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“Why don’t you trust me?”
“You’ve got it all wrong! It’s not that I don’t trust you, I do trust you! It’s just…”
It’s been two years since you were pulled out of your digital cocoon. It’s been two years of slow acceptance.
As long as you’re on Jabberwock Island, your luck is in stasis. The world has ended. This island is nothing more than a liminal space between one imaginary utopia and the next, a limbo for the people one upstart hope spared from hell but can’t yet smuggle into heaven. There is no economy here, nor any meaningful prosperity. There is no rich agriculture, nothing of plenty, and no mobility upward or otherwise.
All this is to say that so long as you’re here, there is no grand fortune your good luck can offer you. Without its ostentatious rival to taunt it into action, your bad luck remains a docile inconvenience, a Gremlin which hasn’t been fed. Your days are spent with excellent pulls in gachapon games followed by minor storms. Papercuts in exchange for rare finds at the library. The last big stroke of luck you had was right at the beginning of these two years, and feels a little on the nose: remission in exchange for this tropical imprisonment. The stagnant Jabberwock life has artificially corked your luck’s tendency to spiral in on itself.
At first, it was hard to accept this newfound stability. It felt too much like good luck, or bad luck, or both… but the busy schedule of being a Future Foundation pencil-pusher kept you distracted for long enough that you grew accustomed to this peaceful life without even realizing it. Perhaps the underwhelming climax is the bad luck to match the good luck of finally having the mundane life you’ve always dreamed of.
“Hinata-kun, I’m not as fragile as I was when I first woke up. You don’t have to hide your pain for my sake anymore.”
“I’m not! I mean… I mean, I am, I guess, but… it’s not like that!”
Of course, a peaceful island life isn’t the same as an idyllic island life. There are still conflicts. There are still arguments. There’s still pain.
Hinata has nightmares. A lot of them. Countless times, you’ve woken up to the sound of panicked mumbling beside you and kissed him awake. He would always give you the same answer when you’d ask what he was dreaming about: a recurring nightmare of the time he woke up during surgery. He recounted it to you in detail once, near tears and hiccuping, how he cried for his parents and begged to go home, how he insisted that he didn’t want this anymore, how he told them he was scared and how helpless and small he felt as they put him back under.
He’s always been frank with you about the effects of the Hope Cultivation Project, and you’ve always been grateful for it. After spending months in his care after waking up from your coma, it was a balm on the idea that he saw you as a burden. Your love for him is rooted in the fact that you’re equals— if he’s protecting you, you need to protect him, too.
So his new habit of brushing you off when he wakes up screaming is bothering you.
“Then what is it? I can’t help if you won’t even tell me what’s wrong!”
“You can’t help me with this! You shouldn’t have to!”
“What on earth are you talking about? Haven’t I helped you before?”
“This is different!”
Over the past few weeks, Hinata’s nightmares have devolved into full-on night terrors. This would be cause enough for concern on its own, but even more concerning is his response when you ask him what’s wrong. His upfront replies have been replaced with dismissive handwaves. It’s stupid, he says. It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.
How are you supposed to not worry about something that makes him wake up screaming? How are you supposed to not worry about whatever it is you did to make him lose trust in you?
“How is it different? The only difference I see is that it’s worse, Hinata-kun.”
So now, you’re arguing about it. Hinata sits on the couch in front of you, still in his sweatpants and too-big tee. (It was sent for the Impostor, who insisted Hinata take it because they “don’t wear such pedestrian clothing.” You’re not convinced— you know they were in the room when Hinata drunkenly mentioned missing sleeping in his father’s baggy t-shirts as a kid.)
He sighs, dragging his hand down his face in irritation.
“Because this isn’t about the project, Komaeda.”
You quirk a brow, tone softening ever so slightly despite your testy, cross-armed stance. “What’s it about, then?”
“I told you, it’s stupid. I don’t wanna talk about it with you.”
You wince. So does he, when he realizes what he’s said.
