#not without massive debt anyways and student debt is already a bitch | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sunbrights · 7 years

Text

fic: by the claw of dragon (1/7)

fandom: danganronpa characters/pairings: natsumi kuzuryuu, fuyuhiko kuzuryuu, peko pekoyama + 77th class ensemble, et al. kuzupeko. character tags will be updated on AO3 with plot-relevant characters as chapters are posted. rating: m summary: The Kuzuryuu Clan stands on the precipice of the greatest era of its history. Kuzuryuu Natsumi promises to be the strongest leader the clan has ever seen, the Overlord of the South born again. That Hopes's Peak Academy would select her for it's 77th class was assumed, not hoped for.

To the younger Kuzuryuu son, everything is as it's meant to be.

The Kuzuryuu family arrives to the entrance ceremony in the compound’s entire fleet of armored cars. In the first, there is only Natsumi and her father. In the second, her mother and brother ride with her aunt and three of her first cousins (the eldest, Yuuto, has not been welcome in their territory for almost two decades). In the third, there are the personal servants and bodyguards of anyone in the first two.

The other seven contain the rest of her family: blood relatives and loyal underlings who have earned the right to stand alongside them.

(“They are here to witness the beginning of a new era in our history,” her father tells her on the way there. “It starts today, whether you’re prepared for it or not.”

Natsumi listens to the steady hum of the car’s engine, and looks him in the eye. “I am.”

Her father says nothing. She can't tell if he approves or agrees, or doesn't. He only nods, and leans over to pour himself a drink from the bar.)

They form a massive block of the audience, a swath of dark suits, expensive jewelry, and mostly-concealed weaponry. The others in the crowd give them a wide berth, and Natsumi can’t help but grin in her seat.

The senior student council president recites something about hope and history and the school’s mission statement. Natsumi isn’t sure; she’s not listening. She doesn’t care about what Hope’s Peak stands for, or how it thinks it’ll change the world. She cares about what it has to offer her and her family: resources, connections, and opportunities.

If it couldn’t give her that, she wouldn’t waste a single second more here.

All the families crowd the students after the ceremony, and Natsumi receives hers in a line out on the grass, Peko behind her left shoulder and Fuyuhiko behind her right. Her father insists; he’s the one that corrals all of them, and then he waits off to the side with her mother until Natsumi’s seen every single one.

For the first few minutes, it’s fine; her aunt clasps both of Natsumi’s hands in hers and says a prayer for the family’s future right then and there, and her cousin Rin shows her the World War I-era pistol she’d managed to get off a collector as payment for outstanding debts. But as the line proceeds and the number of faces already familiar to her start to dwindle, Natsumi begins to understand why her father arranged it this way.

“Natsumi-chan!” Togawa Minato is a grand uncle, who married into the family eight years ago. He reaches out to take her hands, and she folds them behind her back instead. He falters, fingers outstretched into the empty air between them. “Y-You’ve grown into a magnificent woman since I saw you last, Natsumi-chan. Truly. Truly.” Natsumi only looks at him, and without anything to grab he starts to wring his hands instead. “I did have a small favor to ask, if you’ll hear me out. Your mother and I go way back of course, of course, you remember my beautiful wife, and we’re in need of a small loan—”

“We can arrange something with my mother,” Natsumi tells him. “I’m sure she’d love to hear why you decided to presume so much about her generosity.”

He pales. “Oh. Oh, no, no, no. N-No need. I wouldn’t want to bother your honorable mother with such a trifling thing. I’ll be on my way, of course, congratulations again, Natsumi-chan!”

It goes on like that for a while. Most are only here to butter her up before she leaves for school, but some have the stones to ask for more immediate favors: money and contracts and forgiveness. Natsumi knows her father is watching her, and she handles them.

“Lemme guess,” Fuyuhiko mutters eventually. He’s been fidgeting for the past fifteen minutes. “This one wants to know if you can convince the old man to give him an extension on what he owes him after they played cards that one time they were our age.”

“No way,” she whispers back. “He wants free drugs. One million percent.”

“Bullshit.”

“Two bags of karinto says it’s drugs.”

She can feel him glowering at the back of her head. “Fine,” he hisses after the man has introduced himself as second cousin Jun, visiting from the United States. “You’re on.”

