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“You’re giving me this? Thank you, Hinata-kun!” Komaeda smiles at him, good-naturedly and politely as ever. “I’m grateful to receive anything you give me, even if it’s trash or leftover food!”
Then he turns around and walks right out, leaving only the faint smell of soap and the fading sound of soft footsteps behind him, and he's gone, mineral water and all.
“Oh, fuck you too,” Hinata grumbles, blinking against the residue shadow of an image on the too-bright, moving walls.
Then he turns back the clock.
In short, he’s having a bit of a problem. That is, of course, not counting the whole situation they've found themselves in, because, sure, potentially dying of hunger in a photosensitive seizure-inducing fruit hell could be considered a problem, but he’s trying not to think about that one. The current pressing issue on Hinata’s mind is, as unsurprisingly as it sounds, Komaeda fucking Nagito - and it’s not even his fault, this time.
Locked in here, the number of people left down to nine, he finds himself predictably strolling around the place that has no business having the word ‘fun’ in its name, looking left and right searching for Komaeda to continue where they left off. The last time they talked, Komaeda took off abruptly, without having finished his soliloquy about life, universe, and everything, stopping short just as he started revealing personal information, and Hinata just has to know .
Unfortunately, getting him to talk is not as easy as it sounds. Giving people little gifts to make them warm up to him has been a fairly usual occurrence, but in Komaeda’s case, it’s unbelievably tricky to find something that doesn’t make him mildly disappointed at best. He’s all out of the stuff he knows Komaeda likes, and they’re stuck in the stupid Funhouse, Monomono Machine miles away from them.
This was the third, or maybe fourth time that Hinata tracked him down in Strawberry House. Again, they walked around, their talks about nothing inevitably turning into a philosophical discussion, an outing that Hinata could almost describe as normal if he ignored every single of the rest of their circumstances. He had fun, though, repetition notwithstanding - until he tried to gift him something, that is.
He's not getting disheartened by the reactions that he's been getting so far, though, even if the predicament is making it really easy for him to catastrophize. (He's never eating a single grape again in his entire life.)
He presents Komaeda with a bottle full of what looks like sparkling dust - very pretty, which is good. Komaeda is smiling, which could also be good, but could just as well be anywhere on the spectrum containing good, bad, ugly, and catastrophic, because why would anything involving Komaeda be straightforward or obvious.
“It’s really generous of you to give a gift to a piece of trash like me!” He says, then, and leaves, and Hinata really doesn't know what he expected.
Then accept it, he thinks anyway, you picky bastard, I swear to God-
No, he can do this. He can definitely do this. He’s got a couple of items that he hasn’t tried yet.
This time around, Hinata chooses to go with his luck (ha) and picks something at random.
When presented with it, Komaeda hums, tapping his lip with his index finger. “How should I put this? It’s a pretty uninspired item…”
Oh, so you want to be inspired now, is that right, Hinata doesn’t say. You inspire my level of pissed off to grow like Topsy , he also doesn’t say.
“...Receiving this isn't really good luck or bad luck, so I'm sorry to say that I'll have to pass.”
After Komaeda is gone, Hinata takes a few deep breaths to calm himself, then does what he's always done when he fucks up dealing with people - turn back time, try and go again.
This one worked on him before - a weird-looking diamond that’s apparently called Another Hope. He gives it to him, and waits.
“Hmmm… this is quite interesting,” Komaeda says, pocketing the diamond. “Thanks. I’ll take good care of it!”
Hinata holds his breath. Komaeda gives him a smile. Then he turns on his heel and swiftly walks away, his pace so relaxed it almost looks mocking. Hinata feels like throwing something against a happily atrocious, psychedelic wall.
“Fucking come on ,” he whines to nobody in particular, turning back the clock one more godforsaken time. “It even has the word ‘hope’ in the name! Just take it, you bitch ass Groundhog Day-inducing motherfucker...”
This is slowly starting to get ridiculous. The ungrateful little- what does he want, a diamond ring?
That’s not unlikely at all, actually, Hinata corrects himself. The last time he gave him a ring, Komaeda gushed for about a solid minute, more thankful than is probably appropriate, cheeks flushed, Oh no, what should I do? I might start liking you even more…
Hinata's not sure if he'd like it if that happened. Probably. (Who is he trying to fool; he can’t even remember the last time his own cheeks were that red.)
Anyway .
He offers Komaeda an antique doll and gets the side-eyeing of his life, complete with another smile, as well as the repeated privilege of watching the slowly distancing figure, long, green parka covering the sway of hips and the general area where an ass is supposed to be.
Maybe this, Hinata thinks, is what Monokuma means when he’s mentioning absolute despair.
He ends up on his bed once more, slightly less hungry than he was prior to going back, making up for it by being slightly more irritated. The interior of his temporary room doesn't get any less annoying with time, but at least the walls aren't moving .
