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Something our father said is that you have three faces, Maizono's sister writes. She hides in the bathroom with several boxes propped up against the door-- full of belongings of their mother that her father never could throw away.
Someone, or something, has broken into this house, her childhood house. She had thought nobody would find her here. She writes on the back of a paper she found in the box. It looks like it's been folded and unfolded many times, but she has no time to read it. The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends and family.
Her hand is shaking. Her nails are bitten down to the base from anxiety. She hears some kind of hooves in the hallway now-- she wouldn't be surprised if they were the horsemen of the apocalypse, considering what had happened to the world outside. The image of her sister flashes in Maizono Chiyoko's mind and it fills her with pride knowing Sayaka was one of the students who was determined to bring the world back, no matter how it had treated her.
The third face, nobody sees. It's the truest reflection of who you are.
Some kind of nose- it even sounds wet- is sniffing, snorting. Then there's the voice of a man, laughing. As far as the girl knows, the man and the beast are one and the same, a chimera here to swallow her whole.
But I've seen them all in my time with you and my time watching you. I've seen maybe even more than three. Maybe that saying is an oversimplification. You're more than multiple faces you put on for different people. All that adds up to the Maizono Sayaka who I'm proud to be related to. There's a bang on the door and one of the boxes topples over. She writes so fast, the characters practically blur together. You're my world, my only family. No matter what you've done, I'd still welcome you home with open arms. If you're reading this, I don't want you to regret anything that's happened. I don't want you to live in regret.
And if even one of your faces looks out at the world with selfishness, then I'm glad one of us could finally bring a genuine smile to it somehow. Maizono Sayaka, I
The door breaks off its hinges in a flurry of splinters and fangs. Chiyoko lets out a scream.
Then, nothing.
--
Naegi saw the first face, the mask shown to the outside world. Everyone saw the first face. It was on their TVs, on flashing Shibuya advertisements, on a poster in Komaru's bedroom. Maizono Sayaka's music followed you like a guardian angel from high-rise to downtown to homeless shanties-- anywhere with radio. People seemed to put more spring in their step and shine in their smile when they heard it.
Except for Naegi Makoto himself. For him, it all slipped in one ear and out the other, leaving only an atashi here and a ganbatte there the way Maizono herself left sparkles in her wake. This was also the most he remembered of Maizono from junior high. He remembered a girl who raised her hand quickly in class and put a smile on sad student's faces; she wasn't buried underneath regrets paved over by the placidity of being 'just ordinary' like him. She had soared like a crane and he had drifted like one of its feathers in the wind.
"Having a bad dream?"
Naegi snapped out of one stressful daydream into a worse reality. Monokuma's killing game was underway, and Naegi had begun to realize with an increasing anxiety that his memories were hazier than when he had entered, as if they were tires that had been driven a thousand miles, leaving him standing idly by.
The one thing that shone in his foggy memory was Maizono's face-- now staring at him with perfect concern, even her hair falling at just the right angle with a tilt of her head.
"I-it's nothing," and he shook the last of the worried thoughts from his head. "How'd you know?"
"Oh, because I'm an esper."
It surprised him a little every time, if only because it offered an image of Maizono as anything different from what she presented to the world. She was Maizono Sayaka, an open-mouth laugh concealed by painted fingernails, worry a million miles beneath her wings. The only things different from her public image had been her moments of panic in this school life of mutual killing, as if she'd forgotten the lyrics and still had the world's eyes on her.
And even in the ignorance from before Monokuma outlined the terms of the game, she would still at times look as if her attention was somewhere beyond the clouds themselves.
"Hee hee. I'm just kidding," she said.
"You just have good intuition," Naegi finished. He managed to crack a smile. She did, too.
--
There was a time before the students made accusations that they made conversation. He spent some of his free time with Maizono before the murder, just talking politely.
"By the way..."
"Huh?" Naegi perked up.
"Do you have any siblings?" she asked. It surprised Naegi, but he supposed they had talked about everything and nothing except for family.
