Chapter Text
I.
It’s taunting him.
Not Kirigiri, no. Never her. Even if she’s staring back at him with lacquered purple eyes, beckoning him: don’t you want me? Even if she’s just a sculpted piece of plastic visible only through his computer screen; three grainy photos angled at non-flattering directions.
What taunts him sits right under her photos, in bright red font:
300,000 Yen
The number grows higher and higher every time he refreshes the page. Swaths of anonymous accounts curse at each other, at the seller, at the world, through the comment section. They all place their bets nonetheless.
310,000 Yen. 320,000 Yen.
A particularly zealous customer offers a much higher sum. The price jumps.
400,000.
Saihara curses. The Monomi stress ball he has gripped on his left hand nearly implodes with the force of his grip. Internally, he counts up the total sum of his monthly allowance, how much he has saved up in anticipation for this event.
Not enough, not enough, not enough—
The dream of him being able to afford her was already far-fetched yesterday. Now, it’s an impossibility. He can’t even bring himself to feel an ounce of self-deprecation—not when he has done everything. Not when he is still willing to.
He has no choice but to seethe and lean back on his padded chair, chewing on his right nail furiously as he stares at the cursed eBay listing in front of him.
McDonalds X DanganRonpa Collection: Kyoko Kirigiri Figurine (Instant Noodle Edition!! Ultra Rare!!)
Seller: VizDJ
Item Listing: Auction Item
Estimated Price: 20,000 Yen - 30,000 Yen
Current Selling Price: 400,000 Yen
[embedded are four images. The first is the official promotional showcase of the figure as seen on the Danganronpa website. The last three are low-quality photos of the figurine on top of an otherwise empty wooden desk. One is a full-bodied photo from the front, the second is a side-photo, and the third shows her backside]
Description: The long awaited McDonalds X DanganRonpa collectible figurine event is now here! Having your favorite characters in the palm of your hand has never been easier: just go to your nearest McDonalds and order either a Hope Happy Meal or a Despair Daily Deal, and you’ll be gifted with a randomly-selected figure of one of the beloved cast members from the first two seasons! There’s no limit to how many figures you can get, so you can keep trying your luck until you land the character of your dreams!
(What despair, Saihara thinks. The seller didn’t even bother to write a description of their own. Rather, they opted to copy-and-paste directly from McDonald’s social media campaign.)
No—why should he feel surprised? This type of behavior is typical for a human as asinine, as despicable, as utterly hopeless as a scalper. Leeches that swell in the pits of society; those who buy popular products en masse until the market is dry, only to then resell them on the internet for five, ten—or, in this case, a thousand times the price.
It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not—
But no matter how much Saihara maulds, it doesn’t change the reality before him. There are three neglected figurines lying somewhere in his dark room—the only three he managed to pilfer before the hundreds of thousands of collectibles were inevitably wiped off the map through the efforts of only a handful of scalpers.
Teruteru Hanamura, Yasuhiro Hagakure, and Aoi Asahina. Those were the three characters that despair-inducing Gacha system granted him, despite the fact that he was hoping, praying, to get his hands on the best character in the franchise. The only character who mattered.
Yet here she is. Taken hostage. Forced away from the safety of Saihara’s arms and into the merciless arena that is the eBay Auction House. She was the only Instant Noodle-Edition Kirigiri he could find among all the listings on the internet, and he needs her. Desperately.
He stares at the screen until his retina burns. Until the crinkles of his eyes sore and he begins to tear up. 35 million, 40 million, 55 million…
His sights eventually land on the seller’s alias.
VizDJ
What a stupid name.
Absently, he begins to wonder about what kind of vile person hides behind such a name. They must have a horrid character, no doubt. With no decent member of society wanting to touch them with a ten foot pole, they turned to a life of shady capitalistic maneuvers.
But as horrid as they are, they’re only human, aren’t they? They’re not infallible. All humans can be hurt. Can be killed.
Saihara pushes himself up from the desk into a standing position.
Can be caught.
He slaps a pale hand over his mouth to conceal the smile that threatens to spread across his face. Though he’s alone in his room (as he always is), he can’t help but repeat the habit he’s picked up after years of being on the receiving end of judgmental looks and murmured comments.
A sudden rush of giddiness bubbles up from his chest, into his throat, and rushes over his tongue as he lets out a squeamish little chuckle, just barely loud enough to be heard. The tips of his ears redden from the adrenaline of it all.
It’s not the end yet—no, quite the opposite! If DanganRonpa has taught him anything, it’s that the end is never truly the end unless true hope is grasped.
And true hope waits for him. With lacquered purple eyes and a plastic ramen cup atop her head. He loathes to think of what could happen to her in the hands of the wrong person. So he doesn’t.
Instead, he thinks of the upcoming weekday. Of the soft clicks of keyboards and the sweet stench of success. Of pliers and molars and rusted metal and crumbling wood engulfed in flames and something that sounds a little bit like a scream.
How morbid his thoughts can be! He turns his monitor off and chalks it off as inspiration for his next (and last) audition.
