Trust issues, hooray! And much thanks to Lynxkitten on AO3 for giving me the idea with the necklace! :)
And thanks for the reviews and comments on the last chapter! You guys are awesome, and I really appreciate it! :D
I don't want them to know the way I loved you; I don't think they'd accept it - Hurts Like Hell (Fleurie)
o0o0o
Karma barely remembers when she woke up. That period of time is hazy, like she was just floating through the days in a fog.
Megu cried. She knows that much, because Megu was hugging her so hard that she nearly passed out, according to the nurses—Karma doesn't remember, because she'd just come from a world where the air she breathed wasn't necessary.
Her parents cried. Well, she doesn't remember that, but they probably did. They cried a lot. Probably because they were happy.
Karma cried too. She still does. It's cathartic, sometimes, but the pain always comes back. In a weird way, she kind of likes watching her tears roll down the surface of the NerveGear, the droplets getting sidetracked and caught in the dents and scratches in the material. Rarely does one find its way to the end unhindered.
Nothing survived him unscathed.
She cried when she woke up, because the only thing she remembered was his back. The way his hand seemed to leech the warmth from her, instead of suffusing her with strength like he always used to.
She cried when she realized she was back in the real world, because he didn't come with her. And she cried because even after everything he did, she still wanted him with her.
"What about this one?"
Karma glances up at the sound of Megu's voice. "Mmm...there's no red on it," she says, disappointed.
Megu sighs and returns the necklace. "So, mind telling me what's up with your sudden fixation on cross-shaped jewelery? Did you suddenly become religious and everything while my back was turned?"
Megu always talks about it like that. She likes to pretend that she was the one who was gone for two years, not Karma, or that she just got a little far ahead and is waiting for Karma to catch up. She doesn't like being left behind. That, Karma can empathize with.
"No reason," Karma says, almost apologetically, because there was once a time when they told each other everything. What they had for breakfast, how they did on their latest tests (they always had different ones, since Megu was a year ahead in school), what they thought of the new bubble tea flavor at the cafe. Everything, really.
Megu stares at her, her expression unreadable. Karma pastes on a convincing, bland smile, almost challenging her to object.
"How about this one?" Megu finally asks, holding up another necklace.
"...It's too chunky."
While Megu trudges off to keep searching, Karma touches the spot under her shirt, above her sternum. It was barely noticeable, just a simple piece of jewelry, but its absence is something she can't stand. And she knows that even if they find the perfect replica, that absence is never going to go away; it came and made itself a home here, in the pit of her windpipe so it can sneak up on her whenever she's not paying attention and claw the breath from her lungs in a way that has nothing to do with physically breathing.
She doesn't mind it so much. It justifies her, in a way.
Everyone is still celebrating the end of the death game. Of course, people are still mourning too, now that they know—really know, for sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt—that the loved ones whose heartbeat lines went flat on the monitor are never, ever coming back.
She's still mourning. The pain makes her feel justified.
It confirms it. She doesn't belong here anymore.
o0o0o
Karma silently closes her parents' bedroom door and slinks back to her own. Reaching into the slight gap between her bed and the wall, she withdraws her mother's old bokuto. For at least twenty years, it's been gathering dust in the closet. They won't notice.
They live on the third floor, and there's an elevator, but she decides to take the stairs for some extra exercise. By the time she gets to the roof, she's breathless and already sweating. The night air is cool and crisp, but it doesn't smell nearly as clean as it does in Aincrad.
They all think she's crazy, but they only care about how many players she's killed (more than she can remember). Maybe they're only half-wrong.
It's not only because of the body count, really.
Ten minutes later, Karma staggers with a breathless grunt as her knee gives out from beneath her, sending her sprawling to the floor. Ignoring the pain from her scraped hand and the burning exhaustion spreading through her whole body, she rolls to her feet lithely. Even more important than staying up on your feet is quickly springing back up when you're knocked down.
She brings the old wooden practice sword around to bear again. It's lighter and wider than her sword was, but it's not like she has any other options.
And her sword is the least of her worries. She is seriously out of shape—which is to be expected after two years of being asleep, and the people at rehab already tell her that she's in better condition than most. But even now, running through a three, four hit sword skill has her sweating buckets and her lungs burning like she ran a mile.
