A Lesson in Heartbreak

000

You are a master at breaking hearts.

It is a familiar routine.There are 52 other scripts you can reference, and you wrote 6 of those yourself. You cut out the pink slips, the heart shapes, from the fabric, and you play a game. 'How many needles and safety pins does it take to butcher a heart beyond repair.'

As it turns out, only one is needed. One needle for every heart, a incision into the coronary muscles with clinical precision. It is a form of surgery-How to sever an artery so that it bleeds enough for a comedy to become a tragedy.

You do the math, calculate on your fingers counting down. There are 16 of them. You can do it 4 times before you are caught. 4 times, 7 broken hearts.

The first pin is a killing blow. The pianist misses her shot, and you come up and finish her job. She dies, and takes her partner's first love with her. 2 down, 4 to go.

The game kickstarts, and the settings are chaotic enough for you to cover up any slip ups or mistakes in your handiwork.

'You do not slip up. You do not make mistakes.'

You execute the plans in your mind, watch the viewer statistics rise in huge, arcing spikes. A three word description in a personality profile-brave and selfless, a memory of a sister who had never existed in real life. A replacement.Someone who, you admit, would have gotten away if they had not gotten overly confident in their skills. A virus. Something that spreads in the lungs of a random target and festers like rotting flowers.

For a moment, you remember the hanahaki trope that had been all too popular in fanfiction for some time, but no amount of biological altering would be able to produce that effect.

A textbook perfect 'tsundere' from the tropelist. After all, just because it was overused didn't mean it wasn't welcomed.

You study the viewer rates. They're still rising. You decide they are not rising fast enough. You shuffle through the notes, the records. You find the beginning models, the first lessons every author learns.

Protagonist and antagonist. The classic enemies to lovers tag which had never stopped being popular. Unrequited love. You are particularly intricate with your craftmentship of this heart, and you turn it into a pincushion with equal vengefulness.

You remember watching the audition of a boy with too sad eyes and too much truth in his voice telling you-"Whatever it takes. I want to make everyone smile."

You smile to yourself as you fix the last piece of memory in place.

You're sure the audience is laughing at him now. They must be practically cackling at the irony of his fate.

He dies twice. The first time, in their minds, in 'a' mind. Two words-Ultimate Despair. Utterly despairful, and utterly fabricated. The second time, an actual death.A smushed patch of blood and organs leaking from a gap in a hydraulic press like a stepped on fruit.

You curse him to hell when you realise there's no fucking footage -what are we supposed to do, but you know he will go to heaven anyway.

The viewer rates rocketet.You can taste the praise you will recieve when the 53rd season ends. Statistics show that this is the peak of your creations. Nothing will ever surpass what you have created here.

And then it ends. You break 7 hearts, and then you break one more. You stick a pin in a heart that is not fabric but beats in your own chest like a drum. They would have let you live. You would have lived, if you had simply moved away and let the fiction end. No one would have judged you for choosing life first.

But you stopped, and thought.The future of a reality you have avoided ever since you grew up.

Who would the remaining audience remember?

Tsumugi Shirogane, the author, the copycat, someone so plain that they had attracted no suspicion until it was time for them to become someone else; or Junko Enoshima, the 53rd generation of Junko Enoshimas. The mastermind. A figurehead blown up onto billboards on the side of buildings and posters on moving buses and plastered onto aisles and aisles of merchandise.

Tsumugi makes her choice.

There is nothing about her to be missed.

If she had still been a viewer, and not the creator, this is what she would have concluded about herself with the self satisfaction of an experienced theorist.

'You are a master at breaking hearts, and above all, you are best at breaking your own heart.'

The curtain falls. The stage collapses. The lights turn off too adruptly for you to wonder what comes next.

You pray that heaven does not exist. But even if it did, you know that you would not have ended up in it anyway.