#and i can go on for days drawing parallels between the danganronpa cases

[thewhizzyhead]

really find it cool how the first cases of the danganronpa games establish the theme and tone of the series and show the players what to expect - especially in the form of an unexpected betrayal.

like, danganronpa trigger happy havoc's first case introduced the hope vs despair narrative through the real twist being 1st victim sayaka maizono (aka the only person makoto knew at the time) being the one who attempted to murder first which lead to the hope vs despair thing as makoto tries to come to terms with the fact that sayaka tried to kill someone and even attempted to frame makoto for it - henceforth showing that not everyone can be trusted and that there is definitely more than meets the eye when it comes to the cases, these characters, and the whole story.

in danganronpa 2, the hope vs despair theme in the first game immediately gets wiped away when nagito komaeda, a seemingly chill dude that is the first to befriend hajime, twists hope into an obsession of his to the point of even setting himself up as what would have been the first death of the game (had his bullshit luck powers not intervened) so that his sacrifice would lead to the ultimates truly grasping their full potential and becoming figures of hope - henceforth cementing him as not only someone very much apart from his ultimate lucky student counterpart (makoto naegi, who was also a big HOPE dude but to a much lesser extent) but as someone who will make the cases and the rest of the story much more complicated than it was in the previous game; this continues the pattern of "there is so much more than meets the eye" in the first danganronpa cases and also paves the way for a new theme to be introduced (past vs future which well makes a lot of parallels and connections between nagito and hajime's stories) since the whole HOPE thing is now turned into something more sinister.

and finally in danganronpa v3, the truth vs lies theme is established with, well, how incredibly fucking confusing the intro was, and with how shuichi had to trust his intuition and very reluctantly accept that kaede, aka the protagonist and aka the girl who was the first to befriend him and has been with him for like 97% of the first chapter, was ultimately the one who instigated the first case's murder. this parallels really well with danganronpa 1's first case since both involve having to accuse the only people they could consider "friends" at the time of murder but instead of makoto finding the hope to continue forward in the face of sayaka framing him, it's shuichi finding the confidence and resolve to not only determine the truth and the lies from kaede's words but to also take her place as someone who eventually leads the charge in filtering what is fact and what is fiction (especially in chapters 5 and 6 holy shit). so case 1 does not only escalate the "more than meets the eye" pattern especially with well the fucking protagonist being the first to be executed but also jumpstarts shuichi's arc from a nervous boy who can't look people in the eye to someone gutsy enough to challenge monokuma to a rematch in chapter 6 so that they can filter the lies from whatever truth has been established up unto that point in terms of not only the entire game as a whole but also of what exactly had happened in case 1 and if kaede was executed on false charges.

i dunno i just really find it so fucking cool-

[hopeymchope]

Judging the Danganronpa x Sanrio character pairings

You may have already heard that a DANGANRONPA X SANRIO line of crossover merch was announced a few days ago! Which is obviously AMAZING, because they’re combining cutesy characters that have often been marketed to wee children with everybody’s favorite murderdeathkill game! I LOVE IT.

I have a niece who went through a Sanrio/Hello Kitty phase, so I actually know a few of these characters. In turn, this means that I have THOUGHTS on how the DR1 and Sanrio cast were paired up.

Granted, I still had to look up a lot of these guys and read about them. But now I feel adequately educated to the point where I can judge just how well the Danganronpa and Sanrio pairings actually match up. 

Makoto Naegi/Cinnamoroll - Obviously this totally works because Makoto IS something of a cinnamon roll, eh? EH? But Cinnamoroll is said to be shy albeit still very friendly. He also likes to seek out fun new adventures. So, aside from “very friendly,” I’m not sure that this sounds like Makoto. I also doubt that calling a character a “cinnamon roll” is common slang in Japan. So this is whatever.

Sayaka Maizono/Wish Me Mell - Mell has the power to connect people’s hearts by simply stating the feelings they keep inside. She was initially withdrawn and believed she didn’t have any friends, but the people who cared for her finally broke through her shell and convinced her that she DOES have friends. So uh, Maizono... I guess music can also bring out people’s feelings? And perhaps you could plausibly HC that Sayaka has often felt like her surrounding friends were “fake” and only there because of her celebrity status. There’s not really much to go on here. 

Leon Kuwata/Tiran - Tiran is an orange T-rex that is said to be scatterbrained but still a strong and reliable leader. Meanwhile, Leon has orange hair, and he’s certainly strong and kind of scatterbrained sometimes. It sorta works.

Kyoko Kirigiri/Marroncream - Marroncream is bright, positive, and fashionable. She is talented at making crafts and sweets. She lives in Paris. She has nearly nothing in common with Kyoko, although Kyoko did live abroad a lot in her younger years. So I could try to latch onto the Paris thing.

Hifumi Yamada/Pokopon - Pokopon is a raccoon that loves to read but dislikes ghosts and “the thunder god.” (uh... what?) He also finishes his sentences with the unusual suffix “-das.” Of course, Hifumi loves to write (which certainly is connected to reading), and he likes to end all names with a weird suffix (”-dono”), so I can see how they might make a cute pair.

