Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Saihara starts lying. Well, first he contradicts her lie.

“Please, Akamatsu-san,” he says. “You don’t have to lie for me anymore. You weren’t holding the receiver. I was.”

The first words since his self-imposed silence are to doom himself and all of their classmates along with him. Kaede opens her mouth, ready to shout out whatever excuse for why they shouldn’t believe him comes to her first.

Shinguji beats her to it. “Kukuku, is that confession?”

Saihara nods curtly. “It is… I don’t want to drag this out any longer, I…” he peers at Kaede from under the brim of his hat. He lowers it back over his eyes. “I killed Amami-kun… I’m sorry everyon—”

Kaede finds her voice. “You’re lying! Saihara-kun’s lying!”

He won’t look at her. He’s hiding. Kaede feels desperation beginning to bubble up inside of her.

Maki raises an eyebrow. “About holding the receiver?”

“Well, no, not about that, but—”

“So you admit to lying earlier,” Ouma tilts his head. “You said he was not holding it but now you’re saying Saihara-chan’s telling the truth about him not not holding it.”

“Um, Tenko is confused,” the girl interjected. “Who was holding it?”

Saihara doesn’t look up, but his voice rings clear across the growing noise. “I was. A-and I faked it going off in front of Akamatsu-san.” He glances to the side—not daring to meet the truth in Kaede’s eyes— and offers everyone a small, pained smile. “You guys figured me out exactly…”

He’s killing himself.

“No, that’s wrong!” Kaede shouts. “All of this is wrong!”

Tojo is not impolite when she calmly asks, “Akamatsu-san, you seem very confident in that, but how do you know? Please understand that we need evidence to believe you, especially since everything points towards—”

“He didn’t do it!” she shouts again. “And… and I know Saihara-kun didn’t do it because… because,” Kaede prepares to sign her own death warrant. “Because I did it.”

Saihara flinches at her words, and the others’ talking turns into a white noise around them—

Angie gasps. “Ah! A second confession!”

Momota shouts, “I told you Saihara didn’t do it!”

“So you believe Akamatsu is the culprit then?” Maki asks.

“Wha—no! Of course not!”

Iruma launches into cackling. “Wow you really are as dumb as—”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Iruma launches into sniveling.

“Anyway, to talk about something important,” Hoshi sighs. “There can only be one killer, so one of them is lying.”

“Oh, I see, I see,” chirps Angie. “But why would one of them lie? Did God tell them to?”

“One of the confessions is an illusion,” Yumeno offers. “If I had enough MP I could figure out which one, but…” she shrugs noncommittally.

Shinguji waves a finger. “The two of them were always close. Clearly this is a matter of one human choosing to throw away their very life for another. Truly something fascinating to behold.”

“Ah, now Angie understands!” She claps. “Dying for your love! How romantic!”

“But we’ll all die, too,” Shirogane mumbles.

—The words strike a chord in Kaede. This is not simply her life weighed against Saihara’s. But even if it were… the realization hits her like an arrow straight through the heart.

She wants to protect everyone. She wants to protect him, even if it means saving him from himself.

“Which is why,” Kaede says, taking back the conversation with a new firmness in her voice. “I confessed. Because I wanted to save everyone.” She looks across the room towards Saihara. She’s found her reason to die.

He’s shaking his head. He’s found his reason, too.

“Akamatsu-san, please stop. They already know the truth. I manipulated you and used you as my alibi, and I’m sorry, but,” he squeezes his eyes closed. “I won’t let you take the fall for me anymore.” Then, his eyes finally meet hers. “I’m not worth it.”

Kaede feels her fists clench.

“So we vote for Saihara, right?” drawls Yumeno.

“No!” responds Kaede. Logic is leaving her. “He didn’t do it—he’s lying to save me!”

“So… we vote for Akamatsu-san?” tries Gonta.

“There’s no evidence other than her own word that she did it,” says Saihara. “And,” he takes a breath, “and she already lied once earlier… so how much can we trust her?”

The pit that took root in her stomach ever since Saihara called out her lie doubles in size. She grips the podium in front of her tightly. The others are getting restless. The noise is rising, and Saihara’s standing in front of her, serenely condemning himself to death for a crime she committed.

The world is spinning.

“Why?” Kaede’s voice is small, and she speaks only to him over the growing rumble. “Why are you doing this?” She wants to—needs to—hear the words straight from him.

