by Nisioisin
They were a rejection of her self.
“You promised, Araragi. You won’t tell anyone─you promised, okay?”
Never bring it up again.
Not to the school.
Not to the police.
No, more than anyone─not to Hanekawa.
“B-But─how am I supposed to promise something like─”
“…Please, Araragi,” she said. Then, maybe because she thought a promise wasn’t enough─she bowed her head. “Don’t tell anyone about this, please. I’ll do anything if you stay quiet.”
“……”
“Please.”
“Yeah. I get it…”
The way she was pressuring me─it was the only way I could answer.
I couldn’t bring myself to press her any further. Not after being asked something as absurd as that─not after making her ask me something as absurd as that.
She’d rejected me.
And if I’d been rejected─I couldn’t help her.
People went and got saved on their own, that’s all─
“But at least go to the hospital. You put that gauze there yourself, didn’t you? I’ll admit that you’re good with your hands, but even so, that looks a little on the unnatural side.”
“Yeah…okay. I guess I’m not doing anything over Golden Week, anyway, so maybe I’ll have a doctor look at it. I should get some use out of my insurance now and then.”
“And also─if anything happens, call me. I’ll come and help you, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.”
“Haha,” Hanekawa laughed, “where’d that come from? Look at you, sounding cool.” The same smile as ever. “What do you mean by ‘anything’?”
“Well, you know─”
“Yeah, I get it, Araragi.”
Then she added:
“I’ll call you right away if anything ever happens. Would a text be okay, too?”
That’s what she said, but─
In the end, I didn’t get a single call or text message from Hanekawa all Golden Week.
I said I’d be there when she needed me─however.
Hanekawa, the woman I owed my life to, never once needed me at that point─she wanted company, but only to vent, to help her feel better─she didn’t need me, but I was there being useless anyway.
What she needed was a cat.
That cat.
There’s a reason for an aberration.
After that, we steered clear of our earlier conversation and instead discussed our future plans for the class. We mostly talked about the culture festival. As we did, we came across a cat that had been hit by a car. It seemed to be a stray since it had no collar. A tailless white cat. We didn’t know whether it was a breed born with no tail, or if its tail had been torn off during its life on the street. A white cat─it might have even seemed silver depending on how you looked at it, but the color of its fur had been ruined either way, stained with its own blood. It was in terrible shape, probably run over again and again after being hit for the first time─and Hanekawa walked out into the street from the sidewalk and picked the cat up like it was a completely natural thing to do.
“Could you help me?”
No one ever turned down such a request from Hanekawa.
We buried the cat on a nearby mountain─and that brought an end to our prologue, the first of our nine nightmarish days, April twenty-ninth.
I don’t know how much of this first day, or of the conversation, Hanekawa remembers─she was still herself so maybe she remembered burying the cat, but it’s likely she forgot all of the details when she lost her memories. There’s no way for me to be sure, sadly─her mind is as sharp as a steel trap, so she’d figure it out as soon as I try to check.
Now that the introduction is out of the way, the rest of the story is simple.
The next day, though I didn’t have any particular business there, I was so bored that I headed to the abandoned cram school where Oshino lived, checked up on Shinobu (though her name wasn’t yet Shinobu Oshino), and chatted about whatever with Oshino.
At some point, I brought up the cat we’d buried the day before.
Not because it was something else to talk about.
Because I had a bad feeling about it.
A sense of similarity─to the hell I experienced over spring break.
“Araragi. Don’t tell me…” Oshino’s eyes narrowed as he asked to make sure, “this was a silver cat ?”
The chat was productive in the end.
It let us capture the aberration─the Hindering Cat that transformed into the white-haired, white-cat-eared Black Hanekawa, named such by Mèmè Oshino─on May seventh, the last day of Golden Week, after it had spent night after night wreaking havoc in town to its heart’s content.
Nine days.
It would have been dangerous had the tenth day come.
Apparently.
A speedy resolution, depending on how you looked at it─but we’d just made it in time.
With Shinobu’s help (her service then was what earned her the name of Shinobu Oshino), we were able to seal away the Hindering Cat that had bewitched Hanekawa─
Solving the problem.
With unexpected ease, you could even say.
The more complex the problem, the more likely it is to be solved with unexpected ease─because solving the problem doesn’t mean it disappears.
A trance.
Hanekawa had no memories of the time she was Black Hanekawa.
That meant she didn’t know the first people to be attacked by Black Hanekawa were her own parents─
Had those memories returned to her, too?
That’s what I was worried about.
