Danganronpa Extra Life

Naegi Helps Remnants of Despair

There were footsteps coming down the hall. He listened to the striding, the brief pause between one foot coming down and the other lifting, and by that alone he could deduce the person's height. Running through a list of everyone on the island narrowed down the suspects; then there were time and potential motives to evaluate; and in a matter of seconds he had pinned the most likely owner: Naegi Makoto. He lifted his gaze from Nanami's hairpin, curling his fingers around it protectively, just as the door opened and Naegi walked in, exactly as he'd predicted.

Izuru was not fazed by this. Hajime was freaked out.

...No, it was more accurate to say the Izuru part of him wasn't fazed, and the Hajime part was. He wasn't two people, he hadn't had any periods of blacking out and waking up elsewhere with no memory of how. He was one person, but with two sets of memories, and those memories have their own distinct personalities attached, and those personalities have bled into each other, mixing so he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Ergo, creating moments where he sometimes experienced two different reactions to the same situation. He was one person, just confused.

Waking up from the Neo World Program was...disorienting. He blinked gummy eyes open to the pod's lid, scattered memories spinning around in his head before falling into place. In the seconds between waking up and the pod opening, his brain examined and deconstructed all available information, reporting that not only did he have Hinata Hajime's and Kamukura Izuru's memories, but memories of his time in the Neo World Program. That had not been something he'd predicted, and for a moment he was pleased.

And then the scope of everything he'd done hit him like a truck.

It was like being blind for years and suddenly seeing the sun. Hajime's lost morals had returned, and they gaped at everything Izuru had allowed—you could have saved Nanami, you could have saved the world, you could have saved everyone—and Izuru's intelligence started mapping out all the ways he could have stopped Enoshima. And amidst this storm of guilt and horror, he realized—

He'd been missing the point all along. Hajime's obsession with talent, Izuru's obsession with watching hope fight despair, those had been so wrong. Hope, despair, talent, those weren't the end goals. They alone wouldn't make life interesting or enjoyable. It was the memories and bonds you made with people along the way.

How had he not thought of such an obvious answer, as Izuru? How had he missed what was staring him in the face, as Hajime? If he'd stopped being so full of himself, stopped thinking he was absolutely right, for one iota of a second—

He lay there, frozen and overwhelmed, as silent tears spilled over his cheeks and around him the survivors of Class 77 began to wail.

It took the Class 78 trio an entire day to calm them—primarily through sedatives. But even in that state, none of them had wanted to be away from their comatose classmates; as the Neo World Program's main building lacked dorms, several closets had hastily been converted into sleeping spaces. Hajime had immediately locked himself in his room, his head too tumultuous and his heart too knotted for him to interact with others, and tried very hard not to have a panic attack.

A week had passed since then. His emotional state still hadn't approached anything resembling 'alright'. He'd spent a long time trying to decide what to call himself. He thought he might like "Hinata Hajime" more than "Kamukura Izuru"—the only memories attached to that name were bad ones.  Still, discarding it completely felt wrong. As if he were trying to discard responsibility. By the time he'd scrutinized himself a hundred times over, he'd concluded he could never go back to who he once was. He was too emotional and empathetic to be just Izuru, but he was also too talented and analytical to be just Hajime.