ルイージ's Writings

They say they see the sun. Tendrils of light surely comforting under any other circumstance simply burn through his skin, acidic — he’s pretty sure it flakes around his knuckles, which have gone hot white under the pressure of how tightly he’s held onto his gun. There’s cheering, celebrating around him, but what he hears is the screeches of the to be damned who are only prolonging the inevitable. Someone who’s effectively a stranger now claps him on the back, another offers a celebratory dinner, and a girl pipes up that it’s time to go.

He’s never actively considered mortality until recently, really. It’s not that he’s never been keen to the fact that they’ll all die someday, nor that they’ve never been at risk; after all, he’s seen it, in fact, and he’s seen the effect that it has. He’s not as stupid as he looks, never has been. Everyone sees the doe eyes and they’re the doe eyes he puts on, always like a deer caught in headlights before he laughs the same as if it means anything, as if it’s not a carefully constructed mask he’s worn for years. But adults always say the same thing, and it’s that teenagers are stupid and they don’t consider it could happen to them or anyone they know, and maybe he was a stupid teenager too even though he’d been twenty years old. Thirty. Thirty years old, and he’d thought the same thing.

He’s floating in a sea of faces all crowding together, and they look to the citadel like it’s a beacon of hope, the bell chimes undeniably victorious in the way they sound across Insomnia. But when he looks at the citadel, he sees instead a monster that’s devoured everything and everyone else is unsuspecting. It wears sheep’s clothing because the gods blessed it with that ability, as they have blessed the dear Oracle and the King, coming together for Eos’s peace. He knows what he saw on the inside. No one else has to know, no one else has to know. For them this is the dawn of a new day and it’d just sour the damn mood.

For him, it’s the end and he’s only waiting for the remainder of what he has to be snuffed out like everything else.

He attends the celebratory dinner among the Kingsglaive with the same kind of plastered smile he’s always done because thank the gods he’d managed to get a lot of practice in for that. Literally thank them, because it’s their fault he’s even had to practice in the first place. Knives and forks tapping plates barely registers in his mind as he stares up at one of the large paintings that he remembers specifically because of what was said about it. He doubts the others even notice the painting, too busy chittering among each other and acting like that’s it and everything moves forward. And he joins the inane chittering, too, grin stretched too-wide but no one says anything about it. He’d argue no one says anything at all, because they’re avoiding everything because the source of light that they see is obvious, but what brought them that source of light… Well, you hardly notice something that’s impossible to observe.

Everything tastes the same like this, and he’d never been especially fond of eating but maybe he’d developed a habit and it’d been an easy one, too, when it’d been the four of them together. Round the campfire fish tastes like the best thing he’s ever had even if his stomach doesn’t entirely agree with him on that assessment. With four eyes the cook watches him carefully, because he’s pretty sure he’s always suspected him on that front even if he continues to speak to him in sharp tongues. He knows he picked up on it, eventually, talked about it with him one night. He still remembers every word of that conversation.

Like everything else shared only between the two of them, he’s taking it to his grave.

He watches the others and wonders if they realize how plastic the food tastes, then he thinks, No, probably not. To them the flavor tastes just as sweet as the way they describe the clouds, fluffy and bright. He honestly hadn’t even noticed they had clouds. His vision is somehow worse now than it had been when stars were the only source of light that remained in the sky.

It’s somewhere late into the celebrations that she joins him at his table. “You don’t mind if I sit here, do you?” she asks him.

“Nah, s’okay,” he says, lips tight, but at least the corners face upward.

He doesn’t know if she’s silent or he simply doesn’t understand any of her words. Her lips move, but none of it makes any sense and it blurs in with all the other noises around them. They’re hardly cacophony; it’s more like they’re white, like the sun’s rays. It’s bright to them but to him it’s dull, and the only brightness comes from the sting it causes his eyes due to not being used to it. If she is talking, she keeps talking for a while as if he had said anything, and he nods appropriately when it seems like she pauses to make it appear as though he’s listening.

It’s not that he’s ignoring her, not really. It’s just that, like everything else, it has no meaning.

He must’ve nodded to the wrong statement at some point, though, as she stops and looks at him, purses her lips. “Prompto?”

Prompto. Is that who he is? Is that his name? “Yeah?”

“You seem really out of it.”

Out of it. Of course. As if they’re the ones who have come to some realization that he’s slow to catch up to. Out of it, like he’s out of touch with reality. It’s laughable, but he knows he’ll look like a madman if he barks one out now, no matter how tempting. “Just a li’l tired, s’all,” he says, and it’s true, he is tired. Very, very tired. “It’s okay! I’ll be right as rain once I go to bed tonight.”

He knows immediately she doesn’t believe him, which doesn’t surprise him much. She’s always been perceptive. It’s among several reasons that he worries about her. But she doesn’t say anything to call him out on it (call him out on what?) before returning to her food. The clicks and the clacks are the same as every plate, and he’d become tempted, maybe, to think that she’s the same as everyone else, too.

Then she murmurs, “I miss him, too.”

And he feels it again: searing pain. And he sees it again, behind his eyes: him, lying on the throne, very still.

To everyone else, the sun is light.

But in Prompto’s eyes, the last of his own light died along with him.

