Chapter Text
In truth, Karube would rather be anywhere else. If it wasn’t for the knowledge that his father would put him through a verbal hell, he would’ve ditched or even simply dropped out within the first week of being transferred to his new school. Instead, he’d stuck it out and now he’s here with a bunch of new students and new teachers and an entire new school building that he’s still trying to find his way around a month in.
Maybe it’s not totally fair, the other teenagers aren’t that bad, they’re nice enough, he just misses his old set of friends. The new distance had put a bit of a damper of his friendship with Arisu and Chota. At this school, Karube’s newness had drawn initial attention and it admittedly hasn’t faded since that first day. People greet him everyday, they sit and talk with him at lunch, some offer to help him study to catch up in his classes. The issue is in that he just doesn’t really care to be there. He’s disinterested, he knows he’ll never make it into university no matter how hard he studies, so why bother trying now in his senior year?
He swings in his chair at lunch, rocking himself back and forth as he chews what his mother had packed for him. His gaze is turned out the window to the blue cloudless sky when suddenly a friendly punch thumps into his arm, pulling his attention back to his group of new friends who had been talking while he hadn’t been listening.
“Come on, Karube, it’s like a rite of passage,” Kuina says.
Karube chuckles lightly, rubbing his arm where she’d hit him, pouting as he feigns injury. Kuina makes being at the new school manageable. She’s fun to be around and the only one who can match him in P.E., a real tough chick though people wouldn’t know it by the pretty-girly way she dresses. Now, she sits across from him on top of her desk, waiting on his answer to a statement he hadn’t heard; in her lap, she’s holding hands with her girlfriend, Ann.
“What are we talking about?” he asks.
Kuina rolls her eyes with a noisy sigh, throwing her head back.
“I’m daring you to stay overnight in the school,” she reiterates, leaning closer to him and keeping her voice low like she’s worried someone will overhear. Then she smiles, he can hear the teasing before she even speaks, “Unless you’re a big wuss who’s afraid of ghosts?”
It’s his turn to roll his eyes now. The school comes with a story, just like every other school, it’s no different than anything else he’s heard before: some student killing themself and haunting the school and killing other students, blah blah blah. It’s all bullshit, he’s sure. Ghosts aren’t real, they’re just stories people tell to get a rise out of superstitious scaredy-cats, especially around this time of year.
“So … what? I just have to stay overnight and then I get to join your little bestie club?” He turns the teasing back on her. Kuina kicks at the side of his chair, all four legs clattering loudly back to the floor, and he bark a laugh as he playfully slaps at her ankle, knocking her foot away.
“We’ve all done it.”
“Even genius boy there?”
Chishiya glances up then, his brow quirking. His silvery hair is drawn into a small ponytail at his nape, the pale colour glints in the sunlight where his back is to the window. He’s a bit of a snob, if Karube’s honest, and clearly thinks he’s smarter than the rest of them. In fact, Karube doesn’t know why Kuina bothered to befriend him in the first place, but she’s protective of him so Karube doesn’t say anything about it.
“I wanted to see if the story was real.” Chishiya explains simply, his tone familiarly dull.
Karube thinks he knows the answer, but he asks anyway, “Is it?”
A slight smirk pulls on Chishiya’s mouth.
“You’ll have to find out for yourself.”
Yeah, that’s what he expected. He looks back to Kuina, then briefly aside to meet Ann’s gaze.
“You do it too? Anything spooky happen?”
“I spent the night studying in the library. It was …” Her gaze flits towards Kuina, who smiles at her in a way that’s all-too-telling about things Karube quickly tries not to think about, “Uneventful.”
Kuina kisses her hand and, when she glances back Karube’s way, he rolls his eyes in a clearly over-dramatic teasing way. He takes a sip from his drink, swiping his knuckles across his mouth as he swallows.
“So how do I get in? Doors get locked at night, right?”
