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Kyoko woke up to the sound of laughter.
At least, she thought she did, but everything was silent as soon as she opened her eyes. For a moment, she didn't move, still half-asleep and unsure that she had actually heard anything. But then the sound rang through the house again, and her adrenaline kicked in, waking her up completely. She quietly sat up, and a quick glance at the clock told her it was 3:01 am - an odd time for a break-in, since they usually happened in the afternoon, but she reached for her bedside table anyway, fumbling through the top drawer for her pistol as the laughter continued.
As soon as her hand closed around the grip, she finally recognized the voice as Makoto’s.
That made her freeze up immediately. At first, she doubted her ears - why would Makoto laugh like that, so late at night? - but the harder she listened, the more sure she was, and she registered that the bed was cold beside her. The adrenaline began to fade, only to be replaced by an underlying sense of fear. As she carefully slid out from under the blankets, she told herself he was probably just on a phone call with Komaru, or watching one of those funny videos that Hina would send him.
Except Komaru never called this late, and Makoto’s laugh never pitched and dipped so drastically like it was doing right now.
Kyoko tip-toed through the hallways (of her own house, which contradicted everything she had told herself) towards the kitchen. The closer she got, the more erratic the giggling became. And it just kept going, with only a few small breaks between all-too-long fits.
When she reached the kitchen doorway, she hesitated before entering. The cackling had faded, and the silence it left behind was thick and eerie, making her uncharacteristically uneasy. She shook her head sharply, took a deep breath, and turned the corner and walked into the kitchen.
Makoto was curled up on the floor, pressed into a corner created by the cabinets. His knees were together, his feet were splayed to the sides, and his face was buried in his hands. She took a couple quiet steps forward, and realized he was trembling.
Kyoko swallowed before softly calling out, “Makoto…?”
After five and a half seconds (she counted them while she waited, trying to focus on anything other than how small and fragile Makoto looked), he slowly lifted his head, his hands falling limply to the floor. When he looked at her, Kyoko had to force back a gasp.
Makoto’s eyes were wide and hazy, with his pupils shrunk into pinpricks. Tears streaked down his cheeks, curving around a crazed smile that stretched across his face. Her heart dropped at the sight of him. She knew the expression well, accompanied in her dreams by red acrylic nails and the feeling of soul-crushing despair. Two familiar things, but the wrong combination, like you stretched someone’s skin over someone else’s bones.
Seeing her eyes in his soft shade of hazel, and her grin pulling at his lips, was more terrifying than a flashing red bracelet and a ticking clock.
“Kyo… ko?” Makoto’s voice was choked and watery, like it was whenever he was trying not to cry, and it deceitfully made Kyoko’s heart twinge. As he stared at her, his smile fell, although his eyes stayed wide. “Is that… really you…?”
A lump swelled up in her throat, and she didn’t answer. As the seconds crawled by, his grin returned, this time with a rasping chuckle as he looked down again. “Ah, who am I kidding… it’s probably just another illusion…”
Caught up in his offbeat behavior, Kyoko took until then to notice the kitchen knife strewn on the floor, not even two feet from where he was sitting. Her natural instincts began to overpower her shock, and she took a tall step forward in the direction of the knife. “I’m not an illusion, Makoto, I’m… I’m right here.” She tried to sound reassuring, but her focus was split between how quickly Makoto could reach out and grab the knife, and how reminiscent he was of another lucky student, hazy on a simulation screen.
“That’s exactly something an illusion would say.” Despite the melancholy in his tone, his grin stretched wider. “That way I’d get my hopes up, and believe that you’re real, only to reach out to hug or kiss or punch or stab or strangle you-.” His voice quickened with every item on his list, and his breathing became ragged, until he cut himself off with a shaky sigh of happiness. “and my hand will just pass through you. And that would just be so… despairful .” He smiled, looking Kyoko dead in the eyes with swimming gray-green irises, and she shuddered.
