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“You look nothing like her,” says Peko, voice flat and unimpressed. She sits cross-legged on Mukuro’s bed, staring at her friend.
Any other time, Mukuro would’ve shrugged off the criticism, but in the spirit of her performance, she twists her face into an exaggerated scowl.
“Fucking rude,” she says, putting a bite in her words she doesn’t really feel. “We’re literally twins.”
“Fraternal,” Peko responds. When Mukuro only glares in response, she adds, “Your eyes are too small. You’re wearing too much makeup. You look nothing like her.”
Mukuro pulls off the wig in frustration and sits down on the bed. She stares at her lap for a moment, balling sheets up into a squeezed fist, before finally muttering, “It’s not like I can do much about my eyes.”
Peko doesn’t speak. She runs her fingers through Mukuro’s hair, smoothing it down. It’d gotten sweaty under the wig, and with the cap torn off, it’s sticking up in odd directions. She looks like a drowned rat—
No, a drowned rat wouldn’t be wearing nearly this much mascara.
Peko stands up and roots through the gaudy pink bag of nonsense Junko left. Colorful cosmetics, soft creams that smell like flowers. It sticks out like a sore thumb in the utilitarian room, though Peko touches everything in it as if it were a live grenade. Mukuro watches. It was only natural to ask Peko, her perpetual sparring partner, to help with this. Being Junko Enoshima was more stressful than any warzone she’d ever been in, a more delicate dance. She needed a familiar ally in uncharted territory.
Like most things Peko did, she didn’t appear too enthusiastic about her role as an acting coach, but played it regardless. In three weeks she hadn’t had a single positive note about Mukuro’s performance. Today, the problem was too much makeup. Yesterday, the wig wasn’t teased enough. Tomorrow it’ll be something else. For Mukuro, who prides herself in clean perfection, in doing the job right the first time, this continual failure is endlessly frustrating. (Doubly so, when the only other thing she has to be proud of is being the person closest to possibly understanding Junko Enoshima, but that’s not something she’ll admit to anyone, even Peko.)
This is what practice is for. Much to Junko’s irritation, Mukuro is not her sister. They’ll sit in this room and Mukuro will parade around in a short skirt and a push-up bra until she gets it right.
Not tonight, though. Peko finds the makeup remover wipes she was looking for and sits back down. She brings it up to Mukuro’s face, a few centimeters away, then pauses. A question. Mukuro nods. They’ve been at it for hours. Her Junko impression isn’t going to improve through military repetition.
She allows Peko to clean her face. It’s strange to be touched like this. It feels like a strange parody of the kinds of sleepovers she was never invited to as a child, what normal girls are supposed to do in their bedrooms. There’s a carefulness to Peko’s hand, wiping makeup from her friend’s eyes, that you could almost mistake for tenderness if you didn’t know her.
The room is silent for the few minutes it takes Peko to clean the last few smears of black away from Mukuro’s eyes. When she finishes, they just sit, faces close enough to feel each other’s breath on their faces.
There’s a distance neither knows how to close.
There’s a reason Peko doesn’t find her impression convincing.
It’s Mukuro that blinks first. She can’t read Peko’s face and it’s unnerving– usually it’s a carefully controlled blankness, the picture of control, but now there’s something there, something that she can’t identify. Instead of trying, she shrinks back.
“I have to get it right, Peko.” There’s a sad, wet-cat defeat to Mukuro’s words that makes her feel like she should be taken behind a barn to be shot. “She’s never asked me to do something this big. I have to get it right.”
Something crosses Peko’s face. Mukuro is too distracted to read it.
“We could go to the dojo,” offers Peko. A mercy.
Mukuro doesn’t hesitate.
Steel clashes steel. They’d started sparring with a shinai and dense rubber casting of a hunting knife, but got bored and switched to live steel once Peko had gotten more… involved with her sister. They were both skilled enough that the risk of killing each other was fairly low, but the possibility of it, however slim, got the blood flowing.
(Junko had that effect on people.)
It’s a strange duel, the exacting precision of a highly trained kendoka against the messy intimacy of guerrilla warfare, but somehow they’ve found each other complementary partners. For Mukuro, it forces her to keep pace with someone keeping such tight command of the room, there’s not room for a single flinch. For Peko, it reminds her what combat is like beyond the clean confines of a dojo. For both, it’s simply refreshing not to wipe the floor with their sparring partner the moment they begin.
