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You lie easily.
It's one of the few traits you take pride in (most others, most hobbies you can't do, since someone will always be better) and you probably shouldn't. It's not a good thing to be good at, but useful nonetheless.
At the same time, you hate seeing your own reflection.
Perhaps it's because you're so fluent in lies that your own reflection, the boy staring back at you with cloud-white hair and dead grey eyes, doesn't seem like you.
Perhaps it's the despair-loving smile perched on the boy's lips.
You have hated despair, and you do believe that. You believe that all of life's problems stem from despair, and you believe it so wholeheartedly you can taste it.
But at the same time, you love it.
The world cries out and pushes you away when you try to play hero, when you try to rely on paltry assurances created from your fucked-up luck. It's all you're good at, and even then it's pathetic.
Maybe you could be the SHSL Loser.
It's why embracing despair felt so refreshing. Your dream (not that anyone would know it, fuck no) has always been to be able to stand alongside the people creating the world. But with a talent as terrible as luck, you never could.
Now, though... you can spread despair at their sides.
It's perfect and so dizzyingly insane you want to sob, clutching your arms in a frenzied attempt to ground yourself in reality. The luck there once was is now replaced with pure despair, filling every crack in your pathetic, useless mind.
You can be a part of the battle between hope and despair... fighting alongside despair in the name of hope.
It's perfect.
Some would call it bad luck, to be brainwashed alongside your classmates. But you know better, when you stand over their corpses, pale hands stained red red red with the blood of the unbelievers.
This is the best luck you've ever had.
You are sick.
Not from despair, no, never from despair, but just sick.
Not sick of the world, like so many souls are these days (the despair of a crushed body is so exhilarating) but just sick.
Your hands shake all the time now (and that is Very Not Okay) but you're already barely useful as it is, so letting this win would mean being completely useless.
And that is one thing you never want.
So you raid drugstores, swallowing bottle after bottle of pills until the world is sharp in ways you never knew it could be, lucidity hitting you like a speeding train.
You can't afford to be sick now.
"Are you happy like this, Nagito Komaeda?"
The question comes from a boy with one eye red as the blood you're so intimately familiar with, and one green eye hollow with weakness.
The red eye scares you, but thrills you all the same.
The green eye you detest.
"Of course, Hajime!" you chirp, every bit the perfect luckster. "Or... is it Izuru Kamakura?"
You regret it as soon as it comes out of your mouth, but not because of the way Hajime seems to curl in on himself, akin to a kicked puppy. You couldn't give a fuck about Hajime Hinata.
No, it's because such a perfect name, the name of the SHSL Hope should never pass your pathetic, worthless lips.
Without despair, what good are you? Just another washed-up luckster the world once needed, but now (what with everything gone to shit and all) there's even less of a place for you than there was back then.
You shoot Hajime a look - one dripping with disdain, and really, he chose to revert to sickeningly-naive Hajime, when he could have been Izuru fucking Kamakura, the world's hope. You'd give anything for that chance.
A chance to make a difference with the useless life you claim to have.
"Nagito, do you like to hurt others?"
The correct answer here is 'no', he knows it. That much is abundantly clear. He's not an idiot.
"Yep."
You can't bring yourself to care anymore.
More so because you don't care about anything, but also because caring is beyond your rapidly-atrophying brain.
You are sick, and you are losing your mind.
But it's alright, you tell yourself, washing your hands for the tenth time today. The skin, hot-red and rubbed raw, scalded with the hot water, still seems to have far too much blood on it for your liking.
Hajime - worthless, talentless, hopeless Hajime - watches from outside, gaze laden with worry.
You'd reply if you honestly gave a fuck.
Instead, you flash something akin to a smile - it's paltry, weak and lying and all of you know it - and he flinches.
He's scared of you.
Your tongue darts out of your mouth - only momentarily - and you attempt to gauge his reaction.
Funny. He seems as dead as you are.
And for some reason unbeknownst to you, unbeknownst to the world, you cross the room in three quick strides and kiss him.
You don't even want to, but you do.
How despairing.
You're not even sure if you love Hajime, or the concept of Hajime.
There's something about the way he is - the way you can sometimes see remnants of the SHSL Hope peeking through the cracks of the ordinarily unimportant Hajime Hinata.
You stay with him for those moments.
Perhaps Hajime wanted this too. Perhaps you don't want this.
You're not even sure at this point.
And it sucks, really and truly. It sucks to not even be able to trust your own mind thanks to this fucking disease.
If disease is even the right word to call it.
There are so many goddamn things in life you're not sure about, the number increasing each and every day. Memories, logic, personality traits, all slipping through your fingers like water.
You must love Hajime, right? Otherwise, why would you feel the electric rush swimming through your body each and every time your lips touch?
(In truth, it brings to mind corpses, children sobbing besides their parents' bodies, and such an eclectic rush of despair that you can't help but crave it again and again. You don't want this, and the fact that you do it anyways makes it so much better)