I searched my memory for a version of Haruhi that was “understanding” and “wouldn’t give you a hard time,” and concluded that this was the first time I’d ever seen such a thing.
“I’ll come and visit him sometime soon, so tell him I said to get well soon, okay? But I guess Shamisen’s got your sister to pamper him to death too.”
She didn’t seem like she really cared that much; her chin moved around, still cupped between her hands. It was definitely strange to see her so listless, but at the moment I was grateful for it. I still had to figure out the Asahina Problem.
Still, what was this mood? Having the person behind me quietly stare out the window was both nostalgic and strangely novel. If only Haruhi would be like this even half of her waking time…
“Morning, class!”
The morning bell hadn’t even finished ringing when Mr. Okabe came striding gallantly into the room.
I understood.
I understood that Haruhi’s melancholy would not last long. When I thought about it, this was the first concrete prediction that the time traveler had made. According to Asahina, Haruhi would drag us all into a treasure hunt, and we’d wind up walking all over the place. I’d be fine if Haruhi was like that the other half of her waking hours.
For good or ill, that was enough to make me feel at ease.
At lunch, I bolted down my food and hurried to the clubroom.
If she wasn’t in her classroom, she’d be here, I reasoned, and sure enough—there was Nagato sitting at her usual spot at the table, absorbed in reading.
“Nagato, how’s Asahina?”
I was the one who had made her stay at Nagato’s place, so I thought I should make sure everything was okay.
“…”
Nagato turned her lowered gaze up to me, silent as though contemplating the meaning of my question.
“What do you mean by ‘how’?”
“She’s not causing you any trouble, is she?”
“No.”
Thank goodness for that, I thought. I imagined Nagato and Asahina having a pajama party. My heart swelled.
“However,” Nagato said in an even voice, “she is uneasy when she is with me.”
Her glossy eyes dropped once again to the hardcover in front of her.
I looked at Nagato silently, searching for some kind of expression on her pale face. Regret, or loneliness, say—but no such feelings were evident.
I could understand Asahina’s unease. Most people would probably find being shut up in a room with Nagato hard to handle. I could handle it, as could Haruhi and Koizumi, and Tsuruya would probably be fine, but that wasn’t the point.
Nagato had understood Asahina’s fear and had expressed it to me thus, so there had to be something more.
“It’s because Asahina and I both are constantly in your debt. She’s being considerate.”
“It’s mutual,” said Nagato, not looking up. “I have also relied on you.”
But Nagato was always the one who could do something. She’d saved my life time and time again, I told her. When something happened, she was pretty much the only reliable one. I wouldn’t say Koizumi and Asahina were worthless, but if she hadn’t been around, there would’ve been many more times when we’d all have been helpless, I said.
“I was also the cause of many problems.”
C’mon, those couldn’t be helped, I told her. If she wanted to assign blame, she ought to start with the Data Overmind and me. It wasn’t something she could blame herself for. Plus it was thanks to that whole incident that I learned to really appreciate this reality. I got to see Haruhi in a ponytail. When I’d been able to change something, the experience had meant a lot to me.
“I see,” murmured Nagato, turning the page. The cold winter wind blew, rattling the glass of the clubroom’s windows.
I turned on the electric heater. “What about your boss? They’ve suppressed the extremist faction, right?”
“The Data Overmind does not have complete consensus. But the main faction still leads.”
Interesting. Even pure thought entities had internal disagreements.
“And you’re connected to the main faction, right?”
“Yes.”
Asakura had been a vanguard of the extremist faction. Wait—were there just two factions? Were there others? I asked.
“So far as I am aware, there is the Moderate, the Revolutionary, the Compromise, and the Contemplative.”
And they were all different. Asakura had tried to kill me in order to provoke Haruhi, but Nagato had destroyed her. But the higher-ups were still arguing about it, apparently.
Just as I was visualizing the interactions of all those gods in the sky, Nagato spoke.
“I cannot transmit the thoughts of other factions.” She slowly brought her gaze up from the page. “But I am here.”
Her voice was perfectly steady, the very sound of trustworthiness.
“I won’t let them do as they please.”
On the way back from the clubroom, I ran into two familiar faces.
“Heya, Kyon!” Tsuruya waved her hand rapidly.
“Is your kitty okay?” said the person beside her in a worried voice. “I heard he had to go to the vet.”
It was Asahina. The normal, native-to-this-time Asahina. She didn’t seem to know she’d soon be headed into the past.
“Is he taking medicine?”
Oh, of course—Haruhi had called from the clubroom, and since Asahina had been there, she knew what we’d talked about.
“It’s not very serious, but it seems like he’ll need some time to recuperate.” I shook my head lightly, a bit confused. Obviously, this Asahina looked no different from the other one. If I wasn’t careful, I’d fool myself into thinking that Asahina was the one who was supposed to be at Nagato’s place right now, and I wouldn’t even notice it had happened, unless Asahina herself said something.
“Hard to believe Shamisen could get stressed out about anything!” said Tsuruya with a smile. “But I guess that’s better than catching some weird disease. I bet he’s not getting enough exercise! No mice at your house, right, Kyon? Sometimes we get mice in our garden—you should totally bring Shamisen over. I bet it’d do him some good!”
