Work Text:
allel.
Or: walking a thin line;
“-and the hell are you thinking?” Karma roars, wrenching the boy off the railing onto the floor.
When Asano hits the ground he hits it like a limp rag doll, smashing into the floor so uselessly and defeatedly, and for a moment it flashes across Karma’s eyes - the image he would have run towards to see instead, if he had been any later, Asano in this exact pose with this exact pathetic expression twenty stories below with a pool of blood around him-
Then Asano lifts his head, and Karma sees tears running down the boy’s face, and Asano opens his mouth to speak but Karma can’t hear it over the sound of rushing water in his ears.
That’s right, there wouldn’t have been a body for Karma to find, not if Karma had been just a few seconds behind. It would have been swept away by the river running underneath them.
“-why did you save me?-” Asano is saying, repeating, oh, oh, the audacity!-
“Why? What do you mean why? What are you trying to do?” Karma yells at him.
“How is it any of your business, Akabane?” Asano screams back, his voice hoarse like he’s been screaming for hours and hours before on end, (maybe he has,) “just-”
“Just what?! Let you die? Make me a murderer, Asano?!”
An expression, sharp and scathing, flashes across Asano’s face. “Make you a murderer? How does that even make any sense?!-”
“An eyewitness to your fucking stupid stunt!” Karma snaps at him. “What were you-”
“-You know very well what the hell i was thinking!” Asano says, something in his voice cracking a little,
and Karma hates it, he hates it, because he does,
(when he’s standing with his back to a cliff and his mind runs through everyone in his life who has gone and upped and left him behind, the people who told him to trust them and then stabbed him first, and how could he blame them?)
“-you’re selfish!” Karma yells at him, and Asano is getting up on his unsteady feet but Karma shoves him down again,
because, he thinks, back then this was really what he needed, a hard hit to the head to knock him to his senses,
Asano rolls his shoulder on the pavement and hisses and bares his teeth at Karma, and Karma wants to give him that hard hit to the head.
“People like you are selfish, that’s what you are!” Karma tells Asano, and the reflection in the darkening puddle of water by Asano’s head,
“You think you got it worse than everyone else in the world because you got a B on your math test?!” Neither of them have ever gotten a B, “because Daddy dearest doesn’t love you?”
Asano says something, his face twisted in anger, Karma knows he is speaking because his lips are moving but he cannot recall what Asano is saying.
“Selfish little prick, doing this and we’ll have to pick up the slack, I’ll have do deal with your stupid friends’ snivelling crying faces for the rest of the school year,-”
Something in Asano’s eyes flash, and he’s always been scarily perceptive like that, and when he says, “speaking from experience, Akabane?”
Karma brings his foot down onto Asano’s side.
“I should just throw you off the bridge!” Karma yells, over Asano’s yelling, “throw you off and fish you out!”
God knows he needed it, jumping from the cliff! Would he have learnt his lesson otherwise? What was a better teacher than the absolute terror that gripped his heart in that few seconds he was in free-fall, uncertainty at his back, the ground rushing up to him, knowing that he’ll hit something without any warning,-
(Ever take a rollercoaster for the first time with your eyes closed? Gripping onto the pistol like it’s your handlebar, not knowing when it will be the next twist or turn or choke or slam-
hitting the net (Koro-sensei) and still forcing the breath out of his lungs so painfully he thought that was what it felt like when his back breaks, before realizing that he was alive?)
“-Selfish!” Karma says, and when he blinks he doesn’t see Asano’s expression through a hot blur- no, no, he’s crying.
“Y-your dad doesn’t love you! So what? Big deal!” Karma says, in the next blink his eyes clear up (tears rolling down his cheeks) and he sees Asano again, wide-eyed, pained expression, one hand clutching where Karma kicked him, the other propping up his back.
“You think you got it worse than other people? You don’t know hurt!”
“H-h-hypocrite-ical of you to say that,” Asano hisses back, “If you say I don’t know pain, you think you do?”
Hypocrite, Karma is. “Neither of us do! So neither of us should ever do something like this!”
“Who are you to dictate that someone’s pain is worth more or less than another’s?” Asano seethes, “who are you to pass judgement? Saying I’m not hurting enough to die?!”
