#this is my favorite hajime angst ive written also i hate myself now

[chimielie]

Iwaizumi // moving back to Japan, leaving you in the process

He’s snoring slightly.

You’re propped up against the headboard of your shared bed, hands folded over your middle, skin tingling where his arm is thrown over you. Even now, his fingers twitch slightly, an unconscious attempt to pull you closer while sleep and shut-eyed inaccuracy weaken him. You look down at him, resisting the urge to kiss his cheek, knowing the movement will wake him.

He’s always such an active sleeper, snuffling often but never quite forming distinct words, rolling around in search of you if you separate from his unconscious body. You’re long since used to the tossing and turning, the soft noises that lull you to sleep better than any white noise machine. You could record him, sell it. People would love that kind of thing—from him, especially.

Tomorrow (in a few hours, you remind yourself), Hajime is leaving. He’s done it before. You’d been nervous, but your relationship had survived a week, then two, then three months. Five years in a row, you had waved goodbye to him and wished he were back as soon as he left your line of sight. Two years ago and the last, you’d gone home with him, but that had been only two weeks of blissful touring of Japan, and he had visited on his own five more times besides.

In a few hours (you check the clock. Two hours to go, but he’ll wake up an hour early because he loves to be prepared) he’ll kiss you awake and buy you Starbucks cake pops in lieu of breakfast while you tease him about being a terrible nutritionist for it. Both of these will taste like an apology. His uncle will pick up the both of you and drive you to LAX, and you’ll hold hands in the backseat and listen to the city waking up.

Then: before he checks in, he’ll take you aside. He’ll say, I didn’t want to do this in public, I know this is sudden, and I want you to know you can say no. Just like you heard him practicing on the phone with Tooru. And Hajime will offer you something irresistible. He’ll tell you that he can’t stand the thought of these circumstances pulling you apart, that he knows you’ve already agreed to split up but that he wants to fight for this, that he’ll be grateful if you give him any chance at all.

And you will say yes.

This, you think, eyes stinging as you stare into the dark, is the whole problem.

You love Hajime, enough that you could be happy, FaceTiming him and falling asleep to the sound of his tinned voice and paying a fortune for the price of love. You’ve loved him so much for years now; a younger you would have bought a plane ticket on the spot. You’ve loved him so long you know: when he’s in Japan, Hajime will forget you exist.

You don’t blame him for it, necessarily. He isn’t an online person, his itinerary is always packed when he visits, he’s awful at calculating the time difference. Every trip starts off with a daily call and ends with days of radio silence before he shows up back home, ready to wrap you in a bear hug and make all your worries go away.

You trust Hajime, and you can live with short bursts of this. You can’t extend that to indefinitely, maybe forever. Hajime’s life—his dream job, his family, his friends, mostly—is in Japan. He loves his home.

You love California. It’s many things to you, including the place you met Hajime. This state is love to you.

Your paths must diverge here, and if you let him—if he asks you, strong voice gone shy, rough features softening for you, you’ll look into his beautiful stupid face that you love and agree without thinking, because who needs a brain when you have a heart? Your heart, the heart he holds, cannot be shattered six months down the line, when he wakes up and realizes that he hates the string tying him to the golden coast.

The light grey hour before dawn lets in a little light, and you wonder at the way the early morning makes everything feel unreal and distant. You’re grateful, though. You need this to do what you’re going to do.

You lift the dead weight of his arm, slide out of the bed, socked feet hitting the cold floor. You drop your phone when you unplug it and freeze, looking back to see if the sound woke him. Three even breaths later, you relax, a little too much. You break, you give in, and you bend over him, a wet teardrop shining in the air between you before landing on his face. The track looks nearly natural, though there’s a peaceful smile on his face as he sleeps. You brush a thumb softly beneath his eye, wiping away the evidence of it, and you can’t help it. You kiss his cheek, hoping he can feel your love like this, hope that he knows that you’re saving him from yourself.

He rouses slightly, eyes bleary and barely open, dark and pleased and perfect. You can’t look at them too long.

“Just getting some water,” you murmur against his warm skin. “Go back to sleep.”

He makes a noise deep in his chest and his eyes shut. You linger for a moment, tell him you love him and call him by name for the last time, and slip away as the sun rises.

part two here

[luxexhomines]

S

Ahhh, thank you guys so much for asking!! I just compiled them all into one post so I don’t clog up your dash with several posts. Here we go! I’m going to tag this as discourse and put a cut because my answers to the letters might not please everyone, aha. It’s long, too. Major spoilers for NDRV3.

S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?

Honestly, I’m not super sure at this point. Surprise, surprise, I only just recently finished watching the rest of NDRV3 and started writing for it. And I haven’t thought about tropes that much, though I’m sure I’ve written plenty of them into my writing at some point, even if not posted on here. 

If we’re going to go Danganronpa-centric, as this is my side blog for Danganronpa writing, I’d say that I fall in love with characters that are contradictory and with seemingly bipolar or gray morals despite probably having morals as straight as an arrow myself, i.e. Nagito or Kokichi. The characters playing “straight man” and relating to the reader’s perspective are also my favorite; in a wacky situation, they offer reason and normal reactions, which I would peg Hajime as (maybe Kazuichi, too, although he’s more of a crybaby). In fanfiction, I just love hurt & comfort fics, especially involving–you guessed it–Kokichi. I am particularly partial to the Oumota chapter 5 and chapter 5 trial rewrites, which, lucky for me, both of which are quite often rewritten by spectacular writers.

