Chapter Text
At the end of everything, it all came rushing back.
Arguments with Ryutaro. Slamming the door in his face. Her first time in Hope’s Peak. Meeting her classmates. Meeting her classmates again. Boring classes that lasted forever. Sleepovers in each other’s dormitories. Yamoto’s antics. Yukki’s apathetic glare. Satsuki confiding in Maki about her crush on Haruhiko. Akane’s nervous energy. Mikako’s endless supply of sweets. Mitch’s corny advances. Mitch bashing her head in with a hammer. Yukki’s cheerful demeanor. Sprinting through the halls with her friends. A claw impaling an upperclassman. Students throwing themselves from rooftops. The parade. Finally breaking down Rei’s icy exterior. Shooting a hoard of Monokuma’s through teary eyes. The siege of the Kisaragi foundation. Blood gushing from her head.
Memories spilled onto the laundry room floor, mixing with brain matter and chunks of skull. Maki didn’t care. She couldn’t move an inch, forced to lay helplessly at the feet of someone she once called a friend, her eyes level with Mitsuhiro’s bloodstained shoes.
Blood. Blood was everywhere. It trickled down her back and onto the cold tile, pooling around her limp form. She couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. She realized too late that it was her own.
Puzzle pieces snapped into place in her final moments, parts of the whole she hadn’t known were missing. As everything slotted into place, she thought she saw Mitch move.
‘Huh,’ She thought, somewhat surprised by her own lack of fear, ‘So that’s what happened…’
Though she lacked the strength to close her eyes, the world went dark anyway. She heard footsteps moving throughout the room, and then someone’s arms slipped under her legs and torso, was someone picking her up?
She felt the floor fall out from beneath her, matted hair – saturated pink – falling over her eyes, dripping and staining the floor beneath her.
Maki didn’t think anything after that.
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She woke up in the girls’ bathroom, which immediately struck her as odd, seeing how she couldn’t remember how she got there.
Outside of the stabbing pain in the back of her head and her inherent disgust at having slept on the floor of a public restroom, Maki found herself rather alert for a victim of attempted murder.
Naturally, upon recalling that small tidbit, Maki immediately stumbled to her feet, whirling around in a blind panic, scoping her surroundings for any sign of Mitsuhiro. She was ready to fight if she had to, disadvantaged or not. God, what was he thinking? Doing that to her of all people! She couldn’t believe his stupidity. She trusted that idiot – he even saved her life, not so long ago.
Or… maybe long ago? How much time had passed between getting ambushed at the Kisaragi Foundation and now?
Priorities, Maki.
She searched the stalls and around corners, anywhere the soccer player might be lying in wait. Lucky for her, she found nothing. Her shoulders slumped, only then allowing herself to relax. With one problem momentarily solved, she turned her attention to the next.
She felt along the back of her head, assessing the damage. It hurt something awful, and she hissed as her fingertips grazed the open wound.
Her hand came back stained bright pink – a terrible sign. Maki had been trained in CPR and first aid, and though she was no ultimate nurse, she knew enough to know bleeding from the head was really, really bad. Her heart sank into her toes as she reached back again, only to come away with more blood on her fingers. The sight was enough to make her woozy.
She had to keep her head on straight, however. There was no time to waste. She needed to find help. She needed to get out of Mitch’s reach. She needed to find Inori so the smaller girl could stop the bleeding. If anyone could patch her up, it would be her, after all. Plus, if Inori was around, Kakeru was probably not far behind. She’d seen the lawyer bench press three times her weight without breaking a sweat, he’d defend her at a moment's notice. That settled it, she needed to get back to the dormitories.
She stepped forward, about to break into a sprint, when she suddenly stopped in her tracks, a sudden thought entering her mind.
How did she know Kakeru could lift so much? She hadn't spent much time with Kakeru in the past few days, much less watched him work out, why would she immediately assume he and Inori would be together, anyway? Either the blood loss was getting to her or she’d sustained more brain damage than she’d thought, but then, once again, a barrage of memories flooded her mind, instantly bringing her to her knees.
