Work Text:
Kirumi Togami wakes up in an abandoned classroom.
Her head aches.
So this is what it feels like, she thinks, to be overcome.
Kirumi raises a hand to her forehead, pressing cool fingertips to her skin. This doesn’t help much; it doesn’t alleviate the pressure pressing beneath her skin or the ache radiating through her head. Still, the cold provides a sense of clarity, enough that she can lift her head and take in her surroundings.
Most importantly, the body of the Ultimate Maid Butler dozing next to her.
For the moment, Kirumi ignores him. The classroom is just as she imagined an old room at Hope’s Peak would be; shortly before her enrollment, the new building was completed, and all of her classes were meant to take place there (and the surrounding, more specialized, buildings). But in the years leading up to her acceptance as the Ultimate Affluent Heir, she’d imagined what it would be like to be a student in this building and is pleased to find everything exactly the way she believed it would be.
Minus, of course, her other classmates, her teacher, and any explanation for why she is here and not there.
Something feels…off.
Excellent.
After a few more moments of breathing in stale air and noting how her throbbing headache slowly fades as everything comes into sharper clarity (like the steel plates covering the windows), Kirumi reaches over and lightly touches the arm of the boy left in the room with her. “Polanski-kun. Wake up.”
The mop of wheat-colored hair pops up immediately at her gentle, yet forceful, words. “Togami-san,” he says, glancing around the room. “Where are we?” He adjusts his glasses, only to find cracks like spider web across their frames. “And what happned to my glasses?”
“I believe that we have been taken captive.” Kirumi pushes herself up from her desk and walks over to the steel-plate-covered windows and the thick, heavy screws holding them in place. “Someone must have gone through a great effort to make sure we could not leave.”
Byakuya huffs. “And they couldn’t take the same care with my glasses. Imbeciles.” He sets that pair to the side, reaches into a pocket on the inside of his jacket, and pulls out another. “I’ll have to make do with a spare. Ridiculous. You would think that commoners like this—”
“We don’t know they’re commoners, Polanski-kun.” Kirumi runs a finger along the edge of the steel plate. “I don’t believe commoners could make something as exotic as—” The pad of her forefinger catches on a sharp edge, slicing through her skin, and she pulls it to her chest with a sharp hiss.
“My lady.” Byakuya leaves his desk and is by her side in a moment, taking her hand and holding it between his own gloved ones. His eyes narrow. He pulls a thin roll of gauze from his jacket pocket. “What were you saying about the drivel who created this place?”
Kirumi blushes as Byakuya wraps the gauze around her fingertip. “Nothing.” A shadow passes through the classroom, and she glances up just enough to catch the shape of someone else passing their room. She can’t make out who it is through the window in the classroom door. “Someone else is here.” Another shadow, and she smiles. “Multiple someones.”
With a flourish, Byakuya ties the gauze tight. He grits his teeth as he looks towards the classroom door. “Then we have much to fear, Togami-san. They’ll probably want to kill one or both of us.”
“I think that’s a little much—”
“Togami-san.” Byakuya grasps Kirumi’s wrist as she starts towards the door. It isn’t a tight hold; she could break it if she wanted. But she doesn’t. Instead, she stays bound and glances back to him. He meets her eyes. “We had a plan for this sort of thing. You made it yourself. It’s foolproof, and we are no fools.”
Kirumi takes a sharp breath in. Her gaze turns to the door. Then she pulls her wrist from Byakuya’s grasp (despite the frustrated gritting of his teeth that she knows he is doing behind her) and walks to the door. She reaches up and pulls a window cover down then turns back to him, meeting his eyes. “If you insist.”
“There’s no use in wasting a good plan, my lady.”
“No,” Kirumi says, glancing to the door and then back again. “There isn’t.”