#ultimate bore

considering hajime’s incredible levels of emotional obliviousness/repression i feel like his family never really talked about feelings much growing up. so he probably never really got much of an education on sex ed beyond like basic birds and bees stuff. he probably knows gay people exist and MAYBE knows about bisexuality, but he likes girls. he’s Normal. right

and then he passes out on the beach and there’s… a voice?? he opens his eyes. wavy-curly shoulder length hair…. long eyelashes that catch the light… pretty face… soft voice— and then he blinks the sun from his eyes and oh shit that’s a guy. that’s a Dude! not a pretty girl. um. okay. it’s fine. some guys look a little bit like girls and he was dazed so he got confused. it’s fine! it’s fine. ignore that he still feels kinda fuzzy around this guy.

speaking of which this guy is really nice actually :) he’s sweet. and yeah he teases hajime a bit but like he’s helpful, and he keeps hajime calm. yay!! hajime must just really want to be friends with him. yeah. he wants to get to know him a little better

and then komaeda turns out to be Fucked Up but hajime still… wants to get to know him better. he has an excuse to feel nervous around him now at least, but… the nervousness has this weird, buzzy undercurrent to it. he finds himself worrying about komaeda, left alone in the old building. he doesn’t like that he worries. when he goes to bring him food he’s so nervous, and seeing komaeda there, tied up on the ground, smiling up at him and joking and and asking him to hand-feed him— he has to get out of there, his heart feels like it’s gonna pound out of his chest. so he sets the food down and runs. he thinks about it that night (canon in the manga). that buzzy feeling comes back. he chalks it up to anxiety.

this continues throughout the game. when nagito’s sick hajime worries and worries and worries (and questions why he worries), and when he goes to see him after he’s recovered from his emergency state and nagito says that he can’t stand being around hajime, that hajime’s face is jeopardizing his recovery, two things combine in hajime’s brain. 1- his stupid idiot dumbass obliviousness. 2- his denial of his own feelings for nagito (thank you to one of my confessions blog anons (i wanna say it was hca but i do not remember) for presenting me with this idea). hajime falls for the liar disease because he Cannot Handle The Truth. he runs away and he has no time to process All That bc he immediately witnesses a murder afterwards

chapter 4. hajime continues to fear nagito and continues to crave his companionship. assuming he does his FTEs this is most likely the chapter in which the final FTE occurs. nagito shares his diagnosis, hajime is bewildered. he doesn’t know how to respond. nagito must trust him deeply to share that, but… he could die at any time? even if they survive the killing game? knowing his time with nagito is suddenly so fickle horrifies him. and then nagito says all he’s wanted is somebody’s love. hajime’s breath hitches— surely he doesn’t mean- he’s not- hajime likes girls, this doesn’t pertain to him, he—

nagito takes it all back. says he made it all up. hajime is hurt. how dare he pretend to trust hajime like that— even if he was originally telling the truth (hajime knows nagito’s a bad liar, and he knows which of his statements sounds more like a lie), the fact that he’d take it back shows him all he needs to know. nagito asks if hajime will kill him now. hajime asks his final question and turns to leave.

hajime hears the word “aishiteru,” even if nagito seems to change the subject of his sentence to hajime’s hope instead of him. or, in english, he hears the phrase “i am truly in love with the hope sleeping inside of you.” he hears nagito tell him not to forget this. he can’t do this. hajime walks away.

then, later, maybe even the next day, hajime is surprised to see nagito appear before him. but nagito just seems… bitter. nagito confirms all of hajime’s worst fears, then rubs as much salt in the wound as he can. it hurts, and of course it would, but hearing the words from nagito’s mouth, from the person who’s been praising him from the start, from the boy who woke him up on the beach… it fucking stings. so much so that not even chiaki’s kind words can cheer him up. before the class trial, nagito tells hajime “i know you don’t matter, so why do i still care about you?” hearing that makes it hurt worse, for some reason.

and then nagito dies. after one big grand show, he dies, and his death is gruesome and violent and filled with anger. whoever did this to him must have hated him. hajime can’t bear to stomach the thought that one of his friends would mutilate him like this. it breaks his heart when he realizes that anger came from nagito himself. he doesn’t know how to process nagito’s death, he’s too conflicted. thankfully, he isn’t given much time to.

when the survivors wake up from the neo world program, the first thing hajime does after getting his bearings is walk up to nagito’s pod and check on him. his vitals are normal, somehow, but he’s in a deep coma. hajime sits there for a while, slumped, processing what all he’s been through and what all he’s going to have to do. the other survivors are doing the same with their closest ones. souda walks up behind hajime and puts a hand on his shoulder, reaching out to comfort his best friend. hajime gives him a weak smile before looking back down into nagito’s pod. he sees the hand, turns back to souda, and tells him he has an idea for a project once they get the main island facilities up and running.

i’ve mentioned this before, but i think nagito was the last person to wake up by a long shot. like… it took him 6 months to a year post-nwp to wake up. he was in a DEEP fucking coma. in this time, hajime and souda work on their project— building nagito’s prosthetic arm. it won’t be perfect until they’re able to test it on him, but hajime wants to have it as close to done as possible— when nagito wakes up, he can surprise him with it. towards the beginning, souda jokes that he’s acting like a housewife waiting for her husband to return from war— hajime yells at him, but the joke sticks in his mind for some reason. hajime, with a brain now much older and smarter (and co-inhabited by a walking encyclopedia that likes to give him unsolicited advice), does some introspecting and some talking with friends and eventually realizes that Oh Yeah He Totally Is Bisexual And Has Feelings For Nagito Huh. Oh Fuck.

but it’s Fine. he can be Normal about this. nagito will never have to know because hajime is Normal and Respectful and he can be normal around the guy who looks a bit like a pretty girl. for now he’ll just focus on waking him up. return the favor, as it were.