“There’s a broken window, first floor,” Chishiya cuts in. He turns to glance over his shoulder and Karube shifts to see where he points towards the windows of a ground floor classroom. “It’s a little stiff, but you can slide it open and hop right through.”
Karube sighs, leans back in his chair and whistles casually.
“Well, I didn’t want to do my homework tonight anyway.”
A few hours past sundown, Karube climbs and hops the wall at the back of the school. Hiking his backpack on his shoulder, he strolls across the school grounds towards the window Chishiya had pointed out. The place does, admittedly, look creepy at night. The shadows stretch long across the courtyard and the school is old as-is and in desperate need for renovation. It’s reaching the middle of autumn and the trees have rid themselves of their leaves, leaving their tall skinny skeletons standing in wait for next year’s spring. The moon is high and bright in the sky, but the shadows are still utterly dark where they cling into corners.
He reaches the window and slides his fingers along the edge of the window until he can find a grip and jimmy it open. It takes a few pulls, his hands slipping, his blunt nails yanked where he tries to dig them into the paper-thin space, but it finally gives and slides open with a whoosh. Propping his hands on the sill, he pushes himself up and swings his legs into the classroom. His feet land with quiet thuds that sound louder in the silence. Wringing his hands out, he looks around the classroom. His teeth worries across his lip.
It’s just the school, he tells himself, it’s just his stupid new high school and there’s no ghosts and the worst that’s going to happen is he gets caught breaking in by some adult and gets yelled at by his dad and his mom gets that disappointed look on her face that makes his chest hurt. He shakes it off. It’s just nerves.
Pushing the feeling down, he pulls his phone out and snaps a picture of himself framed in the open window, then sends it off to as proof to the group chat Kuina had set up and invited him to. Without waiting for a reply, he tucks his phone away as he walks across the classroom, quietly slides open the door and steps out into the dark hallway. Pausing in the doorway, he slips his backpack off to hang from one elbow and digs around before pulling out a cheap mini flashlight. It’s not much and the light is pretty dim when he clicks it on, but it’s better than walking around in complete darkness.
He might as well have a look around the school if he’s going to be here all night. The only other options are setting up an alarm and finding somewhere to sleep or doing his schoolwork - and he’s definitely not going to do that, so looking around the school it is. As he walks down the hall, his flashlight beam bouncing along the floor and walls, he considers what else he can do to waste time. He could leave notes in people’s lockers or pinned on the classroom boards or throw basketballs around in the gym if it’s not locked up. He bets with a little more practice, he could beat Kuina’s free throw record.
In the silence, every sound is elevated. His footsteps on the ground and the creaks of the building setting and a leafless branch scraping against a window somewhere. What catches him off guard is the sound of a door closing a floor up. Karube freezes, pauses to listen. His heart thumps into a rapid pace in his chest.
Was someone else here? Why would someone else be here? A teacher? Another -
Then it clicks and he exhales roughly. Kuina and the others. No doubt it’s them playing a prank on him, wanting to try and scare him off with that dumb ghost story; they probably snuck in earlier and were waiting for him to arrive. He huffs, feeling stupid, smoothing a hand down his chest to settle his heartbeat. Picking up his pace, he heads towards the closest staircase to head up.
He doesn’t want to call out, he wants to catch them in the act.
Shoes landing on the second floor, he pausing and straining his ears to listen. The silence is deafening, he can hear his own breathing and heart beating, then he hears something else. It’s muffled, but it sounds like a low moan that trails into something like a sob. Karube’s brow wrinkles. It didn’t sound particularly feminine, did Kuina somehow manage to convince Chishiya to do that? That’s seems impossible even as Karube thinks it. He shakes his head, decides they probably just pulled something off the internet, some ‘top 10 scary sounds’ video that they’re playing on one of their phones with the volume jacked all the way up.
Keeping his footsteps quiet, he moves down the hallway, still listening closely. Another quiet sob, followed loud slam of doors - or something hitting a door. There’s a hollow-y echo to it and he realises why as he gets closer. It’s coming from the boys’ bathroom, the slamming doors aren’t just regular doors, they’re stall doors. Karube creeps slowly closer. Gripping his flashlight, he reaches for the bathroom doorknob and takes a breath, then he whips the door open.