“It’s more than that,” he tells her after a moment, voice choked, but he doesn’t cry. That would imply he had anything left inside of him at all, and he doesn’t. He’d scooped it out of him when he’d gone.

“I know,” she says.

“Everyone else,” he pauses, sucks in a shaky breath as he stares at the plate that’s so, so white. “Everyone else is all happy, an’ — everything’s so great for them. Everything’s saved to them. But to me, it’s…”

“I know,” she says again.

The pause between them is pregnant, but once again as Prompto always does he breaks it because it suffocates him. “I-I don’t know if I can go on without him. I… I don’t think I am, even, right now.”

And it’s something besides burning that he feels, for once, when her fingers brush over the back of his hand… It’s almost like understanding. He looks at her face and he realizes he misjudged her. He’s seen that expression as it’s the same one he’s been making in the mirror, now that they can use mirrors again.

“He was everything to me. I would…rather have the daemons back. That’s… That’s selfish, isn’t it, Iris?”

She smiles at him. Something within him loosens. It’s not a happy smile, but it’s the kind of smile he needs right now. Not the celebratory ones. Not the one that he’d gotten upon the proud clap on the back for shooting down the last of the daemons. It’s the smile that says, We’ll navigate this dark world that no one else sees together.

“I think wherever he is, he’s rolling in it that we’re still thinking about him.”

And Prompto smiles back with all the fragility that he’s been riding on. “That’s just like Noct. What an attention whore.”

And Iris helps him to realize that there’s no way, no how he’s ever going to come to regret giving him his everything. Maybe the burn of the sun will die, and Prompto along with it… But at least he won’t be doing it alone.

“So why do you wanna go back to this musty ol’ room again?”

The loud groan of the Exisal hangar’s door is the first noise to greet the small boy’s question. Shuichi watches that typical lackadaisical smile stretched across his face, like there isn’t a care in this world, as the two of them step into the hangar together. If he’s bothered by this place, he’s showing no signs of it — but by now Shuichi knows that him showing nothing means nothing, in the grand scheme of things.

“I just…want to see something,” Shuichi says to him. “We won’t be long.”

It’s with a hum that Kokichi responds to him, arms laced behind his head as he waltzes into the room like he owns the place. Such a gait is only disturbed by the slight stumble that he takes upon approaching one of the deactivated Exisals, now no longer in danger of being used… Permanently. He doesn’t look directly at him, and while Shuichi doesn’t understand everything about him, he knows enough to know that the normally confident Ultimate Supreme Leader not making eye contact always meant something. It helps that the files that he’d seen and the whiteboard continued to play at the back of his mind; and while he’s never asked, he’s sure it’s doing the same for Kokichi, too.

Ghosts linger through every corner that Shuichi looks, despite the fact that he knows it’d never been real. The stench punctuates his nose anew, making his throat clog up in a way arteries should have, but couldn’t. Metallic and coppery as if he could taste it on his tongue for himself, and he just barely prevents himself from gagging on it; but when he glances at the press again, there’s no bright red that he sees. Instead, the day light reveals nothing between the slide and bed, as if nothing had ever been there in the first place. He blinks, tempted even to rub his eyes because despite the visual feedback telling him otherwise, it’s as if he’s drinking in something thick, with such a tiny body producing almost a lake right in the middle of the hangar, so loud and so obvious that even if Shuichi hadn’t been looking at the time he would have noticed. He feels it trickling down his airways and yet he knows that his eyes expose the truth, even if, when he closes them, red becomes the first color that he sees.

‘It’s a lie,’ rings in his ears.

“What?”

Kokichi lifts a brow at him. “I didn’t say anything, Shuichi.”

“Oh.”

There’s something about that, the way that Kokichi looks back at him with those wide, intense eyes that brings Shuichi back to the present, now. His lips still remain upturned, head slightly tilted, and he’s so solid here that it’s any wonder that Shuichi might have thought differently, just for a moment. The mustiness that Kokichi commented on before becomes apparent to him now, overshadowing everything else, as if this place had long been abandoned, as if they hadn’t been walking here a month ago.

The patient expanding and contracting of his chest draws Shuichi’s attention especially, as an idle thought tells him that there’s still a beating heart inside there.

There’s no doubt in Shuichi’s mind that Kokichi notices him staring, but he says nothing about it. “So,” he draws out the ‘o’, “what’s this something, anyway? You never said, and you know how I hate it when you don’t tell me things.”

“Oh. Right.” It’s not like him, is it? To be so spacey — but his skin prickles as the thought comes back to mind of what he’s actually here for, and of what his companion might think of it, or of him, for it. And that trepidation only worsens when he (reluctantly) draws his gaze away from Kokichi back to the press itself, back to the daunting machine that could be sprouting legitimate jaws at any moment, no matter how ridiculous the notion. Shuichi would believe it, after what he’s seen. “Um, come with me.”

Another raised brow, and that casual demeanor… It’s comforting. Shuichi won’t say so out loud, not yet, but he doesn’t really need to, if he has to guess the reason that Kokichi is putting it on in the first place. “Did you lay a trap here for me? Is that what’s going on?” Kokichi’s grin turns more sinister. “Wow, that’s cruel of you, Shuichi! Especially with what you know about this room, huh?”

You know what I’m thinking about, don’t you?

