The Strongest | ɢᴏᴊᴏ ꜱᴀᴛᴏʀᴜ

Final Chapter - a look in the past and the future

Lifting his mattress out of my bed with all my strength, I let out a scream until the side of the mattress touched the floor. I was somehow able to hold it upright by stemming my entire weight against it, and slowly but surely managed to slide it across the floor and through my door. Once in the hallway, I leaned it against the wall and left it there for him to deal with it. As soon as it was out of my room, it wasn't my concern anymore.

The same procedure followed with my mattress. The same scream, the same technique, but the mattress' destination was another. Mine made it back into my bed, and when I watched I fall into the frame, I let out a deep breath to calm myself. Another breath. And another. But it was no use. I needed something else to make me blow off steam. Payback. I'd get it tonight.

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The fifteen alarm clocks

Even though he found all of his belongings in the hallway when he came back from his students, Satoru was incredibly satisfied. Another practical joke gone right. Especially since Aikawa warned him to take his time because apparently, (y/n) had been screaming and cursing him for hours.

He had thought about pranks to play on her for days ever since she started acting like an asshole to him, but so far, he had only come up with small things. But two days ago, this gem of an idea had hit him, but there had never been a convenient opportunity for him to actually go through with it. Until today. She had left for her mission, Shoko had been busy with work, and Satoru had been especially bored. "Why not today?" he had thought and gotten to work.

To be fair, now he had to put his stuff away again, too, but that was a small price to pay. He only wished he could have seen her face or hear her shouts. He wished he'd been there for the anger. It was always so amusing to see her angry.

Satoru didn't even notice that (y/n) wasn't anywhere around until dinner. After dinner, he lay down in bed, but as always, it took him a really long time to fall asleep. Once the lights were off and the world fell silent, Satoru's thoughts always became louder than he could bear. But only for so long until unconsciousness overwhelmed him and pulled him into dreams. Sometimes, he even had nice dreams, and sometimes, they were disturbing because they were nice dreams but involved his least favorite coworker. Mostly, though, he had bad dreams or none at all.

That night, Satoru had a bad dream. But it didn't last long, and when the shrill sound of an alarm clock woke him, he couldn't even remember what it had been about. Not thinking twice, he turned the clock on his bedside table off and lay back down. He probably had forgotten to change the time.

Hold on-- Satoru opened his eyes again. He didn't have an alarm clock with a sound like that. Just as the realization came to him, another sound erupted from the other side of his bed but way closer to him. He turned around to find another clock lying right next to him in bed. Another one started to give a deafening beeping sound, making Satoru sit up. All of a sudden, about ten more started ringing, or maybe it was more, he couldn't tell. His room was filled with different sounds, all incredibly shrill and annoying. He could only laugh.

"Good one," he said to himself and clambered out of bed to switch off the alarms. It took him quite a while to turn them off, and even when he thought he'd found all of them, the ringing didn't stop. "What?" he mumbled to himself, turning around on the spot.

Where was it? There was a single alarm clock left, and he couldn't find it. The one next to his bed that had started this whole thing showed him that it was exactly 4:07 in the morning. It had taken him seven minutes to find and silence the alarms except this last one...

The sound was a little muffled, so Satoru expected it to be somewhere inside of something. It wasn't in his closet or his dresser. It wasn't -

A laugh escaped his lips, almost hysterically, as he opened the top of his laundry basket and found the fifteenth alarm clock sitting on top of his dirty laundry. He switched it off, restoring absolute silence again, but he couldn't stop chuckling. "Well played," he said as if she could hear him. "Well played."