The sword parry breaks in Mukuro’s favor, her endurance finally beating out Peko’s grip strength. She takes the opportunity to close what small distance there was between them. Peko could slice Mukuro to ribbons from arms length before either of them blink, but any closer in and the katana becomes unwieldy. Peko steps backwards, light on her feet, but her sword swipes are awkward and Mukuro dives between them without breaking a sweat. She’s relying entirely on footwork to retake the distance she needs. Deft as Peko may be, she can’t outmaneuver someone used to dodging bullets when they’re at point blank range. Besides, she can’t keep backing up forever. Eventually they’ll hit the wall of the dojo, and Peko will be trapped.
Still, a victory by simply cornering her would be cheap, Mukuro thinks, so she keeps looking for openings. She thinks she’s finally found it, a sword gripped just a bit too low, her shoulder unguarded (a strike there would be disabling, unlikely to be fatal) when a kick hits the center of her chest hard enough to knock her backward.
She hits the ground hard on her elbows. Peko doesn’t usually fight like that.
Real fights don’t have strike zones, and no one but you cares about honor. Mukuro had told Peko that once, after she’d lost a match to a sucker punch and let her irritation betray her.
The advice made the kendoka sound more naïve than she was. Their friendship was based on a body count they both knew better than to refer to directly. The “honor” Peko knew came from a teacher that would break her bones on a bamboo sword doing a perfectly legal kendo move and still expect her at practice the next day. Still, for as bloody as they were, the yakuza had some odd ideas about how politely you were supposed to murder someone.
There was nothing polite about that kick– it was all frustration and power, and by the time Mukuro’s breath returns, she’s found it in her to be impressed. She nods and lets Peko help her up as an admission of defeat.
“You’re fighting like me,” Mukuro offers.
Peko shrugs, not looking at her. “I was distracted.”
Peko’s busy tonight, standing in front of Fuyuhiko’s door, or whatever it is she does when she’s trying to feel useful to him. Mukuro tries to practice on her own, but it goes even worse. She feels silly pacing around her dorm room, talking to herself about nothing. She tries monologuing at her reflection, but she can’t stand to look at herself in the mirror long enough to understand why that is. Finally she gives up, and just sits dejectedly on her bed, still in costume. Her blank stare into nothing is interrupted by the sound of her door lock turning. She jumps, trying to come back to herself fast enough that it doesn’t become a thing, but her sister always knows when she’s been sulking.
(Even before the door opens, it couldn’t be anyone else. The first thing Mukuro had done upon receiving her dorm key was give it to her sister. She’d told the school administrators she lost it and needed a new one. They didn’t ask questions.)
“Stewing in your own misery without me?” she asks, over exaggerated and dramatic. It feels like she’s raised the humidity level of the room just by being in it. “You should’ve texted me! I don’t want to miss the fun.”
She plops herself next to Mukuro, who doesn’t react, and leans in as if studying the way sadness sits on her sister’s stoic face. There’s a second of quiet contemplation before she lets out a hyena cackle.
“Oh my god, your eyes. If you get the wings crooked you need to actually wipe them off , not just add more. You look like a fucking raccoon.”
Mukuro sinks deeper into the mattress.
“Did you even read the mags I left? Gal makeup’s supposed to brighten your eyes, not fucking drown them.”
“I-I’ll keep practicing.” Stammering doesn’t fit well in her voice. She’s supposed to be steady. Then again, Junko delights in knocking her off kilter.
This time when she laughs, it’s like a bell, but somehow no kinder. “Aww, Mook.” She licks her finger and starts rearranging strands of plastic hair. “I know you’re gonna do your best, but I’m hiding all the pictures of me for a reason.”
Their last tonight together is going no better than any of the others. Somehow, Peko is more terse than usual. Mukuro finishes an impassioned speech about the optimal skirt length for the modern woman, and all Peko has to say is, “You aren’t smiling right.”
“I’m smiling like the magazine,” Mukuro argues. To illustrate her point, she holds up a glossy spread up next to her face and strikes a grin.
Peko is unmoved. “She doesn’t smile like that either. Not in real life.”
She’s not wrong. The manic, anglerfish smile that adorned Junko’s face when she was genuinely excited wasn’t even worth practicing. To get that one right, Mukuro would have to file down her teeth. And it is a strange thing, to be acting out a version of her sister she’s never actually met. If she really wanted to be authentic, she’d skip skirt length lectures and tell Peko all the ways she thinks she might die in the next two weeks.
