#THANKS GOD THAT'S SO COOL

[aparticularbandit]

Of A Fatal Captivity: Day One (II)

Summary: When do they decide that she can’t leave? That they’re going to keep her there no matter what she wants? That’s the day her captivity begins. Is that today?

Some of you will think that this beginning is a gimmick. Up to you! Think what you want! (It’s not a gimmick more than anything else in writing is a gimmick, which is to say, of course, it’s a gimmick, because that’s all writing is, really, isn’t it? A bunch of gimmicks? Some of them more successful than others? Isn’t that why we have tropes? The trappings of a Tragedy to tell us whether that’s really what the story is or not? (Do you know the story you’re in?))

Enough games.

You’re here for something better than that.

Or: Junko Enoshima’s factory reset may or may not be going as planned, and Ryoko Otonashi has plenty of things to say about that. Or will, once she realizes what’s going on.

Chapter Rating: T. Fic Rating: M for Danganronpa reasons.

TW for Suicidal Ideation. It's blink and you'll miss it, but it's there.

AO3

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Book One

Five Days Ago.

“Nagito Komaeda.”

The white-haired boy introduces himself with the barest hint of a smile and something sparkling in his eyes that is too reminiscent of Junko’s look when she speaks of despair to make Kyoko feel truly comfortable.  She doesn’t take his hand when he extends it, and he takes it back, before rubbing it nonchalantly along his jacket.  “I take it my associates stole our fearless leader away from you.”

“Your associates?”  Kyoko crosses her arms and gives Makoto a side look, but he just shrugs.  (He doesn’t know anything.  Of course, he doesn’t know anything.  Somehow, she isn’t surprised.)

“Work associates at best, classmates at worst.”  Nagito offers an awkward sort of smile, his eyes closing.  “They’re a little more, ah, Despair-focused than myself.  We’re not friends.”

“But you are one of Junko’s—”

“I’m part of Ultimate Despair, yes.”  Nagito sighs, gaze dropping to one side as his eyes open again.  “But I wouldn’t say I’m into that whole Despair part of things.  Not like the rest of them are.”

Kyoko stares at him – examines him – and then turns to Makoto.  She doesn’t even have to ask if Makoto trusts him; she knows that he does, knows it as surely as she knows that she doesn’t.  Byakuya would demand they keep Nagito for questioning, if he were here with them and still conscious.  Hiro wouldn’t know what to do with him.  Toko would call him a pretty boy (but nothing like her M-M-Master); Jack would cackle and threaten to kill him (he does seem like her type in the murder sense).  And Hina….

It doesn’t quite matter what Hina would do with him anymore.

(Probably ask him what his favorite donut was and make judgments accordingly.)

Without thinking on it further, Kyoko asks, on an impulse, “What’s your favorite type of donut?”

Makoto’s eyes widen, and he looks at Kyoko like she’s transformed into some entirely new creature he doesn’t understand.  But he doesn’t ask why she questions Nagito in such a way, doesn’t undermine her with distracting words.  He trusts her.  (He shouldn’t.)

Nagito’s head lilts to one side, and he taps his chin with one long finger, seeming to give it his full consideration.  “Powdered donuts,” he says finally, “from the school vending machine.”  He lets out a chuckling breath.  “Unfortunately, they’re not available anymore!  Just my luck.”

Hina wouldn’t consider those donuts and would trust – or doubt – him accordingly.

“Why do you ask?”

“Unimportant.”

Kyoko scans the room around them.  She sees no doors other than the one behind her, but that doesn’t mean Nagito doesn’t have another way in.  Junko would have, given all of her secret tunnels.  (She’s not thinking about Junko.)  Still, in a matter of seconds, she goes over everything else she could possibly discuss with him and chooses to ask, regardless of what the others might have thought or wanted, “Can you help us get Junko back?”

(Maybe she is thinking about her after all.)

((Maybe she can’t not.))

“Can I?” Nagito echoes, his voice soft, and he seems to consider it, too, with the same weight as the question about donuts.  “Yes,” he says with a little nod.  “Will I?”  Then he pauses for another beat of careful consideration that sends a hot spike of anger up Kyoko’s back, another little break in the cold numb tingling beneath her skin.  He finally smiles again when he says, firmly, “No.”

