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You turn 16, and you’re all alone.
You didn’t expect any different, of course. Your mom is away on a business trip somewhere you don’t remember (you stopped paying attention to that years ago), your father hasn’t come home for days, probably drinking himself into a stupor somewhere out there, and it’s not like there’s anyone else who would stop by to give you a few words or anything. You were actually shocked a few people wished you a happy birthday at school, since you have no idea how they knew it was today.
You don’t have any actual friends, just some mere acquaintances with whom you occasionally talk about Danganronpa until they, at best, get bored by the topic or, at worse, get creeped out by your never-ending knowledge of Danganronpa lore and semi-inability to talk about anything else.
You’re known as the Danganronpa freak at your school for a reason.
Everyone loves Danganronpa, but some people love it more than what’s “socially acceptable”.
Whatever. Danganronpa is all you need anyways.
You bought yourself some cheap bland cake on your way back from school, purely out of pointless tradition, and you force yourself to sing Happy Birthday with it, your figures all lined up on a circle around the cake as your guests.
Unfortunately, for as realistic as the figurines are, your lone singing still echoes throughout the empty house.
You spend the rest of the day sprawled over the sofa, eating some leftover ice cream you found in the back of the fridge and catching the Danganronpa 47 reprise on TV (you’re lucky; it’s one of your favorite installments, one with an Ultimate Detective as one of the main players throughout the whole game), while you search in your phone for some new fanfic to read or some new fanart to add to your collection. You barely pay attention to the show, but you don’t really need to; like with any other Danganronpa, you’ve watched it more times than you can count.
Still, it makes for some good background noise.
During one of the commercial breaks, it plays an ad announcing that the auditions for the new Danganronpa installment are scheduled for a few months from now. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, it is called, and it is scheduled to air sometime next year, after a hiatus of three years since the last season. Even though it’s old news to you, you feel a faint smile tugging at your lips at the sight.
Now that you’re 16, you finally meet the age requirements for applying to Danganronpa. It’s your big chance, your golden ticket out of this miserable life. You would do anything to be selected, to become a part of the one thing that gives your life meaning.
To be able to die in a worthwhile way.
You’re fully aware that, if you really get selected, this would most certainly be your very last birthday. There’s no way you would survive a killing game. There’s no way you would even want to, to be honest.
You find the thought of that way less scary than it should be. As a matter of fact, it isn’t scary at all.
You turn 17, and you aren’t even aware of it.
It happens in the middle of the killing game, and since you’re trapped in the middle of nowhere (or so you think at the time), with your mind loaded with fabricated memories of a fabricated life, you have no idea that it’s September 7 right now.
Of all the days on which it could have happened, however, it sure lands on one of the worst ones possible.
Your turn 17 amidst a battlefield.
You wake up to one of your friends having been brutally murdered, the sight of their corpse burned in your eyes for as long as you’ll live. You spend the day fighting for yours and your friends’ lives, having to investigate and search for clues just so you can reveal the truth and cause even more pain and suffering to everyone. The class trial is traumatic as always, as every time you have to condemn one of your friends to death, every time you sacrifice one of them to save the rest, you feel like a little bit yourself dies with them.
It’s cruel. It’s brutal and ugly and nasty and you would be horrified if you knew how fervently “you” (as in, the other personality that inhabited your body before the current one was implemented) had longed to be a part of that a year earlier. How thrilled, exhilarated even, that old “you”, with his idolized and romanticized view of the whole thing, would have been if he had been offered the opportunity to spend his birthday doing the exact same thing.
For the current you, however, it is purely and simply, hell.
You turn 18, against all odds.
It has been nearly a year since you and two (out the original fifteen) of your friends escaped from the Ultimate Academy, also known as Team Danganronpa’s filming studio. Nearly a year since your whole life was turned upside down and twisted apart more times than you can count. Nearly a year since you’ve come home to a house filled with things you now despise; to parents you have no recollection of; to a life you no longer belong to.
It’s your birthday, yet and all you can feel is grief. The date now only serves to remind you of all the others who didn’t live to do the same. You ask yourself, why is it fair that you lived to see another year, when so many of your friends didn’t? Why was your miserable life spared, when so many of those who died probably deserved to live more than you?
Your survivor’s guilt has never peaked so much as it does on this day, almost threatening to bury you under all the remorse.
You wish you could see your dead friends once again. You wish you had been smarter, faster, better, had been anything so you could have saved them.
You wish you could hang out with Kaede for a bit and have her play a few songs in the piano for you, maybe even teach you how to play it.
You wish you could hang with Kaito for a bit and stare at the night sky with him, as he would tell you the name of all the constellations you two could see.
But you can’t. Not anymore.
Instead, what you have is Maki and Himiko dragging you out of bed instead of letting you mope around all day. You have Maki baking you a cake, despite never having baked anything before, just so you three can have a small celebration. You have Himiko trying to cheer you up with her magic tricks, and actually succeeding to draw a few smiles from you. You have the gifts they give you, two novels you had been yearning to get your hands on, yet never had the time or the mental disposition to get them. You have them staying with you all day, doing their best to not leave you alone with your thoughts, as they know they are your worst enemies right now.
You have friends, as incredible as it may seem.
It’s not perfect, you know it. You don’t think it ever will be, to be honest. The scars on the three of you still run deep, you have nightmares about the killing game every other night, the shadow of Danganronpa still looms all over you whenever you go out in public, and you know you won’t ever stop feeling a gaping hole inside your heart, where your deceased friends should be. Still…
It’s not perfect, but it’s enough.
Enough to actually give you a happy birthday, for once.