“Oh, oh?! You think you’re hurting enough to die?”
“People have died from less,” Asano snaps, and he’s shaking so much, yet he’s still staring up at Karma with such a straight face, an enraged steadiness,
(Karma imagines, where he punches out every impulsive thought in his head, Asano buries them until he doesn’t quite know how to do anything but,)
Karma says, “do you know what hurting enough is?!”
Asano surges to his feet far too quickly that he collapses straight back into Karma and Karma catches him, fingers digging into Asano’s side.
Asano lifts his head, and Karma can see his eyes - red, skin raw at the edges, sticky and wet - his nose, freckles dusting his skin (Karma hasn’t noticed those before), and Asano’s breath ghosts the side of Karma’s ear when he says, “if you know so much, then make me hurt enough.”
Karma is going to forcefully dig out every single emotion that Asano has forgotten he had.
He rears back and punches Asano squarely in the face.
And when Karma pulls Asano out of the brink, gasping for breath
He gets pulled back under almost immediately, fighting for air-
-for-
“Akabane,” Asano sobs, and they’re somehow tangled up together at the base of the pillar just minutes ago when Asano tried to take his own life,
and everywhere hurts, from where his own tears and sweat is stinging the cuts and scratches on his body, his bruises and muscles ache, cold air biting into his skin.
Asano looks like he is faring no better and he’s finally, finally , letting something go, digging something up
(the past once buried),
clinging onto Karma’s shoulder like a lifeline;
Karma relaxes, slumps over the railing in relief, and closes his eyes.
When Karma wakes up again it’s barely been a minute, or maybe it could have been an hour?
Asano is shivering underneath him, because when Karma leaned against the pillar he pulled Asano down with him, effectively pinning him to the floor.
They’ve sparred before, in gym class, outside of class to test their abilities, once with a knife just to see if they could (and then someone called the cops on them, so they ran as fast as they could.) And in that time Karma recognizes what Asano feels and smells and tastes like, and so now he presses his lips to the copper color of Asano’s hair and feels Asano shudder.
Asano slaps weakly at Karma’s arm.
Karma moves his mouth down to the side of Asano’s temple. He feels the pulse there, beating, beat, beat, beat,
“I just wanted to feel something,” Asano murmurs pitifully.
“Do what you just did and then you’ll feel nothing at all,” Karma scolds.
(What was the difference between cuddling and a fight? Sans the violence. It’s like you’ve held someone in a headlock and you’ve never had someone’s life in your hands as intimately as you did then, just like when they've had their hands around your torso to try and knock you over, and now you’re both curled around each other craving a contact you’ll never ask for otherwise.
It’s odd but also not at all, because you’ve been closer to each other than possible without calling it anything sexual. He’s had his hand around your inner leg to try and flip you, his thighs around your neck and his foot in your face. You’ve pulled his hair, picked him up around the waist to toss him over your shoulder, hiking him up by the legs to keep him pinned-)
“You look ugly when you cry,” Karma says, dipping his head.
“You look ugly all the time,” Asano says, raising his.
“You taste like blood,” Karma says.
“I think you broke my leg,” Asano mumbles.
“You, me.”
“No, I mean it.”
“Shit.”
“I’m going to fireman carry you all the way to the hospital if you don’t shut the fuck up-”
Asano bites his finger.
“You little shit-”
Strange to find the person you’ve beaten up on your couch, stranger to be bandaging them up, but unless - in Asano’s words, “we want to turn up at Emergency like we’ve gotten out of a gang fight,” - they’re in Karma’s house.
Asano’s left leg propped up against a pillow, swelling up rather terribly.
Karma dabs a little extra hard with the alcohol swipe on Asano’s face, just for that.
He slaps the little sonic ninja plaster on Asano’s face, cups his cheeks together, and presses a short hard kiss on his lips. His voice is surprisingly shaky when he says, “don’t ever do that again.”
Asano closes his eyes, and sighs. “I won’t.”
“I was going to kill myself, Akabane,” Asano says, tiredly. “I didn’t bring my phone.”