It’s an ‘of course not’ that never comes, but Kokichi continues as if it had, anyway. “No, that can’t be it. You wouldn’t be clever enough to do something like that.” The stumble, again, Shuichi notices it and it sends a surge of electricity through him, fingers twitching uncontrollably. “C’mon, Shuichi,” and that distinct whine in his voice sounds genuine, “you’re keeping me in suspense! I don’t like that!”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’m fine,” Kokichi roughly cuts him off, the smile faltering. It fixes itself, stitching itself like it’s a mask growing upon his face, as if it hadn’t stumbled like his gait had in the first place. “Don’t start with that stupid shit, okay? It’s annoying. I’m only kidding, anyway.”

You don’t want to be here. And the realization makes his heart pound against his ribcage. You’re telling me to get it over with. And…you don’t even know why I wanted to come here. Maybe Kokichi didn’t mean it when he said it, but Shuichi’s inflicting an act of selfish cruelty on him right now.

“Right. Okay.” It’s easy, sometimes, to forget that Kokichi’s the same age; he portrays himself as seeming younger, has the composure of someone older, but there’s something tight in his face and he’s pretty sure Kokichi himself is aware of it, too. And that’s why he’s here, too; that’s why he’s here, and Kokichi will come to see that. Sucking in a shaky breath, working in his nerve as he can tell his companion is, he barely even notices his own stumble as his feet glide over to the edge. His stomach tightens as the expectation arises, subconsciously, that his shoes will brush along liquid, barely fresh and rising to lap along the soles.

Fingers glide along the press’s bed, a hitch of a breath ringing in the air. It takes Shuichi a second to realize it’s not his own.

The slide stares dauntingly from above Shuichi’s head, and the control panel taunts him from his peripheral vision. The layout of the buttons projects within his brain, the texture of the button tingling his fingertips, despite them currently pressing against metal. Metal, and metal alone, he sharply reminds himself, it’s metal he’s feeling at the moment.

“Shuichi?”

It presses past water that somehow leaked into Shuichi’s ears with how distilled it is, and he releases a tense breath between teeth to clear it. He doesn’t look back at him. “Can you…go to the control panel?”

“But…why?”

“Please, just do it, Kokichi. I promise it will make sense.”

He doesn’t need to look back to feel the hesitation in Kokichi’s body. Fingertips skitter along his back before they’re removed, before he hears the tap, tap, tap of the staircase. He spots white within his peripheral vision, contrasting greatly with the musty yellow. Eyebrows nestled together give Shuichi a surprisingly plain view of what he must be thinking.

His stomach rolls as he focuses on the flat surface in front of him, but all that follows it is a swallow. He’s not about to back out of this now, not after he dragged him into it.

He sidles his rear over the side of the bed, palms pressing beneath them as he uses them as leverage to take his legs along him. Shadows cross all over his body, the green neon lights’ rays no longer reaching him as he’s swallowed beneath the slide. As he twists to follow along with the bed, what was in the corner of his eye is now much of what he can see if he doesn’t want to stare up into deep, plain gray. His eyes follow the humps of the staircase until they arrive straight at the Ultimate Supreme Leader himself, where Shuichi told him to go.

He’s rimrod stiff.

“Shuichi?” he says it again, and now that Shuichi’s really listening he can hear the note that he’d missed before: fear. Kokichi’s eyes are wide on him, and his knuckles white from how tightly he’s gripping the railing. The podium hides Kokichi’s legs but from the way he’s struggling to stay upright, Shuichi’s sure those are shaking, too.

Despite the pinch in his chest, Shuichi doesn’t answer him, not yet. Instead, he begins to adjust himself as he presses his back against the bed, feeling the cool metal seep in like tiny tendrils willing to snuff out the remainder of his warmth. He points his head upward rather than to the side, despite a part of him wanting to gauge Kokichi’s expression now, wanting to drink in everything about how he feels watching this for himself. Eyes light upon the plating that hovers above him, just waiting to come down upon him. He’s locked in place, almost, mesmerized by the fact that this harbinger of destruction is just hanging there, and there’s nothing that will make it move unless it’s told to. That such a power would lie at any human being’s fingertips… He’d witnessed it before, both on video tape and through his own volition, but it’s different being underneath it.

Nothing warm cradles his back, and in a way that’s more comforting than if there had been.

He swallows again, fingers splaying out near his sides, and toes being unable to decide where they want to go. It’s almost as if he’s subconsciously attempting to flatten himself against the bed, as if that will avoid whatever fate awaits him.

It’s so quiet in here.

Did they talk a lot, before it happened? Did Kokichi?

He can imagine it, the boy cracking a few jokes or ridiculous comments, as if the longer he speaks, the more he can delay reality.

“… Can you press the button, please?”

Of course, upon speaking himself, he can’t imagine how tense breaking that silence must be, considering how loud it sounds to him, despite the fact that Shuichi is always quiet.

“What?”

Shuichi winces. He’d expected this.

“Is — is this a joke, Shuichi? ‘cause if it is, it’s not fucking funny—”

“No.” Shuichi licks his lips. “I’m being serious. I want you to press the button.”

Shuichi doesn’t think he can bear looking at him, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t know what the pause that follows means, but it becomes so quiet that if a pin dropped from across the room, he could hear it. Despite that, it’s a strain that Shuichi needs to pull when Kokichi speaks again, his voice cracking, “Why?”

