Archive of Our Own

Akamatsu Kaede doesn’t smile.

The look on her face is foreign in its coldness — jarringly so, for not even a lick of delight that would have once graced her pretty features is present. Not one hint of her sweet nature remains. She is a walking corpse without the chokehold on her neck. Her heart will beat and her lungs will breathe, but it is not enough.

To Shirogane, she has long died.

Akamatsu’s one step out the door, or maybe it’s two, or three or four, because she’s a pianist that works in a common time tempo (one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, tap, tap, tap, tap) before she hesitates.

Her eyes are glassy but there are no tears. She opens her mouth only to ask a final question.

“Are you going to be alright?” She asks.

It’s the kindness that should be there. The empathetic Akamatsu, the pianist that would always look out for her friends.

It’s still not good enough, though.

Shirogane does not feel a thing.

When Akamatsu Kaede ceases being Akamatsu Kaede, she no longer means anything at all.

That’s what she tells herself when she lets her go.

No. 589.

589 turns into Akamatsu Kaede over the span of three days.

She’s witty, proactive, yet painfully nihilistic, so Shirogane fixes her quick as she can. It takes no time at all, and she becomes Akamatsu Kaede without a fault. Simple. Perfect.

Akamatsu Kaede is a jovial girl in sweet love and adoration with the art of piano playing.

She is humble but exudes the charm of confidence – especially motivated to spark it in the eyes of others – and she is gorgeous and bright and inspiring. Her voice is commanding and bold for a girl of soft colors, and at her core lies an unmatched heart of gold.

Typical of a pianist that’s been breathing music since a child, Akamatsu likes piano keys, likes the ridges and edges of them, likes the stark black-and-white. Her fingers rest over them like they were made for it.

589 smiled like she wanted to watch the world go up in flames.

Akamatsu smiles like she’s going to save the world even if it kills her.

Shirogane is only friends with one of them.

Gokuhara Gonta has hands that engulf the device he holds completely. Spectacularly.

Big, calloused, wild hands that never touched the forest earth. Never upturned the dirt to hold the most disgusting creatures with the tenderness of a friend. He isn’t kindness shining anymore, nor a warm, bright comfort to confide in. Not anymore.

He doesn’t show his teeth when he speaks, only talks in mumbles to her – as if he can’t ever find the right words, or remember the right amount of friendly for him to bring Gokuhara back to life again.

“They’re coming to pick Gonta up soon,” he mentions to her quietly, as if forcing a politeness that only exists because he doesn’t know how to be anything but polite to her.

As if he doesn’t know where they stand, even now.

“I see.” Shirogane says.

He does not have the energy or the brightness of Gokuhara Gonta. Gokuhara was impaled and that cost him his heart and soul, leaving only his body behind. She has no use for a hulking body with no heart.

Shirogane is glad that he’s leaving, she thinks.

She’ll miss him forever and a day but she’s glad he’s leaving, she thinks.

No. 376.

376 is Gokuhara Gonta as soon as Shirogane sees him.

She does not know who he was before and that does not matter to her at all.

It’s one of the hardest roles to fill and she bites her lip raw but he finds her and her smile blooms, sweet as nectar for the bees he would come to love – even when they ripped his last breath from his screaming chest.

Her lovely entomologist. Her wolfish butterfly boy.

See, Shirogane wanted a brutish-looking darling for the longest time, and most applicants just don’t fit her bill, but she meets Gokuhara Gonta and he’s everything she could have possibly dreamed of.

She polishes his edges, straightens his tie, and injects him with impossible generosity. Unfathomable kindness. Slips him the tiniest venom of self-sacrificial tendencies, but it’ll be okay, he’ll be just fine that way. It’ll be okay, she made him that way.

With her delicate hands, she takes his raw, unflinching strength and beats it tender.

Takes 376’s pure killing intent and crushes it into compassion.

She makes him the world’s gentlest gentleman.

Yumeno Himiko refuses to look at her when she sits down, an arm’s length away at the bus stop void of other people. It is desolate and cold. The rotting wooden bench is their stage.

They are both performers but neither are wearing their stage presence.

The spotlight is lonely. They too, are lonely.

Here, Yumeno does not seek to entertain, nor does Shirogane seek to infect her with the urgency to.

For the briefest moment, Shirogane considers starting the conversation, lighting the quiet afternoon with a touch of magic. It would only take a spark. Magic is a creature of imagination, a flame that needs no match to burn. Only a spark of brilliance. A desire for wonder.

Magic should have come easy.

Easy as a flash of heat to dry wood can start raging bonfires.

Easy as the girl with the witch’s hat can keep being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the perfect decoy to conceal a murder.

Easy as the girl with the red hair and the red skirt can learn fierceness after loss, can emerge from the ashes as a phoenix does, can cry and scream her own will to live into existence. A mage of fire birthed by the spell of the dead, Yumeno killed her old self to be reborn again.

But now she is cold and her trembling hands are devoid of fire.

If Shirogane sparked a flame, it would die quietly. There is no magic to speak of here.

This Yumeno is a survivor with no fight in her eyes.

Magic is no longer real.

No. 769.

Yumeno Himiko and 769 do not get along at first.

769 is too much energy, overflowing into every room she enters, shockingly loud.

She is nonsensical, her laugh almost far too grating to be on air and Shirogane is perplexed at first by the incompatibility. The formula is a perfect match, but the personalities will not give in to one another. In fact, she nearly doesn’t make the cut, because Shirogane does not know how to fix her well enough, to balance her well enough to be her vision of Yumeno Himiko.

