#otonami

The great Tragedy of the world is how easily it falls apart.

The stitching is imperfect, the fabrics mismatched, the pieces laid incorrectly together.  Its sleeves are two different lengths, the seat of its pants is missing, its beanie has a hole at the top so large that it might as well be an old school monk’s haircut.  The collar is too small for anyone to poke their head through, the buttons don’t match its holes, the zipper is stuck.  Junko doesn’t even need to take scissors to it; she could rip the flimsy thing apart with her bare hands.  She doesn’t need a stitch ripper either when the seams are so loosely done that she can unthread them with her fingernails.  Admittedly, her fingernails have been molded into a sharp point – into bear claws – which makes all of that easier, but that’s not the point.

The point is that the world at large needs a better tailor, and who better to try her hands at it than the Ultimate Fashionista herself?

Even if all she does is tear the current fit to shreds.

Look, sometimes you have to rip the old shit off before you put the emperor in his new clothes, got it?

(Build the suit and leave it for them to find later.  She’ll be dead before they put it on.  Doesn’t mean it’s not still her design.)

~

Junko sits on a rooftop far from Hope’s Peak Academy and lets her legs dangle over the edge.

Across from her, a cathedral burns.

Fire swirls, illuminating the sharp shattered glass from within and sending a kaleidoscope of colors along the street, along each person fighting, attacking, defending, murdering.  It’s an odd spot of beauty among everything else, those sharp pinks and blues and golds, even if it clashes horribly with the blood red sky overhead.

No matter what Junko does, she can’t escape that color.  She was born drenched in it, reflecting it in her eyes, as though it is the only thing she could ever be.  Her destiny: blood, blood, and more blood.  She tastes it rusty on her lips.

Disgusting.

Across the street, a girl grabs a shard of stained glass from the concrete and wields it like a knife.

Beautiful.

Poetry in motion.

Of course, this does not save her.  Who brings a knife to a gun fight?  She throws it like a star, and the sparkling pink glare hits Junko’s eyes.  When she can see again, the girl has already fallen to the ground, the light gone from her eyes.  It sucks – to miss that moment.  Maybe she wouldn’t have been able to see it from this far away anyway, but she would have liked to see the despair overwhelming that girl the way it overwhelmed her once, so long ago.

Maybe it’ll taste better to her.

Junko hears her shoes shuffling across the rooftop towards her before she even sees her, and she doesn’t ask how she found her here.  She could find her anywhere.  Will find her anywhere.  Junko looks up as she sits next to her.  “It’s been a while.”

“It hasn’t been that long, I think.”

Chiaki doesn’t look up from the gaming device in her hands as she kicks her heels against the brick wall beneath her.  She never looks up at Junko anymore; she always has her Game Girl with her, and she’s always looking at it.

Junko scoots over to her, just brushing against her arm, and leans over her shoulder.  Familiar.  Warm.  “Did I do it?” she asks, glancing at the game on her screen.  “Did I make it right?”

The story Junko tells – The Emperor’s New World – unravels on Chiaki’s screen.  Doom and gloom and a villain wrapped in a fantastic, iconic look.  Not that anyone knows what the true villain looks like, not yet.  (And even then, they won’t.  Junko makes herself a villain because it’s easier to fight one that has a physical form than it is to fight theories and philosophies and ideas.)

Right now, the only thing anyone knows is the bear – half black and half white with that singular blazing red eye torn into his skull and half a smile, like he’s always excited and always ready to rip someone’s throat out.  (Yours, if you aren’t careful.)  He looks just as cool as a character framed in 8-bit as he does in real life, although Junko’s sure he’s not nearly as cuddly in the game as the version Kaz and Gundham created for her.  The video game version doesn’t have real fur, after all.

(The plushies won’t either, but no one really cares about that.  It’s all marketing.)

“Will it have a good ending?”

Junko doesn’t say anything.  She goes through every possible scenario again and again and again, and she doesn’t say anything.  It will have a fitting ending, one handcrafted specifically for this story.  One that fits like a second skin.

In the silence, Chiaki continues.  “It’s okay if there’s a lot of suffering, I think.”

“It’s okay if people die?”

Because people are dying.  So many people are dying.  And it’s Junko’s fault.

It doesn’t matter that she knows they would have died anyway, that more people would have died if she didn’t act; it doesn’t matter, because they’re dying now and it’s still her fault, and it hurts.

Of course, the way she is now, that pain and despair only fuels her, only brings her joy.

(It still hurts.)

“I died, Ryo-chan.”  Chiaki still doesn’t look up.  The silence between them fills with screams and thunder and above all of that the background music of Chiaki’s game, the beeps and boops of each button she clicks (and the clacking of them, too).  The cathedral in front of them quivers, and another stained glass window explodes outward, its shards staining the ground.  Finally, into the silence, she asks, “Did you give it a happy ending?”

Ryoko nods, solemn.  “The happiest ending I could, Chicharin.  The happiest ending I could.”

“Then that’s okay, I think.”  Chiaki glances over to her; eyes the shade of Junko’s hair meet hers and frown.  “Hey, hey,” she says, reaching up and brushing her fingers along Junko’s cheek, bringing their tips away wet.  “What’s wrong?”

“You know,” Ryoko says, with a shake of her head.  “Why are you asking when you already know?”