Why? It’s the question that Shuichi never asked enough. Why would Kokichi do this, why would Kokichi do that? Why did Shuichi not bother to listen to him? Why did Kokichi not trust them with this? Why, why, why? He’d done it in the beginning, trying his best to understand him, but he’d given up then. Given up like he’d given up for a while on the hope that they would ever get out of here, on the hope that he would be able to find the mastermind, on the hope that he would ever be able to undo any of his mistakes. And it’s strange, because even to the end, Shuichi knows Kokichi never gave up. He never gave up asking, he never gave up changing his plans — to the end, even when his veins coursed with poison, he still did his best to make the best of the situation. Did his best to point them all in the right direction, and maybe they would have earlier, if they’d just listened.

And that might be the worst realization of all to have here, within the hydraulic press, knowing that Kokichi is still listening, despite everything.

“I want to see what you saw,” he says candidly.

That’s clearly not enough to convince him to press the button for him. “Yeah?” But it is clearly enough to get to him. Shuichi hears it in his voice, a shake that’s not been present during the killing game and a shake that Shuichi sometimes wonders he’s the only one who’s ever picked up on. “Well, that’s fucking stupid. You’re fucking stupid. And crazy! Don’t forget that!” His voice rises, and Shuichi’s chest constricts. He… He understands, he knows what Kokichi is actually saying, and it’s taken him this long to hear it. “You’re gonna get—”

“I won’t.” Shuichi won’t let him entertain whatever dark fantasies are running about within Kokichi’s brain. Not again. “It has an emergency stop. I’m — I’m not…” Suicidal. “I just…want to understand.”

The lack of noise is so loud Shuichi’s sure his eardrums will explode.

“I trust you.”

It expands further, and Shuichi fears that before Kokichi even gets to press it his heart will burst forth from his chest and wreck his ribcage, tearing him apart with how frantically it bangs against it. Fingers curl up more tightly and the tenseness threatens to suffocate him. His back aches as the cool metal that was before comforting becomes almost claustrophobic in the way that it grips him—

The humming of the hydraulic press hits his ears.

It’s happening. The thought hits him harder than the tennis ball that Ryoma knocked back into him. This is really happening right now.

And maybe it’s even worse, then, that he’d heard it before he saw it, because he knows immediately what it means when the slide begins to fall closer toward him. Before it hovered effortlessly, as if nothing could move it, and now heavy metal accelerates toward him. It’s almost poetic how fluid the movement is, with no jerkiness or disruptions or anything that could stop it, like a train whose brakes no longer function. There’s no loud screech like every big blockbuster out there, nor a spark or a fire that would indicate immediate apparent danger to the body; just something solid coming straight for him, and in a way that allows him enough time to consider the inevitable, to imagine the way that it would feel as it pressed against his skin and made certain work of the bones that lie beneath.

Every movie shows this moment the same. Life, flashing behind one’s eyelids, considering the friends and family that a person has made, especially about a significant other that that person may be leaving behind… Of memories colored in sepia tones with a swelling, dramatic piece playing within the background on repeat. The climax rises as the death becomes all the more certain, as escape becomes a far-off dream, but there’s always a smile on the person’s face because they leave without regrets, because the life they’re leaving behind is the one they created, is the one they used to save everyone else. It’s always a hero’s death, and when the inevitable does occur and Disney doesn’t bring them back, it’s something of a triumphant score that greets the aftermath. The death brings pain, it brings grief, but it also brings happiness at the end.

But when Kokichi’s swallowed by the machine to the point that Shuichi can no longer pick him out, even in his peripheral vision, he knows immediately that’s not what Kokichi saw or heard. He’s no expert in understanding this, in understanding Kokichi, hell, Shuichi would argue in understanding anything — but he doesn’t need to, to know it never worked out like the movies portray.

As his surroundings begin to disappear one by one, even the neon lights no longer being able to creep underneath and join him, it’s one thought alone that stands out the most:

He was alone.

He shared this room with Kaito at the time. Kaito could have spoken to him then, Shuichi doesn’t know. But it doesn’t matter if he had, because for all Kokichi knew, Kaito was there to help him carry out a plan… Nothing more, nothing less.

‘Pathetic? Look at yourself, Kokichi. Kaito always has us by his side, see? But no one wants to be around you. You’re alone, Kokichi. And you always will be.’





Kokichi died thinking Shuichi hated him.

It doesn’t matter if they all turned out to be alive in the end, that it all turned out to be fake. It doesn’t matter, because to Kokichi, that death was real for him.





Those words played on repeat in Kokichi’s brain. Shuichi’s sure of that. They are in his, and he’s the one who said them. He’s not the one who had to receive them. He bought into all of Kokichi’s bullshit, all of it. He saw cracks of someone he wanted to trust, but he never tried to dig any deeper, because Kaito’s simple and easy to understand and so is Kaede, but Kokichi isn’t. Kokichi says he wanted them to think this way.

Shuichi…was tired. He’d been tired at the time, that’s the excuse he goes by. But does it really matter what reason he had for saying it?

And Shuichi knows, too. He knows that everyone relied on his word, he knows that everyone trusted him and looked at him as a bringer of the truth. He knows it’s not just Kokichi who heard those words.