“Why not?” you ask. “What difference does it make?”
Hinata’s face twists in thought. After a moment of hesitation, he unfurls himself from the defensive position he’d taken on the couch and stares down at his lap, apparently having lost the nerve it takes to look up at you.
“I mean, what right do I have to whine to you after you’ve been through so much?” Pink singes the tips of his ears. You get the feeling that you may have misjudged the situation. You’re not completely sure what he’s talking about, but your voice loses some of its edge when you answer him.
“...That’s not fair to me, Hinata-kun.” You uncross your arms in favor of restlessly rubbing at your elbow. “It doesn’t make me feel better to hear you say that I’ve been through so much pain that anyone else’s must be a burden to me. Why would I like hearing that? I don’t want to be pitied.”
Hinata hangs his head. “I don’t pity you… It’s not like that…” He fidgets with the string of his sweatpants. “It’s just that I– I can’t imagine being through so much hardship and then hearing a guy complain about something really trivial. Wouldn’t it piss you off? To hear someone act like they’re entitled to the sympathy of people that’ve had it way worse than them?”
You roll your eyes. “It won’t piss me off. I’m asking. And if it was trivial, why would you be having nightmares about it?”
“Because I’m weaker than you, Komaeda!” As his frustration reaches a boiling point, he finally raises his voice, which makes you step back in surprise. Then he pauses, takes a breath, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m… I’m a lot weaker than you. Alright? I’m embarrassed.”
It’s hard to stay mad at him when he says it so plainly like that. You know how easily he gets embarrassed. The stern tone in your voice softens and fades away.
“If I’m so much stronger than you, then I should be able to handle it, right?” You step toward the couch again, closer this time. Hinata retakes his curled-up defensive position.
“I don’t want you looking down on me! Thinking, ‘wow, this is all it takes to give this guy nightmares?’ I don’t want that!”
Your face falls.
“Hinata-kun…”
“Just drop it, okay? It’s not even anything worth talking about.”
There’s a beat in the conversation. You use it to sit down next to him on the couch. He doesn’t shrink away from you, but he doesn’t lean in, either. The way his face scrunches up tells you that he isn’t sure which one he wants, so he avoids the decision altogether and sits rigidly in place instead.
“If it’s not worth talking about, then it shouldn’t matter if you do talk about it.”
Hinata remains stalwartly unconvinced. You sigh. Looks like you’ll need to take a different approach.
“If you’re really not ready, then I understand, but… I mean it when I say I want to know, Hinata-kun. You know so much about me, don’t you? I've told you because you’ve asked. And why did you ask about me?”
Hinata seems a little confused by the sudden change in subject, but he rolls with it the way he always does.
“Because I wanted to know more about you. I wanted to understand you.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?” he squawks. He’s peeved. “Don’t do your whole ‘what have I done to deserve you’ thing right now. I’m not in the mood. It’s because I love you. You know that.”
“So, not because you had some selfish ulterior motive to use my answer against me? Or to lord yourself above me?”
“What? No, of course not…”
“Exactly,” you hum, putting your hand on his back. “It’s because you love me, like you said. And I love you, too. So can’t you accept that I feel the same way about you? That I’m asking simply because I want to understand you better?”
“…”
Hinata heaves out a long, haggard sigh. The tension in his shoulders droops, but the strain still clings to him in his tight jaw. He’s nervous. You cozy up against his side, draping your arm around his waist and Hinata returns the gesture, holding you a little closer.
You let him take the lead, let him be the one holding you. He’s made it clear that he’s scared of being patronized right now— he needs the comfort of his partner, but he can’t abide by being comforted— so you allow him this safety blanket for his dignity. It’s predicated on silence. Neither of you can bring it up or the illusion will be ruined. So you stay silent, and you convince yourself that it doesn’t matter whether Hinata is conscious or not of this quiet grace you’re showing him. Because it doesn’t matter. Not really.
