Danganronpa is the property of Spike Chunsoft, not me. This is parody, protected speech.

Fates Much Worse
Part One

She crouched on the bathroom floor, clutching her broken wrist and trying very hard not to descend into a blind panic. Since it was fair to say that she'd been on the verge of one ever since she'd watched the video showing her what had happened to her friends, restraining herself wasn't easy. But she had hope. She still had hope.

Chiefly, at the moment, what she was hoping was that the dumbass on the other side of the stuck bathroom door would get bored with trying to break it down with his dumbass muscles and just go back to his room with dumbass plans to complain about her the next day. By then, she was sure, she'd have a good explanation for what she'd failed to do. No, not failed, only pretended to do. Pretended. That was much better. She'd just been pretending to make an attempt to kill the dumbass, so that ... so that ... okay, the counterfactual scenario was going to take some work, which she'd be able to do just as soon as the dumbass stopped banging on the door, already!

But she knew that it was going to be okay, because even if the dumbass did manage to get the door down, she still had the knife. Which she could use in her other hand. Even if she wasn't left-handed. So it was okay, she was going to get out of this just fine and then she was going to get out of the school and go out and be even more famous than she'd been before because that was her destiny dammit her destiny and nobody not the dumbass and not a psychopathic bear-thingy was going to get in the way of her destiny and -

The stuck door came unstuck.

"Okay," the dumbass said as he pushed his way through. "Let's just calm down and talk about this!"

He was going to kill her. He was going to try and kill her just because she'd been pretending to try and kill him. Really it was good that things were like that because if he was going to try and kill her then she had every right nay even a DUTY to kill him right back! "Stay away from me!" she shrieked as she charged towards him, waving the knife awkwardly. Surely this would make him run away!

Why wasn't the dumbass running away?!

"Hey, stop that!" he yelled as he grabbed hold of her left wrist and also her right, sending searing pain shrieking up her right arm. She twisted in his grip, cutting him slightly again, and then he pushed her arms back -

And there was a sudden explosion of much colder pain in her chest. Nearly frozen, she managed to look down to see the knife there, most of the blade buried just under her breastbone, blood flowing from the wound. For what felt like a lot longer than a second, she stood there, staring at it ... then lost her footing and fell back against the wall.

"What the fuck did you just make me do?" the dumbass shrieked, sounding as terrified as she should be.

But she wasn't scared. Really, that made the whole thing all right. For the first time in forever, she wasn't afraid anymore. The worst had happened, and now ... now nothing mattered anymore.

Almost nothing. She managed to lift a hand, reached for the knife and felt the blood covering her fingers. There. That should do it. Now to get her hand behind her back so the dumbass, who was still blaming her for all this as he stomped around in the bedroom, freaking out instead of doing the sensible thing and trying to help her, wouldn't be able to see what she'd done. And though it was awkward and she couldn't tell if she'd succeeded, she had a hunch that it was going to work out. They'd figure it out. Some of them would figure it out.

She was never going to graduate.

But maybe one of them would.

Maybe he would -

Oh. Yeah. He was going to be upset about this, wasn't he ...

Oh well.

And then there was nothing but inky blackness.

And then Maizono Sayaka woke up. She drew in a deep breath, wondering at the lingering pain in her chest, since everything that had happened had surely just been a horrible horrible dream that she wanted only to forget ...

But then why couldn't she see anything? Her eyes were open, after all ... but everything was the same whether she opened or closed them. She lifted up her hands - hand, rather, since one of her arms wasn't responding to her thoughts - and found that something was surrounding her, something ... plastic-like. What? What was going on here? Why was she in some kind of a bag? Where was she? What -

Then another sound intruded. A zipper noise, brief, faint, but immediately catching her attention because as it came to her, there was another sensory impression that accompanied it. Light! Light coming through a tiny white hole in the darkness, just above her head. Naturally, she reached for it.

More zipper noise, as her hand contacted metal. She pushed down instinctively, and the tiny white hole expanded, and she lifted her head up out of it ...

