DISCLAIMER: I do not own Assassination Classroom. Nor the pictures.

Garbage Day Battlefield

Chapter 1: The First Offense

Antebellum

022324IMAY16

Monday, May 2

11:24 P.M. (JST)

It was usually the Asanos' maid, Tsukijima, who sorted and took out their garbage every day.

But after falling down some stairs, she had broken her leg and pretty much became unable to work for a couple of months. Which left the task of sorting trash to one Gakushuu Asano, because his father refused to hire a replacement maid out of loyalty. Or was it to torture Asano? As if washing his own dishes wasn't tiring enough, the teenager found himself sitting on the cold cement floor of the garage, staring at a stupidly big pile of garbage.

"You would do well to learn some humility while you're at it," the man had told him.

Of course, it was easy for him to say just as much.

Asano skimmed over the multicolored, twenty-one-page pamphlet, his weary mind barely processing the information. Perhaps he wouldn't have been so tired had he not procrastinated.

Sorting was a simple task, really.

Burnable items were collected twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, in government-issued red bags. Non-burnable items were to be placed into blue bags and put out every Tuesday. As for recyclables, they had to be sorted into clear plastic bags. Along with non-burnables, plastic recyclables were collected on Tuesdays, including PET bottles. Glass bottles and cans alternated their pickups on Wednesdays. Fridays were cartons, papers, and boxes, all folded and bundled with standard white string. Small appliances, ceramics, glass, and metal waste were picked up on the first Friday of every month. Unbroken lightbulbs and used batteries were to be taken to the Resource Recovery Location. Large items required a special pickup order and fee.

That's about… nine categories.

Piece of cake.

Asano had already sorted through the burnable trash the day before, and it had been collected that morning, no problem.

He tried to blink the tiredness out of his eyes as he glanced between two bags, his hand clutching the last two pieces of trash. Did pill sheets go into the non-burnables, or the recyclables? On one hand, they were made of plastic. On the other hand… they were made of plastic. He had to make a decision, for the next morning was a Tuesday, on which both non-burnable and plastic recyclable items were collected. With made complete sense, because they were virtually the same thing.

Why, no, he was not going to climb two flights of stairs to retrieve his phone from his room.

And no, he was definitely not going to ask his father for help.

Ah, screw it. Deciding to leave the outcome to chance, Asano tossed the pill sheets into the recycling bag, dedicating a silent curse to the environmentally-friendly sadist who came up with Japan's garbage sorting system. His butt had gone numb from sitting in one spot for so long, and his advanced study workbooks were waiting for him on his desk.

It was time to call it a night.

At least it was Golden Week. There was no school the next day.

Antebellum

030905IMAY16

Tuesday, May 3

9:05 A.M. (JST)

Bam! Bam! Bam!

It had been such a peaceful morning, too.

Asano felt his eyebrows draw together in a frown at the thought of the person (wow, who could it be?) knocking on his bedroom door. Jotting down the answer to that final mathematics problem, he wedged his pencil in between the pages of his notebook, pushed his chair back, and made his way across the room. As soon as he opened the door, he was greeted by a clear garbage bag dangling in front of his face, which he recognized as the one he had been slaving over the night before, judging from the suspicious number of plastic Ooloongoo green tea bottles in it. Someone had slapped a conspicuous bright red sticker on top of the bag, near the neatly-tied knot. It was emblazoned with dark characters printed in large block font, saying, almost mockingly:

This trash cannot be accepted.

"Why is there a sticker of shame on one of our bags, Asano-kun?" His father's face popped out from behind the bag, a close-lipped smile on his face. His pale eyes were half-lidded and his thick eyebrows lifted high, which signaled that he was displeased. Well, that was nothing new—the man was never satisfied with anything less than perfection—but nonetheless, the expression was rather unnerving.

Asano had to squint to read the messy script in the white box at the bottom of the sticker, where the sanitation worker had written the reason for the rejection. "'The labels were not removed from the bottles,'" he read, then looked up at his father. "And please tell me that you didn't just dub it 'the sticker of shame'?"

"Yes, yes I did," his father said, placing his free hand on his hip and giving Asano one of his notorious haughty looks, as if daring him to challenge his authority as the patriarch of their two-member family (if they could even be called that, what with their dysfunctional relationship and all). "I also remember charging you with organizing the garbage last night. It should have been easy for you to do it properly. If I'd wanted a privileged, incompetent brat for a son, I would have asked for one."

Asano knew that "I had cram school last night" was not a sufficient excuse. It sounded stupid, even when he said it in his mind.

But his father's insult stung his pride.

The final straw was when the man said, "I'd wager that Akabane-kun can sort trash better than you can."

Asano gritted his teeth, seething, as his father deposited the bag in his doorway and left, probably heading down to his office.

If it's war you want, then it's war you'll get.

I know a fic about taking out garbage sounds boring, but... let's just say there's a lot of potential.

This is set in 2016, which is after the in-series graduation, but for plot's sake (and because I didn't realize until after I planned everything out), let's say that Gakuhou's still employed as the chairman of Kunugigaoka Academy and Gakushuu's in his first year of high school.

I based some of the trash schedule from one that I found online. Dunno if people in Japan really have to take out the trash everyday, but… oh well.

*Antebellum means "before war."

*To keep with the war theme, I looked up the military date time group format online, which is really interesting. It goes by DDHHMM(Z)MONYY, which is: day - hour - minute - military time zone code - month - year. So those weird numbers and letters will be indicating a break in the story.

*JST means Japan Standard Time.

I have tons of story ideas, so I'll be publishing a lot of fics, although I'll work on the ones I feel like updating. Expect irregular updates from now on!

Please tell me what you think in the reviews!