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He’s watching, helpless and horrified, as Nanami tries to avoid her fate, and—
She’s facing Kuzuryuu down in the beach house, burning with guilt and anger, and she clings to that anger because at least it’s something to focus on that isn’t the awful thing she’s apparently done, and—
His fingers are slackening around the rope, and his heart is singing because he’ll die a martyr at last, it’s all he could ever have hoped for, that his worthless life could finally find meaning at its end, and—
-
Whoever he is, he wakes up screaming. He’s barely managed to get control of his voice when the door to the cabin slams open, and it’s someone who – someone who died, someone who died in his arms.
He sits up sharply. “Young mast—”
He cuts himself off, but it’s too late. Kuzuryuu looks shocked, and then incandescently furious.
“You say that again,” he says, his voice shaking, “I’ll take your eye to replace mine. You fucking got that?”
Hinata – he’s Hinata – presses his hands to his face. He’s Hinata, he tells himself. Pekoyama is dead.
“Got it,” he mutters.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. The young master is alive.
-
Every morning, he goes for a walk around the islands and tries to remind himself that this is real. He doesn’t know if he can really believe it. The simulation felt exactly like this. The salt of the sea breeze, the warmth of the sun, the way the sand shifts under his shoes, they’re all the same.
He feels like he was in there for months. In a way, maybe he was; he’s experienced those few weeks so many times, from so many perspectives.
Although the time was cut short for most of them.
Has he ever seen the real world? Maybe he’s like Nanami; maybe he’s never been anything more than a few lines of code. It almost seems more appealing than being a real person who has to deal with all this. But Nanami seemed to know what she was.
This morning, when he’s made his way back to the hotel, he stops by Owari’s cabin. She takes a moment to answer the door, raises a hand. “Hey.”
“Hey. Can you tell me what my name is?”
He’s asking Owari because she seems the most likely to give him a straight answer. The others would probably think he was trying to test them somehow, asking such a seemingly obvious question.
Just as he’d hoped, Owari doesn’t even question it. She frowns slightly, but it looks more like a frown of thought than a frown of why-are-you-even-asking-me-this. “Uh, it begins with an H, right? Hamada or somethin’.”
It’s close enough. He was more or less sure before he asked. He checks his reflection whenever he has the chance; he knows he looks like Hinata. But sometimes he needs to hear it from someone else.
-
He didn’t really take in any of Enoshima’s speech, in the trial room below the simulated Hope’s Peak, when he heard it as himself; he’d learnt about Kamukura and he’d just shut down. But he remembers it as Souda.
“See, there’s a way to bring your dead buddies back to life.”
Hinata has to burrow further into Souda’s perspective, because he can’t relive Kuzuryuu’s reaction – the instant of soaring hope in his chest, the almost immediate brick-wall realisation it’s way too good to be true.
“You’re talking shit,” Kuzuryuu growled.
“You think a face this cute could lie to you?” Enoshima asked, pressing her hands to her chest. “I’m offended. It’s true! Because guess what: the data’s still saved. The profiles that were meant to be uploaded back into your bodies after your super-lame beach vacation. All your memories up to Hope’s Peak, all your boring old personalities, all the way more interesting stuff that happened in this simulation. Everything that makes you you, right?”
“You can restore them to the minds of the people who died?” Sonia asked.
“Someone hasn’t been listening,” Enoshima said. “Those guys are braindead. Upload the memories, don’t upload them, it won’t make a difference. They’re not waking up.”
Sonia tensed. “So you meant only to give us false hope?”
Enoshima rolled her eyes. “I go to all this trouble, I give you all this great exposition, and you still don’t have any faith in me? Look, I’ve got all these personality profiles going to waste here. They can still be uploaded into someone’s brain. All the coma thing means is they can’t go to the original owners. Are you getting it now?”
“Wait,” Souda said. “So there’s seriously a way of getting them back? Like, seriously?”
“So, hey, Kuzuryuu,” Enoshima said. “You miss Peko-Peko, right? Just find someone who looks the part. Or maybe someone who looks better! You plug them into the machine, we wipe their head, stick Pekoyama’s memories in there, and ta-da! It’s touching reunion time!”