Kiyotaka Ishimaru/Pekkle - Pekkle is a duck who is good-natured and kind. He loves to sing and dance. It kind of sounds like he should’ve been matched with Sayaka, but instead he’s here with Taka. While Ishimaru is definitely a good person, I don’t think most people would immediately describe him as “kind.” And he certainly isn’t known for his love of music.

Yasuhiro Hagakure/Monkichi - Monkichi is a laid-back, easygoing guy who is upbeat and loves puns. His dream is to become a poet. It’s said that once he sets his mind on something, there is no stopping him! And in comparison, Hagakure is... well, he’s kind of laid-back in the sense that he’s kind of lazy? But he’s actually pretty high-stress a lot of the time, too. Honestly, there’s not much linking the two.

Chihiro Fujisaki/Kurousa and Shirousa - Shirousa is the white one and is the older sibling to Kurousa, the brown one. Shirousa is described as an energetic leader and Kurousa is described as being nice but lazy. They like to make cakes. What does any of this have to do with Chihiro? Beats me. This particular pairing is nonsense.

Byakuya Togami/Badtz-Maru - Badtz-Maru is said to have a bad attitude and dreams of being “the boss of everything” when he grows up. He tends to act a bit selfish, and he mocks things he dislikes/disagrees with. He enjoys expensive food and collecting photos of movie villains. With the exception of that last point, I’d have to say that this sounds like a near-perfect match for Togami.

Mondo Owada/Goropikadon - The Goropikadon are a group of cave boys whose actual names are Goro (blue hair), Pika (pink hair), and Don (teal hair). Goro is always hungry and joking around. PIka is a thoughtful, shy mama’s boy. Don is serious and places a high value on honesty. Overall, I suppose that how quick Mondo is to get angry and resort to violence kind of makes him seem like a stereotypical caveman? But in terms of their distinct personalities, only Don’s focus on honesty rings true for Mondo. 

Toko Fukawa/Lloromannic - Another multi-character one. The Llormannic are a pair of creatures named Berry (the black one, who is male) and Cherry (the pink one, who is female). They are mischievous and love to play pranks on humans. Cherry was originally alone and created Berry for companionship; however, she mixed up her magic spell ingredients and used salt when she meant to use sugar, which resulted in Berry turning out to be a more hostile being than Cherry. I suppose the fact that Berry is a darker creation of Cherry’s sort of reflects the relationship between Toko and her other self, Genocide(r) Syo/Jack. However, Berry and Cherry are still best friends. Toko and Syo/Jack are definitely not that.

Celestia Ludenberg/Kuromi - Kuromi is the rival of a bunny named “My Melody” who doesn’t appear in this promotion. Kuromi is said to look “tough and punk” in her jester’s hat with the pink skull on it, but in reality she is very girly. She enjoys writing in her diary, reading romance books, cooking, and checking out good-looking guys. I suppose Celestia did have that dream of living in a mansion where she was served by handsome guys dressed as vampires? So... they both like hot guys? But that’s all I’ve got here. Pretty sure this pairing only exists for aesthetic reasons. And admittedly, their aesthetics mesh very well.

Aoi Asahina/Keroppi - Keroppi lives with his family on the edge of Donut Pond. He is bubbly, a fantastic swimmer and, because of the name of his home pond, is often associated with donuts and/or things that are donut-shaped. Ok, so this was an obvious pairing, then. They nailed it. Probably the single best pairing they came up with.

Sakura Ogami/My Sweet Piano - Yes, the character’s name is literally “My Sweet Piano.” She’s described as soft, kind, and girly. Given Sakura’s secret love of girly things, I can see how this soft, pink, girly sheep would be something she’d love to be around. 

Junko Enoshima (...?)/Hello Kitty - Hello Kitty (a.k.a. Kitty White) is described by Sanrio as “cute, bright, sweet, kind-hearted and tomboyish.” They also say that Kitty is very close with her sister, Mimmy. As for Junko... look, the only reason I think maybe this is supposed to be Junko is because Mukuro already has her own Sanrio matchup (see the next entry), but in terms of her appearance, this “Junko” sure looks like it’s “Junkuro.” The telltale sign is that giant bow on the left side of the head, which only Mukuro-as-Junko has ever worn. I doubt we’re supposed to be thinking that they did two Mukuros in two different outfits, though? 

It’s like this: If it’s Junko, well, I guess both Junko and Kitty are icons within their respective brands. And Junko tries to put on a “cute and bright” exterior persona, I guess? But that’s pretty thin. On the other hand, if this is Mukuro in disguise, this is actually a semi-decent matchup! Mukuro is arguably tomboyish and certainly very close to her sister (at least from her own perspective), so these two are not without their parallels. 

In either case, both Kitty and the Unknown Despair Sister have a big bow on the left side of their head. Which I think is the real reason they’ve been paired, honestly.