If we’re going in general, I always end up reading manga with an independent, strong and decisive character that crosses worlds and/or bodies by accident or death and becomes incredibly powerful/influential in the world and dominates over other characters with skills ranging from cooking to fighting. I guess I read a lot of manhua with martial arts or other manga with game aspects to it.Writing-wise, I love reading slow burn fics, even if I haven’t read one in quite some time. 

T: Any fandom tropes you can’t stand?

I have a feeling this is going to go into highly controversial areas, so if you ultra ship Kaito x Maki, please turn away now...

I just hate that “man saves woman” from herself or traumatic past trope. Don’t get me wrong, I love hurt/comfort like I mentioned, but to specify, what I mean is when a strong and independent woman needs saving by a man. I realize Maki has a lot of issues from her past as an assassin and that Kaito is a viable, good option for helping her out and facing those issues, but the fact of him being a man and the way he just swoops in and fixes things forcefully by pulling her along for training just irks me. And before you ask, yes, if Kaede did it instead as a woman I would have less of a problem with it, even if I don’t like that somehow after a couple days of training together Maki somehow is better able to get along with others and most notably Shuichi despite having spent the previous entire time cooped up in her Ultimate room alone, is willing to use her experience as an assassin to help out with the investigation when she just walked out in the past, etc. Problems from a past like that would never be so easily faced in reality; people and their minds are much more stubborn than we’d like to think, too. 

In general, I am also highly averse to the Women in Refrigerators trope. To some extent, I feel that Kaede fits this trope, as a.) she is an important, pivotal, incredibly fleshed out female character and even the initial protagonist of ndrv3, b.) she dies arbitrarily for a murder she did not commit, c.) a big part of her death is written into Shuichi’s character development for making him grow as the protagonist (he sheds the cap, faces the truth, and the memory of Kaede’s last wishes serves as his support to reveal the truth several times in trial), and of course, d.) her death in the execution is grotesque as befitting of a Danganronpa execution. Kaede deserved so. much. more.

There are probably more out there, but I won’t mention them for the sake of length & time. 

U: Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

Okay! So don’t hate me for this, but I haven’t been really keeping up a bunch with fanfiction writers or specific ones that much. It just hasn’t ever been a habit of mine in the past to follow one writer–ironic, I know. There’s one that immediately comes to mind, but she’s not part of the Danganronpa fandom, so unless someone asks, I’ll leave her out of it. However, there are a couple of writers that I recently discovered through the Oumota weekend event and which I follow on my main blog, and I thoroughly enjoy reading their work. Their work also contains mentions of NDRV3 spoilers!

1. @kirastrations

I recently reblogged her work on this blog because I have so much love for the Oumota fic she wrote (which deserves more love!). It’s called One by One, One After Another, and I simply adore the way she writes Kaito’s character and experiences with the other characters throughout the game and the overarching feeling that comes across as a result of the situation and what ensues. The diction choices she makes is absolute art; I see the imagery so clearly in my head, and not a single word of hers is wasted. It’s concise while being aptly and most beautifully descriptive. Even though I’m not a huge fan of Kaito, the way she writes him and his actions make me love him. I would describe the work as a futile yet desperate and exquisite struggling, an embodiment of angst that is so beautifully painful that it appears to be an illusion. I haven’t had a chance to check out other works from her just yet, but that’s on my to-do list!

2. @golden-redhead

I love, love, love their work too. They recently posted Lavender, a Kirumi x Kaede (Tojomatsu? Kaerumi? Kirumatsu?) work for femslash Feb, and it is a post-reality Virtual AU short fic. The way they write the interaction between Kirumi and Kaede offers such a delicate, carefully constructed image and story while creating some tension between the two. They also format the story with Kirumi’s thoughts in a simple and straightforward way that is just so delicious to read. Aspects of Kirumi explored are small things that unravel into a bigger statement about her character and the nature of the killing game and the impact it has left on her. It reminds me of the way a player might gently stack up a house of cards–attentively, with a sharp eye and feel. 

3. @starlightwritesalie

They wrote these two Oumota fics for the weekend that I fell in love with, especially the one for Day 1: Heroes/Villains. Sometimes when living in the world of Danganronpa, you forget that these tragic situations and the killing game are experienced, in essence, by children. You can argue that they’re older than high schoolers for the first two games, but mentally they are still high schoolers, and let’s face it–a couple years above the legal age of being an adult in America, 18, can hardly be counted as an adult, either. They reminded me of that sickening fact so poetically yet bluntly, and the story they write only serves as a further reminder of that fact. They write statements about the situation and how the pair act in the situation that are so agonizing yet irrefutable–as is the situation that they’re both trapped in. The ending is so unbearably cruel, packed with pain, but the way they create it is so decisively soft and snatches away my breath with the truth at the heart of the game, the situation. 

So there you have it! Sorry that my answers are so long... I have too much to say, and especially about the people whom I adore. Since it said to pick 3, I didn’t get to include these two, but I also love aroseandapen and mystic-mints dearly. If you ask, I’ll write a whole paragraph on why I love them, too, although I suspect by this time you all are getting rather tired of all my talking, haha. I also didn’t include imagines blogs, but if you’re curious, feel free to ask about that since I am still kind of a imagines blog! I guess at this point I’m kind of a fusion of an imagines blog and normal fanfiction writing blog.

Thanks for asking, and if you have any more questions, feel free to shoot an ask!