Chapter Text
There's nothing here except for Monika and the food and water the school provides and three, fucking, robots, and a whole mess of tools and machinery and parts that she only found after prying apart the doors to the basement.
She feels kind of bad the first time she jostles "Sayori" too hard and she fizzles and stutters, but does it fucking matter? Does it really matter? She pushes "Natsuki" into a storage closet and locks it all day and comes back with a socket wrench and a cable and a beaten-up laptop and it's like it never fucking happened.
It's the end of "club" and she doesn't have anywhere to go outside this fucking ghost town of a school campus, and she trips "Yuri" while she's walking "home" and spends the whole night disassembling and reassembling her arm, cleaning the machinery just for something to do and as long as she hits the right buttons, nothing ever even fucking happened.
Sometimes everyone talks about things that never happened. Monika knows that they never happened, because she never leaves this godforsaken school because there's nowhere else to go and there was no way in hell that a school festival happened with a party of one and three lightning-infused rocks. Everyone says they can remember Monika there with them and everyone says the same story, not exactly, just enough difference so that it's reasonably three friend's separate accounts of an activity they did together, it's not real it never happened and Monika knows so much better than these buckets of scrap metal that memory can be altered and a scraping chill runs down her spine, as she stares into space sitting at the head of the table and vaguely, somewhere in her mind, remembers a banner that doesn't exist.
Monika scratches at the skin of her own arms and has deep, gouging, unshakeable doubts.
Monika shoves vending machine snacks and a beat-up water bottle into her backpack one day and follows "Sayori" outside because what the hell else is there to do? She's bored out of her mind and there's nothing better to do and she's never been lonely in her whole life (which might never have been anywhere else than this empty hell) so it has nothing to do with the gnawing cavern in her chest when "Sayori" turns to her and clicks and whirs and beams and reaches for her hand.
She is fake. She is a fake human being, she is gears and wires and buttons and lights twisted into a metal skeleton and coated in soft dyed plastics. She is fucking fake because she's too fucking hot, and she makes so many noises that people don't make, and she stumbles and fidgets and fizzles and pops and everything she says sounds canned like a pull-string doll even when there's no fucking way her scripted whatever could have called for Monika following her (Monika digging under her bed and behind her mirror and unscrewing the lights looking for whatever the fuck could have altered it rewritten it changed it there has to be something else here) and Sayori is too fucking overheated there is too much warmth in her casual leaning humming embrace to be real and alive. Her breath is too hot. Monika's breath isn't that hot and she's alive she's real she's a human she's alive she's real she's a human she's alive she knows she's alive because of the way red coated her arm when she dug at her skin because it didn't look right she knows she's alive because it was red like fucking oil she's real she's real she's real,
Monika keeps following Sayori home even though all she does is rip up the place and have a slight meltdown over the nonexistence of it all (which Sayori takes notice of every time and holds her soothingly and says nice things that Monika just knows are copy-pasted in her head from some stupid handbook somewhere) because ever since she gave in to her curiosity about it the school feels even emptier and colder.
She doesn't like Sayori because she's a fake hunk of stupid metal with a cute face that someone sculpted just to fucking torment her, but her whole body shudders and aches on the night where she tries futilely to sleep in the clubroom again and she can hear Sayori whirring and humming music too tonally perfect to be real everywhere, and by the time she snaps out of her exhausted daze she's a block from Sayori's house and it would be a waste to walk all the way back to the school. She says, out loud, to Sayori's face and speakers and language parsers (she found those blueprint scraps she knows), and it would be a huge waste of food and energy she needs to be fucking alive because she's alive her heart is beating i'm alive im real im fucking hungry, she whimpers, face buried deep in a hot whirring chest and rocking slowly, she's doing this because there's nothing else.
She's doing this because there's no one else.
She's doing this because
keeping all your feelings inside makes your brain sick, Monika!
She's doing this because
sometimes if we cry, it makes it easier for the sunshine to come out tomorrow, Monika!
She's doing this because Sayori isn't real, not even a little, but Monika aches in her stomach and in her bones and in her head and she feels sick and pitiful but Sayori is warm, and she feels like an abandoned baby left with a terry-cloth stuffed thing instead of a mother and she thinks she understands why, rocking into Sayori's awful robot wire metal soft silicone warm lovely comforting humming torso, those little animals chose a cozy death.