DOOM IN THREE ACTS
“THE WINNER TAKES IT ALL—”
This is straight-up cruel angst, children. Perhaps don’t read it if you already feel too emotional. And if you are a generally emotional person like me, who can cry out of nowhere, I would recommend preparing tissues and comfort blankets (and plushies🥺). Also, I would advise you not to read it if you have gone through a painful breakup or any triggering event in the near past.🩵
I would keep in mind the scene from the Dead Apple manga (spoilers?), when Chuuya punched Dazai and Dazai, acting offended, insisted that he was human too, as if Chuuya had treated him like something less.
I did not proofread. I probably should have. I may do so in the future, but enjoy it nonetheless!🩵
Genre: Angst.
Dazai x Female Reader (x Chuuya)
Warnings: mdni, su*cide (it’s Dazai, obviously) or murder, hurt and no comfort.
———
Act I.
Dazai shifted, lying fully on his back now. Sunlight oozed like liquid through the half‑closed blinds, dimly lighting the room.
His face was barely illuminated by this light; it only reached his chest properly from where he lay. The clock ticked in the uncomfortable silence, accompanied by the sound of your breathing from the other side of the line.
He stared at his phone when you didn’t answer for a while. He shifted again, now sitting up passively. The sunshine passed over him once more, illuminating only his legs and the top of his head.
“I won’t have you speak of him like that.”
Ah. There it is. He scoffed like a child into the mic of the phone.
“Truth is the first casualty of war, is it not, Belladonna?~”
“Osamu,” you muttered, your voice firm.
He scoffed again into the telephone, attempting to lean back on the bed but failing to manage even that. His whole body was tense, caught in something close to fight-or-flight, with an unbearable feeling he couldn’t name weighing heavily on him.
No, in fact, it was the unbearable feeling weighing on him. You sounded hurt. He swallowed hard, the pain in his heart burning all the way up his throat.
He hated hurting you as much as he hated prolonging this miserable life of his. You would probably scold him for “thinking suicidal‑maniacally,” as you liked to put it, if he ever told you what was truly running through his mind right now.
He shifted again, running his fingers through his hair as he let out a sigh. He usually was not a man who struggled to find the right words, not at all. But the air felt thinner, the room smaller.
He kept swallowing, trying to ease the lump in his throat. He knew he was about to sound pathetic, yet he was unabashed now. All he felt was the heart‑aching need to run to you.
“You are marrying a mafia executive.”
He was coy at first, hiding behind his calm composure as much as he could. He felt a flicker of encouragement at your silence and pressed on.
“It is not exactly the most brilliant choice, and certainly not a first step toward a stable life.”
He must have seemed utterly pitiful to you, coming up with the most obvious excuses he could think of.
He, of all people. The man who had outsmarted entire organizations, who had used your husband-to-be as both bait and deadly weapon, reduced now to fumbling words. You probably could not believe what you were hearing either.
Oh, how pathetic he was. And he only grew more pathetic with each new argument. You were probably very confused at this point, the way he had vanished for months, only to return on the eve of your wedding with weak, childish protests and desperate logic.
Not that it was working, either way.
Your soft voice interrupted his string of self-pitying internal insults.
“Why are you doing this?”
He couldn’t speak.
The silence grew heavier until he heard you rasp. He could hear, and almost feel, the cloth crinkling over the phone as you shifted on the bed, as you always did, to comfort yourself.
He opened his mouth to say something, anything, to grab your attention, to tell you not to do it, to show you how ridiculous you were being. He fidgeted inside, waiting, until he heard you speak again.
“At first, you were my friend, Osamu. Then you became the closest person to me. After that, you became my lover. You are losing each of those titles, one by one.”
He flinched.
Your perception of his innermost sensations had always been flabbergasting to him. Fascinating, but unnerving. And it came back to bite him, as it so often did.
He almost forgot his sorrows and grinned at the intimacy of the familiarity between you two. He really must have lost his mind at this point.
It was as if his joints and muscles had surrendered for him in that moment, and he fell softly backward onto his bed, lying down as he had before shifting to sit up again.
The momentary satisfaction faded, replaced by a dull ache that made his faint, satisfied grin vanish. The meaning of your words settled in like a stone sinking in his stomach.
His voice was fainter than before, but he held his ground. He was exerting great effort to sound like his usual sarcastic self, not that it was ever enough to fool you.
