Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first thing that hit him as he stepped through the iron-plated doors of Hope’s Peak Academy into the long-sought arms of freedom was the bitter, stinging taste of the air that wasted no time in affronting his lungs. 

Hilariously, tragically, freedom felt a lot like a painful fit of coughs. 

Makoto felt a hand, gentle but firm, press awkwardly against the small of his back as he fought against the onslaught of thick, heavy smog that seemed determined to make his respiratory tract its newest victim, trampling his windpipe on its way down and poisoning his body from the inside. He was doubled over, hacking his guts out, unable to so much as see through the tears that welled up in his eyes as the first line of defense against the scalding, toxic atmosphere around him. 

He probably should’ve told someone he’d had asthma as a kid. In the midst of the past few months of murder, betrayal, and imprisonment, it hadn’t seemed like a very important detail, but boy was it coming back to bite him in the ass now. 

“Makoto.”
Kirigiri’s voice around the syllables of his name was surprisingly more grounding than Makoto would have expected it to be, and, resisting the pleas of every inch of his aching body, which screamed at him to curl into a ball on the floor and simply give up, he forced himself upright, choking out a few final, shallow coughs before heaving in a deep, steady breath, effectively making his peace with the air that had tried to kill him. He shot Kirigiri a weak but nevertheless gracious look, and she nodded almost imperceptibly, withdrawing her hand and leaving the place where she’d touched him feeling as though it had been branded. 

“Are you finished?” Togami bit out impatiently from somewhere to his right—
(Although if he didn’t know any better, Makoto would’ve sworn that the expression the blonde was wearing when he glanced over in his direction was one of concern)
—and Makoto blinked a couple of times in rapid succession before offering a feeble thumbs up.
“Sorry,” he croaked sheepishly, voice so raspy he barely recognized it himself, “I—ahem—used to have asthma.”

“You, uh, might wanna check the expiration date on that diagnosis,” Hagakure mumbled, earning an elbow to the ribs courtesy of Asahina before she turned worried eyes on her friend. 

“You gonna be okay?” She asked with a frown, pointedly ignoring Hagakure’s indignant, squawking complaints of “Ow!! Hey, man, what gives?” in light of her assault. Makoto blinked out the tears left clinging to his lashes and nodded, doing his best to dismiss the nagging buzz of a dangerous cocktail of nervous energy and utter exhaustion that blurred his vision and churned his stomach, making his legs seem all-of-a-sudden not sturdy enough to hold up his body. 

With baited breath and the embarrassing knowledge that, after surviving both the end of the world and a sadistic killing game, a fucking breath of air was what almost took him out, Makoto finally worked up the courage to gaze out across the dusty, barren expanse of dead grass and the occasional graying tree in the field outside the school, flanking the cobblestone path that led up to the reinforced gate. 

Enoshima hadn’t been lying; this new world, completely unfamiliar and unrecognizable to him, reeked of despair. Hopelessness that hung heavy in the air and, much like the smog and debris, threatened to invade your body and sink deep into your bones. To make a home in your heart out of the shattered remains of the things which once mattered. 

Makoto shuddered, and wrapped protective arms around himself in a listless attempt to ward away an invisible enemy. Tears welled up in his eyes once more, but this time they weren’t the product of the acridity in the air. 

(He hadn’t let himself cry since Sayaka. 

Now it was all over, and the world outside the walls of Hope’s Peak was every bit as dismal and doomed as the life they’d lived within it.)

He couldn’t even see more than three feet in front of him, the dust and the haze blotting out the sun—
(That is, if the sun was even out to begin with. There was no way of knowing what time it was, with the entire world engulfed in a reddish-gray cloud of dismay that kept any semblance of light from shining through the filth. For all Makoto knew, it could be the middle of the night. The sun itself might’ve exploded while he was under the claw of Enoshima’s manicured malice, and he would be none the wiser.)
—and making it impossible to so much as breathe somewhat comfortably. 

His gaze dropped to his feet, which he proceeded to kick softly against the concrete steps leading up to the front doors of the school. 

What now?

“—an inhaler.”

“Huh?” 
Makoto’s attention snapped back to the present just in time to hear the last few words of Togami’s sentence. Apparently he’d been so entranced by the intoxicating misery that wafted off every dead, decrepit surface of the world he’d once known, he had completely zoned out of his friends’ conversation. 

He still winced when Togami’s eyes shifted to glare at him. “What, have you gone deaf?” He sneered, and Makoto almost tried to explain himself before realizing that this was probably one of those questions you weren’t supposed to answer. The other boy confirmed his suspicions by looking away just as Makoto opened his mouth to respond and proceeding as though the brunette weren’t there at all. “I said that if your asthma is flaring back up, we’re going to need to find an inhaler.” Blue eyes locked onto him once more, and Togami cocked his head to the side, an inscrutable expression on his face.

“Unless, of course, you’re alright with asphyxiating and dying the moment a slight wind picks up.”

Makoto’s half-hearted reply was again cut off, this time by an increasingly agitated Asahina. 

“Shut up, jerk, he’s not gonna die!” she chided, scowling at Togami as though he’d just threatened to kill Makoto himself.  

The blonde fixed her with a look so scathing, Makoto just about felt it. 
“He will if our next course of action is to, as you so helpfully suggested, ‘just get the hell out of here and see where to go from there’.” 

Oh. So they’d been debating their next move. That was probably important. They’d escaped Hope’s Peak and Junko Enoshima, but they weren’t out of the woods just yet. 

In fact, if what Enoshima had claimed about the state of the world was true, they were all homeless. Orphaned. Alone. 

The thought hadn’t quite registered during that heated final confrontation. Makoto had talked a big game about hope and perseverance, but most of his motivation had been the adrenaline and desperation coursing through his veins. His life had been on the line; all of his friends’ lives had been on the line. 

And now that they were, for the time being, out of harm’s way, it was finally beginning to settle in. The fact that his family was dead, that the entire life he had come to know and all the people he’d ever loved were gone. 

That while they’d been trapped inside their own little pocket of hell, hell had been busy consuming the rest of the world. 

(And maybe, the reason he’d been able to avoid thinking about it before was because he hadn’t let himself think about it before. There was always some distraction, something he convinced himself was more pressing and urgent. A new victim, a new case, whatever the hell Kirigiri was doing snooping around the school. Ever since day one, when he’d seen that video of his family home, abandoned and left to ruin, and first gotten the feeling that something wasn’t quite right, that escape couldn’t possibly be exactly what it seemed—Makoto had been telling himself, ‘it’s fine. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.’

And now he was here. 

And it looked like he’d severely underestimated the size of that bridge.)

“We can’t just leave,” he blurted out without thinking, eyes glassy and hands shaking as he stuffed them feverishly into his pockets. “We have nowhere to go.” 

Five pairs of eyes bore into his skull, and Makoto did his damndest not to look at any of them, at any of the people who were suddenly all he had left. The silence that settled in the wake of his outburst might’ve lasted ten seconds or ten hours—hell if Makoto, in his catatonic state of shock and detachment, had any earthly idea—before Asahina broke it with a long, sad sigh. 

“Yeah, you’re right,” she conceded, sounding defeated and morose and not at all like the girl Makoto had come to know and care about. “I just—I dunno. I wanted to get away from this place.” 

“And we will,” Kirigiri assured as Makoto’s heart broke for his friend. Of course she would want to put some distance between herself and the school where she almost died. The place where her best friend killed herself. Makoto felt the first of the tears that had been gathering behind his lashes slip from its perch and ducked his head so the others wouldn’t see it. “But to throw caution to the wind and simply make our decisions as we go would be...unwise. We don’t know what’s waiting for us out there. We have to at least try and be prepared.”

In his periphery, Makoto saw Asahina nod her head in assent with Kirigiri’s logic, and he heard Togami mutter something—probably unnecessarily rude and antagonistic—under his breath. For a moment, his heart faltered and a stray, unwelcome thought ricocheted through his skull. 

These are the people I’m stuck with. 

He banished the notion almost as quickly as it occurred to him, guilt welling low in his stomach and making him feel suddenly and abhorrently sick with himself. What the hell was that supposed to mean? “Stuck With”?? These people were his friends!

His friends who had voted to have him executed for a crime he didn’t commit. 

His friends who only minutes ago considered sacrificing him in exchange for their guaranteed safety. 

His friends who—

Makoto shook his head fervently, derailing that train of reasoning before it had the chance to reach the station. He couldn’t think like that. He liked his friends. He wanted to keep them safe. He trusted them. 

(He had to trust them. He didn’t have a choice.)

“The Chemistry Lab.”

Fukawa, who had been silent ever since she sneezed herself back into her body just in time to witness the doors to Hope’s Peak Academy swing open, suddenly piped up. 

The others turned to look at her, inquisitive, surprised, or—in Hagakure’s case—just plain confused, and she flushed under the sudden wave of their attention. 

“I m-mean. The cuh-chemistry lab has a bunch of muh-muh-m-medications and suppuh-supplum-supplements, right? We could...use...that.” She stumbled over her words and wrung her wrists frantically. Togami made a point of slowly and deliberately wiping off the spittle she’d rained on his face while battling to get out her p’s, which definitely didn’t help ease her frayed nerves. Mortified, she took a step away from him, almost slipping down the stairs as she did so. 

Kirigiri, ignoring all of this, nodded thoughtfully, eyebrows furrowed and jaw set, absently twirling a strand of her hair around her index finger. Makoto could practically see the cogs in her head turning as she charted out the best possible plan for them, dismissing all extraneous and nonessential data just as a computer would to run an efficient program. 

(Extraneous and nonessential data, like him. That’s what she’d decided when she’d made the choice to sacrifice him in favor of pursuing the truth. That he was trivial. Unnecessary. Disposable.)

Makoto shook his head again, grimacing and squeezing his eyes shut as he tried to force his frantic mind to settle down. Were his heart not beating so restlessly in his chest and his blood not pumping so loudly in his ears, he might’ve noticed Togami’s eyes observing him in wordless appraisal, or Asahina’s stolen glances of deep-seated concern. 

As it was, though, all he could think of was the thump, thump, thump of his pounding chest, the rhythm of which seemed to be growing closer, and closer, until—

“—think our best bet is to bunker down in the dorms for a bit while we raid whatever we can from the school’s cache of supplies.”

Damnit. He’d done it again. Tuning back in to the conversation in time to hear Kirigiri’s unsettling proposal, Makoto quickly surveyed his friends’ expressions, trying to read from their faces what they made of her plan. 

He didn’t need to scrutinize too hard, though. Hagakure voiced his thoughts aloud mere seconds after Kirigiri finished her sentence, the moments’ delay most likely having been comprised of the time it took for him to process what she was saying. 

“You want us to go back in there?!” He all but shouted, gawking at the girl as though she’d just asked him to fly. 

Kirigiri, never one to beat around the bush and utterly unshaken by his discouraging response, merely nodded. “Yes,” she said, unblinking, “unless any of you have somewhere else to go, I think it’s our safest option. At least for the time being.”

Asahina shifted on her feet, gaze downturned and cheek sucked in, obviously none too pleased with Kirigiri’s suggestion either. Togami provided no discernible reaction, and Fukawa’s eyes were wide and petrified, though whether her horror was from the idea of heading back inside Hope’s Peak or from accidentally spitting on Togami a few minutes before, Makoto couldn’t be sure. 

That left him to be the deciding voice, it seemed. A responsibility he was starting to grow a little bit sick of. 

“I agree with Kyoko,” he said, though he too felt queasy at the prospect of spending another minute within the walls of the school that had claimed the lives of so many of his friends, had fed off his grief and his fear for so long. “The place was stocked for us to stay there for the rest of our lives. Even if we do decide to leave, it would be stupid not to exhaust all of its resources first.” He glanced around at the dejected faces of his peers, voice cracking as he sought a word of support, “...right?” 

“Right.” 
Surprisingly enough, it was Togami, not Kirigiri, who came to his aid, adjusting his glasses out of force of habit—
(A nervous tic, one might even venture, if they were feeling bold)
—and keeping his eyes pointed strictly away from Makoto, as though the act of agreeing with him was something physically difficult to stomach. 
“Besides, I doubt any of us has the energy to actually make it very far tonight, even if we do leave the school grounds.” He shot a sidelong glance at Fukawa, grimacing in distaste. “If one of us left now, we’d probably be found dead in a ditch by morning.”

“Does one of us die every time you open your mouth with a stupid hypothetical?” Asahina spat, more irritable than Makoto had seen her since Oogami’s trial. She didn’t even wait for Togami to offer a response, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring ferociously. “Fine. We’ll spend one last night in the hell school. Whatever.”

With that declaration, she marched past Kirigiri and Hagakure and stormed back into the main hall, refusing to look anyone in the eye. 

Another tense silence claimed the group in her absence, until one by one, Makoto’s ex-classmates began trickling in after her. 

Eventually, he was left on the concrete steps with only Kirigiri, whose back was turned to him as she surveyed the locks on the doors of the grand entrance, perhaps in an effort to understand how the mechanism had worked, keeping them all trapped inside. 

He didn’t say anything, turning around to face the front field of the school once more. It seemed slightly darker now than it had been when they’d first walked out, though the difference was difficult to discern and may very well have been an illusion created by his newly deflated hopes. Through the haze of dust and debris, the outline of the front gates of the school was only barely visible. 

He wouldn’t have to walk more than a few yards to reach them. Just a few yards, and he could get out. He could leave this whole nightmare behind, forever. 

“You coming?”

Makoto startled at the sound of Kirigiri’s voice, having half-forgotten that she was still there. He turned to look at her and found himself face to face with the vibrant lilacs of her eyes. 

The same eyes that were the first sign of life he’d witnessed in that trash pit under the school building. The same eyes that had come looking for him when everyone else had assumed he was dead. 

Makoto afforded the silhouette of the gates one final, fleeting look. 

(There was nothing left out there for him. Not anymore. 

What mattered was what he had, here, at his side. The five people who had decided, in some way or another, that saving him was more important than saving themselves. This was where he was needed. 

This was what he was fighting for.)

“Yeah,” he said, rubbing at his eyes and turning his back on the gate in favor of looking at his friend. “I’m coming.”

Kirigiri smiled, and for a brief, quiet moment, the world seemed alright. 

Chapter Text

“Excuse me.”

A girl with dark blue hair that fell all the way down to her waist and pale azure eyes that seemed to see right through him was tapping on his shoulder, and it took Makoto an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize he was staring. 