"And forget about the ones that have me doing all those flips and stuff," she mutters, mopping her face on her shoulder.
Her sweat-slicked grip slides uncomfortably on the wooden handle of the sword, and she frowns down at it, thinking of ways to remedy this while catching her breath.
"Okay...one more," she decides.
She takes up her stance, settling easily into the familiarity of it, her feet moving smoothly to circle an imaginary opponent.
With a grunt of effort, she lunges, slashing from hip to shoulder before pivoting on one foot, drawing her sword back. Right before she drives the blade forward, she drops, bracing her right hand against the rough asphalt to scythe her fake enemy's feet from underneath them before she lunges.
CLACK!
The tip of the sword comes in contact with the asphalt, and she rolls forward, reaching forward to brace herself-
-and encounters nothing but thin air.
She blinks, staring down at the street. Even so late at night (or early in the morning), there are still cars coming and going, leaving streaks of lights as afterimages in her eyes.
"Whoops," she mumbles, blinking owlishly at the five floor drop down to the deserted sidewalk. It's a weird feeling, like the kind you get when you almost but not quite miss a step, a little misalignment in your gravity before you pull yourself back in order.
Except this is a way longer drop than just a missed stair step. Should she feel more alarmed?
"Ohhhh, right…" She taps the flat of the blade against the side of her head, tsk-tsk-ing to herself, staring down at the street far below her. "Dummy. Safe zones don't exist anymore."
Safe doesn't exist anymore.
With a loud sigh, she lets herself fall backwards onto her back, kicking her legs up in the air before letting them drop over the edge of the building. The asphalt is rough, but her oversized hoodie tied around her neck like a cape (or a cloak) cushions her back against it. She spreads her arms out to the side, the wooden sword clattering softly against the roof.
"The stars are so dull," she says, wrinkling her nose up at the night sky. "Everything is so dull."
The flat midnight blue has nothing on the rich, velvety satin of the Aincrad night, in which she could see actual depth in the sky. The stars embedded in the sky look like fake diamonds, their glitter nowhere near as bright as the tiny little beacons that each Aincrad star was, and it makes her mad.
And knowing that wherever he is, he won't be looking at the same blank sky and the same dull stars, makes her feel even angrier and even lonelier.
"What did I even come back for?" she huffs, scowling at the night sky like it's the sky's fault. "I don't like you. I really don't like you."
She's not sure who she's talking to (she's not sure why either). The boring real world? Or the one who made the world that shimmered so darkly that nothing else would ever compare?
Oh, Asuna...what have I become?
She is nothing without stories to call her own. As gruesome as her story was in Aincrad, it was hers.
A low, keening whine builds in the back of her throat, like a kicked puppy, and she kicks her legs up in the air before bringing them back down, using the momentum to sit herself up so abruptly that she sways over the drop, her tears dropping like liquid crystal over the edge. She digs her teeth into her lip, pretending that the tears and the blood dripping onto the sidewalk far, far below are from the pain her nerves are sending to her brain, and not from the phenomenon that people like to call heartbreak.
Come morning, she'll be normal. She promises she'll be normal. Her parents, Megu, the rehab workers who are probably betting on when their resident certified murderer will snap, the government workers from the SAO Case Victims Rescue Force who ask thinly veiled questions in attempts to gauge her sanity—she'll give none of them a single reason to doubt.
She's got plenty of practice, after all, and the one person who could ever see through her isn't here.
o0o0o
Karma's first thought is, why is this guy trying to bribe her with snacks when she already agreed to meet him?
Politely declining with a lackluster smile that stretches uncomfortably at her scabbed lips, she sits down in the seat across from Kikuoka. He says he's just another member of the SAO case, but if he flew all the way out to Kyushu just to talk to her, he must be one of the higher ups.
"Seriously? He's coming out here just to talk to you?" Megu asked incredulously when Karma told her she had to decline their meet-up.
"Yeah. A friend told me that the guy had some questions he had to ask me about."
Megu gave her a disbelieving look. "And he couldn't ask anyone else? What, were you one of the bigwig players in the game, then? Fighting on the front lines to clear the game?"
