And Yagiri did clearly say that her intent wasn’t to kill.
So given all the factors at play, he made a quick decision and gave her a huge, guilt-free smile—and a total lie.
“It was Seiji Yagiri. He just got into a little fight of some kind. Nothing to worry about.”
“Oh. I see.”
“…”
“…”
Yes, Celty literally typed out the ellipses to emphasize her silence.
“………………………”
The headless woman in the schoolgirl uniform held up her screen to his face, using her shadow tendrils to continue typing. Each additional ellipsis put more pressure on Shinra’s conscience.
“…Ha-ha! Oh, Celty,” he pleaded awkwardly, but she sent forth more shadows to hold him down.
“Don’t lie to me! It’s her! That had to be Namie Yagiri!”
“Ohhhh! You’ve learned to detect when I’m lying, just by looking into my eyes! I love that—it’s like our hearts are more connected than ever!”
“You wouldn’t say ‘Has someone shot you?’ or ‘You’re still alive’ to Seiji Yagiri!”
“What a detective you are, Celty! Fine…I’ll fess up,” Shinra said, sighing. “Namie is planning to revert Mika’s face to its original state. But Mika really enjoys that face, you know? So she wanted to know if I could do some surgery on her tomorrow, while she’s sleeping. So the question was, is it humane?”
“I see.”
“And I wouldn’t want to get in trouble for something like that, would I? I mean, she’s your cooking teacher. So when I brought that up, she got mad and hung up. The reason I lied is because I was afraid that if I brought up Namie’s name, you might go after her to chase down your head…”
Celty withdrew the shadows that were holding Shinra’s body down. “You’re such a fool, Shinra. How often do I remind you that I don’t care about the head anymore?”
“I know you say that, but I’m still scared. Maybe the head will manage to suck you toward it instead.”
“You’re overthinking this. Anyway, what is that woman up to? Does she finally feel guilty about messing with that girl’s face? It’s ironic that Mika herself doesn’t want her old face back.”
As he read Celty’s message, Shinra thought to himself, I’m sorry, Celty. She just doesn’t understand the dangers that Namie Yagiri poses… The call was actually way more menacing than I made it sound. I still just don’t want you anywhere near Namie…and that head.
By baldly lying at first, and then fessing up by telling what was almost the entire truth, Shinra ultimately succeeded at throwing Celty off the trail. It was less that he tricked her than that he simply omitted some crucial details, but at any rate, it successfully kept Celty away from Namie.
Well, after that…I guess we can’t just pick back up where we left off…plus it feels like I just abandoned poor Mika. But hey, she said she wasn’t going to kill her…
He glared down at his phone, blaming it for dousing the steamy situation with a bucket of cold water, and was about to turn it off when Celty showed him a new message.
“How about I change the mood by switching into my next outfit?”
Instantly, all thought of Mika Harima and Namie Yagiri was gone from his head.
“What? Already?!”
Of course, given that he had originally performed surgery on the girl’s face in order to fool Celty, it was hard to see how abandoning Mika was any worse than what he’d already done.
“No, Celty, wait! I want to savor feeling like a student a little while longer! I want to look up to you as my upperclassman…but then, I also want to be the older student treated with reverence…,” Shinra babbled.
Celty suddenly stopped, then used her shadows to hold down Shinra once again.
“Aaah! What’s this?!”
“Sorry—hang on a bit.”
She sent a message to her headless horse, Shooter, and brought the carriage to a stop at the side of the road. As Shinra watched with bewilderment, she exited the booth.
“Wait…where are you going, Celty?! Hang on! Don’t abandon me! If I did something wrong, I’ll fix it! If it’s about last week’s episode of Mysterious Discoveries of the World getting erased, I apologize!”
His plaintive cry vanished into the woods, which Celty walked through, still dressed in a school uniform.
Ten minutes later
After what felt like an eternity in the carriage alone, Shinra was overjoyed to see Celty return, as if nothing out of place had happened.
