Archive of Our Own ^beta

"This room is way too white."

The girl ran her index finger on the surface of the wall. She examined her digit closely, the absence of dirt of any kind, and scoffed with disappointment as she pretended to flick something off of it.

Her boredom melted into disappointment, into depression, into full-fledged disgust, then back into boredom again. It was like watching the colours dance on the surface of blown glass: you never knew which you were going to get next. You never knew if a cloud would settle against the sun and stop them coming altogether, or when and whether it'd lift.

You never knew if the glass would break.

"It's so... boring."

She scoffed at the white wall, filled to the brim with disdain. She peeked at him with droopy eyes, her aura painted black and blue. She shot him one question after the other, curiouser and curiouser, and when no answer came, she simply discarded them all. She swung on the chair in the middle of the room, smiling like a child even as she came dangerously close to falling face-first, regaining her balance a split second before losing it completely like it was the easiest thing in the world. As if she'd calculated perfectly just how far she could dip forward.

As if claiming the power to choose when to fall, and where, and how hard.

"But I don't have to tell you that, do I?"

Her cutesy smile changed and flickered, widening into a boastful grin. It froze on the sides of her cheeks, gaining sharper, crueler edges. It flopped downwards like the ears of a sad puppy. And on and on again.

"After all, you reek of it. My least favourite perfume."

On and off, on and off, round and round like a captivating carousel with no fixed pattern, no set tune, no guarantee that the horses wouldn't suddenly spring to life and trot away with you still on their back. No rhythm, no rhyme.

"Y'know, some feedback would be nice, yes? Are you still there? Are you even listening?"

Kamukura said nothing. He sat through her hectic charade silently, with inquisitive eyes and a strange spark at the back of his mind.

It tickled, he realised.

"Hey."

Despite the girl's attempts, he didn't really feel compelled to speak, not as much as to observe. To file away information after information, to run calculations in his brain as he searched those abrupt switches for any kind of nexus.

To rule them out as an elaborate piece of acting, he thought, might prove to be a grave oversight.

"What's your name?" he finally asked, voice even, gaze like still water.

Her response wasn't nearly as measured.

"My name? Wow, rude." She crossed her legs on the side of the chair, and produced a pair of slim glasses out of seemingly nowhere. Again, her voice changed, professional-like and flattened to perfection, and as if his simple question had opened the floodgates, a river of words streamed out. "Naturally, I wouldn't give it to you so easily. Statistically speaking, 3/4 women are taking an unnecessary risk by introducing themselves first to strange men on the street. Of course, it may become necessary to give a fake alias if the subject displays aggressivity, but that doesn't seem to be the case with you, so I'll refuse you exclusively on the grounds of your absolute lack of manners."

"...I'm the strange individual?" Kamukura tilted his head to the side, showing no emotion in particular as he spoke. "You climbed into this room unannounced and through the window."

"What, like it's hard?"

"We're on the 5th floor."

The girl pointed an accusing finger at him. "And you left me dangling from it! Jeez, isn't chivalry dead after all."

Kamukura resisted the urge to yawn. If their conversation didn't move somewhere, and soon, even this fleeting crack in the monotony of his everyday life would turn dull and grey, just like everything else. Even this whirlwind girl, who couldn't seem to bear spending five minutes on the same setting to save her own life.

A long, resigned breath accompanied his next words, and he distantly wondered if he'd bother to say more after all. "My name is Kamukura Izuru," he conceded. "What's yours?"

Nothing would change once she said it. Kamukura knew that. He didn't even have to ask: he could probably find her in the list his teachers had prepared for him to go hand-in-hand with his education. Every single Super High-School Level student was registered there, name and picture and talent and all kinds of informations for him to instantly memorise as soon as he was told. Her talent, he hypotised, must've been one of the few he hadn't mastered yet. Otherwise, he would know who she was.

