Uso dayo!

The seconds were ticking by as Kokichi sat idly on his bed, gently swinging the Amami effigy back and forth as he stared blankly across his room. After all the time he'd spent here, this would be the last time he would see any of this junk. The piles of boxes, filled with more fake plans than real. The mountains of hoarded evidence—his fingers grazed softly across Amami's cheek as he brought the swing to a stop.

If a painful twinge struck his heart as those glassy, drooping eyes met his, no it didn't.

Kokichi stood from his bed, wandering over to the whiteboard to go over things one more time. Why? He wasn't sure. It wasn't as if he was planning for anyone to see it. It's not like there was any new information, anyway. Every Blackened and their victims were lined up in neat rows, and the remaining survivors... it didn't matter what he thought of them anymore. It didn't matter who was the mastermind, because it was going to be him now whether they liked it or not.

"But I wouldn't gain anything from writing a message like that, would I? That would just make you guys suspect that I'm the mastermind."

It was over. It was all over. He'd set up his dominoes, and now all he had to do was watch them fall.

"I also... don't want to survive with someone who'd do such a thing to Gonta."

"Wh-what's... wrong with him? Is he even actually human?"

It was too late to stop them anyhow.

If the finality set Kokichi's teeth on edge, no it didn't.

The others should be about halfway through the escape tunnel by now; he should probably get going soon. Kokichi pulled his notebook out from its spot tucked in the back of his waistband and pulled the envelope out from between the pages. He wouldn't be needing this anymore. Not if he had his way, anyhow. He carelessly tossed it into the pile amongst the useless papers and blueprints.

The notebook was tucked back in his waistband where it belonged as he patted his pockets for the camera he always kept with him. Check. The Exisal remote? Check. It was now or never.

Kokichi locked the door behind him, tucking his key deep into his pocket. The arbitrary brightness of the fake sun cast no warmth on his skin as he broke out into the courtyard, bound for the manhole behind the school. The simple push of a button was met with the whirring march of the Exisals behind him. It was loud, and despite the knowledge that the campus was currently deserted...

If the racket set Kokichi's teeth on edge, not it didn't.

If his heart was hammering in his chest as he scrambled his way down the ladder in isolation, no it wasn't.

They would believe his lie. Of that much, he was certain.

He put all the pieces into place. After his performance after the last trial, he was certain that he would be able to sell it now. As he strolled casually through the tunnel, skirting around the shorting remains of the various traps left in the wake of Saihara's group, Kokichi whistled an idle tune. The mask slipped on easily, it always did.

If that was a lie, no it wasn't.

What was a lie anymore? What wasn't? It didn't matter. He would be living a lie from here on out.

"You're alone, Kokichi, and you always will be."

For the hope of those left, for the memory of those lost, Kokichi was prepared to show Saihara just how right he was.

Here we goooo! April is just around the corner and over the last week I've been planning my prompt ideas ahead of time so that I'll be able to better keep on top of things. A lot of these fills are based on the various muses and AUs I have over on Tumblr, but a couple are new premises and there's also some Bonkichi in there. I'm really looking forward to it!

( More lies... )

The April is the Cruelest Month whump fic event is just around the corner, so I pulled up their prompt list to come up with premises for every day ahead of time. If I can, I'll write the fills ahead of time, too, but I hope at least having the premises lined up will help me save time and energy during the month itself for actually writing them. I'm kind of excited, since some of the prompts were good enough that I was able to come up with premises multiple prompts for some days.

Since I've gotten into writing short vignettes to help get back into writing, I think I'll actually be able to pull this one off. I am tentatively optimistic.

I'm not used to being optimistic.

If I do write some ahead of time, I think I'll post them here first at the time they're finished and then post them to Tumblr the day of the prompt. I like writing in the post editor here, so it will probably be easier that way. Some prompts I already have longer pieces that I've been sitting on for a while that I plan to post, too. I'll probably post those to AO3 though and share the link here and on Tumblr.

I wonder if I should try to set up that Danganronpa community here before then...?

I'm still not sure how exactly to go about setting it up, and I'm not even sure if anyone would join is the thing. Although I guess even if no one else does, it'll be a fun place for me, Koma-chan, and another friend to put stuff and talk about Danganronpa as a whole. As long as we stay active in there, I'm sure people will come eventually? Every other community for Danganronpa on Dreamwidth is dead, so we'd kind of be the only option...

I just... really want more friends to talk to, I suppose. Especially when it comes to Danganronpa. The community on Tumblr feels so insular and nobody really talks to anyone else unless they're already friends. Tumblr in general has also just been overrun with Twitter people who don't realize that likes aren't very useful in the grand scheme of Tumblr functionality, so reblogs are super rare and it's hard to get off the ground and find people. It's kind of frustrating.

