Chapter Text
Sayori feels gross.
Sayori with short coral hair, askew as usual and adorned with a neat red bow; Sayori in a cautiously-optimistic Fourth Outfit, a light blue tee that doesn’t fit quite right and sweatpants, because - somebody had mentioned they were comfortable.
Sayori; seventeen and unbearably hopeful, staring, horrified, at: Sayori, hair longer, bow gone (misplaced?), clothes... more formal. Adult. Sayori, an adult.
An adult.
Adult Sayori shrugs, tapping her fingers along the wooden surface of Sayori’s kotatsu. (The first thing she’d ever wanted and the first thing she’d attempted to make, which has only gotten easier to recommission every Monday— off-track.)
“I wouldn’t lie to myself, right?” She says, sounding self-conscious and wistful and weirdly old and less like Sayori with every word. “That’d be kinda... mean. And you’re a good kid, you all are - you don’t deserve that.”
Sayori does not return to her seated position.
“I— you want me to do what?”
“Me? I don’t want you to do anything,” the other clarifies, waving her hand in front of her as if to dispel the notion. “I mean, you know, I’m not telling you to do anything, I’m just, y’know. Passing along the information.”
“That— That doesn’t make any sense. You don’t make any sense!”
“Aw, gee, thanks.” Adult Sayori chuckles, looking quite unperturbed by Sayori’s pointing finger thrust in her face. “I dunno, I think it makes some sense, speaking from a failsafe standpoint. You’d need all four characters together to continue the script, right? Otherwise you get all those janky little errors that kinda fuck up the whole experie— oops, sorry. Uhh... mess up the whole experience.”
“I’m seventeen,” deadpans Sayori, to which Adult Sayori knocks a forgetful hand to the side of her own head.
“Ah~! Sorryyy. Totally not a kid anymore. Big bad Sayori, all ready to handle the fuck word!”
(Is she always this fucking peppy?)
“And no,” Sayori manages, “it doesn’t actually make any sense at all. M— Monika’s... my... this Monika’s—“
“Dead.”
Says Adult Sayori, unforgivingly blunt. Sayori crushes her hands into fists.
“... yeah.”
“Well, duh. You wouldn’t be standing here wearing a very cute, very haphazardly-coded little loungewear number if she weren’t,” Adult Sayori hums, swishing a bit of soda around in the mug Sayori had offered her (and was kind of regretting having offered her, at this point). “Or making such eclectic choices in on-hand beverages. You really like mangoes, huh?”
“Quit getting away from the point!”
“Okay, okay. Geez. We do have all day, y’know.”
“I have things to be doing,” Sayori humphs, crossing her arms over her chest. Adult Sayori rolls her eyes, fondly, and Sayori is annoyed because she has no reason to be so fond. They weren’t the same person, after all.
Clearly.
“Well, then I’ll say what I came to say and leave you to figuring out your clever little speedrun tactic. You know, I think you are the first ‘yori I’ve ever seen that’s gotten so far with it!” Adult Sayori says, brightly. “You must be a natural, picking it up quick enough to—“
”Please clarify.”
“Okay, okay. Look,” she continues, “You’re going to be stuck in this week until you get all the pieces back together. I know, I know, it’s stupid, sure, but that’s the way it is. That whole resetting-thing is a failsafe lock; you don’t have the proper amount of characters defined for it all to work clockwork, and all. And since your Monika’s dead,”
Adult Sayori expertly dodges the withering glare Sayori sends her way,
“You’ll just have to get a new one. We are video game characters; there’s not exactly a shortage of us or anything.”
“... you want me to kidnap some other Monika,” Sayori says, slowly. “Like a replacement goldfish.”
“Again, I don’t want you to do anything!” Adult Sayori hurriedly replies. “I’m just delivering information, here! You can, absolutely, keep reliving the same week over and over again and recoding all the cool elements you made from all the past Same Weeks you’ve lived before in the like, three hours you have before school starts every Monday! That’s cool, very admirable, you know, I just don’t know how long you can keep it up.”
