#muradarai

None of this stops you from envisioning the horrific things that could be done to his body, that almost were done to his body.  And for a split second you wonder, every morning, if this moment is the most terrified you’ve ever been, as your eyes wretch open and you gasp for a shaky breath.  It’s the same, it’salways the same.   He isn’t cut open at the stomach, or being actively skinned alive, begging you to drive a stake into his heart and put an end to that unimaginable amount of pain.  He’s sleeping beside you, or maybe you woke him up again.  But he’s okay.

He knows, too.  He’s told you that you scream in your sleep sometimes.  Occasionally about your brothers, but mostly about him.  It isn’t anything foreign to him, though.  He’s been screaming in his sleep since the night that you and your broken body somehow carried him out of the school.

You always hold him when he wakes up.  Sometimes you talk to him until he falls back asleep, telling him decade-old stories about you and your brothers that he’s heard a hundred times before.  Sometimes you softly hum the melody of a song that you know his mother used to sing to him as a child when he was sick.  You know your voice isn’t particularly soft, or melodic, and your pitch is never quite right, but it soothes him enough to send him back to sleep, even if it’s for only another half an hour before he’s plagued with shakes and nightmares again.  

And then sometimes, if the nightmare was about you, and only if he asks it of you and you know he means it, you make love to him then and there.  

Making love in the middle of the night like that is much different than any other time of day, be it by the formality of candlelight or the quiet playfulness of midmorning.  There are nights when you can go for hours and hours, orgasms upon orgasms, and there are days when you lift him onto the counter or against the back wall and just fuck him until he can’t breathe.  It’s not always soft, but it’s always tender, it’s always loving.  (Between the two of you and all you’ve seen, all you’ve been through, there’s no way it could be anything but.) Even so, no small amount of tenderness can come close to those moments after he believed he lost you for good, when he needs desperately to be held, to be touched, to be reassured that you’re there, you’re there, and you’re staying.

This time he dreamt that you were taken apart, piece by piece, fed some tar-black drug through a needle to keep you awake through the whole ordeal.  When he told you, he half screamed it, and even as you move inside of him now, you can feel his fingertips search your skin for scissures.  

If you thought he was crying from pain, you would stop.  But his legs wrap around your hips to pull you as deep as you can go, to take you to the hilt, body arching up to meet yours halfway.  He wants to touch as much of you as possible, as though the parts of you that he saw shredded apart with a bonesaw could be plastered back together in your sweat and your trembles.  

It’s almost overwhelming how much smaller his hands are than yours.  You could easily snap his bones if you wanted to, and that’s part of why you barely press on them at all, even as you slide your palm from his forearm to his wrist, and then as you slip your fingers in the crevices between his.  Your other arm rests beneath you, supporting the weight of the two of you on your elbows, as you hold him tight against your chest by the small of his back.

He pulls you deeper still, the air of the bedroom silent and still besides hot, labored panting and the shifting of sheets beneath and above your bodies.  It’s a bit warm in the room for you, especially to be making love, but years ago he told you offhandedly that cold weather makes his muscles ache.

Even as the room grows louder, grows hotter, and you can feel the inner part of his thighs shudder around the space between your hips and your waistline, you can tell that his goal isn’t orgasm.  He intends to do this until you run out of moonlight, or until you collapse, or both.  To touch you everywhere he can reach, to have you touch him everywhere that you can reach.

His face and yours are mere millimeters apart now, and your lips graze one another every three or so thrusts.  And then there’s a moment, where his hand twitches underneath your own - his breathing turns to soft whines, you feel him tighten around you.  You know he doesn’t want it to be over, and you slow.  

The hand that was intertwined with his travels the length of his arm, of his body, to meet the other one underneath him.  It’s only when you hold him like this, so close, so completely, that you understand how small, how fragile -

…There’s sobs coming from between his teeth.  You feel a sharp digging of pain along your spine, but you allow him to burrow his nails into your skin without complaint.  He’s anchoring you, holding your body here on earth with him as he fights with his own fear that you will vanish into thin air if he so much as loosened his grip.  You know.  You’ve had those nights.  

As much as you hate yourself for it, he has nicks and scars along his backbone for that very reason.

The “I love you” is whispered in a shudder, half-breaking over the sob still caught in his throat.  

By the ninth, the twelfth, the seventeenth, you know that it’s probably jutting out of your skin.  If you don’t stop, you might drive the jagged piece through the artery where your jaw meets your neck and bleed yourself out.  If you don’t, you’ll keep going. You’ll snap your neck, surely, on one of these collisions, or fracture every bone in your shoulders, in your spine, in everything that’s slamming against what you presume is the weakest part of the door.  You’ll disintegrate your bones from the outside in, grinding them to dust as they continue to break, to pierce your skin, and to be sanded down by collision on collision on collision on collision - 

You might have left to find something bigger to throw against it if you felt you had the time.  Hell, it may have even saved you time that you’re currently wasting, breaking your body against a thick layer of metal that won’t so much as shift under all of your weight coming at it over and over.  The door isn’t giving.  Your body will be in splinters by the time you so much as dent the deadbolt.  You know it’s inefficient, you know it’s never going to work, but you can’t bring yourself to look for another option.

