A/N: Yeah...another angsty one...sorry. The Hinanami here is pretty light tbh, it's more an introspection piece.

She's a mole, a liar, and an AI. Only the last would have mattered before Monokuma came; only the last would have influenced her actions and her relationship with her classmates. Before Monokuma came, she just would have been a video game NPC, guiding them to a brighter future before fading into the background. They would never have known about the Future Foundation or suspected each other.

Now she's a traitor too, no matter what she does. If she sticks with her duty to the Future Foundation, keeps her silence here and now, she betrays her friends. If she speaks up, she betrays her creators.

She knows what her superiors would tell her if they could. Let Class 77 guess Komaeda-kun's killer, probably guess wrong, and die. No one could say the Remnants wouldn't deserve it. One of them must have let the virus in. One of them is the cause of all this. They had their chance at redemption and they'd spurned it. Let them die, and the world will be safe from whatever Monokuma's planning then. The Future Foundation can wipe their hands clean of this whole incident and move on.

But. If she does this…her friends will be left as shells. She doubts they can ever wake up. And sure, she'll still be alive, and the world will be safe, but…

Sonia-san's kindness. Kuzuryu-kun's gruff loyalty. Soda-kun's energy. Owari-san's cheer. Those won't exist anymore.

Hinata-kun won't exist anymore.

She loves them all, but it's Hinata-kun she knows she'd regret losing the most. She can't explain it. She's so new to this, so not good at this dating sim thing. He's just so much more confident than her, and even though he's sarcastic about it, he still cares about their friends a lot, even when he's uncovering them as the killer. He's patient around her, he doesn't mind waiting as she pauses, program cycling through gigabytes of data to load a response. He's always taking time to explain stuff she doesn't understand, and he's cozy to sleep against, and just—he's safe. He's a safe harbor on this island.

Spending time with him, listening to him talk about all the places he was going to take her once they got off this island, had been bittersweet. She knows she never had a future with him, but she really wishes she could have. She tries to stay focused on the present, but she still sometimes wonders whether he feels the same about her, or if he'd felt the same about the girl she'd been based on. If there was ever a chance they could have had something…

It doesn't matter though. What matters is here and now, what she can do.

So Chiaki opens her eyes as her friends prompt her if she has any idea who might have killed Komaeda-kun—and that's just another failure of hers, isn't it, that she couldn't find some way to soothe him about the truth he must have learned, maybe he wouldn't have been driven to this extreme if he had—and smiles. She gently lays out the hints, the clues, and watches Hinata-kun piece it together. There's despair in his eyes when he asks if she's the traitor, and it breaks her heart.

It doesn't end as smoothly and quickly as she'd have liked. Hinata-kun is reluctant, and Sonia-san is in denial, and Usami-chan is trying to defend her. She's not scared about dying, she's proud to die for them, she's only scared that they won't let her. This is the first thing she's been able to choose for herself, and she doesn't want them to take it from her.

But the votes are eventually cast. Confetti sprinkles around her. Chiaki closes her eyes and breathes a sigh of relief—they're safe. They can survive and escape.

It's not the future her superiors want, but it's the one she wants, and how can she regret fighting for that?