◣ dazai ◥ :

Dazai feels as though he’s being talked down from an attempt he hasn’t made yet, and the feeling bothers him. If it were a physical sensation, it would feel like needles underneath his skin, forcing their way to the surface, though the feeling is not pain—it’s a static feeling every time the needles push and probe.

「 Am I really being chastised by a girl who had no will herself to live until I said anything? I was just doing my job, you know. It made no difference to me whether you lived or died there! 」

Does he mean it? Not in the slightest. To deliver that speech to her, he dug into his own personal emotions—the one time it did not bother him, because he spoke of an old friend. The thought of his late companion crosses his mind. What would he think of Dazai now, telling a child—his comrade—that it would make no difference were she alive or dead?

◣ ✿ ◥ Ah yes, there came the hurtful comments he’d promised minutes ago–finally. The words hurt to hear, of course, but the effect was minimised when she knew that he didn’t mean them. He wanted her to leave him alone and drop the topic: anything was fair game in accomplishing that. People were less willing to help people who were mean to them, so it made sense to lash out with insults even if he didn’t believe them.

“I did have the will to live before you said anything,” she corrected. “Otherwise it wouldn’t have been so easy to convince me to fight. And it did make a difference to you because, job or not, you wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t care. If I didn’t stop the Moby Dick, you would have died along with everyone else. For someone so apparently determined to die, you certainly have a lot of excuses not to.”

Everything–not wanting to inconvenience others, not wanting it to be painful, wanting to commit double suicide with someone, not wanting certain people to murder him–all led to his continued existence despite his words. For argument’s sake, she wasn’t going to overlook that.