(Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Doki Doki Literature Club. DDLC is owned by Dan Salvato, and I make no claim to their work. This is a fan-made story.)

(Author's note: This is a self-insert fanfiction. To make my age appropriate for the story, it takes place in the year of 2022 to make me 18. No explicit themes, though.)

Prologue

Have you ever hit rock bottom? And no, I don't mean just losing your job. I mean losing everything that you've ever loved or cared for. No friends. No family. No reason to live. Now, you're probably wondering where I'm going with this. There aren't many people out there that understand truly how low someone can fall. When people think of rock bottom as a whole, they think of an impenetrable barrier that no one can fall through. They believe that once you get to rock bottom, the only way you can go is up. However, this isn't true. In fact, rock bottom doesn't even exist. It's a myth. A desperate hope that you can only fall so far. Even when you think you've found rock bottom, you will soon discover that you can go deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

My name is Alex, I'm from Ontario, Canada, and I'm eighteen years old. More than once, I've succumbed to the cruel illusion of rock bottom. The first time I thought I hit rock bottom was when I was sixteen. I had just been diagnosed with depression, and there was a terrorist attack at my school that killed my friends. I was able to cope with their deaths over the course of the next two years, but the survivors' guilt still weighed heavily on my shoulders. It was made exponentially worse when my parents were murdered. That event was soon followed by my sister committing suicide. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.

This story begins on March 31st, 2022, and I had just turned eighteen the previous year. I inherited quite a lot of money from my parent's deaths, but I had no wish to use it. All the money did was remind me of what I lost, but I also didn't want to donate it because it felt disrespectful to just give away my parents' final gift to me. This dilemma made me simply lock it in a safe with a four-digit combination. I also inherited the house that I grew up in, which I was living in. To distract myself from the guilt and depression, I started to continuously play mods for the game Doki Doki Literature Club. It was a game that I started to get into three years ago. The game was originally made as a visual novel that turned into a psychological horror game at the end of your first playthrough.

There are five characters: Mc (the main character), Sayori, Yuri, Natsuki, and Monika. Mc is your run-of-the-mill gamer and anime fan. Not much more to say about him except that he can be a bit dense. Sayori is Mc's best friend from childhood. She's the kind of person who doesn't grow up and you can't help but like. She's always so carefree and happy in public, but she secretly has depression, which causes her to hang herself at the end of your first playthrough. Yuri is shy, quiet, and passionate. She can be quite intense when it comes to her interests, but she's too shy to talk about them and is constantly second-guessing herself. She secretly has a knife collection, which wouldn't be too bad if not for her addiction to cutting herself. In your second playthrough, her mental state slowly degrades and she goes insane and becomes obsessive over the player. She eventually stabs herself in her insanity. Monika is the confident star student and president of the literature club. She becomes self-aware and obsessive towards the player, which causes her to start to kill the other girls off so she can be the only one left for Mc. However, she regrets what she did at the end of the game and deletes all of the files so no one will suffer anymore. Finally, we have Natsuki. She's my favourite. On the surface, she's a short, aggressive manga fan who hates being called cute (which she is). However, if you dig a little deeper, you'll find a scared, self-conscious, nice little girl who's abused and starved by her dad. Unlike the others, her death is directly caused by Monika, who uses her power over the game to randomly snap her neck.

So, there I was, playing a DDLC mod late at night hoping that it would end happily. My eyes were trained on the screen as words began to appear along the bottom, describing the current situation Mc was in. He was making a mad dash towards his house, in which Sayori was staying for the night. Bursting through the front door, he began to make his way towards the guest room. He was scared that something had happened to Sayori, as was I. My eyes began to widen as I watched (or read) what was unfolding right in front of me. I've always had this problem of getting greatly invested in the story and characters of video games. Mc stopped in front of the guest room door, frozen with fear as he thought of what could have happened to Sayori. Multiple possibilities crossed his mind, but he already knew what happened. Desperately hoping that Sayori is in reality just fine, he grabs the doorknob. Slowly turning the knob... I watch the words scroll across the screen:

I gently open the door...

And then there was a loud sound. I can't describe it very well. The best way I could describe it is the slightly muffled sound of someone banging metal on metal. At the very same moment, a horrifying image that I've become much too familiar with pops up on the screen. It's the image of Sayori, hung up from the neck. The visual combination of the noose around her neck, her dangling legs, and her cold, white, lifeless eyes created an image that would make anyone's blood turn to ice. I immediately closed the game. Not because I was scared, no. But because I've seen where this leads before. More times than I can count, I've been forced to witness these characters die via suicide. Never any other cause. Only suicide. I've watched Sayori overdose, Yuri stab herself, Mc shoot himself, and Natsuki hang herself. So many of these mods end in death and heartbreak. I was always trying to find the perfect ending. One where no one dies, everyone's problems disappear, and everyone is happy. There have been mods out there where these endings happen, but none of them are satisfying enough to make me happy. All of these sad endings would always make my depression even worse. It was rare to find me not crying myself to sleep each night. Not that anyone would find me like that, since I was all alone in this world.

Deciding that it was time to pack it in for the night, I began to put everything away. After I finished, I made my way up to my bedroom. As I laid in bed falling asleep, I began to see strange "scenes" of all the characters from DDLC. It was normal for me to think up scenes like this in my mind, but these were so much more real than normal. I saw Monika talking to me outside the clubroom with a very serious expression. I saw Sayori standing in the doorway to her room with a sad look on her face. I saw Yuri about to stab herself in front of... is that Mc? Finally, at the last second before drifting off, I saw the image of Natsuki cowering in fear. I was standing in between them in a position suggesting I was shielding her from him. I fell asleep that night wondering what the hell I just saw...