To those left behind. 

"-Subject reacted violently to extraction, and equally so to removal. After many failed attempts, we decided to sedate him to protect ourselves against assaults. He seems disturbed and malnourished.... Suffering with mania." The man peered over the pod slowly, his glasses slipping down his nose as he gazed at Kokichi, noting down additional annotations, clicking his voice recorder on and off. 

He took a scalpel off the wall, turning the edge over against his fingertips and returned to Kokichi's body. He lined it up against the back of his neck and pressed in, drawing a certain and pronounced incision just above his shoulder blades. 

Up until ten years ago, humans believed that where the shoulder blades are now is where wings once would've been. Complete boloney, of course, ask any geneticist across the country and they'd clearly say that there is no significant evidence that angels as we perceive them could have ever freely roamed the Earth and we, the survivors, wouldn't have known. 

The scalpel entered the skin easily, slicing through it as if it were tenderised and ready to tuck into. 

He licked his lips and began to fantasise about what he was going to have for dinner. His wife had suggested the idea that they have a loin steak for dinner before he set off that morning and now it was seeming quite tasty. 

"Oh, has he woken up as well? Huh." 

He jerked out of his cannibalistic thoughts and dropped the scalpel to the floor, blood splattering a delightful red over the white tiles. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last. He turned on his heels, and caught eye of his unexpected guest. "A-Oh. Acting Chief Medical Officer... what are you doing here?"

She clicked the tips of her heels together and tilted her head with a wide, signature grin. He felt butterflies stir deep in his stomach at her expression. The uncanny resemblance of her eyes to her predecessor still haunted him. Ever since it happened... and she was caught in the midst of that machine. Those were her eyes. Pristine and blue. 

They'd... been the only parts of her they'd been able to salvage from between the plates of the press. 

Simply calling them blue was an understatement, it was a lie. Those eyes pierced into people as if medical vectors and injected cruel, twisted thoughts into their cells, bending the very proteins within their cells to start producing something toxic and self-destructive. She'd rot them from the insides-out, guts on the floor, blood on the walls. She loved to watch people disintegrate and watch as they decomposed before her very eyes. She kept their eyes in jars.

Those on the scene at the time had described the horror of her death. It had been recorded live and broadcasted to the nation, the world. 

At the funeral, he sister had told an amusing anecdote about her not wanting to go out any other way.  

"Checking in." She smiled sweetly and peered over the lifeless body, prodding his chest cavity with her long, boney finger. "This is... number three?"

"No, this is number 8, the Ouma boy..." He looked back at the sheet, flicking over a couple of pages, "Kokichi Ouma. Tests suggest his neural pathways rejected our comatose injections. So we've upped the dose and are praying that he stays under when we take out his kidney. When they wake up, they can get pretty confused and lash out so just be careful if you're hanging around the pods, okay?"

She waved him off with a courteous side smile, "This isn't my first rodeo, I think I can handle it, but thanks for the heads up. They've got some new Monokuma plushies in. They were going to put them on the website but we get first pick and I well, I heard your daughter wanted one. They're down in HR. First come, first served." She sheepishly walked up to him, pulling him in close and, "If you wanted to go down and get one real quick, I'll turn the other eye and finish this up."

"My daughter?" He froze. She picked up the scalpel and handed it to him blade side first, the smile never leaving her face.

She nodded. "You should leave, go get her one."

He looked in two minds before shoving the clipboard into her chest, "I see, anything you need Acting Chief Medical Officer..." His voice eased out, fading, getting quieter and quieter as he grew in distance. His voice was nothing but a shallow squeak as he passed through the door.

Kokichi's body was numb. 

Under the sedation he couldn't feel a damn thing just that his heartbeat was now really loud to the point of deafening. It was an annoying, continuous thumping but it reminded him that he was still alive. He'd theorised a few times about Danganronpa being a pure load of shit, a made-up concept by a capitalist society who made money from watching and creating torture-porn style suffering by watching kids being torn apart, sometimes literally, and broadcasting it for the whole world's sick enjoyment. What were humans like nowadays, just depraved creatures who got off on a voyeristic bloodbath?

