Chapter Text
But not for long.
For a couple days, he feels like he is living on borrowed time, in someone else's life. Karma wakes him up in the mornings with slow, lazy kisses and fingers that trail down his skin in all sorts of promising ways. His smiles grow less sharp-edged and mistrustful, grow more warm and open with each passing day. Nagisa bides his time, perhaps longer than he should have, because - he has to face it, now - he's in love with Karma.
This isn't anything new. He has always loved Karma's incredible personality and fierce intelligence. Before, he could only look at Karma from afar. There had been no way for them to ever stand upon the same stage, in the same battlefield. Now, though, at least in the field of assassination, they are able to think on the same level and communicate without words.
That's why it's so difficult to escape.
Karma knows him well. He knows that Nagisa is terrified of going back into the light, facing the cameras and the court of public opinion, terrified of facing memories of what he has done. He knows that Nagisa searches for the key to his handcuffs every day, knows how often Nagisa has considered dislocating his fingers just to get away.
"Trust me," he says, in between the kisses that he uses like other captors might have used drugs, to sedate Nagisa and keep him calm. "I won't let anyone hurt you. You aren't alone."
"I know," Nagisa replies, soft and warm, and tastes the metallic aftertaste of the key under Karma's tongue.
He pretends not to notice, but it was a message from Karma anyway. To get free, he would have to hurt Karma for it. To run away, he would have to get past the distraction of all those kisses, and pry his fingers into Karma's mouth and make him a liar.
That hurts. That is a far more effective message than Nagisa could have imagined. He feels his resolve wavering as he stares at his best friend, his lover. He knows how much Karma hates liars.
Karma smiles back at him, lazy, challenging. His eyes shine with the kind of arrogance that Nagisa loves him for, and so when Nagisa kisses him, he doesn't think about the key at first.
A long time passes before Nagisa remembers that this is a dream. But that doesn't make waking up any less painful.
The wake-up call comes with a knock on the hotel room door.
"Room service!" Someone calls, a woman's voice, slightly accented.
Karma and Nagisa look at each other.
"Did you get room service?" Karma asks, confused.
But Nagisa is already bracing himself hard against the headboard, his insides going cold and frozen to numb the pain. The chain rips free of the wall in a violent jerk.
He has forgotten what day it is - he has forgotten all about the flow of time. How could he have been so stupid. This place was only ever meant to be a temporary safe house. He never should have stayed here for so long.
Nagisa throws Karma to the floor, and follows him down to the ground right after.
"Fuck!" Karma gasps, but Nagisa can't waste breath on him to apologize. He stays silent and low the ground, behind the bed - particle wood, won't stop bullets -
The knock comes again. "Hello?" the woman calls. "Is anyone there? Room service!"
Karma is getting to his feet before Nagisa can stop him. His eyes are on Nagisa, not on the door. With a chill, Nagisa realizes that Karma thinks he's trying to use this as a diversion, to escape.
"Get down," Nagisa hisses. Karma's expression changes, but too late.
Before he even finishes, the door is kicked open, the lock shearing away from the wall, splinters flying into the room. The hallway light floods in, revealing a woman in a white uniform, masked. She's holding a gun, small but deadly accurate at this range.
She locks in on Karma, who has no time to react. He is tense and coiled like a mountain cat, eyes burning with fury, ready to move in an instant if she pulls the trigger. He looks around for Nagisa, but Nagisa is gone.
"Who are you?" he demands, as if he is the politician he is and not a man about to be killed. "What the fuck are you doing in my room?"
"Where is he?" the woman's voice is accented and clipped. Russian? Karma's eyes narrow at her. She still has her gun trained on him, but it's clear that he is not her intended target. She would much rather be pointing the gun at someone else instead.
"I'm the only one -" Karma tries to shift, to get a better angle of her face.
"Stop right there!" The woman is just as tense as he is. In fact, she might be the more frightened one. She starts talking to the walls. "Don't move! Either of you! If you touch me, he dies!"
Nagisa comes at her out of nowhere. He's smaller than she expected, apparently. And much faster. The gun twists out of her hands, spinning away from her in the air. A loud clatter of chain links is her only warning. But it's already too late. In one motion, Nagisa's arm is around her neck, and in his hand is the sharp gleam of a knife.
He pulls, one sharp motion, like breathing. Red blooms in the air like flowers, or soundless fireworks.
It takes Nagisa a long moment to realize that this is not a dream. He is not having a nightmare.
