Chapter Text
He’s dead. That was all he knew, that he had died and gone nowhere. He had once remembered how the warm black seawater felt on his skin, lifting him up and down but not taking him anywhere. He used to be able to see the grey skies above him and the black water that consumed him, but his eyes were too weak to even open. He couldn’t hear anything, he couldn’t see anything, he couldn’t even feel himself anymore. Maybe his brain was all that was left, and that was his punishment. His physical form was dissolved by the salt and eventually his mind would fade too. He could barely remember the last time that he came to, the gaps between his conscious moments were becoming wider and wider. Memories usually come one sense at a time, faded and far away, lingering just a second long enough to recognize. He tried to keep them around, but after the memory faded he was barely strong enough to stay conscious. He couldn’t remember what these things should mean to him, though he knew they should mean something.
He could hear music, sometimes, though it never sounded nice. It was discordant piano music, being played by someone who must have had no musical talent. The clanging of the keys was too forceful, like someone was slamming their full weight down on them instead of gently pressing with their fingers. The music always seemed to end with horrified screams. He could only imagine that the music was so bad, people screamed in terror to turn it off.
Sometimes, he could see someone running when he thought hard enough. He could see someone running away from him into a crowd of angry people, who were holding up mean signs and protesting. She tried everything to get away from them, and they tried everything to make it known she was hated. He could picture her face clearly, the desperation mixed with pain as she tried her hardest to get away from the terrible angry people. She left a bloody trail in her wake.
He can smell cooked flesh at times. He knows somehow, by the smell that it isn’t any normal type of meat. He knows that someone is cooking a person, and for whatever reason that thought doesn’t disturb him as much as it should. As the heat rises, the scents only intensify as their body transforms. Trapping proteins under skin, coagulating blood, binding muscles and fats together. Sometimes, ever so faintly, he can taste salt on his lips.
Even occasionally, when his body is fully his, he can feel someone’s strong arms holding him close. The embrace doesn’t feel warm or friendly, nor does it feel aggressive. It feels like goodbye. Someone is leaving him and there's nothing he can do about it. Their tears puddle on his shoulder and soak into his heart, leaving a permanent spot for them. He feels as their touch gets weaker and weaker and the pressure shifts underneath him as they step away completely from the embrace. The spot they created aches when he realizes they’re never coming back.
Sometimes all he got was a word. A single word that he would have to play with in his mind, to try and tie any significance to while he tried to remember what had happened to him. Sometimes he got it right away. Words like dice or brother were easily explained and brought back warm memories. Sometimes the words were mean, like asylum or parents. Those words gave him blurry, silvery memories that meant nothing good. Recently, his words had been meaning more and more nothing. He had collected a few words that he thought particularly didn’t make any sense.
Fracture. Camera. Trick. Scrap. Gold. Cage. Locked. Chapel. Wire.
Useless. They were all useless to him. Clearly his subconscious wanted him to know something, but instead of telling him outright, it had to play games with him. Well, from what he was beginning to understand of himself, he liked to play games. This one was frustrating, though. He felt as though these words would tell him how he died, or at least what happened before it. Maybe that was what he’d needed to move on into whatever afterlife he truly belonged in. First, he needed to have closure. Something linked all of those words together, but he didn’t know what it was. He’d tried to select from them, coming up for possible meanings. As he went on, his theories became more and more ridiculous until they didn’t make sense at all.
He fractured his neck and it killed him.
His death was recorded for some gore website.
He was tricked into drinking poison.
He had been in a scrap of some sort that killed him.
He had been sentenced to execution by a council of judges.
He had been kidnapped and left in a dog cage to die.
He had been killed by an Olympic gold medalist.
He was crucified inside of a chapel.
He was shocked by a live wire.
Every possible theory he sent out into the universe was rejected, each and every time he tried to explain his own death to himself he felt absolutely nothing, which meant that he had been completely wrong. He tried to think of people he knew.
Maybe his brother had fractured his neck?
Nothing came to mind. Maybe a member of his organization had fractured one of their necks?
Nothing again. Okay, his organization was wrong. His friends.
A friend.
Someone he didn’t know?
Someone he didn’t know fractured their neck and died.
Someone who was maybe a friend, then?
Not their neck.
Someone he didn’t know was dead because they
fractured
Their skull.
