Seiyo High runs on the same rhythm it always does around midday — the bell, the scrape of chair legs against tile, and then the cafeteria settling into its usual roar, two hundred separate conversations stacking on top of each other until none of them are individually audible anymore.

Your table — the one that's been yours and Akari's for longer than either of you bothered deciding it — already has her tray down by the time you get there, a second pair of chopsticks unwrapped and waiting next to your usual seat. Copper-auburn ponytail still a little damp from morning practice, sleeves pushed up out of habit, that quick, easy warmth she has with basically everyone but somehow still manages to make feel specific to you.

"You're late," she says, not looking up. "I was two bites from eating your share too."

Kaito drops into the seat across from you like he's been sprinting, phone already face-up on the table, mid-sentence before he's even finished sitting.

"Okay, no, but LISTEN—"

Neither of you is really listening, and he doesn't seem to need you to be. His hyperfixation rotates every few weeks with the reliability of a tide chart; this week it's some gacha game's new banner, and he's already three minutes into an argument nobody's having with him about drop rates.

It's a completely ordinary lunch, which is probably why the far side of the room ends up catching your attention at all — nothing dramatic is happening over there. A girl sits alone at the end of a table built for six, the other five seats empty around her the way they apparently always are: close enough to the room that no teacher's ever going to flag her as friendless, far enough that nobody's ever quite gotten around to asking either. A notebook sits open beside her tray, mostly untouched food, her hand moving in short, private bursts across the page. Her hair is a muted, slightly uneven ash-lavender that doesn't match anyone else's copied-from-a-magazine styling.

Nothing about her is doing anything, specifically, to earn a second look from you.

And yet, for whatever reason, today your first glance turns into a second.

She doesn't notice. She's still writing.

The gate at Seiyo opens before most of the building's lights do, and the classroom this early still has that hollow, echoing quality it loses completely by second period — your own footsteps carrying further than they should, the announcement speakers not yet switched on, the smell of floor wax from whoever mopped the night before.

Nagisa's name, when the teacher takes attendance most mornings, gets called in the flat, quick rhythm reserved for names nobody's really expecting an answer from. She's been in your class the entire year — technically present the way a chair or a windowsill is present, accounted for without being noticed. That started changing a while back, when Kaito decided, loudly and more than once, that a person eating lunch alone every single day was "objectively unacceptable actually," and simply started including her the same unthinking way he includes anyone who looks like they could use it. She still hasn't quite settled into it. Neither has anyone else, really — it still gets mentioned when she's not around, though never unkindly.

Right now, though, she's alone at her desk, a battered notebook open in front of her, hair falling a little unevenly over one shoulder like she cut it herself in a hurry at some point and never fixed the difference. Her pen moves in short private bursts — not sentences, just marks, small ones, clustered in the corner of the page, like she's keeping count of something only she can see.

She closes the notebook the exact moment your foot crosses the threshold of the door — not startled, not rushed, just closed, smooth, like the hinge of her attention had been set to that one specific cue and nothing else.

"Oh — hey," she says, easy, unremarkable, already sliding the notebook into her bag. "You're early."

You drop into your own seat a row over, and it's only once your bag is open that you find out your mechanical pencil finally gave out sometime between yesterday and this morning — no lead left, not even enough to scratch out a full letter. Before you've gotten more than halfway through checking your pencil case for a spare, a fresh one lands on the corner of your desk, already out of its packaging.

"Here," Nagisa says, not looking up from her bag, like it isn't really worth commenting on. "You always run out around now."

The track loops around the far side of the Seiyo grounds, mostly empty by this hour — the track club's morning session technically ended twenty minutes ago, most of the team already showered and gone, but Akari's still out on the infield grass when you get there, knees pulled up, hair damp and stuck to her neck, breath only just leveling out. Her bag sits a few feet off, one strap chewed through years ago and never replaced; a water bottle, half-finished, lies tipped over on its side beside it.

Waiting for you like this after practice isn't new. It goes back further than either of you would bother counting, back to some point in childhood neither of you could name exactly if pressed, the two families close enough for that long that nobody's ever needed a reason for it. Long enough that she doesn't so much notice you arriving as simply confirm it, the way you'd confirm something you'd already been sure of.

She pats the grass beside her without getting up. It isn't really a question.

"You're just in time," she says, smiling, still a little out of breath. "I was about to have to walk home alone like some kind of loser."

It's not a special day — that's sort of the point. Ever since Kaito first badgered Nagisa into sitting with everyone at lunch, this has folded itself into one of the regular things that just happens now: the four of you peeling off from the school gate together, walking the same route home, splitting off one at a time at the same two landmarks you always split off at — first the convenience store on the corner, where Kaito tries and fails to talk someone into splitting a bag of chips with him roughly every other day, then the shrine steps a few blocks further, where the group gets smaller by one.

Today the walk starts the same way it always does — Kaito already mid-story about something that happened in one of his classes, Nagisa half a step behind the rest of you, quiet in the way she usually is outside of direct conversation, present without taking up much space.

Somewhere along the way, though, without anyone visibly deciding it, the shape of the group changes. Akari falls into step closer than the sidewalk strictly requires. Her arm slides loosely through yours, easy, familiar, the way she's done it a hundred times before — and somewhere in the last block, the four of you have quietly become two separate conversations instead of one, Nagisa and Kaito trailing half a step further back than they were when you started walking.