“Sure, once he’s better, I’ll do that.”
I wasn’t going to take him outside while it was still this cold, but once spring came, Shamisen would probably love that. Once the cherry blossoms bloomed, Haruhi would definitely want to do some kind of flower-viewing garden party, anyway.
“Kyon, will you be coming to the clubroom today?” asked Asahina a bit forlornly.
“I have to take Shamisen to the vet again today,” I said, wishing I’d asked the other Asahina what my day was going to contain. “I already told Haruhi.”
“Oh, really?” She sounded like she really cared about the cat. “I hope he gets well soon.”
It pained me, but I gave a serious nod. “Come by sometime and pet him. It’ll help him get better. He’s a male too, after all.”
The two girls left to get juice for their lunches, and I returned to my classroom. Not having a heater, it was colder than the clubroom I’d just been in. The only source of heat was the breath and warmth of the students in the room, and the most efficient heat source, Haruhi herself, was gone.
I walked toward Taniguchi and Kunikida and joined in their conversation.
Then, after class was over—
I put the school behind me as soon as I could. I had plenty of time until the time given in the letter, but I was worried about Asahina being left by herself, and if I was going to follow Asahina the Elder’s instructions, there were some tools I had to assemble.
First I stopped by my house and got a hammer and some nails from the garage, which I threw in my bag, then grabbed my bike and sprinted over to Nagato’s apartment building. The winter day was cold enough to make my ears sting, but when I thought about Asahina waiting all by herself, I didn’t care. Plus it was practically guaranteed that s
omething fun would be waiting for me. It was the arrival of a scene I’d been hoping for ever since summer vacation.
My strangely high spirits were the lingering results of my talk with Nagato in the clubroom.
Come what may, Nagato would protect Asahina and me, and I wanted to protect them too. Haruhi treated us brigade members like her property, and if anybody messed with us, she’d flip out and turn them right around—plus Koizumi, at least, could probably take care of himself. It was hard to imagine him getting tired, and if he were to falter, I can’t say I wouldn’t give him a hand. Haruhi would probably order me to, without regard for whether it was convenient for me or not. Not that I cared. I’d been a brigade member for just under a year, and I hadn’t been ground down so much that I’d fold now, of all times.
“Whoops.”
I skidded the bike to a stop, letting the rear wheel drift out a bit for no real reason, then headed for the console in the apartment foyer. I pushed the button for Nagato’s unit.
“… Yes?” I was relieved to hear Asahina’s voice.
“It’s me. Did anything happen? I hope not.”
“Um… no, nothing happened. Ah, I’ll be right down, so just wait there, please!”
I’d wanted to come up to Nagato’s room and relax for a bit, but Asahina cut off the intercom immediately.
I stood there idly for about five minutes, whereupon Asahina showed up in the foyer, still wearing her school uniform. She held school slippers in one hand.
She looked at me with an expression of relief, but then suddenly turned serious, shivering in the cold as she trotted over to me.
“I borrowed shoes from Nagato. Also, here’s the apartment key.”
Asahina held a small key in her hand.
“Could you return it to Nagato for me?”
Huh? What was going on? Since she was staying for a while, couldn’t she borrow both the shoes and the key?
“About that…” Asahina tucked her chin down, her eyes upturned and looking at me. “I don’t think I should stay at Nagato’s place.”
Why not? I asked.
“How should I put this…” The winter wind tried to disturb her chestnut brown hair; Asahina smoothed it down with her hand. “When I’m alone with Nagato, she just can’t calm down.”
I’d gotten the same line from Nagato. But no, forget that—I couldn’t imagine what Nagato would do that would indicate anxiousness to Asahina, I said.
“Um, well,” said Asahina, as though explaining something to a small child. “It’s just a feeling, really. When I’m sleeping at night… I mean, we’re in separate rooms, I’m sleeping in the spare room, but it’s like she’s standing right beside my bed, staring down at me…”
C’mon, she’s not like a ghost, I said.
“… It’s just a feeling, but it’s like she’s conscious of me.” Asahina exhaled whitely, staring at my chest. “I don’t feel it when we’re all in the clubroom, but it’s really strong when it’s just the two of us at her place. It happened last month too. When we returned from the past, I woke up and you were gone, and I just had the feeling that she’d been staring at me the whole time I was asleep.”
What was that supposed to imply? I couldn’t imagine Nagato ever doing anything to hurt Asahina, I said.
“I know. That’s not what she’s thinking. It’s just an impression I get… but I know. It’s like she’s hung up on me somehow.”
This was completely incoherent. I certainly didn’t understand it.
Asahina looked at me accusingly. With a lonely tone to her voice, she said, “It’s like… she wants to be like me.”
“…?” was my only reply.
“Like doing all kinds of crazy stuff with you, Kyon. I’m always doing stuff like that, right? But Nagato just watches. It was like that on Tanabata and during the endless summer too.”