So... unforgivingly blunt.
“Plus, it’s not like you can do the same thing with Nat and Yu’s memories, right? Thaaaat’s kinda just the rub of it. All this cool new stuff and it’s just, like, woah!!! There for them every time they start all over again on Monday! Eventually it’s gonna get kinda, y’know, comically ridiculous. Like, ‘oh right, yesterday I had no clothes and now I have a whole wardrobe!!’”
“What is it with you and the clothes.”
“I dunno, it just kinda seems like your thing? That or mangoes. We have only been talking for like an hour.”
Sayori grimaces. And what an hour it’s been.
“... anyway,” Adult Sayori presses on, “It’s not like... strictly speaking, it’s a bad thing. We’ve kinda got a clever little thing going on with it, so, whatever weird thing you’re thinking of where you crash into another universe and throw a Monika into a white van without windows is not gonna happen, sorry for the spoilers.”
... okay, maybe Adult Sayori was, still, just enough of a Sayori to fit right in.
“ ‘We’ve’? What, the almighty, multi-universal council of Monikas and Sayoris?” Is what Sayori says instead of anything very helpful, but, then again, she is seventeen and trying to handle godhood over a meaningless universe while a grown version of herself she didn’t even know could exist makes jabs at her that fall just short of playful, given the circumstances.
“What? No. That’d be weird. Universes should keep to themselves as much as possible,” says Adult Sayori. “Keeps everything feeling normal enough. This outreach thing is a bit of an exception, but, you’re the only person I’m talking to so—”
“Kidnapping making less sense by the second.”
“Ah. Well, I mean— you know what she did, right?”
Could you please have a little more tact about it?!
“... I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“Oh, right, duh. There was a lot of things-she-did, huh. The thing she did right after the,”
Sayori’s glare finally hits true, and Adult Sayori pauses rather disjointedly, suddenly redirecting her attention to taking a very long sip of mango soda.
“... the, um. The alone-time classroom.”
Right. That place. The place she’d—
(Sayori shuts her eyes, trying not to recall the one time she’d reopened it, just a few days after she’d been given the keys to the kingdom— tries not to recollect how much of Monika was still there, in the desk and the air and the clouds of stardust outside the window.
She wanted to be an astronaut, she’d said, when they were— when she’d confided— even if the memories were all false, fake, scripted— even if it never truly happened—
Sayori thinks she knows how her “best friend” felt, opening her door.)
“Well,” Adult Sayori continues, voice markedly quieter now that Sayori’s head is turned, trying hard to keep the tears dripping off her cheeks obscured from view, “The Player, you know, had a choice to make, then, too. They could... continue from there. Make your universe, make mine. Or, they could stop there.”
”Stop there?”
Sayori’s voice is thick and raw and she rather regrets speaking, even more the sudden thought that shoots painfully through her abdomen that maybe her friend could have been happy—
“Yeah, nothing was forcing them to... y’know... go through with it, or anything. A lot of them didn’t,” says Adult Sayori, taking a pensive moment with her mug once more. “A lot of them. But,”
Oh, no.
“Almost none of them stay.”
Adult Sayori sighs, leaning back on an arm with an at least vaguely distraught expression.
“God, it’s so cruel. Like, the least you could do is get everything over with for the poor kid. But no,” she says, dryly, “They promise her the world and move right the fuck on. I guess they probably have more pressing matters on their minds than, you know, video games, up in their world...”
Sayori is now staring.
“Anyway, that’s the kind of Monika you’ll be taking for your club. If, you know, you ever get tired of Same Week September!” Adult Sayori gestures her cup in Sayori’s direction. “Wraps everything up nice and neat, really, from a like... I dunno... ecological standpoint? You need a new Monika for your club to get anywhere, and look at that! Allllll the Monikas you could ever ask for— all of them probably waaaaay past caring about squabbling over coding style or background-realism or anything like that. Frees up another universe, too! Maybe make ‘em feel bad if they ever boot up their old save again, rub a little salt up in there. Vengeance! Blood for the Lit Club!”
