#of note: ryoko and mikan are not in this chapter

[aparticularbandit]

Of A Fatal Captivity: Day One (I)

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: M for Graphic Imagery. Fic Rating: M for Danganronpa reasons.

TW for Graphic Imagery.

AO3

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Book One

Four FIVE Days Ago.

Day Ten (of an….  Oh, who cares anymore?  It’s over.  It’s over.)

Kyoko stares up at stars winking at her through a sky far blacker than anything she has ever known and takes a deep breath of thickly polluted air and feels despair.

It’s an odd sort of feeling.

Not that she’s never felt it before – she has – but it’s different this time.  Like something ice cold – the way a corpse feels, maybe, when she comes across it far later than she should, when all of the warmth has drained from its body and it’s just starting to turn – pools in the center of her chest, just where her heart should be, and spreads out slowly through her veins, as though it might reach her already aching fingertips.  She can’t breathe through the ice beneath her skin, can’t breathe staring up at a sky she’d thought she would never see again, can’t breathe as the rocket-fueled mecha Monokuma disappears like the twinle of a winking star into that same sky, black on black on black.

Despair.

Kyoko knew she couldn’t save Junko from Byakuya’s mind wipe.  She arrived too late for that; she and Toko both knew Byakuya would already have started whatever literal mind game he was playing with Junko before they made it, before Kyoko even got through the door.  That was expected. It wasn’t an acceptable loss, but it was at least an expected one, one from which they could recover.

What wasn’t expected was a giant mecha Monokuma exploding through the roof.

What wasn’t expected was a girl Kyoko barely remembers stealing Junko away.

What wasn’t expected was—

Interfering with the memory erasure could lead to permanent brain damage.  Wasn’t that what Byakuya said?  And what could be more interference than a giant mecha Monokuma dropping down from the sky and literally ripping Junko out of her cradle?  There’s no coming back from that, there’s no regaining Junko from that, there’s no hope that they might possibly have her back to something even remotely approaching normal – they stole her, and now they can do whatever they want with her when she wakes (if she wakes!), and—

The worst is the realization that Junko….  Junko planned this.  She’d known it would happen even before wiping Kyoko’s memories.  She’d—

“I really did love you.  I really did.”

Kyoko’s throat cuts off.  It burns, raw.  She doesn’t cry because she doesn’t cry (not since Yui), because even if he’s been knocked out, Byakuya is still right there, and Hina’s….  Hina’s somewhere.  Besides, if she didn’t cry over Makoto, she sure isn’t going to cry over Junko Enoshima.  That would be so stupid.

So stupid.

Kyoko clenches her hand into a fist so tight that the leather of her glove creaks.  Her gaze drops from the sky, and she forces herself to draw another smoke-filled breath.

Junko said she was going to die.

Fair enough.

She died.

Just like she wanted.

“...maybe, eventually, you’ll see me again, too.  If you keep your promise, anyway.”

Kyoko can’t think about that right now.

Right now, she needs to get out of the wreckage Junko and her Ultimate Despair left behind.

Right now, she needs to find Hina.

Right now, she—

“M-M-Master!”

Toko races into the room, indestructible, sprints across the misshapen bits of concrete, dances around sparks and machinery that is somehow on fire, and cradles Byakuya in her arms.  There’s a sharp cut across his forehead and blood (red blood) smeared across it, only growing more smeared as Toko brushes his hair out of his face.  His glasses are gone, smashed under debris.  Like this, he almost looks normal.

Almost.

Toko’s gaze doesn’t leave Byakuya to glare at Kyoko as she desperately tries to lift his body with her noodle arms, but there’s venom in her voice when she says, “What. did. you. do?”

“Look around you, Toko.”  Kyoko stumbles away from her, closer to the door, closer to where she’d been standing with Hina when the Monokuma dropped.  Her eyes sweep the wreckage as she does. “Do you really think I could do something like this?”

“I-I-I wasn’t here!  I don’t know!”  Toko struggles with Byakuya, unable to move him.  She tucks her arms under his armpits and tries to drag him backwards, making it only a few steps back before she catches sight of the nearest broken wire still shooting sparks and gives up.  (There’s a soft crack as she drags him.  But there are a lot of sounds around them right now.)  “A little help?” she calls out.  “Please?”

