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Ieiri Shoko's boys are gone. Both of them.
Three fresh cadavers lie flat before her in her morgue, motionless, bloody and empty and cold. A maid, and Shoko's boys. Her teacher stands beside her, sorrowful and stone-faced and saying something she can't hear over the ringing in her ears.
“Shoko,” she doesn't hear. Or, well, she does hear him, but the sound goes in one ear and out the other. He's trying to talk to her, and she's too busy analyzing the cold feeling crawling through her bones. “Shoko, I won't make you tend to— to their bodies, but someone else will have to. I can give you three hours before the other mortician arrives.”
Instead of screaming at him to have some tact, instead of crying or running out of the room or wondering how she's going to break the news to her two kohai, she just nods. If she follows the script, Yaga will go.
He does.
Shoko looks down at the two tables, dry-eyed and trembling. She doesn't feel out of breath, but she can't remember the last time she inhaled, either. She's still still half-expecting them to sit up and grin at her.
They don't.
Is she supposed to just… finish the next year and a half of school, alone? Does she still have to graduate, when her boys aren't there to do it with her?
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
The room is silent, she realizes, besides the clock. She can hear the ticking, and the blood in her ears, but not her boys’ voices. They've never been silent before. They bicker over the top of her head, they argue over philosophy on the train, they laugh during movies even when they aren't funny… Even in sleep, they both snore. Her boys couldn't be silent if they tried.
They're silent now.
One body has a harsh X slashed across the torso, but that's not what killed him. There's a footprint on his face, and his head is at an uncomfortably wrong angle. Someone had kicked his face, snapping his neck with the force.
The other body is even worse off. The most mild of the wounds are four punctures in the left thigh, and they only get worse from there. There's a stab through the back that comes out just below the sternum, and another, far more distressing one that punctured his throat and then dragged over his ribs in a long slant, ending at his hip. The killing blow, though, seems to have been a stab to the forehead that went through the skull and into the brain.
Her boys were famously unbeatable. How scared had they been, losing? How scared had Satoru been, with a blade through him? Or Suguru, alone, knowing that Satoru had been bested?
Shoko's fists clench. How dare they die and leave her alone here? How dare they?
And how dare their killer? Who did this?
The ringing in her ears subsides a little, and she swallows harshly, trying to summon resolve for what she needs to do next. The thought of putting her hands on their corpses makes her sick.
Better sick than dead, though.
She starts with Suguru. Gently, oh so gently so as not to worsen his already broken neck, she lifts his head with one hand and tugs his hair tie loose with the other, slipping it over her wrist. She lowers his head back down, carefully brushes his bangs from his face so she can slip his gauges from his ears and put them in her pocket, and wipes away the dirt on his cheek. She kisses his forehead like she's putting him to bed, and then tugs the cold white sheet over him as if tucking him in.
Satoru’s next. It's worse. There's an unreasonable amount of blood, and feeling around his pockets to find his glasses stains her hands in red. He doesn't smile at her or wiggle his eyebrows salaciously, doesn't press into the initiated physical contact like he needs it in order to breathe. He's not asleep. When she finds his glasses tucked into his right pocket, she slides them free and places them atop her head, lenses resting above her hairline. As usual, he lets her, like it's any other day. She kisses his forehead too, on the opposite side of the wound. She still gets blood on her mouth, but she doesn't bother to wipe it away when she pulls the other sheet over him.
Come back to me, she wants to order them both. Wake up. Argue at each other while smushing me between you, complain about each other's morals, laugh at the stupid videos I show you. Come back. Wake up.
“I'll do everything in my power to keep things like this from happening to our juniors,” Shoko quietly vows instead, to her boys and to the air and to nobody at all. “And even if it kills me, I will find whoever did this to you. Wherever you go, wherever you are now, I promise you that.”
Something in the room changes when she turns around to leave. The air is colder, the stark white of the morgue even less colorful. It feels like the prickle of Satoru’s stare, like the chill of Suguru’s shadows, but when she glances backwards, the bodies are still flat on their backs and covered.
Wishful thinking, maybe.
Wishes don't get granted in the real world, though. The closest thing to that would be a binding vow, but there's no one left to make such a pact with.
Shoko closes her eyes, opens the door, and leaves.