Student

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It’s not going to be easy.

Not this part.

Looking at Hiyoko, resurrected and renewed, in the eyes without his palms feeling a cleaver inside them and her bones snapping beneath them will be hard. To watch her eyes open without remembering closing them.

Watching Ryouta and Sakuya hold hands, watch Ryouta feel the extra four years Sakuya has lived while he was dead will be hard, watching his little brother wonder where to put the admiration he had harbored for someone who is still sixteen when he has become an adult will be hard.

Letting the knowledge of all that he had done spread has been and will continue to be hard, each additional person to learn that he murdered his infant half-brother, that he covered up Hiyoko’s murder and distributed her corpse, that he lied, stole, and assaulted his way through his last day at St. Pigeonation’s and for no fucking reason will be as hard as it has been for the last four years. Like navigating life with his mother now that she know, instead of simply suspecting, what he did, dodging the very serious assassination attempted from a stepfather who now knows he killed his heir, all while putting in grueling effort to make good with the one organization who can still protect him from it all while still suspecting him after his wavering near-betrayal when the shit hit the fan, that has been hard.

Killing Iwamine, however, is going to be easy. He has been so prepared for so long. He has planned extensively, calculated every possible risk, chose the perfect moment. The second that it was confirmed that Hiyoko, Ryouta, and Nageki were alive and well, he left, feigning being overcome by emotion (though he would not call his present state ‘unemotional.’) He knew that Shuu would want to go back home but not be allowed to; he knew the Hawk party would move fast to assure he would be protected. They knew how many enemies their prized doctor had.

But they were not his real competition, and he knew it. His real competition, who had proved wily, versatile, and deceptively quick to the punch when it came down to it, was going to act fast once Nageki was confirmed to be alive. The only risk was in predicted when and where Uzune Hitori planned to finally do the deed and properly intercepting him.

Yuuya dropped down a non-functional elevator shaft into the basement, and then stood still. The empty halls and rooms of the basement would make any little noise echo. He heard his own slow breaths, he heard the creaking of dead beams and metal panels in the walls.

He finally heard a strange shuffling, and made his silent way toward it.

He felt the mere ghost of satisfaction when he finally heard Uzune’s soft, gentle voice drifting in the air from around a corner. (He could not feel fully satisfied that he understood the monster so well.) His gun was already loaded; the safety was already unlatched. He continued to walk around the corner, quit as he could, until he approached an open doorway, an easy line of sight.

When he saw inside was so thoroughly what he expected that he almost thought he was being tricked. There was Iwamine, tied up thoroughly and professionally to a chair; not his wheelchair, which was abandoned in the back, but one that was mounted to the floor of the abandoned laboratory. There was Uzune in front of them, his hands clutched around the doctor’s own tools of torture. A scalpel, a cleaver. Uzune was sick like that. (Yuuya had already thought he might do it that way.)

Uzune heard him coming and turned around. The bleached eyebrows above his false-colored eye rose in an emulation of gentle surprise. The Kazuaki Nanaki disguise, all these years later, was still complete, so perfect that it could not even be eerie. The costume was something worse than grotesque, it was permanent.

“Hello, Sakazaki,” he said, one side of his smiling dimpling his cheek. Though the heavy shadows of the unlit basement room beyond the doorframe made him hard to see, Yuuya could hear in his tone that he would still look no different at all from the mathematics teacher he had once had five long years ago. “There’s no need for you to trouble yourself here. Everything is completely under control.”

“I see that,” Yuuya replied. He raised his gun, so that it was aiming loosely at the man in the chair, diagonally behind Uzune. “I thought I would help out anyway! Maybe earn a little extra credit.”

He felt his own mask-like grin splatter onto his face like a bloodstain.

Uzune laughed twice in response, two quickly-exhaled puffs of laughter. “I won’t blame you if you want to watch!” he said lightly. “I know how he tortured you for a year. He wasn’t shy in telling me about it. But you have to admit it doesn’t really matter which one of us kills him.”

“What matters is that he dies,” Yuuya half-agreed. “What do you mean ‘watch?’ What are you intending to do to him?”

“Oh,” said Uzune, lifting up the tools which had cause the death of so many young students in both hands. Smiling, smiling much too wide, he shrugged.

Yuuya snorted. Then he laughed. “Connard! Tu est barre! Oh, how should I say this?”

