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Dazai Osamu was born with a different name, a different identity, to people so different from him yet all his traits split into two. His name was still a mere five syllables, his blood as hidden beneath skin and muscle as anyone else's, but those simple things condemned him from the moment he took his first unnatural, inhuman breath.
His parents were kind, all things considered.
All things considered being their respectively extensive criminal records and involvement with some of the seediest parts of the underworld.
The nameless little boy, or perhaps the boy whose name was five syllables different than those of Dazai Osamu, was born to doting parents who left their old lives behind for his sake, living off clean money from a criminal front that became an honest business. His eyes were empty and doll-like observing and consuming everything into the voids without reproducing any manner of response, anything human. The parents doted on him regardless of his indifference, spoiled him with fancy meals no matter how little he ate, bought him toys and nice clothing ignoring his apathy to everything around him.
It was his first impression of the word family. Two parents (or one, depending on the day) in a house with one or more children. There were also butlers, maids, chefs, footmen, the like. Those were more fleeting presences, but the nameless boy's parents, his family, seemed fond of their ghostly steps roaming the halls. In fact, they called the servants family, too, though not related by blood. It made the nameless boy question how concrete family was, as a concept, if something as determining as blood was not a hard-stop to define it.
And then they were dead. All except a few of the servants, at least, enough to keep the nameless boy of not yet eight years afloat.
The nameless boy attempted attending school. A private school, where the absence of looming figures behind his little frame was waved away by the presence of a butler left behind, because the nameless family was truly quite wealthy with their honest living. He was originally indifferent, though he had felt something like hope in preparation for it.
All it ended in was disappointment. A new feeling, one the nameless boy tucked close to his chest for later use, when the void became too all-consuming. The second new emotion was hatred. The nameless boy despised school. He feigned being sickly, and quickly dropped out to resume private tutoring.
That life, too, was eventually stripped from him. The nameless boy was at this point ten years old.
He migrated to his parents' roots, the crime-riddled city of Yokohama. It was hellish, a monstrous place housing a mosh-pit of all the most innocent and most villainous types, one created for no reason more than to be the prey or hunter of the other.
The demon that was created, bathed in raining bullets and knife scuffles and screams in the dead of night, took up the name Dazai. He had no real attachment to the name outside of serving its function, as rarely did people refer to him even when he was nameless. He all but abandoned his 'given' name (as though both had not been his first and only gift to himself), if not for something to jot it down on 'highly official' worksheets the pitying librarians gave him.
The streets of Yokohama welcomed him, as he haunted their alleys in the shadows of night. The evil suited him, as cruel as it was with every breath. Dazai created alliances, practice in his ultimate goal of relearning an old game.
Yes, the streets of Yokohama were a perfect place to refresh his memory of how to play chess.
But as with all things of Dazai, he became twelve and the allies that had become far more than chess pieces (and what a pitiful creature he was, to feel so much for something so insignificant, when all the things he could not lose were so bland to him) were taken away. A stronger opponent is always waiting to defeat the reigning champion, he realized then, and it was time for him to graduate from the junior leagues.
And then he was snatched off the streets. Shoved into a horrendous orphanage, with a willow of a man who expected a creature like Dazai to bend to his whims.
He did not fold. Instead, a year later, Dazai slipped away into the comfort of the moonlight. Once again, Yokohama's cruel back alleys received him with grace. He watched, though daring not engage, as others around him formed groups, connecting over a spark of something (their humanity, their desire to live, to prove themselves worthy of existence to those stronger than them) that made them determined to fight, in turn, for each other.
An older boy, probably fifteen or so, once extended his hand to the little demon. Or perhaps a wraith, for he was more of a ghost these days than anything quite so sinister as the Christians' Satan. "We could use a cute kid in our little family, good for scams," he'd coaxed, despite not one of their group—gang, actually—sharing drops of blood they had not spilt in each other's names. Dazai recalled the nameless boy's family, his parents' acceptance of the servants as their own despite being estranged genetically. The servants sweat for them, bled for them when it came to it.
The servants were family. These gang collaborators are family. In common, though not genetics, they have the sacrifice of self through blood offering for the sake of the 'family's protection.