She only has to trial her once, though, sliding her energetic liveliness straight into the negatives and sapping it all away, to realize that no other person was born to play her role.

Yumeno Himiko is innocence, childish wonder and an endearing sleepiness and nothing like the girl that must cloak herself invisible to step out as the magician in black and red, but it works.

Somehow, magically, it works.

Yumeno Himiko is every weakness, overconfident and defenceless and disposable, and Shirogane makes her so because it is so very moving to watch the weak grow.

She is the perfect victim but she won’t die and her every day will feel like a living nightmare as the others do, one by one by one. Her regrets will become unbearable. She will not want to survive. She will want to lock it all away until it’s over, but it doesn’t end like that and magic will keep her breathing even when she doesn’t want to and she will not be strong.

Under the pressure, she will curl inwards and inwards and inwards until she just can’t take it anymore.

Then, she will rise.

Her growth will feel like a miracle.

Shirogane cannot wait to see it.

Harukawa Maki vanishes into the night, just as an assassin would, untraceable and silent, leaving nothing in her wake.

Though she resists it, Shirogane finds herself mourning her, just as one might mourn a loved one after passing. For Harukawa is the embodiment of knowing violence before love, knowing agony before comfort, knowing destruction before peace. Harukawa is made up of things she understands.

She does not want her to go.

There is a reason Harukawa isn’t allowed to die. A reason she survived, despite all odds.

Harukawa is so very dear to her, because she is one of the first of her friends that Shirogane had imagined into existence.

The child caregiver, adored by children who don’t understand yet that a broken thing cannot be mended, and that a girl raised on knives can only feel cut up things.

The assassin, driven by a desperation to break free from the destruction, falls in love for the first time and it unstitches her from the inside out.

She should have stayed.

Her phone lights up with a notification.

“Goodbye. See you never.”

It is short and cutting.

Harukawa Maki has always been.

No. 635.

635 is Harukawa Maki.

There is nothing to object to, when it comes to that fact. She does not even require extensive tweaking, only the promise of a devastating childhood and ruby eyes brimming with distrust.

She has Harukawa’s slight but sturdy stature, her long brown hair, her meticulously placed beauty mark, half a finger’s distance from her lower lash line on the left. Red looks good on her, and so does the hurt.

She even cries pretty, and that is her most attractive feature.

Devoid of affection, groomed to be a killing machine, she will be a threat that looms over all their heads and she will not know how to deal with finally wanting to be seen as a person. She will be callous, she will be scared, and she will not grow.

Shirogane makes her so because it is so very moving to watch the strong fall instead.

Harukawa is quiet but alert, always flitting around in secrecy.

Emotionally unavailable. Socially incompetent.

Disconnecting herself. Keeping the vulnerability out. She is a child trapped in a wrought iron cage, begging to be normal when the world decides she doesn’t deserve it. When the world decides she cannot live without hurting anyone, cannot love without the violence that loved her first, cannot open her heart to anyone and expect them to stay.

That she can be on the cusp of finding something to fight for and for it to slip between her fingers like dust.

Harukawa Maki cannot exist without pain.

And she will never learn to.

It is the only way she should be, and Shirogane is so immeasurably happy to have finally been able to meet her.

Hoshi Ryouma offers civility.

Shirogane mirrors it, because it’s the only way she can stand the reality that she can’t read his mind, anymore. He is overcome with his own apathy, now.

Someone so empty that searching for substance is futile.

It’s always going to be a part of him, such a defeated maturity. Even to those who have wronged him, he no longer picks at the wounds. He is surrender in human form. A white flag on every inhale, a head bowed acceptance in exhale.

He is disappointment and he is disappointing.

“Things got pretty messed up, didn’t they,” he comments, voice a deep trawling tone.

“Things were,” Shirogane replies, “Good.”

His lip curls, gaze bounces from the floor to her and back. A rally of subtle movement. She sees tennis in his body language, how he rolls his shoulders, how his arms swing at his sides.

“Good.” Hoshi repeats solemnly. “Even for you, the best you can say is things were good?”

“They were.” She replies, in the same unyielding manner. He serves her a flat look.

“You’re delusional.” He says.

He is no tennis player, no prisoner, no criminal, not anymore.

Shirogane turns away, and doesn’t hope he lives a good life.

No. 444.

444 is down on his luck and Shirogane has a soft spot for tragedy.

She squats beside him outside Team Danganronpa headquarters, lovingly gives him a reason to live and makes sure he knows it before she takes it away again. Dangles it like bait on a rod, and makes sure he has a taste of it before she takes it away again.

Grief is more devastating than happiness, after all, and Hoshi Ryouma clings onto reasons to live like they’re the very force keeping his body together – and aren’t they?

Skin and bone is material. Human beings live for purpose.

Hoshi Ryouma is an ex-convict and doesn’t know why his heart is still beating and maybe that’s why he’s here, cynical and bitter with no place left to go. His bar is low, anything is better than prison, even one that only looks a little nicer, because what many people don’t understand is that he has long since given up on survival.

Believing in nothing, living for nothing, dying for nothing.

It’s all the same to him.

The world is a tank full of piranhas, and he thinks the only reason he might still be here is because he’s on the wrong side of the glass.

444 comes to the right side when he walks into the building, the automatic doors sliding shut behind him. Sealing his fate.

Skin and bone is material.

