Makoto Naegi woke up on the floor of his room with the door open on... well, he wasn't sure of the date anymore. His left arm was rather numb, but it was pinned under his torso, it had probably just cut off the blood flow. There weren't really any pins and needles though, just that it got progressively number until his hand, which he couldn't feel at all.
He pulled his arm out from under him and...-
Huh? That wasn't his hand, it wasn't his at all. The hand attached to his arm was smaller, more feminine, and clothed in a tight dark purple glove. This was a hand that looked exactly like one that had belonged to Kyouko Kirigiri, someone Naegi knew who had... well, Kirigiri hadn't survived the last class trial. The colour drained from Naegi's face. He felt something well up in his throut and did what anyone else would have done. He screamed a loud, piercing scream from his very soul.
Asahina came running. The dark haired girl was obviously shocked, and half asleep, her hair was still down.
"Naegi, you okay?" she slurred, and rubbed an eye.
"M-my hand," he muttered.
This seemed to wake her up. "Oh, right," she chuckled nervously. "Well, about a week ago, you started acting really weird. Like, really, really delusional weird. Then Monokuma declared the next motive later that morning, which I can get into later. We decided to take turns watching you, so didn't do anything you would regret, in the nurse's office on the first floor. But then, it was Hagakure's turn at three AM two days after that, and he sorta-kinda fell asleep for a couple minutes."
"And?" Naegi prompted, slightly horrified. This was... unreal.
"Well, you must have sneaked out somehow while Hagakure was dozing off. About ten minutes after that, Hagakure came and woke us all up. We found you half an hour later in front of the red doors to the Trial room with that hand attached to your arm and a roll of bloody thread."
Naegi was beginning to hyperventilate.
"Oh shoot, sorry!" Asahina took his hand. "I-I'll go get a paper bag, or something!" she shot off towards the dining hall.
She did indeed return several minutes with a brown paper bag, which was good, because Naegi felt like he was dying. His chest hurt, he was lightheaded, and not thinking very clearly.
After she made sure he was starting to breathe regularly, she half carried half dragged him back into bed.
"I'm going to go get everyone else now."
Naegi still couldn't feel anything in his hand. It wasn't *his* hand anymore, was it? Kirigiri... He could still feel his ears ringing from the terrible banging noise of that machine. He could still see Kirigiri's unchanging poker face finally broken in a final look of unbridled terror. He could smell her scent. That scent... her hand smelled like that scent. Kirigiri, even though she was always all business, had a smell like lavender.
That hand also smelled like blood. Would the body have started to rot yet? Naegi had watched her die, and she was a part of him now, in a twisted way. A reminder that he had failed to save her. He wanted to get rid of it here and now, but he had no clue how to remove it without bleeding to death. No one here had any meaningful medical experience. None of the dead were ever going to be buried, or even mourned in a meaningful way. That included Kirigiri and Maizono.
Maizono was... Even though he had sworn to Kirigiri that he was going to carry her memory with him, his memory of her faded more every moment, and this stupid chunk of flesh that would soon wither and rot was nothing but a reminder of that.
He couldn't even remember the details of her face anymore. The things she did and the way she looked when he found her in his shower just a couple weeks ago seemed more like a dream then reality. In this clinically lit prison, the memory of other people seemed like it was scrubbed from life as quickly as possible in order to make room for the next round of tragedies.
Asahina returned to him several minutes later with everyone else minus Togami. Fukawa had keeled over the moment that he had shown them his hand for a second, more detailed look at it. They looked at it with disgust. They looked at him with disgust.
"So... Naegi, why'd you do it?" Hagakure asked bluntly. Asahina elbowed him and muttered something into his ear.
"I don't remember anything from after the end of the last class trial," Naegi said quietly. He was barely sitting up, propped up against the wall.
"Well, Maa-kun, I can't believe you finally did it! Here I was, holding on to the edge of my seat, watching! That's an undeniably strange fetish, though, I want to hear all about how it went!" The Genocider was... the Genocider. Some things never change, although her talk was creeping him out more then usual. He didn't think he could do much more then staring at her.
He wanted to be alone, but they kept poking, prodding, and questioning him. He didn't really feel like talking to them.
Eventually the interest died down, and they all went their separate ways, leaving Naegi to his thoughts.
One thing about having a dead girl's hand attached to you is that it does a lot less then you'd expect after the initial shock. Naegi hadn't looked at the hand itself yet, just the glove, and he was growing morbidly curious. Kirigiri had never taken off her gloves, no matter whether she was touching something that could have stained or ruined them.
He slid his thumb under the glove and shuddered when it touched cold flesh. The glove slid off easily, although the glove was tight, it was custom made to this hand, and Naegi gasped.
Underneath the glove, the hand was horribly burned. Had the body been partially incinerated when he, in his hallucinating state, had taken it from wherever it was? Along with the burns were several long, thin, red scars that ran down the entirety of the hand, and where pure skin was visible, it was deathly pale. At the wrist, where his arm ended and her hand begun, it was stitched together crudely with thick black thread. He was paler then usual today, partially from blood loss, partially from stress, but the color of her hand made his skin look extremely tan.
