Work Text:
Ding dong bing bong
A body has been discovered!
It felt like Kyoko had been hearing that sickening announcement all her life. In a way, she had. Years’ worth of bodies, investigations, danger. Since childhood, she’d been carefully conditioned to turn an objective eye to the sight of a murder.
Yet for just this moment, she was a fledgling again, a little girl standing in a room with a horrid corpse, her eyesight flooding with a red that shot ice into her veins.
Hiro was screaming. It was annoying. She would sternly tell him off, but her mouth was bolted shut into a hard, angry line that cleared the path in front of her as she shouldered her way past her classmates. The corner of her vision caught their looks. Hina’s, teary. Byakuya’s, irked. Nothing new. Nothing off-script.
Except this.
Except all of this.
This was a trap. Kyoko knew that. It was clamped up tight on her leg now, and if she didn’t act quickly, it would take her down, too.
With Makoto.
Why him? It shouldn’t have been him.
That part of her brain knew exactly why. He was too resilient. Too trusting. Too hopeful. A lit match hovering above the dark pool of the mastermind’s Ultimate Despair. One trial more and it would splatter into the oil, setting it aflame and burning away the curtain over the mastermind’s plans.
So the mastermind put it out.
The mastermind took a knife to it and stabbed it and stabbed it again so that the blood poured over the sheets and stuck on the palms of Kyoko’s gloves when she did her examinations, and in a few hours more it would be dry and he would be gone from here and the fire would be put out before it started.
Monokuma popped out. Laughed his wicked little laugh and gave them his file that told them things her trained eyes could tell at a glance. Stabbed twice. Left to bleed. She could tell a little bit more than that. The victim had been too weak to put up a struggle in the first place. Fell over trying to get up. Maybe call for help. Maybe chase the killer. The weapon used was the knife that had been in the victim’s drawer. It wouldn’t be found anywhere on the scene, because by now, it was most likely planted in a place where it would implicate Kyoko.
It would work. The students would be desperate. They would want to weed out the last of the terrible killers in their ranks, then live in peace. Give up. Lose hope.
As if she would kill him. As if she could do that. As if she could stab him not once, but twice, and then walk out of the room while he stumbled and fell after her, probably calling after her, asking her why she did it with the last of the breaths he would ever take.
As if she could take that.
“What’s wrong, Kyoko? It’s not like you to be so sentimental.”
Byakuya’s voice was dripping with his particular flavor of unwelcome sarcasm. Kyoko scowled. Did it show on her face? The way she hesitated, standing over him? Byakuya wasn’t wrong, then. It was unlike her.
When she responded, her voice was cool and level as usual. She hated it. She wished it would tremble just a bit, fold up at the edges, just to hint at the whirlpool growing at the pit of her stomach before it swallowed her entirely. But hiding what she was feeling was just part of the job.
And Kyoko did her job.
Makoto’s body was light. It was easy to roll over from the splayed position it had fallen in. The first wound, targeting the stomach. Second, in the chest, likely puncturing the lungs. Blood on the lips. Victim must have been struggling to breathe in his last moments. He must have been drowning.
It occurred to her that she was cradling him in her arms. His head was rolled against her. He could have been sleeping, but his face was scrunched up. A pained nightmare. She could have told him to wake up, but his skin must have been cold. She couldn’t feel him through her gloves. She had never felt Makoto when he was warm, either, though it radiated from his face when he smiled and asked her questions and made stupidly naive presumptions and turned red from being flustered when she pretended to be flustered.
Once or twice, she hadn’t been pretending. She wondered if he’d noticed, but now she’d never know.