Archive of Our Own

“Thinking of jumping?”

It’s an earnest question delivered into the night on the pier. Admittedly, he didn’t expect to see someone like her around here — although, he isn’t entirely surprised.

Harukawa turns away from the pier’s edge to face him, startled. The moonlight imbues her eyes with more maleficence than he knows to exist in them.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The stars are shining,” he says, gesturing vaguely towards the sky. “If you’re going to do it, save it for an ugly night.”

She grips her forearm and looks behind her. He hasn’t persuaded her.

“That,” he utters, “or find a higher place to jump from.”

He sees her in class the next day. His prediction proved true.

“Harukawa-san, did you submit our plans for the culture festival?” one of their classmates asks as they wait for the teacher to arrive. He observes carefully from his seat a few desks away.

She smiles. It’s practiced yet stilted. He’s the only one who can see through it to its insincere core, he imagines.

“Yes, I submitted them yesterday before I left school.”

“You were here late, weren’t you? Gosh, you’re such a workaholic.”

Harukawa’s lip twitches — that minuscule tell doesn’t escape his attention either.

She’s been a loose acquaintance since childhood, their paths parallel — never truly crossing, but equal and within sight of one another. The Harukawa family lives three blocks over and one block down from the Hoshi household.

Two of their children — Maki and Ryouma, respectively — went to the same preschool, the same elementary school, the same junior high school, and now the same high school proper. Never interacting, never in the same circles, but joined by a familiar tiredness plaguing their childhoods.

His home was never lacking in storge: there was his mother, a short and stocky woman from pastoral Austria; his father, a short and stocky man from the rice fields of Hokkaido; and his two brothers, both younger. Dinner was fresh on the table every night at seven, and every evening without fail his father cut up seasonal fruit and brought a bowl to each of their rooms. His mother kissed them all good night before she left for work and the warmth kept him asleep until the next morning.

He considers it all in the past tense, yet these traditions continue today — more unremarkable in the present than in history, where all acts seem either hallowed or harrowing, with little in between.

If the Hoshi house is the subtropic, then the Harukawa house is the tundra. He passed their unassuming residence during his weekly pilgrimage to the convenience store around the bend during his last year of junior high. He never heard yelling, nor laughing, nor crying, nor much of anything at all. Quiet. Leise, leise.

The blanket of unconditional love only staved his fate off for so long. The threat of the conditional lured hers into the open.

Hoshi finds her again and again after that serendipitous night on the pier. She overlooks the bridge when no one is watching, rakes her nails over her arm and under her sleeve on the train when she thinks everyone is sufficiently distracted (and they are). He watched her open her bag at the beginning of the year, and nestled inside was a pristine can of rat poison.

He toys with the idea, flirts with it — no strings attached. She is in a much more committed relationship.

Yet, when she spots him spotting her, the tension releases and she recedes back into her persona far more palatable for the masses.

He’s developed a ritual. When he gets home, he exchanges a few words with his mother before scaling the stairs up to his room. He climbs onto his bed and stares at his bookcase of unread books. Then he sleeps for thirty minutes — sometimes more, rarely less. Then he stares at his bookcase of unread books. His mother calls him down for dinner. He goes down and eats. He comes back upstairs and removes his homework from his backpack. Considers it, inspects it; never does it, not fully. His father knocks on his door and brings him fruit. He cradles a slice between his teeth and paces around his room. He watches an episode of anime before discarding the rest of the fruit. He goes downstairs after his mother has left for work and his father and brothers have gone to bed. Takes a walk spanning a few blocks before going back home, showering, brushing his teeth, and falling asleep.

And so it goes, so it goes.

He has cultivated a habit of subtly passing her house every night for a scant few minutes, if only because he has expected her efforts to reach a fever pitch. His gut sinks when he sees her slumped over on the sidewalk tonight, ribboned in red — he didn’t want to be right.

The wounds are fresh. She’s bleeding, but not perilously so. There won’t be any need to take her to a hospital, at least not right away. She wouldn’t go regardless.

