Chapter Text
It’s this dream again.
He’s running in a scratchboard world. A familiar landscape in outline only, devoid of any color but two. Pencil thin, snow white lines guide him down a pitch black road along a pitch black street in a pitch black town. The path he takes is already predetermined, like a toy car on a plastic racetrack, doomed to a fixed set of turns and straightaways that will lead him to an end he cannot escape from, despite his hurried, frenzied pace that would suggest something more meaningful, less predictable, and provoked by a far greater fear.
But still, he is afraid.
Afraid of the danger than he knows lurks just behind him, reaching towards him, forever stretching, so that he never slows his desperate sprint, and never looks back. He can’t slow down, can’t look back. Either course of action would lead to a fate worse than what lies at the end of this monochrome maze. He knows this instinctively, in the same way that he knows there is something reaching for him with ill-intent without ever glancing back to put a shape to it. It’s like an invisible pressure, something unformed and yet with the ability to touch him, to grasp him, to hold him down, to restrain him, to pull him back to that place he’s running so frantically from.
So he keeps running. Gaze locked steady at what is straight in front of him. His lungs burning, chest heaving, legs aching, but he’s almost there. He’s almost at the end. It’s almost over.
The sidewalk comes to an abrupt end. His feet hit asphalt, and that’s when a pair of bright, blinding lights flash from the darkness. The silence of this world is broken by a sharp, blaring horn, and when he turns towards the glaring illumination with flinching, watery eyes he—
“…Sir?”
A barely-there touch at his shoulder. Clay sits up straight with a start.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice coming out of the speakers overhead sets reality back into place. “We will be arriving at Death City Airport shortly. The time is now 12:55. The local temperature is—”
“We’ll be landing soon, sir,” the flight attendant talks over the announcement, smiling politely as she gestures to the back of the seat in front of Clay, “So I’ll need you to return your tray to its upright position and make sure any carry-on belongings not in the overhead compartments are secure and placed under your seat.”
“A-ah, y—es, sorry,” Clay stutters to get his voice working again with a throat dry from deep slumber, but the woman is already gone further down the aisle to inform other passengers of the same information. Clay feels some warmth crawl to his cheeks as he quickly puts his tray up and shoves his school handbook into his bag before pushing it underneath his seat.
It takes until after the plane has landed for his racing heartbeat to calm.
A minute after Clay turns his cell phone back on, it rings.
While stepping onto the escalator to head down, he digs the device out of his pocket while adjusting the strap of his shoulder bag with a free hand.
“Yeah?” Clay answers without bothering to look at the caller ID. He listens to the voice on the other end of the line with a roll of his eyes, “…Yes. I’m fine. I made it here in one piece. ……Yes. Yeah I just got off! ……No, they take my luggage to the dorms beforehand.”
He steps off the escalator and looks around for signs to the exit.
“The welcome for new students starts at three. I’ve got plenty of time,” Clay is saying into the phone as he weaves through the crowd, “…Yeah, yeah. I’ll call if anything happens. ……Really! I will!” He heaves a sigh as he listens to the prattle on the other end, “…Okay okay okay! Look, I gotta go catch my bus! I’ll call you later love you bye!” He hangs up on the spot.
“Excuse me!”
It’s while Clay is slipping his cell back into his pants pocket that someone bumps hard into his shoulder as they sprint pass. The device is knocked out of his hand and falls to the floor, and he only gets a glimpse of a girl in a school uniform run by before she gets enveloped by the crowd.
Clay quickly kneels down to pick up his phone—luckily the casing on it saved it from any actual damage—and when he stands back up the mob of people wanes just enough for him to get a glimpse at what exactly that girl was running towards.
“T-the bus!”
Clay starts to run towards the sliding glass doors as he shoves his cell phone into his pocket, where he can see the bus filling up with the last of those waiting to get on.
“S-sorry, excuse me!” he nearly barrels into several people while squeezing past some, “I’m sorry! E-excuse me, I really need to…!”
A clear path finally shows itself amidst the throng of moving individuals, and Clay takes it, picking up speed to a mad dash.
The figure he crashes into seems to come out of nowhere.
All of a sudden Clay is on the ground, the clatter of miscellaneous objects hitting hard floor ringing in his ears, and his arm hurts where he used it to cushion his fall and he realizes in that moment his first day at DWMA is just going to be one of those days.
Clay pushes himself off the floor faster than he probably should, but he ignores the brief dizziness the sudden movement causes as he looks towards who he ran into.
