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They spend maybe a week thinking those l’il ultimate brats are dead before Jill sniffs them out from under some rubble. Bruised, scared shitless, and reluctant to let Jill touch them—but alive.
She thinks about just leaving them there—screw those little freaks—but then the one with the pink hair starts to cry, and the little boy who hides his face with his hands asks her if she’s going to kill them, and—
Fuck, they’re way too young for her to kill for fun, anyway.
That’s what she tells herself so she doesn’t think about anything else as she wrangles them up, first the punchy kid who hit himself and the little boy with the weird half-spiky blue hair who can hardly stand on his own, and she’s all put yanking on the girl’s pigtails and dragging the kid with the too-long sleeves, but she manages to gather them all, discarding her old mission in favor of bringing them back to the Future Foundation’s sad dumpy headquarters barely held together in the calmer end of Towa City.
And that’s what she tells herself because obviously there’s no other reason for a serial killer to go soft on some snot-nosed rats who killed a ton of people (which Jill can’t judge, either, seeing as her body count’s comparable), but whatever, Jill only murders cute boys and these kids are fugly rascals. No satisfaction in killing them, but she does have to do something with them.
So she finds some shade under the big tarp-turned-tent they’ve been using for operations and dumps them into a pile.
Immediately, Masaru’s up again, his teeth snapping at her hand. Jill swipes a pair of scissors from her belt and swings them in his face. He narrowly avoids chomping on the blade. “Wanna suck on that?” Jill asks, and Masaru falls flat on his butt.
The kids stare up at her, their eyes big and hollow and trying desperately to elicit feelings that Jill is super-duper not capable of.
Then a familiar voice calls to her. “Toki! Or is that you, Jill?” Jill turns, and there’s Komaru, stomping over in her chucks. “Hey! What did you bring back from—?”
Komaru sees them, and her words stop coming.
It occurs to Jill that maybe her girlfriend’s feelings toward the kiddos are not so complex. She might just detest them for trying to literally kill her.
“Dekomaru..? Sorry, should I throw ‘em back out?”
Kotoko plaintively mewls, “On our butts, in the dirt? So cruel..!”
But Komaru comes back to herself, gently shaking her head. Jill notices a small braid framing one side of her face, revealing a smudge on her cheek. She’s bandaged and bruised, but she’s tough as nails. And she’s Jill’s.
Komaru approaches her, taking Jill’s side. She looks down at the kids, and the pity they were trying to claw out of Jill surges through Komaru’s big wet eyes.
She sighs. “They’re just little kids, Jill. They didn’t understand the full magnitude of what they were doing.”
They’re just little kids.
How old was Toko again, when it all began? The rage, smoldering inside of her, heating, pressurizing, volcanic, desperate for release? The fracturing of Fukawa Toko and Genocide Jill? The need for Jill to protect Toko from the worst of it? The first time she cut open warm flesh and felt their blood trickle across her fingers? How old?
She was fifteen when she was scouted by Hope’s Peak. Maybe that’s too old, though. She probably should have known better by then. She should have figured that out on her own.
Obviously, she’s too old to relate to these kids.
“Jill?” Komaru asks.
Jill shakes her head. “Yeah?”
“You think they could help us with the garden?”
The kids are reluctant to do anything at all at first. But then Komaru scrounges some water bottles for them, and they find a mask for Jataro to hide his face behind and a busted-up little wheelchair for Nagisa, and the other kids seem to run out of excuses.
They sure do complain, though. Kotoko hates every single critter that gets in her way, whether it’s a ladybug or a fly or a worm. Jataro keeps telling anyone within earshot that he’s finally found where he belongs (the soil). Then Jataro gets a muddy handprint on Kotoko’s shirt, and they start a screaming match. Christ, they’re both so annoying, they practically deserve to be left together.
But nobody ever fought with Toko like that when she screamed. Toko had screamed so hard, but it went into a void that only Jill could hear. Only Jill could help her.
Later, when Kotoko begs Komaru to help her clean the mud stains on her clothes, Jill doesn’t know why she sits idly by, listening in as Komaru shows the girl how she scrubs, making careful use of their rationed soap, and they make up some sort of singing game about a walrus’s winter coat while they clean. She hears Kotoko’s laugh, for the first time. The girl even asks Komaru to brush her hair before she finds her place in the kids’ shared room for the night.
Jill stares at her while Komaru finishes getting ready herself, changing into her pajamas, washing her face. Komaru must feel her eyes on her, but she doesn’t say anything.
Finally, Jill asks as they’re laying down, “How can you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Be… nice to them. They tried to kill you.”
“Well… I don’t know…” Komaru lets out a breath. “It’s gonna be hard for them to be kind if they don’t know what kindness looks like.”
“Gross, Dekomaru!”
Komaru chuckles, but then she says, “You must know that better than anyone, though, yeah? I mean, before you were in my brother’s class…” Komaru hesitates. She seems to sense that this question’ll hurt, so she drops it.
But Jill feels it slowly revolving around in her head.
Toko doesn’t remember, but Jill does. Jill remembers Makoto bringing cupcakes for his birthday and making sure everyone got one, even her, even when she said she hated the flavor. She remembers Sakura offering to train with her. She remembers reading in the library after school and going on runs with Leon and Taka and she—
They treated her like a person… even though… well… all of the reasons that make her super not a person.
Jill’s still thinking about it when Komaru switches off the light. She doesn’t ask anything when Jill crawls over to her side of the bed and tucks her head into the back of Komaru’s neck, just overlaps Jill’s hands with her own.