Mukuro Ikusaba/Little Twin Stars - Kiki and Lala are a pair of twins that were born on December 24th. Mukuro is one half of a pair of twins ALSO born on December 24th. Instant connection! Kiki (the blue-haired boy) loves fishing and inventing things. He is curious and cheeky. Lala (the pink-haired girl) loves drawing, writing poems, and cooking. She is rather timid. In short, the “twins with the same birthdate” thing is the only thing connecting Mukuro to these two. Still, it’s not bad.

Also, the most amazing thing to come out of this team-up so far HAS TO BE MonoKitty. Hello Kitty cosplaying as our favorite psychotic MurderBear? How great is that? SELL ME MERCH OF MONOKITTY.

[sunbrights]

fic: brick by brick (2/10)

fandom: danganronpa characters/pairings: fuyuhiko kuzuryuu, peko pekoyama + the SDR2 survivor squad. kuzupeko. tags for other plot-relevant characters will be added on AO3 as chapters are posted, yadda yadda. rating: m summary: They meet again, after the Neo World Program has torn them to their foundations: hope, despair, and the yawning debt of their history, waiting to be answered. It's up to them to rebuild, from the ground up, no matter how difficult the work or unfamiliar the tools.

No one can lay the mortar of your recovery but yourself.

read on AO3

Owari brings her a fresh change of clothes, the morning she’s to be discharged from the hospital. It’s all plain, loose polyester: socks, underwear, a black t-shirt, and elastic black pants. The sneakers have their laces pre-tied, the knots loose enough that Peko can slide her feet into them without having to undo them.

She holds them in her lap and looks at them. The laces are dark blue, their loops perfect.

“They’re all like that,” Owari says from the doorway. “Hinata’s been doing it since day one. I wanted to deck him when he gave me mine. Almost cracked my head open on the floor!”

Peko thinks she’s meant to find humor in the story. Owari is smiling while she recounts it, at least. She’s braced diagonally in the doorframe, feet on one side and shoulders on the other.

She’s small. It’s never been a word Peko thought to apply to her before, with all her height and muscle and force of personality, but while most of them are already some degree of too-thin, Owari toes the line of emaciated. Her jaw is sharp and prominent. The bones of her elbows jut out from beneath her skin.

“Hurry up and put ‘em on,” she says. “This place gives me the creeps.”

Peko agrees. She leans down to set the shoes on the floor, and wriggles her feet in toe-first. It takes longer than it should. If Owari notices, she doesn’t say so.

Ostensibly, she’s come to help move Peko’s things into her cottage. But Peko’s ‘things’ amount to a single box of trinkets she doesn’t want to keep, including the clothes she was wearing when she was brought out of the pod.

Owari hands her the box anyway. The heaviest item is the box itself, and it still strains the flexors in her forearms. When she stands up from the bed, her right elbow burns.

(The blade caught on a ligament on its way in. It twisted when it was removed, shredding skin and muscle.)

“You got it?” Owari asks.

Peko nods. She doesn’t redistribute the weight of the box in her arms; it is not heavy, and the damage is not real.

“Alright! Then let’s blow this joint!”

It’s easier said than done; the islands all feel more spread out than Peko remembers them being. She can’t tell if that was an intentional aspect of the simulation, or a shift she missed after being eliminated so early from the game, or if it’s merely a function of her fatigue, each step taking more effort than it should.

It’s a rare, cloudless day. The sun bears down on her, heat soaking into her dark clothes.

“You good?” Owari calls back to her.

“Yes,” Peko answers.

By the time they’ve crossed the first bridge, the burn in her elbow has spread up her bicep and into her chest. She takes small breaths; if she breathes too deeply, it’s like her sternum is splitting down the middle.

(The blade sunk in at an angle, pierced her arm and then sunk further, between her ribs. It punctured her right lung.)

Peko concentrates on keeping her grip on the box, and on putting each foot on even ground. Ahead of her, Owari is telling a story that sounds like it might still be about Hinata and his pre-emptively tied sneakers, but Peko can’t be certain. The sound of her voice is murky and out of focus, and it’s difficult to sort detail from noise.

Her hair is in her face. It sticks to sweat on her neck and the underside of her chin. She wants to push it back, but curls her nails into the flat edges of the box instead. It’s a situation she’s put herself into. She’ll get relief from it when she learns to braid her hair again.

Until then, she keeps her breathing shallow. She thinks herself through each step, and does not think about how she’s sweating much more than she should for the temperature, humidity, and level of effort.

The narrow scope of her concentration clouds her peripheral vision; it’s inevitable that she eventually collides with something, headlong. The box jostles painfully against her ribs, and she almost loses her balance in the shifting dust of the road. When she raises her head, the something is Owari, one hand hooked around the top flap of the box.

“Hey,” she says. “We’re gonna take a break.”

“I would prefer not to waste time,” Peko answers.

Owari ignores her. She leaves Peko where she is and sits on the side of the road with her legs splayed out in front of her. She leans back on her hands to frown up at the clear gap of sky above them, and doesn’t say anything else.