“Oh my god I’m so sorry!” Clay scrambles to pick things up without being aware of who they belong to, “A-are you okay? I’m sorry I-I was just—” he babbles on as his eyes dart every which way, starting to form a sizeable pile of items in his arms without doing anything about them, “There was the bus and the girl and—I-I wasn’t looking where I was going—!”
“Are you going to Shibusen?” a calm, collected voice cuts through Clay’s floundering, who looks up from apologizing to the floor to see his new student handbook being offered to him.
“Ah—” Clay replies intelligently, slow to process the young boy in front of him. From the suit and tie he assumed it had been a businessman he collided into. But now that he actually stops to really look, the person in front of him couldn’t possibly be that much older than himself. Dark hair. Deep blue eyes. Though it’s difficult to tell past the glasses and the cascade of black hair covering the left. It is then that Clay notices the skeletal pin clipped to the boy’s necktie.
“O-oh, uh, yes!” Clay finally answers, taking the handbook with one hand while holding the collection of fallen items in the other arm, “Y...you too?”
“I start today,” the boy answers, keeping up the polite, but friendly smile, “…Don’t worry, by the way. The next bus should be here in about ten minutes.”
Clay blinks once, “Oh,” he glances towards the glass doors on impulse, where the bus is nowhere to be seen outside. “…Right.” If his cheeks weren't already flush with embarrassment, they certainly are now.
The other boy chuckles lightly, “Here,” from his crouch he straightens out his legs to stand, then offers out a hand. Clay takes it and gets to his feet with some lingering warmth to his face. “Thank you,” the boy goes on as he plucks the wallet out of the pile of things Clay picked up, and slips it into his inside jacket pocket. "My name is Akane, by the way."
“Oh—uh,” Clay hurriedly puts away his own fallen items into his pockets and bag, clearing his throat before answering, but he still manages to stutter, “I-I’m Clay.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Clay.” Akane goes on amicably, then asks while pointing towards the bus stop outside, “Do you want to wait for the next bus together?”
Some of the knots in Clay’s stomach untangle themselves, and it feels like it’s the first time he’s uttered something clearly to a stranger all day when he answers, “Yeah, sure!” He tries for a smile that he hopes isn’t as eager and desperate as he thinks it looks.
If it does, Akane doesn’t show it on his face, who merely smiles in agreement and starts leading the walk out through the automatic double doors and into the hot Nevada air. When it hits Clay he suddenly regrets the hoodie, and wonders how Akane can still act so poised even in that suit. But he says nothing about it and follows the other boy wordlessly to the bus stop, which is deserted thanks to the recent pick up, so they’re free to sit at the few empty benches available to them.
“Um, so…” Clay speaks up as he takes a seat, sliding his bag off his shoulder to place in his lap, “…w-where are you from, Akane?”
The boy in question looks up from checking his watch and to Clay’s face, “Japan,” he answers with a light smile.
“Whoa, seriously?!” Clay forgets himself for a moment and exclaims loudly. “I-I mean…” he lowers his voice back to a normal level as he feels a blush return, “That must have been a long flight. A-and your English is perfect!”
Akane chuckles, “Well, thank you. How about you?”
“Oh, uh, California, actually."
“Oh? A short flight like that must have been nice.”
“Heh…” Clay rubs the back of his neck with a lopsided grin, “I-I guess, but I still ended up sleeping through most of it. I was up all night thinking about today and being too nervous to sleep…”
“I’m sure you aren’t the only one,” Akane comments reasonably, and Clay finds himself smiling a little less self-consciously.
The ten-minute wait for the next bus flies by as they continue chatting about mundane things, the tension slowly unwinding from Clay’s body and mind as the seconds tick on by in a casual air maintained by his newly found companion’s cool demeanor. So by the time their bus reaches its destination, Clay’s hopping off from the last two steps to touch ground while laughing loud and uncontrolled at something Akane just said as the bus doors were opening.
“Hey, so I heard the monthly allowances we get here are crazy big,” Clay is rattling on with a grin while they walk side by side down the marked path for school. “Like, I dunno about you, but I’m used to getting ten bucks a week for doing dishes and taking out the trash, but supposedly we’re gonna get—”
And then they turn the corner, and Clay abruptly halts, wide eyes taking in the new sight before him.
“That’s…” his excited grin freezes, taking on a strained undertone, “…a lot of stairs.”
