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It’s the kind of situation that would make your head hurt and your heart skip beats, if you thought about it too much.
“So don’t think!!” Junko would respond, chirping sweet insults at the drop of a hat. “Jeez Louise, lady, you are chock full of shit ideas.”
Corpses can’t talk.
It was so funny to think how desensitized she had become. Things change, obviously—you cast off your original skin cells one by one, little pieces of you shucking themselves off to go be DNA somewhere else. Every seven years you are born into a new body that is, fundamentally, you—but it isn’t. It isn’t the you that you were seven years ago, or three years ago, or even the day before. Different cells. Epidermis, always adapting, always stretching and changing over people’s new forms.
It was not the first corpse she had seen. Autopsies hadn’t ever been her ‘thing’, since she was a nurse and not anything but, but things change. Desires and motives. Occupations. Ledgers. Jaywalking leads to arson leads to mass murders, et cetera, et cetera. Wasn’t even the worse corpse she had seen. By far, not a really terrible way to go.
Crushing, despite the lead-up to it, was relatively quick. The block was heavy enough to permanently knock her out of commission almost instantaneously. That’s not counting the million baseball bruises, or the third-degree burns, or the brain damage suffered from whatever high speeds she had willingly put herself through, all in the good goddamn name of despair. And, in a way, the despair of being killed instantly had to have dawned on her in some retrospect; to think it’s all going to be this long-drawn out torture process and then everything comes to abrupt curtains.
She had even waved, too, shit-eating grin plastered cheek-to-cheek, rocking back and forth, directly facing the camera.
Mikan reaches down, dragging one finger through the puddle of blood that was long finished pooling. It had started to dry, so the substance was thick and cold but still liquid-y, yielding easily to the movements. One object glints oddly, a fragment escaped entire demise, and she reaches out and takes it, thumbing it into the palm of her hand. It is one extra long nail, chipped off jagged with a hellish blunt force. Almost without thinking, she places it over her middle finger nail and marvels at just how wrong and stupid it looks on her own hand.
“Awweeee, they look cute!” Junko had said, cackled, as she held Mikan’s passive hand up to the light and shown off her own work. “Too bad you bite ‘em off so much, or else I could do this more often! Red, just like mine!” And she laid her hand next to Mikan’s, as if compare, waggling her fingers giddily. “Lucky yours are short. You don’t have to just cut two and leave the rest long.” She winked at the end of this quip, bright blue eyes devilishly twinkling, the implication obvious, and Mikan had bloomed red. And they had kissed, red nails and red cheeks and red polish streaking the floor and the carpet. She wished in that moment that they could paint each other’s nails more often. That she didn’t bite them as much as she did.
Long fingernails were just ill-suited for her profession. A useless vanity, to have and to hold. And the paint chipped too quickly to ever really leave any aesthetic marks. Her hands were tools and weapons, and nothing but.
She lets the nail drop back into the blood. The rest of them will come, her comrades in arms—they saw her death on TV, but nothing will quite live up to the despair of seeing her in a hundred million little goopy pieces. That’s when they’ll start taking what they want, the fragments of her they think they are owed, or just don’t care enough to NOT have one piece of the Great Junko Enoshima on their persons. What they’ll do to her corpse. The disgusting ideas they’ve all got swirling around, ready to be relieved by whatever their goddess has left to give them. What they’ll do to the body that once breathed and talked and lived and harmed and ruled had held Mikan in thin, warm arms, breath like cotton candy and blood—
—and she feels tears, hot and warm, leaking their way down her face.
Stupid. What a stupid thing to cry over. Mikan’s free hand reaches up and quickly palms at the wetness, almost embarrassed. In retrospect, its not stupid—the despair that they thrive in asks for no specific kinds, and will take whatever rot and ruin it can get it’s hands on. But it still feels like the wrong kind. The kind her lover would berate her for feeling, forefingers poking and pinching Mikan’s arms and cheeks until she found a quip that made her laugh or a pain that made her forget. Something quick, to take her mind off of it, and to channel those feelings into something more productive.