But the second the girl would tell him, their conversation would reach a dead end. The spark of his curiosity would wither, and soon it would all return as it was, like it'd never been lit in the first place. He'd return to drifting, aimlessly drifting between one day and the next, one hour and the following, one moment and another. Kamukura knew, and yet he asked, because stalling was killing it just as effectively.

And then, something interesting happened.

The second she'd heard his words, the girl's eyes lit up with an odd, sudden glimmer of surprise.

"...It is, isn't it?"

With a fluid, quick motion, she stood, smoothing over the folds in her skimpy clothes, and the glint in her eyes gradually grew into a confident, victorious light. She closed the distance between them in one long stride, her knees digging into the mattress on either side of his lap as she threw all notions of personal space in the trashcan and slammed the lid shut. “Say, big bro,” she purred, craning her neck as she uselessly attempted to look him in the eye through the long fringe covering most of his face. Her fingertips slowly moved up to brush it out of the way. “Won't you let me see?”

Kamukura's fingers wrapped around her wrist in a vice before she even saw him move. Her left hand stopped mid-air, red nails almost touching the hair on his forehead, twitching stubbornly to reach the destination they'd been so close to. His clasp was steady, not violent, and Kamukura imagined it would come across just fine that it would only hurt if she dared move in a direction he didn't like.

It did, and it didn't matter. Her face was split by a wide, cruel grin. She licked her lips, forcing his resistance at the expenses of her own wrist, savouring the pain with a delighted hum and slowly, surely, feeling the contact of skin against skin.

Her palm was cool on his forehead. With a gentle caress, the girl ran her fingers through dark locks of hair, pushing them as far back as she could, nails scraping against his scalp in only the slightest of senses. Kamukura didn't stop her, curiosity briefly trampling instinct, and she locked their free hands together, delicately, staring into his eyes for an eternity.

"You have such beautiful eyes," she cooed, leaning in, warm breath against his ear, "so full of colour, so empty of everything else. Ah, what a despair-inducing sight you are."

"Get off."

She nipped at his earlobe briefly, earning another calculated squeeze of her wrist that immediately forced her back, back enough that they could look at each other. And then she was drinking in every detail of his face, that pale face she couldn't see before, unremarkable in every way except for those red, striking puddles of despair.

"Is that right?"

Without warning, just like everything she did, the girl clenched her fist around his hair and, with all her strength, pulled. Kamukura's gasp was barely audible, but she relished in it, cheeks flushing an unpleasant shade of pink as she dug her nails into his scalp and into the back of his hand.

"They promised me an automaton. A pathetic, overperforming shell, and yet‒"

She choked on her own words when Kamukura flipped her on her back, landing her hard against the mattress. She released her grip on his hair, and it fell like a curtain at their sides, blocking the light from the window and sealing them in shadow.

"That's a nice look." Her hand rose to cup his cheek, lovingly, but her voice was sharp and merciless. "Guess they were wrong, huh?"

It was a novel feeling, the dizziness clouding his head. Kamukura couldn't tell a thing: how she found out where he was, what this girl's goals were, where the conversation was going. Most of all, he didn't care. The confusion nibbled pleasantly at his bundled-up thoughts, and he simply enjoyed the sensation of his heart rate spiralling out of control for the short time it lasted.

"Who?"

Her eyes softened. Something welled up at their bottom, and he wondered if that was what they called pity. "Do you even have to ask?"

She let her right hand fall at her side with a tired sigh, and her gaze wandered past him. It settled on the ceiling, unfocused. "But seriously, it's so white..."

She blinked at him, and Kamukura could only watch as all of her masks clattered to the floor, one by one, until there was only a single face left staring at him, dull, unimpressed. A mirror. "Doesn't it bore you?"

The girl's wrist slipped from his fingers as Kamukura's grip loosened without him noticing, touch feather-like up until just before it hit the pillow. He lifted himself to his knees and answered, quietly, almost too quietly for himself to hear. "Out of my mind."

The girl nodded.