Nagito grins, and in that grin, Kyoko can only see Junko at her absolute troll worst.  “The three of you are fighting for your hope,” he continues, as though explaining his decision will make her appreciate it. “I can help, but I’m not sure your side is the most worthy of my unique abilities.”  His head tilts to one side, eyes growing wild.  “So until you’ve convinced me otherwise, I’ll be keeping my luck to myself.”

“Your luck?” Kyoko asks, raising one eyebrow.  Makoto’s Talent was – is – also luck, but his seems to have only come in clutch when he was in life-threatening danger.  It’s unreliable even at the best of times.

“Here,” Nagito says, seeming to sense her disbelief.  “I’ll treat you to an example!”  His maniacal grin soften, and for a moment, he seems almost normal.  Almost.  “Now, Makoto, you told me that conveyor belt slipped you through a door in the wall over here, right?”  He picks up a laptop from the nearby table and walks to the opposite side of the room, far away from them, the chain dangling about his neck clinking as he does.  When he stops, it appears to be in front of a spot at random.  “You said you could hear a lot of locks?”

Makoto turns to Kyoko, shrugs, and then turns back to Nagito as they follow him.  “Uh, yeah?”  He scratches his chin.  “But I don’t think you can—”

Nagito raises his free hand and places it flat on the wall.  His brow furrows.  Then he taps a finger on one of the panels, seemingly at random.  “There’s something here.”  He presses on it.

The wall suddenly flips in the way that walls only do in movies and television shows, and Nagito abruptly disappears.

Kyoko rushes to the wall with Makoto at her heels.  She runs her fingers along the wall, looking for whatever mark it was that Nagito found, but she sees – feels – nothing.  Her gloved fingers press here and there along the metallic surface, but there’s nothing.  Nothing at all.

It must only be on one side.

And still, despite all this, she can hear Nagito’s voice.

“I must say, it’s not likely your side will gain my luck.  The lightest of her hope is far, far stronger than yours is.”

Her hope? Kyoko thinks.  Her who?  Junko?

Nagito laughs – cackles – and then yells out, “It was such a pleasure to meet you two beautiful lights!  I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors!  Maybe we’ll meet again soon!”

Then there’s nothing.

Not even the sound of his shoes scuffling on the floor or his chain clinking against him.

Something else – someone else – another clue, all slipping through her fingertips.  Like Kyoko decided to grab a pile of ash and hold it tight instead of letting it blow away in the wind, like she hadn’t learned when she was young that holding tight to anything (anyone) just meant it was more likely to slip away.  She’s not clinging to anything, and it’s still disappearing anyway.

(She refuses to think of Hina, refuses to think of Yui’s face in that same dying position, refuses to see the light leaving her true best friend’s eyes again, refuses to remember the hope she’d had that she would survive, refuses to let that hope transfer to Junko now that she’s been taking by the worst people who could possibly take her, who will do nothing but make her worse if she ever wakes up in the first place—)

Kyoko’s hand clenches into a fist against the metal wall, and she leans her forehead against it.  Takes a deep, steadying breath in.

“Kyokyo?”

Grits her teeth together.  “Don’t call me that.”

“In my memories,” Makoto says, “all of us call you that.”

“In your memories,” Kyoko counters, “we’re all alive.”

She doesn’t say that the only person who has called her that since his fake death was Junko; that it’s only now, in her absence, that it feels like everyone else has decided to use that name for her again; that somehow Junko has embedded echoes of herself within the rest of them and she can’t escape it.

It doesn’t matter.

It has nothing to do with her.

And the small flame of frustration, of anger, of something licking at the center of her chest becomes engulfed by the same ice cold numbness, the same despair she’d felt before, so thick that she can taste it sweet as honey on her tongue – no, not honey, blue raspberries, sickly sweet and sweetly sour and fake, a false flavor created by corporations who slapped a name on it, forgetting – or perhaps not caring – that there are no blue raspberries, not in nature, not at all.