Everyone’s shouting now, and it’s only thanks to years of training her ears that she picks up his voice among the chaos. Saihara says, “Because I’m a coward.” He pulls down his hat, but she can see the tears starting to form. “Because I can’t face this truth. Because I don’t want you to die.”

Kaede’s mouth pulls into a tight line, and she starts shaking her head. She screams for everyone to calm the hell down and goes over exactly how she killed Amami. How she arranged the books, how she set-up the camera’s flash, how she dropped the shot-put through the vent, how she did it all right in front of Saihara’s eyes. But…

“Interesting, interesting,” Ouma smiles. “We have two ways someone could have killed Amami-chan.”

“But,” Tenko’s sweating, “but how do we know which one is right?”

Hoshi pulls his hat down. “I doubt whichever of them is lying is going to admit it now…”

“So do we just,” Shirogane wrings her hands. “Do we just have to pick one and hope?”

“But if we’re wrong,” says Maki. “We all die.”

“G-Gonta doesn’t like that idea!”

“T-Tenko doesn’t either!”

Ouma hums. “Looks like we got a fifty-fifty shot.”

“And that’s the best you’re going to get!” chimes in Monokuma. “Because it’s time for the vote!”

This is bad, Kaede’s numb mind supplies. This is really, really bad. She quickly picks herself when her screen lights up. She leans to one side. Yumeno votes for Saihara. She leans to the other. Gonta’s voted for her. She knows Saihara’s voting for himself. Kaede looks around at all of her classmates and has to wonder if it’s really going to come down to one vote.

It does.

And her classmates have just chosen Saihara as the killer by a margin of one.

They gather together to the side of their podiums, looking at the overhead screen light up with Saihara’s face.

Kaede pales. “No, no, no, no… this isn’t happening…” she presses her hands to her head. “This isn’t happening.”

Saihara is standing there with his arms crossed, smiling while on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry, Akamatsu-san.”

He finally reaches out to her, and she looks back at him. And Monokuma says something that absolutely shocks both of them to the core.

“Welp! Looks like you guys got it right!”

Kaede’s world stops. Monokuma’s still talking, but she screams over him, “WHAT!?”

All the color has drained from Saihara’s face. His eyes are wide and his mouth is open, desperately trying to form words, “b-but, that’s not—I—what?”

Monokuma huffs. “Do I need to repeat myself? I said you got it right. Amami Rantarou—The Ultimate Whatever’s—killer is the Ultimate Detective Saihara Shuuichi.”

“But it’s not!” Kaede shouts back. “I did it!”

She hears someone let out a strained sigh behind her. Then Maki says, “Akamatsu, just give it up already. Stop lying.”

“Yeah!” Iruma yells. “We get that you’re sad you didn’t get to fuck your boyfriend before he fucked-up Rantar—”

Momota comes to her rescue. “Hey, shut the fuck up! If Akamatsu says he didn’t do it, then he didn’t do it!”

“But Monokuma just said he did…” Shirogane says.

Kaede glances back at her classmates because she can’t bear to look at the way Saihara is shaking. There’s anger and frustration and despair—and in Ouma’s case—absolute confusion painted on their faces in equal measure. And Saihara… Saihara… she failed. She failed.

Kaede immediately steps in front of him, shielding him from Monokuma. “We both know he’s innocent.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the bear says. “But I do know it’s time for the punishment.”

She steps backwards, closer to Saihara, pulling him behind her. “No. I won’t let you. This is wrong! This is all wrong!”

“Akamatsu-san,” and the quiet of Saihara’s voice gets her attention. She whips around to face him. “This… this is for the best, right? If only… if only I get executed… this is…” there are tears openly running down his face and it’s obvious he’s completely terrified. He tries to smile at her. “This is better than what I was hoping for. This is the best possible outcome. R-right?”

Kaede surges forward and pulls him into a hug. She has a lot of things she wants to say, but she finds that her voice is too chocked by her own tears to get out anything other than, “I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry. This is all my fault… this…”

He hugs her back. “Akamatsu-san… I-I…” his hands grip her shoulders tighter, “I’m glad I got to meet you, even if…”

Monokuma’s getting impatient, hoping around the two of them in circles. “Alright, alright, we get it. You two love each other sooooo much. But we’ve got a punishment to get to!”

The words click something in Kaede’s head, and her hold on Saihara becomes iron. He stiffens. “Akamatsu-san?”

She glares directly into Monokuma’s robotic red eye, and says through gritted teeth, “I. Will. Not. Let. You.”