Still smiling, Uzune opened his mouth to speak. Yuuya pulled the trigger.

Uzune reacted like most people do when shot; not at all, for a moment. The force of it jolted him backward, but he did not fall. His face froze before it fell, and he made a sudden, awful gasp.

Yuuya went mechanically through the motions of shooting him again. Uzune crumped backward, killed too quickly and too well to even say anything.

Yuuya watched him for a moment, breathing heavily. A part of him expected it to be yet another act, and for yet another impossible, death-defying trick to be pulled off.

Not this time.

Another thing that would be hard would be the next time he faced Fujishiro Nageki.

“Ah. ‘You’re so fucked up,’” Yuuya retroactively translated.

“Well. Should I bother to invite you in, or will you just continue to do whatever you want?” Iwamine asked cuttingly. Though Uzune’s warm corpse was mere feet from where he sat, bound to an immobile chair, of course he seemed to not care about it one way of another.

“I wouldn’t want to be rude!” Yuuya said. “Would you prefer me out there, or in here?”

“Well, why don’t you come on in, why not,” Iwamine groused, “so that we can at least do this without shouting at each other.”

Yuuya stepped into the room. He saw that it used to be a control room of some sort, not the exact room in which so much hell had been raised four years ago, but it had to be close. There was a dusty desk behind Iwamine, untouched. Yuuya walked to Iwamine’s side, opposite Uzune’s corpse.

(And it was a corpse. Every sound in that empty place was magnified, and if he was still wheezing through the hole in his lungs, Yuuya would have heard it.)

Iwamine was trussed from neck to ankle, and in many places quite tightly. His glasses had been removed, likely one of Uzune’s futile attempts to make him feel fear, but it was no problem for him to fix Yuuya’s face with his singular, unkind, uncaring glare. “Should I bother to implore you to think of your brother?”

“I am thinking of him,” Yuuya whispered.

“Yes. A revenge killing, long-delayed, as you waited for my usefulness to finally run out. As you see, you had elevated company in that endeavor.”

Iwamine could mechanically understand what it meant that Yuuya had watched him try to murder Sakuya, with his own two eyes, but he could never feel what that felt like. Nor, like some, did Yuuya consider it his mission to make him feel even a fraction of the suffering he had caused. “This isn’t revenge. This is security. You’ll do it again, doctor. We both know you will.”

“I have no reason to do it again. The promise I wanted to fulfill—”

“I know you won’t do the exact same thing again. I know my brother will likely not be in danger from you, specifically, again. But you will kill again, so on the one wing, I consider this a gift to those you would have killed in the future. On the other one, your Party will kill again; they will continued targeting me and my family until I convince them it’s not worth it. This will be a good start.”

“Politics, as always!” Iwamine complained. “Never mind that my intentions and goals never changed, never mind that I only ever cared about the science and one measly, personal promise. Have you really thought this through, Sakazaki? The Party will know it was you, which is apparently your goal. But they don’t have to send personal assassins after you, all they have to do is tell the police you did it and have their work done for them.”

“But it was clearly Uzune Hitori who did it,” Yuuya replied with mock surprise. “Everyone knows he had both motive and intent, and he’s right there beside you. The gun that was used to kill both of you will have conveniently just fallen out of your hands, right after your feathers get all over it.” Iwamine glanced at Yuuya’s grip on the pistol and saw that, indeed, it was thoroughly protected. “You both have dossiers longer than your respective wingspans and the clear evidence that you capped each other will be a relief to everyone involved, though aggravating to the Hawks. Autopsies will show you died within minutes of each other after a struggle, both clearly bleeding out. They may want to pin something on me, but it’s not my gun, and my mother will swear however you want her to that I was with her the whole time.”

“Will she? How good of her,” Iwamine replied. “I wonder, what was your plan if you caught me alone?”

“That wasn’t going to happen, so, neither of us has to worry about that!” Yuuya smiled. “Uzune was going to try to kill you. We both knew that. I wonder myself why you didn’t try to stop him.”

“I’m a wheelchair-bound invalid who is legally under his protection, you fucking lout,” Iwamine responded with no more than a light glower. “Besides, he is… easy to manipulate. He could have been talked out of it.”

Yuuya didn’t know Uzune like Iwamine did, but he was willing to believe his assessment of him. “After years of living with you, who knows what hooks you had in his head? He was massively unstable already.”