Faintly, a woman's voice that came through his drug-induced haze. "Subject responsive, but lacking expression." Must be a blend of morphine and a fucking strong brand of anaesthetic. He looked up at the woman, the blues and blacks of her outfit blurring into a psychedelic nightmare, making his eyes squint. The woman seemed amused by this and gave him a high pitched chuckle as she jumped to scrawl some notes down on her clipboard pages. Shit, why was she laughing? This wasn't funny. 

Last thing he knew he was face to face with a pink bear in a massive pitch black battle murder arena. Even attempting to twitch a finger the pain shot an immense stabbing, flattening pain which spread from the small muscles in his hand all the way through his hand as if they were shoots of electricity. His muscles seized up as the jolts zapped up his ligaments, his mouth gasped voicelessly into the emptiness as his back arched up, a new type of pain taking over. Using all the strength he could muster, Kokichi tilted his head, fighting against the extreme case of whiplash and copious amount of knots in his neck he must've acquired when he broke out of the illusion of the games and burst back fighting in this new unfamiliar reality. The epicentre of his pain was a small cylindrical object, about the size of a penknife, wedged just beneath his hip emanating a low buzzing sound and the odd click or two.

With a quick flicking motion, the woman triggered the voice recorder, "Decent response time considering the trauma the body has endured. Nerve pathways seem to be in tact, some joints are dislodged but none will cause the patient any long lasting paralysis. Dislocation of the left leg joint." He tuned out to the sweet melody of her voice and stared at the ceiling, trying to memorise the wavelengths, or something, everything from the way she hitched as she glossed over vowels, the intonation and certain stresses of her f's and her t's to her accent.

Kokichi closed his eyes. Fucking hell he was tired, that or the drugs were getting to him. Probably both. He could afford a little bit of a rest. Things had been so gung-ho, full steam ahead for as long as he could remember with the time travel and Shuichi's antics and... no. No. No. He forced his eyes open again. He'd been controlled, under the thumb of an oppressive game master for so long. Fuck them. Fuck all of it, all of their fucking bullshit. His life was his to live, not someone's to play around with and use him like an all singing all dancing puppet on strings tugging his joints and contorting them against his will.

Against all odds he found love in a killing game. Their killing game. They'd given him the greatest gift without ever noticing it, faceless bastards. Love. Love had a place among death, the two weren't mutually exclusive, most of the time in fact, they bread in pairs and become the other's gravest antithesis. Death was a dark lonesome tunnel and love its antagonistic blinding light. He cropped a smile, entertaining the possibility. It would've been good for ratings, sure, but what they had was real, real as day and night, as grounding as a certainty as tangible as the earth's rotation.

Strawberries, was it? He tried to recall the shape of Shuichi's lips as he'd suggested they'd go on that date. As he stared up at the ceiling, white and sterile, he thought of those strawberries, the reds luscious and potent, the type of shade that would stain their clothes and would fight against their washing machines to remove. Blood was like that too. The difference between blood and strawberries is that strawberries have this sweetness, the type that resonates childhood outings of strawberry picking where they'd bundle them into baskets and skirt around the fields, stripping the entire crop haul bare and really pissing off the poor farmer who had raised them from seedlings. Blood was constructive, developmental. People capitalise on blood, that's why blood money is a commodity. Blood is useful, keeps us going, but it isn't sweet as strawberries are, it stains and marks and creeps into clothing like an unwanted visitor and no matter how many times you tell it to leave you alone it will persevere and leak in.

Shuichi promised him strawberries.

He interpreted it as a clear message. No more bloodshed, only sweetness.

