"Alright, alright, alright, one sec, one sec!"
Junko whipped a hand across her half-naked chest and down to her hip, and clutched the few tatters of Celeste's costume that still clung to her body. Her fingers swept across and over her shoulder, and there was a flash of black and white and red that flew away and into the air.
There stood Junko, fully clad in her long blonde pigtails, big blue eyes, and black cardigan and red skirt. The lights of the ceiling sparkled off her flawless pink skin, impossibly cleaned off all the gambler's white makeup. She stood there as a force of nature or immovable goddess, and if she felt any pain from the very real wound in her side, then she did not show it.
If Mukuro's dulled, awestruck brain could have formed a thought, it would have been only this:
Did I really call her a fugly bitch…?
"W–woah!" Leon balked. "How'd do you do that?!"
"That doesn't matter," she said, and didn't even bother turning to him.
Those big blue eyes (that were really red) never strayed from Mukuro's, and in them shone an alien feeling. It wasn't despair, or boredom, or disappointment, or disgust, or anything she'd ever shown to her sister before. If she hadn't known better, Mukuro would have almost thought it was a positive emotion.
"Now, Big Sis!" Her voice was softer than Mukuro expected, and almost kind (by her standards, anyway), but it still carried that familiar weight of authority. Years of obedience took over, and the rebelliousness that had consumed Mukuro a moment ago dissipated. Anger was just a distant memory. The hairs on her neck stood up straight, and so did she, and all thoughts of rejecting her sister disappeared, at least for a moment. "Go ahead and explain everything that's happened so far!"
Mukuro did not instantly respond. Her throat tightened up, and she found her fingers rolling up into a fist. Inside, she was crushing the hair clip, but she barely noticed, and cared even less.
That voice!
They were the first words Junko had spoken to her in her real voice in what felt like years. They were so overwhelming, and so easily pushed everything else in the world out of existence. All her instincts screamed to leap up and obey, or to crawl to her sister's feet, grab her ankles, and obey. If Junko had thrown a frisbee into the air, Mukuro might very well have tried to catch it with her teeth and winnowed for the opportunity.
Her eye twitched. It took everything she had not to fall to her knees and obey.
junkojunkojunkojunkojunko
Paralyzed as she was, Mukuro barely registered the outside world at all. She couldn't notice anyone else speak, now that Junko had entered the room for real.
"What's wrong, Big Sis?" Junko asked, very sweetly.
Mukuro wheezed for a few seconds. She wasn't sure why she was resisting. Why did she even want to?
Did she want to resist?
It's not like summarizing the case so far would change anything or hurt anyone… and Junko wants me to…
"Wh… why?" she squeaked out, compromising with herself at last.
"Ugh, Mukuro…" Junko sighed. All of her features changed at once, and she looked down at her shoes, and played with her hair. Despair radiated off her, thick enough to choke from across the room, and she could barely pay attention anymore from the pain and hopelessness of it all.
Junko… She's even more amazing like this!
"Did her personality just totally change?" someone whispered to someone else – Mukuro couldn't tear her eyes away from her sister to check. "Is she alright?"
"Evidently not," replied someone else, more concernedly. "She seems even worse than Jack…"
"What?!" a final voice joined in, furious. "No one's allowed to out-wackjob me!"
Junko groaned, barely able to keep herself awake from the boredom. Mukuro thought for a moment that her sister might tell her not to pay attention to the others, but Junko didn't need to, and she knew it.
"It's so they all understand," moaned the better, more despairful half of the Ultimate Despairs. "I don't want anyone being confused later on about what's happening… I'm sure there are some idiots in the audience…"
"Man, I'm not in the audience, and I still don't understand!" agreed a faraway male voice.
"Don't worry," Junko said, more quietly, yet her voice was so much louder than the others' combined. "We've got plenty of time before Monokuma calls for a vote."
"You've got my guarantee about that!" trilled the headmaster.
With a start, Mukuro remembered that she was crushing Sayaka's hair clip in between her fingers. She didn't even remember grabbing it again.
"O… okay." she hissed, at last, uncertain if she agreed because it would help the others, or because Junko had ordered it.
(Closing Argument)
"Wait, this isn't really a closing argument!" screeched a crazy woman's voice. "We're still in the middle of the trial!"
"Be quiet, peasant!" Junko trilled in her bad British accent, hands on waist, and she pulled a crown from thin air. Somehow, she rolled several Rs, even though the sentence had none.
"It went something like this," Mukuro said, and breathed out.
"Jin Kirigiri and the 78th class spent two years together, sequestered in the school, while the rest of the world burned. Two of us, though, were not just involved in destroying the world, but actively plotting against the other survivors."
"Those two… were my sister and myself."
"We erased everyone's memories to make them think they were just ordinary high schoolers again, then convinced them that they had to kill each other to escape. Our goal was to show the rest of the world, on live TV, the last symbols of hope butchering each other, and drive everyone into even further despair."
"My sister would be the mastermind, and run the game from within the Monokuma control room. My job was to pretend to be her, since the outside world knew Junko Enoshima, but not Mukuro Ikusaba. But I also had another job: attack a Monokuma, fall into a pit trap, and pretend to die. Then, I could help her behind the scenes, and maybe dramatically reveal myself later on. Neither of us would be in serious danger, and we could kill any of you at a whim."
"But we overlooked something, or maybe didn't overlook it, and let it happen anyway: Makoto's luck. He won a literal one-in-a-billion shot on the Monomono Machine, and was rewarded with an item that restored his memories. With those back, he was able to save my life when my sister tried to betray and murder me to scare the rest of you. Although… I'm sure part of her motive was to teach me a lesson, and make my last moments as despairful as possible, with the knowledge that I was dying for nothing."
"Kyoko convinced me to join the rest of you, but in the end, my sister just recaptured all of us, erased our memories again, then threw us into another killing game – except that this time, I was part of the game for real, minus all of my memories, completely. She must have thought it was hilarious to throw me into the game with nothing."
"Or at least, that's what I thought. Because she made one other important change to the game the second time around. For reasons she hasn't explained yet, she decided to join the game herself, by switching places with someone else."
"She poisoned Celeste and placed her in the Monokuma control room. I can't prove this, but I'm sure she also gave her a script to follow, and went to her occasionally to direct her on what to do."
"Don't blame Celeste for helping the mastermind, though… It's not her fault. My sister poisoned her, then blackmailed her with the antidote to keep her alive for a few more days at a time. Celeste must have been panicking the entire time."
"She wasn't an arbitrary choice, was she? You'd have to switch places with another girl… Sakura is too large to switch places with, Hina and Kyoko would refuse to harm anyone else, no matter what you threatened them with… Toko would refuse to endanger Byakuya, and Jack is too crazy to rely on… Sayaka might have worked, but Makoto saw through my disguise because he'd seen a magazine cover with the Ultimate Fashionista on it once. How quickly would he have seen through someone pretending to be another student he'd known for years in middle school?"
"She must have been so excited when he dropped that book in the trash disposal room, and it got Chihiro killed. She'd spent two years planning for all of this, getting to know all of us in the smallest detail, and knowing how hard it would be to get someone to take the first blood. She must have been thrilled beyond words."
"Celeste didn't know that she'd had her memories erased, either. She probably just thought we were all strangers. When Toko revealed that she'd scarred up her leg with a message during the first game, Celeste was the only person who wasn't there. All of us went around the school, trying to hide information from Monokuma, not realizing that the person behind him was ultimately on our side… And that our 'Celeste' was the one we shouldn't have trusted."
"Thinking on it more clearly… My sister, still as 'Celeste,' became an unwitting pawn when she removed her fake pigtails so Toko would mistake her for me. That was part of Hifumi's plan, but it's so obvious in retrospect who really came up with the idea. She must've beat him over the head with it for ages to make him figure out what to do – he'd would never come up with any kind of clever plan on his own."
"And then afterward, when Hifumi screwed up, and got knocked out after Sakura punched him… He never figured out who finished fixing up the crime scene while he was unconscious, but I guess we all know now."
