Yabashiri

It takes a few days to set up an appropriate time for Chiaki to visit Junko’s village.

Junko couldn’t hang around the day she asked for Chiaki’s help – something to do with not having her GGA on hand – and then couldn’t the next few days because she had back-to-back magazine sessions: interviews and photography and all that sort of thing.  Hope’s Peak lets its Ultimates take the time they need off from school to pursue their Talent; some of their students need to pursue Olympics trials, others need to oversee an entire restaurant, Chiaki herself often needs to leave for gaming competitions (or, even more often, to set a new record), so it isn’t surprising that Junko needs to leave for a few days.  It’s more surprising that Junko seems to still be trying to hold to a normal weekend off schedule, so that she won’t miss too much school.

Or something.

Of course, they don’t have to be in the same room or around each other for Chiaki to visit.  It’s just scheduling.

….

And Junko wants to meet up for some reason.

~

Chiaki feels awkward walking into Junko’s dorm.  She doesn’t want Junko in hers, mostly because she doesn’t want to do all the cleaning up that would require.  Her dorm isn’t bad, but there are a lot of mostly empty pizza boxes and Mountain Dew bottles and Doritos bags that she doesn’t feel like shoving into trash bags right now.  She should – Yukizome-senpai would be very disappointed with her – but….

“This,” Junko says as Chiaki follows her inside, “is the front room.”  She twirls around on one heel, arms outstretched.  The front room is all pink and fluff and scattered Junk Co. merch – throw pillows, blankets, even a few plush animals here and there (mostly bears) – which is to be expected.  Junko whirls back around to face Chiaki with half of a smile.  “You know, where all the parties happen.”

“You throw parties?”

“Sometimes.”  Junko’s expression hitches.  Then that smile spreads – full, no longer half.  “You should come to the next one.  It could be wild—”

“No, thanks, I think.”

Chiaki has a good idea what Junko’s kind of parties look like, and they don’t sound like any kind of fun.  Teruteru would be jumping all over her to get in – to even get this far, if she’s honest, although in his mind, a secret meeting with Junko Enoshima at her dorm is probably a bigger win than just being invited to one of her parties.  She’s just never been one for that sort of social gathering.  She holds up her GGA.  “Should I sit, or—”

“Oh, we’re not staying in here.”  Junko clasps her arms behind her back and pulls until it sounds like her shoulder just pops.  “It’s like the whole island situation.  One for the fans, one for me.”  She turns away from Chiaki and starts further back into her dorm.  “You come to my island, so you come to my island.”

Chiaki follows Junko through a pink and white beaded curtain that catches the light in a way that honestly hurts her eyes and gets thrust into what feels like a whole other world.  Wood paneling and floorboards that creak when she steps on them (but not when Junko does) and dark lighting that feels just off.  "Your island is going for a horror vibe, I think.”

Junko laughs at that.  “I just get bored with expectations, you know?  All that frou-frou out there.  It’s exhausting to keep it all up.”  She pushes a door open to what must be her bedroom and gestures like a television game show host.  “In here, Nanami-senpai.”

“What if I changed my mind?”

“Then I’ll escort you right back out!”  Junko leans forward.  “I’m not scary, Nanami-senpai.  Horror vibes or not, I’m really just a normal girl.  Who needs help setting up her island.  That’s all.”

Chiaki doesn’t believe that for a minute.  She wants to believe it.  But the thing is that none of the Ultimates are what anyone would refer to as normal.  They are, in a sense, because they have hopes and loves and passions and desires just like everyone else does.  They are normal.  But often their Talent sets them apart – pushes them onto a pedestal that they have no idea how to handle and destroys them there.  Most people don’t have to deal with that sort of cage.

She hates it.

Chiaki walks into Junko’s bedroom.  It looks like a normal bedroom.  Bed.  Desk.  Drawers.  Closet.  It’s not all pink and white and fluff and Junk Co.-centric as the living room was.  If anything, it’s plain.  Too normal by half, maybe.  She pulls the chair out from the desk as Junko flops on her bed and sits on it.

