"To break free from this vexatious and awful never-ending cycle, this flood of outrageous thoughts, and to long for nothing more than simply to sleep-how clean, how pure, the mere thought of it is exhilarating."

-Dazai Osamu-

He is born with the blood in his veins already stained black; a murderer at birth- a beast ushered into the world with the life of his mother as the toll paid. He is born a nameless whore's bastard son- in a shithole brothel belonging to the Port Mafia that sits in the lantern-lit streets of Yokohama's Red Light District.

(He is born and from that point, as early as he can remember about those days, he pays for his continued life with lies, sins, and blood.)

The brothel is where he spends his early years, a wolf in sheep's clothing even in his infancy, with a penchant for hearing things he's not supposed to- whispers through the walls hidden among the obscene moans, talks of the Boss, of a man named Mori who is his right hand, and of the power of the Port Mafia.

In those days he is too young to understand just how dangerous the information he overhears is. In those days he does not understand just how deep the disconnect between him and the rest of the world runs.

He is still young, the world still seems vast and interesting as it ought to be through the eyes of a child. He is still young, he is loved if only by a single person; he does not yet know the way solitude clings to the roof of one's mouth until it is all one can taste.

Those halcyon days pass by slowly- far, far too quickly- and as the years tick by it becomes starkly clear that he is not quite a normal child. He's not quite capable of understanding what comes naturally to the other children- what makes human beings tick. It does nothing to put to ease the negative feelings the whores feel towards him, it is a nothing but kindling to a flame.

He is still young when he is thrown out to the streets- an unwanted dog, an orphan child- but by then he has learned enough- barely, barely enough- to survive in the cesspit of sins and blood of the slums.

In the world of Yokohama's streets, it is not surprising for children to die young.

Children in the slums- young, abandoned, born of whores that can't afford to have children- are birds without wings. They are not born to live on the ground for too long and cannot escape to the sky when predators slink closer to swallow them whole. They find their end by the hunger that claws at their bellies; frigid winter nights that beget pale carpets of fallen snow; the bite of a knife sliding across their throat.

He is not one of the children that die young.

(When he is older he will mourn the lost opportunity.)

If the brothel is what birthed him, then it is the slums that raise him, who shape the monster-child into a creature who flirts with death but doesn't want to die- at least not at another's hand.

(It is years later when he realizes what that means and the word to go along with it.)

In the world of Yokohama's streets- he suffers, he lives, he survives.

Shūji Tsushima dies in front of a broken mirror.

He kills him when he's old enough to understand that it is the name that belongs to a boy that was not meant to survive his seventh birthday. It belongs to a boy thrown away without hesitation, that was loved by a single person and left alone once death touched that single soul.

Tsushima dies after the sharp edges of jagged glass cuts away the stain on his skin that belongs to a dead boy, the birthmark of the child he's not sure he ever was, with his hands slick with his own blood and the name he has chosen for himself on his lips.

(One day he will look back and laugh at the thought of responding to another name.)

Shūji Tsushima dies with no one to mourn as his desire to understand humanity dies with him, as the wolf in sheep's skin gnaws its way out of him- tearing apart his flesh like tissue and leaving only a corpse in its wake.

He does not cry, has not cried since that day-

(wake up please you can't be gone)

-even as his fingers spasm around the broken glass and his blood runs hot and sticky and glistening down his arm. He does not cry even as his flesh sizzles shut after a heated chunk of metal is pressed against it, as the air filled with the scent of cooking meat.

Instead, he grits his teeth and swallows down the saliva that bubbles up in his mouth from the smell. Instead, he looks down at the gnarled and twisted burn where Shūji Tsushima once had a birthmark and his lips split into a grin reminiscent of the baring of teeth.

Osamu Dazai is born with a murder's smile and eyes as dark as the blood in his veins. He is born out of a twisted and warped understanding of the human experience; he is born a creature wearing human skin but not entirely sure of what it means to be human.

Dazai floats on the edges of morality, of the understanding of the human experience- teetering on the edge of the dread that has always existed inside him and the horror of there being nothing that will ever sate the void swirling within him.

Sometimes he wonders if it is this black hole heart that brought to life a being with no discernable interest for anything besides filling the emptiness of its own existence.

Most times, he cannot bring himself to care.

