Fanfiction: (Mis)fortune (Super Dangan Ronpa 2)
This is not at all the fic I meant to write. Honestly, I was planning to write about Hinata and Kuzuryuu making out. But then the making out caused canon to diverge, and Komaeda somehow seized the focus, and I ended up having to cut out the Hinata/Kuzuryuu entirely because it just felt like an awkward plot device in a fic that had become more about the relationship between Hinata and Komaeda.
Which is a shame, because Hinata/Kuzuryuu is a great pairing. (I've been replaying Super Dangan Ronpa 2, and their relationship has really struck me this time around.) Maybe I'll manage a real Hinata/Kuzuryuu piece eventually.
Title: (Mis)fortune
Fandom: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,700
Summary: In which Komaeda's best-laid plans are thwarted by his own luck.
Enough bombs to blow up the island, Komaeda said. Set to go off at noon.
And they don’t know for sure where they are, but they’re probably in a machine-gun-guarded building they don’t have the code to. They don’t even know whether they’d be able to disarm them, if they somehow did manage to get to them. Maybe Souda would be able to do something, but...
Hinata stares at the ceiling.
His life’s been in danger ever since Monobear told them to kill each other. He knows that, intellectually. But he’s never really felt it like he does now, counting every inhale and exhale, wondering how many he has left.
What do you do when you have five hours to live?
Maybe he should just... go back to sleep. At least try not to spend his last few hours of life freaking out.
Yeah. Like he’s going to manage that. He barely slept last night; it’s not going to be any easier now.
He guesses he should go to the restaurant, but he can’t summon up the energy to move. It’s not like anything he does will really matter at this point. What, does he need to worry about not getting enough nutrition? Seeming unfriendly?
He closes his eyes. Lies there for a full two hours before admitting to himself that, yeah, sleep definitely isn’t happening. He needs to get up and... do something. Try to distract himself from the steady countdown of his heartbeat. If nothing else works, maybe he can just run around the island until he passes out.
-
“Yeah, come in,” Kuzuryuu calls when he knocks.
Hinata opens the door. Kuzuryuu is sitting on the floor of his cottage, leaning back against the bed, staring at an expensive-looking watch. It could probably have helped during the Funhouse case, but he’s just dangling it in front of his face rather than wearing it, so maybe he’s not in the habit of actually putting it on.
“Thinking about noon?” Hinata asks.
Kuzuryuu tucks the watch into a little leather box; there’s a dragon design inlaid in gold on the lid. “What, you expected something else?” He stows the box under his bed, lets out a hiss between his teeth. “Fuck. We’re meant to just sit here and wait?”
Maybe they could get the code to the ruin out of Komaeda, Hinata thinks. That’s probably their last hope at this point. Could they - could they torture it out of him, somehow? He could ask. Given Kuzuryuu’s background, he probably knows something about torture.
But, even though he could argue that it’d be to save Komaeda’s life as well as the rest of theirs, Hinata can’t bring himself to seriously consider it. It’s a line he’s not ready to cross.
Besides, the fucker would probably enjoy it.
“We could talk,” Hinata offers.
Kuzuryuu snorts.
“I know,” Hinata says. “It’s waiting with bells on. I just thought bells might be better than nothing.”
-
They talk a little. About Pekoyama, about Kuzuryuu’s family and the strange world he grew up in. Hinata feels he doesn’t really have much to volunteer himself, conversation-wise. Is he really going to die like this? An ordinary high-school student, nothing interesting about him at all?
Well, the things that have happened on this island would probably count as interesting experiences. Maybe having an interesting life is overrated.
It helps to distract him, a little, kind of. The bombs are still there, a constant presence ticking away in the back of his mind. He can’t stop fidgeting, running his hands through his hair, playing with his tie, buttoning and unbuttoning his cuffs and his collar, moving from the bed to the chair and back again. But the bombs aren’t the only thing on his mind any more; they’re not completely wiping out everything else. Being around Kuzuryuu is helping, even if only slightly, and he’s grateful for it.
There’s no clock in the cottage. He’s not sure whether that makes things better or worse. He keeps thinking that maybe he should ask Kuzuryuu to check the watch again, but he tries to resist. If he’s going to die today, he wants it to catch him by surprise. He doesn’t want to watch his last few seconds tick away, knowing.
But every moment that passes makes it harder to focus.
He isn’t going to ask. He isn’t. He doesn’t have to know the time; it’s not going to make any difference. He just has to stay here, spending time with his unlikely yakuza friend, until everything ends.
It feels like he’s been there for two fucking days before he finally snaps. His pulse is thudding against his throat; he feels like he could choke on it. He doesn’t want to know the answer, but... “What time is it?”
Kuzuryuu curses softly, reaches under the bed, grabs for the leather box. He opens it and takes out his watch.
Stares at it for a moment.
Turns it the other way up and stares at it some more.
“What the fuck?”
-
Komaeda lies in the warehouse, panting under the duct tape.
Where are they?