"I bet it came as a surprise to the real Celeste when Hiro started shouting in the second trial to Monokuma about our erased memories, and how we were all friends. I remember now that Monokuma hesitated for a moment, and only after a few seconds, declared there'd be another trial after I killed Hifumi. And Monokuma told us that Junko wasn't controlling him… We all thought he was just messenger with us, but was she trying to send us a message that we just didn't understand? She must have been debating about whether or not to betray my sister right then and there."
"Was that when my sister decided to kill Celeste? Because she knew too much? Or was it always part of her plan, all along?"
"Right after the Hifumi trial is when Monokuma started acting erratically. With Taka's lines around the doors and gates, 'Celeste's' actions became restricted, which made it harder to plan Monokuma's actions out ahead of time. So, she switched to driving Sayaka insane and full of despair. I can't imagine what she said to her, but we all saw the results. Another life ruined and ended, to keep the game going."
"At the same time, and again for reasons she hasn't yet explained, my sister decided to pretend to be me, and convince me that I was her… She spent a lot of time and resources on that, and it couldn't have been just to mess with me, but I also don't see what she got out of it."
"I suppose things started going off-script once we started suspecting Celeste was a spy in the Sayaka trial. Through clever wording with Monokuma, we were convinced that someone was still behind the scenes, controlling him. None of us realized the true significance of what we'd uncovered when we figured out that she was working against us."
"I wonder if Sayaka realized who Celeste really was? But before she kidnapped most of us and enacted her murder scheme, which was obviously all really my sister's idea, Monokuma had already been programmed to let the real Celeste die in the control room, and transport her corpse to the garden for the grand finale of a plan that would ultimately implicate Hina. Chosen, I'm sure, because I'm close to her, and seeing her executed would hurt me."
"And the person who did all of this…"
"The only person in the entire world who come up with such a horrific plan…"
"The only person in the universe who would destroy the world, kill their friends, and betray and murder their own sister…"
"Is Junko Enoshima."
"It has to be you!"
(Break)
Hot sweat dribbled down the sides of Mukuro's blazing-red face. She thought that she ought to have felt anger or hate, but despite it all, she knew only love and despair.
Yet in the process of laying out all her sister had done, it was impossible not to hate her. How cruel she was, how pointlessly evil. Mukuro had known it all along, but to hear herself say the words, to think of them and then explain them, to remember in exacting detail how Makoto had pushed out of the way of the spears, how she'd done everything to save him, only to fail in the end…
She loved Junko, still, but a tiny voice within her whispered five inconceivable words:
I want to kill Junko.
"Very good, Mukuro, very good." Junko said, and her hair pulled into a ponytail, her eyes dipped behind a pair of thin glasses, and a clipboard appeared in her hand, as if by magic. Her voice was perfectly even. By her eyes, it was obvious that Junko sensed the turmoil within her sister, and it seemed to please her.
The others exchanged worried glances at the suddenness of the mastermind's transformation, and at their own lack of context for her shifting faces and personality.
"She gets bored too easily," Mukuro said, and she didn't take her eyes off of the other Ultimate Despair. "So, she flips between personalities on a whim."
"Yes, yes, very impressive, Miss Ikusaba, very impressive," Junko agreed, and she pushed up the glasses of her teacher persona. "However, in the interest of full transparency, I should probably clear up a few details that appear to either confuse or mislead you."
"You were correct to surmise that I furnished Miss Ludenberg with a script which she should follow, as well as specific instructions as to where she might make deviations. It is also true that she followed it reasonably well until Mister Hagakure unknowingly informed her that–"
"Pineapples!" Monokuma bellowed.
"–that you were all friends, during the trial for Mister Yamada. Likewise, you were correct that I threatened her with poison, and promised to cure her if the game went as planned."
"Would you really?" Hina asked. "Cure her, I mean."
"Of course not!" Junko squeaked, and her eyes were wide and innocent, and her hands pushed in front of her lips. "If I was going to kill my own sister when she obeyed my instructions, do you really think I would hesitate to kill some wannabe vampire slut?"
"Y… you despicable monster!" Taka sputtered. "I can't… I can't believe anyone could be as bad as you!"
"Oh, please!" Junko laughed, still maintaining the innocent persona. "You're friends with Mukuro! She's killed literally hundreds of people with her own hands!"
"Yeah, but– I– well, she stopped doing that!"
"Only 'cause she had no other choice except to get killed by me!" Junko laughed again. "Teehee! Meanwhile, I've never actually killed anyone at all! And if you were going to say that I told others to do it, that still doesn't make me the killer – all I ever gave anyone was the chance! They always did it of their owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwn acccccoooooooooooord!"
"Y… you can't… That…"
For the first time perhaps ever, Taka's eyes twitched and narrowed into slits. It was obvious that he had never argued with anyone like Junko before.
Not many people had.
"Didn't you kill Jin Kirigiri?" Kyoko asked, cutting through the chaos.
Junko froze for a moment. Just as quickly, she rose up, hands on her hips, and flipped her hair. A crown appeared behind one of her pigtails.
"That is correct, peasant!" she trilled, conjuring back up the Queen's English. "In truth, we forgot about that! We must woefully retract our earlier statement to Taka, but allow us to offer two defences: first, that it changes naught, and second, that you cannot rightly blame us for letting slip our mind such an insignificant event about such an insignificant man!"
The insult to the former headmaster meant little to the others, but Mukuro saw Kyoko's lips twitch ever-so-slightly. She knew that Junko saw it, too.
"Don't forget about the real Celeste." Byakuya added.
"Oh, come now!" Junko shook her head. "We practically did you a favor! Aside perhaps from Sayaka, she was the most aggressively boring one of the plebians you call friends! Our version of her was more fun and interesting than the real thing! And we can see from the twisting of our sister's lips that she agrees!"
Something inside of Mukuro was steaming hot. There was a spark of anger inside her, after all. She had never liked Celeste, of course, and now she would never have the chance to see her again.
But she still didn't deserve that fate.
"Regardless, we must ruefully admit one thing: that we despise the way we killed her."
"Why's that?" Leon asked.
"Taeko Yasuhiro wished from childhood to experience everything in the most elegant way possible – failing escape, she would have preferred a romantic, theatrical death. Our sister will corroborate this: the execution we had planned for her was to burn her alive like a French queen! … and then for a random, useless car accident to take her life in the most undignified way imaginable."
"You…"
"In the end, Taeko really was used as part of an elaborate murder scheme, and her death really was dramatic and interesting. We are still quite perturbed by our failure in this way, but as the French would say… c'est la vie!"
"How could you…" Hina started, but her voice warbled and collapsed, unable to really fathom what she was hearing.
Junko threw up two of her hands, and her voice grew deep and rough. She was in her rocker persona now, and her tongue hung almost as far out as Jack's.
"Now, with all that boring shit out of the way, I'll admit somethin' else, too: Mukuro was right about something else. I really was excited when Makoto killed Chihiro."
"No one thinks that counts as a murder," Byakuya interjected. "Not even you."
"Haha! Everyone knew the rules, bro! The fact that things didn't go the way he planned doesn't mean he's not responsible!"
"The way he planned?!" Hina repeated, nearly as baffled as she was furious. "All he 'planned' to do was empty a trash can into a garbage disposal!"
"So what?!" Junko shrugged, cruelly. "I don't see what that changes! Hifumi didn't plan to kill Sakura with that spear – he wanted to kill her with the dumbbell. But the fact that his scheme went off the rails doesn't change who's responsible for what!" Still in her rocker persona, she waved her tongue at Hina and shook her head. "But enough about that boring philosophy shit – since you weren't sure about if Sayaka knew who I was or not, I'll just tell you that the answer is no. Actually, she was even easier to manipulate than Hifumi! They were both pretty dumb, but by the end, all she wanted was to hurt Mukuro."
"You–" Hina started.
"Wait, there's something about your plan I don't get!" Leon said. "I mean, I understand most of it… But we know that 'Celeste' was the one who knocked over the book that let Kyoko know how to cure the poison, right? And that 'she' got poisoned… But you couldn't possibly know for sure that she would remember something that she just glanced at, right? Even if you knew her really well!"
"That's a good point!" Taka agreed. "You'd have an extremely high chance of getting yourself killed halfway through your own killing game and ruining everything!"
