Chapter Text
Red leaves hang low as Hiyoko stares down into the koi pond in the courtyard.
That morning at breakfast, her miso soup had been poisoned, and she had been terribly sick all day. The only people who'd had access to the kitchen were the cook who made most of her food and her mother's maidservant, a pretty (but not too pretty) young lady from a branch family. The prime suspect is obvious. But it isn’t up to Hiyoko to decide what would be done about her.
Through the wall of the mansion’s infirmary, between bouts of nausea and stomach cramps, she had heard her parents’ voices for the first time in months: her mother, defending her maidservant, who had after all been flattering and pampering her for years; her father, defending Hiyoko's safety, begging only for the maidservant to be kept out of the kitchen, and no more.
She’d heard a slap.
She’d heard him falling.
Hiyoko had struggled to her feet, forced her wobbling legs to stand, and gotten as far as putting her hand on the door before stopping. Her grandmother's voice still rang in her ears, telling her that she was never to see her parents again. What was she to do?
In the end, it had been Hiyoko's own cowardice that made her too weak to protect her dear father.
The fading sun sinks swiftly below the horizon. Before she knows it, all she can see is the rippling circle of moonlight in the water and the bats circling overhead. One of them swoops over her shoulder, and she turns, startled, to find—not a bat, but a girl standing with eyes agleam in the darkness, red as the blaze of autumn leaves.
The strange girl smiles, and it is her father’s smile. She speaks as though she hears every little voice in Hiyoko’s heart, and with a deep empathy the young dancer has seldom encountered in her life, she promises to see Hiyoko as she is, rather than only as what she can be used for. She tells Hiyoko that there had never been anyone worth protecting, that her skills ought to belong to herself alone, and that the deepest well of strength in the world comes from apathy.
Hiyoko allows those cold, slender fingers to run through her hair as she listens. They are not as soft or warm as her father’s fingers, but they feel familiar on her scalp, like she is five years old again and listening to him tell her for the hundredth time the story of how he and her mother met and fell in love.
Those fingers pull away from her all too soon. As the kind stranger turns to leave, Hiyoko calls out to her on impulse, asking her name.
“Junko Enoshima,” she says.
On the way back to her room, Hiyoko's grandmother catches her and scolds her for missing the day's dance practice. She acts as though Hiyoko hadn't been ill and suffering for hours on end, and had only been lazy, or faking it for attention.
This time, Hiyoko calls her a hag to her face. This time, she brushes off her threats, which ring hollow, now, in the emptiness of her heart that has learned to embrace apathy. This time, she simply turns, walks away, and closes the door to her room, ignoring her grandmother all the while.
It makes her feel strong for the first time in her life. It excites her so much that she cannot sleep.
When, later that night, a certain bat alights at her window, she invites her in without hesitation.
☽☽☽☾☾☾
Snow crunches under Fuyuhiko's steel-toed boots as he paces, restless, behind his house.
Next to him, a line of splotches leads around the corner of the building, bright spots of red slowly sinking into the snow. Peko had refused his help again. She had referred to herself as merely a tool again. She had walked off to treat her own wounds, and even though she remains so close by, he cannot hear any of what she is doing over the continued sound of his parents fighting in the house—with literal knives and guns—over the right to decide what colour their next car would be.
Fuyuhiko paces, restless, because he wants to follow Peko around that corner, but he hesitates. His heart would not let him see her as a tool. (His pride reminds him that he had never wanted a tool.) And his honour says that because Peko had gotten injured while protecting him from his mother's dagger and his father's sword-cane, he owes her a favour, just as he owes her a hundred more for a lifetime of keeping him safe.
Peko would never allow him to repay her.
Fuyuhiko paces, restless, next to the dotted line drawn in Peko's blood, and each time, he stops short of turning the corner. He knows it is cowardice. If Natsumi saw him like this—well, it would just be more proof that she would make a better leader, wouldn't it?—
The sky darkens around him, and the floodlights in the courtyard flick on. Silhouetted against their light, with gleaming eyes as red as Peko's, is the shape of a girl.