“I am human. Don’t you think you are being too hard on me, Belladonna~?”
He shifted, sitting again on his futon. His own reflection gazed back at him from the crooked vintage mirror you had placed beside his alcohol bottles.
He looked entirely disheveled, unmoored. If you were here, you would probably tell him he looked like a beggar.
A defiant flash in his eyes betrayed the inner hurt beneath. He was glad you couldn’t see it. He wanted to believe you when you told him he was human; only he couldn’t feel it. He never outright denied it because he didn’t want to anger you.
You didn’t answer quickly enough, which gave him room to add anxiously, though he made sure he didn’t sound anxious to you at all,
“Are you really this angry with me?”
He heard you sigh briefly after.
Meanwhile, you shifted on your own bed, facing your gold-framed mirror as you lay numb. Your tears had stained your eyes, and your puffy eyelids were red and swollen from multiple crying fits throughout the night. You felt utterly exhausted. It was almost as if your soul were divorcing from your body.
A new tear formed, sliding slowly down your cheek as you managed to make your voice sound understanding and accepting. Sunlight illuminated your face softly, passing gracefully through the lace curtains.
Your hand, almost unconsciously, wandered to your chest, pressing against your heart as you breathed in and out more mindfully for a moment. You were hurting; the weight of losing your heart was eating you from the inside.
The man you were going to marry… you wanted it to be him.
However, you had not spent these past nights weeping because you wished it had been him. Your tears fell for the life that would never be, for the fragile dream that vanished before it could bloom.
You were suffering for nothing, and you knew it, yet still you wept for the man who truly loved you and who would be waiting at the altar tomorrow: Chuuya.
Or at least that was what you tried to believe. Perhaps it was only a way to convince yourself that your heart had never wavered. Perhaps it was because some quiet, hidden part of you still wondered what choice you would have made if Dazai had ever asked for you.
Chuuya was the gentlest choice your heart could have made, the kind of man whose presence felt like safety woven into human form. Anyone fortunate enough to stand beside him should have counted themselves blessed. You loved him sincerely, and the thought of betraying him felt unthinkable.
Yet none of your affections, pure as they were, ever reached the depth of what you felt for your Osamu. You never loved anyone the way you loved Osamu Dazai.
“No, I am not angry with you, Osamu. I have never been angry with you.”
You gulped. It was only a matter of time before you started crying again. You brushed your locks out of your face, your eyes fixed on your own lifeless, tired gaze in the mirror.
“I have always understood you. Even now, I understand you.”
You breathed heavily. The reflection staring back at you was not that of a happy bride-to-be, even as you spoke so calmly into the phone’s microphone. A faint smile brushed your eyes, mingling with the sorrow there. You were glad he couldn’t see that you were crying.
You waited a few seconds to find the right words, not to hurt him, but to hurt him just enough to bring him back to reality.
“You are human. I am glad you realise that. Everyone gets used to it, Osamu. You will get used to it too. Some things are just not meant to be.”
His heart skipped a beat. He heard it. He heard you.
“Are you crying?”
You let out a sob‑breath before you could stop yourself, pressing your teeth together to keep another sound from escaping.
“Are you?”
This time, he sounded hurt. Desperate. Almost shattered. And you knew that he knew.
You lifted the microphone away from your mouth for a moment, trying to collect yourself as you brushed your tears away with the back of your other hand.
You continued without answering him, before he could insist again on whether you were crying.
“Sometimes there is no anger and no resentment. Perhaps only a quiet ache. In time, it will fade, as everything does.”
Your chest tightened until every breath felt like a swallowed sob.
“You are—”
“A human being… forgets.”
You hung up with tears in your eyes and a burn in your chest so fierce it felt as though you could tear your own heart out.
You stared at your phone with tears streaming down your cheeks, now given free rein. As your crying deepened rapidly, the sound lost its musicality and your throat became a broken string; vowels bent and wobbled, the air catching halfway down, the weight on your heart doubling as your guard finally fell.
“Fool,” you spat out.
Your reflection in the mirror was illuminated by the light filtering through the white lace curtains as you clawed at the silk bedsheets for any semblance of support. Your hair curtain‑ed your tear‑streaked face as you gripped the sheets, sobbing, aching.
You threw your phone onto the bed as if surrendering your last thread of strength.
“Everything could have been so different… fool.”
