Chapter Text
It was another mundane day; the same sunny weather, those birds chirping, and a school day. I’m a student in the Hope’s Peak Academy Reserve Course. Lame, right? I don’t have a talent, and I don’t really have anything to live by— WRONG! I remembered EVERYTHING. Every time travel scenario, every bit of despair I felt, and of course how much I wanted to save Nagito. During the previous few moments, he, Kamukura, and I had been sucked into a portal created by my time travel device (handed over to me by Kamukura), taking us to a new world. As I walked to school, I noticed that everything was playing out exactly the same as back during the first scenario when I met Nagito. So, it meant that despair would infect the world in this scenario again… and it would be up to be to help in getting everyone out of it. Bracing myself, I headed to the school gates.
Lots of students were entering the gates, for their new year here. But in the distance, I saw Nagito sitting on a bench, watching as the cherry blossoms fell from the trees. He spotted me staring at him, and waved, smiling at me like he always did. So he remembered me after all! I let out a breath that I didn’t know I’d been holding, and waved back with a small smile. We didn’t bring up our previous memories, and just focused on living in the present. After all, that’s what hope is all about, isn’t it?
The day was uneventful. I met up with him after school, and we walked home together, as usual. But when we parted ways, I went in a different direction.
I went to a skyscraper, to the very top (the balcony area), and looked down on the world below me from the railing. All this was about to get destroyed, and be engulfed in despair… people would hurt each other and themselves, including Nagito. It would be up to me to save him, but this time, in the ‘now’ rather than in the past. And if he somehow died, I… I’d have to move on, like he wished me to. I pondered over this every time now, at this very spot, the second I parted ways with him.
At one point, he’d found me there. Maybe he thought that it was suspicious that I was taking a different route, and followed me here.
“So, this is where you are? I thought you finally got a girlfriend or something!”
“Idiot. You know I don’t have any charisma when it comes to women.”
“Haha, fair! Your hope lies elsewhere, after all.”
“Shut up…”
But I wasn’t annoyed. It was just playful banter. He looked over the railing with me, looking at the world below.
“All this will be destroyed someday, huh…”
“Apparently. That’s just how the world is.”
Silence. Then…
“Yeah, it is… but creation can’t exist without destruction, the way hope can’t exist without despair. That’s why I have to place my trust in the fact that hope will always prevail, no matter how horrendous the situation is.”
“You sure are optimistic…”
“Hey, we survived the literal breaking of reality, didn’t we?”
“Touché.”
I shook my head, but I could feel myself smiling, in a rather resigned manner. He always had an answer for everything, huh…
We stood there, watching this world below us as time seemed to stop, for who knows how long. I couldn’t help but look at him from the corner of my eye, noticing his thoughtful expression. Perhaps he, like me, was pondering about it all… the consequences, the person he’d end up becoming… I could understand that. The air was filled with unspoken feelings, mostly on my end. But I didn’t know how to say them, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to finish that sentence one day. But I sighed and promised myself mentally that someday, I’d tell him everything, and finish that sentence from all those timelines ago.
There was only one thing keeping us connected, despite our silence, and that was the realization that deep down, each of us just wanted to be told ‘I love you’ by someone. These unspoken, yet undeniable truths, would they ever come to light one day? Neither of us knew, but what we did know was that in the end, pushing through it all would be worth it.
Fin.