Akabane Karma
In the end, Nagisa didn't appear at school for the days before break. Not once, not at all. No matter how much the teacher called or asked Karma (who was, apparently, the only person who had ever actively tried to befriend Nagisa, honestly what's wrong with the teacher, Nagisa had lots of friends) to go check on him, Nagisa remained in an unknown state of a Schrödinger's Cat.
Which is why Karma finds himself hanging out with Itona the first weekend of break, absolutely uncaring of Nagisa's disappearance act. Honestly, fuck that guy. He is tired of worrying and putting a barricade around his bed each night in fear of something, and he is done, done with Nagisa. Let him play games with the new, absolutely-not-creepy guy he met the other day.
"I win again," says Itona, sounding as bland as always, rolling his shoulders and receiving the tickets from the machine with a lazy hand.. Karma wants to throw something at his head, but well, would that scare Itona away? It probably wouldn't, Itona is like ice when it comes to reacting to things. "I am the best at videogames, it is me, don't try to beat m-"
Fuck that as well. Karma pounces, Itona shrieks and they end up in a weird tangle of limbs that would have been awkward if Karma didn't feel so stupidly comfortable around Itona. Like he has spent a long, long time annoying particularly idiotic children who can't pay for their games or drinks. Which, maybe he has (Nagisa never got any pocket money), but then again who the fuck cares?
Not him. Nevermind that they are in a very public, very open game center, which he has never visited because it is in another corner of the city he lives in.
Maybe he should start exploring shady, unknown places in the city more often. Who knows what he will pick up, Itona 2, cool conspiracy information to support his theories everything is going to explode in two years, who knows.
"Excuse me," speaks a voice from above them, and Karma rolls aside to let Itona get up. He ignores the long, smooth legs and the skirtline with expertise, the flat chest and trendy clothes; the girl is small, with long wavy hair that reaches down her hips and hazel eyes. A Japanese beauty, probably a model.
Karma is… not interested.
"Yes?" He gets up and helps Itona up, quickly dusting the dust off their clothes for appearance's sake. Kunugigaoka student; little lordling. He has some habits that are hard to get rid of. Still, after that is done, he gives the girl his full attention. "What may us lazy, worthless scum of society do for this beautiful lady?"
She giggles and it is adorable, or rather it would be if she didn't give Karma the same sense of baby black mamba that Nagisa does. Like there is something well hidden under her pretty looks and girlish voice, something more than just a wicked personality and a terrible backstory.
"I was wondering if you could point me to Shibumi," she says, a faint blush in her cheeks and twisting her bag in her hands. Whatever it is, she is clearly nervous about something, and if Karma can be honest with himself he wants nothing to do with anything related to her.
"...I can take you there." Karma looks at Itona, who looks as uncaring as always and like he would rather not be here at all (same as Karma himself, hey!), and the other boy shrugs. "It's on my way home."
"What, you would leave me alone," he motions with his hand to the empty game center, and the empty street past the broken sliding glass doors, and his empty heart void of any friends. "in favor of the sweet lady, how sad a day it i-"
"Wow, shut up:"
The girl laughs when Itona smacks Karma's head like he actually deserves to be hit. He doesn't, he is a great friend! He groans at the pain and shoves Itona into the game machine.
In the end, Itona leaves with the girl, and Karma starts the long trek back home on his own. Maybe he will drop by Nagisa's home, but somehow he feels that will just mess up everything that is their lives again.
...Well, who cares, to Nagisa's home it is.
(Kayano Kaede) Yukimura Akari
The bookstore was nothing like she expected it to be, really. Oh, it was just as shady as she thought, with piles and piles of unsorted books in one corner, barred windows and randomly placed shelves covered with hardcovers probably just a little more valuable than the paperbacks thrown around. Still, there was also an air of organized mess that she couldn't place and a distinct cleanness that she can't attribute to the creepy clerk.
It is called Shibumi, and it is Akari's favorite bookstore as of a few days ago. The clerk didn't ask any questions about her choice of literature, just handed her the bundled poison guide with a smile and a come back soon. She could have gotten it delivered to her door, but the boy she had talked to through the phone had sounded… familiar.
She had wanted to meet him. Unfortunately, he wasn't there when she went to pick up the book, and she had had to deal with the clerk and store owner that made her insides twist in disgust.
Now, she has a poison guide. For writing reference, she had thought of using as a cover, but since no one asked her about it she had just brought the book back home, put a fake cover on it and let it disguise itself along all the other heavy tomes of her family's library.
Unfortunately, she didn't get the book on time. Even if she had, she doesn't think she would have had the nerve to pull off the murder just yet. Yanagisawa Kotaro is a disgusting man that makes her spine break in goosebumps and the back of her neck and her head hurt with impossible pain, but she feels he is… important. To what, she doesn't know, but he is important and he can't die for now.
