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It’s so, so dark.
Maki isn’t exactly a stranger to nightmares. Of course, she hates trying to look into why she experiences the things that she does, hates blaming them on her childhood or her career as an assassin or even just the particular shittiness of the day that she just had. But she has them, all the time, and skipping out on sleep to avoid them is always a pointless endeavour because she’s bound to pass out eventually and when that happens, well… then the nightmares are going to settle back in again. Might as well get some rest while she’s at it.
At any rate, she’s not sure if this is one of them. Because usually when she has nightmares she’s not conscious of the fact that that’s what they are. Usually when, within a dream, she is faced with the oppressive cold and the oppressive darkness that she is now, all she can register is terror, and the thick gooey-ness constricting her movement, making it impossible for her to draw her arms in against her body and hug herself, impossible to choke in a breath without a mouthful of disgusting tasting slime (a taste that always lingers when she wakes) impossible to even close her eyes or curl into a ball and try to drown it all out.
In the times when she can touch her arms, slamming her palms against them so hard they bruise, no matter how vigorously she moves her hands up and down, the goosebumps refuse to disappear. It just gets colder and colder and colder, and the smell of mold gets so strong that she can feel it manifesting in her lungs and crawling up into her throat, and then she’s choking and gagging and tears are streaming from her eyes and she wants to pitch over and vomit but she can’t because she can’t even move, and--
And that’s not what’s happening now. It’s dark, so very incredibly dark, and everything is fucking cold. She stretches her arms up above her head and reaches out to nothing, feels nothing but heavy cold air, and when she returns them to her sides they’re left floaty and immaterial. Unreal. Icy wind blows past her legs and she reaches down, grasping for her skirt to pull it over her knees, but she feels nothing. So either she’s no longer got any legs, and those goosebumps she feels prickling in the air are just phantom pains, or this is the case with her arms. Maki has no way of ascertaining, nor does she particularly care for the specifics.
But where is she? She screws her eyes shut, more for the sake of concentrating than anything else because all closing her eyes does is block them from the dry wind, and gnashes her jaw as she tries to remember where she was last. She was, she was, at the Ultimate Academy, wasn’t she? She watched Saihara pull Yumeno from the ruins, a bittersweet smile on his face, and they looked around at the rubble, at the remains of the place where they all suffered.
That blue dome over their heads, it had a massive gaping hole in it from where Kiibo flew. That was their ticket to freedom. Their invitation from the outside world, an implicit welcome. They were allowed to join it. Fiction had changed reality. The truth became lies. Saihara led the way, she and Yumeno followed, and none of them looked back.
And then… what? What happened after that? Maki can feel a dull throb starting in her temples and squeezes her eyes shut even tighter, trying to block it out. Why can’t she remember? That couldn’t have been it, could it? Did everything really just cease to exist?
(Maki shivers. She is oh so cold.)
Perhaps she’s dead. That’s what this is, then, some twisted form of an afterlife. Or maybe this is her punishment, to spend the rest of eternity in a cold mess of blackness, haunted by incomplete memories and the fading resolution that so warmed her chest when she was seeing Saihara’s real smile for the first time. But her punishment for what? Maki Harukawa wasn’t a real person. There was no Ultimate Assassin. She didn’t kill anybody. Whoever she was before, she… she didn’t matter. She signed up to die, essentially. That girl, she may as well be a total stranger. Is it really fair for Maki (a fake person) to be suffering for that girl’s sins?
Before she can ponder the thought any further, she is hit with a light so piercing and white it bleeds right through her eyelids. She staggers back, or at least tries to, and shields her face with her arms. Doing so doesn’t seem to help, though, because the light only brightens, and brightens, and then-
She’s hit with a gust of warm, wet wind, and suddenly overwhelmed with sounds, and all different voices, and…
When Maki opens her eyes again, everything hurts.
It takes a moment for her to get her bearings. It’s dark, still, but somehow this darkness feels different, less like water, less penetrative and more just an absence of light. Rather than curling around her like tendrils of smoke it sits, present but relaxed, as though waiting to be filled. It’s an emptiness, not a black goo. She shivers anyway at the temperature change, taken off guard by how warm everything suddenly is, and clenches her hands at her sides. The sharp pain of dull fingernails digging into the meat of her palms is stabilising somehow, and when she shifts her arms her knuckles brush against something soft and smooth and familiar; the fabric of her skirt. It’s a bit moist but nothing beyond what would be expected from sweat.