It takes five seconds for second cousin Jun to clasp her hand and step close to ask her, “Exactly how big are the shipments coming out of Taiwan?” and only five more for Peko to remove him from the line. Natsumi bites her lip to keep herself from laughing while Fuyuhiko swears in her ear.

They go back and forth; it makes handling the last third of the line less of an excruciating bore than it might have been otherwise. In the final tally, he owes her three bags of karinto and Peko a lemon soda. (Natsumi had been able to goad her into guessing exactly once: she’d blown the both of them out of the water by identifying the sibling of another student who’d snuck into the line to ask for work, and then had removed him, too.)

“Look who it is,” Fuyuhiko whispers. Their cousin Yuina has cut to the front of the line; Natsumi remembers her face from childhood playdates that had ended a long, long time ago. “She thinks she’s better than us. Thinks it’s supposed to be her and not you.” He grunts when Yuina comes up from the head of the line, all smiles and false friendliness. “What now, bitch.”

Natsumi sputters a laugh right into their cousin’s simpering face.

Yuina ends up stomping away, red-faced and fuming. It doesn’t matter in the long term, not with her family so far down in the clan hierarchy, but the murmuring from the line turns their father’s head. Natsumi clears her throat.

“I think the young mistress has the rest of things in hand, Fuyuhiko-sama,” Peko murmurs. Her voice is too light and too warm; Peko is good at a lot of things, but telling off Fuyuhiko will never be one of them.

“What, being fought over like some kinda prize ham?” he whispers back. “Yeah, I think so too.” He pinches the back of Natsumi's arm. “Like you really needed Peko to say that for you.”

Natsumi smiles wide at the next person in line, a second cousin once removed from Yokohama whose given name starts with either E or F. “No,” she whispers, “I just figured you’d like it better coming from her.”

Fuyuhiko has nothing to say about second-cousin-once-removed Eikō from Yokohama. Or anyone else after that.

Her parents stay long enough to confirm that her things have been properly delivered and unpacked in her dorm room. Her mother gathers her up in a bear hug before they leave, and even her father reaches out to wrap one strong arm around her shoulders.

Fuyuhiko lingers at the door, and waves their parents off when they’re finished with their goodbyes. “We gotta take care of something,” he tells them, “I’ll catch up.”

He follows her and Peko to the school store, and argues with her the whole way about the odds of Yuina posting a vague message on social media before the night is out. (Natsumi’s position is that she absolutely is, and that he absolutely needs to find it and take a screenshot of it for her.)

“There’s your karinto.” He slaps the bags into her open hands, fresh from the vending machine. Natsumi pops one open right then and there, just for the look on his face.

“Good luck,” he tells her anyway, hands deep in his pockets. “Don’t fuck it up.”

She hugs him then, too, half because he hates it and half because it already feels weird, being separated from him. He elbows her in the ribs until she lets go, but not before she feels him pat her back with one hand.

“Don’t forget!” She points at the drink machine, and swipes the edge of her sleeve against the corner of her eye when his back is turned. “You owe Peko, too.”

“That’s not necessary,” Peko says, even though Fuyuhiko is already pressing the buttons. “The young mistress should—”

The soda clatters into the bottom of the vending machine, and Fuyuhiko bends to grab it. “She got it wrong. You won fair and square.” He holds the bottle out, and Natsumi looks up at the ceiling when Peko glances over to her for help. “What’re you sayin’, I shouldn’t pay my debts?”

“No,” Peko answers, and she reaches to take the bottle with both hands. “Of course not. Thank you.”

He rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah. Anyway— I should go. Mom’ll lose it if we get home too late to have dinner on time.”

“Like she’s not going to lose it anyway,” Natsumi says.

“Yeah, and I’m the one who’s gotta deal with it, right?”

He tilts his head back in Peko’s direction, and Natsumi fights the urge to roll her eyes. It’s the same every time and he doesn’t even know it. He lifts his chin instead of waving because it looks cooler, eyes creasing at the corners because he’s trying not to smile, and Natsumi considers herself a top tier sister for not gagging right there on the carpet.

“Later, Peko.”

“Goodbye, Fuyuhiko-sama.”

They leave at the same time, in opposite directions down the hallway.

