eris.

canon pmzai

so first i want to talk about how it probably starts, because i could sooooo very much see this starting while he & his lover are young. since this is canon, i imagine they meet at around 15/16 like i have dazai & pmreader meeting. dazai's clearly a lot more unstable during his early pm years and i think his obsession with his lover could start with something really minimal tbh. maybe they shoot an offhand compliment to him, or stop to pick something up that he dropped, and dazai is just so alone & isolated by mori atp that he just completely fixates on this person because they’re the first one to ever say/do something kind for him, as small as it may have been.

i think it would even start out harmless, spends a lot of time thinking about you, daydreaming. maybe he even steps in on missions for you - which he notably doesn't do for anyone because he doesn't want to do more work than he has to. but something would happen that eventually triggers the shift from harmless to a veryyyy dangerous obsession. maybe you got critically wounded on a mission, or maybe you start spending time with other people—whatever it is, it just flips a switch in him because he realizes that he is not about to loose you and he doesn't care what he has to do to make sure of it.

on this topic ^^ maybe this is a hot take, but i think canon pm yanzai would be entirely more dependent on his lover compared to adazai. adazai is still dependent, but not to the extent pmzai is. i know people hc him as hyper independent, which i also mostly hc for him, but i think if he's found someone that he's attached himself to like this, he’s young enough that he'll quickly become codependent on them, and that obviously scares him which makes him even more intense with his yan tendencies.

that being said, i still think that he would be careful to not alert you to any shift of his mentality. he'd be very hyperaware of keeping a good image in your eyes, so everything he does do is going to be behind the scenes. he'd probably work a lot with isolation and trying to make you as dependent on him as he is on you—justifies it by telling himself that it's not fair that he can't live without you but you can live without him LOL, won't be satisfied until he's inclined enough to believe that if he was gone you would be ruined without him (which comes into play when he leaves the mafia). he also makes sure that the missions you go on - if he even has you going on any - are all easy AND he makes sure he's overseeing them. probably phrases it as just a shift in command, assuming you were someone else's subordinate first, and you don't really have any reason to think anything of it.

i think he'd keep a really tight hold on his image up until the events of dark era, that whole ... week ? i assume its about a week, of everything going down with ango and oda just tosses him into a mental spiral and he'd probably let the mask slip a few times in front of you. i still don’t think it’s enough for you to really question anything—not until he leaves, that is.

now moving on to adazai - but first, the underground years:

we're gonna assume that you stay with the pm when he leaves. i think he'd spend a lot of his underground years honestly just keeping an eye on you from a distance. i think he'd be like very back and forth with how he feels, like a part of him is soooo satisfied that you're so broken about him leaving but then the other part of him has him wanting rip out his own throat for being the reason for your distress. he'd be rlly hyperaware of you "moving on" from him. his go to would be driving people away from you, like it was while he was with the pm but it's a lot harder now that he has to be a "ghost" so to speak, so i think he would target you yourself more often. and it would be little things, like whenever he sees you start talking to someone new, he'd leave little things around your apartment to remind you of him. maybe pictures you'd taken together, or small trinkets, anything to make you remember him and trigger you back into that spiral of missing him. BUT that being said, i think he would be very careful to ensure that you don't realize it's him leaving these things around, so he'd go through your apartment and look for stuff and would lay it out carefully to make you think that you just happened to leave it out.

i think over the course of his underground years, you start to realize that whatever you had with dazai was not healthy and how he acted with you was not healthy, and dazai does take note of this in his 💀 long hours observing you, which is why he’s so careful to keep up his new mask with you when he inevitably meets you again (read below).

OK now adazai

adazai is interesting. i went back and forth with this a lot, but i think adazai would really utilize his new job & demeanor as a tool to make you come back to him/fall for him again, especially if you’d started to put things together during the years he was gone. he frames his leaving it as how it was just something he had to do, look how much better he is now, he’s healed & hes good now, and he didn’t know what else to do because he knew his mental state wasn’t healthy back in the mafia. <- i think this would be important specifically because you would take note of how he acknowledges how incredibly possessive and weird he was with you, and in your mind, someone who acts like that probably wouldn’t see anything wrong with it, so the fact that he acknowledges it would be a green flag in your mind because maybe he has grown.

he also would probably hit you with a few guilt trips like he didn’t even know he meant enough to you to make you care about whether or not he was there. he’d be veryyyyyy sweet and honeyed with his apologies and pleas for forgiveness, and he’d be patient too. if you weren’t open to listening to him the first time you run into him, he’d orchestrate several other “run ins” over the next few weeks, whittle down your guard until he can finally claw his way back into your skin.