“Celty! You came back!”
“You always overexaggerate.”
“But…but…I was really starting to think that you’d abandoned me once and for all.”
“Don’t be silly. I would never leave Shooter behind,” she typed curtly, while undoing Shinra’s shadow bonds. “Actually, I felt something for the first time in a while, perhaps a fairy presence? So I went to give my acknowledgments.”
“Fairy?”
“In Japan, I guess you’d call it a yokai, or a god of the mountain, or something. Anyway, there’s lots of stuff out in the forests here. It reminds me of the woods back home,” she noted wistfully, but given that she had lost her head and most of her memories, that particular detail had to be very vague indeed.
Shinra chose to avoid poking that topic. Instead, he smiled and asked, “So, did you get to say hello?”
“Yes…well… There wasn’t any outright hostility or anything. It just said, ‘Welcome to Japan’…and then…”
She typed out her hesitation into the message, her shoulders hunching in apparent embarrassment. “It said it hadn’t seen one together with a human in quite some time, and…it wished me luck.”
“Well, we’ll do it proud! What a nice spirit! But wait…does that mean it was watching us?”
“It said…the man was making so much noise, it couldn’t not hear us…”
“…”
If she had a human face, it would be beet red. Combined with the school uniform, he thought, the restless fidgeting made Celty look just like a youthful student.
“Ha-ha-ha, in that case, let’s show off and— Gwufh! Wh…why?!”
He had put his hand on her shoulder, earning him a jab to the throat.
“More importantly, Shinra…what was that about last week’s show…?”
“Eep!” Shinra was tied down with shadow for a third time before he could make any excuses.
“I was saving that for later… I was hoping that we could try to guess who would win the top prize on the show!”
“Aaaaah! S-sorry, Celty, sorry! I’ll make it up to you with something worth a gold prize from the show—no, crystal prize! It’ll be worth it!”
“Dum-dummm! (foghorn sound) Instead, you get tickles!”
“N-no! Not when I’m tied down and helpless! I’m sorry, Celty! It’s too much for me, but on the other hand, being tickled by you is a heavenly thought, but on the first hand, please no, please no, please yes!”
Ten fingers of shadow stretched forth, about to descend upon Shinra’s helpless flank—when his phone abruptly rang again.
“…”
“You can answer it,” she offered, picking up the phone with her shadow fingers and holding it to Shinra’s ear. His expression was a mixture of relief and disappointment as he spoke.
“Hello…? Oh, hi, Shizuo.”
Shizuo, huh? He had a rough time of it yesterday, too, Celty thought, recalling how her friend had thrown motorcycles, kicked cars like balls, and saved little girls. She chuckled secretly, a bit of mirth that tamped down the burst of annoyance she was feeling.
“No, no need to thank me. Actually, I’ve got my hands full at the moment—or should I say, I’ve got them tied down… Yeah. Yeah, no problem. We can do that tomorrow.”
That was apparently the end of the call. Shinra sighed heavily and said, “I’m sorry, Celty… I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize now,” she replied, all snarkiness gone.
She freed Shinra and looked out the window of the carriage.
The lake in the middle of the forest reflected the sunlight, a brilliant gleam flickering through the trees. The presence she felt earlier had waned. There were no figures around them anymore, not even any animals.
The moment was beautiful, and the timing was right.
Then Shinra said, “I kind of wish you’d punished me a little,” and she decided that she would tease him for his perversion.
“If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get,” she typed into the PDA and covered the carriage windows with shadow.
“Whoa, it’s pitch-black!”
Heh-heh-heh, he’s panicking.
“What’s going to happen?! What will become of poor little me?!”
Now I’m going to sit back, do nothing, and watch him writhe.
“Actually, sitting in the dark with a girl wearing a black school uniform kinda gets me all warm and tingly inside!”
That’s a good reminder that I was going to change outfits.