“Makoto… what happened to you?” Kyoko somehow, through all of her confusion and fear, managed to keep her voice steady.
There was that damned laugh again, bumpy and lilting, but this time it was quieter. Like an adult humored by a pouting toddler, except twisted and warped into a haunting sound. “Oh, Kyoko… you’re a detective, aren’t you?” His expression flipped like a switch, and he gazed up at her with adoration, so sickeningly sweet it was saccharine. “You’re so smart, I’m sure you can figure it out!”
It was wrong. Everything about this was just so wrong . Even so, she kept her mask together, not letting a sliver of weakness shine through. “You’ve fallen into despair,” she answered, almost smoothly. The words tasted sour as the left her tongue.
“Ding ding ding!” He clapped his hands together like a child. “You got it right! Just like I knew you would!”
Makoto’s eyes dropped away from her face, traveling along the kitchen tiles before resting on the blade of the knife beside him, and her gut suddenly churned with familiar, ice-cold dread, sending a chill down her spine. Reaper’s footsteps . God, no, this couldn’t be happening, she wasn’t supposed to ever hear those near him, not this soon.
“Makoto-” Her sleep-lagged mind struggled to find the best possible course of action, but even if she could think straight, she wouldn’t know what to do. The situation was entirely new and foreign to her, and she had been thrown miles out of her comfort zone. Going with the most logical option she could think of, she took a step forward, subtly positioning herself to lunge for the weapon. His eyes flicked back and forth between it and her face, and her sense of urgency kicked into overdrive. “Makoto, don’t .”
He blinked up at her innocently. “Don’t what?” Kyoko’s heart sank to her feet as he reached out and grabbed the knife, slowly standing up from the ground on unsteady legs. He took a few slow steps forward, the kitchen knife swinging languidly at his side. Just a foot away from her, he stopped, drawing the blade up in front of him. “Don’t do… this?” On the last word, he snapped his arm up, the edge of the blade coming to rest against his throat.
Kyoko choked back a gasp, blind terror jolting through her. The knife was directly over his carotid, and he was just one wrist-jerk away from spilling his life out in front of her, and it couldn’t end like this, not after they had gotten this far.
“Makoto-” Her voice broke, and she swallowed thickly. “Makoto, listen to me.” She hesitated, choosing her next words ever-so-carefully as she shoved down the panic bubbling up inside her. “You don’t want to do this.”
Something in his mind seemed to click, and his face washed over with contemplation. “You’re right,” he said slowly, as if he was thinking it through. “I don’t.” Then, as the sickening grin returned to his face, he held out the knife so its blade was facing her. As she tensed her muscles to dodge, he flipped the knife around, so its handle was in her reach.
“I want you to.”
All of the thoughts racing through Kyoko’s mind screeched to a halt. She wasn’t expecting this; she couldn’t even comprehend the victorious smirk and absolute euphoria coming from the despairing man across from her. “...what?” she stammered out finally.
“I want you to kill me, Kyoko.” He sounded breathless, as if the exhilaration of his own murder was overwhelming.
Kyoko shook her head back and forth. “Makoto, I don’t understand-”
“It really isn’t that complicated.” His grin seemed to split his face in two, and his eyes were wide and crazed. “I want to feel the most despair possible, and what better way to do that than by dying at the hands of the one I love?”
He took another step forward, and Kyoko took one back. “Besides, this is what you have to do, right? I’m just gonna fall back into despair again and again until you end it all.” No, no, no, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening. “Oh, God, just the idea of you stabbing me through the heart is euphoric . Don’t you want to feel this, Kyoko? Don’t you want to feel this despair ?”
Makoto’s hand started to shake in the corner of her eye, and her mind was screaming at her to take the knife from him, but she was trapped within the haze of his eyes as they bore into hers. “C’mon, Kyoko, you’d love this feeling so much , it’s the most wonderful I’ve ever felt, and all you have to do is take this knife and stab me through the heart and watch me bleed and bleed an-”
Kyoko’s hand flashed out, jabbing him sharply in the temple. Makoto’s jaw fell slack, then his eyes rolled back in his head. As the knife slipped out of his hand and clattered to the floor, he crumpled forward into Kyoko’s arms. She barely managed to brace herself to catch him without toppling over.