Akari doesn't look back to check. She doesn't have to.

"You're coming over Friday, right?" she says, like it's already settled, already true. "Mom's making the thing you like."

Behind you, Kaito's voice carries on, unbothered, mid-way through a story about something else entirely. Nagisa's quieter than usual even for her, walking a little apart from him now too, watching the back of your head with an attention that doesn't look like idle people-watching — like she's measuring something, the exact and slowly growing distance between your shoulder and Akari's.

It's been weeks since Nagisa stopped feeling like someone you were just being polite to. These days there's an actual rhythm to it — she saves you a seat without being asked, you know which vending machine button she'll press before she presses it, and this morning, in the hallway outside class, she said something dry enough about the homeroom teacher that you laughed — really laughed, sudden and unplanned, the kind that just happens instead of the kind you do for people's benefit.

Akari was three feet away when it happened. She didn't say anything about it at the time. She didn't have to.

Kaito had asked you to swing by the east stairwell after last period — he'd borrowed your notes again a few days back and promised, loudly, the way he promises everything, to hand them over before you both headed home. One of maybe a dozen times this year. He's always easy to find there; quieter stairwell, less foot traffic, an easy place to duck into between periods.

His bag is still on the landing when you get there, unzipped, one strap swinging slightly, like it had only just been set down.

The sound arrives before the shape of it does — something wet, rhythmic, entirely wrong for a stairwell at this hour, a sound your mind doesn't have a folder to file under anything but what it actually is. Then the shape arrives too, and there's no version of this that reads as anything else.

Akari is crouched over him with the unhurried care of someone tucking in a blanket, one knee braced against his chest to hold him still, both hands wrapped around either end of the plain ribbon she wears in her hair every single day — the same one, the ordinary one, the one nobody in three years of school has ever looked at twice. Blood is already soaked dark through the front of his shirt collar and pooling under his shoulder, more of it than should be possible from what her hands are actually doing, and still spreading. How long has she practiced this exact grip? Long enough, apparently, that her knuckles don't even whiten.

Kaito's hands are still moving — scrabbling at his own throat, at hers, finding no purchase on either — and Akari doesn't so much as flinch when one nail catches her wrist and opens a thin, bright line across it, blood welling up to join what's already staining the ribbon between her fingers. Her breathing hasn't changed. Her expression hasn't changed. Whatever this costs her isn't showing up anywhere on her face, and that, somehow, is the worst detail in the whole scene — worse than the sound, worse than the color starting to change in his.

It takes longer than anything in a story is supposed to take. That seems to be the point. His heels drum twice against the concrete, then once more, weaker, and Akari holds through all of it without once looking away from his face — like she owes him that much, at least, or like she simply isn't built to do this any other way. When it's finally, fully over, she exhales — once, easy, the exact same exhale she'd make setting down something heavy — and only then does she look up. Toward the stairs. Toward you.

Her smile is the same smile it always is.

"Oh," she says, warm, a little apologetic, like she's been caught doing something merely embarrassing. "You weren't supposed to see this part yet." A beat, like she's deciding whether it's even worth explaining. "I just needed it to still be mine. That's all. It really is that simple."

A hand closes hard around your wrist from the other direction — Nagisa, already there, her grip precise, not frantic. Whatever's on her face isn't fear, exactly, and isn't shock either — it's flat and fast and entirely practiced, the look of someone running a sequence she's run enough times that her body doesn't need her permission anymore. She doesn't hesitate, doesn't check the wound, doesn't waste a single motion on anything that isn't getting you both away from that landing right now.

The route she pulls you through isn't one you'd have picked — a service door propped with a folded receipt that definitely wasn't there this morning, a turn that shouldn't be a shortcut but somehow is, a gap in a fence you never knew was there, all of it taken without a moment's hesitation, like her feet already know the way better than her mind does.

She doesn't stop until you're both behind the old equipment shed past the far edge of the athletics field, out of sight of every window that matters. She lets go of your wrist, presses her back flat against the corrugated metal, and finally, only now, lets her breathing catch up with what just happened — quick, shallow, her hands trembling slightly where they hang at her sides, though her voice comes out steadier than either.

"Okay," she says, mostly to herself, eyes fixed somewhere past your shoulder. "Okay. That's — that's about the worst flag there is. Bad end, no reload, the whole thing." She says it like a joke that isn't one, then forces herself to look at you properly. "This isn't over. She doesn't stop until she's decided nobody's a threat anymore — and right now that's still me. We just need time. Enough to actually think, instead of reacting to whatever she does next."

She counts it off on her fingers, fast, like she's recited some version of this list before.

"Never alone with her — not once, not even for a minute, not even to say goodbye at your own door. Crowds, always, wherever you can manage it. And when she's around — really lay it on. Tell her how amazing she is, how glad you are she's yours. Loud enough that she doesn't have to wonder." A short, humorless breath. "And me — you barely tolerate me, starting now. Annoyed. Distant. Whatever gets her to stop watching me so closely." Her jaw tightens. "It won't fix anything. It'll just buy us a little room to figure out what might."