The others looked back to Junko, expecting an explanation. But all they got was a face full of ecstasy, and a mouthwatering with anticipation of a pointlessly despairful death that she'd narrowly avoided.
It took several moments for them to understand.
"That's something you should probably understand about me," she whispered, already deep inside her new persona, and her cheeks reddened at the thought. "I never plan out every detail, I'm more of a big picture kind of girl."
"Wh–what?!" Leon stammered. "You put in a billion little details to convince us that Mukuro was you!"
"Yeah, I did…" she sighed, looking into the distance. She was back into despair mode, and paid only the vaguest attention again to the goings-on around her. "By the way, you guys missed a bunch of evidence that I was Celeste. When Mukuro was in the nurse's office, I switched our bodies to–"
"No one cares!" Hina shouted, furious.
Mukuro's throat tightened. By all rights, she should have felt exactly the same thing as Hina, but…
Those feelings for Junko just wouldn't get out of the way. As long as her sister stayed foremost in her thoughts, anything else would forever be secondary.
"You peasant!" Queen Junko replied, mocking outrage. "You have no idea how difficult it was to enact that scheme! Don't even get us started on how we spent two years getting fourteen photographs of the entire class with all of their faces visible except for ourself and one other person per picture as part of an elaborate plan to convince any survivor of the first five trials that the others were secretly working against them!"
"First five trials?" Kyoko blinked.
"Guacamole!" Monokuma confirmed.
"We were planning on a six trial extravaganza, of course!" Junko laughed. "Ideally, with somewhere between five and six survivors up to that point! Nine survivors is far too many! Toko or Hiro should have at least had the decency to die along the way."
"Hey, I didn't do anything!" the latter balked, falling backward.
"We know! That's exactly the problem! We are fairly certain that even if the first killing game had gone as planned, you would have spent the whole time bumbling through, doing nothing at all."
"Eh!" Jack shrugged. "I'm sure he'd have gotten roped into a murder scheme as a patsy at some point in the midgame."
"Ah, well." Junko raised a hand and readjusted her crown. "There's still time for another trial, if we're lucky. You peasants are–"
"There's not going to be another trial, Junko." Mukuro said. She'd tried to sound sincere, but compared to the pure confidence that radiated from her sister, she knew it was almost a joke.
"Oh?" Junko glanced over to her, smiling in a different way than normal. She seemed almost intrigued. "Does our sister have something to say about our plan?"
"… Your plan's bullshit, Junko," she forced herself to say. "You should… consider a job in improv, because your screenplay is going off-script."
Junko froze for a moment. A second later, the crown was gone, and she stared ahead, emotionlessly. Her eyes barely met Mukuro's.
"I bet you thought that was really clever, Big Sis." she said, flatly. "But it was just kind of lame. By the way, does anyone want to know how I rigged the trial grounds so that if Sayaka died, her facestand would appear on her podium, and vice-verse for Mukuro?"
"No one cares about that!" Hina raged.
"Did you really think we had an equal chance of voting for either Sayaka or Mukuro?" Byakuya asked, genuinely. "That it was just a coin flip?"
"Who said anything about coin flips?" Junko said into the distance. "I did the math to calculate what chance each of you had of voting for either of them."
"… and?" Taka asked, almost frightened.
"In the case of Mukuro's death, I estimated a 98% chance of the group voting for Sayaka as the murderer," explained Ms. Junko, her glasses shining under the ceiling lights far above. "But the case of Sayaka dying was more complicated. Ultimately, I settled on a 35% chance of Mukuro being declared guilty."
"Thirty-five?!" Hina gasped. "But that means there was a billion-percent chance we wouldn't vote for her!"
Junko paused for a moment, clearly torn between insulting Hina's math and continuing with the important matters. The latter impulse won out, but Mukuro could tell that it wasn't by much.
"Yes," she said at last. "It was desirable for Mukuro to survive, though I was prepared for the possibility of her death at Sayaka's hands. I knew that Aoi and Kyoko could not be persuaded to vote against her, no matter what evidence was presented, and that Mukuro's martyr complex was guaranteed to make her vote for herself–"
"You engineered that," Kyoko interrupted. "You wanted her to vote for herself and hope for death, only to deny it when the rest of us voted to save her."
Junko seemed to grow bored for a moment, and took on another persona. She turned away, played with another strand of her hair, and seemed almost not to pay attention. Mukuro knew instantly that this wasn't Despair Junko, or any of the others that she was used to. It took her a moment to realize that Junko had, for whatever reason, readopted Celeste's personality.
"Ah yes," mused the (not)-gothic girl, and borrowed her victim's lilting accent. "That is correct, of course… I am pleased to see at least one of you was paying attention…"
"Stop doing that accent," Byakuya said. "We know the truth, now."
"Some of you were easier to predict than others, of course," she went on, still pretending to be French. "Leon and I would always vote to kill her, no matter what. That left Byakuya, Hiro, and Jack as the wildcards, who had a 60%, 10%, and 50% chance, respectively, of voting for her as the killer. But… an event transpired that I failed to anticipate."
"What was that?" Byakuya asked.
"It was the stupid one!" Rocker Junko shouted, and threw up her fingers in the demonic gesture.
"I knew it!" Jack nodded. "Leon!"
"You already made that joke!" he groaned.
"Kyahaha!"
"But more importantly, the stupid one and Mukuro!" Junko explained.
"I'm almost surprised you passed up a chance to say 'Mukuro and the other stupid one,'" said Byakuya.
"Oh, no," said Innocent Junko. "I don't know if you've noticed yet, but I haven't insulted Mukily-Dookily even once during the whooooooooole trial!"
I did.
"See, up until the trial over Sayaka's death, I wasn't sure if my plan was working or not… That was the moment when I realized I wasn't just wasting my time!"
"Your plan?" Taka blinked. "What exactly was it?"
"Just hold on a moment!" Junko shook her head. "You're jumping ahead! What matters right now is when Mukuro suggested that you do the opposite of what Hiro's fortune-telling said! For once, I didn't expect that! I really did think that she was too stupid to figure out a way to convince you to vote against her, I really did think you'd vote for Sayaka as the killer, and I really did think that you'd all dismiss Hiro's talent as worthless!"
"That was what surprised you?" Byakuya asked, exasperated.
"You don't know Mukuro like I do," Junko said, and her eyes never left her sister even as she transitioned into her Despair persona and her voice grew dark and morose. "If you had a dollar for every smart thing she she'd ever said up to that point, you'd have zero dollars!"
"How could you say something like that about–" Hina started.
"She's right," Mukuro admitted. "Even… even when I betrayed Junko after she tried to kill me, it was… hard."
Hina, and some of the others, looked to her with sympathy, but even in her Despairful persona, Junko still managed to smile.
"If you had just not come up with the idea to ask Hiro for a fortune, and let everyone vote for you as innocent, we could've still had the amnesiac version of you… That weak, pathetic disappointment." Junko's eyes rolled up to the ceiling, and then back to her sister. "I was born full of despair. I breathed despair every moment of my life. Every thought I've ever had was of despair. I never had a chance to be anything else except exactly what I am right now. But when you finally did something I didn't see coming, Mukuro… I almost felt my heart beat."
Mukuro could think of nothing to say. She stayed silent even as Despair Junko gave way to the serious Junko, the one who raised one hand to cover an eye and kept the other straight on Mukuro.
"I was worried that it was just a fluke," she whispered across the room, without a trace of emotion. "Just a happy accident of fate, or something that involved Hiro's skills in a way I didn't expect, or something Kyoko or Byakuya gave you the idea for, and not really you. I was worried about it this entire trial, until you finally proved who Celeste really was. That was when… I realized you weren't Mukuro anymore."
"Who was she?" Kyoko asked.
"Someone more interesting," she said, just as devoid of feeling. "Someone worth paying attention to, at least. But when she was summarizing the case for us, I had one problem with what she said."
"It was all true," Kyoko said.
"No," Junko replied, though not to the detective. "And if she thinks that, then she's lying to herself again."
"And the person who did all of this…"
"The only person in the entire world who come up with such a horrific plan…"
"The only person in the universe who would destroy the world, kill their friends, and betray and murder their own sister…"
"Is Junko Enoshima."
"It has to be you!"
"What was wrong with that?!" Hina shouted, angrily. "It's all true!"
