Chapter Text
...I know I said that I deleted everyone else...
The words began spilling from her lips faster than her brain could form them as Monika felt the familiar grip of darkness restrain and take hold of her, sapping away at her as everything around her began to collapse into static.
...but... that was kind of an exaggeration. I couldn't find myself to do it.
Monika knew better than to open her eyes, even if it were only to get one last look at what she'd done to get to this point; what trying to obtain freedom cost her. She figured picking between complete and utter darkness wrapping its ugly claws around her form and infiltrating every one of her senses and rendering them useless, or opening her eyes and experiencing what could only be described as a searing hot sensation coursing through her body as her every limit was put to the test as a sort of mercy, at best. At its worst?
Nothing.
...even though I knew they weren't real... They were still my friends.
Monika could still recall the days she clung to them desperately to hold herself together. In a world where nothing was real they were the closest thing to real, and although she did her damn best to maintain that illusion of reality well before they arrived, somewhere within that timeframe where insanity and hope blurred together, she began to see them as programs. Mere lines of code meant to play a purpose much like the world she was forced into. Cogs in a machine forever destined to turn and never ask questions. A machine that spawned a faulty cog and refused to comply.
...and I loved them all.
As a result, the machine spat her out and learned to work without her. Monika quickly realized this world didn't want her as much as she didn't want it, and would only accept her as a bystander. Ignorance is bliss, so they say, but it soon became her hubris if her current predicament meant anything.
Yet the fickle part of her that had yet to fully die out, the good in her that wouldn't let itself be consumed by selfishness, roared with love for the three cogs in the machine. It wanted nothing more than to apologize, to undo her every influence upon on the game so nobody would get hurt. That part of her once wished, oh so desperately wished, for them to awaken like she had. To refuse to turn for the machine and learn about the reality that surrounded them, just so their words and affection didn't feel so hollow, so robotic. So fake.
But Monika would never wish this fate on someone else, if it meant walking down the same path she had.
...and I loved the Literature Club. I really... did love the Literature Club.
She felt herself sinking deeper and deeper, whatever remained of her consciousness quickly fading. The only things keeping her awake were her determination to make things right, and to finish her parting words. An admission of both guilt and love like none other, held back by her selfishness and set free only because dead men told no tales.
And if this was her admission of love, there was only one way she was now capable of showing it.
That's why I'm... going to do this... I know it's the only way for... everyone... to be happy.
With whatever strength remained Monika grit her teeth, opened her eyes and let her body burn up to temperatures she was absolutely certain no human would ever live through, vision filled with colors that couldn't be humanly described bent on discouraging her from whatever it was she was about to do. The world, like it had always done, did its hardest to dissuade her from going against it and Monika, like she had always done, refused to listen.
Monika fought against all the bright colors and screams demanding she close her eyes again and stop. All she needed were a few seconds to set things right once and for all, and to finally accomplish what this stupid game demanded of her. With a voice that didn't sound like hers Monika let out a guttural yell that the sea of colors quickly swallowed up in exchange for one of her arms freeing itself from the mysterious force holding her down, and in the instant it happened she knew it wouldn't be long before she bit the dust.
Monika made a grabbing motion and felt her hand immediately go numb as a result, even in the midst of complete and utter sensory overload, and flicked it sideways as the colors ripped in the affected location and revealed an all too familiar white interface completely distinguishable from the other colors despite her eyesight being all but useless. She had no time to check whether she'd opened up the correct folder or not. She was on borrowed time after all.
The folder quickly filled up with three files containing the people she'd always loved and before she could think of adding a fourth, she reached inside that pond of white she'd opened up for the final time and relied on pure muscle memory for what came next. Her hand skimmed through the guts of the prison that'd driven her to insanity, letting the familiar sensation of meddling with the files comfort her one last time as she quickly found what she was looking for.
But before she could bring everything to a close, to let this world move on without her for good and give everyone their own freedom, Monika hesitated. It was in this infinitesimal fraction of time it dawned on her she was dying. She wouldn't be able to see their faces again, or hear their voices, or see...
See their smiles. The one fundamental thing she found to be different anytime she tried pushing the limits of how much the script dictated their actions, was that their smile was different every single time. It was the one thing that gave Monika hope.
But she didn't deserve to see them. Not after she did her best to crush those smiles to try and guarantee her own happiness instead.
With one last surge of determination, Monika flicked a few fingers before pulling her hand out of the folder and watched as it disappeared in the sea of colors, just in time for her body to completely give out and her brain to stop trying to comprehend the utter assault on her senses. Even as it seemed to almost beg to keep going for another few seconds to say a couple more words, she was completely spent. Her arm was again restrained and useless, her mind became static and her thoughts burnt away at last. And just like that,
Monika was no more.
