A set of single-sentence fics for Danganronpa.
First published September 2025.
Komaeda, 1256 words.
He remembers his mother dressed up, wearing pearls, an untouchable woman who never bent down to lift her only child into the air.
He’s eleven years old, an orphan, the only child left to pick the bones from the ashes.
‘It’s too much trouble to keep a kid no-one will pay for,’ the kidnapper says, and the worst thing is what Komaeda sees in his eyes is pity.
It snows the day they tell him he’s dying, and for a time he considers walking out into it, laying down and waiting for it to cover him up.
When his parents were alive, Komaeda ate very proper, traditional meals – now, even though he can cook, he likes to eat what is easy.
The other students form their own little groups; Komaeda, who is after all only here by luck, can never quite enter into those circles.
There is very little ill luck that can befall one in a library, and if you read a novel, the travails happen to someone else.
The reserve course students are having a picnic for the cherry blossom season; Komaeda watches them through the window and he wonders how it is they seem to be so content.
Once, Komaeda sees their underclassman push Tsumiki down the stairs – it’s a small push, a defensible ‘oh, you’ kind of push, but Tsumiki tumbles nonetheless.
Privately, Komaeda thinks Mioda’s music is appalling, but this is undoubtedly a sign of his own smallmindedness.
The truth is that no-one has ever cared about Komaeda the way Enoshima does; it’s almost irrelevant that her intent is only malicious.
It was Enoshima who put the collar on him – leaving it there is another way he remembers her.
The hope the children have, in the wreckage of the adult world, is its own kind of beautiful – but Komaeda already suspects that Monaca is no longer a child.
The innocence of children is that they still expect their Servant to have fresh milk, even when they’ve brought down all the supply chains.
Kotoko has painted the nails on one hand, but when she reaches for the other, the Servant snatches it away from her.
For a while they put a bell on him to hear him coming, but the Servant, like a cat, learns to walk without jingling.
‘That guy couldn’t get into the closet if he tried,’ Kurokuma says, as if the Servant weren’t listening.
The Servant prepares their meals, cleans their rooms, folds their laundry; unlike a real adult, though, he never tells them what to do.
‘Can I pick it?’ Jataro says, when he notices the Servant’s elbow is scabbed over – he’s really a very unlikeable child, but the Servant says, ‘Go ahead.’
Sometimes he watches from a distance, the adults who are hunted, who fall to their children’s hands; he can’t be too much of an adult or he’ll fall the same way.
One day, when she’s feeling particularly tormented, Monaca drives a nail through Komaeda’s hand; she doesn’t realise that it’s not his hand all.
People don’t do what you think they will; Komaeda’s heroine refuses to win, just as her betrayer refused to leave.
Hope should mean victory, Komaeda thinks, and it takes time for him to realise that Komaru’s refusal to see things through to the end is its own form of hope.
The dust from the building has settled on his skin now, and Komaeda could still walk away.
Someone’s going to die tonight; someone will be that stepping stone – the anticipation makes the food more succulent, and every conversation replete with meaning, even the ones wouldn’t interest Komaeda otherwise.
‘Even if you beat me over the head with a brick,’ Komaeda says, ‘I won’t mind – it’s for everyone’s hope, after all.’
When Komaeda asks Hinata to feed him, it’s really the human contact that he wants: for someone Komaeda cares for to be there for him, even if Hinata has no care in return.
Everyone looks so grim, when they hear the death announcement, and it’s not that Komaeda doesn’t understand how they feel, but couldn’t they express at least a little hope?
There’s a timer ticking down for Jabberwock Island, but Komaeda won’t wait for it to go off.
Komaeda’s always known he wasn’t the star of the show – that honour remains with his talented classmates – but you don’t have to be the star when you can be the stagehand who brings the whole thing crashing down.
Realising that Hinata is no-one, a talentless nobody, is the moment Komaeda’s conception of the world comes crashing down around him.
Glass would shatter, but it feels instead as if Komaeda has been made molten, reading the file behind the Final Dead Door.
Komaeda hugs the truth to himself like it can keep him warm, and if he can’t tell anyone else because it will alert the traitor, it makes him the only one whose choices even matter.
Komaeda might have the nicest bed in Strawberry House, but it doesn’t help him to sleep that night.
On that last day, when Hinata still tries to talk to him, a sickness settles in Komaeda’s stomach, like guilt or regret.
In this world, his talent is something he can rely upon, the mechanism by which he can foil all plans and expose this world for what it is.
If he does this, then Komaeda doesn’t have to think any more what any of this means: he’ll close the trap on the traitor, but Komaeda will be free.
Komaeda knows what they think of him, but they don’t know what’s really inside, that which comes out only once he’s free to work against them.
Stabbing his hand through that knife is the most definitive action Komaeda has ever taken in his life.
The school trip would have to run backwards for Komaeda to ever get a happy ending.
Hinata does consider never waking Komaeda up at all.
The hand that raises itself is Enoshima’s hand; worse, the mind behind Komaeda’s eyes is Enoshima’s mind.
The hand that was Junko’s feels nothing, functions not at all except to threaten that it should spread its rot through the rest of him – this, then, is a reminder of why he hates despair and loves hope.
In his dream, Enoshima puts the crown of thorns on his head, and she presses until the thorns break his skin – ‘Remember you died for them,’ she tells him, and when he wakes up in the real world, he checks his hand for the stigmata that should be there.
When he wakes up, Enoshima’s hand is gone, and only the bandaged stump remains.
After the fourth time the generator goes on the fritz, they stop letting Komaeda near it.
Society won’t be as forgiving as Naegi and his comrades are – Komaeda knows they can never go home.
When Hinata loses a button, Komaeda keeps it, and sews it to the inside of his cuff like a talisman.
Hinata has left the suit jacket he wears for his work with the Future Foundation over the chair; it doesn’t fit when Komaeda tries it on.
‘Back then,’ Komaeda says, ‘you must have liked me a little’ – but Hinata doesn’t respond.