Chapter Text
2016 - the school's population is too sparse to ever see Ayano commit murder. Kokona is stabbed with a screwdriver and bleeds to death in the northern wing's stairwell. The rainbow girls who would group in the Cooking Club room for their routine afterschool meetup won't question Kokona's absence, even with an empty seat at their table. Her body won't even be found for hours, if at all.
Ayano quickly removes Kokona's body and dumps her in the first floor's storage room, barren of shelves or boxes. Blood on her uniform and in her hair, she approaches the Cooking Club room, open-doored and empty aside from the club leader: a gray witness to Ayano's chaos. Her only sense of justice comes in the form of rejecting Ayano from joining clubs if she's aroused suspicion or violated school policy. Otherwise, she stands dormant and says nothing about blood nor bodies.
Ayano runs back up to the second floor and begins following Riku, the rich boy with pierced gold earrings and an anachronistic English accent. Posh, as he was called. He trudges along quietly, blushing to himself. Well, not to himself. When you're around a girl like Ayano, nothing is ever kept to yourself. She follows him back down to the first floor, where he walks to the Cooking Club to do his routine gaze through the open club door.
At 3:47 p.m, Kokona would've been in the ideal spot: standing in the kitchen, preparing octodogs to feed her friends. She cuts up the raw dogs demurely, picking one up to examine its fine slices and give it a smile of approval as she assembles them on the plate. So gentle, so white. She brushes her hair and fails to notice the guy's head poking through the open door. When she's finished, she carries the plate over to the table and eats with the girls. Riku looks on, flushed with longing. Ayano watches this and realizes she's the only one who knows she's not there. Not just because she knows Kokona is dead, but because she knows Kokona is literally not there. Riku is looking at an empty kitchen, a whole lot of nothing. Well, the kitchen's not empty, per say. The club leader stands there, minding nothing. The girls are sitting at the table, talking about nothing. Maybe he's looking at her, or maybe at them. Grabbing an eyeful.
She gets too close to him and he spots the blood on her uniform out of his peripheral. He turns around, alarmed. "Is that blood?! What happened to you?!"
"Yes, it is," Ayano replies, "you pink-faced blushing bastard!"
Confused, he turns back to look at his special nothing. Ayano sighs and walks away. You damn horny bastard, she thinks to herself, I'll incinerate your twin-tailed woebegone middle-class awe. Corpses in Akademi never decompose; they only get discovered. This was especially true for Kokona, whose blood ran down the northern wing's stairs and still went unnoticed.