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In the weeks or months or however fucking long it had been since Kohane had died, An had taken off straight for The School, intending to take as much of it out as she could as the final hurrah of the Vivid Bad Squad. She had been squatting in a hidden cove, scouting out The School’s seaward defenses, figuring out the pros and cons of being a mermaid—she hadn’t totally lost her mind and forgotten her human life, as she’d feared right up until jumping off the cliff, but she had felt a strange sense of freedom and lightness that had warred for a day or two with her grief until the grief finally smothered it, and she had gained the ability to control water with her voice.
She mostly used this to hurl icicles and massive waves at The School’s defenses while screaming profanities at the top of her lungs. This had not gotten her anywhere, but damn if it wasn’t satisfying, and so An continued this day after day until Shinonome Akito literally fell right directly on top of her and she had to save his stupid ass from drowning and then, to make matters worse, he fainted like some prissy royal the moment she asked him a simple question. An waited with his unconscious body until she was reasonably certain that Akito’s would-be murderer had left—if it had been someone from The School she was going to make them regret ever being born— and then dragged him up onto the shore and dove back into the water before he could wake up.
What was Akito even doing here? He was in no condition to fight anything. He wasn’t even in any condition to spend time with her or Kohane— Kohane was dead and it was An’s fault —outside of desperate measures involving their shared revenge. So what on earth was he doing here now? An couldn’t babysit him. An couldn’t even babysit an actual baby, she’d be completely useless against a self-destructive adult friend—especially when she herself had been feeling pretty self-destructive right now, though admittedly in a far different direction than Akito’s self-destruction of the past six years. She would not be good for him to be around—An knew that much, at least.
But she also knew that somebody had just tried to kill him, so An did not go far from where she had left her old friend on shore, and kept careful watch through the waves for when he awoke. This came with the rising sun the next morning, and first he spat sand out of his mouth and swore, and then he clambered to his feet—somewhat of a production; An remembered his terrible limp from the last time they’d spoken, and how Mizuki had told her he’d refused medical care after Toya had died.
An hadn’t been so stupid with Kohane’s death—at some point after she’d turned into a mermaid, she’d found a sluggishly-bleeding puncture wound in her abdomen, and had stoppered it up with first seaweed and then sharkskin leather when one of the big dumb beast had come hungry for her blood. She had tanned its hide and eaten its flesh raw—mermaids, she had learned, were made to eat meat uncooked, as fire was hard to come by in the sea and plain boiled meat tasted horrid even to human tastebuds—and taken its teeth and braided them onto two ends of a rope to someday make a razor-sharp flail. An had always preferred ranged weapons, but her bow was broken back in Vivid Bad Squad’s forest, and so she would need a replacement weapon for when she finally mounted her assault on The School. She knew that she probably wouldn’t survive, but she didn’t want to die without taking a reasonably good chunk of The School with her, and a weapon was step one in taking some of them out with her. A flail had good reach, for a melee weapon, and the shark’s teeth on it made it wonderfully dangerous and unexpected. She planned to poison it, too, before her attack—a swift-acting one, hopefully, so that one scratch from her flail was the same as a death sentence. But first, though, she would have to finish making it, and to practice with it, and—and—
Well, despite her rage and newfound ability to swim, An’s grief and guilt still tugged her down and down and down and she had not yet mustered the energy to teach herself how to fight with a new weapon.
And now it seemed that what little energy she’d gathered would be used on something else, because Akito was still swearing on the shore instead of heading off to safety, and as An watched, her fingers clenching her half-made flail, the idiot began shouting her name and wading out into the water, even though it had a current, even though he had a fucked-up knee and someone had just tried to kill him. An gritted her teeth and tucked her half-made flail back under the rocks and then swam up and breached the surface of the water.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Oh, thank the gods, you’re still here,” said Akito.
“Of fucking course I am, someone just tried to kill you, you idiot,” said An. “And what are you doing here, anyway?!”
Akito raised his right wrist, where, for the first time in years, the Vivid Bad Squad bracelet was tied around it, displaying exactly two lights: his and hers. An stared in stunned silence as Akito folded his arms again and said, “I came looking for you.”
“—Bullshit,” said An.
“It’s fucking true, dumbass.”
