by Nisioisin
Flapping her wings madly, like a bee.
I didn’t think she would appreciate being compared to an insect, though, so to her I said, Like a hummingbird.
Either way.
Maintaining our altitude at above one thousand feet, we waited out the night.
As protagonists, we were an embarrassment of a two-man cell (The original cover text was a lie. Strongest two-man cell in narrative history, my ass), but in light of the physical and mental fortitude it required for us to remain floating at an altitude of a thousand feet for almost ten hours, maybe we can recover just a little bit of our dignity.
That said, there’s no art to just bobbing there like an idiot (the lack was mine, not Shinobu’s), so over the course of those ten hours we flew around observing the situation on the ground.
Every city, town, and village we spotted was the same. Pondering whether or not to continue on past the borders of the prefecture, we realized that our current patrol could only end in the same despair as our daytime search, so we returned to our starting point.
I thought about telling Shinobu, Fujiko fan that she was, This is kind of like a Perman patrol, but she was so despondent that I decided against it.
Maybe I should have said it precisely because she was so despondent, but─at the very least, it seemed best not to joke around until I figured out what she really meant about it all being her fault…
I think it was the right call.
Occasionally, even I make one─and then dawn came.
As the sun rose in the eastern sky, the zombie horde on the ground simply disappeared. And I mean literally disappeared… I don’t remember taking my eyes off the ground for even a second, but before I knew, they were all gone.
It was almost like someone had set a timer to wipe them out with the coming of dawn. Had they sunk into the ground, or secreted themselves in the shadows? But it seemed unlikely that they would suddenly become so agile upon daybreak.
Whatever the case, Shinobu’s (and my) power dwindled as the sun rose, and we suddenly couldn’t maintain our altitude, putting us in a pickle of a precipitous beeline descent that would have ended with a deadly crash-landing for anyone else. So we were grateful for their disappearance.
I say disappearance.
But they probably hadn’t actually vanished.
They weren’t actually─gone.
They were there─they were everywhere.
We returned to the Araragi residence─walking through an abandoned town where not an iota of evidence remained that, up until a few minutes ago, a horde of zombies had been strutting about the place, we returned to the Araragi residence, and I talked with Shinobu in the living room.
To be precise, I listened to what she had to say.
All in all, the sky hadn’t really been the place for that kind of conversation.
“So─what do you mean it’s your fault, Shinobu? Tell me,” I jumped in without any small talk, still unable to offer anything in the way of refreshments. As you might expect, given the circumstances, I wasn’t holding her in my arms. This was a conversation to be had face to face. “You don’t just mean because you perpetrated a time slip, do you? Because then I’d be complicit─and I was the one who suggested it in the first place, so I’d be the guiltier party. But you made it sound like this was a solo crime─what’s going on?”
“’Tis my fault,” Shinobu said. She sounded exhausted. She’d been flying all night long─but that wasn’t why. “To be precise, ’tis the fault of my counterpart in this timeline.”
“…? By this timeline, you mean─”
In other words.
The Shinobu Oshino from this altered─from this timeline that we altered?
“Aye. Two months previously, the me of this world, a me other than myself, turned the entire human race into vampires─that is what I am telling thee.”
“I still don’t get it, Shinobu. How are those things vampires? Sure, if you define vampire broadly, I guess that could include walking corpses, but─oh, I see. Vampires are also called nightwalkers, right? And those things definitely spent the whole night walking around─though it really seemed like they were just out for a lazy stroll, not doing anything significant. Is that what you mean?”
“Hmm. I fear that both of us are equally confused, so perhaps ’tis best if I start at the beginning. In this case─ah, but ’tis difficult indeed to explain.”
“Equally? Sorry, but I think I’m way more confused. During the day it’s a ghost town, and at night it’s zombie town. All the humans have become zombies, and you keep on insisting that all of it is your fault. I’m confident that right now I’m the most confused person in the entire world─though you and I are the only candidates left, I guess.”
“…”
“Hey, so don’t get all gloomy on me.”
“I shall become gloomy if I wish. Because if I tell thee what I have done, thou shalt likely become truly enraged─of course I realize that cannot be helped, but nonetheless─”
“Quit talking like that,” I said to an irresolute Shinobu, unintentionally interrupting her explanation as she sat awkwardly averting her eyes from me─to a Shinobu who’d never looked that way before. “Don’t hold anything back. Listen, Shinobu. If we’re going to start at the beginning, then I’ve got something to say first. Whether it’s the you from this timeline, or the you sitting in front of me right now…”
I put out my hands and took hold of Shinobu’s shoulders.