For the fifth time, Karma’s phone lights up with the Principal’s number. Karma doesn’t have it saved, but Asano leaned over his shoulder and rolled his eyes when he saw it.
Karma’s phone is on silent, so he lets it ring through. They’re both in the waiting room of the Tokyo Emergency Hospital, two call number slips in Karma’s hands. Asano has his head on Karma’s shoulder, drifting in and out of consciousness.
A message notification comes through, interrupting the call’s incessant blinking. It’s Sakakibara, from what Karma can see from the tinny message box at the top of the screen, “Five more minutes, line’s a little long.” He'd rushed over immediately when Karma called him - the plush goat (affectionately dubbed Goatkushuu) that Asano is hugging to his chest now is his.
Karma closes his eyes.
When he opens them again it’s to the rustling of bags. Sakakibara is here now, balancing three takeaway cups, and Asano takes one from him. Karma takes another.
“Principal still calling?” Sakakibara says wryly, when Karma’s phone lights up.
“He’s not calling you?” Karma says.
Karma’s phone stops ringing. In his hand, Sakakibara’s phone buzzes. He shrugs.
They finish their drinks. The Principal calls several more times, and then Karasuma calls, and Karma deliberates a little while longer on picking that one up, but he doesn’t.
On the monitor, one of their call numbers lights up. Karma hands that slip to Asano, who uses Sakakibara as a human crutch and hobbles to one of the rooms.
Karma settles back in and waits.
The second call number lights up.
He gets a disappointed look from his attending physician, but that’s normally how most adults look at him these days, sixteen years old and fresh out of a fight. Koro-sensei never looked at him like that, but Koro-sensei only had one expression. Karasuma-sensei always looked at him like that, but Karasuma-sensei also only had one expression, (and he looked so disappointed at his own wedding that Karma might have thought he actually was if not for how hands shook when he tried to put on Bitch-sensei’s ring, and that day 3-E discovered his second expression, which was the look on his face when she walked down the aisle.)
At least he’s mostly cleaned up, no longer in ripped river-stunk bridge-metal clothes. They remove his home bandages and reapply new ones.
They bundle him out to wait for prescriptions (ointment to apply and a pill for common sense) so Karma takes a new call number and sits back down. He texts Sakakibara, who texts back with many spelling mistakes, and something about how he himself has been kicked out of the observing room and Asano’s leg is fractured, according to the x-ray.
Then halfway through their text exchange the Principal - who’s finally thought to check the public healthcare service resources, which he should have done if Karma had ran to the bridge slightly slower - stalks straight up to Karma.
The receptionist is watching them with not unsubtle eyes, her tapping the pen against the counter (that makes Principal Asano glance over first, so she could stare meaningfully at him.) It was the same woman who smiled at the both of them when Karma half-dragged, half-carried Asano - Gakushuu, in an hour ago.
Principal Asano - Gakuhou, he’s no longer the Principal - looks like he would yell, but he’s also the sort of person that would rather not make a scene. “I called you,” Gakuhou says.
Karma turns the phone over in his hands. It blinks, from a notification from Sakakibara, which he knows that Gakuhou saw.
“Yeah,” Karma says.
“You,” Gakuhou says, taking in a deep breath.
“Me,” Karma says, and then he looks at Gakuhou in the eyes. “You.”
Gakuhou is no stranger to the fights/spars/altercations that Karma and his son get into; it is a reasonable conclusion to make, Karma bandaged from head to toe. Gakuhou’s expression is thunderous, but he doesn’t deserve to make that expression, Karma thinks bitterly, not when he was the reason that Gakushuu-
It’s not Karma’s story to tell, though, so Karma sits back and turns his head and looks away.
And Gakuhou glares at him for a lot longer, but then he sits down as well one seat away, fingers twitching in his lap, and he looks almost defeated.
He must have called ahead, then, because he doesn’t ask Karma any questions. The receptionist would have told him Gakushuu checked in (they’re still legally obligated to because Gakuhou has a guardianship.) Karma wonders if she puts the voice on the phone to the face. Gakuhou’s a little bit of a celebrity in the news circuit, his face plastered all over the television screens. Gakushuu’s may not have been, but the hereditary (and name) is far too obvious; but the boy shuttles between school and his home with a single-minded determination, so not much of him is seen outside of Kunugigaoka walls. When he is, Karma suspects it is a deliberate PR stunt, and he doesn’t doubt the boy to pull it off - mid-activity participating in a charity fundraiser, helping an old lady cross the street, patting a cat on a park bench.