But Kyoko isn’t paying attention to her.  Kyoko’s paying attention to the other cracks, the shifts in the concrete, the wires and the sparks and the bits of flame, and the singular hand outstretched from beneath a huge, huge piece of—

Kyoko isn’t strong.  She has never been strong, and the nerve damage in her hands hasn’t helped with that.  But something in her snaps, something in her rips her own muscles as she grabs the chunk of concrete, as she heaves, as she digs in her broken heels, as she shoves it off of Hina’s body.  (She’s done this before, and it tore her hands apart, and it’s tearing them apart again, and she was supposed to learn from it, and she didn’t learn anything at all, and it’s happening again, and it’s happening worse, and it’s—)  The cold within her spreads, another numb stronger than the disconnect she normally needs for examining bodies, as she sees Hina, broken, before her.

(She doesn’t see Hina.  She sees Yui.  She—)

Blood trickles dark and red from one corner of Hina’s lips.  Even from a non-medical professional, it’s clear that her spine has been shattered from the crooked way she lays along the ground, not that it matters much when her right arm has been smashed off, shards of bone sticking out through shorn muscle into nothing, not that that matters when Hina’s eyes are already starting to glaze over, their light fading.  And yet still, she speaks, her voice a rasping creak, “K…K…Kyo…ko…?”

She shuts off.

She has to shut off.

To survive, she has to shut off.

(She can’t do this again.  Not again.)

It isn’t fair to Hina.  It isn’t.

But it’s not like she has any control over this sort of thing.

(She does.  She does.)

“I’m here.”  Kyoko kneels down in the debris, takes Hina’s remaining hand in her own broken one, and gives it as gentle a squeeze as she can.  “I’m here.”

Hina searches above her, either not seeing Kyoko or not able to focus on her.  “I…I…I didn’t…I didn’t think…I didn’t….”

Kyoko brushes a hand through Hina’s hair, torn from its ponytail, and traces her fingers along her face.  “It’s okay,” she murmurs, even though it isn’t, even though it hasn’t been for a very long time, even though it might never be again.  “You’re okay.”

That’s another lie.

“We couldn’t have known.”

That’s not.

Hina laughs – or tries to – but it turns into coughing.  So much blood.  So much blood, enough that it spatters a bit onto Kyoko’s face.  (She doesn’t wipe it off.)  “It…it…it was…was nice,” she struggles to say, her voice fading with every word, “to see…the…the stars….”

She doesn’t say anything else.

For a moment, Kyoko doesn’t move.  She just kneels, holding Hina’s remaining hand in her own, running her thumb comfortingly along her skin, as Hina takes in that halting, stuttering sharp last breath emblematic of death – once, twice, then no more – as her body struggles to maintain what her brain has already given up.  (Habit.  Muscle memory.  A refusal of belief.)  Then Hina’s jaw hangs open, gravity pulling it down now that she doesn’t have anything to hold it in place.  Someone else might reach over to close her eyes, but Kyoko leaves them open.

So she can see the stars.

(A body has been discovered!)

Then Kyoko stands, brushes the dirt from her skirt, smearing the deep red blood spattered across it, and turns to Toko, who continues to struggle with Byakuya.  She hears another crack, sharper this time, as she walks over to her, carefully avoiding the wires and sparks, and sits down next to her.  “Go get Hiro,” she says.  “I’ll keep an eye on—”

“You g-g-get him!” Toko interrupts, spitting the words out.  “I can protect Master b-b-better than y-you!”

After a brief consideration of current events and, more importantly, what Toko can do if something else should happen, Kyoko acquiesces.  She nods.  “Stay focused on him,” she says as she stands again.  “You won’t like what you might see elsewhere.”

Toko glares at her.

“And quit trying to move him without help.  You might make things worse.”

Kyoko feels Toko’s continued glare on her as she leaves, but she doesn’t hear any extra shuffling, which means she’s listened, at least.  She doesn’t spare another glance for Hina’s corpse as she passes it by.  Attachments like this will do her no good.  Hina is dead.  She needs to accept this.  To let it go.

And yet.