“I’m fine, Owari,” Peko says.

This central island was grassy and manicured, in the simulation. Here it’s cracked and barren, mostly loose dirt and little else. Owari still flops back into it, arms spread out and smeared with dust.

“I know you are,” she says. “Ain’t sayin’ you’re not.”

She says it so plainly that Peko can only take her at her word.

“Coach used to get on my case all the time,” Owari goes on, after a few long seconds of silence. “‘Bout how I’m not supposed to use up all my strength in one go just because I can. It’s stupid, right? Like, if I can take somebody out, I should just take ‘em out, and if I can’t, then I should do as much damage as I can. Why waste a bunch of time dragging it out?”

Peko understands the parallel she’s trying to draw. It’s clumsy, but self-explanatory. “I understand,” she says. “But in this case—”

“A couple minutes,” Owari says. “Then we’ll go.”

Peko closes her eyes, and breathes in. Her chest burns, but in the time they’ve been delayed it’s dimmed from piercing to merely discomforting.

“... Fine.”

She opts to stand while she waits.

*

The cottages are not assigned. Hinata had emphasized that detail, when he first informed her of her discharge.

“You’ll have a choice,” he’d said. “There are plenty still open.”

Regardless, Owari turns down the left side of the walkway when they arrive. The others have clustered their choices together; the left section is nearly full, leaving the right one completely empty.

It makes sense, from a strategic perspective. The cottages are more defensible when they’re together, and there’s no reason to believe the fifteen of them wouldn’t be targets, even in a remote place like this. With so many of them as vulnerable as they are, any advantage is one worth having.

Peko hovers at the fork of the walkway all the same.

There is one cottage left available on the main side, all the way at the end. It was Hanamura’s in the simulation, Peko recalls. He’d apparently opted to take Tanaka’s instead, when it was his turn.

(Tanaka remains in his coma, with no signs of recovery yet. Peko understands that everyone who is still incapacitated is either a killer or a victim.

She also understands that she has upset the ratio of those awake.)

Owari realizes Peko hasn’t followed her only when she reaches the door. “Hey!” she calls. “What’s up?”

Peko turns down the right side of the walkway. She follows the row of cottages almost to the end; it feels otherworldly and strange, familiar and not. Second to last, on the right. This one was hers, in the simulation.

She balances the box against her hip just long enough to test the doorknob. It swings open without protest. They’ll need to get keys for the locks.

Owari comes up behind her. “This the one you want?” she asks. She sounds skeptical.

Peko looks in from the doorway. None of the personal touches that had been added for her in the simulation remain; it’s sparsely furnished, and coated in dust. She imagines the others are in largely the same condition.

In the simulation, the young master had spilled Koizumi’s photos across the floor of Peko’s cottage. It had been a bright, cloudless day like this one, as picturesque as all the ones before it. She had recognized the photos for what they were, or thought she had: a collage of Koizumi’s missteps and the young master’s anger.

He didn’t remember the incident depicted in the pictures. Peko hadn’t, either.

She remembers now.

She says, “Yes.”

*

Owari stays with her through the afternoon. “I’m s’posed to keep an eye on you so you don’t wander off again,” she says, straightforward, and Peko is in no position to argue. The concern is valid, with her recent behavior.

There’s more to be done, either way. Months of neglect have left the cottage caked in dust and dirt; the sheets of the bed need to be changed, and the mirrors in the bathroom wiped down. Hinata had warned her about the state of it. The others haven’t had time to comb over the other cottages, just yet. There’s too much to do and not enough hands to do it, he’d said.

It’s fine. It’s only right that she contribute.

Owari brings supplies in from the other cottage: brooms and rags and fresh linens. Her sweeping and dusting is halfhearted at best, but that’s fine too. Peko bridges the gap herself; as degraded as they are, her muscles still remember the motions. It’s thorough, repetitive. It gives her mind the opportunity to retreat somewhere warm and still and silent.

It’s late in the day before she’s able to start on the bathroom. She has to clean the mirrors in slow, methodical pieces; her lungs burn when she raises her arms above her head, and dark splotches cloud her vision if she keeps them that way for too long.

(The blade came from above and behind. It shattered her scapula and then lodged itself in bone; it had to be wrenched out like a pry bar, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.)

“Heyyy!” Owari whoops from the other room. “Look who it is!”

Peko has only half the mirror finished. The reflection of the front room is grimy on one side, but the image is clear enough: the young master stands in the open doorway of the cottage, looking at her.

His gaze jumps away as soon as she makes eye contact. He has a box cradled against his chest, the top flaps folded together to hold it closed. His hands are full, so he and Owari exchange a friendly bump of elbows.

“Yo,” he says. “How’s it going?”

Owari leans against the doorframe, and squints appraisingly back into the room. It’s just as empty as it was when they arrived. “Pretty good,” she says. “We’re pretty much done. What d’you think, Pekoyama?”

“Yes.”