"Um..." he scratched his chin, like he did so often when he thought. Back again to the memories-- they were there, but suddenly everything felt like it were longer ago. Maizono sensed his discomfort and was about to backpedal, but he interjected: "I have a little sister. Her name is Komaru."
She looked like someone had reached out and plucked a heartstring. This time he was about to change the subject, even if she looked happy beyond the sudden sadness, but she interrupted, "Would you tell me about her?"
"I-if you want!" he said. Anything you want. "Um... she's a little younger than me, but she's taller, aha. We always got along really well."
"That... that makes me happy."
"Oh!" he said. "She's a fan of yours, you know."
"Really?"
"Yeah!"
He saw something besides the first face again, just once more: that distant look as if she were far away, and her body was only a pulse away from being just a marble statue. Then it was gone. "It really is nice hearing that. Thank you."
"I-it's no problem at all!"
"Could I ask you one more question?"
His heart skipped a beat. "Yes."
"Aren't... you afraid you'll never see her again, locked in here?"
The sentence would play over and over in his dreams, the way lyrics of her songs would be stuck in other peoples' minds. He would soon realize why his memories felt so distant, how he ended up in these circumstances-- that he had willingly locked himself in this school with all the others. Him in here and Komaru out there.
If it was for the greater good, that outweighs the good of just one person, he had thought. He had thought he'd help however he could inside Hope's Peak to make a better world for Komaru. So long as she was happy somewhere, he was happy too.
As far as he knew at the time, Komaru was still sitting at home on the couch with his parents.
"I only know for sure I won't see her again if I give up!" he said. "We have to maintain hope."
"... You're right. Thank you again."
He believed it with all his heart. Maybe somewhere, she let herself believe it for a moment too.
In the year to come, as he relearned all his erased memories, he'd find a letter in Maizono's belongings in her childhood home. He had come with the Future Foundation on a mission to clean and secure the overall area, polluted with years of despair. The letter had been unfolded and refolded many times.
He'd soon find that the person who had signed it was Maizono's late mother.
This was the final line: hope only gets you so far.
--
Maizono Sayaka's scent went from the down feathers of a baby bird and cherry blossoms to sweat and blood pumped with adrenaline (and he'd wonder for a moment, when she was accused of attempted murder, which one was natural to her). The mixture had been seeping down her ribs, visible now as her shirt stuck to her frail body, down to her thin legs, upon which she had promised to follow Naegi to the ends of the earth. Now she had gotten there first and again left him in the dust.
The school had killed the life he'd lived in happy oblivion. A world in which idols just rose to the top like angels fluttering on gentle wings, rather than the damned climbing from the Earth's core and tearing one another down to get just an inch higher. Things just fell into place-- he believed that. He really believed that.
He really believed her. (And oh, Naegi Makoto, I'm really leaning on you, I so trust you-- was any of that real? Had he failed Maizono or had Maizono failed him? Which one hurt less to believe? Which viewpoint was hope?)
He discovered the body and screamed until his vision swam and his body took a breath, until he didn't know he was screaming anymore. His tears ran so hot down his face, it felt like they were washing off the skin and revealing what was underneath.
It was just his luck that when he came back to reality, it was only to an investigation of Maizono Sayaka's death with him as the prime suspect. Deep down, he did want them to choose wrong and be jointly executed; what was a world without her in it? (--And several trials later, when Asahina Aoi felt the same about Sakura, Naegi empathized so deeply it felt like surgical scars had been torn open for a second look.)
But what image of 'her' did he have? She'd sung her last siren song about hope and left a final message about the cold reality of life-- kill or be killed. She had used him and he probably would have accepted it even if he knew outright.
Hope only gets you so far.
In the end, it was a girl with no presence at all- the opposite of Maizono Sayaka- who reminded Super High-school Level Hope to feel hope whatsoever. Kirigiri suggested she left the dying message to clear Naegi's name. She was thinking about him in her final moments.
He said it was just revenge on her killer. He blamed the mastermind for doing all this, and he would until they escaped. But he felt he had been betrayed, and he felt worse because it was for a just cause. A cause that someone stopped drifting through the present for.
Maizono had tried to kill because she had wanted something badly enough. What he wanted, he still didn't know-- to live? His own revenge? Was that why he hammered the final nail in Kuwata Leon's coffin?