The bear puts a paw to his chin. “Oh? Are you defying your headmaster?”

Her answer is to pull Saihara even closer.

He gasps. She knows she’s hurting him now, but it’s the only thing she can think to do to stop this. Not a muscle in her body wavers when she says: “If you want to execute him, you’ll have to kill me first.”

Monokuma bears his claws. “That can be arranged.”

Kaede hears movement behind her, and suddenly Momota is standing in front of her, flanked by Tenko and Gonta. “You’re not gonna fucking kill anybody,” he says, slamming his fists together.

Tenko’s already fallen into a battle stance. “Tenko will use her neo-Aikido to protect all her classmates… even the boys.”

Gonta’s attempting a battle stance. “Gonta will fight, too! A gentleman uses his strength to protect his friends!”

Monokuma pauses. “Hmm, a five-way execution might get a bit hairy, but it sure would be a series first!”

Ouma takes a step forward. “But you don’t want that,” he says, a hand at his chin. “You don’t want to kill all of us.” A strange smile that stretches too far slides on to his face. “That’s why this is happening.”

Thoughts of what the hell Ouma’s talking about and something not-quite-right about what Monokuma said begin pushing their way into the back of Kaede’s mind. Of course, most of her thoughts are simply a loop of protect Saihara, don’t let go of Saihara, protect Saihara…

Momota opens his mouth, likely to ask the questions currently being shoved out of Kaede’s immediate thoughts, when giant robots burst into the trial room.

The Exisals are barring down on them, and the Monokubs are chattering about how they’re going to enforce their father’s will. Red lights flash over them, and though none of the three assembled in front of her budge an inch, Kaede can see the sudden stiffness in Gonta’s shoulders, the sweat beading down Tenko’s back, and the vein straining in Momota’s neck as he clenches his jaw. And something about that makes her simultaneously realize two things: none of them will back down and they will all be slaughtered.

They’ll all die protecting her, just like Saihara… Saihara’s quite desperately struggling in her grasp now. Then he’s shouting, “S-Stop! Everyone stop!”

He shoves the entirety of his weight against her arms, and Kaede’s grip gives out just enough for him to stumble forward, her hands still catching on to his arms. She breathes out, “Saihara-kun?”

He doesn’t look back at her. “Everyone, stop,” he says. “It’s okay. No… no one else needs to die.”

Momota pivots on his heel to face him. “You’re just going to give up your life?”

“No! I,” he takes in a deep breath. “I just don’t want anyone to die because of me.”

Someone—likely Maki—says, “You mean anyone else.”

Saihara grimaces at the comment echoing through the room. “Y-yes. Anyone else,” he turns to Kaede. “Because I did it, okay? That’s… that’s the truth of this case. So, please, Akamatsu-san, please find the mastermind, and… and save everyone, okay? If anyone can do it… it’s you.”

He tries to smile, and says “Promise me, alright?” and Kaede’s heart breaks in two.

Monokuma leaps up. “Then it’s finally time for the punishment!”

Before Kaede can say a word, a door she hadn’t seen before flings open, and a chain flies out past all the other students and snaps around Saihara’s neck.

He’s forcibly wrenched out of her grip, the strength of which sends his hat spinning to the ground as his body is yanked down the strange hallway that seems to have suddenly burst into existence. Kaede’s feet are moving after him as soon as his hand leaves her. She sprints down the hall in a dead run, the footsteps of Momota, Gonta, and Tenko echoing close behind her, followed by everyone else.

The screens in the courtroom spell out:

In bright, neon letters. A pixilated image of Monokuma dragging him away happily appears underneath. Kaede’s own sprite appears to chase after them, tiny feet shuffling quickly along the bottom of the screen.

The real Kaede doesn’t spare the mocking image a single glance. The real Kaede keeps her eyes locked on the look of terror on Saihara’s face.

He reaches a hand out to her. Kaede’s lungs are on fire as she forces her legs to move even faster.

Saihara’s pulled into a strange circular room decorated to be reminiscent of an old manor except with see-through walls and odd statues of Monokuma dressed like cupids placed at the intersections of wall and ceiling.

The chain releases him, and a final wall shoots up from the ground to seal him inside. Saihara tries runs to the wall Kaede’s racing towards, in one last ditch attempt to reach out to her again. He doesn’t make it far. As soon as he stands, a Monokuma statue pops out of the ground behind him, armed with a revolver. Kaede makes it to the window just in time to see him scream as the bullet passes through his leg.

