Living in the real world after the conclusion of the killing game—the ending of Danganronpa as a series, thanks to her and her friends—was difficult for Maki to wrap her head around from time to time. She knew that what had happened within the confines of the fictional world was just that, fictional, but it still came back to haunt her by means of memories that she never wanted to replace, never wanted to toss out and forget about entirely. Her memories focused almost exclusively on two individuals, one she still knew and one she wished she did, and she would find herself staring out into nothingness thinking about various scenes and situations that she'd been forced to live through.

The ones that involved Shuichi, she was always able to discuss with him whenever he made himself available to her to do so. They didn't live in the same town, and if she could have it her way it wouldn't have been the same country, but every so often he'd call her and they'd talk through the memories that were haunting their day-to-day lives because of what they'd endured. He was always thinking about her, or about Kaede, and she could hear his voice crack when he'd talk about the conversations he'd had post-show with the pianist who really knew next to nothing about how to play a piano. "It sucks that none of us were who we thought we were," he admitted, his whole story about being a detective being false, although he did come back to a reality where he was working in the law field. "I would've loved to have really gone and practiced piano with her sometime."

"I'm sure you would have," Maki replied, trying not to sound callous with the terseness of her response. "Must be nice knowing that you can actually talk to her. How's her family treat you whenever you guys have your calls?"

"I think they understand that we need to talk to each other in private to heal from what happened to us." He'd talked at length before about how Kaede was just a college kid who lived with her parents and her sister and didn't do much more than study and go out partying on weekends. She may not have been who the game had made her out to be, but she still seemed decent enough, and if Maki cared she probably would have tried reaching out. "We're going to have a coffee date one of these days, there's a shop halfway between my work and the campus."

"Good for you." Again the response seemed rough, but Maki really did not want to hear about how he was going to have an actual relationship with the person he'd fallen for in the killing game, when she'd never even spoken to Kaito once since everything had ended. She knew where he was, getting treatment overseas for the illness he'd truly had in reality, but she only knew that because his grandparents, who were real and actually his guardians, had reached out to her and let her know that much. She didn't want to sound too angry at Shuichi about how lucky he was with getting to reconnect with Kaede, but at the same time she was struggling to mask her true emotions.

She would not have been lying in the slightest if she said she wished that she'd had the life that she'd been given in the killing game, compared to the life she actually led. Every day was a struggle to survive in a town that was far too expensive for her to live in, even with the pay she'd received from being on the show. Her day job was working reception at a therapist office, which she found catharsis in whenever the clients would leave and she could slip into the office, talking out all of her problems to someone who docked her pay for that exact reason. At night she sat alone in a barely-furnished apartment, overlooking a sparkling city that would have been so much more exciting to live in if she'd had someone else there to live with her.

The memories that she had to deal with often were about the end of the game, about the desperation in their hearts when they'd thought they were going to die there, only to come out of the rubble and find their way back to reality. She wasn't sure how much of what she remembered was real and how much she'd added in the time since things had ended, but she'd almost entirely blocked out Himiko from things and instead focused all of her memory power on what Shuichi had done right then. (That wasn't a dig at Himiko by any means, she'd just not wanted to force herself to remember how horrified she'd been at things when she was quite the different person outside of the game, stronger and more confident.)

But sometimes, as she'd be sitting out on the balcony, looking out at the stars in the sky, Maki would find herself remembering more about Kaito than anyone else, their relationship that they'd had in the game being so whirlwind and so unlike anything she'd experienced that it was hard to forget about it. She'd come to learn after she returned to her real life that she'd always been closed off from others, and the fact that the fictional her had been the same way but opened up for one space-themed man was laughable, but she felt in her heart that her feelings for Kaito had been real, they'd been the actual her bleeding through.

The memories of how she'd train with him and Shuichi, or how she'd helped him learn to build a crossbow, or how she'd thought she killed him and had to see him come back just to watch him die, just to learn he was alive but dying somewhere else…they'd hit her with the force of something unlike anything she'd ever felt before. Kaito's astronaut persona may not have been real by any stretch of the imagination, but the love she'd learned to feel for him was real, and it killed her a little more each day when she'd come home to her empty apartment and remember that she wasn't meant to be with him. They weren't meant to connect, they weren't going to get to know each other, they were going to remain separate entities for the rest of their lives and there wasn't anything that could be done about it.

Her calls to talk about the floods of memories went on regularly, and she couldn't help herself but maintain feeling the bitterness in her heart whenever Shuichi would talk about how he was actually meeting with some of the others. He detailed his coffee date with Kaede, which turned into a regular deal where she rambled about her school work and he thought about how to get back to his job, as well as arranged meetings with some of the others that they'd been in the game with. He talked to Himiko almost as often as the calls were, because she was in constant need of reassurance that the game had happened and that she wasn't dead, even though she was so strong compared to her passively weak self in-game. He'd had meetings with Tenko (who was still strongly anti-male, and was very much athletic, but preferred running track events over doing martial arts), and Kirumi (who worked for the catering company assigned to feeding the prime minister), and he'd spoken once about seeing Kokichi in passing, but none of them were who Maki wanted to hear him talk about.

