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Your life runs in parallel lines, and in black and white.
When you look at your mother, she is an angel and nothing but. She glows pure white – come sun, rain, and snow – and she is the brightest figure in your monochrome life.
That’s why you don’t blame her for what she does.
Her cooking is awful, straight from the pits of hell, and she tries so hard, but she’s not cut out for having a child; she’s too young, too reckless, too idealistic. You can never be idealistic in this opportunistic world, you’ve learned. It’s only ironic that you’re learning faster than your dearest mother ever did.
Maybe maturing fast isn’t a good thing.
You’re rarely ever known good things – with a name like ‘Gundam Tanaka’, people only ever make a joke out of you – and that’s just another thing your mother has done to make your life difficult. But she tries hard enough, and you take pity on her. It’s not her fault. It was never her fault.
It’s not her fault that the world is dark and unforgiving, and that she is that one figure cloaked in white, with ruby red lips that spill out ‘sorry’ in a heartbeat. She shouldn’t have to apologize. She isn’t in the wrong.
She isn’t the reason why, when you look into the mirror, you don’t see a boy or a child or a human or an anything, really. You see emptiness.
You’re black-and-white in a world full of color, and maybe that’s the reason why you can’t seem to fit in. If you can’t see what everyone else sees, maybe that’s why you’re so lonely.
Yet you comb your hair back. You don your favorite scarf. You stretch your face into a smile. Life goes on.
But everyone else is just so cruel to you.
Now, you know already. Just walk away. Always walk away.
When you look into the schoolyard, where all the other children are playing, you wish you were there but you don’t belong. You never have.
They can call you a ‘freak’. They can call you some kind of ‘monster’.
But the truth is, you never did anything wrong.
You soon learn to seek solace in silence, because it’s the only thing that won’t attack you.
On rainy days, you lie to your mother about going to school – it’s a regret you hold to this day, but you couldn’t help it because the other children always pushed you into puddles on rainy days, and then you would have to lie about your muddy uniform and the scrapes on your arms.
In the rain one day, you find a companion.
She’s small, but glows white in the corner of your monochrome vision, and you would have missed her if you weren’t gazing down; to the earth in hopes that it will swallow you whole. She’s whimpering in the cold, and the rain is streaming down like it want to drown her, so you hurriedly make your way over and cover her with your umbrella.
Outside her home – or what little of a home you could call her soggy, grey cardboard box – there’s a smudged piece of paper that reads, “FREE DOGS”. Your heart goes out for her, because she’s the only one left; left unwanted and miserable and helplessly alone (just like you, just like you who would not admit it), and you pick her out of the box and whisper soothingly to her, telling her that you will be her companion from that day forward.
The only form of identification she has is a collar, you later discover, and apart from a hanging yellow charm, it is completely blank. You remove the atrocious thing from her neck, and pocket the charm for safekeeping.
Your mother is glad to have her – it’s another burden on her shoulders, but she’s an angel so she doesn’t mind – however you soon learn that no matter how hard you tried, it’s useless. Gundam Tanaka is a bird of bad omen, a monochromatic figure of ill luck. Your little rescued puppy, whom you had for such a short time that you never got the chance to name, had already spent too long in the rain; no vet, no animal doctor could save her.
Even now, you wear her ugly charm on your ear, and mourn.
Animals will not betray you. The years pass and you take pride in befriending animals for the sake of your deceased friend; you grow to become lord of beasts, knowing how to tame and how to nurture. Animals are often lonely creatures, that humans do not even attempt to understand, but you reach out for them, and you do.
Without trying, you transgress; from freaky, weird, bad omen Gundam Tanaka – to Gundam Tanaka, overlord, ascendant ruler, communicator with the animal gods.
Your acquire four of your most loyal companions yet – the Four Dark Devas, the Four Deathly Gods of Destruction – and you don’t know what this feeling is, but you think that you might finally be happy.
You become the world-famous animal breeder, Gundam Tanaka, with his world-famous bubbly breeding blog, and his world-famous skills that even Hope’s Peak Academy lies in awe of. It feels like you’re on top of the world, so you tattoo a mark on your face as a reminder. This is the mark of feeling like a god. This is the mark of finding happiness in this ever unhappy cycle of the universe.
You lose sight of that emptiness, because working with animals who rely on you and need you and want you around is what completes you. Because you’re not lonely anymore, and you feel loved and special by all these creatures of many species and types and sizes and names. You feel grand and glorious and truly content.
Being scouted by Hope’s Peak is simply a bonus.
Your first term is successful, and soars without a hitch. If you could capture a moment of your life to replay, then this would be it.
Your mother holds your entrance letter to Hope’s Peak, during the holidays when you return for a home visit after your first term at the Academy, and cries.
“I’m so proud of you, Gundam,” she says, crystal tears pouring down her alabaster skin, “I’m so, so proud of you, beautiful.”