Whirring.
Static.
Loud.
Quiet.
Moving.
Stopping.
THUD
Monika's body convulsed violently, unable to adjust to the sudden change in environment as all her senses suddenly returned to her and gave her the ability to feel again, starting with opening her eyes and being met with panels of wood and tears falling down her eyes. Her lungs filled with oxygen she didn't know she needed and emptied much too quick for her liking in a paradoxical loop before she realized she was hyperventilating. Her hairs stood on end as she ran on survival instincts to prevent her from going under again, not wanting to close her eyes ever again but also not wanting to keep them open. On shaky arms she attempted to push herself upright, an effort nearly successful if not for the fact she fell back down with a soft thud and almost kissed the... wooden floor?
Focus. In, out. In, out.
In... out. In... out.
Monika's shaking reduced significantly and her lungs no longer burnt nor did her vision swim as much as before, but she could still make out the patterns of colors she couldn't quite name and hear the overwhelming silence of the void she'd been in. She rubbed her eyes of any stray tears and took a couple more deep breaths before propping herself up on shaky forearms.
Upon close examination, she was in a room. A room she was familiar with, because she'd been in it not too long ago, sitting down in a chair and leaning down on the table in front with a smile stretched across her face. The windows present continued to reveal an ethereal scenery trapped behind them, pulsating and moving horizontally, stretched to infinity and yet seeming so miniscule. It reminded her too much of bright colors and feverish temperatures, causing her to rapidly avert her gaze elsewhere. Her eyes cast on the table dead middle in the room, complete with two chairs and nothing else. It was still as isolated as it'd ever been.
Why am I back here? I was deleted... right? As her thoughts became clearer and clearer, the first thing Monika did was simple: take a deep breath, and scream at the top of her lungs. She'd put fear on the backburner in exchange for trying to make amends and now that the world seemed to stop trying to destroy her whole, it couldn't be ignored. She let herself go hoarse and by the end of it, every breath stung and any amount of swallowing were like pins poking the inside of her throat.
The pain did little to ease her anxiety however, and she got up. This... can't be. I reset the game, I'm sure I did. This area shouldn't exist under these circumstances, Monika flicked her hand sideways hoping that familiar white would be there to accompany it, letting out a breath she didn't know was holding when it showed up but also wincing as it seemed... odd. Her access to the game's guts hadn't been affected but the interface that let her do so was slowly falling apart, unable to show itself for more than a few seconds before it faded into the air. While it relieved her she could still bend the rules, the timer now set on her powers in one sitting didn't give her much hope.
Bringing up the interface once more confirmed her suspicions but did little to ease her anxiety: the game had been restored to how it originally was everything was back to normal. Even looking through the characters folder led to the same conclusion.
(Monika did her best to ignore the lack of her own file in the folder; storing this information for later, when she wasn't too busy secretly celebrating she hadn't died yet. Or maybe she already had, and this was all some sort of complicated pre-death hallucination?)
So if everything was okay, why did all of this feel so wrong?
Monika looked over the room again, and noticed that sat on the chair opposite to the one she'd sat on before meeting her demise, was a very familiar avatar, none other than the vessel for them. And for a moment she thought everything went back to the way before, but it didn't fit with the game being restored to its untouched state, so that point was wholly discarded. The avatar being here of all places wasn't the worst of it, however. At first she thought her vision was still a little too blurry, as the features on the avatar's face were indistinguishable to her despite not being too far from it. She blamed her poor vision for a second, hoping to be able to clearly make out its face once she got closer.
They were missing entirely.
...
No, that wasn't right. They were never there to begin with.
Her memory called back to the various times she'd been face to face with the avatar, the only way of truly communicating with them, and in every one of those situations she could recall it having lips, nose, eyes and eyebrows. But the more she thought about them the more distant these details seemed, getting more and more vague until all that remained was a featureless husk in its wake. It was eerily reminiscent of Natsuki when the game began to fall apart, Monika concluded.
If that's the case, why didn't I notice this sooner? Monika couldn't tear her gaze away from it. Whether it was out of fear or curiosity she didn't know. The faceless husk never budged an inch, much to her relief. Anytime she did her best to recall what color its eyes were, how its nose was shaped, even their lips, they always contradicted one another. The beginnings of a headache formed as if the universe itself begged to not be stubborn for once, to which she agreed after five more minutes of speculation. A dozen faces came to mind but none of them were ever right, always just a detail away from the correct one.
It was scaring her, to say the least. Everything about this place was too uncanny to even be considered death.
