Chapter Text
Second day of classes.
The next day, the Ultimate Literary Author was exhausted from the sleepless night.
The lack of sleep and the intensity of his subsequent thoughts had left his mind foggy, so he decided to take a break and explore the academy in search of inspiration.
He walked the halls, noting the impressive architecture of Hope's Peak as well as the multiple rooms that housed stories never told to the public, all while staying between the Ultimates.
With class attendance being a non-obligatory thing, the young author decided he would burn some of his time sleeping in some empty classroom. At least that was the idea until he heard someone call out to him.
"H-Hey... excuse me..."
Turning around somewhat abruptly, Ryou's narrowed eyes found that the voice that called out to him belonged to the girl from yesterday, the one who kept staring at him before the disaster in the chemistry lab.
Seeing how the poor girl was startled, the author felt the need to give in to his twitch and let his eyelid tremble. What on earth was wrong with his eyes scaring girls and boys? He had been like that since ever...
"Uhm, excuse me, I'm a little sleep deprived... D-Do you need anything?" his voice cracked a little at the end as a result of thinking hard about what he was going to say. That was how it happened to anyone who didn't sleep well.
As for the girl, she tightly gripped the sleeves of her bunny hoodie and sometimes opened her mouth, but said nothing, trying to choose the right words. Ryou, wanting to be a gentleman, didn't push her and waited until she was ready to speak, understanding well that some people had difficulties when it came to interacting with others.
Finally, with a very audible sigh, she spoke.
"I-I'm Umesawa Aiko... U-Ultimate Toymaker..."
"Nice to meet you, Umesawa-san," Ryou flashed her his best smile. "I'm Kitahara Ryou, Ultimate Literary Author."
Aiko smiled shyly at Ryou's introduction, though she still looked a bit nervous.
"I'm sorry if I scared you before, hehe. Sometimes, my look can be a bit intense without realizing it," Ryou said, trying to ease any awkwardness he might have caused.
Aiko shook her head, her light brown hair falling slightly over her face.
"N-no, don't worry." She took a breath before continuing, "I-I was thinking... yesterday, you know, before everything went to chaos because of the lab..."
Ryou nodded.
Aiko looked down, nervously playing with the sleeve of her hoodie.
"It's just... I was thinking of a-asking you..."
He arched an eyebrow, intrigued.
"... I wanted to ask for your autograph."
The boy scratched his cheek ruefully, taken by surprise by Aiko's request. It wasn't the worst thing a fan of his works had ever asked him.
It still gives him nightmares about the girl he saw at a Book Fair carrying a dakimakura of him.
"Uhm, sure. Do you have a sheet or...?"
Ryou was startled a little when suddenly, Umesawa made a book of considerable size appear in front of the author's face that made Aiko's hands look smaller than they already were.
It was a tapestry whose cover was framed by the illustration of a broken window with flowers on the sill and the title 'The House of Reflection'.
Ryou's biggest bestseller, the one to blame for his receiving the invitation to Hope's Peak.
The young author looked a little askance at the book, before reminding himself that this was a favor for a classmate. They didn't know each other in depth, but something inside Ryou was pushing him to give her his autograph; it was his gut telling him that Umesawa Aiko had had an intense battle with her ego to determine to speak to him.
"Huh, that's the collector's edition..." he commented, having noticed that the book featured different illustrations in a surreal style (chosen by Kitahara himself), its own bookmark and several dedications that Ryou wrote for the sake of it.
"Y-yes. It was worth it to spend two days standing in line..."
It was inevitable that he looked at Aiko with surprise, feeling strangely touched that the Ultimate Toymaker was such a passionate fan of his writing.
Not wanting to put it off any longer, Ryou signed the first page of the book while keeping a smile on his face the whole time.
"Well, Miss Umesawa, you are now the possessor of a signed collector's edition," he said as he handed it back to her.
Small tears formed in Aiko's eyes as she smiled so brightly that Ryou feared he was going blind. The surprises didn't end there considering what happened next.
On an impulse, his classmate rushed over to hug him. Being much shorter, the girl's head buried itself into the author's chest, with the author himself not knowing what was happening or what to do.
Regrettable to put it this way, but such an action exceeded Ryou's pre-set measures for 'affection' in general.
Things continued to progress at a very difficult pace for the boy to keep up with, with Aiko realizing what she did and apologizing and then excusing herself and leaving, of course, not before asking Ryou if there was anything wrong with them working as a pair in class - which meant joining desks - to which he ended up agreeing.
"... Huh, so that happened..."
Ryou's strange day had barely begun.
But hey, at least he already knew someone else besides Seiko.
... ... ...
... ... ...
The rest of the day was very simple.
Sleeping in the middle of the morning sleepless night = a nap with no dreams and nightmares at all.