Standing up from the sofa, I crouched in front of her so that my face was level with hers.
Staring straight into her golden pupils.
“You and I are one, in body and soul,” I said. “What I have done, you have done, and what you do, I do too. If you did cause this somehow, it’s true, I might get angry, but I will never, ever turn my back on you. I love Senjogahara best, and I respect Hanekawa more than anyone else. Hachikuji is the most fun to talk to. But if I had to choose someone to die with, I would choose you.”
“…My lord.”
“If something is burdening you, don’t take it all on yourself. Share the load with me. In fact, it hurts me to think of you keeping anything from me.”
Shinobu writhed in seeming pain─perhaps I was squeezing her little girl’s shoulders a little too hard. Realizing this, I released my grip─but she no longer kept her eyes awkwardly averted from mine.
And.
“I too,” she said. “I too would have thee by my side, when my time comes.”
“…Yeah. That’s self-evident, you don’t even need to say it.”
If Shinobu were to die tomorrow, then my life could end tomorrow as well.
That vow was already written in stone.
Engraved in my heart.
Deeply, so deeply.
All the way down.
It had become flesh and blood─inscribed in my very bones.
“Hmm… Then indeed, I shall relate it in its proper order. Though, ’tis not as though I did not have some idea all along─’tis not as though a likely explanation did not come to mind. And ’tis not as though the newspaper did not prick my memory.”
“Yeah… Now that you mention it, you did say something, didn’t you? What was it, something about your memory being fuzzy or something?”
“June fourteenth.”
“Hm.”
“At last I recalled what day that was─though I can only think the recollection hath come too late to make any difference…or no, perhaps it would have been too late no matter what.”
“‘What day that was’?”
“I expect thou dost recall it too. It was a most memorable day. Nothing springs to mind?”
“Well, it was the day the world fell apart, right? So of course it was memorable. The night of June fourteenth, or June fifteenth─”
“Nay, nay, ’tis not that of which I speak. I speak of the night of June fourteenth in the real─in the original timeline.”
“I’m still not getting anything─and there was no a
rticle in that newspaper that rang any bells.”
“’Tis nothing to do with any article. ’Tis only the date that is important.”
“June fourteenth…the fourteenth, the fourteenth… Let’s see, it was a Wednesday, so that means─the fifteenth was a Thursday, and…” I brought the month up on the calendar in my cell phone, but still nothing struck me.
“…It seems it shall not come to thee,” Shinobu muttered, sounding somehow disappointed.
My total inability to figure it out was definitely disappointing─but no.
Judging from what she said next, Shinobu wasn’t just disappointed that I couldn’t figure it out. How can I put this?
She seemed disappointed─
By what an inherently disappointing person I was.
“If I were to tell thee that June the fifteenth was the day before thy ‘culture festival,’ might that jog thy memory?”
“…Ah.”
So that was it.
Once she said it─once I made her say it, I finally caught on.
Caught on to just how obtuse I was being.
June fourteenth─the day before the eve of the culture festival.
Once reminded of that fact, I didn’t have to try and recall what had happened.
By which I mean, there was no way I could forget.
That day, the day after my very first date ever, with Senjogahara─after our trip to the observatory, and also the day of Tsubasa Hanekawa’s second transformation into Black Hanekawa─and.
The day Shinobu ran away from her home at the abandoned cram school where she lived with Mèmè Oshino─the day I ran all over town searching for her.
And finally, it was the day Mèmè Oshino left our town.
“It seems thou hast remembered.”
“Y-Yeah…”
“Thou art the lowest of the low. Hast forgotten it all, the date of thy first date with thy sweetheart, the date on which that former class president, who thou dost perpetually call thy benefactor, underwent such a grievous experience, forgotten the date I ran away and on which the Aloha brat departed.”
“…”
What could I say.
I’m sure you readers already figured it out and were laughing at me.
Well, maybe you felt too disgusted and just stopped reading.
Yup, I’m glad this came to light in a scene no one is reading.
“Come on, though,” I pleaded, “everyone always says I’m not manly, but I can’t remember important dates the way girls can. I don’t keep a diary or anything─”
“And yet, with so many events occurring in rapid succession, I should think ’twould be one date ye might recall.”