It’s not even a despair rooted in despair. It’s a despair rooted in anger, an unfamiliar source of the undiluted feeling, hot and bubbly in the back of her throat. It’s a jealousy.
The survivors; who knew where they were now? Out amongst whatever was left, picking their way through rubble and debris. But they got her, in her last resplendent moments, gloating and glorious in her utter lack of empathy for them. Her cruelty that knew no bounds, snuffed out in the same school that it had grown in. They had watched (or maybe hadn’t, she had seen the way that swimmer would cover her eyes and barely peek through her fingers if it was especially unpleasant) her very last breaths taken on this Earth, after so stubbornly casting her aside, and they had stood there for a few moments, and they had left.
They hadn’t taken the time to savor the last, final, unyielding image of herself crushed under massive metal that would undoubtedly be pasted to their minds for the rest of their lives. They hadn’t taken the moments to thank her for everything she had put them through, and everything they had done. They had stomped on her final minute and decided, no, they were too good for despair. As if they had never felt it so ardently—as if the previous weeks under her lock and key hadn’t happened in the first fucking place. As if all their insipid little friends were still alive and well. They got those last moments.
Mikan had gotten a stifled scream, fingers scrabbling at a fuzzy screen on a tiny television, and a pit in the root of her stomach as she rushed to the scene of the crime. The first to arrive. They had gotten her last moments. They had won, had bested her at her own game. They had taken everything.
Her job had been to stock the nurse’s office, and Junko had come in a few times to check on how she was doing, but had let her hand linger on Mikan’s shoulder, tapping a little rhythm as she had sorted out various bandages (“Y’know, in case they’re fucking…stupid or something, and miss a killing blow.”) until the nurse had looked up at her, and Junko kind of tugged her up off of her knees and onto her feet.
“Babe.” And her playful tone was serious, as was wont to do without warning, “I’m gonna be in here for a while, you know? Like, making sure these bastards kill each other and whatnot. Maybe getting some better friends out of it! But we’re not gonna see each other for a little bit.” She pouted, then, pushing out her bottom lip, so there and so kissable.
“W-What do y-you suggest…?” Mikan had stuttered, very aware of what Junko was proposing, but before she had been able to get any other part of her query out Junko had pushed her up against a wall, fingers winding into her unruly hair and kissing her hard and fiercely, teeth clattering and lips pulling and tugging, tongue wandering madly in her mouth, and they had tested out the infirmary bed together. Just to ‘make sure’ everything was ‘in order’.
She had heard her voice then, afterwards, obviously, through walkie-talkie dictated outside orders, or suggestions at what they could fix, or incessant ‘it’s fine! It was going to happen’s at their voiced opinions of Mukuro’s demise. But they hadn’t talked again face-to-face. Or even said a proper goodbye other than Junko shrugging her shirt over her head and pipping out a “Thanks, babe! I gotta check the library next, see you!”
The selfish kind of despair was always good, but it was important to note that she was thinking of it the wrong way. There was nothing to be so pissed about. Junko had never belonged to her. Junko was everybody’s who needed her—the shining cyanide pill they needed to pop in order to book it out of their mundane lives. Something to escape. The lever to move the world. And Junko hadn’t been hers, ever. She had been Junko’s. But Junko hadn’t been hers. Not even for one second.
Junko was everybody’s. And here she was, in little bite-sized souvenir pieces, so everyone can take part of her home.
Mikan realizes that the nail is still in her palm. Red nails. Red blood. Red streaks on the floor. She curls her fist and places it in the pocket of her coat. Of course, she’ll take more. She’ll take what she wants once the metal is gone, just as the rest of the Despairs will do. Just like everyone has already, with her philosophy and her impact. Might as well sacrifice flesh and blood and bone to the cause as well; every bit of her was made for despair, of despair.
She breathes a silent, “thanks, babe,” before she straps on a procedure mask and gets to work.