The mind can be destroyed quickly but the body can keep deteriorating for years. No, the body can be destroyed quickly, but the mind can keep deteriorating for years. No, a person without a purpose can be destroyed quickly and a person with one can survive beyond capacity.

A person without purpose is the first drop of blood in the water.

Shirogane is the first piranha, and she is not apologetic.

So, in the end, maybe 444 and Hoshi aren’t all that different, either.

He’s been drowning in self-loathing long before anyone could have even tried to save him.

444 isn’t saved by Shirogane but she’d like to think that he was.

Hoshi Ryouma isn’t saved by anyone, but he doesn’t want to be.

Because he does not want to be happy, and that is the only wish she grants because she does not want to be happy, either.

Iidabashi lingers, still in the stagnant atmosphere as Shirogane pours herself a boring mug of coffee. His face looks abnormally bare without the thick lines of the metal plates, the signs that he had not been human.

He is no good as a human. She had designed him otherwise specifically.

“Late night,” he muses quietly.

“I don’t have time for small talk.” She replies.

“I’m leaving.” Iidabashi says, acknowledging her statement with a nod. “There’s no reason for me to stay, anymore.”

“Leaving Danganronpa?”

“Yes,” he confirms, as if he hasn’t said something that would hurt her at the very thought. “I can’t stand this place. I hope it blows over, and none of this matters in the end.”

She knows that they have no proper connection, but loneliness is hungry and wants even what it cannot have. It searches incessantly for a code in the universe that will sate it, always coming up empty.

Shirogane does not know why anyone who knows Danganronpa as intimately as they do would leave it.

“You are making a terrible choice,” she finally tells him, not knowing what else to say to someone who built such a life for themselves to want to let it all explode and crumble away.

“I’m making the right one.” Iidabashi says.

She has never been more disgusted. She smiles.

No. E571.

Kiibo works at Danganronpa headquarters part-time, and employees usually don’t apply.

The reasons he does so are unclear, though likely it is out of being something gullible so she keeps that part of him and respects him only because he is a moving cog in their team and his programming skills are second to none.

Respects him only because he made the logical decision to join Danganronpa and the logical decision to apply for a role in the killing game and logical enough to hardwire himself into being her best asset. Reforming his own body, becoming lines of true and false, code littered with loops, a binary non-binary non-human human, rejecting his organic components to be her friend.

Kiibo is her friend only when his humanity ceases.

Such wonderful, despicable dedication.

She can only take advantage of it, because the reality is that she did not change him much at all, and she refuses to think that her reality affected her perfect fiction.

Refuses to let him corrupt the world she built, so she writes him harder lines, writes him a little less like a person and more like a ticking time bomb because she’d rather blow it all up than admit she had even the slightest bit of fondness for a brilliant coworker with bright, eager eyes.

That would simply be troublesome. She raises the stakes, so she can prove she isn’t soft.

if (hope == true)

{

Kiibo will get everyone killed;

}

if (hope == false)

{

Kiibo will kill everyone;

}

Shirogane makes him out of spare parts on purpose. She makes him the lifeline, the connection to the outside world, fritzy and prone to the weakness of adhering to logic, a self-destruct system waiting to go off.

With one catch, for bonus points.

He will be the eyes of the audience.

He can only die if Danganronpa dies.

Early morning, Shirogane sits quietly in the canopy outside a bakery.

It is a rainy day and the paper bags she’s holding most certainly don’t stand a chance in this weather, so she waits as the sky unleashes its grief over the loss of summer, lifting the leaves off of trees to give company to its misery.

Her hands are busy picking apart a small round bread bun, crumbs flaking onto the ground as she languidly chews at the pieces, finding the tastelessness fitting for her boredom. There is no art to it, only an instinct to make art of it.

Feelings, after all, are worth infinitely more when they bleed into art.

When it comes to artists, after all, the successful are not so merely because they are talented, but because they are tortured enough that the very essence of their emotions escape their body to find refuge elsewhere.

Angie Yonaga is smiling when she swings by, smiling when she says, “I thought I’d find you here, Tsumugi.”

“Well,” Shirogane clips disconsolately. Empty, just as empty as she would be in the face of divine intervention. “You found me.”

No. 372.

When she sees 372 – petite, blue-eyed, snowy white hair that brushes her shoulders in soft waves and deeply, deeply sad — Shirogane’s first thought about her is that she must be some sort of angel.

An angel which comes through with an epiphany, holy and true, and that is that 372 and Angie Yonaga are a match made in heaven.

The foreigners that apply are few and far between. Rather, they apply for the novelty of it, but 372 is not following a trend, she is monstrously saddened by life itself and wants to turn it into art.

Angie Yonaga is an artist and a blessed girl and Shirogane turns this angel into her.

Her sadness is so enticing, but Angie’s joyfulness is simply better. Brighter, positively uplifting, energetic and cut with a sharper edge than expected, yes, Angie Yonaga is the wilderness of the cast that she needs.

Angie Yonaga is gorgeous brown skin and hair like dove’s feathers, wanting peace, seeking peace, threatening the freedom of the school for peace.

Angel, angel, angel.

Shirogane is thrilled to know an angel.

She wants to clip her wings. She wants to see that pretty gaze shatter, wants her ocean blue eyes to spill over with tears. She wants Angie Yonaga to destroy herself, to suffer religiously, to be selfishly unsaintly so that everybody knows angels aren’t pretty when they fall.

But Angie is pretty. Angie is a painter in a yellow coat, a sculptor so skilled that she can carve a smile permanent on her face, and Angie is so powerfully devoted to happiness that she wants to control danger itself.

