Super Dangan Ronpa 2 - Sonia/Gundam

[lirillith]

Title: Glass Coffins
Fandom: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Characters: Sonia/Gundam
Word count: 1200 words
Rating: PG
Warnings: Massive endgame spoilers.
Summary: The princess wakes up.
Notes: Just.... spoilers.

*****

Sonia wakes up to the hush of a door sliding open and a sense of overpowering confusion.  She’d sworn not to forget something; the dream had been so vivid, and she remembers powerful emotion, anger and fear and determination, and she remembers being very much in love.  Do not roll over, she reminds herself, the surest way to lose a dream.  She doesn’t feel like she has much room to do so anyway, but she can hear voices, distantly; people speaking in Japanese.  Easier to tune out than Italian or Hungarian, at least.

There’d been a game, a sadistic game calling for murder.  Battle Royale?  Close enough.  The rules aren’t what’s important.  Her classmates had been there, and— it’s crashing back now, actual reality, Junko’s smile and the duotone bear and Gundam with blood running down his face, but in the dream, he was fine again, the scar was just makeup and the odd eye was a contact lens.  She remembers sitting on the bed in a cheap hotel room, for some reason, watching him put it in. Or rather, she knew why she was sitting on the bed and in his room; she wasn’t sure why they were in that motel at that time.  

You should go back to your own room, Madam Cat, he’d said.  Before everyone wakes up.  Or there will be no living with your shark-toothed suitor.

There is no living with him as it is, she’d grumbled, or something along those lines.  But she’d still waited for him to signal that the hallway was clear, and then darted back into her own room.  It wasn’t the normal place they’d stayed.  Someone had been sick.  Tsumiki… no, Tsumiki was taking care of the patients, wasn’t she?  But then she’d killed Saionji, and not even for the reasons everyone would have understood.  And later Nidai had been a robot.  Dream logic, but the dream had made so much sense at the time.  She remembered spending a long time in discussion of the shape of a nonsensical building that had strawberries and grapes on all the walls.  

She sits up, covering her face with one hand.  She’s not going to forget.  She remembers calling him Tanaka-san in the dream, even when they were alone.  Even when they were in bed.  She thought of him as Gundam, but she always called him Tanaka.  She remembers that first night; Ibuki and Komaeda and Owari were all sick, and they were staying in the motel to keep close, and she hadn’t been able to sleep.  She’d knocked on his door in the middle of the night.  He’d answered the door in a cheap terrycloth bathrobe, one of the ones the motel supplied, and his scarf, and when she started crying he put his arms around her, even though he always said his skin was poisonous.  

The Tanaka kingdom, and all that I have, is yours.  But you should be more cautious about touch.  That was what he’d said afterwards, when they were curled up together in the bed, and she’d sat up just so she could see by his face if he was joking.  The room was dark, all the colors leached out, but he’d flushed dark and wouldn’t meet her eyes.  She’d just asked him how she’d ever build up her tolerance if they didn’t continue increasing her exposure.  He’d gotten over that in their first year of high school, hadn’t he?  But then, that’s the age they were in the dream.  

And in the dream he’d been heroic.  She has to remember it for both of them, because for him, just waking up at all will be enough.

They’d had to decide, in a confrontation with a giant Junko Enoshima, whether to trade their memories of the island and the murders and the losses for their friends, for the lives of the people who’d come in to save them, for reality.  She’d hated agreeing to forget, and while it doesn’t feel real enough, it feels more real, in its way, than recording a broadcast ordering the people of Novoselic to give in to despair.  If all of that is real, how do they make anything right again?  How can all of that be real, and yet Gundam challenging Nidai to save the rest of them from starvation, and going to his death for it, be just a dream?  And how do you keep fighting off despair when that’s how it is?  

"Your highness," someone says, in English.  "Ah… votre altesse?"  The accent is slight, but she thinks it’s Japanese.  That would fit.  She uncovers her face, and looks at Togami — the real one, not the one she knew.  

"I think you had Novoselic confused with Monaco," she answers him, in Japanese.  

"But you attended school in France before transferring to Hope’s Peak."

True, but at school she’s always just been Sonia.  She accepts his hand to stand up.  There are strange pods, like coffins — glass-topped Snow White coffins, only the glass and the light inside are green — arranged like the spokes of a wheel around something electronic that seems to represent everything they went through.  She’s trying to grab the shreds, still, as they begin to blow away and dissolve.  Maybe the computer still holds them all, if they could just drive Enoshima out of it.  

Souda is sitting on the edge of another of these pods; Owari, her hair longer than Sonia remembers, is actually doing stretches like she’s about to go for a run.  Kuzuryuu is standing, hands in his pockets — he really was wearing a pinstriped suit all this time — looking down into another pod.  He glances at her, and for a moment she thinks he’s winking, but it seems more like the eye he lost in the dream is having a hard time coordinating with the other one.  She steps out of her pod, finally, and lets go of Togami’s hand.  ”Where is Tanaka-san?” she asks.  

Togami’s eyes flicker to one side.  “This way,” he says, leading her past Souda’s pod. 

“Sonia-san?  You got your hair cut…” He trails off, apparently remembering he’s awake now.  Her hair’s longer, no doubt, than it had been before they all came to the island.  She can feel it brushing her shoulders, but she can also feel that there’s less of it than she expects, less than she had in the dream.  The simulation.

There are still bandages over one side of his face.  His hair is parted down the middle, not brushed back like he prefers it, and his face is slack with sleep.  Peaceful.  Not vacant.  Absolutely not.  

"I need a haircut," she hears Hinata say, clearly and a little too loudly, over the murmur of unfamiliar voices, and that’s enough of a hopeful sign as well that she smiles at Tanaka, resting a hand on the glass.  Traces of all of them made it out, didn’t they?   

 

 

They each tell their rescuers the same things.  They want to stay on the island.  They want to care for their comatose friends, look after them, be there to help them wake up.  She says it, and it’s all true, but it’s not the whole truth.  She does want to look after their classmates.  But she won’t stay on the island if she thinks she can find better care for Gundam somewhere else.

All that I have.  Whatever the state of the world now, she should still have some resources at her disposal.