So having a place to centralize and interact with people would be nice, I think.

It's especially hard being Ouma and not having anyone to talk to, especially about canon since it's deeply moving to me. It's isolating in a way that's uncomfortably reminiscent of the way Ouma was isolated in the killing game. It's not really a fun time.

I don't want to turn this into another ennuiposting mess, though. This was supposed to be a happy post for once. I don't get those very often.

The first time, they’d fooled him.

The second time, too, and maybe the third and fourth and fifth and sixth… Kokichi had honestly lost count. He hadn’t known any better. He was so little the first few times, and didn’t understand at all.

“Kokichi?”

Ignorant to the impermanence.

“C’mon, Koko, where’d you go?”

But Kokichi was four and a half now.

“Stop hiding from Papa.”

His Papa was gone, and this was an imposter.

Even now, it startled him every time. He would round a corner in the hall, and there he would be with open arms, and Kokichi would forget for half a second that Papa was never coming back. Everything about them was eerily similar. The eyes, the voice, the warmth. Or maybe it was just that the memories had faded as he’d grown.

You don’t remember much of anything when you’re just a baby, do you?

Kokichi covered his mouth to muffle his breathing as the heavy thunk of footsteps trailed by the cupboard. He’d gotten real good at hide and seek, squeezing himself between towering cans of hoarded food. One had a picture of sliced beef on the side, and the idea of dinnertime made him gag.

That’s when they’d shown up. He was hiding from dinner again.

“Don’t you miss me?”

Kokichi’s chest tightened.

He missed Papa. Of course he missed Papa! Papa and Mama both. He wanted them back more than anything in the world.
Maybe if they were here, Nee-nee would cry less. They were grownups! They could protect her better than he could, from her mean friends who pushed her around so much. Why did they do that? Kokichi still didn’t understand. Maybe they needed a grownup to tell them that it was wrong to be mean to your friends.

Maybe then they would be mean to him less, too.

“I miss you, Koko,” Papa—the not-Papa—said somberly. “Don’t you want a hug from your Papa?”

He wanted his Papa, he wanted his Papa so badly. Carefully, Kokichi pushed the cupboard door open just a crack to peek outside. There he was, bigger and rounder than Kokichi remembered, but still so undeniably Papa despite everything Kokichi knew telling him that it was not Papa. He gazed about the room, looking under tables and behind boxes as if they were only playing a game together. It was just a game to him.

Did that make it less scary?

“If you come out, Papa will give you a big hug and make it all better, alright? Then you and me and your Nee-nee can all have dinner together as a family. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

That would be nice. It would be so, so nice. Kokichi sniffled, rubbing at his eyes. It wasn’t Papa, though. It wasn’t real. It was a lie. It wasn’t Papa. Papa was gone and he was never coming back. Kokichi knew this. It was a lie and he would wake up tomorrow and Papa would be gone again without a trace because it never was Papa. Not this time, not any time Papa had come since Nee-nee brought Kokichi here.

“And then you can have your bath and Papa can help you get ready for bed. I’ll tell you a bedtime story, any story you’d like, and I’ll be right there until you fall asleep. How does that sound, Kokichi?”

He would be alone again and he would cry and Nee-nee would pet his hair so gently all while cruelly tell him not to be so silly to think Papa was coming back, just to see him cry more. It was a lie. A lie! And yet…

The cupboard door banged open as Kokichi clamored out, clumsily knocking cans over to spill and roll across the floor as he ran with teary eyes to bawl into his Papa’s arms.

"Papaaaaaaaaa...!"

Maybe Kokichi needed a kind lie right now.

Or... I guess that's kind of a lie. It's more like... I don't know where to start with everything I want to talk about.

It's hard to really put things into words a lot of the time. I'm so used to not saying anything, or not being listened to, and now that it's changed I'm like a leaky faucet and just can't stop. I don't know where to put it all, or how to approach it, because after a single day of it I already feel disgusting. A nuisance. A burden. A downer.

So maybe I should just keep talking to myself here.

I want to still talk about things here. Some will and some won't be put in the Access List. I don't want to keep all personal posts behind the Access List, especially now that they're allowed to subscribe to this account. That feels... cruel. And pointless. Besides, I want to maybe expand things a little. Use this for other things. What things? I'm not really sure yet, because I still have... a lot of messy emotions to untangle and get out first.

