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“Do you think the dog survived?”
Questions from Utsuro always go like this. Mundane, ordinary, philosophical.
Pointless.
“Mm,” Yamato’s voice is a careful hum. His heart thrums in his chest, marching to Utsuro’s beat. He imagines it: Utsuro’s thumbs circling the detonator, and Yamato a bloody mess on his own foundation’s carpets. “I suppose it depends on the speed the locomotive was traveling at, and if the dog could have managed to squeeze between the spaces in the track—but it would more than likely die.”
He knows this trick though: would the dog have survived without a scratch with luck? Luck, that determines the fate of the world.
Or is the dog even worth saving? It’s just a dog after all, and what gives lives worth anyway? A human is worth more than a dog, and a dog is worth more than a bug. But if the dog is just some mutt, is a purebred worth more? Or a rare jeweled butterfly, auctioned for thousands in a picture frame, while the dog is taken behind the woods?
Or one hundred orphans or fourteen talented children. Two talents were never on the table. Is one person worth one hundred points? Does a person’s score decrease or increase with talent or time?
What’s the difference between being buried under a train or in a trash can, or your execution being publicly broadcast on every local news station?
Despair gives your life worth, that’s what.
“I see.” A satisfactory response, Yamato supposes. The dog escapes another day. “You have a meeting in around twenty minutes, yes? I won’t keep you, then. They can have you.”
(With luckier hands between his legs and a tongue shoved down his throat—they can’t have you.)
The inventor knows, by now, how his luck works. Like some omnipotent god, in all the wrong, slovenly ways. “Of course. Should I expect another call soon?”
“If I feel like it.”
The line goes dead.
In this universe, there are so, so many choices—that’s what gives a life meaning, after all.
Or it’s suffering. Or math. Or saving poor abused orphans or orphanages from fires. Or sex.
For Yamato Kisaragi, it’s to help others. He doesn’t want the Carnot Engine just for the sake of having it—he wants it to be useful. So when he makes one, he discards it for its inefficiency; an idea worth coming back to.
Bountiful, endless energy, a completely reversible process found only in nature—Utsuro found the solution long ago. Numerous suicide attempts and not one scratch on his body.
He wants to love him. He loved Mikako too, in a different way, and her true self blossomed—someone independent and strong and so deeply loving she could help others in ways he never could.
So he tries to open Utsuro up with love—the way only a teenage schoolboy knows, blooming, love, love, love. Utsuro doesn’t love and lives the only way he knows how—the physical aspects of life, and he plunders and plunders until all the petals on the flowers are gone for them both. Utsuro doesn’t like kisses and flowers, his heart demands love but his orders demand blood.
So Akane listens through her shaking conscience, and Yamato’s love meant nothing to Utsuro. Except—
Utsuro makes a phone call every week. Maybe he gets lonely.
Maybe Utsuro has always hated him.
(Not a sound escaped Mikako in those early days-he’d wondered if she’d simply been born with her mouth sewn shut, or worse, one of those ghosts she saw got her—
He tugs her hair. “C’mon, there are more ways to enjoy lunch than to sit in this gloomy old rinky-dink.”
Such good intentions.
She’s always hated loved him. “Don’t touch me,” she spat back.)
Fighting back tears, Mikako takes the bomb.
Then he wakes up. His head hurts.
He tries to speak. Nothing makes sense. Monokuma laughs and laughs and laughs and says it’s his fault.
He tries not to let the betrayal sit in his tongue or everything tastes too bitter.
Ayame’s arms are rather warm. So is Mikako, sobbing in his arms. They run and run and run—
And there’s a clean hole the size of a dime where Utsuro’s powers redirect his friend’s bullet into some poor violent maid’s body.
(No that’s not right. He’d cared about Akane too, hadn’t he? His memory is all fuzzy these days. Aftereffects, he hopes. Because his memory tells him he’d mistakenly loved Yuki Maeda, too.)
Utsuro’s wrists burn beneath his palms. Memorize it, Utsuro had probably ordered, because Yamato still remembers the shape of his teeth against his skin and the heat of all his empty spaces being filled.
By who? Yuki? Utsuro?
In the end, they both escape. Yuki Maeda doesn’t. Utsuro does. All sixteen students of Hope’s Peak Academy survive.