And that fills you with pride. You haven’t been hugged by her this hard in the longest time.
“You’re such a good boy,” she says, patting you on the cheek and letting her tears flow on freely. “I don’t deserve such an amazing son.”
Those are her last words, before she falls to the ground.
You snap the locks on the cages of your zoo of pets, and your clients’ pets, and fumble for the phone, quaking in fear for your mother’s safety. You couldn’t lose her. You couldn’t lose the only person that mattered to you in your life. You couldn’t lose that light; the light that never wavered in your all-consuming darkness – but the beeping red of the telephone wrenches you in more of a panic than you’ve ever known.
You end up carrying her to hospital by foot, and her black hair is cascading down, her skin paler than ever and cold as ice, and you’re scared beyond all comprehension. But even through your fear, even as you burst through the hospital doors and refuse to talk to anyone who shouts your name – anyone who knows you for what you’re good at but not who you actually are – you hold tight to your mother. Your angel. The brightest figure in your monochrome life.
But you know what death is.
And your mother has met it.
Going back to Hope’s Peak Academy is never the same after that. It feels like you’ve lost meaning in your life, and though you tend to your animals as you usually do, that emptiness from your childhood is slowly coming back into your life again.
Your mother had been ill from the beginning, the doctors tell you. Of course, that explains why she was always so pale, and why her skin was always so white that she looked like she glowed.
She didn’t tell you, because she’s just the angel you thought she was. She didn’t want to ever taint your happiness. But when she fell, that wish fell with her.
The Devas try and comfort you, but the bustle of school life is driving your head in. The prefects shout at you for bringing animals into the classroom, the teachers shout at you for not paying adequate attention, the other students shout at you for the same reasons as always; you’re a ‘freak show’, a ‘walking weirdo’, an ‘asshole that thinks he’s better than everyone else’, a ‘monster’.
It’s all too loud, and you feel more and more numb each day. You’ve been blind at Hope’s Peak Academy. You forgot to see it as the same as the rest of the world; an inescapable place for the pure and the impure, the ugly and the beautiful, the loved and the unloved, the brave and the cowards.
All those people – your eyes scan by the faces you wish you had the courage to speak to, and all the faces you have spoken to but couldn’t bring yourself to ask to be friends – and they’re all out to hurt you. They laugh and tease and poke fun at you. So you shut them out.
They all blur into dark, moving shapes with no significance to you whatsoever.
You shut yourself off from the rest of the world, communicating only through the screen of your breeding blog, and during classes and nothing more. The animals are your only companion now.
A little drop of red seeps more and more into the corner of your vision.
Hamsters have lives that are much too short.
Red is the only color that has ever existed for you.
It’s only a year since your mother’s passing, and your entering of Hope’s Peak Academy, when your Devas start to leave you behind too.
“Oh? You seem to be missing a few friends.”
Your head snaps up at the voice, and your eyes narrow at the unfamiliarity. You’ve seen her face before, but you care so little for what she does.
“A shame, isn’t it, Tanaka?” She has the nerve to laugh. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you never had any friends in the first place.”
She’s really nothing to you; that Junko Enoshima.
Why would you care who she is? Just like always, humans live to betray one another. No matter how earnest she seems; she would betray you, and you know that.
“I’ll be your friend, hey. If you want. What do you say, high and mighty animal breeder, sir? Or do you not like that name?”
But she reminds you so much of your mother.
Glowing, angelic, all-knowing. Sweet, and almost ethereal. She has her sting of poison; a streak of malice in her eyes, but that reminds you of your mother too.
“Aren’t you sick of it?” Her words fall from crimson lips; the color of your faux eye – the color of your mother’s dress on days when she tells you she loves you, and that she’s sorry. The only splash of color in your life – it has always been the color red.
“You’re sick of it, Gundam Tanaka. You’re sick.”
Sick? You do not succumb to illness like the common man. You are immune. Your blood flows full of your mother’s poison.
“You are, aren’t you?”
“You’re sick of how everyone treats you. Like you’re a freak. A weirdo. Some kind of monster.”
I’m not a…
“Well, let’s show them, shall we?”
What are you talking about?
“You are a monster.”
“I always knew you were.”
No, I’m not, I never did anything wrong! Not then, not now, not ever!
“Let’s show them all what happens when they cross you.”
You don’t speak to her, but your thoughts are whirring and Junko has the smile of a wild cat stalking her prey.
“Come, Gundam Tanaka.”
“Join me, in despair.”
You wish you weren’t born in this black-white-red world. You wish you could apologize to your mother, embrace her stark white figure and hear her say how proud she is of you.
But all that means nothing now. You’re so sick of being you. You’re so sick of having your heart trampled – again and again. You’re so sick of the way they look at you. Talk about you. Laugh about you.
You’re about to become the monster they all knew you could be.
Junko’s smile fades into darkness.
You’re surrounded by red.