The light-hearted, teasing tone indicated that she had no idea. Karma shoved her playfully, snickering. "I'm loving the doubt, y'know. Who says I wasn't?"
Megu wrinkled her nose, grinning. "Yeah, right. Well, whatever, wanna grab a drink at the cafe?"
Kikuoka is all friendly smiles. "How's physical rehabilitation going for you, Akane-san?"
"It's fine." Everyone there is waiting for her to snap, she knows it.
He hums, flicking through a file on her; there's not much in there. She was never exactly outstanding enough in any way to keep tabs on up until now.
"You live with your parents, right? Your mother's a nurse, your father a high school teacher? How are they doing?"
"They're fine, just tired," she says with a shrug. "My mom's dealing with all the kids who woke up with more severe physical problems, and my dad recently moved to a school further away, so the commute is longer." She knows he doesn't care, and he probably already knows, but there's no point in being all defensive when he hasn't given her a reason to—yet.
"Mmm," he hums, nodding amicably. "So, you're a friend of Kirigaya-kun?"
"Kirito-kun? I wouldn't say we're friends, but we saw enough of each other."
"He had good things to say about you," he informs her cheerfully.
She leans back in her seat with a humorless smile, lifting her chin with a sigh, fingers curling under her hoodie to touch the grip of her knife.
"That's sweet of him. He was probably one of the only ones, hmm?" she asks, a hint of a laugh in her voice, dry as a desert.
Kikuoka's good mood falters, though he regains control quickly and smiles, deigning not to answer that. "Well, I've got all the notes from the SAO case worker who spoke with you before, but I'd just like to rehash a few basic points, if you don't mind. You were a member of a guild called the Knights of the Blood Oath?"
"That's right."
"Could you describe your role within the guild for me?"
Karma sighs, propping up her face on her hand. And so it begins.
"I was basically just a solo player with a guild, really. I used to be the leader of one of the three teams within our primary army, alongside my friend Asuna. I stepped down from that role a few months in. I wasn't suited for a leadership role, and Asuna was. I still participated in boss fights with the rest of the guild, though. I was one of the strongest players."
He looks at her expectantly for more information—as if she's that easy to crack. She smiles politely, silent, forcing him to broach the subject himself.
"Your guildmates and other members of the front lines say that you were rather...close to your guild leader, correct?"
Memories bombard her, the shrapnel coming at her from all sides, bypassing her defenses without a moment's respite—maybe she left fissures in her defenses on purpose.
"What do you mean by that?" she asks, unblinking; her tone is almost pleasant, but not quite, in the almost-a-threat tone that she has perfected.
He meets her gaze, eyes narrowing slightly behind the rectangular lenses of his glasses. She dares him to push her.
He does not. "You said you were a solo player within the guild. What were your duties, then?"
"To the guild? Whatever they needed, really, if I had time. Getting info on good hunting grounds, farming mats, helping them grind levels if I was bored. Sometimes I'd go with the scout team as extra muscle to get a look at the bosses," she says lightly, amused.
If you want to know, ask. I can do this all day.
Kikuoka shuffles through his files meticulously, but she can tell from looking at his eyes that he's not really reading them, just stalling. She could move the interrogation—ahem, conversation—along, ask why he couldn't talk to Kirito, but it's not like she has anywhere else to be. If he doesn't have the guts to confront her, then she won't bother.
Finally, he clears his throat, adjusting his glasses. "Is the guild name Laughing Coffin familiar to you?"
She coughs loudly, burying her mouth against her elbow in an attempt to conceal her shark-like grin. Really? Just, really?
"Are you alright?" he asks awkwardly. "Are you sure you wouldn't like some tea-"
"No, thank you, I'm fine," she reassures him, glad she has an excuse to be smiling now; she quickly licks away a drop of blood that beads from her chapped lip, newly cracked from grinning so widely. "Yes, of course, I can't think of a player in SAO who didn't know of Laughing Coffin." Except for those who cooped themselves up in a room in the Town of Beginnings for seven hundred and thirty days, maybe.
"You've had several encounters with their guild members, correct?" he asks diplomatically, clearly making a valiant attempt to ignore her all but openly laughing at him.
"Several more than I would've liked, yes," she agrees lightly.