It was such a well-laid plan, everything in place, everything perfect. And it must be past noon by now, and nobody’s opened the warehouse door.
Did they not notice the laptop? Did they not pay attention to his message? Did they give up on finding the bombs before going to the factory? He should never have relied on them. They would need hope to keep searching, and they’ve already disappointed his faith in the worst possible way.
Even if they find him now, it won’t be as poetic as he was hoping. He chose the music so carefully, but the track has ended and the MP3 player has moved on to far less appropriate tunes from Monobear’s music collection.
The wounds in his legs feel like they’re throbbing through his entire body. It’s hard to breathe properly; the duct tape is covering his mouth, a little too close to his nose. He’s starting to feel lightheaded.
He tries to keep his grip on the spear.
-
“Kuzuryuu!” There’s a pounding on the cabin door. “Kuzuryuu!”
Hinata and Kuzuryuu have just been staring at the watch’s hands, watching as they tick further and further past noon, but now they look at each other.
“That’s Souda,” Hinata says.
Kuzuryuu nods. “Maybe he knows something. The traitor might’ve turned themselves in.”
Maybe it won’t be something they want to hear, Hinata thinks. Maybe he’s found that the bombs are just going to go off a little later than scheduled. Honestly, there’s a part of him that’s tempted to ignore it, keep living in the dark. But Kuzuryuu’s already got up to answer the door.
“Finally,” Souda says, the second it’s open. “I can’t find anyone! And I heard explosions! Explosions, I swear.”
Kuzuryuu breathes out sharply through his teeth. “Shit. Where?”
“The fifth island,” Souda says. “From the factory or the warehouse next to it or something.” He’s practically hopping on the spot with agitation. “What if it’s the bombs?”
“The island’s still here,” Kuzuryuu points out.
“Maybe what Souda heard was just the start of it,” Hinata says. “A warning shot, like the lobby. There could be more.” He looks at Souda. “Did you check the buildings?”
“On my own?” Souda demands. “Why do you think I came back to find you guys? I’m not gonna run in there by myself and be the only one who gets blown up!”
Hinata stares at him. “The entire island! We all get blown up if they go off! What if-”
He cuts himself off. What if you could have disarmed them on the spot? What if noon was just an estimate? What if you wasted time we don’t have by coming back here? But shouting at Souda won’t change anything. It’s not like he and Kuzuryuu have been doing much to avert their impending doom.
Souda is frowning. “Waaaaaait a sec. This is Kuzuryuu’s cottage, right?” He cranes back to check the sign outside it. Looks hard at Hinata, who’s suddenly very aware of what he must look like after several hours of nervous fidgeting, sitting on the bed with his hair ruffled and his shirt half-buttoned and his tie lying on the floor. “Why-”
“We’ll meet you there,” Kuzuryuu says, slamming the door.
-
It seems like Souda managed to pull all the others together, as they’re all gathered outside the factory. They split up when Hinata and Kuzuryuu get there. Souda, Nanami and Owari go to search the factory itself; Hinata, Sonia and Kuzuryuu take the warehouse, despite Souda’s insistence that Sonia should definitely be on his search team.
The warehouse door is harder to open than Hinata remembers; it seems like something’s blocking it. But, when he puts more force into it, he’s able to get it open without too much trouble.
“Well,” Kuzuryuu says, “something’s definitely going on here.”
The lights are out, and upbeat dance music is blaring at full volume throughout the entire building. The lyrics are making it slightly hard to focus on what’s going on. I’m Monobear! I just don’t care! I’m stuffed with cotton, not with hair!
“Do you think someone is trying to entrap us?” Sonia asks, peering into the darkness.
Is it a trap? Is the music trying to hide something? Is turning on the light going to activate the bombs?
But Komaeda will die as well if they go off. He doesn’t need to trick them into activating the bombs; he could just do it himself, if he really does want to destroy the island. It wouldn’t make a difference.
Hinata edges just inside the door. Feels around for the light switch.
Despite his reasoning, there’s still a rush of relief in his chest when the lights flicker on and he doesn’t get blown up.
“This is very untidy,” Sonia observes.
She’s not wrong. Hinata remembers the Monobear panels being neatly stacked the last time he came in here, but now they’re scattered across the floor.
My right and left are white and black! Say my colour scheme’s boring and you’ll get a sma-
Kuzuryuu yanks the MP3 player out of the speakers, for which Hinata is extremely grateful.
Now that he’s able to hear himself think, Hinata notes that the panels don’t seem to be scattered randomly. There’s a line of them leading towards the back of the warehouse, one on top of the other. He follows the line up to the curtain, and...
There’s a strange smell in the air here. It takes him a moment to pin it down.
“The curtain’s damp,” he says. “Smells like petrol.”
Kuzuryuu comes over to look. He stoops down, picks up something lying on the floor, just by the last Monobear panel. Hinata hadn’t noticed it.
“An oil lighter,” Kuzuryuu says, turning it over in his hands. He moves away from the curtain and flicks it a couple of times. “Looks like it’s burnt out. Ran out of fuel.”
