Getting into Hope's Peak was the greatest moment of Nagito Komaeda's life. To be able to be among and bask with the perfection of the other students, all of them so talented and wonderful and great... Of course, for somebody as pathetic and stupid as Komaeda, it got depressing. He was filled with the hope of the world, and yet, for some reason it made him feel worse and worse every day.
It was his fault for being so stupid, he reasoned. His emotions were wrong, he couldn't think right. The way he felt came from his own stupidity and worthlessness and there was nothing he could do about it.
Until he made the discovery.
The discovery was of a bit of powder he could dissolve in water and inject into his arm and then he slowed down and he didn't need to be a super high school level anything to feel good. The feelings didn't sting him so much and he knew he couldn't be so stupid because he found something to make him feel happy - and eventually it would wipe his pathetic life away with an overdose and the world would be filled with so much hope. They wouldn't have to deal with him anymore.
He'd started using the drug in school and of course it had fucked up his grades but they were never any good anyway - nobody noticed him getting more and more pathetic. When he was sober he realized it and it brought more and more despair into his heart so he used heroin in school and nobody even noticed. He joked with himself and called it "hopium" - a stupid pun befitting someone as stupid as him.
Nobody noticed except for Hajime fucking Hinata, who was so fucking clever that he'd seen the effects before even Tsumiki - who Komaeda had been avoiding because she was a fucking nurse - nurses would know that shit. But Hinata? Hinata picked things up quickly, but he wasn't an anatomy expert.
And then when Komaeda had finally built up the nerve to use even more than before - enough to maybe even kill him, which made him feel so good and hopeful inside. And he locked himself in a bathroom stall and dug the stuff out of his pocket and he didn't even bother to clean the needle because he would be dead anyway.
He could hear Hinata pound on the door and he pretended not to hear it until it faded away - then there was more noise and he could hear 2 more footsteps that he couldn't recognize. And as he put more into the vein in his arm the door was kicked open by Akane Owari and he could see Tsumiki there with Hinata and he smiled.
"You've come to see somebody like me off? Wow... you're not just talented, you're compassionate. That's amazing."
But Owari grabbed the needle and smashed it on the floor - great. Komaeda sighed, he'd been halfway there and he felt despair - he didn't deserve this, he didn't deserve to be saved by somebody as useful and good as Owari or Hinata or Tsumiki.
But in the ambulance Hinata had stayed and for some reason, staring at Hinata and touching his hand, there was a bit more hope - because even somebody as worthless as Komaeda could, evidently, be cared about at least a little.