Work Text:
"PRESS START"
The words almost made her dark-adjusted eyes hurt. When she started up her Nantendo GameGirl Advance, the time had flashed in the corner for a brief moment. 1:32am. Chiaki knew that she was going to have a rough day at school tomorrow, even if Hope's Peak technically didn't require her to even show up for class. Being sleepy during class was still preferable to the nightmares.
Chiaki's eyes and fingers moved automatically, but her mind's eye still dug up the very nightmares she was trying to forget. Hajime. It was always Hajime. They had only known each other for a few months before he had stopped coming by the fountain, but he was still in her every non-gaming thought. Chiaki's homeroom teacher said Hajime was just fine, still in the reserve course, and everything was awesome, but she couldn't quite buy it. She didn't argue her teacher, but her gut knew otherwise. The Hajime she knew was a good man who would never just abandon someone without saying so...unless he couldn't? He'd seemed focused elsewhere when last she had seen him. Maybe...
"GAME OVER!" Chiaki tried to remember when she had last seen "STAGE CLEAR," but it had been months, the last time she and Hajime had played co-op. The ultimate "super-high-school-level" gamer's eyes squinted closed and she told herself the wetness was just from eyestrain. Someday, Hajime would come back and they'd both have a laugh over how silly she had been, being so worried, and she could bury that tear-stained face in his chest as his arms held her strong, and everything would be just fine. Chiaki wanted to believe that more than anything. She would've even given up her talent, and thus her place at Hope's Peak Academy, for it to be so. She set her GameGirl on her nightstand and rolled over to try and sleep again.
***
Chiaki only saw his backside, but she knew who it was. It was Hajime! With all of her strength, she ran after him, but even though he looked like he was walking at a normal pace, he seemed to get farther and farther away, no matter how hard she pushed her body. They were on a beach, at night, with a shore that looked endless, but somehow Chiaki didn't have problems getting her footing as she ran. She called out, "HAJIME!" but the figure she was chasing didn't even hesitate, as if he had not even heard her.
The chase continued. He stopped. Chiaki tried to catch up to him, but it became as if her feet were cemented to a sidewalk. Black hair sprang from his head and grew all the way down to his feet, bending and twisting some as it did. Chiaki wasn't sure, but he also seemed to get a few inches taller? She tried calling again, "HAJIME!!!" calling as if one of their lives depended on it.
The figure turned around half-way and one bright red eye glared at Chiaki. The face didn't look angry, but the mouth was just barely downturned at the corners. Chiaki remembered her mother saying that indifference was the opposite of love, rather than hate. Chiaki had never believed it until now. That red eye looked at her like she was gum on his shoe, or a gnat too small to see, let alone care about. Weakly, Chiaki's voice squeaked out, "H--Hajime?"
Chiaki tried reading the man's mouth as he seemed to be giving his name, but it came out far too muffled for what it should have been. "Iz-- ------ra." The next thing he said, however, came out painfully clear, "And you are boring. I have no need or desire to see you again." The man turned and walked away again as Chiaki fell to her knees in the sand. Why did the words of a stranger make her feel like her heart had been sundered into pieces, like her last Nantendo handheld when she'd accidentally dropped it while leaning against a stairwell on Hope's Peak's fifth floor? It had broken to almost be unrecognizable.
Just as despair threatened to engulf her completely, Chiaki Nanami woke up.
"That's not Hajime, though the face structure and the shoulders...that hair color...his voice... Why do I feel this way? Who IS that???" Chiaki rubbed her face and eyes. Her throat felt tight. This exact nightmare had been playing since...Chiaki tried to think...since a week or so before the slaughter of the student council, if one had to use a date marker, morbid as that one was.
Chiaki had only been able to glance at the outer edges of the demonstration the Reserve Course students were putting on, the one the administration referred to as a "parade" without seeming to realize how macabre it was. She'd looked for that familiar ahoge, but hadn't seen it anywhere. She couldn't see it, either, when she watched the entire mob from a distance in her classroom.
Was Hajime in that mob anywhere? Chiaki didn't know that, but she knew one thing: her homeroom teacher was either ignorant or had deliberately lied to her. Hajime WASN'T fine; Chiaki knew that in the core of her being without a doubt. She looked down at her GameGirl and bit her lower lip as a tear hit its screen.