Someone tried to set fire to the curtain?
“Whoa, this place is a mess.”
It’s Souda’s voice. They turn to see him and the rest of the factory team at the entrance to the warehouse.
“Did you find anything?” Hinata asks.
“Something definitely exploded in there,” Souda says. “There was this damaged truck, metal debris, all that kind of stuff. But it looks more like someone set off a load of low-power fireworks than heavy explosives. The hotel lobby was worse.”
“Ah!” Sonia exclaims. “I may know what occurred.”
Hinata looks sharply at her. “Seriously?”
Sonia nods. “There are bombs at the military base, but they are fake. Komaeda-san must have mistakenly believed them to be the true McCoy.”
“You knew there were fake bombs on the island?” Kuzuryuu demands. “And you didn’t think we might need to know this when we were being threatened with bombs?”
“Ah.” Sonia looks abashed. “Forgive me for keeping this from you. The bomb in the lobby was real, so I believed Komaeda-san’s threat.”
Hinata can forgive Sonia. Right now, he feels like he can forgive just about anyone. The bombs weren’t real. The island’s still here. They can go on living.
He lets out a long gasp of relief, bracing his hand against the-
Against the wall behind the curtain?
There is no wall behind the curtain, it turns out, and he finds himself stumbling through it instead, to the back of the warehouse.
His eyes meet Komaeda’s, and he absolutely cannot make sense of what he’s seeing.
-
Monobear grumbles a lot about what a great trial it would have been, but he concedes that there wouldn’t be much of a trial if Komaeda died of his wounds now, and so he’s prepared to take Komaeda to the hospital. Hinata briefly contemplates going straight there himself, but he’s really not sure that he’s ready to see Komaeda right now. He can’t get it out of his head, the horrific wounds, the knife through his hand, the spear just waiting to fucking impale him...
He doesn’t get what Komaeda was trying to do. There’s a lot he doesn’t get about Komaeda, but this is something he especially doesn’t understand. Did he just want to make his suicide look like a murder? He could have just used the spear for that; why the hell did he stab himself, what, thirty times?
He doesn’t really want to know, but he thinks he might need to. It’s probably a lost cause, but maybe, if he understands what Komaeda was thinking, he’ll be able to prevent something like this from happening again.
When Monobear shows up in his cottage to announce that Komaeda is conscious, it sparks a strange mixture of emotions. He’s glad Komaeda’s pulled through, but this means he’s going to have to fucking visit him.
-
“So what exactly were you trying to do?” Hinata asks, pulling up a chair by the side of the hospital bed. “Kill yourself, make it look like a murder? You’d win the trial, but you’d be dead.”
“Ah, you’re interested in my plan?” Komaeda asks.
There’s that harsh edge of pain in every breath he takes, in every word that he speaks, and Hinata can’t keep his eyes from flicking down to the bandages around his hand and his arm and his legs. How could he do that to himself?
Komaeda closes his eyes for a moment. “It was a good plan, if I can say that myself. It’s disappointing that nobody could see the result.” He opens them again, then, and looks at Hinata. “I suppose I’ll tell you.”
The plan he outlines is incredibly elaborate and incredibly fucked up, although Hinata could probably have guessed the ‘fucked up’ part from the state he found Komaeda in.
“Poison in the fire grenades?” Hinata asks. “So...” The realisation hits him hard. “You were trying to make us all killers?”
Komaeda frowns slightly.
“If we all threw the fire grenades, we’d all be responsible for your death,” Hinata says, half to himself. “But you left enough hints to make us think it was a suicide, so we’d vote for you in the trial. The killer would go free, but it’d be all six of us.” He focuses on Komaeda. “All that talk of blowing up the island, and you were trying to save us.”
Komaeda laughs. “Oh, yes. I can see how you might have misunderstood. But I was actually trying to kill you.”
It’s like a cold hand on the back of Hinata’s neck. “What?”
“Well, everyone but the traitor. They would have been the murderer, if all had gone to plan. It should have been impossible to solve.”
“You know who the traitor is? You’re taking their side?” He finds himself breathing like he’s been running. “Why do you want us dead? I don’t - I don’t understand you.” He’s been trying and trying, ever since the first trial, but he never seems to get any closer to understanding what goes on inside Komaeda’s head.
“But the plan failed.” Komaeda sighs. “How unlucky.”
“You’d have been dead if it had worked,” Hinata says. “Souda happened to be close enough to hear the explosions, and we got there after the lighter burned out but before you dropped a gigantic spear through your chest. How long do you think you could have held on to it?”
Komaeda pauses. “Not much longer. Nidai-kun would have been very disappointed.”
“So there was this tiny window where we could find you and you’d survive,” Hinata says. “And we did it. Here you are. Sounds like good luck to me.”
“Good luck,” Komaeda says to himself, softly. “Perhaps.”
He’s silent for a while.
“I came up with a plan to kill all of you,” he says eventually, so casually that it sends shivers down Hinata’s spine. “But my luck decided that keeping me alive would be the more fortunate outcome, it seems. Why would that be?”
