Work Text:
When Kaede had offered to play a song specifically for the assassin, Maki had initially wanted to deny the request.
Harukawa had never been the biggest fan of music. Sure, she’d do her best to croon when the little brats at the orphanage begged her for lullabies, but it wasn’t as if she truly had anything to compare to. The majority of Maki’s childhood had been discordant; out of tune.
She wasn’t about to pick apart and analyze every note that Akamatsu played. The song, she knew, would be wasted on her.
When Harukawa endeavored to verbalize this, however, Kaede merely simpered, proffering towards the brunette a lithe chuckle that warmed the perilous girl’s cheeks.
“It’s not a waste,” the pianist had insisted. “I want to play for you.”
And that’s how the two had ended up situated amidst the Ultimate Pianist’s lab, Akamatsu’s nimble fingers capering across ebony and ivory keys, Maki seated beside her, scrutinizing her every move. Every so often, their shoulders would bump, and the assassin would blush for reasons she could not yet identify. Once or twice, Kaede would glimpse back towards the other girl, plush lips splitting into a grin.
Maki refuses to allow herself to think about it for too long.
Settling her claret gaze upon her own unmoving hands - hands whose fingers are calloused and rough - the girl attempts to focus her attention upon the music itself as opposed to its performer. It’s what Kaede expects, she knows.
And as she does so, she’s astonished to recognize the ways in which the melody festers, each note rising higher than the last, tickling her ears and brushing kisses against her forehead. The tune’s inflection gambols fervently about her mind, a frolicking blight of emotion that is so overwhelming - so obvious - that Harukawa cannot help but block it out again.
Kaede is trying to tell her something she does not want to hear.
Stilling her beating heart - a heart she yearns to be construed of no more than stone - Maki’s breathing slows as a pair of umber brows knit together amidst stern, stoic apathy. A rouge gaze glances back towards the pianist once more before regretting it nigh instantaneously, scalding heat flustering the assassin’s cheeks as she coerces her eyes away.
It amazes her, the way that Kaede is able to express herself so vividly.
Maki cannot help but experience the slightest iota of envy. After all, until Kaito had practically barged his way into her life, Harukawa had considered herself to be an emotional invalid; expressing yourself in any way, calling attention to one’s individuality, Maki had been taught, was nothing more than a surefire ticket to the grave.
But the idiot had embedded his claws into her, plaguing and persecuting her with that amicable endeavor to include her in everything, no matter how ineffectual. Oh, how the girl had struggled and lashed during their freshman year, and my, how amusing it was to glance back on it all with the knowledge that her own obstinance could never contest against the mulish tenacity of one Kaito Momota.
And it hadn’t just been him, she knew, who had come to affect the girl for the better.
There was Saihara, with whom she would oft commiserate with when the astronaut’s optimism became too overbearing, but who had also managed to teach her that the things she had to say were….well, they were worth listening to. There were times in which, although she might never admit it, Maki had fathomed herself rambling, each thought that formed amidst her mind being poured forth from her lips without hesitation - and Shuichi had listened to every word. Occasionally, the smallest smile would twitch upon his ebony-painted lips, or a slight nod might tilt his head, eager to express to the girl that he could hear her. That he wanted to hear her.
The entire class had assisted her, in their own ways.
She and Amami had come to bond over their shared experiences of being around and caring for children; each conversation betwixt the two found Maki embracing her softer side just a little bit more.
Hoshi’s penchant for pessimism had been the initial cause for Harukawa gravitating towards him, although the more the two got to know each other, the more she realized the common ground upon which they both stood. Life sucks. And it’s hard.
But that doesn’t mean you just give up on it.
As for Tojo, her conversations with the maid had included one particular takeaway that perhaps the both of them could benefit from - a life serving under others is no life at all.
Creation had been the basis for Maki’s bonds with Yonaga; the artist had taught her that she was capable of creating beautiful, beautiful things. Destruction did not have to be her only option; not if she didn’t want it to be.
Her solidarity with Chabashira’s physical prowess had proved rather useful; the two had become rather close, training and sparring not for the benefit of their bodies, nor for those who viewed the girls as mere possessions to repress, but for themselves. Tenko, Maki recognizes, is the quintessential balance of sentimentality and strength, with muscles large and looming, and a heart whose size is even greater.
