Chapter Text
Gakushuu was fifteen years old when the yellow octopus creature that had blown up the moon was killed by Class 3-E.
~ ~ ~
Gakushuu was sixteen, on his first day of Kunugigaoka High School, when he first talked to Akabane about it.
“Your teacher, last year. What was he really like? I haven’t heard much, apart from the usual monster stories.”
Akabane winces, his hand tight around the carton of strawberry milk. “Why do you want to know, hm, second-place?”
Gakushuu stiffens at the teasing smirk aimed his way, even if it’s clearly a defence mechanism. “None of your business, Akabane.”
He remembers 3E on the night of their teacher’s death. The whole class had slept in their building, thick personalised books in front of each one. Gakushuu remembers seeing them through the trees, wondering if he should go up and talk to them, to offer some comfort.
He didn’t.
So he knows why Akabane wouldn’t want to talk about it. Grief is a wild, cruel thing. It turned his father insane; it can surely make a few young students quiet about it all. He doesn’t push.
~ ~ ~
Gakushuu was five when his father ripped up a drawing he made of his friend. All he wants is to show it to Ikeda. But his father becomes very quiet and very pale, and in a matter of seconds, the coloured paper litters the floor like confetti.
“Go to your room, Gakushuu. Don’t ever interrupt me like that again.”
Five-year-old Gakushuu stares at the blob of yellow on his page, eyes stinging and blurring with tears. He doesn’t know what he’s done wrong. He doesn’t understand why his father sounds so cold.
The temporary silence is broken when his father shouts. He never shouts. “Go! Get out! Get out of my office!”
Gakushuu jumps, tripping over his own feet as he stumbles out of the room. The door slams behind him, and he doesn’t know it yet, but that final door slam is enough to lock him out of his father’s heart forever.
~ ~ ~
Gakushuu was sixteen, in Biology class, when he saw a flash of yellow outside and mistook it for the octopus. It’s just a piece of paper. Some stupid paper aeroplane thrown out of the window by a student, bright yellow and feeble in the strong winds.
It makes him think of the teacher, though, and his fixed smile. The way his tentacles would wave about when he became excited. How there was always a little white drawing on the chalkboard when Gakushuu impressed him with an answer.
For one painfully tender moment, he misses the creature.
“Hey, Asano, pass this along.” Ren whispers beside him, shoving a slip of paper in his hand.
Gakushuu sighs, brought out of his daydreams. He passes the paper along, letting it continue on its way to a girl in the front row. “Are you actually paying attention to Mrs Ito at all?”
“Yes!” Ren hisses back, showing him a full page of notes on the anatomy of an octopus. Huh. No wonder he was thinking of the supercreature. “I hate these things. They creep me out.”
“Octopuses?” Gakushuu raises an eyebrow. “Must have been terrifying to learn that 3E had its very own.”
Ren only stares at him blankly.
“Their teacher.” Gakushuu huffs, internally rolling his eyes. He evidently needs new friends, if these ones are this slow.
“Their-?” Ren’s question is cut off by the bell. He still looks bewildered.
~ ~ ~
Gakushuu was fifteen when he met the octopus, Koro-Sensei. All he was doing was minding his own business, walking up the hill of his school. Ok, so, maybe he was creeping around 3E’s building to try to find out why they were suddenly doing so well. But he hadn’t expected to bump into…
A bright yellow octopus wearing teacher’s robes and a fixed beaming smile.
“Oh.” He breathes, staring up at the… thing. Gakushuu would have fainted, probably, if he wasn’t an Asano. Asanos don’t faint.
“...Ah.” The creature sighs.
They stare at each other for a second or two.
“I suppose we should talk about this, shouldn’t we?” The creature says faintly.
Gakushuu nods, praying to whatever god is out there that this is all a dream.
Spoiler: it isn’t. The creature gives him some hot chocolate, a biscuit, and a hint about raising teacher salaries before launching into his long spiel about the entire story. He leaves the biscuit and the hot chocolate, ignores the hint, and feels his soul leave his body as he listens attentively to the creature.
Surprisingly, the being who destroyed half of the fucking moon is actually rather sweet. Gakushuu is told to call him Koro-Sensei, which apparently is the name 3E gave him, and the creature has the courtesy of privately letting him sign the NDA without disclosing his new knowledge to the government. It’s a rather cute arrangement, actually. Gakushuu keeps quiet about Koro-Sensei, and Koro-Sensei tells him about 3E for half an hour sometime after school.