And looked blearily down at the black rubber bag her head was protruding out of.

She'd seen these kind of bags before, on television. She knew what they were called.

That was when she started screaming.

Fortunately, her complete loss of composure was relatively short-lived. While she lay there and screamed her head off, the impotent thrashing motions of her panic shifted her weight enough to send herself tumbling off of whatever tabletop or other surface she was resting on. She dropped helplessly to the floor below - only about a meter or so - and the shock of actual physical pain, particularly intense on her right arm, was enough to shock her out of the hysteria. Of course, that meant that she had to deal with the pain.

After a moment, when the pain had eased enough to let her move again, she reached up with her good hand and pushed down the zipper of the ... the bag. (Her internal narrative jerked away from the more elaborate term.) That allowed her to get a good look at her current condition for the first time. She was wearing what looked a bit like the gown that she'd worn the last time she'd been admitted to a hospital - not a pleasant set of memories - and her right arm was heavily bandaged and wrapped up in a sling against her chest.

That meant that her wrist really had been broken. Swallowing, she lifted up her left arm to touch the area where the knife had gone in. She could detect what felt like bandages under the smock, and flinched a bit at the pain that her own touch caused her. But she'd thought ... no, she'd been sure that it was a fatal injury. On the other hand, what did she really know about such things? It wasn't like she'd ever been killed before.

Slowly, awkwardly, she got to her feet and took a look around. The room, like every room in the school, had no windows. (Was she still in the school? Maybe she shouldn't assume.) It didn't have much of anything, except for a door, a set of cold fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and the table - on rollers, she'd noticed - from which she'd just fallen. Wait, now that she took a look, there was something else. The head of the table - at least she thought it was the head, since she thought that her own head had been looking out at the world from that direction when she poked her head out of the bag - was near a panel in the wall that looked like a miniature garage door.

It had a handle. Hesitantly, she reached out with her good hand for that handle.

Before she touched it, however, there was a buzzing noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Simultaneously, the table rolled on its own power so that it bumped into the wall just below the panel. A second buzz, and then the panel slid open very quickly. Then, with a whoosh, a black rubber bag shot out of the panel and landed on the table. At that sight, she jerked back, and so when the panel closed just as quickly as it opened, she wasn't in any position to try and hold it open, even if she'd wanted to do so.

Not that such considerations were much on her mind at the moment. Her attention was riveted on the bag. And this time, she had less difficulty giving the bag its proper name - the body bag. It was clearly just as occupied as the one she'd just escaped had been, but she couldn't even begin to guess at the condition of that occupant. Every bit as hesitantly as before, she reached out for the bag's zipper.

Once again, events outpaced her attempts to interact with them. The zipper started to wiggle slightly, and then slid down just a few notches, enough that a pair of red-nailed fingers could poke out of the tiny opening, and push down on it. Once the hole was large enough for a head to push through, the fingers dropped out of sight, and a strawberry-blonde set of hair began to slowly push itself out of the hole. Somewhat dazedly, Maizono found herself remembering and comparing the present situation to the sight of a baby's head 'crowning' as had been featured in a sex ed video she'd watched, years before.

And then the face of the other girl exposed itself. She looked blearily about. "Wow," said Enoshima Junko. "That really sucked."

Sayaka swallowed, then hoarsely spoke up. "Enoshima-san?"

The other girl's icy blue eyes, which had been looking blearily around the room, abruptly settled on her with their usual disconcerting laser-like focus. "Uh," she said. "Maizono. I'd say this was a surprise except that it's not really except for the parts that are, y'know?"

"No," Sayaka answered. "Did, did he get you too? Did you walk in on him while he was cleaning up and -"

"Cleaning - oh, you're talking about the guy who iced you," the model said. "Nah. I mouthed off to our esteemed headmaster and so he made an example out of me. And then, well ..."