Shirogane wants her to fall, wants her to be the beacon of despair so that they all drop to their knees.

But Angie resists and it’s even more beautiful.

That’s why she doesn’t let it happen.

She makes Angie Yonaga the savior that never breaks.

Saihara Shuuichi comes to see her before he goes, and Shirogane wishes he wouldn’t.

He has always been too soft-hearted for his own good.

“You can be better, you know,” Saihara says. “Just because this is the end of Danganronpa, doesn’t mean that it’s the end for you.”

“Yes, it is.”

He sighs, but doesn’t drop the subject just yet.

“You don’t want to be without it, do you? You are living because of Danganronpa. You wouldn’t exchange it for anything else.”

His intuition is irritatingly sharp. What he gets for being a detective is his keen eye, after all, but he might have had that from the start.

In which case, Shirogane does not want to think of him as Saihara anymore, because sweet Saihara veered off-course and she left him too long on the tree to ripen and now he’s nothing but spoiled fruit.

He failed her.

She had set him such high expectations, to be the detective that finally understands that the truth is Danganronpa, and nothing else is the truth but Danganronpa and he should have let the world know it and it would have been her greatest success.

He would have been her greatest success, but he failed her.

She doesn’t know who he is right now but he isn’t the shy detective with the tired eyes, cowering from the thought of being held responsible for anything.

He has grown too responsible.

He is not the exhausted lifelessness she wanted him to end up, so that maybe she could empathize. She doesn’t understand him, anymore.

Saihara Shuuichi goes, and Shirogane hopes it’s because of her.

No. 154.

Saihara Shuuichi is gruesome 154, eager and ecstatic and fanatical and easy.

He is easy, too easy, and that is why Shirogane chooses him. Saihara is easily influenced so having a similar base is preferable.

Under scrutiny, he falters.

That is what she wants.

He will be an impossible threat, seeking the truth at all costs, deducing and deconstructing the paths of the killers and the victims in a devastating clarity.

He will cut down arguments, strike down false accusations. Critically. So very desperately.

Only weak to his sorry excuse for confidence, only falling back to the fears circling his head. Overthinking. Overthinking.

Saihara is beyond smart, wild accusations backed up with theories and evidence and the memory of each and every alibi and aspect of the case without having to write a single thing down.

He is the driving factor of the class trials, the active investigative force that keeps their hearts beating, keeps them alive.

The drama! The suspense! The intensity!

It all revolves around him.

The protagonist, so drenched in self-doubt that he cannot see how threatening he is — to the killers, to the audience, to Danganronpa.

He is the pinnacle of the story she has created, the culmination of every journey it took to reach the climax, and everyone will know it.

Everyone will know that Saihara Shuuichi is momentarily the centrepoint of all things Danganronpa, and Shirogane will remain in the shadows, unimportant and uninteresting as ever.

Saihara Shuuichi pushes V3 forward, becomes the voice to follow and the face to trust.

Saihara Shuuichi is the beloved protagonist, and when the audience looks back, it will be his story, not hers.

Even though she was the one that wrote it. Even though she was the one that planned it and shaped it and brought it into fruition, it will be his story and it will be like she doesn’t exist.

That’s the way it has to be.

She almost wishes they could swap places.

It would have been so easy for them to have been each other instead.

Chabashira Tenko retains her energy and not quite enough empathy.

Shirogane hears her before she appears, her steps thudding aggressive against the floorboards, the door crashing open to allow her entrance.

“It was you,” she’s saying, and her chest is heaving, her posture correcting subconsciously, her palms coming up into a battle stance. She will not raise a hand against Shirogane, but the intent is there. “You did this. You did all of this. You hurt so many people for your– for your twisted games! You’re the worst!”

Shirogane is not a degenerate, but Chabashira talks her down and she supposes she might as well just take it.

“Yes.” Shirogane replies, and she yearns to be yanked off her feet, given the punishment she deserves so that maybe she’ll feel even a fraction of the emotion that’s burning off of Chabashira’s skin. “Yes, it was me. Yes, I am the worst.”

Chabashira moves like there’s years of training in her. Like a natural.

Shirogane is not protected from her anymore, now that they all know the truth.

She doesn’t hit her.

She grabs onto her shoulders, squeezes tight and says, tersely, “This is not how you learn to feel. You shouldn’t stop yourself from feeling things. If you gave Tenko her words, then you should learn to live by them too. Live life facing forward. Stop this. Release your feelings and stop holding on. Be real again. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

This is a fight that Chabashira will not lose.

But Shirogane is no longer afraid of losing her.

“You’re the one,” she whispers. “That doesn’t understand anything.”

No. 275.

Chabashira Tenko glows where 275 is dull.

275 is a neutral palette with a depleting confidence, never looking like she quite fits in her own body. She is potential that hasn’t made itself into anything and that’s why Shirogane steps in.

She sees her, teetering in between two extremes in a perfectly boring balance and tips the scales.

First, the loathing.

She gives Chabashira loathing, disgust that twists her features sour and a brashness that dismisses everything in the shape of men. Chabashira is blatantly gullible, vocal in her distaste, quick to anger, quick to act. A hair-trigger temper, an intolerance for the ones she despises. That is her first extreme.

Secondly, the loving.

Flung down the other side of the scale, Chabashira is full of consideration and open affection and warmth for everything in the shape of women. Chabashira is shamelessly enthusiastic, vocal in her passion, quick to excite, quick to act. A high-speed infatuation, an overspill of emotions she cannot control. That is her second extreme.