The bathroom is empty.
Karube frowns. Maybe they’re hiding in the stalls. He takes a step inside and flicks his flashlight beam around the room. He leans, peers under the stall doors, sees nothing. What the hell? He was sure he’d heard those noises. There’s no way he could’ve just been hearing things. He huffs, takes a deep breath, ready to tell them to give it up and come out already then -
“Get out.”
It’s a whisper. Raspy.
Karube jolts up. His gaze flicks around the room. Slowly, he turns the flashlight beam around the room. It falls towards the far corner, in the space between the matched set of all-lining stalls. A dark figure stands there, looming in the shadows. The light goes right through it, dispersing gauzily against the wall. The air is thick with a kind of sudden overwhelming, pressing anger. It’s a choking weight. Karube’s blood goes cold. The figure is too tall to be Chishiya, and the body shape too wrong to be Kuina or Ann.
“What are you doing here? Get out!”
Something slams into him, feeling like a gale-force wind as he’s forced back out of the bathroom into the wall opposite it in the hallway. His shoulders and the back of his head pangs with pain where he hits the wall. Karube’s heart thumps around his chest, rabbit-panicked as he leans against the wall, staring at the swinging bathroom door.
What the fuck was that? A ghost? It couldn’t be, ghosts didn’t exist … did they?
He steels himself, shakes his head and takes a deep breath. There’s no way he can just go and leave now. As stupid as it sounds, he’s got to figure it out. He marches forward and shoves his way into the bathroom again. Lifting his torch, he aims it around the tiled room. In the corner again, the beam falls across the figure. It’s translucent and pale, headed with a mess of dark hair and equally dark eyes staring back at him through square-lensed spectacles.
“I said get out - get out!”
The figure - ghost - whatever - rushes at him again but stops short as its hands go right through Karube’s chest. He feels a chill in his lungs, like breathing in snowy winter air, but he doesn’t get thrown back this time. The ghost is closer now and Karube can see him a bit better.
He looks like a teenager, around Karube’s age even. He’s wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a school uniform, but it looks different than Karube’s own, older, a little more vintage. It’s missing a gilded button at the neck and there’s thin dark threads hanging from where it’s been clearly torn off. His left sleeve is ripped at the shoulder, his white school-issue shirt standing out through the stretched-open seam of the dark jacket.
“Who are you?” Karube asks, forcing his voice steady.
“Leave me alone. Get out. Go away.”
“You’re the ghost, aren’t you? From the story?”
The ghost looks shocked, then quickly affronted, then his expression twists into something hurt and sadder, immediately making Karube feel bad about having mentioned the story at all. He steps - well, more like floats - back, moving away from Karube and turning his back to him. He seems to deflate, his shoulders drooping, hands hanging at his sides.
“Please … just leave me alone.”
Karube knows he could just leave. He could just go sit by the window he came in through and wait the night out until morning, but he looks over at the ghost again, hovering around the bathroom, his skinny arms wrapped around himself. His torch beam is still angled towards him. Light shine through the mostly-transparent back of his head and, through a part of his dark hair, Karube can make out a blackish no-doubt-once-bloody wound.
Was that how he died? Is that rude to ask about?
“What’s your name?” Karube asks instead, refusing to simply leave.
The ghost looks back over his shoulder, his pouting mouth drawn in a scowl.
“Why do you care?”
Karube shrugs, loosely crosses his arm, still aiming the torch beam across the room at the ghost.
“Well I’m stuck here for the night and I’m bored. You seem more interesting than just walking around classrooms and reading teachers’ notes. So what’s your name?”
The ghost turns, still frowning. There’s a long pause of silence, neither backing down.
“Niragi,” he answers finally, his voice quiet like a breeze.
“I’m Karube.”
“What are you doing here, Karube?”