Hoshi does not feel especially compelled to act quickly. Instead, he strides over to her place on the sidewalk, clutching his jacket closer in light of the breeze, and kneels down next to her crumpled form.

“Harukawa. Are you awake?”

She doesn’t open her eyes, but makes a vague noise indicating that she is conscious.

“Good.”

He takes her shoulder in one hand and the back of her torso in the other and hoists her up into his lap. A part of him knew this would happen someday and kismet would have him find her. Another part of him internalized his mother’s tendency to mobilize swiftly and to never go unprepared on the streets. Thus, he reaches into his bag and produces a first aid kit and extra gauze.

Upon inspecting her wounds, he can see that she oscillated between finality and continuity — between “farewell” and “see you in a bit.”

Hoshi begins disinfecting the various cuts on her calves and wrists — she hisses and jerks, yet manages to keep her eyes closed — and gingerly wipes the remainder of seeping blood from them. When he tears off the gauze and prepares the tape to dress her wounds, he can see tears forming at the corners of her eyes. He makes quick work of her wounds; she weeps softly, increasing in volume and vitality with every passing minute.

“Now, now,” he murmurs, dressing the last of her wounds. “You’ve cried enough, haven’t you? There can’t be anything left.”

She’s silent as he completes his ministrations, although he can tell that there is a flood beating against the dam of her mouth. He’s content with that and he withdraws, her limbs still trembling. She takes her time accepting the fact that she is still alive.

“Wh-Where did you learn to do that?” she rasps, speaking her first words of the evening.

“Mom’s a nurse. Always watched her do her work when my brothers got themselves in trouble. Enough about that. Let’s go get you something to drink.”

Harukawa takes her time extracting herself from his lap and rising to her feet. He has all the time in the world — the night’s expanse has just begun. He gets up and fishes in his pocket, finding a few hundred-yen coins.

“There’s a vending machine in the alleyway four blocks down,” she says. She’s hunched over slightly with her palms on her knees, careful to arch the wrist away to avoid putting pressure on the lesions.

“Good. Here.” He proffers two coins, and she extends a hand to accept.

They walk in silence to the vending machine, where he purchases a can of cold coffee and she a bottle of water. They both sit against the wall and watch as a tabby cat — hardly older than a kitten — watches them with green saucer eyes.

“Here, here,” Hoshi calls, snapping his fingers. The cat hesitates, but soon scurries over and purrs as he runs his fingers through its fur. Harukawa grazes her own hand against the cat’s tail. He imagines that anyone looking at the two of them would guess that they’re normal kids doing normal kid things — and, for the moment, he supposes they might be right.

Hoshi acquiesces petting privileges to Harukawa and produces a small notepad and pen from the front pocket of his bag. He begins writing.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Wait.”

After a few moments, he tears the page away and hands it to her.

“Here. Just in case they ask.”

Hoshi hands her the slip of paper, which she promptly scans and reads aloud, angling it so that the vending machine light illuminates his handwriting.

“‘Harukawa-san, please forgive me for your daughter’s injuries. My cat, Tanpopo-senpai,’” (she chuckles), “‘isn’t used to strangers and simply couldn’t control himself. We bought some first aid supplies at the konbini up the street.’”

Harukawa laughs despite herself, eliciting a smile from him. She sniffs and holds onto the note like it’s her only tether to the world beneath their feet.

“Thank you, Hoshi-kun.”

“Of course.”

“I should go home.”

“So should I.”

They both rise to their feet and emerge from the alleyway. Tanpopo-senpai has already leapt away. He gazes up at her.

“Go to the hospital when you can. You need stitches on your leg.”

She’s silent at that, but speaks selectively.

“Thank you.”

He raises an eyebrow. “I hope you know what you’re really saying when you thank me.”

There’s a glimmer of understanding in her crimson eyes, but again — she remains silent.

“Bye,” she says eventually.

“Yeah. See you later.”