Harukawa yearns to be even half the woman that Chabashira is.
Shinguuji, too, had helped her, in their own odd little way; the occasional lecture on human behavior may have, once or twice, veered its way onto the topic of trauma - a conversation that two fragmented souls had woven together, their own perspectives on the subject a tapestry of vile refuse that was raw and unmitigated. Harukawa knew things about the anthropologist that nobody else ever would.
“Everything that we went through formulated some part of us,” Maki recalls lamenting once. “I guess that makes us pretty ugly people.”
The anthropologist’s perspective was slightly different.
“Our resilience against the things that have hurt us ought not to be trivialized,” she remembers them stating, their timbre imbued with a rare bout of affection. “We fought to remain alive, despite a world that insisted we were better off dead. If anything, I’d attest that our resilience is a mere reminder of the fact that we are beautiful.”
Iruma was….well, Iruma. But the two got on well enough.
In fact, Maki had fathomed herself rather fascinated by a couple of things the self-proclaimed “girl genius” had crafted. Things that did not fit together by conventional means would be assembled into some sort of newfangled creation that appeared to affirm that necessity was not the mother of all invention; Miu was.
Iruma decided what fit where, Iruma could decide what belonged and what didn’t.
Perhaps Maki could do that, too.
And Gonta? Heh. Gonta had helped her to find the purity in the ugliest of things. He loomed large and intimidating, and yet the man had been nothing if not saccharine and sweet. Once, he had admitted to subconsciously associating Harukawa with some poisonous bug or another; something about how the girl protected herself via the only ways she knew how, but wasn’t nearly so terrifying when approached and handled with kindness and care.
Maki remembers running away from that conversation. Even now, her cheeks flare up with embarrassment at the mere memory.
Yumeno’s languid nature had balanced out Harukawa’s own intensity rather fittingly; a fair multitude of interactions surfaced amidst her mind, an equitable number of them involving the two lying on their backs within the confines of the courtyard, either one chatting idly about this or that. Once or twice, the assassin had even allotted herself to drift off into slumber beneath the glaring sunlight, the knowledge that her friend remained safe by her side a pleasant comfort in itself.
Himiko had gifted her the sanctity of relaxation.
Hell, even Kokichi had taught her something.
She was more patient now than she’d ever been and, agonizing as it was to admit it, she could not deny that it had been in due part thanks to the supreme leader’s ever-aggravating antics. Whether off trying to get Kaito to piss himself in fear, or attempting to thieve the ultimate detective’s hat, or bugging the everloving shit out of her, it astounded Maki to realize that Kokichi did not incur her wrath quite so often as he’d managed to during the beginning of their Hope’s Peak journey together.
He was annoying, to be sure, but she’d managed to restrain herself from strangling him for - how long’s it been? Months?
Huh.
Good for her.
But then there was Kaede.
Soft in all the places that Maki was bony, pretty in all the places that Maki was not.
Flaxen tresses hanging just past her shoulders, an untameable cowlick raising its defiance where Maki’s hair remained flat, vacuous, and suffocatingly long.
As her fingers continued their dance, a virgin’s music erupting from their movement, unsullied and unblemished, too beautiful for the marred Maki to bear witness to, the pianist peers over towards her audience once more, browsed raised as though amidst expectation. A mauve gaze scours every inch, every perceivable crevice of the assassin before flitting back towards the instrument’s keys, and Harukawa can feel her soul being bared.
She remembers, hazily, that Kaede plays the piano in order to make people smile.
If anything, it speaks more to their disconnect.
Kaede Akamatsu puts smiles on people’s faces.
Maki Harukawa puts bullets through their brains.
Even so, the melody compels Maki enough to be selfish. The rhythm is tantalizing, a letter inscribed with invisible ink, a message only for Harukawa to know.
Kaede is trying to tell her something.
Kaede is trying to tell her that it is her turn to be Maki’s mentor.
Like each of their classmates before her, Akamatsu is going to impart something crucial onto Harukawa and change her for the better, whether she wants it or not.
The notes crescendo.
Maki holds her breath.
And in that moment, she realizes it.
Kaede Akamatsu is going to teach her how to love.