She hadn’t meant to knock him unconscious. She was acting on pure instinct, allowing her hand to work ahead of her brain, recalling lessons taught by her grandfather years ago. And in all honesty, she was glad she did - she couldn’t stand to listen to those words in Makoto’s voice any longer.
After slowly lowering the two of them to the ground, and allowing herself a moment to breathe, she went into her room, grabbed their burner phone, and called Tsumiki.
Makoto woke to the sound of hospital machinery.
Rubbing his eyes open, he blinked around at his surroundings. He was definitely in a hospital, judging by all of the blinding, sterile white in the room; eventually, he recognized it as the Future Foundation’s private center. “Wha…? Why am I-”
“I knocked you out.”
Makoto whipped his head around at the interruption, and saw Kyoko sitting in a hospital chair beside him. She was wearing a jacket hastily thrown over her pajamas, and her hair was loose and tangled. When the faint ringing in his head finally registered, the events of the night before came flooding back to him.
Oh. He had fallen into despair; an eternal reminder left by the brainwashing videos. Kyoko had seen it, and dear god, he asked Kyoko to kill him-
“Kyoko…” Makoto murmured with a voice that sounded guilt-weighted, even to him, staring down at his hands. “I’m sorry I never told you about that video. I should’ve told you all about it as soon as everything from the Final Killing Game had calmed down.”
“Yes, you should have.” Kyoko’s voice was flat and neutral, and Makoto flinched. He hadn’t heard that tone in a long time, and he waited for her to berate him on his idiocracy, or to ask him if he really trusted her; ready for them to go right back to square one after all these years.
“But that’s not important right now,” she continued, and the warmth in her tone surprised him. Makoto felt a rough, scarred hand cover his, and his breath caught in his throat. He looked up to see her smiling softly at him, and he swore his heart monitor spiked up a bit. “What matters is that you’re okay.”
“Kyoko…” Makoto was breathless, whether by her words or the sheer exhaustion he felt, and he felt his lips pulling into a smile of his own as he turned his hand to latch onto hers. However, it didn’t last long, all of the paranoia in his mind weighing down his happiness. “But… what if it happens again?” He looked down at their hands. “What if it happens, and I actually hurt you? Or me? Or-” He couldn’t bear to finish that sentence.
“We’ll get through it. We always do.” Kyoko sounded unexpectedly confident, with a cadence to her voice he was used to hearing from his own. He thought back to the first few weeks after the Final Killing Game, where Kyoko had been laying where he was while he held her hand and flooded her with reassurances, and marveled at how the rules had reversed. “Besides-” A teasing inflection colored her next words. “-isn’t optimism your strong suit?”
Makoto couldn’t help but laugh, and it sounded so clean and clear to him (unlike the horrible cackling he half-remembered from the night before) that it chased away his lingering doubts. “Yeah,” he said in between giggles, “yeah, it is.”
“Whatever happens, I’ll stay by your side.” Kyoko’s smile never faded as she lifted their hands, closing her unoccupied one around them. “And I... I’ll love you no matter what.”
Makoto’s jaw dropped on instinct. He had heard Kyoko say “I love you” before, but rarely. He knew how difficult it was for her; she had confessed to him once about her fear with carrying the weight of the word - that one day it would tear itself out from the home it made in her heart and leave her to bleed. He had hugged her, then, and told her to take as long as she needed, and to say it whenever she wanted. Hearing it now, after everything that had happened, was almost too much to bear.
“Kyoko, I…” His eyes stung with unshed tears, but he grinned anyway, with a happiness so overpowering it felt like life itself ran through his veins. “I love you too.”
And for the two of them, that was enough.