“Did you remember, too?” Makoto asks, his voice soft.

Kyoko doesn’t know what Makoto is asking, except that she does.  It’s the same question that she has spent the last week and a half fighting, both from without and from within, about Junko and her relationship with her in a time when she should have but did not know, when she was using Junko for her own purposes the same way that Junko was using her – just as they are now.

Or were.

No.

Are.

Even now, a part of Kyoko is certain that Junko is still using her the same way that she always has.  She needs her, after all, for some nefarious purpose.  Or maybe this, too, is an empty hope, something that says Junko must survive this happening to her so that she might still have some use for her.

(The best way to stop whatever her plan is would be—)

The thought hits her like a slap to the face, and Kyoko takes a much sharper breath, and Makoto’s face shifts into one of concern and apology because he thinks it’s his fault, she can read that much on his face, and she doesn’t deny him that.

At least he cares.

“Who I was in the past is not who I am now, Makoto,” Kyoko says, unmoving.  “I don’t know what you want from me.”

Makoto blinks up at her, uncertain.  “I don’t want anything from you.”

“That’s true now, but it hasn’t always been true, has it?”  Kyoko turns her head, still resting on the metallic wall, to stare at him.  “You sacrificed yourself, and you expected me to save her.  You wanted me to save her.”  She meets his eyes but doesn’t need to search them.  “Didn’t you?”

“Not just you!”

Makoto keeps talking, but Kyoko stops listening.

Kyoko turns away from Makoto as he continues, his voice overpowered by the ringing in her ears.  She closes her eyes.  The metal feels cool on her forehead.  Real.  It’s nice.  Not comforting in the slightest, but nice.  She lays her gloved hand flat against the wall and uses it to push herself off.  Then she looks up at the wall, as though that should mean anything at all, and then turns away from it, from Makoto’s hopeful chatter, his hopeful explanation.

(For a moment, Kyoko considers that he’s just as bad as Nagito is – expecting his words to make her feel better about his bad decision – but she doesn’t dwell on that.)

She’s halfway across the room before his question breaks through the ringing in her ears, “Where are you going?”

“To meet the others,” Kyoko says, blunt and without turning back.  “What’s left of them.”

~

Kyoko doesn’t know exactly where she’ll find them.

A part of her, at this point, doesn’t care.

Somewhere, at some point, her brain broke.  After her heart did, probably.  Maybe at the same time.  It’s hard to pinpoint when both happen.

(No, it isn’t.

Her heart cackled when she realized Junko planned this whole thing, broke when the mecha Monokuma she could never have known to expect broke through the ceiling, shattered when Nekomaru (those names are burned into her broken mind) ripped her out of that mechanical cradle.

Her brain cracked here and there along the way, but it broke when she found Hina dying, shattered when she found Makoto alive.

Those are the moments.

She knows them.

She just doesn’t care.

This doesn’t have anything to do with her.)

Makoto chases after her.  Every now and again, he attempts to strike up some sort of conversation, but she ignores him or answers in blunt, one syllable words.  Eventually, he stops.

Maybe it isn’t fair to him to not say anything.  He’s been locked in a room alone for a week and a half with no company – or so she assumes, although she has no idea how long that Nagito was there with him – and has no idea what has happened since he supposedly died.

But it wasn’t fair of him to expect her to—

The others aren’t in the main hall when they get there, and so Kyoko goes into the tunnels, types in her name like the code it is, because it has always been her name, it’s still her name, first her father and now Junko, people who she hated but who apparently loved her enough to type it over and over and over again, just that constant call haunting and unyielding like the first Monokuma Announcement after the end of the Game—

Kyoko goes into the tunnels, types in the code, and leads Makoto unspeaking through the passageways until she arrives back at the wreckage.  Out of the corner of her eye, she sees his face grow ashen, and as she walks forward, she notes how he doesn’t move, frozen in place.  “Be careful when you enter,” she says, the first full sentence she’s said to him since they left the mirai room.  “Don’t step on Hina.”

“Don’t step on—?”

Makoto’s voice is soft in its echo and drops out entirely as he drops, seeing her corpse.