“You could sit on the bed, you know.  It’s super soft!”

“I’d rather not, I think.”  Chiaki pulls out her GGA.  “You’ll get everything set up, right?”

“Mm!”  Junko gives a sharp nod and pulls out her personal GGA.  Unlike her fan-centric one (which Chiaki suspects is a bright pink), it’s split straight down the middle – white on one side and black on the other – with a red rim to the screen and red buttons.  “My island’s open to visitors – to you, Nanami-senpai!  All you have to do is connect!”

“Nanami-senpai.”

“Hm?”

Chiaki barely looks up from her Game Girl Advance.  She could play this game in her sleep – most of the moves aren’t randomized, and there’s only so many places the enemies can be, and she’s played the game so much that she doesn’t even think about any of this ever (because she’d never thought about it when she was playing it the first time and now it’s just all muscle memory) – but that doesn’t mean she wants to look away.  This game has good graphics – gorgeous graphics – and the soundtrack is enhanced by the sound of the water fountain behind her.  It’s very atmospheric.

“Do you play every game?”

Chiaki flinches.  Blinks twice.  Doesn’t stop playing her game, and doesn’t miss a beat in it.  “What do you mean?”

“I mean, there are, like, hundreds of games that come out every year.  The big name pushy stuff, the big name good stuff, the indie games, the mobile games, all that gambling bullshit—”

As the list goes on, Chiaki considers that there’s no such thing as bullshit games and good games.  A lot of times what makes a good game is subjective.  Different gamers want different things, and one gamer’s Sonic Boom is another gamer’s Pokemon Red.  No one really wants to have that conversation, though.

When the girl finishes, Chiaki says, “I play the games I want to play.  Mostly retro games.  Chat gets mad that I don’t play shooters, but I don’t like them.”

A smile twitches at the corner of the other girl’s lips – Chiaki can see it reflected in her GGA screen – and she says, “How can she be the Ultimate Gamer if she’s not winning any competitions?  Like that’s how you measure that sort of thing.  It’s all bullshit.”

“Did you want to ask about a game in specific?”

“Yeah, uh.”  The girl sits next to her and then says, much more quietly, “Do you play Crossing?  I just started my own game, and I’m trying to get all the fruit trees.  And cosmos seeds, if you have them.  Or pansies.  They’re my favorites, but I got stuck with tulips and mums.  Which is shit luck because pansies are one of my birth month flowers, so I could have—”

Chiaki pauses her game and glances over to the other girl.  She’s familiar with her enough to recognize her once they’re sitting next to each other, but not so familiar that she could guess who she was from her voice alone.  “Enoshima-san,” she says, “why are you asking me?  Your fans would give you anything you want.  You just have to ask them.”

Junko sighs and clasps her hands together between her bare knees.  “I’ve got an island for them to visit,” she says.  “It’s all decked out and full of the most popular villagers.  I hold raffles to have fans come in and take a villager when they leave, and I go out and visit their islands, too, from time to time.”

It’s so boring, she seems to say, even though those words never leave her lips.

“I just….”  Junko sighs again, and her head tilts innocently enough to the side.  “I wanted something that was just for me, you know?  So I’ve got a second system and game and everything.  I’m starting it over from scratch, and I thought…maybe you’d help.”  She shrugs.  “But it’s fine if you don’t.  I can wait for the random flower seed drops at the store, and I’ll get the ones I want eventually.  Fruit will be harder, but if I get really desperate, I can swap some over from my original game.  It’s just—”

“Lonely,” Chiaki completes for her, gaze dropping to the GGA in her hands.

Out of the corner of her eye, Junko nods and hunches forward.  “Yeah.”

Chiaki presses her lips together and then nods.  “I’ll help.  But,” and here she pauses, careful not to meet Junko’s eyes as the other girl looks hopefully at her, “I want to visit your island instead of the other way around.  Okay?”

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?”