#slapping that bad boy on there bc i'm back to my regular scheduled kitsunezai brainrot

[anticidic]

Ahhhhh~ Belladonna! 🌹So we meet again.

I’ve come to sing your praises and gift you a rose as sweet as your name penned into prose. 😏

You move hearts, your art of words building visions beyond our wildest dreams; you could make anyone recite poems to.

But alas, my time here is borrowed (I can only sit in your inbox for so long 💀) and I’ve come with a challenge for you. Beyond the ocean and far away from fairytales, dare to inspire yourself and us too.

“❛ I would destroy myself to fix you. ❜”

#prompt heroxvillain sentence starter

(Everytime I see Dazai in your PFP I have to be dramatic 💀 sorry, not sorry)

THE DAZAI GIF JUMPSCARE WHEN I OPENED THISSSS 😭✋ This was so cute though, omg.

Also me: challenge accepted (gonna hide some of this under the cut because wtf I wrote like 900 words)

GRAVE FLOWERS

He would destroy himself the same way the flowers would come winter. Seasons changed. Leaves upon trees turned from pink to green to yellow to dead. They fell in piles where children jumped, and even now, as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette, the sound remained a little jingle in his mind's attic. The sound of the beginning. But his end would come. Only so much could be destroyed before nothing remained. Chuuya thought his heart concrete and impenetrable, but the cracks were there. The cracks were all there ever was. What mattered was how long it would be before it crumbled to dust and a wonder of how much more he could withstand.

A gray rain fell on Yokohama. The city soaked in it, cold and dripping. Waves hit concrete breakers, homeless huddled by the fires behind the fences—the cinders he tapped away from the end of his cigarette the last dash of color on the world. And there was Dazai standing before him with the same boyish grin he had the day they met many springs ago on the highest mountain peak, all alone. He looked a little more human than usual, and it could’ve fooled Chuuya.

No, it did. Chuuya smiled back. He couldn’t help himself even as he took a drag.

Mist clouded his vision, and he wiped away the droplets that struck his cheek. Once he smelled the earth and felt the dirt beneath his fingernails as he chased Dazai through the fields, trampling flowers and kicking up puddles that scared nesting birds away. He did it with a laugh so breathless his lungs were on fire then, and each time he reached out to grab a handful of Dazai’s sleeve with a ‘gotcha!’, Dazai disappeared.

And left him all alone in the meadow.

The laughter withered up and died and it hurt. Something stung his eyes, the damn salt of the sea, as he flicked away a stray tear. Wildlife returned to the forest: a doe and a fawn, their heads held low to the wet grass, disinterested. Sad, even. An owl hooted from afar. He felt the eyes of a family of birds staring back at him, all ten eyes in silence.

Chuuya sighed then and crushed the flowers he still had in one fist. He tossed them to the ground and watched how petals drifted away in the breeze, into holes dug by chipmunks.

Now, Dazai stood proud and tall before him. Unbothered. He had his hands hidden in his sleeves, whether by habit or hiding the ugly truth. Chuuya used to yearn for that burning truth, but now that it was his, he ached to turn back time to that one spring many months ago when they only knew each other by name and knew not the rift that would separate them from now until the end.

Dazai’s story would continue, ceaselessly, and Chuuya’s would end someday. He took solace in knowing that it was not this fine, rainy day, and smiled through that. Along with that smile, another tired exhale releasing smoke into the air.

Maybe if he sickened himself on high-tar content until it made his throat raw and he became dizzy, he’d see the most beautiful sight he longed for since they last saw one another: nine tails white as snow, dipped in blue. But for now, Dazai was but a man no older than Chuuya. An ancient and sunken ruin of a man where history went to die, and much as Chuuya tried to pry it from Dazai’s lips, words never followed. Chuuya wouldn’t like what the past used to be like, with war-torn buildings and roaring fires razing nature to the ground. But his mind swam, drowning in colorful visuals of carnage and men dying and horses shrieking, black soil. Dazai was once part of that forgotten past, and Chuuya helped bring him back to life. Though he lived for centuries, it had not been kind to him. The weariness in Dazai’s eyes came and went in flickers the same way his tails did. All part of the grand illusion.

The wind picked up. Fine sea foam lashed Chuuya’s face. And it felt like needles.

Today the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette, the jokes cast out to sea as they huddled under an umbrella for safety. Today the embrace before hurting.

He knew this; he accepted this when their fates became entwined and now, they were a spiderweb of glass that was painful to look at—just two twin stars burning out in the darkness.

Wood hit cobblestone, one-two step, and he looked up to see Dazai extending a hand out to him, whispering against the downpour, “Gotcha.”

Dazai was not human, but he was human enough. Together, there were many more chapters for them to fill in. It began with Dazai bastardized as a thing of nightmares and today, it blossomed like the sweetest rose. He was a living memory, and Chuuya was glad to be a part of that.