A Danganronpa fic.
First published February 2017, for NightsMistress.
Hinata x Nanami, 1975 words.
It had come to Hajime when he saw what remained of the robot, the pieces that scattered the hallways of the Future Foundation headquarters. The seared halves of the torso. The limbs forsaken in favour of weapons.
No-one had minded when Hajime took what remained – it wasn’t the real Gekkogahara after all. It was an unpleasant memory. And they were all still so shaken.
Hajime didn’t dwell on Gekkogahara’s fate. He couldn’t do anything for her. But with these parts ...
‘Hinata-kun, you’re planning something?’
He didn’t jump; he’d been expecting Nanami to show up.
‘What does it look like?’ He examined the wires – where they’d been broken, where they led.
‘I think Hinata-kun is feeling lonely,’ Nanami said. That did startle him, and he turned to face her.
Nanami’s lip quirked.
‘It’s not about me,’ he said. ‘Don’t you want to –’ He raised his hands in feeling – ‘live?’
Nanami’s expression of humour closed off. ‘I died,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t mean there’s anything I regret.’
‘Then why are you still here?’ Hajime asked, feeling exasperated.
Nanami didn’t answer. She looked away sideways, and he thought she would disappear.
Hajime knew the answer anyway. It wasn’t Nanami with the unfinished business; it was him.
‘Souda, c’mere. I need your help with something.’
‘Ah hah! The infamous Kamukura needs my help with something.’ Souda grinned, and cracked his knuckles. ‘Is it a girl?’ He turned his hands into a gesture of prayer.
‘It’s not a girl,’ Hajime said, as Souda began following him, then bit his tongue. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Not exactly a girl? Are you keeping things from me, Hinata?’
Hajime stopped to unlock the door of the building he’d been working in – it was little more than a shed, and no-one else used it.
‘When we left the mainland,’ Hajime said, ‘I took something with me.’
He opened the door and flicked the light.
After a moment, Souda went bug-eyed. ‘A corpse?’ He turned to Hajime. ‘Hinata ... you’re scary.’
‘It’s not a corpse,’ Hajime said. He’d reassembled the pieces, but the damage was still clear. ‘Look properly.’
Gingerly, Souda stepped past Hajime and into the room. He poked the shoulder of the body. ‘This isn’t something kinky, right? Cos honestly, Hinata, you want a girl ...’
‘It’s a shell,’ Hajime said. ‘If you can get the body working, I can program it, and we can bring her back.’
‘Who’s that?’ Souda’s voice went high. It took Hajime a moment to realise what he was thinking. He supposed he deserved it. The suspicion.
‘Nanami,’ he said.
‘Nanami.’ The tension slipped from Souda’s face. ‘You think you can bring her back.’
‘Not –’ Not the real girl, who’d waited for Hajime. Whom he’d disappointed. He’d seen that Nanami die; he’d let her. ‘From the game world,’ he said. ‘The data was destroyed, but I can recreate it. I just need the body to work again.’
As he spoke, Souda’s expression changed, turned gleeful. ‘And so you came to the Ultimate Mechanic,’ he said. ‘Well, you can count on me.
‘Yeah,’ Hajime said. ‘I thought so.’
After Hajime had explained some more, Souda went off to get his tools. Hajime could leave him to it now, he thought. But he was reluctant to leave the body alone.
‘You don’t need Souda-kun to do it, right?’ Nanami asked him. She usually only showed up when Hajime was alone. As if it were too painful to be with the others when they couldn’t know she was there.
‘I could do it alone,’ Hajime said. ‘But that wouldn’t be fair.’ He avoided her eyes. ‘They all want to see you again too.’
‘Good.’ When he glanced over, Nanami gave him a firm nod. ‘You’re learning.’
If he thought about it – if Hajime thought about it – he didn’t really understand Nanami. He didn’t understand how she’d seen better of him in the game world, any more than he could understand the worth she’d seen in him back at Hope’s Peak. He’d misunderstood her then. He would inevitably misunderstand her now.
But when Hajime let go of himself – all the petty fears and hang-ups that got in the way – he could understand her well enough to write her. The less he thought and the more he just did, the better. If he thought too much, he’d lose track of her, the girl who stood beside him but who wasn’t there.
And she couldn’t help him with this.
‘Oi, Hinata!’
Souda waved at him from across the courtyard, screwdriver still in hand. ‘You gotta come see.’
Souda looked gleeful, and proud, and as Hajime went to join him, he thought, maybe we can actually do this.
‘Still doesn’t look anything like her,’ Souda said, his expression turning bashful. ‘But she’d moving alright!’
By the time they got to the shed, they’d drawn a small crowd. Owari and Sonia, both curious, trotting along beside them. Hajime didn’t have the heart to blow them off; Nanami wouldn’t want that.
Sonia clapped her hands when Souda demonstrated. ‘How marvellous!’ she said. ‘Souda-san finally has a girlfriend.’
Souda’s mouth fell open. ‘N-no,’ he said. ‘No, Hinata asked me to fix her.’
Sonia’s sparkling eyes turned to Hajime.
‘I don’t know if it will work yet,’ Hajime said. ‘And I know it’s not the same ...’ There was so much faith in Sonia’s eyes it was painful. ‘The Nanami in the game world,’ he finished. ‘I wanted to bring her here.’
‘So ya made this robot,’ Owari said, and she leaned over to inspect it. Souda made the body turn itself toward her – he was still operating it for now.
