The first time Osamu Dazai came to the hospital, he didn’t struggle. There wasn’t much point in struggling anymore.

He had already made enough of a mess of things — wrists opened one too many times, a rope burn still fading along his neck, the dull sting of pills he couldn’t quite keep down. And the other thing — the one no one liked to talk about — was what pushed the decision over the edge. “Trauma-induced instability,” they’d called it, but he knew what they really meant: broken.

So they brought him here. To the place where the walls were padded and the windows were barred. Where time felt like something that had stopped trying.

Most days, Dazai lay on his bed, staring at the cracks in the ceiling and counting them over and over until the numbers lost meaning. He didn’t talk much. Didn’t eat much, either. The nurses used to ask if he was okay — now they didn’t bother. You stop asking questions when you already know the answer.

Sometimes he watched the sunlight crawl across the wall. Sometimes he listened to the boy in the next room scream. Mostly, he just was. A quiet, empty kind of existence.

That morning, he’d been sitting on the edge of his bed, picking absently at the edge of a bandage when the door opened.

“Dazai-kun,” one of the doctors said, that same calm, careful voice they always used around him. “This is Nakahara-kun. He’ll be your new roommate from now on. Please be nice to him.”

Dazai lifted his head lazily.

The new boy stood framed in the doorway — small, sharp, restless. Red hair, eyes that burned even though the rest of him looked like he wanted to fight the world just to prove he was alive. There were orderlies on either side of him, hands half-raised like they expected him to attack.

So that’s the violent one, Dazai thought.

He looked at the boy for a heartbeat — long enough to notice the tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw clenched, the way anger looked almost like fear when it ran too deep. Then he looked away.

He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

The doctor left, the door clicked shut, and the silence grew heavy again.

He heard the thump of a duffel bag hitting the mattress, then the boy’s voice — rough, tired, defensive. “Guess I don’t gotta worry about you talking my ear off.”

Dazai didn’t bother answering.

He just kept staring at the floor, at his own hands wrapped in bandages, and thought — He’ll get tired of talking soon, too.