Saihara falls to his hands and knees, and more Monokumas pop up from the floor, brandishing a pipe, a knife, a candlestick, and a wrench. They move in circles on a track around him, the ones with blunt weapons liberally smashing their chosen tools against his legs, arms, stomach, only once against his head to blur his vision with blood—anywhere that won’t be fatal. The one with the knife is slower, taking care not to inflict any wounds that could kill. A simple knife through the heart would be too easy.

Kaede begins pounding her fists against the window, shouting for them to stop, for anyone to save him as the floor inside the room begins darkening with his blood.

Momota, Gonta, and Tenko throw themselves against the window with her. It stands strong. Saihara’s being slowly beaten to death.

Suddenly, the four statues stop all at once and sink back into the floor. A red Monokuma statue appears behind him armed with a rope. It lifts the rope, ready to wrap it around his neck when the weapon is yanked out of its hands by the strange robotic Monokub.

Saihara’s limbs are weak and barely respond as he tries to push himself up on to his knees against the floor slick with his own blood. Behind him, the robotic Monokub has turned on the blue one, wrapping the rope around its neck and yanking on either end until his head pops off. It’s a strange sight, but it means that nothing is currently trying to kill Saihara.

Part of Kaede thinks that the execution has to be over. That he somehow survived and is going to be released when she spies one of the cupid Monokuma statues beginning to move.

Kaede screams even louder.

Saihara looks up through the blood obscuring his vision to see Kaede shouting his name. He’s staring into her eyes when one of the statues let its arrow fly straight into his chest. It stops right at the surface of his skin, and instead of piercing his heart and putting him out of his misery, he instead feels the arrowhead beginning to burn.

The moment of pure shock as to what is happening to him is quickly replaced by panic as his hands desperately scramble to pull out the arrow that is incinerating him from the inside out.

Breathing gets harder and harder as his lungs become engulfed in flames, and he is in such excruciating pain that eventually the world blurs around him into darkness.

Saihara dies bloody, half-beaten to death and gasping for breath. His body collapses to the ground, and Monokuma announces the execution has been a tremendous success.

The walls that had been keeping everyone out slowly retreat into the ground. The smell of blood and burning skin fills the air around his corpse, but Kaede rushes forward.

She drops to her knees and just stares at his face, twisted from the agonizing pain that was meant for her.

Her mind goes blank, and she finds herself being restrained by Gonta, kicking and screaming and Monokuma in front of her laughing.

She is going to kill the mastermind. She is going to kill the mastermind.

-

No one speaks to her on the elevator ride back to the school. Kaede doesn’t have any speeches about hope or carrying Saihara’s sacrifice with them or how they all just need to believe in each other.

She can barely even feel her own grief over the raw anger bubbling up inside of her.

Momota looks like he’s on the verge of speaking, but he remains silent and the few moments of attention that are directed towards Kaede are focused on preventing her from rushing Monokuma and receiving a spear straight through the heart.

Kaede goes immediately to her room and screams as she thinks about the arrow that went through Saihara’s heart. In the privacy of her soundproof walls, she sinks to the floor with a wordless yell.

Time passes, and her voice is hoarse and her eyes are red and her fists are bruised from when she slammed them against the window Monokuma gave her to watch Saihara die.

The bear in question pops up in front of her. “My, my, someone seems upset.” She looks up at him from her place on the floor. “And here I thought you’d be happy, given that this trial had—oh what was it?—the best possible outcome.”

Kaede grits her teeth. “He was innocent. We both know he was innocent.”

Monokuma places a paw over his mouth. “Puhpuhpuh, you seem awfully sure about that—but what evidence do you have to prove that’s the truth?”

“The fact that I did it!?” she shouts in the bear’s face.

“That’s one truth, buuuuut,” he says. “If everybody thinks something else is the truth and that the truth is a lie, who can really say which one’s true?”

She shakes her head. “Stop trying to mess with me. I know what happened. And you—!” Kaede points a shaking finger at him. “You broke your own rules to kill Saihara-kun!”

“Oh?” Monokuma tilts his head to the side. “Is that what happened? Am I the one who killed him? Or did he kill himself? Or did you kill him? Or did Amami-kun kill him? It’s hard to say, don’t you think?”

“I said,” Kaede clenches her fists. “To stop messing with me. I was there. I killed Amami-kun, and I should be the one who’s dead!”

“But you’re not, are you?” he smiles.