And, God, he can remember how tempting it was for everyone in that room (although Souda’s reaction was slightly conflicted when he thought about whether Sonia might bring Tanaka back). But...
“It wouldn’t be her,” Kuzuryuu said.
“It’d be her memories and emotions and personality,” Enoshima said. “That’s what makes a person, isn’t it? Or do you think she’s just her looks? God, you’re so shallow.”
Kuzuryuu clenched his fists. “And I’ve got enough people killed. I’m not going to wipe some stranger’s brain for this.”
“Come on,” Enoshima groaned. “It wouldn’t have to be a stranger, anyway.” She lowered her voice to a stage-whisper. “Go on, admit it. Nobody’s a big Souda fan. Why not replace him with someone you actually like? I mean, sure, they’d have the disadvantage of looking like Souda, but dye his hair and that’s a big improvement straight away. He’s already in the machine; we could do it right now.”
The stomach-churning terror of being Souda in that moment hits him full-force. God, they could rewrite his personality. They were going to wipe him out and turn him into Tanaka and... and, okay, maybe then Sonia would finally like him, maybe he could live with that, but – what the fuck, he was going to get erased—
Sonia tossed her head. “We will replace nobody,” she said, her voice clear and sharp, and Souda practically passed out on the spot.
“Ugh,” Enoshima muttered. “I offer you your dead friends back, and it turns out you just really want them to stay dead. You secretly hated them all along, well, that’s your business. But I’m making an executive decision here. I’m not going to let these personality profiles rot away. It’s a tragedy and a waste.”
Oh, crap.
“There are five of you, ten dead kids, not counting any soulless robots, so I could just put two in each of you,” Enoshima said. “But, you know, this whole uploading thing is kind of complicated, and it’d take way too long to think of the most hilarious combinations. Not sure I can be bothered to sort the dead kids from the living ones, either. Easiest if I just stick all these memories and personalities and things in one person.” She grinned. “You’re my favourite, Hinata-chan, so it’s gonna be you!”
And he stood there, shaking in his lime-green overalls, so desperately grateful that it wasn’t going to be him.
-
He had a plan for when he got out of the simulation. He wanted to rebuild himself, to wipe out the last traces of Kamukura and go back to being Hajime Hinata. But how is he supposed to do that now? Whatever he’s meant to be is so mixed up in pieces of other people that he wouldn’t know where to begin fishing it out.
Some people are easier to separate out than others. He can generally tell when a thought comes from Tanaka or Mioda or Saionji or Komaeda – people who think in unique ways, or who at least are different enough from Hinata for him to be sure that their ideas don’t belong to him. But he often finds himself forgetting that he isn’t Koizumi, for example. She’s probably the hardest for him to mentally tear his own identity away from. They have a fair amount in common – they’ve both felt like nobodies surrounded by the extraordinary; they both liked most of the other island residents but found them a little hard to deal with – and so it’s all too easy for him to aim at Hinata and hit Koizumi instead.
And then there are the other issues. This body is wrong. Everything about it is wrong. It isn’t muscular enough, and the weight’s not distributed right. It’s too tall. It’s not tall enough. He keeps misjudging the width of his shoulders and banging into doorframes, although to be fair that might just be Tsumiki’s influence.
Even thinking of himself as male feels strange now; the Koizumi part of him hates it. But it’s not like anything else would feel any less uncomfortable. Being female is really important to Koizumi; being male is really important to Nidai. There’s no compromise to be reached there. All he can do is go with the thing that used to feel right and hope one day it’ll start to fit again.
It’s easiest to wrap himself in the Imposter’s mindset when it really starts to bother him. After a lifetime spent being other people, sometimes male, sometimes female, you kind of stop caring.
He wishes the Imposter could have survived. It’d be good to have someone to talk to about this, someone who understands what it’s like to have your own sense of self frayed to threads.
-
He requests a copy of the recording of the killing game before theirs, at Hope’s Peak. He’s seen it before, in Tsumiki’s memories, but somehow he feels he should watch it again now that he’s capable of being horrified.
Naegi looks a little uncomfortable. “Are you sure? I mean...” He hesitates. “I guess you have the right, if you’ve been through the same thing. But I don’t know if I can watch it with you. I mean, it was hard enough seeing it once. You understand, right?”