-
“Good morning, Yamada.”
The following Monday during lunch, Saihara looms over the desk of one of his classmates, a lanky bespeckled boy who always appears four inches shorter than he actually is with the way he curls into himself. As always, Yamada is hunched over his personal laptop. He looks surprised to see Saihara speaking to him. Or rather, cautious.
(neither are correct. A better descriptor for how Yamada is feeling is “appalled,” and bubbling on top of that in a thick, viscous layer, is “fear.”
Saihara Shuichi is by no means well-known, but he has earned himself a reputation. The clusterfuck of Kirigiri pins on his backpack is one thing, as well as the jet black hat he refuses to take off no matter how much his teacher grumbles. It’s not the fact that he’s a die-hard DanganRonpa fan that’s the problem either—and he’s a bigger fanatic than anyone Yamada has ever seen. His devotion to the show is almost suffocating in its palpability, way more than the typical audience and their recreational viewing.
He’s not overtly harmful. He’s never threatened anyone. He has good grades and decent-enough looks.
And though it’s vague and wholly judgemental, it’s probably his aura that sets people off. The way that it’s hinted subtly through his behavior—the flashes of that crazed glint in his eyes. The way he submerges himself into others’ personal space. The way he somehow slipped in his highly-detailed Danganronpa murder plans into a class presentation about crustaceans.)
Yamada gulps.
“G-good morning,” he murmurs. The RPGMaker game he’s been coding is suddenly much more interesting, and he refocuses his attention to it doubly.
Saihara leans closer, putting his hands on the edges of Yamada’s desk in the process. His eyes bore into Yamada’s brow, which is coated in a sheen of sweat.
“I’m sorry if I’m bothering you,” he says, although he doesn’t really sound like he means it. “I was just wondering if you could do me a quick favor.”
He tries to smile invitingly, but whatever expression he makes only causes Yamada to flinch backwards.
“If you want, I can pay you,” Saihara offers, already digging for his wallet in his back pocket. “How much are you willing to work for? I don’t have much, but I’m willing to—”
“I don’t want your money!” Yamada suddenly shouts. He realizes the volume of his voice and the curious stares. His shoulders sink as he wilts. “Just—what do you want…?”
“Ah, really? You’ll do it?” The excited lilt to Saihara’s voice can’t be good news. Without asking for permission, he grabs Yamada’s laptop off of his desk and begins furiously typing on it with his free hand. As he does so, he idly continues his tangent. “It’s nothing bad, I promise. I just need you to do a little this and that, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
“The fact that you won’t tell me what you want up-front scares me…” Yamade mutters to himself. He’s too afraid to make a grab for his laptop, so he has no choice but to pick at his nails while Saihara busies himself with the item.
“Ah, there it is!” Saihara suddenly exclaims. With both hands, he turns the laptop around so that it faces Yamada, and there it is.
“Is that…?” Yamada says, utterly dumbstruck. “An eBay listing?”
He looks more closely at the contents of the item. It’s a figurine from the latest McDonalds collaboration with Team Danganronpa. Figures that Saihara would be interested in something like this.
His gaze then lowers until it reaches the price tag.
625,000 Yen.
Yamade jolts upwards from his seat.
He points towards the screen in shock, as if it were some kind of monster he needed to draw attention to. It may very well be.
“What the hell is that?!” he demands. “There’s no way a cheap plastic figure like that should be so expensive!”
Saihara lowers the laptop. His face darkens, his irises turning a stormy shade of black.
“Cheap plastic figure…?” He repeats in an off-putting, monotone voice. Yamada doesn’t have enough time to think oh, great, another tangent, before his laptop is roughly slammed onto the desk and Shuichi’s mouth has started moving again like a well-oiled machine. “It’s not just cheap plastic, Yamada, it’s a Limited Edition Kyoko Kirigiri Figurine never to be seen before in all of DanganRonpa history! Of all her outfits that have ever been released, this is the first time they’ve included the iconic Instant Noodle version of her, and from McDonalds no less? If I don’t have this figure, my life will be ruined! Ruined!”
It’s horribly melodramatic, and much too loud. Everyone is staring at them, Even Kisaragi, who Yamada has been crushing on ever since that rainy day in middle school.
“Lower your voice!” Yamada hisses, sitting back down and ducking his head in hopes of not being recognized. “Just—if you’re expecting me to buy that stupidly expensive figure for you, then there’s no way in hell I’m doing that. Go away.”
“Huh?” Saihara sounds genuinely surprised. And then: “Ah. Is that what you were thinking? That I was trying to coerce you into buying that for me? If that’s the case, then that’s not it at all! There’s no way you would be able to afford her at this price point.”
“I said lower your voice,” Yamada glares at Saihara through the hood of his eyelashes. “And if that’s not what you were asking me to do, then what?”
Saihara leans over again, a bit too close this time, and presses a sweaty finger on the computer screen that denotes where the seller’s username sits.
“This guy, right here.” Saihara taps his fingers against it a few times. VizDJ, it reads. “I was wondering if you would be able to track his IP address for me.”