And only once the killing game ended and he clutched that letter in his shaking fingers would he realize why she soared so much, what propelled her so hard. He would think for a moment he was lucky to have just drifted.
--
Chiyoko saw the second face, the one seen by friends and family. Maizono Sayaka's friends were simply 'connections' before going to Hope's Peak. Her only other family besides her younger sister was her father, who was away from home so often he forgot what both his daughters' faces looked like.
It hadn't been like that before it happened. Her father was in love with her mother. She didn't feel the same. She never felt the same, explained her suicide note, after she had slit her wrists and bled to death in the bathtub. She had just drifted and drifted and this was the one and only choice in her life.
Chiyoko had only just stopped breastfeeding. Sayaka was just old enough to understand that her mother was never coming back. She was just old enough to understand that her father threw himself into his work both to support the children and to get away from them, like he were paying off malicious ghosts to keep them at bay.
She was just old enough that Chiyoko's infant memories of her mother's warm smile and blue eyes merged with Chiyoko's childhood memories of her older sister's own features until the two had merged perfectly in her mind.
"It will all be okay," Sayaka would tell her younger sister. "Hope will move us foward. No matter what, we'll never give up."
Hope only gets you so far. The rest of the letter had been written in obscure kanji that looked all the world to young Sayaka like buildings collapsing, towers of people piled atop one another, the world ending. It was all she read at first before she tossed the letter aside and tried, even if she knew it was futile, to wake her mother up.
She would look back on it later and think that her mother wouldn't have wanted to see her even if she had succeeded. Her birth was the first assurance to her mother that she would never be able to leave the marriage. It said so in the letter.
She would keep the letter on her person later in life. Her father wanted nothing to do with it. Chiyoko only knew that something bad had happened and that's why mom was gone. Sayaka tried to bring herself on multiple occasions to tell Chiyoko the real truth, the whole truth- I'll do it this birthday, this new year, this obon- but never came close.
(And how could she explain to Chiyoko that her mother had not once mentioned her in the suicide note, that she hadn't been in mother's thoughts in her last moments? Had mother not wanted her to find out-- how couldn't she? Or was the blame sorely on Sayaka, not the second child?)
The last person to know had been a member of the government Maizono Sayaka bribed. He was someone with yakuza and police force connections who could cover up the suicide as so not to bring any scandal to her idol career. He had suggested maybe her mother had clinical depression, not depression brought on by Sayaka herself. She had told him to do his job.
And he did.
---
Hope will only get you so far. The rest came from within one's self, Sayaka had decided. She felt a kinship in that with her father, how hard he worked after his wife's death. She wanted with all her heart to resent him for not caring for his daughters better, especially in the wake of such a tragedy. The difference between them was that she was working long for herself and Chiyoko; he was working long to avoid her and Chiyoko.
"But is hope really just suppression of despair?" Monokuma would ask, looking Maizono in the eye even if it were a general statement. The mastermind knew Chiyoko were watching on TV-- the world was always watching Maizono Sayaka, one way or another. "You can't run forever. Eventually, despair will break down all your doors find you in all your hiding places."
Sayaka could never resent her father, after all. He still made appointments, bought clothes, cleaned the house-- just often in the middle of the night, or when it was early enough to be considered morning. She woke up early too, and he would try his hardest to be happy.
"How do you always read my mind?"
It had been a joke before her mother died. He'd always say that the toddler was an esper, that he of course was thinking about McDonalds for dinner again, how did she know?
It stopped being a joke after her mother died. He tried to fake joy when they saw one another. He wasn't good at it.
Sayaka learned how to read people quickly in order to understand his moods-- from sobbing and apologetic over her mother to fuming and screaming over her mother. All these emotions amplified by how if he ever slept anymore, it was in his office.
When he died young, she wondered which took his life first: the insomnia or the despair.
--
Before the school life of mutual killing, before she worked and did everything a mother would do, before she was an idol, she and Chiyoko were children in a shabby house on a shabby street. The changing daylight would cast shadows on Chiyoko's face as she stared out the window for any hint of their father. Chiyoko would sit until only a streetlight illuminated the world outside-- so far away from the neon that would become Sayaka's world.