He looks at the room before he looks back at her. He seems preoccupied, but it’s difficult to tell; his face isn’t the open, expressive canvas it used to be. Or maybe it’s her, maybe she’s not as adept at reading what’s written there anymore. Maybe she never was.

When he does look at her, he can’t seem to focus on her face for longer than a moment or two. “Right,” he says. He shuffles at the threshold of the door. “Well, I... Uh, I brought this for you, Peko.” He lifts the box up. “I had it, so… Figured I’d save you guys the trip.”

He isn’t coming inside, so she leaves her rag in the sink and goes to him. (With her mind drawn back to the forefront, she feels the grinding objection in her knees.) She doesn’t recognize the box, and it isn’t labelled, aside from her surname written on it in permanent marker. It’s his handwriting.

“What is it?” she asks.

“It’s the stuff you had on you when the Future Foundation picked us up,” Owari tells her. “Kuzuryuu put all the boxes together. He hides ‘em in the back of that smelly old hotel building.”

“It’s not smelly,” he says.

Owari grunts. “To you, maybe.”

“And I don’t hide them, either. Are you missing the whole point on purpose?”

“What’s in it?” Peko asks.

He looks down. There is a small gap in the top of the box, where the bent flaps aren’t fully flush, but the shadows are too deep for her to properly see inside it.

“Just a buncha crap,” Owari says. She sounds bored. “Mine was mostly clothes.”

“Clothes,” he confirms. “And- other stuff. I don’t know if…” He jostles the box higher in his arms. Something metallic clatters inside. “Just, you should get to decide if you want to look at it or not. And what you want to do with it.”

“Do with it,” Peko repeats. “Like what?”

Owari counts on her fingers. “I trashed mine. And Hanamura’s, ‘cause he asked me to. Mioda and Souda burned theirs, Sonia threw hers out into the ocean, and Hinata and Kuzuryuu kept theirs.” She tilts her head in his direction. “Right?”

His only answer is, “Yeah.”

Peko holds her arms out. “I’ll take it.”

He’s careful not to touch her when he hands it off, which makes the hand-off clumsy. The weight put on her biceps is uneven, and the right one buckles unexpectedly. The box sinks sideways, which sends the contents sliding inside, which makes the weight distribution even more uneven.

“Shit.” He fumbles. “Sorry. You got it?”

She braces the bottom of the box against her stomach. She manages to answer, “Yes,” but even she can hear the grit in her own voice. He doesn’t believe her.

“Here,” he says, and shuffles forward to take on some of the weight. “Let me—” His hands slide between hers on the underside of the box. The edge of his pinky brushes the inside of her wrist. She remembers his lips tasted like sea salt.

Her muscles spasm. It’s the only explanation she has for how her biceps abruptly contract, twisting pain up into her shoulder. It jerks the box out of his hands, and sends her stumbling back a step and a half. She can feel Owari’s hand hovering at her back, a spotter’s safety net.

His face has changed, but she can’t read him well enough anymore to know what it means. She watches the way his mouth forms around the initial plosive of her name— and she cannot think about his mouth in that context.

(He wishes it didn’t happen. Therefore, it did not happen.)

“Thank you,” she says, before he finds the sound.

His jaw snaps shut. He returns his hands to his pockets with a slow, deliberate roll of his shoulders. “Right,” he says. “Sorry about the— yeah.” He clears his throat, and looks at Owari. “Anyway, I... I gotta get going. Got Souda up my ass about a bunch of resistors we don’t have.”

Owari misses his cue. She says, “Okay?” and looks at Peko for confirmation.

For a moment, he doesn’t leave. He lingers in the doorway and looks at her too, gaze finally steady on her face. There is something to say. It crowds the breath in her throat, but she doesn’t know what the words are.

“Thank you,” she says again.

He nods. He leaves.

Peko sets the box on the floor, next to the one she and Owari brought from the hospital, and returns to the bathroom.

*

She doesn’t sleep any better in the cottage than she did in the hospital.

She tries. She lies in her bed, on top of the sheets, and closes her eyes. She gets as far as the hazy half-place between sleeping and waking, when her measured control over her muscles and her mind begins to unravel.

She is seventeen and beginning her third year of high school. Her skills are at their peak, but the young master turns them away. He calls her ‘Pekoyama’ in front of their classmates. She is always working harder to be what he needs.

She is sixteen, and the sea around Jabberwock Island gleams pink in the morning sun. The young master clashes with the other students. He picks fights and makes threats and isolates himself. She worries for his safety.

She is nineteen, and the world is over. She pins a dog to the ground with her sword, the blade pierced through the muscle of its back leg. It whimpers and whines, its claws scrabbling uselessly in the dirt. She waits hours, until it stops moving.

She is twenty-one, and she is alive when she should be dead.

She is all of them, and none of them. In that place of half-sleep, the well-defined edges of her mind lose their clarity. Memories seep across the boundaries like watercolors, mixing together until the colorless remains of her self are muddy and dark.

She is nineteen and escorting the young master to the morgue.