“Sorry,” he scrambled to straighten himself, standing up from where he was perched on the edge of the auditorium steps and banging his hip against the side of the stage in the process. “Whuh-umm-what is it?”

‘Smooth operator,’ his brain admonished, as if it weren’t itself responsible for the inarticulate garbage he’d just spewed from his mouth. 

The blue-haired girl seemed unbothered by his lack of eloquence, however, and simply folded her hands in front of her, smiling pleasantly at him in a way that made the hair on the back of his neck tingle. 

“You’re Makoto Naegi, right?” She asked, beaming gleefully when he nodded dumbly in confirmation. “I knew it! I knew I recognized you!”

After a moment of giddy celebration, the girl once again looked him right in the eye, making his blood pump faster and his heart rattle erratically against his ribs. “I’m Sayaka. Maizono,” she said—as though the world’s biggest pop sensation needed any such introduction—and extended her hand amicably. Makoto took it, just as vacantly as before, trying and failing not to short-circuit at the warm sensation of her palm tucked into his. 

“I don’t know if you remember it,” she babbled happily, giving his hand a firm, cheery shake, “but we went to middle school together. You were in my Year 1 English class.”

‘She remembers me?’ His mind raced a mile a minute at the baffling revelation that international celebrity Sayaka Maizono not only knew his name, but somehow remembered him from junior high.

“Of course I remember you, silly!” She chirped mirthfully, releasing his hand to cover up a snicker with her own, “after your stunt with that crane, you were sort of all 12-year-old me could ever think about. I’m just surprised you remember who I am, since I never got the chance to talk to you back then and had to transfer to home schooling in Year 2 when my group started touring in other countries.”

Makoto’s head would’ve been reeling from the influx of information, and from the assertion that he was, quote, “all 12-year-old Maizono could think about”—if not for the fact that he was fixated dumbfoundedly on the very first part of her sentence. 

“How—how did you know I was—?”

“Oh,” Maizono dismissed his astonishment with a wave of her hand and a quiet chuckle that quickly cemented itself as Makoto’s favorite sound in the world. Her next words came out as casually as an offhanded remark about the weather or a question regarding last night’s homework. 

“I’m psychic.”

Makoto balked, eyes going comically wide as—for perhaps the fifth time in the past minute alone—his brain ceased to function. Maizono observed his baffled reaction and snorted, face going red and hand once again springing up to cover her mouth. 

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding!” She amended, recovering from a fit of giggles as Makoto tried to remember how to think. Swiping a tear from her eye, Maizono grinned wildly at him, and Makoto found himself inclined to smile back, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. 