“So what is it that I’m telling you?”
“Preferably, what you’ve been screaming about.”
Hinata huffs, finally acquiescing. “It’s about school. Not Hope’s Peak— Kodaka High. My hometown.”
You hum in acknowledgement, taking a moment to think. “I've heard bits and pieces about your life before Hope’s Peak, but not much else… I’d like to hear about it, though.”
He makes a face. “That’s because it wasn’t anything worth talking about. It was just boring.” He rethinks his word-choice, switches to something with less baggage. “Average. What do you even wanna know?”
“Whatever you’re okay with sharing. What was your family like? Your hometown?”
Hinata shifts uncomfortably. “Um… My family was pretty normal, I guess… We were a little poor, but my parents were nice people. My older brother, Junichi, he was the real golden child.” You didn’t know he had an older brother.
“I mean, I didn’t hold it against him or anything. He was a good older brother, and Momma and Papa didn’t play favorites. But I always knew he was better than me anyway.”
You find it endearing that he still calls his parents momma and papa, but you hold your tongue. Bringing it up would only embarrass him.
“But, uh… Just because Momma and Papa didn’t play favorites doesn’t mean it was the same with everyone else. I was raised in a really small rural town, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, so at school everybody knew my brother. I guess since he was the one who set the bar for how a Hinata was supposed to act, when I didn’t act that way, everyone just kind of… ignored me?” He swallows, fidgeting with his cuticles. You don’t stop him, even though the habit makes you cringe.
“It started in kindergarten. I was really shy, so I was bad at making friends, and I wasn’t really good at anything so nobody approached me first. Then since our town was so small, I spent every year at school with the same group of people. They’d already separated into their own little friend groups and stuff, and with every year that passed, it just got worse and worse. I felt like I couldn’t relate to any of them, and because of that they all thought I was weird, which made them push me away even more, which made me feel even more… alienated. It was a vicious cycle.”
You know a thing or two about vicious cycles. Your brows furrow sympathetically, but he’s too busy staring at the wall ahead to see it.
“Even the teachers…” and his voice catches for a moment, growing thin, like he’s struck a nerve inside himself, “even the teachers started to completely overlook me. I started getting forgotten about and left behind coming home from field trips. I stopped talking during class. I worked so hard to get good grades, but I was never the best in the class, so nobody ever noticed. I…”
He forces himself to chuckle, forces himself to keep his tone light despite how strained his voice is getting. It makes your heart squeeze. You recognize that sort of laugh— it’s the same one you’ve perfected.
“I realized, by the time I hit high school, that I was surrounded by people I’d known my entire life, but none of them would have been able to tell you my given name.”
The situation tangles into a knot in your mind, needling at you like a hangnail that’s too short to cut. The end result of ostracization may have been the same between you, but the means by which you got there couldn’t be more different.
You’re used to everybody knowing exactly who you are. You’re used to news reporters hounding you with fake sympathy gifts, unsubtle bribes for your side of a story. You’re used to being introduced to a new classroom and immediately banishing yourself to the back of it, making yourself unapproachable, ignoring every outstretched hand to ensure that it wouldn’t get severed the next time your luck decided the time had come.
You’ve always known what your options were. To the left, a road weaving over hills and valleys, the joy of human connection and the inevitable despair when your luck’s insatiable body count would snatch it away. To the right, a road of self-imposed isolation to protect the people around you, where the trees and the pages of your books would whisper to you that you were doing the right thing, that your sacrifice was noble, that it served some purpose.
Hinata started his life at a dead end.
The thought is a lead brick in the pit of your chest, uncomfortable, heavy.
You frown, squeeze him, but don’t interrupt.