"Yeah," she said, absent-mindedly, admiring the stark contrast between the ceiling and her nails. "It could use some painting."

She yawned as Izuru rolled off of her, and murmured, mostly to herself – or so he thought at the time, "This whole damn school could use some painting."

***

When Kamukura Izuru came to, it was under red neon lights, and coming out of the speakers was the voice of a girl.

It was drowned in the commotion of the others in the room, and distorted by the static of the speakers, but it was, without a doubt, a voice he knew.

The only voice he'd ever looked forward to.

"Oh my, didn't you hear me?"

That soft voice sliced through the disbelieving pleas of the Student Council, and the room fell silent. Of all the people there, Kamukura seemed to be the only one familiar with that particular voice: the only one listening, truly listening for its fluctations, focused on pinpointing its dips and spikes, and relegating what it was saying to another corner of his mind.

A sharp tapping noise filled the air, irregular both in rhythm and intensity, followed by the unpleasant clicking of a tongue. "This is the last time I'll say it, alright? So, please, pay attention." Drawn, like a magnet, Kamukura stared at the closest speaker, and caught himself hanging onto every word with genuine interest, almost with hope.

"Kill. Each. Other."

The buzzing from the old speaker hadn't faded yet, when the elevator doors creaked open and the body of the Student Council President collapsed onto the floor.

It faded then, and the room exploded with screams.

Somewhere, behind his back, Kamukura heard the beeping noise of a camera turning on. A chair flew by his head before he could look, and Izuru broke into a run.

"I-I'm sorry..." The girl inched forward, a broken bottle in her hand. "If I don't do it, we're all dead. She'll kill us all." Her voice was broken, too, coming out of her throat in dry, raspy sobs.

To think that she'd been the Super High-School Level Opera Singer. The shy, reserved, petite girl with the voice of an angel who made his teachers teary-eyed with the memory of her performances alone. None of that was left now: the way she stepped over the dead body of the boy at her feet, whose blood was still seeping through the cracks in his skull ‒ the Super High-School Level Soccer Player, was he not? ‒ had nothing of the person his teachers had admired, loved, cultivated. Nothing of the hope she was made to embody, he thought as her heel pressed casually into the boy's wrist. She didn't even notice the sickening sound it made.

The girl charged, and took a swing at him. A predictable, boring downward swing, which Kamukura dodged effortlessly.

Kill or be killed?

He felt a horrible taste spread through his mouth, worse than anything he'd ever tasted, dripping with bitterness and the sensation of something splintering inside of him. The idea of his own adversion to that mindless killing game being made utterly irrelevant was one, but there was yet another thing, one that made his whole being sink even lower.

It was the idea that he'd been looking forward to this. To whatever surprise she'd promised she'd cook up to keep both their boredom at bay.

Don't make me laugh.

The girl swayed, recovering her balance at the last second with a hollow hiccup of surprise. The jagged edges of the bottle glistened red, catching the light of one stray ray of sunlight that had found its way into the closed-off building, somehow. She swirled around almost too fast, her limp limbs jerking back to life as if someone ‒ something ‒ had yanked on her strings, her figure doll-like and her eyes dark, bottomless pits. The next swing exceeded his calculations, but only slightly: in one swift motion, Kamukura drew a curve around her, raised his arm, and knocked the bottle out of her hand. It shattered on the ground, shards flying around their feet.

Your rules are boring.

One slipped right through the cracks in the wood, hitting the floor below. It came apart with a silvery sound and, for a moment, her eyes filled with longing.

Your game... is boring.

If only.

And I want no part in it.

The girl jumped back and tripped over her own shaky legs, dropping to her knees. Small shards were digging into her skin, already drawing blood, and her skirt was flared out like a flower. She looked up at him, eyes wide, and she made a sound in her throat that might have been a sob. Everything about her reminded Kamukura of prey animals, and how meek they meant to look when they realised they had been cornered‒

"P-Please... don't..."