Maybe later, though.
"Akari-san, can you pass sugar?"
...yes, not for now.
She honestly doesn't understand why her father would hand Aguri over to this sleazebag of a man. Her sister could do so much better, even a tentacle monster would be better than Yanagisawa Kotaro who probably experiments on children and has a nuclear bomb hidden in his pocket. Anyone would be better than Yanagisawa Kotaro.
She still passes the sugar, though. Nuclear bomb. Experiments with children. She hates and fears this man with all her heart.
Aguri has been… distant these past few weeks. Really, really distant. She kept working in future lesson plans for her dead-last class, but she seemed to have her head in the clouds more than usual. It is starting to worry Akari that one day she will fall into a curiously positioned knife, or tentacle, and her life will be forever ruined. Even more than it already is with fucking Yanagisawa Kotaro being her future husband.
...what's up with her and tentacles, lately? Does she have a hidden fetish for tentacles?
"Akari, have you seen about the transfer?" Aguri speaks, softly, with a smile that eases Akari's heart into a pile of mush (it has been so long), and serves another cup of tea to her disgusting fiancé. "I know you don't like Kunugigaoka..."
"I have been looking into it," she admits, reaching to steal the last muffin before Yanagisawa can take it. "But it's already too late, even for me."
She would have had to have started studying months ago, and since her decision to change schools was a sudden thought one second and an established path the next, she hadn't gotten to plan so far. Kunugigaoka is a Yanagisawa Kotaro-like school -disgusting, full of stuck up people and with shady deals going on behind the pretty face of the main building, and she didn't like it, but it was definitely the best school in the area.
She was an actress. If she can act like a stuck up shit, she is sure to fit right in.
"Akari-san is looking into changing schools?" Shut up, you white freak. Both Akari and Aguri look at him, him who has been mostly quiet and thinking through their meal. He looks handsome quiet and thinking, but it rarely happens since he loves the sound of his own voice. "May I ask what brought this on?"
For some reason, the conversation dissolves into education politics, middle school rankings and the benefits of escalator schools, as well as child labour laws and the lack of quality free higher education. With a teacher, a politically oriented scientist and a child actress in the same house, it always ends up like this.
They get along, at times. That doesn't stop Akari from loathing Yanagisawa Kotaro.
Shiota Nagisa
The facility is in the other side of the city.
That is something Nagisa figured out soon after he came back. That it isn't easy to travel back and forth between school and the facility that holds Koros- the God of Death, and still be back in time for dinner. It cannot be done, point.
He had worked around it the first few days after meeting Shinigami. Make as if he was going to class, then detour to change clothes, meet with Shinigami for whatever stupid game he was playing now while evading his mother's working place. Have lunch with Shinigami, continue evading his mother's workplace while following along with the little shit's whims, then head to the facility's outskirts and watch.
Simply watch.
He wants to do so many things, but he can't do anything right now. One, the God of Death inside the facility is not his teacher. At all. He is a sadomasochist, suicidal and destructive information sponge that cares not for anyone, still months away from becoming anything close to Korosensei. Two, he can't do anything acting alone.
He needs someone with access to the facility. He needs someone to support him from both outside and inside, and then he needs someone who actually knows what they are doing, because Nagisa is acting on pure instinct right now and it is probably going to get him in trouble.
It already did.
As he holds an ice pack to his bruising cheek and disconnects the phone, he goes back to his initial thought process. The facility is in the other side of the city. It is currently break time, which means his mother won't let him leave home at all unless it is with friends, which he doesn't have and doesn't want to pull into the mess he is making his life become.
The facility is in the other side of the city. He has no class to act as his cover and no friends who would willingly put themselves in a dangerous situation (there would be Karma, but he doesn't want to bring Karma into this. His neck still hurts and his heart aches when he thinks of Karma, he still needs to apologize and Karma told his mother he hadn't gone to class). He has his father, who would let him stay at his home, but his father lives in the next city over and that is even farther from the facility than he needs.
He steps up the stairs with his shoes in one hand and his old/new peeling knife in the other. He has locked the doors from inside and left his keys on the table. His mother's keys are hung from the wall, so he picks them up to put them somewhere relevant as well.
He doesn't drive, either, so he can't just take the car. He doesn't even have a license, for anything four or two wheeled or vaguely motorized, and he has no Yoshida to drive him around. He isn't Itona or Kayano either, so he can't just tentacle himself over. He thought of contacting Kayano, but he doesn't know her, she doesn't know him, and it would bring more mess to his life than it already is. He already spoke to her, she was fine, purchasing questionable literature but fine, and he is not getting involved with that trainwreck family yet. He could free run all the way, but that would mean he would have to run back, and the distance is too long and he is too physically weak to deal with it right now.