She is twenty-one and washing Koizumi’s blood off her skin in the shower.

She is seventeen and breathing in the smell of rot until she vomits.

She is sixteen, and wakes gasping.

She tries two more times. After the third attempt, it’s too late to try again; color peeks up from beneath the horizon, just visible through the slats of her window. She sits up on the mattress, legs crossed underneath her, and lets the silence crowd in from all sides.

The cottage isn’t any different from the hospital. It yawns around her the same, an empty swath of space. The colors are warmer, but the finish of the wood is still cold.

She rolls the heel of her hand against the outside of her thigh.

(The blade had been aimed at the small of her back, but glanced off the guard of another weapon. It only skimmed her leg, but the angle sent it gouging into the soft flesh beneath the young master’s ribs.)

The box Fuyuhiko brought for her is still at the end of her bed, the flaps still folded shut. It contains clothes, he’d said, and other things.

She gets up. She closes the shutters of the window, and peels off the loose t-shirt and shorts she wore to bed. She stands naked in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom, and inspects the body that she’s in.

She doesn’t recognize it, from any angle. It’s the same as the muddy center of her mind, an unintelligible mishmash of diverging histories. She is too thin at her ribs but too full at her hips. Her hair is at once too short and too long. She recognizes some scars, struggles to recall others, and searches for still others that don’t exist at all.

She lays her palm flat against her stomach, where there is a purple, ragged cut arcing from her left hip to her ribcage. She draws her fingers up the line of puckered flesh and remembers: Munakata Kyosuke had in a rare moment gained the upper hand against her. He’d intended to kill her, and had come very close. Tsumiki had stitched it up while she was still awake, giggling, tracing spirals in the blood.

She twists at the waist. There is a swath of raised, shiny skin on the outside of her right shoulder, and she remembers: the young master had fired his gun point-blank into a crowd of people, the side of the barrel laid flat against her skin. He’d been aiming at nothing in particular. The crowd had only been a net to catch the bullet. All he’d wanted was to see her flesh bubble and to hear her scream, and he’d gotten frustrated when he only achieved the former. He’d hit her with the butt of his revolver, leaving a divot beneath her collarbone.

She dips her finger into the space. Fuyuhiko, her mind corrects belatedly. She regrets it as soon as she thinks it.

(She had responded. She struck him across the jaw with the hilt of her sword, hard enough to send him to the ground in a spray of blood and spit. He coughed and cursed into the dirt, and the crowd had taken the opportunity to scatter.

She stood over him, and touched the tip of her blade to the thin stretch of skin at the dip of his collarbone, over his trachea. She considered the ramifications of killing him, not for the first time and not for the last.

He sat up on his elbows, eyes bright, and laughed until his chest heaved. She’d had to draw her blade back, just a fraction; it wouldn’t do at all if he sliced his own neck open. “Hey Peko,” he’d said, between gasps. “Isn’t this perfect?”)

She refocuses on the mirror. It’s her face again; the current one, at least, or probably. She is twenty-one.

The box behind her is caught in the reflection. From this angle, she can read the block letters across the side. Pekoyama. She stares at it. She isn’t sure for how long.

Eventually, the sun rises.

*

Owari knocks early. “Woah,” she says, when Peko opens the door, “you look like crap.”

Peko touches her fingers to the half-moon of skin beneath her left eye. It’s entirely possible she does. “I didn’t sleep well,” she says.

“Oh, yeah, that.” Owari grins at her; Peko has already lost track of the number of times she’s done so since yesterday morning. “Don’t worry about it. It sucks the first few days, but it gets easier. Beds’re better here than the junk we’ve got up in the hospital.”

Peko doesn’t disagree, so she doesn’t say anything. Owari doesn’t seem bothered. She takes the silence for what it is.

“Anyway, breakfast is up at the lobby, if you want it,” she says. She jerks one thumb over her shoulder. “You remember how to get there, right?”

“Yes,” Peko answers. The implication isn’t lost on her. “... You won’t be coming?”

Owari hunches her shoulders. “Eh. The food’s pretty whatever, you know? Even Hanamura can only do so much with the crap we get. I’m not really feelin’ it.”

There was a shift in the conversation, somewhere. The interaction suddenly feels off, in a way that's difficult to pinpoint. Body language, or inflection, or— something. She doesn’t know Owari well enough to read her mannerisms.

She doesn’t know what to say, so she only says, “Alright.” Owari waves and leaves toward the beach, her spine bent and her arms pillowed behind her head.

Peko goes to the hotel by herself. She’s one of the last to arrive; Hanamura is using the reception desk as a workstation to ladle creamy oatmeal out into bowls, and the others congregate around him, half line and half crowd. The only exceptions are Sonia, who sits alone by the window, and Hinata, who has his laptop open on one of the derelict arcade machines.

Hinata is the first to notice her. He says, “Pekoyama,” sharply enough that the others all look at him, then swing back around to look at her.

The weight of six attentions trained on her at once, all varying degrees of surprised or concerned, presses her back towards the exit. She grips the edge of the doorframe to keep herself in place.

