazai, never spoke about himself, sacrificing a genuine exploration of his true thoughts and feelings for charming smiles tainted with an overdramatic flair.
By comparison, you think, you’d much prefer the empty conversations you had with Dazai, over the overbearing false confidence oozing from the man beside you.
His mouth moved in a manner that did not wait for you to divulge. Unrelenting, flapping jaws reminding you of how lucky you were that such a “tired looking woman” was so “endearing enough” for him to give you a chance.
You don’t even know what that means, eyebrows furrowed as you processed the insult, hating how you silently relished in the honesty of his voice.
At least you were talking to someone who did not hide true intentions behind confusing actions and unsaid truths.
You bite the inside of your mouth, and embrace the seething sting of pain, punishing yourself for your constant comparison.
You were not here to think about Dazai, you were here to move on, to avoid the constant, overbearing ache in your chest that came with acceptance that Dazai, could never reciprocate your unspoken feelings.
And so you shuffled in your battered bar stool, the creaking below forcing you out of your thoughts and back to the lost conversation.
The bars light was dim, hollowing out the faces of all those who sat within its dullness, shadows chasing out the warmth and leaving seemingly lifeless, drunk husks of people.
“…And of course one should ask where I get the time to balance both work and steady relationships.”
“Uh huh..”
“And I would tell the fool who asks the same thing I’ll tell you…I do it by combining the two!”
“Yea?”
“To me, relationships are like business, both transactional, both just as give or take as the other.”
You awkwardly look up at him, he winks and you feel sick.
“Of course.” You offer, wishing you could bite your tongue of instead of agreeing blindly to his vulgar beliefs.
He continues in his crudeness, and you glance at your phone, staring at the time.
00:37
You want to go home.
Clearing your throat, you fold in on yourself when he pauses mid sentence to look you in the eye, his brow inclining.
“It’s um late, I have work in the morning…” You trail off and inwardly die when a flicker of exasperation dances in the movement in his changing expression.
“Would you mind walking me to the train station?” You scramble, trying to save yourself from the awkward stillness that follows.
He nods and you both move to leave, he walks in front of you and you watch the back of his head as he continues to talk.
He has a mole on his neck, it peeks out at you from behind the collar of his shirt, you count the freckles behind his ear and wonder if he even knew they were there.
In your opinion, Yokohama was beautiful at night.
More lively. Cluttered with different people doing different things, every passing face appeared more open when followed by moonlight.
The streets lined themselves with opposing humans with different names and contrasting history’s, and yet, they all looked the same when shadowed.
You’re nearing the train station, although you knew there would be no train waiting for you past Midnight, Nakatani, in all his drunken glory, did not seem to realise this, instead he had slowed his pace, allowing you to keep pace with his wide strides. A prologue to a goodbye.
A woman bumps into you pushing you towards your date, he laughs, the sound vibrates brazenly in your ears and you smile because you don’t know what else to do.
“Can I kiss you?” He’s saying, holding your shoulder, “As a reward for a long journey.”
You want to remark that the walk only took five minutes, the time on your phone reading 00:42, but you don’t.
Instead you nod and turn to him, watching as his rosy gloating face gets closer to your own.
.
.
.
There’s a horrible tongue in your mouth.
It curls around and smooths the underside of your teeth, mapping out the area of your gums and you cringe, your nose scrunching.
He tastes of cheap liquor and cigarettes, you feel yourself dizzying from past nicotine breathing down your throat, burning your lungs as you inhale him.
Your choke and step away, wiping your wet lips as you do, recoiling in the after taste, spluttering out fake broken apologies.
“I just remembered..” You hesitate grasping for words that appear to be stuck in your raw throat, “I can’t kiss you.”
“Excuse me?” He replies, you see his broken ego in the darkening of his eyes as he names you a bitch and looks you up and down.
