Notes

You woke up with your head split apart. You felt your mind being pulled one way and another,your consciousness bristling and crackling in the cauldron of your memories. Not one of them make sense. None of them make sense without the whole, but the whole was volatile. It refused fo form. You screamed, perhaps, soundlessly, as your mind tried to settle. Neither one nor the other would give in. So why not both? They're both you.

… Who are you?

You got up from the place you had slumbered/lived/waited in. It was a large sleeping capsule of a sort, its lid open. You felt your head being weighed down by an unfamiliar/familiar burden. Your hair. Has it always been this long? Yes, of course. You looked around the room as your Ultimate eyesight (is it? Yes, of course it is) quickly adjusted to the dim light. You are not the first to wake up. There was someone else, standing next to you. He crouched down, his eye on level to yours. His face was one of relief. He was worried about you. More than anything, he trusts you. Why does he trust you so much?

"Thank goodness. You're awake," he said. Then he asked of you, no fear in his voice, "Are you okay, Hajime? Or... Izuru?"

He had called you two ways. Two names, both yours. Impossible. You remembered him both ways, and both times, he was a stranger. But both times he had tried to save you in spite of that.

The force that had put you here wanted you to be just one, to discard the other as it was discared before. But you have the Ultimate mind. You don't have to heed it.

One? How boring.

They're both you.

---

Makoto Naegi was the first to wake up, and he didn't remember a thing. He remembered that there was something wrong with the Neo World Program. A virus that would see the Survivors of Despair destroyed. He had tried all he could to save them. He gave Hajime Hinata the clues he needed to escape. He had called his trusted friends for help. Lastly, he had lied on the capsule and wired himself in. It was a risky thing he did, but Makoto had trust in both his friends and the remaining Survivors.

Now he was awake, and he couldn't remember anything else. Izuru... Hajime was typing away at the computers at the center of the room, circled by the other sleeping capsules. He was the second to wake up, and he went to the computer without giving Makoto anything more than a second glance. Makoto wasn't worried. The fact that he couldn't remember anything meant that they did it, right? They initiated the Shutdown Sequence, which means they would have every memory they made in the Program erased.

But Izuru seemed to know what he was doing.

"Hajime...?" Makoto asked, for the third time, this time calling him by a different name. "What are you doing?"

He looked at him with those sharp red eyes of his. When he finally answered, it didn't go along with those red eyes at all.

"I'm saving my friends."

---
Kyoko Kirigiri knew the chance of survival was slim, but she trusted Makoto. Excessive hope is a bad trait for a detective to have. It dilutes your reasoning. But Makoto's hope had never let her down before. It was her trust in him and in his excessive hope that had kept them alive this far.

The program was a gamble, the Forced Shutdown, even more so. But Makoto had trusted the Survivors of Despairs that they would do the right thing, all the way to the end. Did he? All Kyoko had to do was to be there, and to observe. And he did, and he saw the Survivors made their choice.

The room was dim, illuminated by the green light of the capsules and the blue of the screens. She got up from here sleeping capsule and asessed her surrounding. Seven of the capsules are open. Byakuya was still asleep in the capsule next to hers. Makoto? Makoto was awake, standing next to the computers at the centre of the room, where Izuru Kamukura was typing away.

Makoto seemed to be in no harm, but she made her way carefully to him anyway. Izuru's ears perked up, she noticed. He knew she was awake, but make no attempt to stop her.

"Makoto?" Kyoko asked. "Are you alright?"

He turned to see her and his eyes lit up. "Kyoko! Thank goodness you're okay! I was worried that, well. Thank you for coming!"

"You don't have to thank us twice. Of course we came."

"Twice?"

Something else clicked in the ultimate detective's mind. She remembered everything that transpired in the program, how Alter Junko came to them and how Hajime had come through and that stupid scene with Gekkogahara's rabbit creature. But if the shutdown was succesful, she shouldn't be able to remember any of it, yet she did. And Makoto didn't.

She turned to the only solution she could deduce. "Izuru Kamukura? Or should I call you Hajime Hinata?"

For a second there was only the clicking noise on the keyboard, and then it stopped. The long-haired boy turned his red eyes towards her. "You remember everything, then?"

Kyoko nodded.

He turned back to his computer. "So it works. Of course, it works. Why wouldn't it?" For a second there was an uncharacteristic doubt in his voice.