He’s seen the deaths on the island from fifteen different angles. Yeah, he can understand. “I wasn’t asking you to watch it.” He grins. “If you want to see something else with me, though, we should definitely arrange a private viewing.”
Fuck. You’re not Hanamura, he reminds himself.
Naegi, perhaps fortunately, doesn’t seem to realise he’s being hit on. “A movie or something? That might actually be fun. It’d be good to take a break from everything.”
You haven’t scored, Hinata tells the Hanamura part of himself, ferociously. This isn’t something he can afford to think about. He has enough worries without getting into the question of how the hell you can make a relationship work when you’re fifteen people, only some of whom actually find any specific person attractive.
“I’ll ask about the recordings,” Naegi says. “Kirigiri-san might be able to watch it with you.”
Right. Of course. They want someone with him to make sure he doesn’t relapse into despair.
Fine. He wouldn’t trust himself either.
-
There’s a screening of the Hope’s Peak events at the Jabberwock Island cinema not long afterwards, open to whoever wants to attend. Kuzuryuu and Sonia show up. So does Kirigiri, looking impassive as always.
The version they’re watching is heavily cut down, edited to skim quickly over the deaths and trials and to emphasise the bonds of friendship that developed in such a seemingly hopeless situation. Someone at the Future Foundation has put real effort into twisting Enoshima’s intended message into one of hope. It still makes for pretty miserable viewing, though, especially when Hinata knows that he personally had a hand in causing it. Or multiple hands.
He has to walk out two trials in. The Komaeda and Tsumiki sides of him are both incredibly turned on for different reasons, and it’s kind of fucking him up.
-
Tsumiki’s memories are the worst. Every morning, when he wakes up, he looks down at himself twice. The second time is to check that he’s still Hinata. The first is just to make sure he isn’t Tsumiki.
She didn’t just kill Mioda because the Despair Disease made Mioda a convenient target. She killed Mioda because Mioda was the one she was closest to at school. Koizumi was never unkind to her, but her pity could be hard to bear sometimes. Mioda treated Tsumiki in exactly the same way she treated everyone else. It made things easier, somehow. And, at the end of a twisted path of logic Hinata doesn’t ever want to find himself walking again, it meant that she had to die.
Somehow, Tsumiki’s memories from before she fell into despair are even worse. All he can do is try as hard as he can to keep them out of his mind.
Still, there are some things he’d miss if he ever cleared out all the things that don’t belong in his head. When things are hard, he’ll sometimes retreat into Mioda’s mindset. He knows he probably shouldn’t, he knows he needs to rebuild the boundaries of his identity, but it’s so hard to resist Mioda’s way of seeing the world.
A lot of his classmates had serious self-esteem issues. Tsumiki, Koizumi, Kuzuryuu, the Imposter – Tanaka, weirdly enough – he’s spent a lot of time in his memories hating himself, whoever ‘he’ happened to be at the time. Hinata himself wasn’t any better, back when he knew who he was. Mioda was one of the few who was totally comfortable in her own skin.
He can’t imagine how she gave in to despair. She probably just thought it’d inform her songwriting.
He can’t ever be pure Mioda, of course – it’s not like all the other people he remembers being just go away when he’s not fighting to stay Hinata – but it’s relatively easy to pick her thoughts out of the mess, as her way of thinking is so distinctive. She’s a lot better than Hinata at handling the ‘too many psychological cooks’ situation; she mainly just thinks it’s hilarious.
The impulses Nidai left him with can be useful as well. Never give up. Take this as an opportunity to reinvent yourself; if you can’t go back to the person you once were, you can become someone stronger and better. Strip everyone naked and give them massages. Maybe not that last one, but still.
Does he have to go back to being Hinata full-time? Maybe there are better options open to him now. Can he just... take on the persona of one of his dead classmates?
It’s a creepy thought. He shudders. Or maybe Koizumi shudders. Who knows?
-
Naegi is evasive when Hinata asks about the people he once knew, or the people he remembers knowing, at least. Hinata doesn’t think Naegi is trying to hide anything, exactly; he probably just doesn’t know how to deliver bad news.
