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She goes home with him because his aftershave smells like Momota’s. But he’s rough, and loud, and she won’t let herself cry, and god, she’s so drunk, so she steals his jacket and walks home before anything gets permanent. The sky above her is spinning, and the tequila in her throat threatens to tag team with the constant bile and make her throw up. Of course, all she can think about are the stars, and how hard they are to pinpoint when she’s wasted. Flailing like death around her head, she imagines that they must feel familiar to the part of her that belongs to him, at least; all whirring past her head and sickly bright light and clutching to ghosts.
The jacket doesn’t keep her warm, but she won’t take it off until she’s sitting back at her apartment - the apartment provided to her as a participant of Danganronpa 53 - and she’s sobbing into the thick denim, trying to catch onto the faint smell of aftershave and tobacco smoke, like the imagination of Momota will bring him back to her. She puts the jacket around one of the pillows in her bed, and holds it, praying that it will come to life and hold her, too.
“My bad for making you cry like that,” he said to her. And he was smiling, with blood sinking down his chin, seeping into the atoms and the milk and the marrow of all that made up Momota. When she couldn’t stop sobbing, he held her for a moment, and whispered, so faintly that even the cameras couldn’t pick it up, that he loved her, too.
Her hands were ripped raw trying to clutch onto him as he was dragged backwards, away from her and into the rocket. She ran to him, but the door slammed shut before she could beg to be executed alongside him, and all she could do was press her hand against the thick glass, watching in heartbreak as he did the same, before Saihara pulled her backwards and saved her from getting sucked into the flame that signalled the beginning of the execution. She hated him for that.
The next time she gets into a fight, it’s because there’s a man at the bar with purple hair, and that’s not allowed. Nobody is allowed to be a cheap imitation of Momota Kaito, and she squares up to him, looking for him to sink his fists into her so she can see if it feels like holding his hand. Antagonising drunk men is easy, and before she can think about what she’s doing - not that she would backtrack, anyway - he’s hitting her and she’s hitting him and there are stars in her vision that she hopes he can see, too. It’s this moment that she feels close to Momota, when she’s surrounded by pain and galaxies swimming across her battered head.
It lands her in hospital. When she wakes to a clinical, white room, she sees Saihara sitting next to her. The dark circles around his eyes tell her everything that she’s been wondering about him over the past few weeks, and he doesn’t say anything, just stares at her.
“Sorry,” she says.
“Don’t,” he responds.
“I just -”
“Yeah, me too.”
When Kiibo self-destructed and blew a hole in the Ultimate Academy, she didn’t move. Saihara was holding Yumeno’s hand and running, like they hadn’t yet accepted fate. She knew him best, knew that he’d want to die, too, but she also knew that he felt endowed to his protagonist role, and with that, he had to save the person who didn’t want to be crushed into oblivion. Harukawa, on the other hand, willed it to happen. Begged for it. And he saw her, and she saw him, and he carried on running because she’d never forgive him if he forced her to carry on living.
As the rubble broke around her, she tasted Heaven for a second. Saw Momota’s face, bright and beautiful, with his arm outstretched to pull her up to an eternity where they would be together again. In that moment, she was happy, and there was nothing else to be said. She reached out for his hand, grasping it tightly, shaking off the destruction around her and bursting through the finality, like breaching through the surface of a lake that she’d be more than happy to drown in.
But it wasn’t Momota’s hand, and she realised that too late, before she could pretend to be dead and hope for suffocation beneath the rubble. It was Saihara, sweating and nervous, confusion written across his face like a book that was never supposed to have a sequel.
Then, she had to keep on living, because Team Danganronpa wouldn’t let her do anything else.
There are men who remind her of Momota. Men with deep voices, who tell lies, but do it all with a smile that speaks of having a good heart. She tries to know them, but she falls in love with the idea of replication, and nobody can live up to what Momota was for her. There’s nothing in her life that can come close to him, no amount of men who wear his aftershave, or grow goatees, or become obsessed with Danganronpa and tell her that they’re going to be astronauts. The latter are the worst, for her, people who watched her on screen and decided that they were worthy of becoming a cheap, knockoff Momota Kaito and bagging themselves a taste of the season 53 survivor. They creep up on her in bars, with their fake dyed purple hair, their low voices, repeating words that he’d said on screen in hopes of seducing her into just another lie.
She carries a knife on her at all times. She wants to cut down the imitations.
The fact of it is, Momota - her Momota - is dead. He was tossed into the spotlight with his winning smile and optimistic speeches, and then killed by Team Danganronpa in a blaze of glory.
When Saihara calls her, she knows what he’s going to say. It’s tempting to let the phone ring, but she knows it’ll play on his anxiety, and she doesn’t want to cause him any more grief than the trauma he’s already going through.
“M-Momota’s on,” he says down the line, “a-are you w-watching?”
“No.”
“Y-You should.”
“Momota’s dead, Saihara.”
“M-Maybe y-your Momota, but h-he’s still the s-same person. M-Maybe h-he can c-change?”
“He’s dead. You need to accept that.”
Still, she turns on the television once she’s hung up the phone. He’s there, wearing a perfectly tailored suit, with both of his arms in the sleeves. Flashing smiles for the cameras, living up his Danganronpa fame, answering all of the intrusive questions from the audience.
One of the reporters speaks into a microphone. “Do you wish you’d retained your in-game personality like everyone else?”
“Nah,” he laughs, “that guy was bullshit! All that fake optimism and playing the hero. I’m glad I got through the simulation and came out the other side still myself.”
“And what about the relationships you made in there? Saihara and Harukawa - do you talk to them?”
“‘Course I don’t. I mean, it’d be nice to catch up, but that’s all I got, man. They were friends with a guy who doesn’t exist, ya know?”
“So it’s safe to say that Danganronpa’s resident ladies man isn’t still hung up on his in-game girlfriend?”
“Girlfriend? You mean Haruma - Harukawa? I haven’t talked to her since the whole thing blew up. We just ain’t the same people anymore, so there’s no point.”
She throws the remote at the television and cracks the screen. Long gone are the days where she could shoot dead the DJ of this party.