The year didn't heal anything. It just buried Tsurugi deeper.
One year after he walked away from kendo, one year after he pushed Hayato away with cruel, hollow lies, Kirisawa Tsurugi had reached a place he hadn't known existed.
It wasn't just sadness; it was rock bottom.
It felt like living under a mountain of wet cement, where every breath was a struggle and movement was impossible.
He was still at the same school, sitting in the same classrooms, but the world around him was duller, faded. The sunlight hitting the desks looked weak. The sound of the students laughing was muffled, distant.
He saw everything, but felt nothing—except the constant, crushing weight of his guilt.
Tsurugi had stopped trying to look presentable. He wore his school uniform every day, but it was usually wrinkled, his shirt untucked, his jacket slung carelessly over his shoulder. His once-neat hair was too long and fell into his eyes, giving him a constant shadow. He never bothered to fix it.
Why should he? No one was looking at him anymore, not with curiosity, but with simple, boring indifference. The whispers had faded into silence, which was somehow worse than the hate. He was no longer worth talking about. He was just a ghost.
His routine was small and simple: Wake up, go to school, hide, go home, hide in his room, sleep. Repeat.
He ate dinner with his parents, but he barely spoke. He had perfected the neutral mask, the blank expression that signaled: I am fine. Don't ask questions. His parents, tired from a year of worrying and unanswered questions, had finally backed off, mistaking his silence for stubbornness instead of despair.
The moment he got to his room, he felt the release of the mask, but the weight of the mountain pressed down again.
The guilt had become a physical thing. It lived in his body.
He was always tired, a bone-deep exhaustion that sleep could never fix. His shoulders were permanently slumped forward, as if he were trying to hide his chest. He felt like his body was made of heavy sand.
Whenever he walked through the main hall, his mind would flash back. He didn't see the colorful banners or the posters for school events. He saw Hayato's face, pale and scarred, and heard the thump-tap of the cane walking away. That sound was a constant soundtrack in his head, a reminder that the pain in Hayato's leg and the fracture in his skull were gifts from Tsurugi.
Sometimes, when he was alone in the quiet stairwell, he would rub the spot on his own forearm where Hayato had touched him a year ago. He had flinched away, convinced his touch was toxic. Now, he craved that contact, that simple reassurance, but the memory of his harsh words—"We're not friends"—kept the isolation airtight.
He still had the yellow lemon candy wrapper. It was still folded neatly in the front pocket of his uniform, faded and soft from a year of constant handling. It wasn't a memory of happiness; it was a badge of dishonor. He looked at it sometimes and hated the boy who had chosen lies over loyalty.
His mind, once sharp and focused on kendo strategies and schoolwork, was now mush. He couldn't concentrate.
In class, he would sit at his desk, staring at the teacher's mouth moving, but the words wouldn't stick. They just floated around the room, meaningless.
He couldn't force himself to care about history dates or math formulas. Everything felt too big, too pointless.
His grades had fallen sharply. He was failing half his classes.
One afternoon, a teacher, a kind man who taught Japanese literature, called him aside.
"Kirisawa," the teacher said, his voice quiet.
"You used to be one of our best. You got an F on this last test. You didn't even write the essay. The page is blank."
Tsurugi stared at the paper. It was true. He had looked at the prompt—Discuss a character's greatest internal struggle—and his pen had frozen.
How could he write about someone else's struggle when his own was so overwhelming? He didn't have the energy to invent sadness when he was drowning in the real thing.
"I'm sorry, Sensei," Tsurugi mumbled, looking down.
"Are you alright, Kirisawa?" the teacher asked, placing a hand on Tsurugi's shoulder—a gesture of genuine care.
Tsurugi felt the familiar, terrifying panic.
Warning. Danger close. Push away.
He flinched, pulling his shoulder away sharply. "I'm fine," he said, the lie spitting out quickly. "Just tired. I'll do better next time."
The teacher sighed, looking defeated. "Please do. I don't want to fail you."
Tsurugi just nodded and walked away, leaving the teacher standing alone. He knew he wouldn't do better. He felt like he deserved to fail.
Failure was the only thing that felt honest anymore.
His true rock bottom came in the locker room, a place he usually avoided but was forced to use after a mandatory school meeting.
He quickly changed his shoes, keeping his head down, when he suddenly caught his reflection in the long, slightly dusty mirror on the back of the door.
He stopped breathing.
The boy staring back was a stranger. His eyes were dark, tired, and dull, holding none of the fierce light they used to have when he was on the dojo floor. His posture was weak. He looked smaller, almost fragile, despite being taller now.
The memory of the whispers hit him—
Psycho.
Killer.
Unstable.
But now, those words weren't outside. They were inside.
Tsurugi lifted a hand, his fingers shaking, and slowly traced the scar on his own wrist—a small, old burn mark he'd gotten as a child. He imagined a different scar, the jagged line on Hayato's temple.
He closed his eyes, fighting the urge to shatter the mirror.
This is what you did, a cold voice inside him whispered. You broke him, and you broke yourself.
He hadn't been an athlete who made a mistake. He wasn't even a student with bad grades. He was just a liability. A thing that broke other things.
He slowly pulled out the yellow candy wrapper from his pocket. He held it between his fingers, looking at his defeated reflection.
He realized in that moment that for an entire year, he hadn't just been hiding from the world—he had been hiding from the person in the mirror.
He had successfully cut off every single anchor to his old life, trading potential happiness and connection for the certainty of isolation.
And he had done it all himself.
There was no one left to save him. He was truly and utterly alone, trapped under the crushing mountain of his own making, unable to move, unable to breathe, and fully convinced that this lonely, dark existence was the only thing he was good for.