smashacademy | (semi-narration) and [action]: Past Blasting

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(semi-narration) and [action]: Past Blasting

When he came to, his vision phased into a classroom from the grainy blur it started out as. Rows of desks lined up from the back where he sat, in a desk of his own.

It was always a goddamn desk. Mondo was sure by now that the haziest points of his memory all revolved around this one unremarkable piece of furniture. It had nothing to do with his inability to cogitate class lectures, which were also the number one most fuzzy and tremendously dull moments in his traffic accident of a life. No. It was like a teleportation pad that transported him across voids sundered by his amnesia.

And this was the third time he'd woken up in one without ever recalling sitting down in it.

----

The second time was only a little over a month ago. Was it anymore? Time just didn't make sense the way it used to. There's a classroom. Rows of desks. He wakes up with a head full of cotton and an eyeful of flowing black hair. His sights snap into adjustment in a flash because that's sure not the last thing he remembered seeing. And neither is that teacher he doesn't recognize scrawling on a chalkboard posted in a classroom he doesn't go to and even more earthshaking for him are the identities of the students' backs before him.

They're... Hope's Peak students. Class 78, all here in the living flesh. All here, in the... Mondo ejects himself from his seat from the mental impact, gripping onto the sides of the desk like it was the only thing keeping him from falling over. Really, his thoughts could swirl together and pop out summed up in his next exclamation.

"What the fuck am I doing here?!"

His interruption cuts the string of lecture short and bends everyone's necks around. Most of the looks directed at him are addled, stupefied like they don't know what to tell him or where this outburst came from. Mondo glances around and feels the hot pinpricks of stress sink into him. All of this is strange- their uniforms, their collective presence, this normal-looking situation, the bright sunlight pouring into the room, no bars or bolts blocking the outside world from sight. In the absence of the teacher's retaliation, Kiyotaka is the first to speak up, his face stiffening back into its usual severity.

"What's the meaning of this? It's obvious, isn't it? You're here to learn!"

"No, no! That ain't what I mean! I-I mean..." He struggles to find the words to describe what happened without it sounding crazy.

"Then what are you talking about?" asked Aoi.

"Maybe he fell asleep and forgot he went to class..." Hifumi posited.

Okay, fine. Maybe it had to sound crazy. This entire situation was crazy, so why couldn't he be a little crazy, too? "I fell into a weird hole, and the next thing I know... I wound up here!"

The entire class goes back to staring at him like he was eating his own hair. Then it breaks out into laughter.

"You sure about that??" laughs Leon from the front of the room. "Man, I didn't think I hit your head THAT hard in P.E..."

"Maybe you ate lunch too fast, dude!" Yasuhiro decides to chime in.

This isn't the kind of clarification he wanted at all. Feeling hotter than ever before with shame, he rises to full height and makes his way to the door spouting an excuse to leave.

"Shit... I gotta go to the nurse! See ya!" The door slides open and slides shut with a final thump, leaving the classroom's laughter to die off and the light mood to plummet, heavy with real concern.

In truth, he never went to the nurse. He got carried away by his surroundings, blown away by the fact that this was Hope's Peak, that dim cagelike atmosphere full of students in classrooms and natural lighting. It looked like a real high school, like the kind of high school he wanted to experience. Why was he here all of a sudden? Was this some kind of dream? Everyone seemed to remember him, but it had been clear back then that they remembered things he didn't, and whatever he remembered didn't fit their understanding. All he knew was that it would never make sense to him, and that the culprit was probably a huge lapse in memory. It freaked him out bad.

No matter how fascinating it was to see Hope's Peak operate like a real high school, Mondo was quick to find the exit. Maybe it was ingrained from the time he wanted nothing more than to break free of the trapped feeling, and to him the school was symbolic of despair. The anxiety that the doors and windows would be barred shut again at any moment only quickened his escape.

And then he went... home. God, it had been years since he'd gone home. He went straight home because he wanted to prove to himself that he could, and sure enough, he made it. Without bumming around for long he mounted his precious bike- HIS bike, and went straight to one of the Crazy Diamond's hangouts feeling like he was riding on paradise's clouds. That feeling only intensified when he saw them there, shooting the shit to make night come faster, like it was any old day in the life he left behind. Overjoyed as he was, none of the guys could understand why he was holding back tears and slinging arms around them so much.

He spent the rest of the day with them and didn't look back. It was the best night he'd had in a damn long time.

When he returned home at two in the morning, he was surprised to find both Kiyotaka and Chihiro standing there. Kiyotaka didn't waste a breath before sending barrages of exasperated scolding upon him for interrupting class and lying to skip school, and Chihiro quietly handed him the bag he left behind and didn't even know he had. Beyond mere duty as classmates, they came because they were worried- their persistence in coming, even when it was the middle of the night, was evidence of that. Since they took so much trouble for him, and they were his closer friends from the Hope's Peak mess, he promised he would explain his bizarre situation to them tomorrow.