“Most people wouldn’t question that,” Hinata says. “Most people would just figure that, yeah, staying alive is the good option.”
“There must be a reason,” Komaeda says. He rolls onto his side, with a soft hiss of pain. “Because it’s better for me not to die? Or because it’s better for you not to?”
“What a shame,” Hinata says. “You don’t know who’s meant to stay alive. Guess you’ll just have to let everyone keep living.”
-
The ‘graduation exam’ is a painful, horrible experience. Learning that Nanami, who came all this way with them, won’t be at their side if they escape; she was never real in the first place. Learning about the world outside, about themselves, who they are, what they did. Having everything they believed about themselves and each other stripped away. Komaeda fucking knew this; he couldn’t have warned them?
But, in a way, Hinata is glad that Komaeda is here with them, at the end. Eventually, Hinata straightens up and gathers his resolve and decides that the options they’ve been presented with are crap, that they’re going to cut their own path.
And Komaeda grips the stand in front of him with both hands, panting audibly.
It’s horrifying, frankly. But it’s an easier horror to cope with than any of the other horrors they’ve had thrown at them, and that makes it a welcome distraction.
-
They’re quiet for a while after they wake up, absorbing the truth of everything Enoshima told them, the comatose state of the others. The state of their own bodies; Hinata can’t look at the out-of-place hand attached to Komaeda’s arm without wanting to throw up. The absence of Nanami, awake or asleep.
Komaeda goes missing for a couple of hours, which puts Hinata on edge. He eventually comes back, with-
“Fuck! Komaeda!”
Komaeda frowns. “What is it, Hinata-kun?”
“Komaeda,” Hinata says. “I have had a really, really fucking long day. Please don’t pretend you can’t think of anything that might be freaking me out right now.”
Komaeda looks down at the bleeding stump on the end of his arm.
“I mean, okay, this makes more sense than most of the things you’ve done,” Hinata admits. “But you need to get that looked at.”
He wishes Tsumiki were awake. He doesn’t want to use Kamukura’s skills; it’s a reminder of what he did to himself, and to everyone else. But he’s the only one qualified to treat Komaeda right now.
-
Komaeda doesn’t speak while Hinata is cleaning his wound. Usually, Hinata would be grateful, but Komaeda’s silent reverential gaze might actually be more unsettling than anything he could be saying right now.
“I was wrong about you,” Komaeda says, eventually.
“Yeah?” Hinata asks, rifling through the hospital’s medical equipment.
“I thought none of you could be redeemed. You fell into despair. You forced each other to kill in the name of despair, and those who were killed were only more agents of despair. It was all meaningless.”
Hinata has to pause for a moment. Digs his nails into his palms. “Thanks. Wouldn’t want to forget about any of that.”
“But I was wrong,” Komaeda says. “It was all leading up to the greatest hope I could imagine. You, Sonia-san, Kuzuryuu-kun, Owari-san, Souda-kun... you’ve all thrown off that despair and risen to shine brighter than you ever did before. I was privileged to witness it.”
It’s all tied up in his usual nonsense about hope and despair, but something about it hits Hinata in the chest. Komaeda thought they couldn’t be redeemed, but he changed his mind. Is he right? Can they move past the things they’ve done? Sonia, Kuzuryuu, Owari, Souda...
Hinata turns to look at him. “You’re talking like you weren’t part of it. You threw off despair as well, the same as the rest of us.”
Komaeda sighs. “I didn’t deserve to be there.” He glances away from Hinata, out of the hospital window. “I was unworthy even as a stepping stone. I tried to kill all of you. I would have destroyed that future hope.”
“We all made this choice,” Hinata says. “We all dragged ourselves out of that pit. Can you stop worshipping us now? We’re equals.”
Komaeda stares at him for so long, frozen, that Hinata has to gently remind him to breathe.
-
Kuzuryuu pokes his head around the door of the hospital room while Komaeda is sleeping. “You fixed him?”
“I don’t know if it’s possible to fix Komaeda,” Hinata says. “But he’s not going to die of blood loss or infection. And I don’t think he wants to murder us any more.”
Kuzuryuu shrugs. “That’s something.”
There’s a moment’s silence. Hinata watches Komaeda’s chest rise and fall.
Is there room for friendship there? Komaeda has done terrible things, but... well, he’s not exactly alone in that. He’s incomprehensible and infuriating, but somehow Hinata can’t imagine walking away one day and never seeing him again. They’re tied together now, all of them, everyone who was in that program.
“You just came to check up on him?” Hinata asks.
“I didn’t know you were good with medicine,” Kuzuryuu says.
Hinata swallows. “I wasn’t.”
“Can you take it out?” Kuzuryuu asks, gesturing at his eye. His right eye. The blue one.
Hinata hesitates, then nods. Yeah, he doesn’t really want to use Kamukura’s abilities (or to remove someone’s eye, if he’s honest). But right now those abilities could be useful to his friends. Maybe he can drag something good out of the fucking Hope Cultivation Project.
