A/N: i have like,, sound sensitivity sometimes so i wrote this to cope :)
Shuichi didn't know what was wrong with him. He just couldn't handle noises anymore. Loud noises, multiple noises, even quiet noises when he was really stressed.
It just... really irritated him. His whole body would tense up and he'd start losing control of his breathing. Sometimes he'd cry. Sometimes he'd scratch himself or anything around him. It was awful.
Maybe it had something to do with the killing game, maybe that had affected him enough to mess him up like this. Maybe it was just his anxiety, manfifesting in a different way. Whatever it was, it was a challenging experience that hindered his daily life, and he just wanted it to stop.
He tried to wear headphones but they weren't working anymore. They just didn't silence the noise like they used to. Either he was getting worse or he was just getting too used to them.
And he tried playing music, which canceled out the rest of the sound and kept him focused on one thing. That worked, sometimes. But other times, that would backfire and leave him feeling even worse. So he tended not to rely on that.
All he could do was run away from the situation or wait for the noise to go away. That was his only way to deal with this.
Or he could stop the noise himself but it's not like he could just tell everyone to stop making noise. Not when sometimes it was their voices that irritated him so much. He didn't want to inconvenience them or offend them.
So to avoid that, he tried not to stay around noisy places. But that meant he didn't really leave his room, the one that Team Danganronpa assigned him, and that he avoided being with his friends sometimes. That wasn't making his already poor mental health any better.
Today, he tried to go out though, hoping that contact with the outside would help his mental state. The cafeteria shouldn't be crowded, it never is. The victims of the killing game tended to avoid anything that reminded them of the dining hall.
When he arrived, he didn't put his headphones on. Not yet. He felt weird about wearing headphones in front of people, it made him feel like people would stare at him more. Like when he wore his hat...
It wasn't too loud in here. But there were different friend groups scattered across the space. And the combination of talking, food noises, walking noises, laughing, even tapping, made him unsettled. In an instant, he put his headphones on, hoping to muffle it and avoid him feeling worse. It worked, a little, so he got his food and sat down, far away from the others. None of the people in here were from the killing game he was a part of, only ones that came before him. He didn't know any of them, but unfortunately, due to him ending the game, they all knew who he was.It only made him more anxious.
Maybe this was a bad idea.
The noises were still there. He could still hear them.
Would his phone distract him? Like a game or something.
He tried his hardest to focus on that instead, leveling up the random game he chose. It almost worked for a while.
But he kept focusing back in on the noises. They were still there. He tried so hard to stop thinking about it but he just couldn't.
And now he was fidgeting, like he usually did when it started getting bad. If anyone around looked at him, they'd think he was crazy. He wasn't only fidgeting, he was shaking slightly and grabbing onto his sleeves. He didn't bother to check if anyone was judging him, he didn't want to know.