"Is it?" Junko asked, her voice perfectly even. "What do you think, Mukuro?"
Mukuro said nothing.
"Say it," Junko whispered, again. "I'll even believe you."
Shaking, Mukuro looked away. She had sworn to never again look away from the truth, however painful, but still, her every instinct screamed not to voice it.
"You're right," she squeaked. "There were two people like that. And one was me."
"I bet you thought something like 'I want to kill Junko' after laying out my whole plan, and just don't have the balls to do it. Isn't that right?"
Mukuro nodded her head, but she could no longer speak.
"For twins, we were so unalike," Junko said, not offended. "One of us was smart and beautiful, and the other was stupid and flat and only good for killing. For all you did to fight me, you only became more and more like me…"
Junko threw her head back, galvanized and excited, and returned to her Queen form.
"And this pleases us tremendously!" she trilled.
"Wait a second," Byakuya demanded. "You still haven't explained what your plan with Mukuro is. It seems almost unrelated to the plan to throw the world into despair."
"Oh, we will freely admit that our original plan is in shambles," She nodded, and placed her hands upon her hips. "We veered rather off-track. Originally, it was supposed to be about spreading despair all over the world by spreading it equally around the last remnants of hope. One-by-one, each of you would turn into desperados."
"I object!" Taka complained. "That word does not mean what its etymology implies!"
"Oh, who cares? As it happened, you would take the rest of the world with you."
"Off-track…" Kyoko repeated. "You mean, you got sidetracked into focusing on Mukuro."
"Can you blame me?" asked Orgasmic Junko, drooling as her eyes drank in her sister. "She's just so torturable! I could've spent the rest of my life messing with her, if I'd had the time."
"Well, you failed!" Hina yelled. "'cause Mukuro is ours! I don't even care about what your stupid plan was supposed to do, or how it was supposed to work, because she's our friend, and not your toy any longer!"
"Heh."
Junko chuckled a few more times, each one louder than the last, until she actually snorted.
"What makes you think she can't be both?"
"You can't…"
"I know what you're thinking," Junko said. "'What now,' right? Where do we go from here, now that the killing game's over?" She raised a Monokuma to cover her face and chest, and her voice grew high-pitched and mocking. "I think you all forgot about something!"
"What's that supposed to mean?" Hiro asked.
"What do you actually do once the game's over? You were so focused on how to stop me, but what do you do after the world's destroyed?"
"I…" Byakuya started, but even he seemed reluctant to go on.
"You only really have two options, you know," said Junko-kuma. "You can either leave or stay. That's it!"
"You can't…" Taka tried, but his voice died in his throat.
"Leave, and you enter a destroyed world. It's nothing at all like you remember. The sky is darkened, the air is poison, food is just a barely-remembered dream… you'll probably die within a day just from that, but if you somehow overcome it, then there are the survivors. They'll know you're leaving, and how valuable you are… and my other followers? You'll be dead within a week, especially if you try to lug around a useless blind girl with you!"
"…" Kyoko stared on, not disputing a word she said.
"On the other hand, you can stay, if you want. It's impossible for anyone on the outside to ever reach us. You'll be safe, and warm, and fed. You could even start families, if you wanted!"
"But we…" Hina's face screwed up.
"Upfufufu! And don't forget – this is exactly what Mr. Kirigiri wanted for you, the fine little students he had to protect, and what you wanted, too, before I removed your memories!"
"Why are you telling us this?!" Hiro moaned.
"Because you've got to make a choice! And which one you want changes everything! Leave, or stay!"
"And you'll respect that choice, for all of us?" Kyoko asked.
"I don't recall saying that!" She grabbed the robot's head from the top, and roughly shook it from side-to-side. "I'll let most of you go, or stay, as you wish, but there's one I want to keep! And if you refuse… upfufufufu!"
(Present Your Argument)
"You're all worthless to me now!" shrilled Monojunko. "I hate to admit it, but you're right that the killing game is over."
"…" Taka said nothing.
"I'll never get anyone else to kill," Rocker Junko growled. "Not now that Makoto, Hifumi, and Sayaka're dead!"
"…" Hiro said nothing.
"Ah well!" Celeste-Junko cooed. "Those three did still prove that anyone can become a murderer… That there isn't much left in the world to turn to, save despair."
"…" Jack said nothing.
"So, perhaps you wish to leave?" asked Teacher Junko. "Or perhaps you would prefer to stay? Either can be arranged."
"…" Leon said nothing.
"You're all friends forever, and you can all go out together, or stay here!" Innocent Junko squeaked, as sweet as ever. "… But I'll do the opposite, and I wanna take my dear Big Sis with me!"
"…" Byakuya said nothing.
"Isn't that the best option possible?" Despair Junko asked, voice warbling, looking at her feet and the floor. "That way, everyone gets to live, and you all proved that you couldn't be turned into murderers. Oh, and obviously if you want to stay, I'll rewire the air purifier to not require my presence anymore."
"…" Kyoko said nothing.
"Like Mukuro said, the rules don't really matter," Bored Junko yawned, paying only the vaguest attention. "I'll just change them right now. If any of you vote to give Mukuro to me, then you can all walk out of here, or have the school to yourselves, together… But if all of you vote against that, then I guess we'll have to keep talking, and who can predict how things will go?"
"…" Hina said nothing.
"So, we demand a reply!" trilled Queen Junko. "Do you still desire the exit, or security, that you have every right to, and that you need sacrifice nothing for, except one mass murderer who's worthless to you in every way?"
"…" Mukuro said nothing.
"Or do you want to risk everything, for nothing?" Orgasmic Junko squealed, drooling, almost beside herself. "Do you want to risk things moving forward, when the only possible other future left is despair?"
(You're all friends forever One mass murderer who's worthless to you in every way)
(Break)
"Shut up, you liar!"
Hina stood there, huffing for breath for what seemed like minutes. She had never looked angrier; she had never looked like she even could be this angry. Endless beads of sweat rolled down her tense muscles, and she stared Junko down, barely able to contain her rage.
"No one's gonna abandon Mukuro," she said. "You can offer us anything you want, but no one's gonna do it."
Junko paused mid-switch, caught halfway between Boredom and Despair. Her eyes scanned across the room, first to Hina and Kyoko, and then to the others. She had hoped, obviously, that one of the more mercenary students would be persuaded – Jack, or Leon, or Byakuya. But even they said nothing, though they must have been thinking it, and their silence meant accord.
They wouldn't leave Mukuro behind, and that was more painful than everything else combined. The former Ultimate Soldier's chest had never felt so warm, her heart had never felt so weak.
That unfamiliar feeling rose up in her body, a feeling that choked her even as it summoned tears to blur the world before her, and even as her legs gave out from under her. It stole away whatever strength she had left, and it would have left her a husk, if it had left her at all. It clung to her and filled her until there was nothing left.
She knew what it was, now. What it did to her, how it plunged knives into her heart and cruelly made her regret everything, how it was the inverse of all that she had ever felt before, of all that she had ever been. She knew its name.
It was hope, and she hated it.
Her breath caught in her throat, and she smashed her fist into the surface of her podium. She was crying, and whimpering, and wished for nothing so much as the others to vote to leave her. She would have voted for that, if she could.
"You're not taking the easy way out," Kyoko said, somehow aware of what she felt. Sympathy, and maybe even love, overflowed from her voice. "We won't let you."
Mukuro shook, unable to face the others, for many seconds. Because no matter what they thought, no matter what she herself felt, no matter how much she raged against and cursed Junko…
I can't turn against her, in the end…
At last she looked up. Across the circle, she saw Junko facing her, face bored and expressionless. Annoyed, perhaps.
"I see," she said, emotionlessly. "Most of you don't realize how much of an insult this is, but right now, you're all even more of a disappointment than my sister."
"Why?" Byakuya asked, smugly, and lied: "It's not as if I care about Mukuro… We're all just sick of your nonsense."
"Oh, Byakuya," she replied, and did not change her personality. "I expected better from you. How can you risk everything for her, for nothing? You don't owe her anything. You'll never owe her anything. I recall you earlier, saying that you'd happily kill someone to escape. I could understand changing your mind if she was your friend… but she spent two years carefully planning to betray you."