“I’m sorry Nakatani, that was a horrible kiss.” You state, words falling out of your vile tasting mouth, the alcohol on your breath forgetting to filter kindness into your speech. “I um… can’t kiss you.”
“Well your not too nice to kiss either, don’t think this was anything more than charity work.” He hisses back, teeth bared. You think he looks like a dog.
“Then, you should consider better ways to help charity, Mr Nakatani.” You breathe, unable to add enough insult into your voice. Your stuttering, shame ploughing it’s way through your body, you want to throw up.
He’s cursing at you, face flushed with alcohol and embarrassment, and then he’s turning and walking away, he sways with the whisper of the wind and you suddenly feel quite drunk yourself.
It surges and you gag, turning to face the crumbling wall beside you, shaky hands clamping over your mouth as you relive the kiss only moments prior.
You feel sick, you want to go home.
There’s a street light beside you, it flickers when you sit against it, eyes staring out into the docks Yokohama, the sea, a black pool before you.
The waves carry the moon as they crash amongst each other, ripples of reflection morphing to produce a white highlighted stream, stopping the merging of a black sky and sea.
You rub a hand over your face, letting the skin under your eyes drag downwards before you let your hand fall to rest on the ground.
There’s no stars, it must be cloudy tonight.
Shin Nakatani was nothing like Osamu Dazai. Perhaps that why you’re now alone, sitting on a wet footpath, in the crux of a cloudy, cold night, thinking about him instead.
You sigh, and watch as your breath materialises into smoke before you, fading into the darkened dusk, carried by a breeze of which you could not seem to feel.
Your superficial affection for Dazai may not be built upon the foundations of shared interest, but God was it a hard wall to knock down.
You just can’t seem to move on from the man, despite his every action being one that pushed you away again and again.
You brush a tiny spider from your thigh, you don’t see where it lands, eyes too focused on the bitten nails found on the tips of your cool fingers.
“Excuse me! The pretty lady on the ground!”
You seem freeze, your head falling backwards to hit the street lamp behind you.
Of course he would find you like this, huddled pathetically on the side of a road wallowing in self pity.
He stops just in-front of you, bending down to look you in your eye, an grin plastered across his face, you almost huff at the irony of his appearance.
“Hello Dazai.” You mumble, blinking up at him, weak light reflects off his features, b across the stretched apples of his cheeks making it appear like he’s glowing.
“You’re on the ground.” He muses, standing upright, looking down on you, a view he much preferred.
You don’t reply, choosing instead to simply look away, ignoring the palpitations of your heart. Vulnerability silencing your words as you swallow the remnants of your horrible, horrible kiss.
Dazai looks at you, his eyes moving across your painted face, glancing sideways to an empty street, solidifying your aloneness, his expression morphs into one of acute understanding before it vanishes in the execution of a trained smile.
You don’t see his smile, but you take his momentary silence as one of accurate assessment.
You think his quietness is more deadly than his usual entourage of sharp one liners that encase each conversation shared with him.
You wipe your mouth again.
“..I’m on the ground.” You conclude, stretching your legs in-front of you, eyes remaining on the scuffed tips of your battered shoes. “I’m um just sitting to catch my breath Dazai, you can..you can leave, you don’t need to stay.” Your words come out whispered, and you think they sound cruel when you taste them on your tongue.
“But your gloom is so blatant my dear!” The man before you guffaws, his volume far exceeding your own, “How could a gentleman like myself leave you here to rot in your own misery!”
You glance up at him and he’s clutching his heart through the layers of his coat, head raised in a substantial showing of himself.
You rub your eyes, you feel the makeup on your lashes smudge.“You’re giving me a headache.”
“How cruel of you to say!”
“Dazai.”
“Hm?”
“Please, go away.”
He’s smiling, he’s smiling at your words and you want to rip your eyes out as an atonement for ever believing you could see “authenticity” in his grin.
You’re tired, and Dazai knows, he knows everything. You’re sick of his unspoken understanding.
