Chapter Text
Nagisa remembered his parent’s divorce. He remembered the fighting, the crazy look in his mother’s eyes. He remembered the courtroom fight over which parent should look after him. Which parent cared more. Which parent LOVED him more. Nagisa remembered thinking that they were fighting for the sake of fighting. They only wanted him because the other did. He remembered deciding he didn’t want either of them. But no one asks what the child wants. No one cared about what would happen to him. No one LOVED him for him. They only ever LOVED the idea of him.
His father only wanted the assassin that could fool everyone. His mother only wanted the daughter he will never be. They both wanted the girl, never the boy.
That is how Shiota Nagisa ended up sitting in class 1-D of Kunugigaoka Junior High School. The two years before that he had been home-schooled by his father, while they travelled the world and trained. He was going to miss the travelling he did with his father. He wasn’t going to miss the blood they left behind in each place they went. He knew his training had ended that day the court ruled in his mother’s favour.
‘ Travelling the world is no way to raise a child’ the judge stated, ‘He needs to be around children his own age.’
The judge’s IDEA of him was a defenceless child with no place to call home, so Nagisa played the part.
His mother’s IDEA of him was the perfect daughter, so Nagisa played the part.
His father’s IDEA of him was the perfect assassin, so Nagisa played the part.
He used his father’s training to be the idea everyone saw him as. Because who would ever LOVE the real him.
So Nagisa sat quietly at his desk. Waiting to be everyone else’s ideas. The quiet one, the strange one, the no hoper one, the stupid one, the End Class one. Nagisa played everyone’s ideas until he couldn’t. He played everyone’s ideas until Akabane Karma.
Akabane was different. Akabane was everything Nagisa wasn’t. Akabane didn’t play on everyone’s ideas of him, and he never held any ideas of anyone else, he just didn’t. Akabane knew he was better than them so why bother thinking about them at all. He knew he was going places others only could dream of and it showed in the way he spoke. In the way he held himself. In the way he acted.
Akabane was different.
Why, Nagisa could never understand, did Akabane want to be friends? What made Nagisa different that Akabane chose him? He chose Nagisa to be on his level. To be seen as his equal or as his sidekick? Was it a ruse to hurt Nagisa? If it was, why couldn’t Nagisa have seen it? Why couldn’t Nagisa just play the role like he did with everyone else? Why were there feelings? Akabane did have an idea of him after all. He was just a mouse to Akabane and Nagisa played that role as perfectly as he did every other role he had.
Until he couldn’t and Karma left him just like his father.