"Come on, Saihara," Maki says, "let's get you home."

"It should've been her who survived," Shuichi says, his voice warping due to all that whiskey and vodka he has coursing through his scrawny body, "her, not you. It should've been you who died."

Maki looks at him with some sharp-edged sort of patience. "Do you think I don't know that?" She sounds so casual about it that Shuichi gets stumped enough to let her haul him out of the bar and into the waiting taxi.

Ice cubes clink together in the glass Himiko sets in front of him. Shuichi stares blankly at it, then downs the water in one go, barely noting the sweet aftertaste. He's still feeling that particular blurriness, softening his vision and swirling inside his head, of being drunk. He must've gone really hard yesterday — he supposes so; he doesn't remember much.

"You were very rude to Maki-chan when she found you," Himiko says, and Shuichi forces his eyes to focus on her dour expression. "You hurt her."

"Did I?" he asks. Himiko makes a face.

"Nah. Not that badly… But there's a reason it's me you're seeing, not her."

Shuichi chuckles. "A reason other than you two having stolen the spare key to my apartment so you could fool yourselves into thinking you're helping out?"

"Three carrots, a carton of expired soy milk, and half of a hamburger," Himiko counts out on her fingers. "Those are the contents of your fridge. The edible ones, so if—"

Shuichi yanks himself up and bolts to the kitchen, stumbling and bumping his hip on the doorway in his haste; he browses through the cabinets and shelves and doesn't find a single bottle. He sees them — dry, all of them emptied out — after checking the trash can.

He's still gaping when Himiko joins him, lays her small hand on his back.

"This is why—" she begins in a tone gentler than Shuichi probably deserves.

"Get out," he cuts in.

It's getting increasingly harder and harder to reach that stage where the alcohol numbs him to the point in which, like, only ten percent of his thoughts are about Kaede. Well. At least his bank account statement has more zeros than he has fingers, so he'd drink himself to death first, rather than drink himself to bankruptcy.

Actually, it's very probable that Shuichi will find his demise in a bottle, now that he thinks about it. The thought is almost enough to make him leave the shop at once — after all, if he wasn't afraid of dying, he'd probably already have committed suicide.

But — but almost. He carries his basket to the self checkout and scans the whisky. Smiles to the cashier who is overlooking the area — she knows him, so she doesn't come to ask for his ID card.

(Isn't it funny, how he feels like a high-schooler trapped in a body which was already twenty by the time it auditioned).

His fingers tighten on the bottleneck. Knuckles push up against his sweaty skin, giving it a sickly yellow undertone. Shuichi chews on his bottom lip, then slips the liquor inside his ratty backpack and re-enters the store to buy another one.

He wakes up in his bathtub, covered in vomit. He looks down onto himself, then throws up again. His hands shiver as he takes off his pants, boxer briefs, binder; he drops it all at the tiled floor and turns on the water, hot enough to make him cry out hoarsely.

Shuichi squeezes his eyes until his head hurts even worse, and weeps. The tears spill over his face and onto the water tinted amber with the undigested alcohol.

Kaede's quaking smile is vivid underneath his eyelids.

"You need to get help," Himiko says. Shuichi doesn't even bother with the pretense of being surprised by seeing her, sitting on his shitty sofa with her legs tucked underneath her. "Like, professional help. Maybe go to a hospital—"

"No way," he interrupts, toweling his hair dry. It's so long now, and so many people use feminine pronouns for him, but his raw wounds pain too much to leave any place for dysphoria. "No hospital. Never again."

"Saihara, listen." Himiko catches his eye. "This has to stop. Do you really want to—"

"Yes," he interrupts her again. "What if I said yes, Yumeno-san?"

Her concerned expression wavers. "Then I would be really sad."

"Tell me about it," Shuichi says. It comes out much softer than he expected.

He comes back from the club sober enough to still feel (like an itch, like a scratch, like a cut) the love Shirogane twisted into his skin, threads of truth and threads of fiction tangling together into a sense of hollowness inside his chest. There isn't enough alcohol in him to fill it.

That doesn't stop him from trying. He drinks, sprawled out on the floor, until he aches.

There's so much pain in his world. Fingernails breaking when he digs them in the drywall; missing Kaede; the familiar headache after he pukes all the alcohol out; banging his head against the wall while the barman gives him a wary look; acidic bile sticking to inside of his mouth; seeing Kaede out of the corner of his eye; the hot rawness of sixth, seventh, eighth shot of vodka which burns the back of his throat both coming in and out; his ribs protesting when he wakes up with his binder on; thinking about Kaede; how Maki and Himiko slowly stop coming to check on him; Kaede, Kaede, Kaede.

His world begins and ends with her, and Shuichi wishes he didn't love her so fucking much. Alternatively, when he's not too drunk, he wishes he had died. Not her. Never her.

Then everything fades away. And away. Blur. Soft. Nothing hurts. He's not in his body, he's out out outside, the walls of his vision closing in as he flies above them, free for once. Weightless. Safe. Unable to care.

Ain't that nice.

"Shuichi Saihara, famous for being one of the three winners of Dangan Ronpa's last season, has been seen belligerently drunk in a Tokyo club. Did the—"

Shuichi turns off the TV, then takes a look at his phone. It has been silent for the last few weeks, since Maki and Himiko moved to Taiwan, as he found out from the news.

He's free, free from their concern turned into disdain. He's been liberated. He's on his own. Free.

(That's a lie he can't stop telling himself. But isn't everything about him fake anyway?)

He pours himself a glass of cheap tequila and curls his bony fingers around it.

"Cheers, Akamatsu-san," he slurs out, toasting the TV and almost spilling the liquid onto his filthy couch, then — bottoms up!