Five Nights at Monokuma's

Night Five

Makoto was starving.

He'd been sitting in the security office for hours, watching the surveillance log. If the computer clock was correct, it was nearing 3 AM. He'd missed dinner and his family was probably frantic, unable to reach his dead phone, but he couldn't tear his attention away from the horror unfolding before him. The surveillance cameras had only been used by Hajime Hinata the first two nights, but they had been left running from the third night all the way up until the fifth night. Makoto had witnessed Nagito dragging Hinata's unconscious body from the security office to the dining hall, then the video cut out abruptly for several minutes until the image returned and Nagito was alone. Makoto had skipped through the feed from the next day, watching just a few minutes from each hour to confirm that no one had found Hinata's body during that time. It was only from the show stage's camera on the fourth night that he could hear Nagito speaking to Hinata.

Then the catwalk had fallen, allowing Hinata to escape. If Hinata had known how close those bears were to getting him…

But a more interesting event occurred on the fourth night, and that was Nagito cornering Junko Enoshima in the security office. There was no surveillance feed for the room itself, but from the west hall camera, he could hear it. The sickening screech of straining metal, snapping sparks, and Junko's unearthly screams. Makoto had to crank up the volume to make out what she was saying. Eventually, he realized she was repeating the same word over and over.

Killer. Killer. Killer.

"Killer, huh." Makoto paused the feed, leaning his elbows on the desk. An animatronic created for children's entertainment shouldn't have been programmed to understand death, especially killing. But, despite his actions, it didn't appear that Nagito had that understanding, at least not the way Junko did. In all his conversations with Hinata, he never used those words. He used words that would make sense to an animatronic, like destroy and disassemble. Junko, on the other hand, was very clearly aware that she was being murdered.

Makoto began to feel an inkling that she was the catalyst to all of this.

The cameras continued to run through the fifth day. The pizzeria remained closed. Makoto skipped through clips of the morning staff hoisting the fallen catwalk back up and moving what remained of Junko Enoshima to the parts and storage. The manager stood in the dining hall, repeatedly trying to get a hold of someone on his phone, before finally snapping it shut in frustration. By noon, everyone had cleared out.

Nagito appeared on the dining hall camera in the afternoon, standing in the center of the room. Makoto couldn't get a read on his expression, but it was obvious the animatronic was at a loss. What Makoto didn't understand was why the staff hadn't shut him down. If they'd seen the surveillance footage, that would've known what Nagito had done to both Hinata and Junko.

Perhaps… they couldn't shut him down, so they'd just locked up the pizzeria instead.

Nothing else happened the remainder of the day, so Makoto skipped to around midnight when Hinata's shift started. Unsurprisingly, the guard didn't show up. But the fire had, presumably, originated in the dining hall, so Makoto selected that camera and hit fast-forward. Someone moved onto the screen around two-thirty AM, and he hit play. It was Hinata. He hadn't changed his clothes; the cuff that had been ripped by the broken catwalk was still dangling from his right sleeve. More immediately worrisome, however, were the large plastic canisters he was setting down on one of the tables. He unscrewed one of the caps and carried the canister up to the show stage, dousing the area in a clear liquid.

Gasoline…?

It had to be.

Makoto watched intently. There was no doubt Hinata had started the fire, but carelessly using gasoline to do it… Was there a corpse somewhere in the wreckage of the dining hall?

Hinata had just finished emptying the second canister when Nagito emerged from the storage room. He must have picked up noise in the dining hall.

Makoto turned up the volume when they began speaking.

"Izuru! I was worried you'd been taken away from me again. They weren't able to repair Junko today, so there's no reason for you to be frightened. Now I can fix you, and we can be together—"

"I'M NOT IZURU!"

Makoto jumped when Hinata's scream blasted through the speakers.

Hinata rounded on the animatronic, looking more crazed than Makoto had ever seen anybody. "I'm done with all of this. I'm going to destroy you and Junko and those bears and this stupid place forever!"