At first, Gakushuu doesn’t enjoy it at all. Koro-Sensei is slimy and far too bright about everything, constantly encouraging Gakushuu to do things he does not want to - like apologising to Class 3E, calling his minions ‘friends’, and taking a break from his constantly tight schedule. Gakushuu despises every moment he has to sit with the creature, discomfort crawling up his back.
Then he relaxes. Koro-Sensei listens to him, doesn’t judge him, in a way that is so unlike everyone else. He can rant about anyone or anything, and Koro-Sensei will not tell a soul. Even the creature’s slimy rubbery hugs become accepted and comforting after a while.
When his father stops Gakushuu from attending school lessons, Koro-Sensei takes up teaching him in their time together. It’s helpful and tailored to him in a way that the group lessons in 3A could never be, letting him race through subject after subject with ease and understanding. So he continues to learn from the creature, long after the exams are over and done with.
Maybe that’s why he misses him so much when he’s gone.
~ ~ ~
Gakushuu was sixteen when he took the trek up the hill, panting lightly by the time he reached the building. It’s abandoned now, not a person in sight. That doesn’t matter. He’s used to seeing it like this.
He wanders down the hallway, basking in the quiet noises of nature outside. Beautiful, just like Koro-Sensei used to say. Appreciate the natural beauty of the body, just as much as you appreciate the beauty of nature itself. Gakushuu snorts, reaching the door. He’s never been self conscious of his body, except in moments where he’s hated the way his eyes are his father’s.
The door slides open.
Everything is exactly as it was. The blackboard smudged with white chalk, desks neatly set out in rows, the windows looking out onto the forest. Gakushuu wanders through, fingers brushing against the wooden walls, nails scraping along the chalkboard. Koro-Sensei always hated when he did that. He wouldn’t shout at him, though. He never shouted at him.
“What are you doing here?”
Gakushuu turns. Akabane stands in the doorway, one hand on the frame, one eyebrow raised. He shouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes people process grief in the same way, wandering around the places of people they lose.
“Does it matter?” Gakushuu responds instead, sliding into the second seat of the front row. He always used to sit here, on their after school sessions.
“It matters to me.” Akabane strolls to the blackboard, grabbing the chalk and doodling a frowning face mindlessly. “Why would the school council president from 3-A come to the abandoned old 3-E classroom? When it’s a dangerous hike up the mountain. When you’ve never been here before.”
“I have.” He mutters. His hands rest on top of the desk, skin on wood, sinking in and clawing. The curve of his nails fit perfectly into the grooves he dug over months, tight pain carved into a desk, the physical show of his tearful rants about the crushing weight of his thoughts. “I’ve been here before.”
The chalk comes to a halt with a screech on the board. Birds cheep outside, filling the silence with their song.
“Did he… to you, too?”
Gakushuu looks up. Akabane’s back is turned to him, arm up and fingers crushing the chalk in his fist, body shaking. Grief. Painful, suppressing, silent grief.
“After school.” Gakushuu admits after a second or two passes. It makes no difference now, when the creature is dead and gone. The whole world could know and it wouldn’t change a single thing. He doesn’t know why he kept the entire thing a secret for so long.
Akabane lets out a choked laugh, shoulders shaking. “I’m sorry. He- I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Gakushuu drops his eyes back to the desk. He feels the faint trace of a tentacle on his hand. “His death wasn’t your fault.”
The chalk clatters to the floor. Akabane walks out in quick steps, the door sliding open roughly, wood on wood. “I wish it was.” The other boy growls, fury boiling his words to red-hot lava. “After everything he did.”
Then the other boy is gone, and Gakushuu is left to wonder what on earth Akabane means by that.
~ ~ ~
Gakushuu was nine when he met Ren, the brightest and kindest boy he knows. They sit together in class. He isn’t the smartest, admittedly, so Gakushuu has to keep him secret for a while. Ren laughs at him when he tells him that, saying he doesn’t care about whether or not Gakushuu’s dad likes him, only that they keep hanging out.
Ren admires him. Gakushuu knows all of the answers, is always the first to put his hand up, the last their teacher picks because he always says the right thing and ‘we need to give other people a chance, Asano’. Ren stares at him in awe when he explains things, even if Ren doesn’t understand a word of it, because he says it makes Gakushuu ‘shine’. Gakushuu practices in the mirror. He doesn’t know what Ren means. All he can see is his father reflected back at him, plus some baby fat.