Sayaka was never content to sit in the nest so much as take a leap of faith herself. She often made them both dinner with her feet on a stool and her eyes on a cookbook. Her father mostly brought meals home, enough for them to eat leftovers for days at a time. He started crying when he found out Sayaka had started to cook for herself, as if putting that guilt on her weren't also a form of abuse. (She knew, also, how he'd wash his face and even shave in the kitchen sink, anything to avoid that one bathroom. She was an esper, after all.)
Sayaka would wipe her younger sister's tears away with her thumb, even encourage her to eat when the despair of their home life locked up her body and glued shut her mouth. "It's the only way you'll get healthy and strong," Sayaka would say. "It's the only way you'll grow up to be like me."
That always got Chiyoko to eat.
Chiyoko never comforted her sister the way she was comforted, not because she didn't want to, but because Sayaka never allowed her to. The worst despair had done to Sayaka's face was eyestrain after hours of watching idol tapes-- no, studying them. All her despair burned like coal in a fire, only to power her on.
And eventually Sayaka came home as frequently as her father had, and eventually Chiyoko found out Sayaka was starving herself to fit into tighter and tighter outfits, and eventually Sayaka snapped at her and broke the bowl when Chiyoko tried to encourage her to eat the way had been done for her as a child.
Even when Sayaka apologized and held her sister close while she wept, she didn't cry. She didn't tell Chiyoko all the horrible things that happened in the idol industry. She smiled until Chiyoko calmed down-- a smile brighter than a mother's love.
"You're fine?"
"I'm fine."
"You're sure?"
In several years, when Chiyoko watched her sister on TV- but in a killing game, not on a concert- she'd realize all Sayaka's fake smiles had been practiced on her.
--
Chiyoko was 10 when Sayaka moved herself and her sister out of a place so backwards that even the trains didn't run to it and into an apartment outside Tokyo. Their father had stayed behind in the old house. He was too proud to live in an apartment his daughter bought; he couldn't accept that his teenage daughter was supporting him rather than vice versa, even though she had cooked his only meals for years already. Chiyoko said goodbye once and for all when he left early in the morning to shower at the gym, and he said 'see you' casually, as if she would be there when he got home, even if she had a suitcase in her hand.
The purchase of the apartment wasn't a grand display of wealth, even if the Maizono family was new money-- Chiyoko felt having her own bedroom was a luxury. She sat on the edge of the bed as if it were an elaborate throne and the stuffed dolls before her were her servants.
At night, the lights from the city kept her up. She would have closed the blinds, but she couldn't bring herself to traverse the wide empty space in her room. It was overwhelming to fall asleep without the rise and fall of Sayaka's breathing. Her servants- stuffed animals- only reminded Chiyoko of her sister, who had bought them for her.
If she were royalty, it was lonely at the top. She stared from her bed out the window until the sun rose. Did Sayaka ever feel this way? The dolls, the luxuries, even the new apartment-- Chiyoko felt Sayaka's love all around her, but not from her sister herself.
Was this just the way she knew how to show love?
They had ridden with the rest of Sayaka's idol group in the car on the way over. The idols fawned over Chiyoko for a moment or two, marveled over how polite she was and how Sayaka wore a matching hairclip all the time. They also fawned over the pink suitcases that Sayaka had packed her belongings in and a fat pigeon outside in the birdbath and a odd cloud in the sky.
One of the idols' words stuck in Chiyoko's mind, even if they were whispered to Sayaka: "I didn't know you had a sister."
Sayaka would flash smiles at Chiyoko in the backseat every so often, squeeze her hand, say they were almost there. Then one of the fellow idols might ask if she said something and drag her back into the conversation. The slamming of car doors rather than Sayaka's nudging awoke Chiyoko when they finally arrived.
"Onee-chan--"
But a fan recognized the group and took a photo, then took a selfie with each member individually, then asked Chiyoko to take a photo of them all together.
Chiyoko was sure, at least, her sister was smiling the brightest in that picture for her.
