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Their courtship consists of convoluted mind games and childish competition, and—once, when Karma is more than a little bored—putting live reptiles in each other’s backpacks. It is, to say the least, far from traditional.
At first, Karma is quite unaware of its status as a courtship. He begins to notice it as one when he finds one Gakushuu Asano waiting for him at the bottom of the mountain road. He’s leaning against a knobby oak tree, and it reminds Karma of some ridiculous hipster clothes' ad that’s trying way too hard to look like it's not trying at all.
“Asano,” he calls out, “it’s the second time you’ve shown up this week. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you missed me. Is it getting lonely over at that poor excuse for a teaching environment?”
Gakushuu grits his teeth. “I came to warn you, you idiot,” he says, but his face is the slightest bit flushed.
“Oh, isn’t that sweet of you,” Karma says. “Do you want to make friendship bracelets next? Or do you not know what those are? See, when you have an actual friend—”
“I know what friendship bracelets are,” Gakushuu says. “I’ll make you one, since you seem to want it so badly.” His mouth curls up at the edges.
“Oh, Asano,” Karma says, voice syrupy-sweet. “Does that mean you think I’m your friend?”
“I—I have a job to do, Akabane.” Gakushuu coughs, then straightens.
“By all means, your highness,” Karma says. He then takes it upon himself to perform the most dramatic hand gesture in the history of humankind.
“Could you… not?” Gakushuu’s left eyebrow seems to be twitching.
“Could I not what?” Karma asks, lazy smile permanently etched into place.
“Exist, preferably. But since I don’t have an alibi readily available, how about you just stop being insufferable?”
“Eh, you love me anyway,” Karma says.
“I do not—love you, Akabane,” Gakushuu says, and Karma’s pretty sure he just increased his own probability of being murdered. A forest isn’t a horrible place to get rid of a body, all things considered.
Karma is sort of thankful that he’s a trained assassin, right then.
“Are you sure about that?” he asks.
“Very,” Gakushuu says.
Karma would believe him. Really, he would. But he’s known this boy since their first year of middle school, and he notices. He notices how he stares just a little too hard, how his words come out just a little too sharp, how his mouth curls around them like it’s a challenge.
He smiles. “So, what are you here for,” he asks.
…
Gakushuu doesn’t actually say the word revolution, doesn’t mention anything about a coup d’état, and tastefully omits words like overthrow, but Karma hears them anyway.
“You realize this doesn’t have to be some convoluted, evil master plan, right?” he says.
“It’s not—.”
“No, for real. Don’t be boring, Asano. Just, you know, help me tutor them.”
Gakushuu pauses. Stares. “What?” he says.
“If you want to prove a point to your lovely father,” Karma says, slowly, “Then just help me tutor class 3-E.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“When have I ever not been serious?” Karma asks, because he has a monthly pissing-people-off quota to meet.
Gakushuu scowls.
“Look,” Karma says. “I get that you’re not big on the whole being an actually decent human being thing, but so what if your insane father wants to put college-level stuff on our finals? It’s just college-level stuff because someone decided it was. They’re smart kids, they’ll catch up.” He pauses, deliberately. “Unless you’re scared you can’t do it,” he says.
“Oh, I can do it,” Gakushuu says. He takes a few steps forward, and suddenly he’s close.
Karma is absolutely not hyperaware of the space between them. Or the way Gakushuu’s mouth curves. Or—
“Can you?”
That, Karma thinks, is a very good question.
…
Their shared tutoring sessions set off a chain of remarkably catastrophic events. One: Nakamura—undeterred by their furious blushing—never shutting up about how cute they are, trying to end a tyrannical regime, and setting their differences aside to do so. Two: Koro-Sensei fawning over his delinquent boy finally maturing into a responsible young man, overjoyed tentacles and all. Three: Gakushuu falling asleep on their desk after a particularly brutal session involving Terasaka and the fundamentals of Existentialist philosophy.
The true travesty, Karma muses, is that he looks sort of—almost, maybe, objectively speaking—nice, like this. With his hair falling over his face and his eyes not tearing holes into anyone’s soul, when he’s not saying anything particularly corrosive. He’s kind of… beautiful.
His arm moves on its own, and Karma’s hand is brushing the hair away from Gakushuu’s face before his—clearly sleeping on the job—brain catches up. He’s faintly aware that this may be the stupidest thing he’s ever done.
Behind him, a camera shutter goes off. Koro-Sensei smiles at him from behind the lens. “My, my,” he says. “Glorious. I should show this to the principal over some nice chamomile tea. It’s good for calming your nerves, you know.”