“I got dared to stay overnight in the school. I thought it was going to be pretty boring actually.”
Karube crosses further into the bathroom, drops his bag onto the ground, and hops up onto the counter, swinging his legs a little as he sits. His heart has settled a little, calmer. Looking at the ghost - Niragi - now, he’s not so scary. He’s just a kid. That thought hits him like a punch and his brows furrow. Niragi really is - was - just a kid, so how had he ended up like this?
Niragi turns, looks at him. His face scrunches in confusion at Karube’s relaxed posture.
“No. Here. In the bathroom.”
“Well, I heard you.” He motions to the stalls, “The doors slamming and the …” He trails off. Niragi’s gaze snaps away, his shoulders hunching, embarrassed. Karube continues quickly, “I thought you were my friends, playing some joke to try and scare me.”
Niragi huffs.
“Maybe you saw them, they’ve all stayed overnight here apparently.”
Niragi pauses, thinking.
“Two girls and a guy with annoying eyes?” he queries.
Karube laughs shortly, “Yep. That’s them.”
“They didn’t notice me,” Niragi adds dismissively, drifting around the room. “Most people run away anyway. You’re the first to come barging back in after I pushed them out - which makes you stupid.”
Karube frowns, “Or brave.”
Niragi snorts. He drifts closer, hops up onto the counter beside Karube, facing him. He hovers about an inch or two above the counter as he sits and crosses his legs. Karube looks at him, taking in his appearance. He’s thin, it’s like his uniform is wearing him instead of the other way around. Everything about him reads 'sensible nerdy student'; Karube doesn’t mean it in a bad way, but it’s the only way he can think to describe him.
“What’s the ghost story you mentioned?” Niragi asks.
Karube shifts uncomfortably. It feels silly - and a little insulting - to talk about it to the ghost in question. Niragi stares at him, waiting. He doesn’t blink. It’s eerie, and Karube shifts again, turning his gaze to a crack in the wall across from them.
“They say the school’s haunted by a student that killed himself. That he kills students who are alone, especially in the … bathroom.”
Niragi scoffs, “Why don’t they just call me 'Hanako'?”
He looks at Karube again. His big ink-dark eyes wide behind his glasses. He’s practically blown into complete greyscale, there’s no colour in him. He’s pale, diaphanous like clouds in front of the moon, his form shifts, disappearing and reappearing in the dim light. It hits Karube that he’s actually kind of pretty, for both a guy and a ghost.
Niragi leans closer, the cold tip of his nose almost touching Karube’s, his wide eyes unblinking. Torchlight catches on his lenses. Karube’s breath hitches slightly, caught behind his teeth.
“If that’s the story, shouldn’t you be more scared about being here with me? In this bathroom? All alone?”
“Well, are you going to kill me?”
Niragi leans away again. Karube exhales quietly. Niragi shrugs.
“No.”
There’s a quiet beat, Karube glances sidelong at him. His gaze drops to the rip in his sleeve, the strings of the missing button. He takes another breath. Here goes nothing.
“So what’s the actual story then?”
Niragi frowns. He twists and refuses to meet Karube’s eye. Wordless, he drifts away from the countertop and then disappears through the floor. Karube winces. Shit. He knew he shouldn’t have asked. He hops down from the counter, looking quickly around the room, but there’s no sight of Niragi anywhere. The flashlight beams around onto emptiness.
“Wait, Niragi, come back. I’m sorry!”
He gets no answer. He pushes open the doors of all the stalls, finds no shred of Niragi hiding within any. He turns his flashlight around the room, into the dark corners, and finds nothing. With a sigh, he sits himself back onto the counter and leans against the old mirror, feeling the coolness of it through his shirt and against the back of his head. Stubbornness prevails, and he decides he’ll wait. He has all night.
Niragi will have to come back … won’t he?
