Empire of Dirt

by Arkastadt

“Oi, the fuck are you doing in there?"

The voice that interrupts his afternoon break comes from a boy standing outside the fountain. Dazai's only able to make out the obnoxiously bright ginger hair on the other side of the water that separates them, but it's annoying enough as it is. Turning his head, Dazai decides to ignore him until he leaves.

"You know I can see you, right? You were just looking at me!"

--
Or: Dazai's bored and lives in a mansion, Chuuya's the mysterious garden boy working for his family, and fate brings them together over and over again only to rip them apart.

A tragedy in three acts.”

Genres: Fan Fiction

309 pages, ebook

Published August 5, 2020

Reviews

[Bailey Salinas · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 i love sokuoku so much this was so sad and why does every story have to have a terminal illness lmao, written really well me and my friend joke we're chuuya and dazai so i gobble up any double black stuff

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fucking broke me

[ayah · Rating 5 out of 5]

bro that was so devastating im gonna cry myself to sleep lmao anyways analysis time ‼️

"Just fuck off and go to sleep already, bastard."
"Oh, did I not mention it? I'm an insomniac. I might not sleep for hours."
"Want some help? I could try to choke you with that pillow under your head."
"Ohhh, kinky ."

omgomgomgiwouldlethimchokeme i mean what who said that !! not me that’s for sure anyways this entire chapter was so scrumiddlyumptious i LOVE the yuan-dazai thingy whatever tf is occurring there it’s so lovely and interesting and that’s what real enemies should be like instead of random codependencies where they say they’re enemies but they secretly “sometimes he’s got a free hour, and they grab dinner or make out in the storage room against the door”-> this is NOT an example of how enemies should act and im not opposed to displays of affection but getting freaky in a garage is a stretch ngl but at least it wasn’t the water fountain cause i was so paranoid they were gonna start hooking up in there instead of mowing the lawn and my relief when they moved apart was IMMENSE

why’d yosano die tho that was uncalled for like “she was healthy” if bro was healthy she would NOT have died at age 50 cmon bro this is the 2000s i would’ve assumed she’d make it to at least 70 but i guess the universe has a secret hidden agenda that nobody knows about I honestly think the dog stole her remaining time because wdym the dog survived to be like 25 anyways we digress

I loveloveloveloved the ending sm im so glad he killed himself and not in a bad way like dont get me wrong i love dazai and i think his character lore is great and id prefer if he stayed alive but i hate when books pull a whole thing where everybody who carries importance in somebody’s life dies in the most tragic undeserved way and the character just gets over it and lives life because that does NOT happen like nobody’s getting over losing every single person that ever mattered to them cmon bro 💀💀 i think the fact he committed suicide right after kind of proves that and it made the whole story so cyclical I really enjoyed it except when chuuya started dating SIGMA 😓😓I know it was only for like a year or something but I started tweaking its a great rarepair but it made me cackle because sigma of all people 😭 I thought it’d be nikolai or fedya or tsujimura or kunikida literally anybody but sigma that was so uncalled for lmao but great plot addition anyways 10/10 story I will be rereading this every october for the rest of my life

[Claudia G · Rating 5 out of 5]

creo que jamás volveré a ser la misma persona
me he deshidratado de tanto llorar

[Wen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every single tear I shed because of this, was SOO worth it

[zai · Rating 5 out of 5]

i thought i’d cry as much as i did. when i read flowers from 1970. apparently not. i cried 10 times harder. from watching tiktoks abt eod, i thought chuuya would die in a gruesome way. i knew he was terminally ill but i thought he would pull an “i want to eat your pancreas” ngl but his death hurt me in ways that they’ve never hurt before. many of my close relatives have died before, but i never felt anything. i thought something was wrong with me. only until when i read eod, i suddenly felt something. i read on and when chuuya died in dazais arms, i felt really really devastated. the readers also went through what dazai did during chuuyas last few months. but they could never feel how guilty and regretful dazai was when chuuya died while dazai was talking. and 3 days after baki died, dazai commit suicide and it was known that he also was suffering from liver failure, maybe because of his excessive intake of alcohol. overall, this was a really pleasant yet painful book. i highly recommend it to anyone.

[Naka Chu · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I tell you I fcking cried my bloody eyes out, like I didn't even finish halfway when Dazai started talking about how it was gonna be when I started bawling my eyes out.

[POTENTIAL SPOILERS]

Like this entire Fic BROKE me.
And to say that when I read this for the first time, I almost never cry, it is an extremely rare circumstance for me, and to tell you this when I was sleeping over at my niece's house (she's the same age as me) and when that scene came she freaked out when I cried. like I had hiccups and swollen eyes until the day after. I cried for an hour and a half before I could start reading again. and mind you this was at night, so that made it entirely sadder. And all the memories I loved experiencing with the two throughout the story I absolutely LOVED. I go back to reading it once in a while, to remind myself of this UNDERRATED masterpiece. I've been editing it into a pdf so I can go onto Lulu and print a personal copy for myself. And when I do reread it, It still manages to make me cry a few tears.

[mertries · Rating 5 out of 5]

for the first time in my life i read the "major character death" tag and didnt pay attention to it. as the story developed and the hints of something bad happening at the end started showing i HAD to go double check the tags just to find "unhappy ending". at that point i was like fuck it it can't be that Bad right??? i finished this thing DEHYDRATED i was in shock i needed to talk to somebody i needed to wake up because all i kept thinking for an entire night was this fic. forever engraved in my brain

also the first years when they meet and chuuya is working at dazai's mansion always gave me major Attonement vibes (a movie that also broke me in pieces) essentially the first scenes when everything is calm and the hot summer at the fountain (? scenery is all you can focus about

[ren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This. Hurt. So. Bad.

When the 'Right person wrong time' and 'We didn't get enough time together' tropes are mixed it's a devastating combination. (or maybe I'm just incapable of not crying over terminal illness plots)

[Shadowchapters · Rating 5 out of 5]

that was the saddest ff I ever read. I will NOT recover from this. it's literally haunting me day and night. (it's been 2 months.)
it also seems to be inspired by the 7 husbands of evelyn hugo, which makes it even better.
it ruined me.
it destroyed me.
i love every single thing about it.

[Tessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sobs

[Beyza Eda · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who doesn’t cry a lot, the way I WEEPED at the end was just… changed my perspective on a lot of things hurts so bad but 10/10

[Ixela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eatado: líquido

[Klairstar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me encantó la narración, eso no lo puedo negar.

[Daria]

bye.

[I'M Still]

How can I enter and read it??

[Didi Herondale · Rating 3 out of 5]

M gusto, pero no se, no tanto. Creo que es pq sabia el final

[Yuls ♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Si no hubiera estado mi hermana al costado hubiera llorado Mares

[Barbara Chávez · Rating 3 out of 5]

1. Adoramos que hayan fanfics aqui because they are LONG.
2. Ctm fanfic UGUGUGUHUH Mf.

[Yeana Nishat · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way I actually want to bang my head against the wall till I pass out

[I Forgot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but definitely overhyped.

[yours truly, Michèlle౨ৎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't finish reading this book, It finished me instead.