"...Izuru, why? Why would you do that? I've… been trying to help you…"

"You aren't helping me at all! You're planning to fucking kill me!"

"Kill… kill… You said that word before… after that incident. What does it mean? I don't understand it."

"It doesn't fucking matter. If I go up in flames with this rotten place, then so be it, but I'm dying as Hajime Hinata. Do you hear me, Nagito?"

"You are not Hajime Hinata. How many times do I have to tell you?"

"Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up! You're the one who's insane! I'm not crazy, I am Hajime Hinata!"

"I see… you are functioning incorrectly again." Nagito took a few steps toward Hinata. "I will fix you, Izuru."

"Get away from me… Get away from me! Don't fucking touch me!"

Makoto vaguely found himself wondering if there hadn't been gasoline covering the floor, would Hinata have been able to escape?

Nagito caught the back of Hinata's shirt when he slipped, then grabbed his arms and dragged him over to the show stage. Hinata struggled, kicking and screaming, but it was to no avail. Nagito pinned him on his back with one hand around his throat, tearing the front of his shirt apart.

"I will make you whole again, Izuru. I promise."

The bloodcurdling scream following the crack of bone would haunt Makoto for a long time. Hinata writhed in agony on the stage, his chest no longer at all the shape it should be. Nagito's arm was coated dark with blood. The animatronic reached inside, and—

The screen went black.

Makoto switched to another camera, but it was disabled as well. All of them were. He fast-fowarded through the feed, but there was nothing. The surveillance system ran until six AM before it was finally turned off. Heart pounding wildly, Makoto rewound. His entire body was sweating. Surely at least one camera had picked up something in those four hours?

A flash on the dining hall camera around three AM finally grabbed his attention. It took a couple of tries to pause the recording at the right time, but he managed to catch it. The image was bright orange and blurry; the dining hall was an inferno. He peered closer, squinting at a figure in the middle of the room. It wasn't Nagito, but it wasn't Hinata either. They had a similar build to Hinata, but their hair was almost to the floor. A pair of red eyes glowed, boring into the camera.

"Is this… No, it… can't be," Makoto whispered, staring. "Izuru…?"

Twelve hours ago, if you had told Makoto he'd become a witness to a murder that occurred in a pizza place ten years prior, he would've laughed. But now, he was reeling. Had Nagito somehow really managed to get Izuru working again? Or had he really… put Hinata into… Was that even possible?

Shaking, Makoto closed the surveillance program and scooted away from the desk. Monokuma was still squashed on the chair with him, but Nagito appeared to have done a good job putting it out of commission.

In hindsight, it was a miracle Makoto had reached the security office at all.

He spun slowly in the chair, staring up at the emergency light. Even after all he'd seen, he wasn't of the opinion that Nagito was necessarily malicious. Everything he did revolved around Izuru. He attacked Junko and the bears to protect him, and he murdered Hinata for the sake of "fixing" him. He wasn't like Junko, who had an awareness of killing.

But puzzling over the motivations of a rogue animatronic wasn't getting Makoto home any faster. He was going to suffocate in the security office if he didn't get out soon.

Praying this wouldn't get him killed, Makoto got up, snatched the pad of sticky notes off the desk, and approached the west hall window. He sucked in a deep breath and tapped on the glass.

It didn't take long for the glowing eye to appear down the hall. Makoto's survival instincts screamed at him to get back and go hide under the desk, but he quashed it and forced himself to tap a few more times. Like a ghost, Nagito appeared on the other side of the window.

The right side of his face was doll-like and expressionless, while the left was an inhuman mass of wires, plates, and circuitry. His waiter uniform was dirty and ripped, hanging partially off his shoulder and exposing his endoskeleton arm. Wires from his chest stuck out in random directions.

The Nagito who had murdered Hajime Hinata had not looked like this.

Swallowing, Makoto scribbled words down on the notepad. He could barely keep his grip on the pen, but did his best to write legibly.

Are you Nagito?

Makoto held up the pad to the window. Nagito stared at it for such a long time that Makoto panicked, thinking he couldn't read, until the animatronic nodded.