“I just have a really good intuition.”

~~~

“Makoto. Makoto, wake up!”

When Makoto’s eyes snapped open, the first thing they landed on was Kirigiri’s face, mere inches away from his own, worry knitted into her eyebrows and lips pursed in a barely-there frown. He managed with some difficulty to quell his immediate reaction—which was to thrash and yelp at their unexpectedly close proximity and the alarmingly solid weight of her hands on his shoulders—and instead simply blinked in bewilderment, performing mental cartwheels he wasn’t nearly lucid enough to handle in an effort to distinguish what was real from what wasn’t. 

Real: Kirigiri’s hair, tied into an uncharacteristically messy braid and draped over his chest as she shook him awake. 

Not Real: the school auditorium, sunlight filtering in through the high steeped windows and painting the wood panel floors in strips of warm morning golds as students—more students than he’d ever seen at Hope’s Peak at any one time—milled about and mingled at their leisure.

Real: the past 24 hours, perhaps the most stressful of his life. The trial, the execution, the opening of the doors. Junko Enoshima’s harrowingly peaceful smile as an oversized stamp slammed down on her head. The haze of dusty red and suffocating emptiness that greeted them in the outside world. 

Not real: Sayaka Maizono, alive, smiling, hand slotted into his and eyes alight with joy, brighter than he’d ever seen her in his life. 

What an awfully cruel dream. 

Kirigiri moved off of him, satisfied that he was properly roused, and threw her hair—which Makoto now realized had yet to be brushed, suggesting that she hadn’t woken up much earlier herself—over her shoulder, clearing her throat and crossing her arms over her chest. The panic that had briefly flashed across her normally poised features when Makoto first awoke had disappeared, but the concern was still there, ebbing into her eyes and crinkling the corners of her lips. 

“I just came in to get you and found you...like this. Your breathing was shallow and you were making these little keening noises. What happened?”

Makoto opened and shut his mouth a couple of times like a dying fish, unintelligently blubbering as he floundered to catch up with her words. His head felt heavy and jet lagged, the unbearably lifelike image of Sayaka’s smiling face still emblazoned on his brain, the sound of her enchanting voice still ringing in his ears. 

(Had it really been only a dream?) 

“Kyo...ko?” He eventually managed to say, which was neither an answer to her question nor even a full sentence, but he was proud of himself nonetheless for managing to wrestle together some fruition of reality that he could at the very least attach a name to. 

“Yes?” She responded, fastidious as ever, although her pointer finger had begun tapping at the crook of her elbow—a sure sign that her patience was starting to wear thin, if Makoto had learned anything over the past several months of knowing her. 

“What’re’yuh doin’ in my room?” He asked, having already mostly forgotten the question she’d posed to him. His voice was laced with grogginess, and his words had to fight for precedence on his tongue against a very insistent yawn that seemed dead set on making itself known. Already his eyelids were beginning to droop, and either Makoto was a lot more fatigued than he’d initially assumed, or it wasn’t actually morning just yet. 

Kirigiri observed her friend’s losing battle against somnolence shrewdly, perhaps coming to terms with the fact that she wasn’t likely to get any sort of coherent answer out of him about whatever had been ailing him when she first stepped into the room. Sighing softly, she carded a hand through her bangs, squeezing her eyes shut and allowing her expression to betray the slightest hint of frustration before sitting down on the edge of Makoto’s bed. 

“There’s...someone here. A woman. She got in while we were asleep and is now waiting for us in the cafeteria. Says she ‘just wants to talk’.”

That wrenched Makoto out of his drowsiness like a bucket of ice water on a mid-December morning. He sat up ramrod straight in his bed, eyes shooting open and mouth falling agape as a strangled noise of panic and confusion fell from his lips. “What?” He choked out, reeling as he tried to process the new, incredibly unexpected information Kirigiri had decided to thrust upon him. There was a stranger in the school building? How had she gotten in? When had she gotten in? Why was she here? What did she want?

His mind, overwhelmed with this troubling new development, filtered quickly through several possible worst-case scenarios: assassins hired by Enoshima to take them out if her plan went astray, mobs of despair-poisoned viewers angry that they had won the game and ruined their fun, new order leaders that wanted every last trace of life before the Tragedy exterminated, looters planning to gun them down and steal the school’s supplies. The thought finally occurred to him—
(Or rather, the truth finally caught up to him)
—that those iron plates on the windows and doors had been put up to protect them, to keep others out. 

And now they’d opened the school right up and left themselves exposed, completely vulnerable to the unspeakable medley of horrors that were waiting out there. 

(How naive they had been, to think that just because they didn’t actively seek it out, trouble wouldn’t simply come to find them.)

Kirigiri nodded, seemingly to herself, and continued speaking, as though Makoto weren’t suffering an anxious meltdown right in front of her. 
“It alarmed me, too, but there wasn’t much that could be done about it,” she said, biting the inside of her cheek and staring wistfully at the wall, “I went into the kitchen for a glass of water, and there she was, demanding to meet with us. So, I made a round of the dorm rooms and woke everyone up.”

Makoto spluttered, struggling to grasp the fact that an outsider had infiltrated their makeshift sanctuary, probably with nefarious intentions, and Kirigiri was sitting here talking about it as though it were a minor inconvenience. “Wasn’t much that could be done”? Had she even tried!?

He shook his head in earnest, trying desperately to jostle his thoughts free of the clutches of panic and back into place. Having long since tabled the disturbingly realistic Sayaka dream for a later, more appropriate time, Makoto tried to focus on the facts, the absolute truths at hand, in an effort to paint a clearer picture. 

(It was a strategy he’d learned to adopt back in grade school, around age 10, when the lessons first started becoming more challenging and he found it harder and harder to pay attention to all the little details. His math teacher had sat him down one day after he failed one of her exams and taught him to make a list of bullets in his head: little, condensed bits of information to focus on when the big picture was too much to handle. Makoto would never dare reveal to anyone that he’d used that same 5th grade learning technique to solve some of the murders of his friends. It made him feel like even more of a clueless child than he already often did.)

One. Kirigiri had come into his bedroom to wake him up, presumably after paying similar visits to each of their other four classmates. 

Two. Her disheveled hair and odd choice of attire could probably be attributed to the fact that she herself had been asleep not too long ago as well. This was not a planned event. 

Three. The reason Kirigiri had needed to wake everyone up before morning was because at some point during the night, a stranger had snuck into the school building. Said stranger had apparently told Kirigiri she wanted to speak with the six of them. About what, she hadn’t disclosed. 

Four. At the time being, everyone was most likely still safe and alive. Though she wasn’t the type to get explicitly emotional over the misfortune of others, Makoto doubted that Kirigiri would fail to mention it if one of their friends was hurt or dead. In fact, that was probably what she would’ve led with if it were the case; Kirigiri never wasted time worrying about being indelicate. 

Five. The longer he stayed in bed panicking, the more Makoto risked his friends’ status of safe and alive remaining that way. Even if the woman in the cafeteria hadn’t done anything to harm them yet, it didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous. He needed to get his shit together. Now. 

“Okay,” he breathed, curling shaky fingers around the edge of his comforter and pushing it away from his body. “Okay.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and got to his feet, a little dizzy from the bout of exhaustion his body was struggling to keep at bay. One night’s uneven, interrupted sleep hadn’t done much to ease away the strain of months spent scrambling through Enoshima’s torture regiment, but Makoto didn’t have the time to worry about that right now. Ignoring the swell of pain that sparked behind his eyes and echoed through his skull the moment he stood upright, he forced himself forward. He needed to see for himself the situation unfolding in the kitchen. He needed to know for a fact that his friends were alright. 

Makoto was not a betting man. 

(In the periphery of his mind’s eye, a Victorian castle went up in flames to a soundtrack of silent screams. Heavily mascara’d eyes drilled through him, bleeding their crimson hue deep into his heart.)

From where she was seated on the corner of his bed, Kirigiri followed her friend’s rigid, jittery movements all the way to the bathroom door. She tilted her head to the side, watching him fumble with the handle a couple of times before successfully stumbling into the washroom, and tried to gauge the best response she could offer in light of his clear, understandable struggle to handle what she’d dumped on him. Discouragingly, all she could come up with was moral support, which had never been one of her strong suits. 

Oh well. The guy was quite literally the only reason she was still alive and breathing. The least she could do was try. 

Behind the bathroom door, Makoto had situated himself at the sink with both hands clasped against the edge of the counter, knuckles white from the force of his grip as he willed himself to breathe in time with the rapid beating of his heart. Perhaps not the best metronome to rely on given the current circumstances, but he was desperate and had little time to spare. He made sure not to let his gaze drift towards the shower, mortified of what he might see there—
(Even if he’d decided to dismiss the dream for now, there was no erasing the visage of Sayaka that would forever haunt his bathroom walls, her blood dripping down the drain and her vacant eyes half-open, pointed up at the sky she’d never get to see again)
—as he splashed cold water on his face, doing his best to wash away the sleep still tugging inconveniently at his eyelids. The chill prickled at his skin even after he’d toweled his face dry, and his eyes were hollow and grim in the bathroom mirror. 

With a steely, fractured breath, he gathered up what he could of his mess of nerves and left his bathroom to face the music. 

When he swung open the door, he was immediately greeted by the sight of Kirigiri blocking his way, extending the hoodie he almost always donned towards him with an unreadable look in her eyes. 

Makoto took the jacket, offering her a mumbled word of thanks and slipping it on over his head before turning to the door that led out into the hallway. 

‘Stop pushing your luck,’ his muddled mind supplied. ‘Everyone’s waiting on you.’

With his heart once again pounding hard enough for him to feel its rhythm against his eardrums, he turned the doorknob and stepped out into the hall. 

Even with Kirigiri trailing close behind him, his footsteps echoed along the silent corridor with what felt like the weight of the entire world, a clamor of steady thuds against the linoleum tile floor. The school felt too big, too empty, and Makoto felt too small and alone. His mind raced almost incoherently, still churning through inane hypotheticals of trained hitmen or armed abductors surrounding the building, just waiting for them to slip up so they could make their move. Of angry mobs and psychopathic killers and unhinged criminals, of a world swaddled in a blanket of despair and mania that wanted nothing more than to suck them under the covers. 

Of the ambassador to that anguish who was waiting to introduce them to their asinine new reality just behind the cafeteria doors. 

By the time he found himself in front of the the dining hall, Makoto’s face was coated in a copious layer of sweat. 

(God, would they never get a single moment of peace?)

Mercifully, a sudden sensation on his shoulder jolted him out of his spiraling swivet, and he startled a bit at the striking realization that he wasn’t as entirely alone as he felt. 

Kirigiri’s hand provided a focal point, something to fixate on that wasn’t the impending sense of doom wafting out from underneath the dining room doors. 

Makoto decided it might be even more effective tucked into his. 

Without really thinking it through, he wrapped his quavering fingers around her steady gloved ones and pulled her hand off of his shoulder to swing instead by his side. If Kirigiri was surprised by this new development, she certainly didn’t show it, waiting a couple of moments before giving Makoto’s palm an encouraging little squeeze. 

Head a little quieter and heart a bit less clamoring, Makoto braved a push against the wooden double doors in front of him and made his way inside in one swift motion. 

(He’d always subscribed to the belief that a bandaid was far less excruciating if you tore it off in one go.)

There, congregated around one of the small circular tables arranged in the center of the dining room, were his friends—Hagakure, still half-asleep with his head on his folded arms, Asahina and Fukawa, sitting across from one another in tense, unwavering silence, and Togami, pacing back and forth with a nervous energy atypical of the usually aloof and unbothered heir—and her. A woman with porcelain white skin, straight black hair, and horn rimmed glasses, who looked to be in her mid-thirties and whose pale, almost transparent gray eyes snapped towards the door the moment it closed behind him. 

...Huh. Makoto had to admit, she didn’t look evil. 

(Then again, neither had Junko Enoshima in all those magazine covers and school photos.)

Before either he or the massive, unwelcome elephant in the room had the opportunity to address one another, Asahina broke the brief silence that had settled in the air with a relieved sigh. 

“There you guys are! We were beginning to worry you had abandoned us here and skipped town,” she chuckled nervously, tugging at a strand of her hair, which was for once free of its usual ponytail. 

“That probably would’ve been the smartest thing you could do,” Togami added, voice clipped and even more irritated than usual, “given the interloper that has so helpfully decided to inject herself into our already sabotaged lives.”

The woman sent the blonde an unaffected glance, folding her hands on the table and leaning forward. “I told you all already,” she said, her voice smooth as butter—
(Bad analogy. Makoto’s memory fried at the edges and sent sparks of electricity searing down his spine. Terrible analogy.)
—and her tone patient and even, “if I wanted to do anything to harm you, I would’ve done it while you were still asleep. I had no reason to sit and wait for all of you to wake up and gather here if my only intention was to hurt you.”

“And because of that, you expect us to blindly believe every word you say?” Togami demanded, turning to glower at her, “a rather bold request to make of a stranger who broke in in the middle of the night and won’t even tell us her name.” 

The lady met Togami’s glare head on, and even though there was still a solid chance that she was evil, Makoto had to admit he was a little impressed. It had taken him weeks to work up the courage to look his stony, cold classmate in the eye. The fact that this woman didn’t even flinch under his venomous look of disdain was nothing short of incredible. 

“It’s a little unfair,” she remarked coolly, “for you to call what I did ‘breaking in’. After all, the doors were unlocked and a disestablished high school is hardly private property.” Her eyes flitted to Makoto, and he felt himself freeze up a bit, clutching his hand a little tighter around Kirigiri’s to ensure that she was still there. “And the reason I wanted to wait to disclose my name was so that I could introduce myself to all of you at once. Believe it or not, I am a very busy woman and I don’t like having to repeat myself when it can so easily be avoided.”

With that, she got to her feet, brushing her hair back and stepping away from the table. She strode over to where Makoto was standing stiffly in the entrance and offered him her hand with an air of cordial professionalism that made the boy feel like he was in a particularly important job interview. 

“Ayano Akamine,” she stated clearly. “It is an honor and a privilege to meet you fine young ladies and gentlemen.” 

For a person who had just claimed to want to address all six of them at once, she sure did seem to be singling him out. 

“Naegi, don’t touch her,” Togami barked, and Makoto was about to object that he wasn’t planning on it until he noticed his hand, drifting towards hers of what seemed to be its own accord. He blinked and retracted it quickly, head spinning once more as his gaze shifted to the side, alarmed to find the spot where Kirigiri had been standing only moments prior empty. When had she let go of his hand?

Scrambling to place his unbelievably evasive friend, Makoto’s eyes locked on to the light lavender of her messy braid, swinging behind her as she marched over to where the others were sitting. She sidled into place beside Togami’s imposing figure, discreetly standing on tiptoe to whisper something in his ear before turning to face Makoto with a determined gleam in her eyes. 

He blinked, confounded, and—not for the first time—felt completely out of the loop, unable to figure out for the life of him what that expression was supposed mean. Even in rumpled pajamas and unflattering bedhead, it seemed that Kirigiri remained two steps ahead of the rest of the room, countenance trained into her trademarked unyielding stoicism as she offered him the tiniest of nods. 

Miss Akamine seemed to take his blank expression and lack of reaction to mean that Makoto was giving her the cold shoulder—
(Which, in all honesty, he wasn’t in a solid enough state of mind to consciously do)
—and let out a small sigh of frustration. She moved out of his personal space, and Makoto found himself letting out a nervous breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in. 

“I know it’s difficult to believe,” she started, this time truly addressing all six of the survivors, “but I’m here to help you.”

“W-w-wuh-what can you do to h-help us?” Fukawa stammered, frown a little deeper than usual and fingernails digging anxiously into the skin on her forearms. “Wh-why should we buh-beluh-bullee...why should we trust you?”

“You shouldn’t,” Akamine answered bluntly, sucking in her cheeks and surveying the dubious looks of the children around her. Her severe expression softened at the very real fear and alarm that crept into Asahina’s eyes at her words, at the tensing of Togami’s shoulders and the way Fukawa’s nervous fidgeting ceased immediately so her entire body could freeze up, as if keeping still would make her a less obvious target. 

(It was easy to forget how young and afraid these kids were when you were watching them kill and condemn one another on a screen. 

Akamine didn’t have that luxury of convenient detachment up close.)

“I’ve given you no reason to,” she added, voice noticeably gentler, “and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. All you have is my word.” She turned to Makoto, then, eyes peering down at him from behind foggy lenses which she pushed up on the bridge of her nose with the pad of her finger. “My word that I have absolutely no desire to hurt any of you in any way.” 