Now with a moment to actually think about what all that meant, Maki felt faint.
“There’s no way. There’s no fucking way. This can’t be happening!” She cried, her voice echoing in the empty bathroom.
There was too much to reconcile in the moment. She had to focus. One thing at the time. She needed to find Inori.
She mustered enough strength to lean back on her haunches, testing her balance. She leaned back a little too far, however, and landed on her butt, her head bumping into something.
‘Jeez, right in the head wound!’ She lamented, turning around to see what she’d hit.
Maki considered herself to be a pretty tough cookie. She didn’t run away from a fight, hell, she started fights more often than not, besides, she had to have some grit in the sharpshooting scene. All that to say, there wasn’t a lot that could truly shake her.
Still, when coming face to face with her own hanging body, she screamed.
Nononononononononononononono…
Her eyes were still open, half lidded, no light reflected in them. She stared blankly into space, entirely unaware of her surroundings – unaware of the other Maki retching at her feet, shaking violently, yet unable to cough up anything other than saliva.
“No, no, please no, God! Oh God, please no.” She whimpered between breaths, unable to stop herself from glancing up, catching a glimpse at the…thing, before doubling over again.
This was too much. She could handle losing her entire family. She could handle the world ending. She could handle being thrown into a killing game by a psychotic teddy bear. She could handle a myriad of things. But this? Maki couldn’t handle this. She couldn’t handle coming face to face with her own dead body. She couldn’t handle the translucent tinge to her own skin that she’d somehow missed before, yet was quite obvious under the fluorescent lighting.
Maki didn’t even believe in ghosts. But she also didn’t believe that any of her friends would turn on each other. She’d made that mistake twice already.
She didn’t even understand what happened. How she got there, why she was hanging. Why would Mitch do this to her? They used to be friends. They were friends. Right?
But that wasn’t the Mitch she knew. The Mitch she knew was an arrogant asshole at the start of the year, but who mellowed out and became an smarmy yet adorable goofball after only a few months of being around people who wouldn’t take his shit. The Mitch that saved her life then asked her out in the same breath. The one that made her feel pretty even though she wouldn’t go out with him in a million years.
Seemingly, they were the same person. Mitch would do this to her. Desecrate her like this. And for what? They would’ve been okay. They just had to keep their hopes up. Someone would have come for them eventually.
No, they wouldn't have. They were on an island. This wasn’t Hope’s Peak, but a cruel facsimile. She could see it clear as day now. She knew what the outside world was like; what it’d been reduced to. They ran to the Kisaragi Foundation for a reason.
Nobody was coming for them.
Maki broke.
She cried, she writhed, she continued to dry heave till it was clear that there was nothing in her stomach to heave. She screamed, she cried for her mom, her dad, for Ryutaro. She cried for Haruhiko and Satsuki, she cried for everyone till her voice gave out, but still, nobody came. Nobody came because nobody heard her. Because nobody can hear a ghost.
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She looked everywhere, but she couldn’t find anyone.
After prying herself out of the well of her own self-pity, Maki stumbled towards the dorms, banging on doors, shouting for her friends to “Wake the fuck up already!” to no response.
She’d about had a heart attack when she slammed herself against Haru’s door when jiggling the lock didn’t work, only to be suddenly thrown into a freefall, colliding with the floor on the opposite side of the door.
Of course, ghost powers. Why not? She should’ve expected this.
Unfortunately, unless everyone had been miraculously rescued in the some-odd hours since her untimely demise, it appeared that Maki had no access to the land of the living. That included getting to haunt her classmates, apparently.
Her skin crawled at the thought of being completely alone in this new environment. She’d always hated being by herself. She thrived in groups, she lived to see her friends. To be unequivocally isolated from the outside world… that would be her personal hell.
She wondered if anyone had found her by now. Enough time had passed, surely. It wasn’t like Mitch had hidden her body. Someone was bound to stumble upon her sooner than later.