That said, the next day, nobody understood quite yet why Mondo was acting so strangely. They noticed something about him wasn't 'natural', and there were some whispers about him going crazy for real, but that was about the extent. His classmates were living on a completely different plane now. They would refer to stuff he never personally experienced but technically 'did'. He quickly learned that, just like the members of his gang, they had experienced a different Mondo altogether. It felt like he was some kind of understudy, like he was filling a role left behind by some other Mondo who was missing in action. Like he said he would, he got together with Chihiro and Kiyotaka during lunch period and explained himself to them. He never expected them to understand completely, and they didn't. Could he blame them? It got especially heavy when he summarized the game of mutual killing, that Class 78 was coerced to kill each other, one of their classmates was responsible for orchestrating the whole mess, and that the three of them suffered a cruel fate because of it. He did not have the heart to describe it, nor did he think it was good to go into that sort of gritty who-killed-who detail at that moment, no matter what their curiosities begged of him. As wacky as Mondo's story seemed, they could not help but believe him due to how sincere his emotions seemed when detailing it. In the end, he confessed with dismay that he could not remember a single day of their more carefree high school lives, and that if they could fill him in, he would be grateful. They were impacted greatly by this and all the other revelations and were more than happy to support their friend with his difficulties. Mondo was still Mondo, even if he had forgotten parts of himself.

He could have told the whole class about his predicament, but it felt impossible when the mastermind herself was walking around. That's why with most everyone else, he cut off more of his explanation and they only understood that he was experiencing some memory problems. Over time, he knew he would need to warn everybody of Junko's future designs. He just wasn't sure how to keep Junko from eventually catching wind that they were onto her.

The first week of his new life was the strangest and took a bit of adjustment on his part. He often wondered when he would wake up from what must be one of those 'alternate universe' things and couldn't detach himself from the idea that this wasn't real somehow. Even though they no longer shared the same stream of memories, Mondo got a glimpse of what everyone's friendships were like, and even the nature of some of his own, unspoiled by the mar of murder and despair. Ironically, it was his own side of the relationship that he couldn't peer into, which was completely ass backwards. He could only guess, and that was easy enough. As time went on, even without memories of the past 6 months he'd forgotten, he fell into place with Class 78 as easily as a jigsaw piece. Soon enough, he was smiling and laughing with them, sweating alongside them during sports day, setting up preparations for ~~kyouko's cat cafe suggestion COME ON WE ALL KNOW IT~~ the culture festival... It was almost like he belonged there all along. Best of all, he got to relive his heyday with the gang he sorely missed again. And with each passing day, as a month became almost two, Smash Academy drifted further and further away. He let go of the idea that he was returning in favor of this lifestyle, and all the baggage he carried from the past was shoved away where he didn't have to acknowledge it.

That's why when he awoke from a nap to find himself in a classroom with the Smash emblem printed on a red flag...

----

...he was completely shaken.

[[Ever since AU month sort of came to a close, Mondo's been missing. His stuff isn't gone, so it doesn't seem like he's gone forever, but has he always been this... well, not here? The truth is, he's been gulped up by one of those rips in spacetime and hasn't returned until now. Spooky. Well, just in time for Halloween! Mondo's gonna start moseying around in crisis mode now, so go ahead and run into him if you'd like. ~~I swear I didn't mean to make a KI: Uprising reference; that's not the kind of crisis mode he's in~~]]

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There was a stark contrast between the Kiyotaka that once attended Hope's Peak Academy and the one that was now in his third and final year at Smash. He'd grown another inch or two, if anyone cared to notice such a minute detail; his hair, while still short, had been allowed to grow out just enough to cross over from "spiky" to "fluffy"; a well-stocked student kitchen left his face just a little less gaunt. But he also looked tired. While he never stopped being high strung or approaching things with too much enthusiasm, the bags under his eyes and the somewhat more normal pace he carried himself with made it clear that life was getting to him.

Because he was tired. Of high schools filled with nothing but danger and despair. Of corrupt authority figures. Of a broken system that punished valiant efforts and rewarded all the wrong people. Of being so helpless to change anything. Of watching people come and go, sometimes with a goodbye first, sometimes completely unpredictably.

When he first came back from Kalos to find Mondo missing, he tried not to think too deeply into it. Kiyotaka never liked it, but he did understand that sometimes he just had to get out and ride until dawn. But he never came back, and Kiyotaka wondered if he just drove on and never looked back. But his bike was still down in the parking lot, and it didn't look like he'd taken any of his meager belongings, which set off warning bells in his head. No note, no text messages - even if they classified themselves as mortal enemies these days (read: a thinly veiled excuse to talk to each other again) instead of as brothers, there was no way Mondo would just up and go without a word like some of the others.