There’s no time to lament, though. He has an organization to run, because he alone cannot save the world from despair. With his sister by his side, and so many capable people, like Tsurugi and Rei—
And the bomb in his chest. His knees are a bit weak as Utsuro tells him—through the crackling line of the highly encrypted phone call—tell another, and you’re gone.
“Do you think God exists?”
Yamato has to laugh despite the situation he’s in. “Do you want me to put Bishop Uehara on the line? I think he could answer your question better than I could.”
“Don’t get smart with me. This is the first I’m hearing of his promotion.”
“You would know if you bothered to turn yourself in. Do you only use your powers to keep track of my schedule just so you can bother me?”
“Kisaragi.” Oh, last name basis. Something must be bothering him—people who’ve hunted down divine luck have all conveniently disappeared. He knows that not even the jaws of Junko Enoshima have ensnared him after his escape—Utsuro had told him such. And he has let her down, Junko has no need for beta testers anymore. “I would’ve called him if I wanted to know. I want to hear your answer.”
“Me? Perhaps this is unscientific of me, but I know Mikako believes, and Kinji believes, but Rei doesn’t—but there’s no proof either way, so I don’t know. I believe when it’s convenient and I didn’t believe when you gagged me in that basement. What do you want to hear?”
His chest hurts. Maybe that was the wrong answer.
“I guess you’re right,” Utsuro acquiesces. “God exists when he makes you better and he doesn’t when he makes you worse. But for you, God exists in a physical form to inspire piety, doesn’t he?”
He’ll never change his situation if he lies there and takes it.
“The Kisaragi Foundation is willing to take in those that are willing to reform themselves from despair. All they have to do is ask.”
Utsuro cuts the line.
Yamato knows—God exists for Utsuro, out of reach. If God is omnipotent, Utsuro does not allow himself to understand or feel love.
Swapped lives and swapped secrets and swapped roles. Maybe he should be dead by now.
(Mikako grows her hair out long, and she complains about how her hair escapes her grasp when it’s down. His hair is short, and they need new clothes, so they take each other’s. It’s a perfect fit.
So are their new names, too. No, these were always their real names, it’s just that now he gets “heir” labeled on to his inheritance too.
He likes his boys, and Utsuro likes his skin.)
He wakes up with the wetness of a memory on his tongue and between his legs.
Daringly, foolishly, hopefully, Yamato looks back. He dials the most recent number on the phone.
Ding ding ding ding! A body has been discovered!
An error message appears. This number is not in service.
The chill in his chest isn’t from the cold metal of a bomb or the loneliness of Utsuro’s presence.
Mikako tells him to get the bomb removed. Doctor Kanata will be free until their next operation to reclaim Shinjuku.
The phone is ringing. He tells her “later.”
She doesn’t look satisfied.
“Have you gone to visit your father’s grave yet?” He doesn’t let his language slip, but by everything that is holy in Mikako’s beliefs, Utsuro is a fucking jackass when he wants to be.
“I haven’t taken a day off in months, so no. Do you have any other questions that you already know the answer to?”
“So you understand. You’re just another warm body to light the hearts of the people. They’ll never know you, or the sacrifices you’ve made.”
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that in the end, there’s some way for everyone to keep moving forward.”
“Do you really believe that everyone shares the same dream as you? To help others? To make the world better?”
He can’t hold his tongue. “Of course not. I’m speaking to someone who has never had that dream ever.”
Yamato doesn’t actually know this. Maybe that’s a dream he had once before. Before, when Utsuro had no one but his ambitions. Yamato had his sister. Utsuro had no one permanent until Akane.
“…And are those people still worth saving?”
Not a moment passes. “Yes.” And it’s the truth.
All nights must be lonely for Utsuro, without Akane. And if he dares, maybe they’re lonely without—
“The hope you’ve been searching for,” Utsuro starts suddenly. “You may never find it.”
“I’ll still keep looking. Akane is still looking, even without you. You can too.”
The embodiment of hope and the embodiment of apathy. Who will lose the game first?
Mikako sets down a suspiciously dark purple looking glass on his desk.
“Wine?” Yamato asks, though he knows likely not—they’re both nineteen, it’ll be a year before they can drink without Tsurugi knocking on their doors.
His sister rolls her eyes. “No. It’s grape juice, from Akane’s birthday party. I brought it for you. I think you could use it.”