‒and right before they lashed out with all they had.

It was the biggest shard, and it came at him from below. Kamukura knew he wouldn't have time to dodge: he intercepted the girl's wrist, and was about to break it and leave her disarmed when he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, her other hand wrapping around another big shard. He realised within a split-second from the blow that he wouldn't have time to dodge.

The girl gasped in pain. Her arm twisted right around under Izuru's pressure, and she looked down in shock as the shard disappeared into the curve of her own stomach. It had happened so quickly, she still seemed to be reeling from the pain in her arm, only distantly aware of everything else. Kamukura, too, was only distantly aware.

It was already buried deep when he delicately let go, and he was vaguely surprised to find his hands were shaking.

Her grip softened, then went loose. With a thud, her whole body lolled forward, hitting the floor, staining it, her head a light weight on Kamukura's left shoe. Under her stomach, a puddle of blood soundlessly made its way through the cracks in the floor.

Reflexively, he knelt. He found himself raising a hand above the girl's face, slowly, hesitatingly. Kamukura stared at his own fingers in curiosity, but whatever he'd been about to do, he didn't manage: he heard a dragging noise from somewhere behind, and simply pushed the girl's head away from his foot before rising back up and dodging a metal bat at a hair's breadth.

It didn't touch him, making a dent into the girl's skull instead, and the last Kamukura saw of her was red, red, red.

No one was left standing, no one except him.

Thirteen bodies lay on the ground: some unrecognisable, some in pieces, some (a rare few) looking like they'd just gone to sleep. Thriteen symbols of hope, the best, the brightest, and all that was left was a sea of red.

How... disappointing?

Kamukura pondered if that was the right word for the sickness twisting his guts from within, black and bottomless.

The students at Hope's Peak Academy are the symbols of Hope. Their talents will lead the world, one day. You, who have every talent known to man, are the brightest among the brightest.

He wondered if he should take pride in being any brighter than this.

A few sounds broke the silence. The first one was a lens clicking shut: in all the commotion, it had slipped Izuru's mind to look for the camera. He found it now, its tired black eye resting innocently, hidden safely in the crook of the stairs, just before the heavy wooden plate that had kept them locked on the ground floor. Kamukura made his way to it, his shoes making a squelching sound against the puddles of blood and mashed insides. Disentangling the cold fingers that clutched it, he lifted a fairly big rock from the side of a faceless corpse and smashed it into the camera. He pushed and pushed, distantly aware of small shards of glass biting into his hands, and didn't let go until the rock was stuck deep inside the lens. When he stepped back, he heard the second sound.

It was the sound of a door unlocking.

Kamukura glanced towards the main entrance. He could feel a single, cold breath of wind coming in through the narrow gap that had opened between the leaves, and he felt a surge of delight. He'd gotten used to the sticky heat and the smell of iron, and the perspective of clean air was something he was almost looking forward to. He'd already started to make his way to the door when the third sound stopped him in his tracks.

The sound of someone breathing.

It was low, and ragged. Kamukura turned towards the elevator, half-expecting for the sound to be coming from the speakers, but it was too clear, too close. He followed the wheezy breaths to their source, and found himself staring at the very first body he saw drop ‒ except that it wasn't, in fact, a dead body.

In the dim light of the old school building, Murasame Soushun struggled to prop himself up, huffing a laboured breath after the other.

Anticipating that Murasame wouldn't be able to do much more than that, Kamukura grabbed him by the shoulders and rolled him onto his back, so that he could look at his face.

The Student Council President gave a surprised groan, squinting in pain. There was blood caked into his hair and covering half of his face, and Izuru thought it very unusual for someone with that kind of head wound to have woken up so soon, let alone tried to stand.

That was enough for Kamukura to understand the person in front of him completely.

"Who‒ what..." Murasame was breathing harshly, occasionally gritting his teeth together to withstand the waves of pain he must've been feeling. Still, he propped himself up once more, blinking hard, and looked around.

