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milky-aeons · 12 hours ago

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reid im sobbing my whole eyes out this is the most beautiful thing i have ever had the privilege of reading — fuck. your words are so fluid and poetic and impactful, you write him so raw and honest. its like you ripped my heart out and cradled it so softly.

sobbing. please read this sweethearts its outstanding!!

⊹ I KNOW

I WILL PRETEND THAT I DON’T KNOW OF YOUR SINS UNTIL YOU ARE READY TO CONFESS . . . ft. Osamu Dazai

wc: 2.1k

cw: gn!reader, implied/referenced dissociation+anxiety+self harm+scars+past suicide attempts, hurt/comfort but it's him so of course it's a little unhinged, mentions of dying and being dead, mentions of kidnapping but it's not serious, minor suicidal ideation but it's romantic i guess? non-sexual nudity/intimacy, showering together, lots of kisses, just unbandaging a fragile Dazai and covering him in kisses

reid: draft i been sittin on. how many times will i do an iteration of unwrap and clean him. idk. a million billion. i love him so bad

He’s looking down at his hands—or his wrists, or his fingers, or the spaces between his fingers; you’re not sure. But he’s looking down, emptily, when you nudge the cracked bathroom door further open.

He’s sitting on the lid of the closed toilet. He has no shirt on. His bandages are unraveling at each end of their respective reaches. It’s long past time they should be changed, long past time the flesh beneath them breathe and be washed.

Changing the bandages is just something that has to be done; he will not give them up, nor will he give up the habit evidenced beneath them, and you’ve been with him long enough to know this is how he survives. The bandages do the holding-together when you’re not there to, which is far more often than he’d like. Ideally, he’d be able to shrink you down and keep you in his pocket for safe-keeping and take you out whenever he needs, like a good luck charm; he’d be able to have you on his arm all day, every day, but that’s not possible when you’re an adult with a job and a life. Like him. Right? Right. He’d shuck this skin sooner than the habit, anyway, so, like showering, it’s just something that has to be done.

He doesn’t particularly love when you watch him do it, or offer to do it for him, but you certainly drive off the impulses, hazes, and tremors that come with doing it alone. So, he lets you.

He didn’t always; he went out of his way, bent over backwards for a long time to make sure you never could, much less had to. Somewhere deep down, though, beneath that resolve and the facade stilted upon it, he knew he couldn’t hide his ugliness from you forever.

Despite the normality—the domestic intimacy that standing beneath the water with you suggests now, so much that he has to admit it stills the expansion of the ever-growing black hole inside him—he still always fears it’ll be the last time you want to look at it.

“Osamu?” you mumble from the doorframe.

He does not move, does not look at you over the white noise of the shower running—if he’s noticed you’re here, he doesn't show it. You move to him, slowly, like approaching a skittish cat.

Before you touch him, you bend down—beneath the sink are the rolls of fresh bandages, the clean, new ones that make him look less like a mummy unearthed from Victorian times and more like what he understands himself to be in his purest form: a basket case of the modern era, the worst gift you unwrap every Christmas and birthday and have to pretend to fawn over until it’s safe to be rid of it. You’ll never be rid of him, he thinks regretfully while you shuffle next to him; he’ll never get by without you now, and it almost makes him wish he never met you in the first place, just so he never could’ve inflicted himself upon you.

But you never send him back. Dazai can’t seem to understand, even with all that sharp intelligence of his, that you don’t ever plan to.

Four rolls. One for each of his legs, one for both of his arms, the rest for miscellaneous spots like around his neck or across his chest or wherever else he decides he needs them this time. That’s how many you set on the counter before you land in front of him, your hands pushing his hair back, your proximity forcing his cheek to lay tired against your stomach while those hands curl around the backs of your legs and pull you closer to stand between his.

You cradle Dazai’s head like you’re some sort of saint. To him, you might as well be.

Thumbs brushing his temple and the base of his skull, you speak again, just as quiet. “Come on, let’s wash.” Or, let me unwrap you and look at all that ugliness. He can’t help that he doesn’t move for a firm fifteen seconds; why would he want to, when you hold him so sweetly like this?

But eventually, he rises.

You don’t feed him formalities or those silly questions anymore when you do this. No more can I? Or, you’re gorgeous, or, is this okay? He doesn’t want those during this, you’ve come to find out; you’ll tell him you love him plenty in a few minutes, when he’s only marginally more ready to receive it, but right now you go to work like a tinker repairing a broken doll. Your touch is objective, but not cold or clinical. You treat him with a tenderness he couldn’t have fathomed until he knew you.

After he steps out of his slacks, you loosen the strips with one hand and twirl them around the other; they accumulate in a graying mass of two or more weeks worth of sweat, and you place them in the trash, softly, like you adore and respect those, too, as he skitters past you toward the water for a sense of cover. He knows you’ll be in right after him, but at least the light behind the shower curtain is dimmer. When he disappears, it’s as if he was never there.

But he says, “I’m okay,” unprompted, as you step beneath the water.

He is, really. It’s just jarring when it’s the focus.

The process of becoming accustomed to vulnerability is often more painful than the vulnerability itself, Dazai has learned. While the realization can be sudden, like the flipping of a switch, the vulnerability on its own can actually be quite nice. Peaceful. He knows this because you showed him—continue to show him.

He’s just a man in the shower with his beloved, so, now you’ll talk to him.

“I know,” you say. And you do, really. The hardest part is over, and he’s practically pranced through it this time. You crack a smile.

And he mirrors your smile, not so bright and smug as under normal circumstances but soft and searching. Dazai reaches for your arms, your waist, and pulls you into him; the water hits your back—hot, how he likes it—and you tuck your head into his shoulder and wrap yourself around his middle, whispering I love yous into his shoulder.