There’s a sliver of an opening at the very bottom.  It’s why you're terrified to leave them.

You...you can hear their voices.  

You can hear his voice.

And all of the crunching, the gushing, the cracking around it.  

I-I’m s-s-s-sorr...r - y.  You hear him sob.  He’s crying so hard that he can barely hitch his breath into that pathetic, forceful squeal that you hear next.  

I-I- I- I - ‘ mmm S-s-s....

Crunch.  

S-s or...I’ m s-s

Squelch.  

Sorr....y, I’m sorry I’m sorry I-I-I-I-I-I-I’mmmmmmmm - sorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryims-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s- ....

Snap.

You only register that your legs have given out beneath you when you feel your nails dig into them.  You could be drawing blood underneath your jeans.  You don’t know.  You really don’t care.  

... And then suddenly you’re caught between accepting one of two equally true, and equally incapacitating realities.  It has to be one or the other.  If you accept both, you may never move again.  

You either accept the fact that your body is far too broken to help anyone, that this door is never going to crack, that the students inside are completely and entirely at the mercy of both one another and Enoshima’s ability to keep her word - 

Or you accept that with every squelch, with every crunch, with every unmistakable clang of metal hitting fragile, hollow bone...

Every splash of human flesh hitting against the walls like common ground meat...

...

...It’s relief.  You’re feeling relief.

You swore to protect them, and yet with every terrifying, painful, inhuman death - 

...

Aha. Ha. 

H h a a.  AH a.  H a.  

Your chest hurts.  You think for a moment that the difficulty breathing has to do with a likely punctured lung.  It doesn’t.  

It’s that you’re sobbing so hard that you can’t draw breath.  

Your teeth are clenched together so tightly that your jaw aches.  Your eyes are screwed shut, and you can’t rip them open, force your sight to come back and drown out the senses that do know what is going on in that room.  Drown out the sound.  The smell.  

The taste.

The air is thick enough to leave a layer of heat and blood and bodies on your tongue, and you want to vomit.  You would, if your body trusted you not to choke on it with as hard as you’re already racking.  

And even then.  

All you know, all you can think of,  -- 

..

..

I love you.

...

...

.......

It’s the first time you say it, and it’s hissed into existence like a prayer, through locked jaw and spasming throat.  

I love you.  

...

It almost is a prayer.  The universe has shifted for less.  If you pray, if you grovel, if you beg hard enough, with enough conviction, enough sincerity, if you - 

... 

I-I --- I.... 

I love you. 

IloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou

You say it until you’re screaming it.  

You say it until your voice is hoarse and sore and saying it again feels like swallowing broken shards of concrete.  

....

You say it until Izuru Kamukura is announced the victor, and the door finally gives.  

...

I’m going to start by talking about both of these characters individually, because we never get to see them interact, so I can’t exactly start with how they act around one another.  I mean, they obviously have interacted in canon, but because of the nature and timeline of DR0 those interactions are never onscreen.  

Let’s start with Soushun Murasame.  

The biggest thing that stands out about Murasame is his talent.  He is the SHSL Student Council President, and it isn’t at all implied that he may have had a different talent before and simply got elected into the council, where his title changed.  We can infer that this means his ability as a president of some student council somewhere is what got him scouted by HPA in the first place.  It’s a really fucking specific talent to have, and not one that normally gathers enough attention to warrant even being noticed by anyone outside of whatever school he attended first, let alone the most prestigious school in the world.  Which means that Murasame must have been really, really fucking good at his job.  

Like.  Absolutely out of this fucking universe good at it. 

There’s one other talent in Dangan Ronpa that operates like this, and it’s Kiyotaka Ishimaru’s.  Kiyotaka got his position at HPA by personifying the absolute ideal of everything that someone with his role should be - diligent, hardworking, even scrutinizing. And it’s safe to say that, much like Kiyotaka was scouted out because he embodied his role so perfectly that it was almost excessive, the same can be said of Murasame.

From what Yasuke mentions in his scenes with him, it doesn’t seem like Murasame got to where he is by being a hardass.  It’s actually mentioned multiple times that he was, or at least used to be, a really good person up until the tragedy.  And for Yasuke of all people to notice something like that means that it was probably a pretty significant part of his character.

So if Murasame embodies the best elements of the role he’s filling, what would that look like?

Well he’d have to be a great leader, for one.  This kid’s charisma is probably off the charts.  I don’t think he would have gathered enough attention to be scouted by HPA if it wasn’t.  A lot of this is headcanon, yeah, but I’m pretty confident that Murasame could get people excited about the most mundane things, like different kinds of dirt.  Because that’s just how he is. 