“Owari isn’t with you?” Hinata asks.

The room is quiet. Peko can’t read any of their expressions, so she settles for the truth. “She decided against breakfast this morning,” she says. She sees understanding light one by one across their faces, and still doesn’t understand. “Is something the matter?”

“Shit,” Kuzuryuu says under his breath.

Across the room, Sonia stirs. “She cannot be alone,” she says. It sounds like she reaches for her diaphragm but makes it only to her lungs, her voice breathy and unsteady. She smooths trembling fingers over her knees, but doesn’t manage to stand. “I… I should...”

“W-Wait.” Souda shoulders his way out of the skinny breakfast line. “I’ll do it,” he says. He reaches one shaking hand out in Sonia’s direction. “You stay here, Miss Sonia.”

Sonia lifts uncertain eyes, but doesn’t say anything. Kuzuryuu glances at her, then back. “You sure?”

“I… I was kinda able to get through to her the last time,” Souda says. “I mean, I think I get where she’s coming from. Kind of. Lemme go.”

No one objects.

Peko steps aside to let him pass when he reaches her. She doesn’t say anything, but something must show on her face, because he smiles at her, small and tight. “Don’t worry about it, Pekoyama,” he says. “You didn’t know.”

A gloom settles over the lobby, but the motions of the day don’t cease. Hanamura takes two bowls off the reception desk, and begins handing the remaining five out to the others. There is not one set aside for himself.

Mioda brings a bowl to Sonia. Hinata gets up to take his.

Kuzuryuu brings the last to her.

“Hey,” he says. He’s stopped a few feet away from her. “C’mon. You can come sit down.”

She’s still in the doorway, she realizes, with her fingers still wrapped around the frame. She lets go, and follows him to one of the lobby’s faded couches. He gestures for her to sit, so she does; he perches on the edge of the coffee table across from her, his knees catty-corner to hers.

“Here.” He holds one of the bowls out to her. She reaches up to take it from the bottom, and it warms her palms, just on the edge of too-hot.

“Thank you, Kuzuryuu,” she says.

There is a palpable stretch of silence.

He looks startled, confused, maybe hurt. She rewinds in her head to find her mistake. Did she not say what she thought she did? He specifically instructed her to use his name instead of his title, so that the other students wouldn’t—

Understanding clatters its way in, too late. (She is sixteen, and their professional relationship does not exist on this island.) When she finds the words to apologize, he’s already said, “Yeah. Uh, you’re welcome,” and dropped his gaze into his bowl.

She looks down at her breakfast. Even with supplies as meager as they are, it still looks appetizing, with a fluffy consistency and pale beige coloring. The others eat around her, spoons ringing against bowls at uneven intervals.

“So…” He clears his throat and bows his head. It’s to muffle his voice while at the same time disguising the fact that they’re having a conversation at all. It’s a familiar habit. “You look tired,” he says, and then ruins the effect by lifting his eyes enough to look at her. “I mean, did… did you sleep okay? Last night?”

Technically, he’s lifted only the one eye to look at her. Owari had talked about him wearing a patch in her more colorful and bombastic retelling of the simulation, and a hazy memory of one lingers in the recesses of Peko’s memories, but as long as she’s been this self, she’s never seen it. As far as she knows, he’s only worn the scar.

(She remembers: messy blood on her fingertips, the smell of copper in the back of her throat, and his strained laughter in her ears. Whether she was the one holding the blade or not is immaterial. It was always her responsibility to see him whole and unharmed.)

“It was… an adjustment,” Peko says.

He swallows a bite of his breakfast with a grimace. She imagines it’s bland, no matter how well it’s made. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I get it. I know what you’re talking about.”

His jaw works. He wants to say something else, so she waits. “Listen,” he starts, but the rest of the sentence flounders in his throat. He rubs at his temple. “Just… First thing, I’m not trying to bullshit you or anything. Okay?”

He’s focused on the empty end of his spoon, his brow pinched down. It’s important to him, whatever he wants to say. She doesn’t want to discourage him. “Alright.”

It takes him a few more long seconds to sort out the words. He drags his eyes (eye) back to her face, and the look he gives her is sympathetic to the point of intensity. It makes her want to break the eye contact, but she doesn’t.

“You know you can tell someone, right?” he says. “If it... gets bad. You don’t have to just tolerate it.” He hesitates, and when she doesn’t fill the space, finishes: “... Hinata has ideas for stuff that can help, sometimes.”

She doesn’t recognize him either, she realizes. She’s always known the kind, gentle core of him, but she’s never seen him let it sit so plainly on his surface, before now. The softer edges suit him the way she always quietly thought they might: compassion and leadership and responsibility.

She should be happy for him and the progress he’s made. She is happy. She is grateful to have the opportunity to see it.

She looks down at her lap, her throat tight. Her breakfast is starting to get cold.

The others finish up their meals. Mioda tells Sonia a story about a pair of singing alley cats on their way out of the lobby, their elbows intertwined. Hinata has sunk into his work, his shoulders curled over the keyboard of his laptop.

