"I see..." Money, the age-old problem. Atsushi certainly knows what it's like to be poor. Even after being found by Dazai and getting a job at the Agency, he'd been extremely careful about the money he earned, a little too afraid of becoming penniless again. Well... he has to admit that rooming with Kyouka had messed up his careful budgeting somewhat. It was hard to deny her the tasty things she wanted.

"I'm from an orphanage myself, so there was never any money... but since the government made some level of education compulsory, even the orphanage couldn't get out of it completely." The occasional bouts of torture and being chained up for days notwithstanding. Suddenly Atsushi feels rather lucky for having had the opportunity to learn how to read - though he tries to cut off that train of thought there. His feelings about his past are complicated enough without feeling lucky about anything that happened to him in that place. "I can't imagine how I would have managed there without books..."