As he ages, Dazai becomes personally acquainted with the sharp blade of starvation. His body learns the song of hunger echoing hollowly in a concave belly. His lullaby becomes the number of ribs he's able to count as his fingertips trace the jutting bones on his sides.

This becomes his daily life, this constant tug-of-war for survival in a town without mercy.

He knows he is dirty, that his clothing hangs off his skinny frame in just the right way to display the prominent bones along his collar- that he looks like the filthy starving brat that he is.

He knows that the clumsily wrapped bandages on his right arm are off putting, that they make the people that see them wonder what lies beneath. He knows that some people look and pretend they can see through the flimsy fabric and to the twisted scar tissue over the mark of person he once was.

Dazai knows that there's no one that could understand just what he's done to himself in order to survive, to kill that weak part of him that never understood what has to be done to live on. He knows this because he is a genius. He is a child so brilliant that the place that birthed him threw him away out of fear of what hid behind his eyes.

So while there is dirt smeared on his cheeks and bruises blooming from when he couldn't outrun the stall owners; there is also something dark stirring awake in his chest every time he goes hungry, something that makes him sharper and dangerous as he survives another day- as he finds himself with more injuries to bandage up.

He wonders if learning how to give his smiles substance, how to crinkle his eyes as he bares his teeth in order for people overlook just how artificial the expression is, is what draws others to him despite the apprehension that hovers in his chest at having things he does not understand so close to him. He calls it apprehension because he cannot stand admitting that it is fear.

He will refuse to call it fear even until the day he knows it is.

If there is something the brothel has taught him, it is the art of playing people, of curling their beings around his fingers- fighting the urge to see what would happen if he tears the things in this hands apart- and making sure they see only what he needs them to see.

He crafts masks of wide-eyed innocence and childish naivete, trussing those around him in his web of deception in the same way he has seen spiders do to the things that stumble into their traps. Honeyed words flow from his tongue and twine, tangle, enrapture.

("Come into my parlor," said the spider to the fly.)

Dazai has always been far too good at hiding the teeth of the beast that lives inside him. At blurring the lines between what is boy and what is monster and what it means to be alive. At leaving broken-eyed things in his wake when they outlive their usefulness as pawns on the board they're not aware they're on.

In the same breath, he murmurs words meant to destroy, distort, break.

In the nighttime, under bridges, in the places hidden between the shadow and the dark, he earns a reputation for his ruthlessness. For having a heart full of apathy and not much else. For exuding a detattachment to his humanity that puts anyone in prolonged proximity on edge.

In the sunlight, in the parks, in the places illuminated by the blinding glare of the burning sun, he earns a reputation for his charisma. For his bright laughter and brilliant smiles. For knowing the right thing to say to make someone willing to lie for him- to make someone willing to die for him.

Dazai will forever be the perfect juxtaposition.

He has always been the kind to smile- with a soft lift of his lips and eyes bright- as he rips wings off butterflies so he can watch how they drag their broken bodies along the ground.

The Wardens of the Night. They are what is spoken of only in the nearly forgotten places that exist between the shadow and the darkness, in the calm of places that come into being after something dies inside them. They are the law for the lawless, the damocles sword threatening to fall and cut open any who do not abide by the rules it sets.

He recalls the whores talking about it in the dead of night, when their clients were all fucked out and gone; when they thought that they were quiet enough for no one to hear them speak about the monster that festered and spread in Yokohama's underbelly.

The Port Mafia.

The ones that are spoken of only in the silence between heartbeats, in whispers so quiet that the winds strains to hear the words.

"No one can escape the Port Mafia," he'd hear in whispers that dissipated into the air as easily as steam, "if they want you then they will have you."

Then one day, the beast looks him in the eyes and decides it wants him.

And like all those butterflies he's cradled in his hands before he pulled them apart, he knows there is no escape.

The sun is setting. A red haze falls over the slums as it slinks closer to the horizon. With it goes the heat- which has pounded down unrelentlessly on the city for these few months of summer. It's a pretty sight, if one cares for those kind of things, which Dazai sure as hell doesn't.

He scarcely cares about anything. He thinks the desolation inside him swallows up anything he may feel besides the darker things that fester from within.

His eyes are on the alleyway just below him, not on the scarlet sky above.