You hear a wave crash along the far side of a ship, it crashes into a dock and vibrates the ground on which you sat.
It’s bitterly cold, your teeth chatter in your jaws, you clamp them shut, and look away again.
“I’m assuming it was a date then?” Dazai’s watching you closer now, eyes flitting across the slight tremor in your lip as you nod.
“Leaving a beautiful woman by herself in the dark, he mustn’t have been that interesting.”
“He said I looked tired”
“You do.” His voice sounds strangely empty, the blank sky above you holding more substance, the crinkle of his eyes seems forced now, as if struck by realisation.
You don’t know what to say, so you resort to saying nothing, focusing on the blinking of your eyes, and the rise and fall of your chest. Dazai watches as you breathe.
The hands in his pockets are tainted red across the knuckles, his finger tips too. Bandages seemingly useless in combating the perils of an approaching winter, Dazai doesn’t mind.
He joins you in your silence as he steps towards you and kneels down, shoes scrapping across the hard ground, it looks like he’s falling to his knees.
“You’re stuck in self pity.” He states, his voice sounds bored, eyes narrowed. Embarrassment clings to the curve of your waist and trails it’s way up to your face, you blink and look towards the source.
His nose is slightly reddened, but his expression does not falter, does not reveal any rhyme or reason, nor a motive to why he’s not leaving.
You try to dissect his thoughts in your mind, cutting him open and trying to stare through the black pools of his eyes to try reach the core.
Instead you find you can’t, there’s a steel wall preventing you from prying, you grow frustrated and Dazai just watches.
“Self pity is a nightmare.” You almost think he whispers it.
You want to reach out and touch his face, follow the curve of his lips right up the hair framing his hollowed face.
“Can..can I hold your hand?” Your timid, pathetic, needing to be held to stabilise yourself, how did you get so weak.
There’s a pause, Dazai stiffens, it’s just barely noticeable but you see it, you’ve caught him off guard with your boldness.
Dressed up to impress another man and yet, it’s him you ask to cling to in the blackened equidistant of the night.
Slowly, as if approaching prey, Dazai lifts his hand out of his pocket, his eyes never leaving your face as he presents his hand.
You grasp it, hold it.
You think the ground would be more pleasing to touch.
It’s obvious he’s uncomfortable, he can’t push you away when you’ve captured him like this, but for the sake of the expanding the mask he’s crafted after years of desolate numbness, he says nothing about the way your hand tightens around his.
“And what would your date say about this hm? Do you usually hold the hands on another after being with another man?” He muses, you think his smile looks cold.
“It’s not a habit.” You mumble, your thumb tracing the line where his bandages end; they’re new, the implications make you feel sick.
The ground where his knee sits digs into his flesh, stones pressing into the skin of his knee, but he does not move, he’s almost statuesque.
You frown, at him, the reasoning behind his words falling onto your ears. “Don’t judge me Dazai.” You mutter, words sounding far more harsh when spoken out-loud.
“I wasn’t.” It’s simple.
Dazai’s quiet when he lies, at least you can walk away having learned something new about the man who holds your hand but drops your heart.
“I-I’m just sad.” Your shoulder deflate, his hand tighten around yours for a split second, you think you imagined it.
“Then.” He starts, dullness oozing out of his voice, “If you’re so miserable why not join me in a double suicide, I’m sure it would be far more romantic than this.” He removes his hand from yours and stands, forcing his hand back into his pocket, you miss how he flexes it, as if holding back a truth he cannot speak.
His smile is ugly, so ugly that it’s pushing you away, forcing your head to look the other way, to not watch the man hiding his inner downfall infront if you. Dazai’s eye twitches, and his mask cracks for a moment.
A building nearby turns its lights off, you see the silhouettes of two people, working the closing shift, they laugh as they pull down the shudders before the door, and turn to walk together, in the opposite direction, none the wiser to the two people sat watching them from afar.