She curls her hands up in it and squeezes so tight she is sure the blood rushes from her hands. She would be able to confirm this fact if she was able to see.
Maki is lying down. She thinks as much because there is softness beneath her calves, her shoulder blades, her head. Her hair tickles her neck with every slight movement, and there is a sticky noise whenever she removes a part of her body from the smooth mattress she is lying down on. Her knees knock against the sides of wherever she is lying. She can still hear all of those voices from before, that overwhelming loudness, but it feels distant and faraway, like she’s listening to it from underwater. Her tongue darts out from between her lips and moistens them once, twice, three times; they’re chapped and bitter but the fact that she can taste at all is reassuring.
Her eyes are closed, and it occurs to her that perhaps this is the cause of some of the darkness. There isn’t any light piercing through her eyelids though, none at all, so she thinks that perhaps it is dark beyond them as well. Still, she flutters them open and finds that it isn’t entirely black, rather a dark greenish colour, with thin lines of yellow light poking through. It’s difficult to adjust to but she forces herself to blink and breathe normally, pulling at her skirt when it gets too overwhelming. The air in here, wherever she is, is stale. It smells terrible, like a combination of sweat and stillness and heat, and she almost prefers the taste of that darkness, to be honest, because for all its faults it was dry and cold. This is just uncomfortable in an entirely different way. That oppressive feeling is settling in again, the louder those outside voices become, and Maki is finding it more and more difficult to focus on the situation at hand, the longer she sits her.
All of a sudden, a knock reverberates through the space, a heavy handed boom boom boom that vibrates through her body, and a low, familiar voice calls, “Harumaki? You awake?”
Her entire body stiffens for reasons entirely unrelated to her current position, and she opens dry lips to respond but her throat constricts. Her muscles are tense and at the ready. She’s certain that if she is freed from this space, whoever she sees in a moment or two she won’t be able to stop herself from attacking. It’s all she knows, after all, self-defense. Beyond self-defense, she knows how to harm other people for no reason. She knows how to go on the offensive, unprovoked. She has done so before. It’s as simple to her as breathing, no matter how fabricated that backstory of hers is.
That voice continues, “I’m gonna open the lid, alright? It’s gonna be really bright, but bear with me!”
“Momota,” another low voice, similarly low but more innocent, Maki recognises, sounds unsteady and frowny. “Isn’t Harukawa still wearing her headset? Gonta doesn’t think it’s going to be that bright…”
“Oh, that’s right, huh?” Fingers drum on that lid Momota was discussing removing, a steady and rhythmic tap-tap-tap-tap, and Maki strains to hear him as he muses, because his voice has sufficiently decreased in volume. “Well, then, no worries! It’ll still be pretty cold, though!”
“Toujo,” a rather lower voice rumbles. “You might want to stand back a bit. Momota hasn’t opened these things before so I can’t imagine that he won’t be needlessly rough with it.”
“Oh, of course.” Hums a pleasant, higher tone. (Neither of these, Maki remarks without speaking, she has heard in a long while; neither of these she was ever expecting to hear again.) “I am simply standing by in case he needs help.”
Before anybody can say anything else, or Maki can find her voice enough to ask what the hell is going on, there is a loud click and then a grunt from Momota, and then a dull, heavy thud that rings through the space as green-tinted light floods her vision. She flinches a bit, even though Gokuhara said it wouldn’t be that bad, and brings up one of her hands to touch her face. Her knuckles bump against cold plastic (likely the aforementioned headset) and she shivers as a cool gust of wind touches her.
A hand lands on her shoulder, and another one slides across her lower back, and a rumbling voice instructs, “Hold onto me, Harumaki,” and there’s a light, dizzying feeling as she is helped to sit upright. She can’t help leaning to the side, feeling the gentle squish of her headset sinking into Momota’s stomach, but his forearm under her shaking hands is steady and warm and she holds tight to it, trying to ignore the alarm sounds in her brain that are going off at his very presence.
Another click, this one softer and less obnoxious, and she squeezes her eyes shut as that headset is removed. The light loses its green tint and appears pink through her eyelids, making her scrunch up her face. It is so very, very bright. Maki shivers again in the cold and feels Momota’s hand rubbing up and down her back, coaxing down goosebumps and sending chills through her that are entirely unrelated to the temperature.
When she finally musters the strength to flutter open her eyes, Maki almost balks.