It’s coming closer to him, now. He can almost feel the metal up against his skin, and an anticipatory pain, as if his body is ready for something to happen to it, ready to pump in the endorphins, readying a fight-or-flight response so he can get out of there alive, and yet he has to fight the instinct with everything he has. He can’t run. He can’t run because there’s nowhere to run.

Shuichi gets himself to think what Kokichi must have thought.

I can’t run from this. If I do, Maki will be made the blackened, and this’ll have been for nothing.

But…

Shuichi’s throat tightens.

I’m scared.





A creak shakes him to his very core, running through his entire body despite the fact he’s nowhere near it. When an alarm sounds, it hits him then: the hydraulic press must’ve stopped.

Shuichi’s breath is shaking badly when he does manage to hear it again. He shuts his eyes tight.

He wasn’t suicidal. He wasn’t looking at the slide like a brave hero would in some movie. He didn’t regard his own actions as heroic…

This wasn’t peace for him. It was just inevitable. He had to do it. He had to.

“Shuichi?”

Kokichi’s voice ends the alarm. The machine moves again, but it’s the slide moving back up. Shuichi’s veins still pump with adrenaline, with his body’s need to protect him, and he has to continue breathing, remind himself to continue breathing.

Metallic footsteps sound in a room in which all other noise has faded. Shuichi doesn’t rise to his feet yet, so he knows it’s Kokichi, despite his eyes being closed. In a way, the repetitive noise is comforting… It’s different from the hydraulic press. It contains some kind of life to it.

They eventually stop, and Shuichi can tell by the distance that Kokichi isn’t far from him. In fact, he’s likely up against the bed itself, and it makes him wonder if Kokichi fears it a little. Even if he does, here he is—

Here he is, for Shuichi.

“I’m sorry,” Shuichi chokes out, after a moment. Fear has his heart leap into his throat, but he forces his eyes open anyway and looks at Kokichi, really looks at him.

Kokichi’s eyes are the same wide as they were before he went into the press, but there’s something softer to them that wasn’t there before. “You’re crying,” he tells Shuichi.



Shuichi hadn’t even noticed until Kokichi pointed it out.



Kokichi’s head turns, slightly. “You look stupid and ugly when you cry.”

And somehow, some way, that gets a laugh out of Shuichi. A soft, broken laugh, but it’s a laugh nevertheless. Did you say something like that to yourself? But Shuichi won’t ask that question, nor will he ask any of the others, at least not now. They’ll…have plenty of time now, to talk about it. That’s what he will make sure of, anyway. “Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing, idiot.”

“Sorry—”

“Ughhh,” Kokichi groans, but Shuichi sees it — he’s smiling. And it’s different from the smile of before, from when they first entered the hangar. It’s something real, as if there’s a latch of understanding between the two of them that wasn’t there before, and it has Shuichi’s heart lurch to see it. To know that Kokichi would smile like that, at him, after everything that happened. After the pain that he caused him. “You’re so dumb, y’know? And really transparent, too. I know what you’re thinking right now.”

“What am I thinking?”

“You’re thinking I’m totally a crybaby like you.” Kokichi waves a hand. Shuichi opens his mouth to ask what he means by that, but— “You’ll figure it out, Mister Detective. But as lovely as this place is, I don’t wanna be in it for another minute more… So…if you’re done…?”

The feeling is definitely mutual. Shaking palms press against the edge of the bed, legs swinging over it, but he can feel the shake within them. He can feel the shake within everything. It’s as if he really was about to die, back there, under the hydraulic press; that if the emergency stop hadn’t gone off…

He glances at Kokichi, who despite sounding impatient before, is waiting for him easily, albeit while looking at his fingernails. No, he thinks to himself. Kokichi was manning the controls. If the emergency stop didn’t go off, Kokichi would have stopped it instead.

‘I trust you.’

Shuichi had meant that. It wasn’t a lie.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

He reaches out for Kokichi’s hand.

Kokichi eyes it and he hesitates. “What, you want help out? Is crying tuckering you out that much?”

Shuichi raises an eyebrow at him. Kokichi seems to understand, then, as he takes his hand.

And then it occurs to Shuichi right then what Kokichi meant.





I forgive you, so don’t worry about it anymore.

When Shuichi first asked Kokichi to come along with him to the Exisal hangar, he’d thought he was crazy. He’d agreed to it anyway, of course — the way that Shuichi looked at him was urgent, pleading, like he had something important that he’d been standing on the precipice of. Shuichi’d given that look many times before, and as always, Kokichi felt compelled to follow it.


Now that they’re here, he still thinks he’s crazy.


“So why do you wanna go back to this musty ol’ room again?”


Fuck, but the sound of that door opening is haunting. Kokichi summons the little needles to his face again in desperation, scrambling as the neon green greets their eyes. Shuichi’s watching him, likely for signs that Kokichi will want to bolt; after all, there’s no way that he’s oblivious to the way Kokichi feels about this place, with the moaning and groaning that he allowed before they arrived. Still, he smiles, smiles, smiles back at him, because they’re not here for him anyway.


“I just…want to see something,” says Shuichi. “We won’t be here long.”