It takes two hours. Karube’s head is bobbing as he feels himself drifting off, he can barely manage to keep his eyes open and his vision blurs to his shadowy surroundings. He jerks up as he gets the sensation of falling, knocking the back of his head into the mirror. With a grunt and a quiet swear, he rubs his hand over the sore spot on the back of his head. Blinking sleepily, he notices a pale glow and when his eyes finally focuses, he sees Niragi standing by the entrance to the rows of now-closed stalls.
He jolts, sitting up straighter. Niragi isn’t looking at him. He’s standing, his arms crossed tightly over his chest, staring down at the middle of the room. His figure flickers, more translucent, he’s little more than a blurry glow. Before Karube can speak, Niragi does, whispering.
“They killed me there.”
Karube’s chest tightens, his mouth feels dry.
“Who did?” he asks, shaky and just as quiet.
Niragi’s eyes flick up to meet Karube’s. Quickly, Karube notices the differences in his appearance. His glasses are missing, his eyes are darkly circled and watery, his face is mottled with greyscaled bruises, there’s a split in his bottom lip, dripping black blood down his chin and neck. The white collar of his shirt is stained with the same blackness. He’s harrowing to look at and Karube grips his clammy hands to the counter.
Niragi’s words spill out in an overwhelming babbling susurrus, so dissonant that his words seem to overlap.
“I don’t know why they hated me so much. I’d never done anything to them. Every day - they’d never leave me alone - every day they’d find some way to torture me. I just wanted them to stop. I just wanted them to leave me alone. But when I told someone, it didn’t help and they - they fucking killed me!”
The final shout echoes, hitting Karube like a shockwave, making him flinch. His ears are ringing with a high pitched whine. His torch goes out, leaving him in the dark with only the ghostly glow for dim lighting. Niragi’s figure is flickering horribly now, disappearing and reappearing, upper body heaving with breaths he didn’t need to take. His face is a mess of streaking inky tears and black blood. He collapses to sit on the ground, his knees pulled to his chest, arms wrapped tightly around them and his face buried into his knees.
Karube’s torch comes back on in his trembling hand. Slowly, he moves. He slips quietly off the counter and crosses the room to sit down beside Niragi’s trembling, flickering figure. Glancing at him, Karube wants to reach out and lay a comforting hand on him, but he’s sure his hand will just go right through so he just sits and waits.
After a few minutes, Niragi’s sobs give way to sniffles and lifts his face from his knees. His form has evened out into its original glow, the flickering finally stopped. Karube notes that he looks back to normal too, his glasses are back and the inky blood is gone. His expression is still crumpled, frowning, his brows drawn together. He doesn’t look at Karube, just stares at the set of tiles in the middle of the room.
“Were they caught? Did they pay for it?” Niragi asks quietly.
Karube frowns. He’s not sure.
“Hold on,” he answers, digging around for his phone in his bag. Clicking his phone on, he blinks at the brightness of the screen, then flicks across to open the internet. “Uh, what’s your first name?”
Niragi shifts, lifting his head to look Karube’s way. His eyes fall on the phone for a moment, confusion slightly colouring his expression.
“It’s a phone,” Karube answers plainly.
Niragi’s face scrunches, slightly embarrassed.
“I know that,” he snaps, “Phones just … didn’t look like that when I was alive.”
“Oh. Right.” A small smile pulls on his lips and he ducks his chin to try and hide it. His thumbs hover over the screen’s keyboard, 'Niragi' already typed into the search bar. “Well?”
Niragi huffs quietly, “Suguru.”
He types it in and as the page slowly loads, Niragi leans in closer to look at the screen. Karube can feel the coolness of him against his arm, deep into the muscle like Niragi’s reaching into him. The search page loads in, a bunch of links popping up. Karube scrolls through them, the first few are useless, another couple unrelated. Niragi frowns, he leans in closer, Karube has to look at half the screen through his watery translucent head.
“What is this? Why isn’t there anything about me?” Niragi asks. He sounds panicked, and Karube can see him starting to flicker again, like a candle in the breeze.
“Hey, hey, chill, there’s got to be something, what’s this - oh.”