Hinata rustles around his metaphorical pockets, trying not to worry too much about the fact that he's running out of items, and finds a gag ball - which, he wasn't sure anyone on the island would accept, if he had to guess. But, perhaps…
He really shouldn’t be assuming anything, especially about a guy who sounded close to dying a little death lying on the floor tied up, back when Hinata visited with breakfast to make sure he doesn’t die an actual death by starvation.
“This is amazing, Hinata-kun!” Komaeda lets out a chuckle, hands outstretched, eyes dark. Wait, does he really…? “What an impressive display of harassment!” He continues, laughter slightly manic.
Well .
“...Even I'm about to lose sight of hope in the presence of this thing!” Komaeda takes a small, polite step away from him. “I’m sorry, but could you put it away right now?”
On the other hand, Hinata should’ve known that someone who’d still be physically incapable of keeping his dang mouth shut even if his life depended on it wouldn’t react well to being offered something like a gag ball.
Drop down to your knees and lick my shoes , something else in his mind echoes, and, yeah, alright, he gets it.
With growing desperation and annoyance, he offers a Go stone, a stapler, and a slap bracelet to the spoiled diva that is the boy he's for some reason trying to woo, none of which end up producing desired results. Jesus Christ on a bicycle.
Idly, he wonders about the way Komaeda would report this disastrous dinner date that lacks dinner and isn’t exactly a date, if he had any friends to talk to. He makes himself snort-laugh imagining Komaeda sitting cross-legged while sipping on some cocktail, complaining to Monomi, So get this, I’m out with this loser and he offers me a bottle of mineral water. Mineral water! Today’s scene is so... hopeless…
Maybe his rapidly deteriorating mood and a desperate need for a hamburger are seriously starting to get to him, Hinata considers. He's got no other explanation.
“Thank you, Hinata-kun! I’m grateful to receive anything you give me, even if it’s trash or leftover food!”
This again.
“Yeah, I heard you the first time, you passive-aggressive son of a…”
“Excuse me?” Komaeda blinks at him politely.
“Excuse me ,” Hinata says, snapping his fingers, even if snapping his fingers is a completely unnecessary action in order to go back, even if there’s no one around to remember seeing his theatrics anyway. Maybe because.
He wonders if it’s possible to achieve Nirvana by unlocking every single additional stage of grief and coming up with some new ones. Congratulations, you caught them all and beat the game , says a voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Nanami. Why didn’t he go and hang with Nanami like a sane fucking person?
His mental list of gifts-to-try is as empty as his stomach.
The next iteration, he digs up a candy wrapper, a snapped shoelace, and Mioda’s bent hairpin that he for some reason has, out of his pocket. Understandably, Komaeda won't even look at him for that one, turning his nose up at the contents on Hinata's palm as if seeing dog poop or a used condom that someone left lying on the sidewalk. Am I a joke to you, Hinata-kun, his demeanor is saying.
This is a circus, Hinata thinks, turning back time once again while leaving the ends of a particularly nasty swear hanging in the soon-to-be-retconned air, and I'm the biggest clown of all.
He's got nothing. His hands are empty, he just went through the longest, politest talking down of a lifetime, and he's still got nothing. Defeated, Hinata tries to think of something he hasn't tried yet.
Over the past month or so that they’ve known each other, Hinata's felt what’s probably every emotion under the sun for the guy - infatuation, anger, betrayal, exasperation, fear, arousal, curiosity of varying degrees of morbid, to name a few. Listening to him has been both enlightening and confusing, and he keeps coming back no matter what, repeatedly touching the stove despite common sense, reason and rhyme.
What’s worse, if he’s being honest with himself - and Hinata does not enjoy being honest about these things, even to himself - he likes it.
He likes spending time with Komaeda, to hell with caution and wanting the story's closure and everything else. It's simple as that, the only real reason for this Sisyphean free time event loop that he’s willingly making himself go through. And, if feeling the most at ease while being next to a murderous lunatic makes him just as screwed up in the head, he’ll take it.
There has to be something else. He doesn't want it to end like this.
Then, sitting there like an idiot, Hinata pauses mid-taking off of his socks (he's really at his wits' end here, okay,) and suddenly feels like smacking himself over the forehead with something heavy.
He can still access the Monomono Machine from the Funhouse.
After acquiring a Fucking Hope Ring Fucking Finally, trademark, Hinata doesn’t really feel like any less of an idiot, but at least he’s armed with a sense of accomplishment. He walks with purpose over to where he knows Komaeda will be, and offers him to hang out one last time, back straight, feeling a strange kind of calm, like he already knows the answers of a test he's about to take.
He doesn't even have an explanation or an excuse for the way his stomach flutters when he gets the expected 'yes'.
“...But, ah, I’m truly lucky!” Komaeda tells him at one point, looking at a sickly, moving strawberry. “It’s been so many times that you talked with the piece of garbage I am, and you still keep coming back...”
Looking at him flatly, Hinata thinks, You have no idea .