"How would you describe their behavior?" he inquires, folding his fingers together on the tabletop. "Would you say they'd been forcefully coerced into harming other pl-"
"Oh, no, most of them were happily murdering people, according to the creed of their leader," she says bluntly. At his 'go on' hand motion, she explains, "Their leader apparently told them that they couldn't be blamed for the deaths that occurred in this game, because the creator of the game was to be blamed, so they could go crazy and have all the fun they wanted killing people."
Her tone grew sharp somewhere along the line, and she dials it back a little. "There were some green players that they forced into their ranks so they could infiltrate safe zones, but I don't believe there were many. They killed a lot more than they tried to bring to their side."
Kikuoka sighs. "So, many red players were willingly committing these crimes…"
"I'd say so, yeah." She does feel bad for him, just a bit. That must be a nightmare to deal with, deciding what constitutes a crime committed under duress versus the alternative. No one fit to pass judgement was actually in the game (and honestly, there really is no one fit to pass judgement, former player or not, in her humble opinion). How can they decide like that?
"How organized were they, would you say? Did they mostly act independently, or was there some sort of structure involved? You mentioned a leader."
"Yeah...Laughing Coffin rose on New Year's," she sighs, scratching her head as the memory resurfaces. "Went on a mass killing spree, targeting lone players or small parties who wandered out of the safe zones to celebrate. And it's not like all orange and red players operated under the name of Laughing Coffin, but their activity grew a lot more dangerous after they saw how damaging organized crime could be. Before, they were pretty disorganized, mostly just smaller parties and guilds going around wreaking havoc on the lower floors."
"And you were someone who was regularly tasked with dismantling these smaller groups of criminals, correct?"
Oh, here they go. "I wasn't the only one. Plenty of green guilds rose to the task to defend their turf."
"But you were the only one acting totally by yourself."
"Probably."
She hears him sigh again, shuffling through more papers. "You've been going to the mandatory therapy sessions, correct? The ones for players who were forced to take lives within the game?"
Karma resists the urge to roll her eyes bitterly. "Sure I have. They're at the place where I go for physical rehab." It's not like she could get out of it.
"Your therapist's notes state that you've been...unresponsive," he says, making eye contact with her sternly—as if he could intimidate her into cooperating. The notion is laughable.
She's stared down bosses four times her height with four times the number of HP bars, if not more. She's been surrounded by so many red players that she couldn't even pick a person to stare down. She's been on death's doorstep; she rang the doorbell, blew a raspberry in their face, and skipped away to live another day.
She also knows that she's not the only one being forced into therapy, and she knows there are far more who actively seek it out. Her therapist is surely stretched thin, just like all the others in the nation, and she looks for all intents and purposes like a fully functional human being. She's eating, drinking, sleeping, hanging out with friends, on good terms with her family. They may have her records, they may know that her body count is higher than even she remembers, but their capacity to think about her will surely run out sooner or later when they have cases that look far more pressing.
That and, even if she was the only person going to therapy, even if there was a whole team of people working on her, there's no way in hell she would ever crack.
She's good at that. She had two years of guilt and sorrow and grief to build her perfect mask, and that's one thing she didn't leave behind in Aincrad. There was only one person she ever trusted to fully take off that mask around, and he's not here.
Like hell she'll ever trust a stranger with the memories she holds so dear—the good, the bad, the blissful, the painful, and everything in between.
They never saved her life. They never believed in her when she was hesitant to believe in herself. They never said the right things to bolster her confidence when it dropped. They never saw her with her hair disheveled from a fight, red pixels like blood pouring from her wounds, stumbling out of exhaustion, they never saw her hands stained red.
If he's not here to care about her (or at least act like he did), then what's the point?
"I'm sorry," she says in the same not quite pleasant tone, "I'm not sure what you mean by that." He opens his mouth, and she bulldozes right over him. "I'm also not sure why you are asking me this. I was under the impression that you had important questions to ask me, questions that couldn't be answered by Kirito-kun, arguably one of the most knowledgeable players in the game. I had to call off a nice day out with my best friend today, so I'd appreciate it if we didn't waste time here, Kikuoka-san. I've been really nice about answering those important questions so far, haven't I?"