“Do you think I have no hooks in your head?” Iwamine asked.

Yuuya clenched the gun for a second. He breathed out.

“Ho ho ho. You still see me in your nightmares, I bet. Will this finally make them go away, do you think?”

Yuuya breathed out slowly and steadily. “…Whereas I have not had much of your company for the past few years,” he replied evenly, “And am not much effected by your cheap attempted to rile me. Quel dommage, doctor! You can’t talk your way out of this.”

“Oh? So why are we talking at all? You can’t still be hesitating about killing me. You’ve clearly been planning it for years.”

“Not at all!” Yuuya promised him. “Would you believe I just missed you?”

“No.”

“Ah, too bad!”

“Is there information you want? A question you have left to ask me?”

“Not as such,” yuuya admitted. “I know you’d answer honestly; you always do. You never lie, you only evade. In fact the truth rarely wants to be free more than when it’s around you! I was waiting for something but, alas, I suppose I need to admit that I’m not getting it.”

“And what would that be?” Iwamine asked.

Yuuya turned and shot him. Just like he did when Uzune shot him years ago, Iwamine reacted with a flinch of physical pain, but nothing else. Yuuya, however, did not shoot to merely hurt.

Iwamine coughed.

“The moment you feel something, honestly,” Yuuya said. “I keep waiting for it. I keep digging to find the same soft place in you that exists in the rest of us, but I guess it’s genuinely not there. I don’t know why I want to see it, either. It won’t make me feel any better about what I’m doing. Maybe I want to believe men like you can’t really exist? Or perhaps it’s worse than that. Perhaps I need reassurance that I’m actually killing some unfeeling thing, and that you won’t suddenly become a person like us at the end of things.”

Yuuya could not shoot him again. If Iwamine was riddled with bullets, the cover story that they had shot each other would be less plausible. As it stood, it looked like Iwamine had been shot once, wrestled the gun away, and then shot Uzune twice. Then, with the gun on the floor just beneath his bled-out body, the story would write itself. But that meant he had to wait for Iwamine to bleed out.

“That’s not what you want at all,” Iwamine wheezed, his teeth clenched around the pain. “Because you killed Hitori without remorse, and he was nothing but excessive feeling, like an ant driven by parasitic cordyceps. You want to see me ashamed, like the rest of them. You want the feeling that you’re doing the right thing. Ridding the world of a dangerous maniac. As always, I am completely incapable of offering up the emotional satisfaction that is demanded of me; as always, I am punished for it. Finish me off.”

Yuuya felt sick. He smiled. “If only! But it would ruin my cover story to riddle you too badly with bullets. Just one will prove fatal. I’ll set up the scene, now; be a dear and bleed out before someone gets here you can blab to, will you?”

 “I wouldn’t want to disappoint,” Iwamine snarled. “You are the liar I always pinned you for, Sakazaki.”

“I must be,” Yuuya agreed, observing the place Uzune had fallen. He nudged him slightly with the heel of his boot so that he fell onto the blood splatters and disguised their trajectory.

“You still carry an air of heroism, but your actions are of a cold-blooded killer. Don’t you claim to care about Fujishiro and the others? Have you not thought about how they’ll take Kazuaki’s loss?”

“It is unfortunate about Uzune! And I might have let him go, for the sake of my underclassmen.”

“But you had to kill me yourself.”

“No. He was going to torture you to death, and I wasn’t going to just stand and watch while he did it. He thought I would want to, which I found very unsexy. This isn’t the first time I’ve made the choice that the world would be better off without someone. Ah, making your point, really.”

“Joy. Peer-reviewed.”

Yuuya couldn’t help laughing. “In you, however, the only thing I am depriving the world of is your sense of humor, which was always your best trait. Anyway, you don’t think I’m a peer.”

“In academia? No. In this, you’re respectable.”

Yuuya knelt down by the doctor. He ran the gun over his unresisting feathers. “You know, I was very young when I made the choice to kill my half-brother and put Sakuya in his place,” he said lightly. “Young enough that my life before is a little burry. So, killing someone is the first thing I can remember clearly. That was a fact that used to sting, I admit. But it just doesn’t hurt forever. You get numb. Now it’s something I can ignore, or I can use.”

Yuuya dropped the gun, just under Iwamine’s wing. It clattered a little distance away, but that would make it believable that he had dropped it after growing weak.