A beat of silence. A pregnant pause. And then:
“You want me to what?”
It comes off as a screech. The spectators that were slowly losing interest are again at high alert.
“Yamada, you’re being a little bit loud,” Saihara says nervously. He wraps a clammy hand around the lanky boy’s wrist. “Here, why don’t we talk outside?”
“I don’t want to talk outside!” Yamada interjects. “In fact, I don’t want to talk at all! Why the hell do you want to know some guy’s IP address?”
His complaints go ignored as Saihara forcefully leads him to the back of the classroom, pushes open the sliding door, and rushes them both outside the classroom. For such a skinny guy, he’s surprisingly strong, or maybe—and probably more realistically—Yamada is just very weak.
“No reason,” Saihara lies, finally letting go of Yamada once they reach the nearly barren hallway. “I just want to have a chat with him, is all.”
“Well, whatever it is, if you’re planning to do some kind of. Some kind of—kind of—” Yamada’s voice quiets to a frantic whisper. “Some kind of crime, then I want nothing to do with it!”
“But Yamada, all you have to do is track him for me, there’s nothing else to it than that,” he says. He doesn’t deny the part about potentially committing a crime, which is, you know, the part that matters.
“What are you going to do? Doxx him? Or—don’t tell me—you’re planning on visiting him yourself?” The thought is so absurd that it’s almost laughable. In fact, it’s so laughable that Yamada can’t help but release a string of guffaws. In front of him, Saihara is smiling similarly.
“Just leave that part to me, Yamada,” Saihara says earnestly. As if they’re friends. As if they’re in on this together. “All you have to do is find out where he is, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
“You don’t understand—I don’t want you to take care of the rest,” Yamada huffs. “In fact, I don’t want you to do anything at all! You are going way too far for a McDonalds Happy Meal Toy, dude.”
Saihara frowns. “But I haven’t even done anything yet.”
“It’s the yet that scares me.” Yamada pinches at the bridge of his nose in exasperation. “Look, even if you do find out where this guy lives, it’s probably too far for you to reach anyways. He’s probably in Tokyo or something, living it up at Akihabara or Shinjuku. Where are you even going to get the money to travel there?”
Saihara fiddles with the brim of his hat. He hasn’t even considered the possibility that the scalper would be on the other side of Japan.
“We’ll think about that when we get there,” He decides. Again with the ‘we.’ “But even so, we have to try, right? So you’ll do it?” And then again when Yamada doesn’t answer for a beat. “You’ll do it?”
Yamada groans. At this point, he’ll do anything to get this creep out of his hair. Who knows how long he’ll be pestered by him if he says no—or worse, he’ll be guilt-tripped into thinking that it’s his fault Saihara couldn’t get his hands on the damn figurine.
“On two conditions,” Yamada says dryly. “One, you make sure no one knows that I was the one who gave you this information.” Saihara bobs his head up and down agreeably. “And two, you don’t bother me for the rest of the year until graduation.”
Saihara pauses. He tilts his head to the side, the angle he settles on is just enough for the shadow on his face cast by his hat to disappear. Yamada shivers at the sight; at the dizzying, almost hypnotic look in his eyes. At the drool leaking at the corner of his mouth, threatening to dribble onto the floor. Gross.
“But we only have three months left?” Saihara points out.
“Yeah, three months too long…” Yamada grunts bitterly. With his intellectual prowess, he could have graduated a semester ago if it weren’t for his mother’s insistence that he experience all the milestones high school has to offer. He shakes off the thoughts. “Whatever. Deal or no deal?”
With zero hesitation, Saihara’s hand shoots out to take Yamada’s and he swings their arms around in a facsimile of a proper handshake. “Deal!” He shouts excitably. “After you give me the IP address, I won’t talk to you for the next three months. No, the next year—no! For the rest of our mortal lives!”
Yamada wrenches his hand away. It’s soaked in Saihara’s sweat. He rubs it on his uniform pants.
“Whatever…” He groans. “Just don’t blame me when you realize you have no chance of getting to him.”
-
As it turns out, VizDJ is located at the coast of Miyazaki, just a two-hour bus drive away from their hometown.
Saihara is ecstatic about this.
Yamada is decidedly not.
But he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore. True to his word, after Saihara copies the IP address and pastes the location on Google Maps—a wide grin marring his delicate face the entire time—he grabs his backpack (the one with the asinine amount of Kirigiri pins attached), and silently leaves the empty Janitors closet they were crouched in.
Yamada is left alone, his only company being the blinking lights of his laptop monitor and the 1000¥ Saihara left on top of his keyboard despite him not asking for it.
II.
VizDJ’s home is located on the second floor of a Mom n’ Pop’s diner, one that a bunch of rowdy fishermen congregated at a few hours prior, staring at a football game that was playing on the TV attached to the bar. Now, it’s half past midnight. A dense fog of silence permeates the diner’s interior, with the only noise emitting from a few shady shops in the area.