The stranger answers Fuyuhiko's wariness with distance and respect. She speaks to him seemingly without moving her lips, her face locked into the icy doll-like expression Peko often wears, and her intense crimson gaze seems to root him to the ground. She tells him three truths: that as a son, his task is to claim his own destiny; that as a yakuza, his task is to claim his throne; that as a man, his task is to claim his woman.
His woman. He feels suddenly dizzy. Somehow, he had shied away from thinking of Peko that way, but it all seems to make sense when he does.
The stranger has somehow gotten closer to him, and now stands at his side like a knight. She gives the trail of blood an oddly hungry glance, and then smiles and places her hand firmly on his back. He accepts the push.
As her cold touch fades into the winter air, he asks her name.
“Junko Enoshima,” she says.
This time, Fuyuhiko follows the trail of blood around the corner. This time, he takes Peko's bandaged hand in his. He leads her back inside the house, where his father is reloading and his mother is prying a dagger out of the wall, and with his swordswoman on his arm, he demands, on pain of death, for them to cut it out.
Snow blows in from the back door he left open, and his fervent pulse fills the silence that follows.
When he turns and sees the strange girl still standing at the doorway, he invites her in to join him.
☽☽☽☾☾☾
Cherry petals flutter down around Mikan as she picks her skirt up from the ground.
The woods behind the school are quiet as she rummages through her pockets, but she hears laughter in the distance as her classmates walk out of the gates with their new friends. Sunlight spills through the flowering branches. A soft breeze ruffles the grass. It is a beautiful day to mark the beginning of the new school year.
Mikan's trembling fingers steady when she finds her first-aid kit. With practiced ease, she cleans the scratch on her arm, places gauze over it, and rolls a bandage over the gauze, fixing it in place with a piece of tape.
This was not something that was done to her; this was something that she had offered to do. Because it was not done to her, she does not need to be afraid. Because she had offered to do it, it was a connection all her own.
Her skin feels warm where they had slapped her.
These are the thoughts that run through her head as she zips up her skirt, adjusts her socks, and buttons the buttons on her blouse, one by one. Halfway down, her fingers pause.
One of her buttons is missing.
She drops to her knees and starts searching, running her fingers through the grass. A button on her brand-new uniform is missing. If she were to go home right now, her mother would stop cooking dinner and make her hold the boiling-hot saucepan with her bare hands. If she were to go home later, her father would be on his third can of beer, and his belt might miss and strike her on the back of her head. And if she went home late enough that they were both asleep, then in the morning...
The wind picks up, and Mikan shivers. When did it get so cold? So dark? The streetlight flickers on, and standing under it, bathed in that artificial glow as though it is her very own spotlight, is the figure of a girl.
Before Mikan can react, the girl is suddenly right in front of her, blood-red eyes gazing into her eyes, long elegant nails tilting her chin up with little pricks of pain. They dig hard into her chin, hard enough to draw blood, and pull her to her feet.
The stranger leans down and softly kisses the blood off Mikan's chin. She smiles. She licks her lips. She tells Mikan that she is delectable, and when she sees the uncertainty that quivers in every line of her body, she tells her more: that she is perfect as she is; that silly mistakes like hers ought to be forgiven; that if nobody else will forgive her, she will.
A last drop of blood falls from Mikan's chin and lands on the stranger's finger, sparkling like the jewel on an engagement ring. Between the pain and the gentleness, for the very first time, Mikan falls in love.
With a dizzied gasp in her voice, Mikan cannot help but ask the stranger's name.
“Junko Enoshima,” she says.
On her way home, Mikan walks with steady steps for the first time in years. Her parents have finished dinner without her, and her mother looks up from her ironing as she opens the door. She calls Mikan stupid and lazy for being late, and when she sees the blouse gaping open where the button is missing, she even calls her a slut.
This time, Mikan laughs—she giggles with an innocence she seldom feels. This time, when her mother approaches her with the clothes-iron in hand, threatening to brand her back with another scar, she flips the ironing board at her with a flick of her arm and walks away from the sound of shocked screeching and sizzling skin.
For this, too, she will be forgiven. With this certainty in her heart, Mikan giggles to herself as she tosses and turns, sleepless.
When, in the darkness before dawn, Junko comes knocking, she smiles and invites her to stay.