A fresh wave of nausea rolled over her at the thought.
She didn’t want to imagine her friends finding her. She didn’t want to picture their faces turning blue from shock when they found her body. She didn’t want to guess who’d find her first. Any way she sliced it, it ended with the world as they knew it ending and the course of their lives forever changed.
It was enough to make her want to rush back to the girls bathroom, to cut herself down from the makeshift noose and arrange herself in a more peaceful manner to somehow soften the blow.
“Soften the blow?” HA.
She continued to search for signs of life, but found nothing. Everything was just as it’d been left when she died.
With nothing else to do, she returned to her room, if only to lie down and wallow in her misery a little longer. She deserved some wallowing, after the day she’d had.
She paused with her hand on the doorknob, an oddity catching her eye.
She stepped back, glanced back and forth between her room and the one next to hers, gears turning in the back of her mind.
She opened her door, stepping inside, the row of guns displayed on the walls confirming with a single glance that it was indeed her room.
So, why did it say it was Tsurugi Kinjo’s on the nameplate?
Maki was never one for puzzles. She preferred things to be as straightforward as possible, so while it certainly caught her attention, she didn’t give much thought to that particular detail, instead flopping down on her bed, curling into the fetal position, hugging herself for comfort, glad that she could at least still sink into the mattress and the feel the warmth of the blankets, if nothing else.
She didn’t realize she was still bleeding till she gazed through tired eyes out at the room, spotting a bloodtrail that betrayed her every move.
She didn’t know if ghosts could use cleaning supplies, but that was an issue for another day. Who knows, maybe she’d move on to an actual afterlife while she slept, instead of this waking nightmare.
She wasn’t so lucky.
As Maki soon found out, not even death could stop Monokuma from bothering her.
She was startled out of a tortured sleep to the bear's shrill voice gleefully booming over the intercoms,
“A body has been discovered!”
Immediately she shot up, vision swimming momentarily from the sudden shift in perspective.
She hoped that she wouldn’t spend eternity with a headache, though things were hardly going her way so far, so she wasn’t getting her hopes up.
It took a moment to process what the announcement actually meant, outside of serving as the world’s worst wake up call.
A body… Oh…
So, they’d found her.
It took longer than she’d expected.
She thought back to what Monokuma had said upon their arrival, about how anyone who decided to kill would first have to pass a class trial before escaping. If her memory was correct, then upon the discovery of her body an investigation period would start, where everyone would then be forced to investigate her murder and solve the case like some twisted form of Clue.
The thought of her classmates – her friends – being forced to examine her corpse was sickening. She just hoped they wouldn’t be too traumatised by what they found.
That led her to another thought. Mitch would have to get away with the crime, which meant that he likely staged her body to throw off the others. After all, why else would he hang her? She was whacked on the back of the head. She hadn’t examined herself too thoroughly to see whether he’d cleaned up the bloody mess that was her skull, but surely it’d be obvious that she hadn’t hung herself or died by suffocation. Hell, they had a surgeon on standby! If Mitch thought he could sneak anything past Inori he was dumber than she thought.
Of course, he’d somehow avoided getting pummeled by a machine gun in order to string her up in the girl’s bathroom, so obviously he was somewhat creative. Too bad he never applied that same ingenuity to his studies, but it wasn’t like grades mattered much in this new world…
Wow, it was weird having a backlog of memories return out of the blue. A lot of it contrasted with what she’d taken as fact over the past week. It felt like looking into a parallel reality, a real life spot the difference. Her head was sent spinning just thinking about it.
Alone in the halls of “Hope’s Peak”, Maki had plenty of time to mull it all over. She couldn’t be certain how this whole “haunting” schtick worked, but as long as her circumstances weren't some cosmic fluke, there was a high chance she wouldn't be alone for long.
She’d reassured Yuki that nobody would kill anyone. She preached about keeping their spirits up and having a positive attitude, not realizing that at that very time, Mitsuhiro was plotting her demise.
Her blood boiled just thinking about him. A shiver ran down her spine, imagining the look on his face when she walked through the door before he swung the hammer without a word.