Saihara walks to a nearby food stall and orders a steamed red bean bun. The stall owner wearily takes in his suspicious attire: a baggy dark hoodie with the string pulled taught, a disposable face mask, gloves, and the gaudiest pair of heart sunglasses anyone has ever seen. Nonetheless, he gets the meal he paid for. He takes small nibbles as he scouts the perimeter of the building, hawkish black eyes swallowing the cut of the window, the way it stretches from the balcony to the back. It’s designed to be slid open, an outdoor lock nestles between the edge of the window’s frame.
Idly, he wonders if the toolkit he brought would be enough. He did an extensive amount of Googling the night before, and WikiHow seemed to have a plausible article on ways to successfully pick a lock. Specifically, a pin lock. Oh, he hopes it’s a pin lock.
The window’s curtains have been tied open, and as planned, the inside of the room appears to be completely vacant. This should make the mission much easier.
He finishes the last bit of his food and throws the trash somewhere nearby, brushing away the stray crumbs on his sweater. He glances around himself apprehensively to make sure no one can see him. Then, when he’s sure the coast is clear, he begins his shoddy attempt at scaling a building.
He’s lucky the first and second floor are separated by a makeshift roof, one that is short enough for Saihara to climb on top of by using the outdoor seating as a stepladder. He struggles to balance himself on the brick flooring and grabs the walls as he attempts to make his way towards the window’s lock.
He nearly trips twice, the latter in which he had almost rolled off the ceiling if it were not for the nearby balcony railings, which he uses as an anchor to keep himself from keeling over.
But by something just short of a miracle, he makes it. He has a shaky grip on the pillars that connect the first roof to the second, heaving stiff breaths as he celebrates his first small victory. Though he does want to do a little shimmy right about now, any sudden movements will probably have him plummeting down to ground zero, so he settles for a quick fist pump.
His celebratory feelings are short-lived as he refocuses his attention to the lock.
It’s a padlock.
The ones found in gym locker rooms. Who the hell decided to attach a padlock to the front of their window?
“Godammit,” Saihara mutters to himself belligerently. He furiously opens up his fanny pack and takes out his toolkit, searching for the bobby pin he’s stuck between the hinges. WikiHow did not teach him the intricate ways of opening up a padlock—he knew he should have bought chain cutters from Lowes before coming here—!
Though his chances are low, he uses a gloved hand to grip the center of the padlock and tugs it closer to him in an attempt to reveal the keyhole at the bottom.
But what ends up happening is that the shackle ends up separating entirely from the base, as if someone had forgotten to close it completely once they finished using it.
He stares, dumbfounded, at his sudden stroke of luck.
Are you serious? He thinks numbly. Was it really this easy?
Unsure if it’s merely a hoax, he slides the lock away from the window’s ledge. It slips off easily, and when he lets go of it, it lands on the flooring of the first roof with a dull thud.
Holy shit. It really is that easy.
Apparently, VizDJ is an idiot who doesn’t know how to lock their windows completely from the outside.
Saihara doesn’t even bother trying to hide his self-satisfied smile as he slides the window open and slips in through the gap. He hums a jaunty little tune to himself when the soles of his sneakers find balance on a desk. Absently, he recognizes it to be the same one present in all the photos on the eBay auction.
He takes in the interior of the room. Just as he suspected, VizDJ is clearly not as devoted to DanganRonpa as they should be, and that they’re wholly undeserving of collecting such glorious figures. Though each nook and cranny of their room seems to be filled with merchandise, none of the boxes are open, implying that they’re kept in crisp condition in order to be resold at a higher price.
A real DanganRonpa fan (Saihara) would never do that. A real DanganRonpa fan (Saihara) would treat his merch with the reverence and care they deserve; he’d take them out of their boxes and line them up on the shelves, presenting them in all their glory. He’d play with them like Barbie dolls (the complex, melodramatic tale he’s already concocted could use a few more characters), clean them, bring them to school, to college, to work.
He deserves them in a way that VizDJ never will.
A feeling of despair suddenly washes over him as he realizes he doesn’t have the means of rescuing all the characters that have been taken hostage. He only brought a single fanny pack, and climbing back down the window wouldn’t be feasible with a stack of merch between his arms.
Besides, he’s come here with a single goal in mind.
To relinquish the Limited Edition Kyoko Kirigiri McDonalds X Danganronpa Figure, Instant Noodle Edition, and then get out of here.
He thinks back to Yamada’s previous indignation and nearly chortles to himself.
As if he had actually planned to confront the damn scalper. He doesn’t have the guts.
Hoping to finish early so that he can leave as soon as possible, Saihara makes quick work of going through the scalper’s belongings. He rifles through boxes of the Danganronpa S Figure Collection, the Danganronpa 28 Promotional Poster Collection, the Danganronpa 43: Welcome Back (Again) Despair Developer’s Book, and myriads of other items that aren’t the one he’s looking for. Some are knockoffs and some are official. Some of them Saihara already owns and some of them he doesn’t.