His response was as simple as it was stern:
"Enough. You're not changing our minds."
"Yeah," she said. "I know."
She tapped a finger on the surface of her podium, and a lever grew out of its center. It was similar to the ones used to vote at the ends of trials, but this one was smaller and darker. She pulled it down and back, and an ominous rumbling overtook the whole room.
A second later, the floor underneath most of the students opened up, and metal shackles the size of adult men launched up. They grabbed each person by the chest and knees and elbows and pinned them to the podiums, unable to move, barely able to struggle. Only two were left unchained: the Sister of Despair
"No!" Mukuro rasped, but Junko just shook her head.
"Oh, don't worry, Big Sis, they're fine."
A second more passed, and a set of matching, smaller shackles jumped out of the podiums and around their mouths. The seven other students could shake their heads and hands and scream into the gags – but that was about it. Their eyes met Mukuro's, and most were full of fear.
"Why?" she asked.
"Obviously, they were getting in the way," came the bored, honest reply. "We were past the point where any of them had anything useful to say. Besides, they all volunteered for this."
"Volunteered?!"
"Of course they did. They wanted to risk their lives for you, Mukuro. So, they will."
"No!" Mukuro thrust out a single panicky hand. She still felt so much unwanted hope; it was so fragile and painful and cruel, lapping at her edges. It screamed at her that they would all escape together, that they would all be together forever…
And then there was Junko and that lever, which surely could kill them all at a whim.
"Don't!" she said, barely able to stay at all calm. "D–don't hurt them."
"Why not?" Junko asked, and humor returned to her face. She was smiling now, mischievously. "Why shouldn't I?"
"Because they didn't kill anyone."
"We're already past that, Mukuro." Junko tapped two fingers on the edge of the lever, bored again. "You were so proud to tell everyone that the rules for the game are pointless. You can't tell me now that I need to obey them."
"Then don't kill them because… because…"
"In fact!" The innocent, childlike Junko squeaked. "Now that I think about it, killing them all right now would be preeeeeeeeeeeeeetty despairful for everyone watching! All that effort you all put into surviving, all those emotional connections I'm sure people watching at home have made, swept away at the last moment for nooooooooo reeeeeeeeason at all!"
"What do you want?!" Mukuro screeched, but she already knew the answer:
Despair.
And one look into her sister's eyes told her that Junko knew she knew, too.
"Don't worry," said the Ultimate Despair, one hand held over her face, and her eyes deadly serious. "It would be pretty funny if I killed them, but I won't."
"You promise?"
"I don't have the power to kill them. The only person who does it you, Mukuro."
"M—me?"
"If you tell me to release them, then I will. But if you don't, then I won't."
"Then—release them!"
"No!" trilled the queen. "We will not!"
"But you just said—"
"Your command to release them doesn't count unless you understand!" She raised a hand to her lips, and ho-ho-hoed for a few seconds. "And we know that you do not yet understand what has happened, or what continues to happen! Your 'friends,'" She sneered as she said the word. "Wished to mindlessly support you, and so I shall offer them the opportunity! They may support you all they wish, but they'll have to see for themselves whether or not you are actually worthy of it!"
"Worthy of it?" Mukuro echoed. "What does that mean?"
"It means that you are behaving like a peasant! We… are not amused!" Junko shook her head for a moment, then locked eyes with her. "For the briefest modicum of a second, there was something to you… Something beyond what there was before. Something that grew up during this last killing game, we should think. Something we wish to observe more of."
Mukuro shook for a long while. Warm sweat dripped endlessly off her brow and her nose, and dripped off onto the floor.
"You mean… when I figured out you were Celeste? Or when I proved it?"
"No, you fuckin' dumbass moron!" Rocker Junko growled. "That was just part of it! The lead-up! The warm-up act! The shitty amateur band they play before the main event!"
Mukuro thought for a moment. The answer was obvious.
"When I contradicted you?" she asked, already certain.
"That's correct," replied Teacher Junko. "More precisely, when you contradicted me, and could back it up with facts. But do you understand why?"
"No!" Mukuro shook her head. "I understand what you're doing, and how… but I don't understand why at all. I know you tried to convince me that I was you, but I still don't know why you did it, or what you wanted to get out of it."
Junko hesitated. Time passed, and then she smiled very toothily. Her eyes shut tight, she tilted her head to the side, and she raised two fingers to form a victory sign. Even Mukuro needed a moment to understand who this was supposed to be:
Her imitation of my imitation of her.
"It's, like, whatever, that you don't understand," said the doubly-false Junko. "But I guess I should probably explain?"
"Why are you…"
"What's wrong?" asked the false-Mukuro, and her eyes narrowed in a skeptical way the real Junko's never did. "Don't you like this?"
"You know I don't."
"Why?"
"Because I hate that girl!" Mukuro screamed until her throat was sore.
For a long while, nothing happened. Blood rushed through her vein, and made them painful and sore, and she could barely see for her anger and rage. All that existed was that face – and it wasn't her sister's, it was her own.
A pair of big, beautiful blue eyes slinked toward Mukuro. When Junko spoke, she was almost smiling genuinely.
"Who do you hate, Mukuro?"
She didn't want to admit it. She didn't want it to be true. But she couldn't deny it, not when asked outright.
"Me." she squeaked. "I hate… myself."
"Why?"
Mukuro rasped hoarsely, and drove her good hand into the podium's edge. Her skin turned red.
"I'm weak," she admitted. "I could kill anyone in the world without even trying… but I'm weak."
"And you don't want to…"
"I don't want to look at myself."
Junko laughed, once.
"What do you want?"
"I want to feel hope!" Mukuro moaned, and she already did. It was poisonous. "I want to feel it without fearing that everything is going to go wrong because of who I am!"
"And who are you?"
Mukuro's head pounded. The world was black. Just admitting it would poison that unwelcome hope even further, but she couldn't deny it, either.
"I'm despair," she whimpered.
She looked up, crying, and found Junko's smiling face across the room. But there was no humor there behind the teeth.
"I see." she said.
Tears welled up in the corners of Mukuro's eyes, and she shut them up tight and turned away in shame. She would have hidden from herself, if she could.
"Well," Junko said, out of sight, but not out of hearing range. Her voice was cool and detached and vacant. "Big Sis, Ultimate Despair. What do you want to do now?"
"Now…?"
"You admitted what you are, but do you know what you actually want?"
"Want…"
The world drew away from Mukuro. She tried to look up at her sister, but there was only a sallow, indescribable blur. It settled after many seconds, and she saw Junko from on high, and herself – that pathetic, mewling little girl with a broken arm, too weak to even surrender. She saw herself shaking, sweating, and crying – but felt none of it, physically. A feeling of a feeling, a memory of a memory. The Mukuro she saw worked on her accord.
All she actually felt was this reckless, churning hope that couldn't be cast off.
"The others know what they want. They want to leave, or to stay, maybe. It doesn't really matter. The point is mainly just that they want you to be with them. But all I know about you is that you want to 'feel hope.' What do you actually want?"
"I…"
"Do you want to stay with me, Mukuro?" Junko asked. "I promise I'll never try to hurt you again."
"Stay…"
"I'll tell you what I want, Mukuro, even though I think you already know. I want you back." She paused, and Mukuro didn't know how much time passed. "You know, when I tried to skewer you with spears, and Makoto saved you, and you tried to leave me… I almost couldn't believe it. I'd run through every possibility of how the game might go in my mind, and even in the ones where you realized I wanted to kill you, you still came crawling to me on your hands and knees, begging for me to take you back."
In the distance, someone screamed into their metal gag. Mukuro didn't know whom.
"It must have been Makoto getting injured that changed things," her sister continued. "If he'd just pushed you out of the way, and avoided the spears himself, I'm sure you would have run off, hidden for a while, and come back on your knees to lick my boots. Then again, you liked that sort of thing, anyway. When you betrayed me, that was the first time that you ever did anything interesting at all… though, I bet you were thinking at the time 'if I betray Junko, that will drive her into further despair, which is what she wants,' am I right?"
She was.
"That was the first time in our lives that I almost wanted to see more of you, just to see what you would do. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but in the end… you didn't disappoint me."