It seems impossible that an outdoor staircase can be that spotlessly white. But it is. Somehow. Obviously Clay’s read about and seen pictures of the illustrious stairs leading up to the world’s foremost educational facility for meisters and weapons alike, meant to only add to their physical as well as mental training for the several years they’d be studying here. But it certainly looked significantly more…daunting in person.
“Something wrong, Clay?” Akane asks from the sixth step up, smiling in a way that makes Clay think his question isn’t as innocent as he makes it sound.
“O-of course not!” Clay smirks, quickly catching up to the other boy and stopping on the seventh step, “I was just thinking for how often this place is talked-up, the staircase would be longer.”
Akane chuckles high and bright, “…Well then, shall we have a friendly race to the top?”
“Huh?” Clay’s grin falters for a moment, “O-oh sure! Just, y’know,” he clears his throat briefly, abruptly taking on an instructor-like tone, “no matter how in shape we might be, we should be careful on a hot day like this. And not push ourselves too far.”
Akane smile widens to what Clay can only perceive as the edge of a smirk.
“Oh, I don’t think you have to worry about me.”
Clay didn’t have to worry about him.
“…Are you sure you’re alright?”
Somehow he knows, even while on his hands and knees gasping towards the ground, Akane is smiling with very little concern as he asks that.
“…I-I…m fine…” Clay pants, finally lifting his head just to show the other exactly how fine he is, “I…isn’t it…obvious…?”
“Very,” Akane, kneeling down at his side, affirms with exactly the kind of sweet smile Clay had been picturing in his head. “The abundance of sweat is a nice touch.”
“Y-you…” Clay wheezes with narrowed eyes, but when he tries to grasp for some kind of comeback, all he can think about is how gross he feels from his damp clothes sticking to his skin. “…Forget it…” his head slumps back down.
Akane laughs, and when he stands back up Clay sneaks a glance to make sure he’s not leaving without him, and watches Akane absently tug down his sleeve to peek at the wristwatch underneath, “Oh, and so you’re aware. The welcoming lecture for new students starts in about fifteen minutes.”
That gets Clay to snap his head back up and scramble to his feet. With his hoodie tied around his waist by the sleeves—something he did about a quarter way up the staircase, revealing the thin T-shirt underneath—he wipes away the sweat at his forehead with a bare arm, takes in a deep breath, lets it out slowly and controlled, adjusts the strap of his shoulder bag, and then begins taking wide steps ahead of Akane towards the entrance of the school.
“Well what are we waiting for then?!”
If Akane reacts at all to the obvious trembling in Clay's legs, Clay doesn’t see or hear anything about it as the other boy trails obediently after him.
The room where new students are gathered isn’t hard to find, luckily. While Clay had also read about the academy and its famous maze-like structure to train the memory and intellect of its students even outside the classroom, just for today, it seemed, there were signs aplenty to lead the two along the many corridors and hallways towards where they needed to be.
By the time they reach the proper door, Clay is sufficiently cooled off from walking around the air-conditioned school. Though it’s Akane who reaches for the doorknob and enters the room first, while Clay follows close behind.
Immediately to their left is a small desk where a tall, well-built man of African descent is standing behind it.
“Weapon or meister?” is the first thing he says to the pair.
“Meister,” Akane answers first, and Clay doesn’t quite process the response while he’s saying “weapon,” to overlap the other by a split-second.
But as soon as the words leave their lips, they both stiffen in surprise, and turn their heads to look at each other in unison.
“Hey, alright. Good,” the man behind the desk is talking, completely oblivious to the surprised stares the boys are throwing each other, “Already found yourselves a partner. That makes things a lot easier. We’ll skip the pins then, you two just wait with the others till we start.”
But they don’t move from where they’re standing, eyes still locked and wide.
“That’s right…” Akane murmurs after a moment.
“…we never…” Clay starts to continue the thought.
“…asked if we were—” they both begin to say at the same time, but stop.
A few seconds pass of silent staring before they simultaneously burst out laughing.
The man behind the desk jumps in surprise, looking between the two of them in apparent confusion, but they both ignore him while the laughter dies down, and Clay wipes away a marble of a tear at the corner of his eye.
“Well, why not?” Clay takes a half-step back to hold out his hand to the other boy, “Being partners, I mean. It’s worth a try.”
For a moment the grin fades from Akane’s face, and in that moment Clay thinks he’s made some horrible assumption and his stomach drops. But then the smile returns to Akane’s features, the one that’s been putting Clay’s worries and fears at ease all afternoon, and Clay realizes it was just surprise more than anything.
“…Alright,” Akane nods, “I look forward to working with you, Clay.”
And he takes his hand to shake.