He lingers as she turns on her heel and heads back toward her house.

They aren’t going to ask.

Ryouma Hoshi has never seen an episode of DanganRonpa and doesn’t especially care about the show’s entertainment value. He fills out an application one day after dinner (this is a terrible way of repaying his parents, he considers) in a desperate bid for an unnameable and unattainable something, a je ne sais quoi to jolt him.

Even in this digital age, the application team prefers snail mail. It’s likely to deter any impulse applications — a fact he considers as he drops the envelope in the mailbox around 1 AM that night.

He drags his feet back up the stairs, careful not to rouse his sleeping family, and throws himself on his bed.

As Hoshi exits the school for the day, he can feel Harukawa following him, albeit in a noncommittal way. Surprising, given that he thought she’d stay behind to help prepare for the culture fest.

“Hoshi-kun,” she calls out when they reach the stony bridge that passes over the creek separating campus from the rest of town.

“Yeah?”

He turns around and she’s awkwardly making her way towards him, her gait uncertain. It’s been a week and a half since their last encounter, and she’s downgraded her gauze in favor of regular bandages.

“I meant to ask you something a while ago.”

He nods, waiting for her to proceed.

“That night — why were you there?”

When he looks up into the red plains of Harukawa’s eyes, he sees the forgotten promise of abandoned hobbies, the fear of a dark future and the even greater fear of a bright one, and the wide-eyed melancholy one carries when they live in a minefield.

He shakes his head. “I like to take walks at night and you live close by.”

“But still...”

“What’s your real question?”

She blushes, eyes trailing off to stare at the bare trees at the foot of the bridge. They’re only a month and a half into autumn, yet the leaves are already gone.

“I don’t understand. Why did you do it?” she asks, wringing her hands.

He sighs and turns the unlit cigarette that he pilfered from his father over between his fingers. He looks everywhere but her face.

“Because it’s what anyone would do. Isn’t hard to understand.”

“But I — ”

“Trying to argue against it is pointless. It’s as natural as anything else.”

“That can’t be the only reason,” she implores with mounting desperation in her voice. She’s picking at her hair, manually splitting the ends in a flurry of anxiety.

This time he does manage to look her in the eye.

“I’m not sure what answer you’re looking for. I probably won’t give it to you. What I said was the biggest reason.”

She looks down at him and searches his eyes for the other unspoken reasons. He can see her relinquish her efforts and turns his back when she accepts the outcome.

“Live, Harukawa,” he urges quietly. “Leave this town and live.”

He can’t see her, but he pictures a steely resolve in her eyes, her shoulders straight — she won’t run away, and that’s the image he prefers to frame in his mind amid the tumult and cowardice.

“Okay,” she says. Her voice trembles, breathless and desperate. “Okay.”

Ryouma Hoshi boards a train after school.

(Staying behind to help with the culture fest. I’ll be home before dinner. He fires off the message to both his mother and his father before replacing his phone in his pocket.)

He finally arrives at the television station and saunters into the waiting room. One other person is with him — a lanky girl with long red hair and several piercings adorning her face. They call her in first and she emerges from the interview room thirty minutes later, crestfallen.

He shifts around in his seat, trying to get comfortable, but he cannot.

After a few minutes, a woman with long, luxuriant hair and thick glasses emerges from the door opposite his side of the room.

“Ryouma Hoshi?”

“That’s me,” he announces as he leaps off the chair and shuffles over to her. She looks down at him, visibly surprised. He’s accustomed to that reaction, and it only serves to bring a smirk to his lips — if involuntary.

She escorts him back into the audition room — strangely large and open, he notes. He wonders if it’s for participants to showcase their existing talents. She takes a seat behind the desk towards the center of the room and he presumes to sit in the chair in front of it.

“It’s nice to meet you, Hoshi-san. I’m just going to ask you some questions to get to know you better.”

“Understood.”

His eyes flicker up to the camera above the desk.