Karube scrolls quickly down the search page, pausing to click into an article and then going quiet after it loads. His stomach drops like a stone. It’s an article about a missing teenage boy from almost a decade ago. As he scrolls slowly down, a greyscale, slightly blurry, blown-up image of Niragi’s school picture is shown between the title and the first paragraph.
“I’m not missing, I’m dead!” Niragi cries, distraught as he takes in the article. Realisation seems to hit him. The flickering gets worse, the mottled bruises start to come back like dark spreading stains across his pale face. His voice is a quiet hollow echo. “They got away with it.”
“Niragi …”
“They killed me and they didn’t get punished for it? They just get to keep on living like nothing happened while I’m dead and stuck here in this stupid school? That’s not fair!”
“What if I can help you?”
Niragi goes silent in surprise. He looks at Karube, who stares back at him.
“What?”
Karube takes a breath. He’d just blurted out the first thing that came to mind, anything to stop Niragi from spirally into that scary form again.
“What if I can help get justice for you? You know who killed you, maybe I can find them, find out what they did to you. If we can find some proof, I could get the police involved too.”
He has no idea how, or even where to start. He’s no detective, books and movies like that have never interested him much either - but Niragi had looked so distressed that it had toppled out of Karube’s mouth before he could stop it.
The mottling bruises start to fade again. Niragi’s dark eyes are wide behind his lenses.
“You’d do that?”
“Yeah,” he shifts awkwardly, “I mean, you’d have to help me out, but I’ll do it. How far can you move from this room?”
“Not far. A few metres each way? It’s harder during the day too.”
“Maybe I can take you with me somehow,” Karube ponders aloud.
He pauses to think, glancing around the bathroom. If he could bring Niragi with him, it’d be a lot easier. He quickly wracks his mind for everything he knows about ghosts, which admittedly isn’t much. He looks back to Niragi. A question waits behind his teeth as he weighs how insensitive it is, if it’s okay to ask or if Niragi will even answer. He doesn’t want to risk Niragi getting upset and disappearing again.
“Ghosts are usually tied to places by something … physical from their life, right?” Karube doesn’t want to outright say 'body', though he’s not sure if implying Niragi’s corpse might be on the school grounds is better. “Do you know if something of your’s is here?”
Niragi frowns, looks around the room as he thinks.
“I don’t …” he trails off slowly, “Wait, there used to be a cupboard in here. For cleaning supplies,” he answers, standing. “I think they’ve covered it up now.”
Karube gets to his feet, “Where was it?”
“Here,” Niragi says.
He drifts towards the small slice of wall between the sinks and the first stall. Karube follows after him and shines the light of his torch along the wall. As he guides the light down, he finds a small metal keyhole half way down that had clearly just been painted over. He raps his knuckles on the wall and a hollow sound echoes back at him. Running his fingers along the wall, he tries to find the edge of the door. It’s not large, more of an inset wall cabinet than a closet. Niragi hovers close behind him.
“I need something to cut through this paint,” Karube murmurs. Maybe he should’ve brought more in his bag than torch, phone, snacks, and beer stolen from his dad.
“Try the teachers’ room,” Niragi suggests. Karube nods.
“I’ll be back.”
Leaving his bag, he grabs his torch and heads out. It takes him a while to remember exactly where the teachers’ room is and he heads up the stairs to the next floor, his steps echoing. As he walks, doubt starts to ebb into his thoughts. What was he doing? What could he actually do to help? Was this even really happening? A ghost. He’s been talking to a ghost. It sounds crazy even as he thinks it. Did he fall jumping the school wall or when he hopped into the classroom? Was this a dream?
His phone weighs heavy in his pocket. Ghost or not, Niragi was an actual missing person. If Karube can do something to help, shouldn’t he? Taking a breath, in then out, he steels his determination. What else has he got going on anyway? Bad grades, disappointed parents, probably no actual future beyond shitty-paying jobs. With everyone else seemingly having given up on Niragi, maybe Karube’s the only chance he has left for justice.