Support and compassion embody her core. Martial artists are trained for balance, and Chabashira has times where she tames her extremes.

Support and compassion. When Chabashira does not loathe or love, she is filled with it.

She is encouragement and strength and empathy, and she will be so bursting with it all that nobody else knows how to deal with it.

Chabashira won’t know how to deal with it.

She will be too many emotions rolled into one, and she will not use any of them wisely.

She will be a havoc of close calls and missed opportunities.

She will dedicate all her energy to be uplifting and it will not be enough. She will not succeed, nor will she ever reach her full potential, because some people are made too quickly, too hazardously, to be worth it.

Shirogane loves all her friends, but Chabashira will not find justice because life is cruel.

She really thinks it’s better this way.

If Shinguuji smiled, Shirogane wouldn’t have known.

She suspects he hadn’t, though.

He isn’t inclined to smiling, and less so now that he no longer sees the world for the beauty that it is, drenched so deeply in its agony.

She asks, anyway, “Are you smiling?” because at the time it doesn’t sound like a terrible question to be asking.

The terrible, the terrific, it is all relative, anyhow. Shinguuji would know that more than anyone, his intricate study of human beings and their relations and their cultures being an endless resource. She granted him with such intelligence that he hurt for it, and she thinks that is a fair trade.

The infinite search for knowledge is not a kind one, and she had to break a few things so that he would have the space to keep it.

“Am I,” he mutters, fingers meeting mask. “I wonder if I can. You see, I am changed and find no merit in it anymore.”

“Are you sad,” she says, more than asks.

“Perhaps I never stopped being so,” he replies. “But so are you. You made us this way, after all. Don’t you realize that creations have a habit of reflecting their creator? It’s just an interesting thought.”

Shirogane purses her lips.

Says, “You’re not my creation if you can be so human as to say such silly things.”

“You are lying to yourself,” he tells her. “You are disillusioned, but we can all see the truth. That you have split parts of you into us, so that you don’t have to be alone, anymore. Isn’t that what this is really about? You, being so human that you can’t stand it, so you’ve tried to escape into a fantasy but it wasn’t enough.”

Suddenly, but not very sudden at all, she wonders how he’d feel if she pushed him into a lake.

“What do you know about me, anyway,” her voice leaves her in a toneless apathy.

The most beautiful thing humanity can offer is despair.

No. 398.

398 is Shinguuji Korekiyo before Shirogane can even learn his real name.

She loves the darkest things, the ones that stood so precariously on the edge of what could be right and what could be wrong — but she loves them secretly, tucked in behind indifferent glasses and unfeeling smiles.

He’s meant to be one of those things. Dark, soul breaking, beautiful.

With his image, she seeks to mold the most disgustingly tragic human being and when it’s not enough, she doubles it. She splits him down the middle, binds him to sins she could never commit herself, because she loves to live vicariously through fiction and being something of the worst person on earth is a life she’d be thrilled to dive into.

She does not care for collateral damage.

398 has lips that are zipped shut because silence is an easier way to be when nobody is listening, so Shirogane unzips him and lets the words cascade, and still nobody is listening but that is inconsequential.

Shinguuji is a broken haunting of atrocities masquerading as something human.

Maddened by traumatic experience, murdered by social conditioning, he is a ghost in an animate carcass. Nowhere to go, but life beyond death.

She won’t let him have that luxury.

Shinguuji Korekiyo is nothing but dark, soul breaking and beautiful.

Iruma Miu is popular, and the numbers don’t add up.

She is meant to be worth less, meant to be the downfall for feeling too much and too intensely, but she isn’t. She is loved. She knows it, relishes in it, takes advantage of it so quickly it’s as if she knows how Shirogane despises it.

Statistically, Iruma has more unlikeable traits than a grand portion of the friends she has made, but the statistics prove this wrong.

Iruma Miu is popular, and Shirogane’s blueprints for her ruin themselves.

“You fucked up,” Iruma says mockingly, twirling her hair by her face.

“I didn’t.”

“You fucked up,” she says again. “And you can’t take it back. You fucked me over, made me feel like the shittiest excuse for a person alive, and yet you forgot something super important.”

“I didn’t forget anything.”

Her finger waves carelessly in the air. “You made me outrageously personal, dumbass. And people like that. We are an impersonal nation, but everyone secretly wants to know what everyone else is thinking. I overshare like a motherfucker, don’t filter a single goddamn thing,” she cackles, “And people find that refreshing! Different! Aren’t I just the best thing that ever happened to you?”

“You aren’t. You’re not supposed to be this way.”

“Oh, but I am, and you fucked up,” Iruma’s finger shoots in her direction. “I’m the golden-hearted bitch that’s so batshit fuckin’ crazy that people can’t stop lookin’ at me. Love me, hate me, it’s all comin’ in like wildfire, and this country’s fuckin’ burning its chops off for me, ya feel?”

“I do not,” Shirogane protests. “You are only a fad. People do not actually like you.”

“Aren’t you just jealous?” Iruma sneers. “Because you’re boring and I’m not?”

Terrible. She’s terrible.

She was supposed to be a failure.

Shirogane doesn’t know how to deal with the fact that the only real failure is herself.

No. 869.

Iruma Miu doesn’t get a chance to be 869 because Shirogane doesn’t have to give her a second glance to assign her a new identity.