“You left, ” An hissed, her voice unfortunately unsteady. “You left—for years! We begged you to come back—and you didn’t—so why now ?”
“I know a thing or two about self-destructive spirals,” said Akito, “so—”
“No fucking shit you do.”
Akito winced, and then scowled. “Look,” he said, “that’s—deserved, but listen, I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did—”
“How can I do that?” An shot back. “Everyone who ever gave a shit either died or stopped caring about me. I haven’t abandoned anyo—”
“I still give a shit!” Akito yelled. “I never stopped giving a shit—that’s why I stayed away, I didn’t want to hurt you guys anymore!”
“You hurt us a hundred times more leaving than you ever would have staying,” An shouted, “and now it’s too—fucking—late! Kohane is dead and I’m going to destroy as much of The School as I possibly fucking can before they get me too, and you would just be dead weight!”
“I don’t care!” Akito yelled back. “Technically I’m legally dead and should have about a month before Ena shows up to kill me herself, so if you think you can make me leave you’re insane!”
“You already left!” An shrieked. “You don’t need to bother coming back! We all have lives of our own now, Akito, so go back to yours!”
“—I don’t,” said Akito.
“What?”
“I don’t have my own life. I’ve done absolutely nothing with myself these past six years other than beat myself up over what happened to Toya and hitting you, and trying to forget how much it fucking hurt. I just got married to a woman who wanted to kill me for my money because her family’s political connections are useful to my sister, and as far as anyone knows I’m literally dead in the water, and nobody is going to miss me because I’ve wasted the past six years of my life. But you and Kohane built something really amazing on top of the foundation that you two made with Toya and me, and I can’t let you throw that away—or throw your life away. I won’t let you make the same mistake I did.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” An snapped.
“Yeah, well, you don’t have any personal bodyguards, so you can’t force me to go away,” said Akito, “and unless you forgot already, there’s at least four people up in the town with a vested interest in my death, so you aren’t getting rid of me that easily.”
An glared at him, but Akito glared right back. It was a familiar standoff, though one that hadn’t happened in six years—when they were children, An and Akito would fight like this all the time, until they reached a stalemate or Kohane and Toya managed to force them to make up. But now, neither Kohane nor Toya was here; it was just An and Akito, and this fight was so much bigger than any they’d ever had as children.
But An was no longer a child, and so she sighed and said, “Fine. I’m sure the Lady Ena will show up and drag you away eventually.”
Akito bared his teeth in a grin. “Great, ‘cause I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “And I plan to train up to be in as good fighting shape as I can be by the time we take down The School.”
“Who says this is a ‘we’ thing?” said An.
“You just said that you were planning on fighting them until you get killed,” said Akito, “and if you take them on alone that’s definitely what’s going to happen. Honestly, even if we both attack we’ll probably still die…but you won’t die alone, and we can do more damage together than separately.”
“Have you considered,” An hissed, “that I don’t want you to die?”
“And I don’t want you to die either,” Akito snapped back, “but if that’s your plan I know you well enough to know that I can’t stop you, I can just go with you and watch your back.”
“Bullshit you can—”
“I took everything you and Kohane had compiled on them from the treehouse, including your letter from that magician friend of yours even though it was just talking about blueberry pie and talking smack about one of her classmates who apparently claimed to know you,” said Akito, “and I’ve been studying up on them as much as possible, though I couldn’t decipher the coded message in the letter. And I’m already planning on getting back into shape—”
“What the fuck do you mean,” An said, voice shaking. “What the fuck do you mean, a coded message from Haruka that mentions Blueberry Pie?!”
“Uh, there was this letter, pinned up on your wall,” said Akito. “It looked like you and Kohane had read it a million times. Why? What’s so important about that? I thought she was just talking about dessert and stuff.”
Shaking, An dove beneath the water and swam to shore, refusing to surface until she absolutely had to in order to compose herself. She sat on the sand beside Akito, and he immediately sat beside her, stretching out his bad leg.
“Do you remember,” she said, “when we were all little—back before you met Toya and Haruka was recruited by The School, and we’d all play and fight and compete on the riverbanks?”
“Yeah,” said Akito. “I remember. Once I chased you down and rubbed mud in your hair and then you and Haruka half drowned me.”