Kyoko pauses just inside of the tunnel leading out of the now quite destroyed room.  She turns, bends down, and finds that small plush bear buried beneath the rubble.  His torn red eye somehow seems even more torn, as though the fabric sewn beneath the hole is beginning to bleed through, and the black, covered with dirt and dust, seems softer, lighter, while the white seems stained from overuse.  Hiro will panic, if he sees this.  (Hiro is panicking already.  Kyoko doesn’t need to hear him to know that.)

She stares at the bear, brushes it off, and then tucks it into the inside pocket of her jacket.

Only then does she go.

~

Kyoko finds Hiro running about in the main hall, scurrying from one room to the other in his panic, yelling with his arms raised high above his head and his chunky sandals clunking along the floor.  She calmly walks over to intercept him (it’s easy to be calm when she’s numb) and places a hand on his shoulder to still him.  “Hiro.”

“AAAAAHHHH!”

Hiro jumps in his skin, bounds away from her, and whirls about with his hands up in some sort of attempt at a martial arts defensive stance.  “Don’t hurt me!” he says, eyes squinted shut.  “I know kung fu!”

Kyoko stares at him as he tries, blindly, to attack forward before easily stepping out of the way.  “Hiro.”

Hiro’s eyes snap open at the sound of her voice, which he somehow hadn’t recognized before in his panic.  “Kyokyo!”  He rushes forward and grabs her in his arms.  “I was so scared!  And now you’re here!”

“Hiro.”  Kyoko tenses at his touch and carefully disentangles herself from him.  “I know that calm is not easy for you in our current situation, but I need you to remain calm.”

“Calm?  Me?  I’m always calm!”  Hiro crosses his arms and fakes a laugh.  “I’m 100% sure that I’ll survive whatever’s going on!”  Then he leans forward, eyes still wild.  “But the explosion?  There was an explosion, Kyokyo!  And you’re—”  His eyes grow even wilder.  “You’re covered in blood, Kyokyo—”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Huh?  But Kyokyo is—”

“Please don’t call me that,” Kyoko repeats, firm, as she grits her teeth together.  “Ever.”  She waits, waits for another counter to her words, but when Hiro doesn’t say anything else (surprisingly), she continues.  “Byakuya tried to erase Junko’s memories.  A mecha Monokuma—”

“A mecha Monokuma?!?!?!?!” Hiro echoes in a high-pitched shriek, jumping back again with his hands in front of his face.  “Say it ain’t so!”

Kyoko ignores this.  “—broke through the ceiling, allowing a few of Junko’s associates to take her with them.”  She takes a sharp breath in through her teeth.  “Hina is dead.  Byakuya is hurt and unconscious.  Toko needs your help to—”

“Hina’s….”  Hiro cuts her off, voice soft.  “Hina’s dead?

There are a lot of things Kyoko could say in this moment.  She could explain what happened in more, excruciating detail.  She could say just how she found Hina after everything.  She could mention that maybe, if she’d searched for Hina first, instead of focusing on the giant Monokuma and the people who’d came for Junko and Junko herself, she might have gotten to Hina in time to—

To what?  She isn’t the Ultimate Nurse.  Even if she’d gotten Hina out from under the fallen rubble faster, there was nothing she could have done.  Nothing.

(Mikan was the Ultimate Nurse.  Kyoko remembers that.  She could have done something.  But she wouldn’t.)

((This is wishful thinking, Kyoko.  Mikan couldn’t have saved Hina.  Not from that.  No one could have.  Hina was dead the moment she betrayed you.))

“Yes,” Kyoko says instead, with all the finality of saying it during the previous incarnation of the Game (A body has been—), only there’s no Blackened, no one to punish for Hina’s death.  (It wasn’t a murder.  Junko may have planned for all of this, but it wasn’t a—)  She tucks her hair back behind one ear, brushes her fingers through the much shorter pieces that once held a braid before Jack cut it off (she should have the ribbon, and now that’s gone, too, because she’d never had the occasion to go back for it), and then brings her fingers back sticky with a bit of Hina’s blood.  Her ears ring.  “We need to get Byakuya out.”

“Yeah.  Okay.”  Hiro crosses his arms with a perplexed expression.  “So, uh.  Where were you?”

~

It’s just as they make the turn into the last tunnel that Kyoko remembers.

