This is full of spoilers so I wouldn't recomend reading it until you've finished Ansatsu Kyoushitsu!
The whole Akari Yukimura revelation was one of my favorite twists in Ansatsu Kyoushitsu, I was so disappointed when instead of developing it more they just made her the exact same as she was before her true identity was revealed.
Like what? She was playing a role as a sweet, bubbly girl and was actually a sweet, bubbly girl with basically no difference to the character she had been acting as? Why? It just seems like such a waste of potential to me.
Alternatively : they give everyone character development besides Kayano Kaede and so I give her the logical, if a bit gory ending she should have gotten post-reveal... I may have gone off the rail with this.
This stops following the plot as of chapter 133 : Confession time.
Warning : swearing, mild violence and character death - just Aguri and characters who will not be missed by much, don't take out your tissue just yet.
There's only one person in the whole wide world that knows who Kayano Kaede is.
(it's not her first role, far from her most successful work as Haruna Mase but -)
That person just so happens to be six feet under.
(she always made Aguri laugh)
(Kayano Kaede is a silly one-shot character, one who appears only briefly as the ditzy ex-girlfriend of the male lead)
This Kayano is just as ditzy, just as dumb. She likes pudding, she is insecure about her chest size, she's - Plastic, completely and irrevocably fake. She inhales sugar like a pig because she wants to, not because of the calories needed to support the weapon building beneath her skin.
She's cute and friendly, not bitter and spiteful and hurt. She hasn't lost her sister, no Kayano Kaede has two loving parents and never had a sister to lose.
(she never spent days in the sun with Aguri, never tasted the woman's homemade soup when sick, never spent nights crying over absent parents who might as well have abandoned them both, never-)
She will never hate the way Akari does, she will never feel rot crawling up her throat and want to slice someone open to see what's inside. She'll never look at cute boys who are so very good at assassination with jealousy and think, I want what he has, he doesn't even want to kill that damned octopus.
Kayano is a shell, a facade who's not even that cleverly crafted.
Akari might as well be dead.
She tries not to think about where that leaves her, "Do you often laugh when you're alone? You're creeping out the nurses."
Itona isn't the first one to visit, but he's the first one to visit Yukimura Akari - well besides Korosensei who showed up a day before and asked how much of the student he had interacted with these past few months was an actual person and not just a character, if she ever meant anything she said.
No, she laughs and doesn't stop until she's crying, not a damn thing.
It's strange because Itona was never friends with Kayano and no one knows Akari.
"Came here over to bond over fucked up families and tentacle-induced headaches?" he barely misses a beat at the pieces of information he never gave, bringing up his family is a bitch move Kaede never would have dared to think about.
She does not feel an ounce of guilt.
"I have some leftover paste for your neck, it helps with the pain." Pale fingers wrap around the offered tube for a second before pushing it back into his hands.
"Yanagisawa was the one who made this right?" she smiles a broken, ugly smile. "Thank you, but no. I never needed it, I can barely feel a thing anymore anyways."
He blinks, "Liar." Itona always was far too bluntly honest for his own good.
(she doesn't tell him that after nine months and some of this agony, not feeling any pain would be too weird)
Something's got to keep her on her toes after all, and even if the pressure is no longer searing pain and more of an uncomfortable stiffness, it's familiar.
"That man had no right to involve you in this," Itona frowns at her words, mouth parting into an unspoken question. "I'm sorry he did, you deserved better than that."
"You suffered too," because it was Aguri, because her sister and she was already involved in this. She plunged the needle herself, she felt a thrill at the pain and at the power it gave her. Itona never asked for this, "That doesn't matter, you didn't deserve it either."
Her heart aches.
"You're a good person Itona," she crawls out of the too firm hospital bed. "Kinder and stronger than I am," he tenses in her arms but does not push her away and she takes it as invitation to rest her head over his shoulder.
Akari is a good actress, if anything else, she goes straight for the small knife she knows is hidden in the pocket sewn on the inside of his jacket - boldly presses a kiss to the side of Itona's jaw before he can take his leave.
Maybe he notices, he probably does not.
(she is gone by morning)
Korosensei is the one who finds her - of course he is.
I love you Korosensei, don't die while I'm gone. She had scribbled two little hearts surrounding a chibi Korosensei next to the simple message, before disappearing like a thief - thief that she is she supposes, with Itona's pocket knife still in her back pocket and all that.
(the blood is no longer as warm as it was, it's now crusted all over her skin and clothes - she mourns the loss of her frilled shirt, she knows she'll never manage to get the stains out)
She doesn't doubt that her teacher will give her the scolding of a lifetime when all of this is over. Akari's lashes flutter, exhaustion washing over her like a tidal wave. The newest attack sends dust and rubble flying everywhere around them.
Nagisa's holding her close, thin legs unable to support her own weight, "Hey, don't close your eyes - Ka-Kayano!"
"Sorry," she has barely slept, barely slept for a week and some more. There's a second pair of hands keeping her upright now, Karma. "You know, Korosensei I expected, the rest of you not so much."
Something like a near dozen of her classmates are there, bile rises up her throat.
"Of course we came, you're our friend." She laughs and laughs some more when Nagisa and Fuwa flinch at the sound. "We want you to finish the year with us, I told you didn't I? I'll never believe none of it was real."
