Chapter Text
He should be happy.
Thrilled. Ecstatic.
To be alive at all was a miracle, to say nothing of this comfortable life spent surrounded by kind people on a picturesque resort island. Sequestered far, far away from horrors constructed by his own hands, that were still being dismantled slowly, painfully, by people who rightfully hate him and his cohort with a vitriol reserved only for the lowest trash of society. It was a life more than someone like him would ever have a right to. Something bright, peaceful, and full of hope for the future.
Nagito felt a dread so deep in his chest it sent bile into the back of his throat.
“Are you doing okay?”
Looking up from the open page he’d long since stopped reading, Nagito met a pair of worried, dull green eyes fixated on his face. They’d certainly caught the flinch he hadn’t been able to suppress.
With a weak laugh and an attempt to wave his visitor off, Nagito replied, “Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be? The sky is clear, the sunset is beautiful, and I’m enjoying a book in the company of lovely people.”
Hajime pursed his lips, looking unconvinced.
He ducked under the sun umbrella Nagito had camped himself out under hours ago, two yakitori skewers gripped in one hand and the other gesturing to the novel Nagito held in his lap. “You’ve been staring at that same page for twenty minutes.”
“Ah. So impressively observant,” Nagito praised, as he always did. For all it felt empty, it was honest. Ever since their island’s little party started, Hajime had been flitting up and down the beach at everyone’s beck and call. Despite alternating between barbecuing, mixing drinks, fixing a broken bluetooth speaker and “accidentally” spiking a volleyball into Kazuichi’s face (because he’d been getting on everyone’s nerves)–Hajime’d still kept a close enough eye on Nagito to notice something as insignificant as a wandering mind.
His stomach turned. When Hajime offered a skewer, Nagito smothered his nausea and took it. The thick, sweet smell of the tare sauce stuck to the back of his throat.
“Have you been drinking enough water?” Hajime asked. “It’s still hot, even in the shade.”
Nagito nodded his head at the chunky water bottle sitting two-thirds empty at his side.
Hajime looked at it, then trailed his eyes up Nagito’s left arm. His brow furrowed slightly. “Are you having any pain?”
“Your engineering is working just as perfectly as expected.” Nagito flexed his robotic fingers for emphasis, the metal joints quietly clicking together.
The furrow deepened, Hajime gnawing on his lower lip, “...Why don’t you come over and help me get the fireworks set up? I can’t decide on a good order for them.”
A bemused giggle slipped out despite himself. “Do you really want to put me near explosives? And besides, I’m sure someone as talented as you doesn’t actually need my input on anything.”
Hajime winced, grasping for a new excuse. “But–”
“I’m fine,” Nagito interrupted. He plastered on a smile, readjusting in his simple deckchair and waving to the umbrella that had been protecting his fair, burn-prone skin. “You were already kind enough to set me up a comfortable spot. You don’t need to make me feel any more included.”
“They don’t hate you,” Hajime said suddenly.
Nagito didn’t respond.
Hajime’s patience was clearly thinning, but instead of anger, his frown only pinched into more obvious worry. “You’re not putting anyone in danger just by existing near everyone, either. But you’re never going to fix things if you keep isolating yourself, so just try talking to them,” he urged. Hajime held out his open palm. “I’ll go with you.”
The silence stretched, cut only by distant laughter and waves breaking against the shore. The ocean wind ruffled Hajime’s frizzy hair, revealing glimpses of black roots that were otherwise kept meticulously dyed brown.
Eventually, someone started calling out Hajime’s name. Nagito nodded towards the sound.
“Go make yourself useful, Reserve Course.”
Hajime sighed, shoulders drooping and hand falling limply to his side with a soft smack. He watched Nagito for a moment longer with an intensity that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand. It was a struggle not to instinctually shrink back, Nagito’s whole body tense with the effort.
“Fine,” Hajime muttered, finally. “If that’s what you want.”