Makoto cocked his head to the side, and silence once again befell the cafeteria. The only movement to be found was in the vehement tapping of Fukawa’s foot, which had resumed its relentless assault on the cafeteria floor the moment Akamine had clarified that she posed no immediate threat. All eyes were on the tired brunette, whose face was scrunched up in clear concentration and whose lips were tucked into a thoughtful frown. 

After a minute or two of mulling it over, Makoto arrived at a decision. “I trust her,” he announced, shoving his hands into his pajama pockets and assuming an air of authority and confidence that Akamine would never have thought possible of the befuddled, blindsided boy who’d first stumbled into the dining hall. 

“Of course you do,” Togami scoffed, alerting the woman to the others’ presence and to the fact that, for a split second, she had been so completely enraptured by the shift in Makoto’s demeanor that she had all but forgotten her original intent. “You’d give Pinocchio the benefit of the doubt if you could.”

“It’s not the benefit of the doubt,” Makoto argued, stepping forward and locking eyes with the blonde. 
(He was, after all, far from the kid he’d been when he’d first walked through the halls of Hope’s Peak Academy.)
“She’s telling the truth. Think about it. We were all asleep when she first got here. If she was going to kill us or kidnap us, it would’ve been way easier to do it quietly while we had no way of noticing. She’d be able to pick us off one by one with pretty much no trouble.” His eyebrows furrowed and his jaw set in place, gears finally turning in his head as he worked through the facts of the case. “Plus—and I know you think this kinda stuff is circumstantial, or flimsy, or whatever—“ he raised an eyebrow at Togami when it looked as though he were about to raise an objection, “but it’s not easy to fake concern. She’s got no dog in our fight. She has no reason to want to help us.”

He turned to look once more at Akamine, whose expression was, to the untrained eye, no different from the one she’d been wearing when he’d first walked in. 

(Fortunately, over the past several months, Makoto had become pretty damn good at reading the nuances in people’s faces.)

“But she does,” he said, giving her a small but nevertheless hopeful smile, “I can see it in her eyes.” 

Togami let out an unimpressed and wholly undignified noise of dissent, and was about to express his numerous issues with Makoto’s hasty logic when Kirigiri gave him a hard nudge and fixed him with a sharp stare that, shockingly, seemed to make him reconsider his obstinance. 

“I trust her, too,” she said, then, which shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise—it wasn’t often that Kirigiri disagreed with him—but earned her a gracious look of relieved gratitude from Makoto nonetheless. “We may not have any explicit reason to believe what she says, but we have no reason to disbelieve it, either.” For the first time since she’d laid eyes on her earlier that morning, Kirigiri met the older woman’s gaze. “Caution may be wise, but needless skepticism is a fool’s gambit.”

A quiet lull settled for a couple of moments as the others absorbed Kirigiri’s words, before Asahina, newfound resolve shining brightly in her eyes, slapped her hands down on the table and rose to her feet. “If Kyoko and Makoto trust you,” she said, speaking directly to Akamine despite having pointedly avoided even glancing at her for the past half an hour, “then so do I.”

Makoto smiled softly at her. She’d always had an inordinate amount of faith in him. 

“I’m in, too,” Hagakure piped up, mirroring Asahina’s movements and hopping to his feet as well. “Besides, there’s six of us and only one of her. Worst comes to worst, I’m sure we could take ‘er.”

A ‘tch’ of indignance in response to Hagakure’s enthusiasm caught Makoto’s attention. He watched as Togami rolled his eyes at the painfully clear domino effect unraveling around him, muttering something about being “shocked that he can even count” under his breath and earning a small chuckle from the shorter boy in spite of the gravity of the situation. 

Fukawa, eyes darting frantically between her friends and Akamine with worry weaving its way deeper and deeper into the wrinkle of her brow, seemed to recognize that the others were waiting on her to voice an opinion. “I...I don’t want to disagree with Goshujin-sama—
(Makoto observed with entirely too much glee as Togami let out a forceful exhale of prickling agitation at the unwelcome title)
—but if she’s ruh-really going to help...”

“I am,” Akamine said hurriedly, looking pleasantly surprised that things were going her way. “At least, I’d like to try.” 

With that earnest and all too human bid for their credence out in the open, Togami let out a loud and incisive sigh, betraying little more than the facade of haughty frustration he wore like a second skin. 

(Though Makoto, if he were feeling especially optimistic, would point out with a small semblance of perhaps overindulgent affection that this particular bout of frustration was the result of Togami looking out for the group—something the other boy had once sworn he’d never be caught dead doing.)

“It appears I’ve been outnumbered,” he said with a twinge of annoyance in his voice, “so why don’t you tell us how exactly you plan to ‘help us,’ and we’ll see for ourselves if there’s any merit to your claim.”

Akamine turned to face her sole challenger head on, allowing Makoto a reprieve from her rapt attention for the first time since the moment he’d entered the room. He surveyed with curious intrigue as she strode back to the table the others were gathered at, exuding confidence and purpose the likes of which Makoto had once believed he’d never see again—not in Enoshima’s world. 

From the inner breast pocket of her crisp navy blazer, the woman produced what appeared to be a brochure. She looked Togami, who stood only a couple inches taller than her, dead in the eye as she slid the pamphlet across the table for the students to see. 

“I’m a member of an organization of powerful and competent elites, leaders from the Pre-Tragedy era. Those of us left alive in the wake of The Ultimate Despair formed an underground committee outside the eye of the chaos and calamity that claimed the rest of the world,” she recited what seemed to be a memorized pitch, sounding as though she were about to try and sell them something. Her words were far more mechanical and rehearsed than they had hitherto been, and Makoto felt the sudden, inexplicable urge to take notes in case there was an exam on the information she was presenting. 

“Covertly, we have been working to rebuild civilization, providing humanitarian relief and aid where we can and gaining momentum in several major cities across the country that are still in operation. We’re working to expand worldwide to reach others that are like us,” her eyes drifted to Makoto, “that still have hope.”

She took a steadying breath, fidgeting again with her glasses and drinking in the kids’ puzzled, disbelieving, or otherwise overwhelmed expressions. “I’m here to recruit the six of you, if you’ll join us. Simply put, we could use the influence and abilities of six ultimates from Hope’s Peak who also happen to have infamously overcome the clutches of The Ultimate Despair itself.” Akamine crossed her arms over her chest, studying the students’ reactions as it dawned on the them precisely what was being asked of them. 
“I’ll be frank: the entire world has had its eyes on you for the past seven months. No one was expecting you to win this game—at least, not in the way that you did.” Her expression darkened, “I don’t think even you truly understand the weight of what you accomplished here. You beat her. You took down Junko Enoshima, one of the most influential leaders of The Ultimate Despair, on live television. To you, it may have been a matter of survival, but to all the hundreds of thousands of viewers, it was something much, much bigger. You kids have given hope to the hopeless.” She grimaced, “and also painted a massive red target on your backs.”

“My organization can offer you protection, can grant you shelter from the masses that I guarantee are out there right now waiting to claim either your hearts or your heads. The majority of the downtrodden see you six as living proof that there’s still something worth fighting for. That there’s still a chance. You’re waking the world up from the haze the Tragedy left it in. That makes you a threat to those in charge, to the entire ideology of The Ultimate Despair. You’ve thrown a wrench in their plans by not adhering to their rules, and now they’re out for your blood. The only way you can stay safe is if you stay under the radar.” 

(The ‘if you come with me’ part of the bargain remained unspoken, but didn’t go over anyone’s heads.)

“The only reason I was able to get to you before they did was because I took a risk. I knew as soon as Mr. Naegi’s execution failed,” her gaze flitted for the umpteenth time over to the boy in question, who flushed pink under the scrutiny of her stare, “that there was a chance you were going to beat this. Small and unlikely, sure, but still there. And I knew that they knew it too, that they were already making preparations just in case their carefully laid plans to broadcast the last remaining symbols of hope killing one another off to teach the world a lesson about what happened to those who tried to resist Despair backfired.”

“So, I made a plea to my supervisor to let me come out here to try and get to you. He was hesitant, of course—the Despair had made it very clear from the get go that anyone who attempted to rescue you was embarking on a suicide mission—but I managed to convince him that the potential of gaining the six of you, alive, as assets to the organization was worth the risk of my death. He let me go, on the condition that I reveal no proof of my connection to the organization to anyone I happened to encounter on my mission. I kept close tabs on your progress over the weeks I spent making my way here, and by the time you revealed Enoshima as your captor, I was already bunkered down outside the school gates.”

“After the live feed cut out, I figured it was only a matter of time before you left the school grounds. I waited until nightfall yesterday before realizing that you’d made the decision to stay within the building—a wise choice, by the way, although I’m sure it was far from the easiest one to make.” Akamine took note of the way Asahina prickled and subsequently wilted whenever Hope’s Peak was mentioned and Fukawa averted her eyes each time she said the word ‘kill’.
“So, I made my way in during the middle of the night, and, well. You know the rest.” 

Thoughtful silence, which was quickly becoming a close and familiar friend, once again claimed the cafeteria. Makoto’s head spun—
(It hadn’t actually stopped spinning since the minute he’d woken up, merely taking brief respites to build up its stamina before starting up again)
—as he tried to digest what was far too much information to be taking in on so little sleep. Assuming that everything the woman was saying was true, “winning” Enoshima’s game had proven to be an even bigger burden on the survivors than Makoto had originally thought it would be. Sure, there was the matter of the lifeless faces of their friends and classmates scorched permanently onto the backs of their eyelids, and the knowledge that they had lost two years of their lives to a woman with a fetish for misery, and the gutting guilt of surviving when so many of their closest peers had perished that would weigh down on them for as long as they lived—but the simple act of surviving to see what a wasteland the world had become had also apparently earned them a spot on the list of the Despair’s most wanted, and Makoto’s initial fears about mercenaries and kidnappers hadn’t actually been too far off the mark. 

Makoto scowled. Even from beyond the grave, Enoshima was managing to make their lives hell. 

“The Future Foundation,” Kirigiri’s voice shook him free of his morbid musings, and he turned to find the girl reading aloud from the pamphlet Akamine had provided. 

The older woman’s cheeks dusted with pink as Kirigiri studied the authenticity of the brochure. “The name of my organization,” she said a bit bashfully, “It’s-ah, something of a working title.”

Makoto raised an eyebrow, questioning the rationale behind being embarrassed of a cringey name when the entire world had gone to shit. 

(Then again, wasn’t it those little things—the gut reactions of mouth-watering contentedness in response to the smell of bacon in the morning or abject disgust towards words like moist and squirt—which distinguished human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom? Wasn’t it the dumb, illogical, insignificant tidbits of life that made up the very definition of being alive?)

“So,” Togami, who had never had the time or the patience to waste on the unnecessary frivolities of being alive, seemed to be the first to brave a response to the unspoken question Akamine had left hanging in the air. “What exactly is it that you want from us?” 

Akamine’s eyes bore into him with feverish intensity, and she folded her hands neatly in front of her. 

“I think you already know.” 

Makoto swallowed thickly, glancing around the room to see if the others looked as accosted as he felt. The tall order from Akamine appeared to have left visible impressions on Hagakure, Fukawa, and Asahina, who all seemed a little bit ill in light of the unsettling new information the woman had dropped on them. Togami, though his expression was still expertly impassive, had gone white-knuckled and stiff, the vein in his temple thrumming agitatedly against his pale skin the way Makoto had noticed it always did whenever something upset him. 

Only Kirigiri appeared to be taking the news of their newfound misfortune in stride, though Makoto knew better than to take her mask of unaffected coolness at face value. He recognized her fear, just as real and tangible as everyone else’s, in the way her fingers began inconspicuously twisting the ends of her hair. In the subtle scrape of her teeth against her bottom lip, a nervous tic that only gave itself away in the most dire of situations. In the rapid flitting of her eyes across the pages of the Future Foundation’s pamphlet as she weighed the options at hand and tried to make the most productive decision she could with the limited knowledge she had. 

“I understand,” Akamine said in a low, gentle voice, “that it’s a lot to take in. I can’t imagine how horrific it must be to have all of this dumped on you all at once. And I truly wish I could give you the chance to properly process it and think about my offer before making a decision,” her eyebrows furrowed, and she wrung her wrists in obvious discomfort, “but we really don’t have much time.”

“I need you kids to come with me, right now. I guarantee that if you stay here, you’ll die here.”

The finality of her words hit Makoto like a ton of bricks. If the woman was lying, then she was an even better actress than Celestia had been, but Makoto couldn’t imagine that the blend of urgency and remorse blemishing her tone was something that could be all too easily feigned. 

She really and truly believed what she was saying. And she desperately needed them to believe it, too. 

“Kyoko,” his throat was dry and tight when he croaked out her name, and he had the sneaking suspicion that no amount of clearing it would help unwind the uneasy knots it had tied itself in. “Is the brochure—?”
“It’s legitimate, from what I can tell,” she answered his question before he could finish it, placing the piece of paper back on the table and crossing her arms over her chest, “and it checks out with her story, too. If Akamine-san is making this all up, she’s certainly going to great lengths to do so.”

The confirmation that Akamine was most likely telling the truth wasn’t nearly as comforting as Makoto felt it should have been. Even operating under the assumption that the woman who had snuck in during the night was in their corner...

That still left half the waking world on the opposite side of the ring, just waiting to knock their lights out the moment they stepped one toe out of line. 

“So,” Asahina mumbled, toying with the strap of her tank top and refusing to look anyone in the eye, “we don’t really have a choice, do we?” 

Togami let out a reproachful little exhale and shot her a furtive glare. “That’s hardly true. There’s always a choice. Those who really wish to succeed carve out an option of their own when the ones they’re offered don’t fit the bill.” His scornful gaze shifted over to Akamine, who kept up her impressive defense against its onslaught of derision, “that being said, even if we don’t go with her, it’s pretty obvious we can’t just stay here. As of now, every second we waste agonizing over a decision is another second we spend as sitting ducks.”

“As much as I hate to admit it,” Kirigiri mused, “I’m inclined to agree. No matter what our next course of action is, our first step needs to be gathering everything we can from this place and vacating its premises as quickly as possible. Everyone who watched Enoshima’s...show...knows that we’re here. We need to stay one step ahead of them if we want to stay alive.”

A hum of nervous agreement made its rounds amongst the rest of the group, until Hagakure, taking initiative in that inept but well-meaning way of his just as he’d been doing since Ishimaru went catatonic, announced that he was going to go pack up his personal effects before meeting back up with the others in the dining hall to start stripping the school of anything that might prove useful to them. 

With that sloppy and half-assed call to action out of the way, he stalked awkwardly out of the cafeteria, leaving the others to follow his lead with varying levels of reluctance. Fukawa in particular seemed to be rooted to her chair, stewing in her own thoughts, until Togami snapped at her to get moving. Even then, she took a couple of seconds to stumble to her feet before she started making her way towards the dorms in a trancelike trudge, mumbling to herself under her breath and scratching angry red lines into her arms. 

A part of Makoto wanted to reach out to her—to grab her by the wrists and keep her hands from clawing at her skin and assure her that they were going to be okay—but he seriously doubted he’d be of much help right about now. It wasn’t as though he was any better off, his head still worryingly dizzy, pounding from either the overwhelming stress, the extreme fatigue, or the fact that he was probably still concussed from the fifty-fucking-foot fall he‘d taken not seven days ago. 

Beyond the walls and ceilings of the hallway that seemed to be swapping places with one another every time he blinked, Makoto could make out the forms of Togami and Kirigiri up ahead, both doing a spectacularly better job of not stumbling off-kilter every ten steps they took than he was, talking in hushed voices and throwing the occasional glance backwards as they strode to their respective rooms. 

Makoto frowned, remembering Kirigiri’s sneaking whispers and pointed glances from earlier that morning. The message she’d tried to relay to Makoto through her eyes that Makoto wasn’t all too sure he’d properly received. The looks and nudges she and Togami had been tossing at one another while Akamine was explaining their situation. It may not have been the most pressing of the problems they were facing at the time, but for some reason it was the matter that stuck most stubbornly in the forefront of his mind. 

What were they talking about?

Makoto didn’t get the chance to try and unravel that mystery just yet, however, because before he could really wrap his head around the burgeoning thought, the floor suddenly slipped out from underneath him. 