He tries speaking to Kirigiri instead.
He asks about Hanamura’s mother. Dead, of course.
He asks about his – no, Owari’s siblings. Kirigiri checks with Owari for permission before she’s prepared to tell him. All dead but one; the survivor’s whereabouts are unknown.
Tsumiki would often leave one member of a family alive. It was never an act of mercy.
He stops asking.
-
If you’d asked him beforehand what the most embarrassing thing about having all these sets of memories in his head would be, he might have said going to the toilet or something. Actually, that’s not a problem. He doesn’t feel like he’s spied on the others in the bathroom; it’s something everyone pretty much does on autopilot, so he barely remembers any of it.
Well, except for Nidai. He’s been inside the guy’s thoughts and he still doesn’t know how it’s possible to be that passionate about bowel movements.
Knowing everyone’s masturbatory fantasies, though... that, that’s awkward. Especially when they involve other people on the island – other people he knows, other people he’s been. Souda’s in particular make his skin crawl, just because Sonia seems so wrong in them. And he doesn’t even want to get into the ridiculous orgies going on in Hanamura’s head just about every second of the day.
But, of course, he is Souda and he is Hanamura and, however much he might want to deny it, his shirt is starting to feel a little uncomfortable. He needs to stop thinking about this.
God, his sexuality must be so fucked up. He doesn’t think there’s a single person from the island he wouldn’t be tempted to sleep with if the opportunity arose, himself included.
Well, apart from Hanamura. Nobody was attracted to Hanamura. And he can’t even take comfort in that, because the Hanamura side of him is devastated.
Actually, that’s not true, is it? Hanamura definitely featured in Komaeda’s fantasies. Everyone on the island did at one point or another, in fact, although the fantasies were never actually sexual. Somehow, that just makes them creepier. Komaeda’s favourite was of Hinata correctly pinning him as the murderer in a trial.
Hinata tries so hard to keep Komaeda’s feelings and memories at bay; they’re almost as bad as Tsumiki’s. The feelings towards the others Komaeda left him with, when he killed himself by proxy, are a complicated, horrible mess – love and loathing and admiration twisted up together. He hates them for their connection to despair, and yet...
-
He can’t really cope with seeing his comatose classmates; it brings back memories of being stabbed, of being strangled, of having his throat slit. And it’s so hard for him to remember he’s not Saionji when he sees Koizumi, or that he’s not Owari when he sees Nidai. Whoever would suffer the most, that’s who he is in the moment.
He never forgets that he’s Hinata when he’s looking at Komaeda, but that doesn’t exactly help.
Somehow he keeps coming back to the hospital anyway. And seeing Pekoyama is what causes the most pain, a combination of Kuzuryuu’s feelings about her and the memory of her last thoughts, so – of course – somehow he finds himself at her bedside more often than anyone else’s.
He leans down, Pekoyama’s hand cold under his own, and presses a quick kiss to her forehead.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Shit. Kuzuryuu.
“Get the hell—” and then Kuzuryuu cuts himself off, goes quiet for a moment. “Okay. I know you’ve got my memories or whatever. But you’re not me. You didn’t know her.”
Who the fuck is this guy to tell him that he didn’t know Peko?
No. Hinata grits his teeth, tries to sift through his thoughts. No, he cannot let himself slip into Kuzuryuu mode here, because Kuzuryuu having a blazing argument with himself isn’t going to end well for anyone.
Still, the Hinata side of him is a little pissed off as well. He doesn’t know Pekoyama? He literally has her entire life in his head.
But it’s hard to get too furious with Kuzuryuu when he loves him so deeply.
God, he’s such a mess.
“Fine,” Hinata says, holding his hands up, stepping back from the bed.
Kuzuryuu doesn’t say anything for a long moment, standing in the doorway, staring at Pekoyama.
“If you’re going to tell me I can’t visit my comatose friend,” Hinata says – maybe ‘friend’ isn’t exactly the right word, but he’s not sure there is a right word for this situation – “you could at least move so I can leave.”
“Enoshima put Peko in your head as well,” Kuzuryuu says. “Right?”
Hinata looks at him.