I don't know how or even want to explain the nuances, so I won't, but there won't be Shiro-flavored posts for a while. The way I set things up here, I want to keep things as vague as possible. It's my own little lying game. People can make whatever they want of the dichotomy. It's an Ouma thing for me as much as a safety thing to keep it a secret.

But maybe that's a lie. It's not like anyone reads these.

I have one subscriber that's not them, but I understand if the content here is a little too out there to interact with. I guess I'm just lonely. I don't know. Things were better yesterday, but now they've gotten bad again. Not because of anything in particular, though. It's more like... It felt like things were changing too quickly, and I didn't get a chance to properly feel and appreciate the bad feelings. I know there are a lot, and it's hard to keep track of all of them, and I know that if things look up too quickly, they will fall to the wayside and fester.

I feel like there are two modes to Ouma: he either says nothing about his feelings and takes them to his grave or spills his guts all over anyone who will listen. I'm a lot like that. For a very long time, I operated by default on the former, but now it feels like I was forcibly pushed to the latter. Honestly, I'm grateful for it, but I'm so, so scared of falling back into old habits. I don't want anything to go unacknowledged, so I've just been venting and venting and venting in personal spaces with friends and I imagine it's started to get tiring for them. Especially when the feelings are so visceral and nebulous that I don't even really know what I'm talking about most of the time. I'm just vomiting whatever these feelings are into the text box and trying to make sense of them so I can appreciate and understand them even just a little more.

So others can appreciate and understand them just a little more.

But doing that kind of makes me kind of a drag to be around, doesn't it? I talk about them, and then at some point it feels like the conversation should be over, but I want it to keep going. I don't want it to end. I want to keep feeling. I want to keep being listened to. I want to cry. I think that's something I really miss a lot. Crying.

I don't really know where I'm even going with this anymore. I've said a lot of this already to friends. I don't know why I'm saying it all again for a post on a Dreamwidth account that nobody pays attention to. It feels... performative? Like my friends weren't enough so now I'm out here being a dirty attention whore about it. Which isn't what I'm trying to do... At least, I don't think it is...? I just... feel a lot.

I'm tired of feeling. But I'm more tired of not feeling.

I want to feel in a way where I can finally find a way to let them rest. So I can feel better without being scared that it invalidates all those bad feelings. I want to feel in a way that feels real. Does that make sense?

Like... I'm upset almost all the time. That's my baseline, I think. But then I'll see a joke or someone will do something funny and I laugh on reflex. It gives me this ache in my chest like「What was that? I thought you were upset.」It feels like a betrayal of my feelings to laugh so easily when I can't even cry. I don't know what to do about it other than drown myself in things that make me upset and think about things that make me upset and wallow in all of the ennui, but then there's nowhere for those feelings to go and so they settle into white noise until something suddenly makes me laugh again and you get the idea.

I wouldn't call it anti-recovery, but I don't like the sentiment of「It will get better. This bad feeling won't last forever.」It's not that I don't ever want to feel better. I do want to feel better one day, but I don't want to right now. Maybe I want the bad feeling to last forever, just for a little bit. I want people to see and to know and to understand and appreciate it with me. Not in the sense that I'm vying for pity, but... I don't really know. Something to escape this lonely feeling I have in feeling this way.

I want people to know what my deal is. I want people to want to know what my deal is, so that I don't feel like a parasite rehashing the same thing over and over to any schmuck unfortunate enough to be in the same room as me. It's tiring. It's lonely. I don't know what will make it better because talking about it unprompted feels like I'm whining for attention. A disingenuous cry for sympathy or something.

And yet, here I am.

I guess the other part is I'm just rambling to make sense of my own thoughts and feelings. I feel a lot through music, so I'll just pick a song that fits the vibe I want to examine and put it on loop while I talk or write about things like this to navigate things just a little easier. That's why I always go out of my way to put links in my「Listening」for... I guess myself more than anything. So I can quickly get back to it when I'm reexamining old posts. I do that with fics, too. Since Ouma is an identity to me, I wanted to utilize him as a vessel for my ennui. That's where「He stared at the ceiling.」and「There was... somebody here.」came from.

That's on AO3 now, by the way, as「Who is Under the Hydraulic Press?」, which might have more installments. I don't know. Quick sidebar for a shameless plug in the middle of my ennuiposting. Why not.

Actually, this has gotten really long, hasn't it? I don't even know where else to go. Any connecting thoughts I had have dried up. I just know that I'm still upset and I want to get it down. Solidified in some way before I lose it. It seems at this point I've already lost it, though. Sad.