Gakushuu doesn’t know why he wants to be friends with Ren. The other boy is a brainless idiot, a himbo, whose only worth seems to be in making the girls giggle. If Gakushuu’s father knew he was hanging around this fool, he would…
So Gakushuu pretends he has an after-school activity and drags Ren to an empty classroom. He tries to teach him. The first few sessions are a disaster, because Ren is far too distracted, but then Gakushuu realises what he’s been doing wrong.
He teaches Ren like he would teach himself; desperate, cramming hours of work into a few minutes, body-slamming into the hardest questions until they feel mentally battered and bruised. Ren cannot handle that, doesn’t have the same motivations. Ren likes people, not knowledge. Gakushuu needs to use people.
That’s when he meets Nat, or Natsuhiko as he called him back then. He sees the opportunity, and takes it. The moment Ren sees this bullied, ugly little snotty kid being fawned over by Gakushuu, he wants to find out exactly what he is doing wrong. It may be manipulative and ‘evil’, as his ethics teacher adores to say, but it works. (Plus, Gakushuu gets a strange warm bubbling in his stomach whenever a jealous Ren steals him away for time alone together, away from Natsuhiko.)
Ren hears Gakushuu praising Nat’s intelligence, fawning over the test results, and instantly starts improving in their sessions. He listens intently, even when he’s bored stiff of the work. Gakushuu starts to notice him sneaking books home to read and study for their next sessions.
Finally, after only a few months, Gakushuu reveals to his father the foundations of his elite group. They call themselves the ‘Three Professors’ (a fact teenage Gakushuu would later vehemently deny), strutting around school at the top of their class, and suddenly being smart becomes a cool thing. Nat may not be the one the girls drool over, but Gakushuu and Ren make up for it in spades.
His father laughs.
Gakushuu shouldn’t have expected any more.
~ ~ ~
Gakushuu is twenty when he remembers something.
Koro-Sensei had brown eyes, so dark they were almost black.
He leans over the side of his bed and throws up, tentacles holding him.
~ ~ ~
Gakushuu is fifteen when he meets Irina Jelavich. He’s coming out of the classroom after one of his talks with the creature, his blazer slung over his arm, shirt rumpled. It’s hot in summer, very hot, especially in a building with no AC.
Her eyes widen as she takes him in, and for a second he mistakes her for one of the main campus teachers. Fear floods him at the thought of his father hearing about this, hearing that his son is taking lessons from the delinquent’s teacher.
“Don’t tell him.” Gakushuu blurts out. He flushes. It seems all negotiation skills fly out of the window when faced with his own imminent doom.
“What were you doing in there? Did the principal send you?” She scowls, arms folded over her… substantial chest. Ugh.
He swallows, pulling himself up straight to adjust his clothing. He’s sticky from the heat, uncomfortable. He can’t wait to go home and have a long, freezing shower. “No.” He settles on, concluding she must be the 3-E teacher. No way would a main campus one trek all the way up here.
She raises an eyebrow. He stays quiet. “Well, are you going to tell me what you were doing in there?”
Thankfully, that’s the moment the creature decides to step out into the corridor. “Irina! What’s going on?” Bright and bubbly as always. Gakushuu can feel that stretched smile behind him, even if he can’t see it.
“What’s he doing here?” She asks again, gesturing loosely at Gakushuu’s tense body. He needs a shower, something to relax and wash away the filth. Wait, he has to go all the way down the hill, too, with this sticky feeling clinging to him. Great.
“Oh, just checking up on us. The principal wouldn’t come all the way up here himself, you know.” The creature laughs, making Gakushuu flinch. He hates all of the talk of his father. When he’s up here, he’d rather forget the man exists at all.
“Hmph.” The woman narrows her eyes at Gakushuu for a moment or two longer, then sticks out perfectly manicured nails. “Irina Jelavic. Tell your dear papa I said hi, hm?”
“Of course.” Gakushuu slots his hand in hers, shaking firmly with the perfectly-trained polite smile smeared over his lips. He won’t, obviously. His father doesn’t know this woman outside of hiring her, he wouldn’t appreciate Gakushuu reminding him 3-E exists.
She sticks an equally fake smile on her red lips, subtly wiping her hand on her skirt (well, sweat isn’t pleasant, he supposes) and stepping aside. “Goodbye. Sensei, could we have a word?”
(Why didn’t she stop for a second and think?)
“I suppose?” The creature sounds confused, but Gakushuu doesn’t bother turning to watch them go back into the classroom. He marches out instead, suffocating in the heat, nursing his sore nails, praying the shower will soothe his protesting butt.
Sore nails from digging into the desk. Aching butt from sitting down for so long. Sticky and sweaty and ruffled from the heat.
Right?