“I started losing time,” he continues. “Even now, every memory I have of sitting in one of those classrooms feels like I’m just… looking at snapshots. Blurry polaroids. I don’t remember any of the details. My parents didn’t understand what was happening. The teachers never had anything bad to say about me, so they didn’t know why I was so upset. And what could I tell them? I just kept thinking, ‘I have to get out of this town. I have to go somewhere where people will understand me. I have to become somebody, because right now I’m nothing, and I’m going to keep being nothing until I get out of here.’” His voice trembles as he speaks. He’s still staring forward at the wall, cheeks red, too ashamed of his emotions to look at you.
“Then I found Hope’s Peak. My parents couldn’t afford it, but… they, uh. They didn’t know what else to do.” He looks down at his hands, pink now from how he’s been wringing them. “I felt guilty. I knew I was stressing them out with how… bad I was getting. And I knew they’d have to sacrifice a lot to send me to Hope’s Peak. But I couldn’t stay in that town anymore. I just couldn’t. And they said it didn’t matter how much they needed to cut back if it meant—”
He has to pause to take a shaky breath here, to keep himself from crying.
“—if it meant they got to s-see their son happy again.”
The heartfelt words of his parents send a tiny, ugly shock of envy crawling up your esophagus, but it doesn’t last longer than a moment. How can it? It’s stopped by the spasming ache of your chest. It’s stopped by the lead brick.
“S-So I told myself I’d be able to repay them tenfold once I’d graduated from Hope’s Peak, and I enrolled in the Reserve Department. You know the rest.”
Before you get the chance to respond, he forces another laugh. “Pretty dumb, right? I was just… some friendless loser. Sorry you had to hear all that. It must sound pretty rich, me talking to you about isolation. As if I could possibly get it. As if I know anything.”
“Hinata-kun…” Your voice is gentle and sad— perhaps hypocritically so, since you know how easily it might be mistaken for pity, but you can’t help it. Your hand caresses his cheek and you feel him flinch, ready for you to laugh at him, to belittle him, to say, ‘was that all?’
Ready to respond by rebuilding his walls around him, laughing at his own pain, agreeing with your cruel assessment. Ready to say, ‘yeah, that was all.’
You try not to take it as a judgment on your own character. You know he doesn’t doubt your kindness or your ability to take him seriously, even though it stings when he acts like he does.
You know better than that.
Loathe as you are to admit it, you have always known exactly what your own problems are. The events which made you the person you are today have been so outrageous that sweeping them under the rug was impossible. You’ve had to find a way to incorporate them into your worldview, to work with them, and that has forced you to be adept at matters of introspection.
It’s the same sort of introspection that Hinata, so thick in the haze of denial and self-doubt, lacks. He doesn’t know that the implicit accusation he’s making about your ability to sympathize with him is hurtful— he doesn’t even realize that there’s an accusation to be made. Rather, his belief that he’s undeserving of such compassion is so deeply held that the very possibility of its existence doesn’t occur to him.
You recognize that feeling all too well. It’s one that you’ve been on the other side of in the past, albeit for different reasons, with Hinata patiently taking the brunt you’re bearing now.
Even in this, it seems, the two of you are equals.
“Hinata-kun,” you repeat, and he winds up further, shoulders rigid, preparing himself for the blow.
It doesn’t come.
“I can’t… imagine what that must have felt like.” Your voice is bare. Your voice is sad. Hinata whips his head around to look at you like he’s been shot.
“W… What?”
The confusion in his welling mismatched eyes is so sincere, so desperate, as if he’s terrified that he’s misheard you, or terrified that he hasn’t.
So you repeat it. “I said, I can’t imagine what that must have felt like.” Your thumb brushes his skin, tracing the dark rim of the circles under his eye, the bullet scar etched into his cheekbone. He looks dumbfounded.
“B-But… You… But you’ve been…”
“I've been what? Lonely?” Hinata winces. You’ve hit the nail on the head, it seems. “You’re right. I have. My entire life, I've been lonely.” You sit up so you don’t have to crane your neck to look him in the eyes. It’s enough of a struggle as it is with the way he’s darting them this way and that.