His mouth feels tight. He can’t tell her that he left early because he was expecting a call. “I’ll tell her I’m sorry I left early tomorrow.”
Mikako’s expressions were never hard to begin with, but the years of fighting for hope—they’ve made her stronger and softer at the same time. “Don’t worry about it. Everyone knows at this point that Munakata just likes taking up your time with political stuff—but we’re getting close to the end, aren’t we?”
It’s true. This lie is coming to an end, too. Once this is over, he’ll go back to being Yamato Kisaragi, even if he can never shake the label his name will have.
He doesn’t know if Utsuro will still need him by then. Mikako has long since figured out that something is wrong, but she won’t tug his hair like he used to. Not when he snapped at her back then in their juvenile years before the betrayal, and he told her—
He still needs her. “Thank you for staying by my side this whole time.”
He doesn’t tell her you should run or ask do you still have nightmares, even though he wants her to run in his weakest moments. He remembers the device pressed against their heads that only they remember, preserving a lifetime that only they remember. Maybe it would have been easier if he carried the burden of the past on his own.
But he’s always been too cowardly to fight in his own, and even when he pushed her away, he remembers his body going slack in her arms under the anesthesia and the scalpel in her hands and the unprofessional tears in her eyes—Kanata isn’t an option anymore. This place isn’t even sterile.
Mikako used to feel so small next to him. He remembers, foolishly, believing as a five year old, that he could never be anyone’s older sibling, that she was just another girl clinging on to someone’s love too.
But in the end she’s just someone brave, and he’s just another boy, so she runs into the death game with him, and by the end, they both pull each other out.
(Like all memories, no matter how hard a hunk of metal clings, this will start to fade, like burns and bruises, scabs and rashes—a memory that burns when picked at. But not all of the past is so evil.)
A toast. “I think that’s my line.”
“Akane has moved on from me.” It’s not a question.
It’s true, in a way. Except she will always love him, even if her smiles aren’t strained and her glances are lonely even when her hands are wrapped around Rei or Mikako or Kanata or Ayame or—well, she’s popular with the ladies. But she will never be free, not without—
“She needs to see you,” Yamato blurts out, not caring for his own safety in the moment—for a friend. Yes, a friend, he acknowledges now. “She may love others now too, but you abandoned her—you’re still alive. You don’t need to have regrets, and you don’t need to leave her with them either. You’ve always,” his jaws hurt under the strain of his tension. “You’ve always been so selfish.”
“…Do you hate me?”
It breaks his heart, but not for Utsuro. “I don’t know.”
“…The bomb is safe to disable now.”
Yamato almost feels like screaming. Dropping this so casually, like he hasn’t been taking up his time every week, making Yamato acutely aware of his own mistakes and mortality. He’s got a meeting with the Future Foundation to discuss how to restore fiscal policies in the places hit worst by the despair epidemic tomorrow and the day after, he can’t afford to drop “sorry, sudden surgery” as an excuse and send Teruya and Rei in his place to do double the work, everyone is overworked enough. But he understands now.
Utsuro doesn’t sound so clear anymore. He’s not quiet, he’s not brave, but there was always some part of him that was Yuki Maeda too. Uniquely vulnerable: “Would you have given me a chance even if—”
“Yes, you idiot. Even if it took as long as it did, I would still have tried to set you free, without the death threats. Because I still,” he swallows. He imagines the sulfur, the bomb in his throat. “I still care about you.”
“Tell me, then. What you want,” Utsuro has the audacity to order.
It’s not mocking, and Yamato can’t find the source of the courage that kept himself going for so long, because he knows, it didn’t come from him, it came for everyone that he wanted to fight for. This includes Utsuro, and Utsuro doesn’t sound very brave right now.
“I can’t. Because,” his voice somehow holds strong until the end. “Because it’s just like my sister always says. You need to save yourself. I think you know what you want.”
Utsuro hasn’t cut the line.
“I’ll be waiting,” Yamato continues. “Akane won’t wait forever, you know. I can’t either. But my door will always be open to you.”
“…See you,” Utsuro ends.
He awakens to a knock on his window. He contemplates going back to sleep and giving this supposedly lucky man a taste of his own medicine, but his bed is accommodating and lonely without two.
“…I’ve missed you.”
Whoever it was that said that, well, who knows? Does it matter?
(There’s a chance that the dog is still alive. It’s worth looking under the train anyway.)