There are introductions the first day of class, even though it’s pointless. Anyone with half a brain and ten minutes of spare time would have done enough googling to put names to faces. (Natsumi knows much more than just names and faces by now, but not everyone here is her. She’s generous enough to give them a lower bar.) She doesn’t see the point in separating them into classes at all, but the school seems determined to pretend it’s even halfway normal, at least in the first few days.

Natsumi stands when it’s her turn, and when she tilts her head, so does Peko.

No one in the room misses it.

“Kuzuryuu Natsumi,” she says. It starts right away, eyes shifting and people leaning across desk aisles to whisper. A swell of satisfaction lifts her chin. “Nice to meet you, I guess.”

Peko bows her head, on cue. “I am Pekoyama Peko. It’s nice to meet everyone.”

That’s all anyone ever needs: Natsumi’s name, and Peko’s sword. The rest sinks in on its own. Natsumi sits, counts to five in her head, and then she sorts them.

There are three who won’t meet her eyes at all: Tsumiki, Souda, and Hanamura.

There are four who seem too stupid to understand what’s in front of them: Owari, Mioda, Nanami, and Komaeda.

That leaves five potentials: Nidai, Saionji, Tanaka, Sonia, and Mitarai.

Well. Five potentials, and one more:

“Oh, wow. Look who it is, Peko-chan!” She laughs behind her hand when Koizumi stands up, loud enough to get as many pairs of eyes to swing toward her as possible. “Did you get lost on your way to the Reserve Course, Koizumi-san? I didn’t think they’d even let trash like you through the gate.”

“Hey, hey.” The teacher stirs behind his desk; he doesn’t raise his head, but he does flick the edge of his hat up to look at her properly. He reeks of tequila. Natsumi assumed he was dead. “Let’s treat our classmates with respect, yeah?”

“Back off, Natsumi,” Koizumi says over him. “I have just as much of a right to be here as you do.”

“Ohhh, I remember. The pictures, right? Sure, sure. They were kind of cute, I guess.” Natsumi leans back in her seat, and makes sure her smile is wide. “My bad. Go on.”

Koizumi does, and even manages to keep her face from flushing red until after she’s already sat down again. Frustration or embarrassment, Natsumi doesn’t really care which. If she’d known they’d actually be put in the same class together, she would have done something about it, but it’s too late now. She’ll just need to handle it, like everything else.

“Right, right. Nice to meet everyone,” Kizakura says, after Nanami has spent thirty seconds standing at her desk playing her game, completely silent. Natsumi thinks the odds that he was listening to any of them at all are pretty low. “We’ve got about thirty-five minutes left.” He burps into his hand and tries to pass it off as a cough. “So, uh, unstructured free time, I guess.”

It’s about as much as any of them expected. A few people chat quietly, but most everyone else works on their own: Mioda plucks a few notes out on her guitar, Tanaka encourages his hamsters through a relay race on his desk, Souda tinkers with some kind of robot that looks like it could either be a dog or a chicken

Natsumi takes stock.

Her list has shrunk since the start of class: Tanaka had talked for five straight minutes and said almost nothing, and she still has a headache from Nidai’s shouting. Mitarai had been soft-spoken and stuttery in his introduction, not at all what she expected after the cool stare he’d given her after hers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much.

She has unstructured free time to burn. No reason not to test a few theories.

Natsumi stands, stretches (she can feel eyes on her, but there’s fewer now; people are learning), and follows a winding path toward the front of the classroom. She bumps Koizumi’s desk with her hip on the way there, scattering photographs across the floor.

Koizumi glares. “Watch it.”

Natsumi smiles at her, and twists one of them under her shoe. “Oops. Really sorry, Koizumi-san.”

Mitarai is looking at her. When she meets his eye this time, his head drops immediately back down towards his desk. He quails under her scrutiny, shoulders drawn up and face pressed so close to his tablet he might smudge it with his nose.

She kicks the picture under her foot toward him. “Hey, Mitarai-kun,” she says, “I think one of Koizumi-san’s pictures fell over there. Can you grab it?”

“Oh.” He lifts his head, but he’s looking past her, at a point somewhere behind her shoulder. “Um.” He bends, and holds the picture out to her.