Karma is still standing, shocked, on the other side of the room. Nagisa can't look at his eyes, can't face the judgement that might be waiting there.
He has just killed a woman, a woman no different from Irina-sensei, right in front of his childhood friend.
Oh, he remembers, now that there is the familiar cool of blood on his skin and red on his fingers, and death in the air. That's right. I kill people. This is who I am.
How had he forgotten that?
Then he remembers Irina-sensei and her sad smile, saying: there's a reason why people like me can't fall in love.
The woman is still bleeding out on the carpet. Nagisa doesn't recognize her, but he knows where she's from. His organization is full of paranoid people, and they must have been following him. After days of silence, they must have assumed that he had been captured, or worse, that he had decided to give them up.
That was the thing about becoming an assassin. Once you entered that world, and once you started to recognize faces, it became impossible to leave. You knew too much. Too many people knew you. People who killed for a living.
"Karma," he tries to say, but the name doesn't come out quite right. Had they really been kissing, moments ago? It all feels like a dream now.
Nagisa looks up, strangely woozy, like he's in shock. This is going to get him killed, he knows. He needs to have his eyesight back. He needs to be clear and calm and focused. He's in danger, they should move. They need to get out of here as quickly as possible.
But he's not the cold assassin anymore. He's just a kid again, nineteen and desperately scared by the person he's become.
"Karma," he chokes out, and then suddenly Karma is there, holding his face in his hands. Reality blurs out as his vision does, and Nagisa clings on to the warmth of Karma's skin as if it is the only thing holding him together.
"Are you hurt?" Karma asks, because of course, trust the politician to have ice in his veins right now. "Nagisa, look at me."
"Get the gun," Nagisa gasps. His body won't listen to him. He's clinging onto Karma like a child, hindering his movements instead of getting up and moving, which he should be doing. "We have to run. We have to get out of here."
"You're bleeding."
He is, but it's from the handcuffs, and not from a bullet wound. No discharge. No bullet fired. The woman had either hesitated, unwilling to kill a third party, or she had died too fast. Nagisa feels sick to his stomach. He knows all sorts of things about this woman - how fast she moves and how fast she kills, but he doesn't even know her name.
"Hey. Hey!" Karma squeezes his face in his hands. Nagisa struggles against that touch - he can't be restricted, not now. He has to run. He has to fight.
"It going to be fine - "
He can't breathe, the world is going black around him. There's so much blood. He's so scared. There's no way out of this darkness for him, not now, not ever.
"It'll be okay. It's okay. It's okay."
Nagisa wishes he were a kid again, wishes that words like that could have an effect on him.
"It's not okay," he says, quiet, despairing, wishing he could scream. "Karma, it's not going to be okay. They'll send people after us, and when they find this, they know that you were involved. They'll put the pieces together. They'll figure out the connection between you and me. They'll think that you killed her, or worse, that you hired me to kill her. They'll think it's an attack on them."
"Nagisa - "
"They'll hunt you down," Nagisa continues, starting to cry in earnest now, now that he's remembered how to. "They'll kill you and everyone you love, your family, everyone from class 3-E, maybe even everybody from Kunugigaoka. Karma, you don't understand, these are the people that I work with."
Karma doesn't even blink. He catches Nagisa in his arms, his voice steady. "We'll deal with it, Nagisa."
He doesn't understand. They thought they were risking their livelihoods for him before, but now they were risking their lives for him. Nagisa can't allow that.
"I'm sorry," Nagisa whispers. He bites at his fingernails, a habit that he never had from his childhood. Karma is smoothing his hair away from his face, far more tenderly than Nagisa deserves.
"Let me call the police," Karma says, so rock-steady and certain and sure that Nagisa almost wants to believe him, and trust that everything will be okay. "Once we run an ID check on her, we'll be able to tell where she came from. Let them take it from there; you need to come home."
Home, Nagisa's heart twists at the last moment. He wonders how his mother is doing, and if she smiles bitterly when she thinks of him, her second chance with its unexpected endgame. He wonders if his father will even recognize him if they meet again.
"Karma," he says softly, his heart in his mouth. When Karma looks at him, Nagisa surges up to kiss him, a full kiss with everything in it - all his desperation and longing, a silent plea for forgiveness. What he has with Karma is probably the only remnant of home that he has left.
When he's done, he pulls back and Karma blinks at him, worried and confused. His eyes remind Nagisa of the sun sometimes, with how bright they are, and how they're always a little painful to look at directly. No wonder, given how much of his life Nagisa has dedicated to the moon.
