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When Hinata wakes up, he vomits.
It is hot and slimy and cramped, it is wet and dark and turquoise, there are long tendrils of sweaty sticky ropes around his neck, there are things pinching and digging at his skin and he can’t breathe, his mouth is full and his nose is blocked –
He screams through the sick.
He’s the only one of the five survivors of the game awake. The others are still asleep, but they will wake up in a few hours, just long enough for him to remember a few vivid moments as Kamakura Izuru and pass out on the floor, screaming.
Sonia wakes next, not long after Naegi has wrapped him in a blanket and force-fed him soft chewy vitamin tablets meant for babies. He sits huddled in the corner of the dank, miserable pod room and watches the pods intently, not quite believing that his friends are in there and they’re all alive, even the ones whose bodies he’d examined after death, even the ones that that godawful bear had torn to pieces in front of them.
Sonia’s pod opens and she crawls out, dripping with slime and shaking with fear. She stumbles towards Hinata and the two huddle beneath his blanket, naked skin stuck together by congealing slime. It’s gross. Hinata is so scared that she’ll vanish and be replaced with the person he keeps remembering that he can’t let go of her.
Togami watches her warily. Hinata shields her with his thin pathetic body and they wait for the rest of them to wake up.
Kuzuryuu wakes up screaming because there is a rotted blue eye where his own used to be. Hinata blacks out and when he wakes up he has a bloody putrid chunk of flesh in his hand and Kuzuryuu is passed out beneath him. He’s clutching a scalpel. He thinks he just cut out his friend’s eye.
Hinata vomits over the side of Kuzuryuu’s slab onto the floor. This room already smells of sick and his mouth tastes worse
The first few weeks are mostly filled with sleep and screaming, with choked down nutritional mush and awful, awful nightmares.
Naegi spends most of his time running around babysitting them. Eventually they are able to get up and walk around without coaxing, are able to cook and clean and eat and shower without being ordered to do so. Togami and Kirigiri watch Naegi like a pair of hawks, clearly seeing monsters where Naegi see traumatised children.
Togami and Kirigiri are right. There are no children here.
They explore the research facility together, an attempt to rehabilitate their atrophied muscles. It is set up a lot like Hope’s Peak had been, only instead of a trial room in the basement there is a dark room filled with comatose murderers.
Naegi cuts Hinata’s hair. It’s messy and uneven and a thousand, a million times better than having it long. They throw the hair into the incinerator and smell it burn.
There is a greenhouse on the roof. This one has glass walls and all of the islands are visible from it, but they don’t spend much time up there. They can go outside if they want sunlight and none of them are fond of heights.
“Nanami,” Hinata says, when they’re all awake and almost human. “Who was she?”
Sonia shakes her head. The others look similarly downcast. Naegi tells them.
“Nanami Chiaki was an AI built to oversee the program,” he says. “She was based off of technology that Fuji- never mind. She was designed to help you all get along.”
She had been way more important to him than just some computer program but that can’t matter now because she’s dead, and he had killed her. He had put the foul wretched AI of Ennoshima into the simulation and that AI had killed her, and he had known that would happen and he hadn’t cared at all.
He killed her.
“What happened to her?” Souda asks. His voice is rough with disuse. “When she was executed. What happened?”
Naegi looks him straight in the eye and Hinata wonders how many times he’s had to do this, how many times he’s had to tell grieving families that the monster that was Kamakura Izuru had killed someone they loved, someone they could never have back. “She’s dead, for a lack of a better word. Her program was deleted. I’m sorry.”
Too many times. Way too many times. He’s far too good at this – Souda shakes his head and starts crying and then they all do, only Hinata can’t and instead just leaves, and throws up when he’s far enough away that they won’t hear him.
He’s killed a lot of people but he only remembers killing her.
Eventually, the three from the Future Foundation leave. Naegi looks at them with hope in his eyes and they can’t tell him that he’s wasted his efforts because they can’t make him miserable and jaded but he’s going to get into trouble for this and they all know it’s their fault.
“Good luck,” he tells them. “I’ll probably never see any of you again.”
The three leave on the helicopter that Togami and Kirigiri arrived on. Naegi must have come in on the boat with the rest of them, the boat that’s currently docked on the central island. It’s fucking huge. Hinata wonders where the crew went.