———
Act II.
Today was supposed to be a happy day.
Dazai moved through the Port Mafia corridors with an imitation of calm, though the turbulence inside him raged like a storm against the sunshine outside.
Anyone who caught even a glimpse of him would have known immediately that he had to be suicidal — no man with a will to live would walk so openly into the place where he was branded a traitor, an ex–executive whose death had been promised more than once.
He reached Mori’s quarters. The secretary rose at once and opened the door with an almost ceremonial respect.
“Boss has been expecting you, Dazai-san.”
Dazai stepped inside like a deer wandering into a lion’s den.
He exhaled sharply when he saw Mori alone, with no guards, no security, not even Elise. The man sat with unsettling leisure, sipping tea before the towering windows as he always did, perfectly composed in a way that stood in cruel contrast to Dazai’s disheveled state.
He approached the boss in silence, not offering a single word.
“I expected you a few days ago,” Mori said without turning to him or looking up. “You are late.”
Dazai’s dark gaze, already frayed at the edges, dulled further into nihilistic numbness.
“Of course you were expecting me. You know exactly what deadly wrongs you are committing. Grave mistakes lead to disasters, far more than they ever benefit you, boss. You should have learned that by now,” he spat out. His voice was strained but calm, heated in a way that betrayed his composure.
“Sharp-tongued as always,” Mori answered calmly. For the first time since Dazai had stepped inside, he lifted his gaze to him, wearing a faint, insincere smile.
“I am listening.”
Dazai looked more wounded than he ever intended to show, like a prey animal displaying the laziest hints of aggression moments before the hunt closes in. The sun illuminated only Mori’s seat, leaving Dazai standing in the shadows.
“You know exactly why I am here, Mori-san. Just as you knew what you were doing from the beginning. There is no one else who understands your motives the way I do, and you know that.”
Mori’s smile sharpened into a sincere, almost sinister grin. He was being deliberate.
“Oh? Would you care to elaborate?”
He was being so deliberate. But Dazai had neither the energy nor the time.
“I am talking about the fact that you turned a blind eye to their closeness just to hurt me. To make me suffer because I refused you.”
Mori lifted his teacup with a precise, almost elegant motion. The steam drifted upward like a ghost, softening the sharp line of his smile. His eyes remained half-veiled beneath his bangs, unreadable except for the slow curl of something smug at the corner of his lips.
He watched Dazai with the same quiet fascination one might reserve for an animal caught in a trap it swore it would never step into.
“I am saving you the trouble, Dazai-kun. To see what lies before you will make you more…”
Mori paused, letting the silence settle like dust in the air as he held Dazai’s gaze without blinking. His smile sharpened with quiet amusement while he selected the final word with almost surgical precision. “…focused.”
“I am not going to come back, Mori-san.”
The air between them tightened. Mori’s smile changed, settling into something wiser and older, a smile built on years of knowing exactly where Dazai’s wounds were and how deeply they ran. It was not kind. It was not cruel. It simply knew him.
“You understand why all of this is necessary, don’t you?”
Dazai’s gaze lowered, the shadows around his eyes deepening until they seemed carved into his face. His expression held that strange, brittle stillness of someone who had been hurt in a place no one had the right to touch. If his silence were a blade, Mori would have felt it against his throat.
“The first to make a move wins.”
Mori inclined his head. His voice was softer this time, almost satisfied.
“The first to make a move always wins.”
For a brief moment, the room seemed to hold its breath. Mori remembered the boy Dazai once was. Clever, bratty, dangerous. He recognised the same spark of self-inflicted trouble. The mask of humor couldn’t contain the ache in Dazai’s chest, even as he held his ground.
Mori pressed on with deliberate precision, his offense measured, cruel, executed with the brilliance of a mind that fully understood the weight of every move.
“What is it with you, Dazai? This is not the right time to be so stiff. You are very welcome to save this demeanor of yours for later. It is a happy day.”
“You will ruin this anyway,” Dazai said, his voice sharp, tinged with humor that did not reach his eyes. “I know you too well.”
Mori’s amusement was faint and precise. He set down his teacup, letting the porcelain click echo in the room while Dazai continued, his restrained, brooding tone carrying the weight of his anger. It was more than obvious to Mori what Dazai was going through, but the boss was not cruel enough to cut him off mid-sentence.
“You brought her into our lives. Orchestrated their relationship, perhaps?”