She must have lived some life beforehand, but it doesn’t matter now, she’ll be the inventing whiz that exists in a constant tantrum of hurt and anger and boiling frustration and an unmistakably dirty mouth. She fits the role, she gets the role, who she was doesn’t matter, it’s all about who she will be.

The thing is, Shirogane wants a scapegoat. An attention-seeking attention-hoarding catastrophe that keeps eyes off of the true mastermind, hollering incessantly about how good she is like it’ll make her case any stronger.

The thing is, Shirogane loves her friends but does not think they all deserve to be loved.

The thing is, Iruma is not made to be loved, she is made to be a suffocating distraction and that is why she doesn’t know where to stop. She is a whirlwind, a hurricane, a wind blowing everything over, not knowing how to be anything but too loud, too aggressive, too unstable to be reasoned with.

The thing is, Iruma is hardwired to be explosive as a firework and ten times hotter, and that’s exactly what she is – a violent burst of color and brightness and sound, and then she’s falling, falling, falling, because not even the vastness of the sky wants her to stay.

Her moments of brilliance are short-lived, and though she clings desperately to them, lauding her own “Sweet body! Fuckin’ genius! Golden brain!” – it never works.

Eventually, people see how she really is.

What she really is.

Dust. Ashes. Worthless, unworkable, unlovable.

Her mind is restless. It’s an on-off fireworks routine, one minute she’s on top of the world and the next she’s tumbling into a numb hell with no idea how to respond to any kind of positive social interaction without breaking into pieces.

This is the life she has to live.

It doesn’t get better.

This is what Shirogane wants. A disgusting, vulgar attention-hungry pile of rot that needs to learn how to keep her filthy fuckin’ bitch mouth shut.

She will make sure that the world hates Iruma Miu.

He has not ever touched the stars and that is something he will never do, and he doesn’t deserve to, either.

Momota Kaito is not what the galaxy wants him to be, and he refuses to change.

“There is so much shit out there,” Momota says. “You’re only another person who doesn’t actually mean anything, ya know. We’re nothing compared to the universe. The universe is so big.”

“That tends to be the case.” She replies, adjusting her glasses irritably, wanting an astronaut with a boisterous kindness instead of a boy who’s only the worst parts of him.

“I don’t think you’re very smart,” Momota adds, unprompted and brash, “You’re not particularly creative, either. All you do is obsess over nerdy garbage to the point that you escape from your own life because you hate yourself that much. You love fiction because it’ll never hate you back. You follow the journeys and developments of characters because you refuse to develop yourself as a person. That’s your sort of shit.”

Shirogane is quiet.

“Not to mention, relationships.” Momota sneers, knowing this strikes a chord in her because she tenses even more. “You love relationships because you get to envision a world where people bond in ways you’ll never get to. You watch them like an outsider who never learned how to love someone, and that’s why nobody loves you.”

He is supposed to be better than this. He is supposed to be full of encouragement and pumped with enthusiasm and spilling over with excitement at the realm of possibilities and beyond.

He is supposed to be sweeter, more wide grins and careless righteousness – all good intentions.

There are so many greater things that he is meant to be than this.

Unfortunately, people cannot always be changed that easily.

The impossible will forever remain impossible.

No. 174.

174 becomes Momota Kaito because Shirogane hates his attitude.

It’s show-offs like that, vulgar and arrogant, that need the most trimming down – and even then, she can’t find it in herself to care.

174 becomes empty space where Momota stands, wanting only to do the right thing and to have the glory of it.

He will have one fatal flaw, and that is believing in people.

Shirogane does not know why those sorts of characters keep winning. It is time they lost for once. She doesn’t believe in believing, and that’s why the stars don’t align for Momota, even when he wants to think that they have.

He is brave and ambitious, hopeful even, and that is every facet of a hero on the path to greatness, but there is no time for following a journey like that. He is in the wrong narrative, and that will cost him.

Indeed, he will have every trait that makes a protagonist but in this story that is not being made for him.

His attempts will fall short. The worst part of it all will be how hard he tries. He will try. He will push himself to his limits trying, and he will never reach his goals.

He will plaster every inch of his heart with his beliefs that things will be better, that people will learn to rely on him, that he will be special and he will be right and he will do the right thing and people will look up to him – but they won’t.

He will do everything he can to help, to encourage, to foster bonds and unity and he will beg friendship to save them all, he will beg for that happy ending where believing in others is enough.

Momota Kaito is made to be a hero, but this isn’t his story.

Instead, he is left to be an overacting optimist in a world that won’t listen to him, and he’ll know it. He’ll build himself up, he’ll stretch his whole being into reaching for greatness, but he’ll tumble before he ever touches it.

He will always come crashing down.

Blood in his mouth, overzealousness getting the best of him.

Crashing down.

This is not his story.

No matter how hard he tries, his words will ultimately be worthless.

Toujou Kirumi sees her first, and maybe Shirogane should be flattered, but she isn’t.

Toujou slinks towards her, dark skirt swaying as she walks and Shirogane makes a meagre attempt to avoid her.

She bows her head as she sweeps through the crowds, tipping her hat over her eyes and slipping by — in the background, blending in, as always.

This is what it was always going to be like for her, and this is all she needs it to be. Falling into the masses, forgotten for her deeds; this is Shirogane Tsumugi’s reality.

Toujou stops in front of her.

Shirogane stops right there.

“Did you get what you wanted in the end?” Toujou asks, and it’s gentle enough to be cutting.

Shirogane does not know how they can have the same conversations over and over again.

“Yes,” she snaps. “I don’t know why you think I wouldn’t have.”