She trusted him. She shouldn’t have, but she did. Even without her memories of her school life she still followed that note to her death.
She fell for the oldest trick in the book. Wasn’t that the first rule of mystery novels? Don’t follow the suspicious note telling you to meet in a secluded place and to tell no one where you’re going. She heard her brother’s voice in her head, mumbling about his stupid sister. Maki liked to think she was smart. Not Rei smart, but smart enough to have some common sense.
It became evident that it wasn’t just her skull that was shattered, but her confidence as well.
No, that wouldn’t do. She rolled her shoulders back, forcing herself to raise her chin up in defiance to the circumstances. So what? She was dead. She’d get over it. For now she was still trapped in a mystery box that was this faux academy, and as of now, she was the only one capable of solving any of it.
She said a silent prayer to her friends, hoping against all odds that they’d be alright. She wasn’t sure if she could include Mitch, that was still too fresh of a wound. Regardless, she set off to investigate.
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Rooms, rooms, rooms. Classrooms, bathrooms, dorm rooms, Maki grew frustrated by the amount of ground she’d covered with annoyingly little to show for it. She wasn't entirely sure what she was even looking for, after a while. She was dead, it wasn’t like there was a special button she could press that would magically teleport her back into her body. The most she could hope for was to fumble her way into uncovering some secret they’d somehow missed.
But what if she did? Then what? It wasn’t like she could tell anyone. She couldn’t help anyone now.
However, that didn’t stop the mysteries from itching at her. None of this made a lick of sense to Maki, from how she lost her memories to how she could hear the Monokuma announcement when she was supposedly alone.
She saw no signs of life, aside from herself. The only things that moved were things she touched with her own hands. The kitchen showed no signs of being used despite plenty of time having passed, enough for both breakfast and lunch to have come and gone by her estimation. It didn’t make any sense. Maki didn’t know if anything she did here affected the real world, otherwise she was certain Mikako would’ve busted out the ouija board the moment she sensed a supernatural presence. Heck, even Kinji would’ve noticed had something went spiritually awry. So, for now, she was forced to operate under the impression that she was completely isolated from the living world. That sucked, but wasn’t wholly unexpected.
It was hours into her investigation that she noticed it. In the entrance hall, where there had once been a solid carpeted wall, now stood an open elevator. She did a double take, racking her memories, certain that no such apparatus existed in either version of Hope’s Peak; not in this spot, at least. That only fueled her curiosity, and with literally nothing left to lose, she stepped inside.
She didn’t expect pushing the buttons to do anything, so she jumped when a ding rang out, and suddenly the elevator roared to life, the doors shutting before Maki could react, slamming shut and trapping her inside.
Okay, maybe she did have something to lose, she wasn’t sure if she could die twice, but death by elevator sounded a lot more gnarly than a blow to the head, and she really didn’t want to give herself any more brain damage.
Thankfully, the worst didn’t come to pass, as the elevator functioned exactly as intended. Maki felt her stomach flip as she slowly descended anyway, the large shuttle ferrying her down, down, down.
That didn’t make any sense, as even though there was a basement in Hope’s Peak, it didn’t take that long for an elevator to travel the distance between floors. Maki readied herself for anything as the elevator finally screeched to a stop, the doors inching open to reveal a place that Maki had never seen before in her life.
“What the hell?” She said, her voice echoing in the large chamber.
What stood before her was a crude mockery of a courtroom, complete with gaudy decorations and a throne where the judge’s chair would have sat. Below stood a bunch of smaller platforms, each with a podium that made a circle in the middle of the large room. Tentatively she stepped forward, vigilant to her surroundings, kicking herself for not bringing one of the weapons from her room for protection.
“Stupid even in death, Maki,” She berated herself for her lack of forethought, but it was too late to go back up now, who knew if this room would close off again the second she went back upstairs.
She stood in the center of the circle. Glancing at each one podium, all empty, save for one.