Mori said nothing.
“Congratulations, Mori-san. You’re efficient at dooming people’s lives left and right. Don’t come at me with the excuse that you orchestrated this for the Port Mafia’s sake. We both know that is not the case.”
Dazai’s voice was bitter, sharp, unrelenting. “You planned this. You brought them together.”
Mori’s grin spread slowly, deliberately. “…and they fell in love.”
Dazai wobbled briefly, though his face remained as blank as before. He slowly gripped the gun he carried in his trench coat.
Mori noticed, of course, but chose not to look away. Their gazes locked.
“It all started because of you,” Dazai continued, his voice low and sardonic, each word a blade. He wasn’t entirely aware of how defensive he was becoming, despite the careful mask of composure he tried to maintain.
“…You brought her to the Port Mafia quarters. Assigned her to Chuuya and me. You knew Chuuya loved her. You let it happen. Used her as a pawn against me. To impede Odasaku’s cause. Me. You know exactly what you are doing. All of this will not bring me back here.”
“And here you are.” Mori’s thoroughly amused smile, which might usually do little to him, only deepened Dazai’s already excessively gloomy expression. His hair fell further into his eyes, curtain-like, as he stared at Mori without blinking.
Dazai’s hand hovered near the gun, then he grabbed it slowly. Not out of fear of being stopped, but because he did not have the strength to move faster.
He let it rest lightly against Mori’s temple. The sun glinted off the gunmetal, giving him a familiar, almost ironic comfort.
He could use this gun now. On whom it mattered less than the act itself.
“This game has gone too far. Time to stop. You’re destroying lives. They’re not your puppets. The Port Mafia gains nothing from this.”
Mori’s smile did not falter. “Since when do you care about lives? You were the one who said life had no meaning. Now you contradict yourself.”
“Enough,” Dazai rasped. “You are stubborn over an unsolvable issue. Do whatever you can to prevent them from getting married.”
Mori pressed slightly against the gun with casual nonchalance.
“Why would I?” he asked, calm, almost tenderly detached. Then he leaned back as if observing a patient.
Dazai’s eyes widened, the world tilting and crumbling around him, yet he quipped dryly.
“It is impossible for them to get married.”
“Having a happy, married Chuuya strengthens the Port Mafia tenfold,” Mori muttered calmly, his voice steady. “He has not been himself since they came together, in the most positive way possible. She steadies him, and she is a key to the Port Mafia, you know that. She assumes a role he could not.”
He stared into Dazai’s soul with a quiet, fatherly cruelty. “They are happy. They are in love.”
The gun Dazai held against his temple wavered as his hand flinched.
“Why would I interfere when everything serves its purpose?”
Dazai swallowed as if downing a stone. He straightened his shoulders, keeping a wry grin that did not reach his eyes. “I’m supposed to remove that ginger slug, then. Charming. And you have no problem, of course, having thrown your powerhouse under the bus?”
“You could not do it, even if you wanted,” Mori said softly, leaning back further, almost relaxing against the gun. “You had your chances. You didn’t. Deep down, you know you and Chuuya are vital as a team. You would not abandon Yokohama to doom. Not when Odasaku’s cause runs the other way.”
“I’m not a good man,” Dazai muttered quietly, the strength draining from his voice. “You know exactly that I would not let that happen. No matter what, I will not allow them to marry.”
“And why is that?”
“You told me that yourself. That I remind you of yourself.”
Mori’s smile softened.
“You still do.”
Dazai slowly lowered the gun. He could not move his feet. His legs felt as if made of stone. Heavy. His heart froze into nothingness. Every sensation in his body pressed down on him, relentless and inescapable.
He stepped back. One step, two steps, three, four… his gaze wavered, losing focus with each movement. His entire body, shoulders and spine, screamed under a weight he refused to name.
He turned away from Mori, moving toward the exit as if pulled by gravity.
“Dazai-kun.”
He stopped walking instinctively.
“Before you go, I have a present for you.”
The office worker handed him a box, its lid already open. The room seemed to shrink around him as he looked inside.
A black tuxedo lay folded neatly, eerily reminiscent of Mori’s own attire. The smooth fabric gleamed faintly in the sunlight.
“It will suit you very well. I am sure the bride would love it on you.”
———
Act III.