Actually, he will always be physically weak. He is an assassin, not a brawler. Which is why he has a skewer fork, a peeling knife and an illegally acquired taser on his bed instead of things other people would have like... knuckles. He can't believe people use metal knuckles for anything.
Still, the facility is in the other side of the city. He has only one contact willing to help him in this situation (in exchange for what, he doesn't know, helping out at the bookstore?), another contact who will probably kill him for fun because Nagisa is fun to tease, and right now, he will take what he can.
Nagisa throws the skewer fork into his bag and zips it. 2 AM. He puts his mother's keys on his desk and locks his door from the inside. 2 AM. He puts on his shoes and the warm jacket goes over his shoulders. 2 AM. Opens the window and steps into the windowsill on his tiptoes.
In a past, future event, at 2 AM after this same course of events he would have stabbed his mother, instead now he is closing the window with a string. It closes with a click and the string comes back to his hand, whole, as he pulls himself up the roof.
The moon is whole and the world is so bright.
Horibe Itona
"Don't come back."
"Yes, uncle."
"Go somewhere small and where people won't see you."
"Yes, uncle."
"Bring your keys with you."
"...yes, uncle."
What. First he tells him to not come back, then to bring the keys along. Itona will never understand his uncle, never, ever. He hates people, but his uncle takes the crown of confusing-yet-impossible-to-hate. Not because he isn't annoying, but because Itona's uncle is the only family he has left.
He also has a friend, maybe. Akabane Karma has been showing up to invite him to games and food for a few weeks now, and if he is honest with himself, he is really flattered. Or well, he would be if Karma wasn't clearly using him as replacement for something else, but well, beggars can't be choosers. He has found a ray of light in his dull light, and all that weird, sappy bullshit.
He locks the door behind him and makes his way down the street. The moon is still whole, the world is still safe and he hasn't been kidnapped into awkward human experiments like he keeps dreaming it happens. Not that he is kidnapped, in his dreams, but he cannot believe dream-him would be so stupid as to follow a clearly psychopath scientist.
He throws the ends of his scarf back and adjusts the beanie. Is it just him, or did it suddenly get cold? Maybe it is just him, from remembering his dreams, nightmares that keep plaguing his mind every few nights. Nightmares where he is strapped down and left as a mere puppet of something else's actions, acting on instinct alone.
His missing limbs throb and he hisses. The phantom pain of the nonexistent limbs has become stronger in the past few days; whatever it is keeps wanting to reach to the skies and leap, go somewhere far, far away, wrap itself around people and pull them apart bit by bit. They are subconscious words behind Itona's own thoughts, lurking and waiting like a monster that keeps whispering 'become stronger'.
He is… a little scared. He will become more scared when whatever it is decides to break the barrier of 'this is definitely not Horibe Itona' and into 'these are Horibe Itona's dark thoughts'. He hates people, but even he wouldn't dare to break them and dig into their bodies looking for- for what, exactly? He is not a murderer, he just wants to become stronger-
No, wait, not that either. Right now, he feels in a limbo of not quite knowing what he wants to do with this mysterious new skill tree he has randomly acquired. Bloodlust, level 1, and he is pretty sure Karma's own is level 10. The Itona in his dreams has no other skill, he hopes he will not become quite as stupid.
He reaches the old, ruined building and climbs up his usual tree. Here, he has the best view in, and no one has found him so far.
After taking a long, long drink of his beer (illegally acquired, because his uncle doesn't care, thus cannot be hated), he settles down against the trunk and waits. Maybe in half an hour, he will start hearing the telltale sound of people ruining their lives through the shadiest streets of Kunugigaoka city, but for now he can just lay back and relax.
And then the battles begin inside the building. He is personally betting on the foreigner with the scar on his arm.
Ah, yes. Underground brawling. Better than TV.
NOTE: Chapters are so short... I should have kept March as a single chapter... Black mambas are really fast and really shy, also really poisonous. They are the natural assassins of the snake world. I wanted to look for a proper, tentacle animal for Akari's motif, but then I got lazy so I will do that later.
Akari should be having phantom pain, but she didn't go crazy for as long as Itona did. She shouldn't buy books she doesn't plan to use, also Itona shouldn't be drinking, also Karma stop ruining people's lives, also Nagisa where are you going to stay? Itona is remembering through dreams (or rather, tentacle residue), Akari is going to remember through interaction with Shiro. Karrrrrma is… he's gonna do things, yeah.
Though Shinigami, Aguri and Korosensei are supposed to be POV characters, I'll only use them when they need to show up. Ritsu, too, because she is too corrupted to be doing anything right now. She will come back soon... hopefully...
Last chapter I said Itona's father passed away. That is my mistake, but I'm too lazy to go back and fix it. He says his parents are dead for his own ease of mind, which is something that will… become important later? I guess? I should stop making plot points out of mistakes.