“What was your primary motivation for auditioning for DanganRonpa, Hoshi-san?”

“It’s simple. I want to die,” he tells the woman, averting his gaze and straightening his jacket while doing so.

The woman stops writing and scrutinizes him from behind her glasses. It’s a curious gaze, devoid of suspicion, but it sets him on edge nonetheless.

“That isn’t the first time we’ve heard something like that, Hoshi-san. But are you sure that’s why you’re here?”

“Yes.” The conviction in his voice surprises him; conviction is something he’s never had in appreciable amounts.

The woman slowly begins writing again, her pace agonizing — as though she’s waiting for him to make an addendum or add a caveat. Perhaps she already knows him better than he knows himself, because he finds himself sifting through the right words to say next.

“I have a friend, and she’s sad.”

The woman tilts her head to the side. “Sounds like you have something in common.”

“I suppose we do, yeah.”

“Well...what about your friend, Hoshi-san?” the woman entreats softly.

Now that the words have come out of his mouth, he isn’t quite sure how to proceed. He chuckles and folds his arms over his chest.

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead, to be honest with you. But — if I had to say — if this world can make my friend as sad as she is, then it’s not one that I want to stay in for very long.”

“Why is that?”

He blinks slowly — once, twice, three times — and the image of her bleeding on the sidewalk swims behind his eyes.

“It’s exhausting.”

Despite his own newfound relationship with true fatalism, Harukawa appears to have ceased her contemplations and all the trappings that accompany them. She throws herself fully into culture festival preparations and he no longer sees her lurking around the perimeter of her house after dark like a ghost with a heartbeat.

When Hoshi gets the package in the mail, he almost feels wistful. Almost.

The night before he’s due to check in at the facility where the cast’s memories will be purged, Hoshi finds her sitting on the park bench near their houses. He overheard her telling a friend that she’s made a habit of coming here at night to clear her mind.

She is startled when she spots him, but it’s a customary reaction.

“Oh, hi,” she greets, playing with a pigtail.

“Mind if I sit?” He gestures to the spot next to her. She nods and he takes a seat.

They’re quiet for some time. He half-expects her to eventually question why he’s there or if he was just feeling lonely tonight.

“It’s such a pretty night,” she remarks with wonder as her eyes scan the stars.

“...It is. It really is.”

And it is a beautiful night, he thinks, a beautiful night where the chill doesn’t quite reach their bones and the moon glows, and his mother is almost done cooking dinner and his father is chopping apples while his brothers shun their homework. A beautiful night where Harukawa is here and the tempest in his brain is calm.

The moonlight shines against her long, glossy hair, and he recalls the moonlit waters on the pier that night.

He feels Harukawa looking at him and she is smiling when he turns his head. He can’t stop the nervous laughter from escaping his lips, and she quickly grows sheepish.

“Don’t look embarrassed. No reason,” he assures.

She nods vigorously, and the smile returns — this time accompanied by tears. He preemptively pats and rubs her shoulder in anticipation of the sobs that inevitably follow. He hears a strangled brand of catharsis and joy. A small part of him, suppressed to the depths of his id, wants to cry with her. When she’s drank her fill, she wipes her eyes and looks to him once again, voice endearingly nasal.

“Well, it’s dark, and we have a long day tomorrow. I’m going to go home.”

“All right. I’ll stick around for a bit.”

“Good night, Hoshi-kun. I’ll see you at the culture festival tomorrow,” she bids with a weak but sincere smile.

“I’ll see you then.” The lie sluices through his throat like smooth alcohol — the bite doesn’t come until later.

She gets up and turns her back towards him as she begins the short walk home. Errant strands of hair flutter in the incipient autumn breeze. He leans against the alleyway until he hears the creak of a door in the distance. Satisfied, he starts his own trek back to his house a few blocks away.

When he reaches his doorstep, he glances up at the sky. The stars are bright and they spurn him for what he’s done — to himself, to everyone.

He turns the doorknob.

Good night, Harukawa.