Kaede doesn’t respond.

“Really, we should both be grateful to Saihara-kun. It’s such a pain when the first killer gets away with it, but thanks to his sacrifice, you get to live and the game has been jumpstarted!” he nods. “Yep! I would’ve taken either of you as the first killer, and he decided to trade his life for yours!”

Her anger subsides only for a brief moment due to an overwhelming feeling of confusion. “Why would you have taken either of us? And-and,” she pushes herself to her feet to point down at the bear. “And why is it ‘a pain when the first killer gets away?’ Aren’t those the rules of your game?”

“Ah,” he says turning away from her. “So many mysteries and so few answers! It’d be nice if we had a detective around here! Oh wait!”

Kaede’s about to lunge forward to wring Monokuma’s furry, robotic neck when she hears a knock at her door. She whips her head towards the sound, and Monokuma’s gone the moment she turns back. With a huff, she nearly slams her door open.

Momota’s standing there. He says, “Akamatsu—” at roughly the same time she practically shouts, “What do you want?!”

He’s taken aback for a moment before a smile oddly enough breaks out on his face. “You’re still angry.”

Kaede nods.

“Are you still going to fight Monokuma?”

“I was about to when you interrupted me,” she sighs and folds her arms. “He came by to taunt me, and there’s no Gonta-kun in my room to stop me from punching him right in his stupid face.”

“You’d get executed for that.”

“It’d be worth it.”

Momota’s still smiling. “It would. I understand why Saihara felt so strongly about you,” his expression changes as a seriousness begins to creep into his voice. “You’re a strong person, Akamatsu, and I think that if anyone can stop Monokuma, it’s you.” He pumps a fist. “But just because I’m rooting for you doesn’t mean I won’t try my hardest, too!”

Kaede’s not in the mood for optimistic speeches, but she somehow finds herself baring a tired smile. “Yeah… but did you just come here to say that? To cheer me on?”

“Nah,” he pulls something out from behind his back. Kaede blinks as he extends Saihara’s hat towards her. “I also wanted to give you this. I picked it up before we left the trial. I figured,” he shrugs, “you probably don’t have a lot of memories of Saihara, but maybe having something of his, well… maybe it’d help.”

Kaede takes the hat gently from his hand and holds it to her chest. She turns it over a few times in her hands. The anger begins to drain from her as she stares at the black fabric. Without the emotional fire that had been blazing through her, she suddenly becomes aware of the ache behind her eyes, the rawness of her throat, and the soreness of her hands.

All she feels is exhaustion. She says, “Thank you, Momota-kun… I apologize for yelling at you earlier.”

“Don’t,” Momota says. “It’s good that you’re angry. It means you still want to fight for him. And,” he looks her straight in the eyes. “I also wanted to say that I believe you.”

She stares up at him. “Huh?”

“I believe what you said at the trial,” he says. “I believe that neither you or Saihara killed Amami.”

Kaede feels something rotten beginning to bubble up in her throat. Her eyes dart to the side, and she opens her mouth when Momota reaches towards the hat in her hands. He plucks it from her grip and places it on to her head. “Also hats are for wearing, Akamatsu,” he’s grinning again.

She sighs and reaches up to adjust the hat. When it’s in place, Kaede realizes just how much of Saihara’s vision was regularly obscured. She tilts her head up higher than before to look Momota in the eyes. Many different things run through her mind to say, but she settles on, “Thank you, Momota-kun, for a lot of things, but…” her eyes dart to the ground and the brim of Saihara’s hat blocks out Momota completely. “Let’s talk tomorrow, alright? I’d like to be alone right now.”

He nods. “I understand.” He turns to leave. “Just don’t blame yourself, alright? This isn’t anybody’s fault besides Monokuma’s. Got that?”

Kaede leans against her doorframe. “Got it,” she lies.

Momota nods at her again, and she closes the door.

Kaede looks at herself in her bathroom mirror. Saihara’s hat is designed for hiding behind, and she tilts her head this way and that to take in the angles of her face as they appear and are obscured again.

Then she sighs and simply stares at her reflection. Only one of her eyes blinks back at her. She pulls the hat down lower.

Amami and Saihara’s blood is on her hands. The killing game has begun.

Kaede clenches her fists and takes a deep breath. She says to herself, “But I’m still alive,” she stares at her one eye in the mirror. “And I won’t let anyone else die.

“I’ll save everyone, and I’ll find the mastermind. It’s a promise, Saihara-kun.”