Dazai mentally corrects the nameless boy's gauge of family. Family is who unflinchingly bleeds for you, who looks down the barrel of a gun solely for the knowledge that if they did not it would be you instead in their place.
The allies he'd accumulated before their massacre bled for Dazai, at times. He was willing and had bled for them in return. Did that make them family, he wondered? Many nights and days he spent awake, tossing the consideration around in his mind. He had lost his family, by the age of ten, but perhaps there was a chance of reaccumulating one.
But then, Dazai had to account for his lack of the one connection every human being shared; a desire to prove himself worthy of living.
It was at age thirteen that Dazai began contemplating methods of suicide.
He was petty in the manner that he refused to be splayed dead on the street by some useless thug's gun. It was dishonorable to those who had no choice in the matter of that fate, those who Dazai had come very slightly to value before they were stripped of him. He also disliked the idea of dying painfully, for the point of suicide was to rid himself of the constant ache of lack he'd become quite so familiar with. The void would consume him even after death, he feared (another emotion he knew not what to think of, but quite well how to manage), if he were to die bathed in it.
It was not until he was fourteen that he came upon the idea to drown himself. A marvelous thought, one he'd hardly entertained straying so far as typical from the port. The mafia ruled there, and Dazai refused to die at another's will. As long as he lives, he will spitefully not bend nor will he snap. He is not willowy nor brittle, but something far worse.
He jumps, and someone saves him. A greasy, slimy doctor, who's been itching to get his hands on a doll masquerading as a little boy as empty as Dazai.
"Dazai-kun..." he coos after him affectionately. Mori is an evil, creepy man. Dazai finds himself relaxing in his presence. He begins to consider Mori family; he makes Dazai spill blood for him on the regular, and Dazai has his imitation of fun holding scalpels up to Mori's bobbing throat and watching gorgeous, pure red bubble out. Mori sets Dazai at ease, for he disgards Dazai's prominent lack of humanity.
For the fourth time, Dazai revises the word family in his mind. Family is not bound strictly by blood, nor humanity, for monsters can find family in their kin. Family bleeds and makes bleed, and sets you at ease with familiarity.
In Dazai's fourteen years of life, he decides that it is right. The fourth answer, he believes, is the correct one. What else could there be, when he finally found something lesser than human as himself to relate to?
Mori murders the now-former boss before him, and Dazai meets Ozaki Kouyou.
He discovers amusement, with her, the fourth emotion (in order, disappointment, hatred, pettiness, if you so choose to count the last one) he is granted access to. This is because, in her first meeting with Dazai, he is so empty-eyed that she believes him the second incarnation of Elise, asking Mori when he found the time to improve his Ability so as to create two manifestations.
Dazai had laughed, and introduced himself, despite the sound being rather hollow. Ozaki barely faltered in her composure, though something (an emotion) Dazai did not recognize lurked behind the grace of her demeanor. Dazai decides, then, that he rather likes Ozaki. Though, she seems far too wary of him to reciprocate the sentiment. (A sentiment, affection. Even if as dulled as everything else, it is Ozaki, his mild preference for her, that makes him realize he liked his old allies, too. Yes, Dazai does like Ozaki very much in particular.)
He gives her a wide berth as he is reborn again. This time he sheds a human name. He is the wraith of the Port Mafia, Mori's shadow with the hollow caverns of a demon dug into his skull where eyes should be. In his dip through fire, he grows fond of Elise. Elise is rather like him, despite being molded that way to Mori's preference. The wraith doesn't spare that more than a second's thought, at least its implications. He is perfectly content to patter about with a girl hardly younger than him, endless eyes matching each other with some sort of inhuman glee.
It is Elise who teaches the wraith of his fifth revision to family, in specific regards to a little sister. It is a crucial point he cannot believe he missed so entirely before; family also constitutes companionship. Her presence is one that does not bore or agitate the wraith, and it is for that he learns appreciation. He has become more and more short with Mori by the day, much preferring his Ability to him—which the man doesn't seem to comprehend, given how much contact he maintains with the wraith. That was another discovery, of sorts—No Longer Human, the name of his void.