Or rather, he took one misstep too many and went tumbling backwards. 

Fortunately for him, Asahina had been walking right behind him and had reflexively wrapped strong, sturdy arms around his torso the moment his feet decided they no longer felt like functioning. Though she staggered a bit, she was able to hold him up well enough that they didn’t both come crashing to the floor, and after a moment and a half of awkward entanglement, she helped push him back upright. Sheepishly, his features painted in deep, flustered reds, Makoto mumbled out an apology. 

Asahina shook her head fervently, face screwed up with worry. “You don’t have to be sorry,” she said, “just be more careful.” Guilt warped her expression and she muttered the next part almost inaudibly. “I don’t think you can afford another spill.” 

The pitter-patter of high-heeled shoes hurrying down the hall announced Akamine’s arrival before she herself got the chance. She scrambled to the students’ side and immediately placed a steadying hand on Makoto’s shoulder. “Are you alright, Naegi-kun?” She asked, her even and otherwise calm voice laced with that same brand of Grown Up Concern that teachers expressed towards trouble-students or parents showed to lost kids at the park. Makoto blinked at her, and was suddenly awash with shame. 

Here was a woman who had put everything on the line, who had risked her own life to try and save theirs. A woman whose warnings may very well have guaranteed their continued survival for at least another day. A woman who so clearly wanted nothing more than to help.

And what had he and all the others repaid her compassion and generosity with? Distrust. Dismissal. Suspicion. 

Was this what the world had come to? Was this instantaneous unease and skepticism about everyone around you all there was left?

(Was this what ‘being alive’ meant now?)

In that moment, with Akamine’s hand on his shoulder and her eyes locked onto his, Makoto wanted nothing more than to give in to the exhaustion and the anxiety tearing him down and take the easy way out. He wanted to put his complete blind faith in this person who seemed decent enough, who clearly knew more about what was going on than he did, and not have to worry so hard anymore. He was tired of thinking. Tired of trying. He wanted to let someone else take the reigns and slip into the background like he was oh so used to. It couldn’t possibly hurt all too much if he did. He was almost certain that Akamine’s claims about the Future Foundation and the help and protection they could offer them were true, after all. 

Almost certain. 

But almost wasn’t good enough anymore. Almost had been the difference between Sayaka living and Sayaka dying. Almost had been the distance Fujisaki still had left to reach before he overcame his perceived weaknesses. Almost had been the bindings between the cracks in Celestia’s meticulously crafted exterior that ultimately gave her away. Almost had been the chance of it being Kyoko strapped to that conveyer belt of death instead of him. 

Almost had been the hair by which Enoshima’s contraption had missed squashing him like a bug. 

Makoto couldn’t put his fate in the hands of almost anymore.

“I’m okay,” he said, forcing a wobbly smile onto his face and shrugging her off with a stunted little laugh. “Just a bit tired ‘n clumsy, is all.” 

He fought both tears and bile as he packed his clothes and belongings into a drawstring bag with Monokuma’s face printed on it—
(As much as he hated looking at it, he wasn’t exactly flush with options, and now was hardly the time to be picky)
—his entire body imploring him to give it a moment’s reprieve. The past few months—
(Seven, Akamine had said. Had it really only been seven months? It felt like lifetimes had past since he’d first stepped foot into the accursed halls of Hope’s Peak Academy.)
—were finally catching up to him, threatening to send him sprawling headfirst into oblivion if he dared overexert himself. His skull still felt as though something were trying to burrow through it, and his heart was too loud and raucous in the cavity of his chest. 

He attempted to avoid meeting Sayaka’s eyes as he grabbed the shampoo from the shower, to ignore the tune of her faint, haunting humming as he gathered up his toothbrush and towels and tried not to think about the fact that he was abandoning her for a second time. 

‘I’m sorry, Sayaka,’ he thought sadly as he shut his bathroom door behind him. ‘I keep breaking my promises.’

After changing out of their sleepwear and meeting back in the dining room as Hagakure had dictated, the students quickly consolidated a plan to scavenge the rest of school for parts and supplies. After brief deliberation, they decided to divide and conquer to save as much time as they could at the expense of the relative safety of traveling in numbers. 

(It was a little embarrassing to admit it, but the six of them had been staying in groups of at least two for so many weeks now, Makoto hadn’t even realized that working alone was an option until Kirigiri suggested it.

“It’s not as though we need to worry about anyone killing each other anymore,” she had said, and for some reason the simple observation had struck a bitter chord deep in Makoto’s chest. Nonsensically, the notion of the school that had served as a slaughterhouse for the past seven months no longer posing any threat to them made him feel even worse than before.)

They divided the most crucial tasks evenly between the six of them. Fukawa would grab as many nonperishable food items as she could from the kitchen, Asahina would gather medical supplies from the nurse’s office and supplements from the chemistry lab, Hagakure would find any knickknacks from the school store that might prove beneficial to them, Togami would scour the biology lab and surveillance room for any tools that they could put to use, Kirigiri would strip the shed in the garden and the equipment room behind the physics lab of anything that could be used as a weapon, and Makoto would pack up as many extra supplies from the storage room as he could possibly carry. 

(...Okay. So maybe even was too generous a way of putting it. You’d have to be stupid to think that Togami would be willing to do anything that might require him to break a light sweat or to believe that Hagakure could be trusted with finding and cataloguing anything other than nonessential items. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone that Makoto had been left with the most demanding job: confronting the mammoth cache of miscellaneous items piled all the way up to the ceiling in the storage room and combing through them for whatever might come in handy. Even after spending over half a year with these people, he was still a bit of a doormat when it came to taking orders from them.) 

Before going their separate ways, the kids regrouped in the storage room to get bags in which to carry everything they needed, peeling in and out of the glorified supply closet with large camping knapsacks or oversized suitcases—
(Notably, nobody dared touch the duffle bags that had been collecting dust over in the corner ever since the second trial)
—occasionally pausing to speak with Makoto for a moment or two before hurrying to get where they needed to be. 

Kirigiri finished gathering all the things on her assigned list first, and returned to the storage room to keep the brunette company.

At the same time that she crouched wordlessly down onto the floor beside him, the tall, looming double doors she’d closed behind her swung open. 

Togami stiffened in the doorframe when Makoto’s eyes turned and landed on him, face contorting into that stern, disapproving grimace he liked to wear before he walked briskly away without saying a word or even stepping foot in the room. 

Makoto watched him go with a frown of his own, trying to make heads or tails of his peculiar behavior. The boy always got a bit pissy when things didn’t go exactly as he’d planned, and Makoto was sure Akamine’s account had thrown him for a loop just the same as everyone else...but there was something more that was bugging him. He turned to Kirigiri, who was also observing the blonde’s retreating figure with an implacable expression on her face. 

“Hey,” Makoto started, heart skipping a beat when her gaze snapped right up to meet with his, as though she had been anticipating the interjection. “What...did you say to him? Before?”

Kirigiri cocked her head to the side. “Pardon?” She queried, though the gleam in her eyes suggested she knew exactly what Makoto was talking about and just wanted to see him squirm to get it out. 

Makoto pressed his lips together and scratched at the back of his head, the confusion he’d been keeping at bay earlier bleeding into his all-too transparent features. 

“When I told the others to believe Akamine-san, he definitely wanted to stop me. In fact, I’m pretty sure he was about to stop me...but he didn’t.” He looked Kirigiri right in the eye, “that was because of you, right? You said something to him earlier, and it stopped him from fighting me on what he honestly had every right to believe was a terrible mistake.” Makoto remembered the look of almost-panic that had flashed across his sort-of-friend’s face when the others had collectively agreed to put their lives in the hands of a total stranger.

It was one of the most human things he’d ever seen Togami do. 

“I’ve never seen him act like that before. It was like he was—” domesticated felt like too demeaning a way of putting it, but Makoto couldn’t come up with another word. He shook his head, frown deepening, “what did you do to him? He was just so...agreeable. At least by his standards. Did you, like, threaten him?”

Kirigiri smirked. “No, I didn’t threaten him.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I merely told him to trust your judgment.”

Makoto blinked, taken aback. “Or else...?” He prompted, refusing to believe that that was all there was to it. 

Kirigiri’s lips softened into a small, knowing grin, and she got to her feet, tossing her now-brushed and neatly tied hair over her shoulder and slinging her bag onto her back. “That’s it,” she said, “I told him he ought to trust you.”
She offered him a hand, which he took in an almost dreamlike state, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet as his mushed-up putty brain struggled to wrap itself around the implication of her words. “And it looks like he agreed.”

The hand that had hoisted him up released its clasp on his fingers in favor of resting on his shoulder, and Kirigiri tilted her head to the side, eyes alight with the possession of knowledge only she seemed to be privy to. 

“You don’t give yourself enough credit, Makoto,” she said, lips still quirked upwards. Then, without elaborating any further, she withdrew her hand and turned on her heel, the bottoms of her boots clicking rhythmically against the floor as she walked out of the storage room and into the hall. 

Makoto watched her leave for a couple of moments before heaving a small sigh and getting back to packing. 

Last he’d checked in with Akamine, she’d told him that it was only about five in the morning. 

They had an awfully long day ahead. 

Chapter Text

Byakuya had long since learned to permanently suspend his disbelief for the cruel and the obscene. It hung right up in the rafters along with his pride and his entitlement, a token of his prestige as much as any wealth or infamy attached to his name.

(You didn’t live the life he’d lived, didn’t see the things he’d seen, without getting an uncomfortably personal taste of precisely what man was capable of.)

However, even to hardened sensibilities like his, the atrocities of the post-Tragedy world were...unsettling, to say the least. Not fifty feet from the gates of the school did they find their first body, strung up to a lamppost, half-skinned and festering with flies, sporting the word “Justice” carved into its naked chest. That in and of itself wouldn’t have been all too shocking—they had, after all, seen more than their fair share of grisly deaths in the past few months—but the rotting pile of human flesh at the corpse’s feet, flanked by candles and flowers like some sort of deranged offering, was more than a bit too much to bear. Dismembered appendages, gouged out eyes, and even the occasional tongue were situated upon the scene in a makeshift alter, their varying degrees of decay suggesting that someone had been leaving the little gifts for quite some time. A rat leapt out of the sewer and started chewing on what looked to be a freshly severed ear.

From somewhere behind him, a loud, disconcerting thump could be heard, followed immediately by a string of swears from Asahina.

Fukawa had fainted. Terrific.

The group paused for a moment in order for Hagakure to gingerly pick up their fallen friend, positioning her clumsily over his shoulder and insisting against Asahina’s offerings to help carry her, “Nah, I got this. Fukawa-chi weighs less than nothing.” A moment passed as he steadied the lower half of her limp body against his chest by wrapping an arm snugly around her calves, and after it seemed certain that Fukawa was safely strapped in for the ride, the others hastened to make their way past the unsightly display at the crossroads.

Ayano Akamine observed this little delay with quiet consideration, the look on her face utterly unreadable.

(Contrary to what many assumed, Byakuya was actually rather in-tune to what other people were thinking and feeling—he had been reared to be a business tycoon, after all, and you couldn’t very well do business without being able to analyze expressions. Successful transactions, sustained professional relationships, hard-pressed bartering and trade: it all depended on a keen ability to read the room and everyone in it. So yes, Byakuya knew how to tell when someone was upset or anxious or excited or afraid. It was just that, the vast majority of the time, he didn’t really care. The thoughts and feelings of the populace were not matters worth concerning himself over.

He rarely even afforded himself the chance to indulge in his own.)

If Byakuya had to venture a guess, he would say that the woman was gauging the students’ reactions to the body on the lamppost, taking note of what they made of their first real exposure to this gruesome new reality. It took next to no effort to school his face into a neutral facade—
(He’d only been doing it since birth)
—on the off chance that she was searching for weaknesses, and he took a fraction of a second to glance around at the others to see how they were faring under her scrutiny.

Fukawa was, predictably, out for the count. Probably for the best, if he was being honest. She was a far lesser hassle to handle when she was unconscious.

Asahina and Hagakure were wearing matching expressions of blatantly unfiltered worry. Asahina’s eyes kept darting to Fukawa’s prone form, and she stuck to Hagakure’s side as if intending to catch her if she fell from his grasp. They were likely using the girl’s condition as an excuse to distract themselves from the inhuman horror laid out in front of them, Byakuya decided, as he saw no other reason for them to take such an interest in Fukawa’s fainting spells now, otherwise. She’d been passing out at the mere sight of blood for months, now, and he’d never once seen them react like this before.

(It didn’t occur to him that maybe, his peers were suddenly so much more concerned about their friend’s wellbeing because of the horrors at hand. That being in a more dangerous, uncontrolled environment enabled them to be more cautious, sticking to those they were close to in an effort to keep one another out of harm’s way. Putting all their care and attention into the ones they loved in the face of indescribable terror.

Kirigiri had accused him once before of too easily dismissing human compassion and empathy.

In his defense, it was hard not to dismiss the things which you’d never encountered.)

The young detective in question, meanwhile, was bringing up the party’s rear, examining her surroundings with an unsurprisingly unbothered expression. If there was any one person in their group that could hold a candle to him in a match of masks, it would be her.
(Though Byakuya would like to think that his were worn a lot more seamlessly—he doubted that she had been honing the craft since before she could walk, and with more experience came a far greater advantage, after all. She hadn’t fought to shape herself into the most perfect possible version of what she could be, so invulnerably pressed into the moldings of her barriers that there were no spaces left between flesh and facade, no determining who she was underneath all the pomp and menace. No weakness. No room for error.)
Still, she was convincing, her air of vacant impartiality to everything around her never faltering against the stench in the streets or the promise of more heinous obscenities sure to greet them on their walk to Akamine’s campsite.

All in all, his classmates’ reactions were par for the course. Fukawa’s hysterics, Hagakure’s misguided attempts to help, Asahina’s overemotional outbursts, Kirigiri’s unwavering indifference—nothing any of the dreadfully dull lot of them did could surprise him anymore.

Well. With one glaring exception.

From where he was standing closest to Akamine, having spent the past several minutes of their march through the road engaged in a conversation Byakuya had no interest in eavesdropping on, Naegi was eyeing the corpse on the street corner with a severe, contemplative look on his face. The expression itself wasn’t altogether foreign—Byakuya had seen the same infuriatingly acute attentiveness and scrutiny etched onto the boy’s customarily harmless features during every single trial—but the circumstances were, admittedly, defying his expectations.

He had seen Naegi around human bodies before. Whenever one of their classmates turned up dead, the boy’s face would drain of blood and his hands would start shaking feverishly. He was almost as bad as Fukawa, having passed out at the sight of that Maizono girl’s cadaver and gone distraught with panic and grief over the discovery of all the others. Sure, his annoying explosions of fear and anger and entirely too many other exhausting, unnecessary dramatics had been decreasing in intensity with every body they came across, but they had never truly gone, much to Byakuya’s chagrin. Even with Ikusaba, who they hadn’t even known, his expression had reeked of weak-willed, painfully transparent terror and, inconceivably, even sorrow. As if the girl hadn’t herself been a part of the reason they were trapped in that damned school to begin with. As if she deserved their pity.

But now, faced with perhaps the most grisly and vile display of any corpse they’d seen to date, half-flayed with countless other human body parts scattered all around it, Naegi didn’t even flinch. Didn’t betray so much as a hint of fear or unease or even that unending supply of sympathy he so ardently swore by. He looked disturbed, sure. You’d have to be a psychopath not to be disturbed by something like this.

But he wasn’t scared. There was nothing in the murky, earthy greens of his eyes that would suggest that he was actually afraid. That he was even all that uncomfortable. And unless the boy had undergone a major personality shift in the past twenty minutes, Naegi was not particularly skilled at hiding it when something made him uncomfortable.

For some reason, the fact that Naegi wasn’t explicitly affected by the gruesome exhibit in front of them bothered Byakuya an awful lot more than he was willing to admit.

(Seven months. Seven whole months he’d spent with that obnoxious little nobody and he still couldn’t quite understand him. Everyone else he’d gotten down to an exact pattern, an algorithm as reliable as the cyclical trends in the stock market and as foreseeable as the frigidity of the future he’d been born to call his own. Fucking Makoto Naegi, of all people, had had the audacity to break that pattern, and Byakuya didn’t get it. He didn’t even know why he wanted to.)