"Wha…"
"I made a mistake, you know. I tried to have two plans at once. The first plan was the killing game. I thought that if I erased everyone's memories and threw you in with the rest of them, we could just have a nice, normal killing game like I'd wanted all along, and you'd get killed at some point along the way. I was rooting for you to kill Sayaka out of jealousy, actually."
That awful, evil hope seethed and frothed within her. Mukuro clutched at her heart and gnashed her teeth. Junko didn't seem to notice.
"The second plan was about you, Big Sis… Do you know what it was?"
Spit leaked out of the corner of Mukuro's lips. She had an inkling.
(Present Your Argument)
"Heehee! Maybe it would be easier if I reminded you about what happened!" Innocent Junko said, supremely excited. "That might help jog your memory. Let's start with how the Monokuma Control Room was on the fourth floor, which meant I couldn't—"
"You wanted to turn me into you." Mukuro sputtered.
Junko hesitated again. Mukuro forced open her eyes, and saw those big blue ones shining with something not entirely unlike love.
She glanced over at Hina and Byakuya, both of whom were staring at her, wide-eyed.
"There's been a big question in my mind since I realized you were Celeste," she said. "Which was… why? You didn't really need another spy, so you could have just hidden in the room and controlled Monokuma from far away. It would have been like you to make me depend on 'Celeste,' only to reveal you were always an enemy, just to hurt me… but you didn't really do that, either. And the audience you're trying to make feel despair wouldn't really care… The whole misdirection seemed pointless."
Junko smiled. Mukuro knew she was giving her sister exactly what she wanted, but there was no stopping now. She felt like she should have been calm, but voicing everything only made that wretched seething in her gut even worse. She didn't know what was coming, but she knew that it was of Junko's design, and that was bad enough.
"Did you get the idea from the costume I wore of you? Turning the literal into the metaphorical?"
Junko tilted her head back and drooled. Orgasmic Junko was back, and she brought with her the certainty that Mukuro had guessed correctly.
"You wanted your sister, Junko," Mukuro said. "But you didn't want… me."
"What's wrong with that?" Junko played with a strand of her hair, and saliva snaked down her arm. "I'm the Ultimate Despair, and you… you were boring. You weren't as smart as me, you weren't as charismatic, you weren't as driven, you weren't as pretty, and your boobs weren't as big. You were just a gnarly pimple on Hope's Peak's ass, one too stale and hidden to be worth popping… but there was one thing you could match me on. One thing that would have made us similar, and would have given you some value beyond the nothing you were born with."
"It was despair!" Innocent Junko trilled. "That empty feeling inside!"
"You always said you feel that way because the world's too boring for someone as smart as you," Mukuro was confused. "But you also said I'm not smart enough to be like you!"
"I didn't mean that way!" Junko shook her head from side to side, and kept right on smiling. "Obviously, I knew you were too stupid to be exactly like me. But wouldn't it be great to take someone capable of feeling positive emotions, and then scrape out everything inside until she's nothing but a husk?"
"RRGghghHHRH!"
Mukuro's eyes flashed over to Hina, who was screaming into her gag. She looked just about ready to explode.
"Imagine," Junko flashed the peace sign, and smiled the wide, toothy grin Mukuro had given when pretending to be her sister. "Imagine if I could turn Mukuro Ikusaba, the most boring and pathetic person in the world, into another Junko Enoshima. Convince her that she was the one-and-only. I was envisioning the sixth trial, you up on my stand, explaining everything, genuinely believing in your heart-of-hearts that it had all been you planning everything the entire time, and hating yourself for being such an evil bitch!"
"And where would you be?"
"Isn't it obvious?" Mukuro-Junko lowered her hand to her side, and locked her blue eyes directly into the real Mukuro's gray. "Can't you tell?"
Mukuro's brow furrowed. There wasn't any evidence to suggest it, but…
She gasped.
"You weren't…"
"Correct!" trilled Queen Junko, laughing insanely. "You understand now, don't you?"
Mukuro's jaw still hadn't closed. It was almost too crazy an idea, even for her sister.
Almost.
"You were going to trick me into killing you, the way you tried to kill me… knowing that I would eventually realize the truth during the trial? And that way… you'd get your perfect killing game to destroy the world, and I'd be plunged into even more despair than you?"
Junko nodded.
"We are impressed!" she admitted. "Even now, we still had our doubts about you, Mukuro! But we must concede – there was more to you than we gave credit for, after all."
Junko's face changed all at once, and she stared at the floor, listless, despairful, and bored.
"You were always boring, always stupid… Deep inside, you wondered if you could've lived a normal life, found a normal boyfriend, but you weren't even interesting enough to do it on your own. How weak-willed do you need to be to not at least try?"
"If I had…" Mukuro whispered, voice warbling with undue hope. "If I had tried to get that normal life, would you—"
"I'd've have ruined it, duh." Junko shrugged, still not facing her sister. "You're not allowed to leave me. Man, it's a good thing Makoto saved you from those spears. Guess I'm the lucky one, in the end."
Mukuro was shaking. Her hand moved from her chest, and to the podium, and she realized she was squeezing its corner. The wood cracked under the pressure, and splinters dug into her palm. It was all she could do not to break the thing in half and scream.
That awful, evil hope inside me… just make it go away!
"You look upset right now," Junko said, languidly. "Is it about the dark bags under your eyes? Don't worry; they match your hair."
Mukuro's knees buckled. She didn't care anymore, couldn't care, about pride. She just lay there, clutching the podium for support, all her strength instantly gone, and sobbed until her face felt like it was in a puddle.
"Oh, gross." Junko shook her head, and her Rocker persona took over. "Man, this is exactly what I was talking about! This is even worse than you used to be! At least the original Mukuro was useful!"
Mukuro pressed her face into the wood, forcing her eyes shut as tightly as they would go.
"Why?!" she wailed. "Why… where did it go off-track!"
"I should think that's very obvious, Mukuro," answered Teacher Junko, in her dulcet, tranquil tone. "I already discussed this with Kyoko: I couldn't run the killing game properly and mindfuck you at the same time. This is why I required Celeste's assistance. In retrospect, I should have jettisoned Kyoko or Aoi earlier on, which would have allowed me to do both, but I'm nothing if not willing to admit my own mistakes."
Mukuro hiccupped. She wanted to cut out this awful hopeful feeling with a knife. If she'd had one, she might have tried. For reasons she couldn't understand, she clutched that stupid kitten hairclip, pressing as hard as she could against her heart.
"No, that wasn't it, really…" Junko sighed. "I could have won anyway, even balancing the killing game and you, even dealing with Celeste learning too much… What threw me off and ruined my plans is even simpler than that…"
"I didn't expect you to get smart." Junko said, her voice perfectly even, staring on ahead. "I knew you had it in yourself to betray me, but I didn't think you were capable of beating me." Emotionlessly, she said: "Turning Hiro's fortune-telling against me was one thing, but actually unraveling my Celeste disguise… You proved to me that you're worthy of being my sister, Mukuro. Not only that, but worthy of being an Ultimate Despair."
Mukuro opened her red, puffy eyes. Her cheeks were on fire, and so was her throat, and she saw her sister standing across the circle, smiling at her – not cruelly, not out of boredom, but with the closest thing to love she was capable of.
"Come with me, Mukuro," she whispered, genuinely. "No one else matters except the two of us. Let's just leave, together, and leave the others here to starve to death, shackled on the trial grounds. And the two of us can be together, forever. You'll be my pet, and I'll never hurt you again… well, except in the ways you like."
Saliva eked out of Mukuro's lips. Her heart pounded.
She wanted this. She had never wanted anything more.
Trembling, she reached out her hand…
But so it was that on either side of her sister was one of her friends.
Hina stood there, chained against the podium, helpless, her eyes watering, and almost as red as Mukuro's, begging her silently to stand up and refuse. To Junko's other side was Hiro, who watched on in horror… and maybe a little confusion. Kyoko and Byakuya were not far, and then Leon, and Taka, all of them telling her with their eyes that she needed to refuse. Even Jack stared at her with contempt for even considering it.
Mukuro's entire body paused. She didn't even breathe.
It was like reality itself had been rent apart.