And then he lost all of that after the tragedy, traumatized to the point where he regresses into something that Yasuke considers only barely human.  But I’ll come back to that.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about Madarai.  Because very, very little is known about him aside from what’s shown in the light novel itself, a lot of this is speculation and headcanon, but bear with me here for a minute.

He has seven siblings who look, act and think exactly the same way he does.  Assuming they don’t operate in a literal hivemind system, this means that either they are so similar that they might as well be treated as the same person, or they’re really, really good at acting like they are. 

The one thing that’s clear though, is that those brothers have some serious, serious identity issues.  The immortality ploy is an example of this. 

All three brothers that are introduced after (the one that is mostly likely) Nishiki claim to be immortal, citing that as the reason why they keep coming back to life after dying.  It obviously isn’t true, but the fact that they were all on the same page about it strikes me as really, really odd.  But also really, really telling. 

Here’s the thing. 

One of them didn’t drop the immortality line as a throw away and have the others go “okay well I guess we’re going with this, then.”  Nishiki refers to it as the ace up his sleeve before he dies.  The surviving brothers who confront Ryouko and Mukuro outside of the medical building ask what happened to the others, so they obviously weren’t all there to see it, and I’m pretty fucking sure Mishiki didn’t pass along the information after Junkuro crushed his skull.

The immortality ploy was planned all along. 

Those brothers preemptively prepared for at least one of them to die, finding a way to justify replacing one another after the fact. 

Nishiki knew that Mishiki was watching, and knew he was going to take his place when he died under the shelves.

They actually think they’re replaceable.

It’s pretty safe to say that those brothers believe that their worth lies in what they can do as a whole, and not so much in any of them individually.  

The other thing about the Madarais is that they’re protective and loyal to a fault.  One of them outright says that the tragedy as a whole is his fault because he failed to protect the student council from it.  What’s more, this isn’t even the brother who was involved in it or present when it happened.  Isshiki is dead long before dr0 takes place.

Their relationship to the student council seems to go well above a security/client dynamic.  If that’s genuinely all it was, the subject of their revenge would be about their brother and their brother alone, who died alongside the student council in the tragedy.  But that’s never the case.  

Isshiki is a huge part of it, sure, but he isn’t ever singled out as the one that the brothers are taking revenge for.  While it can possibly be argued that it’s to keep up appearances and maintain the illusion of the eight brothers really being one single immortal being, even when they are revealed to be separate people, they still talk almost exclusively about the student council. 

"You think we can give up now?" "We swore to them!" "We'll keep on going for the student council!" "We'll prove that to you!" "We swear to protect the student council's honor!" "We'll protect it to the death!" "We'll definitely take our revenge on you!" "We won't let anyone get in our way!"

They do mention their brothers later on, of course, but the student council is obviously their #1 priority even in the face of that.  

SO.  Now that I’ve gone into detail on both of them...why do I like them together, exactly?

Because their personalities (or what we can guess their personalities are, I suppose) are extremely complimentary to one another.  

Murasame, being as charismatic as he probably is, as well as kind enough for Yasuke fucking Matsuda to give a shit enough to mention something about it, is probably one of the only people who is really, really likely to treat the Madarai brothers as individuals as opposed to fractions of a whole.  Granted, he’s probably one of the only people who actually know about their true talent (if he actually does, that is, but it’s not unlikely) but I can really see him being the kind of person who would at least try.  Which is something one of them would need in a relationship, I think.  Someone who doesn’t treat them like they are, in fact, as replaceable as they often seem to believe they are.  

And as far as Murasame himself goes - 

Especially after the tragedy, he needs someone he can trust.  Not only for the sake of not getting himself murdered, either.  Having someone who he can actually be honest with about his condition is vital to him getting any sort of healing from that traumatic event he went through.  A person as loyal and protective as Madarai would really be ideal.

Not to mention, if it is actually Isshiki he’s with (and somehow they both survived the MK - which isn’t likely, but it’s not impossible either.  Junko thought Murasame was dead, she obviously is capable of making mistakes in that case) there’s the added bonus of having someone who has seen the horrors he’s been through firsthand.  There are certain experiences that absolutely cannot be related through words alone.  He would never, ever be able to accurately make another person understand what it felt to be in that room that day who wasn’t there with him.  To be able to heal from that alongside someone who went through the exact same ordeal is huge.  It’s why survivors with PTSD are encouraged to reach out to others who have had those experiences too.  There’s absolutely no way to make anyone who wasn’t there understand what you went through.  

BASICALLY.... I think a relationship between them would be very mutually beneficial and healthy and just all around Good and I think....we should all consider it B)

WELL this is long and rambly and probably not even vaguely coherent but like, tada