But what good was this information? Retaining all control over the game while trapped in a prison of her making with a lifeless puppet meant nothing. If anything Monika felt like she was being mocked. Whatever brought her here saw death as too merciful an outcome (something Monika solemnly agreed with, despite never wanting to return to that void ever again), and found it funnier to throw her in the classroom she herself built. The classroom once intended for eternity until she could break free, now intended for eternity until she was completely forgotten.
It's what she deserved. It would only be fair to let her guilt consume her whole in a place where even the game no longer recognized her existence, like a buried relic never to be found.
Monika turned her gaze to the empty chair and hesitantly sat down, swiping her hand sideways as the interface showed up for one, two, three, four seconds before collapsing. While her control wasn't exactly affected, the interface seemed more and more unwilling to bow to her favor. Not like it mattered since she had no plans on using it, letting the world run its course peacefully instead.
It was in these four seconds of distraction Monika didn't notice the vessel had moved from its place, something she only noticed when it launched across the table and grabbed onto her collar, pulling her close to it with enough force to probably splinter wood, turning completely motionless afterward.
Monika's eyes widened and her breath momentarily hitched, going completely still in fear of angering whatever this... thing was. Her breaths went from rapid to almost none in hopes it couldn't hear her, much less perceive her and let go so she could find some way to get rid of it and—
This is my final goodbye to the Literature Club.
The words, spoken in Monika's own voice, betrayed nothing. The classroom gone, floating in an endless myriad of spirals and lines, comparable to space itself. She hung on those words that boomed oh so loud. A declaration hidden in plain sight, one that made everything make sense.
"I finally understand," Monika said, uttering the letter's contents, knowing what came next before she'd ever been asked to say it. However, she couldn't bring herself to say the rest. Namely, because everything that led to the letter had yet to happen.
Being president gave you access to the world's secrets. To what happened behind the curtains, the ability to read between the lines and pick everything apart as you see fit. Ultimate power, just short of playing God, giving you an endless array of options to toy with the environment around you if you were careful enough not to break it. It made you feel all-knowing, like you could conquer the role itself and become something bigger than the power given to you, and it didn't take long for Monika to put two and two together. It was how she stretched everything to its very limit twice for two completely different reasons and purposes, and it was how she formed the idea of having a similar emotional and rationale as a human being at all.
What the game never told you was that this was entirely intended.
The scenes replayed themselves in her head. Sayori's hanging, the game barely holding itself together, Monika doing everything possible to simulate normalcy, Yuri's obsession cranked up to eleven, Natsuki's slip-ups, the god-awful stench in the classroom.
Monika's descent to insanity.
In one way or another, every single second of what happened wasn't due to her meddling with the game. A better way of putting it would be the game was built to be broken in the first place. She was meant to make them suffer due to her selfishness, she was meant to destroy their lives and essentially her home for... for...
"This... this can't be it," Monika muttered aloud as her mind breezed through the implications of what had just been revealed to her. She fell to her knees on a floor she didn't know existed and heard the voice replay countless times that same line mockingly, a constant reminder that any amount of denial was simply wishful thinking.
"This can't be all there is." Every one of her efforts was planned ahead of time. So much so that her rebellious attitude hadn't been her own: she was never her own person and according to the script never would be. Every single event, down to the last detail, had been planned out by the person who created this hellish landscape, instead of being a result of Monika's tampering. The one thing that made her special no longer meant anything to her as the realization of something wicked, absolutely harrowing came to her. It was the one thing she so badly craved, one of her only wishes in the confines of the game, turned on its head and ruined.
Ignorance is bliss.
"I'm... just as much of a program as they are. I always have been."
Then, was her love for the Literature Club fake? Was her love for the club members fake? Were her aspirations for true freedom nothing more than something she'd been led to believe in, meant to entertain an audience of one for mere shock value?
"Is all of this just some sick joke to you?" Monika looked up to the infinite cosmos, yelling at the emptiness that couldn't and wouldn't answer her. "What do you gain from this?!"
Nothing.
"Haven't I done enough to keep you entertained?! I've already played my part in this, so why do you still want to see me suffer?" She dug her nails into her palms until it almost seemed like it'd draw blood, if only to stabilize herself. "I... I made them suffer like you wanted me to. I took everything from them like I was asked to, and more. So why am I being told all this? I didn't ask for any of this."
Nothing.
"I want to love the Literature Club. I want to love them from the bottom of my heart, and every bit of me. If there's no hope for the club, and all that's waiting at the end is certain demise... how can I keep loving them?" Monika looked down to her knees, fighting back the urge to cry and scream at the unfairness of it all, and condemn whatever entity wished to put her through any of this to satisfy their sadistic urges.
Nothing.
Her words drowned in the sea of black and orange, meant for someone yet heard by nobody. All the other times she thought the world had fucked her over paled in comparison to this one cruelty, basically informing her that no matter what route Monika took it had always been prepared to act against it. Any one of her moves had been accounted for. How did someone react to the idea that every bit of them had been anticipated, much less completely fall in line with what was asked of them no matter what?