Kamukura didn't follow his gaze. There was no need for him to. He'd seen all there was to see, and Murasame's reaction wasn't going to be anything he hadn't already hypothesized.

He'll stare at the ground‒

Murasame's eyes widened, and his throat closed.

He'll gasp for breath‒

The Student Council President found himself gaping.

He'll deny what he sees‒

A single 'no' escaped his lips, so weak that Murasame himself couldn't hear it.

He'll turn around‒

Blinking, he searched for Kamukura's gaze.

He'll grab my collar‒

Murasame's hands shot up, shaky fingers clenching around the fabric of Izuru's shirt.

And he'll say it was all‒

"This... all of this..." Murasame's voice was strained, like a frayed thread close to breaking. He said nothing, staring back unfazed, unflinching.

"Was it... her?"

Kamukura blinked.

"Was it..." Murasame's voice caught. It looked like his own throat was keeping his words from spilling, syllables stuck between one breath and the next. "Eno... shima... Jun... kh... khhh..."

Izuru interrupted him, unwilling to wait for the last syllable to come out of the choking sounds Murasame was making. "It that what she's called?"

Murasame just nodded, desperately, not caring how much his head hurt. "I'll never... forgive..." He retched, hastily pressing a hand to his lips. "Never..." His voice was muffled now, and his fingers shook harder than before. "Never..."

Kamukura watched as his eyes rolled back and Murasame's whole body tensed up, shuddering hard for long seconds before suddenly going limp and quiet.

He caught Murasame just before he hit the ground.

Kamukura was careful. While lifting Murasame, he didn't let his head loll: instead, he placed it against his chest and firmly kept it there, fingers holding it steady and steering clear of the wound. It was natural for him to do it ‒ for someone as beloved by talent as him, it was easy, even. He held Murasame as he got up, slowly making his way out, but something caught his eye on the way to the door and he briefly stopped by the speaker.

Would he hear her voice, he wondered? Her ever-changing, unpredictable voice, commanding one more killing to happen before a winner could be crowned in laurel. The door would have to re-lock, of course; and without that tiny sliver, the stench of blood would flood the place once more, stronger – and then, perhaps, fresher.

But the speakers stayed silent, the door stayed open, and Kamukura walked into the cool air of the sunset, leaving behind a world in red.

***

"Kamukura... !"

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw it.

"What... what have you done..."

It looped and looped, coiling around his mind like a vicious, hungry snake.

"Quick, we have to call Matsuda‒kun!"

It'd never happened to him before. Some part of him seemed to think that it wasn't supposed to happen at all, and added a curious not anymore at the end that he had trouble explaining, even to himself.

"And we have to hide him."

Murasame Soushun's lukewarm body. Not a survivor: a witness, purposely left behind by the one pulling the strings, pulling all of their strings, including his.

"This mess is unbelievable. How are we going to explain this to the Headmaster?"

The last look in the pleading eyes of the girl with the bottle.

"We won't. We'll bury it. We'll bury every single body, every single shred of evidence. We'll bury the entire building if that's what it takes."

The gruesome spectacle of the others, dealing the killing blow to each other as much as to themselves.

"It's all... for the sake of hope, after all. Isn't it?"

Her voice.

A thick layer of dust covered the walls. Cobwebs had started to form at the corners of the room, one after the other, but he didn't mind. He liked watching the spiders weave, through what little sunlight came through the barred window when the sky was clear. They weaved meticulously, restlessly, and most of all, patiently. They weaved until the silk of their threads was shiny enough to draw a companion, and sticky enough to turn it into a prey.

He didn't have a single thing to keep his mind occupied, apart from the spiders. If anything, it gave him time to think. It gave him time to weave.

Kamukura Izuru blinked up at the ceiling. He was lucky to be able to see anything at all: the shadows, approaching the room from all sides, had painted it a dark, bottomless black.