Whatever the case, Saihara can’t help but feel a pang of jealousy as he’s faced with a seemingly endless supply of all the physical content that Danganronpa has to offer. It’s like he’s just stumbled into the Monokuma warehouse, or, alternatively, heaven on earth.
He seethes at the injustice of it all.
He’s only a third through the room and he can’t find what he’s looking for anywhere. Frustration mounts at his temple as he pries open the closet door.
Which is exactly what he shouldn’t have done, because there’s a girl sitting in there.
A living, human, breathing girl. Not a mannequin. She has long blonde hair and is dressed in about the same amount of clothing Saihara is—which is a lot.
His first thought is: holy shit, VizDJ straight up kidnapped someone.
His second thought is: wait—what if this girl IS VizDJ, who has been hiding inside the closet like the boogeyman, waiting to jumpscare Saihara and hand him over to the police?
His third thought is: no, there’s no way VizDJ is a girl—women are the goddesses of the earth, and they are all both unwilling and unable to commit morally atrocious deeds. (Saihara notably doesn’t interact with many women, and it shows.)
With these three thoughts oscillating in his head, the girl suddenly lurches out of the closet and closes her hand around his wrist, wrenching him into the closet alongside her. He doesn’t even get a chance to celebrate this rare moment of intimacy (yes, he considers any form of human contact as ‘intimacy’) that he doesn’t get from, well, anyone, when his hand nearly slams into the closet wall. The door pushes closed behind him.
“Are you an idiot?” She asks. Her voice is laced with venom. “Are you trying to get me caught?”
“I—what?”
“You don’t get to do this,” she sneers. He can’t see her face with the lack of light, but her violet eyes are burning menacingly. “I got here first, ergo, I have first dibs. Ugh—it’s so typical that someone comes along and takes advantage of my hard work! I’m the one who broke the lock, you know?”
Oh my god, women can do crimes. What a revelation!
Still, Saihara can’t help but feel a bubble of excitement course through him. She’s not just doing any crime, after all. She’s doing Danganronpa related crime, which is the same crime Saihara is doing, which puts them on the same boat. What are the odds of two strangers, breaking into the same house, on the same night? If anything, it’s fate.
“Which one?” He asks excitedly, jumping on this one opportunity to talk to a fellow fan and dig his claws into her like a vulture. She backs up slightly from his volume, and he doesn’t hesitate to close the distance between them. “You’re here for the Limited Edition figures, right? Which one? I myself am gunning for Kirigiri, the best character of the entire franchise, but I understand different people have different tastes, and it would be bad for our goals to overlap because—“
“Be. Quiet.” She warns through gritted teeth, casting a severe glance at the closet door. “You’re ruining the operation!”
“Oh,” Saihara immediately wilts; he didn’t mean to mess things up so quickly. “You’re right, sorry. Looks like I got ahead of myself there—but still, it would be remiss for us not to take the opportunity to get to know each other after this, uh, fateful encounter.” He digs a hand into his fanny pack and pulls out his mobile. “Maybe we can exchange LINE accounts? Phone numbers, mayhaps?”
“Maybe you can shut up and back away,” The girl immediately counters. The rejection totally flies over his head, and just as he’s about to open his mouth to begin another unwarranted and embarrassing tirade, there’s a loud sound from downstairs. It sounds like a door slamming open and closed.
Someone just came home.
No—not someone. Someones.
Saihara hears two voices—audible even from the second floor due to their sheer volume. One of them—male, gruff, scratchy in a way that hints at a smoking habit—is cursing violently. The other one isn’t as audible, but seems to be attempting to placate the angry one with less than desirable results.
They stomp up the stairs—one set of footsteps heavy and the other light—and the bedroom door flings open. It slams against the wall so aggressively that Saihara can’t help but flinch.
“—When I find that bastard, I swear to god I am going to pull his goddamn teeth out with my bare hands—!“ curses the angry one. “The hell were you thinking, letting him in here by himself? You should’ve known he was going to pull a fucking Walter White on us!”
“I think you’re more like Walter in this situation. So, technically, he’d be more of a Gus—“
“—don’t try playing cute with me, you little shit!” He groans heavily, and even his heavy cursing doesn’t fully mask the anxiety in his voice. “Fuck, fuck, fuck—seven million fucking yen. Down the drain.”
Saihara boggles from inside the closet. Seven million yen?! That’s an asinine amount of money!
The calmer one hums. “He said the buyer offered more than that, actually.”
“Well it doesnt fucking matter how much the buyer offered anymore, does it, Ouma?! None of that cash is going into our pockets, so it’s all fucking meaningless.” He slams a fist into the wall and the ensuing crunch makes Saihara wince.
“Can you not do that in my house?” The calmer one—Ouma—requests. “At least punch the pillow, geez. Besides, we don’t even know if he betrayed us. He might pay us after the trade.”
“He took the goods right under our noses without telling us, Ouma. He isn’t paying us shit,” Angry guy growls. “I know a rat when I see one, and that sonuvabitch has always been a rat. I’ll fucking kill him, mark my words.” A short pause, and then: “So what are you just waiting around for?! Are you gonna get ready, or what?”