He thinks about the nine comatose people hooked up to the Neo World Program. Starts to look harder at the skills the surgery left him with.
Maybe he can aim higher than ‘good’.
Which is a shame, because Hinata/Kuzuryuu is a great pairing. (I've been replaying Super Dangan Ronpa 2, and their relationship has really struck me this time around.) Maybe I'll manage a real Hinata/Kuzuryuu piece eventually.
Title: (Mis)fortune
Fandom: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3,700
Summary: In which Komaeda's best-laid plans are thwarted by his own luck.
Enough bombs to blow up the island, Komaeda said. Set to go off at noon.
And they don’t know for sure where they are, but they’re probably in a machine-gun-guarded building they don’t have the code to. They don’t even know whether they’d be able to disarm them, if they somehow did manage to get to them. Maybe Souda would be able to do something, but...
Hinata stares at the ceiling.
His life’s been in danger ever since Monobear told them to kill each other. He knows that, intellectually. But he’s never really felt it like he does now, counting every inhale and exhale, wondering how many he has left.
What do you do when you have five hours to live?
Maybe he should just... go back to sleep. At least try not to spend his last few hours of life freaking out.
Yeah. Like he’s going to manage that. He barely slept last night; it’s not going to be any easier now.
He guesses he should go to the restaurant, but he can’t summon up the energy to move. It’s not like anything he does will really matter at this point. What, does he need to worry about not getting enough nutrition? Seeming unfriendly?
He closes his eyes. Lies there for a full two hours before admitting to himself that, yeah, sleep definitely isn’t happening. He needs to get up and... do something. Try to distract himself from the steady countdown of his heartbeat. If nothing else works, maybe he can just run around the island until he passes out.
-
“Yeah, come in,” Kuzuryuu calls when he knocks.
Hinata opens the door. Kuzuryuu is sitting on the floor of his cottage, leaning back against the bed, staring at an expensive-looking watch. It could probably have helped during the Funhouse case, but he’s just dangling it in front of his face rather than wearing it, so maybe he’s not in the habit of actually putting it on.
“Thinking about noon?” Hinata asks.
Kuzuryuu tucks the watch into a little leather box; there’s a dragon design inlaid in gold on the lid. “What, you expected something else?” He stows the box under his bed, lets out a hiss between his teeth. “Fuck. We’re meant to just sit here and wait?”
Maybe they could get the code to the ruin out of Komaeda, Hinata thinks. That’s probably their last hope at this point. Could they - could they torture it out of him, somehow? He could ask. Given Kuzuryuu’s background, he probably knows something about torture.
But, even though he could argue that it’d be to save Komaeda’s life as well as the rest of theirs, Hinata can’t bring himself to seriously consider it. It’s a line he’s not ready to cross.
Besides, the fucker would probably enjoy it.
“We could talk,” Hinata offers.
Kuzuryuu snorts.
“I know,” Hinata says. “It’s waiting with bells on. I just thought bells might be better than nothing.”
-
They talk a little. About Pekoyama, about Kuzuryuu’s family and the strange world he grew up in. Hinata feels he doesn’t really have much to volunteer himself, conversation-wise. Is he really going to die like this? An ordinary high-school student, nothing interesting about him at all?
Well, the things that have happened on this island would probably count as interesting experiences. Maybe having an interesting life is overrated.
It helps to distract him, a little, kind of. The bombs are still there, a constant presence ticking away in the back of his mind. He can’t stop fidgeting, running his hands through his hair, playing with his tie, buttoning and unbuttoning his cuffs and his collar, moving from the bed to the chair and back again. But the bombs aren’t the only thing on his mind any more; they’re not completely wiping out everything else. Being around Kuzuryuu is helping, even if only slightly, and he’s grateful for it.
There’s no clock in the cottage. He’s not sure whether that makes things better or worse. He keeps thinking that maybe he should ask Kuzuryuu to check the watch again, but he tries to resist. If he’s going to die today, he wants it to catch him by surprise. He doesn’t want to watch his last few seconds tick away, knowing.
But every moment that passes makes it harder to focus.
He isn’t going to ask. He isn’t. He doesn’t have to know the time; it’s not going to make any difference. He just has to stay here, spending time with his unlikely yakuza friend, until everything ends.
It feels like he’s been there for two fucking days before he finally snaps. His pulse is thudding against his throat; he feels like he could choke on it. He doesn’t want to know the answer, but... “What time is it?”
Kuzuryuu curses softly, reaches under the bed, grabs for the leather box. He opens it and takes out his watch.
Stares at it for a moment.
Turns it the other way up and stares at it some more.
“What the fuck?”
-
Komaeda lies in the warehouse, panting under the duct tape.
Where are they?
It was such a well-laid plan, everything in place, everything perfect. And it must be past noon by now, and nobody’s opened the warehouse door.
Did they not notice the laptop? Did they not pay attention to his message? Did they give up on finding the bombs before going to the factory? He should never have relied on them. They would need hope to keep searching, and they’ve already disappointed his faith in the worst possible way.