Those two elements together were synonymous with paradise for Ryou.
He had entered an empty room that, according to what he had stored, could be a sort of practice room for different types of art. So he improvised a bed in one of the corners of the room and went to sleep without a care in the world.
He had arrived around 9:40 AM and now, even though he was drowsy, he noticed that the watch on his wrist read 2:25 PM.
'... I didn't get much sleep,' he thought cynically.
Truth be told, the author would have slept much longer had it not been for the loud noises that now flooded the room, noises that in his drowsiness he still didn't notice were coming from the stage he had analyzed so much hours before.
It wasn't until a voice that could only be described as 'unbelievable' broke through the already chaotic cacophony that Ryou turned his attention to the aforementioned place.
Amidst the blinding multicolored lights, the reverberation of metal and the fruit of taut strings, the voice of a muse made an appearance, catching Kitahara Ryou like a siren's song. If there was something that the young author could rely on to describe what he heard, then the most simplified way was to say that it was a cutting and intense voice of the Doom/Death Metal genre, but at the same time it had the quality of becoming a falsetto, a soprano, and so on. In conclusion, it was a voice that shared the same versatility with which its owner performed on a chimera of instruments at the same time.
Noticing the quirky appearance of the girl performing on stage, he couldn't help but think of punk culture.
Perhaps his head had been dancing for a long time between his fascination with the girl's musical abilities and the thoughts that followed, because when he fully returned to his strange - read tired - self, Ryou realized that she was finishing with a 'riff' on her guitar... using her tongue... Had that guitar been shooting flames?
Mere instinct led Ryou to clap intensely once the eccentric, but incredible 'riff' came to an end. This caused a radiant smile to show on the punk girl's face.
"Yahooo! Ibuki's instinct was right, you were the right audience to try out my new song! I came in here to practice and, bang! There you were in the corner, wrapped in the fifth dream waiting for the tune to bring you back. It was just like that fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty! Except for the cannibal queen."
"Uh..."
"I'm curious though," with a single leap, Ibuki got so close to Ryou that her face was uncomfortably close, "How did a homeless manage to get into Hope's Peak?"
"..."
Ryou's left eye contracted. Sure, he was wearing an old coat full of patches, his face looked badly shaved and had dark circles under his eyes, but that didn't make him a homeless!
"I... I come to this school."
"Ibuki too! I won't brag, but they call me Ibuki Mio-da, Ultimate Musician!"
"I can see why they do that," Ryou told him, trying to put behind him the fact that he mistook him for a homeless. "That thing you did on stage? I've never seen anything like that before, it was... amazing, and I'm telling you from someone who's not much of a music fan."
Mioda's face paled as if she had been told something profane that should never have come to her knowledge.
"Who could not love music with all his being, so much that he sits in the middle of a volcano explosion while the magma runs free burning everything in its path!"
"I guess that would be me, the Ultimate Literary Author... Though you can call me Ryou, Kitahara Ryou."
And there he was, the ever-polite author treating this matter as if it were a meeting with some publisher and not of the most puzzling but satisfying interaction he'd had in a long time.
"Well, Ibuki's going to tell you something, Ryu-chan!"
"Ryu-chan?" a drop of sweat trickled down his cheek at the sudden nickname.
A frantic flame appeared in Ibuki Mioda's eyes as more and more she latched onto a line of thought arising from the literary author's statement.
"I'll show you the wonders of music! And at the end of this day, you'll understand Ibuki Mioda's passion!"
"..."
The tormented boy could not keep up with the passionate artist. Her words seemed to him meaningless after meaningless, her way of talking made him want to get closer to the door and get out of there, everything about her was the opposite of what he was used to, and yet...
He wanted to go with her.
He wanted to witness again that vision that welcomed him back into the real world.
With a determined voice, a tired but sincere smile and expectant eyes, Kitahara Ryou gave his answer.
"Well, show me the way, Ibuki-san."
... ... ...
... ... ...
Page 10, Melpomene's harpoon.
Between my back and the wall, I tried not to succumb to exhaustion.
The pieces were falling into place and I was so close to succeeding, to putting a stop to this bizarre tragic comedy that had trapped us in its poisonous webs.
It was not the time to hesitate, it was time for actions that my means would justify, actions that my morality would consider right to give a happy ending to the wretched in the eye of this hurricane of injustice.
With the sinister missing from its destiny, the right was the only possible route for me.
And, in the most deviant right there ever was, she waited, the red-eyed one, ready to drown me with her siren's voice and claim this heart once and always hers.
Our gazes met, ready for one last duel that would bring order to the existence that we both were.
Her twisted melodies traveled through the air like putrid poison, wiping away all traces of humidity and leaving behind heartbroken shells.
Thirteen -Death- followed her.
In my right, a torch illuminated by a miracle shine.
And I returned.