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What they’d all expected of him wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t fair that it all somehow all fell on him…someone who was completely and utterly unremarkable. Someone with no talent to his name, who had no business holding the fate of the Future Foundation — of society in and of itself — on his shoulders. It wasn’t fair that he’d been expected to sacrifice everything, including his own being, because it was the ‘right’ thing to do.
Who the hell were they to decide what was ‘right’ anyway? Who were the members of the Future Foundation to decide he was selfish for wanting to stay?
Nothing was fair.
None of it was fair.
He didn’t want to disappear. He didn’t want to wake up from Junko’s artificial nightmare only to inevitably lose himself to Izuru Kamukura. All he wanted was to stay where it was safe. With his friends. And with Chiaki.
Chiaki. Who wasn’t even real…but did it even matter anymore? He was just like her, after all…someone who did not exist outside of their dome of simulated paradise out in the physical world. When the simulation was over, they would both cease to exist. Their lives would end as easily as the flick of a switch.
It wasn't fair.
It wasn’t fair that they had to stay in order to survive.
So he tries not to think about it when the perfect summer days on Jabberwock Island begin to blend together in an endless loop. The state of the outside world makes no difference to him here. Here he’s safe, and he’s surrounded by his friends, and he's with Chiaki, and he’s Hajime…not some abominable product of Hope’s Peak Academy’s dark underbelly.
He tries not to think about it when Chiaki looks at him with something indescribable in her eyes that tells him she wants to say something but isn’t capable of doing so. Maybe she wants to tell him that he’s selfish, or berate him for being too much of a coward to take his fate into his own hands. Or maybe she just pities him for preferring to live in what he knows is nothing more than a beautiful lie rather than face the truth head on.
But he doesn’t want to disappear.
He doesn’t want her to disappear.
He only wants to continue drifting through the days that never truly pass without remorse. In a world where he doesn’t think about the fate of the outside word. Where he doesn’t think about the Future Foundation or Ultimate Despair, or an existence without Chiaki.
All that’s left is this.
Only this.
Only eternal paradise.