A dull whirring noise inching closer to his jawline startled him awake and he felt his body tense, his eyes snapping to the woman shining the pen shaped object near his chin. "Stage 5, catatonic state, easing now. Releasing subject from incubation and seizing all muscle relaxants."

True to her word, feeling started to reign back up in Kokichi's body as he wriggled his fingers around, then his legs. Except the odd tint of pain every so often, he felt ready to spring up and cave the woman's face in. Not like he would, he'd seen enough violence to last him a lifetime and enough decomposition to put him into extensive therapy for the rest of his days. The woman peered over the pod, her nose nearly bumping into the glass, her glasses performing a balance act as she jotted a few more scribes onto her notepad murmuring intelligibly to herself. She flicked a button to her left and stood back a few pages as the pod lid peeled back, screaming as if it hadn't been operated in eons.

Warily, Kokichi dragged himself up to an upright position, his lower back absolutely killing him. "You couldn't have put me anywhere more comfortable, could ya?" He whined, flinching as he reached a hand around to his back in a futile attempt to soothe it, rubbing it up and down like he was an eighty year old with arthritis. He blinked, ridding the crisp material that had accumulated around his eye sockets from the most unappealing hibernation ever and started to take in where he was. Where exactly, no fucking idea.

Government base or research lab if they had such high tech equipment but wherever it was it was extensive, stands with blood prepped for transfusion, operating tables and rows of other pods, each individually separated by what seemed to be panes of non-standard-probably-bullet-proof glass. 

"Subject is-" The woman raised her voice recorder up to her mouth slowly as her eyes preyed over Kokichi's weak state in front of her as if he was a slab of meat and she was a butcher, "Stable, and is registering fully mobile despite the trauma put upon his body. Recording the subject," She held the recorder to his face and clicked the button again. "State your name, age, height, weight, birthdate as well as anything you can recall from the last year."

Kokichi stared at her and his anger built up through his body. "Where's my Shumai?!"

"Subject is showing strong emotions towards another participant - SHSA19281V2." She noted with a excited grin, "I was rooting for you two to make it on the screens- ah the romance was so compelling, your feelings for one another inspired me to put myself out there and register for a Hinge profile- you are an inspiration. Oh! Our merchandising team wanted to discuss a cute little idea with you..." She pocketed her recorder and held her clipboard closely to her chest with a cutesy hollow smile as she rose and fell by rocking on the balls or her feet. "As it's Pride month in just over two weeks we thought that it would be an incredible advertising opportunity for you and Shuichi to be our new Danganronpa brand ambassadors!" She pointed to her little rainbow flag on her lanyard. "It's not like we've never had a queer at the front of our previous series, however the audience this year has really resonated with your struggles to admit your love for one another as well as your resilience!"

Kokichi burst out laughing, "Brand fuckin' ambassadors?! I never wanna have anything to do with this game, it's totally fucked!" He jumped up and grabbed her lanyard then pulled her down to bash her head into the edge of his metal incubation chamber. The sound of skull and metal rang through his ears as he heard the hard bone crack and her body thud to the floor with a pathetic amount of ease. 

He spat down at the bundle of limbs on the floor and the smear of her red lipstick down the white edge of his pod then pulled all the wires and monitoring equipment out of his arms and body with a hiss. Kokichi swung his leg over the edge of the pod and finally put his feet down on the white medical suite floor.

Eyeing the signs, his eyes caught on one in particular. 'Rehabilitation'. 

"If they're gonna have my Shumai anywhere..." He narrowed his eyes and scooped a syringe out of the unconscious woman's pocket, "It's gonna be there."

.

.

.

.

It was lunchtime in the canteen of the Danganronpa V3 Headquarters, it was a new build, one the company had been able to justify the cost of as the Danganronpa enterprise grew and they began to have conversations with law-makers in order to bring the empire into South East Asia and Africa. On the menu was a sweet potato Katsu curry with bulga wheat, as well as a 'make your own ramen' station that was situated right next to a instant coffee machine where a line was already forming full of employees desperate for a caffeine fix.

