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She tells you she doesn’t know what she is, she’s not sure who she is, but you already know her. She is Kirigiri Kyoko, and sometimes you call her Kiri. But not because you don’t know her name or because it feels too complex in your mouth. You know her, you know her name like you know your own. You’ve learned it through constant repetition in the late hours of the night, whispering it like it’ll save you from everything that’s happening, tasting it on your tongue.
Kirigiri.
The perfect balance of vowel and consonant, your tongue hits the room of your mouth and bounces back like it’s made of tin, all metallic and sharp. It cuts like her wits and the blood would be sugary sweet if it were anything more than imagined.
Kyoko.
Sits heavy on your tongue, the weight of her bearing down on you. She’s there. Her name is not yours to dissect and yet you do so feverishly. You sing it like a melody and you whisper it late in the evening when announcements have played and the night is still. When the only sounds you hear are ones you make. Soundproof walls never had much appeal until you realized you could whisper her name all you like.
She may not know who she is, as she tells you, but you do.
She tells you lots of things, but she leaves out just as many. She’s like the saying one step forward, three steps back and you walk it anyway. Like a lone road of gravel and concrete, you saunter along without any care, thinking maybe if you trudge along enough everything will fall together and make sense.
She tells you things, loud things at breakfast when you all eat up despite the protests of grief spinning your stomachs into knots. She says loud things, meaningless and simple. She asks you to pass something or other and you do so on autopilot.
You stare down at your food, head in hand. The meat on your plate trickles red juice and it looks so deeply unappetizing that you gag. You gag on a million emotions and on the saliva that runs dry in your mouth.
It looks a lot like her, like Maizono. Like Sayaka. A piece of meat put out for the sole purpose of enjoyment, for the pleasure of some cruel mastermind.
Last night you fell asleep on the bathroom floor, staring at the tiles once painted in her blood. It was cruel of you, to put yourself through that, to remember her in such a state, but you couldn’t turn away. It was so sickly alluring and you had to give in.
Kirigiri tells you things, quiet things. Sometimes you sneak around with her after hours and she whispers little nothings into the air around you. You pick them up like a trail of breadcrumbs, leading to her very core.
She tells you she doesn’t know who she is, and you think that maybe she doesn’t. But you do.
You know she can braid her hair with her gloves on and you know doesn’t laugh so much as smile and speak with a change in pitch. You know, you know there’s no room to laugh in a place like this but you still hope she’ll do it. You know she side-eyes you whenever she feels you looking—you look a lot. You know she is thought most likely to be the one behind all of this, and you know that doesn’t really bother you.
There’s a word for that, you think. When your captor is the one you feel closest with. It sits on the tip of your tongue, stagnant. Unlike Kiri which you say aloud with such carelessness, unlike Kirigiri which you speak when times call for it, unlike Kyoko which you whisper tentatively in the darkness for only yourself to hear.
Vocabulary never was your strong suit.
Her hair is lilac and sometimes you pretend it’s the morning sunrise. It looks more like dusk than dawn but you prefer the latter and you’ve gotten good at pretending.
(You miss the sunrise, you miss it a lot. Sometimes you think of watching it with her and your stomach goes all fuzzy and you think you might be going crazy like this.)
You brush her hair out of her eyes, sometimes. When she’s too focused to do it herself. She gets that way a lot, far-off look in her eyes dragging her away from reality.
You always pull her back.
Maybe you whisper her name like a lifeline, maybe you pull her from the brink, like a lifeline. Maybe she is as much a saviour to you as you are to her.
You’d like to think that.
Togami goes and tells you that Kirigiri is the mastermind. That he knows it for a fact and that you should stop hanging around her. He says you’ve only found solace in her because of the gap Maizono left behind.
You scoff at him, tell him to loosen up. You think his words are fucking bullshit, as Oowada puts it. Don’t make any damn sense, as Hagakure says. A bit rude, Asahina. Gospel, Fukawa. You don’t trust her as far as you can throw her, so you ignore those words just like you ignore Togami’s.
If Kirigiri, if Kyoko , is the mastermind, you wouldn’t mind all that much. You feel a lot of things for her, but you could never feel hatred.
You’re friends. Good friends. Friends don’t hate each other.
You don’t love her, but you think she’s pretty in ways that don’t even matter. You don’t know the difference.
Her eyes are violet and unhinged and you stare into them far more often than you should. The gloves of her hands sparkle in the cafeteria light and you watch as she picks apart her meal bit by bit as though interrogating it.