He does not deign it an Ability. The anti-Ability, it is called, and the wraith thinks that is more correct. An ability is attached, entwined, born of the human soul. That is not something the wraith has, which even someone like Mori, so similar to himself, possesses. The antithesis of a human being is what he is, so it is no wonder the name sat correctly on his tongue when it was first uttered.
Ozaki becomes less wary of him with time, as the mafia acclimates to Mori's ascension. The wraith smooths the friction, working quietly in the dead of night, perhaps seeking family in the familiarity of it. He kills, far from the first time, but he learns to do it quietly. Painfully. Quickly, slowly, without leaving a trace.
Mori's medical experience is worth something, he supposes, even as Ozaki huddles the little killer farther away from where Mori's claws—or, so the man thinks—are already dug deep. She says to call her Kouyou, which the wraith indulges in. And then it is Ane-san, which fills him with a new emotion. She lends him a book that says it is called fondness.
He considers thanking Ane-san, for she has gifted him (directly or not) three ranges of feeling that he had not previously possessed.
Ane-san is the address of a sister, family, so the wraith decides her input is good to make his sixth revision. Family is something that makes you feel, and coaxes you to express emotions of varying ranges. Before Ane-san gifted him the book, he had hardly realized there was such a range of emotions, much wider than hate and pettiness and even something stronger, better, than appreciation. He makes it his goal to obtain the rest of the emotions in the little book before he kills himself successfully, and wonders if he will have to continue to bother Ane-san for such revelations or if he will need to accumulate more people to create a larger family and more opportunities to experience emotions like hunger.
No, that's not right.
Awe, that's the one he is thinking of. He wants to experience awe. He wonders who he will have to collect to obtain it.
And excitement. Affection. Anticipation. Contentment, maybe?
The wraith dares not wish for love. Even he, in his naivety, is not so foolish as to imagine a being the antithesis of containing a soul will be able to capture such a thing in its range, when it eludes even human beings, at times.
The wraith turns fifteen and officially joins the mafia. He pulls Mori's strings, without the man's consent but his full knowledge, and regains his name as he scrambles up the ladder.
Dazai.
Not the nameless thing he was at the very beginning of his condemnation, the thing called life.
The first one he collects is Hirotsu-san. Hirotsu-san and Ane-san already know each other, which originally makes Dazai wary. But then he realizes that Ane-san and Hirotsu-san get along, and Hirotsu-san is very cordial with him, so Dazai relaxes. He relaxes around Hirotsu-san, and decides that the man then qualifies as family.
The new addition makes Dazai revisit his list. As of late, he has Mori (though the man is very close from removal, because he had been the cause of Dazai's very first case of annoyance), Elise, Ane-san, and now Hirotsu-san. Of the living, of course, because Dazai has no use counting corpses. He doesn't care much for the stench.
Dazai, upon deciding Hirotsu-san is family, tests a theory that will be his seventh alteration to family. He indulges in the childish antics he observed in his first stint as a wraith, on the streets, when he haunted the libraries. He fools around with video games and listens with only a half an ear apparent. Hirotsu-san doesn't falter in his loyalty nor toleration of Dazai as a result. In fact, he seems himself to indulge in fondness.
Hirotsu-san is the catalyst of both Dazai's seventh and eighth alterations to his definition of family. Family does more than tolerate you when you are, objectively, 'obnoxious', or inefficient. Not that Dazai is ever inefficient, but he portrays himself very well to be. Hirotsu-san merely tries to cover his blind spots, the dreaded wraith. Family also feels affection and/or fondness for you, feeling something more than apathy of your presence, a positive thing.
Dazai meets Chuuya. He's not sure what kind of family Chuuya is supposed to be, because brother doesn't feel right. There is the affection required of family, the willingness to bleed and make bleed, the pulling of emotions from each other, but family is not right. It disturbs Dazai that he doesn't know, but Ane-san only laughs when he goes to her for clarification, her lent (and never returned) book in hand and trying to guess the right one of his options to sort out what he feels for Chuuya beyond affection. The opportunity to piece together where Chuuya falls is for naught, because Ane-san just waves him off with a knowing look he doesn't appreciate.