Nagisa can’t participate like the other kids. His health’s fragile, exacerbated by whatever happened to him after that fight. But Jill finds him tucked away in what’s left of the library, poring over books about preservation, nature, survivalists, and the like.
“Whatcha got there, nerdlinger?” she asks, popping out of the hallway. To her endless joy, Nagisa recoils in shock at her appearance. He’s so stunned he accidentally claps the book shut, and a cloud of dust flies off it.
He needs a moment to regain his composure, but once he has it, he mumbles, “I can’t help with the physical things, so I—so I thought… there was some other way I could pitch in.”
Jill squints down at the pile of books the kid’s amassed. Toko would know if they were credible sources, or whatever. They just look like potential bludgeons to Jill. “That’s cool,” she says, eventually.
She thinks she’s better at emotions than Toko, because Toko just assumes everyone’s out to get her. But Jill knows better. Plus, she’s strong enough to kill anyone who’s a threat to her, so.
Then she hazards, “You should tell Dekomaru what you learn. I bet she’d like that.”
Nagisa bobbles his head. “I planned to.”
“Good. And… uh…” She awkwardly flicks one of the book’s covers. How to say this without being an entirely new flavor of weird. “Don’t… study all day. Or else maybe I will make an exception to my rule of killing only cute boys.”
Nagisa makes a face. “You’re weird.”
Jill lets out a riotous little laugh.
She tries not to linger on what the kid said about his childhood. The dark, cramped rooms. She’s not big on those, either.
She tries not to think about kindness, too, when she catches Masaru literally beating on himself for the rock he can’t quite shift into just the formation he wants. Luckily, Jill’s strong, and fast, so she can swipe his pretty little rock and give him a new target to chase after, and it’s a distraction, but it gets him to put his fists away. Ultimately, Jill leaves the rock where he wanted it, in a line that she thinks is supposed to make a wall. “A fort,” he informs her. “For our base of operations.”
Ah, yes. To oversee the tomato sprouts shooting from Komaru’s tidy little garden. It surprised Jill just how quickly the darn things started sprouting, valiant little green fronds.
When she crouches in the rows of tilled dirt, that’s when she finds the other little kid, blending in with all the mud. Jill toes around Jataro, creeping in close enough to brush her fingers along a fuzzy leaf.
Then she looks over her shoulder and asks him, “You see this thing?”
The kid lets out a long, cavernous moan. “Surely, one as ugly and monstrous as I shouldn’t be allowed near such a fragile thing of beauty… I will crush it.”
Jill wrinkles her nose. She pinches the leaf between her fingers. These hands, which have taken so many lives. “Look,” she says to the kid, “I can do it. And I bet I’ve killed way more than you.”
Indignant, Jataro pulls himself out of the muck. He’s sprinkled in chunks of mulch. “Have not.”
Jill grins. “Have, too!”
“Have not!”
“Have too, too, too!”
As if to prove his point, Jataro stomps over to Jill and snatches up a plant stem. Whatever he was planning to do with the plant, he’s stunned into silence by the feel of it. Then he crouches in the dirt by Jill and spends quiet, slow minutes petting the leaves like he would a kitty.
Jill points out a little something wriggling in the ground beside Jataro. “Look! A worm!”
And then they’re collecting worms and trying to see who can find the biggest one. And once Masaru overhears them, he has to get involved, and they have to race the worms, except Jill’s worm is an asshole and he won’t go in a straight line.
By the time Jill shows up at her and Komaru’s place, Komaru gives her a long once-over. “You need a bath,” she tells her.
Damn. Jill’s least-favorite thing. “Do not!”
“I am not cuddling a giant glob of dirt, Jill!”
“You’re a little bitch, Dekomaru!”
Komaru wins that argument, but after the running and the shouting and the chasing, Komaru’s covered in dirt, too, so then they have to share the bathwater together. It’s not so awful with Komaru’s warmth beside her.
Toko doesn’t see Kotoko until the girl’s flying at her like an ugly little pink comet.
Once the kid reaches her, Toko notices she’s sobbing, big heaving things.
Toko sneers up at her. “What?” She’s sitting next to Komaru on a wide, flat rock, overlooking the garden.
Kotoko lands with a splat in Toko’s lap, giving Toko a perfect look up her nose, and, more particularly, at the beads of blood dripping down it.
“Masaru pushed me!” she shrieks, to no one but Toko’s unconscious body.
But by the time Jill’s pulled herself back up, Kotoko’s staring expectantly up at her with those big wet eyes, her cries muffled by the blood in her snout.
“Oy!” Jill snaps, “You little cretin, stop tilting your head back!”
She has to hold Kotoko’s head forward to keep her from choking on her own blood. Kotoko struggles and whines, but Jill’s stronger and whines louder, so eventually the girl shuts up.
All the while, Komaru stares at them, until Jill asks her for a rag. She hands one to Jill, who sops up the mess.
Finally, Komaru blurts, “Hey, don’t you think you’d be an amazing mom, Jill?”
Jill comes this close to dropping Kotoko on her fucking head. “What.”
“I-I mean… come on! Look at you!”
“Yeah!” Jill breaks into wild laughter. “The serial killer!”
Komaru splutters. “B-But..!” She huffs out a breath, her cheeks hot. “Think about it, would you?”
Jill doesn’t think about it.
But she does get that little brat’s nose to stop bleeding, after it drips all over Jill’s legs.