◣ dazai ◥ :

Her words sting—like a slap to the face, or freezing water thrown over his face to rouse him from a deep, deep sleep. He draws his head back slightly, eyelids lifting to widen his eyes (though barely visible to the tiny girl before him.)  

『It would be easy if you tried. 』

That’s what she says, and the squeezing sensation in his chest must mean she’s right. Failure is not in Dazai’s vocabulary; even that bastard Chuuya has said it before, that there’s no way Dazai Osamu, of all people, would let something happen through ‘gross negligence’ or incompetence, or anything of the sort. Kyouka’s point makes sense, and it makes the older male even angrier. He balls his hands into fists inside his pockets but keeps his tone even. He won’t yell at her—he won’t.

「 You couldn’t possibly know that, Kyouka-chan. It isn’t unheard of to survive attempts at suicide—it’s why they’re called attempts. Did you know that there are stories of people surviving bullet wounds to the head? And before you ask, that’s exactly it—imagine how painful it’d be to survive a gunshot to the head. 」 He shakes his head.  「 I don’t like pain, so I won’t shoot myself if there’s a chance I’ll survive and be in pain. I hate pain. 」 

As he rambles on almost madly, he lowers his eyes to the floor.  「 What’s more painful than this life, Kyouka-chan? 」

◣ ✿ ◥ Kyouka’s eyes narrowed at the argument presented to her, and okay, she could understand not liking pain. As for suicide attempts, even the people who took it seriously weren’t Dazai; most people weren’t so intimately acquainted with death and killing as people like him (and her, even), so it made sense that they didn’t succeed because they didn’t know the full depth of their actions.

“Then you shouldn’t attempt at all. If you refuse the most surefire way of killing yourself because a few other people can’t aim properly, why waste the energy on the methods more people survive?”

Perhaps her desire to argue the point came less from finding it illogical and more from the indignation at his earlier threat–an empty one, apparently. Why say it and not do it? Did he not consider her important enough? She never thought she’d be so upset about someone not insulting her, but the man named Osamu Dazai caused strange things to happen all around him.

“I don’t care how painful it is. Living isn’t as bad as you seem to think it is.”

She didn’t have the heart to say much more–she certainly couldn’t turn the tables on his own statement and make him cry instead–but hopefully her words wouldn’t be in vain. Psychological stuff went beyond her. But was anything she did ever enough? She wasn’t sure of that either.