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Kaito hates that they're stuck there, waiting for their required two months of therapy to end, living like caged animals once again after finally breaking free from the game. He hates it, and yet, he wonders what they'd do if they weren't contractually obligated to stay. All their memories are fake, their old ones permanently erased, and with that, their place in this world has ceased to exist. He knows none of them would ever admit to it, but the painful truth is that now that it’s all done and over with, every member of the killing game is left, unwillingly, as dependent on the whole group as a bee is on the rest of its hive.
What should they do when they leave this place? How can they continue living in a world so unlike the false one constructed in their minds? Every one of them must be plagued with similar thoughts, and the most frustrating part is that Kaito can do nothing to help ease their worries, not when he himself is filled with anxiety at the thought of stepping foot outside this makeshift prison they're all being held in.
Out of everyone, the only one who seems unbothered is Ouma, which would've pissed Kaito off at a different time - back before he figured out what makes Ouma tick, before he got a glimpse under that veneer of his. He knows better now, knows that the tenser Ouma is, the less likely he is to show it - knows that the jokes, the ribbing, the poking at fresh wounds and dry commentary is nothing but an attempt at keeping his fragile façade in place.
The more Ouma skips around and pushes everyone's buttons, the more his mask cracks and slips right before Kaito's eyes. It's unnerving in ways Kaito can't explain. Somehow, he doesn’t know when, he’s come to rely on Ouma to give him a sense of normalcy, his usual brand of behavior a sign that things will be okay. Maybe it started back in the game - as much of a villain as Ouma played, and as much as his presence always seemed to throw a wrench into everything, at least he was consistent when going about it. Kaito knew what to expect from him, knew to expect some form of chaos whenever he was involved.
He could rely on Ouma to be Ouma. Unchanged in the midst of all that was happening around him.
Or so Kaito thought, until the hangar.
After that, well...it’s hard to think of someone the same way when you know the exact color of their blood when it pools under your feet, the way their breathing turns shallow as they sweat out against a slow acting poison, the way they smile ruefully up at you with both of your inevitable deaths looming over your heads.
Yeah, that’s bound to change your perspective just a little bit.
"Momota-chan has been staring into space for so long, has your brain finally blown a fuse?"
Kaito pushes Ouma's face away, leaning back in his chair to increase the distance between them. His chest burns at the proximity, a sensation not unfamiliar to him nowadays. "Shut up, I was thinking."
Ouma's mouth splits into a mischievous grin. "Oh? Did it hurt?"
Kaito wrinkles his nose but ignores the insult. "What do you want?" He asks, and watches in silence as Ouma dramatically drapes himself over the table between them and blinks up at him through his lashes. His face is small, all of him is small, and the way he peeks up at Kaito would almost be cute, if Kaito wasn’t trying so hard not to think about that.
"I'm bored, Momota-chan! Entertain me!"
"Can't you ask anyone else?" Kaito scowls, turning his attention back to the book he'd been peacefully reading before Ouma entered the library. It’s supposed to be about a little boy’s journey of self discovery after adopting a mistreated cat from the local shelter. Shuichi claimed it was lovely when he recommended it, but the slow pace of the story has been giving Kaito a bit of a headache.
"Aw, but you're my favorite!" Ouma grins, and then, with a loud snicker and a hand to his chin, adds, "But of course, that's a lie!"
Kaito's eye twitches and he forces himself to try and focus on the words in front of him instead of Ouma. It doesn't work, of course - not when Ouma somehow manages to radiate ‘ pay attention to me’ with every breath he takes.
"C'mon, you know you don't wanna read that," Ouma says dryly, like he's so sure of it that he finds it pitiful of Kaito to even pretend otherwise.
Kaito sighs, giving in, and flips the book closed with one hand, the other pinching the bridge of his nose in mild exasperation. "Fine,” he grunts, “what do you wanna do?"
Ouma perks up at that. "Let's play charades!"
"Charades? Don't you need teams for that?"
Ouma shrugs, pulling out his new Team DanganRonpa sponsored phone from his pocket. "I expect Momota-chan wouldn't try to cheat, and I guess Momota-chan will have to trust that I won't either." He places the phone between them on the table and taps on it for a moment.
"Easier said than done," Kaito mutters, watching as Ouma opens an app titled 'charades'. "Wait, they have apps for that?"
"They have apps for everything, my dear Momota-chan."
Kaito scowls, feeling his cheeks warm up against his will. "Don't call me that."
"What? Momota-chan?" Ouma asks, blinking innocently up at him.
Kaito drags a hand down his face. "You know that's not what I mean." He clicks his tongue. "Whatever, let's just play this game of yours, the sooner it's over the sooner you'll stop bothering me."
