Naoki

1. When the orientation finally ended and the Headmistress announced a fifteen-minute break “for those who didn’t check their schedules,” Arisa-sensei and Mamoru-sensei led the students to their respective classrooms.

Naoki ended up in Class A, so he followed Arisa-sensei through a labyrinth of hallways and sliding wall panels to a classroom along the side of the dome.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” she said, easing onto the chair behind the teacher’s desk. “Class starts in ten. And don’t concern yourselves with seating arrangements yet. We’ll do that later.”

The other students almost immediately looked for seats and sat down, probably having chosen familiar-feeling seats, or seats that ensured a certain distance from others. Naoki knew students did that—he’d done it throughout middle school himself.

Naoki took his time and looked around. The classroom was easily several times larger than the average classroom. The ceiling was a full eight meters high, and the amount of space everywhere; between the desks, at the front and back of the classroom... Naoki really didn’t understand why they needed things to be so big here.

The only seat left was the last one in the window column, which Naoki took. He counted the number of people in the classroom.

Twenty. That meant Class B had nineteen.

Which reminded him of something he’d heard from Sakuya maybe two years ago? He didn’t really remember. It was something from the news, something that mentioned the existence of a “legend” within the Higashi Academy, a first-year who’d defeated a teacher at the age of twelve. But the first-year had disappeared right after, and nobody had seen her since.

Which meant the one extra place was reserved for that “legend.” Naoki wondered where she was. It didn’t really matter how powerful she was—the Pacific Treaty required that the education of an Angel never stop for a period of time more than a week every two months, so her being gone for years didn’t really make sense to him.

He sighed and stretched out in his seat. Well, thinking about that wouldn’t really do him any good, would it? He pulled his phone from his pocket and resumed the paused playlist.

Second period started, five minutes later than it should have, but Arisa-sensei made no light of it. She acted naturally, so Naoki immediately actively stored that piece of memory in his mind—Arisa-sensei’s class starts five minutes late. Just something he knew to pay attention to.

As he expected, the lesson wasn’t new to him. He knew everything Arisa-sensei was teaching, and he found he was getting more and more bored by the minute.

He lost all interest in the lesson by the tenth minute and tried to find something else to concentrate on. He couldn’t listen to music untainted by the background of Arisa-sensei’s voice, nor could he sleep.

So he did the next best thing.

He looked out the window.

He just looked blankly out the window, allowing his eyes to focus and unfocus every time his gaze landed on specks of dust on the glass.

Green, green, green everywhere. He could just see the trees he’d cut earlier when he looked as far as he could to the left.

How long will those leaves stay on, I wonder? He thought to himself. Then he snorted softly in an effort to hold back his laughter. He could already imagine the forest completely stripped of leaves.

He looked a little more downward, closer to the wall of the first floor.

Score. Something interesting.

A path, snaking, unnecessarily so, cut through the trees, and Naoki realized with a start that he had the one spot in the entire school from which anyone could see the path. How lucky.

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Two girls, apparently skipping class, maybe second-year upperclassmen, walked along the path at a leisurely pace. They looked like they were having a fun conversation. One of them said something, and the other laughed, throwing her head back without a care.

They held hands, and Naoki recoiled from the window, surprised.

Well... He returned to watching them.

The one who’d laughed leaned into the other girl’s shoulder.

Naoki guessed that was natural. It was an environment without males, after all. And though he saw nothing wrong with it, something in the sight of them felt slightly wrong to him. But if that was normal, then where would that leave him? Despite being famous, he’d never had a fanbase for his looks. And he didn’t blame them. The only times he ever voluntarily looked at his own reflection were when he held his blade up before sheathing it. Seeing his reflection there was an illusion, as well. It showed his naturally-mismatched eyes in slightly different shades, though the “slightly different” made quite a big difference.

In the reflection of his blade, his right eye was a light shade of purple, and his left eye was a rose pink. Those weren’t far from the truth, but they somehow were, too. In reality, his right eye was a darker shade of purple, and his left eye was a dead white.

He wasn’t exaggerating with “dead white.” The white was the same color as his hair, only a few shades darker than his sclera. He’d seen many of his classmates turn away from his left eye before, repulsed.

His hair was another issue. He and Sakuya were born with naturally-white hair, and that was apparently seen as weird by almost everyone else.

In the past few hundred years, with the appearance of different kinds of magic, different natural hair and eye colors that never used to exist began to pop up, and now they were almost everywhere. Black hair and brown eyes, the most abundant colors of the distant past, had long ago blended into the average.

But not white. White used to be associated with age, and there had been rare cases of white popping up around the world, but even those had disappeared. And so, as the only two humans with white hair, Naoki and Sakuya had always been looked at with a certain degree of distance.

Sakuya had it better, too. At least his sister had both eyes colored purple. She actually looked pretty with the combination of her white hair and purple eyes.

But Naoki had gotten even the white eye.

He’d learned to ignore the times when people looked away, but well...

He tried to turn his attention back to Arisa-sensei’s lesson, but his attention only survived another five minutes. He found himself looking outside again.

“Yanatake-kun,” Arisa-sensei said, her voice playful and teasing. “Could you tell us what you’re looking at outside?”

Naoki jerked back from the window.

Crap. He’d been looking at nothing, and he couldn’t imagine Arisa-sensei would be happy to hear that ‘nothing’ was more interesting than the lesson she was teaching. That was just how teachers were. He knew it because he’d gone through many similar events before.

He looked outside again.

Green, green, green everywhere.

He was about to just apologize, but then suddenly he saw it. A small patch of a different color almost hidden among the green. He looked away, then back, to make sure that his mind wasn’t playing tricks on him. But it’s obviously there.

A patch of pink.

He stood and apologized. “I’m sorry, Arisa-sensei.” Then he pointed toward where he’d seen the pink. “Is that pink? Why would there be pink here? Does the Higashi Academy have cherry blossom trees?”

He knew he was grasping at straws, and he was perfectly prepared to be scolded. He wasn’t prepared for what actually happened.

Arisa-sensei rushed to his side, actually moving too fast for a human, as if she wanted to confirm the pink instantly.

“You can see it? The pink?”

Naoki, bewildered by Arisa-sensei’s sudden interest, nodded. He figured she was probably messing with him. That she knew it was there, and was about to embarrass him further. He’d gone through enough teachers to know that that was a possibility.

Arisa-sensei squinted as she looked out the window, but after a few seconds of searching, she resigned and shook her head. “I thought if someone finally...”

Naoki started fidgeting with his headphones.

Then Arisa-sensei gripped his wrist, a little too hard.

She turned to the rest of the class. “Watai-chan, please take care of the class. Yanatake-kun, you’re coming with me.”

They didn’t really react much, only a few whispers here and there, and Naoki realized that the girls had taken his existence quite in stride. Apparently boys weren’t that much of an alien concept to them, after all.

He turned away from Arisa-sensei and looked out the window one last time, just to make sure he’d actually seen the pink. And just as the pink left his vision one last time as he once more turned away, his vision focused on a spot within the pink, and he could have sworn he’d seen a head.