He quickly bid any unrest surrounding his peer group and one particularly unremarkable brunette from his mind, deeming it impractical to fixate on something so insignificant when life itself was crumbling at the edges. They weren’t even worth his consideration on any normal day.

The seven of them passed by the body on the lamppost in what couldn’t have been more than a handful of minutes.

Annoyingly, it occupied a small portion of Byakuya’s mind for the rest of the damn day.

After stalking through the barren streets for a little more than an hour, blindly following a woman they didn’t remotely know as she directed them to a refuge that could every bit as easily have been a trap as it was a safe haven, the party happened upon a run down little corner store at the edge of an old neighborhood that appeared to have been abandoned for quite some time. The gas station in front of the automatic doors to the bodega reeked of spilled petroleum, and Akamine advised them to watch where they stepped as she ushered them into the derelict building.

As soon as they were all inside, the woman smashed in the censor that triggered the door’s automated mechanism, then shoved over one of the few shelves still standing in front of the newly-sealed entrance for good measure.

Huh. Trap it was, then.

“What the hell?!” Asahina strayed from Hagakure and Fukawa’s side for the first time in over sixty minutes to rush over to Akamine’s little blockade, staring wide-eyed at the mess that now stood between them and the only exit in sight. “What did you do that for?”

“Shh!” Akamine hushed her in lieu of a reply, grabbing her by the arm and tugging her away from the front of the store. She gestured for the rest of the kids to follow her as she ducked underneath the vacated cashier’s counter with Asahina in tow, eyes darting between the glass doors of the convenience store and the watch on her wrist.

Byakuya blinked as the others exchanged confounded glances and complied with her wordless orders, shuffling hastily into the small space behind the counter and falling into terse, anxious silence. More than a little caught off guard, the blonde slowly slotted himself into the spot on the floor in between Kirigiri and Hagakure, attentively watching the older woman’s eyes as they continued their ferocious game of ping pong between the barricaded entrance and the ticking timepiece. It was obvious that she was waiting for something.

But for what? The arrival of an accomplice to help her finish them off? Or maybe human traffickers she’d arranged to sell them to? Byakuya was briefly and irrationally struck with the notion that he should’ve fought harder against the others’ decision to put their trust in this stranger—then immediately hated himself for even entertaining the idea that he had any sort of obligation to his former classmates to begin with. So what if they wanted to die over their stupidly misplaced faith? He’d had no responsibility to join them. He wasn’t these idiots’ keeper. He’d made that unfathomable choice, the decision to stick around for lack of anywhere better to go, and now he was paying the justly demanded price.

Served him right for overestimating the value of company that had clearly exhausted what little usefulness it once served long, long ago.

He was acutely aware of Kirigiri’s prudent eyes boring into him as his features twisted into an ugly scowl, and he was about to stand up from where he was crouched—or rather, cowering ridiculously behind the counter—
(Who was this Akamine woman to tell him what to do? If she was going to try to kill him, then he sure as hell wasn’t going to take it lying down)
—when a surprisingly strong hand grabbed hold of his wrist, keeping him rooted firmly in place. Byakuya’s gaze snapped down to the owner of the hand’s leather gloves, then up to her stony face, and his eyes narrowed in clear displeasure. What was the meaning of this? He gave his arm a little tug, hoping she’d take the hint and relinquish her grasp, but Kirigiri simply held on to him even tighter, determined not to let him defy Akamine’s commands.

He balked at her. Surely she couldn’t still believe that the shady old woman had their best interests at heart. Not after she’d locked them in a gas station corner store and forced them to their knees beyond the view of any outsider who might pass them by.

As if she could read his doubts tattood across his forehead, Kirigiri squeezed the blonde’s wrist and stared him down before gesturing pointedly behind him with a flit of the eyes.

Against his better judgment, Byakuya chanced a glimpse in the direction the girl had thrown her glance. It didn’t take very long for him to understand what she’d wanted him to see. Just beyond the wildly unkempt mess of Hagakure’s hair and the slowly stirring stature of Fukawa’s body sat Naegi, perched on the balls of his feet at the very end of the counter, peering out from behind its corner at the crudely reinforced doors with a troubled look on his face. Byakuya let out a huff of annoyance as Kirigiri’s words from earlier that morning rang obstinately in his ears.
“Trust Makoto,” she had said, and—god help him and his unforgivably terrible prudence—he’d chosen to listen. It had seemed a lot more compelling at the time, as if the mere brevity and confidence of her words had given them the power to sway him.

(After all, belligerent and haughty as he was, Byakuya was never dishonest. Not with others, and certainly not with himself. It would be stupid to pretend that Naegi hadn’t proven himself to be an asset, and although the notion of having to acknowledge him as anything but a nuisance made something strange and foreign curl uncomfortably in his stomach, Byakuya had never shied away from a challenge out of mere inconvenience. Yes, the brunette had his strengths. People—their motivations, their weaknesses, their secrets—seemed to be one of them. So maybe, in the groggy lull of the break of dawn and the confusion stirred up by Akamine’s unprecedented arrival, it had made some strange sort of sense to believe that the boy had held some insight into the stranger’s intentions that he and the others weren’t privy to.

Or maybe, that was just the easiest thing to think.)

But now, in the light—or lack thereof—of day and the clearheadedness that came hand in hand with the cumbersome sense of dread building heavy in his chest, Byakuya could see that his previous judgment call had been a grave mistake. Naegi was no more certain or secure about his confidence in Akamine than any of the rest of them were—he was just more stupidly optimistic.

And sure, maybe that optimism was the only reason Byakuya was still alive, the only reason he wasn’t rotting away in Hope’s Peak just waiting for the other shoe to drop; waiting for one of his self-proclaimed “friends” to make an attempt at his life in a fit of desperation, waiting for the perfect opportunity to curl his hands around one of his classmates’ throats and squeeze the life out of their bodies just like he’d done with—
(Fuck. Not now. Not the fucking time.)

Maybe stupid, sweet, starry-eyed Makoto Naegi had saved his life. But that meant next to nothing now. He didn’t owe him his trust or his loyalty just because he’d happened to get lucky in his inconceivably accurate perceptions of people once or twice. He didn’t owe anyone anything.

(His name was Byakuya Togami. He’d earned that name through years and years of callous, barbaric bloodshed and unforgiving anguish. He’d seen and done things people like Makoto Naegi would consider unthinkable for the rights to that name. Not even the apocalypse could take that away from him.)

Even more livid than before, Byakuya had just about made up his mind. He wrenched his arm free of Kirigiri’s persistent grip, glowering at her with what he hoped was his most scathing glare, and made to get to his feet to give that manipulative, insidious bitch Akamine a run for her money, when—

“No, fuck, plea—!”

Bang.

An awful, strangled cry that couldn’t have come from more than a yard away from the gas station was abruptly cut off by the unmistakable barrage of bullets hailing out of the cartridge of a machine gun. The ruthless torrent shattered the uneasy blanket of silence in the air with a raucous boom that seemed to shake the earth itself. Kirigiri’s hand found his once again as the shock of the sound tore through him like a full body blow, and a glance at the girl beside him told Byakuya that even she hadn’t been prepared for that.

Of course, neither of their stupefied responses could compete with Hagakure’s, who had quite literally catapulted backwards at the sound of the gunshots and wrapped protective arms around his head, crumpling in on himself with an unseemly yelp and, ironically, making the biggest and most noticeable scene out of them all.

Byakuya was about to tell him off for creating a racket when Naegi of all people took the honors, reaching over Fukawa to grab the older man by the arm and, with an intensely severe and petrified expression that looked woefully out of place on his gentle, warm features, order him to “shut the hell up!”

In the three seconds it took for the gunfire to cease, the world shifted on its axis, twisting into something even more foreign and sinister than what Byakuya had already known. From somewhere to his right, Asahina choked out a muffled sob. Kirigiri’s hand tightened around his and, against all odds, Byakuya found himself clutching it right back. Under Naegi’s admonishment, Hagakure quickly clasped his hands over his mouth and shrunk as far in on himself as his body would allow.

When silence claimed the room again, it felt almost like a threat.

Three, five, eight pairs of feet shuffled briskly past the front of the store, accompanied by gruff, muffled voices barking out what sounded like laughter. Byakuya didn’t dare peer over the counter to get a reading on the men they belonged to, holding his breath and remaining absolutely motionless, as if keeping still would somehow make him any better hidden. Some part of his brain scolded him for the irrational overreaction, told him that there was no way those assailants could know where he was or get to him even if they did, that he was acting like a scared little child—but that critical, logical voice was drowned out by the still-stammering beat of his all too human heart, pounding with the rhythm of stuttering bullets and fear he hadn’t felt in well over a decade.

There was banging on the glass doors of the bodega. Asahina whimpered and Naegi crept closer inward, pressing up against a half-awake Fukawa—
(Or was it Syo? Byakuya couldn’t focus on anything other than the breath trapped painfully in his lungs well enough to tell)
—and clamping a hand over her mouth to keep her from making a sound. Akamine, eyes glassed over with worry, extended an arm out in front of the kids closest to her, as if that could possibly shield them from the arsenal of armed madmen right outside the door.

For a small fraction of forever after the pounding had stopped, no one dared to make a sound.

Then, there was a muffled crunch of heavy footfalls outside the store that grew quieter and quieter as the last of the men presumably walked away, and Byakuya breathed.

(Later, in the security and scrutiny offered by unavoidable hindsight, he would be absolutely furious with himself for reacting the way he did. He’d seethe in silence over his immaturity and how easily he’d given himself away, over the fact that he’d allowed himself to startle at mere gunshots. Gunshots he’d been taught to identify and evade at age three, when an assassination attempt on his father had prompted a month of firearm training and constant vigilance in the Togami household. Gunshots that hadn’t even posed an immediate threat to him at the time. Was he really so pathetic that he now feared death? That he prickled at any slight chance of danger? What had the proletariat done to him that, in an instance of panicked adrenaline that he damn well should’ve learned to keep at bay by now, he feared not only for his own safety but for the safety of his peers?

When had he even allowed himself to start thinking of them as peers?

He’d slipped up. The weight of Kirigiri’s hand in his own still burned his palm like melded iron against woefully fragile flesh. He’d let her know that he was afraid. That he was, for even the slightest, most inconsequential moment, vulnerable.

He could never take that back.)

Not even a minute after the footsteps of the gunmen were finally out of earshot, the quiet in the convenience store was broken by a sharp exclamation of “Ow!”

Byakuya glanced over to see Naegi cradling his hand and staring owlishly at Fukawa, who was now fully awake and sitting upright. His affronted eyes shifted and made contact with the blonde’s, and when Byakuya raised an eyebrow at him, the boy’s expression morphed from bewildered to indignant.

“She bit me!” he said, giving his hand a wounded little shake to emphasize the severity of the offense, and the way his lips fell into an honest-to-god pout made Byakuya briefly question whether the merciless, inexplicable murder they’d just witnessed had been a figment of his imagination. How the hell was this what Naegi chose to complain about?

“You put your hand on my mouth!” The accused girl shot back, and the shrill force of her voice was all the confirmation Byakuya needed that they were now dealing with the somehow less obnoxious of Fukawa’s personalities. Anxiety ebbing away and being replaced with the much more familiar and manageable emotion of annoyance, Byakuya pinched the bridge of his nose, wondering why the girl couldn’t have just done them all a favor and stayed unconscious.
“That’s basically sexual assault,” Syo continued nonsensically, jumping to her feet with either a complete disregard or an unapologetic sense of cluelessness about the gravity of the situation. “You were askin’ for it, Shrimpy!”

Naegi spluttered a bit but ultimately had no defense against the lunatic’s outlandish reasoning. Satisfied that she’d put him in his place, Genocider Syo took a brief moment to scan her unfamiliar surroundings, eyebrows furrowing and mouth tugging into a frown as she struggled transparently to fill the gaps in her memory. “Where the hell even are we?” She asked, and then, gaze landing on Akamine, cocked her head and pointed imprudently, “Who the fuck are you?”

Akamine, recovering from being subject to a public execution faster than any reasonable person had the right to, stood up from behind the counter as well, worry draining from her features to make room for a look of focused resolve that dredged up unwanted memories of sharp, dark eyebrows and loud, booming voices.

“Ayano Akamine,” she introduced herself nonchalantly, having clearly anticipated Fukawa’s inevitable dissociative break and prepared to greet her secondary identity accordingly, which made Byakuya all the more uncomfortably aware of just how much of the survivors’ intimate information had been leaked to the entire world. “I’m part of an organization dedicated to combatting the efforts of the Ultimate Despair. I’m here to keep you safe.”

Syo scoffed and crossed her arms in flagrant dismissal of the woman’s explanation, standing at least an inch taller than Fukawa’s customarily hunched, cowering silhouette ever allowed. “Is that why we’re hiding in a grungy-ass corner store while some guy becomes Swiss cheese outside? Because you’re keeping us safe?”

Loathe though he was to admit it, Byakuya had to concede that the maniac had a point. It seemed clear that Akamine had known full well about the dangers of the gun-toting madmen beforehand; why else would she have bothered blockading the door and forcing them all behind the register? The nervous glances between the watch and the entrance. The rush to keep them all hidden and silent. It wasn’t as sinister a scheme as Byakuya had originally hypothesized, but it sure as hell wasn’t innocuous, either. She’d obviously expected this. She knew.

She knew, and she’d led them here anyway.

“What even was that?” Asahina voiced feverishly, arms wrapped around her knees and eyes still wide with palpable horror. “What did they...why did they—?”

“The Watchmen,” Akamine interjected before the shellshocked girl could crumble into hysterics, adjusting her glasses and brushing the wrinkles out of her blazer with a quiet sigh.

Byakuya narrowed his eyes at her, reeling to attach her lackluster elucidation to something he understood. Being out of the know was never an option, not for him.
“What,” he said, and it came out sounding more like a command than a question, but his nerves were far too frayed for him to pretend to care.

“The Watchmen,” she repeated, her grim expression making her look older and more worn than she was, “this neighborhood is under strict curfew on account of its close proximity to Hope’s Peak. I meant what I said before.” She turned to look at him with those icy gray eyes that Byakuya found himself hating more and more every time they glanced in his direction. “The Despair wanted to make it clear that trying to rescue you, to even make contact with you, was suicide.”

“At the beginning of the game, people were outraged by the fact that you kids were being sequestered against your will. When the Despair made their plans for you public, mobs began to form, fuming civilians that couldn’t bear to consider the fate you were doomed to suffer. They stormed the school premises, attacked the building, did everything they could to break inside and get you out.”

An unwelcome chill made its way up Byakuya’s spine. Vaguely, he remembered the muffled thuds and crashes just outside the school walls that he and the others had dismissed as construction.

Akamine inhaled slowly and shut her eyes, folding her hands in front of her and just barely bowing her head.

“Agents of Despair gunned them all down before they could even make a dent in the reinforced doors.”

Byakuya swallowed thickly, making damn sure to keep the look on his face as apathetic and scornful as ever. What was it the bear had said? ‘Construction work can sometimes sound an awful lot like gunfire, can’t it?’

“After that, they stationed armed guards outside the school and on every street corner within a five kilometer radius. They also imposed a curfew on any neighboring areas still populated by survivors of the Tragedy. Patrollers would make their way through the city streets, and if anyone was out after six p.m, for any reason at all—”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence. Byakuya could still feel the force of the artillery fire reverberating in his ribs.

“Eventually, people stopped trying. Or died. The guards were removed from their posts around the school building, but the curfew remained.”

Of course it did. Anything that could be used as an excuse to kill someone was valuable ammunition for the Ultimate Despair. Byakuya pressed his nails hard into the skin of his palms, concentrating every ounce of nervous energy that had possessed the gall to poison his mind into the imperceptible clench of his fingertips.

“The men you just heard outside are members of the task force assigned to exterminate this particular neighborhood of anyone who dares to break their arbitrary rules. They’re called the Watchmen because they’re little more than genocidal hall monitors—
(Out of the corner of his eye, Byakuya saw Naegi flinch at the mention of hall monitors. He didn’t have to fight the urge to scoff as hard as he usually did.)
—and the ones that are still left at this point are nothing short of bloodthirsty.” Her eyes darkened and the corners of her mouth twitched. “They catch you, they kill you. Going out while they’re on duty is a certifiable death wish.”

No one said anything for a moment, mulling over Akamine’s distressing words. But, as always, the quiet consideration didn’t last for long.

“Why didn’t you warn us before?” Kirigiri demanded, voice even as ever but eyes alight with ire. “You knew we were in danger, and you didn’t say anything. Can we expect you to just wordlessly shove us into a hiding place last minute any time there’s a threat in the future?”