The flip-flop is almost even more pathetic than the ones who’d known not to stare right off the bat. A miscalculation on her part, or maybe some temporary bravery on his. Either way, he’s not worth wasting time on.

She plucks the picture from his fingers and tosses it back onto Koizumi’s desk, dust and all. “Hey,” Koizumi snaps, “You can’t just walk around here like you own the place. You—”

Natsumi ignores her. She turns her back on Koizumi's self-righteous lecture and raises her voice just enough to carry. “Hey, Peko-chan?”

Peko lifts her head. She’s near the front, behind Souda. “Yes, young mistress.”

“It’s kind of a pain with you sitting all the way over there and me all the way over here. Do you see somewhere we can sit together?”

Peko doesn’t need to be told what to do. She makes as if scanning the room for empty spots. “I’m sorry, young mistress. They all look to be taken already.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I bet we could trade with somebody.”

Natsumi reaches over Souda’s shoulder to pluck his dog-or-chicken robot off of his desk; he jerks in his seat, and the noise that comes out of his throat is somewhere between a whine and a yell. She hops up to sit on the edge of his desk, and fiddles with one of the robot’s loose screws. “So! Souda-kun.” She smiles down at him; his eyes are so big they could fall out of his head. She points to an empty desk in the back corner. “You sit there now.”

“H-Hey. You can’t—”

“What? You don’t want me and Peko-chan to be able to sit together?” She indicates past his shoulder with a tilt of her head, and she knows he doesn’t need to turn around to picture Peko behind him, tall and cold and immovable. “We’re inseparable, you know.”

“No, that’s not what I—”

“Then what’s the problem? You don’t mind swapping desks, do you?”

“It’s just that I—”

Natsumi leans down into his space. She holds the little robot under his nose. “You what?”

His teeth clack together when his jaw snaps shut. “That’s what I thought,” Natsumi says, and drops the robot into his lap. He jumps straight up in the air, knees knocking against the underside of the desk, and nearly falls over himself scrambling out of it. Natsumi waits until he’s clutched his books and bag against his chest and hurled himself toward the back of the room, and hops into his empty seat.

“I feel you may have been too harsh with Souda-san,” Sonia says from her right.

“I just did you a favor,” Natsumi tells her. She stretches out wide into the seat, arms crossed behind her head. “Did you see the way that guy was looking at you? Eugh.” Sonia did see; she’d been looking straight forward at the blackboard when Natsumi came in the room, even when Souda leaned forward to try and catch her gaze. Natsumi shudders to hammer the feeling home. “He’s a stalker-in-training. Now, instead of a creeper, you’ve got your year back. You’re welcome.”

“He can be a little… much sometimes, that is true.” Sonia rolls her shoulders in what Natsumi thinks is probably the princess-equivalent of a shudder. “It is what it is, I suppose.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Natsumi grins at her. “You can owe me one.”

Natsumi spends afternoon homeroom in the dojo with Peko. There’s no point in going back to class today; Kizakura is a pushover, and there’s no official punishment from the school even if he wasn’t. She made the impression she needed to make. (She ate lunch alone, the entire table empty except for her and Peko.) It’ll solidify better the longer she lets them stew in it.

Besides, what’s the point of being at this school if she still has to sit in some boring class, anyway?

She sits by the lockers instead, out of the way enough that she won’t be caught in the crossfire of any Ultimate Archers or Gunslingers or whatever else, and watches Peko rise and fall through her forms. Natsumi names each one in her head as she goes (Ippon-me), the way she has since they were both small and Peko was just beginning to learn.

(Her father had strong objections toward her sitting in on Peko’s lessons, at first. He’d thought it was inappropriate and that Natsumi’s time could be better spent.

If they were meant to work together, she’d argued back, it only made sense for her to know exactly what and how much Peko was capable of.

Natsumi had gotten her way.)

There are times now when Peko moves too quickly through them for Natsumi to see the transition between each one. (Nihon-me.) When that happens, she sits in on as many more of Peko’s practices as she needs to until she gets it right. If she lets the gap get too big, she’ll never catch up, and she refuses to let that happen.

Today, Peko goes through them more slowly than normal. Natsumi knows she’s doing it on purpose; she’s adjusting to the new environment, new equipment, and new training partners. Even when her partner trips over herself trying to show-off to the new Ultimate Swordswoman, Peko keeps the same slow, measured pace.