It doesn’t matter.

Kyoko knows this, knows Makoto.  Hina will become another badge on his blood-soaked chest, another name of another classmate who has fallen who will propel him on towards more hope – Makoto, who never wants anyone to die but who could have stopped the killing by letting Junko die – Junko, who clearly wanted to die, who told Kyoko as much.  Hina will become just another name on his lips.

Makoto cares.  Of course, he cares.

But she’s just. so. tired. of his ineffective caring.

And it’s a different tired than ten days ago when she wasn’t sleeping, when she started hallucinating, when she believed him and saw him and he told her she was doing good.

(It’s the despair seeded within her.

The thought briefly crosses her mind – Does Junko always feel like this? – before she shoves it back.  it doesn’t matter how Junko feels anymore.  Maybe it never did.  It’s not like she’s feeling anything right now anyway.)

“Kyoko Kirigiri?”

A hand from behind gently touches her shoulder, and Kyoko nearly jumps from that just as much as she does from the unrecognizable voice.  Nearly.  Instead, she stays as she is, her shoulders hunching down.  Still, the hand remains gentle.  Doesn’t squeeze, doesn’t grip, doesn’t twist her around.  It’s just soft, as far as softness goes.

It’s been so long since she’s felt anything soft.

“What do you want with me?” Kyoko asks easily enough and then finally, without hesitating, glances over her shoulder.

A woman she’s never seen before with faded orange hair and bright green eyes offers her an answer as soft as her grip, “Nothing.”  Even though she smiles, her expression is one Kyoko knows well enough because it’s the same one she’s wearing now: Tired.

Kyoko holds her gaze, too tired to search it.  “Who are you?”

“I’m Chisa Yukizome,” the woman answers, her tone belying an energy that Kyoko no longer has, “and I’m a member of Future Foundation.  I came to rescue you.”

[royaltea000]

“A thousand generations serve to praise…”

[egophiliac]

Hello ! I positively adore the running joke of Idia unknowingly finding Lilia to be the coolest guy ever whenever he doesn't know it's him, like when Silver described his father, or obviously with muscle red. I can't say what'd be funnier, Idia finding out his online best friend is actually Lilia, resident spooky hyper fairy; or them both never finding out, and it'd become even more ridiculous as time goes on. How do you think it'll play out ? You're always so on point

(Also, though it makes sense, I'm still devastated bat boy didn't get a ticket for the Halloween skeleton train : ( does anyone mentions him at some point ? Like how he'd have fit right in with all those Halloween town little freaks, and how he'd have impressed them with his spooks and scared techniques; after all he's been every Briar Valley's children worst fear on Halloween for centuries. I'm on the eng server and I didn't wanna spoil myself by watching the whole thing on youtube)

Have a nice day !

you and me both, Idia and Lilia being oblivious online BFFs (+ Idia being incredibly intimidated any time Silver brings up his jock gamer dad) is my favorite running joke/subplot. 🤝 it's SO good, to the point where I also am unsure if I actually want it to ever be resolved or not...maybe, like, as a post-canon stinger or something? everyone's standing around covered in overblot ink, and Idia and Lilia's phones go off at the same time...

(legit I do think this is part of why Idia couldn't be present for Lilia's dream, because for some reason Lilia decided he was going to just. embody his past self online. he probably quotes his own battle strategies or whatever in the middle of boss fights. Idia didn't pick up on the whole "oh how weird that we both live on a super remote island" thing, but he would spend thirty seconds listening to General Lilia describing siege warfare and be like "w-wait")

all that aside, however it does end up happening, I do see Lilia being very blasé and all "oh! cool!" about it. y'know, taking it very much in stride! and Idia...very much not.

(can't tell if tumblr is going to chew this into illegibility or not, this will be a fun surprise ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ)

as for Lilia sadly missing out on Halloweentown shenanigans...he does get one little mention as part of an offhand reference to the light music club, but so far no one has brought up how this basically is just Lost In the Book of Liliatown (Sebek's been too busy yelling about not getting to be in the same group as Malleus). 😔 honestly though, it's probably for the best that he got left out, because he would just settle right in and refuse to ever leave. canon would shatter. we would miss out on all the delightful angst of episode 7 because Lilia is too busy eating poisonous shrubbery inbetween practicing his very best screams, and no one can pull him away from it.