He's watching, chin in hand and gaze intense, at the two men prying a third's jaw open, shoving the street curb between teeth and stomping down hard.

He's never seen anyone die before.

If he was anyone else then perhaps he would recoil at the loud crunch and the blood that flows out of the man's mouth- at the agonized scream that spills out of the man's throat. If he were anyone else then perhaps the spit and snot and tears would stir up more feelings than the disgust the sight brings him. But as it is, violence doesn't do much to phase him.

Not much does anymore.

Not much ever did to begin with.

There's no other way he can explain it to himself, no other way he can dissect- peel apart the flesh to see what festers underneath- the momentary satisfaction he feels when his actions leave a mark, regardless of how blackblackblack that stain may be, on the world.

Some would say that it's one of the things that makes him feel alive, if only for a moment. He knows it's true enough to not disagree. If anything violence seems to distract him from the fact that he is a play-pretend boy in a play-pretend world.

He is a genius, yet still, he cannot find an answer that sates his hunger, his undying curiosity, for what comes after death has stolen the final breath from something's lungs.

He's too curious for his own good.

Even when he lived at the brothel, death held a certain kind of fascination for him. It was, and still is, the ultimate question; the true unknown. He would examine the bloated bodies of stray animals come to the gardens to die- with a wondering glint in his eyes. Cutting them open. Holding his breath against the smell of rot as he rolled their decaying hearts in his small palms.

It's this curiosity of his that began these voyeuristic excursions to begin with.

After that first time, he stumbled upon the corpse of a man beaten to death in an alley, his desire to understand just how easily a human being can die has only grown.

The pleas for help that float up from the alley makes Dazai click his tongue in bemusement. There's no one in the Red Light District that would willingly approach the sound of screaming, especially not now that the sun has fully sunk into the horizon's edge and the night comes to life in the darkness. That's if he excludes himself, of course.

He cocks his head in intrigue as the two men roll the third over and the bloody pulp where there were once teeth are revealed. The emptiness in the man's mouth reminds him of the neat little rows of vacant graves he saw when passing the cemetery just a few days ago.

Except bloodier. Except not so neat.

Something inside him wonders if that's what everyone's mouths would look like if he were to rip out all of their teeth instead of just shattering them on the curb of a filthy street and he decides that he would like to find out one day for himself.

A gun is pulled out of the first man's coat. His hands shake as he aims it but after he glances at the second man, his aim steadies. The man on the ground holds his hands to his empty mouth and screams, choking on the his own blood.

Dazai leans forward eagerly. His feet stop swinging from the edge of the building. He holds his breath as the first man tightens his finger on the trigger.

The gun goes off.

Once, twice, thrice.

The man on the ground spasms, goes limp, and dies.

It's oddly anticlimactic.

Dazai can't help but feel disappointment at how easy that was, at how little fanfare there is- mild torture disregarded- in taking a human life. There's nothing particularly outstanding about the human existence if snuffing it out is just as simple as putting a starving dog out of its misery.

The cicadas start singing despite the stickiness of the summer night. From his vantage point on the roof of the abandoned warehouse, Dazai can see the tenants of the streets come out to play.

Hookers filter into the mouth of alleys a little ways ahead. Burly men stand guard in front of venues that everyone knows are infested with alcoholics and gamblers. Lanterns are lit along the main streets and cast the dusty and worn buildings in a sultry red glow, masking the true nature of this part of the city under pretty lights and raucous laughter floating out of open bars. A few streets away from the stirring nightlife is the cooling corpse of a man that died in pain and begging for mercy that would not come.

Dazai sits back on his hands and tilts his head to the blackened sky overhead, marvelling at the oddity of it all. Death come so easily to everything in this world. It's so easy to be killed, to die in an accident, to be in the wrong place in the wrong time and have the entirely of a life snuffed out in a matter of seconds.

Out of everything else in this world, Death may be the only thing Dazai craves to understand more than human beings. Out of the two, it may also the the only thing that he may ever grow close to understanding.

A/N: So I really shouldn't be starting another story, but this first chapter has been sitting in my Docs for months now and I might as well post it before I forget. I have no idea when the next chapter will be up but I hope you all enjoy this first one!

Don't forget to tell me what you think! See you next time!