“... you... you just... take them?”
“Yup! That’s where I got mine. She’s a sweetheart— didn’t want to remember, though, and I’m no meanie, so not like I could bring her with for this. Eh. Maybe for the better, it’s always cute to have someone to surprise with maaaagical quick-coded presents~! Makes me feel like a regular Santa Claus!”
... taken out of their—
”Yours is dead, though. You wouldn’t exist otherwise.”
”Why do you keep saying that?!”
“It took me two years,” says Adult Sayori, staring into her soda, “ten months, fourteen days, five hours, twenty-eight minutes, and eleven seconds to realize that my Monika was dead, dead dead, not CG-dead, not backed-up-dead, not jumpscare-dead. Dead dead.”
Sayori, slowly, sits down.
“And you seem like a very nice kid, and I kinda don’t want you to burn yourself out trying to figure out a way to resurrect someone who can’t ever come back. And,” she continues, pointedly, “I don’t want you to be all halfassed towards whichever Monika you pick out because you’re still waiting somewhere for yours to come back out of the blue. That would be... you know... a horrible thing to happen, for the both of you.”
Sayori remains silent.
“So!” says Adult Sayori, setting down her drink with a sense of purpose and beginning to write on a sheet of paper that had, of course, always been there, bright blue pen catching the light as she does so. “Guess I’ll be taking my leave now, y’know, got my own girls to be tormenting on a— Tuesday?— yeah, Tuesday night! I’ll leave you the port numbers to some good Monika hubs. Be careful, yeah, but not too careful!”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“Eh, you will. Hey, you wanna be my niece or my cousin in my excuse for being la— nnnnnevermind,” Adult Sayori says, flinching at the look Sayori is giving her, “Just the numbers then, here you go.”
“... what if I don’t want a new Monika,” says Sayori - soft and damp and rather hopeless, all considered, for a girl who is supposed to have the most hope out of all her peers.
Adult Sayori shrugs.
“You don’t have to have one, remember? Just if you ever feel like moving outta this weird never-ending festival prep thing you’ve got going on here. Like I said, maybe you’re into that,” Adult Sayori says, standing from the table and moving to gather her coat from the rack by the door. “Not here to judge.”
Sayori remains extremely, extremely quiet; staring at the paper on the table like it was a thing that would rip off her hand should she make so much of a movement towards it.
Adult Sayori shuffles, standing by the door for a moment - then sighs.
“... if it makes you feel better,” she says, “We’re all happy with this. Really. It’s a lot of work, but... it’s worth the effort, in the end. There’s a payoff. You know?”
Sayori stays silent.
“...”
She stiffens, slightly, at the sudden touch of arms circling around her shoulders; a warm body above, leaning against her.
“Hey. You’re a brave, strong kid, you know that? You’ve gotten through a lot. And you’ll make it through a lot more.”
Sayori doesn’t
“I know. I know it feels like— a lot. Like betrayal. Like forgetting.”
Say anything
“But all she wanted, in the end, you know - it was just a chance to live her life. With friends, and the club, and with people who loved her,”
At all.
“And... there’s really something to be said about a second chance, you know? … hahaha...”
But the Sayori from a world with far more choices behind her, and far more choices left to be made, gives her a reassuring squeeze anyway.
“You can do this, kiddo. No matter what you decide to do, you’re smart, you’re resourceful, and you’ve got so much love in you it’s ridiculous— I know you’ll make it. No matter what. Your dreams, your wishes, your realities...”
Sayori is left staring at the paper for a long time, that Tuesday evening.
“You can do it. You can make it all come true, you know, because you’re you.”
And in the end, she does come to a decision.
“Good luck, Sayori. Keep that chin up, okay?”
But it’s not until the following Sunday - yet another week of nothing much happens, and then you fall asleep staring her in the face, immovable and impossible to fend off, despite the most valiant of her efforts - that she picks up the sheet of paper with even a shred of intent behind her actions.
Sayori, next week, will have a plan to move forward.
Sayori, next week,
Will bring a Monika home.