Instead of answering, Karma throws a knife at him. He dodges, and Gakushuu slowly awakes.
“Akabane?” he says, voice groggy. “Did I fall asleep like this?”
“Uh, yeah,” Karma says, masterfully awkward, while Koro-Sensei disappears with a muttered something or other about letting youthful feelings blossom. “You did.”
“That’s distasteful,” Gakushuu says, blinking any remaining sleepiness away. His jacket’s off, and the collar of his shirt is unbuttoned and rumpled, just a little bit.
Karma does not stare as he stretches.
…
“Akabane,” Gakushuu says, inordinately furious. “Did you seriously explain insulin production to Maehara and Isogai without mentioning the specific roles that enzymes play, and why the gene used for replication should not have introns?”
Karma looks up from his math homework, pencil hovering over the page. “Some of us like to separate their lessons into actually manageable pieces, Asano,” he says. “It’s 11th grade material.”
“It’s the bare-boned beginning of 11th grade material,” Gakushuu retorts. “Weren’t you the one who said you could handle it? I swear, I leave you unsupervised for two minutes—”
“We can, but dictatorship isn’t how we do things around here. Isn’t that what you were trying to prove?” Karma asks. “Or are you just like your father after all?”
The entire room goes quiet at that, and Karma feels like there’s a spotlight shining down on them. Gakushuu grits his teeth together. “I am not my father, Akabane,” he says. “My father would have wrung you dry much, much earlier. I am the picture of leniency, compared to him.”
He takes a deep breath, then continues. “Just because you never tried to work hard for anything in your whole, pathetic life, doesn’t mean everyone else had it that easy. Some of us didn’t get to play hooky, turn everything into a tasteless joke, and still show up to get second place.”
There’s a thousand scathing responses at the tip of Karma’s tongue, begging to be let out, but for once there’s no spark of pleasure at the thought of causing a bigger mess. He doesn’t—
“You’re right,” he says. “I don’t get it.”
He pushes his chair back, gets up, and walks out.
Gakushuu does not follow him.
…
He’s skipping rocks into the lake—and absolutely not sulking, thank you very much—when Koro-Sensei finds him.
“Karma,” he says, placing a comforting tentacle on his shoulder.
Karma resists the urge to shrug it off. He’s learned, recently, that sometimes it’s alright to let people care about you. He’s trying not to forget that, even now.
“Don’t,” he says. Another rock hits the bottom of the lake with a single, sad plopping sound.
“Gakushuu still has a lot to learn,” Koro-Sensei says. “It can be difficult, at that age, to express your emotions in a healthy manner. Especially for someone like him.”
“Yeah, an arrogant, spoiled, narcissistic, machiavellian, sociopathic little—,”
With each word, Karma’s breathing becomes more rapid. It’s not until his cheeks grow damp that he realizes he’s so angry he’s crying. It hurts, is the thing. Because—
“He’s right,” Karma says, after he’s calmed down, knees hugged to his chest and gaze downcast. “I never really worked hard for anything in my life. Ever.”
“You’ve made tremendous progress this past year. I’m proud of you, Karma,” Koro-Sensei smiles, wide and bright and yellow, and it makes the corners of Karma’s own mouth tug upwards.
A tentacle ruffles his hair.
“I just—I mean, I feel like I could be doing so much more,” he sighs. “And he knows it. And I know he knows it. And it’s a bit ridiculous that he would—I sort of figured he was getting better. That we were helping him grow past his weird world domination thing. I saw him laugh, that time Okuda spilled acid on his jacket. It didn’t seem fake. He even complimented her preparation technique.”
“He still has a long way to go,” Koro-Sensei says, solemn. “You do too, Karma, but I think you could help one another. It may not look like it, but Gakushuu is most likely terrified right now.”
Karma looks up at that. “Asano?” he scoffs. “Terrified? Not likely.”
“He’s just a boy,” Koro-Sensei says. “A boy who’s been told all his life to be perfect, and who’s just now beginning to realize that the person who told him that was wrong about a lot of things. It takes courage to do what he’s doing, Karma.”
…
Karma walks into class the next day with an escape plan in tow. If the worst happens, he can always move to a new country and change his identity. Mr. Karasuma probably knows a guy who could help with that.
“Morning,” he says, surprisingly bashful. “I, uh, printed some stuff. There’s also a color-coded table with enzyme names and their functions. I think having a visual representation of the process is going to help most of the class with structuring the information. Also, uh—,” Karma keeps talking, like a fool, because he’d rather die than let some weird, guilt-filled uncomfortable silence take over.