He slid the glove back over the hand. Out of habit, he tried to move the fingers so it would fit better, but of course, it didn't even twitch. Was he really going to live with this thing? It was shaped like a hand, but it didn't move at all. The fingers just sat there, unmoving. It was hard to believe that it had once belonged to a living being, much less someone like Kyouko Kirigiri. Did Kirigiri even feel anything with this hand in life? It was burned almost black, like a piece of meat forgotten on the grill after everything else has already been taken off.
Kyouko was just another face engraved on a portrait in the courtroom now. He had seen as she had been crushed. Blood had sprayed across the room, getting in their hair and clothes. Had he taken a bath since then? He was still wearing the same clothes as he had that day, but the detergent here was suspiciously good at getting rid of blood stains. He remembered drowning in the scent of blood every time a body was found, or someone was executed, as the relationships he'd built up were slowly and sadistically torn down.
He almost admired the ability to disconnect from the emotions of their dead friends that Kirigiri and Togami had. The ability to see it all as a game, or another case to be solved. Naegi hadn't ever been able to even touch the corpses. That was ironic, huh? He was too squeamish to ever touch the dead, and now he was always touching her corpse.
His room was darkened. He had taken up sleeping with his face to the wall away from the door recently. It spared him from having to look at the shower room whenever he went to sleep, or woke up, since seeing that door made it rather hard to sleep. Was it all some convoluted metaphor for the impermanence of life? That as soon as we die, we're carted off, buried, and then forgotten.
He didn't like to go into rooms where someone's body had been discovered. Even if their physical presence was completely erased, the memory of them was enough to overwhelm his mental presence.
Did anyone on the outside even know what had happened? Were they off in some unknown location, made disappeared people for the rest of eternity?
He thought of his family. They had been thrilled when they found he had been accepted into a school like Hope's Peak. His little sister had given him a hug big enough to knock him to the floor. She was a little jealous too, but Komaru got jealous of everything. He almost laughed. What would they think if they saw him now? Tired and sad and nearly dead. Scared nearly witless too, but that was just a normal part of life here in the School Life of Mutual Killing, the creeping fear that someone was behind you, or waiting for you where you were going, with a knife and the deadly wish to get out, that single wish that had killed 8 people.
It was sickening. Maybe if they were somewhere else, on a tropical island, or out in the world, he would feel better. The entire atmosphere was suffocating. He hadn't spent this much time indoors consecutively in his entire life, and he had surely grown several shades paler himself since he had come here. Maybe that's why Asahina and Sakura had pushed so much milk on everyone. Asahina cared about everyone, even if she was a bit odd in showing it to some people.
The nighttime announcement rang. Had he really spent an entire day in bed? Of course, there was no way to tell how long it actually was between announcements, as far as he knew, they could be happening every five hours or every thirty six. When he first got here, he habitually checked clocks whenever he saw them. Now, he didn't even notice them. The passage of time had become meaningless to him. Sometimes it felt like one extremely long day. Other times, it felt like it had stretched on for months or years.
Celes had first suggested the Nighttime Rule, back in the very beginning, when no one but the most cynical thought that anyone would be murdered. How wrong that faith in the others had been. Celes especially, was much more and less then anyone had ever thought. She had masterminded a brutal double-murder, taking advantage of everything the victims held dear and then playing them like marionettes. Celes's perfectly calculated image had shattered even more then Kirigiri's when Celes was pressed.
Ishimaru was unstable at the time, and Yamada was easily fooled. It was almost surprising Celes didn't go for anyone more challenging.
He was getting tired now. Naegi didn't want to sleep, for fear of whatever he would dream of if he even got that far. He had had terrible dreams since the first murder. Especially about the first victim. He could still remember his first dream after the first trial.
"Why do you think I died, Naegi?" Maizono smiled, bled from the mouth and bloomed, impaled on a thousand different poles, but not screaming. Maizono never screamed in his dreams, only stared into Naegi's eyes and blamed him for all the torture she had endured as she died at the hands of someone who was practically a stranger.
But then, out of every hundred bad dreams was the spare dream that tasted like sugar and sweet memories of a school life with his classmates that Naegi had never had. Those dreams were the reason Naegi still slept by choice at all. He smiled slightly at the memory of the latest one he had had. It was after they had finished a race in gym, and they were all exhausted, but satisfied, and laughing. His group had come second, but no one save Ishimaru was really seriously competing. They all smiled at each other, and joked around, there was none of the suspicion of ulterior motives that stalked them all in their reality.
The very memory of it made him sleepy, and he could feel sleep in his body already. Tomorrow would be the same as today, repeating on into infinity, the last survivor left in an empty building wandering the halls, but Naegi had these dreams that he could cling to, no matter what happened to him. There was no future, and no thing called hope in such a place, but if Naegi could keep dreaming, he thought he would be all right for at least tonight.