Employees were tucking in to their meals, chatting among themselves about the most menial domestic things. It made Kokichi even madder. How dare they talk about the weather, and about organising childcare when he would never be able to enjoy another peaceful sleep again? When his sky was fake? When he was taken when he was just an adult into a killing game to murder and pillage. With all he went through being in a comatose state and being doused with all the legal and illegal drugs available to the corporation, he doubted that he could even still have biological kids.

He stuck to the walls and shuffled along as he watched all the normal, untraumatised people live their normal untraumatised lives, and slunk into the rehabilitation centre through a pair of massive glass doors. 

As soon as he walked in, 8 pairs of eyes all fixed on his in disbelief. His mouth dropped open as the wind was suddenly sucked out of his lungs by a tight, suffocating hug. If he was a boat, the wind would've been stripped down from his sails, and cast free to supply the sea breeze.

"I-" The man with the face of his boyfriend opened his mouth and began to speak. The voice that came out of those slender lips of his was raw and croaky, a stark contrast to his usual calm and sophisticated tone. From the thin red line that sat indented a few millimetres downwind of his nose, and another below his bottom lip, he assumed it was probably a feeding tube. 

"Couldn't-" Fuck, that sounded painful, like razor blades in the throat cutting down and severing every word he spoke. "Believe th-egm..." He winced and held his neck. "They-"

"Shuichi, you need your rest." A girl piped up from the back where she was silently crocheting a little doll in the corner of the nursery-esque room. He hadn't had time to appreciate the decoration before now, but fucking hell it was weird. The unit was bathed in a light yellow light, the walls were black and white with red embezzlements in a not-so-subtle checker-print design.

There was a cute little, well-being room with a little balcony area attached where brightly coloured flowers sat in cute little pots with handmade labels written on used lollipop sticks and posters with perky signs with messages on them. 'don't stop, keep growing!', 'Just keep digging' and 'The sun will come out tomorrow.' Just reading them, Kokichi threw up in his mouth.

He squinted his eyes and looked closely at the signs when a small little buzzing thing fluttered by and settled on a petal. As he kept observing it he noticed something that made everyone's behaviour made a hell of a lot more sense. The body of the  little insect was a fucking camera. 

"Smile!" Shuichi kept hugging him, oh so tight. Even though his nails had been clipped, as one would do to tame a ravenous young kitten, they were still sharp and had clearly been bitten recently. "P-Please," When words came out they sounded desperate, and Kokichi finally fixed on his love's eyes. "Smile, Ouma." They were the colour of elephant's breath, an abstract grey, the sight of a cloud from an airplane or solder from an iron, and overlayed with a glassy film which teased tears. 

Kokichi smiled and looked around at the other survivors who were all gathered on the floor. Their eyes weren't vibrant anymore, instead they were dull. "Shumai?"

Shuichi held his hands and stroked his thumbs over them then turned to a guard. "Miss Suzanne? I would like to take Kokichi to the outdoor facilities." He finished off with a little smile, and that pretty much convinced the guard to let them go. Stupid decision, really. Why, when you spend years teaching kids how to lie would you let them go that easily?

In silence the pair walked. Through the rehab centre, through the therapy rooms and well-being spaces, and the room with the fancy teas. Shuichi pressed a button on the door release and dragged him outside with a new strength he hadn't had just minutes before. "Ko- are you okay?! What did they do? I- I was so worried, I woke up and you weren't there and I feared that everything had gone wrong- but..." Tears broke the threshold and his body crumbled down, tears streaming down his cheeks as he clung onto his medical gown for dear life. As he was hugging him, he started to notice all of the cuts and scrapes down his body and his heart weighed down with guilt. "The pods... did that surgeon get to you too?"

Thank you, thank you @tnugay it's been such a long time coming, this piece of art! You've been the most patient fan that I could ever have asked for, and this art is truly amazing! Please everyone comment and show some lovvveee!!