“The door to the future will open before then.” “About halfway, I’d say.  Halfway through the story.” Her eyes widen.

“They’re just through there.”  Kyoko gestures to the broken door at the end of the tunnel.  There’s no need for a code anymore, which is good because Hiro is so overcome to be exploring the secret tunnels that she’s not sure he would remember it to get in.  “Can you make it from here?”

Hiro pauses halfway to the door and turns back to her, blinking in confusion.  “Yeah, but…but what are you doing?”

Kyoko doesn’t respond with any sort of chagrin, but there’s something of Junko in her when she says, “The same thing I do every time, Hiro.”  She can’t quite complete the reference – she’s not the sort to try and take over the world, unlike some people she could name – but there’s something warm and almost comforting about saying it.  Something that breaks her heart.

But she’s not thinking about that.

As she turns away, Kyoko hears Hiro behind her, “Yeah, but what is that?”

Honestly, sometimes there’s no helping people.

~

For all that a huge mecha Monokuma smashed through part of the school, the rest of it doesn’t seem too terribly damaged.  It’s as though whoever designed the old building – or, at least, whoever created all of the hidden tunnels and passageways in the first place – wanted that particular room, meant for experimentation, segmented away from everything else.  So Kyoko makes her way through the rest of the building back to the Data Processing Room, back to the Monokuma Room, and back down the hatch without any particular trouble.

And finds the mirai door – the future door – wide open.

Inside, Kyoko sees two people.  One of them is a boy with fluffy white hair and a thick chain about his neck who she has never seen before, leaning into a chair with a curious, bemused expression on his face, his hand on his chin.  She looks at him and senses nothing but discomfort.  Of course, she does not dismiss him outright, but her gaze is drawn much faster, much stronger to the other, to the boy who is supposed to be dead.

“Makoto?”

He startles, having not noticed her entrance, and looks up at her, an awkward sort of smile crossing his face.  “Kyokyo!  I, uh.  I didn’t die!”  He bites his lower lip and scratches the back of his neck.  “Sorry?”

Kyoko stares at him.  Blinks.  Tries to process.

There’s just so much.  Too much.  Happening all at once and all together.

Her brain short circuits.

“What…what did you call me?”

[aparticularbandit]

Of A Fatal Captivity: Day Seven (IV)

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 Vomit. A lot of vomit.

AO3

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Book One

Day Seven (of a Fatal Captivity).

Ryoko hunches over and retches again.

There’s nothing there – she’d gotten rid of everything when she’d smelled that rotting corpse – but this is….

This is worse.

“Ryoko?”  Mikan is by her side in a moment with a trashcan in one hand.  She sets it in front of her, then gently pulls Ryoko’s hair back out of her face and rubs her back soothingly just the same way as she had on the trip here, when Ryoko became afraid during the gunfire.  “Wh-wh-what’s wrong?” she asks.  “Are you okay?”

Of course, I’m not okay.

But Ryoko can’t really say that, can she?  She can’t tell Mikan that she just remembered—

Ryoko shudders and retches again.  Then she tries to take a deep breath through the burning in her throat and just ends up coughing again and again while her stomach stills.  She groans.

“H-h-here!”  Mikan hands her a bottle of something from out of nowhere.

At first, Ryoko doesn’t even drink anything.  She just holds the bottle cool between her hands; then she presses it against her forehead and against the back of her neck.  It helps.  (It doesn’t help.)  But as she stands there, forcing herself to breathe, Mikan – again, as though out of nowhere, brings her a cool, damp cloth.  “Are you magic?” Ryoko asks as she takes the cloth and drapes it across the back of her neck.  It’s only then that she glances at the contents of the bottle; it’s not water, but something clear and carbonated.  “Do you just have these?”

Mikan flushes.  “There’s a mini-fridge.”  She points away from her.  “Right there.”

That doesn’t explain the cloth, but as Ryoko takes it from her neck and refolds it to bring the cooler side back against her skin, she realizes that it’s not a rag.  Instead, it’s a thin pink tank-top, folded and rolled into shape to mimic one.  She runs her thumb along the fabric.  It’s soft.  Achingly soft.

It also smells a bit.

Well, when it’s against the back of her neck, that doesn’t matter!

(After getting sick so much, Ryoko’s pretty sure she smells a bit, too.)

