Justice Reborn (?) | Kei | Motive Reaction
Just as the grim reality of desensitization had set in for Kei, everything had been upended for her once again. The fire, which had the increasingly-numb legal assistant close to visibly panicking, Monokuma’s leg being ripped off, which hadn’t made keeping it together any easier for Kei, the descent to a new area, underground, as if escape wasn’t difficult enough (prolonged, this ‘Monomi’ had said, this game would be 'prolonged’…) being met with a crop of new students (she presumed…) and yet another captor…
…at least the massive shock of those recent events had forced Kei to come back to her senses, just a bit. She had been going through the motions for the past while, so to speak, barely reacting to anything or anyone outside of trials that she’d been wandering half-asleep into, withdrawing from the group in favor of legal studies that would probably never see use (she’d been one of the possible targets on that note, even if TK had died instead this time around, it was but a matter of time, wasn’t it), and letting the waves of despair this whole farce was creating wash over her when she should have been fighting against them. Pathetic that it had taken all of this to wake Kei up from her increasing stupor, but she never had claimed to be the strongest or best of people.
Maybe this could be a new start, she told herself. Maybe she could actually redeem herself somewhat. Maybe, if she actually survived this, she could emerge as someone her father would be proud to call his daughter, as someone actually worthy of the Katsuya family name.
And for a while, Kei had actually managed to make herself feel a bit better. A bit relieved. A bit deserving of a decent nights’ rest and more than trifling amount of food a day, because it had taken a lull in the mutual killing game (and Miyako’s expressions of concern, those really had gotten to her) to make Kei realize how badly she had been neglecting herself. (She’d never been this bad at the law offices, even if she had fainted a few times… but then, attorneys didn’t typically go around killing each other.) But at the back of her mind, she knew the lull wasn’t going to last forever, that the routine of murders, trials, and executions would start again very soon, and that she would probably backslide once more.
Not that the motive had personally meant much to Kei when it did drop, the unfamiliar voice of Monomi issuing an offer to… somehow erase or alter something in their past.
“…”
Kei spent a few moments staring at her ID blankly before pocketing it without so much as a second glance at the screen. Such an offer meant little to her - if there were things she was ashamed of in her past, they all came from her personal weaknesses, from her failure to be anything but an uninteresting and unsatisfying child (up until she’d discovered law) who had done nothing but burden her father with her existence. And retroactively changing oneself was probably out of the question.
(There was… well, there was the moment her mother had left the family, but changing that moment wouldn’t change anything in the long run. Megumi Katsuya had never once been happy in her marriage, Kei had accepted that long ago, and if the moment where she had left her husband and her daughter was erased from time, it probably would have occurred later. And if it didn’t… could she really wish her mother over a decade of misery for a few moments of selfish happiness on her end?
She could not, Kei decided. Deeply flawed she might have been, but she was not terrible enough to ever wish something like that on anyone, much less the woman who had given birth to her, one whose only crime was running away from a man who felt obligated to marry her and leaving her daughter one parent short.)
But then, as her weeks in her prior prison had proven, her personal disinterest in a motive did not preclude anyone else from acting on it, especially people in a population… a now-doubled population that had grown increasingly desensitized to the act of murder and no doubt included people with things they would desperately wish to retcon out of their pasts. As much as Kei wanted to cling to idealism and believe that this time, someone wouldn’t take the bait, it had become nigh-impossible to do so after so long.
Someone would die sooner or later. It was just a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Again. She wasn’t proud enough to pretend she could do anything to change this, let alone get everyone out before it could happen again (at least this time… ?). That had been thoroughly proven.