He slowly brushed over the white tuxedo he wore. He knew you liked the contrast his dark hair made against brighter colors, even though he himself had never been entirely fond of them.
White. White like you would be today.
He looked at the mirror once more, struggling to conceal the deep-rooted pain behind his eyes. He walked slowly, almost passively, toward the room where you would be.
Had you already put on your wedding dress? What did it look like? Was it the one you had shown him, the one you had said was your dream? His chest ached at the thought. Moments later, he knocked on the door, holding a small ivory box in his other hand—his present for you.
“Come in!”
His breath caught, just for a moment, at the sound of your soft, enthusiastic voice through the door.
He opened it, and you were sitting right beside it. Your smile softened into something gently wistful, though it passed quickly.
And bloody hell, you looked angelic.
“Welcome, Osamu.”
He managed a soft smile, struggling to control his expression. His hands were slick with sweat, and he brushed them against the soft cloth of his tuxedo. The silence between them grew almost unbearably loud, each second stretching painfully as he remained dumbfounded.
“Thank you for coming,” you said gently, gesturing toward the little ivory box in his hand. “Is this for me?”
Dazai stared blankly at the box for a long moment, then nodded slowly, handing it over with deliberate care. “Yes.”
He held your other hand while you were distracted by the box. His insides were burning, with longing, with pain, with a self-inflicted madness that had nowhere to go except inward.
His breath caught as his fingers finally closed around yours. He had missed you so profoundly he felt he could stab himself just to quiet the ache. He softly placed a kiss on your hand.
“You are,” he whispered, voice softly trembling with longing, “the most beautiful bride to ever bless this earth by her mere existence.”
He was doing that again. Resisting him was so very hard, almost painfully impossible.
You blinked. “Are you sober?”
He almost rolled his eyes. Of course you would say that. That familiar humor of yours, light and grounding, felt painfully out of place in the inferno inside him.
He could hardly focus on your words now. Being this close, seeing you like this, feeling your hand in his, was enough to briefly smother the agony he had been drowning in.
“Osamu,” you murmured, gently pulling your hand away as his cheeky kiss lingered a little too long against your skin. He must have known he was affecting you. “What are you doing?”
You were afraid you might break into tears if you allowed him to continue.
It was so unfair. All of it.
“I came to abduct you, Belladonna,” he said, a soft, cracked grin curling at the edge of his mouth. “Isn’t that obvious?”
You sighed, setting the box he had brought aside. You had never done that before. You would usually cherish everything he had ever given you, holding each item as if it were sacred. You had never dared to put anything aside, always too anxious to risk dropping them. You would not even dare handle them as one might a love letter.
He remembered the incident you two had gone through before you finally gave up on him. He had asked, ‘I want to know where I stand with you.’
‘Must I be the one to tell you that? You stand wherever you wish to, Osamu,’ had been your answer.
But you had been lying. He was not where he truly wished to be. He knew it, yet he tried to ease the burden on his heart by shifting the blame onto you. And when he finally saw it for what it was, the truth cut sharply. You had never been someone who deserved the blame.
He looked you dead in the eyes, as if your silence were holding him back from the only meaningful conversation he had ever known. The quiet stretched, growing heavier with each tick of the clock in the ivory-white room.
He leaned against the doorframe. The Dazai you knew and loved—always on the threshold, never inside the room, never outside the room.
He could barely hold himself together, seeing you like this. You were stunning, more beautiful than he had ever imagined possible.
The most breathtaking bride to ever grace the earth with her illuminating presence.
And you were about to marry a short, ginger dwarf. He almost chuckled at the cruel irony of fate.
Laughing at his own misery had become a custom. But this time, he couldn’t laugh. Every muscle in his body felt dead and emptied of purpose. It was as if they had withered the moment you chose to give up on him. Since then, he had never once felt alive.
He was breathing, but not living. And he knew, down to the marrow, that the only moments he had ever truly felt alive were the ones spent near you. When you abandoned him, life abandoned him. He had never felt this dead before.
“I thought you would eventually change your mind, Belladonna.”
His voice betrayed him. Soft. Broken, ghostly but oh so childishly hopeful. A boy asking the world to be kinder, just once.
You felt your heart twist painfully. For him. For yourself. For what could have been if either of you had been made a little less fragile, or a little more brave.
But you knew he needed to let you go. If he clung to you any longer, you would be trapping him inside the prison of your affection, one he would remain in willingly, blindly, forever.