Asking ~~shiny pidgey npc~~ students yielded no results. Putting a few posters up out in the city and asking the police ended up just as fruitless. But there were never any reports of a body being found, so Kiyotaka took that small sliver of hope and held it close in desperation.

It didn't take long for him to settle back into the safe familiarity of routine. That's what he did to take his mind off of things - focus on studies, on self-improvement, on the kinds of things that surely would have mattered in schools that weren't this one. Recently his studies included that of swordsmanship, because he was so sick of not being able to protect himself or others. He hated losing them.

It just so happened that he was headed to the stadium to break a few targets when he saw an all-too-familiar corn cob rounding the corner before the rest of the man followed. Kiyotaka's breath hitched, and the gym bag dropped from his hand.

Thank goodness.

There were a dozen things he wanted to ask, like where were you or are you even the same Oowada who left here but all he could manage was a quiet little,

"You came back."

Even though the possibility of finding Kiyotaka in this school had already dawned on him as he pressed forward, it was brief and not given nearly as much thought as the hows or whys behind being transported back to FDC all over again. Viciously he kept throwing himself against how he didn't want to accept that the life he had just grown used to and accepted was all gone. He'd wondered if everything was going to be the same as he'd left it, or if even this school would be a trip through memories and circumstances he never played a part in. Was this just a cycle he would never escape from? Was he going to fall through universe after universe for all time? Maybe he really was dead, and everything leading up from his execution was just some kind of hell. He believed in that possible reality harder than he would have ever done before.

He had no idea what Kiyotaka was going to be like until he ran into him like this. 'You came back' cleared it up instantly. In a way, he was grateful for those three words. It made him have to guess less about timeline continuity or whatever. Standing here now, the differences between the last snapshot memory he had of his brother and the one before him were starker than ever before. God, they really had changed, hadn't they? Mondo stuffed his hands in his pockets and averted eye contact as he tried to gather the chaos of his mind together so he could remember how he was supposed to be treating him right now.

"Yeah. I'm back. ...It's prolly been awhile, huh?"

It was like a switch had been flipped. Mondo's words were just unceremonious enough to snap Kiyotaka from his daze, and all of the sudden every question that had been humming in his mind threatened to burst forth all at once. He brought a heavy foot down as he swung his arm in the most over-the-top, accusatory pointing the world had ever seen.

"Is that all you have to say for yourself?! You were gone for months!"

His face worked itself into quite the lovely shade of red in a hurry, and his eyes shone with tears of anger and bittersweet relief. Probably been a while. Mondo Oowada had a lot of nerve. Did he even stop to think about the grief he caused other people sometimes?

"You left everything behind except for an explanation!! Where did you even go?"

He knew he would ask. There was no dancing around the subject, just like he couldn't expect to avoid an explanation back when he was transported to Hope's Peak. This was a little different; he could always pretend like he really had been gone on his own free will with a hastily-constructed lie, but what was the point of that? He was so damn tired of complications that he wanted to be as straightforward as possible. This version of Kiyotaka would believe him even quicker than the one he'd come to know the past two months, anyway. He quit skirting eye contact.

"God, would it kill ya to cool it down a little? I didn't do it by choice. I went back... to Hope's Peak."

Even Mondo was aware of how dramatic the hook to his story came out. Whatever. It was kind of cool this way, so he could deal with it.

That may not have quelled his fury but it certainly did make Mondo's disappearance a lot more forgivable in Kiyotaka's eyes. Still, that short explanation raised even more questions. His hand lowered to his side, fingers uncurling but remaining in an uncertain half-point.

"...You made it back to Japan?"

The middle of the halls... probably wasn't the best place to pry further into it. He scooped up the bag he dropped before, motioning for Mondo to follow him. He knew the school like the back of his hand, each classroom and when they'd be empty and left unlocked. The closest wasn't far at all. "Let's-- Let's move somewhere more private first!"

Mondo didn't really see a huge need, but he certainly wouldn't protest to it. "Okay, sure." He followed Kiyotaka to the classroom nearby and slowly made his way to the front row, planting his butt on the tops of one of the desks and facing Kiyotaka with a straight face.

"But yeah. I said I went to Hope's Peak, didn't I? So obviously I was in Japan, too." He kicked his leg back and forth and watched the white of his shoe sway. "But it was different this time. This time, we could leave whenever we wanted. None of that shit with the school trials and the killing and stuff even went down yet. It was..." He stopped his leg. "I showed up at a time we all forgot about. Y'know, like back in time? Everyone was alive, man! It was fucking nuts. It was... a completely different feeling from the last time we were at that school." There had been a flash of excitement jumping out of his eyes as he tried to describe it, like he was eager to continue.