Instinct fights with desire to support Shuichi then. On one hand, he’s not blind; that weight of importance hasn’t left his feet, and with the deliberation that he takes upon entering the hangar, it’s clear he’s experiencing as much trepidation as Kokichi feels. On the other hand, it’d be way, way fucking easier to be patient about this sort of thing if Shuichi actually gave him an answer worth a damn.


It’s because of that that Kokichi needs to look away, look anywhere but this boy who he’d follow to the ends of the earth, who’d seen everything there is to know about Kokichi Oma, and draw his eyes instead on one of the deactivated Exisals that he’d controlled as part of his plan. He always hated the way those things moved, mechanical parts sliding against each other and reminding Kokichi of the fact that the only living, breathing people in this school could be the very same who would opt to take him down at any moment. Had opted to take him down, in fact, when the opportunity presented itself. It’s only later he’d even learned from Shuichi what kind of ridiculous back story that Shirogane managed to conjure up for him, in a desperate scramble of a counter-gambit against his own.


He remembers, plain as day, the agony within Shuichi’s eyes when he looked at him, when he told him he was the mastermind, and how Kokichi had to repeat himself over and over that that pain was necessary.


Right, that’s enough, Kokichi thinks, and as he does and as his gaze draws back onto Shuichi, he catches it: a far-off look in his eyes, like he’s somewhere else entirely. He’s staring directly at the hydraulic press.


Kokichi frowns.


He’s on the walk over to Shuichi’s side, tempted to jolt him out of whatever reverie he’s fallen into, when he suddenly says, “What?”


Kokichi raises a brow at him. “I didn’t say anything, Shuichi.” Are you okay?


“Oh,” says Shuichi, rather lamely, at that, and he offers no explanation, again, and it’s a little frustrating. A part of Kokichi, perhaps a completely irrational part he admits, but still one nonetheless, worries that he may be losing him, here.


Then Shuichi’s gaze focuses on him with an intensity that almost makes Kokichi shrink back under it, like as if he’s latching onto him, hooking his whole being into him and leaving whatever headspace he’d dived into just then. It doesn’t stop, either; he’s staring at him, and more specifically he’s watching his eyes and his chest, as if he’s looking for…


“Soooo,” Kokichi drawls, trying to break this silence that’s dawned upon the both of them, this silence that’s making Kokichi consider his own mortality in a way he really doesn’t need to in this damn room. “What’s this something, anyway? You never said, and you know I hate it when you don’t tell me things.”


“Oh. Right.” God, what’s gotten into him? With every single spaced out response like that, Kokichi’s unease only grows. This really isn’t like Shuichi — he’s not someone who’s slow on the draw, when it comes to conversation. And further, the edge of a haunted look he’d seen in those irises has made Kokichi increasingly tempted to call this whole thing off, to tell him that they can leave. It’s not like Kokichi even needed an excuse to want to, in the first place, when the hydraulic press makes him twitchy just by being in the same room as him. That urge becomes one to actually grab him when he sees Shuichi’s gaze switch to the thing like a magnet, and the sweat growing at the back of his neck and the churning of his stomach indicate to him that there might be something else to this whole fixation on that machine. “Um, come with me.”


Come with you? “Did you lay a trap here for me? Is that what’s going on?” Kokichi doesn’t think so but he just wants to get Shuichi talking. He’s in some other place, somewhere, and… And he’s seeing a different Kokichi than the one that’s standing right in front of him. “Wow, that’s cruel of you, Shuichi! Especially with what you know about this room, huh?”


Shuichi doesn’t say a word. Come on, say something. Call it a lie, or something. Come on. “No, that can’t be it. You wouldn’t be clever enough to do something like that.” Kokichi takes a step closer to him, and he notices the way Shuichi’s eyes jump to his little limp; those thin fingers of his twitch like an electric current is running through them, and— Oh my god. Shuichi, I’m here for you. I’m here for you. “C’mon, Shuichi,” he whines, “you’re keeping me in suspense! I don’t like that!”


Kokichi’s chest tightens as he watches the way that Shuichi’s eyebrows twist upward and he can already predict this response. “You don’t have to—”


“I’m fine,” he cuts him off, his smile dropping, because at this point he’s desperate, now. He’s not actually mad at Shuichi, but he wishes that he would trust him, just a little more. He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want to be. (And okay, a part of him doesn’t want to be. But Shuichi’s worth it. Shuichi’s always worth it.) “Don’t start with that stupid shit, okay? It’s annoying. I’m only kidding, anyway.”


And maybe, just maybe, Kokichi had gotten to him there, a little, because he sees the way the gears turn in Shuichi’s eyes, and although his response is no more eloquent— Just, “Right. Okay—” it’s clearer than he’s been since they got here. Like whatever he’s going to do, he’s going to do, and maybe he allows his relief to sink into his face slightly when Shuichi turns his back to him again, toward that damned machine for the third time.


That relief is short-lived when he sees Shuichi’s hand glide over the bed of the press, and Kokichi’s breath hitches at the sight.


What…are you doing?


No explanation comes to him from watching Shuichi as he begins to practically dance around the press, like as if he’s mapping it out. Kokichi’s gut tightens as he notices that Shuichi hasn’t removed his fingers from the bed. He can’t help the thought that occurs to him, then—


Those fingers could get crushed if he keeps them there.


“Shuichi?”


Shuichi freezes then, but it takes him a moment before he responds. “Can you…go to the control panel?”