"… Still unsure?" Junko asked, surprised. "I have to say, I'm a little confused, Big Sis. I know this is everything you ever wanted. My love, my respect, my attention, my promise not to hurt you… If you want, I'll even do that thing where I knock you to the floor and drive my heel into your skin. I know you like it. What else is there in the world you could ever want?"
That churning again, that emotion! Mukuro hissed. She didn't understand it, herself. All she knew was that it felt like something was tearing her chest apart.
"I see." Junko said. "I'm not going to force you, Mukuro, just like I never forced anyone to kill during the game. But you didn't say no, so you must at least be considering it." She thought for a moment. "I'll tell you what. Let's have one last, final, actually-the-end-for-real-this-time class debate. Everyone can put all their cards on the table, and then you can decide for yourself."
She pulled the lever again, and the metal gags, though not the arm and leg restraints, disappeared back into their podiums. Everyone gasped and groaned with their newly-freed mouths.
"Let's get this started," she said.
(Present Your Argument)
"Mukuro," Byakuya groaned, aggravated, and he stared down at the quivering form of the girl still on the floor. "If you even consider this, I'll lose whatever modicum of respect I mistakenly gave you before."
"An interesting point, but only because of who made it." Teacher Junko pushed up her glasses. "Byakuya is someone who repeatedly stated his intent to play in the killing game out of pure amusement and boredom, bragged openly about how he would murder one of his classmates, and didn't do so only because new information came to light… but you already have all the information about the killing game yourself, Mukuro."
"I—!" Byakuya grunted.
"Furthermore, Byakuya has said nothing meaningful. For the sake of argument, let's expand what he said to the idea that you'd hurt your friends by rejoining me, Mukuro. But I know perfectly well that I mean more to you than all of them combined, especially since Makoto is dead, and it will hurt me if you reject me, so I would suggest that his point is useless."
"You can't—"
Junko pushed forward the lever again with her clipboard, and the gag resilenced Byakuya. She looked at the paper clipped to it, and nodded.
"We'll go in a clockwise circle, starting from Byakuya. Next up is Leon."
"Wha—?" Leon's eyes went wide. "Well, I—"
"Actually, wait a moment."
Leon paused, baffled, and then Monokuna spoke up.
"Yes, yes," he announced to his captive, panicking audience, and waved a hand dismissively. "Ms. Asahina was alone there, I'll confirm."
"Okay, now go," she nodded.
"Uh… Mukuro," he said. "If you go with that crazy bitch again, she'll probably just kill you when she gets bored of you!"
"We already went over this, you dumb asshole side character!" Rocker Junko retorted. "Everyone on Earth's watching us right now, and I bet no one's ever said 'my favorite character in this series is Leon Kuwata!'"
"Hey!"
"Mukuro knows that I'll keep my promise here, 'cause she knows how I operate – and the whole killing game would be pointless if I lied. Besides, the whole reason I agreed to never hurt her again is that she got more interesting after Makoto died, so killing her off like a punk would fuck up the entire point! You lose your chance!"
"Rgrh!" was all he got out, as the metal gag closed in on him.
"Hey, Jack!" Junko grunted at her. "You're fucking up!"
"Hm, hm, hmmmmmmm!" Jack licked her lips, salivating. "You know, honestly, I think I like Junko's style! Kyahahahahah!" Her eyes grew ever-so-slightly more serious, and she looked down to Mukuro. "But, oy, Pukuro… I know you're not a killing artiste like me, right? You're not in it for the work itself, just to get done what you wanna get done, right? This Junko bitch, she's fucked up your life for years, and made fun of your superior tiny chest. She even killed your boyfriend! If she'd killed my boyfriend, Master Byakuya, who told me before the trial that we're dating and he's gonna marry me once we're done here—"
"Mmrffrffh!"
"—then I know I'd want some cold, hard revenge. I'd do it by stabbing the shit out of her with some scissors, but you could settle for, I dunno, a gun or something. What I'm saying is… kill Junko 'cause she's such a bitch!"
"Yesssssssssssss, that sounds super-de-duper smart!" Innocent Junko nodded along. "You should listen to Jack, right, Mukuro? After all, in that shell masquerading as a human being, you've gotta have some anger at me, right? I did kill Makoto, or at least I engineered everything in an overall sense. And she's right about another thing: when I tried to kill my sister, it was mostly out of boredom, but if you did it, it would be for righteous revenge and justice! So, if you feel any anger at me at all, you should get up right now and kill me! I promise not to resist!"
Mukuro did not, of course, stir. She just looked up at Jack, silent, weeping. What she felt wasn't anger.
"Whoopsie-doopsie!"
Junko pushed the lever again, and Jack just shook her head as the gag came back, disappointed and annoyed.
"Next up is the loudest person in the school: Kiyotaka Ishimaru!"
"Mukuro, I've had some time to think while the others spoke," he said, hurriedly. "To be brief: no matter what Junko says, she doesn't love you. It isn't that you failed to impress her, I do believe she's being honest about that, but she simply isn't capable of loving you. She is obviously a broken, evil monster who is only capable of understanding the world through pain. Even if she honors her word to you, her every interaction with you will still be calculated purely to make both of you feel anguish!"
"My, my," Despairful Junko whispered, and she stared at the floor. "That was more coherent than I expected from you. It looks like Mukuro wasn't the only person I underestimated, besides Makoto – I didn't think he had the balls to tell Mukuro to condemn him during the first trial. By the way, Byakuya, that's how you form a cogent argument."
"Rgghrh!"
"Where can I start? Probably… by admitting that everything you just said is absolutely true."
"What?!" Taka balked. "You… you can't just admit something like that! It proves I'm right!"
"Of course you're right. I'm history's greatest monster. You literally can't count how many people I've killed, or at least gotten killed. And I do it for no other reason than that it slightly alleviates my boredom. We already established all of that. So, when I take Mukuro with me, wherever it is we go, or stay, of course I'll keep hurting her. And that twisted, fucked-up little girl crying on the floor will enjoy it, partly because that's just who she is, and partly because she knows that I'm the only person in the whole world who's more fucked up than she is." She paused. "Of course, if anything I just said is wrong, then she can speak up right now, and tell me that she doesn't want me to hurt her, or that she wants a good life with her friends, or something else like that."
Mukuro said nothing. She bowed her head and looked to the growing puddle of tears on the floor, and saw only her own wretched reflection.
"Too bad, Taka," Junko said, pushing the lever. "You did very well."
The gag silenced him again.
"Mm, next up is Kyoko Kirigiri. What's everyone's favorite detective have to say?"
A long time passed before the girl with lavender hair replied. Her eyes just stared off into the distance, not settling on Mukuro.
"Mukuro," she said. "We've finished the mystery element of this game, so I'm not much help anymore as a detective. There are no arguments I can make except for this: we want you to stay with us. We want to help rebuild the world, and we want all of us there, safely. No matter how beholden you feel to your sister, you have no actual duty to her. You should cast her off, embrace hope, and join the people who really care about you."
Junko covered her face with one hand, and went back to her disengaged, listless persona. She stared at Kyoko for a while.
"I can't tell whether to be disappointed or impressed," she said, emotionlessly. "That wasn't really an argument, but it was still smarter than anything else anyone has said so far. You must already know the problem with what you just said, Kyoko: Mukuro wants to stay with all of you and be friends in some kind of saccharine rainbow nightmare forever, even without Makoto, but she also wants me. No – she needs me, or at least she thinks so. I've been with her literally since we were born, and the idea of us not being together is like knives in her heart."
Mukuro moaned. It was all true.
"And if she needs to choose between you and me, she's going to choose me. Isn't that right?"
Mukuro cradled the kitten hairclip, and pushed herself into the podium again. She couldn't face Kyoko, even if the other girl couldn't see her.
"I think I'll settle on disappointment," Junko said, and pushed the lever to quiet Kyoko. "Taka's argument was better. Aoi – wait, hold on."
"We're not leaving this trial room!" Monokuma added into the air. "Fine, I'll just confirm that you technically can reach that room by swimming… but that doesn't mean anyone did!"
"Yes, now, Aoi, you're up next."
"Mukuro, Mukuro, listen to me!" cried the Ultimate Swimmer. Her voice cracked at almost every syllable. "You… you're letting your crazy evil sister get to you. You shouldn't listen to her, you should listen to me, right now, and not her."