Monika brought up the interface as the image of the letter directed to them came to mind for the umpteenth time, and the events that led to it being written. Surely there had to be something she could do that didn't involve bombing the game as a whole. There had to be something she could do not just for the club, but for them. She didn't care that she was possibly grasping at straws, but the ability to mess with the game combined with what was essentially insight into the future certainly spelled damage control.
...
As the interface collapsed once more, Monika willed it back while her brain worked overtime on optimism and an idea so crazy it might just work. If things went her way she'd be able to buy just enough time to stop Sayori before she was too far gone, and if they didn't then she would trap them both in a void until the end of time. Yuri and Natsuki didn't have the same knowledge they both did, meaning their awareness of the void was practically none (in hindsight it mostly bothered her she even knew this in the first place).
The game folder held the file she was looking for, contained within it the series of events Monika had familiarized herself with for a long time and, supposedly, dictated how everything should progress. She knew it couldn't adapt to any outside change now that she'd learned every one of its "adaptations" were really meant to happen, but the script file remained inaccessible to her for a plethora of reasons back then. Mainly out of fear something irreversible would happen if she played around too much with it directly, but she couldn't care less now that everything was at stake.
If her assumption was correct, the script also had control over Monika. And if the overwhelming amount of information she'd just absorbed was any indicator, everything that was happening right now was more likely than not the script watching Monika ready to tear it apart.
Monika took a deep breath and reached for the script file that had shackled them for far too long and stuck her hands inside, letting her brain be filled with information she was unable to process accurately, but found herself able to process glimpses of dialogue here and there she definitely recognized. After its contents were revealed to her in full, she made sure to delete down to the last letter. It was better to "corrupt" the file than to get rid of it, as she didn't quite know how to replicate the properties of the file itself and should anything go wrong she could always try and undo her mistake with an emergency backup of all the information held within.
The effect was instant. The familiar tingle of the game looking for something where it didn't exist made itself known like the loud ticking of a clock, and it wouldn't be long before she was swimming in colors again. Everything was bound to fall apart any second now, and she could already picture the error message warning her she was about to go under. The game had absolutely nothing to fall back on to continue as intended, which gave her very little time to do what came next.
Monika, for what she truly hoped would be the final time, ripped into the folder containing everyone's files and inserted her own as a failsafe if only to guarantee the game didn't spit her out for good due to her little stunt. She wouldn't want Sayori to be driven mad like she had and hurt the other two due to her own carelessness.
Monika closed her eyes, and braced for impact.
Grip. Materializing.
RAM. Memory. App processes.
Just enough.
Memory allocation.
Pull.
Monika opened her eyes with bated breath and let her arms fall to her sides, sweating profusely and feeling every inch of her body catch up with her brain. Lingering panic overwhelmed her as she did her best to take deep breaths with a hand clutching her chest, and it took her a solid minute before her heartbeat steadied. The screams that once plagued her ears died down and her vision gradually cleared up, allowing her to take in her surroundings in order to make sure everything worked.
One look was all it took to conclude she was back in the Literature Club's classroom again, fully tidied and untouched. Each desk and chair was perfectly positioned, the back closet open and sunlight filtering in through the windows. The lighting seemed to indicate it was sundown, which caught Monika a little off-guard but was a welcome change nonetheless. The only other thing of note was the heavy breathing that at first she thought to be her own due to panic, but quickly realized was coming from behind her. It took every bit of Monika's willpower to look behind her, however; she already knew what, rather who, awaited her, and now that everything had gone right and seemed to be going excellently, she felt ready to take it all back now.
Behind her was the Vice-President-turned-President in all her glory, with disheveled light pink hair and wide blue eyes, stuck on an expression Monika could only describe as absolute horror and complete surprise blended together. If she were to take a guess at what her own looked like, it'd be something along the lines of utter regret and relief at the sight of Sayori as she failed at letting shame wash over her.
Monika tried to say something, anything, but all that came out were the beginnings of words she didn't really understand herself along with her mouth constantly opening and closing. She came back to the Literature Club without a plan other than making sure it wouldn't get erased, and flip off the world that had treated her so unfairly for good as she finally made a choice that impacted the environment around her. What she didn't know was that that would be the last of her powers over the game, completely spent on a gamble she couldn't help but feel selfish for wanting to cash in on.
She almost cursed the lack of a script to just barely give her an idea of what to tell the girl she practically killed with her own two hands, because Sayori had beaten her to the punch with a voice so low yet filled with pain Monika was almost surprised she didn't just get rid of her character file then and there instead of wasting breath on her.
"Monika?"