"So mean! You want to get rid of me that bad?!" Ouma cries out, crocodile tears running down his face.
Kaito doesn’t, actually, but letting Ouma think that he does is in his best interests at the moment, so he doesn’t deny it. Instead, he says, "Let's do this thing,” and spreads his palms flat against the table. "Who starts?"
Ouma taps a finger to his lips and then points it at him. "You start, Momota-chan!"
Kaito nods his assent and grabs the phone, tapping the randomize option so a card shows up.
‘Moon,’ it reads, and he frowns, wondering how he’s supposed to describe that with only gestures. When he glances up at Ouma, he’s excitedly wiggling in his seat, eyes wide with expectation as he watches him.
Kaito sighs and places the phone back on the table, screen down.
“Don’t blame me if this is hard to get, I never said I was good at this game,” he warns, and then raises one finger.
“One word,” Ouma says, grinning.
Kaito nods, and makes a circle with both hands, followed by what he hopes translates as a shining motion with his fingers.
“Uh,” Ouma narrows his eyes, “A ball? Twinkles?” He tilts his head to the side. “A lamp? Lightbulb?”
Kaito shakes his head, and then places his hands in the shape of a telescope over his right eye, gazing up at the ceiling with a mock look of wonder on his face.
“Oh! Oh! Star gazing! Stars!” Ouma exclaims, pointing at him in his eagerness.
Kaito shakes his head again, biting his lip in frustration. He runs a hand through his hair and then makes the shape of a ball again, before getting up from his seat and mimicking the slow low-gravity walk of an astronaut on the moon.
Finally, Ouma seems to get it, because his eyes light up and he shouts, too loud in the quiet of the library, “Moon, the moon!”
Kaito sits back down, pleased at their success. “Yeah, it’s the moon.”
Ouma does a ridiculous little dance in his chair, looking for all the world like this has been his greatest accomplishment to date. “Great! My turn now!” He leans over and grabs the phone from where Kaito had placed it, eyes sparkling.
He taps the screen, focused, and then a look of surprise crosses his face and his expression goes worryingly blank. He looks up at Kaito, lips pursed, and Kaito opens his mouth to ask what’s wrong, wondering what could’ve possibly made him so visibly hesitant. Before he can utter a word, though, Ouma seems to come to a silent decision, because he puts the phone back down and carefully gets up from his seat.
He lifts one finger.
“One word.”
Ouma nods and makes the shape of a cross with both fingers.
“Cross?” Kaito guesses. Ouma tilts his head and gestures for him to wait, before stepping up to him and bending at the waist, a hand coming up to hover in front of his belly and the other pulled back, arm flexed at the end of his spine.
“Hmm,” Kaito stares, confused.
Ouma looks up from under his bangs and upon seeing his lack of understanding, unbends from his position and stands tall for a moment, before stooping down again. This time, however, he moves the arm he has at the front in a graceful spiral before bringing it down to his belly again.
He’s bowing , Kaito realizes with a start, and followed by that comes a different realization, one that tastes sour on his tongue and makes his insides twist unpleasantly.
A cross and a bow.
“A crossbow,” he says, voice strained. No wonder Ouma reacted so strangely to it, what the fuck.
“Good job, Momota-chan!” Ouma says with a clap, returning to his seat. He isn’t smiling for once, but his voice still carries a false cheerfulness that Kaito can’t help but wince at.
“You make it easy,” Kaito admits, trying to sound blasé and missing by a mile.
Silence quickly descends upon them then, as they both stare unseeingly at the phone on the table. Already big as it was, the elephant in the room grows, and grows, until it’s occupying all the spaces around them, suffocating.
Kaito doesn’t know what to do, what to say, how to say it. With anyone else, being straightforward would be easy, almost like breathing, but this is Ouma. Nothing with him is ever simple, and all their conversations always end up going in circles, around and around, leading places Kaito never expects.
It’s terrible and probably counterproductive to the hours of therapy they’ve been subjected to all this time, but the truth is: he doesn’t know how to broach this subject, didn’t even think to try until this moment. He’d always assumed it was best not to mention what happened back then, always expected that if he did, Ouma would cut him down and close himself off from him. And as much as he likes pretending not to enjoy having Ouma around, Kaito is person enough to admit, at least to himself, that he needs him with a desperation that is almost embarrassing. With Ouma, he doesn’t have to play the indestructible being of endless positivity role - Ouma knows the ugly, has seen it with his very own eyes. He was there at the end, when Kaito was at his most vulnerable, and in turn, Kaito was there as well, to witness Ouma unravel, the exposed brittle lines of his defenses crashing down around them. It wasn’t a willing show for either of them, but it was the hand they got dealt, and humans are nothing if not adaptable in dire circumstances.