‘A robot’s good,’ Owari said. ‘You messed it up though. Nanami was shorter.’
‘This is just the first step,’ Souda said. ‘We can make it look more like her. Right, Hinata?’
‘Right.’ Hajime hesitated. ‘And I’ll need something from all of you.’
‘Whatever we can do to help,’ Sonia said.
‘Your memories,’ Hajime said. ‘What you remember of her. I can write the personality, but otherwise ...’
‘She wouldn’t know us,’ Owari said.
‘We can do that!’ Sonia said. ‘I’ll ask everyone. We can share them tonight.’
That easily, she took the task out of Hajime’s hands.
After the others had gone, Hajime went for a walk, waiting for Nanami’s ghost.
‘I know it’s not the same,’ he told her. ‘You had a whole life none of us knew ...’
‘Which one?’ Nanami asked. ‘The life where I was their classmate? Or the one where I was the traitor?’ She put a smile against the words.
‘You were always their classmate,’ Hajime said.
‘Yes.’
In a quieter voice, Hajime added, ‘Theirs, not mine.’
Nanami stopped walking, and she took Hajime’s two hands in hers. He blinked at her. The sensation was so clear – her soft hands, folded around his ... but he must have felt this before.
‘I was always your classmate,’ Nanami said. ‘Always your friend.’
Suddenly it was tears Hajime was blinking away. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know.’
It was hubris to think that he could ever recreate her. The way she existed folded in on herself, until you could get her talking about games and she expanded, would become the centre of the whole world. It was only in retrospect that Hajime could see Nanami’s insecurities, her conviction that her gaming was the only thing she had, as if she weren’t a light on her own, altogether remarkable. If Hajime hadn’t seen that about her then, what was he missing now?
But if Hope’s Peak had made him this way, then couldn’t he get this one selfish thing out of it? You give away your soul, so that you won’t even save the girl you love?
It’s not that he can save her now. But he can give her another chance.
Hajime had died once before, after all. Kamukura had died too.
If Nanami could haunt him, couldn’t he give her somewhere to go?
Tsumiki was telling the story, haltingly, of how Nanami had tried to help her with her feelings for someone. Who that someone was and what exactly those feelings entailed was unclear, and it made Hajime uncomfortable how she kept looking at him – little darting glances, as if he might jump at her. He was biting his tongue, wanting to ask she get to the point. But the way the other girls were nodding along, Hajime suspected he was being obtuse.
‘I thought it would be easy,’ Nanami said from beside him, ‘but the route didn’t go where I expected it to.’
Nanami’s words made about as much sense to him as Tsumiki’s did. She’d made an exception to their aloneness, as if she enjoyed the reminiscing.
Tsumiki’s story trailed off, and she began to apologise for it, though the others cheered and congratulated her.
‘Maybe it was only a friendship route, in the end,’ Nanami said. ‘They can be satisfying too.’ But the way she held her lips, he didn’t think she believed it.
‘Thank you, Tsumiki-san,’ Sonia said, putting an end to Tsumiki’s embarrassment. ‘May we all know how to trigger our good endings in the future. Who would like to share their memory next?’
The stories went on for hours. And yet, they formed such a small portion of Nanami’s life.
Hajime had to hope they were enough.
The robot sitting in front of him still didn’t look like Nanami, not really. But he thought Nanami would forgive him that. It was the mind he was worried about anyway – there would always be more he could put into her. Every game she might have played. Every little recollection any of them could make. There would always be more.
Hajime would’t wait on perfection. If he, Kamukura Izuru, couldn’t do it, it couldn’t be done.
Nanami’s ghost watched as he slid open the chestplate, and he slotted in the card that held everything he knew about her. Everything he could guess. He closed the chestplate up again, and buttoned her shirt over it, fingers trembling.
It was alright to be scared. When Hajime – Izuru – hadn’t cared about anything, he could be confident about everything. But Hajime cared about Nanami, and his heart was a fluttering bird, its wings heavy against his ribcage.
He waited.
And the eyes that had looked blankly forward resolved themselves, focused. On him. And if the face was wrong, the eyes were the same – Nanami, curious and trusting.
‘Hinata-kun?’ Nanami lifted a hand and stared at it, before looking at him. ‘What’s this?’
Hajime let his head hang and his breath escape him. ‘Thank god,’ he said. ‘It’s you.’ He pressed his hands in fists against his knees. ‘This was the best I could do. The best we could do.’
‘We?’ Nanami asked.
His breath trembled; he looked back up at her and made himself smile. It came out more sincerely than he’d expected. ‘All of us. All your classmates. So ...’ He couldn’t say it was all okay now. It wasn’t. The world was changed irreparably; there were these few things only Hajime could repair. The things that mattered to him. The people who mattered. ‘Welcome home,’ he said.
Her smile was still the warmest thing he’d ever seen.
‘I’m home,’ she said. And they smiled at each other a long moment before Nanami got to her feet, reaching her hand out to Hajime. ‘The others are waiting, right?’
‘Yeah.’ Hajime took her hand, and she pulled him upright. He felt himself begin to blush.
‘Then let’s go see them,’ Nanami said. ‘Together.’
Hajime hadn’t wanted to wake her in front of the others. He’d wanted this moment to himself. He’d wanted to be the first thing she saw when she woke up. But Nanami was here to live, not to be the secret who walked beside him.
They were both here to live.
Hand in hand, they walked out to meet the world.