Ryoko screws the cap off the bottle, takes a drink, pauses, and then chugs half of it in one go.  It’s sweet in her mouth, washes away the horrible taste of everything, and fills her empty, quivering stomach without sitting heavy, without the cool in that void bringing the nausea back.  She wipes beads of sweat from her brow and then turns completely away from the screens, from the entire set-up that even now her eyes want to keep sweeping over.  There’s more there – there’s so much more there – but she doesn’t want to see it, she doesn’t want to know.

Still.

Sometimes, apparently, it doesn’t matter what she wants.

Ryoko runs her fingers along the wall just the same as she had in the tunnels.  Her eyes light on a note taped to a wall on the opposite side, and she heads towards it.  But it’s just an arrow.  Her brow furrows, and she turns – there’s a longer area, but it’s empty, save for a note on the opposite side.

This time, though, when she reaches it, Ryoko finds that the note has writing on it.

Just your luck!  Press here, Ryoko-chan!

The writing is unfamiliar to her, which means it isn’t hers.  It has to belong to someone else.  She should probably be concerned about that, but she isn’t.

“Ryoko, what did you—”

Ryoko presses on the tile, and another keypad appears.  She doesn’t know what the passcode Mikan used was, but if she gets it wrong, she’ll ask.  This one is supposed to be for her, though, and if someone who knows her set it up, then the passcode should be 927853.

Yasuke.

As soon as she presses the last digit, the keypad merges back into the wall, and then the whole wall slides open, just as the one from the tunnels did.  Even before turning the light on, Ryoko sees multiple racks of…of something.  She flicks the light on.  Inside are three racks, full of clothes.  They look nothing like what she’d imagined the Ultimate Fashionista would wear, given what little she’d seen of her clothes (one outfit does not a full person make), but then….

There’s another note taped to the front of the middle rack with her name written on it in huge gel pen pink bubble letters shaded with black.  Ryoko starts for it immediately, but before she does, Mikan is there, fingers brushing along the paper.  “Hey!” Ryoko snaps without thinking about it.  “That’s mine!”

It has her name on it, after all.

“It’s from Junko-sama,” Mikan murmurs, not stepping away.  Instead, she carefully pricks the paper from the rack.  She runs her finger along the sharp edge, gasps, and then brings her finger away with a slice through it, deep red blood bubbling up from within.  “Oh.”  Her lips curve into a bright, bold grin.  “A gift.”

Ryoko snatches the note from Mikan’s fingertips.  “That’s not a gift!” she exclaims.  “That’s just pain!”  She tucks the note under her arm and then pulls Mikan’s hand into her own.  “Are you okay?”  It’s only as she examines Mikan’s fingers that she notes the second slice now there, left from how quickly she taken the note from her.  Her eyes widen.  “I-I-I’m sorry!  I didn’t mean to hurt you!”

It takes a second.

Mikan blinks at her fingertips, brow furrowing.  “Huh?”

“Miki, you’re hurt.”  Ryoko glances up, meeting her thistle-bruise eyes.  “You’re the….  You said you were the Ultimate Nurse, so you’ve…you’ve got band-aids or something, right?  And um….something to clean it with?  You gave me this—”  Instinctively, she pulls the cloth from the back of her neck, unwraps it, and presses it against Mikan’s fingertips to stop the bleeding.  “Are you okay?”

But Mikan just blinks again.  “You don’t…you don’t have to worry about m-m-me.”  Her brow furrows again.  “It’s a gift—”

“Getting hurt is not a gift!” Ryoko exclaims, gaze jumping up from Mikan’s hand to meet her eyes again.  “Who told you that?”

Mikan squeaks.  She quickly looks away.  “N-n-no one!  No one t-t-told me that!”

It’s a lie.

It’s a lie.

Which means—

Junko told her that.

Mikan must read that realization on Ryoko’s face because she takes her hand from Ryoko’s, wraps the dirty tank-top a little tighter about it, and says with some trepidation, “I-I-I’ll just go take care of…of this!  Th-th-there has to be soap here somewhere!”  And then she scurries off, back into the first room.