Should he offer to... be Pekoyama for a while? Try to pull her thoughts out of his wreck of a mind, try to give Kuzuryuu a conversation with something close to her?
Can’t do it. Too painful. Too creepy.
“You want to know something about her?” he asks instead.
Kuzuryuu doesn’t speak for a moment. “No. Forget it.”
There are wild rabbits in Jabberwock Park. Sometimes Hinata will use some of Tanaka’s techniques to summon these noble and bloodthirsty denizens of the land to his side, where they can at last take up their true role in the universe as indispensable allies in—
Ahem. Sometimes Hinata will use some of Tanaka’s techniques to tempt them over to him, and then he’ll call up Pekoyama and spend a couple of blissful hours petting them.
He can’t bring himself to tell Kuzuryuu that.
-
It’s messed up his head, and it’s made the thought of everyone they’ve lost even harder to bear – he knows them all so intimately now – but maybe it isn’t all bad, having these memories that don’t belong to him.
When he found out about Kamukura, he thought he’d never be able to forgive himself. But he can forgive the others, when he’s able to keep them separate from himself in his head. He doesn’t know exactly what most of them have done, apart from Tsumiki, but he’s seen inside their heads and he knows none of them are bad people. Maybe he can learn to see himself that way as well.
He tries to look at himself through Koizumi’s eyes, as they’re the ones closest to his own. She’s not exactly the forgive-and-forget type – she’d at least expect him to make some effort to atone – but he doesn’t think she’d consider him irredeemable. It makes him feel a little better. And a little worse, because Koizumi isn’t here to shout him out of his despondency.
And that’s the other thing about these memories. No matter how much pain they cause him, they’re a legacy. They’re a way of holding on to something of the people who’ve gone.
Some days, when he can’t remember if he’s Hinata or if he’s Sonia or if he choked to death on his own blood with eight skewer wounds in his chest, he thinks he’d give anything for someone to offer to take these memories away. But he isn’t sure that he’d really be able to take that offer, if it came.
-
Naegi will occasionally visit Jabberwock Island just to talk to everyone, check how they are and, although he doesn’t know it, drive the aspects of Komaeda inside Hinata’s mind wild with unsettling adoration. When Kirigiri visits, though, it’s always for a specific purpose. She calls a meeting in the hotel restaurant a few weeks after they get out of the simulation.
“We found a survivor linked to the island,” Kirigiri says, brisk and businesslike. “Mahiru Koizumi-san’s mother. She was on a war photography assignment overseas when the Incident broke out and the ports were closed. She has only recently been able to return to Japan.”
Hinata stares. She’s alive. Mom...
Koizumi’s mother, he tells himself. Keep it together.
Actually, forget keeping it together. There hasn’t been a lot of good news. If being Koizumi for a moment makes this better, that’s what he’ll do. Although Koizumi’s feelings are tangled up with fear; what did she do while she was in despair? Does her mother know about that?
“Does she know of her daughter’s condition?” Sonia asks.
“She’s been informed,” Kirigiri says. “She says she’d like to speak to someone who was in the simulation. This would be entirely your decision. If one of you is willing to talk with her, we can transport you this evening.”
Kuzuryuu closes his eyes for a moment.
“I don’t guess she’ll want to talk to me,” he says, opening them and getting to his feet, “but if she wants to know what happened... well, I owe her a lot more than I can pay.”
“You don’t have to,” Hinata says, maybe too quickly. “I’ll go.”
-
They meet in a cavernous, grey-walled underground shelter; the air above ground is no longer dangerous to breathe, but the streets are still unsafe. Koizumi’s mother looks up as he approaches her.
She looks so much older and sadder than the last time he saw her. Or the last time Koizumi saw her. It wrenches his heart.
God, he loves her so much and she doesn’t even know his name.
But it’s something. It’s something good, even if it hurts. Maybe there are other survivors, other people he cares about, whether they know it or not. Maybe he can give them something of the loved ones they’ve lost, even if he can’t ever replace them.
“You’re the one from the island?” she asks.
He nods and gives her a half-smile, trying to show her their shared sorrow, trying not to show the pain that won’t make any sense to her. “I know your daughter.”