we can't hate him

Kaito, Maki, Shuuichi

Kaito Momota

"This is the stupidest thing you've ever done."

"Actually, not really, because one time I was eating a cookie, and then I dropped it into the gutter of a street. It was raining so hard that the cookie got soaked. It flowed down the stream of the curb and got stuck on some leaves. And then I—"

"Don't tell me you ate the damn thing!" Momota groaned. "You've gotta be kidding me, Ouma..."

"I was hungry," he defended. "What was I supposed to do, starve?"

"That's what I would've done. Or I would've bought another cookie, at least."

"Hey, you sound smart for once! Did you get replaced by Monokuma or something when I wasn't looking?"

"Fuck you and everything you stand for."

"Good thing I'm sitting, then."

"Fuck you."

Their banter continued as usual, and it didn't feel out of place. In fact, it felt as if everything was meant to be that simple from the very beginning. Momota Kaito and Ouma Kokichi were two opposite ends of a magnet, perfectly so. One was bursting from head to toe with boundless positive energy, going through life with a determination so pure and strong that it was infectious. Wherever he saw negativity, he did his best to rectify it, even if it meant taking in strays or putting his life on the line.

The other was quite the opposite. He was negatively charged, to the point where he stole the life and energy of other people as his own. He devoured everything in his path, and knocked down obstacles in his way. If he saw something wondrous and positive, he had no other instinct than to tamper with it, and show them all the polar reality that existed in front of their eyes—but that they ignored like their lives depended on it.

They never got along. They went so far as to physically hit each other at times, punching and kicking wherever words couldn't fit: because Momota was honest and earnest, smart where it counted, but pretty-fucking-dumb otherwise. And Ouma was deceptive and cunning, wonderfully brilliant, but an absolute-pain-in-the-ass at every other instance. They were very alike but very different—complete opposites, but complementary individuals.

It made sense that they didn't understand each other, and when they finally did see eye-to-eye, it was too late.

The poison surging through their veins deemed it so.

But the banter picked up like nothing, and it was an electric current that pulsed through their bodies and minds, reminding them of the dwindling minutes. It acted as a morbid counter held over their heads, constantly preserving the seconds that winded down until the numbers read zero. Once they reached that point, one of them would give out, and they'd lose to the murder game like almost everyone else before them.

Ouma made sure that theirs would be a case unsolvable, however. He waited for a development like this to happen. In his notebook, well-worn and pressed for space anywhere he could get it—in the margins, in the corners of the pages, on the backside of the front cover—there existed hundreds and hundreds of different scenarios, lines, plans, and schematics. Everything from potential trial outcomes and murders, to criminalistic profiles of every person that participated in the game thus far.

When Momota read through it all, he felt a sick mixture of admiration and disgust all at once. While the exact scenario of Ouma kidnaps Momota, Harukawa intervenes, Harukawa dooms both Ouma and Momota to die, now Ouma and Momota have to scramble to come up with a good plan before they both die in vain isn't inside, a plan that almost matches it (instead of them both dying, Ouma writes inside that Harukawa kills him and Momota protects her during the trial—something that could very well happen if Momota wasn't so righteous in those few seconds in time) is there, so they go by those guidelines if anything else.