“Don’t do that Dazai.” You start, your clawing onto the remains of an awkward conversation, trying to force it back to life, ignoring how his words made your heart stop in the hollowed captivity of your chest. “Please, not now.”
Your begging he realises, begging for a true moment with him.
But he won’t give you that, to think otherwise is foolish.
However, as he watches your trembling figure, foolish is the only way he can describe you. The grotesque smile falls from his face and onto the dirty ground of which he stands and you sit.
“Struck a nerve?” Dazai queries, he sounds bored again, you hate yourself.
“Sorry, sorry.” You repeat, eyes swimming with poorly expressed expression. “I’m just..selfish and lonely tonight.” You’re confessing, as if he himself is a God, nihilism forgotten in the shaking of your voice.
“I just wanted to feel connected with someone without having to beg for it”
The meaning of your words crumbles in the silence that follows, dancing across the distance between the pair of you, from your mouth to his ear.
“Ah.” A soft smile of understanding crosses his features, you jump when he turns on his heel, “Then I am not suited for his conversation.”
“I’ll call Kunikida, he’s more inclined for situations like this than I.” He’s walking, he’s walking and you’re watching and you feel yourself rip at the seams, you need to know if there’s a chance, a chance he might care. You fight the will to keep yourself composed and your desperation comes out triumphant.
You’re stupid, he knows of your affections, yet he leaves every-time.
“I kissed him.”
The air melts into a bitter, silent breeze, you fear you might have just pushed a boundary, reaching forward with your eyes closed, crossing a line you could not see.
Dazai stops.
He doesn’t know why he stops.
He does not care for your love, he does not reciprocate, he refuses to. You don’t know him, your love is not his to accept, it acts as a maladaptive pining for a man, a human, for which he cannot claim, less he wear a fake suit presenting as himself.
And yet, you kissed another man, and the chilly motions of the wind blowing across his stagnant face whisper to him that he’s bothered by this, blowing into his ear, mocking him for being, despite everything; as humanly selfish as you.
Perhaps he’s bothered by your lack of self-respect, kissing a man you were so clearly uninterested in in your vain search for connection, but he turns and looks at you, and feels in his soul, that he’s lying to himself.
It’s a realisation that leaves him as bitter as the atmosphere encasing the pair of you.
“And?” He speaks as if it’s a secret, as if him prying was a sin, and he omnipotent.
“It wasn’t you.”
The small movement of his head betrays how much he wants to look away, forcing himself to stare you out, to intimidate you into walking away.
You’re brave tonight, he thinks.
“I don’t hate you Osamu.” You breathe.
You can’t breathe, too preoccupied with staring, truly staring at his face, wondering if maybe, just maybe, he would listen to you should you get to his level.
You stand up, he stays where he is.
“Are you expecting reciprocation?” He moves to checkmate, his voice heard like a warning, his eyes reading as empty.
You shake your head, and bite the skin on your lips.
“I just needed to know that you heard me.”
Dazai throws his head back and laughs, it fills the void of sea and sky and you shake at the cruel sound. To an outsider it may appear as if he’s brimming with joy, unable to hide its serene hold on him. But you’re too close to mistake his laughter as anything but uncomfortable.
“And tell me.” He breathes through his laughter, his hand placed on his stomach, “Did you hate him? Hate the kiss?”
Shame burns your cheeks, and you look to your shoes again as heat floods your face.
Your king was dead, you’d been defeated.
“It was like a slug in my mouth.” You muse.
Eventually he stops laughing, and your world returns to normal. Silent and unchanging, you count the intervals between the sounds of the waves.
Dazai is untouchable again. Everything is back to how it was.
“Shall I take you out drinking too then hm? Then I’ll kiss you properly and we shall never speak again.”
You don’t answer, thwarted by the maze of his twisted personality.
“Did you hear me?” He mocks, his smile sly, you want to rip it off his mendacious face.
