#yuisa

“No.”

Kyoko tilts her head back and looks directly into Yui’s eyes.  She’s grown in the years they’ve known each other; she doesn’t need to tilt her head back any longer; she could just meet Yui’s eyes, but she doesn’t.  Acting like this, there’s a bit of obstinateness, stubbornness.  Like Kyoko knows best, when she doesn’t.

(Or maybe she does.)

“I’m not going in there without you.  Not with him.”

Over a year of study at Hope’s Peak, and Kyoko is no closer to her father than she was when she started.  Yui had hoped that the close proximity at least would help things along, and she’d told Kyoko multiple times throughout to give him a chance, but….

Well, who can argue with why should I give him a chance when he didn’t give me one?

And it’s not like Yui doesn’t understand being abandoned by her parents.  After her sister’s death, she practically stopped existing, as far as her parents were concerned.  They barely acknowledged her presence with all of their fighting, and the boarding school where she’d gone for middle and high school was a peaceful reprieve.  She’s certain they’d forgotten her while she was there.

That’s not the same.

“Kyoko, if you don’t go, you’ll die.”

“And you won’t?”

There’s no weight of emotion in Kyoko’s voice.  She’s not being overcome by anything; she’s simply pointing out the logic of the situation.  And to be fair, she’s not wrong.  If Kyoko is at risk in the world marred by the Tragedy, then Yui is, too.  It doesn’t matter that Yui’s older than she is; the Tragedy affects all of them equally: young, old, male, female, and everything in-between.

But that’s not the point.

“They are offering this chance to you and your friends—”

“Yui Onee-sama is my friend.”

“I told you not to call me that.”

Yui reaches out to ruffle Kyoko’s long lavender ice hair, but Kyoko bats her hand out of the way.  She remembers, when Kyoko was younger, when they’d first met, how Kyoko kept her hair in matching braids, one on either side of her head.  As she’d gotten older, she’d retired the braids but still woven at least one black ribbon through her hair, sometimes leaving her hair down and using the ribbon to hold it back out of her face, at other times tying her hair back so that she can think without having to worry about the distraction a single strand could cause.  Her hands are still just as dainty and porcelain white as they were when they first met, just now she covers them with gloves whenever she works, refusing to contaminate the evidence with even a single fingerprint.  (She’d gotten Yui ones to match with hers, but Yui doesn’t wear them very often.  Her detective specialty isn’t quite as fastidious.  It doesn’t matter that Kyoko doesn’t agree with her.)

A fond smile traces Yui’s lips, and she reaches around to ruffle Kyoko’s hair anyway.

“You’ll be fine.”

“I’m not going without you.”

Yui knows as Kyoko says it that it’s a lie.  It isn’t a battle.  Kyoko doesn’t want to go, but she will.  She’ll hate every moment of it, but she’ll still go.  It isn’t about friends or survival or everything going on outside, it’s—

“You have to take care of the mysteries in there,” Yui murmurs, “and I have to take care of the ones out here.”

“Yui Onee-sama is no good at—”

“Hey!”  Yui props her hands on her hips and leans over Kyoko.  This shouldn’t work, now that Kyoko’s grown taller, but somehow it still does.  “I’ll have you know that I found that Izuru guy—”

“He got away again—”

“But I found him!”  Yui’s gaze grows firm.  “You couldn’t even do that.”

Kyoko pouts.  Not like most people pout – it’s just a downcast of her eyes, an averted gaze, a slight pursing of her lips.  At least she isn’t trying to change the subject now, as is her way when she wants to draw focus away from something she doesn’t like.

Not for the first few seconds, anyway.

“What if something happens?”

That’s not exactly what Kyoko means.  She’s not putting words to the harder fears – What if you need me?  What if something goes wrong?  What if you die?  But they’re all encased in that singular question, and they’re all valid.

Yui isn’t going to lie to her.  She won’t say she’s going to be okay.  Because she doesn’t know that she will.  Something could happen.  To either of them, maybe!  And with Kyoko locked away, Yui won’t be able to help her either.  Won’t be able to do anything.

(Maybe she could, if she were there, but—)

“You won’t need me.  You’ve never needed me, Kyokyo.”

Kyoko’s lips purse in disgust, and her next words come out in a hiss.  “Enoshima-san is a plague.”

“You like her.”

“I don’t.”

Yui brushes her fingers gently through Kyoko’s hair and tucks it back behind her ear.  She notes when Kyoko blushes faintly and smiles – fond, knowing.  “You’ll have Enoshima-san in there with you, and I’ll have Chi-chan out here with me.”

Don’t say we’ll be okay.

So Yui doesn’t say it.  She only notes when Kyoko’s gaze drops.  That’s the thing – Kyoko doesn’t cry.  She’s never once seen her hurt enough to get to that point, but if she looks closely enough, she can see something like a tear curling at the corner of Kyoko’s eyes.  That’s probably just her imagination, though.