Kaito’s reliance on Ouma isn’t a matter of trust, but rather symbiosis. Ouma knows him and in his strange twisted way, accepts him, embraces the bad just as readily as others would embrace the good. And Kaito, helpless in the face of that, can do nothing but stupidly see the good that Ouma tries so hard to keep hidden from the world.
Sometimes, he wonders if Team DanganRonpa made them like this on purpose - character foils of each other for the public’s consumption. It’s an awful thing to consider, so he tries not to think about it too much. He’d rather their tragedies be self made than imposed on them by others.
“Ah, this game’s boring after all,” Ouma says, startling Kaito by being the one to break the silence.
When Kaito meets his eyes, his gaze is steady, and something about it swallows him in, like a whirlpool appearing in calm waters. He wants to know what Ouma is thinking, wants to know what he sees when he looks at him - at all of them. Even when Kaito comes closer than anyone else to touching the other side of the looking glass, there will always be an unpredictable element to Ouma that catches him off guard. It’s both the best and worst part about him.
“Say, Ouma,” he says, watching as Ouma grabs the phone and slips it inside his pocket with an air of disinterest. “Have you thought about what you’re gonna do once we leave this place?”
Ouma stares at him for a long moment, expression inscrutable. “Yes.”
Kaito waits, expectant, and when it becomes obvious nothing else is forthcoming, he leans forward. “And?”
Ouma snorts and arches an eyebrow. “What, you want to know my plans?”
Kaito bristles at his tone, scowling. “I can’t?”
“Momota-chan,” Ouma says, letting out a sigh. “We’re not friends.”
Kaito can’t really deny that, because whatever they are, friends certainly wouldn’t be the word he’d use either. But, “We’re something. ”
And Ouma’s eyes cut to him like a blade, searching. They shine in the artificial lights of the library, a bright purple that looks almost surreal. Not for the first time, Kaito wants to pull him in closer and stare at the planes of his face until his eyelids can’t stay open any longer. It’s comical, how much he yearns for something so small.
After what feels like an eternity, Ouma’s lips curl into a wry smile. “That, we are,” he says, and taps two fingers to his mouth, body curving over the table until he’s close enough that if he stretched one arm he could touch his palm to Kaito’s chest. “Momota-chan, you never change, do you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ouma ignores his question. “I’m using all the money we got from this freak show to get as far away from this place as I can possibly get.” He licks his lips, fingers tapping a mindless rhythm against the table. “What about Momota-chan? Following your ‘sidekicks’ to wherever they go, I imagine.” He laughs. “Can you guys even survive without each other?”
“Actually, my plans only go as far as yours at the moment. As far away from here as possible,” Kaito confesses with a shrug. He tries to imagine living outside these white concrete walls and fails, tries to imagine living without Ouma in his life and fails even worse. “You’ll tell us, right? Where you’re going.”
Ouma frowns, looking away. “Why would you need to know?”
And the thing is, Kaito finds it hard to be roundabout when it comes to this - how is he supposed to tell Ouma he doesn’t want him to disappear from his sight when just looking at his shifty behavior and avoidance makes it obvious that’s been his plan all along. Is there any way to avoid the inevitable? Has this always been the place where their paths are meant to diverge?
He doesn’t want to accept that. Refuses to believe that after everything they’ve been through, they’re supposed to go their separate ways like a pair strangers. Whatever else Team DanganRonpa did to them, it gave them all a connection to each other that can never truly be severed.
The ties that bind them, the strings shackling them together; Kaito is relying on that to keep moving forward, is relying on the fact that he’s not alone in this struggle to remind him why it’s worth it to be here, why it’s a good thing that they survived, that they made it out. He can’t do this with Ouma gone, or, more accurately, he doesn’t want to do this with Ouma gone.
Perhaps it’s his own selfishness at work here. It’s not as if he’s helpless without Ouma, he’s certainly not incapable of living without him - he just thinks it’d be a little bit miserable if he did. There’s a color that comes with knowing him, a color that Kaito can’t imagine was there before he met him, though he can’t possibly say for sure when he has no memories of ‘before’. All he knows is that in the hangar, before he pushed that button and closed his eyes to the sound of death, he could still see it all around him, but after, when he opened them again, it was gone. Washed out of existence. Erased from his small little world; a wonder he didn’t know was there, until it wasn’t.
“Because I want to know where you are. Do I need to have some convoluted reason?” Kaito says, clenching his hands in his lap, nails digging into his palms.
“So you wanna keep tabs on me?”
“No,” Kaito rolls his eyes. “I want to know where you are, so I can go there and see you. What about this are you not grasping?”
Ouma opens his mouth, as if to retort, but pauses when Kaito’s words seem to finally sink in. “Uh- go see me?”