Disappointment was etched into his face even as he turned away, trudging back to the rest of their classmates through the sand. Sonia was waving to him, a gaggle of them clustered around a bonfire struggling to stay lit. Hajime called back an acknowledgement and picked up his pace.
Nagito felt a dozen muscles relax, like a rabbit that had successfully crammed itself far enough back into its burrow to be missed by a passing fox. His hammering pulse began to settle, no longer echoing in his ears.
But the lingering dread remained. The same familiar sense of foreboding that had followed him his entire life, gnawing at the back of his mind whenever something too good, too lucky had landed in his lap, and he was left waiting for the inevitable backlash.
They’d gotten a happy ending.
Nearly all of them had survived. The one who hadn’t had already been taken a long time ago.
Nagito hadn’t even been made to witness the worst of what the others had woken up to. From what he’d heard, Hajime had been the slowest of the “survivors” to pull himself out of the program, but the quickest to start putting everyone’s broken pieces back together. He’d shuffled people into surgeries he’d only just remembered he had the capacity to do, all before he’d even taken care of his own appearance–something Nagito had never actually seen, and only had the brief glimpses of undyed hair, dropped contacts, and hazy, indistinct memories to construct an image of in his mind.
Then, apparently, Hajime had spent day and night digging into the Neo World Program and developing something that could dive in and drag everyone out of their respective, endless… Dreams, Nagito supposed. A grueling cycle of tweaking the program, forcing a new person awake and easing them through the trauma that came with lucidity, then fixing their altered bodies with whatever could be scrounged up around the island or smuggled in by Makoto’s team. It should have all been impossible, and yet Hajime had pulled it off.
Nagito himself had been the last person to wake. As it turned out, the longer the time spent conscious in the program, the harder it was to pull someone back out of it. Since Nagito had purportedly been the last death–the last human death, at least–he’d been the most complicated to wake. Perhaps the prolonged trauma of the death game, and the fact Nagito personally had learned the truth of what they were outside that game, meant he had the least incentive to break from his lovely fantasy and face reality.
Either way, Akane had made sure to mention how Hajime had been glued to his little pod for days, taking cat naps on a futon he’d dragged to the lab and subsisting on protein bars because sitting down for a proper meal took too much time. Said just to make sure Nagito felt the appropriate level of guilt, of course.
Hajime, meanwhile, seemed to feel no resentment at all, and was also unaware he could detach himself from Nagito’s side now.
It had made some sense early on, when he’d been interrogating Nagito on his preferences for the prototype of his new arm, and then when he’d been observing his condition after the (extremely experimental) operation to affix it. It made less sense when Hajime assigned himself Nagito’s personal nurse and psychiatrist afterwards, but getting on a medication regimen that helped to ease his litany of physical and mental troubles probably benefitted the island population as a whole in the long run. Mikan had certainly taken no offense, and had been happy to continue avoiding Nagito like the plague.
It made concerningly little sense why Hajime kept trying to involve him in things, even going so far as to bring him along during their little impromptu siege on the Future Foundation headquarters. That hadn’t even been particularly long after he’d woken up, and however he may have helped was almost entirely accidental–though the opportunity to properly meet Makoto face-to-face had been exciting. It had all worked out in the end, at least. Maybe Hajime had just needed Nagito to fill out numbers for their spooky little video taking blame for the Foundation’s incompetence. It was a stretch, but maybe he could believe it.
But it made no sense why Hajime was trying so hard to be his friend.
No one else did. Not as though Nagito blamed them, of course. He hadn’t been popular even before everything happened, though most of his classmates hadn’t been openly hostile towards him. He was just the unpredictable, sycophantic kid best excluded from conversations where possible but tolerated if he butted his way into them. But that tolerance was gone, now.
Some of the kinder ones, or the ones he’d had something approaching a friendship with before–Sonia, Ibuki, Fuyuhiko–would at least respond if he asked something. The rest would leave the room when he walked in, act as though he didn’t exist, or chastise him for breathing in their vicinity.
