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Sometimes, things don't line up.
It's like peering through a window that's been broken, with filmy cracks webbed over the world outside; it's like the window's been badly-repaired and there are shards missing here and there -- not enough to be significant, perhaps, but enough to unsettle.
.
Maybe she's getting too old for this idol business. Maybe she's got terrible cramps. Sometimes she stares at herself in the mirror, at the flat plane of her stomach, and wonders why it hurts.
Sayaka doesn't know who to talk to, because her questions don't come out right, any more. She can't just go to someone and ask them, hey, do you dream about dying. That's not what a thing most people do, do they.
(But it's also not a thing to dream about ruin; ruin of her career, her friendships, ruin of everything she's struggled towards. She's just a girl caught in the lightning-struck tower with nowhere to go but down.)
She dreams a lot, now. She dreams about a boy in her class. He smiles sheepishly as she pats his hand and says one thing, while meaning the other. I'll be your assistant, she tells him, when she really means, you'll be my accessory to a crime. Did she really set him up to take a fall, she wonders. That's awful. She's awful.
She's awful because she made him believe in her. She's awful because he believed in a fabrication, a pastel-perfect persona of a girl perched on a pedestal. She's awful because she thought about stabbing him in the back when she leaned in to kiss his cheek.
Maybe she deserves it. Maybe it's why she doesn't tell anybody.
They wouldn't understand, anyway.
.
He doesn't play baseball any more. Not as much as he used to, anyway; not as much after he said, I want to play music instead.
Leon isn't sure why. It was because of a girl, wasn't it. The chicks like a guy who can rock out on a guitar. yeah, that's exactly the way it is. He likes it a lot more than being in the pitch, with the paint smeared over his cheekbones.
He likes pulling expressions in the mirror as he carefully teases his hair into unruly spikes; he likes the way he can roll his r's, make them sound like he doesn't give a damn, because that's what the girls dig, right. They like someone rough and devil-may-care; they like someone who props himself against the wall and knows he's the damned best, right. The saccharine-sweet ones like the bad boys, he remembers that much. He remembers kissing a girl behind the bleachers; he remembers her smacking his hand away from the hem of her skirt. He remembers her teasing him, telling him he'll get there once he can serenade her.
Yeah, the girls like a guy who can wax lyrical about the stars in their eyes.
What the chicks don't dig, he thinks to himself at night as he unplugs his amplifier and pulls off his headphones, is a murderer. It's easy to sing about shit like that, until he starts thinking about a knife in his hands and seeing himself, reflected twofold in the terrified doe-eyes of a girl who knows she's going to die.
And by his hand, at that.
.
Friends. What are friends. Ishimaru's certain he can call Naegi a friend. Fujisaki, too. Even Oowada. God knows why he's friends with a hooligan like that. It seemed natural, at the time, to clap Mondo Oowada on the shoulder as they watched the doors roll open, and say, this is it, aniki, we're finally free.
Why, then, does he hesitate when he's trying to dial their numbers. He doesn't even know them. There's some sort of distinction, isn't there, between actually knowing someone, and just being their classmate. There's some line to cross, before you become friends. A thin line between friends and acquaintances. An even thinner one, between friends and confidantes. Right? Right.
(They were best friends, once. Or were they? He doesn't know. He didn't write up detention slips for Oowada back then. Or did he? Did he write a detention slip when - when, oh god, when he found out Oowada murdered Fujisaki? No. No, that's not right. Mondo Oowada was a thug, but not a murderer.
Right? Right.
It was nice, though, to be able to use the word friend. He doesn't think he had any, before he went to that school.
It was hard, wasn't it, for other children to understand him. Strange, how he thought a thug was his best friend.)
.
It's easy to blend in again. She's back where she belongs; returned to her element, where she reigns supreme.
The mundaneness of school life suited Taeko Yasuhiro -- a plain girl with black hair and brown eyes who liked oily gyoza; a girl who just wanted to escape the boredom of a predictable life. It did not, however, suit Celestia Ludenberg -- not the queen of liars; of falsehood, and two-facing. She's glad to be rid of the place.
"Full house," she murmurs. She smiles sweetly and drums her lacquered nails against the table.
She hates this place, too, with its hazy gloam of cigarette smoke hovering low over the poker tables. She's never liked smokers; the way their eyes glint in the hazy fumes. It's so hot and stuffy. Stifling. She feels like she's burning. She's always wanted to escape.
To escape.
to escape.
she wanted to escape that place too she didn't want to die she didn't want to be like the others she wanted to
live
she wanted
to live.
(And that's why she killed them, wasn't it. She didn't want to die but others would have to, in her place.)
.
Hope.
Hope.
She must not lose hope.
Touko Fukawa doesn't think she understands. Maybe she doesn't want to. Hope doesn't exorcise a serial killer from her head. Hoping has never meant she'd wake up from a fugue without blood on her hands.
She still writes, but the words don't come as easily as before. It used to be escapism, perhaps in microcosm. It's easy to write about romances she can't have, because solitude makes for a perfect muse. She doesn't know what she's hoping for.
Maybe she'll write a crime thriller, or maybe even two. She dreams about them enough, anyway. Genocider Syo helps, too. She'll write about the locked-room mysteries, the corpses in the shower, the boys with their skulls caved in, with scissors in their wrists. She'll write about unreliable witnesses and fallible juries; about confirmation biases, and availability heuristics.
The memories that seep between her fingers, like sand, like water -- they're just confirming what she suspects. What Syo already knows.
.
It's easy to go back to her old rhythms, after leaving Hope's Peak.