“I was merely curious,” Toujou answers. “After all, I don’t think it was an ending you would have been satisfied with.”

Shirogane doesn’t respond, tries to leave, tries to maneuver back into an unrecognizable state, but Toujou catches her.

“Or is it that you would not be satisfied with anything?”

And that is true, perhaps, but Shirogane will not admit it to a girl that doesn’t know the meaning of satisfaction that is independent of other people. Does not admit it to a girl that relies on others for direction, that cannot be at peace without orders, without rules, without guidance.

Without a purpose, she has no purpose.

After all, a person without purpose is the first drop of blood in the water.

After all, a person given a purpose is going to give up everything to meet it.

So she was the first piranha, and Toujou was the second.

Shirogane thinks that might be for the best.

No. 486.

486 isn’t Toujou Kirumi, but she’s close enough.

Shirogane doesn’t settle, doesn’t know the meaning of the word. She fixes her, like she does everyone else. Perfectionist in her planning and perfectionism in her execution, she gives Toujou Kirumi perfection and Toujou Kirumi is literally, factually perfect.

Pristine in her dressing and graceful in movement, she can perform all tasks, any tasks, doesn’t hesitate, not for a second. She works to the bone, slave to maidhood, and never considers failure as an option.

486 is not worthy of Toujou Kirumi, but she’s close enough.

Nobody is worthy of her, after all, and yet she will never know this.

She is dedicated selflessness, unwavering and true.

She is devoted to others, and that is the only thing that matters about her. If she cannot serve, she will suffer, and maybe that is an unhealthy way to live but it isn’t as if Shirogane allowed any of her friends a chance at anything else.

They all chose this life, and 486 becomes Toujou by sacrificing her individuality. Her selfish will.

Now, she is servitude and Shirogane is her sole master.

A master which does not want to see her succeed.

Toujou will be discarded easily.

She will cut her marionette strings and let her plummet. She is destined for ruination.

Here’s the lesson. Some things are simply too good to be true.

“I used to think about you a lot, you know,” Shirogane mentions off-handedly.

“Gross.” Ouma pulls a face. “Keep saying things like that and people will start thinking you’re obsessed with me or something.”

He says that even though he had spent far too long trying to figure her out, in his own obsession with trying to destroy her, if only for the smallest satisfaction of it.

Perhaps they are too alike, but she cannot say that aloud. Ouma will only sneer, tease her for being stupid.

He knows exactly the care she put into bringing him to life, and hates her all the more for it.

Only he doesn’t really hate her, because he is deeply kind even when he refuses to show a single inkling of it. If he wasn’t, he would have been a tyrant, but Shirogane didn’t allow him that.

She makes him monstrous, but not tyrannical.

Only enough – just enough – to be unwanted.

There is a certain unspeakable sadness to making monsters out of love and having them turn into lesser things because it makes slaying them so much harder. She wants him unsympathetic, wants him hysterical, maniacal, wants him to be the figurehead of self-destructive loneliness made of lies, wants to want him dead.

But she gives him soul. Gives him fear. Gives him paranoia.

She lets him feel the consequences of his actions.

In fact, she lets him feel everything on the sole condition that he feels it alone because he can’t face the responsibility of caring. She lets him feel everything.

Maybe, Shirogane thinks, it makes her the monster instead.

No. 101.

Ouma Kokichi is everything 101 isn’t.

So 101 doesn’t exist, and doesn’t require a moment to be spoken about.

Ouma is entertainment, Ouma is a carousel of emotions, a ferris wheel of unbridled paranoia, a slot machine of lies. Amusement park in a body, all to divert from the cynicism that lies within, all to crush the crippling lonely that threatens to steal the logic thinking right out of him.

He is too smart for that, but loneliness is a vicious affliction.

Ouma Kokichi is her proudest creation.

The ruthless supreme leader. The fun supreme leader. The cold supreme leader. The crybaby supreme leader. The cruel supreme leader. The cheerful supreme leader.

He wears so many masks that he will forget what lies underneath.

So he will not care then, what happens to it.

The duality of Ouma is that he does care, he cares about them all, Shirogane made him that way, so he will fight to keep what isn’t his – fight to save what doesn’t care for him, fight in his own way, by running, by hiding, by pretending. He will not stop thinking, will not stop plotting, because if he stops, he will be hit by the brunt of it and he will not want to go on and he knows that.

More than anything, he knows how easily he can slip up, so he takes his precautions, does everything Ouma Kokichi is meant to do. Flawlessly, rebelliously.

And oh, he will be laughing all the time.

He will smile and joke and grin out of defiance.

Defiance will be his weapon, but he will not win.

He is not meant to be a bad person but he will be too busy playing one so that she doesn’t have to. He is not meant to be a bad person but he will be too busy playing one because he is the mask she is wearing, amidst all the masks he takes on himself.

He will be monstrous and ingenuine for her. He will never stop performing, for her.

Shirogane thinks she’d rather die than be bored.

So Ouma will embody that.

“Hey, you coming?”

Shirogane shakes her head.

Amami smiles, and only looks a touch sympathetic.

“Y’know, there’s a lot more out there than just Danganronpa,” he says, and his hands flutter across his chest then up behind his neck, like he doesn’t know where to place them. She despises every moving part of him. “I mean, you’ve done all there is to do here, haven’t you? So why don’t we just… move on? Find something new?”

“Leave me alone,” she tells him, and her voice doesn’t shake as he steps towards the door.

