Chapter Text
Day 456
8:30am
"Aaaaagh! Let me out! Let me out! Let me OUT OF HEREEEE! Ow!" Makoto Naegi retracted his arm with a hiss of pain as he banged on the door so hard it sent fire searing through his entire being. Panting, he took a few steps back and closed his eyes.
Every morning. Every morning for the past 450 or so days, he came running right out of his plain bedroom and into this reinforced wooden door to scream and shout and beg for his life... at least, he thought it was reinforced. He wasn't that weak, right? With the pummeling this poor dead tree got every day it was a wonder it hadn't crumbled to pieces yet.
Well, it didn't look like today was the day he was getting out either. Since he had arrived here, Makoto had found that the only interaction he got from the outside world was when his meals were served in the morning, noon, and in the evening. His fridge was constantly stocked with bottled water (to the point where Makoto had taken all the bottles out and tried to escape through the back of it) and he had a running shower, mangas posted through the door along with his food and a working TV. It was an introvert's dream, but Makoto wasn't an introvert.
And the bars on the windows certainly didn't help either.
He had been trapped here, stolen from his post at the Future Foundation branch and trapped in this tiny apartment for just over a year. The Future Foundation was his life! It was the only place he found solace after the Killing Game, after Junko Enoshima's death - he got to bury himself in his work against the Remnants of Despair and eventually captured a few of them... that was all he remembered. Even his sister, he knew she was alive but didn't know her whereabouts, but he was hell-bent on finding her - he just had to have hope.
He sighed and dragged his weary feet back into the bedroom. He had fled the bed in nothing but a tee and underwear, not that it made much of a difference because all he had to wear was the same Future Foundation suit over and over again. His wardrobe was full of them and if he got one dirty he would just toss it in the laundry basket under the window in the bedroom and it would be gone the next morning.
He looked out the barred window and down at the bed, messy and with distant damp stains from the nightmares he had every night. Nightmares from sitting at an innocent school desk, a cutesy black and white bear teaching him about reproduction as the conveyor the desk was sitting on inched him closer and closer to a swift death. He may have escaped at the time, but the memory of being tied down with nowhere to run and knowing he was about to die would never leave his mind. He grumbled and ran his hands through his hair, which never looked tidy anyway, and pulled a new suit out the wardrobe. It was plain, which didn't exactly help Makoto's diminishing hope, black with a white shirt and a small emblem on the lapel... the expression on his face was odd, he usually had such a bright beaming smile and wouldn't let anyone else see otherwise - ugh! What was happening? His inner monologue sounded like some kind of piney manga protagonist.
This train of thought was interrupted by the familiar clink then thunk of the oversized letterbox in the front door opening and the sliding of a plate through it... Makoto froze for a second and listened before another harsh thump of a book being thrown through rang through the apartment and the letterbox slid closed.
Makoto finished making himself look somewhat presentable before he emerged, looking down at the pop-out shelf underneath the letterbox holding a plate of food, and then a new manga on the floor in front of it.
"Thank you, I guess..." He took the plate and looked at it mournfully. At least this cooking was better than whatever Asahina would come up with while they were still at Hope's Peak? He would give anything to taste her odd spice combinations again at this point.
Mournfully carrying the plate to the mahogany dining table in the other room, Makoto took some time to reflect on what his options were (as he did every morning)... so, he had already tried to hack away at the bars blocking the windows, but they wouldn’t budge. Of course not, all he had at his disposal was the pitiful butter knives he was given with his meals. He had kept them all instead of posting them back through the door with his plates, but to no avail - the best thing they did was cut up the plastic water bottles when he was bored.
He sighed, spooning some rice into his mouth and resting his chin on his palm - at least the weather was nice, he noted. The sun always shone brightly, wherever this was. Was he still in Japan? He hoped so, he had no idea how much time passed between when he was taken and when he was left here. He could be in the States for all he kn-
Ca-thunk.
The fork he was holding slowly dipped towards the half eaten food as a strange clunking sound emitted from behind the front door. It was odd, nothing like that had ever happened in all his time here... of course, a normal person wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but Makoto was a prisoner here. Anything out of the ordinary was hope.
He gulped quietly and stood, setting the fork down and grabbing the butter knife next to him... he crept forward uncertainly, and jumped when the clunking sound came again.
“...Hello?” Ew, did he really sound that small when nervous? Nonetheless, he surged forward and looked through the peephole... nothing. Usually it was just black, as though it was covered - but Makoto barely had time to step back before the hair just above his ears had the first few millimetres shaved off.
Shhhhik!
His eyes slowly trailed sideways and he was looking right back at them as the reflection of the claws protruding from the door displayed the absolute shock in them. If he was so much as a centimetre to the left, it would have nailed him in the head... time slowed as the claws dragged themselves backwards out of the door and Makoto gasped, tumbling backwards when the wood began to crack.
“Puhuhuhu... Waaahahahahaha!” The next set of claws sent the door flying off it’s hinges and Makoto’s worst nightmare crashed through it -
Monokuma.
“No!” Makoto rolled to the side when Monokuma lunged for him - this one was different, slightly bigger and bulkier, with long claws threatening him - but this was still the same one, right? So how? How!? Junko was dead! He had watched it happen! Unless... unless...
Scrambling to his feet and away from the bear, Makoto held the knife out feverishly towards it as it turned on him.