With the cover of total darkness, Celty felt at ease enough to undo her shadow outfit. It had taken considerable care to do it earlier without showing off too much skin, but in the darkness, she could afford to be more daring…
Just at the moment that her skin was most exposed, Shinra’s cell phone went off, sitting on the front-side seat.
The phone screen lit up the interior of the closed space, pulling back the darkness—and giving Shinra a glimpse of the soft curves of Celty’s body.
“Wha…?!”
Hyaaaa!
…
Hyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?!
She panicked, instinctually covering Shinra’s eyes, then her own body, with a layer of shadow. Shinra felt around blindly for his phone, picked it up, and then answered in a daze.
“Hello… Hello…? Ahh…it’s you… Yeah, I know… Probably at Yagiri Pharmaceuticals, Warehouse Three… Your sister was saying something about luring her there or whatever… Yeah. So long,” he said, his voice bleary and absent. Celty hadn’t been taking the words in, though.
She was in a mild panic, far too preoccupied to pay attention. Once she had replaced her shadow clothes and desperately regained control, she finally opened the carriage windows to the world again.
When the soft light of the forest caught her properly, they showed that she was so hasty in dressing that she was now clad in pitch-black armor of the type she wore back in Ireland. It was very strange to see her with that look, holding a modern PDA—but Shinra did not even register the armor.
“D-did you see that, Shinra?”
“…Huh?”
“I—I know you’ve seen that back home, but I’m not as comfortable with being seen in a place like this. Plus, as I said, Shooter’s right there…I’m quite shy about it,” she typed in little fits and bursts. Shinra merely smiled with beatific serenity.
“It’s all right, Celty.”
“What’s all right?”
“You’re so cute, Celty. Hee-hee.”
“Gross!”
I broke him! I broke Shinra! she realized, as he laughed eerily to himself. She tried slapping him to bring him back to his senses.
“Get a grip! You hear me? Get a grip!”
“Bwuh! Bwap! …Oh. Oh, Celty. Why are you wearing armor?”
“Huh? Uh, er…because…”
“Armor… I see. It’s the dullahan’s basic cultural garb. I had never considered this! It might downplay your femininity, but I can sense your cuteness oozing out of it!” raved the man. Celty had pulled him out of the realm of fantasy only for him to travel to yet another dimension.
But for her part, she didn’t seem to mind the compliments. Given that it was her basic outfit in the distant past, this seemed to be an affirmation of what she’d always been. In fact, she was so embarrassed with delight that she started to change yet again.
“No! Wait, Celty! Let me take a picture!” Shinra pleaded, holding up his phone as her shadows began to writhe. At the instant that she changed into new clothes, with part of her arms and legs exposed—though not as badly as the previous instance—Shinra pushed the photo button with perfect timing.
Except that another call arrived at the same time, switching the phone out of camera mode.
“Aaaaaaaah!” Shinra shrieked in rage, nearly screaming. “Wh-who did that?!”
“Well, that’s one of the more bracing ways I’ve ever heard a person say hello over the phone.”
“Oh, it’s Izaya. Good-bye.”
“Hey, don’t hang up. Listen, I’m bored, and I can’t move right now. I finally got the chance to borrow the hospital phone.”
“Hospital? You’re in the hospital?”
“You didn’t watch Daioh TV this morning, then. I got shanked yesterday.”
“Oh, cool. Good-bye.” Shinra abruptly hung up.
“…Who was that from?”
He blithely answered, “Izaya. Says he got stabbed and is in the hospital now.”
“What? Is he all right?” she typed, alarmed—then reconsidered and replaced that message with: “Well…whatever the details are, he probably earned it, right?”
“Of course he did.”
“And if he called you, he must be doing just fine.”
“You bet. He sure sounded fine over the phone.”
Realizing that neither she nor Shinra were at all concerned for him, Celty considered the topic of Izaya. I guess he’s just the type of person you don’t worry about when he gets hurt…like Shizuo, but for a different reason…
“Still, I think you might have been treating him a bit coldly right there.”