He’s been in this game for a long time now, and he shouldn’t be giving up, he survived, he survived, he should know better than to leave, why is he leaving? Why? He should know better.

He should know better. He should know better than to leave Danganronpa.

Nobody should want to leave Danganronpa.

The world is Danganronpa.

Danganronpa is the world.

“It’s an idea and I hope you’ll consider it.” Amami offers, and he steps even further away. “You have no place here, now. You know that, right?”

“I said, leave me alone.” She hisses.

His eyes soften at the edges, and he nods. “I’m sorry.”

“Danganronpa is the only thing that matters.”

“I’m sorry.” He says again.

For a moment, she wishes he would understand, but she doesn’t reach out and he doesn’t look back.

He will not be missed.

No. 022.

Amami Rantarou is 022, all casual-pretty with the rich boy pass and the kind of person everyone loves but Shirogane despises.

She’s imagined him dying more times than she can count, but he won’t stop coming back.

They’re the same kind of mediocre. That blank slate, could-be-anything kind of character — anything but special, that is, because empty canvas can become art but it will never stop being a canvas. Scrape off all the colors, and that’s all they are.

“But we are special,” he says, and he’s got some stupid list of inspirational quotes on his phone again that neither of them really believe in so Shirogane curls her lip and does not reply. He smiles lightly, as if his words would mean anything to her, but his gaze is hollow. “Everyone is special and unique. Or something.”

“You know that’s not true,” she mutters.

“Everyone,” he repeats, then his phone locks with a sharp click. “Except me and you.”

“You and I.” Shirogane corrects primly.

“Who cares?” Amami laughs and perhaps if she closed her eyes, it would sound like he was sobbing and she wishes he would just start crying instead of talking. “I wish Danganronpa was over already.”

She tells herself she’ll hate Amami Rantarou until the day he dies.

(And dies and dies and dies.)

This one’s for the boring people.

The people nobody listen to. The people nobody care about.

The people who daydream more than they live. The people who are distant and emotionally unattached to the world.

This one’s for the boring people who don’t enjoy anything with anyone, and pretend to have friends that actually stay, but then don’t.

This one’s for the boring people who have no connections.

The boring person who would give her life to Danganronpa.

And did.

No. 011.

Shirogane Tsumugi is 011 before she is herself.

She is so distant – from the world, from reality, from people, from her identity – that she thinks she might have made herself up from the very beginning. Her life is lived inside her head, and even there, she is only background noise.

Only background noise could be capable, after all, of dreaming up a place with a vibrant cast that complements it. Background noise, like wallpaper, like paint, is the foundation that exists to be built upon.

It is required, for a space to become real.

Without background noise, nothing feels real enough. Nothing exists but a void of unlived silence. Even breathing is noise, even blood rushing through the veins is noise. Even if unheard, movement is noise.

Reality is discontented without noise.

The reality is that her actors should not have wanted to be without her.

Her cast should not have left. Even if she wanted them gone, she should not be alone.

It doesn’t make sense.

Shirogane bites her lip and flips through pages and pages of notes, trying to find the error that would explain why it all came crumbling down – how did they turn out this way? Why did they all desert her?

They were supposed to be friends. They were her friends. Her dearest friends.

And they wanted this.

They all wanted this.

They held her hand in that moment of crazed truth, eyes alight and they wanted this.

People were so unreliable, after all.

She put so much work into this, clawed a universe into existence, gave this escapist fantasy fiction her life and everything in it – gave it her soul, her entirety, her vast and endless mind, her inspiration, her love, love, love, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, HER BELOVED FRIENDS, HER THRILLING, CHILLING NARRATIVE – ! IT WAS PERFECT SO WHY ISN’T SHE HAPPY?

SHIROGANE LOVES DANGANRONPA.

SHIROGANE LOVES DANGANRONPA.

SHIROGANE LOVES DANGANRONPA.

WHY ISN’T SHE HAPPY?

She worked for years, worked until her fingers bled and her eyes were weary, for days she stopped sleeping and eating for this show, she was obsessed with perfecting it, gave herself to it, dedicated herself to nothing else, just so she could feel something that wasn’t just in her mind for once.

SHE IS NOT A CONCEPT. SHE WILL BE HUMAN.

SHE WILL FEEL HUMAN. FINALLY.

Just so she could see them. Be with them. Her friends. Within the fictional reality she constructed, where she could give them everything, see their rise and fall, be their rise and fall, watch their despair come alive, alive, alive, for Danganronpa, she spent her entire existence loving Danganronpa, everything she did, EVERYTHING WAS FOR DANGANRONPA –

– and, for what?

HEADLINE: LONELY GIRL GIVES HER LIFE AWAY AND GETS NOTHING IN RETURN FOR IT BECAUSE HER LIFE ISN’T WORTH ANYTHING ANYWAY.

Enoshima Junko the 53rd grins, her tragedy perfected, the ultimate real ending overwhelming her with so much glorious despair that she can’t stop beaming.

HEADLINE: LONELY GIRL GIVES HER LIFE AWAY AND GETS NOTHING IN RETURN FOR IT BECAUSE SHE CANNOT FACE THE FACT THAT SHE WAS WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING AND IT’S TOO LATE TO TURN BACK NOW.

It is unbearable.

HEADLINE: LONELY GIRL GIVES HER LIFE AWAY AND GETS NOTHING IN RETURN FOR IT AND TO BE PERFECTLY HONEST, SHE DOESN’T CARE AT ALL.

Shirogane Tsumugi doesn’t smile.