Chapter Text
These is a certain way that one approaches their life when they are raised by a suicidal man who believes he can't have a meaningful relationship and people who would gladly tear someone apart for hurting one of their own.
That is to say, they would tend to view it as redundant, a word here which means useless, or no longer helpful.
This is very certainly how Tsushima Kazuko suddenly felt, at 2 AM in the Emergency Waiting Room with her Aunt Naomi, Aunt Yosano, and Uncle Junichirou, all wrapped up in Dazai Osamu's tan coat which was many sizes too big for her, being told that the man in question, who was her very own father, did not survive a fall off a height that had never felled him before.
Auntie Yosano, who is one of the best doctors in the city, probably one of the top three of you would think of it, immediately started to protest. Aunt Naomi and Uncle Junichirou simply dragged her out of the sterile hall and to the car outside before things got Yosano's brand of messy.
Tsushima Kazuko does not cry. She is not a crier, she only cries when she's harmed physically. Out of the nine, soon ten, children legally registered as under the protection of the Armed Detective Agency (and Port Mafia), she is the least likely to cry when someone dies.
However, on the way to the car (which is Naomi's, as is most of the working and unharmed transportation the Agency owned), the siblings stopped walked when they felt their niece's steps grind to a halt. It was not screeching, but a gradual thing one does, typically when you're tired or feel like you should rather wish to fall over.
And when the oppositely colored adults looked at her, there was tears in her eyes, wide as usual. But this time, they lacked the intensity of a doll's stare, and much rather closer to how one of their kouhai's had been when she was rescued by Junichirou's spouse, Atsushi, from the trenches of Yokohama.
She tried to take a step forward, but she seemed mildly in a daze, because her footsteps did not raise high enough to make any motions to go with the two, and rather she ended up tripping lightly. Had Junichirou not reacted in time to catch her, she likely would be in physical pain and have black smudges on her hands and knees.
A rather horrid sound came out of the 16 year-old's mouth, a scream neither had thought her capable of. She is at best firm, she's never yelled in her entire life as far as they could remember, so this shriek of an animal caught in a bear trap was rather upsetting and haunting to the two.
That was the cry of a child who lost their parent. They've heard it a few times in their life, even from Kazuko's cousin.
They never thought she'd ever be one to make such a noise. They had hoped she'd never be one to make such a noise.
And yet the only thing the two could do, as Junichirou silently scooped her up and walked to the car, was shush her, because how could they do anything else? They would be hypocrites to tell her to quiet, as they were both holding back tears of their own.
For Kazuko, however cliché it may be, she felt as if her grief were heavier. She felt lost. But more importantly she felt dead. She's been half dead a handful of times. One would have to be to live in Yokohama.
But this was more than that.
She actually felt dead. Like she was rotting. Like something inside of her was rotting away because her father no longer lived. It felt hard to breath.
Darla, one of her cousins, has drowned to literal death before. It's how the found out about The Hollow Dolls. She wonders if this is how drowning feels like. If the rooting didn't leave her alone. She can almost feel it...spreading. Like it was trying to choke her the way mold would a wallpaper.
She regards everything with a detached level of detail far to clinical to be her own. She never knows why this happens. It always happens when she's in pain.
She was so stuck inside this clinical detachment as she thought of how much she was dying that she didn't notice the car was moving until the loud beep of a car hit her ears.
Her head jolted up, and she nearly hit Yosano, who'd been holding her gently as best she could with both of them buckled in.
"Calm down, calm down, calm down." The woman said quickly, pressing the child's ear to her chest. "You're perfectly fine, Kazu-chan. It was just an annoyed driver. Can you tell me at the very least 2 things you're sure you're aware of?"
Kazuko mumbled, confused for a moment, grasping a bit helplessly at the woman's dark green shirt, a change of attire due to the party earlier that ended beca-...
She didn't even want to think about it. She really didn't want to think about how her Chichi had stepped off the ledge right before she opened that latch door.
"I..." She'd probably had a nightmare, that was why she had felt rot. The only problem with that hypothesis is that she could still feel it if she wasn't thinking about something else. "I-I'm in...a car. And I-I...I..."
"Take your time."
She pulled in a breath. She's so tired. She thinks she wants to sleep. Why is she feeling all these things?
"And I'm...wearing Tousan's coat. Because I...because it was on...on the rooftop, next to his...h-his-" She couldn't stop crying. Why can't she stop crying? Make it stop make it stop make it stop!
Yosano tried to shush her, but saw it was a failure to try, and so the rest of the ride home was done in silence, her tears the music no one could make themselves put on.
It was 4:13 AM when Yosano opened the door to her apartment, Kazuko huddled close to her.
"The girls are staying with Yukiko. You can't sleep in your apartment until...well, until things calm down."
Translation; suicide watch. If that's supposed to make her feel less shitty, Yosano or the Agency or whoever suggested this should probably remember she's not about to kill herself over a person dying in front of-
Oh who's she kidding? She would. She wants to. That was her father. She deserves to feel a bit fucking suicidal after watching him literally jump off a fucking building.
She pushed down the violent thoughts and only nods, silently walking to the room she's spent many sleepovers in. She doesn't even bother trying to steal the specific twin's bed that pissed her off last week, she just collapsed on one of them.
She can't feel anything. She can't care for anything. She can't do anything but sleep.
So she buried herself under the tan coat and leaves the world. Maybe if she tries hard enough she can die in her sleep from suffocating.