Peko has nothing to prove to anyone.

(Sanbon-me.)

Natsumi rifles her phone out of her bag, and texts her brother.

me 14:09 🎉🌏💁

She doesn’t expect him to answer right away, and he doesn’t. (Yonhon-me.) She taps her phone against her cheek and waits until it buzzes in her palm.

fuyu-chan 14:13 when the fuck are you going to start using words like a grown up

me 14:13 👎👎👎

fuyu-chan 14:13 you shouldn’t even be texting in class anyway

me 14:13 i’m not in class

fuyu-chan 14:13 the hell is that supposed to mean

fuyu-chan 14:14 are you skipping???

fuyu-chan 14:14 IT’S DAY ONE

Natsumi waits. (Gohon-me.) Peko’s phone pings in the open locker next to her. It barely even took him one full minute.

me 14:15 🙌

me 14:15 peko’s skipping too btw don’t even bother

me 14:16 literally nobody cares about this except you

(Roppon-me.)

At first she thinks he’s started ignoring her after that, but then Peko’s phone pings again. Natsumi counts backwards from twenty in her head, and gets to three.

fuyu-chan 14:19 goddammit quit dragging her into your bullshit

fuyu-chan 14:19 and stop snooping around her phone

me 14:20 maybe you shouldn’t be texting her while you’re in class!!

me 14:20 that��s so disrespectful to the teacher fuyu-chan 😲

(Nanahon-me.)

He really does start ignoring her after that. (She sends three more messages, with as many combinations of the heart emojis as she can manage.) One of the downsides of them not going to the same school anymore: she doesn’t get to appreciate how red his face gets when he’s trying not to throw his phone across the room.

It’s Peko’s final set of forms. She finishes with her partner, sword sheathed with no flourish or flash, and bows deeply. All those repetitions and she’s barely even broken a sweat; her partner tries to hide the way her breath heaves in and out, and fails miserably.

“I am finished, young mistress,” Peko says, when she comes back over. “Thank you for waiting.”

Natsumi doesn’t bother looking up from her phone. She watches because it's important for her to, not because it’s some imposition; Peko knows that just as well as she does. “So? How’re the new digs? Is it everything the website said it would be?”

“The facilities are even more extensive than I expected,” Peko admits. She’d brought all of her equipment with her, but today the only things she hadn’t swapped out were her shinai and her sword bag. Natsumi knows because it had all been shiny and slightly too big, not at all like Peko’s broken-in and battered equipment from home. “I’m grateful for everything your family has provided—”

“Whatever,” Natsumi says. She flips her phone back against her palm and leans her chin on her hand. “If you see something you like better, tell me and I’ll get Dad to buy it for you. He doesn’t get to skimp just because he feels like it.”

“Thank you, young mistress.” Peko reaches into the locker for her change of clothes; she balances her phone on top of the pile, its notification light still blinking. “Did something happen?”

“It’s my brother,” Natsumi tells her, while she scrolls through the messages. “We’re gonna need to chat with him in a couple days. He’s getting something ready for me.”

“He says we shouldn’t be skipping class,” Peko says. “In mostly capital letters.”

“Oh, yeah. That too.”

“Should we attend class tomorrow?”

Natsumi laughs. “Me? No way. I’m not spending my morning watching some old guy sweat out his hangover. You?” She shrugs. “It can’t hurt, I guess. You can go if you want to. I think it’d be a waste of your time, but whatever. I’ll tell you if there’s ever a day you definitely need to skip.”

“Yes, young mistress.”

Fuyuhiko doesn’t respond to her until the weekend. He’s just being a baby; she knows it doesn’t take him that long to crunch a few numbers. He does it faster than she does, which is why she even asks him to do it in the first place.

She video calls him from her dorm room before dinner, while Peko sits on the bed to wait.

“Still with the fucking emoji code?” he says when he answers. “What are you, eleven?”

“Hi, Fuyu-chan.” He glowers, and she grins. “Did you get what I asked for or not?”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it.” Fuyuhiko waves a manila folder at the camera. “I’ll have somebody bring it to you. What do you even need these numbers for?”

“I want to see how we measure up in Europe,” Natsumi says. “I think I can open up some contracts.”