She blanched, taken aback by the sight of her own face staring back at her. A picture on a stand, right where a person would be, except her portrait had been graffitied with a large X that covered her features.
“That’s… fucked…”
She examined the area some more, bouncing on the velvet lined throne, checking for anything that gave a clue as to the room's purpose. It hit her surprisingly late.
“Class trial. Of course!”
Everything else about the whole killing game was distasteful as hell, why would she expect the class trial to be any different?
So this was where everyone would battle it out, turn against one another and inevitably sentence someone to death. She hoped for their sakes that they got it right, at least. She didn’t want to see any of her friends here before their time. Someone had to get off this island. Someone needed to find her mom and dad to tell them she wasn’t coming home. Someone needed to look out for Ryutaro. She didn’t know how long she’d been gone, but it couldn’t have been that long, surely. He was a teenager now. Maybe as old as she was when she first left for Hope’s Peak.
She wished she’d been kinder to him, given him a proper goodbye. She’d trade anything just to give her little brother a really big hug, right about now.
Dejected, and with nowhere else to go, Maki slumped beside her podium, her picture taunting her. She turned away, staring out into the empty courtroom, the endless silence closing in.
There was nothing she could do now, except wait.
She’d never felt so hopeless.
Later, when it became clear that nobody else was coming, Maki returned to her room, where she spent hours laying in bed in a futile attempt to sleep off eternity. In reality, she only succeeded in acting like a slug until she was finally pulled from her lethargy by a faint bump from somewhere outside her room.
After only a day, Maki was unsettled by how quickly she’d adjusted to isolation. Her heart rate quickened and adrenaline spiked at the faintest hint of something other than her existing in this space.
She froze, unable to discern what her next move should be. She couldn’t be one hundred percent certain she’d heard anything – for all Maki knew, she just had a jumpstart on going completely cuckoo.
So, she lay very, very still and listened; holding her breath, waiting for something to happen.
Thump
Yeah, something was definitely out there.
Friend or foe, Maki wasn’t taking any chances. She reached for her rifle, triple checking that the barrel was full.
Ear against the door, she listened for any signs her mark was drawing closer, confirmation she gleaned immediately.
Whoever it was, they were shuffling down the hall, feet scraping against the floor, by the sounds of it. Their footfalls were heavy, causing them to sound closer than they actually were, they were at least at the end of the hall.
With a deep breath, Maki pushed open the door.
Through the sight, she scoped the area, landing on a tall figure that, true to her deduction, stood opposite her at the end of the dormitories.
It looked like a person – or what used to be one. They were tall, hunched, and completely unrecognizable. Flesh had melted together, patches of skin having sloped off, exposing bone in areas. Clothing clung to the gnarled frame, singed, some parts attached by a only single thread. The arms and legs were contorted beyond measure, as if they’d been broken in several places. Maki didn’t understand how it was even standing, much less walking. She felt the familiar urge to vomit.
It saw her. She couldn’t see its eyes beyond the heavy scarring but it must’ve seen her somehow. It picked up its pace, shambling towards her on broken legs. She heard damaged bone snapping some more with each step, knees buckling but the figure kept moving. The thing must’ve been running on nothing but adrenaline.
At a loss for what to do, Maki did what she was best at. Barreling ahead without thinking.
She closed the distance between them in two big strides, bringing the butt of the gun up high over her head, slamming it down on the creature.
It stumbled, disoriented, slumping against the wall, gurgling in what might’ve been pain.
And for the second time in twenty-four hours. Maki ran away screaming.
She really couldn’t make a habit out of this.
She retreated back into her dorm, slamming the door and locking it. She fell against it, hyperventilating, vision spotting as her airways constricted. Still, she’d been spotted, and she could hear the thing using the wall to pull itself up, continuing its slow march towards her door.
She clutched the rifle to her chest like a child would a teddy bear. A million thoughts running through her head.
The main one being: who was that?
Second one being: What the FUCK happened after she died?
Maki wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to either.
Unfortunately, she didn’t think she’d have a choice.