Everyone except Hajime.
Hajime, who Nagito would have sneered at if they’d met as students, adding to the chorus of voices ridiculing him and his Reserve Course peers.
Hajime, who Nagito befriended, and then almost immediately yanked that trust away and dangled it mockingly over his head. Who had been provoked and disoriented by him at every opportunity.
Hajime, who Nagito tried to sabotage at every turn, challenged at every trial for selfish reasons utterly incomprehensible to him, until they culminated in a traumatic scene that failed in killing them all, only because it succeeded in killing the person closest to him. Hajime, who managed to successfully walk the tightrope over a second apocalypse, carrying everyone’s lives in his arms.
Hajime, who had more reason than anyone else to hate Nagito to his core.
Hajime, who had woken up, and instead treated Nagito with gentle hands and a kind smile.
Hajime.
Hajime…
“Hajime”.
The sunset washed the beach in a warm, golden glow, and Nagito watched his classmate’s dark shadows dance and stretch along the sand.
He wondered if he looked hard enough, long enough, he would see one of them stumble, finally betraying its near-perfect performance.
- - -
“Where did I put my stupid key,” Hajime mumbled, fishing around the bottom of his satchel full of party games and tupperware leftovers.
What the point of feigning a poor memory was, Nagito didn’t know.
He lingered at the edge of Hajime’s porch. “Why do you lock your door? Who’s going to break in?”
“I’d like to think no one,” he said, finally “remembering” he’d actually shoved the key in the pocket of his swim trunks, “but I’ve heard the stories of what Hiyoko and Teruteru would get up to. Anyways.” He looked back up at Nagito with a smile, eyes crinkling. His nose and cheeks were flushed with a sunburn, the rest of his skin a deep tan. He looked like a normal, handsome young man in his tacky, half-buttoned Hawaiian shirt–save for the litany of faded scars littering his arms and legs. “Thanks for helping me clean up. I know it's late, and you didn’t even use half of that stuff.”
“It’s the least someone as useless–”
“–not useless,” he interjected.
“–as I could do,” Nagito finished, waving him off. “And I wanted to ask you something privately, regardless.”
“Oh?” Hajime popped his cottage door open and tossed the satchel inside with a graceless thunk, before leaning casually against the door frame. “Are you going to tell me you’re in love with me, again?”
Nagito wanted to vomit.
To be honest, he wasn’t sure where the sudden shot of bravery came from. If he could call it bravery–his pulse was jackrabbiting so fast he could feel his heart in his throat, and cold sweat was sticking to his palms. The idea of asking what he’d wanted to ask for weeks, months even, made his insides churn. But the thought of continuing on like this, waking up every morning, plastering on a smile and playing house, made him even more nauseous. He wanted to dig into his skin and rip his stomach out.
He laughed, instead. “No, no, how could I ever insult you like that again?” He would regret that moment of cruelty until he was finally, genuinely dead. It had been the truth, that confession. But the words he’d used carried a sick irony, now. “Though, it is a bit of an odd question.”
Hajime cocked his head. “Hit me.”
Nagito’s smile felt like his skin was tearing in half. “That video game you always played with Chiaki after school.”
“What about it?”
“Can you tell me what it was called?”
The temperature plummeted. Maybe it was the breeze kicking up. Maybe Nagito was just going mad. Hajime’s expression didn’t change, polite curiosity frozen in place.
After a moment, he replied softly, “I didn’t think you were interested in games.”
“I’m not,” Nagito said.
“Right.” Hajime eyes never broke with Nagito’s, even as he shifted off the door frame, standing stock straight. They were always unnaturally bright, even in the dim moonlight. The kind of thing you’d see staring at you from within dense underbrush, deep into the forest. “Then why do you ask?”
Because Nagito already knew the name. Chiaki had mentioned it once before, and it had lodged in his brain because the idea of an Ultimate as wonderful as her spending her evenings with a shitty Reserve Course student was unthinkable to him.