To begin with, she’s sitting inside of what appears to be a casket. There are all sorts of wires and buttons lining the inside, many of which that she likely disturbed in her writing, but all of them have since been unplugged. The floor is blue but bears the appearance of the skin of a machine in that it is transparent. Pipes and lines are crisscrossing haphazardly beneath their feet. The ceiling above her is high and lined with bright yellow lights, as well as beams and other kinds of lines that are likely connected to the machinery in the very box she’s sitting in. Somewhere off to her right there is another one of those caskets, but this one is empty and deserted. The room is loud, full of voices- familiar voices- and Maki is finding it difficult to recollect herself.
The most startling thing, she supposes, is the fact that aside from Momota supporting her, Toujo, Gokuhara, and Hoshi are standing around her. Held in Toujo’s gloved hands is the VR headset that Maki can only assume was just pulled from her head. The lid to the casket is on the floor, tipped on its back, likely from Momota throwing it off.
After a moment of heavy breathing, Maki rasps, “What is this.” It’s hardly a question but she swivels her head around to Momota, hoping that he’ll be gracious enough to give her the explanation she wants. His lilac eyes are gentle, stabilising, and he cracks a smile at her when they make eye contact, but she tries to remain expectant. Seeing that smile again tempts her to break down, and she can’t have that, not yet, not when she still isn’t entirely sure that this isn’t some kind of convoluted afterlife, or a hallucination that she dreamt up herself in that bone-chilling dark place.
“There’s a lot,” Momota prefaces. “How much do you want to know all at once? There’s gonna be time to explain more as we go along.”
Maki suppresses the urge to glare at him. “Why are you
alive,”
she stress, irate, “is the question that I was asking.”
“I knew that!” Momota defends, which suggests that he perhaps did not know that. “The killing game wasn’t real. Neither was anything else. The murders, the trials, the execu-”
“It was a simulation.” Hoshi interrupts flatly. “We were plugged into a computer by this group called Team Danganronpa and put into a virtual reality program that made us think we were trapped in the Ultimate Academy when in reality we were all right here.”
“I was getting there,” Momota says, somewhat poutily.
“Hoshi has explained this to more people than you have, Momota, I wouldn’t take his conciseness personally.” Toujo inclines her head with a small smile. Maki finds it strange to watch her move, strange to even hear her voice and to see her smiling so serenely when the last thing she saw of the other girl was… well, there’s no need to get into that, not when there are still things to discuss, but… it’s still jarring, all of it is, to be hearing their voices outside of nightmares.
What is more jarring is how they’re dressed, so casually, as though they’ve all just gotten out of bed. Even Toujo is dressed in a t-shirt and leggings. Seeing Hoshi out of the prison attire, and Gokuhara wearing something other than a suit, Maki feels… entirely out of her depth. At least Momota is still wearing slippers. That’s one part of this that feels comforting. Uniform, familiar in an ocean of unfamiliarity and strangeness. She looks back over at the man in question, sees that he’s watching her with his forehead wrinkled (as though he’s concerned), but when they make eye contact his face lights up in a smile again.
“Oh, can you sit up on your own?” Momota moves to pull away, but the moment his hand lifts from her back, Maki startles, reaching over and clutching at his shirt. She knows it’s immature, and clingy, but she feels too unsteady to risk forgoing the only thing keeping her stable right now. Momota gives her an undecipherable look before crouching down at her side, pulling her hand from his shirt but enveloping it in both of his. His gaze is soft.
“Should we leave?” Maki isn’t looking, but she hears Gokuhara speak, and the quiet murmurs in response from Hoshi and Toujo. They speak much softer than the entomologist (?) does, so she can’t make out exactly what they are saying, but a moment later Gokuhara speaks again. “It seems like Momota and Harukawa need a minute- Hoshi can apologise later, right?”
There’s a sigh, and then a quiet, “Yeah,” from Hoshi, which Maki supposes is accompanied by the boy pulling down his hat. “Toujo, you wanted to apologise to Yumeno, right? I think Chabashira will be fine with it if it’s just you. I should talk to Saihara, anyway.”
At the mention of the other survivors, Maki feels her heart pound a bit louder in her ears. It makes sense that they’d be here soon, and realistically she knows that she probably saw them very recently in the simulation, but… well, it’s hard for her to process that it was a simulation at all, actually, and that this isn’t some strange alternate dimension in which Momota and Hoshi and everyone are still alive.