Reaching the door of the teachers’ room, Karube pulls it open and aims his torch around the room. He’s only been here twice but it’s familiar, a lot like the one at his old school where he’d spent a lot of time getting scolded by teachers for fighting at school. Walking in, he heads for one of the desks, pulling open the top drawer. He looks for scissors, a box cutter, anything he can use to carve through the layers of paint in the bathroom. Pulling open another drawer, he finds a large pair of scissors and grabs them, giving them a cursory 'snip-snip'.
He turns to leave then, as an afterthought, grabs an aluminium ruler off one of the desks. Glancing down at his phone clock, he frowns slightly when he sees it’s past midnight now. He’ll need to send the group chat another photo for proof that he’d stayed the night and still make it home before his parents wake up. Hurrying, he rushes back downstairs to the bathroom.
Niragi’s still staring at the wall as Karube re-enters. He runs his pale glowing fingers along the edge of where the door must’ve been before it was painted over. His mouth is downturned in a small frown. As Karube walks over, Niragi glances up and drifts back. Karube waggles the scissors at him. Popping the end of his torch in his mouth, he separates the scissor blades into two parts and sets one part and the ruler onto the counter.
Finding the edge of the door with his fingers, he digs the blade of the scissors in and drags it along, chipping through the paint. It takes him a while and the entire time, Niragi hovers just over his shoulder, a cold chill against his back and nape. As he chips the last of the paint off around the edge, he notices a small dent beside the paint-covered keyhole where a door handle must’ve been removed.
Setting the scissor blade onto the counter, he picks up the ruler and wiggles it into the space between the door and jamb. As he starts to jimmy it open, worry pinches in his chest. What could be hidden in there? It’s was too small for a body … right? Even one as skinny as Niragi? He shakes it off. If there was a dead body, there’d be a smell, there’s no way it could’ve be hidden here for so long.
The lock snaps and the door pops ajar. Karube takes a breath. Now or never.
He pulls the torch from his mouth, working his jaw as he slips his fingers into the gap and carefully pulls the door open. Inside, it’s musty, making Karube’s nose scrunch. There’s dustpans, rags, small brooms - all things that someone clearly hadn’t bothered to remove before sealing it up and painting over it. He jabs around in the small closet with the end of the ruler, pushing the objects around.
“There’s nothing?” Niragi says, sounding defeated.
“Hold on,” Karube replies, trying to keep up hope as he digs around.
As he’s poking around, one of the small brooms shifting and he’s something clink glassily. Leaning closer into the cupboard, he pulls the broom out to toss it aside. Behind the broom, there’s a partly stained cloth hidden. Karube jabs at it with the cloth with the ruler, causing another quiet jingle of glass.
Uncomfortable with the sight of the unknown stains, he doesn’t want to reach in and actually pick up the cloth, so he tries to shift it aside with the ruler. As he does, a pair of glasses slips out from between the folds and clatters onto the bottom of the cupboard.
Niragi freezes. The air in the room drops several degrees, chilly. Where Niragi’s ghostly form touches him feels like ice, making him shiver. Slowly, carefully, Karube reaches out and picks up the glasses by pinching the end of one slightly-bent arm. He lifts it into the light of his torch. They’re a little dusty and one of the lenses is jaggedly cracked through the middle of the lens, missing a chunk that still lays in the cupboard. The arm that Karube isn’t holding is rusty and stuck folded by some dark liquid that he doesn’t want to admit to himself might be blood.
“My glasses?” Niragi murmurs.
Karube lifts them, holding them in front of Niragi’s face and lining them up with the ghostly off-coloured pair of his face. Niragi’s eyes flick over the cracked lens and the rust-folded arm.
“Definitely looks like it,” he replies.
In his pocket, his phone buzzes noisily. He pulls his phone out and looks at his phone clock again as he stops the alarm. It’s close to 3am, nearly Kuina’s set deadline. He carefully puts the glasses down onto the counter by the sink. For a moment, he looks to his phone, then from the mirror to Niragi.