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"Shu-..." The ex-supreme leader watched him, then smiled for real. He didn't think he could still do that. He wrapped his arms around his back and hugged him tightly, not allowing there to be any space separating their bodies and decided to change the topic. "The robots-"

Shuichi wiped his nose with a little sniffle. "Can't hear us here. There's interference, Kaede found that out when she first woke up here."

He stared at him. "Kaede??"

"Ah... you don't know." Shuichi took a deep breath. "Some people who died... they're here. Miu- she's in a wheelchair, and has three prosthetic limbs now- but she's still... herself. And Kaito but he..." He smiled at the thought before his eyes lit up. "Maki made it too... and she said that we should visit her and Kaito... when we get out."

"Maki? She- that bitch is okay?!" He latched onto that as a weight he didn't even know was on his shoulders lifted. "If those fuckers try and stop us from leavin' then I swear to fucking god-"

"No, love." He squeezed his hands. "They just... let us go. In our contracts it says that if we won we win our freedom. That's why they kept us in there for so long and made me re-do it..." He trailed off and found a random object to focus on. "I can't be here much longer, every time I see her face... I... remember killing her... the person who played her died, but her model... she's fucking alive..." He stayed frozen for a free extra seconds before he blinked and came back to reality, focusing on Kokichi. "I've signed my paper, but I'm not going without you. Never, it's two of us against the world." He smiled as his eyes welled up again. "If you'll have me and my fucked up brain. I-I need help, but we can get it out of here. Just say yes." 

"Are ya fucking with me?? Yeah, fuck this fucking scam! I'm going!" He got on his tippy toes and kissed his boyfriend on the lips before dragging him back inside to shout that made all of the staff members in the queue for the ramen station jump, "GIVE ME MY FUCKING PAPERS!" A few beansprouts fell to the floor. 

Shuichi followed, more than a bit fucked up and not ready for what was to come, but hopeful that his love- who he adored more than anything in the entire world, would love him for as long as he could.

As the pair walked out of the Danganronpa facility hand in hand, the neon red of the large DANGANRONPA headquarters sign rained down on them, casting them in a villainous hue. They, together survived the unsurvivable. There's no such thing as a perfect person, to say that would be denying the fact that good people do bad things, and morals are cut and dry, both accusations being false, but there were people with good intentions.

With a squeeze of a hand, an "I love you" escaped Kokichi's lips, and Shuichi matched it with a tongue in cheek, "I love you so much, I'd kill for you." 

As the light bathed the two in red, they claimed each other's lips like it was the first time, then parted with love in their eyes. It was them that made people believe that true love existed, even if it may be forged in death.

Shuichi Saihara had two rounds of blood on his hands, and Kokichi Ouma had lied, blackmailed and insinuated his way to the top of a mountain of bodies, but they were happy, in the end, and they were free soon to face the perils of monotony.

They didn't just live after they were freed, they didn't hide away. They adventured, travelled to every country in the world and basked in their freedom to do so. For a year, they joined a travelling clown show, and another year they spend solving missing person's cases in New York. They loved each other, in fact, not a day went by where that ever wavered in the rest of their time together. Either one of them would wake up, and know they were the luckiest man alive to be next to someone who made their heart feel so full.

Often, Kokichi and Shuichi would organise private double dates with Maki and Kaito, where they'd fill other in on their lives. Even now in their old age, they remained the bestest of friends.

As for the Danganronpa games, two years later just before the 54th game was due to start, together with the rest of the survivors of the 53rd Killing Game, Kokichi and Shuichi set the damn building ablaze and burnt it down to a crisp, the only thing that survived from the entire centre in the end, was a single Monokuma plushie. 

As the fire roared on, the survivors all clinked glasses of champagne and held marshmallows over the flames. Maki and Kokichi smiled at each other, then turned to their respective partners and cuddled into them, whispering quiet, "I love you's."

"I love you too." They'd say.