“J-Junko...” he squeaked. “Don’t... please don’t...”
“It’s punishment time!” The bear cackled, causing Makoto to have a momentary flashback - he was stood behind a wooden podium, watching Leon get dragged away by a chain around his neck - Mondo sweating as he was tied to a bike - Celestia grinning as she was set on fire - Alter Ego wearing Chihiro’s face as he was crushed - he yelped and shook his head, tripping over his own feet into the new hallway opened by the front door being destroyed.
“G-Get away... Keep away from me!” He roared, tossing the knife feebly at the advancing Monokuma. It didn’t talk like the other one, it gave Makoto the impression that it was somehow programmed to spit out stupid catchphrases at timed intervals - he turned tail and bolted down the new corridor. He knew from his time in the apartment that the room he was in was on a higher floor, so instead of diving into the nearest room, he looked for stairs, or an elevator, or something- sweat created a sheen on his forehead under the strong lights that flickered to life when he ran past.
He could hear the bear squealing with laughter, toddling after him - the thing was slow but, if you had seen what Makoto had with your own two eyes, you would be terrified too.
A singing smell reached his nose, so he stopped running for a split second and turned in a circle... it smelled suspiciously familiar, like... fire.
“Waahahahaha! Don’t make me punish you!”
His eyes widened as he turned back towards the direction of Monokuma, and he realised that not only was it right behind him, but also - the damned walls were going up in flames.
What fresh hell was this!?
He took off running once more - shouldn’t a set of stairs be more easily accessible in an apartment building for this exact reason!? He gasped and skidded around the next corner and his face lit up when he saw an elevator. Not ideal but, it would do - he flung himself towards it and slammed his hand against the summon button and almost cried when the panel lit up, signifying the fact that it was working.
“Thrills, chills, kills!”
“Waaahahahaha!”
“Puhuhuhu...”
Makoto slammed his back against the comfortingly cool elevator doors as he looked back down the corridor he had just come from. The initial Monokuma was there, shown by the fact that it had tiny wood chips in it’s fur, but... there was two more, and a larger group behind that - it was everything Makoto could do not to sink to the floor in fear. Multiple Monokumas!? In his mind, that meant multiple killing games. Hundreds of deaths, all in the name of some dead girl’s despair.
He didn’t even hear the dinging of the elevator, nor did he hear the other voice until he fell back and was caught underneath the arms - he slowly looked up and he was looking upside down at the sneering expression of Byakuya Togami.
“Byakuya!” Makoto wailed, throwing himself against the former ultimate affluent prodigy - Byakuya was thoroughly disgusted and wasted no time expressing it, shoving Makoto sideways into the elevator and holding some kind of gun out towards one of the Monokumas - he pressed the trigger and it exploded in some strange warped light, hitting the bear directly and causing it to short circuit and collapse into a pile of limbs.
“M-Master Byakuyaaaa! You’re s-so heroic!” Toko Fukawa was there too, stood on the other side of Byakuya in the elevator - she had a gun strapped to her side, it was a stun gun; Byakuya had presented her with it to keep better control of her two personalities. Makoto could see she had also been presented with her Future Foundation uniform since he had last seen her - in all honesty, he was quite happy to see her too, even if she wasn’t being helpful at all.
“Here,” Byakuya was shoving something into Makoto’s hands. It was a similar gun to the one he had, modelled after a megaphone - there was a dial on it and a trigger, the dial was set to ‘Break’. “This is what we’re calling a hacking gun. It sends electromagnetic codes through the air and shorts out Monokuma’s circuits. You’ll figure it out. Use it wisely and run,” he grabbed Toko’s arm and pulled her out of the elevator, leaving Makoto inside.
“Wh- Run!? What do you mean? I’m staying to help!” Makoto tried to get up and come back out, but he was flung backwards by a harsh hand to his chest.
“Disobeying Master? Hmm, I see, I see! Maybe I should try it sometime and see if he punishes me, keeyahahahaha!” Toko shrieked. Except... well, this wasn’t really Toko, Makoto knew that all too well. The tongue was hard to miss. She spun a set of scissors around two fingers before flinging her arm out and lodging them into a Monokuma’s head.
“Now, now, Big Mac! You be a good little boy and stay put, hmm?” Syo beamed, leaning down and pulling more scissors out of her stockings. She waved them kindly at him and smiled as best she could (still, with her tongue sticking out) - Byakuya shot a few more of the bears before looking over his shoulder.
“There’s a restaurant across the street, and a Future Foundation lackey waiting there for you. Be careful, the entire city has had an outbreak of these things. And... don’t die.”
That was all Makoto got before the elevator doors closed and he could hear Syo shrieking with laughter as she tore apart the robots.
So many questions. So many questions. But of course, Makoto had experience in having questions and none of them being answered. It was funny, this was almost like the killing game all over again - he was being kept prisoner and now there was a robot bear after him. Ha... haha... he could almost laugh.
The elevator was stuffy, he noted. Maybe it was his nerves talking, or maybe it was some deep rooted fear of descending elevators after what had happened in Hope's Peak.
Fear could be consuming, Makoto had learned that very quickly - as the hairs on his neck pricked up and the squeaking metal ropes squealed to a halt, time thickened and a shallow breath was all Makoto managed before the doors slid open to the desecration that was now the outside world.