It's peaceful. He sways you ever so subtly.

But in true Dazai fashion, he'll shatter the peace. Ever the disruptor.

“I'm sorry you have to love this part of me, too.”

The ugliness, he means. Not just the marred and keloided skin that maps out his history of self-destruction, but his resignation to it. The scabs that touch the small of your back are freshly healing and peeling. If you didn't have him beneath your watch right now they'd probably be scratched open, raw and bleeding again, but as previously mentioned, your presence staves off the itching need to do so.

The tips of his fingers squeeze you when you pull back to look up at him, sliding your hands up his shoulders and behind his neck to link.

“I love every part of you,” you murmur as his forehead dips to rest against yours. Your stunted slow-dance deepens as he sighs himself back into his body, back into the clearer image of you in his grasp. “Don’t be sorry about it. Wouldn’t do it if I didn’t want to.”

The demons snap at his ankles, though. “What if you change your mind one day?”

If he was a hair more insane, he might take you hostage. Keep you to himself forever, and never let you leave. But that would take the peace out of it, he thinks. Your volition makes it all sweeter. You want to be here. You want to love him.

He just doesn’t want that to change.

You hum patiently, although hating when he what ifs. That’s the plague of the ever-moving mind he keeps, you suppose; so intelligent, but so restless. “I don’t think I will.”

You don’t think you will, but that doesn’t settle the insecurity that’s settled in his stomach like a coiled snake.

You don’t think you will, but you will. He knows you will, because that’s how it’s fated to unfold for him.

Your short words don’t corral him away from the snake, but the less you treat him like he’s a gaping wound, the better. You see it. You don’t cry or gasp or lament or promise how you could never leave him, will never leave him; you don’t like to make promises that reach beyond your control.

The human existence is so strange and fluid, and while you’re confident you won’t tire of him, well, your reciprocated touches aren’t the only things stitching you together, you know; there’s a world, much larger than both of you, that you live in, and a universe even more incomprehensible and its whims are fickle—but they’re also serendipitous. Everything is a miracle, if you think about it. A big, beautiful mistake. You don’t know how much he buys into this, and you’d rather him not read into it as an excuse not to answer with a resounding I’ll never leave you, my love, so you just do what you always do best: spin it in a direction his troubled mind can find solace in, pair it with kisses that have all your soul for him to inhale, and promise what you can: your hope.

You start with his lips. The best place, arguably; one of your hands tilts his chin toward yours and you kiss him softly, simply. Dazai responds hesitantly, still holding onto you tight. You kiss him for minutes, until he's humming, until his grip loosens comfortably and his shoulders untense and his palms rest on either of your hips.

You have a habit of kissing him silly, literally. Your lips move against his and he feels high. His head gets light, and his hands get restless, and between the short puffs of air he draws in through his nose he croons at the way your fingers push his hair back, trail down his neck.

“I’m confident,” you say, sliding across his cheek to beneath his ear while he grabs at you in soft and absent-minded desperation, “that I’ll love you ‘til the end of my days.”

“But what if the e—”

“I’m certain—” You cut him off, first with speech and then with a kiss before you begin pressing your lips into a necklace around his throat, “—that I want to get old with you.” On one side, you bite softly. “That I want to die with you.” You bite the other. “That I want to be buried next to you.”

Osamu’s breath catches on the words buried next to you. Of course it’s crossed his mind before that if you were to go before him, he certainly wouldn’t be long after you. The thought that you want to live a full life with him before any of that can happen, however, makes his heart swell almost uncomfortably, like it’s no longer meant to fit inside his chest—like it wants to crawl up his throat and go home to yours. It will one day, you say, when you’re rotting next to each other. He wants to melt at the idea of it.

“And then… I don’t know what, if anything, will happen after that. But it’s my purest hope—” You traverse from one shoulder, across his collarbones, stopping only above his sternum to finish, “—that I’ll be with you forever,” before making your way to the other. He’s a mistake you’d make again and again, given the opportunity. If reincarnation is real, you’re sure of it, more than anything—you will.

And you know not expect anything but speechlessness from Osamu until after you’ve kissed a circle around that heart of his that’s beating so frantically for you, until after you’ve brought his knuckles to your lips, all twenty-eight of them, until after you’ve made your way back up one arm just to kiss down the other, until you’ve bent to scatter kisses across his stomach, his hips, until you’ve knelt to descend the ladder marking each of his thighs, until you’ve sat at his feet with your arms looped around the backs of his knees with your head pressed against him like he’s the saint this time. You sit at the feet of a sinner and make him taste redemption. It tastes like the shower water that’s touched your skin and the dinner you both ate before wandering into this strange place between his disillusion and his sheer need. You kiss him back into his humanity.

When you stand, level with him again, he smiles that smile you love so much—not the cocky, performative smile nor the uneasy, misgiving one that wants to trust but has forgotten how to but the smile that’s altogether subtle and plain and sad and the most radiant thing you’ve ever known. Every time he falls apart, you just stitch him right back up what he’s always wanted to be: loved, held, loving and holding.

Osamu touches your lips with his fingertips like you’re not quite real, like you’ve not just reminded every other inch of him that you very much are; he speaks, not a progenitor of pretty promises himself—but he owes you forever, he thinks, as long as it’s what you want. “Thank you.”

You laugh once, breathy, in no need. “Thank you,” you echo, “for being the most wonderful thing to love.”

Not the easiest, you both know—but it’s just something that has to be done, and there’s no law forbidding you from reminding him how beautiful he is in the process. Until you can be buried next to him. There’s hardly anything keeping forever from beginning right now.

He holds you, and you hold him, and he feels clean.

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