“The culture festival the next day was so fun that I forgot,” I offered in the way of an excuse, but I do sincerely regret it.
That said.
“That said, even now that you’ve reminded me what day it was, I still don’t get it. It’s true that a lot of things happened, but the entire world falling apart wasn’t one of them.”
From my date with Senjogahara to Black Hanekawa, to Shinobu, or Oshino─I couldn’t believe any of it was connected to the destruction of the world. Even if history got altered a bit…
“If anything, I guess Black Hanekawa’s rampage was linked to an aberration… Still, Black Hanekawa was much less out of control than during Golden Week… Then again, she did try to kill me, didn’t she?”
“Aye, and Black Hanekawa is not unrelated, but the important thing is my absconsion.”
“Your─absconsion? But that, if anything, we resolved without incident─”
Wait.
No.
That was only in the timeline that we knew, the one that we experienced─which is to say that in this timeline.
Maybe something happened.
Maybe we didn’t resolve it at all.
“Ultimately, I have told thee little of the details of my absconsion, and thou hast never presumed to ask me. I am grateful for that consideration, and I do not intend even now to give thee a full accounting, but there is one fact that I can no longer keep hidden, which I will now disclose.”
“All right. But don’t act so self-important about it.”
“On that day, I intended to destroy the world if thou didst not find me.”
“It was that big of a deal?!”
No way!
I knew she ran away with some intensely grim resolve, but─I’d never imagined it went that far!
The whole world!
“You think on a massive scale!”
“Well, I was a globe-trotting vampire, after all…”
“A little too globe-trotting. Wh-Why?”
“I was driven to desperation─’twas a fit of pique. If anything,” Shinobu said confoundingly. “Nevertheless, I had lost my power at that time, so could not have accomplished it in any case. ’Twas nothing more than words, thoughts, but…it appears that in this world, things went differently.”
“…”
She’d told me something like that before.
That during the five hundred (actually six hundred) years of her life, she’d wanted to destroy humanity any number of times… June fourteenth had been one of them.
I would never have guessed.
“…? Then, in this world… Hang on, this is confusing, but what you’re saying is that the Koyomi Araragi in this timeline wasn’t able to find you on June fourteenth?”
“So I believe. But, think on it a moment. The first to notice my disappearance on that day was the lost lass, was it not?”
“Now that you mention it…” Apologies as always for my vague recollection of the peripheral details, but now that you have. “Didn’t that day begin with Hachikuji spotting you in front of Mister Donut?”
I don’t remember it too clearly, but I remember bragging to Hachikuji about my date at the observatory with Senjogahara when I ran into her on the way to school that morning.
And that’s when─she told me.
About Shinobu running away from home.
“Because I never heard about it from Hachikuji, I wasn’t able to find you─”
Wait.
Wait, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t have been able to find Shinobu.
Hachikuji did help in the subsequent hunt, but─and this is a terrible thing to say about someone who helped you─in the end, she didn’t actually contribute all that much to finding Shinobu.
And her escapade would’ve come to light sooner rather than later, even if Hachikuji hadn’t told me about it…
So this is my conjecture.
It wasn’t just about that day.
If Hachikuji─if Hachikuji-the-aberration didn’t exist, then never mind June fourteenth, I wouldn’t have met her on that Mother’s Day in the first place─in other words, the Koyomi Araragi of this world was a Koyomi Araragi who’d never met Mayoi Hachikuji.
Which must have had some influence on his (and yes, I will venture to refer to him in the third person) actions, his character─even if only to the slightest degree.
Not just Mother’s Day.
From May fifteenth to June fourteenth.
The me of this timeline missed out on that month of hanging out with Mayoi Hachikuji─and because that’s the kind of me he was, he wasn’t able to find Shinobu Oshino.
And so, at that moment.
At that pivotal moment in the tale.
I must not have been able to look to Shinobu to help me.
“…I see. In that case I probably─got killed by Black Hanekawa.”
This timeline.
Had to be that kind of timeline.
“Shinobu. If you don’t want to answer this question, you don’t have to, so just take it with a grain of salt… Honestly, I don’t even really want to think about the thing I’m asking, but I want to know what you think. We’ve been bound to each other like this ever since spring break, but as such, whether it’s you or me, if one of us were to lose our life in some unforeseen accident, what would happen to the oth
er one?”
Since we were bound to each other, would the remaining one be dragged along on the road to hell?