--
When their father lay on his deathbed, Sayaka cancelled her tour and chartered a private jet home. Her designer limousine bounced over the potholes and litter of her childhood home's neighborhood. It was the first time Chiyoko had been alone with her sister in years by that point, having met her off the plane with the chauffer and one of the private tutors her sister left behind.
Chiyoko wore hand-me-down clothing and carried a small purse containing nothing but essentials. Sayaka wore a costume from a concert and looked at the poor and homeless around her and heard nothing but silence. Her eyes fogged with tears, having soared so high and close to the sun that she looked at the ground and realized she didn't belong there anymore.
"It's okay," Chiyoko had told her, pulling her sister into an embrace so tight it threatened to merge them into one being. "Hope will move us foward. No matter what, we'll never give up."
--
Their father, in his last days, would call them into the room in order to tell them the same things over and over again, having forgotten he'd said to them minutes earlier. The first time Chiyoko had seen Sayaka cry was when he referred to the older sister by her mother's name.
The last person to speak with him had been Maizono Sayaka. "He said he was sorry for working so much when we were younger," she said. "He said he loves you very much and is very proud of you."
Chiyoko believed it, if only because she wanted to so badly. It's not that she never resented her sister's popularity, how everyone around her adored her. She didn't let herself think about it out of fear that Sayaka, never having learned how to handle those emotions, would snap at her again.
Still, she held Sayaka's hand tight during the funeral, as if they mutually feared one or the other would float away.
(Naegi felt he saw more than the first face, standing in that bathroom where her mother died, while Future Foundation operatives screamed into his earpiece because he wasn't responding. He read her mother's suicide letter from start to finish, then found Chiyoko's note on the back. Not everything could be put in the daylight for the sake of hope. He had realized that during his final class trial, with Kirigiri and Monokuma's Key.)
Chiyoko loved her sister with a heart several sizes too big for her small body battered and beaten by the world. When Sayaka, as a child, had begun to lock herself in her father's bedroom to watch idols on TV, Chiyoko would sit outside the door and listen in. The second TV in the house had long been pawned for more than it was worth, and Chiyoko denied wholeheartedly that her underaged sister had done anything dirty to get the extra money.
Chiyoko had loved her sister when she came home after rejection upon rejection trying to break into the idol industry. Chiyoko had loved her sister on the days when she didn't come home from work or did come home with concealer around an eye. Chiyoko had loved her sister when she said she'd still stand by her side if she weren't an idol and Sayaka stormed out, slamming the door so hard the house shook.
"Idols spread hope and joy throughout the world," Sayaka would say, at more than one stage of her career. "If I could make even one other person with a situation like ours feel that there's a future for them, that they could grasp a better life, it would be worth it."
Chiyoko wanted to hold on to the edge of her skirt like when she was a young child trying not to get separated from Sayaka in public-- but now it was more like trying to hold on to a dream after waking up rather than enjoying the warmth it might have brought you already.
Chiyoko loved her sister enough to finally let her go, and picked up the pieces Sayaka cut off of herself to create the idol persona, good and bad, and kept them locked away in her heart.
--
The mastermind saw the third face, supposedly never seen by anyone. But Junko had looked deep into everyone's minds to wipe two years away; Junko watched them on cameras when they thought nobody else in the world was watching. Junko had a tape of Maizono's murdered idol group and a motive card that said Maizono Sayaka is responsible for her mother's suicide, because she knew the idol would actually believe it.
The screaming echoed throughout the data processing room, muted from the rest of the school by the dorms' soundproofing. Enoshima Junko stood behind a chair with Monokuma seated in it, them both watching the screen displaying Maizono Sayaka's dorm within the school.
There was Maizono Sayaka, the real Maizono Sayaka: screaming, weeping, thrashing and hurting herself as if her body had never taken bruises before. This was the truest Maizono Sayaka there was, Junko thought. She made sure to make it a primary focus on her broadcast. Maizono's screams would resonate through every store and every family room like her music had.
This was the first lesson that was taught at this academy of despair. Maizono had already learned this lesson in her neglect as a child: scream all you want; nobody's coming to help.