Feeling a bit braver, Makoto pulled the sticky note off the pad and wrote on a new one.

I'm Makoto Naegi. It's nice to meet you.

He added a smiley face at the end.

After reading the note, Nagito tilted his head as if to say, is it?

Makoto soldiered on. I'd like to go home. Will you let me out?

Nagito lifted a hand and pointed to his right. At first, Makoto was confused, then realized Nagito was pointing at the door switch inside the room, trying to indicate Makoto could let himself out.

So, the AI was more literal than he'd anticipated. Makoto tapped the pen against his cheek, mulling over his word choice. The margin for error was slim; Nagito's misinterpretations had deadly consequences.

Eventually, he settled on: I want to leave the pizzeria.

Nagito took even longer to respond. Makoto could barely breathe. Finally, the animatronic nodded again and receded into the darkness.

Was that… Was that it? Was it safe to leave? Nagito wasn't going to kill him?

Placing blind trust in an artificial intelligence of questionable integrity was quite possibly the stupidest decision he'd ever made, but a tiny part of him wondered if it wasn't the same for Nagito. For the animatronic, he could very well be someone who was planning to take Izuru away from him again. That was assuming Izuru was still inside the building. But, if he wasn't, why would Nagito be there?

The realization hit Makoto right as he pressed the door switch.

Was Hajime Hinata still alive?

The door opened and Makoto waited with baited breath, but nothing came through. Cautiously, he stepped out into the hall. It was very dark.

"A-Are you still there?" Makoto whispered.

A porcelain white hand extended toward him from the blackness and he jerked back, but the hand only offered its palm. Barely breathing, Makoto gingerly took it. He was pulled down the hallway a little quicker than he was comfortable with, but Nagito didn't seem to have trouble navigating.

They stopped, and a prickle of anxiety shot through Makoto. Would this be the end of him?

Something creaked. Makoto was suddenly aware of a lighter rectangle of shadow in front of him.

"I-Is this the door?" he asked.

Nagito didn't respond, but Makoto didn't really expect him to. The pad of sticky notes and pen were taken from him, and Makoto heard the dull roll of the pen across the paper before a single note was pressed back into his hand.

Makoto couldn't read it in the dark, so instead he met Nagito's glowing eye as best he could and said, "Thanks…?"

Silence.

"I-I'll just go now..."

Makoto awkwardly slipped himself out the back door, clutching the paper tightly. He straightened up, sucking in harsh breaths of cold night air. The moon was bright and full, casting a gray glow on the alley behind the pizzeria.

He did it. He was out. He was alive.

Behind him, the pizzeria door slammed shut.

All Makoto wanted to do when he got home was sleep, but the universe had other plans for him. Explaining where he'd been to his parents, it turned out, was even more terrifying than trying to escape the pizzeria. In the end, he stammered out some bullshit excuse about how he'd gotten horribly lost on the other side of the city trying to find a particular store and had fallen asleep on a bench, despite the fact that it was now four AM and there was no way in hell it would've ever taken him that long to get home regardless of where in the city he'd gone. His parents clearly didn't believe him, but he was surprisingly okay with them thinking he'd been sneaking around with some girl.

Thankfully, the next day was Sunday. Makoto slept fitfully until the afternoon before his sister came banging on his bedroom door, saying Sayaka was on the phone.

"H'llo…?" Makoto muttered, drowsily shoeing Komaru back out of the room.

"Makoto! Geez, I thought you'd gotten murdered or something last night! Nobody knew where you went, we couldn't get a hold of you… Where the hell were you?"

Makoto slid back into bed, pulling the covers up over his head. It was painfully clear there was no way he'd be able to sneak into the pizzeria again on his own. Putting Sayaka in danger was not his first choice, but if she at least believed him, there was a chance they could convince someone else to help.

"Look, I can't talk about it here, but my parents won't let me leave the house by myself right now. Can you come over? There's somewhere I want to go."