The seal of the SOS Brigade was all over my memories of the previous year. One of them was that Nagato was always the hardest-working member.
“I wonder if that’s part of why she changed the past. She’s always watching over us, instead of always getting saved, like me.”
Asahina breathed into the palm of her hand, then nodded decisively.
“When I think about it like that, it makes sense. What I feel from Nagato, I mean. She might want to become like me, in a way…”
My mind went on a wild flight of fancy. I couldn’t help imagining going into the clubroom as usual and encountering a maid-outfit-wearing Nagato there, cheerfully serving me tea. She would smile as she poured out the hot water, then, holding the tray, ask me how it tasted…
If Nagato were to become like that, I couldn’t really complain. But what would happen to the Nagato who sat at the corner of the table, reading?
“I think Nagato knows this herself too. That’s why I don’t think I should be here. It just makes things difficult for her.”
Asahina’s eyes were serious. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be in Nagato’s home, it was that she was being considerate of Nagato. We already knew what could happen when too many bugs turned up in Nagato’s system, and we knew what caused them to accumulate. As a result, she’d restricted herself. No more synchronization. She was trying to avoid bugs of her own free will. Was Asahina really Nagato’s ideal? A person who, unlike herself, takes action without knowledge? A time traveler—her perfect opposite.
It was the ultimate irony. Asahina suffered from her own ignorance, while Nagato knew too much.
I looked up at Nagato’s place. “Yeah…”
Asahina might have been right. When I thought about it, the most perceptive people I’d known had all been female—although Haruhi and Tsuruya were a little too perceptive.
Nagato had her own virtues, and they were virtues enough. But when she herself didn’t realize that, it made things difficult. If pressed about it, she’d just feign ignorance.
It was also possible that Asahina was overthinking this. Nagato might be just fine as she was. She might just occasionally run out of books to read and stare at Asahina without any particular intent. But if Asahina was worried, I would just ignore her concerns.
“I understand. I’ll tell Nagato for you. We’ll figure out where you’re going to stay later.”
She could stay at my place as a last resort, but it wasn’t like there weren’t any alternatives.
“Anyway, there’s something else I wanted you to look at. I got another letter in my shoe locker.”
Asahina looked at the letter I gave her as though it were a crib sheet for a test she was about to take. “Oh, this is”—she pointed to the very end of the directions—“an order code. The very highest priority.”
I hadn’t been able to figure out whether the line was a code or a signature of some kind. I asked if it was some kind of future language.
“No, it’s not a word… um, it’s a code. One that has a special priority for us. It means no matter what the order is, it must be carried out.”
“You mean… this?” I asked, thinking about the contents of the letter. “What point could there possibly be in a prank like this?”
“That’s…” Asahina began, her head cocked, confusion on her face. “I… have no idea.”
“What would happen if we ignore this and do nothing?”
“We cannot ignore it,” said Asahina flatly. “Having seen that code, I must take action to ensure its execution.” She looked at me uncertainly. “And you’ll do it too, won’t you, Kyon?”
We did as the letter said and proceeded to the location in question. Our method of transportation was a bicycle; it should go without saying that Asahina rode behind me on the luggage rack. In any case, although our target was within the city, it was still some distance on a bicycle.
We killed some time wandering around; by my watch it was now just ten minutes past six. The letter had directed me to set up the materials I now carried between 6:12 and 6:15.
I felt a little lonely, and not just because the sun had already set. The road
was a bit removed from the local residences and didn’t see much traffic. Then there was a little side path that branched off it, which was unpaved. It didn’t seem like a private drive, but neither was it a shortcut to anywhere in particular, which made one wonder why anybody would go to the trouble of using it. The x on the hand-drawn map was just at the intersection of that little path and the road, a few centimeters away from the edge of the asphalt.
We were lucky there weren’t any pedestrians around. What we were about to do was not exactly upstanding behavior—to put it bluntly, it was a practical joke.
All I needed were three things: a hammer, some nails, and a steel can. You can probably guess what I did.
“All right, I’d better get to it,” I said.
“Yes,” nodded Asahina.
I’d been hiding behind a telephone pole; I jumped out, ran for the spot, and began pounding nails into the ground. The ground was pretty hard. I had to pound them really hard to get them even halfway in—but I couldn’t risk making a lot of noise and possibly catching the eye of a passerby.
I was in a hurry, so I don’t think it took me more than thirty seconds, all told.
I covered the nails with the can, then hurried back to the telephone pole, where Asahina awaited. We then found a darker place a bit farther away in which to hide.
So what was going to happen? I was really interested to see what effect this prank was supposed to have.
I didn’t have to wait long. It was 6:14.
Opposite the street from where we hid, a male-looking silhouette came walking along at a leisurely pace. I could tell he was wearing a long coat and carrying a shoulder bag. He didn’t seem to notice us.
He seemed to be looking down as he walked. He didn’t seem particularly cheerful. Suddenly, he stopped. He was looking directly at the empty can.
“Haah…”
I heard a sigh. Just when I was wondering if he were the type to take offense at litter, he lined up a kick (with perfect form) and directed it with all his strength at the can.
The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 8