"I'm sorry," Nagisa whispers. "But I had to."
The realization hits Karma like a bag of bricks. His eyes widen, he stumbles. "Nagisa, what - what did you do to me?"
"I love you," Nagisa confesses tearfully, but it's too late. The sedatives are already working - enough to take down an elephant. It should be enough to take down Karma too.
He catches Karma before his head hits the floor. And even if he spends the next few moments curled over, unable to breathe, like he is watching the slow death of everything he has ever wanted or loved, at least his tears are silent.
When he leaves, he takes the gun with him. He cleans up the crime scene the best he can, erasing any traces of his presence. The room was in another name. He books another, and moves Karma there. He doesn't touch Karma any more than he has to, afraid of Karma suddenly waking up, afraid of how much he wishes that Karma would. Even now, he desperately wants Karma's touch. Those few days had changed him somehow. Now that he knows what Karma feels like on his skin, it is like growing used to a layer of clothing that he suddenly no longer has.
The woman he leaves as a mystery for the local police. Despite what Karma had claimed, Nagisa knows that she won't show up in any databases and her fingerprints won't scan. She doesn't exist, just like a person once known as Nagisa Shiota.
The hotel makes the news, later, but not because of the murder. Karma Akabane makes the news for being seen leaving a seedy hotel, and everyone speculates: does he have a secret lover? Was he involved in a secret drug deal? Nagisa studies the picture in the newspaper, but he can't make out the expression on Karma's face. Then he realizes what he's doing, and throws it away.
He only survives the next few days by burying himself in work. He has people to find, and places to be. At most, he has a few hours of a head start, and he has to guard that extra stolen time with his life.
Whispers start up on message boards and darknet forums. There's a shinigami walking the streets. People disappear from the streets, big-name Russian politicians, rich businessmen with perfect family lives and generous donations. All of a sudden, secret contacts stop picking up their phones, some numbers stop replying to texts.
Information becomes a scattered thing, too hard to gather in time, especially when the strings you are used to tugging come loose with nothing on the other end. A man goes to his death, still asking why he hasn't been paid for services rendered. People said it was the shinigami again, only that everyone knew that reapers didn't exist, not really.
That's a thing of the past, they said. No one exists like that now. Someone used to, but they're dead now.
They never realize that they are wrong until it's too late.
For the ones who see him before they die, they all describe the same thing - an innocent, almost childish face, eyes still bright with life, not the eyes of a killer. He is the last person they would have expected, bearing death to them with a sad smile, as if it were an offering.
"Why are you doing this?" they beg him, the ones who have the chance to, pleading for their lives, saying my children need me, saying please, saying have mercy.
He had run out of mercy a long time ago, buried it somewhere far away and forgotten how to find it again.
"You tried to kill my friend," Nagisa tells them, the ones who deserve to know. They stare at him as if they've never heard that word before.
It takes a few weeks for his devastation to run its course.
By the end of it, the channels that used to be so full of life of activity have gone dark and quiet, slow pings every now and then like drops of blood spilling from an already-dead corpse. The smart ones disappear, leaving this life behind, or are scared away for good. The rest, Nagisa hunts down slowly, methodically, until he is doubly sure, triply sure, that he has found everyone responsible.
He doesn't think the world is a better place for it, afterwards. But he also doesn't care.
Karma doesn't know what wakes him up. There's something in the air that reminds him of when he was a kid, and watched an electric storm rip apart the sky from miles away, how the lightning flashed and forked and burned the air into plasma, but made no sound for seconds and seconds.
He recognizes that feeling, so he gets up and fights the urge to get the knives that he always keeps in his bottom dresser.
In the days and weeks following his encounter with Nagisa, Class 3-E redoubled their efforts in finding him. Karma called on some old contacts, some old debts. He had been so furious that he could hardly breathe. He spent long hours imagining what he would say if he ever found Nagisa again.
He can't remember any of it now.
When he opens the sliding door, he finds Nagisa sitting on the balcony, hair and eyes glowing in the moonlight, looking like a ghost. His shoulders are bare, and his black tank top makes him blend into the darkness. He's conspicuously unarmed. And he is completely, utterly silent.
Karma looks at him and thinks, he hasn't changed. Even after all these years, the sight of him under the night sky is as breathtaking as ever.
Then Nagisa smiles at him, and he has never looked more like Koro-sensei than he does just at that moment.
"I've come to turn myself in," he says.