(oh don't the stories make it sound so easy? living like this)
"Nagisa I like you, more than I probably should really," Rio smirks when the boy's face flush a red darker than Karma's hair, not sensing the upcoming but, "I just slit a man's throat, give me a break."
Everything stills.
Her friend(?) almost drops her and Karma has to adjust his hold from an arm wrapped around her shoulders to one wrapped around her waist to compensate for Nagisa's fumbling hold.
The red haired opens his mouth to say something, but ends up just looking at her for a few seconds in that appraising sort of way he always does when his endless curiosity gets the better of him.
She always liked those eyes, those sharp liquid gold eyes of his.
KaedeAkariKaede blinks slowly, what day is it again? She's sure to have passed New year two days after her escape of the hospital and at least a week spent on the streets so something like the fifth? The sixth maybe?
Nagisa flinches at the roar of feral fury that leaves the, the thing that their teacher is fighting against. All she can think about is how similar it sounds to her own.
At first it was pure bloodlust, she had told Okano that day, then I got to know Korosensei and started to wonder if there was a good side to my sister's killer I didn't know about, started to think I should get to know him before killing him. The tentacles were already so full of hate by that point, they wouldn't let me not do it.
She had meant it, she had not (completely) faked her fondness for the stupid big yellow monster that had killed her sister.
(forgive me Aguri)
Then Korosensei had told herself and the rest of the class his story, he had opened his heart the way she would never hold the strength to do. She had cried, had hid her face in shame as Kanzaki and Yada tried to appease her beaten and bruised self.
She still hates herself for the profound relief she had felt then, felt like she had not cared for her teacher like this for nothing. Relief because he had not murdered her sister in cold blood and that she was allowed to love him without guilt eating at her.
(oh thank God)
Akari had always been a bit slow and it's later that night, when she'd been practically forced onto a hospital bed that she realised the meaning of his love for Aguri.
The younger Yukimura never had a pretty crying face - when she's not acting that is. Hate, however, she wears like a crown.
Yanagisawa Kotaro, her sister wretched fiancé.
He did this, the cold harsh truth is that she is an idiot. Because she knew, she knew how he dealt in immoral experiments and slept with women who could never hold Aguri's warmth or endlessly dark eyes.
Maybe a part of her always knew that the despicable man would be her sister's downfall, but wasn't it so easy? To hate a faceless monster standing over her sister as blood pooled on the ground under them both.
The tentacles may have made her lose her sanity little by little - made her erratic and unstable, but never had they made her hate .
No, that was all Akari.
The tentacles asked her what she wanted to be. Hateful, she had answered when the tentacles did not grant her first wish.
(weak, said the world's greatest assassin) (strong, pleaded an abandoned little boy)
I want to be a sister.
Sister to a living and breathing and happy Aguri. Sister to that girl who haunts her nightmares with a gaping hole in her chest cavity, that wonderful girl who's in that tentacled monster's arm. Let her go, she howls until her vocal cords are unable to do so, Aguri, Aguri please..!
Even now, even when she is still covered in Yanagisawa's blood, her wish is no more of a reality.
(give me back my sister you motherfucker-!)
Her second demand, she'd like to think was more of her own doing than the tentacles'.
Tracking the man down had been a bitch, but well Akari always was as stubborn as a mule. She doesn't let him inject himself with any sort of serum, jerks the knife so deep across his throat it may not even be considered a slit and more of a decapitation.
No antimatter tentacles, no nothing.
Just her as he falls with a pathetic gurgle and blood surges to splash all over her clothes, her hair. Her breath comes out in short and harsh pants, wide hazel eyes stuck on the man whose single eye is now dull. She hates him, her foot crunches the bones of his hand as frustrated tears begin to run down her face.
(everything's fun and games until one of them actually kills someone isn't it?)
That's when the monstrosity that's fighting Korosensei right now appeared, if it did not look all that sad at the scientist's demise - perhaps even impressed, it still goes to strike her down.
She knows she will not manage to survive this confrontation - especially not when the building they're in, a stinky defected lab, is unknown to her as much as it is familiar to the opposing side. Sorry Korosensei, no graduation for me it seems.
It's a wonder that after all these months, she still underestimates her teacher and his drive to protect his students.
I'm so happy to still be one of them, she thinks just as she's tossed into a pair of arms that she's pretty sure belong to Isogai by yellow tentacles, the knife barely has time to nick the skin of her abdomen - further destroying her top.
The rest is blurry, with the facility dissolving into rubble and classmates showing up out of nowhere. She doesn't think any of them, except maybe Isogai who was the first one barging in the room along with Korosensei, see Yanagisawa's corpse.
(mouth agape with the last words he never got to utter, throat split wide open)
Maybe she should've kept her mouth shut, kept it between herself and Korosensei, but well after months of keeping her mouth sewn shut, she's a bit desperate to scream and to never shut up again.
So Kayano watches her sensei defeat the underling - this 2.0 of Yanagisawa, with a blurry vision and the certainty that at least a third of her class know that she's a killer.
"Ka-Kayano!" Nagisa's hair must be out of his (their) usual hairstyle because strands of blue tickle her cheeks when she falls into his arms, unconscious.
(oh pretty baby)