None of them were Kaito.

And so none of them really, truly mattered.

The bitterness only grew as they went on longer from the ending of the series, and she was beginning to lose the prominence of the memories in her mind. If she didn't have the ability to remember what Kaito's face looked like, what his touch had felt like, what his voice sounded like, Maki wasn't sure how she was going to survive in her bleak existence, yet as much as she didn't want to lose the things so dear to her she knew she had to overcome them. She couldn't let herself be hung up forever on Danganronpa, even if it had changed her life in so many ways.

Calling Shuichi went from a common event, to once in a while, to the point that she wasn't able to recall the last time she'd talked to him. No one else had ever reached out to her, and she wasn't going to make that attempt herself, so she was completely and utterly alone in that regard. That was, until a knock on her door brought her world around her crashing down, shattering into a million pieces that she wasn't going to be able to pick up.

The person on the other side of the door was gaunt, nothing more than skin and bones, with brittle hair that looked like it was on the verge of falling out. The face was familiar even in its completely angular form, the lack of facial hair concerning but not a deal breaker, and when Maki saw the sunken-in purple eyes shining at her she knew that she'd been given a miracle there in that moment. "Can I…come in?" Kaito's raspy voice asked, unlike how he'd spoken before but understandably so. "There were a…lot of…stairs to…"

"Yes! Come in!" Maki'd never invited someone inside so fast in her life, and as she watched him hobble into her apartment she only wished that she had more furniture for him to pick from to sit on. He was able to make it to one of her only chairs in the room before stumbling, needing to catch himself with a twig-like arm that was so different from how it had looked when she'd last known him. After he was seated, he was fumbling through the bag he'd carried with him, pulling out all sorts of medications to find whatever he was looking for, and she did him a favor and got him some water before he strained himself to ask for some.

The room was silent for a while as he collected himself, his whole body tremoring every time he took in a deep breath, and she couldn't help but wonder what had happened to him to make him look so miserable. His grandparents had mentioned him being treated for an illness, but they'd never specified about what it was and she'd never pushed the question. "I got your…address from…ugh, I can't remember…" Kaito was wincing as he tried to pull the information he was looking for from the air, and she so badly wanted to help him. "My grandparents said you'd…like to see me, maybe."

The eagerness in her nod must have been apparent, based on how he smiled at it. "I'd always hoped that I'd get to, yeah," she replied, not wanting to sound too desperate for this interaction. "Wish it would've been under better circumstances, you're looking rough."

"What? This is the best I've looked in…weeks? Months?" He seemed aware of how his current condition differed from how he'd looked in the game, but he wasn't going to let it slow him down. "I got put in the hospital for a…long while. Bad times, really. Only learned to walk again last month. Talking right before that. Kind of a miracle that I made it here." One of the things he pulled out of his bag was his phone, and he feebly offered it to Maki so that she could see the pictures on it, images that must have been taken by either his grandparents or the hospital staff because of how raw and unfiltered they were. He clearly had been on the brink of death, and it was nothing short of a miracle that he was there with her right then.

"So, why here? Why come to visit me, of all people?" she happened to ask after passing the phone back, not wanting to stomach too many more of the pictures. "I'm sure everyone else would've been just as happy to see you."

He tried to laugh but it was only air, no sound attached. "All I thought about was you. Needed a happy memory…when they were drawing blood? You, it was about you. Coming back from flatlining? Your face was right there. I had to see you again." The breaths were there, shallow and needing force to happen with regularity. "Even if you aren't…the you I was seeing."

"I'm about as close to it as you're going to get, all things considered," she replied, feeling strangely flattered that he'd just admitted to using her as his means for keeping his sanity and his life during a tough time. "I may not be an assassin like I was in all of those memories, but I'm pretty similar to the me you knew."

"You definitely look like it." He wasn't lying, she did still have the long hair that she'd had in the game, the short stature, the lean frame that wasn't physically imposing in the slightest, but everyone looked similar enough to who they'd been in fiction. The lone person to look strikingly different was him, and she was sure he knew it. "I wanna get to know you, Maki. This you, just like I…knew the other you."

Nodding in agreement, Maki moved herself so that she was closer to him, close enough for her hand to brush against his leg if she barely reached in his direction. "Same to you, Kaito. I'd be honored if we'd get to spend time together, once you're better and all that. Don't want you overexerting yourself just to see me."

"I'll climb a million stairs for you."

"I'd rather you not."

They sat and talked for a long time, until a reminder on his phone went off and he started scrambling to find things in the bag he'd brought with him, pulling out an entire case of medications for him to pick through. It pained her to watch it happen, but she knew pretending like it wasn't happening would only make things worse—the Kaito she'd known in-game was sick too, even if she hadn't known it until late—and if she wanted to pursue being in this one's life she needed to accept his struggles. He didn't seem to mind having to take so many different types of medicine, which he ended up explaining the purpose of once he'd swallowed down the small handful of pills he'd gotten.