She smirks at something someone at the table says. You aren’t listening and you scratch at your cheek, looking down at your food instead of laughing along. You’ve joined Asahina in eating doughnuts, anything else is too much for your body to handle and after spending last night curled over the toilet staring at the spot where Maizono lay dead, you figure it’s best to tread carefully for a while.
You are not obsessed with Kirigiri, not in the way Fukawa drools at Togami’s heels, not in the way Yamada is at Celestia’s beck and call, not in the way Ishimaru and Oowada have been hooking arms around each other all morning, more in the way Asahina looks casually to Ogami with nearly every word she speaks.
(They are friends. Good friends.
You and Kirigiri are friends. Good friends.)
You do not love her, but you are obsessed with her in the smallest ways. You don’t think there’s a difference.
There is a specific way she folds her hands in her lap when she’s finished eating and it has you smiling like someone has just told you that you’re going home.
There is a specific way in which she excuses herself from the table that has you wishing to follow her anywhere. But her heels clack, clack off without you and you can do nothing but smile in her wake.
You don’t love her, but you could never bring yourself to think poorly of her. There is no difference.
You think of Maizono far more often than you should. You don’t think of Kuwata nearly enough. You don’t think of Junko at all.
You think of Maizono every morning when you shower and every night as you choke down water to keep your dinner in your stomach. You haven’t been here all that long and it still feels like forever since you’ve been drowning in grief over the death of a girl you hardly knew.
You knew the minimum, enough so she seemed human, enough so she seemed attainable. She was human, the world seemed to forget that as she danced across stages and bled her heart out through song.
She was human, the world seemed to forget that as she sat in the shower and bled her guts out.
You think of Kuwata only when someone else brings him up. When Oowada lets out a particularly rude joke at a dead man’s expense as a way to cope. When Hagakure says he isn’t planning on pullin’ a Leon and going crazy.
He was only human, too, and he let no one forget it. He was flawed, he had problems and uncertainties and he was so, so human. No one could ever forget it, not as he hit home runs for the world to see, not as he strummed careful melodies on vintage guitars, not as he bled and bruised beneath the force of a thousand sick blows.
You don’t think of Junko at all. She was plastic-fake and so horrendously perfect you doubt she was even real. She was pretty, pretty, pretty and that’s all she was.
Maizono was human, Kuwata was human, Junko was not, and you think, as you sit across from Kirigiri in the stairwell to the second floor, that she is human, too.
It’s late, well past curfew, but you don’t mind. You invited Kirigiri to come with you as you sat down on the stairs and she followed, blind to the world outside of you and her.
“I drag you around so often, I guess it’s only fair for you to do the same,” She says in that pitch that implies laughter.
You sigh, there is no laughter bubbling in your throat, only the thick tar of everything that comes along with a Hell like this. You tell her—on a whim because you think about her a lot and you think about this a lot and it’s all a lot in your mind and you need to get it out—that you think she’s very human. You tell her that maybe she tries to hide it with fancy words and fancy gloves and fancy heels. You tell her no matter how much she leaves out and how many gaps and holes there are in her anecdotes that she is the most human, most fleshed out and most full person you think you have ever met.
She laughs this time. She really laughs. It’s high and it’s cynical and it’s horribly ugly but you want to drink it down and feel it on your lips regardless. You want to drown in it. Maybe it’ll be the oil to the water you’ve been breathing in since arriving in this place. Maybe it’ll push out the grief—the despair—and things will be better.
“I don’t feel that way,” She says. She seems to bite back something else, something much more cynical than even the laugh she let loose earlier.
“That’s okay,” You tell her.
She nods and all is silent for a few moments. The ceiling above you creaks and you wonder briefly if anyone else is awake at this hour. If another pair of students are sitting somewhere having a similar conversation on the second floor. You don’t get to wonder for long, because Kirigiri is leaning in and you’re gasping with wide eyes as your lips meet hers.
She kisses you soft and slow. She’s warm and she smells industrial, like leather and metal. You smile against her lips and maybe there is room to laugh in a place like this.
I know you , you want to tell her, to scream it in the safety of your soundproof room. I know you , you want to tell her, to whisper against her lips and her neck and her hands. I know you , you want to tell her, to let her know that if she is lost, you are here for her.
I know you, and I know your humanity.
Blood is drying on the mats in the upstairs locker room, you have just kissed the girl you don’t quite love.