She won’t say they’ll be okay, but she can say the next best thing.

“When you get out of there,” Yui says instead, “when the Tragedy is over, I’ll be right there.  Waiting.”

Kyoko turns away from her, and her hair falls in front of her face.  A curtain.

“I’ll make sure the world is cleaned up out here.  So you can come back.  Okay?”

“Yui Onee-sama will take a hundred years, and she still won’t clean everything up.”

Not without me.

“It’s a good thing I’ll have plenty of help, then!”  Yui pushes a bright smile on her face as Kyoko turns to her.  “There’s a whole group of us!  Chi-chan and me and Munakata-san and Kimura-san and—”

“And I can’t join you?”

Yui’s smile falters.  “If you’re here with me, who will take care of your classmates?”

Don’t say your dad sits on the tip of her lips, although Yui won’t say it.  They’d fall into familiar banter then – the inadequacies of Kyoko’s father in the face of everything that is going on, specifically.  He hadn’t investigated into anything himself; he’d hired Kyoko and Yui to do it for him, and although he’d fired Kyoko from the job, Chisa Yukizome found more in her investigation into the Steering Committee’s corruption than Jin Kirigiri had in the years he’d invested in the job.  He was an utter failure of a man in all respects, and having him head up this measure….

“They’ll need you.”

Because Jin Kirigiri certainly wasn’t going to protect any of them.

“You’ll keep them safe.  I know you will.”  Yui leans forward.  “You and Enoshima-san both.”  She tries to smile.  “Okay?”

Kyoko shakes her head once and looks up to meet Yui’s eyes once more.  “No.”

Yui Samidare still remembers the events leading up to the moment she died.

One of her girlfriend’s best friends asked the two of them to look into certain mysteries surrounding Hope’s Peak.  Her girlfriend, Chisa, took on a teaching internship that quickly became a full role so that she could do some light digging, with the understanding that if things got too dangerous, Yui would be called in.  Of course, Yui wasn’t unknown to the headmaster the way that Chisa herself was, which meant Chisa could get in deeper than Yui ever could.  Still – there wasn’t much to see that they hadn’t already, and even Chisa (and her best friend’s boyfriend) weren’t able to find much.

Then, a few months before the end of the school year, one of Chisa’s students, Chiaki Nanami, hired Yui to look into a missing person’s case.  A fellow student (from the Reserve Course, oddly enough) disappeared halfway through the school year, shortly after the murders of two of the other students.  (Yui wanted to ask Kyoko to look into those, but she knew better.  Besides, the school covered all of that up, and any attempt from a real detective wanting to poke their nose into things….  Well.)

Yui finally decided to pull some strings and step into her own internship, presiding over Kyoko’s class.

She…wasn’t very good at it.

But they were good kids, all of them.  A little troublesome at times, often at odds with one another, more than a few egos – but that’s Hope’s Peak!  She’d graduated from here, too, after all.  She knew what it was like!  And every single one of them knew about her relationship with Chisa, a fair few of them guessed at her semi-familial relationship with Kyoko, and two of them in particular kept giving her advice about ways she could propose.  One of those was harmless, but the other….

Junko Enoshima always felt familiar to her, but she was never able to put her finger on why.

Now she knows.

When Mikan disappeared – no, not disappeared, simply did not show up to class for multiple days – Yui searched for her, too.  This was easier; people had seen Mikan much more recently than they’d seen Hajime, and all routes to Hajime pointed towards Hope’s Peak in a way that seemed…bad.  (Kyoko helped look for him.  Then her father asked her to look for someone named Izuru, and Kyoko asked Yui to join her – not because Kyoko wasn’t a good enough detective in her own right, but because disappearances and missing persons was Yui’s specialty.  Kyoko eventually got distracted with the murders of the student council members, and Yui found—

Sometimes, it feels like Junko is lying to her.)

Yui found Mikan.  She found Mikan and Hajime and Izuru because Hajime and Izuru were one and the same, and she has always been a sacrificial lamb for someone else’s slaughter, so of course, it would be that way, too, when she sent the other students away and stayed behind.

But Junko didn’t attack her.  Just tilted her head to one side and murmured, “Yui onii-sama, I believe you still owe me a kiss.”

Now she knows.

~

Chiaki dies to break her classmates.

But Chisa’s death would not break Yui in the same way that Yui’s death would not break Chisa.

It’s the impossible choices that break Yui.  She cannot save anyone, not even Junko herself, but she’ll try.  Because Junko could be good.  Lico could be good.  She’d seen it.  Maybe, if she’d done a little better, then Junko – then Lico—

Yui knows and says nothing, and the saying nothing breaks her.

Chisa knows that something is wrong that Yui won’t say, and that unspoken thing between them breaks them both.