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Every year, a class trip.
Every class trip, a roommate.
And every time, Toko sits by herself near the front of the bus – last one on, first one off – and waits to find who her luck of the draw roommate will be. She never chooses anyone, and no one ever chooses her. It’s like sports teams. No one ever wants her. And she doesn’t want to be wanted. If anything, she would far prefer to have a room all to herself. But Hope’s Peak doesn’t allow for that, even with its most prestigious Talents. If Sayaka Maizono and Junko Enoshima can’t have their own rooms, then Toko Fukawa can’t either.
She hates it here.
(To be fair, she hates it everywhere. This is just a better here than being shuffled between her moms or being shoved into a hotel room, waiting on fan meetups or signings. Sometimes one or both of her moms go on those trips, too, so they can have a bite of her fame. Fame she never wanted, fame she never needed. She just wanted to write.
It may have gotten her out of that situation, but it got her into this situation, so really.
Sometimes she wishes she’d kept it all to herself.)
At least the view is nice.
Toko scurries out of the bus the first chance she gets. It means she gets the key from their supervisor first, it means she gets to the room first, it means she gets the first choice of bed and drawers and…and anything else that happens to be in their hotel room. It also means she can snatch a few things from the minibar before her roommate shows up and tells her not to take anything.
Hope’s Peak doesn’t like it when any of their students do that. It’s highly frowned upon. But Toko always takes something anyway. A few sodas, some chocolate covered peanuts, bags of chips, some cheap ramen.
(It’s habit. An old one. She doesn’t know how it started.
So don’t ask.)
But just as Toko gets off the bus, something – someone – hits her back like a force of nature and wraps her arms around her. She freezes, tightens, tenses, shrinks to make herself as small as she can be so she can get out of that grip. It doesn’t matter. However small she makes herself, the grip just grows tighter, until Toko is lifted off her feet and whirled around in circles as the person holding her spins with her.
(She thinks she’s going to be sick.)
“Roomie!” Junko Enoshima rubs her cheek against Toko’s as she twirls with her. “We’re going to have, like, the absolute best time!” As always, she smells of blue raspberries. It’s her signature scent, the base of every single one of her perfumes, with different, subtler notes that filter through and around its manufactured falsities.
(Toko’s a writer. She does her research. She knows that blue raspberries aren’t real – she used it as a metaphor in one of her earliest books. Whatever they call blue raspberry is really a mixture of something else, usually apple or pear or blueberry or even actual raspberry. They’re not real, and they’re not consistent. If Toko were writing this book, that would be a subtle indicator of Junko’s true character. But she’s not writing the book because this isn’t a book – it’s real life – which really just means that Junko didn’t think any of it through or didn’t want to try and match the scent of something real and so has full control over what blue raspberry smells like in a way that makes it easier to adapt to other scent notes, which makes it easier to sell. It’s just marketing. Ugh.)
This close, though, Toko can pick up those subtler notes, and she thinks there’s something of orchids within it.
“L-l-let go of me!”
At Toko’s words, Junko suddenly drops her. “Sure thing, roomie!”
Toko stumbles forward, unsteady on her feet. She turns to the other girl with a grimace. “Th-th-there’s no way!” she exclaims, pointing at her. “There’s no way we’re r-r-roomies!” She spits the word out, then corrects herself. “I-I-I mean, roommates.”
(That’s a trope, isn’t it? And then they were roommates? A part of Toko’s mind starts to flicker through the different scenarios, and internally she grimaces even harder. What if there’s only one bed? What if they’re forced to share a bed? Hope’s Peak would do that to them, would they? What if this is one of those enemies-to-lovers situations? It can’t be, right? It’s not like she and Junko are enemies, so…so that would never—)
“Why wouldn’t we be?” Junko asks, her head tilting to one side. She presses her own cheek with the tip of a blood red fingernail. “I mean, I picked you as my roomie and everything. I don’t think they’d, like, change what I wanted.” Her eyes widen. “Unless you, like, wrote someone else down! Then I’d be all on my own!”
“You won’t be on your own,” Mukuro interrupts, nudging her sister in the back with her elbow. “There’s an even number of us. They’d match you with someone.”
Junko pouts. “I guess. But I really wanted to spend time with Fukawa-chan!”
“L-l-liar!” Toko drops her accusing finger and holds her hands close to her chest. “You just…you just want to make fun of me!”
“Noooooooo.” Junko draws that one syllable word out into multiple syllables, less like a whine and more like an extension of her pout. “I really wanted to spend time with you, Fukawa-chan!”
“Quit calling me that!”
Junko’s pout deepens, and her eyes grow sad. In her business, they probably call them puppy dog eyes. “I….” A blue shade suddenly appears across her forehead like she’s some kind of anime character; she twirls a strand of hair around her finger, and mushrooms somehow grow from the top of her head. “I thought we were friends, Fukawa….” She hesitates, then says, “-san.” When she looks up and meets Toko’s eyes, there’s something hopeful in them, but nothing particularly menacing.
“Wh-wh-whatever!” Toko grabs her bag and stalks off to the front of the hotel. “W-w-we’re not r-r-roommates!”
“I told you,” Junko says, still twirling that strand of hair around her finger as she sits on the other bed. “You’re stuck with me, I guess.”
Toko stares at her.