She forces herself to meet Momota’s eyes again when she hears receding footsteps, notes how calm and present he seems as compared to how he looked in the simulation, the healthy flush of his cheeks, and the gentle quality of his smile. He’s watching her like he’s waiting for her to speak, like he has all the time in the world to listen to her, and it makes a lump crawl up into her throat. Maki desperately wants to keep from crying if she can avoid it, but… it’s not out of the question.
“Is everyone alive?” She forces herself to ask, hates how thick and foggy her voice sounds. “Akamatsu, Amami… Ouma?”
“Yeah,” Momota grins at her. “The little shit has been annoying people since he woke up. But he’s not so bad now that I understand him a little better.” His expression softens. “Akamatsu has been great, too. Leading everyone like usual. She was cheering you guys on during that trial, y’know. I was too,” he adds suddenly, and his eyes focus back in on Maki’s face. “I was really… proud of you guys.”
He doesn’t say anything else, or repeat any of that stupid stuff about sidekicks or heroism, and it makes Maki feel a little bit worried. He doesn’t look sad, but he looks tired. It makes her wonder how real those auditioning tapes where. That man in the video, the one with Momota’s face and voice, he would never be gazing at her with such softness, holding her hands and crouching by her bed (casket?) like he has all the time in the world to explain things to her. At the same time, it’s hard to equate this person with the boy she knew in the simulation. The one who faked it all the way up until he was coughing his lungs out in a rocket ship. The one who died before his execution could kill him, and then they all considered that to be a victory.
“Harumaki, you look troubled.” Momota says eventually, and his eyes are frowning in a way that his mouth isn’t. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m having,” she pauses, debates being honest like she was about to be. Momota is here now, there’s no longer that sense of urgency that was there after the fifth trial, no longer the pressing need to tell him the truth about her feelings, and yet she can still feel the regret that lingered afterwards. The ugly way it felt speaking those words and knowing she would never get a chance to act on them. She remembers that regret, remembers how much she hated herself for not telling him the truth. She’s done regretting things. “I’m having difficulty believing that, that you’re really here, right now.” She admits finally.
Momota’s expression turns unreadable. He gazes at her for a moment, eyes half lidded, and then eventually lifts one of her hands, guiding it until it rests on the side of her face. (Maki’s heart skips a couple beats, and then a couple more, and she marvels at the fact that she doesn’t pass out with all the blood rushing to her head right now.) His cheek and chin are scratchy with facial hair, but his face is very warm, and her hand molds into his face automatically. The feeling is unfamiliar, tenderly cradling someone’s cheek, and for a moment she hardly knows how to respond to it.
“Momota,” she breathes.
“When I was about to die in the simulation,” Momota says softly. “And you confessed your feelings to me,” Maki’s face burns. She can feel her heart rate increase because it’s crawled up into her throat, and now she can barely swallow around it. She tries, anyway. “I didn’t want to tell you what I was thinking, because I didn’t think it would be fair. I knew I was going to die. And saying how I felt would have left you with even more regrets than before. So I just tried to encourage you.”
He’s being so articulate, Maki didn’t think he was capable of it. He’s speaking so slowly, and carefully, and it makes her wonder what dying did to him to make him this way, to make him so gentle and soft and attentive. (She knows, without a moment’s hesitation, that it’s him, though, because she can feel his face under her hand, and if she shifts her fingers she can feel his pulse thrumming through his throat, and it’s solid and present and real.)
“But I still-” he cuts himself off short. “Shit, Harumaki, I-” Momota seems at a loss for words, looking at her like he doesn’t know how to say what he’s thinking. A far cry from how well-put-together he seemed just a second ago. “If I had had more time, I would’ve-”
Maki interrupts him, even though she doesn’t particularly want to, to say, “We have time now, though, don’t we?”
And rather than correct her, which she is so afraid he will, Momota blinks at her, and then his expression breaks into a smile, as though she has just reminded him of a fact that he had forgotten. (Idiot.) He releases her and pulls himself to stand up again, and Maki’s hand slips from the side of his face. After he’s firmly on his feet he opens his arms, smiling hopefully, and Maki pushes herself onto her knees to fall into them.
Momota catches her, tight and secure, and loops his arms around her waist.
When he asks, gruff but warm, “Can I kiss you?” Maki responds by pushing her lips against his, and all cold escapes her.