Hinata falls off a cliff that evening. He lands at the bottom on a pile of foliage so soft that he’s not even winded from the fall with no way back up.
He laughs.
They figure that waking their friends will be just like downloading a computer program onto wiped hardware. Hinata spends seventeen hours reprogramming the simulation, until he passes out from low blood sugar and they make him eat a veritable feast and sleep for the rest of the night. He drinks his own body weight in water and passes out naturally this time, and wakes up two days later to throw up.
He can’t bring back Nanami because she was never real. He spends three days looking for a way to do it, under the watchful eyes of the others. But he’s forced to admit that there’s nothing left, that there’s nothing for him to extract because she was a program and she was deleted. So all he can do is bring back his friends at the moment of their deaths and hope that they have not been corrupted, dragged back down into despair.
He finishes his computer program, and then he sends his finished work to the pods of his still-sleeping friends. Perhaps it will work flawlessly. Perhaps it will kill them all. Perhaps it will change nothing. He’s the closest thing to a god there is, but still, he prays.
Something listens.
Tanaka wakes first. He curls into Sonia and Souda and shakes, but he doesn’t remember much at all. They hear him screaming later, and the next morning they can see that none of the three have slept at all.
They adjust.
Pekoyama wakes. She had been a serial killer before she was twelve. She doesn’t sleep for a week once she remembers.
Hinata’s memories are not like the others’. Hinata can remember the things Kamakura did some of the time, and some of the time he can barely remember the last eight years at all. He doesn’t know how to perform surgery, how to cook or dance or garden or paint or build. But sometimes –
Sometimes he just does these things. Sometimes his body moves before he does and his mind will go cold and he’ll do something incredible and he’ll turn to see one of the others shaking with fear.
He tries not to.
The others begin to wake slowly. They learn the most efficient way to unhook them from their pods, the best way to bring them through the remembering process. Sometimes Souda will turn white and Hinata realises that even those who woke up first still have trapped memories, lost to the invasive machines of the Future Foundation.
Souda cries a lot. As does Owari. As do they all.
They adjust to their night terrors. They sleep with the lights on, in the daytime, outside in the grass. They sleep in fours or fives, they sleep with people awake nearby. They sleep with loud noises and strong smells, so that they don’t sleep too deeply. They sleep far too little, apart from Hinata, who is so exhausted all the time that he sleeps far too much.
Souda builds them a water filter and an air purifier and starts tinkering with the boat that Naegi left. Hinata encourages him to do things, anything, anything at all to stop him from going mad.
They read the reports that get updated to the Future Foundation’s information network. Naegi Makoto had got in trouble for trying to save them. They’d almost had him killed for it, but they had nothing to prove he’d done anything at all and so he was released without charge and an apology for the damage to his reputation.
Hinata remembers Naegi telling him about the paper trail he’d so carefully destroyed to get them here, remembers Kirigiri’s quiet confidence and Togami’s overbearing arrogance. The three of them could probably plunge the world into despair on their own, but dragging it out is proving to be a little more difficult.
Sonia had insisted that they go and rescue him. They’d all agreed, their idolisation and hatred of Naegi warring. He’d saved them. He should have killed them all.
They didn’t leave. Too many were still asleep and they weren’t in any position to go anywhere, save anyone. They had no transport and no weapons, no way of helping anyone.
It is likely that the sight of them would incite despair among the survivors too. It is likely that they would be reminded of the things they had done for despair and fall back into it, start committing monstrosities in Ennoshima’s name again. It was best if they simply faded out of existence, became irrelevant, a failed footnote in the history of the Tragedy. It was best if they became symbols for how futile despair was, how it would burn out and leave nothing but a bad taste in the mouth.
It was best if no one ever saw them again.
Hinata’s hair is growing. It is growing fast.
A month has passed since Naegi’s impromptu hack job on it and already it is past his shoulders, the slimy black falling around his neck. The others watch with concern as he ignores it, and then as he ties it back into a low ponytail and cuts it all off in one.
“Hinata,” Kuzuryuu says. “Hinata, you’re dying.”