Byakuya’s nails dug in harder. If he actually cared, he might’ve been worried about breaking the skin.

Akamine blinked in perplexity at the sudden hostility of the girl’s words, but answered her with the same curt civility as before.

“The information wasn’t pertinent at the time. There was no guarantee we would even encounter the Watchmen at all, and I didn’t want to burden you with any extra distress,” her gaze softened as she made quick note of the unease still ebbing out of the stiff, stunted terror in the atmosphere around them, that was painted clear as day in the vacancy of Asahina’s haunted eyes and the washed-out color of Hagakure’s pallid face. That was less evident but still unmistakably present in the set of Kirigiri’s jaw and the wringing of Naegi’s wrists.
That hid in the undetectable, angry red crevices of crescent-shaped incisions on the insides of Byakuya’s hands.

“You kids are under enough pressure as it is. There was no need for me to stress you out even further.”

“That wasn’t your call to make,” Kirigiri said coldly. “We aren’t children, and you don’t get to decide what we can and can’t handle.” Her eyes narrowed, and if Byakuya had taken the time to step out of his own head for even a moment, he might’ve seen the uncertainty threaded through her eyebrows, might’ve heard the worry laced in her words.
(She’d betrayed vulnerability, too. Had let slip her better judgment in a moment of fleeting fear. Had revealed a kink in the machinery that wasn’t supposed to exist. They were two stubborn fools rocking in the same decaying boat, unwilling or perhaps unable to take the plunge and swim.

They both knew all too well what lurked within the water.)

“I didn’t mean to imply that you couldn’t handle it,” Akamine offered gently, seeming to recognize that she was treading on volatile grounds, “I just meant that you shouldn’t have to. The world as it is now...” she swallowed, taking care to phrase her next point as delicately as possible, “we’ve had time to adjust to it. You haven’t. It’s a lot to take in, all at once, and I didn’t want to overwhelm you.”

It was an earnest and thoughtful line of reasoning. Sympathy shone through her honeyed words like a gleaming lifeline, and in his periphery Byakuya could see Naegi and even Syo nodding along in wordless understanding.

Kirigiri, it seemed, wasn’t as impressed.

“We were out there, on the street, exactly where that man was slaughtered literally minutes ago,” she said slowly, expression hardening into something clinical and withering that Byakuya had never seen directed at anyone other than himself—
(While nobody had been huge fans of what he’d done to Fujisaki’s corpse, it seemed that she in particular had never quite let go of her contempt for him over it)
—dropping her mask of cool indifference to reveal the unabashed vitriol hidden underneath.
“Your sensitivity could’ve gotten us all killed. If you want us to work for you, you should try being a little more honest.”

Blunt and biting, Kirigiri made it very clear that she had said what she needed to say, turning away from the older woman to face Asahina, who was still curled up on the floor staring stupidly at nothing. She placed a hand on the near-catatonic girl’s shoulder and muttered something Byakuya didn’t care enough to make out.

Akamine’s mouth hung open for half a second following the end of Kirigiri’s spiel, but she shook off the girl’s unprecedented antagonism as easily as she’d disregarded the earth-shattering gunfire from before, looking entirely unmoved and, if anything, a little irritated.

“At any rate,” she started, ignoring the uncomfortable glances Naegi shot between her and Kirigiri and the soft snorting of Syo, who seemed to find the whole situation nothing short of hilarious. “We can’t stay here. My campsite isn’t far, but I’d like to get there before sundown. We’re already behind schedule as it is.”

The flagrant inconsistency in her proposed plan to her earlier claims stuck out in Byakuya’s racing thoughts like a sore thumb.
“What happened to going outside while the Watchmen are on duty being a ‘death wish’?” He asked balefully, adjusting his glasses out of force of habit more so than necessity.

“Yeah!” Syo piped up unhelpfully, hopping onto the countertop and making a show of crossing her arms over her chest. “You trying to get us killed, lady? Because I’ll have you know that nobody gets to rip out Togami-sama’s guts but me!”

Byakuya grimaced.
“On second thought, the Watchmen don’t sound so bad. In fact, I’d like their nearest approximate location at once.”

Peeling his eyes away from Kirigiri’s still-turned back, Naegi glanced at the blonde and cracked a lopsided grin.

Byakuya, naturally, ignored this, and tried not to fixate on the baffling fact that the boy could find it in him to smile even at a time like this.

Akamine pushed a strand of black hair behind her ear and craned her neck some to look out the doors at the glossy orange haze that had replaced what was once the sight of a setting sun.
“I’ve observed the rounds that the Watchmen make before,” she said in response to Byakuya’s initial query. “They don’t have an exact routine, but they follow certain patterns. We’ve got a small window of opportunity right now before any of them canvas back in this direction.” She frowned contemplatively and fiddled with her glasses, “I’d been hoping to avoid them altogether, but, if we’re careful, we can probably still elude their detection.”

“That’s it?!” Hagakure spoke up for what felt like the first time in hours, an uncharacteristic feat for a loudmouth like him. “You’re staking our lives on the chance that we don’t run into those crazy weirdos?” His dark hazel eyes were saucers in his skull, and, not for the first time, Byakuya found himself unable to believe that the man was three years his senior.
(Which he supposed made him 20 now. And Byakuya 17. Oh god, they’d lost two whole years in that masqueraded prison. It was agonizing to think that there were things some other, expired version of himself might’ve known that he no longer did. That so much of his precious time had gone to waste.)

“Like I said, it is highly likely that we will be completely fine,” Akamine persisted against Hagakure protests.

“You have no way of knowing that for sure!” Hagakure shot back, and oh, if irony was worth its weight in gold, they’d all be wading waist deep in the riches of the world.

Asahina seemed to have recovered enough from her mortified stupor to find the strength to back up her friend.
“Wh...what if we just stayed in here?” She asked quietly. “It’s gotta be safer than going back out, right?”

Akamine shook her head ruefully, diverting her attention from the gaggle of shaken students to the ransacked interior of the store, which none of them had quite had the chance to take in before the reckoning hour struck. Byakuya followed her gaze and scowled a bit at the decrepit state of the establishment. Sure, corner stores had never exactly been the height of luxury to begin with, but whatever dignity this place might’ve once held had been shorn away long before the seven of them had stepped foot in it.

Shelves were toppled over and nonperishable food items aged years past their ‘sell by’ dates were scattered sparsely around on the floor, most of them free of their packaging and trampled into the ground, discolored lumps more so than identifiable provisions, staining the filthy tile and leaving the stagnant stench of old junk food sitting heavy in the air. The wallpaper was cracked and peeling and in several places completely absent, exposing the crumbling drywall underneath, which itself was riddled with holes, some obviously the product of bullets, others larger and greater threats to the structural integrity of the building. The entire store had clearly been stripped of anything that might’ve proven useful to somebody, and Byakuya sincerely doubted that the lack of supplies on the shelves left intact was due to a sudden boom in customer patronage. Dried blood was splattered on the walls and the floor, signifying that, just like pretty much every other location on the face of the planet, this store had served as the final resting ground for more than one victim of the Tragedy. Aside from a couple of occasionally flickering bulbs all congregated eerily in one corner, none of the lights in the ceiling panels worked—although, Byakuya noted, that did mean that this part of the city was still getting electricity. He’d never been the type of person to see the value in small victories, considering them little more than pathetic consolation prizes for the ninety-nine percent to coddle themselves with, but, in the face of such bleak circumstances, even he was forced to lower his standards.

Negative sentiments aside, the convenience store was, objectively speaking, a downgrade from the school. It was filthy, dilapidated, useless, and presumably one particularly fervid sneeze away from total collapse—but Asahina was right. It would make do, at least for the night.

However, Akamine was adamant.

“I told you. We’re already running late,” she said, annoyance seeping into her words. “You may not understand it just yet, but we are operating under a time limit, and staying in any one place for too long isn’t an option.”
Her statement had a kick of finality to it, subtly daring the others to challenge her authority. Again, Byakuya was struck with the palpable discomfort of having to follow a person he didn’t know and certainly didn’t trust like a sheared lamb being led to the slaughter, but as much as he hated to admit it, he was, just like his classmates, backed up against a proverbial wall. This was unfamiliar territory for all of them, and their best chances for success in navigating a world locked away from them for so long, a reality so far removed from anything they’d ever encountered that no amount of instinct, skill, or notoriety could grant them any sort of advantage—was to stick with her.

After all, even though she’d walked them right into the lion’s den, she was also the only one who knew to look out for the beast.

So, with a tad more coaxing and the sacrifice of a couple of minutes they couldn’t afford to lose, the ramshackle group trickled out of the corner store through a side door located in the office behind the cash register, and made their way back onto the empty streets. It was chillier now that the sun was dipping below the horizon—Byakuya caught Naegi shivering quite a few times, even through two layers of outerwear and that mane of unkempt hair that the blonde had once loudly attributed to being the only thing keeping his brain from leaking out of his ears. Asahina must’ve noticed this, too, because it was only minutes before she jogged up to the brunette and shrugged off her prized Nike jacket, proudly chirping that she “never got cold” when Naegi tried to refuse her offer.

Meanwhile, Hagakure was indiscreetly putting as much distance as he could between himself and Genocider Syo, who, infinitely bolder than Fukawa could ever dream of being, always hovered much closer to Byakuya than the timider of her personalities would dare. She’d pulled out her scissors, and the familiar schink of the twin blades brushing against one another taunted his ears just as gratingly as they had for the past several months, a constant reminder of the psychopath’s unwavering promise to kill him. Byakuya wasn’t so foolish as to write off the fiend’s express intentions as an empty threat—he was well aware of the fact that the girl was just waiting for the perfect opportunity to get the jump on him, building up both her resentment towards him and her passion for her “craft” as much as she could to sweeten what he had once had the displeasure of hearing her call “the ultimate climax”—but there had always been more urgent, more interesting matters to busy himself with than the hazard of her hypothetical assault. Paradoxically, the killing game had offered him some level of safety from her unbridled insanity; if she had tried to slaughter him in her modus operandi while under Monokuma’s watch, the class would’ve gone to trial and it would’ve been all too obvious that she was the culprit. While self-preservation and escape had never seemed high on Syo’s list of priorities, being executed in Hope’s Peak would’ve meant that she never got the chance to kill again, and, while she assured Byakuya that he was to be her magnum opus, she didn’t want to close herself off from all other possibilities.

Disturbing as all that was, Byakuya still couldn’t find it in himself to be all too concerned. Serial killer or no, Syo was still 5’3 and weighed 90 pounds soaking wet. All her previous murders had been cases in which she’d caught her victim off guard and gained the upper hand under the guise of innocence, any semblance of which she had long since sloughed away around him. As long as he saw it coming, Byakuya foresaw no possible way for any attack on her part to overpower him.

(Plus, a nagging, insufficiently suppressed voice in the back of his head supplied, the others wouldn’t let that happen.

Byakuya shut it up before he had the chance to consciously assess what it had fleetingly and unsolicitedly asserted and what that fleeting, unsolicited assertion implied, unwilling to open up such a truly unsightly can of worms.)

Not too far behind him, Byakuya knew that Kirigiri was stalking her way through the street in impenetrable reticence. The group had forgone the main road in favor of sticking to the sidewalks now in order to decrease the possibility of being seen, which meant that the girl didn’t get to lag behind as much as she generally liked to, but she was still, for all intents and purposes, closed off from the rest of the world, mind whirring behind the lilacs of her eyes, crossed arms and pensive expression making it clear that any attempts at making conversation would be met with radio silence. She hadn’t uttered a word since they’d passed the body of the man killed at the storefront—
(Literally right where the seven of them had been standing moments before Akamine had stowed them away in the gas station store, his body proliferated with enough bullet holes to kill him thrice over and then some, more blood and sinew than human being)
—and Byakuya could only assume that she was dwelling on the same troubling thought afflicting all the others:

It could’ve been them.

He wondered briefly whether she was finally reconsidering her undue faith in Akamine, before reminding himself that it didn’t matter what she believed, and that lingering on unwarranted thoughts of her—or any of the others, for that matter—only served to deplete his intelligence and worth minute by minute.

A particularly sharp snip of Syo’s scissors that was just a bit too close to his left ear for comfort wrenched him out of his unbecoming ruminations, and he picked up the pace just enough to sidle into place beside Asahina, who, insufferable as she was, remained leagues better than the literal serial killer drooling at his heels.

The athlete strafed to the side to make room for him on the pavement, adjusting her hold on the backpack strap slung lazily across her shoulder as she eyed him over wordlessly.

Byakuya challenged her leer with a withering glare of his own, frowning pointedly at the girl in tandem. “Is there something you would like to say?” He condescended, turning his nose skyward and dialing his arrogance up to eleven to compensate for the lack of immediate derision he felt towards her.

“To you?” She raised an eyebrow, shrugging disdainfully, “almost never.”

Byakuya scowled, clicking his tongue in annoyance and quickly conjuring up the ill will he was obligated to harbor for her, lowlife that she was, banishing any ludicrous, unjustifiable blights of unease or concern that he might’ve momentarily suffered after her anxiety attack back at the store.

“Then I’d ask that you stop staring,” he sneered, making it unabashedly clear that he did not care for her (because he didn’t.)

Impervious to his virulence after months of being subject to it, Asahina simply rolled her eyes and averted her gaze, affording Byakuya the opportunity to examine her properly for the first time since they’d left the gas station.

She seemed to have recovered from her meltdown well enough, her previously wilted gait reverting back to its typical, infuriating bounce of high energy and unshakable determination. There were goosebumps mottling the bare skin of her arms and shoulders where the loss of her jacket had left her exposed to the elements in only a thin tank top and torn jeans, but she didn’t appear to mind. Her face was no longer sickly pale, and the only hint of agitation or unnerve in her expression was the clear displeasure she felt at having to be anywhere near him, which was hardly a new development. All in all, she looked about as alright as any person in her situation could hope to be, which Byakuya felt no need to take with a grain of salt since she suffered from the same case of terminal transparency and openness that afflicted softhearted idiots like Naegi.

(Of course, this observation did not soothe a tension in Byakuya’s shoulders or imbue his veins with a sense of relief, because to do so would mean that he had cared an iota about the girl’s emotional well-being in the first place, which was most certainly not the case.)

“Now who’s staring, jackass?” Asahina jeered, crossing her arms and looking huffily back at him in a way that made her short, neat ponytail bob briefly up and down, the disarming little action draining her words and her expression of any venom they might’ve held.

Byakuya tch’d at her again and looked directly ahead, willing himself to think about literally anything other than his annoying, worthless, burdensome classmates.

He settled on the graffiti garnishing the walls of the neighborhood they were silently slinking past.

“End of Days, Death of Hope” it read in drippy magenta lettering that had clearly started to fade into the chipping brick backdrop of its makeshift canvas months ago. “Death of Subtlety” might’ve been more apropos, Byakuya thought, but he supposed the message came across either way.

The Ultimate Despair had really done a number on this place.

From through the numerous gaping holes denting the walls meant to gate off the community and keep it secured and protected, you could clearly see the wreckage of what must’ve once been an array of happy family houses smothered in debris and left in various states of disrepair. There were no lights left on in the windows, meaning that at the very least, the occupants of the neighborhood weren’t around anymore to see what had become of the place they’d once called home. Front doors had been torn off of hinges, windows shattered and roofs caved in. There was spray paint and dried blood amalgamated in a sickening discolored concoction that decorated the deteriorating outer walls of the buildings in abstract designs, or the occasional harbinger of doom graffiti messages that whoever had desecrated the place seemed to be so fond of. One of the houses in Byakuya’s line of vision had been halfway demolished, crumbling into the ground with a wide open cavity left in what remained of its frame, inside of which abandoned rooms and obliterated furniture could crudely be made out. The sight of it would’ve been disheartening if the boy who was studying it still possessed a heart. As it were, though, Byakuya simply filed the milieu away as another example of proof of the Despair’s overarching power and destructive capacity, building a cohesive profile on the people he’d vowed to destroy.

(That was one of the few things left in the post-Tragedy world that still fit in his wheelhouse, after all. Cruelty, vengeance, cutthroat survivalism—that’s what he had been prepared for. That’s what he was good at. Focusing on what he would do to the vile motherfuckers who had laid to waste the world he was supposed to rule one day put him right back in his element, gave him a reprieve from the confusing ambivalence that made up whatever muddled impropriety intoxicated his thoughts of his ex-classmates and not-friends, his begrudging peers in the post-apocalypse.