It wasn’t until he’d read the student files that he’d made the connection and realized who that student had been.
Nagito swallowed past the tightness in his throat, ignored the ache in his chest, and answered,
“Because Chiaki was important to him.”
The face in front of Nagito was carefully blank, the whole body slack and void of emotion. His skin crawled like a thousand insects burrowed inside him.
Nagito repeated himself, slowly, deliberately. “Can you tell me the name of the last game they played together?”
Those eyes finally, mercifully closed.
“No.”
It was impossible to read the feeling in that voice. Resignation, disappointment, boredom, or maybe nothing at all.
Nagito swallowed bile the same time a crazed laugh bubbled out of him. “That’s what I thought.”
A sliver of muddy green reappeared, but stayed downcast and shadowed by long eyelashes. “Was that all you wanted to ask?”
Yes. And yet, something else spilled from Nagito’s mouth before his brain had a moment to catch up.
“Was it fun, lying to us this whole time?”
The harsh sea wind stirred the leaves in the trees around the cottages, cicadas shrieking from their depths. The screaming was simultaneously piercing and muffled. It made Nagito’s head pound.
Eventually, the body stepped further back into Hajime’s cottage, pressing a hand to the door beside it.
“Good night, Komaeda.”
Nagito smiled.
He smiled, smiled, smiled so he couldn’t scream until his lungs were ripped from his chest in a bloody heap.
“Good night, Kamukura.”
The door closed, locking with a sharp click.
- - -
Izuru didn’t want to get out of bed.
He hadn’t slept. He’d never slept well. He hadn’t been made with rest in mind.
But the bed was warm, and soft, and silent, and his.
No one was watching him.
He hadn’t been that surprised when Komaeda had confronted him. Komaeda had been increasingly distant, every effort Izuru made to pull him closer only served to send him scrambling further back. Izuru had been acting exactly the same way Hajime would have, so it was hard to tell what had tipped him off. But Komaeda had never been a rational man, least of all when it came to Hajime. Maybe he’d been observing Izuru intently enough to pick up on the most minuscule of differences, or maybe he had just been paranoid and took a wild swing that happened to hit. Either way, he’d been right.
Izuru hadn’t thought this would last forever. But he’d at least thought he could keep the facade going longer than a measly six months. Maybe long enough to blur the sharp divide between who he was and who the others desired him to be. Long enough that he could forget, too.
Alas. What was another failure to add to the list.
Sunlight stubbornly slipped through the curtains drawn tightly closed. It would only be more suspicious if Izuru hid in the cottage all day.
There was still the possibility of recovering things. Not with Komaeda, but Komaeda had little sway over the rest of the island. Going about life like normal would be the smartest thing Izuru could do. He pushed himself up and out from his burrow under the thick comforter, moving mindlessly through the steps he took every morning.
Bathroom. Start the hot water. Take medication. Shower. Shave. Brush teeth.
Trim away the rapid hair growth on the scalp. Leave enough to cover the scar. Bleach and box dye the roots when they get too obvious. Put in the green contacts Naegi had been kind enough to send, to help with “mental health” and “body dysmorphia”.
Bedroom. Dress in simple, boring clothes. Grab the worn, red and white hairclip off the bedside table and tuck it into the deepest pocket.
Check the mirror. Practice expressions. Smile. Laugh.
He was a perfect replica. Of course he was. The face staring back at Izuru through the dusty mirror belonged to Hajime. It would only ever be Hajime’s.
And that was for the best. That was what they wanted. They wanted to see Hajime, and Izuru could give them that, perfectly. He had been made to bring hope, and these were the last people on Earth capable of receiving it from him, so long as they didn’t know who “he” was.
Things would be fine, if he just did what he had been made to do in the first place.
Things would have been fine, if he had just done that from the start.
