Ninsei sat on his bed, legs crossed, calloused hands on his knees. His hair was disheveled, his clothes in place only by the virtue of him having so little of them on his body in the first place. His gaze was fixed on his door, awaiting someone open it, something, anything: he desperately wanted attention yet didn’t want to face any of his classmates for it.
They... Even Tsubaki had murdered someone. The way Suzuka had earlier spoken, too-- It made his heart hurt, even to think of it. He had been... Rude, to her, too. Haruo, Suzuka. Who else would he hurt next? And not only with words, that time.
He had promised to never to cry, and now he had to promise to never to be angered. The hollowness of his thoughts, that he welcomed with open arms, pressing his knuckles against his forehead. He regretted throwing the headphones on the floor so that they had broken, and the only audible voice now being static accompanied by distant parts of sentences and singing. He fiddled with them and put them over his ears anyway, laying backwards on his bed, kicking his legs away from underneath himself.
There was only static, now, and that was how he fell asleep.
The announcement woke him up, audible through the white noise.
Ninsei removed the headphones and listened, staring at his ceiling as he did. The other unfamiliar: the other suspiciously reminiscent of the cat-inspired mascot.
A virtual reality testing?..
There was nothing else but static in his thoughts, somewhere far away a noise whispering that it was what he must do.
It sounded like a fun game, something morbid in these circumstances. Stand-ins for the passed students? It sounded awful. He had never played a lot of games, being the sporty type, so he didn’t know if he could be of any help in this game of theirs.
He promised to try: not for his own sake, but for everyone else’s. He... He couldn’t deny he didn’t want to go home, though. Maybe this all had been just a virtual game from the start, a fluke, utterly thoroughly fake. It was a comforting thought, one Ninsei couldn’t stop himself from indulging himself in.
Ninsei opened his eyes, standing up from his bed.
Slowly, Ninsei made his way towards the Bronze station.
He couldn’t make himself get out of the train. He sat on his bench, staring outside at the station through the clean glass. What if it was just a trap. A false promise.
He willed himself to move, to do anything: his thoughts were static and his limbs unmoving. Someone boarded the train, too, he could tell: footsteps padding against the floor.
“I... I’m going play-- Going to play the game.” His voice was a promise and an encouragement to himself all in one, black eyes opening to fix their gaze on one of the six remaining students.
The static of his thoughts was too much, and he fell silent. He had no tears to cry, no anger to shout, and something was carving him empty from the inside out. He held his own hands together, gaze averting to the floor. On his soft features, there were marks of exhaustion, but no trace of any other emotion.