Sayaka felt the panic swelling up again. "We're dead? This ... this is what happens after we die?" She looked around at the sterile room. "What kind of sick afterlife -"

"It's not like that," Enoshima interrupted, her affected dialect momentarily in abeyance. "This isn't the afterlife. We didn't die. It's a lot more complicated than that."

"What do you mean, Enoshima-san?" Sayaka asked in an unhappy tone that nonetheless wasn't a whine, because she wasn't a whiner.

"Oh quit whining," the other said disgustedly. Then she closed her eyes. "And ... while you're at it, you might as well stop calling me that. My name isn't Enoshima Junko. It's Mukuro. Ikusaba Mukuro."

"Huh?" Sayaka inquired calmly and without any confusion.

'Enoshima' shook her head. "It's ... tell you what, I'll explain everything if you help me out of this thing."

Hesitantly, Sayaka reached forward and pulled the body bag's zipper the rest of the way down, exposing the other girl's torso - which was covered with a gown just like the one she was wearing. But her upper arms were heavily bandaged, and from the looks of things the bandages extended onto her torso as well. Whatever had happened to her was clearly a lot more traumatic, at least in a physical sense, than Sayaka's injuries had been.

The girl - whom she supposed that she should get into the habit of thinking of as Ikusaba, now - looked down at herself and let out an annoyed sigh. "There goes my perfect record," she mumbled.

"Huh?" Sayaka repeated.

"Nothing, nothing, never mind, not important. Okay, it's kind of a long story, but the short version is, I'm Junko's twin sister -"

"But you said your name -"

"What did I just say about it being a long story? Look, for reasons that I don't want to go into right now, I was posing as my sister on our first day of school and got caught up in all of this. And then ... well, the mastermind found out about it, and recruited me to work as a secret agent inside your group. If I didn't do what I was told, something horrible would happen to my little sister ... and nothing else in the world matters to me as much as she does."

"The mastermind?" Sayaka asked, blinking.

"The person who's running Monobear. Come on, he's obviously a robot, you had to have figured that part out, right?"

Sayaka, who of course had, blinked. "Then ... you know who's behind all of this?" she asked.

Ikusaba let out a long sigh. "No," she lied. "I only met the mastermind, I don't know their name and I didn't recognize that person's face. I don't know what all this is about ... but I do know what's happening now. In between Monobear killing me and waking up here, I woke up somewhere else and had it all explained to me."

It had been a very unusual conversation.

When Mukuro had woken up, she had been in more pain than she could ever remember having endured. The sheer torment was almost enough to drive her back into unconsciousness, but she knew that it was important to stay awake. Very, very important.

Because she was there, looking down at her expressionlessly with a face that was almost a mirror of her own. Almost. Mukuro had nearly panicked when the slight difference had been pointed out, earlier. There was a strong urge to ask her if that was the reason for all of this, but she quelled it. There was something much more important to say. Much, much more important.

"... I'm ... sorry ..." she said.

Junko simply nodded. "It's all right," she said, soothingly. And that, more than anything else, told Mukuro that awful things, far worse than having spears explode into your chest, were in the offing. "It's all just part of the plan. Oh, not the plan I told you about, that was complete bullshit that I came up with to get you to act the right way. I'm talking about the real plan." Abruptly there was a crown on her head. "Are you not entertained by my godlike brilliance?" she asked haughtily.

"Uh-huh," Mukuro replied. She didn't like the queen act. She hadn't liked the person it was based on very much, and thought that her sister would have done better to imitate the one of their circle of acquaintances who actually was royalty. But that wasn't the sort of thing you could really tell someone like Junko. "Can ... I ask ... something?"

"Why certainly, Muku-chan!" Junko enthused cutely.

This was a more tolerable mask. Slightly. "How'm I ... alive?"