Toko stares at the multiple, multiple bags that Junko has stacked on her side of the room.
Toko stares at the door to their room like it might bring some kind of salvation, except that there’s nothing better on the other side, either.
Maybe, if she begs, they’ll let her switch rooms with someone. Whoever hasn’t signed up with someone else. There has to be someone, right? There’s always someone. So if she just finds them and matches up with—
No, no, that won’t work. There’s only someone left over because she’s always left over. Two leftovers who get matched together. If Junko chose to sign up with her, then there’s no chance that someone else was left on their own, too. Which means she really is stuck with her.
“Wh-wh-why?” Toko doesn’t know what else to say, how else to put words to it. “Y-y-you could have been with…with anyone else!”
(This is true. Junko Enoshima and Sayaka Maizono are the most prized of potential roommates among their classmates, with the exception of Hina and Sakura, who have roomed together since they were first matched up. It’s absurd. They’re all Ultimates, but some of them are just more Ultimate than others. Like him. (Not that anyone asks her.))
Junko’s eyes grow wide again. “But I wanted to be with you, Fukawa-san.” She pulls an iced coffee from the minibar. “I know the others all talk about how you stink and don’t bathe or whatever, but there are ways around that.” She pops the top of her coffee. “I mean, Mukie smells worse than you. All that fighting and blood and gunsmoke and whatever the fuck.” A hum leaves her lips as she takes a swig of her coffee. Then she holds it out to Toko. “Want some? It’s got, like, the perfect mix of vanilla and cinnamon. Which, like, shouldn’t work in coffee as well as it does in hot chocolate, but this might as well be hot chocolate, except it’s not, like, hot.”
“Ew, gross,” Toko says without thinking. “I-I-I’m not gonna p-p-put my lips where you stinky, nasty skank lips have been.”
“Suit yourself.” Junko shrugs, pulls another bottle from the minibar, and tosses it to Toko. “Here.” Then she rummages in the minibar again and pulls out some chocolate-covered peanuts and a bag of popcorn. “I’m starving. They don’t feed us shit on the way down here, and then they give us so freaking long before dinner, and, like, how’s a girl supposed to survive?” She shoves the bag of popcorn into the microwave, then pops down onto her bed. “Oh, I forgot – do you want something?” After a second’s thought, she tosses the peanuts to Toko. “These’ll probably go better with the coffee, but, like. I can’t really eat them and the popcorn. Gotta maintain my figure, you know?” She winks.
Toko catches the bottle, which is fortunate, because it’s made of glass, and if it fell, they would have glass shards all across the hotel room floor and would have to tell their teacher why, which would mean explaining that they’d taken something out of the minibar. Her eyes widen as she realize just what Junko’s doing, and she barely starts to stutter out, “W-w-wait! W-w-we c-can’t—” before the chocolate-covered peanuts are thrown her way. Instead of catching them, she tries to dodge them. The bag hits her square in the face, then drops to her bed.
“Oops!” Junko sets her bottle on the bedside table set between their beds. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to—”
“Wh-wh-what are you d-d-doing?” Toko bursts out, hand tightening on her bottle. The bottle she still did not want but somehow now had. “We can’t…we can’t take anything from the…from the….” Her eyes narrow. “Y-y-you just want me to get into trouble! Th-th-that’s it, r-r-right? T-take stuff f-from the minibar, and blame it all on T-t-toko!”
Junko blinks twice. “No?” She crosses her arms – always so bare, like she won’t get sunburned while they’re out walking, like she’s not going to put on so much sunscreen that the gross scent of it overwhelms her fake perfume – and frowns. “I’m gonna pay for it, obvs. Like, I’ve got the money to spare, and if the school’s gonna be fucking touchy about it, then they can bill me, you know? I’m not gonna live like trash just because Hope’s Peak wants to be a fucking Scrooge, you know?”
“I-I-I guess.” Toko glances at the bag on the bed. She likes chocolate-covered peanuts. Junko probably picked them at random, though, so she’s not going to give her any credit for that. Her lips purse together. Then she opens her bottle of coffee and takes a sip. “Yech.” She makes a face. “This stuff is g-g-gross.”
“Oh, for real?” Junko pushes herself off of the bed and returns to the minibar. “Here, what about this?” She pulls out a plastic bottle and tosses it to Toko.
Toko doesn’t catch it either. “Q-q-quit th-throwing stuff at me!”
“Sorry!” Junko winces. “I’m so used to Mukie being the stinky one, and she can catch, like, everything. She’s so much better at it than Leon. If she wasn’t a gross soldier, she’d probably be tons better at baseball than he is. Sucks that they don’t let them play against each other.”
But Toko has stopped paying attention to Junko’s rambling and is instead examining the bottle Junko’s thrown her. Rose hip tea. It’ll need to be warmed up, but—
Toko sets the bottle on the table between their beds. “C-c-can you get rid of this? You’re….” She hesitates. “You’re closer to the…to the trashcan.”
“Oh, sure!” Junko takes Toko’s bottle, seems to consider it a second, then takes a swig from it.
“Wh-wh-wh—” Toko can’t even get the words out.
Junko shrugs again. “Seemed like it’d be a waste to just throw it out, you know?” She licks her lips and grins.
Toko nearly faints.
(This does not bode well for the rest of the trip.)