What? Kokichi’s eyes widen, but Shuichi can’t see them. I don’t like this. What are you doing? Shuichi? “But…why?”


“Please, just do it, Kokichi. I promise it will make sense.”


It would be nice if it made sense now, in Kokichi’s opinion.


Heart grinding against his ribcage, sense of foreboding only growing and giving his body tremors, he still moves, because he promised he’d be here for him — but not without brushing his fingers along Shuichi’s back as he passes. His fingertips tingle with the fabric of his suit. Kokichi would be convinced his ribs suddenly shrank into his organs with the feeling that kicks him when he sees the way that Shuichi relaxes upon that touch.


Each step he takes sounds familiar in a way that Kokichi wishes it didn’t. He’s gone up here before. He’s also heard Kaito go up here before.


He arrives up top at the control panel, greeted with the arrangement of buttons as well as detailed instructions on how to operate the hydraulic press, as if he needs them. He doesn’t bother to read it. Instead, he whirls his gaze immediately to where Shuichi is by the press’s side, knitting his eyebrows together. He distantly notes that his own breathing is tense, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t — The image that he’s taking in, now, of Shuichi and the press as a backdrop — He doesn’t want it.


He decides immediately he liked it way more than the image that he’s getting now when Shuichi decides to crawl into and sit on the press’s bed. Kokichi’s fingers grip tightly onto the railing and he’s starting to feel a little faint, but not for the reason Kokichi himself might have expected. He might’ve seen himself, or Kaito there. Expected to, that is; but that’s not what’s flashing behind mind’s eye when Shuichi settles in against the metal. No, it’s a picture that he’s never seen before and hopes to moon and stars above he’ll never see that’s encroaching on his brain, like a god-damned cockroach.


“Shuichi?” He’d probably hate the way his voice shakes normally, but he’s too consumed with the idea that Shuichi needs to get out of there to care right about now.


But either Shuichi doesn’t hear his plea, or he ignores it entirely, because instead of leaving the bed, he begins to fully lie down on it instead, splaying himself out. It’s as if he etches the marks that Kokichi left behind perfectly, because his arms are spread and his legs slightly parted, and all he’s missing is the jacket behind his back.


Such parallels are hardly comforting.


Kokichi’s on the verge of calling for him again, when Shuichi speaks up quietly, “Can you press the button, please?”


Literally the last words that Kokichi wanted to hear him say.


“What?” Kokichi’s breathing turns a little harder, and he nearly sways off his feet entirely. “Is — is this a joke, Shuichi?” He doesn’t think it is, really, he’s just… He’s just… “‘cause if it is, it’s not fucking funny—”


“No,” Shuichi cuts him off. “I’m being serious. I want you to press the button.”


You’re not — You’re not, right? You’re not. You’re not. That’s not the reason. It can’t be. It can’t. You can’t expect me to go through with it if it is. If it is, I’ll kill you, I’ll…


“Why?” is what Kokichi actually asks despite all of that being what he wanted to say, his voice hoarse.


“I want to see what you saw.”


Kokichi’s breath stutters.










The closing in of the slide into his body. The darkening of the room as the neon lights, hardly functional as is thanks to the Electrobomb, disappear behind the hulk of a giant that is the machine. The way that Kaito disappears beneath it and everything becomes devoured like a fucking black hole by the harbinger of his demise, lingering above him as it comes closer, closer still. Thinking about what Kaito must have been seeing then, perhaps even apologizing for subjecting him to that because he knows what it’s like to be part of that plan and to witness it happen right in front of you. Convincing himself not to run because he has to, he has to, it’s inevitable, the poison will kill him and Maki will die and he can’t let that happen. He can’t let anyone else die.


Knowing that he won’t be getting back up from this and hearing the sound of the machine running as he thinks, I don’t want to die.


But I have to. Like I was just written to die. Whoever wrote this story is fucking cruel.










“Yeah?” Kokichi’s barely paying attention to his words at the moment as he speaks up in vain because he can’t do this, for a multitude of reasons and he doesn’t think Shuichi gets what he’s asking him to do. “Well, that’s fucking stupid. You’re fucking stupid. And crazy! Don’t forget that!” His voice raises in volume as he borders on a kind of hysteria, please don’t make me do this, please don’t don’t don’t— “You’re gonna get—”


“I won’t.”


And like that, the static screaming within Kokichi’s ears dims, a static he hadn’t even known been rising. A weighty, confident promise passes through Shuichi’s lips, then.


“It has an emergency stop.”


Right. It does.


“I’m — I’m not…”


Kokichi stares at him. You better not. I’ll kill you if you are.


“I just…want to understand.” Yes, Shuichi expressed tha— “I trust you.”


Kokichi doesn’t know if he hates or loves Shuichi right about now, because… You know that’s a cheap shot, you dick. And in spite of it, there Kokichi is, beginning to smile shakily. Three little words, and it’s almost like a challenge. Like Kokichi wants to prove himself worthy of that trust, which is strange in hindsight. He’s the one who’s never trusted anyone.


He doesn’t know if Shuichi sees it, but he nods. He moves toward the control panel.


Call him weak, but he still has to close his eyes as he presses the button.