“But my loneliness was a choice,” you croon. “I chose to isolate myself to protect others. I took solace in seeing myself as a martyr. But you…”
You shake your head, lowering your gaze to his trembling lips. “Your loneliness was imposed on you by others for no reason at all.”
You’re reminded of the first day spent in the Neo World Program, where everyone else left him behind when he fainted in the sand. The way you had to introduce him to the others because he was too anxious to do it himself. How could you be the first person to show him that kindness? How could he have been neglected for so long? How has he been failed by so many people when it would have been so fucking easy to help him? Righteous anger bubbles in your chest. It, too, is stopped by the lead brick.
“For no reason,” you whisper. You’re not sure if you’re repeating it for his sake or your own.
Hinata still doesn’t know what to say. He opens and closes his mouth like a fish, searching for any response, but nothing comes. Nothing comes at all. He’s speechless in the face of someone seeing him for the first time, acknowledging how deeply he’s been hurt in a way that even he doesn’t fully comprehend. He’d never considered that this was a wound, let alone the idea that it could hurt him. Now he’s left it unexamined too long, let it get infected and fester, and the scope of its impact seems incomprehensible to him.
Yet another pirouette in this dance of role-reversal, another feeling you understand from being on the receiving end of it at the hands of one Hinata Hajime: the complete upheaval of a worldview.
It’s painful, but necessary. You hate to be the one to inflict it on him. You know that it could never have been anyone else. It had to be him, the one whose hope shone bright as the sun even as he helped you onto the pedestal you put underneath him. It had to be you, the one whose pain he’d been unconsciously using as a point of reference to deny himself.
And it’s a selfish thing he’s doing, comparing his pain to yours like that. You’ve had to learn the hard way that putting yourself beneath everyone else is just another form of self-aggrandizement, made all the more insidious for the way it masquerades itself as humility. It wasn’t fair to others when you insisted you were somehow lesser than them and therefore not beholden to the same standards. It’s not fair to you, now, the way he presumes to know your pain, nor the way he wields this warped perception as an impossible standard for what constitutes as “bad enough to count.” It’s not a problem of him seeing you as broken or damaged— it’s a problem of him not seeing you at all. It doesn’t feel good to be the means by which someone hurts themself.
But you can’t find it in yourself to stay mad at him, because you know this spiral of comparison and denial isn’t intentional. He’s not even aware of it. He does it because he’s hurting. He does it because nobody has ever acknowledged how badly he’s hurting, so he has to find a reason why it’s wrong for him to hurt.
Because if he’s wrong to feel hurt, then at least he’s the one in control of the pain.
Yet more ways in which you are equals.
Hinata is still balking. You let out a deep, deep breath.
“The Hope Cultivation Project isn’t the only thing that’s unique about you, Hinata-kun.” Hinata blinks, half-shakes his head.
“But…”
You cut him off, or he cuts himself off, or he never had more words to say in the first place.
“In fact, if anything, I relate to it more than what you’ve just told me. Obviously I can’t know how it feels to be a victim of human experimentation, but the desire to be something greater, the will to sacrifice yourself for that chance… And to be put through a gauntlet of tragedy, where you lose your autonomy again and again…” You readjust your position once more, guiding him to lean against your side so you can hold him. Another pirouette.
“I understand the shape of that despair,” you murmur, carding your fingers through his hair. “It’s the same as my own. And you’ve never denied how much that’s hurt you.”
“That’s because it’s different,” he retorts weakly. Of course, the only time he can find something to say is when he’s given something to fight against. Your typical, stubborn Hinata. “Of course I’m not going to deny that that shit hurt me. That was, like… real. The Hope Cultivation Project, just like all the stuff that’s happened to you, that’s trauma, Komaeda. Real trauma. It’s not the same as just… being lonely as a kid.”
“You’re right,” you say, “all that is real trauma. But what hurts you more now, Hinata-kun? The Hope Cultivation Project, or the life before that led you to it?”
Hinata doesn’t have an answer for that.