Chapter Text
When Junko Enoshima fails to drag Chiaki Nanami into despair, she kills her.
She's the hope of the class, after all, and her death will send the rest of the cockroaches that make up Junko's following into despair—or at least, further than they are now. It's easy, really, some sweet words about testing her, of seeing their confliction, and the tantalizing promise of despair if they succeeded. Really, Junko thinks, Chiaki should have known better than to defy her, when she has her whole class on her side. She kills her, and it's easy; she is beloved, and with her, her classmates hope die.
There are many reasons she kills Chiaki Nanami. She resisted her, and such a person walking around makes her look weak, her ideology look weak. Ideology that even now, Junko clings to. She was a threat, to both said ideology and to her operation on a whole, and too much of one to be ignored. She was the last thing holding her classmates back, and now without her, they despair. But maybe the truth is, Chiaki Nanami just pissed Junko off.
Kokichi Ouma is not like that.
For one thing, he is not beloved. He does not symbolize hope, is not seen as it. For another thing, he's nowhere near as naive as Chiaki. The moment he sees her, he is suspicious—the moment she lies, he hates. He lies, he distrusts, he poisons. Where Chiaki uplifted her classmates, he tears them down.
And yet, here Kokichi Ouma is, staring up at her defiantly and saying the same words Chiaki Nanami said.
"You will not hurt my classmates," they had both said, like they could have stopped her.
Despite being a boy of bitterness and darkness, it seemed Kokichi Ouma was not a boy of despair.
Compared to Chiaki Nanami, it is pathetically easy for Junko to convince the class to turn on him. They never liked him, not one, although select few had tolerated him. Tried to search for goodness, only to be pushed away, with lies and harsh words and scorn. Everyone who ever tried to get to know him was poisoned with his tongue; Kokichi did not want to be known.
This, of course, meant he had no allies, however.
Whereas Chiaki was loved, Kokichi was despised; whereas she was light, he was dark; whereas she was honest, he lied.
And yet, perhaps they were remarkably similar, Junko mused.
They both had a wonderful way of pissing her off.
"I'll never despair, " they would say, fierce, and Junko wants to break that, to make them take back those words. Everyone despairs. It's natural, expected. And when you've experienced the despair Junko has, there is no going back. It makes her seethe, that they would proclaim this, makes her heart accelerate with the need to tear these little up-starts apart until they apologized to her in tears, until they saw they were wrong, until they drowned in the feeling Junko knows is the one thing true in this world: despair.
It's unbearable that they would live in hope, so she makes them die in despair.
That, Junko supposed idly, was just who she was.