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“I hate him.” A pull of a cigarette between lips. Karma shouldn't be smoking. Ren doesn't say, don't say that. He says, "don't smoke." He doesn't say, you smell like the columbarium.
He wonders what Gakushuu will think, the two of them on the rooftop of the high school they were supposed to go to, ash between their teeth.
It's half past seven in the evening because Karma had swiped the keys off the janitor's belt earlier that year and made a copy. Ran a photo of it through a scanner app and got a 3d-print of it, and Ren met Ritsu for the first time. Ren didn't even know that sort of thing worked outside of spy movies.
Gakushuu would have hated it: not the rule breaking, but the high margin of error and the extra steps it took instead of just picking the lock. ("Not something we learnt in assassin class," Karma said, snorting. "Worthless lot of shit they taught us, there." He toed the line between jesting and meaning it, on those days when the sunset dipped between orange and yellow, when the gossip trains poorly disguised as awareness campaigns and in memoriams start making the rounds. Karma hates the performativity of it, when it comes the time of the year for everyone to pretend to care about Gakushuu Asano when they'd rather avoid any impression of him anytime else. Ren doesn't know what to think - he almost wishes he could care that people are still talking about him, still holding out hope trying to find him.
Gakushuu Asano vanished from the face of the earth in the summer between their first and second year of high school. It’s a convenient time to disappear - the period of socially acceptable absence where nobody thinks the worst of missing you for a few weeks, and Gakushuu was just the kind of guy who dipped out of social interaction with the phases of the academic season - (“winding down from another year of being an insufferable bitch,” Karma had joked, but he was smiling, pushing an elbow into the side of Gakushuu’s ribs and getting a crescent-eyed squint in return.
“I hope we don’t lose you to your efforts of learning the entirety of second-year material before the semester even starts,” Ren had chided,) what an ironic thing to say, on hindsight, (and Gakushuu looked contrite.
“I won’t, I promise. We’ll catch up.”)
The media circus surrounding Kunugigaoka post-moon and the camera focus towards anything in its periphery named Asano meant that Gakushuu had gotten rid of his socials before the year even began. There are five weeks of summer vacation, and in that time a total of five people had been in the habit of utilizing Gakushuu’s personal phone number. Seo is in the states for four of those weeks, Ren is in France for three, and Karma had gone to his middle school class reunion in Okinawa. On Week Four, after a brief beat of radio silence and a bout of worry, Araki and Koyoma knocked on the Asanos’ door.
The ex-Principal had answered it, looking bored. “Gakushuu went out. I don’t keep tabs on him.”
“Without his phone?” Araki pressed.
“He broke it earlier that week, didn’t he tell you?” Gakuhou had said. Which was silly to say, because how could he have if he did?
“Will you tell him that we came by?” Koyama said insistently. “We were supposed to meet up but he didn’t show.” That’s a lie.
“Of course,” Gakuhou said, and shut the door in their faces.
A day later the police came knocking. “Your friend, Asano, has been reported missing.”) That’s a lie.
Ren hated Gakushuu after that for a very long time, because any mention of Gakushuu’s name and face was just anger melded with grief melded with desperation and Ren didn’t know what else to call it: His heart twisting in his chest at the empty seat in the middle of class, the baggage of sympathy and memory that Gakushuu had thrown his way and left him to drown in with. Karma had thrown Ren into an empty stairwell. “You and I both know who did it.”
“Akabane,” Ren feels a migraine building up, “not today.” He can’t do this again, running himself to death in circles.
“You know. You’re his childhood friend, you must have known him the longest, you know-”
“He’s just missing.”
“Sakakibara,” Karma says, nails digging into Ren’s shoulders, pulling him down the wall with him. “Sakakibara. Ren. Please. Please- ”
“He reported Gakushuu missing. If the police found anything they would already have - Akabane, get off me.”
“You don’t believe he’s innocent.” He’s right.
“I want to believe Gakushuu’s not dead,” Ren begs. Karma’s right. “Please just let me have this. Just a bit longer.” Karma had thrown his hand over his eyes and pushed his forehead to the wall, taking in deep shuddering breaths. Araki finds them and drags them back to class. He doesn’t say anything about it, because it’s his third week of listening his father’s voice appeal for witnesses on the news. Then it becomes three months, then there are fresher cases to solve with more vulnerable people.