“Yeah,” said An. “Well—when she got to The School—she realized pretty quickly that they were censoring her letters and also reading them for information, and so we started making codenames for the people we knew. I made the codenames for the people I met outside of The School, and she made them for the people she knew inside of The School. I called you Mudpie because—well—I thought it would annoy you if you ever found out, and because that’s what she knew you from. When you met Toya a few years later, and started bringing him around, I based the name I used for him in the letters off of that—I called him Blueberry Pie, or, later on, just Blueberry. If she wrote a coded message mentioning him…”
“No,” said Akito, sounding somewhat choked up. “The coded bit came later, after she started talking shit about her classmate. Some A. O. guy who’s apparently a liar—though apparently he and Haruka were talking about you and blueberry pie—maybe Toya. But what I could read included that he claimed to be a—an old friend of yours, and he had a coded message for you.”
“How the fuck do I not remember this?!” An said. “—I don’t suppose the letter could have been planted there?”
“Maybe, if The School could get into the treehouse,” said Akito, “but I thought Toya’s magic prevented that. And there was all that info I gave you guys still sitting out, too. It hadn’t been changed at all. I really don’t think they would have left that there if they broke in.”
“Right,” said An. “But why don’t I remember it?”
“Ena said that you had a curse on you,” Akito pointed out. “That’s why I came after you originally. Maybe it’s a memory curse.”
An frowned, running her fingers through the sand. “If that’s the case,” she said softly, “what else is wrong with my memories?”
She and Akito were quiet for a moment, and then he grabbed the bag he’d fallen with from where it lay on the ground over to his lap and rummaged through it. “—Damn it,” he said.
“What is it?”
“The letter isn’t in here. None of the papers are, actually. It’s just Toya’s old spells and your bow. It’s broken, but I thought we might use one of the spells to repair it, just in case.”
An’s fingers stilled. “Toya’s spells, huh…” she said. “Kohane and I never touched them.”
“Yeah, I could tell,” said Akito. He pulled out her snapped bow and dropped it in her lap, and followed it with a little satchel. “But…Toya would have wanted you guys to use them. And if you and I are going out with a bang, then let’s take what’s left of him with us.”
An ached at the idea of using up the rest of Toya’s spells, but it would be so much worse to leave them for others who didn’t know and love him to use. “Alright,” she said, undoing the tie on the satchel-spell and picking up her bow. “Let’s use this, and then…”
The magic spilled out, stronger than either An or Akito had expected. It completely mended and restringed the bow, and then polished it, and, for good measure, finished up by completely healing An’s stab wound.
“Holy shit,” said Akito.
“I wonder if it’ll make the bow waterproof, too…” An mused.
Almost before the words had left her mouth, the magic darted back to the bow, as though it was heeding her request. An and Akito stared at it as it continued surpassing its work.
“...Toya put a lot of effort into these spells back then, didn’t he?” An said.
“Yeah,” said Akito, still choked up, reaching out and hovering his fingertips in the cloud of magic. “Let’s pay him back by making sure our suicide attack gets as much vengeance for him as possible.”
The magic sparked slightly, and Akito swore and yanked his fingers away, shaking out his hand. “Ow, shit, ” he said. “I guess maybe it’s acting up since you guys didn’t touch it for six years, An. ”
“This from the guy who didn’t even keep his bracelet on for that entire time?” An shot back. “You have literally no room to talk.”
“Oh, fuck off,” said Akito, but there was hardly any bite to it. The magic was swirling up into a spiral now, as though it was about to do something else, and An and Akito both eyed it suspiciously. “I could use a new weapon that works with my bum knee,” Akito said hopefully, but before the magic could do anything else it dissipated on the wind and he and An both sighed, a little disappointed.
“I’ve been working on a flail,” An suggested. “It has better reach than a sword, and you’d still be able to fight in melee, which if you haven’t changed from back then I know you prefer. And I can watch your back with my bow and arrow in case anyone gets too close.”
Akito looked over at her, and then he grinned like a predator. “Great,” he said. “We can practice with that, and then let’s make sure that Vivid Bad Squad’s last hurrah is the biggest, boldest thing out there.”
An grinned back, baring her teeth, letting her rage fuel her smile. “Let’s introduce them to our pain as best we can,” she agreed, as the light of the noonday sun glared off of the sea, and the remains of Vivid Bad Squad prepared for their final battle.