Something tells Ryoko that Mikan won’t find any soap at all.  If Junko – the person who was here before – thought that pain was a gift, then why would she keep soap around?  She’d get hurt and just leave it, get hurt and let it get infect, get hurt and—

Mikan calls Junko beloved.  She would never have let Junko hurt herself that way.  Not if her care of Ryoko says anything about it.

Ryoko takes another sip from her bottle and then pulls the note back out.  It’s still emblazoned with her name – RYOKO OTONASHI!!!! – with more exclamation points than that and surrounded with multiple hearts, all in pink and black, all in varying sizes.  Why would Junko leave a note for her?  How had she even known that Ryoko would be here?  And if this is Junko’s handwriting – one that doesn’t look as close to her own as Ryoko…doesn’t, strictly speaking, remember, but feels like she does – then…then whose was that on the other note?  Because it certainly doesn’t match this one either.

Maybe Mikan will recognize that one, too, if she gives it a good look.

But it doesn’t matter.

Right now, Ryoko has this note, one with her name on it in as loud a way as someone can write it, and which, if she opens it, may explain a few things.

Does she really want to know what Junko wants with her?

Curiosity overcomes Ryoko’s hesitation, and she pulls herself to one corner of the room, hunkers down, and opens the note.

Ryoko! As I live and breathe (hah!), Ryoko Otonashi! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen you? I mean technically I’ve never really seen you, just a mirror image of you, which strictly speaking isn’t the same thing, so I guess you couldn’t say I’ve seen you.  How unfortunate.  Kind of defeats the whole purpose of that question, huh. Oops. Better question: Do you know how long it’s been since you’ve been out and about in the world?  Couple of years, at least.  You probably don’t remember any of that, though. Best question: What do you remember?  Do you remember me yet?  That’s the thing about recovering memories; it’s a little unpredictable.  I mean, I know you’ll get all of them eventually – been there, done that! – but given all those modifications I made to Yasuke’s memory manipulation thingamajig and Izuru’s input— You’d think I would have given that a better name, actually, but I didn’t want to overwrite what he’d done with me, you know?  It’d be a bit like erasing him.  I never wanted that. But you probably haven’t remembered that bit yet.

Ryoko pauses.  Remembered what bit?  She’s suddenly struck with an even stronger bout of nausea.  Whatever this is, she’s not sure she wants to remember.  Is there a way to not remember?  To pick and choose which memories she wants to keep?  Can she do that?

No?

Back to the note.

Anyway. What I mean to say is that I don’t know what you’ll remember when! Honest.  I don’t even know if you’ll remember everything in order.  Maybe you won’t!  Wouldn’t that be great?  All of those pieces and no way of knowing how they all fit together until suddenly, all at once, they do! And hey!  Maybe you won’t be the one who dies this time!  That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway!  ;) (Don’t tell Mikan.  She’s the one with you, right?  I don’t know why I’m asking; I know it’s her.) Oh!  Fun fact!  You’re not just the Ultimate Fashionista!  I know, I know, that’s all my little Horrors are going to talk about, but that’s because I never told them this one! And you shouldn’t either. Point of fact, I’m pretty sure there’s only one person still alive who knows. …and Izuru, I guess, but he doesn’t count, because I didn’t fucking tell him, he probably just guessed it.  Asshole. Huh. How tragic. How despair-inducing. For me, not for you, although you’ll remember that in the future, too, so – no spoilers!  You’ll meet her in approximately— Oh, right.  No spoilers!  I literally just wrote that.  How boring. Well, Miss Ultimate Analyst, your Ultimate Fashionista bestie made you a whole new line-up of—

Ryoko stops again.  Wait, wait, wait.  She just slipped that in like it was nothing.  Ultimate Analyst?  What does that even mean?  Is that…is that how Junko knew Mikan would be with her?  How she knew that Ryoko would be here in the first place?  Hm.  Well, if she’s the Ultimate Analyst, and if she’s Junko (which she still steadfastly refuses to believe, no matter how much evidence continues to grow in that direction), that means Junko is also the Ultimate Analyst, which means she should have been able to accurately predict the kind of clothes Ryoko would like.

Okay, fine.  That’ll be her trial!

If Junko really is her, and they really are the Ultimate Analyst, then…then Junko should have been able to recreate the suit Ryoko stole from Sonia!  She should have been able to make it, and it should fit perfectly!  And – and! – Ryoko should be able to button up the lavender blouse without having to worry about…about fit!