Kaito lets out a groan. “Yes, Ouma, visit you. Like normal well adjusted people do when they have some sort of relationship with each other.”
“Some sort of...” Ouma echoes, looking small and confused. It’s not a look Kaito’s used to seeing on him - the only other occasion he glimpsed it was a month back, when Ouma woke up from the simulation. He’d stayed in for longer than Kaito, despite his earlier death, mostly due to the traumatic way of his passing. When he was pulled out, Kaito was there, waiting, standing behind the doctor as the woman explained what had happened and detailed what would happen going forward. Similarly to back then, Kaito feels the irrational urge to spring forward and pull Ouma into his arms, hide his face from the world, protect the vulnerable twist of his lips and the shine of his wide eyes.
“Look, it’s not a big deal. I just want to be sure you won’t disappear on me the moment we get out of here.” He juts out his lip, eyebrows furrowed. “That wouldn’t be cool at all, okay?”
Ouma seems to recover from his little trance at that, eyes splitting into half moons as a smile stretches over his mouth. “Aww, Momota-chan, I didn’t know you liked me that much!” He tilts his chin up, looking down his nose at Kaito’s deadpan expression. “Would you look for me if I disappeared?” He adopts a dramatic voice, bringing the back of his hand to his forehead like a damsel in a period drama. “Search through every city without rest until you found me? Oh, Momota-chan, I didn’t know you were such a romantic!”
Kaito shrugs and leans back, trying to give off an air of indifference despite the way his heart is racing in his chest, embarrassment coursing through his veins. “And what if I did?” He narrows his eyes at Ouma. “Don’t try and test that, though. I really mean it.”
Ouma drops his hand back to his side and frowns. “You’re no fun.” His cheeks are red.
“Wasn’t trying to be.”
They stare at each other for a long moment, thinking, and then, looking a little uncertain, Ouma says, “If I tell you where I go, you’ll have to tell me where you go too.”
Kaito lets out a laugh at that. “I wasn’t planning on hiding it.”
Ouma looks down. “Right.”
Kaito lifts his eyebrows. “What, did you think I was the one that was gonna disappear on you?” He asks in disbelief.
Ouma’s shoulders go up to his ears, a defensive look crossing his face. “You never mentioned anything about it.”
“Neither did you!” Kaito retorts. “Do you think you’re easy to read or something? Of course I didn’t say anything, I thought you’d balk at any mention of it!”
“I don’t balk,” Ouma says, wrinkling his nose at the mere thought. “I naturally assumed you were going with Saihara-chan and Harukawa-chan.”
“Maybe I am, I don’t know yet. Either way, that has nothing to do with whether I want to see you again or not.”
“They don’t like me very much,” Ouma mumbles around a pronounced pout.
“And I like you fine, so they’ll deal with it.” Kaito sighs. “I didn’t think you’d worry about things like that. Did I ever give you any indication that I wanted to cut ties with you?”
Ouma abruptly smiles, shrugging as if without a care. “Well, Momota-chan never seems that pleased to see me, now does he?” He makes a snipping gesture with his fingers. “And what ties, there are no ties.”
“You want me to start kissing your feet whenever you walk into a room, is that it?” Kaito asks dryly, ignoring the last comment for its attempt at riling him up.
Ouma’s smile twitches. “That’d be a nice change of pace, actually!”
Kaito pretends not to hear him. “You always do your best to push my buttons, of course I get angry when you’re around.” He rubs the back of his neck, hesitating for a moment before continuing. “Still, I don’t hate you or anything.” He peeks at Ouma out the corner of his eye, feeling something sweet and sticky clinging to the insides of his lungs, the bones of his ribs, the bottom of his belly. “We’re something, you know?”
Ouma makes a face at that, looking away as if to try and hide the softness threatening to break across his features. “Eww, you’re so gross Momota-chan! Say that to Harukawa-chan, not me!”
Kaito snorts. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. You got my point, didn’t you?”
Ouma doesn’t look back at him when he says, “I got it. Tell Momota-chan where I’m going. Don’t vanish into the night like a frog into a swamp fog.”
“I said none of that about the frog but okay.” Kaito leans across the table until he can reach his hand over and touch two fingers to the small jutting bone of Ouma’s wrist. “Hey, you’re not lying, right? You really will tell me?”
“I’ve never lied to you in my life,” Ouma says, which is a blatant lie, but his eyes ring true when they meet Kaito’s over their connected hands, and that’s enough for him to believe him. It’s enough for him to trust that maybe that miserable future, the one with the Ouma-shaped hole in it, isn’t his future at all.
“Good. That’s good.” He smiles.
And Ouma, in a rare moment of transparency, smiles back.
END.