“Your memory is merely another tool. I—” it was getting harder for Iwamine to talk. It was the first time Yuuya had ever seen him shake. The bloodloss. “—must agree. Such things only have the power you give them.”

“Oh, how lovely it is that we agree so!” Yuuya said. He was starting to shake himself. He looked around for anything else had had to fix; he hadn’t left any tracks, fortunately, and nothing else seemed out of order. “Be honest, then, doctor. Is my work any good? Do you truly think I compare to your august pinnacle of homicidal achievement?”

“Oh, how well said,” Iwamine rasped. Sarcastic until the very literal end.

“Thank you,” Yuuya said, “but indulge me with an answer.”

“No,” Iwamine said, “Allow me one indulgence. My former colleague on the ground there still liked to refer to you and your associates as ‘his students,’ though that has not been true in some time. I will just once do the honor of referring to you as mine.”

Yuuya’s hands clenched. He took a few moments to clear his head, and then stood to his feet again. “Fine,” he said, “Just once, if you answer my—”

Iwamine was dead.

His mouth was still open, but suddenly gone slack. The last of his breath had been exhaled. The blood still oozed, though slowly, out of the wound in his core.

Yuuya stared. He felt his own breath on his face as he breathed in and out. It did not feel real. Iwamine remained immobile, slumped forward as far as his bonds would let him.

“No tricks, doctor?” he asked the corpse. “No medical miracle to re-start your heart? No trap set to spring the second it stops? No foul disease that will come billowing out the second you die, no secret henchman waiting for me? You’ve got nothing?”

Only silence answered. The deed was done, and he was getting away with it. There were not even approaching footsteps waiting to catch him in the act yet.

Despite the fact that he was staring at him, it did not feel real. For so many years he had lived under Iwamine’s shadow, constantly under threat. That threat would not be gone—there were many Hawks, and they would never be at peace with him. But he felt more peace than he ought to, staring at Iwamine’s slack face.

A slight, tinny noise caught his ear. He turned, attempting to locate it. There should not have been any electricity in the room, it had been cut years ago. He followed his ear down, and eventually realized it was coming from the dead professor.

“Ah, the trick is here, then,” he said with some relief. He searched with his eyes; better to not get anything on him if he could help it. Finally he saw it; once of Uzune’s buttons was really a camera.

“Connard,” Yuuya breathed again. He reached down and carefully plucked the tiny camera, lifting it to his face. Yes, just a tiny spy-camera, and the battery had been what was holding it onto his shirt, but its memory was in the miniscule black object he was holding. But why would he film his own?...

“Because you wanted to be able to watch it again. You sick fuck,” he told Uzune with some appreciation. “Nothing for it; I’ll have to take it with me.”

He pocketed the camera and took the time to hunt for others, but found nothing. If he hadn’t found that one—but it didn’t bear thinking about. Despite his best efforts, the consequences of his actions would always come back for him, in one way or another. Ryouta would learn he had assaulted him; Nageki would learn Uzune was dead. Hiyoko would learn he was a killer at least once over and that it had been him who had taken her apart like a doll. Sakuya, his angel, would still love him.

Yuuya moved to leave the room, but could not resist turning around once more just to make sure—of what, he did not know. He just could not believe they were both dead.

He looked at it all again. Uzune fallen onto the ground, in a pool of his own blood. Iwamine tied up and dripping red. The gun on the ground, the covered-up splatters. No noises, no breath.

“I’ve heard it said, gentlemen,” he addressed them, his face still feeling a little numb, “that if you kill a killer, the number of killers remains equal. Obviously, because you are one yourself. Having done in both of you, though, I feel I have done the world a service. Adieu,” he said, and turned on his heel to leave the way he came, down the same corridors, up the same abandoned shaft, through the same halls and into the same beautiful autumn afternoon, essentially unmissed, visibly unchanged, and exactly who and what he had been when the day had started.

--

((A scene where he doesn’t find the camera is also awesome, though. Making him watch that in court, or in a private room with the victims there. Lol he probably doesn’t live through that though.))

--

No, it’s not easy.

The reunion is emotional and overwhelming. It’s beautiful. Even though there are many things that are hard about it, Sakuya is so happy. The returned ones are even happy to see Yuuya, especially Hiyoko. She kisses him on the cheek.