(Oh, and how Sayakers would crawl out of the woodwork, how some of them would even get close to the academy, how they loved Sayaka-chan. Junko made sure that their bodies were packed with machine gun fire even long after they were dead, until they were just mush. If Maizono ever faced Graduation, Junko would make sure to bring her to a fan reunion.)
Maizono screamed for all she had done to get to the top, only to be dragged down to the base instincts- hunt, don't be hunted- by some hack operating a teddy bear. She sobbed with a heaving chest for all the people she failed, every member of her idol group drowning in their own blood like her own mother had. Junko's body tingled with ecstasy imagining how Maizono would react graduating and realizing just how many more people she had failed-- how despair had clouded the sky she'd hoped to brighten.
Maizono had her emotional breakdown for what seemed like ages before the overwhelming quiet of the room took reign again. Junko leaned closer until her face was against the screen. How does it feel, Sayaka? she whispered in Monokuma's voice. Being alone in this overwhelming quiet, abandoned like you were as a child? Oh, you want an idol video to calm you down? I have a great one for you!
Upupupu-- and then Junko was laughing until her sides ached. She'd always especially hated that fucking idol twat. The only thing she liked about her was that she was the only one of these dumb dolts she had called her classmates thinking about committing a murder-- she could tell. She did always have initiative. Maybe she'd make her Graduation even more special than just making her look at the mutilated bodies of her fellow idols and her last few fans.
After all, Junko sighed, considering how naive Naegi was shaping up to be, the class wouldn't last beyond one trial if Maizono did commit her murder. She had to do something to bring the world more beautiful despair.
Maizono sat perfectly still in her room, like a doll that had run and run until it ran out of battery and fell over right where it stood. Junko clicked her fingernails in boredom, then flipped open the cell phone she'd taken from Mukuro. Junko wasn't going to use it- what fun was being locked in like the others if you could talk to the outside world?- but she had an idea. A despicable, despairing, dastardly idea.
Tanaka answered on the first ring. "I am at your service."
"Yeah yeah, I know," Junko muttered. "I need a tracker, and my mutt sister is dead."
"Give me your command."
Kill yourself, Junko thought about saying, but no, she wanted this plan put to action. "Find this Chiyoko, and make it fast, for fuck's sake. She's just some kid, how well could she be hiding? I was going to ask Kamukura to do it, but I don't want to give him the chance at excitement."
The idol group as a motive seemed to have worked perfectly well, so she had thought it unnecessary to find Chiyoko. Now, though, how would she make Chiyoko greet her sister upon Graduation? Maybe she'd read off a list of all the crimes Sayaka had committed to get to the top, finishing with the murder in the killing game? Maybe she'd end it with 'and it was all for you'? Maybe she'd make one of them kill the other as the game's bonus round?
(She was glad she didn't ask Kamukura-- talking with him was always a drag. He'd say something stupid like 'weren't the idols enough', and then she'd yell at him to write 'no amount of despair is ever enough' a thousand times like a bad student. And the dumbass would actually do it.)
"Look no further!" Tanaka declared, raising his voice as if an army of crows were rising into the air behind him. "No beast whether scaled or feathered across Japan will stray for a moment in their divine hunt of Maizono Chiyoko--"
She flipped the phone closed. Maizono Sayaka had begun to stir again in her room. Junko clutched Monokuma into her breast excitedly. Finally! Get this killing game rolling!
"We-- we're going to--"
We? What, you think you're royalty now? Junko thought. The image of Sonia sending that annoying last Sayaker, Komaru, to the guillotine flashed through Junko's mind.
"We're going to get out of this despair, no matter what it takes. We've looked worse in the eye and come out on top. We'll shine brighter than ever before."
Junko felt herself gagging. Despair and hope were two sides of the same coin, each with its own distinct face. Even Komaeda knew that one didn't exist without the other. In just a second, Maizono Sayaka had moved from her true face to whatever lie she saw when she looked in the mirror.
"Then I'll come home again, Chiyoko. I won't just hope so. I'll promise so," Maizono said, in one final whisper.
