This is a thing I started writing a few months ago before letting it sit at about 90% completion for a while, and then I decided to finish and post it for Fukawa's birthday. So here it is.

Happy birthday, Fukawa? (this is not a happy fic oops)

Thanks to CSakuraS for being my beta as usual. :3

Danganronpa ≠ mine.

Counting the Tallies

Touko Fukawa didn't pay much mind to the tally marks on her thigh. On the contrary, she preferred not to think of them at all. She made a point of completely ignoring the scars left behind, of suppressing the morbid curiosity urging her to count them. The only time they shot to the forefront of her mind was on the occasion that she felt a sharp sting in the bath as the hot water teased a fresh, scabbing scratch.

So she stopped bathing.

It honestly didn't make much of a difference with Kaneko's pungent stench perpetually stuck to her, but it made her feel disgusting, which suited Touko just fine. She was disgusting. Her mothers would scream just that as they threw her into the searing-hot shower, and her head would smash against the tile, and her thigh would sting, and she knew without looking that there was yet another reason that she was a despicable human being.

Not that she needed the tally marks to know that. She knew it, everyone around her knew it—even if they had never seen the marks, even if they knew nothing about her. Touko was disgusting and worthless, with or without the tally marks lining her leg.

It shouldn't have mattered if she spent weeks, months, or even years trying to ignore their existence.

It wasn't until a few days into her hellish life at Hope's Peak Academy that she accidentally caught a glimpse of her scarred thigh while in the bathroom, and for the first time since she could remember, she stared. She stared long and hard at the tally marks, furrowing her brow in confusion.

There were more of them.

Of course, she wouldn't expect there to be less of them, and it wasn't uncommon for her to catch a glimpse of one or two fresh incisions from time to time, despite her best efforts, but the sheer volume...

It seemed like there was nearly a full row of new tallies.

Her mind swirled madly. Was she misremembering? When was the last time she had seen the marks? It couldn't have been that long ago, but she had tried to ignore them as usual, so she wasn't sure, but she was pretty sure that there had been a lot less, but that didn't make sense, and she had been trying so hard to suppress her since being invited to Hope's Peak, and she couldn't think of when she could have gotten out...

Her eyes widened.

How long had she been knocked out on the day she arrived?

She thought it had been just under an hour, but there was no way that she could have come out and killed so many in such a short time. Even if she had, most of the marks looked old. At least several months old, probably. There was no way they had all been carved into her flesh just a few days earlier.

But could she really be so sure she had only been unconscious for an hour?

All of her classmates had corroborated that claim, so she hadn't questioned it at the time. Suddenly, though, she was feeling incredibly stupid for taking them at their word. Those people had no reason at all to tell her the truth. On the contrary, they had every reason in the world to willfully mislead her, laughing behind her back as she was made a fool of once again.

Touko Fukawa was trash who deserved no better, after all.

That was always the easiest conclusion to come to, the one that yielded the least pain: they had to be lying to her, and she wouldn't fall for it. Even if she knew deep down that it was highly improbable that fourteen other students would keep quiet about such a thing just to torment her. Even if there was no precedent for her to maintain control for such a ridiculously long time. Even if logic dictated that there had to be a more sinister, more utterly terrifying reason for the sudden increase in tally marks.

No, the answer had to be the simple one, the one that had always worked best for her in the past. No one was to be trusted, and the less she confided in others, the better.

So even as sickening uncertainty tugged at the recesses of her mind, she obscured the marks behind her skirt once again. Nothing good ever came of looking at them.

And if the sudden icy fear churning in her stomach never subsided, then it was only what she deserved.