“It’s fine. Izaya’s the kind of masochist who loves people even when they’re mean to him.”
“Oh, look who’s talking. Still, you have to watch out for infections and blood clots with stab wounds. You should probably apologize later. I mean, Shizuo and Izaya are the only friends you have…”
“Yeah…I should. If you say I should.”
Yet again, Shinra’s cell phone went off.
“See? Speak of the devil. Izaya’s probably feeling lonely and worried, after being stabbed like that.”
“Fine… Hello?” he said into the phone. Celty watched him, smiling inwardly.
“Yes… Yes… Huh…? No, I’m a friend of Izaya’s… Sorry, I’m on a vacation right now… Reason he would be hated? Geez…there are so many, I couldn’t begin to narrow it down. He’s been getting himself into trouble ever since high school. Me? No, I’m clean as a whistle.”
Whatever conversation he was having, it was a little strange. He didn’t seem to be talking to Izaya. And the phrase clean as a whistle gave Celty a little start.
Now that I think of it, I’ve hardly heard any idiomatic expressions or extravagant vocabulary words from him today. Usually, he likes to throw them around to display his intellect. Maybe…he’s feeling nervous or forgetting to do it because he’s enjoying the trip… I really hope it’s the latter.
Just then, the call ended.
“Who was that?”
“…The police.”
“Huh?”
“They wanted to know if I knew anything about Izaya getting stabbed. They probably just redialed the number from the hospital phone. Phew! I was terrified that they found out I was a black market doctor! Felt like I was dragged from my vacation dream right back into real life.”
Shinra slumped his shoulders, and the phone went off yet again.
His cheek twitching, he answered the call—and heard Izaya’s voice through the speaker.
“Yo. Did you just get a call from the cops?”
“Yeah, thanks a lot.”
“I see. Well, it’s been so boring here. You were bragging about being on holiday, so I got a little mad. Thought it would be funny if the cops called a black market doctor. How was it? Exciting? Did the extra thrills just rekindle things with Celty? I’m assuming she’s there with you.”
“Ha-ha-ha! I wish you’d rekindle your
body and burn to death.”
Shinra hung up and went back to being dejected.
Once again, the phone rang.
“If you don’t knock it off, I’m going to tell everyone about that thing from middle school, Izaya!” Shinra snapped in a rare display of anger—but there was no response.
“…?”
He thought this was strange, until he realized that next to him, Celty was holding her own phone up to around where her head would be. He checked his screen.
Above the number was the contact name—CELTY, MY HONEY.
He looked from the phone to Celty, back to the phone, and then figured it out.
“Ha-ha!” he giggled, and then his face softened to a grin.
“Thank you, Celty. I really do love you.”
The words she’d heard hundreds, thousands of times…
They came both from Shinra’s mouth and from her phone.
Sandwiched between both sources of sound, she came to a sudden realization.
Oh. I get it.
This is happiness.
She took her hands away from the PDA keyboard and sat back to listen to Shinra talk. She allowed his voice into her mind, and he read her emotions to produce words. Sometimes, they just stared at each other.
It might have looked like Shinra was holding an entire conversation on his own, but in truth, he was deftly reading her emotions, giving the impression that they were having a two-way discussion.
Eventually, he closed his mouth, and they sat shoulder to shoulder for a while.
Oh. I see, Celty thought idly.
It was something so ordinary, so matter-of-fact, she hadn’t felt it necessary to even think about before.
But, to Celty, just the recognition of this fact made the entire holiday meaningful.
I really do…love Shinra.
After this, they would run across an attempted murder in the mountains, get attacked by a bear that escaped from the zoo, and wind up in the crosshairs between two groups attempting to win a prize by finding the supposedly extinct Japanese wolf, among other events with a higher level of “extraordinary” than usual—but those are stories for another time.
Durarara!!, Vol. 7 Page 18