once that whole first stage of “winning you back” is over, dazai would quickly return to old habits although, however careful he was while in the pm to keep a good image in your eyes, he’s 100000x more careful now. because now it’s beyond just not letting you see the “demon prodigy”, he’s been advertising himself to you as a good, changed man and he has every intention of maintaining that image in your eyes. so yeah, he might be using access to cctv cameras to stalk your every move and yes, he’s slowly but surely driving everyone away from you, but in your eyes, he’s a detective who spends the saving people and that should never waver in anyway.

i think one notable difference is that adazai’s first big goal is going to be to drag you from the mafia, so while he is isolating you from people in the pm, i think he wouldn’t be so quick to isolate you from the members of the agency. in fact he would even encourage it to an extent - as long as they know their place 💀 - until he gets you to leave the pm, that is, then he might start to isolate you altogether again.

adazai likes to fashion himself as a bit of a savior to you i think. he saw how you spiraled without him, and came back to you, promising to never leave you again, apologizing for ever having have. gets in your head by making comments about how he didn’t even know you rlly cared about him like that.

^^ he’ll drag u from the dark shadow of the port mafia and tuck you right into his own shadow instead. and yeah, it might be just as dark, but at least he’ll be there to to make sure some light is peeking through cell bars of his “love”.

nowwww pmzai who never left the mafia.

i think i’ll keep this one short because imo i feel like this would just be canon pmzai without bothering to keep the whole front up in front of you. he doesn’t really care to hide his obsession over you - what are you going to do about it? run? he’s not going to let you do that, and he knows you don’t want to do that anyway. this pmzai is even more unstable than canon pmzai - i imagine he still lost oda, but then failed to even fulfill his last request by leaving the mafia and going to the light, so instead he focuses all of his energy onto the one person he has left: you.

but he knows very well what he's paying for.

you don't seem all that concerned about his more eccentric comments, and even if he’s certainly far from your usual customer, you treat him as well as you’d treat your other clients. he’s watched enough of your ‘dates’ to know that by now. you roll your eyes at his terrible flirting, but smile as though you’re smitten. you pretend to be upset when he steals spoonfuls of your dessert, but never move your plate away. you let him lean on you when he complains about his feet hurting, even if it makes for an awkward position.

it would be so easy to fall for someone like you. someone so perfect; a fantasy of a perfect relationship. lovely dates to indulge in after a exhausting week. a small escape from the painful mundanity of life.

you send him off with only a squeeze to a hand and a word of gratitude. it isn’t much, but his hands tingle and he wonders how much it’d cost to get a kiss on his cheek instead.

he’s not of your usual crowd of lonely salarymen and awkward students, and you likely don’t expect him to come back. but he shows up a week later, and you greet him with that same bright smile.

“thank you for making time for me,” you say, and to any onlookers, this might appear like a perfectly ordinary date. apart from a curious look, nobody acknowledges the two of you, likely out of consideration. but dazai knows the people here were well aware of your job, likely having seen you around. only he could pretend this fantasy was anything more. 

“the atmosphere is off,” he claims, before asking you to go to the countryside for a change, knowing well how ridiculous the demand was. it’s a pathetic reason for a equally pathetic attempt at satiating a desperate need to be with you. 

again, he tells himself that it’s not because it’s you. he just wants to know how it’d feel like; to be loved, and to be in love; the gentle, soothing kind. all the things that dazai knows to feel are vicious and intense, and nothing like the tenderness you offer. he wants something to alleviate his greedy heart, if only for a moment, and you just happen to be willing to play your part.

after excusing yourself for a few phone calls, you inform him that the countryside is too far for a day trip, and suggest other places instead—all bustling with people, and nothing like the remoteness he’d have liked, though he smiles and takes his pick regardless. on the train, he stands too close to you, but you continue the conversation without faltering. you've always tried to accommodate him, and not entirely because you have to. last week he heard you tell a friend over the phone that he reminded you of a cat, with how he jumped from overly clingy to quiet, and he took it as a good sign.

still, exploring the city with his hand in yours is far more delightful than he’d hoped. he preens at the envious looks he receives, and happily eats up the comments of how cute the two of you look together. the two of you struggle over directions together and navigate congested streets, and you even agree to share your ice cream with him. you grumble about the heat, hair sticking to your forehead, and dazai eagerly blows right at you, making you scowl and bat his face away. but you’re laughing right after, and he’s smiling like a lovesick fool. he takes care to imprint the sight of you, grinning with your hands sticky with melted ice cream shielding your face, in his mind.