You sighed. There was nothing you could do… If you didn’t do this, you would never set him free. To give him his freedom.
“I will not sacrifice myself for a relationship you could not even summon the courage to claim, Osamu.”
That felt like a stab to his heart. Ironic, wasn’t it? He could have sworn his heart was empty, as hollow as a donut. And yet, he was feeling more now, in the wake of your rejection, than he had ever allowed himself to feel while you were still fighting for him.
But now that it had been pierced, he could feel how full it had truly been all along.
“Will you truly marry him?”
It was such a shame he had never noticed before how beautiful white looked on you. He hated himself for it. His own pathetic attempt to distract himself from his grief gnawed at him in the most exquisite, painful way.
“I will not sacrifice a good man like him. Though I am fully aware of the truth, I have accepted this situation, not in the way you longed to voice it, but in the way you chose to remain silent.”
He hated to be right about you.
Your so-called moral purity was what both kept him alive and became his undoing. You were choosing not to destroy a man who had shown up for you, who had claimed you.
“I was aware of everything, even the things you never dared speak aloud, the words you locked behind your lips, the truths you silently hoped I would perceive, the meanings you quietly longed for me to understand without a single word. I have always been aware.”
But you were choosing to destroy him. Your Osamu.
He knew this was a rebuke to his own inaction. He despised your acceptance, quiet, dignified, absolute.
He had fallen in love with the fire inside you, hoping it would burn him in the end. Hoping it would end his suffering in the most meaningful way possible.
“Do not come to me again on this matter. Do not disturb us. You have no right. You know perfectly well that you have no right to demand this of me.”
He reached as if to brush your hair from your face, the gesture he had made a thousand times before, but you flinched. His hand froze midair, then slowly drew back, yet he could not lower it entirely.
The weight of that stillness pressed on him, sharper than any pain he had endured, heavier than the act of living itself.
“I have done all I could, and now I am marrying him.”
He exhaled painfully, leaning against the threshold. Hurting him hurt you so cruelly, so immensely.
“You must know I do not say this to wound you. I chose the man who claimed me. The one who dared stake his heart, who places me above all fear, who makes me feel seen and cherished.”
The way you drew in your breath, as though exhaling the last remnants of your heart to close the door forever, as though leaving no fragment behind for regret, made his own breath catch. It was a breaking that he could not stop.
“Your state is not your fault, but it is not mine either. I fought for you in my own way, and yet I was defeated by your silence. I have no regrets. I hope you find a path to happiness.”
Dazai’s silence spoke louder than any words could. You knew, and the urge to comfort him rose like a tide you could not restrain. The way his dead eyes darkened further made your heart ache.
It was haunting, watching a man collapse from the inside out. A quiet, suffocating sadness settled in you, one you had never imagined feeling on your wedding day. The weight of helpless, resigned acceptance pressed against your chest.
Relief and horror waged war within him. Relief that you saw him. Horror that being seen offered no salvation. The cruel futility of exposure without action.
‘I loved you. I understood you. But I can’t keep dying inside your silence,’ was what you were telling him, essentially. So it was true. His silence had never been protection. It had been a prison, for both of you.
He knew that Chuuya was everything he was not.
Chuuya was safe.
Chuuya was warm.
Chuuya was true.
Chuuya was human, and even Dazai could not help but be impressed by the depth of his humanity, rare and undeniable, even though he was not considered entirely human.
Chuuya.
Chuuya.
Chuuya.
Chuuya.
Chuuya.
The fire to his ice. The fire to your fire.
A bitter taste lingered in his mouth as his lips curved into a soft, melancholic smile. The smile barely reached his eyes, and this time, it was the least convincing of them all.
Dazai never truly hated Chuuya the way he claimed. Now, he felt a burning, consuming anger.
Chuuya had once been everything he was not, and because of that, he had taken everything from him. He had taken you from him. And yet, he could not even bring himself to blame him.
After all, who could resist you? Who wouldn’t want to have you?
In that moment, all his defenses crumbled. He smiled bitterly.
~~~
The soft click of the gun’s mechanism was a sound only he could hear.
“Do you take this man as your husband?”
“I do.”
Osamu Dazai had lost a war he had never truly fought.
The gunshot tore through the silence, sharp and final, before the explosion of applause rose around it.
“—AND THE LOSER HAS TO FALL.”