He can’t argue with that. There is something wrong, something awfully wrong. His hair grows back faster this time, a month sees his hair to his elbows and he’s losing weight, he’s lost a lot and he was already thin from his time in the pod. Everyone else is starting to put weight back on, perhaps not as much as the Imposter would like, but enough that they’re not as risk of malnutrition.
“Why do you say that?” he mutters. The last time he managed a full day without throwing up was before the three from the Future Foundation left, but Kuzuryuu doesn’t know that.
“Because we know what dying people look like, and they look like you.”
And Hinata really can’t argue with any of that.
Mioda wakes up. The dye in her hair has long since faded and all that is left is a few white streaks where the colour used to be. The roots are showing, and for a moment Hinata thinks she’s upset about it.
“How stupid,” she mutters. “I’m sad about my hair.”
She chops the stuff off. Hinata sympathises.
She dresses in much the same clothes as the rest of them do, raided from the store on the first island. There are more colourful options, clothes that aren’t the black trousers and white shirt that they all seem to favour. But Mioda conforms, dresses like the rest of them, does as the rest of them do. Which isn’t much.
Hinata tries things.
He tries dancing. He tries kendo. He tries botany and painting and cooking. He’s very good at all of it, and sometimes he remembers the researchers at Hope’s Peak teaching him things. Archery and flower arranging and kickboxing.
Teruteru doesn’t appreciate his using the kitchen. He curses him out with his backwards accent and Hinata screams right back. It doesn’t matter to him, it doesn’t matter to him at all. He doesn’t like doing these things he just has to know, he has to see if Hope’s Peak gave him any limits at all. Teruteru yells and Hinata roars back and his hair feels like it’s lifting around him, forming an unholy halo around his head.
“Whatever,” Teruteru mutters. “I’ll use the one at the hotel.”
Hinata can smell piss. He leaves the kitchen as soon as Teruteru has gone and vomits in the hallway.
The Future Foundation are still searching for them. Reports about supposed sightings of the Remnants of Despair are common, all of them obviously inaccurate. Hinata reads them all obsessively and checks and rechecks that there are no trails leading to the islands.
Sonia and Kuzuryuu help him. Those who didn’t survive until the end of the simulation are more wary of him, their memories of Kamakura Izuru stronger than their memories of Hinata Hajime. They hadn’t known Kamakura but they had known what he’d done, and it’s not hard to reconcile Hinata and Kamakura when Hinata looks the way he does.
Sonia and Kuzuryuu help him redirect attention away from the island, focusing the Future Foundation’s efforts into other parts of the world most affected by despair. Naegi Makoto continues to advocate for the capture and rehabilitation of the Remnants of Despair, backed quietly by the survivors of the mutual killing game. It’s almost like a game, only if they screw up and draw attention to themselves the Future Foundation will send people to the supposedly abandoned research facility on Jabberwock Island and they’ll all be killed. It’s a lot like a game.
If anyone did come to the islands they wouldn’t be able to put up anything resembling a fight, because they have no weapons and only a few of them are in any shape to resist. The rest of them are too weak from the pods, too tired of killing that it would be easier to lay down and surrender.
Tsumiki wakes up last, apart from –
She doesn’t cry, doesn’t scream, isn’t horrified. She’s just tired.
It’s worse than the ones who’d screamed for weeks.
She nurses them obsessively, checks them over a thousand times, tells them they need shots and to change their diets and tests their blood and eventually burns out, burns out from not sleeping for a week. Hinata is left to nurse her back to health, because everyone else knows what she did in the game and they are terrified she’s still in despair. Saionji spits at her bed where she lies, feverish and garbled.
He’s a good nurse. Obviously. She recovers soon enough and then turns all of her attention on him, because he’s the sickest of them all and shots actually will help him, will bring the acid in his blood down so that he’s not so exhausted and thirsty and skinny.
The acid is from his failing organs. His body is eating itself from the inside out, his pathetic mortal form unable to contain so many talents, so much perfection. Tsumiki wrangles her hands and tells him she can’t save him. Hinata holds her hands still and tells her it’s not her fault.
It isn’t. It’s his. He’s the one who threw away his humanity in an attempt to become a god and all she can do is make his decay less painful.