“Oh, the issue of her memory?”
When Black Hanekawa showed herself a week and a month since Golden Week, we managed to tie her up immediately (making use of lessons learned the last time), heard what she had to say (it barely meant a thing to us with the incessant mews, meows, nyarls, and purrs she used when she talked), and left her bound body behind in the classroom (ignoring all the curses “she” hurled at us). Then Oshino and I moved to one of the other two classrooms on the fourth floor─where the man immediately stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth and began to speak.
We were now face to face. It was me and Oshino talking now.
“I don’t think it’s fatal─her memories while she’s Black Hanekawa aren’t compatible with her as missy class president. Her memories as miss class prez, though, could be an issue. I doubt they’ll disappear this time around, because unlike last time─she’s completely self-aware right now.”
“Is it bad if she’s aware of what’s happening?”
“Not that bad, in and of itself. The problem is that this is our class president we’re talking about, Araragi. As you’re aware─she’s a little too bright. Her brain works about a hundred times faster than the average person’s. Give her the materials and it’ll be easy for her to connect all the dots and construct the memories herself.”
“Construct the memories?”
“We were able to wipe out all the memories from last time. Both Black Hanekawa’s and our class president’s─we left her without a clue. We managed to seal that whole aberration away, which naturally meant any memories related to it disappeared, too. In other words, when we got rid of the effect, we managed to get rid of the cause, too. So it’s fine if her memories are incoherent because she doesn’t even realize there’s anything that needs to be coherent. This time around, though, you could say it’ll become a fill-in-the-blank problem. Like some important words are missing here and there from a sentence─it’d be impossible to give a perfect answer, but you could figure out the general kind of words that should go in if you’re perceptive enough, right?”
“Oh, so like─a language arts test.”
I didn’t do well in that subject.
But─Hanekawa did well in every subject.
“There’s nothing we can do about it─but we ought to think of it as a silver lini
ng that her memories from last time won’t be returning. Though it’ll seem more like a dark cloud to her.”
We could call last time a lucky break.
But this time it was a silver lining.
“From my point of view, though, it might be a good thing for her─drawing an aberration toward yourself makes it easier for aberrations to become drawn toward you in the future. It’s what you’re experiencing right now, Araragi─so if it’s going to happen to her, too, then it’s important for her to know about aberrations.”
You have to be aware, Oshino said.
And─maybe he was right about that.
There are some things you can’t handle without knowing about them first. While other things are unmanageable even if you do, knowing means you can at least run away from them.
In other words─that’s how you maintain a balance.
“But─Oshino,” I said as I thought─about Black Hanekawa, still tied up two classrooms down. “Why did─that thing─appear again? I thought we sealed it away during Golden Week. Wasn’t it never supposed to appear again?”
“I didn’t say that.” Oshino tilted his head. “A Hindering Cat, you see─is a bit different from the other aberrations you know about. If I had to compare it to one, it might be close to miss sapphy’s monkey.”
“Oh…I guess they are both beasts.”
“Yes. Only─didn’t I tell you last time? To describe it in a way that’s in line with reality, the Sawarineko is a multiple personality disorder─Black Hanekawa is the flip side of miss class prez, so to speak. Aberrations are here, there, and everywhere─but ultimately, the Hindering Cat exists only inside of our president. It’s only a trigger, a medium─the problem is the stress she bears.”
Stress.
According to scholars, it is the body’s response as it tries to respond to every demand─apparently.
“By the time Black Hanekawa faced off against me last time, she’d already gone wild for so long that you could say she’d gotten rid of most of her stress─so sealing her away was easy. But seal her away is all we did. It’s not as if she disappeared. We may have made the aberration go away, but it’s not as if we made the stressor go away. So that thing will rise to the surface again once enough stress builds up─like a bubble.”
“Stress…”
“The question is what the stressor is this time.”
The cause of the stress.
In Hanekawa’s case, it was of course her family.
At least, that’s what I thought.
“Oh, I thought the same thing at first, too─but what do you think, Araragi? She just got rid of the stress she finally unleashed after holding herself together for seventeen years─would it really build back up to the same level in a month?”
“Well─I guess not.”
“And fortunately, she hasn’t been on the receiving end of any violence from either of her parents, has she?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
The first people she attacked.
Her dad and her mom─her parents.
Things had reverted back to normal─back to a family with no relationships that didn’t communicate, a bunch of humans who just live together. That had to be stressful for Hanekawa.
But Oshino was right─one month was too soon.
Maybe if she had been hit yet again.