Izuru glanced at the clock. He normally made a habit of waking early and helping Hanamura prepare breakfast, and it was long since sunrise. But last night had been a long party and a lot of alcohol. Sleeping in would be plenty believable. He took one last look over at the body in the mirror, then grabbed his key and headed outside.
The weather was fine. Puffy white clouds dotted the sky, the summer sun warm without yet becoming oppressive. The rainy season was on the horizon, and he would need to help reinforce some of the older buildings for typhoons, later.
No one was around.
For an island so lightly populated, the stretch between the cottage lane and the hotel they used for socializing always seemed to be bustling with some nonsense or other. This morning, all Izuru could hear was the sound of his own sneakers tapping against the stone. There was no half-asleep shuffling from behind the neighboring cottage doors, or distant splashing from morning laps in the pool. Considering all the mismatched schedule preferences, it was a special occasion to get everyone together for breakfast at once. Izuru wasn’t sure that conclusion was more or less comforting than the idea everyone had simply vanished in the night.
They hadn’t, though. The muffled voices leaking from the second story of the hotel confirmed that, as Izuru passed by the pool and up to the front steps. Loud, impassioned voices all overlapping each other in an incomprehensible mess. Izuru quietly pressed open the door and stepped into the lobby at the same time an indignant yelp echoed down the stairwell.
“You’re insane!”
Soda.
“Why are you still trying to get us to turn on each other?!”
Owari.
“This freak’s just mad Hajime won’t fuck him, I bet.”
Saionji.
“Will everyone just calm down for a second, please!”
Nevermind.
“I’m not listening to a lying creep!”
Koizumi.
“Everyone just shut the FUCK up!”
Kuzuryu.
The cacophony settled with that last deafening command. Izuru made sure to lighten his steps on the stairs, hesitating just before the door to the restaurant. Through the wooden boards seeped a softer voice, hoarse and reedy.
“Please,” Komaeda begged. “Please believe me. I’m telling the truth. Please.”
Someone started to bite back, but a sharp “shush” cut them off. Nevermind’s gentle, accented voice followed. “We believe you–”
“We?!” A low bellow. Nidai.
“–we believe you,” she reiterated, “In regards to what happened last night. But Nagito, don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions..?”
Tanaka hummed an agreement. “A traumatized mind is an unreliable one, even for greater beings.”
“He wouldn’t forget something like that!” Komaeda cried. “And it doesn’t even matter, he didn’t even try to defend himself!”
“He probably just said whatever would get you off his back!” Soda argued.
A low, monotone voice piped in. Pekoyama. “Hajime has been forthcoming about his identity this entire time. He has never denied that part of him, so there was nothing to defend.”
“He’s just rubbing salt in old wounds,” Hanamura mumbled right after.
“I’m telling you guys, he’s just fucking crazy,” Saionji droned over everyone, voice laced with venom. “He’s an ugly, bitter little loser who’s only happy if we’re all miserable. Just tie him up again and chuck him in the ocean this time, or something. He’ll probably do something even more nuts if we don’t–”
Her words were drowned out by a shrill, misplaced giggle. Komaeda’s response was muffled, likely by his own hands holding back a sob.
“You really don’t believe me. Hajime is dead, and none of you believe me!”
He wailed, and cried, and laughed. A horrifying, ugly sounding thing.
They didn’t believe him. Of course they didn’t.
It would be comically easy to cement everyone’s opinions against Komaeda. They were already making up excuses for Izuru without him even being there. He could make Komaeda “mysteriously” go missing tomorrow and half of them would pop champagne. He could continue this charade without a single blip, all because the wrong person figured him out.
It would be easy.
Izuru opened the door, immediately silencing the overlapping chorus of voices, save for one person’s wet, ragged breathing.
Nevermind gasped, startled. “Oh, Hajime–”
It would be easy.
He’d grown used to being looked at kindly. Looked at like someone dearly loved.
“You should believe him,” Izuru said. “He’s right.”