He’s pushing you away, the distance between you extending far beyond your reach, you falter with the consequential loss of your friendship with Dazai.
You don’t know what to say, your words can’t create a bridge to combat the vehement river of “unsure’s, so instead you shake your head, arms moving up to embrace yourself.
Dazai is quiet when he lies, however he’s silent when he’s unsure.
And when you don’t respond he narrows honeyed eyes, an uncertainty you don’t see flickers across his pupils and fractures the disciplined facade of his character.
He’s pushing you away, and for once he feels hesitant.
He’s forced you away timelessly, but you’re still looking at him, with that foolish soft look in your eye. And Dazai wants to smudge it off your features and chastise you for regarding him in such a tender manner.
He says nothing, but raises his hand once more, presenting it you.
The street is empty, nobody but Dazai present to witness how your eyes widen and your head tilts, confused.
Your emotions bleed out onto your face, staining the crease of your eyes with hurt, your lips pouting in trepidation.
And you hold his hand in yours, it’s stiff, it’s awkward, but it’s an unspoken viaduct into his psyche, your heart soars.
“Despite everything..I really don’t hate you, you know?” You’re speaking dangerously again, pulling him towards you despite his childish resilience towards trust.
His hand tightens, you’re sure of it this time.
“Ask me.” He mumbles, pulling you closer, your feet nudge his, your nose almost touching his shirt when you look up at him. “Ask me to kiss you.”
“Osamu-” His face is half encased with shadow, the glow from the street light failing to fully show him to you. You breathe and he feels it on his chin.
You don’t understand, your stuck in parallel to his contradictions, frantically scanning for the root of his intention, hands balling into fists when you can’t find it amongst the fog.
His hand comes up and tilts your head upwards, leaning down towards you, your nose touching his as you bite your tongue.
Time slows, and you whisper, it comes out meek.
“Kiss me, please.”
It’s instantaneous to your request. His bottom lip brushes against yours, and he’s on you like fire to oil.
His hand spreads out against your cold cheek, pulling you closer, his middle finger finding rest on the lobe of your ear.
He kisses you as if he wants to. As if he’s making a sick point to the man who had previously stolen your breath within the same night.
He breathes you in, and you breathe him out.
You want him to swallow you whole, right there and then on the side of the street, hidden away from the rest of the world.
You almost cry when he pulls away, eyes glistening as you look at him once more.
His spit is on your lip and you query, “Was that a-”
“It was a kiss.” He doesn’t let you finish, pushing his palm into your cheek, watching as you let your head move gently with the force.
Your unspoken question dies in the removal of his hand, and is reborn when he doesn’t not walk away immediately, hands stuck back in tattered pockets as he smiles, and for a second, a split second you see him as a boy, with fear breaching the walls of his eyes.
It vanishes instantly, disappearing with the climaxing waves behind you.
You try to recall the genuine look in you mind, try to pinpoint the vulnerability you had seen for a moment, but you lose sight of it as he claps his hands.
“Now, the night is still young my dear, I must be off.” His personified joy hits you like a raindrop hits a petal, and you stare, as if in a daze as he steps back, away from you.
“Oh- ok?” You grasp at anything to say, anything to reassure you that everything was ok.
He smiles, and nudges your arm, you can’t tell if he’s being himself anymore.
He going, and your left with the sickly sense of hope swimming in your chest, drowning amongst your spoken affections.
“Safe home!” He calls, his voice light, revealing nothing, and leaving you with less.
There was nobody in the world like Osamu Dazai, and perhaps that’s why you turned and began to walk home, alone.
masterlist <3
feel free to leave a request !
a/n: beep boop bop im tired- i hope this made sense, i just love the cruelty of dazais character <3 (can you tell) anyway reminder i love you and that you’re doing ok !!! ALSO shin nakatani was named using a random name generator i found on google and i think that’s very funny, my cat is sitting on my chest as i type this, it’s hard to write when you can’t move all that much :,)
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