“Europe?” He lays the folder flat out on his desk, and flips to one of the center pages. The aluminum crackle of the bag of karinto under his left hand isn’t friendly to her computer’s speakers.

“How many bags of those have you had today?” she asks.

“Shut up.” He snaps the next piece noisily between his teeth. “It’s pretty pathetic out there. You’d have to get a lot more to make it worth anything. Maybe find someone other than those Nagahara dumbasses to make the shipments. The only reason Mom didn’t roll them after the last one they lost was because it was barely worth anything anyway.”

The shipments. She hadn’t thought of that. It’ll set all her still-forming plans back by at least six months if she can’t find a decent way around it, maybe even squash them before she has a chance to get them any further than that. The whole point was to expand into the region by securing more lucrative contracts, but if the goods go missing between here and there, they’re even more dead in the water than they were already.

“That’s fine,” she says anyway. “I’m Ultimate, aren’t I?”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, according to somebody. Still a dumb as fuck thing to call it, if you ask me.” He ducks out of view of the camera, and Natsumi knows he’s rifling in the bottom drawer of his desk for more karinto. “What’s that place like, anyway? Are the toilets made out of solid gold or what?”

“They might as well be. There’s a kid in my class whose real talent is dumping the perfect log, I think. Ultimate Actual Shitter.”

“Fucking gross. I didn’t need to hear that.”

“Well, I had to, so now you have to.” She waits until he starts fidgeting with the packaging of his snack, and then tilts her head to talk back over her shoulder. “Oh! Plus, Peko’s got a bunch of cool new stuff to try out. Right, Peko?”

Fuyuhiko says, “Peko’s there?” behind her, his voice tinny over the speakers.

“Did you bring any of it back with you, Peko?” Natsumi says over him. “I bet Fuyuhiko’s dying to see it.”

“No,” Peko says. Natsumi nudges the edge of her laptop to put her in better view of the camera. “The equipment is intended for all the athletes. It wouldn’t be fair to keep it to myself. I’m sorry, Fuyuhiko-sama.”

He fumbles. Natsumi could set everything up perfectly for him, and he’d still find a way to mess it up. “No, that’s not— Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

“That’s okay,” Natsumi says, “I’ll take a picture next time!” She leans her chair back as far as it will go, and frames Peko and her laptop between her fingers. “Ka-chk. It’ll be just like you were here too, Fuyu-chan.”

“Yeah, hard fuckin’ pass on that one.”

Natsumi describes it instead, the way Peko has already worn through three training volunteers without even trying, until the bells ring to tell them they’re late for dinner.

For two months, everything is fine. Her teacher gets more and more useless every day, and her classmates stay out of her way, which gives her all the time she needs to do what she needs to do. She opens eleven more weapons contracts in France, Belgium, and Italy, with a twelfth in the pipeline.

All of them are conditional on her having a better and more reliable shipment team within the next six months, but that’s fine. She can find the contracts, and she can find the shipments.

Natsumi texts her brother a time and an address while she waits for Peko to change and start her forms. The deal is too big to lose, but too small for her to go herself; sending Fuyuhiko lets them feel good about themselves, but reminds them that they aren’t good enough yet to see the heir in person, much less the boss.

The door to the dojo creaks open. The woman who steps in is too old to be a student, but she’s not any faculty worth knowing. Natsumi ignores her. “Kuzuryuu-san.” She doesn’t look up. “Kuzuryuu-san, did you know class has started?”

“That’s a laugh,” Natsumi says, and she does laugh, for good measure. “Calling that garbage ‘class.’ I think I might actually get dumber the longer I spend in there.”

“Ah. Sorry, maybe I misspoke! What I meant was—” Natsumi doesn’t know how a teacher managed to get reflexes like that, but next she knows she has a faceful of ginger ponytail, and her phone isn’t in her hand anymore. “Kuzuryuu-san, it’s time for class.”

Natsumi swipes her hand out, but the teacher ducks back out of her reach. It’s the most anyone has crossed her since the very first day, and Natsumi nearly has to sit on her hands to keep herself from leaping off the bench. She grits her teeth, says instead, “Take it up with Kizakura. Or maybe all of your students dropped out already?”