It does, however, knock his revision count of family to nine. Family is teasing and amusement, fun? He's not sure the correct word, but he notices such interactions between both Ane-san and himself (her doing the teasing) and himself and Elise (him responsible for poking fun). He decides sisters are for joking with, and that it is the older sibling who is responsible for teasing the younger. He takes his duty to Elise on with pride, his responsibility for Ane-san as the victim less so.
He pushes Chuuya farther from the spot of brother in his mind. He will find someone else to occupy the space, surely, but he also does not want to be teased relentlessly by Chuuya. That would be quite unfortunate.
Soukoku begins to form (and partner is the word Dazai had been looking for to describe Chuuya, he learns) and Dazai accumulates strength. With it, he accumulates men.
His life slows. Not in any sense of boredom, as surprising as it is. In fact, the monotony that made it whiz by in a blur of color is broken by the useless subordinates Dazai has to train to work directly and solely under him, the horns to lead his bull charge where his arms cannot fulfill the tasks his mind lay out.
"Shoot!" he barks at them for hours a day. At first, they hesitate. Process. Glance at each other. Dazai gets up in each of their faces, lets them shiver, consumed by the hollowness of his eyes.
"You can keep blathering when I give you orders," he croons. "I'll be waiting for you in the pits of hell, when I inevitably usurp Satan. I'll linger in the corner of your dreams, around the corner when you're visiting the store. I will be everywhere," he warns. You can't escape a ghost, a wraith, and that is truly still what he is. "I promise," he hums, "I am a patient man."
They stop hesitating.
Not just to pull the trigger. To raise the gun. He says jump, they don't ask how high. They know. He gathers Ability users. He learns each of the names of the men and women in his squad, to more effectively threaten them into subservience.
They fall into line like fanatics.
He adores them.
They're neutral and unflinching under his steady command, but so devastatingly, individually human regardless, and Dazai treasures it. He runs out of reasons to threaten them, but dares not forget a single name. Their eyes hide behind pitch-black glasses and he can almost pretend they are simply as empty as his own.
At some point, he realizes he should not care so much about his subordinates. He should not let it show as much as it does, because it makes them fond of him, as well, beyond the fanaticism instilled by unstable fear for their lives. Ushijima ruffles his hair in passing when they're both off-duty. Dazai should've cut his hand off for it a long time ago, but he continues to allow it, because it makes him feel an affectionate emotion that is rather pleasant, in truth.
They bleed for him, they prompt him to feel emotions, they indulge his childishness, feel some manner of affection for him, set him at ease with the reassurance of their gunshots ringing out to kill crawling assailants as soon as his breathing alters slightly to indicate noticing one, and offer consistent companionship by accompanying him at every moment of the day. Excluding making him bleed in return and teasing him (both of which they, even as his most favored subordinates, would not ever be permitted to do lest the hierarchy collapse), Dazai's squad fits all the criteria of family.
It doesn't hurt to suppose them as such, does it? After all, each was handpicked and trained by his hand, the unworthy weeded out very quickly.
Ushijima still pats Dazai's head in passing when he turns sixteen and officially ascends to the Executive seat (the youngest in history) and Mori's right hand, though he has long since been running the mafia himself.
Family, Dazai's squad teaches him, the tenth of such instance, is something of loyalty. Absolutely unfaltering.
The eleventh is Dazai erasing Mori from his list of family. He is the anomaly of every rule of family, for none of Dazai's other family brings him meaningless harm for their own enjoyment.
No, Mori is not Dazai's family, and family does not make you bleed in return.
Dazai realizes this upon taking in the Akutagawas. Gin is a prime target for sexual exploitation and he frankly doesn't want to send her to become one of Ane-san's girls, and Ryuunosuke is a hot mess wearing Dazai's hand-me-down coat. He wonders if the way it swamps the boy is how it looked on him upon receiving it, and shuts the thought down for the uncomfortable wave of embarrassment it brings.
It strikes him quickly that the siblings have already dragged two things out of him; embarrassment and want. Dazai does not remember ever wanting before, not for anything besides humanity. But now he wants for something not so grand, something attainable.