Ouma sighs and mutters an exasperated, “okay, okay…” Saihara doesn’t know what ‘getting ready’ exactly entails, but in hindsight, he should have. After all, getting ready typically implies the act of changing, and changing often requires the usage of a storage unit, such as, let’s say for example, a closet.
Ouma pushes open the closet door with zero preamble, and is greeted with the warm welcome of two strangers sitting inside, equally wide-eyed.
He goes slack-jawed, and for a moment, they all just stare at one another. Finding the blonde girl hiding in the closet was one thing, but being caught, being face-to-face with the very same scalper he was hoping to steal from, is another. Ouma looks nothing like what Saihara expected him to. He’s short, lithe, and pretty—with long messy hair that reaches his elbows and flies in all different directions, making him look like the victim of some sort of electrical accident. The only thing off-putting in his otherwise innocuous face are those eyes: soulless. Two black holes. He looks like he’s staring past Saihara rather than at him.
His companion, on the other hand, looks like everything Saihara expected from the scalper. He’s the one that speaks first.
“Is this a fucking joke?” He guffaws, appearing behind Ouma like some sort of sleep paralysis demon. Objectively, he isn’t bad looking—and yet something about him exuded sheer ugliness, as if the inner rot of his core personality were so permeable that it expunged outward to his epidermis and tainted any semblance of brooding masculinity that would’ve made him otherwise attractive. Maybe it’s the goatee. No, yeah. It’s definitely the goatee.
Saihara doesn’t know how long the four of them just stare at each other before someone finally begins talking.
“Shit,” the blonde girl says. “Shit, shit, shit. I didn’t want to have to do this but—“
She pulls a gun from somewhere inside her gaudy jacket—Oh, fuck!—and everyone flinches backwards, sans the goatee guy, whose sneer transformation into something of a grin—if you could even call it that.
“Holy shit,” he barks out a laugh. “Is this supposed to be a robbery?” He whips around to face Ouma. “Dude, you have fucking robbers hiding in your closet!”
“Shut up!” The girl commands. She holds the gun up towards him, but her arms are shaking erratically, swaying the trigger this way and that. Slowly, she steps out of the closet. Ouma backs away, but the goatee guy doesn’t. “Where are they? If you just hand them over, I won’t shoot.”
“Momota, I think I’m going to call the police,” Ouma whispers to his companion.
“The fuck? Are you kidding me dude, don’t fucking do that!” Momota scolds. He rubs his nose in a way that looks somewhat embarrassed. “We can’t lead the police here! I hid, like, way too much meth underneath the floorboards. Those fuckers can sniff that shit out like dogs.”
“You hid what?!” Ouma exclaims. “This is my room!”
“Okay, in my defense, the police keep cracking down on my place so—“
“Excuse me!” The girl screams, successfully interrupting them. She waves her weapon around. “Hello? Girl with a gun talking here—I swear, human beings get worse and worse by the day—just—where the hell are they?”
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that,” Ouma says.
She groans. “You daft little—the seven ultra-rare McDonalds Danganronpa figures, duh!”
Now, Saihara isn’t going to lie, he’s sort of been tuning out a good seventy-percent of this conversation ever since the girl pulled out the gun. Mostly because, well. He’s too focused on the gun. However, at the mention of Danganronpa, his ears perk up.
“You have all seven?!” He gasps. He honestly hadn’t checked all that closely for the other ultra-rares since his sights were set on Kirigiri the whole time. “You mean you have Jacketless Komaeda, Mukuro Ikusaba, Sparkling Justice Peko, Instant Noodle Kirigiri—“
“—Izuru Kamukura, Genocide Jack, and Magical Girl Chiaki,” the girl finishes. “Yes, he has all of them. And I want them. Now.”
Saihara bites back a squeal. He wrings his hands in an attempt to push back his growing excitement. All seven of them. The odds of obtaining such a rare set is in the millionth of chances, and he can only imagine the lengths the two scalpers went through to procure such goods.
However, they don’t seem to share the same enthusiasm as Saihara does. In fact, the two exchange knowing, off-putting looks.
“You want them, huh?” Momota snorts. “You and me both. So, tough luck with that.”
For a second, the girl falters. She recovers quickly and glowers at him. “What do you mean?”
“It means that we don’t have it anymore, you stupid bitch,” he clarifies scathingly. “Congrats, you broke into someone’s house and pulled out a gun for something that isn’t even there. Do you want a medal? A consolation prize? Here, have this fucking Monokuma paperweight, you hack,” Momota mocks, picking up said paperweight from somewhere on Ouma’s nightstand and chucking it at them. Well, less chucking and more-so throwing with an intent to kill. The girl only barely dodges as it lodges itself into the wall, splintering the white paint and leaving a large crater. Jesus.