“I’m Yukizome Chisa,” the teacher says. She smiles, bland and placid, like she isn’t holding Natsumi’s phone hostage. “I’m your new homeroom teacher.” Her eyes lift past Natsumi’s shoulder. “Pekoyama-san, I hope you’ll come with us as well.”

Natsumi looks; Peko is just a few steps behind her, her shinai half-drawn. She doesn’t answer, only looks to Natsumi for instruction, and Natsumi jerks her head.

Yukizome has the air of one of those starry-eyed schmucks in their first teaching job, determined to motivate everyone into holding hands and doing their homework. She’s not the half-drunk limp noodle Kizakura is, but it isn’t like taking care of her is going to be hard.

“Yukizome-sensei, huh?” Natsumi drapes both arms over her knees and meets Yukizome’s persistent pleasantness with a saccharine drawl of her own. “You’ve got a lot to learn. Me and Peko-chan are like peas in a pod, you know? Even Kizakura knows that.” Peko falls into place behind her, silent reinforcement. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

Her phone buzzes in Yukizome’s hand. That’s her brother, probably complaining about how far away the meeting place is. “I understand,” Yukizome says. “What if I made you a deal?”

“A deal?” Natsumi repeats, “Is this a joke? What’re you gonna offer me, my phone back?” She flicks her wrist; she’s done with this stupid conversation. Peko ducks to start collecting their things from the lockers. “Whatever. Keep it. Read my texts if you want. I’ve got better things to do.”

Yukizome doesn’t read the message; she doesn’t even look to see who it’s from. “You come to class with me today,” she goes on, “And I’ll owe you one favor. Anything, no questions asked.”

Natsumi laughs in her face. “It is a joke! Are you hearing this, Peko-chan? Keep at it, Yukizome-sensei, you’re already miles ahead of Kizakura.” Peko’s ready; Natsumi can feel her waiting for what to do next. She stands up, both hands on her hips. “What am I supposed to get out of that? Somebody to make my bed for me?”

Yukizome considers the ceiling. “Well, you could if you wanted,” she says. “But I was thinking more along the lines of… Access to school security and surveillance footage? Faculty contact information? Performance and disciplinary records?”

She lists them on her fingers, one by one, like they’re items on a grocery list instead of potential breaches of her contract. Natsumi looks her in the face and still can’t decide if she’s stupid, bluffing, or ballsy.

“Please,” she says, “You don’t have access to any of that.”

Yukizome’s smile doesn’t flicker. “That doesn’t mean I can’t get it,” she says. “Just remember! It’s only one, Kuzuryuu-san. That’s the deal.”

As far as Natsumi can tell, there’s no downside. She suffers through one class, and if Yukizome is telling the truth, she has an ace in her pocket. If she isn’t, then Natsumi can break her fingers later for her practical exam. “Yeah? And what’re you getting out of this?”

“You’re my student,” Yukizome says, like it’s obvious. “It’s my job to help you accomplish your goals.” She holds the phone out, an offer. “So, will you come to class this morning?”

“One class,” Natsumi says.

“One class,” Yukizome agrees.

Natsumi snatches her phone back.

There are six other students already waiting outside the dojo. Sonia beams when Natsumi and Peko follow Yukizome out; the others groan all at once.

“There was a betting pool on whether or not you’d agree to Yukizome-sensei’s terms,” Sonia explains on the way to pick up Komaeda. “None of the others thought you would.” She pulls a small wad of yen from the front pocket of her uniform. “I have just ‘made bank’!”

“That was a stupid bet,” Natsumi tells her. “I almost said no.”

Sonia only smiles. “Admittedly, I did not know the details,” she says. “But a good leader will do something unpleasant if it benefits the people who follow her, yes?”

Natsumi’s phone buzzes again. She shrugs Sonia off, and tells Fuyuhiko to suck it up.

#natsumi kuzuryuu #fuyuhiko kuzuryuu #peko pekoyama #kuzupeko #danganronpa #it's here finally i'm locked in #me: let's do a chapter fic #me: let's make a character with like three minutes of screentime the main pov character #me: let's put emojis in it #me: sets me on fire #don't ask me if the emojis were worth it i don't want to talk about it #i'm excited though!!#fic: by the claw of dragon #sunwrites

9 notes · View notes