Maybe a random derail, then, into regression. I'd been small before, especially the past couple weeks, but it's... strange to me. It's one of those things that I get this achy longing for, but there's a listless feeling of... artificiality to it now. That's the wrong word. I don't know what the right word is. I guess it's like, I only seem to be able to really tap into and feel it when I'm really, truly, viscerally upset.

And that's kind of the upset I've been chasing.

Because right now, it's that white noise kind of upset that doesn't feel real. There's this disconnect that I can't seem to breach. I'm too dissociated from my own feelings to really get much out of them, and I don't like it. I'm just upset. I want to cry. I want... things I can't ever seem to have. Things I can't articulate, because while I want to try to have them, some part of me seems to have accepted that I shouldn't, and so it's keeping them from me. Out of sight out of mind. It's always out of sight out of mind.

I'm just a「lie」that makes up「me」, or some such nonsense like that.

He did that a lot these days, just staring at the ceiling. Was it the ceiling? It was hard to think, with the haze constantly clouding his mind. Death had not been kind to him. He was tired. Going anywhere would take great effort—his lungs constricted in a vice and his muscles fatigued and lethargic from the poison that coursed through his body, persistent aches radiating through every bone in his body as they'd slowly been crushed into splinters.

No, it was easier just to stay down, and so he laid there on his back, staring at the ceiling, contemplating his situation.

He couldn't tell where he was. He didn't really care much, when he thought about it. To find out would mean to get up, and to get up would mean to fight the ache in his chest and bones and soul. Wherever it was, it was quiet. So very quiet. Not a breath of life anywhere. Not even from him.

There was nobody here.

Where had he come from, then? That thought was a little more enticing. He spent a lot more time thinking about that than anything else. The others. They were doing well, he hoped. It was the only thing he could bring himself to hope. Obviously, there was no way to know.

There was nobody here.

He was alone, and he always would be.

Would he be happy, knowing that? Did he mean it when he'd said it?

His finger stung for no apparent reason.

It's not like it really mattered anymore. Not now.

The floor was cold—was it the floor?—but then again, everything was cold. It was the kind of cold that seeped into his already aching bones and chilled his very core in a way that would have made him tremble if he could. There was a coat or something beneath him, a layer of fabric that should have protected his bare back from the icy metal beneath it. With the chill that wracked his body, it decidedly did not.

The ceiling was shiny—was it the ceiling?—and reflected his miserable body back at him. Pasty-white, drained of life and blood, dead eyes that barely acknowledged themselves staring back. The coat splayed out from beneath him like starry angel's wings, streaked with his own poisoned blood.

Except there was no body there. That was the whole point, wasn't it?

He closed his eyes. He didn't like thinking about where he was. He decided to lie that he didn't know until he conveniently forgot again.

Where must the others be, if he was here alone? Somewhere better? That would be nice. There was no way to know the truth, so why not cook up a kinder lie?

He was in space somewhere, exploring the farthest reaches of the stars and universe the way he always wanted without the inhibitions of mortality holding him back. He was in a sunny clearing in a forest, free from the scrutiny of his peers, with every bug he could imagine there to care for and to study. She was in a well-stocked lab with all the tools and supplies and ideas she could ever want, with no need for food or sleep to hold her back anymore. He was watching over his sisters in a world that was always changing, never boring and always intriguing, where he would never run out of places to explore.

She was following along behind the person she loved, watching over her and protecting her. She was with the god she'd revered so much. He was reunited with his sister. She was free from her duties and expectations, finally released to see to her own needs. He was at peace with his lost loved one. She was watching over him and everyone, friends forever.

And he...

He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.

He was here.

The ceiling stared back, unmoved.

There was nobody here.

His soul ached.

There was no body here.

He closed his eyes again.

He was tired. Maybe he should just sleep. Rest and let eternity pass him by all on its own. The lies were too much, with no one to share them with. He would be alone either way, and thinking was getting too difficult to be worth the trouble.

Maybe after some time, he will be able to muster the energy to turn his head, and see the light pouring in through the open hangar door.

But for now, he wanted to sleep in his cruel lie.

Call me Uso-kun, although I'll never really answer as Uso-kun. I come in two flavors, Kuro and Shiro, and the nuances between the two are a mystery. I made this journal to talk about whatever comes to mind, usually what bothers me. I don't know yet what else I may do with it.

Let's play two truths and a lie. Except let's make it more creative, and make it three lies and two truths:

• Kurokichi is the one who lies.
• Shirokichi does not tell the truth.
• Kokichi Ouma is a major identity for me.
• I've played Omori to completion.
• I am a deeply lonely person.

What do you say? Which ones are the lies? I'll give you a hint: They are all true.

( More lies... )