He wraps the bottom half of Gin's face in bandages and considers training the light-footed girl in assassination. He deigns to see how she holds a knife; the best assassins are born with their hands twisted on a hilt, after all.
The freshly-dubbed Demon Prodigy sighs heavily as he drags the two, barely younger than him, into his sides to keep them from tripping as they nod off. Ryuunosuke has a nasty cough Dazai will have to investigate.
Concern. A third emotion.
He will train them to bleed for him, and will make bleed any who harm what is his in return. He will tease them as an older sibling must. He will more than likely be unsuccessful in stomping out the blooming affection in his chest cavity, and they no doubt have some gratitude to him for extending the offer, Ryuunosuke more so than his sister for the promise Dazai made. They will be moving into his also-new executive apartment (quite an upgrade, truly, from his shipping container), so companionship is checked off in addition. Loyalty, unfaltering and unquestioning, is another tentative thing that Dazai dares not place expectations on as the one unpredictability of human beings.
Ryuunosuke's eyes are as empty as his own.
And, well, he sighs again as they return from fresh showers and he presents them with clothes and a tour of their new, luxurious lodging. Twelve revisions, now. Family is someone you have a desire to care for, in more ways than bloodshed.
Yes, nursing Ryuunosuke's fragile lungs teaches Dazai. He learns there is care that is gentle; scratching and biting and yowling like a feral beast is not the only method of easing the burdens of those who ease his in turn, his family.
What a pain it is, when Dazai accumulates Odasaku and Ango. And, really, he can also count Verlaine. The man is so pitifully human for something so artificial that Dazai can't help but understand him despite their situations being reversed.
Understanding, is thirteen. Family is understanding.
Worry, he learns the crease of Ane-san's brow so long ago now was, from Ango. Ango worries that one day Dazai will finally succeed in his (less and less serious, pitifully enough) attempts and stop showing up to the bar. Ango frets about Dazai being in a bar, worrying that he'll ruin his health by drinking so frequently at such a young age. Fourteen is worry, and that is from Ango.
Fifteen is from Odasaku, and that is... help. He supposes. Odasaku wants to be a writer, which Dazai promises to fund as soon as he can figure out how to keep Odasaku close without the risks that come from being involved with the mafia. He gives Dazai the words for twisting emotions Ane-san's book doesn't cover, that Hirotsu-san can't explain. Odasaku also helps when Chuuya is away and Dazai is injured, too proud to return to his apartment and let his apprentice and Gin see him in such a state. So, Dazai's fifteenth addition to the meaning of family is that they help.
He supposes that applies to everyone. Ane-san helps him with emotions. Elise helps ease his boredom, and harass Mori. His squad helps him on missions, helps him keep secrets, helps him stay sane on the worst of days. Hirotsu-san tries to help him beat his high scores. The Akutagawas help with the very few chores around the apartment, and are shaping up to possibly join his squad themselves, though likely with a higher position than the rest.
Dazai is convinced, at that point, that he has amassed all the criteria necessary to determine if someone is family and the people to prove it, if blood relation is not the determiner despite how such is implied. Except in cases of adoption, he supposes.
Then he meets the orphans Odasaku took in. He teases them as an older brother is obligated to (though he does quite enjoy doing so), grants them his affection, allows expression of emotions, etc., etc.
He's not sure exactly what it is that makes it hit him. It feels like an obvious conclusion, but at the same time something so out of reach that he has to recall if he truly had misinterpreted all of his familial relationships thus far.
fam·i·ly
/ˈfam(ə)lē/
Family (n.): a person or group of people one loves
Love, the thing that had felt so far and unattainable to him from the very start. It's not interchangeable with fondness, Dazai doesn't think so, but flipping through the digital camera he'd insisted on Hirotsu-san purchasing for him, filled with pictures of his family, Dazai thinks that distinction is not one that matters. Because on the camera, filled with the Akutagawas and Hirotsu-san and Ane-san and even Elise and Chuuya and Odasaku and Ango and his squad in a professional formation with Dazai making a goofy face at their front, are people Dazai loves.
His family.
Yes, that one is right.