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“Hey.” Maki Harukawa sat down on the floor, at the other side of the kotatsu, not bothering to get under the futon.
Himiko looked up from her book. It was Shuichi’s book, before, but it was a fantasy novel and he said she would like it better than he did… so now it was her book. “Nyeh… hi, Maki.”
“No ‘Maki Roll’?”
“I’m not allowed to call you that, right?” Himiko asked tiredly. She picked a playing card and slipped it into the pages for a bookmark. It was the three of hearts; she was sentimental lately. Whether it stood for Angie and Tenko or for her fellow survivors, she couldn’t decide, but everything good seemed to come in threes, and hearts were the one thing each of them had—“them” meaning the fictional characters created for the final season of Danganronpa. Himiko rubbed her eyes and tried to sit up straight. She could never completely erase the flaw Team Danganronpa built into her… but she could try to be better. Real people didn’t act like that. Not to the extent she used to do.
“No, but it’s weird for you to respect my wishes. What’s wrong?”
Himiko blinked. ‘What’s wrong’? Maki asked me that, huh…? “Nothing, Maki Roll!” Himiko perked up. “Mmmm… pick a card, okay?”
“Seriously? Card tricks again?” Maki’s lips turned up a little! Himiko smiled in turn.
“Just do it!”
…
…
…
“You got me again,” Maki commented flatly. “Can we stop now?” Himiko shook her head and readied another trick. Now that she had started, she decided, she had to practice every trick she knew at least once.
…Or at least a certain number of them. The sum of the numbers Maki had picked was three plus four plus two… so nine. “Nyeeeeh, I have six more.”
...
...
...
“…Good job,” Maki said. “How many is that now?”
“That’s the last one!” Himiko answered with a smile. “I feel better now… Thanks.” Maki nodded.
The shorter girl shifted and wrapped her arms around her chest. Even with the futon, winter was hard on her. She wanted to earn enough money to get a better apartment. They had given their reward money away. It was a statement. Shuichi had done it, so the other two followed suit. “Okay,” she said, “I’ve decided. I won’t steal Kaito’s nickname for you. He’s special, right?” Maki averted her gaze.
Then something unexpected happened, and Himiko squinted in confusion at the space where Maki was a moment ago before she was pulled up by a soft, slender hand in hers. “You're two different people,” Maki explained calmly. Without another word, she led Himiko to the bedroom the girls shared. (Shuichi had his own, smaller room, because he said he felt uneasy about sleeping in the same one. Maki and Himiko’s beds were stationed on opposite sides of the room from each other. They weren’t particularly comfortable, but they weren’t terrible, either.)
None of them spoke to or of their families anymore. Himiko’s parents had reached out to her, but they were nothing like the single mom or her mentor from the false past she had been given, and they both liked Danganronpa. Even if the world had been changed… sort of… by what the three had done—what Shuichi and Maki had done, thought Himiko, for she had always been a follower and nothing more in the game no matter what her two friends said—there were still plenty who resisted the change. Things didn’t shift magically like that; Himiko herself was an example.
Besides, Shuichi and Maki had no one, and so they decided to share a home; Maki’s talent was useless in the real world. There was no need for assassins, so no real organizations like Maki’s existed in the first place. And if there were, Maki had said once, she wouldn’t join them. Himiko selfishly didn’t want her best friends to be closer to each other than to her, and she wanted to help. Besides, it meant they could all attend the same school, and spend time together, and share the burdens of cooking and cleaning and everything else. Himiko wasn’t used to taking care of herself. Maki helped her a lot, with all the things Shuichi couldn’t, because he was a boy and he didn’t want to be inappropriate and he didn’t know how to do things like take care of long hair—Himiko was growing hers out, because she wanted to change in every way she could, and because she wanted to be a little more like Tenko.
Maki said Himiko helped her learn to be normal and have fun, and Shuichi said that it was because she was more light-hearted than either of them. Himiko was an entertainer by nature. Even if Tenko had died for her, and even if her family was fake, and even if her mentor never existed, this one part of her stayed true. At the same time, because of this, Himiko had come to realize something: the other two looked out for her.
They were always looking out for her, and that was why she couldn’t trust them when they said she was good or fun or important. It was nice to hear, but it wasn’t enough.
Maki sat on Himiko’s bed and carefully, tenderly pulled her into a very awkward Maki-style embrace. Himiko shivered and buried her head in the other girl’s clothes. Maki was still in her school uniform, which was gray and bland and reminiscent of Kaede’s from the audition tapes they had seen, although not the same.
“You need warmer clothes,” Maki muttered.
“I miss Tenko,” Himiko answered groggily.
The magician realized what she had said a second later and widened her eyes in horror, covering her mouth with her hand in what must have looked like the most clichéd gesture straight out of a TV show, but Maki nodded silently. In her arms, Himiko relaxed a little more and huddled closer. Even if Maki acted stoic and cold, she was warm on the inside. Himiko wanted to say that, for she thought it quite poetic, but instead she explained what she had been thinking about when Maki came home, when she had been trying to read Shuichi’s fantasy book and her eyes had passed absently over the words.
“I miss Tenko, but she only liked me because she was built that way. That’s why she was all obsessed and stuff. I didn’t like it back then, but now that she’s gone, and my mommy—my mom is gone, there’s nobody that needs me. Right? I mean… honestly. Really, truly needs me,” she rambled, her voice fading into a murmur at the end. She buried her face in Maki’s chest and felt the other girl’s breath get louder. Oh. That was a sigh.
“Look,” Maki said, “‘need’ isn’t important. I wouldn’t tell you that you helped me if it weren’t true. You should know that by now, but I suppose you never will, huh?”
“It’s hard.”
Maki’s grip tightened, and Himiko looked up.
The other girl was blushing.
Maki continued, “I’ll never ‘need’ anyone, but you’re important to me, and I would be...” She stopped, and so did her breath. Himiko blinked. Maki’s sharp gaze was directed at the window that looked out on the boring, busy street, but her arms were still firmly around Himiko. “I would be a lot worse off if you weren’t here. So would Shuichi, but probably… not in the same way.”
The girl lifted one hand and messed absently with a strand of her long, dark hair. “You aren’t Kaito. Our actions from now on are our own. I can’t be Tenko, either, and I wouldn’t want to be.”
Himiko felt her heart lift at those words. She nodded. “I wouldn’t want you to be, either.”