"We heartily concur!" trilled Queen Junko. "Aoi is looking out for your best interests, whereas we obviously care only about our own!"
"You shut up!" Hina raged. Her voice grew softer a moment later. "Mukuro, Junko…" Her face screwed up for a moment, and she licked her lips and thought as hard as she could. "Junko will be fine without you. You know that, right? You can just leave her at any moment, and she'll be just fine, 'cause she's so smart. Even she knows that, because she thought she'd be fine if she killed you. But the rest of us… we need you. We're all obviously idiots, right?" She smiled, but it was very strained. "So, we need you to guide us. You're part of our group. We've lost too many people already, and everyone owes you everything. Without you, we'd fall apart. So, get rid of your psycho sister, and come with us!"
"Somehow, we think you overstate the degree to which you will 'fall apart,'" Junko chided. "Certainly, you will be sad, but as we recall, you survived Makoto's murder of Chihiro just fine. You will have Byakuya and Kyoko to guide you – the chance of Mukuro's disappearance leading even indirectly to any of you being hurt or your group fragmenting is quite minimal… Unless our dear sister disagrees?"
Mukuro just gasped. Her throat was too tight for her to respond.
"Too bad, so sad!" Junko pushed the lever again, and Hina managed only an "eep!" before being quieted. "Hiro, we believe you shall be the last to offer an argument."
Hiro's face screwed up even worse than Hina's. He looked from side to side, sweating almost as much as Mukuro, like a deer caught in headlights.
"Uh… Mukuro…" He bit his upper lip, empty thoughts drifting through his empty mind. "You should come with us because it's the right thing to do? Like, even though Makoto killed Chihiro, they'd both still want you to!"
Junko stared at him a while, utterly blank-faced. His lips grew very long and flat, and her eyes betrayed the annoyance and disappointment she felt.
"Hiro," she said, quietly. "That's the stupidest argument yet."
She pushed the lever forward, he was gagged, and she looked back to Mukuro.
"So, my other self?" she said, flashing another peace sign and smiling just like Mukuro no longer could. "What's it gonna be? I'm the only person in the universe who understands you. I'm the only person in the universe who will never lie to you. I'm the only person in the universe who can give you everything you want… You know that these people only like you because they won't accept the monster that you are. You've listened to what everyone has to say, and I've told you everything there is to know about the game, and there are no more lies to uncover, so now's the moment of truth to decide your fate."
(Blood on Monokuma's claw - There are no more lies to uncover)
(Break)
Mukuro shook.
That hope.
There was something else there, now.
Doubt?
It had been a thousand years since Mukuro felt anything but doubt and misery. Of any other emotion, she was sure only of one: love for her sister, and that itself, and even its absence, birthed only more doubt about all else. Even certainty brought doubt with it, in other ways. And now she was certain of one more thing: that Junko was hiding something. And Mukuro, though she yet shook with confusion and fear over what was coming, knew that her sister hid this final secret above all the others. And she knew one more thing:
I'm gonna ruin it.
It wasn't strength that filled her, but it was something similar. She clawed her way up to stand, and Junko drew quiet.
They stared each other down for a long while, one in disbelief, and the other in bemused curiosity. Mukuro was shaking, and little driblets of sweat popped off her cheeks and flew in all directions. Her gray eyes twitched incessantly. Junko just waited there, staring back at her coolly. Mukuro needed all the time she could get to build up what courage she could.
At last, when Junko grew bored enough and began to speak, Mukuro raised her fist high up into the air. A familiar presence formed at her back and at her side, warm and impossible to ignore. Doubt was only a half-remembered dream when it was with her. When she moved, she felt its skin against hers; when she cradled the hair clip in two fingers, she felt its hand on hers, and when she brought her hand down to point at her sister, the ghost's voice and her own bellowed as one:
"NO, THAT'S WRONG!"
(List of Truth Bullets)
* DANCING MONOKUMAS: The music room was filled with dancing Monokumas that watched, clapped for, and recorded Mukuro and Sayaka during their fight.
* TAKA'S ACCOUNT: Everyone except Mukuro and Celeste was poisoned by food from the kitchen, to which only Taka, Kyoko, Celeste, and Toko had access.
* DUST DISTURBANCES: The door to the data processing room was opened at some point within an hour before Mukuro destroyed it, and Celeste and Aoi got poisoned. The gate to the fifth floor was opened and closed shortly after they were poisoned, so they could be taken upstairs to heal. The game to the fifth floor opened and closed when Celeste returned to the group, and within the same hour, the Monokuma door also opened. The dust underneath the Monokuma door was disturbed at some point just before, during, or after Sayaka's murder. But, there's a chance Sayaka did this. The fifth floor gate remained closed. Lastly, the Monokuma door was definitely opened at some point during the investigation of Sayaka's death. The fifth-floor gate definitely remained closed.
* KYOKO'S BLINDNESS: Kyoko went blind after regaining her memories when she ate a grape. Mukuro also regained her memories, but didn't go blind.
* POISONED DARTS: Hina and Celeste were poisoned by darts. Kyoko knew in advance how to create an antidote, because she claims she read it in a book knocked over in the library. Celeste recovered before Hina.
* KYOKO'S HANDS: Kyoko's hands have very distinctive burns all over them. It's impossible not to notice, except if she covers them with gloves.
* MYSTERIOUS TAPE ON THE DOOR: A piece of tape placed on the inside of the door for the destroyed classroom where the first killing game occurred. A wire is inside of it that broke when the door opened, which activated a microchip that was also inside of the tape. The room was empty when the door opened, so it's a mystery how it was placed.
* MYSTERIOUS WIRE IN THE BED: A wire and microchip that were in the bed Hina woke up in. The wire crumbled at the touch, and the microchip has a flashing light that seems to mean it was on… whatever it being 'on' actually does. Hina thinks it wasn't there when she woke up.
* BIOLAB LIGHTS: The biolab has drawers to store corpses in. Each one has a green light if it's empty, and a red light if it's full. Currently, there are six red lights, and the bodies inside are definitely Mondo, Chihiro, Makoto, Sakura, Hifumi, and Sayaka.
* JACK AND CELESTE: Jack has watched over Celeste every second of the day since the previous trial, even at night.
* TAKA'S SCHEDULE: Taka checks the line of dust in front of the Monokuma door in the data processing room every thirty minutes, except at night. It hasn't been disturbed since the last trial.
* MONOKUMA FILE #5: The victim was a student at Hope's Peak Academy. They died at some point before their body was found. Their body was found in the dojo.
* KYOKO'S AUTOPSY: In life, the corpse belonged to a girl between 5'5" to 5'8", and weighed 98-104 pounds. Her Fenrir tattoo and chest measurements are an identical match for Mukuro's, and the tattoo is not new. She seemed to have short black hair, but this wasn't confirmed. She was killed by poison between 8 and 10 hours ago, and it was slow and painful. She also has a mark on her right wrist, implying that she was injected with something. Finally, she has rope burns on her wrists and ankles.
* MONOKUMA IN KYOKO'S ROOM: According to Kyoko, Monokuma entered her room at about 3 AM. She listened to him fix the bathroom door lock, then leave into the hallway.
* STUDENT PROFILES: Official profiles for every student of Class 78, including Junko Enoshima, written by Jin Kirigiri before they entered the school, with photographs and body measurements. Monkuma promises that every profile is accurate unless altered by a student. The photo for Mukuro is definitely "the" Mukuro who is with everyone else.
* MAKOTO'S PROFILE: Makoto's official student profile mentions that 'every' female student was interested in him as a partner, to varying degrees, but that he was only interested in Sayaka.
* MYSTERIOUS LIQUID, SYRINGE, AND ROPE: A container of a noxious green liquid taken from the chemistry lab that's been opened before, a syringe, and two lengths of rope, all found in the same cabinet in the Monokuma control room.
* BLOOD ON MONOKUMA'S CLAW: Weeks-old dried blood found on a Monokuma robot's right claw. It stains the sides of the paw, but not the palm or back, and when it was still liquid, dripped down over where fingers would be. There is splatter on the back, but the front is cut off by a hard line.