"So which are you? Hajime Hinata or Izuru Kamukura?"

"Can't I be both?" The boy said as he went back to the computer.

---
Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu thought he was waking up from a nightmare, one where Peko died to save him. Then he realised that the world was not much better. The cables ran from his sleeping capsule and circled all the others, the screens on the pillar at the center of the room shone brightly at his one eye. He felt his mind rolling in his head, the memories fighting each other. He had ordered thousand of deaths. He had been an asshole on a school trip. He had caused the destruction of civilizations. He had met people he can call his friends. Peko was dead in one of them, not the other, but now she was dead in both.

He jolted up from his capsule and scrambled instinctively, to where he knew she'd been sleeping. There she was, her grey hair unbraided, her face filled with countless scars. He hit the glass of his capsule, called her name, but none of them changed the fact. She was dead.

"Fuyuhiko?" Hajime was calling his name. "It's alright. I can wake her up."

He turned to the source of the voice, but it wasn't Hajime standing there. It was the baddest guy of them all.

"Kamukura? Who the fuck invited you here?"

"It's me, Hajime," he said, with Hajime voice. "I can get her out, you just have to wait. And trust me." After a second, he added, "Can I borrow Peko's sword?"

---
Sonia Nevermind will never be queen. The phrase went back and forth as she opened her eye, but her mind wouldn't settle on why. Why, because she did something embarassing during the school trip? Or because she had ordered the murder of countless people, had let her kingdom be destroyed? Or was it because, the one who would be her king, the Lord of Darkness, is dead?

"Somebody! Explain to me what is going on!" she said in her most matronly voice as she rose from her sleeping capsule. She was wearing a dark, tattered dress, her hair was dressed up with a skull hairclip. The dress was much more revealing that she remembered, or was it? Nevermind, she remembered putting it on herself.

There were people in the centre of the room, converging around the computer and the man who was typing away at the centre of it. Hajime Hinata. He turned to her after her outburst and smiled. "Glad to have you back, Sonia."

It was Hajime, and yet it wasn't. His eyes were odd, not the same soft green as she remembered them. She made her way to him, but then she saw the capsule next to hers. The Lord of Darkness, with his scarf, his monochrome hair, the scar running down his eye. Sonia still refused to believe it. He died, didn't he? Was he not coming back?

"Ugh... Ouch," somebody said behind him. Purple mane, sharp teeth. Kazuichi Soda was getting up from his capsule. "Miss Sonia! Are you alright?"

"Oh, Soda. Hello," she said noncomittaly.

"Soda!" Hajime exclaimed from where he was. He didn't so much as glance at them, but he was sincere. "So that just leaves..."

"Gah, where the hell are we?" a harsh feminine voice cried from the other end of the room. Akane Owari. She jumped out of her capsule with her hands spread like claws. "Huh, that you, Hajime?"

"Welcome back, Akane," Hajime said, although he was unable to pull his eyes away from the screen to see her. Something inside him was telling him it wasn't necessary, but even so, he wanted to know for sure that she was all right.

"So, that's everyone then?" said Makoto Naegi. "We should talk about what we're gonna do from now on."

"No!" Hajime said, surprising even himself with the firmness in his voice. Still he typed away into his computer. "That's not everyone, not yet."

The others converged around him, watching as numbers and graphs flit through the screen, as his fingers flew on the keyboard with what appeared to be superhuman speed.

"I see what you're trying to do," said Byakuya Togami, who had emerged from his sleeping capsule earlier, his memory intact. "Are you sure you're capable of such feat?"

"Trying to do, what, what?" Soda said. "Whats going on?"

"I'm hungry," Akane muttered.

"Hajime! Can you really...?" Sonia started. "No! No doubt! I order you to keep trying."

Fuyuhiko took a glance on his guard's capsule before saying what he had been hoping for, "You can save Peko, can you?"

The detective, Kyoko, spoke up, "Technically, they aren't dead. So if you can reverse their cognition of their death..."

Hajime typed and typed on the keyboard through all this, as the others chattered away their hope an despair. His concentration was ultimate in theory, but he felt his old self clattering in the background. Can we really do this? Will they be okay? *Yes, shut up*. And then, one tap with a finality to it, and he stopped. The others went quiet and looked at him expectantly.

"I was made to be the ultimate hope, wasn't I?" He said, quietly, as if he was trying to convince himself that as much as he was convincing his friends. "Put your hope in me."