Chapter Text
Kakine Teitoku, ranked second of the Level 5s, had what he thought was a cold.
It had started something like a tickle in the back of his throat last Tuesday and over the course of five days had evolved into a full blown cough.
It was irritating. He hadn’t been sick since, well, as far as he could remember. Maybe back when he was very young and before his ability had evolved into being.
He was at the hospital because someone had asked to see him. Normally Teitoku would’ve ignored such requests, but the identity of the patient who had made the request had piqued his interest.
He expected to feel triumphant or vindictive, staring down at the body of his great enemy laid exposed and bare. Instead, he felt nothing. Accelerator’s snow-white hair blended neatly into the color of the bed and the walls. He had always reminded Teitoku of a bird, thin and airy and light-boned.
Someone, it seemed, had shot this bird out of the sky.
There was no gore. It had happened softly and so quickly that the last Teitoku remembered Accelerator, it had been two, no three, no it was two, two weeks ago, and the first ranked of the Level 5s had sneered at him, as if looking down at him from a high point above, and issued the verbal equivalent of a spitting in the face.
“Look at you,” Teitoku marveled. Who was the one standing above the other now? To be so high up in the first place meant only you fell harder and faster when they kicked the ladder out from underneath your legs.
Accelerator might’ve glared at him. It was hard to tell. Those red eyes had lost much of their anger and vitality. They were dull and fixed on distant nothings.
“Why did you want to see me?” Teitoku asked.
Accelerator did not respond with strength or vitriol. He could not have. The oxygen mask fixed to his face prevented that. But through it, his dry and cracked lips were seen to have parted, and the tips of his fingers twitched, ever so slightly, indicating the question had been heard, and Teitoku, against his better judgment, leaned in.
In Teitoku's ear, Accelerator spoke the name of the boy he had been before he’d become a monster and before the monster had become him.
Teitoku did not realize nor understand. To him, the words had just been a garbled mess of syllables, a dying person’s nonsense. As Teitoku leaned back, bemused, he considered pulling the plug of the machine in the wall to revel in the sight of Accelerator choking to death, drowning in his own lungs, lips turning blue. Wouldn’t that have been humiliating? he thought. But in the end, he decided against it. It would have actually been a mercy. And besides, in all the ways that mattered, it was already over. Accelerator really had left his last meaningful moment with him.
A mass of nurses and doctors rushed into the room as he left. As Teitoku walked out of the hospital, he was seized by a sudden bout of coughing. When he looked down at the palm of his hand, it was flecked with blood.
Accelerator died three days later.
Teitoku didn’t get to enjoy being at the top for long. Gokusai Kaibi found his body slumped against the wall of a dirty alleyway, hand curled on empty air.
Kaibi thought the expression on Teitoku’s face made him look a little bitterly satisfied, as if he knew, somehow, all that was to come. His expression might have said something like, At least I wasn’t the first or finally, I beat you in something.
Misaka Mikoto stared at the sink basin miserably. It looked splattered with petals of dark rose.
After a while of staring at it, so long she knew her eyes couldn’t possibly be deceiving her, she turned on the faucet and rinsed the petals away.
So, she was dying, huh?
The news of the first and second ranks’ deaths had spread through the city like wildfire. When it happened, Mikoto had been sitting in class, and there had been an announcement over the PA system, requesting that she go to the student office. There, she found a couple delegates from the Academy City Board and scientists waiting for her.
Mikoto didn’t trust scientists by habit. After they had explained the circumstances of the number one and number two’s deaths, she still didn’t trust them, although that might have been because she was too busy in shock, reeling over the implications. Deep down, she could understand their… concerns. One Level 5’s death might have been a freak accident. Two might have been a coincidence, however unlikely. Three and it would have been a definite pattern.
Shortly after that meeting, Mikoto picked up a cough.
Some of her friends expressed concern for her, hearing the unsettling rumors floating through the city, but she laughed it off. Then she had started coughing up blood. And there was nothing left to deny. To herself, at least, she accepted it—to her friends, she kept going on as if nothing was wrong.
“This means,” Shokuhou Misaki said, in the same casual breezy manner she loved to speak with so often, “that I am very possibly dying, too.”
“Don’t say that.” Mikoto spoke it as a harsh order, but the underlying tremble and shortness in her voice ruined the effect. She knew it to be the truth, too.
Misaki reached for Mikoto’s hands and gently twined their fingers together. “What are we still waiting for, Misaka-san?” she said. “Do you want to continue to run from this? From us?”
“No,” Mikoto breathed, sighed, and made the beginning of a sad song. “No, I suppose not.”
They kissed on the rooftop, they kissed in the hallways, they kissed in front of the astonished eyes of their classmates and friends. They held hands shyly, were tender when they felt like it, did all those cliche and cringeworthy things people in movies were always doing and were not self-conscious of it. They lived like they were living in a Hollywood movie. Dying had given them the rare courage to be open and honest and reveal the real feelings hidden in their hearts. Fear of embarrassment, fear of judgment, they all seemed insignificant next to the looming feeling of ‘I wish there was more time’ and ‘so in the end we can only make do with whatever we have’. The old habits of hiding what troubled her, Mikoto kept, but the old habits of hiding what gave her joy, she did away with.
In the long and complicated history of two people who claimed to hate each other, they found love. Inevitably, Misaki’s symptoms started to manifest.
“It does look like roses,” Misaki said, about the blood. She continued, thoughtfully, “Isn’t it strange that we both thought of that? Isn’t it strange, that in a whole wide world, two people can have the exact same thought, at the exact same moment in time, about something so small…”
Mikoto said nothing.
“Sure,” Misaki closed her eyes. She sank down, slowly, down, down, down, and squeezed Mikoto’s hand. “Let’s stay like this for a little longer.”
Mikoto said nothing.
She would say nothing again forever.
In time, Misaki’s own breathing quieted, became content.
The sad song ended.