Otherwise, no one looks at the boy with the cap and the hoodie and the big dorky glasses fumbling his way through the supermarket shelves, mulling over worksheet questions in the library, picking a fight with Karma Akabane in the middle of an alleyway.
Karma continues texting Sakakibara.
When Gakushuu and Sakakibara emerge again both Karma and Gakuhou stand up. The both of them look straight at Karma. Karma reaches over, slots his hands around Gakushuu’s face, and kisses him squarely on the lips.
Gakuhou freezes behind them.
“I got it,” Gakushuu says. “A psychiatric referral,” and Karma hears the intake of a shocked breath behind him.
“I’m proud of you,” Karma says, and he means it.
“Me too,” Sakakibara says, smiling.
Gakushuu says, loud enough for it to matter, “thanks for pulling me off that bridge.”
Gakuhou sits back down on the chair.
“Maybe I just needed some sense knocked into me.”
“No, you didn’t, it was just…” Karma sighs, and looks away. “Look. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have said those things and I shouldn’t have. Tried to hit your face in when you were dealing with your mental health crisis.”
Gakushuu - Asano? - Gakushuu laughs a little wryly, lips quirked up at the side. There’s a sonic ninja bandage on his cheek. His nurse apparently had some on hand. It’s not the exact same design Karma had, but it was cute.
“It worked, though.”
“For a bit,” Karma says.
Sakakibara enters the room. His house is just as empty as Karma’s, but he’s more used to receiving guests, and he already has some of Gakushuu’s things over. He slots himself in Gakushuu’s side and Gakushuu curls up into Sakakibara.
“I texted you about homework,” Karma says.
“I didn’t reply, and you assumed the worst?” Gakushuu raises an eyebrow.
“You’re always stupid about texts,” Karma points out. Gakushuu not texting back about half an hour was usually suspicious - not that he never ignored Karma, he ignored Karma a lot. But he was usually deliberate about it, and he kept his read receipts on for that reason.
“How did you know where I was?” Gakushuu asks.
Karma looks away, out the window. It’s nighttime. Sakakibara has a soup boiling in the kitchen. Gakuhou must be at his house now, doing whatever it is that he does, and Gakushuu doesn’t want to go home right now, but it’s 1 in the morning and Gakushuu says his father gets up for a morning run at 3. Which is, frankly, pretty ridiculous, but he’ll be back by 4, so Gakushuu’s going to head back around then, because there’s a long-overdue talk waiting for them.
(Karma went jogging once, with Gakushuu. They weren’t friends yet, but Karma was out for a jog, and then he saw Gakushuu, and they started an unspoken race. When Karma wandered to the end of his usual route he let Gakushuu take the lead, and they went around what Karma would later learn was also Gakuhou’s mid-night route.
Then they decided to cut across halfway (because Gakuhou’s route was stupid) and they ran across the bridge.
“My father doesn’t run across this bridge,” Gakushuu had said.
“Why?” In fairness, it’s not a very good bridge to run across, the ground wasn’t too even and the railings were kind of short.
“Someone he knew died here,” Gakushuu said, and he had looked over the railing of the bridge into the river down below. And there was something there, then, that clicked for Karma when he watched Gakushuu watch the water like he was searching for something. The wind blew and Gakushuu's hair fluttered and the sound of water rushing filled Karma's breath, and Karma's eyes drop down to the way Gakushuu's fingers curled against the edge of the railing the same he would an exercise bar-
-Karma almost reached out there and then.)
And then Karma and Sakakibara are going to come by with breakfast at either 8 or before if Gakushuu texts them, to make sure that neither of the Asanos have killed each other.
“Lucky guess,” Karma finally says.
Gakushuu goes to therapy and so does Gakuhou (probably) ((he should)) and despite all of this Karma and Gakushuu don't actually admit they like each other/start dating until months later, much to Ren's exasperation