Tools to him, and nothing more. Designed to be used and then discarded, just like every other member of their pitiful caste.

Not frightened faces and fingers woven through his own. Not stupid laughter and tired, trusting smiles. Not terror that clutched the heart he wasn’t supposed to have in a vice grip at the memory of a vote he didn’t cast, a punishment he hadn’t agreed to, the clamoring thud of a giant metal weight that he was powerless to stop.

The terrifying, impossible possibility that he didn’t want them to die.)

Night had nearly fallen by the time the group arrived at a small, battered shack at the end of a dirt-paved path that stretched off the side of the main road, a ratty little excuse for a house surrounded by overgrown foliage and hidden in plain sight, just far enough from the neighboring town to circumvent suspicion and much too pathetic to give off the impression of being lived in. Akamine strolled up the rotting wooden steps that led to the porch—evidently unruffled by the way they creaked in protest under the strain of her weight—and pushed back the loose panel of chickenwire attached to an empty space in the front door that must’ve once sported a window. Reaching through the opening, she weaved her arm carefully around the sharp crosshatch of the broken frame to grope about for the doorknob and unlock the door from the inside. A soft ‘click’ signaled that she’d successfully reached her target, and after tugging her arm back out and giving it a firm shake to wrestle out the kinks in her joints, she pushed the door open and stepped decorously to the side. It swung inward with a slow, mournful whine that evoked a wince of pity for the abused hinges off which it hung, and when Byakuya caught a glimpse of what was waiting for them inside, he couldn’t help the repulsed little wrinkle that undertook his nose.

Cobwebs and dust adorned the rickety old doorframe in tangled droves, hanging like drapes from the decayed, splintering rafters to greet them at the house’s threshold and set the tone for the treasures yet to come. Beyond the entrance and a worn out welcome mat that jutted out of the floor—
(It actually just said ‘W  L  OM  ’ but Byakuya could appreciate the resilience in its effort)
—the frontmost room of the glorified shed was shrouded in darkness, sofas covered in soot-soiled tarps and a broken table surrounded by chairs that promised backaches from the sight of them alone just barely visible through the haze of filth and grime. The immediate onslaught of dust that had fled out the door as soon as Akamine opened it sprang moisture in Byakuya’s eyes before he even made it up the suspiciously unstable steps, and oh fuck—

His gaze shot to Naegi two seconds too late, just in time to see him recoil into Asahina’s jacket and hack out a ragged, guttural cough.

All eyes landed on the brunette as he doubled over for his second asthma attack in as many days, turning away from the door in a vain attempt to keep from breathing in the dust still floating unfettered in the air. His eyes were shut tight and his face was screwed up in pain as he choked out cough after brutal cough, and damnit, who’d been in charge of raiding the medicine cabinets, again?

“Asahina,” Byakuya said sharply, tearing the girl’s horrified attention away from Naegi’s coughing fit, “tell me you found an inhaler in the nurse’s office.”

Asahina blinked at him uncomprehendingly a couple of times before it dawned on her what he was asking, and she quickly swung her backpack off of her shoulder and began rifling through its haphazardly packed contents. Her frantic digging couldn’t have lasted more than a minute, tops, but undercut by Naegi’s haggard wheezing, it seemed to take half a lifetime before the girl was able to produce a small red respirator from the bottom of the bag.

“Got it!” She declared triumphantly, as though her friend wasn’t mere moments away from dropping dead on the spot, too busy suffocating to even notice the ‘it’ that she held. Byakuya, who had never once claimed to be a particularly patient man, wasted no time in snatching the prize from her fingers, ignoring her insulted “hey!” of protest as he strode briskly over to where Naegi was losing a battle against his own impotent lungs, wordlessly shoving the inhaler into his trembling hands and ordering him to breathe.

It took a bit of fumbling on the shorter boy’s part, but eventually, Naegi managed to bring the respirator up to his lips to take in a sharp, stuttering pump of the medication stored in its canister. His face, red from exertion and contorted in duress, took a while to relax, lips still wrapped taut around the mouth of the inhaler as he heaved in a few more desperately-needed breaths. When he was finally able to right himself and brave the house once more, he pulled the device away from his mouth with a soft, experimental exhale, eyelids fluttering shut as his whole body seemed to decompress.

Six pairs of eyes were still tense and trained on the brunette when his own opened up once again.

Naegi smiled a small, sheepish smile that looked more befitting of a person who had just embarrassed himself in front of a higher up than one who had nearly choked to death on dust, and gave a meek little wave of dismissal accentuated by an entirely inappropriate “sorry.”

Absently, Byakuya wondered if Naegi would apologize to a waiter who spilled boiling soup in his lap.

While Kirigiri took to explaining to a dumbfounded-looking Akamine that Naegi’s hitherto dormant asthma had recently flared up again and Syo complained loudly about him being “a big baby bitch, it’s just a little dust!”, the boy in question turned to face Byakuya with a small, ardent smile playing at his lips. “Thank you,” he mouthed warmly before Asahina and Hagakure began crowding around to fuss over him, and Byakuya managed with more difficulty than he should’ve had to keep the relief he wasn’t supposed to feel from bleeding into his features, turning away from the brunette without so much as a nod of acknowledgment.

(Lord help him if he gave away his burgeoning sense of solicitude to the one person who might be able to see through his gilded veneer.)

After a wary apology from Akamine for failing to warn the kids beforehand about the decrepit state of the house and at least a dozen reassurances from Naegi that he was fine, they could keep going, it wasn’t a big deal, the group made its second attempt at confronting the dilapidated hideout, stepping single file through the narrow, unwelcoming doorway into the marginally-less-dusty-but-still-absolutely-abhorrent interior of the drawing room.

Once they were all crammed inside the dingy, constricted hallway separating the living area they’d seen through the door from the adjacent and equally unsightly kitchen, Akamine flipped up the light switch clinging to the far wall, all exposed wires and cracked casings, hanging by a thread and barely even that. There was a moment’s delay before the light in the nearby ceiling fan feebly flickered on, bathing the room in a dim yellow glow and filling the silence with a low fluorescent buzz.

If it was even possible, Byakuya would wager that the house looked somehow worse under the clarity of proper lighting.

The shabby furniture in the paltry parlor was scuffed up beyond recognition, the clearly compromised, none-too-sturdy wooden legs of two sordid old sofas balancing precariously on top of a filthy shag carpet, and the three-limbed amputee of a coffee table laying in somber disarray at the center of the scene. All the seats in the room faced a sooty, unlit fireplace that was probably the culprit responsible for the arsenal of dirt and dust lingering thick in the heady atmosphere. Byakuya watched as particles of filth floated lackadaisically through the air, catching beams of light from the weak fluorescent bulb and dancing in lazy, unencumbered strokes around the grungy old room.

Across from the living quarters sat the modest—
(Read: pitifully inadequate)
—kitchen and its conjoined dining area: a measly countertop, sink, and ancient-looking fridge opposite a stove that Byakuya wouldn’t dare trust to light, lest the whole building went up in flames. There was a little wooden dining table that appeared to be the most (relatively) intact piece of furniture in the house thus far, with five rickety chairs arranged neatly around it. Feeling his posture worsen just from looking at the stiff, rigid seats surrounding the slightly tilted tabletop, Byakuya shifted his gaze over to peer inquisitively down the hall, into a dark, tapered corridor that ended in the scarcely visible outline of two closed doors.

“Man , what a dump!”

Syo spared no courtesy in bemoaning the pathetic condition of the shack before dramatically depositing herself onto one of the cloth-covered couches, the gently laid tarp collapsing under her weight and revealing the plush, faded-mustard surface of aged, battered cushions underneath. She heaved a laborious sigh, as if she hadn’t just spent a solid half of the day blissfully passed out and being carried around like a ragdoll, rubbing at her temples and letting her eyes squeeze shut against the glare of the lightbulb above her. Hagakure, who was still brandishing her stuffed knapsack, awkwardly plopped the bag down on the floor beside her prostrated body for lack of anything better to do. After a moment of pensive consideration, he discarded his own backpack on the nasty graying carpet as well, and took a seat on the floor in front of the broken coffee table.

“So...” he said when nobody else had uttered a word, still taking in their surroundings, or, in Naegi’s case, gravitating towards something in the corner of the dining room that had apparently piqued his curiosity. “This your place, Akamine-san? It’s, uh, nice.”

Akamine turned to stare bewilderedly at the younger man, perhaps wondering if he was actually being serious, before arriving at the conclusion that he must’ve been as she responded in nonplussed ambivalence, “...I don’t live here, Hagakure-kun.”

“Oh,” Hagakure said, cocking his head to the side thoughtfully, “good.”
He propped one leg up and laid the other down flat, pressing his palms against the carpet with absolutely no regard for how visibly vile it was. “Because it’s not very nice.”

If Byakuya could’ve rolled his eyes any harder, they might’ve gotten stuck up in his skull and rendered him veritably blind for the rest of his life.

“Ignore him, Akamine-san,” Asahina offered congenially, “we think he was dropped on his head as a baby.”

“Or as recently as last week,” Byakuya added, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and glancing to the side to watch Naegi skulk carefully around the lopsided dining table. From where she was leaning against the frontmost wall, Kirigiri seemed to have taken notice of the boy’s unexplained diversion of attention as well, checking out of the others’ conversation to peer over the kitchen counter at whatever Naegi was approaching with such heedful care.

Vaguely registering Hagakure’s offended lamentations about how mean everybody was to him punctuated by Syo’s insufferably shrill laughter, Byakuya drifted inadvertently towards the kitchen counter himself, quietly observing the other boy’s calculated steps toward something the blonde couldn’t quite make out behind one of the wooden chairs. Tongue poking out through tightly pressed lips in a comical display of focus and concentration, Naegi ducked behind the table abruptly, disappearing with a thud and what sounded like a small, none-too-human squeak. Baffled, Byakuya spared a glance at Kirigiri, who seemed no less perplexed than he did, eyebrows elevated and mouth warped into a faint, thin frown.

When Naegi reemerged from his brief stint with the dining room floor, his face was split into a wide, cheerful grin and his hands were clasped together an arm’s length away from his chest.

A second squeak and the emergence of a small, furry head from within the space between his fingers quickly dispelled any lingering questions Byakuya might’ve had.

Of course Naegi had been so giddily distracted by a fucking rat.

“Look!” He announced proudly, putting an end to whatever undoubtedly mind-numbing exchange had been happening over on Hagakure and Syo’s end, and the four group members who hadn’t already been engrossed by his frankly embarrassing antics turned to look at him quizzically. He presented the rodent clutched in his hands as though it were a prize rather than a pest, and its little quivering nose and beady black eyes greeted the others with substantially less enthusiasm than its captor had flaunted.

Asahina let out an unholy shriek and fled to the corner of the living room to seek shelter from the two ounce ball of hairy vermin nestled in Naegi’s palms, and Byakuya took that as his cue to tune out the rest of the following conversation. He found himself suddenly struck with seven months’ worth of cumulatively compiled exhaustion, only exacerbated by the still stuttering gunfire ricocheting through his skull and the lingering echoes of fear and subsequent shame that came along with it. Akamine had proven to be more or less correct in one regard, at least.

This whole Armageddon thing was proving to be an awful lot more stress than it was worth, even for such pinnacles of human perfection and tenacity as him.

After washing up one by one in the mold-ridden restroom and indulging in a dinner of granola bars and canned peaches around the fire that Hagakure, after ample poking and prodding, had somehow managed to start, the party settled in to go to sleep for the night.
(Or rather, for what remained of it; by the time the last of the idle chatter about what they would do and where they would go from here had died down, it was already one in the morning, meaning that they’d been up for over twenty consecutive hours. And though Byakuya was no stranger to pulling grueling all-nighters and working weeks on end without respite, even his busiest days hadn’t often been occupied by strung up corpses and gun-slinging sentinels, by hours spent walking through desolate, desecrated cities and enduring utterly enervating bouts of unbidden emotionality.)

The girls took the bunk bed in the bedroom down the hall (the bottom bunk was shared by Asahina and Kirigiri in light of Syo’s adamant insistence on sleeping alone in the top one), while the boys commandeered the living room, Hagakure happily resigning himself to the floor as Naegi and Byakuya claimed opposite ends of the bigger couch. That left the loveseat to Akamine, who seemed determined not to drift off until all the kids had fallen asleep: a decision that was deemed incredibly suspicious in the eyes of one disavowed heir and was in accordance taken as a direct challenge.

(After all, the world could never know that Byakuya Togami, perfectly oiled machine that he was, ever faltered or tired. It didn’t matter if that world was made up of the constantly scrutinizing eyes of the media and the social elite or the exhausted, wilting ones of a woman at her wits’ end; Byakuya would not lose.)

“Aren’t you tired, Togami-kun?”

Her voice came out in a hushed and gentle whisper, perhaps out of consideration for the other two people occupying the room, both of whom had conked out within minutes of curling up underneath the ratty, moth-eaten blankets they’d found in a linen closet in the back of the bathroom. There had been five spare comforters and quilts holed up in the washroom cupboard in total, and Naegi had offered one to Byakuya earlier that night which now lay discarded on the floor at his feet, after the blonde had taken perhaps a bit too much offense at the suggestion that he might drape something so grody and disgusting over his body. He’d live a thousand and one lifetimes with frozen toes and unrelenting chills before he ever allowed an article of cloth that had no doubt once served as the birthing grounds for a family of roaches to come in contact with his skin.

The socialite narrowed skeptical blue eyes at the older woman as Naegi’s sock-clad feet kicked softly against his shins, regarding her apprehensively over rectangular lenses that reflected the small slivers of moonlight seeping in through the boarded-up windows.

“Aren’t you?” He returned instead of levying up a response, pulling his knees in close to his chest as Naegi’s legs demanded more room to sprawl out, beginning to kick with a touch more wherewithal.

Akamine blinked at him and sighed quietly; the muted darkness in the drawing room made her look softer and more brittle than her pretense would lead you to believe, aging her a hundred years in a matter of minutes between dimly adjusted eyesight and seconds of stolen silence wherein Byakuya could almost, almost see himself buying her insidious act.

“You really don’t like me, do you?” The woman chuckled dryly, and the resignation in her tone nearly caught the blonde off guard.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he replied with the appropriate amount of venom. “Not liking you would require me to acknowledge your relevance in the first place. Which I don’t.”

His retorts weren’t nearly as smooth and biting as he would’ve liked them to be after twenty-some hours spent awake and on edge, but he was sure that the sentiment rang through regardless.

Akamine hummed, taking this addendum into consideration. “You don’t trust me, then,” she amended, sinking into the quilt that Naegi had given her and she, unscrupulous snake that she was, had graciously accepted.

“No, I don’t,” Byakuya said, because lying to protect the feelings of people who were beneath him (and may very well still be planning to kill him) had never been all that appealing.

“But you trust them.”

She jutted her chin towards the sleeping forms of Hagakure and Naegi, the latter of whom was slowly encroaching closer and closer into Byakuya’s personal space. Exhausted, irate, but for some reason reluctant to wake his slumbering classmate and snap at him to move, Byakuya scooted up against the edge of the couch as far as the sunken cushions would allow without sending him plummeting to the floor, and grimaced knowing that just weeks ago, he wouldn’t have spared so much as a second thought before kicking the squirmy brunette away. Wouldn’t have even let him get this close to begin with.

Dear god, how the mighty fall.

“What gave you that idea?” He jeered, and then, shaking his head, quickly tacked on, “actually, no. Don’t answer that. This conversation is over.”

He punctuated the proclamation by turning his back on his adversary, facing away such that the woman on the other sofa was rendered nothing more than a blurry figure in his periphery, only barely visible so that if she moved, he would still be able to see it. Naegi’s feet, which were all but in his lap, finally seemed to settle down, and Byakuya had half a mind to move them away but refrained from doing so on the off chance that touching the other boy might reignite his fidgeting.

Akamine shook her head and rolled onto her side, removing her glasses and setting them down on the floor by the firepit.

“I think it’s nice,” she said noncommittally, no trace of animosity in her voice, “how much you care.”

Byakuya stiffened, opening his mouth to object to her baseless accusation before remembering that he wasn’t supposed to be listening in the first place.

“Try to get some sleep, Togami-kun,” Akamine mumbled, before turning to curl into the crook of the couch. “Goodnight.”

Naegi’s heels pressed into the base of his ribs, and when Byakuya eventually did succumb to the aching exhaustion laying waste to his bones, his spine was still ramrod straight and his glasses were still perched, somewhat askew, on his nose, the only indication that he was even resting at all divulged by the soft, uncharacteristically gentle steadiness of his breaths and the barely-there droop of his head.