Chapter 2: Duel Noir 1, part 1
Return to the beginning?
Danganronpa Kirigiri Volume 1
Chapter 2: Duel Noir 1, part 1
He dreamed of being burned in a furious blaze.
When he woke up, the sweat from his brow had traveled down to dampen his cheeks. Or maybe those were tears? He wiped them off casually with his right hand.
He was in a hospital waiting room. Nurses came and went to quiet instrumental music, the scent of disinfectant sprinkling behind them. The electronic display would never show his number.
"It seems it"s going to take about an hour," an old man said from the seat next to him.
But he just gave a standard response and let himself ignore it. If he engaged, the old man was never gonna shut up. He looked away, pretending to fiddle with his cellphone.
"Rehabilitation, is it? That has to be tough," the old man said anyway.
"Nah, today my legs hurt, so I"m getting some meds..." he mumbled while looking down at his phone screen, clearly indicating that he didn"t want to partic.i.p.ate in the conversation.
"The cost of medication is nothing to sneeze at either, is it? And the government"s a.s.sistance doesn"t amount to much. You"re not being compensated nearly enough for the injuries you"ve had to live with," the old man said in a kind voice.
He raised his head to look at the old man. The old man wore a felt hat tipped over his eyes, and an expensive-looking suit. There was an old, long scar that cut across the right side of his mouth, so that when he smiled, it seemed to warp and twist.
"Who are you?" he responded to the old man in a belligerent tone. "How do you know me? Are you with the media?"
"I"m a sympathetic stranger." The old man"s scar twisted. "Someone with compa.s.sion and empathy for you."
"Oh, so this is about religion? Then go hit someone else up. I"m sick of that s.h.i.t. You guys just feed off of the weak."
"No, we have no affiliation to any religion. Nor do we have ties to the media, of course."
"So then what?!" His voice was starting to become increasingly uncontrolled.
"These are the kind of people that we are." The old man held out a jet-black business card.
"Victims" Catharsis Committee...?"
"That"s correct. Furthermore, we have no connection to the government, so I"d like for you to consider us as an independent non-profit organization."
"You really are with some kinda religious thing, aren"t you? You say it"s group therapy or a care seminar, and act all kind and caring to get close to people, and then you take outrageous amounts of money in lecture fees. Too bad, Gramps. You gotta go for the easier ones with that c.r.a.p," he spat, moving to get up from his chair and go somewhere else. And then—
"You don"t want revenge?"
The old man"s murmur reached his ears.
"What did you say?" He stopped without thinking, turning around.
"We have an interest in the depths of your darkness. I see; you do indeed have a deep, dense darkness living inside of you." The old man touched the brim of his hat, as if adjusting its position on his head, but his eyes remained covered. "It would be difficult to say you had been happy, but you once had an ordinary, lackl.u.s.ter life. You didn"t bother anyone, worked a respectable job, and accordingly, you had people who loved you. And then, five years ago, crime stole everything from your life. Brusquely, unreasonably, completely... What have you ever done to deserve that? No, you are innocent. At the very least, you never arbitrarily ruined anyone"s life, or anything of the sort."
The old man"s voice caused his heart to waver. Strangely enough, it almost sounded like he was hearing his own voice.
"What we offer is nothing like therapy. Let us leave that, too, to the easier ones. We a.s.sist people with taking back their own lives. We are an organization that can return what was stolen from you in its entirety."
"Taking back... my own life?"
"You have the right... no, the obligation to do so. For the sake of those who were lost due to that abominable crime."
The old man"s confident tone displayed persuasive power strong enough to brighten even his soul, that had long ago given up. Just like the old man suggested, he recognized himself as a "robbed protagonist". The spotlight wasn"t shutting off. It certainly wasn"t there to illuminate anyone else, either. It was there to illuminate his own future...
But he smiled bitterly, tossing those delusions to the side. "Ever since then, lots of people have pa.s.sed me by. Policemen, prosecutors, defense attorneys, doctors, insurance workers... In the end, none of them ever saved me. And now I"ve finally reached the point of getting sympathetic strangers. Honestly. If I have to pick someone to thank, it"d have to be the doctors. At least they made it so I can stand on my own in this world again. But that"s all I got. I"m nothing but a corpse that"s just barely clinging to life... Any hopes and dreams I had died on that day." He turned his back on the old man, and left his seat behind.
"I will be waiting in the park outside. If you have an interest in our Catharsis, please do come on over," the old man"s voice came from behind him, as he disappeared into the shop.
Writing off his involvement in the crime as just bad luck would be an understatement.
Five years ago, there was a series of arsons near his house. The security cameras in the area never caught the culprit on tape, and residents lived in fear of a crime with no criminal.
The arsons continued for days. One night, the fires that had stayed relatively small up until then grew into something ma.s.sive. Probably in part because the air was dry that night. The fire burned down two homes. His family had been living in one of them. Him, his wife, and his two-year-old son. All three of them were severely burned, but he was the only one who was saved.
There were many more arson cases continuing after that, but a certain detective paved the way to solving them all in one fell swoop. The detective called attention to the fact that if you connected the dots of the arson sites, it made a bizarre star shape. An astrologer in the divination business lived in the middle of the star.
The detective went to the astrologer"s home immediately. But the man had already burned to death. He had written down some last words that were left next to him: some incomprehensible thing along the lines of "I set the fires to change the path of the stars". With the conclusion that the suspect was dead, the case was closed.
When he heard the news, he was thrown into chaos. The sword that he"d been sharpening on the grindstone of hatred, that he"d planned on someday sticking into the culprit"s chest, no longer had a target. He didn"t know who he could throw his anger at anymore. He couldn"t turn to his dead wife or son, either.
Five years had pa.s.sed since then, and his body at least had seen great improvement. But his soul was dead. He had lost his job, and was somehow managing on compensation payments from the state. He didn"t even pretend to have anything to live for, thinking this life would continue on until its conclusion, with no meaning, with the winner in this game of life already decided...
Until he heard the word "revenge" from that old man just now.
It was a single ray of light in the darkness. No one had ever shown him light like that before. Well, most likely, no one had even understood the depths of his darkness in the first place. What he had been searching for was not a way to clear away the darkness, but a signpost to guide him through the dark abyss.
Stay tuned for the next update next Sunday (PST)!
Read the rules before commenting!