Even if they find him now, it won’t be as poetic as he was hoping. He chose the music so carefully, but the track has ended and the MP3 player has moved on to far less appropriate tunes from Monobear’s music collection.
The wounds in his legs feel like they’re throbbing through his entire body. It’s hard to breathe properly; the duct tape is covering his mouth, a little too close to his nose. He’s starting to feel lightheaded.
He tries to keep his grip on the spear.
-
“Kuzuryuu!” There’s a pounding on the cabin door. “Kuzuryuu!”
Hinata and Kuzuryuu have just been staring at the watch’s hands, watching as they tick further and further past noon, but now they look at each other.
“That’s Souda,” Hinata says.
Kuzuryuu nods. “Maybe he knows something. The traitor might’ve turned themselves in.”
Maybe it won’t be something they want to hear, Hinata thinks. Maybe he’s found that the bombs are just going to go off a little later than scheduled. Honestly, there’s a part of him that’s tempted to ignore it, keep living in the dark. But Kuzuryuu’s already got up to answer the door.
“Finally,” Souda says, the second it’s open. “I can’t find anyone! And I heard explosions! Explosions, I swear.”
Kuzuryuu breathes out sharply through his teeth. “Shit. Where?”
“The fifth island,” Souda says. “From the factory or the warehouse next to it or something.” He’s practically hopping on the spot with agitation. “What if it’s the bombs?”
“The island’s still here,” Kuzuryuu points out.
“Maybe what Souda heard was just the start of it,” Hinata says. “A warning shot, like the lobby. There could be more.” He looks at Souda. “Did you check the buildings?”
“On my own?” Souda demands. “Why do you think I came back to find you guys? I’m not gonna run in there by myself and be the only one who gets blown up!”
Hinata stares at him. “The entire island! We all get blown up if they go off! What if-”
He cuts himself off. What if you could have disarmed them on the spot? What if noon was just an estimate? What if you wasted time we don’t have by coming back here? But shouting at Souda won’t change anything. It’s not like he and Kuzuryuu have been doing much to avert their impending doom.
Souda is frowning. “Waaaaaait a sec. This is Kuzuryuu’s cottage, right?” He cranes back to check the sign outside it. Looks hard at Hinata, who’s suddenly very aware of what he must look like after several hours of nervous fidgeting, sitting on the bed with his hair ruffled and his shirt half-buttoned and his tie lying on the floor. “Why-”
“We’ll meet you there,” Kuzuryuu says, slamming the door.
-
It seems like Souda managed to pull all the others together, as they’re all gathered outside the factory. They split up when Hinata and Kuzuryuu get there. Souda, Nanami and Owari go to search the factory itself; Hinata, Sonia and Kuzuryuu take the warehouse, despite Souda’s insistence that Sonia should definitely be on his search team.
The warehouse door is harder to open than Hinata remembers; it seems like something’s blocking it. But, when he puts more force into it, he’s able to get it open without too much trouble.
“Well,” Kuzuryuu says, “something’s definitely going on here.”
The lights are out, and upbeat dance music is blaring at full volume throughout the entire building. The lyrics are making it slightly hard to focus on what’s going on. I’m Monobear! I just don’t care! I’m stuffed with cotton, not with hair!
“Do you think someone is trying to entrap us?” Sonia asks, peering into the darkness.
Is it a trap? Is the music trying to hide something? Is turning on the light going to activate the bombs?
But Komaeda will die as well if they go off. He doesn’t need to trick them into activating the bombs; he could just do it himself, if he really does want to destroy the island. It wouldn’t make a difference.
Hinata edges just inside the door. Feels around for the light switch.
Despite his reasoning, there’s still a rush of relief in his chest when the lights flicker on and he doesn’t get blown up.
“This is very untidy,” Sonia observes.
She’s not wrong. Hinata remembers the Monobear panels being neatly stacked the last time he came in here, but now they’re scattered across the floor.
My right and left are white and black! Say my colour scheme’s boring and you’ll get a sma-
Kuzuryuu yanks the MP3 player out of the speakers, for which Hinata is extremely grateful.
Now that he’s able to hear himself think, Hinata notes that the panels don’t seem to be scattered randomly. There’s a line of them leading towards the back of the warehouse, one on top of the other. He follows the line up to the curtain, and...
There’s a strange smell in the air here. It takes him a moment to pin it down.
“The curtain’s damp,” he says. “Smells like petrol.”
Kuzuryuu comes over to look. He stoops down, picks up something lying on the floor, just by the last Monobear panel. Hinata hadn’t noticed it.
“An oil lighter,” Kuzuryuu says, turning it over in his hands. He moves away from the curtain and flicks it a couple of times. “Looks like it’s burnt out. Ran out of fuel.”
Someone tried to set fire to the curtain?
“Whoa, this place is a mess.”
It’s Souda’s voice. They turn to see him and the rest of the factory team at the entrance to the warehouse.