“We did put a bell around her neck─and I think that paid off,” Oshino said. “It let us detect the Hindering Cat in its early stage. See? You can never be too careful. To be honest, though, I never thought we’d actually need to use it. I was careless. I thought that even in the worst case, it would wait until she turned twenty. The story I heard made it sound like her parents were going to get divorced once she became an adult, and I’m sure her plan is to leave home by then─and that’s why I didn’t bother to say anything to either of you.”
“Twenty, huh… So the opposite of Kanbaru.”
“The age of majority is an easy measure to understand,” Oshino remarked with a bitter smile. “Yes, and she’d have become strong enough to keep from being bewitched by an aberration by then.”
“Oh… Anyway, Oshino. What’s this bell you’re talking about?”
“The headaches. She was also complaining about a headache during Golden Week, remember? So I set a little trap─though I should have shared that with you at least. So, tell me again, when did missy class president’s headaches start?”
“I want to say─about a month ago?”
“Huh… And they weren’t so bad at first, but then… I wonder what it could have been─but it doesn’t seem like we have the time to pin down this stressor. It could very well be a mix of multiple causes, and I still understand barely a word that lust-besotted cat purrs.”
“Even you don’t understand her?”
Wasn’t he the one saying it’d be quicker to ask her directly?
“No, I don’t. We had a lot of hints, but when it comes to the exact details… It’s a delicate matter, not something I can make haphazard guesses about. Heh, I guess we’re dealing with a cat’s brain at the end of the day. But I do also think she might just be playing dumb─we can’t let our guards down, because beneath it all, she’s miss class prez.”
“You don’t want to get on that woman’s bad side.”
“We haven’t gotten on her bad side.”
Black Hanekawa.
Another Tsubasa Hanekawa, created by her own heart and mind.
A contrasting personality─or rather, one that served as a counterpart.
In addition to aiding, “Tsubasa” also connoted pairing─mismatched wings, indeed.
“But even if we did pin down the cause, would that mean much, Oshino? Whether it’s her family or something else─removing the stressor is the best way to solve this, sure, but it’s not like either of us could do that.”
It had been the same way last time.
Hanekawa’s family problems? How could we solve something like that? I couldn’t even imagine what would have to happen to her family to solve the problem. Someone on the outside couldn’t step into your personal issues.
That would be true arrogance.
“And unlike the times with Senjogahara and Sengoku,” I pointed out, “this aberration harms others… While it might be similar to Kanbaru’s, it’s different from that, too. Like before, I think our only choice is to treat the symptoms with a palliative measure─”
“Yes. You’re absolutely right, but. Yeah.”
Oshino was being obviously evasive.
It wasn’t like him.
Did he still have something to say about the Hindering Cat? No, it felt like he’d been acting off all day, even before I brought this up to him. Something was strange from the moment we saw him outdoors on a sunny morning─
“What’s the matter, Oshino? You’re being vague. Are you about to come up with some new fault you’ve found with me? I mean, I understand you can’t help me out with this as much as you did with Sengoku, given the circumstances─”
He’d had to deal with her for a while now, and I knew Hanekawa wasn’t a plain victim like Sengoku─I knew Hanekawa was relying on this aberration. Mèmè Oshino was someone who hated that.
Relying on others as long as you need them─
Then treating them like a burden once you don’t.
You need to have more respect than that─he’d say.
“But aren’t you obligated to help out this time around?” I pressed nonetheless. “You took her hundred thousand yen, and yet we’re facing what looks like the same condition─she could practically sue you for breach of contract since you’re supposed to be a professional at this. You needed to give her more aftercare. If you’d told me about that bell you said you put on her, then─”
“Well, I suppose you can say that.”
Surprisingly enough, Oshino didn’t argue with me.
It was an unthinkable reaction.
“Though I have to say, Araragi, cat ears do look good on her. Ha hah, yo
u know what manga she reminds me of? Neko Neko Fantasia. You know, with the girl with the cat ears by, um, Neko Nekobe─”
“Neko Nekobe wrote Goldfish Warning! Don’t confuse the two just because they both include the word for ‘cat’… Hold on, Oshino, are you trying to dodge something right now?”
“What are you talking about, dodge something? I’d never do something that deceitful. Oh, that’s right, speaking of cat ears. Arale from Dr. Slump used to wear them all the time too, didn’t she? That manga was really ahead of its time now that I think about it. A little girl with purple hair and a weird speech tic who’s also a robot and a little sister, wearing cat ears and glasses, all in one!”
