[Oh, what a question. Chuuya and Dazai have never gotten along, it’s true. They understood each other in a different way than he and Odasaku had. Something deep and shallow simultaneously; perhaps the ideal sort of professional relationship in a place like the Port Mafia. Loyalty which nonetheless could never be used as a weakness against each other, because they each knew the moment they became a liability was the moment they would be expected to cut the other loose.
Even so, there’s something so devastatingly, grimly hilarious about that bitterly asked question. Dazai doesn’t laugh, but his previously blank expression twists into a smile all the same. It’s not like his usual plastic ones, that almost uncanny valley cheerfulness that advertised its falsity like a neon sign. No, if his heart is a black hole, this smile is the x-rays that emerge from within, the ones that allow detection of something drawing all light and matter into its void. There’s a palpable weight to its emptiness.]
That’s a silly question, Chuuya. Someone like me … can never attain real happiness.
[No matter how hard he tries, how tightly he tries to grasp at things he wants, they're destined to slip out of his fingers like so much sand. It’s like he’d said in a certain bar, as a different man, and yet the same — there’s nothing worth wanting that would prolong this life of suffering. Certainly not something so abstract and unknowable as happiness.]
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Even so, there’s something so devastatingly, grimly hilarious about that bitterly asked question. Dazai doesn’t laugh, but his previously blank expression twists into a smile all the same. It’s not like his usual plastic ones, that almost uncanny valley cheerfulness that advertised its falsity like a neon sign. No, if his heart is a black hole, this smile is the x-rays that emerge from within, the ones that allow detection of something drawing all light and matter into its void. There’s a palpable weight to its emptiness.]
That’s a silly question, Chuuya. Someone like me … can never attain real happiness.
[No matter how hard he tries, how tightly he tries to grasp at things he wants, they're destined to slip out of his fingers like so much sand. It’s like he’d said in a certain bar, as a different man, and yet the same — there’s nothing worth wanting that would prolong this life of suffering. Certainly not something so abstract and unknowable as happiness.]