Sayaka was pissed when she arrived, but Makoto didn't blame her. He could feel impatience rolling off of her in waves as they walked down the sidewalk in silence, following the familiar route he took to school. Finally he stopped, turning to face the road.

"Well?" Sayaka snapped. "Are you going to say anything or not?"

"This is it. This is where I was last night."

Sayaka furrowed her brow, following his gaze. Across the street was Monokuma's Pizza. If Makoto were to be honest, the daylight didn't make the place look any less menacing.

"The pizzeria? Nice try, but that place hasn't been open for years."

"I know," Makoto said, stuffing his hands into his pockets. The paper there scraped against his knuckles. "I snuck in yesterday afternoon, but I didn't get out until after three AM."

"Why were you in there so long? Wait, don't tell me—you got stuck in a broom closet."

Makoto laughed harshly. "I wish. You're half right. I got stuck somewhere, but it was the security office. I wound up watching almost a week's worth of surveillance footage. I know how the fire started."

"Wait, really? You're not just saying that to sound like you didn't really get locked in a broom closet, are you?"

"Sayaka! I'm totally serious!"

Makoto launched into a clumsy explanation of everything he'd witnessed the previous night: the reason a night guard was hired, the case of mistaken identity by Nagito, the attacks on Hinata by Junko and the animatronic bears, and the resulting gruesome murder.

The two of them ended up sitting down on the curb. Cars occasionally whizzed by. Makoto didn't look much at Sayaka while he was talking; he kept his eyes on the pizzeria instead, desperately wishing he could forcibly reach in and drag out the rest of its secrets.

"So, wait…" Sayaka said. "If Nagito was so obsessed with Izuru or Hinata or whatever, why did he kill Hinata?"

Makoto leaned back on his hands. "I don't think he meant to. At least, not in the traditional sense. He didn't want to kill him to make him die, like Junko did. Nagito had the animatronic body of Izuru hidden somewhere in the pizzeria, and he wanted to somehow… stuff Hinata into it."

"That's… messed up. How could he possibly think that would even work?"

"I have no idea. But I'm worried it actually did."

"What? You're can't be serious. You're totally joking. You are… joking, aren't you?"

Makoto pulled his legs up to his chest, tightly hugging his knees. "The cameras cut out while Hinata was… was being killed. They didn't come on at all after that, except for a couple seconds in the dining hall. I saw somebody there, and I think it was Izuru."

Sayaka looked skeptical, but Makoto pressed on.

"Hinata was the only one who could've possibly started the fire, because he was the one who intended to start it," he said. "Nagito didn't want to burn the place down, and Junko and the bears were all out of commission. If Izuru was really who I saw in the fire… Nagito might've actually succeeded."

Sayaka rubbed her forehead. She sucked in a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. "That's… totally impossible. But… even if it happened, what's there to do about it? Everything got destroyed by the fire."

"No, that's wrong." Makoto finally pulled his hands out of his pockets, clutching the sticky note. "I wasn't stuck in the security office because I accidentally locked a door. I was chased in there. By Nagito."

"What?!"

He handed her the sticky note. In Nagito's large, sloppy handwriting, it read: STAY OUT :)

"I eventually convinced him to let me out, but…"

"M-Makoto..." Sayaka's voice trembled and she bit her bottom lip, looking like she might actually cry. "If the animatronic really… You could've died."

"I know," he whispered. "I was terrified that I was going to be stuck in the security office forever, or get ripped apart if I tried to leave… And I really don't want to go back, but at the same time, I can't help but think… Hajime Hinata might still be alive.

Trapped in the body of Izuru."

"Hey Izuru, I learned something really interesting today! You wanna hear it? I'll bet you do—nobody talks to you about anything interesting, but I think this is something you'll enjoy. Those little boys who came in today taught me a fun game. If you cut somebody's head off, they die. Isn't that fascinating? You look confused, Izuru. Has Nagito not told you about that? If you kill somebody, they die. And dying means you stop functioning forever! If you really hate somebody, you can kill them! Isn't that interesting, Izuru?"