“i want to go to an amusement park next,” he whispers, ignoring the displeased look he gets from everyone else on the train.

though you poke his side in response, you still nod, and you don’t move away when he leans his head on your shoulder. as always, your hand is around his with a reassuring squeeze. he squeezes back. he thinks that he likes the weight of it—familiar and real. he closes in eyes to take it all in, to memorize his pounding heart and your warm hand in his, the scent of your shampoo and the way your hair brushes against his cheek.

but he'd like more—greedy as he is—and as the pricing for next week goes up, so does your proximity. you naturally ease into calling him osamu and baby, and even the ridiculously cutesy nicknames he demands for without a single moment of hesitation. you comply with all the cliches he wants, letting him feed you and brushing away the tiny spot of cream at the corner of his mouth (ignoring how he had just smeared it there himself), easily catching him when he stumbles and offering him your jacket when it’s cold. the most he gets out of you is a raised eyebrow at some of the more startling requests—when he asks for you to refer to him as your superior on one date, or when he asks you to wrap new bandages around his arms, but you never say anything else. you never make him feel like it was anything but ordinary.

it’s a shame he can’t get anything more intimate, no cuddling or kisses—at least not the kind he wants, with your mouth on his and your hands in his hair—but he can find other ways to make up for it, even if at this point, the idea of playing pretend leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.

two months and eight dates in, he asks you to fight with him.

you shoot him a wary look, “i don’t know how. though if want to go see a fight—"

you've let your guard down a little by now, and dazai finds that he likes this side of you more than the facade you put on. you're still terribly warm and polite, but your smiles are less practised and your words less polished, your eyes brighter and your movement less stilted. you're becoming comfortable around him, unbeknownst to yourself. dazai relishes in the fact—maybe another month would be all it takes for you to drop the act completely.

"no," he says, "i want us to fight. like couples."

"like couples?"

"you know, argue about buying the wrong groceries, or about forgetting birthdays. that sort of thing."

"is it your birthday?"

he considers saying yes, just to have something to whine about and have you try and appease him, but ultimately decides against it. "no."

you stare at him, still unsure of what to do.

"you were late again," he starts, "it's the third time this month."

he has to bite back a smile at your blank expression.

"i'm sorry...?"

"don't say it was because of work again. i won't buy that excuse any longer."

you nod at how he harrumphs, finally catching on.

"i'm sorry, honey. i really need that promotion."

he shoots you an accusing glare, "is that the reason? or is it because of that coworker you keep hanging around?"

"you know i don't care for anyone else," and your eyes soften, "it's only you."

he pouts, but lets you grab his hand from across the table and squeeze it. he can't think of anything else to say when you're looking at him like you're so endeared.

it's only an act, he knows. but to what extent?

"i like you," he admits when you see him off at the station, "i didn't mean to—i know i shouldn't"

he can't remember when the revelation occurred to him. but somewhere during those dates, he realized it wasn't just a simple kind of love he was craving. it was something more, and something that you were fundamentally part of. it was your laughter he wanted to hear, and your hands he liked the weight of, you he wanted to hold and your love he wanted to feel. his voice is weak enough that he hopes, for a second, that you don't hear him after all. but your eyes are always on him when you're together, and there's no taking it back anymore.

you don't reply, lips pursed together. your eyes look dull, and he wonders if you've been hiding how tired you were to not disappoint him. you watch him board the train with a pensive look on your face. dazai understands; it was a sudden revelation you probably had not been expecting. but you'd come around, he's sure. you were already starting to blur the lines between you and the persona you played. you've mentioned that you think he's funny, that you think he's cute. that must mean something, right?

he finds that he's been blocked from the website the next morning.

he's not entirely sure why—was his confession that frightening? or was it just what you had to do, for your job? maybe it wasn't even up to you. he tries again from an internet cafe, but the minute he keys in his card information, he's kicked off the site. he considers taking kunikida's card for the booking instead, but he would be livid, and...the thought of you getting ready for anyone else made him sick to his stomach. was he supposed to watch as you put on your kind smile and wait for kunikida instead?

fortunately, he knows your habits well enough to plan a meeting with you. while your work hours were inconsistent, there were other things you did regularly—grocery shopping on thursday evenings and dinner with your friends on saturdays. he could work around that, coupled with listening in on a few calls.

he lies in wait outside the convenience store you frequent, running over all the things he'd like to say to you in his head. should he apologize, or pretend like nothing had happened? maybe he should ask to explain things over a drink, or just beg you to hear him out.

you stop walking when you catch sight of him, and you look more irritated than upset. your mouth is twisted in a scowl he's never seen before.

he's certain of it now—this is his only chance. and it's obvious you weren't going to sit and listen.

perhaps a small part of him had always known that it'd never work out the way he wanted. it would be easy, he thinks, to just take you. you could change your mind about him later, but at least you'd be with him. he should have known he wasn't the kind of person deserving of sweet words and slow kisses. dazai had only ever known to be cruel, and perhaps this was all he could ask for in return.