"...You have," he agrees, nodding perfunctorily, "and I'm grateful-"
"You're welcome," she chirps; she knows her smile is all teeth and doesn't reach her eyes. "I'd be happy to keep answering these important questions of yours."
She makes sure he knows what she considers important, and she makes sure he knows that what she doesn't want to give, he will never have.
Karma will be nice about it, of course. She will never snap, not at them, not in front of them. That right—the right to see her at her weakest, when she has no control over her own emotions—is one that they do not have. That they and anyone else will never have.
She learned her lesson the first time.
o0o0o
As soon as she gets home, she calls up Kirito, sprawled out on her bed with her feet kicked up on the headboard.
"Hello? Karma?"
"So, I talked to Kikuoka today," she snickers, and Kirito sighs.
"Was it that bad?"
"No, no, not at all, we had a great time. Oh, but he did drop something that I had to give back to him." When Kirito doesn't speak, she eggs him on gleefully, like a little kid who did well on a test waiting for her friends to ask. "Ask. Ask what he dropped."
"...I don't know. What did he drop?" he asks, resigned.
"A listening bug. On the inside of my sleeve, probably when he shook my hand really vigorously. So clumsy of him. You should've seen his face."
"Oh my god," Kirito groans, followed by the sound of him facepalming. "Karma."
"What was I supposed to do, just let it stay there?" she asks peevishly, rolling onto her stomach.
"Well, you noticing it makes it seem like you have something to hide," he reasons, sounding reluctant. "I can't believe you actually noticed something like that."
"I didn't survive actively hunting murderers for one and a half years for nothing," she shoots back with an indignant sniff. "Really, you'd think after he saw my body count that even I had to guess at, he wouldn't underestimate me."
"We're in the real world now."
"And it only makes me ten times more paranoid."
Another sigh, followed by keyboard noises. "Are you mad?"
She snorts. "Angry mad, or crazy mad?"
"I don't know," Kirito says, sounding mildly aggrieved. "Both?"
"Well, I'm about as sane as the next person," she says breezily. "And as for angry mad? I wouldn't waste effort being angry. It's really just funny, although it wouldn't be if I hadn't noticed," she admits, kicking her feet lazily in the air. "What do they think I'm hiding anyways? Maybe they think I was in cahoots with the red players all along?"
The keyboard noises stop, but Kirito doesn't speak.
"...Oi, Kirito-kun."
He makes an uncomfortable noise, accompanied by drumming fingers. "...I think they think maybe you know something about Kayaba."
"...Right, you can tell Kikuoka I'm never talking to him ever again," she says flatly, her voice belying the way her fist clenches in the sheets, knuckles whitening. "He's an idiot if he thinks we're working together or something, and if I talk to him again, I'm afraid I might lose brain cells."
She hits the red 'end call' button and buries her face in her hands.
"You think I knew anything?" she whispers, curling up into a tiny ball.
With an anguished snarl that no one is home to hear, she grabs the covers and violently yanks them over herself.
o0o0o
oh, I fell in love with you...and you said you loved me too - Sometimes Hearts Break (Nathan Wagner)
I was made to fall in love with you, with every breath, with every move - Love (Nathan Wagner)
I kinda wish SAO focused a little more on how SAO survivors had to adapt to the real world after two years of being in Aincrad. They just sorta did a timeskip two months ish forward to move on with Fairy Dance, which I get is for plot reasons and stuff. But I'm sure SAO changed everyone's lifestyles and behavior, especially when after two years, surely their real lives had at least somewhat fallen apart by then. So I wanna dig a little more into this in this fic, since it's quite prominent in Karma.
Oh yeah, and everyone from SAO knows who Karma and Kirito are and what they did in the end, but outside of the people working on the SAO case, people who weren't players generally don't know. So Megu doesn't know, and neither do Karma's parents. Even if they were aware of what went down, they wouldn't associate the name 'Karma' with Natsuki.
Also, I adore the song 'Love' by Nathan Wagner. It's so raw :) Actually, I just really love all of his songs. I'm gonna use a ton of them in this story for the song lyrics, so I'll probably say this 7982356 more times, but please listen to them, they're so good :D
Guess what? I'm bringing someone back next chapter...and it's gonna be Super Fun for Karma :)