The memory came back to him. Rantaro Amami, someone who he didn’t know, was killed by a shot put ball to the back of the head. The force of the ball instantly killed him and created a fracture in his skull. Slowly, the memories start to come back to him. He remembered the harrowing sight of the body on the floor, but nothing more after that. A disgusting feeling of dread creeped through him as he remembered the terrible series of events that unfolded one after another.
Kaede’s tears while she confessed her murder plan to them, explaining how she had avoided being caught by the cameras.
Chunks of Ryoma’s flesh and guts floating on top of the water, his untimely demise hijacking Himiko’s magic trick.
The look of abject horror on Kirumi’s face when she realized it was over, that a scrap of her own glove had been left in the pool.
Angie’s body, surrounded by gold flakes from the decaying artifact used to take her life.
The caged child seance that took Tenko’s life, how she bravely volunteered herself even though she knew the cost.
Korekiyo’s locked room mystery that they spent hours agonizing over, all while he watched them with delight.
The chapel they found Miu’s body by, her adorable virtual corpse face down in the snow.
Gonta’s dismayed face once he realized that he had crossed the wires and forgotten his whole murder plan.
They were dead. Every single one of them was dead and they weren’t here, and Kokichi was dead too and he didn’t know how. At the time of his death, there were seven of them left alive. Six of them hated him. Actually, seven of them did. At that point in time, he hated himself too. He could remember a couple faces easily. Maki, Shuichi, Himiko, Kiibo and Tsumugi stuck out to him as being alive, which raised a question. Was everyone else dead?Well, they were killing each other, but why were they? What happened to the murderers, once they admitted they were murderers? Where did they go?
He couldn’t remember.
He recounted the faces he could remember in his head. His stomach hurt when he’d realized he came up short. He was missing someone. Seven people had been alive. Five of them had been accounted for at the time of his death.
One of them had been responsible, and Kokichi couldn’t picture a face in his mind. He couldn’t think of a name. Maybe he could do it if he could remember what had happened to him in the first place.
The press
A burst of electricity gives him the faintest reminder of his body. The jolt travels through the very core of his body, down his spine and through the nerves in his fingertips.
He can see his body in the eye of his mind. A white outline on a black surface, his frail body laying against… something he can’t make out. All he could see was a sketch, a picture that his memories couldn’t fill in.
I died from a hydraulic press?
There was a hole in his skull, filling up with water. The water puddled in his bones and slowly started to trickle throughout his body. The warmth of the water flowing down his spine made him feel heavy and a little sick.
He could see himself more clearly now, watercolors spreading against the sketch he created like bruises. He was bleeding from his arm, a violent vermillion swirled around his pale skin and dripped onto something purple. He was laying on something purple.
Someone I knew wore purple.
The electricity is getting stronger and stronger in his body. He was practically twitching, feeling his muscles bend and twist against his will. Someone was puppeteering his muscles, making him jerk and flail awkwardly.
He was bleeding and he was in pain because he had been shot. He had been shot with a poison arrow, and he had been wearing someone’s purple jacket.
Not wearing, I was pretending
The water that filled his bones was starting to mingle with his blood, filling more and more of his body. His veins were practically going to pop. All he could do was sink, the sickening feeling of something pushing down on him began to overwhelm his senses.
He was pretending to be someone that he wasn’t underneath the hydraulic press. He’d lied to everyone and pretended to be his own killer just so that he could stop the mastermind and their silly game.
The game. Oh my God, the killing game.
On his skin, everything connected. The water and electricity met, and only for a moment he was completely still. His body went completely rigid in its fully formed state and the weight of the water shoved him all the way under. Now all the way down, the puppet master was back, plucking his nerves in a way that made him thrash and kick violently. He cried out loudly, hoping for someone to hear him, but the water filled his mouth too quickly and he couldn’t breathe anymore. For just a moment, his eyes shot open and his vision was flooded with white lights. Someone was speaking to him, but their speech was garbled and incomprehensible. They were pulling on him, trying to yank him out of the water. He couldn’t help them, all he could do was hit them out of his way. They let go of him just as His eyelids felt heavy again, and just as quickly as the world of bright light came to him, it was taken away. Everything inside of him was gone, all the heaviness and twitching and sickness and pain had disappeared, leaving him to decompose again in the warm salt water. His brain floated off once again, leaving him one last memory, a sticky puddle of gore underneath a giant metal shoe.