“Did you find anything?” Hinata asks.
“Something definitely exploded in there,” Souda says. “There was this damaged truck, metal debris, all that kind of stuff. But it looks more like someone set off a load of low-power fireworks than heavy explosives. The hotel lobby was worse.”
“Ah!” Sonia exclaims. “I may know what occurred.”
Hinata looks sharply at her. “Seriously?”
Sonia nods. “There are bombs at the military base, but they are fake. Komaeda-san must have mistakenly believed them to be the true McCoy.”
“You knew there were fake bombs on the island?” Kuzuryuu demands. “And you didn’t think we might need to know this when we were being threatened with bombs?”
“Ah.” Sonia looks abashed. “Forgive me for keeping this from you. The bomb in the lobby was real, so I believed Komaeda-san’s threat.”
Hinata can forgive Sonia. Right now, he feels like he can forgive just about anyone. The bombs weren’t real. The island’s still here. They can go on living.
He lets out a long gasp of relief, bracing his hand against the-
Against the wall behind the curtain?
There is no wall behind the curtain, it turns out, and he finds himself stumbling through it instead, to the back of the warehouse.
His eyes meet Komaeda’s, and he absolutely cannot make sense of what he’s seeing.
-
Monobear grumbles a lot about what a great trial it would have been, but he concedes that there wouldn’t be much of a trial if Komaeda died of his wounds now, and so he’s prepared to take Komaeda to the hospital. Hinata briefly contemplates going straight there himself, but he’s really not sure that he’s ready to see Komaeda right now. He can’t get it out of his head, the horrific wounds, the knife through his hand, the spear just waiting to fucking impale him...
He doesn’t get what Komaeda was trying to do. There’s a lot he doesn’t get about Komaeda, but this is something he especially doesn’t understand. Did he just want to make his suicide look like a murder? He could have just used the spear for that; why the hell did he stab himself, what, thirty times?
He doesn’t really want to know, but he thinks he might need to. It’s probably a lost cause, but maybe, if he understands what Komaeda was thinking, he’ll be able to prevent something like this from happening again.
When Monobear shows up in his cottage to announce that Komaeda is conscious, it sparks a strange mixture of emotions. He’s glad Komaeda’s pulled through, but this means he’s going to have to fucking visit him.
-
“So what exactly were you trying to do?” Hinata asks, pulling up a chair by the side of the hospital bed. “Kill yourself, make it look like a murder? You’d win the trial, but you’d be dead.”
“Ah, you’re interested in my plan?” Komaeda asks.
There’s that harsh edge of pain in every breath he takes, in every word that he speaks, and Hinata can’t keep his eyes from flicking down to the bandages around his hand and his arm and his legs. How could he do that to himself?
Komaeda closes his eyes for a moment. “It was a good plan, if I can say that myself. It’s disappointing that nobody could see the result.” He opens them again, then, and looks at Hinata. “I suppose I’ll tell you.”
The plan he outlines is incredibly elaborate and incredibly fucked up, although Hinata could probably have guessed the ‘fucked up’ part from the state he found Komaeda in.
“Poison in the fire grenades?” Hinata asks. “So...” The realisation hits him hard. “You were trying to make us all killers?”
Komaeda frowns slightly.
“If we all threw the fire grenades, we’d all be responsible for your death,” Hinata says, half to himself. “But you left enough hints to make us think it was a suicide, so we’d vote for you in the trial. The killer would go free, but it’d be all six of us.” He focuses on Komaeda. “All that talk of blowing up the island, and you were trying to save us.”
Komaeda laughs. “Oh, yes. I can see how you might have misunderstood. But I was actually trying to kill you.”
It’s like a cold hand on the back of Hinata’s neck. “What?”
“Well, everyone but the traitor. They would have been the murderer, if all had gone to plan. It should have been impossible to solve.”
“You know who the traitor is? You’re taking their side?” He finds himself breathing like he’s been running. “Why do you want us dead? I don’t - I don’t understand you.” He’s been trying and trying, ever since the first trial, but he never seems to get any closer to understanding what goes on inside Komaeda’s head.
“But the plan failed.” Komaeda sighs. “How unlucky.”
“You’d have been dead if it had worked,” Hinata says. “Souda happened to be close enough to hear the explosions, and we got there after the lighter burned out but before you dropped a gigantic spear through your chest. How long do you think you could have held on to it?”
Komaeda pauses. “Not much longer. Nidai-kun would have been very disappointed.”
“So there was this tiny window where we could find you and you’d survive,” Hinata says. “And we did it. Here you are. Sounds like good luck to me.”
“Good luck,” Komaeda says to himself, softly. “Perhaps.”
He’s silent for a while.
“I came up with a plan to kill all of you,” he says eventually, so casually that it sends shivers down Hinata’s spine. “But my luck decided that keeping me alive would be the more fortunate outcome, it seems. Why would that be?”
“Most people wouldn’t question that,” Hinata says. “Most people would just figure that, yeah, staying alive is the good option.”