Shuichi seemed to need to see this, for some kind of catharsis. Kokichi’s not sure why he dragged him along, honestly. He could just do this by himself, right? What with that emergency stop and all.


It’s starting to better click into place, though, when the slide lowers, and Kokichi’s throat gets thicker as it’s harder and harder to see Shuichi underneath it.


Shuichi’s compensating. He’s compensating. And Kokichi is pretty sure he knows what Shuichi is compensating for.


Under any other circumstance, Kokichi may think, What an idiot, with that note of fondness he’ll reserve only for Shuichi, only for the detective who worked so hard to understand him, and only for that stupid fucking numbskull who believed for some reason that Kokichi’s still upset about the fact that Shuichi no longer trusted him, back then, in the killing game — as if Kokichi had been trying to earn it then, as if burning all of his bridges hadn’t been the intention in the first place.


His words hurt him. Kokichi won’t deny that. But it doesn’t matter anymore, right? The killing game is over. And they’re here.


There are a lot of things harder to accept about this reality than the fact that Shuichi deserves forgiveness.










Still, Kokichi’s eyes, and really his entire being, are now glued onto that machine, in case it goes wrong. And despite Shuichi’s promises and his faith, those images are still playing about in his mind and Kokichi can’t be the cause of something like that again. Can’t be, directly or indirectly. He could hardly… Hardly… With Gonta…


But then Kokichi wonders, is that how Shuichi felt? When he figured it out in that trial. When he realized what actually happened, when the truth came to light and into fruition.


No, perhaps not. Kokichi tried to ensure, after all, that he no longer cared about him.


But maybe he did, after they walked away from it all. Maybe he’d been thinking about this for a while. That maybe it’s not him who pressed the button, that it’s not him who shot that arrow, but it’s him who controlled Kokichi’s thoughts at the very end. And Kokichi’s not always honest with himself and he’s not honest with others much at all, but if this is the one time he decides to be, it’s to admit, just a little, that maybe Shuichi had some influence, then. He wonders if Shuichi is realizing that now as the press comes down, down, down, ready to crush him beneath its cold cruelty.










I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you how I felt. I’m so fucking stupid.










But you were right. I’m alone, and I always will be. And I have no one to blame for that but myself.










It’s a good thing, then, that ever since, Shuichi’s been making sure that that thought is no longer true. And maybe, just maybe, that first one? Kokichi can capitalize on that, too.










The alarm sounds, and it startles Kokichi, but he’ll never tell you that if you asked. The hydraulic press stops, and…Shuichi is alive underneath.


But Kokichi needs to check anyway, like a dolphin searching in the depths with echolocation. “Shuichi?”


The slide moves up, up, revealing Shuichi again, and decidedly not crushed, and decidedly not hurt, and that’s what Kokichi registers first. It’s immediate — his feet rocket him away from the control panel because he doesn’t want to be there, he wants to be where Shuichi is, hydraulic press be damned.


He moves up against the bed, and he hates the way the metal feels but he ignores it because Shuichi, Shuichi.


“I’m sorry,” says Shuichi, and his voice sounds awful, and that’s what makes Kokichi stop for a moment and stare at him, both because he has an idea of what the apology is actually about and because the tone pricks into his skin and rings alarm bells.


It’s only when he’s this close to him that something else registers to him.


“You’re crying.”


Sure enough, Shuichi is shaking, and the rivets run undeterred along his cheeks, and Kokichi swallows as he sees it, the pang in his chest intense enough to bring him to have to look elsewhere, because he can’t stand the sight of Shuichi crying.


“You look stupid and ugly when you cry,” he says, but he doesn’t mean it. He wants to take Shuichi out of this place.


But in spite of everything, he hears peals of laughter from Shuichi; they’re not the happy kind, but they’re no less genuine, and they’re meant for him and it slides into place, then. Shuichi understands. “Sorry.”


“Stop apologizing, idiot.”


“Sorry—”


“Ughhhh,” Kokichi groans, but he’s doing his best to smile. Actually, that’s a lie. He doesn’t have to do his best with the sheer amount of relief that he’s feeling, knowing that Shuichi is okay, and perhaps a little part of him somewhere in his stone cold heart is mended, knowing that Shuichi even cared enough about all of this to do something so stupid as this, for him. That maybe, just maybe, there was something else to this and it’s not as one-sided as he might have thought. “You’re so dumb, y’know? And really transparent, too. I know what you’re thinking right now.”


“What am I thinking?”


“You’re thinking I’m totally a crybaby like you.” Kokichi waves a hand. He sees Shuichi’s confusion, but he knows, trusts, that Shuichi is smart enough to get it. “You’ll figure it out, Mister Detective. But as lovely as this place is, I don’t wanna be in it for another minute more… So…if you’re done…?” Please, dear god, be done.


And all his prayers have been answered when Shuichi does move to get off the bed, albeit shakily. “Okay. Let’s go.”


And then he offers out his hand, which sends a burst of warmth within Kokichi’s chest. Damn it, Shuichi… “What, you want help out? Is crying tuckering you out that much?”


But Shuichi doesn’t take that bait then, raising an eyebrow at him, and reminds Kokichi once again of why he ever liked him in the first place as Kokichi takes his hand, then.


Or, more importantly, why he deemed him trustworthy.










I already know, Shuichi. I already know I’m not alone anymore.