From the look on her sister's face, she'd known that was a mistake. "Dumb, dumb, dumb big sister!" she spewed out cutely. "Don't you know? Don't you know? We are Ultimate Despair! We have tons and tons and tons of really, really smaaaaaart Ultimate Mad Scientists and Ultimate Unethical Doctors and Ultimate You Get The Ideas working for us! With allllll of thaaaat, it's easy-peasy." Glasses appeared on her face. "The design of a method to induce a state similar to death, slowing down all biological functions to the point where only the most intrusive examination could determine the subject's actual state, occurred almost simultaneously with the discovery of a method of inducing rapid regrowth of injured tissue," she explained clinically.

"Oh," Mukuro said. That did make sense. As much as anything that had ever happened to either of them did. "Then -"

"I used it at half-strength before we started this little chat," Real-Junko explained. "That's why you're in pain. This is your punishment for screwing up."

"... thank you."

"You're welcome. And now, we come to the actual plan."

"You said ... they were going to die ... you said ..."

"Mukuro-chan. Dear, sweet Mukuro-chan. My best-beloved and utterly useless big sister. It is so funny that you of all people should not realize what a liar I am." And now she grinned. "We're going to do much worse things to them than that. Are you ready to play your new role in all of this?"

There was really only one answer she could give to that question from her little sister, who was the most important person in the world to her, whom she did not want to see suffer the horrible fate of becoming so bored with the world that her anger turned inward again. There was really only one anwer that she could give.

So she gave it.

"Wait," said Sayaka. "Waitwaitwaitwait. How's that again?"

Ikusaba paused in her necessarily abbreviated account of that meeting, which omitted any details that might give Sayaka a clue as to the mastermind's true identity. "Which part?"

"The, the part about how we, we slow down, and ... how does that ... it doesn't make any sense," she concluded. "I don't remember being injected with anything -"

"Do you remember anything that happened between your arrival at the school and when you woke up in the classroom?" Ikusaba asked patiently. "No? Of course not. It was probably then, that we were all injected with something that would release that drug if we ever suffered an injury bad enough to kill us."

"But ... but, no, that doesn't make any sense," the idol protested. "We're being manipulated into trying to kill each other, but when we do, the people we kill don't actually die? Why would anyone do that? It doesn't make sense."

"Well," said Ikusaba cheerfully. "It's a good thing, then, then it doesn't have to make sense. Isn't it? So then you don't have to make any sense out of it. You just have to figure out how you're going to survive it. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. You've shown that you can do that by trying to kill all of us." That part was delivered cheerfully too.

Sayaka rocked back. "I ... I never did, I just ... I was pretending and -"

"Lie to yourself all you like. I'm not interested in your justifications, right now. We need to find out what the rest of the situation is. Presumably, we're not going to just be stuck in this room forever, or there wouldn't be a door. Does it open?"

Still stunned a bit by that last wholly unfair accusation, all that Sayaka could do was to repeat, "Open?"

"Yes, that thing that doors generally do unless they happen to be locked. Or stuck. You may have observed it happening in the recent past."

Sayaka tried to stammer out a reply, but Ikusaba was already in motion, walking over to the door and turning the handle. "Oh, look, it does open!" she said. "Are you coming or would you rather wait here?"

Following along behind the far more aggressive girl, Sayaka soon found that the door led to another hallway - a long one, almost exactly as long as the hallway where their rooms were located back in the main body of the school. It was like that hallway in more than just length, though, for there were other doors all along both sides of it at even intervals, with name plates just beside them. At the very far end, the nameplates for the doors had pictures of the two of them on it, just like their rooms back there had - well, almost like them. Those pictures hadn't had their eyes exxed out.

Just beyond that point, the hallway opened up into a large room filled with couches, chairs and tables, and with a large viewscreen on one wall. As they arrived in that room, pausing to take it in, the viewscreen flared to life, and they were treated to the sight of the people they'd left behind standing in a circle in a room somewhere.

"What -" said Sayaka.

And then what was going on became very clear, as Monobear on the screen proclaimed, "Let's start off with a simple explanation of our school trial!"

To Be Continued.

Author's Note

This is intended as the reverse of Teakay's "Hope is No More Behind A Closed Door." Look it up if you're curious.