(I can hope for a sequel next year though...)

[lazylittledragon]

hi i'm unw el l

[cowboythewizard726]

beautiful orc girl leed helllOOOOO beautiful leed alert oh my GOD she's so cool WOOAHHHH beautiful siilly girl she was really pretty and awesome and so kind i think shes wonderful and there should be a statue made just for her thats really big and in the center of everything and she should get anything she wants ever smile face

[caspersscareschool]

the person who commissioned this gets 2 free extra pages for no reason . ❤️

kofi

[lilybug-02]

Sometimes I look back at the little crossover comic you made and I just... uh...

*smacks lips* yeah... *cough* AWAY I GO!!!

Hnjfmyhljfg what. WHAT. W H A T.

THE SHADING. THE TEXTURE??? THE DETAIL??!?? THE CRAFTSMANSHIP???

Wdskdkuhdflidhf what do I say??? I’m speechless. Like holy cow. You did such an excellent job with their designs and adding little details. Bruh I wish. Eeehehege gfhjh sorry I’m a very normal person. Very normal about this.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

this has been a roller coaster of a design journey but finally I can present you: class swap artificer!adaine and rogue!fabian

[jazzy-a]

After Ody gets home and, of course, slaughters all the suitors and reunites with his wife and son, that man absolutely sat down with a council and immediately pulled out schematics, like:

"Cool, cool. So, first things first: We're building new temples for Athena and Hermes. What? Placement? Oh, yeah... Just knock down the Poseidon one. It's fine. I stabbed that God, like, 20 times into submission. Pretty sure that means the ocean is my b*tch now....And f*ck that guy anyways, am I right? So, for Athena's temple, I'm definitely thinking blue✨-"

[the-one-that-weeps]

Every time someone in this godforsaken fandom says "I think we've talked about misogyny enough" I want to hit them with a hammer. No we haven't.

We haven't even talked about the deep "Ruikasa&Akitoya Vs. literally everyone else" imbalance enough but imagine all of the people that get pressured into writing specifically for male/male ships simply because otherwise they won't get any appreciation.

Yes it's a cowardly thing but when you see Ruikasa having over 4000 fics and Ichisaki having like 5 in total obviously you're going to be discouraged. Obviously you'll be biased into creating Ruikasa instead of other ships.

And as someone who depends on appreciation in particular to do any work at all obviously that's going to have a lasting consequence. Some people spend 4 hours crying in front of a screen just for 3 people to like their work and leave, it's understandable if they lose passion for creating at all, you guys killed them.

It's even in how we handle m/m ships. You go into a fic that's tagged Rui&Tsukasa(platonic), someone in the comments always goes "okay but when do they kiss". You go to an action-packed longfic, someone always ends up going "okay but when do they kiss".

Fuck you guys. Actually. This is a silly piano tiles game about Hatsune Miku, we should be one of the MOST CREATIVE fandoms in history and somehow people still get mad over two boys not kissing immediately after getting introduced. It's so fucking difficult being a content creator in this fandom because you always end up having to take the same route. They meet they tease they kiss. End of story. "Oh you're doing something "lame" instead? -1 kudo. Bring me my yaoi next🖕"

[dishonored-pendletwin]

Cutest sorcerer this side of the Underdark 🥰

Art by the wonderful @moonydrawsart

[technically-human]

Fell in love with this fucked up version of Charles and the gang so i drew them !! <3

Here they are spliced up for better quality :3

(Can you tell montys my favorite character ? LOL)

LOOK AT MY FUCKED UP BABIES!! SO PRETTY!!!

I love it so much thank you thank you thank you

[drippywing]

Wings of Fire in Spore - Part 1: Rainwings

[ghelullu]

Half the fandom: "The Ministry is in the USA!"

The Band:

[buwheal]

Unexpected but fair.

How long were we disconnected?

[kirby-the-gorb]