Junko stared at the flickering screen until her eyes dried out. 'Maizono Sayaka' was an idea, an expectation rather than a human being by now; without being an idol, what was she? Hope had brought her that far, and the rest, she would just let go? She'd give up living a lie as an idol to return to living a lie as an older sister and surrogate mother?
She had instinctively switched the TV feed from Maizono's room to another great view of 'Enoshima Junko"s corpse in the middle of Maizono's drivel. Fuck it. Fuck it fuck it fuck it, Junko thought, so long as she kills someone.
--
She couldn't.
Leon had fast reflexes as a natural-born sportsman, but Maizono was faster, sharper. She had cut down closer people to her. A fellow idol from a different group once had been found dead-- Maizono gave a rehearsed statement to the media. The police ruled it as a suicide-- Maizono pretended she had never crushed the other girl under her boot to further her career.
But when the cameras were off and it was as dark as nights were in her old home district, she paid some of her workers to put three month's worth of Sayaka's own salary of flowers down before her grave. When she had to cancel coming home for the third time to do an extra fan-meet event so she could wire home money for Chiyoko and her father, she recorded a long and sentimental video message for Chiyoko's private viewing, media's prying eyes be damned.
Even now with a knife in her hand, Maizono had never been able to fully cut all emotion out from herself except for a practiced joy. She still felt pieces of guilt, fear, despair, all locked away somewhere within her. She knew that would ruin her one day-- but as she struggled with her killer through eyes blurred by tears, unable to end his life directly, she thought: I didn't imagine it like this.
He was just as desperate as she was to escape, to survive. She fled to the shower room and let the door jam behind her. Leon pounded his fists on the door the same way Chiyoko had when her sister locked herself in to watch idol tapes, leaving Sayaka anxious and lost and wondering for once, just once, if hope had taken her in the right direction to begin with.
--
"G-god," he breathed. "Oh... oh my god, what have I done?" was all Leon could say in Maizono's dying moments. "Ch-christ, I'm-- I'm so sorry, I'm so fucking sorry--"
The baseball player stepped backwards out of the bathroom, eyes fixed on the crime scene. His breaths were shallow. His hope had gotten him this far. Now he'd have to face what remained.
Once he had left the bathroom, Maizono tried to stand again in one weak moment, but she couldn't feel her legs anymore. All of her body felt heavy, like a coat over her true self, and the real Maizono Sayaka was the overwhelming pain of the stab wound. She felt like she was rising from her own body, looking down on herself-- not yet, not yet, she thought. Not yet.
There were so many things she wanted to say as whoever she was now, rising from Maizono Sayaka's copse, that she couldn't say as the public personality Maizono Sayaka. Almost all of them started with I'm sorry. She dipped one shaking finger in her own blood, as if her body were a doll with strings about to snap.
Carefully, she pressed it to the wall behind her. Leon was still in the room over, cleaning it of any trace of him. Naegi would be found guilty almost immediately, she knew.
Naegi. God, Naegi. She couldn't imagine how heartbroken he would be when he saw it-- saw her, the girl dying as alone and abandoned as she'd been in life. She had read him as someone she could use, but now, seeing herself as she bled to death, she looked inside herself and realized somewhere in there she had wanted their friendship to be true.
(Men in her life had always failed her-- her father, her managers, the men she bribed, the men who blackmailed her, the men who made attempts on her life as an idol. She realized, when presented with someone as genuine and honest as Naegi Makoto, she wasn't sure how to respond.)
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There was no more space for apologies, for messages to her only surviving family, to the first friend she'd made outside of her idol group only to have betrayed him only hours later. She remembered how she felt the first time she stood on a stage-- the light blinded her; she couldn't imagine how anyone saw with those lights blaring right in her retinas. Now it was going bright again, brighter than anything that could be real or physical in this world.
The last movement she made was a small smile. Hope to all of Japan, all the world-- that was her dream. There and gone again, as impossible to grasp as a sunbeam. Now she had just this in front of her: Leon grunting from the exertion of cleaning the entire room; her chest heavier than ever with blood-clumped clothes; an overwhelming light, light overtaking her for once rather than everyone around her.