Mukuro looks down at the pages in her hands, a non-threatening gossip mag targeted at middle school girls. Junko Enoshima smiles back, her photo sitting next to an advice column style interview on finding your own individual style.
“These things… they know her from this. This is who they’re expecting,” Mukuro says. She closes the magazine and sets it down, then flashes another grin at Peko. She uses more teeth this time.
“Then why are you asking for my advice?” Peko presses, voice flat and edged with… something. “I don’t read those magazines.”
Mukuro doesn’t have an answer for her, and the subsequent silence is tense. It absolutely does not help when Mukuro finally breaks it with, “Wow, gloomy much! I’m just looking for a little girl-to-girl advice, jeez.”
It sounds even more forced than usual. Peko quirks a brow, unimpressed. Mukuro breaks character immediately.
“You were right about the makeup,” she offers, a desperate peace offering, trying to get through the wall Peko’s put up. This isn’t working. “Junko helped me this time. To get the wing thinner. It should be right.”
“How is that supposed to help?” snaps Peko. “She won’t be there to do it for you. You’re going to have to do it alone.”
Again, Mukuro has no answer, because of course Peko’s right, the whole point of this is learning to do it on her own, but– but she’s also thinking about sitting on the bed, eyes closed, chin tilted up by the gentle hand of her twin, feeling plastic nails run along her jaw without the hint of violence. How she didn’t flinch even when the foam tip of the liner brush was dragged across her eyelashes. Maybe she should’ve, blind and helpless under the hand of someone that would skewer her eyeball with a fingernail, but despite everything she cannot bring herself to fear her sister.
Peko shakes her head. “It just doesn't look right. It still doesn’t look like her.”
“What is your problem ?” Mukuro finally snaps, startling herself with the bite behind her words. Maybe the costume was getting to her. “I fixed every little thing you’ve criticized! We’re running out of time, give me something I can use!”
Peko grasps for words with the grace of a frustrated toddler. They don’t come. It’s true, Mukuro has followed each panel of the tutorial to a T. To anyone else, the person standing in front of them would be unmistakably Junko. But it’s not. There’s something fundamentally wrong that she can’t articulate, and irritation burns through Peko in her inability.
It’s not really about the mascara. Or the wig, or the voice, or the amount of swear words, nor any of the other things Peko had critiqued across weeks of practice. It’s that Mukuro is an unnatural silence which refuses to be filled, the void where life has been sucked away, the danger of knowing something is about to happen. Junko is as subtle as a carpet-bomb. Peko knows how to sit in silence.
And so, she does something impulsive. She lunges forward to snatch the wig off Mukuro’s head. Even caught by surprise, Mukuro is able to snatch her assailant’s wrists out of the air. They’re usually an even match, Peko’s speed to Mukuro’s reflexes, but whatever that something is about Peko tonight that Mukuro can’t put a finger on, it’s making her slip.
“Do not sabotage me just because you’re jealous your master doesn’t ask you for anything! It’s not my fault he thinks you’re useless!”
Maybe it’s that– just pure, bone-deep envy that Mukuro’s been given a task that allows her to so completely let her identity be subsumed by her master. Maybe it’s something else. By the twitchy micro-expressions Peko desperately tries to hide, Mukuro has to guess she’s struck some kind of nerve. She digs in harder.
“He doesn’t fall for the tool act. Neither do I. You’re a lovesick puppy– no matter how many times he kicks you, you keep coming back.”
“She’s going to kill you,” Peko spits. “You’re not special to her.”
“You’d be jealous of that too.”
Mukuro holds her wrists. Peko does not try to get away. The violence of this moment is something she knows how to live in.
“We’re out of time, Peko.”
They lie there another few breaths. Mukuro can feel Peko’s blood rushing through her veins, her heart pounding with anger even as she gets her face settled back into blank marble. Once, months ago, Peko had told her that she couldn’t stand the feel of her own heartbeat. That all it did was remind her that there were things in her body even she couldn’t control. How livid she must be now, pinned to Mukuro’s bed, knowing the one on top of her can feel the autonomic betrayal of her veins under her skin.
This is their last night. The next time Peko sees her face, it will be of someone unrecognizable.
When Peko shoves Mukuro off, she lets her. She’s already been as cruel as she has energy for.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Peko. “Junko’s gassing them as we speak. None of them even know who you are.”