The others tiptoe around her for a while but they give up in the end. They’re all as likely to fall into despair as each other. Tsumiki just happened to be the one who remembered first.
She still remembers most clearly, despite being the one who woke up most recently. She remembers the most out of all of them and her eyes glaze over when she talks about it, delighted and horrified awe twisting her face. She’s the only one who talks about it. The others let their memories fester into nightmares, and Tsumiki doesn’t dream.
And then they are just waiting for Komaeda to wake up. No one says it aloud but they all know it would be easiest if he didn’t and it’s possible, because he was weak enough before he went in the pod that an extended period of time in a coma could kill him. Hinata tries to remember the names of all the diseases Komaeda told him he had, but the list fades away towards the end and he gives up. It wouldn’t help them anyway, because there’s only so much they can do.
Sonia sits on the mattress beside him, facing the other way, and runs her brush through his hair. It’s long enough again that she can reach it without straining. He brushes her hair too, both of them silent, focused on their simple task.
Sonia’s hair is much, much nicer than his. Sonia’s is soft and fine and pretty and his feels slimy no matter how much he washes it, feels like it’s been coated in oil and grease.
“You don’t have to touch it,” he tells her. “I can deal with it.”
Sonia ignores him and begins talking to him in Spanish. She’s trying to get him to learn, because he can supposedly do everything she can and she misses practising her languages. Hinata wishes it wasn’t so easy for him to pick it up.
She brushes his hair and he brushes hers, and he can feel long long strands of it are coming out in her fingers but she doesn’t seem to care, just pulls them free and sets them down and carries on brushing and encouraging his Spanish.
He hates Spanish. He’d always sucked at English at school and now he can pick up an entire language in a few months.
Still, the lack of movement is good for him, because he doesn’t throw up in the hours he’s with Sonia, because he doesn’t sleep for a full day when he’s done with her.
“Kamakura Izuru,” Komaeda says, and reaches up his cold dead hand. “No, Hinata Hajime.”
Hinata takes his hand without flinching and pulls him up. “It doesn’t really matter,” he says.
They unanimously veto the idea of staying on the island. They hate this place.
The boat Naegi left is their only way off the island but it’s more than enough. Souda has already fixed it up but now his pet project has a purpose and he throws himself into it. He fixes the air purifier and the water filter into the centre of the boat, rigs up running water throughout. Hinata helps when he’s not vomiting up his internal organs.
Hinata also builds Komaeda an arm. Komaeda follows him around the islands like he had during the simulation before he’d learned who they were, before he’d learned that Hinata was the worst of them all. He seems not to care so much about that now. He seems not to care that any of them are despair.
Because for all Naegi’s kind words, they made their choices and they all chose wrong.
Komaeda has found his ugly coat that he’d been wearing in the crate they’d been shipped over here in, the same coat that he’d been wearing in the simulation, and refuses to take it off no matter how much it creeps everyone out. It’s ragged and bloodstained and reminds them of everything.
But he doesn’t take it off.
Tsumiki continues to fuss over Hinata and Hinata tries to tell her that she should just let him die the most painful death she can, because that’s what they both deserve. But she has been a nurse for so much longer than she has been despair and she won’t do that, so she sticks needles in him and pinches him when he complains.
Komaeda’s arm is… pretty… perhaps. It is sleek and shiny and elegant and far more clean than any part of anyone else on the island. Komaeda laughs and laughs when Hinata fixes it in place.
“Oh Hinata, you’re far too kind to someone like me,” he says, staring at his new arm and poking at the red, irritated flesh of the join. “Can’t you tell? I’ll be dead before you are!”
He seems delighted at the prospect. Hinata looks at Komaeda, with his sickly pale skin and colourless hair and skinny, scrawny, pathetic limbs and almost believes that.
Hinata has progressed from throwing up every meal he eats to vomiting blood, hot and congealed and far worse-smelling than the stench of half-digested food.
Souda’s boat is ready and they can leave as soon as everything is packed away and ready, as soon as they’ve transferred everything useful that the island has to offer into the storage sections of the ship because they may never land on shore again.