When she’s been silent long enough, Fuyuhiko sets his palm against his knee and pushes himself up to standing. “You should eat,” he tells her. “It’ll help. That’s not bullshit either, I swear.”

“I know,” she answers.

“Okay.” He looks back over his shoulder, and his frown flattens into a grimace. “Smack Hinata if he doesn’t wrap it up in a few minutes. I’m gonna be pissed if he puts you behind schedule.”

“I will.”

“Okay,” he says again. When he looks at her, the lines of his face are weighed back down. “Then... I’ll see you, alright?”

He leaves.

After that, it’s only her and Hinata left in the hotel; more precisely, maybe, only her and the rattle of Hinata’s typing. She scrapes at the edge of her bowl with her spoon.

If the oatmeal was appetizing once, it isn’t now. The consistency is cold and thick, and it slithers down her throat when she swallows. Queasiness bubbles in her stomach, and seeps up the back of her throat. She manages three bites before she can’t manage any more.

(She watched three separate blades pierce her stomach. The wounds gaped, and spilled black gastrointestinal blood out over the young master’s chest.)

She dumps the rest of the bowl out into the parched, empty garden behind the hotel.

*

She doesn’t need to rouse Hinata. He finds her when it’s time, his laptop tucked under his elbow.

“Pekoyama,” he says. “Are you ready?”

She nods. Being discharged from the hospital doesn’t mean she’s finished her regimen of physical therapy; the only difference now is that their sessions are scheduled in his cottage, instead of behind the closed door of her hospital room.

There is a table set up in the main room. At the center is the stack of coins they’ve been using for her fine motor control exercises. They come in various sizes, whatever Hinata could find: wide plastic medallions and individual yen pieces and small, smooth buttons.

They’re starting a new set of translational exercises today. Hinata shows her with one of the smaller buttons: passed to his palm, then back, then set aside. She begins with the largest medallion, and makes it one step down in the stack, to the fat 500 yen coin.

The metal is harder to keep a grip on than the plastic, and the smell of it on her skin makes her head ache. She fumbles the coin while passing it back up to her fingers; it hits the table at an angle and goes spinning to the floor.

She looks at it, tucked behind the leg of the table. It should be simple to bend to retrieve it, but the center of her back shrieks with pain, and objects to even tiny adjustments of her posture. Even now, with her body as unfamiliar to her as it’s become, she understands that picking the coin back up while still remaining seated is outside the range of her flexibility.

That’s where her memory ends.

When it begins again, the room is darker, and wind is rattling the cottage’s only window. Hinata has his laptop open on the table. He isn’t typing; he watches something on the screen, his chin set in one hand.

“You’re back,” he says, without looking up.

Peko looks down. The 500 yen piece is back on the table, stacked neatly with the other coins. They’re separated into piles, organized first by color and then by size.

“You were gone for a while,” he tells her. “... I got bored.”

Some of the flatness in his tone and expression wrinkles. After so many weeks of sessions, she’s learned to read embarrassment in it. His wrinkles are the only parts of him that are still Hinata, flickers of color against a monotone background. Some days he is nothing but wrinkles. Most days he is nothing at all.

It upsets some of the others, Fuyuhiko especially. But to Peko, it’s one of the few things that still makes sense.

She watches him snap his laptop shut and rearrange the coins back into a single pile. She doesn’t apologize for wasting his time. It would change nothing, and she isn’t in a position to promise it won’t happen again.

Hinata pushes the stack of coins to the center of the table. She’s reaching across to take them when he says, “We don’t have to keep doing this, you know.”

She looks up at him. His wrinkles have smoothed back into nothing.

“Does it still hurt?” he asks.

(The blade dug up from below, clipped past her spine at the center and cracked her third and fourth rib on the right side.)

The shriek has calmed to a hum, but it’s still there, a steady distraction. She doesn’t need to answer him. He must read it in the wrinkles of her own expression.

“You’re well enough now to help with the basic maintenance of the island,” he tells her. “Endurance will come back on its own. If that’s all you want, you don’t need this.” He opens his hands above the stack of coins. She looks at them, mismatched colors and uneven sizes.

“But,” he goes on, “if you ever want to improve— actually improve— you have to learn to let go of it.”

(The blade lodges in her neck. It fills her throat with blood. She can’t breathe, can’t speak, can’t see.)

“If you don’t…” Hinata shrugs. “Then don’t.”

She is seventeen, and Satou Yume’s skull shatters against a metal baseball bat before she can intervene. The day after it’s done, the young master tells her he feels better.

She is sixteen and about to die. She holds her chin up, but makes the mistake of looking over her shoulder when the young master screams.

She is nineteen, and every member of the main branch of the Kuzuryuu family is dead except for one. She helps him drag their bodies out into the garden, where they can be left for the crows.

(It was her responsibility to see him whole and unharmed.)

She stands up from the table. Hinata says nothing when she walks out the door.