Ren walks into Akabane arguing with a man dressed in black around the corner from where the old entrance to the 3-E hill sat. “Is there really nothing you can do, Sensei?”
“We’re trying, Karma, we really are.”
“You know who-”
“We can’t say that.”
Karma drags a hand down his face. The man - Karasuma-Sensei - looks over, lips pursed. Ren says, “we’ll find him.”
“Sakakibara Ren,” Karma says, “you-”
“Akabane, please.” Ren shuts his eyes. Karma falls silent.
The curtains in the windows of the Asano estate are drawn. Autumn has brought a blanket of crisp orange leaves onto the garden. Somewhere on the Kunugigaoka security tapes there was a video of Gakushuu getting into his father's car, a bandage on his cheek. It's the first and only time eyewitnesses reported the two ever going home together. Some people think Gakuhou would have let his son run away from him, as if Gakushuu would have willingly gotten into that car.
Everyone wanted to talk to him. Nobody wanted to talk to him. “Hey, Akabane, you and Asano were rivals, right?” Someone hollers. Karma flinches. Ren grabs him by the arm and hauls him out of the way of the crowd.
Karma’s voice is soft under Ren’s arm. “You don’t think I-”
“We both know who did it,” Ren tells him. The rooftop is empty this time of the day. (“Gakushuu knew how to pick the lock,” Ren tells Karma, pushing on the door handle. “I prefer swiping the keys, but I’ll have to return it.”
“Study knew how to pick locks?”
“He knows how to get out of places,” Ren says. Karma sucks in a breath between his teeth. “I want to believe he’s alive. I really, really want to.”) Karma collapses on the parapet and Ren leans back on the railing, feeling the breeze behind his ears; the ghost of fingers carding through his hair. “We had our first kiss here,” Ren tells him. Karma looks over with wide eyes.
Every so often Ren goes to the columbarium where Gakushuu's mother is kept. It feels like admitting defeat, because Gakushuu hasn't been found, and some days he wishes to be optimistic, and some days he wishes to snap out of the denial. If he truly didn't want to be found, and this is Gakushuu they were talking about, then they never will - and if he was dead, then he's somewhere no one dares go look. Sometimes Ren knocks on the door and nobody answers - he almost wishes someone would, if only so Ren can see what Gakuhou'd say. ("The same thing he told every officer that came knocking," Karma jokes, smile not reaching his teeth. "Come back with a warrant.")
Karma toes off his shoes and stows it aside, before joining Ren at the doorway, gazing into the hall of endless shelves. They pad down the line of urns: Asano, Hikaru. Ren gets down on his knees, and next to him Karma bows as well. "Hello, auntie."
He hadn't known how to face her for a long time, first when Gakushuu went missing and Ren felt like the world's worst failure of a best friend. He still doesn’t know what to tell her. He hopes she knows the truth - he hopes she is taking good care of Gakushuu.
“Auntie, it’s me, Sakakibara Ren. This is Akabane Karma,” Ren says, to her. “He was Gakushuu’s…”
“We were good friends,” Karma says. His hands are on his lap, thumbs rubbing over one another. “We’re not giving up on him, you know,” he says the tired words that Ren can’t bear to repeat, even to a dead woman, it rings hollow.
None of the other Virtuosos have ever come with him - they have never met the late Mrs Asano, but Ren has scarce memories of her hand around Gakushuu’s wrist when he still came up to her knees. But Ren saw Karma wandering with flowers that he didn’t know what to do with, and it felt like a jinx to hold it for a person they didn’t dare say was dead, so Ren brought him here. When they’re back outside in the cold air, Karma says, “you come here every month?”
“Gakushuu used to, even when he was busiest,” Ren says. “He really loved her.”
“You think her own husband would have,” Karma mutters.
“Don’t say that!” Ren hisses, more for propriety than the Asanos’ sensibilities. Gakushuu once told him that his father thought the past was a burdensome sentiment. What a load of shit.
“I know, I know,” Karma says, looking away.
“Since when do you smoke?”
“Since I hear it’s a popular pastime for delinquents who always hang out on rooftops,” Karma says, flicking a finger towards Ren, who shakes his head and nudges it away.