Despite the very-obvious murder attempt, the girl seems less focused on that and more on the state of the figures she wants so badly. “As if! Your eBay post is still up and running, asshole!” She shouts. Her finger is dancing around the trigger so liberally that Saihara really thinks she might actually slip up and pull it. He doesn’t get to dwell on that train of thought any longer when she points an authoritative finger at him: “You! Find his eBay account right now and pull it up!”
He doesn’t waste a second doing just that. He digs out his phone and scours the entirely of the Danganronpa eBay listing with sweaty fingers, finally turning his phone for her to see when he finds what she’s looking for:
McDonalds X DanganRonpa Event New!! Full Bundle, All Ultra-Rare Characters!! Exclusive!!!
Seller: VizDJ
And if the Instant Ramen Kirigiri figure was expensive, Saihara doesn’t dare say out loud the current auction price of this.
“See!” She announces vindictively, swiping Saihara’s phone right from his grip and holding it so close to Ouma’s face that it nearly slams against his nose. “I told you!”
Momota slams a palm onto his face while Ouma purses his lips. “Look, just because we had it before doesn’t mean we still do,” Ouma says. “We were working with a guy and he crossed us. He took the figures and is probably trading it away right now. By himself.”
At his side, Momota sneers: “Yeah, because you let him into your room unattended.”
“He said he needed to go to the bathroom!”
“And you believed him?!”
“I was trying to be polite—!”
“Gentle reminder that I’m still the one holding the fucking gun here!” The girl interjects hotly. “Here is what’s going to happen: you two are going to tell me exactly where this guy is, or you’ll both end up with a bullet lodged in your skulls”
“How the fuck are we supposed to know?!” Momota growls. “We’re not his fucking moms—the bastard just up and disappeared! The only thing he left was a fucking Snapchat of the American Bagel he had for dinner.”
Ouma shrugs. “We were just gonna wait for him to come back to school on Monday so Momota can beat him up and get our money back.”
“That too,” his companion agrees.
“We don’t have time to wait for him to come back to school on Monday!” says the girl. “I want those figures, and I want them now.”
Wow, Saihara thinks. She must really be into Danganronpa. He swoons.
“You said that he posted what he had for dinner, right?” Saihara pipes in. Apparently, the other three must have entirely forgotten about his existence, because they flinch backwards at the sound of his voice. Which, okay—rude. “Do you know how long ago this was?”
Momota scoffs. “I don’t know—an hour ago? What’s it to you?”
“An hour ago isn’t that long,” Saihara says, thumbing at his chin thoughtfully. Wherever this mysterious man is going, he isn’t that far. All seven of them, Saihara thinks. He shivers at the thought.
Making up his mind, he pushes past the blonde girl, not minding the way that the metal of her gun bites at his skin as he brushes past it. He steps out of the closet with the door in mind, but doesn’t make it far when Momota steps in front of him, blocking his path onwards.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” The taller boy accuses. “You think you can just break into our house and then leave when the going gets tough?”
“My house,” Ouma corrects.
“Oh, whatever-the-fuck!”
Saihara frowns. He thought what he’s doing is fairly obvious. “I’m going to the bagel place, obviously. I thought it might be helpful to retrace his steps.”
He guffaws. “What are you, an idiot? You fancy yourself some sort of boy detective—”
He doesn’t get to finish that sentence when Ouma taps him on the shoulder lightly, and he whips around like a dog being pulled on a leash.
“Momota,” Ouma says. He has his phone out and is staring at the bright blue screen. “He posted another photo.”
Not just Momota, but everyone clambors over to see. Even the blonde girl, who lowers her gun momentarily to lean forward, is entranced by this new clue.
Therein lies a very innocuous looking blonde boy holding up a high-resolution and unmistakable Takada’s coffee cup. It’s as if he has a sticky nose on his forehead with the words: “come find me!” written on it. He’s pretty, Saihara notes, with olive green eyes and a carefree smile. Pretty, but incredibly, incredibly, incredibly—
“Stupid,” Momota finishes the thought for him. “Holy shit. He’s a fucking idiot.”
He has to be. What type of person steals products from whatever shady business they are a part of and then announces their location to the entire world? Doubly so when their business partners consist of a homicidal maniac with a goatee and—some other guy. Saihara has no opinions on Ouma, he doesn’t even think Ouma has opinions on Ouma.
“Takada’s” The girl mutters to herself, in a daze. “I passed by there on my way here.”
She jumps out of the closet and makes a beeline for the door, pocketing some of the random merchandise that Ouma has splayed out on his bed in the process. Momota is close behind.
“Hey! Where the fuck do you think you’re going?!”
“Where do you think? Hat-boy had the right idea,” Hat-boy?! “If that idiot wants to get caught that badly, then I’m going to be the one who does the honors. Those figurines are mine.”
“Actually, those figurines are fucking ours. They’ve been ours this whole time, you bitch,” Momota curses, grabbing her wrist and then wrenching her backwards. At the contact, she immediately whips to raise the pistol at his head. To his credit, he doesn’t flinch. Saihara wonders if he can slip through the door while they’re distracted.
“Careful,” she hisses. “You wouldn’t want to contaminate all these products with your blood, would you?”
