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Kyosuke knows about swords and lovers.
During the first killing game, he sits at the monitors and watches— the first killing, this shouldn’t have happened as quickly as it did —as a boy grabs a cheap replica sword, the closest thing possible, and fights rather than freezes. The boy who does not want to know himself and the girl who is entirely convinced that she has looked everywhere, left no stone in her mind overturned—and they had seen themselves in the other, hated it needed it wanted it despised it. The girl thought he wasn’t committed enough and needed direction, but thought back to a time when she did not have direction and looked on him with uncomfortable pity. The boy thought she was everything, an inspiration, an aspiration, but he could not imagine dedicating himself so completely to something. Was she really so happy? If he was like her, could he really be? His entire body shakes as he trips over himself to get to his dorm, find his toolset, unscrew the doorknob—
She dies yearning to go outside, be seen by the world once again, and he, with the desire for it to have happened at all. The boy, despite his craving for attention, for eyes on him, to be known to be recognized to be seen, does not realize his death has been broadcast live across Japan. So he is a topic of discussion anyway. Fame slips from her fingers to his and then out of the reach. A boy and a girl and two blue lights in the converted bio lab. Kyosuke says he’s only mildly disturbed, but finds himself looking away all the same.
He does not think about it again until the Neo World killing game. A girl’s bravado falters as she tries to hide the true motivation behind her crime—she will be fine if he comes out of this alright. Either way, her past is dragged out for the whole courtroom to see. She is sorry sorry sorry because she did not do her job well enough. Across the courtroom, a boy’s knuckles are white from clutching the edge of his podium because he just wants her, he doesn’t care how good she is and he didn’t want her to do this and he really would have been fine with dying now rather than her…
There may be no way for him to take her place, but he can at least try to interfere in her execution.
The girl’s hands, having held little more than a sword, feel only a comfortable weight. And her body, having felt as little more than a tool, feels only a comfortable detachment as she loses control of it, cutting down dummy after dummy. She does not need to think to do this. She has never needed to think, and she is as comfortable as one can be in the face of her own death, until she slices down and a dummy falls away from… the boy himself.
He had paid the price, at least, for interference, in the form of his eye. Kyosuke would like to personally find Naegi, give him a good shake, and ask why in the world he thought this would go well.
Now, Kyosuke’s own sword hangs limply at his side.
I wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been Despair, so he must have been Despair. If he was normal and alright and genuine and loyal, it wouldn’t be an issue. So he died knowing why even if… he had asked… so it must have been to mislead me. I can’t have done it for nothing. It can’t have been for nothing.
Sakakura had been concerned about his wounds and supported him and said that he would make the world better. Sakakura, who he had known since high school and who he, in tandem with Yukizome, credits for his position now. And Sakakura was dead, and Kyosuke had felt only a numbing cold as he stuck the sword in. (Yukizome had been the very first to die, and now Sakakura was dead by his own hand. So Sakakura had to be Despair. Kyosuke wouldn’t be sure what to think if he wasn’t. The flimsy pieces of tape holding him together might lose their adhesive and fall.) Sakakura must have been Despair, and that’s what he’d been wanting to say before Kyosuke… cut him off.
Kyosuke, for a second, thinks about swords and lovers; boys so scared of betrayal they left all ends sealed and girls who had so much ambition and so little peripheral vision; girls who let themselves be puppetted because it was more comfortable and boys who only got hurt when they tried to help; hope and despair, Romeo and Juliet, swords and lovers, swords and lovers…
For once, he feels sick.