Chapter Text
The room is dark and quiet, completely devoid of any signs of life except for the slight rise and fall of his chest as he lies on his back. The absence of windows keeps any traces of illumination from creeping in. Even the bedroom door fits seamlessly into its frame, barring any light whatsoever trying to make its way in from the outside world.
There’s no clock to be found anywhere at all in the room, not even a wristwatch. The slow, tedious ticking of an analogue would only rub at his nerves like an itch under the skin, and the searing glare of a digital would do nothing but ruin this tentative, lightless peace that he’s finally achieved. He’s already well aware that every so often the television will come on, informing him that it’s precisely eight in the morning or ten at night. Whether or not that information is actually correct doesn’t really interest him.
Time lost its meaning for him long ago in this game.
He stares aimlessly at nothing in particular. There’s no light with which to see anything, but even if there were, he’s left his usually-cluttered room barren this time around. Gone are the stacks of cardboard boxes, the piles upon piles of books and binders which were once haphazardly strewn all along the floor at random. Gone is the mountain of crumpled paper balls which once dominated his trash can, filling it to the brim with discarded theories, plans, and memos to himself. And gone too is the whiteboard which once stood front and center in the room, completely covered with pictures of his fellow classmates as he stood in front of it and tried for hours on end to pinpoint the link tying them together and the ringleader behind this game that they’re in.
Rather than just “gone,” he should say they never existed in this room in the first place. He doesn’t need them, this time around. There’s no point anymore.
Ouma stares at the ceiling, feeling the darkness pressing down on his eyelids every time he blinks, and thinks about the mechanical press which killed him—the last time.
It’s almost funny. He’d really thought that one might actually get the job done.
He sighs and shifts on the bed, hoists the covers up over his shoulders, and tries to sleep. But it’s a futile effort and he knows it. Exhaustion seeps through every bone in his body, beating like a drum (like a mechanical press crashing down) above his right eye, but he still won’t be able to sleep no matter how hard he tries.
After all, whenever he closes his eyes, he can clearly see each and every wrong step, wrong turn, wrong move, wrong guess he ever made playing out on the backs of his eyelids like a movie on a screen.