“I’ll take my chances,” he taunts. He’s an idiot too. Maybe even dumber than the blonde guy they’re searching for.
Before Momota can get his brain blown into tiny pieces, Ouma steps in, raising his arms in surrender. He walks over to the blonde girl slowly, like a wildlife ranger approaching a rabid lion. Saihara understands why Momota and the other guy included him as part of their business; those two really need at least one smart person to handle their finances. He certainly throws the blonde girl off-kilter, and her eyes flick from him to Momota, unsure of where to point her gun now.
“Hold on,” he says in the most calm, soothing voice that he can muster. “What if we all go together?”
Evidently, not the right thing to say. Both parties look at him with the same weathered down, judgemental expressions.
“Are you fucking joking?” The blonde girl says, simultaneously with Momota who adds: “Ouma, just shut up.” Even Saihara would be saying something scathing right now if he weren’t so damn irrelevant.
“I’m serious!” Ouma insists. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? We have the phones that help track him, and you have. Well, you have a gun. Maybe if we’re lucky, you’ll also have a car, because Momota’s got totaled after he drove it into our teacher’s garage.”
She blinks at him. “You do have the phones, don’t you?” Realization begins to dawn on her. She clenches her jaw. “Well, in that case, then I’ll just shoot the both of you now, and take it out of your hands. How do you suppose that sounds?”
“Okay, let’s say you do decide to kill us and take our phones,” Ouma muses, entertaining her. “How long do you think it will take for you to unlock it? Neither of us use fingerprints or face identification, but you’re welcome to guess our six-digit passcodes. How many possibilities was that again? A million?” He hums. “I wonder how long it will take for the guy you’re looking for to sell off the figurines… Definitely shorter than how long it will take for you to unlock—”
“Ugh, shut up!” The girl shouts. “I get it—we need you, right? Fine! But I’m only taking one of you,” she snaps at Ouma with her free hand. “You come with me, the asshole goatee stays.”
We, she said. Saihara preens at this, basking in the rare opportunity of being included in something, even if it’s mostly for the sake of ammunition against these two random strangers who are probably homicidal.
“Sorry, but we come as a package deal,” Ouma hisses.
“No one comes as a package deal. People just say that to delude themselves into thinking their codependency is cute,” she shoots back viciously. Funnily enough, she doesn’t object. Instead, she flicks her long blonde hair behind her shoulder and pulls out a set of keys from her pocket, jingling it in front of the boys. “Also, yes. I do have a car.”
-
They all end up in the blonde girl’s cadillac. It’s an ugly piss yellow color, and the license plate is noticeably covered by washi tape, which Momota clicks his tongue at upon seeing. The car is one of those types without a roof, which makes Saihara feel especially nervous due to how exposed they will be. Momota and the girl argue the whole way to the car; more on even ground than ever before with the gun tucked inside the girl’s hoodie, away from public sight. Saihara gets shotgun because the two other boys are attached at the hip, like those creepy siamese twins from The Shining.
“So here’s the deal,” She says as she shoves her keys into the ignition. There’s some middle-aged man walking his dog in front of them. “You all get to come along for the ride, and in exchange for your cooperation, I’ll let you guys have one figure each.”
Sounds good to Saihara. He only ever came for the Instant Noodle Kirigiri, anyways.
Momota snorts. “Cooperation, my ass. You had a fucking gun.”
“Have a gun. Still got it,” she says, rolling her eyes. She begins reversing where she’s parked; at the edge of the gas station. Horizontally. She had taken up two parking spaces—at first, Saihara had thought that this was just because she’s an asshole, but as she reverses, she hit the gas too hard that they all lurch backwards.
“You do know how to drive, right?” Saihara asks cautiously. The car is a stick shift and the way she’s holding it with only two fingers is making him scared.
She murmurs something unintelligible, which is shorthand for: no.
“Holy shit,” Momota realizes. She can’t drive. “She’s going to get us killed.”
“I’m not!” she protests. “I drove all the way here from Tokyo, and I’m still alive, aren’t I? So there.”
Momota turns to Ouma. “She’s going to get us killed,” he repeats.
“You said you could drive!” Saihara accuses. He holds onto the car’s handlebars until his knuckles turn white as she turns the wheel sharply.
“No, I didn’t. I said I have a car,” she retorts.
“Do you at least have a driver’s license?!” He demands. Panic rises from the bottom of his throat, and he is afraid he’s going to throw up. He’s been in this car for less than three minutes. He takes a sneak peak at the dashboard: 60 miles per hour on a residential area.
With her hands still on the wheel, she turns to him. She just stares at him for a full five seconds (still brazenly driving), and then turns away silently.
No.
Saihara pales. He exchanges wide-eye glances with the two boys in the backseat through the rear view mirror.
They’re stuck in a car. Whose license plate is covered with washi tape. With a girl with one gun and zero license. And they chose to do this for seven limited edition ultra-rare McDonalds Happy Meal Toys.
Eh, Saihara decides. He knew the risks before coming. Better than trying his luck with the gacha system.