Gakushuu cuts him off. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I really shouldn’t have said all that yesterday.”
“It’s okay,” Karma says, eager for some semblance of normal.
“No, really. It was very unprofessional of me. I understand that it has negatively influenced our working relationship and I would like you to know that I—that I value that.”
Karma raises an eyebrow. “You realize you can just say hey, Karma, I like you like a normal person, right?”
Gakushuu looks faintly scandalized, like he wants to clarify that that would be preposterous and plebeian and a lot of other overly complex words that begin with p, but instead he swallows and says: “Alright then. I like you, Aka—Karma.”
Karma feels much too warm, right then. He’s pretty sure he must be the spitting image of a tomato. “I return that sentiment,” he says, smirking.
Gakushuu glares.
“Ugh, fine. I like you too, Gakushuu.”
…
Karma doesn’t notice it, not really, but something changes between them. There’s a new kind of tension, lingering in the air, and he doesn’t know what to do about it when tying the other’s shoelaces together and swapping the salt and sugar containers isn’t allowed. It’s—odd.
“Hey, is this weird?” Karma asks, after a tutoring session where they had both reached for the same pencil, and he had jumped in his seat when their hands had made contact.
Gakushuu turns to look at him. “What?” he asks.
“Us?” Karma says, and immediately regrets it, because that is not a word he should use in their current—situation. “I mean, not us as in us. Just, like… us?”
“Have you been going through withdrawal symptoms?” Gakushuu asks, serious.
“I—what?” Karma says.
“Is it the pranks? Do you need to prank someone? Because I don’t particularly enjoy it,” he says, then, much quieter: “but if it’s something you require to feel emotionally fulfilled, we could reach a compromise.”
Karma stares. “You’d willingly let me prank you?”
“I wouldn’t—I was thinking something more along the lines of paintball, but—”
Karma smiles, content to let him ramble.
…
It takes willingly answering a phone call at three in the morning for Karma to realize that things may be getting slightly out of control.
“Hello,” he says, voice muffled by his pillow.
“Hi,” a familiar voice answers. “You were probably asleep, weren’t you? I’m sorry, I can just—”
The speed with which Karma shouts no surprises both of them. “I mean,” he says, clearing his throat, “You probably called for a reason.”
“I—it’s stupid really.”
“It’s not.”
“I just—I was looking over tomorrow’s lesson plans and had this moment of intense trepidation, I guess? What if I’m doing everything wrong? And what if everybody fails because of me?”
“You’re not. And even if you were, you trust me, right?”
There’s a pause before Gakushuu whispers, “Yes.”
“Well, I’m telling you you’re not. So go to sleep. We can’t have that pretty face of yours looking less pretty than usual.”
“You think I’m pretty?”
“Everybody thinks you’re pretty,” Karma says, then hangs up, heart beating out of his chest.
…
“This isn’t exactly as terrible as I initially imagined it would be,” Gakushuu admits to him, a few days later, during lunch break.
“Oh, really? Are we simple peasants finally enough for you?” Karma asks around a mouthful of grapes.
Gakushuu grimaces. “Don’t do that,” he says. “I’m making an effort to be nice, and you have to go and ruin it.”
“Oh, my God,” Karma says, pointing an accusing finger at him. “Who are you and what have you done with Gakushuu Asano?”
Gakushuu looks at him for—too long, then sighs, and smiles. “You’re insufferable.”
Karma shrugs. “So I’ve been told,” he says.
…
It’s surprisingly peaceful, after that. The exams draw nearer and nearer, but Karma isn’t scared, for once.
Everyone’s English has improved thanks to Nakamura, Okuda’s near-lethal experiments have tripled the class’s interest in Science, and Gakushuu and he have been giving joint extra lessons to anybody who’s asked for them, so he supposes it’s going to be fine.
When the much-anticipated day comes, Karma mouths you’re going down to Gakushuu as they walk in for their first final.
Gakushuu just smiles at him, and shrugs like it doesn’t matter.
…
After getting first place, Karma expects yelling. Maybe a restraining order or a genuine murder attempt. The usual.
That’s not what he gets.
The moment he’s in sight, Gakushuu tackles him to the ground, and kisses him. In full view of the entire student body. And the principal. It’s absolutely, unquestionably the best day of Karma’s life.
He smiles into it, much too wide, and everything feels like it should.