They have a raucous, joyful dinner. It takes, in Yuuya’s opinion, too long for the news to reach them that both the Doctor and the Professor have been found dead, apparently at each other’s devices.

Yuuya felt incredible relief. He looked immediately to Sakuya, which was fully in his habit and believable. Sakuya, also, looked relieved, as relieved as he was stunned.

Why wouldn’t he believe? Both men were absolute nightmares to Sakuya, monsters, terrors. He was terrified of both of them though he had always been brave about it. Yuuya let himself feel a moment of pride, and warmth. If he followed this up right, Sakuya would never have to feel so afraid again.

But then Sakuya’s face, four years leaner than it had been when this all began, became suffused with the same determination that had driven himself into the mouth of hell the last time: the need to get to the bottom of this and, once he got there, kick Satan’s ass for doing it.

Yuuya had hoped this wasn’t going to happen, but since it was, he was in. They were going to investigate the crime.

And by God, he did it perfectly. He examined and came to several reasonable conclusions without firmly deciding on any one; Sakuya did the rest. He gave accurate specs on the gun that had been used, and held it exactly like he had used the like before, but not this one. This exact one did not know the warmth of his wing. The investigation was eventually taken from them by Hawk Party members doing double-duty as police, as fascists liked to do; the camera he had stolen from Uzune, which he had had no opportunity to put somewhere safe, burned a hole in his pocket.

It had already been the plan to drop off the newly-resurrected ones somewhere safe for the first night to rest and spend some time alone before the news fully caught on. The place that had been chosen was the Hitori house, where Anghel’s mother had enough space to host them for an evening. Yuuya dropped off Sakuya and embraced him and told him how happy he was for him.

“But don’t have blissful, joy-filled reunion sex with any of them,” Yuuya counseled him. “They are all sixteen, and you are not.”

“Yes, that is very weird,” Sakuya agreed with a sigh. He put his head in Yuuya’s shoulder, then asked if he wanted to stay.

Yuuya told him it had been a bit much for him. Sakuya knew this was an excuse; Yuuya saw that in his sharp look. He knew that Yuuya was going to investigate the deaths, and he wanted to come with him, but the call of returning to Ryouta and Hiyoko was the stronger one.

He did not think Yuuya had killed them. Yuuya would have known if he had.

No one thought that. No one yet suspected him, or if they did, it was in the very corner of their heart, under more firm assumptions. He drove home to the apartment he had shared with his brother and mother for the past few years as they worked to make it on their own, parked, and made his way upstairs and inside.

He was gobsmacked but pleased that absolutely no one appeared to suspect him right until the moment that he entered his house, turned around to shut and locked the door, and heard his mother, behind him, saying his name.

“Sakazaki Yuuya.”

She did not suspect. She knew.

Yuuya took a deep, slow breath in. He deadbolted the door. He said, “He wasn’t going to stop.”

His mother was standing a few steps behind him. He did not yet turn around to face her.

He shouldn’t have been surprised and shouldn’t have felt that hollow fear in his stomach. If anyone at all would have known immediately and certainty that the murder looked like Yuuya’s work, it would be his mother.

“Maybe he would have never sought out us again, but his friends would have. And Sakuya would never feel safe with him alive.”

She was silent for several long moments. Finally, she said, “You didn’t have to do that.”

Yuuya opened his mouth, then closed it again. Then, he admitted, “No. I didn’t.”

Finally, he turned around. Shirogane Elodie stood some ten feet away, halfway down the bar of the kitchen counter that the entrance hallway led right into. Only the light of her bedroom, far down the hall behind her, was lit. The rest of the house was dark and still.

“I didn’t have to do that,” he admitted. “But I wasn’t willing to accept the risk that this might not be over. I need this to be over.”

His mother didn’t respond.

“I need Sakuya to be safe,” he said.

A few years ago, a time dead between the deaths and resurrections, she had made a mistake. In conversation with Yuuya, she had called Sakuya ‘your son.’ Initially, Yuuya had thought she had, for a split second, forgotten that Yuuya was not his own father, her long-deceased husband. He did come to look more and more like him every year, in both his own and her opinion. But then he realized it was a worse slip-up than that. Somewhere inside, Elodie thought of Sakuya as Yuuya’s—his choice, his child, his fault, as opposed to her own child, which was the one Yuuya had murdered.