If anything, she knows discipline; to have discipline, is to have strength.
Sakura's life is the same as it always has been. Wake up as dawn creeps across the sky; help around at the dojo and teach acolytes; train for three hours. A brief respite; she will make protein coffee and watch the sun stain the horizon gold. She meets up with Aoi on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays and they spar together; then they adjourn for morning or afternoon tea, depending on what time they finish. Sakura allows herself a doughnut, and listens to Aoi chatter as she dips sweet, calorie-laden pastries into milky coffee; she smiles when Aoi dusts powdered sugar off her fingers and enthuses about the simple pleasures of life.
Other patterns persist. She visits Kenichiro on Mondays, Thursdays and weekends, and they will chat -- about the future, her training, his recovery, her time at Hope's Peak.
She doesn't tell him everything, though; like how she doesn't enjoy protein coffee as much as before. There's always a lurking sense of danger that throbs under her skin when she curls her fingers around a cup. Something's wrong, something's wrong.
That's how all famous martial artists were taken down, weren't they. A slow-acting poison, slipped into a drink at the end of a duel round. It will creep into the bloodstream and paralyse the nerves; maybe it will be an anticoagulant. Maybe it will rupture her, from the inside out. It'll be easy to hide, at first, she hopes.
Nobody will have to watch her die.
.
He's made a good life for himself; Celestia is wrong to think hers is the only career built of deceit and trickery.
Hagakure doesn't know what to make of his dreams, though. He'd dismiss them as prophetic, maybe. Déjà-vu, perhaps, though he's sure he's never seen visions like these before.
(And he never will, because things like those don't happen in real life, do they. Do they? He doesn't know. He doesn't know any more.)
He sees dead people. Oh, how hysterical that sounds. What a joke.
(He wishes it were a joke. He wishes he were dead, so he doesn't have to keep seeing things like that.)
There are dead boys, dead girls. All younger than he is. Something gnarled and charred and reeking of melted synthetic fibres, with hands clutched in prayer; too many cranial bones latticed with spiderweb cracks, haemorrhaged grey-white tissue peeking through the shards. Sometimes there are other images that don't seem quite right. His memory's poorer these days, sparse and patchy. If he was one for conspiracy theories, he'd swear his mind got wiped at some point, like erasing the data on a floppy disk with magnets. If he didn't know better, he'd believe there are false memories in there, somewhere, to cover the empty swathes of scrambled information, implanted to give him a false sense of security. A false sense of hope.
He remembers filching tidbits of lunch from a girl's bento box; he doesn't remember her face but she laughs and gives the whole lot to him, anyways. He remembers pretending to read their (whose? Oh, god. He doesn't know) palms, and making up grandiose futures that promise success.
Because that was the nice thing to do. The right thing to do, because they were friends.
.
Mukuro feels guilty, sometimes, for leaving Junko like that. Blood's thicker than water, that's how the phrase went, wasn't it?
It doesn't seem to ring true. When she tests the words, rolling them carefully across her tongue, they don't fit; they slide between her lips, jutting like ugly teeth. They don't fit. They're all wrong.
She once thought she'd do anything for her sister. Anything, because only her sister understood her. Because only she understood Junko.
But she's wrong. She's wrong because she knows she'll never truly be free of Junko's shadow. She'll always be running, watching over her shoulder and one day Junko will be there to collect. She always does, just as the devil comes knocking.
She thinks about the day they got free. She thinks a lot about the spears that Naegi took for her. In her dreams, she's not as lucky; in her dreams, Junko smiles a cruel wolf's smile and laughs Monobear's high, breathy giggle. It's all supposed to be an act and the school is their stage; their classmates are the backdrop.
Except it doesn't go according to plan. She's fast, but not fast enough. Never fast enough to avoid the spears. Never fast enough to escape. Never fast enough to flinch away from the first, the second, the third, as they slide through her body.
But in her dreams, she's the first to smile at him. At the boy who always smiled at her.
.
It galls her not to know. The truth is always beyond her.
Dreams are poor evidence. Dreams will not hold up in any court. Memories are never concrete; the mind is not infallible.
Kirigiri keeps a record of everything, these days. It settles her mind; it draws her attention away from the scrambled snarl that weaves itself into knots at the base of her skull. She feels like she's living a lie; her own mind is betraying her.
She's filled eight notebooks; she reads through them all, but she still can't make sense of what she sees.
She remembers working. Was it working, when she was at school? Normal school syllabi did not involve corpse-inspection; it did not involve breaking the fingers of a body seized by rigor mortis; it did not involve snapping on surgical gloves, swiping a finger down a blood-slicked forehead. There were trials; she remembers presenting evidence, cold and clean and clinical. That's what she's good at.
She remembers other things, far more mundane, trivialities recorded on crisp notepaper in her distinctive shorthand. A record of Byakuya Togami's kind deeds. The number of times Hagakure and Celestia challenged one another to monopoly games, and attempted to swindle one another. Skipping gym class with Enoshima and Fukawa, and ignoring Ikusaba's pointed, stony glares. The number of times she woke up to Kuwata attempting to serenade Maizono with rock ballads at two in the morning, before they decided to soundproof the rooms.
She remembers thinking she will die. She remembers dying, or, rather, the moments before she does. She remembers trying to keep a calm face, as something heavy and metallic pounds behind her. She remembers admitting defeat, until Makoto Naegi stares into her eyes and says, you must not lose hope.
Hope.
Her last notebook is filled with the word, over and over, more then three-quarters through the crisp pages. She must not lose hope. She will find the truth.