The boat was originally meant to house a thousand. Fifteen people will barely take up a tiny fraction of the space. No one says it but as they load everything on to the boat they are all thinking it; it may be safest for the rest of the world’s recovery and for themselves if they never see another person again. If they live and die confined to this ship, with only their slowly-returning memories for company. Hinata thinks that living with despair may be the only punishment they can give themselves.
He does love them, if he’s capable of feeling that anymore. The memories of the person Kamakura was are as strong as his own memories now, that of Hinata Hajime, super high-school level nothing, and Kamakura hadn’t felt a damn thing.
But fifteen people on a giant fucking boat is not a sustainable populace and Hinata thinks that it will be cruellest of all to the last one of them left alive. But it won’t be him and it won’t be Komaeda so why should he care about that? He’s still alive because Kamakura is a god, a monster, and Kamakura won’t let him roll over and die yet.
They don’t sleep in beds. They sleep in chairs and under tables, on the flat glass surfaces of each other’s pods and in the greenhouse on the top floor of the research facility they never moved out of. They live on a tropical island. They never get cold.
More often than not Hinata comes across Komaeda when he’s asleep and sits and watches him until he wakes up. It’s fair enough. Komaeda is pretty in a pale ugly way and Hinata still doesn’t know a thing about him. More often than not, Hinata wakes under Komaeda’s gaze, shameless in his perversion.
It doesn’t matter. Very little does. They’re gearing up to die, the two of them, and watching each other sleep barely registers as weird now.
So they keep doing it.
Saionji insists he dances with her, even though every step exhausts him and he can barely keep up with her anyway. She gives him a fan and they do the steps together, and she treads on his toes and giggles at his scowl. He knows the two of them are beautiful but when he catches sight of the two of them dancing together reflected in some glassy surface he can only see monsters.
She finds him a kimono. She wears their shades of black and white now, not the bright orange of the island or the muted purple of her later years at Hope’s Peak. None of them dress like teenagers anymore because none of them are kids now, they’re adults and hiding behind a mask of adolescence would be… well, childish. Though Souda still wears overalls and Tanaka wears his scarf.
But she wears a kimono to dance and she tries to make him wear one too, and sometimes he does. On a good day they’ll dance for an hour before Hinata drops to his knees and vomits with exhaustion, and Saionji dances backwards and away from him and finishes her steps perfectly without missing a beat.
He doesn’t begrudge her that. Maybe she still loves to dance. Maybe she never did. Hinata has never asked and he never will. He will be dead before she is comfortable enough to tell him.
They finish loading their crap into their boat and wave the island goodbye. Hinata’s last memory of the island is vomiting over the edge of the boat and feeling Kuzuryuu rub his back, before he passes out on the deck to wake up three hours later in a cabin.
He guesses this is his cabin then. They hadn’t decided beforehand. Maybe they should have done.
Living on the boat isn’t too bad. It’s big enough that they have a library and a pool and a smallish heated bath. There are screens they can watch films on and three kitchens.
Hinata spends a lot of time laying on the deck and staring at the sky. He plays games on the handheld console he’d pinched from the electronics sector of the third island and takes way more nutritional supplements than a human is supposed to, because he can’t really keep solid food down anymore.
Neither can Komaeda. Komaeda usually winds up in Hinata’s cabin, sitting in the chair by his bed, waiting for him to wake up. They don’t really talk much. There’s only so much to say. Their cabin smells of medicine and vomit and air freshener. They should have taken one with a window, or at least an air vent.
Life on the boat is a lot like life on the island, only they have no memories of the boat and no one will find them. They are safe, isolated. The world is safe, isolated from them.
This is all they can give now.
Hinata wakes up with his lungs full of blood and his body dying around him. He spits over the side of his bed and Komaeda wakes at the sound, starting in his chair.
Hinata reaches out his hand. Komaeda takes it and lies down next to him. They stare at each other wordlessly, hands clasped between them, cold metal and colder skin. This is the first time they’ve been on this bed at the same time. Any bed.
“Any last words, Hinata?” Komaeda asks. His voice is ragged.
“What’d be the point?” Hinata mutters. “No one will live to hear them.”
Komaeda laughs at that, because Komaeda’s sense of humour is as fucked up as they are. “That’s my Hinata,” he says, cheerful. “Miserable to the very end.”
Hinata doesn’t answer. Komaeda closes his eyes and breathes.