Work Text:
It doesn’t start immediately.
No, it takes a while to settle in. A week, to be exact.
Three days in government custody; the not-so-frozen mummy, Alice, ratted them out to the feds only hours after the Nonary Games finished. They descended upon the car at a rest stop, pulling them over and taking them intro custody. It was a mess of interrogations and sleepless nights and issues with everyone’s visas. Junpei is the last one left - the others are gone by the end of the second day. He’s the only one of them who refuses to say a word about Akane and Aoi Kurashiki. For better or for worse.
A day in the air; the flight is twenty-four hours exactly, including the stop-over at LAX. As it turns out, Nevada is on the other side of the world to Tokyo. Go figure. He has everyone’s numbers in his phone but knows he won’t call. Seven and Lotus are back in Osaka, Snake and Clover went to their parent’s place in New York. Ace should be rotting away in a cell somewhere. He’s all alone.
Two days in class; an attempt at normalcy. The jet lag doesn’t help. His absence meant a pile of missed deadlines, unfinished work, and angry professors and group mates alike. Junpei tries as hard as he can to force some semblance of order, but it’s impossible. His apartment isn’t safe anymore. The walls are closing in on him. Class is just an endless cacophony of meaningless noise. Nothing seems to matter when the only thing he can think of are those nine fateful hours.
A final day; he hasn’t slept. Not last night. Not the one before. He keeps on expecting a gas mask to pop out from behind every corner. He keeps remembering, longing, for the presence inside his head. There’s an emptiness where her voice once was, a gaping chasm left behind. Without her to fill in the gaps, too much information leaks in, seeping into every crevice of his body. Every time he doses off, another world not his own replays over and over again. He feels the touch of a knife, the knows of an axe, the incinerator’s cruel embrace, even after awakening.
And then it happens. It comes after midnight, when Junpei tosses and turns but sleep continues to elude him. The events of Building Q replay on his mind over and over and over again, a broken record of broken dreams. He agonises over every detail - the way his hands shook when inputting the final sudoku numbers, the glass of the Nevada sun. Nine hours - nine years - of seeking a way out, and what does he have to show for it? He doesn’t care about the deaths or the game, or even the deceit; he would have stood by her no matter what. So why did she leave him behind? Why—
His throat burns. Oxygen won’t reach his lungs. Junpei scrambles to the side of the bed just in time to retch up bile and disgust and fear. Something is stuck in his throat and he can’t get it out, he’s trying but it’s not working, he can’t breath can’t breath can’t—
Petals splatter to the floor. Junpei gasps as precious oxygen flows back into his lungs. Like a puppet loosely strung, his body flops forwards without a single ounce of energy remaining. All he can do is gasp for breath and try to ignore the pile of violet hyacinth petals now littering at floor, try to pretend that the colour doesn’t remind him of Akane Kurashiki, the girl who left him behind.
He fails. More petals come.