None of the medications meant anything to her, at most she was familiar with antidepressants and mood stabilizers and things prescribed to the patients the therapist saw on the regular, so Kaito had to strain himself to break down all of the ailments he was medicating for. With every problem he talked about she wanted to shrink away, realizing that he was much worse off in the real world than she ever could have guessed, from needing a transplanted lung to having all sorts of further issues that had developed over the course of waiting for that transplant. By all accounts, he should not have shown up unannounced to the front door of a house belonging to someone he hadn't ever actually met in the flesh, but he made it very clear that he was there to see the guardian angel who had existed in his memory to get him through the painful waiting period.

"Okay, so now that all that's behind you, what do you expect to do with your life?" she asked him, resisting the need to look up how long someone who'd had a transplanted lung could reliably live. "What's your goal? You did Danganronpa, now what?"

"Fun question," he replied with a smirk, his lips visibly cracked from all of the talking he'd been doing. "Before this, before that…I was a film kid. Big on the movies. Wanted to be one of the stars."

"Makes sense as to how they got 'astronaut' from that, I guess." Maki wasn't expecting the title he'd been given in the game to relate to his life, so that came as a pleasant surprise. "But let me guess, you got sick and all that had to get tossed out, huh?"

Kaito's pause lasted nearly a minute, time spent deep in thought about how to reply. "Acting, yeah, I don't want to do that anymore. But…spending all that time in bed, I got to watch a…lot of movies. More than I'd ever seen. I never thought I'd be so in love with…"

He trailed off looking straight at her, and Maki felt like his eyes were staring deep into her soul, as if he'd gotten sidetracked on what he was saying. "In love with how they film things?" she suggested, hoping to get him back to explaining his dreams. "I can see you as a producer or whatever, bet you've got a real eye for setting the scene and the drama that goes with it."

"Huh? Oh, yeah, cinematography's neat. I'd love to know how to make the perfect movie." His eyes were still focused on her, and she didn't know what to do at that point. There was clearly something else running through his mind and she wasn't sure if she wanted him to spit it out or let it fall to the wayside. "But I don't know if I'll get to do it. Lots of competition there. Lots of people who went to school for it."

She laughed, a memory of something she'd heard said at the end of the game coming back to her mind, something she knew had found its source in him. "The impossible is possible, isn't it? All you have to do is make it so."

"You're right, but…like this? Not happening." He tried flexing an arm but the pitiful display of wasted-away muscle was enough to make him stop within seconds. "I'll stick to writing screenplays, actually. I've got the stuff figured out, I just…need someone who'll read it for me. Tell me if it's good."

"Are you telling me that's why you're here, Kaito? To ask me to do that for you?" She was sure it wasn't, but for the moment where Maki had convinced herself that it was she felt herself filling with a bubbling rage. Their conversation had been so pure, so enlightening, up until that point that to find out that he was there only to solicit her assistance made her angrier than she could recall ever actually feeling. But when he shook his head and insisted that wasn't the case, the rage rushed away and she audibly sighed. "Then why are you here, if it's not that? Is it really just to see me?"

"Wouldn't lie to you, Maki. You saved me without knowing it. Least I could do was come thank you for it." There was so much genuine emotion in his voice that discrediting him was impossible, and she felt thankful for his honesty. They talked a bit longer, until he said he needed to leave for the night, so that he could get home before he needed to medicate again, but when he didn't tell her how he was getting home or where home was, she immediately took control of things. She decided she would take him home, so that she knew where to visit him the next time he wanted to see her, and she wasn't going to have it any other way.

It took an excruciatingly long time for them to get down the stairs, Kaito frequently getting winded but stubbornly refusing her help, and once they were on the bottom floor of the building she had him wait in the lobby while she got her car and drove it from the garage to out front, a much shorter walk than him having to go along with her. Their ride was filled with more conversation, and when Maki finally dropped him off outside his grandparents' home outside of town she felt like she'd found closure she wasn't expecting to get with that surprise visit.

"I put my number in your phone, you better call me whenever you want to talk," she told him with a sternness in her voice, him nodding at her words. "I mean it, Kaito. This, well, meant a whole lot to me, to see you in the flesh and not in memories."

"Same back to you, I'll call when I need you. Maybe next time we see each other…I'll be looking a bit better." They shared a smile before he was heading inside, his grandparents waving at her from the doorway, and for the ride home she felt a hole inside her chest patching itself up knowing that things weren't all that bad with Kaito after all.

When she'd gotten home and started cooking dinner for herself, she heard her phone ringing from where she'd plugged it in, but she didn't check it until after she'd eaten. The call she'd missed was from Kaito, and the voicemail he'd left was simple: I'll be looking forward to next time. You really are an angel, Maki Roll.

Hearing the nickname she'd thought she'd despise forever made her heart swell until it felt like it would burst. She had Kaito back in her life, and even if neither of them were the people who'd originally fallen in love, she had a good feeling about their chances at making that happen again in the real world.

A/N: this one hurts, but...happy ending, right? prompt was memory