“A cliché, that’s what you are,” Ren says. “Breaking the dress code, wearing a black jacket…”
Karma took a long drag of his cigarette. “The last time I cried, before all of this,” he said, “was about Koro-sensei.”
"Does it get better?" Ren asks. "Missing him."
Karma lets out a long breath. "Yes. No. I don't know. It's been almost two years and it feels like yesterday. It's been a year and it feels like yesterday."
“You shouldn’t be smoking.”
Karma huffs out a laugh. “Let me, Ren. I only have so many things I can be properly upset about.”
They celebrate Gakushuu Asano’s seventeenth birthday with copious amounts of alcohol so they can pretend like they’re not talking about it. So of course they talk about it. “Remember Kevin?” Seo said. “I spoke to him the other day. He passed on his condolences.”
“So we’re not even going to pretend he’s still alive?” Araki mumbled, staring down the neck of his bottle. Koyama snorted, and started sniffling, and Karma shoved freezing toes under Ren’s thigh.
“I had,” Karma said, in between swigs of his cider, “the biggest crush on Gakushuu Asano when he was still ali- around.”
“Who didn’t?” Ren sighed. But who’s to say? There were plenty of people who liked Gakushuu and pretended they didn’t because he was an Asano; plenty of people who didn’t like him and pretended they did because he was a tragedy immortalized. Happy Birthday to the boy whose disappearance rocked the nation, as if time didn’t march relentlessly forward, swept up in headline after sensational headline.
When Ren wakes up in the morning Karma’s on his porch, hair almost golden in the morning sun. He looks up when Ren joins him and then looks back out again onto the sky, violet-orange streaking through the clouds. Ren doesn’t say, I miss him - there is little point in filling the space with words they’ve both memorized. He says, “breakfast?”
"Where are you thinking about for college?" Karma asks, knees knocking into his. Ren shifts, moving his laptop to adjust for the cat sprawling into his personal space, purring loud enough to drown out the noise of the fan.
"I'm looking at international universities," Ren tells him, because it's good etiquette not to immediately bring up your dead-not-dead best friend to start a conversation; because Ren is thinking about the summers in the states that Seo always talked about, the golden-amber sun and red sand and the reflection of the sky in his glasses. "Some local ones. Maybe. I don't know." If he can bear to stay. He wants to, but Gakushuu wouldn't be here, even if he was still alive. Frankly, he hadn't been here in a long time.
"If I’m going to be a bureaucrat, I’ll probably stay local,” Karma says. “Better to know the scene, make connections.” He’s frowning, knees knocking against Ren’s.
"We're not going to fall out of touch just because we're in different countries, you know," Ren reassures him.
Karma sighs, a little biting. "I know, I just-" He drags his tongue over his teeth, and sighs again, and his head falls to Ren's shoulder. His browser is open to MIT's admission's page. Karma politely doesn't mention it - Ren shuts the device and sets it away.
"I miss him, Ren," Karma says. "I know it's not his fault, wherever he's gone, but-"
"I know," Ren says.
"I miss him. He said we were going through high school together. He'll keep me on my toes."
"I know." Ren laces their fingers together. He's said this too often to cry. "We were supposed to go to the states together. He'd always wanted to leave-" Japan. The house. The man. Ren bites down on his tongue. Karma grips his palm.
They graduate high school two years after Gakushuu Asano does. It’s silly that they loved the same boy and never got to tell him - Ren who pretended like he wanted to practice kissing girls, and Karma who pretended like he wanted the study sessions to sit across him. Seo tells them he’s never coming back to Japan. Araki says he’ll stay and remember every January First and April Fourth on the radio. Koyama says he’ll cut his hair. Karma drags Ren up to the rooftop and rattles the stolen-copied key in the doorknob just before the others see him cry.
“I hope he knows we’re still waiting for him,” Ren says, and Karma laughs, bright and loud. They sit there and say nothing long after everyone has gone on.
Ren doesn't say, don't smoke. He doesn't say, you'll taste like ash. They have their unfortunate vices - Karma and drag of nicotine he feels reminiscent enough to justify, Ren and the lingering smudges of cigarettes on Karma's lips. Their knees bump together; the sun sets behind them.