“Hey, stay there a minute,” he says, flicking across to the camera.
“Why?” Niragi asks, brows scrunching.
Karube turns his back to the mirror, flipping to the front camera and angling so the picture he takes so it includes Niragi’s reflection off to the side of the image. After taking the picture, he takes a closer look at it and smirks. Niragi’s form is dark and blurry - it almost looked edited, like one of those 'real ghost proof’ pictures online. He’s sure it’ll freak Kuina out if she looks close enough to notice. As the clock ticks over to 3am, Karube sends the picture off with a 'dare done' message, mentioning nothing about Niragi, then shoves his phone away into his pocket.
Leaning down, he picks his backpack up, setting it on the counter and carefully slipping Niragi’s glasses into the side pocket. He puts the torch away as well, hauls the bag on, and nods towards the door.
“Come on, let’s see if this’ll work,” he says. Niragi nods shortly.
Karube heads downstairs back towards the corner classroom, Niragi drifts along beside him. He slides the door back closed behind them. Across the room, the window is still open, a cool night breeze blowing into the classroom. Hiking his backpack higher, he starts across the room, only pauses when he notices Niragi has stopped halfway. He turns back around, a confused look on his face. Niragi’s frowning again, his gaze downcast.
“What if this doesn’t work? What if I can’t come with you?” he asks quietly.
Karube’s brows furrow, then he exhales and sets his determined gaze on Niragi.
“Then I’ll come back every night until I can figure out what happened to you back then and get those guys punished how they deserve,” he says, resolute, “but you don’t have to worry about that because this is going to work, so come on.”
He twists, walking over to hop up and out of the window, landing quietly on the concrete outside. Turning back to look at Niragi again, he sets his hands on the sill. This is going to work, Karube’s sure of it. Niragi hasn’t moved from his spot halfway across the room, he hovers there, his face still creased with nervous unease.
“Niragi,” Karube starts, “I can only do this if you help me, so you’ve gotta trust me.”
Silence stretches, Niragi still unmoving.
“Why do you want to help me?” he asks finally.
Karube pauses.
“I … don’t know,” he replies honestly, “but I want to. I don’t think you should be stuck in this school forever and I don’t think the people that killed you should just get away with it. You’re right that it’s not fair, and I’ll do whatever I can to make things right. I promise.”
Niragi looks up then, finally meeting his gaze. His eyes search across Karube’s face. After a beat, his features set in renewed determination and he drifts across the room towards the window. Karube steps back to give him room and Niragi pauses at sill, looking around the window frame. Steadying himself, he hoists up out of the window, touching down in front of Karube.
Holding back a sigh of relief, Karube just grins instead.
“I told you it would work,” he said, stepping around Niragi to slide the window closed. “Now we gotta move, ‘cause my dad will be pissed if he finds out I snuck out all night - Niragi?”
Niragi is staring up at the sky, at the twinkling stars, at the moon shining down on them, down through him. He glows a little brighter.
“I … haven’t been outside in so long,” he whispers.
Karube glances back towards the school. Niragi’s been locked up in there for almost a decade, he realises, no wonder just seeing the moon has left him so starstruck. He waits, watching as Niragi turns in a slow circle, taking in the courtyard.
“It looks so different.” His eyes fall on Karube, he shakes his head slightly, a tinge of embarrassment across his face, “Sorry. We can go.”
Karube smiles, shrugging, “It’s fine. Ten years, it’s a long time to be stuck inside. Look around as we walk.”
Niragi nods shortly and the pair cross the courtyard back to the wall. Karube climbs over the top. Niragi, much to Karube’s chagrin and amusement, drifts easily through it. Karube calls him a 'show-off' and Niragi smirks a little, calling it 'one of the only perks of being dead'.
Hiking his bag up on his shoulders, Karube smiles confidently at Niragi. He’s going to figure it out, he’s going to do whatever it takes to help him. But first, he needs to get home before his parents wake up.