In Kiyotaka's mind, "back to Hope's Peak" meant back to the bloody, depressing state it had been left in, standing in the ruined remains of whatever chaos had spread through Japan while they were trapped inside. Makoto never did describe the state of things while he'd been here the first time, and Kiyotaka's (mercifully limited) imagination was left to try to fill in all the blanks. He was expecting Mondo to finally confirm whether his worst fears were all true, but what he revealed instead...

Didn't make sense.

Kiyotaka readily accepted it, of course. Alternate realities, time travel, coming back from the dead-- that was all pretty standard fare here. But that of all things was the last thing he expected to hear.

"Then--!" He gripped the sides of the desk Mondo sat on, leaning in a little too close for comfort. He didn't even care to lecture him on not sitting on top of them in the first place. "Does that mean you remember what happened back then? If... If you went back to experience it, then surely...!"

Ahh, wait, he wasn't sure if that was sound logic. But screw it, none of this was logical. Either way, he wanted to know everything.

Mondo watched the pandemonium dance in his eyes from his VIP spot. He cocked an eyebrow and went, "What? No, stupid. Just 'cause I went back in time doesn't mean it's all gonna come flooding back! Yeah, I fucking wish. But..." Yes, he leaned in even closer and pushed the volume control knob down several notches, like it were highly classified information. "Everyone around me sure did."

If going back and actually reliving those moments did nothing to jog any memories, what hope was there of simply being told about things helping at all? Damn it. He shouldn't have held his hopes up so high; that just made them an easy target.

Still, he couldn't deny he was curious. Even if he couldn't recall anything directly on his own, at least these would be a few more pieces to the puzzle. Maybe it could put his mind at ease about a few things.

He tilted his head just slightly, eyes wide and unblinking. Their noses were practically touching by this point.

"...Go on," he urged, more than desperate. "Hold nothing back!"

"Why should I!" He snapped his head backward again. "I'll do my best to tell you as much as I can, even if I can't do it all in one go. Got no clue how I wound up there, but I think I fell through some kinda creepy purple wormhole and woke up in the middle of class. It was real freaky for me. First off, who the hell trips and wakes up in the middle of class? For a sec I thought I hit my head on something stupid and blacked out- wouldn't be the first time- and that's how I wound up in a completely different place than I remembered. But when I noticed who all were sitting in front of me and where we were, I had a fucking heart attack. Nothing made any goddamn sense and..." He wiped the nonexistent sweat off the back of his neck and glanced away for just a moment. "I blurted something stupid and got laughed at, shit like that. So I made some excuse to leave on the fly and ran out before anyone could follow me. Get my head together, y'know? I had to ditch school just so I knew what the hell was goin' on. Actually, I think you were dogging after me down that hall 'cause I heard those boots of yours stomping around, but you never caught me~♪."

The tail end of his explanation was sung out in that teasing neener-neener way children like to do.

"Don't act so proud of skipping out on class!"

It was a kneejerk response, one that hadn't changed a bit from the way he used to be two years ago. Four years ago. Longer. Hearing that some past and/or alternate version of himself went after Mondo was kind of comforting, to know that much was the same even in a time he couldn't remember. But then his brain caught up with his mouth and he mentally kicked himself, knowing that of course he probably would have freaked out just as badly in the same situation.

But he still would have stayed in school. Most likely.

"So, where did you end up going?"

Mondo's smile settled back into a neutral line. "Home. Just to see if I could. Wouldn't you do the same thing? There was a ton of junk flying through my head at the time, but it all somehow got filtered into that one impulse. Everything was more or less the same when I got there. I thought to myself, 'Yep. I'm the guy who lives here.' It was... really comforting."

Edited (my brain doesn't work right) 2014-11-12 02:55 (UTC)

Home.

No... given the chance, he really would have done the same after all. It was stupid to feel jealous. He told himself long ago that he accepted what happened to his home and to his family. To him. There was nothing he could do to change it. But there was still an ugly knot forming somewhere in his stomach, an anxious fluttering in his chest.

If Mondo could go back, maybe one day...

But he'd end up returning too, wouldn't he? ...Maybe that was for the best. He had too much here to completely abandon. What would he really do if given the option, though?

He turned his head away for a few seconds, staring out the window while he tried to sort his thoughts. Finally he looked back at Mondo, brow furrowed.

"Did you... try to stop it from happening?" Did he try to preserve his comfort? His home? His life?

TLDRSSSSS

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Aaaaaaaah