“There must be a reason,” Komaeda says. He rolls onto his side, with a soft hiss of pain. “Because it’s better for me not to die? Or because it’s better for you not to?”
“What a shame,” Hinata says. “You don’t know who’s meant to stay alive. Guess you’ll just have to let everyone keep living.”
-
The ‘graduation exam’ is a painful, horrible experience. Learning that Nanami, who came all this way with them, won’t be at their side if they escape; she was never real in the first place. Learning about the world outside, about themselves, who they are, what they did. Having everything they believed about themselves and each other stripped away. Komaeda fucking knew this; he couldn’t have warned them?
But, in a way, Hinata is glad that Komaeda is here with them, at the end. Eventually, Hinata straightens up and gathers his resolve and decides that the options they’ve been presented with are crap, that they’re going to cut their own path.
And Komaeda grips the stand in front of him with both hands, panting audibly.
It’s horrifying, frankly. But it’s an easier horror to cope with than any of the other horrors they’ve had thrown at them, and that makes it a welcome distraction.
-
They’re quiet for a while after they wake up, absorbing the truth of everything Enoshima told them, the comatose state of the others. The state of their own bodies; Hinata can’t look at the out-of-place hand attached to Komaeda’s arm without wanting to throw up. The absence of Nanami, awake or asleep.
Komaeda goes missing for a couple of hours, which puts Hinata on edge. He eventually comes back, with-
“Fuck! Komaeda!”
Komaeda frowns. “What is it, Hinata-kun?”
“Komaeda,” Hinata says. “I have had a really, really fucking long day. Please don’t pretend you can’t think of anything that might be freaking me out right now.”
Komaeda looks down at the bleeding stump on the end of his arm.
“I mean, okay, this makes more sense than most of the things you’ve done,” Hinata admits. “But you need to get that looked at.”
He wishes Tsumiki were awake. He doesn’t want to use Kamukura’s skills; it’s a reminder of what he did to himself, and to everyone else. But he’s the only one qualified to treat Komaeda right now.
-
Komaeda doesn’t speak while Hinata is cleaning his wound. Usually, Hinata would be grateful, but Komaeda’s silent reverential gaze might actually be more unsettling than anything he could be saying right now.
“I was wrong about you,” Komaeda says, eventually.
“Yeah?” Hinata asks, rifling through the hospital’s medical equipment.
“I thought none of you could be redeemed. You fell into despair. You forced each other to kill in the name of despair, and those who were killed were only more agents of despair. It was all meaningless.”
Hinata has to pause for a moment. Digs his nails into his palms. “Thanks. Wouldn’t want to forget about any of that.”
“But I was wrong,” Komaeda says. “It was all leading up to the greatest hope I could imagine. You, Sonia-san, Kuzuryuu-kun, Owari-san, Souda-kun... you’ve all thrown off that despair and risen to shine brighter than you ever did before. I was privileged to witness it.”
It’s all tied up in his usual nonsense about hope and despair, but something about it hits Hinata in the chest. Komaeda thought they couldn’t be redeemed, but he changed his mind. Is he right? Can they move past the things they’ve done? Sonia, Kuzuryuu, Owari, Souda...
Hinata turns to look at him. “You’re talking like you weren’t part of it. You threw off despair as well, the same as the rest of us.”
Komaeda sighs. “I didn’t deserve to be there.” He glances away from Hinata, out of the hospital window. “I was unworthy even as a stepping stone. I tried to kill all of you. I would have destroyed that future hope.”
“We all made this choice,” Hinata says. “We all dragged ourselves out of that pit. Can you stop worshipping us now? We’re equals.”
Komaeda stares at him for so long, frozen, that Hinata has to gently remind him to breathe.
-
Kuzuryuu pokes his head around the door of the hospital room while Komaeda is sleeping. “You fixed him?”
“I don’t know if it’s possible to fix Komaeda,” Hinata says. “But he’s not going to die of blood loss or infection. And I don’t think he wants to murder us any more.”
Kuzuryuu shrugs. “That’s something.”
There’s a moment’s silence. Hinata watches Komaeda’s chest rise and fall.
Is there room for friendship there? Komaeda has done terrible things, but... well, he’s not exactly alone in that. He’s incomprehensible and infuriating, but somehow Hinata can’t imagine walking away one day and never seeing him again. They’re tied together now, all of them, everyone who was in that program.
“You just came to check up on him?” Hinata asks.
“I didn’t know you were good with medicine,” Kuzuryuu says.
Hinata swallows. “I wasn’t.”
“Can you take it out?” Kuzuryuu asks, gesturing at his eye. His right eye. The blue one.
Hinata hesitates, then nods. Yeah, he doesn’t really want to use Kamukura’s abilities (or to remove someone’s eye, if he’s honest). But right now those abilities could be useful to his friends. Maybe he can drag something good out of the fucking Hope Cultivation Project.
He thinks about the nine comatose people hooked up to the Neo World Program. Starts to look harder at the skills the surgery left him with.
Maybe he can aim higher than ‘good’.