With a giddy smile on her face – because the likelihood of all that is so small as to be impossible – Ryoko returns to the note.

Well, Miss Ultimate Analyst, your Ultimate Fashionista bestie made you a whole new line-up of— And you’ve stopped paying attention. Fine, that’s fine, I know what it’s like to get bored and distracted, trust me, I get bored all the time, but you can at least pay attention to the rest of the letter that I lovingly crafted for you, can’t you?  Maybe?  Just a little bit? No? Well. I need you to do something for me.  Immediately.  Without finishing reading this.  Okay? Just a little…trial, we’ll call it.

(Ryoko doesn’t catch it, but you do, don’t you?)

In the back of the middle rack, the very last hanger should have a garment bag.  Can you open that one for me?

Ryoko’s brow furrows.  What an odd request.  Still, she folds the note again, takes another swig from her bottle, and pushes herself up from where she’s been crouched in the corner.  Mikan still hasn’t returned, which means she probably didn’t find soap in the other room.  Not that Ryoko’s particularly surprised by that.

Middle rack, middle rack.  All the way at the back—

There, separated from all the other clothes on the rack (clothes that Ryoko doesn’t hate, actually, although she’s not too terribly focused on them) is a garment bag.  There’s a note pinned to it, too, although this one isn’t folded – a note that says, Yes, Ryoko!  This one! inside a huge pink heart.  Ryoko takes the note, crumples it in her hand, and shoves it into her pocket.  Then, as directed, she unzips the bag.

Her eyes widen.

Her entire being tenses, a singular chill running up her spine, and she resists the urge to vomit again.

She doesn’t want to get it on the suit.

Shaking, Ryoko brings the other note back up.

You wanted a suit like Sonia’s, right?  You were probably wearing that yesterday, too, huh.  And today, you’re back in my war outfit. Of course, I never referred to it that way.  Kyoko did.  Not that she ever said as much to me, but— Oh, do you remember Kyoko yet?  You’ll LOVE her! I certainly did, anyway. But it’s simple to read things like this, Miss Ultimate Analyst. Mikan was going to come save me. She was going to take me to that hideaway because it’s the closest one, and she was worried about carrying me too far away…and because she believed that I was going to meet the rest of them there after that final Killing Game.  (Don’t worry if you haven’t remembered that one yet, it’ll come sooner or later.  You’ll hate me for it, but then again, that’s the entire point, isn’t it?) Mikan took you there, and I didn’t leave any clothes there, which meant after you woke from your coma, you would want clothes.  She would ask Hiyoko, who would be the closest fit, and you would bring up Yasuke because you always bring up Yasuke, you poor, broken thing, and Hiyoko would be a bitch about Yasuke because that’s a game she and I play together, and she’d think she finally found a way to get under my skin, and it would be a bit of a joke to her, and if you were me, it would be a great game, but the thing is— The thing is you’re right, you know. You’re NOT me. (Again, that’s the entire point.) But you would bring up Yasuke, and Hiyoko would be herself, and you would snap and hurt her in one form or another, and then you would run, and Kazuichi would be in the hallway from trying to talk to Sonia for the millionth time and not being able to get through to her, and he would notice that you needed better clothes (although he probably liked you in the towel, huh), and he would of course think of Sonia because she’s always the first thought in his mind when I’m not. Which means you would end up with Sonia, and you wouldn’t like all of her frilly princess dresses because I don’t like all of her frilly princess dresses, and most of them don’t fit you even if you did, which leaves one thing. The suit. Oh, yes, you would like the suit. And you, my darling girl, reading my letter and noticing that I called you the Ultimate Analyst, would conspire some sort of trial for me to prove myself, and it would of course be that suit. Because how could I ever know about Sonia’s suit? Well. Who do you think made that suit? :) Believe me, Ryoko Otonashi, when I tell you that despite everything we are the same person and you are the Ultimate Analyst and that if you don’t get your shit together then you will be the one who dies instead of me, and let’s be really honest here, neither of us wants that. So get your head on straight, Ryo-chan. Remember me. And then figure out how to kill me before I eat you alive. Kisses!! Junko Enoshima ♡ ♡ ♡