by Nisioisin
She went along with me.
Ah ha…
That was why Senjogahara seemed to be turning a blind eye to Hachikuji… The words “blind eye” were almost stupidly apt. And Hachikuji must have been acting that way…hiding behind my legs as if she were trying to avoid Senjogahara─for the same reason.
They hadn’t said a word to each other.
Senjogahara and Hachikuji.
“Senjogahara… That’s why you said you’d go meet Oshino─”
“I wanted to ask him. I wanted to ask him what was going on. But he chastised me when I did─or actually, he was appalled. No, he might have even laughed at me.”
I could see why. What a silly little situation. It was like a joke.
So ridiculous it wasn’t funny.
“So the one who’d come across the snail─was me.”
First a demon─and then a snail.
Oshino, too─he’d told me from the very beginning.
“Child aberrations,” Senjogahara continued, “little girls, in particular─are apparently quite common. I already knew that to some degree, of course. They’re even in our Japanese-class textbooks. A ghost in a kimono who causes travelers to lose their way in the mountains, a girl who sneaks in among children who’re playing and snatches one of them near the end─though I wasn’t well-versed enough to have heard of the Lost Cow. You know, Araragi, this is what Mister Oshino told me. For you to meet one─you have to wish not to go home. Well, it’s a little passive to be called a ‘wish,’ but we’ve all thought that before. We all have family issues.”
“…Ah!”
Tsubasa Hanekawa.
It was the same for her.
Her home was a troubled, warped one─so she went out for walks on Sundays.
Just like me, or maybe even more.
And so Hanekawa─could see Hachikuji, too.
She saw her, touched her─and spoke to her.
“An aberration…” I muttered, “that grants a wish.”
“It sounds nice when you put it that way, but you could also say it’s taking advantage of a person’s weakness. It’s not like you really don’t want to go back home, Araragi. So maybe we shouldn’t say a passive wish, but a certain reason.”
“……”
“But Araragi, that’s exactly why it’s so easy to deal with a Lost Cow. Remember what I said in the beginning? Don’t follow it. Distance yourself. That’s all you need to do.”
Wishing─to lose your way.
That was true─it made sense. Following around a snail whose destination eluded it for all eternity was a sure way never to come home.
Put into words─it was very simple.
Hanekawa was able to stroll out of the park.
Likewise, going home was all it took to go home.
You couldn’t if you followed a thing that went on and on.
But.
Not wanting to come home? In the end, it’s the only place a human being can return to.
“It’s not a particularly malicious aberration, nor a particularly powerful one. It usually isn’t all that harmful. That’s what he told me. A Lost Cow is a prank─a small bit of mystery, nothing more. So─”
“So?” I interrupted her.
I couldn’t bear to listen─not anymore.
“So what, Senjogahara?”
“……”
“That’s not it, and you know it isn’t. That’s not it at all, Senjogahara─I get what you’re saying, and sure, this is a neat little explanation for all those things that were nagging at me this whole time─but you know that’s not what I wanted to ask Oshino. Thanks for the etymological erudition, but it wasn’t for such a lesson that I asked you to go to him.”
“…Then what was it for?”
“Come on!”
Clench.
My hand clamped down harder on Hachikuji’s shoulder.
“What I wanted to ask him was─how to bring her, Hachikuji, to her mother─that was it, remember? That was all, from the beginning. Who am I supposed to impress with all that minutiae? Useless trivia─is nothing more than a waste of brain space. That’s not what matters here─and you know it.”
It wasn’t about Koyomi Araragi.
It was about Mayoi Hachikuji, and no one else.
I just had to distance myself from her? No.
That was what I shouldn’t do.
“…Don’t you get it, Araragi? That girl─isn’t really there. She’s not there, nor anywhere else. Hachikuji…Mayoi Hachikuji, was it? The girl…is already dead. She’s not meant to be─she hasn’t been possessed by an aberration, she, herself, is the aberration─”
“So what?!” I yelled.
I yelled─at Senjogahara.
“Not meant to be? Then who is?!”
“……”
Not me, not you─and not Tsubasa Hanekawa.
Nothing─lasts forever.
Even then.
“M-Mister Araragi? That hurts.”
Hachikuji squirmed helplessly under my arm. I hadn’t realized that I was holding her too tight, and she seemed to be in pain from my fingernails digging into her shoulder.
She seemed to be in pain.
She continued.
“U-Um, Mister Araragi. The lady, Miss Senjogahara, is right. I-I’m─”
“Shut up!”
No matter what she said─her words didn’t reach Senjogahara.
They only reached me.
But in that voice that only I could hear, she’d announced honestly from the beginning─that she was a lost snail.
She’d done her best to announce it.
She’d also said─
The very first thing she said.
“You couldn’t hear her, Senjogahara─so I’ll repeat it for you. You wouldn’t believe the very first thing she said─to me, and to Hanekawa, out of what seemed like nowhere─”
Please don’t speak to me.
I don’t like you.
“Do you get it, Senjogahara? Having to say that line to every single person she meets because she doesn’t want anyone to follow her─do you understand how she must feel? Someone who has to bite any hand that pats her head? Because I can’t.”
You should ask people for help─cruel words.
She was it, herself.
She was the funny one.
How could she bring herself to say that?
“But even if we don’t understand, feeling like you have to say such things even though you’ve lost your way, even though you’re all alone─haven’t both of us gone through that in a different form? We might not have felt the same, but we felt the same pain. I came into an immortal body─and yours was burdened with an aberration, too. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that the truth? Then whatever it is, a lost cow or a snail─if that’s what she, herself, is, that changes everything. I know you can’t see her, hear her, or even smell her─but that’s exactly why bringing her to her mother’s side─falls on me.”
“…I thought you might say that.”
I started to calm down after my entirely misdirected outburst, and of course I knew that what I was proposing was ridiculous─but Senjogahara responded without her complexion changing a shade or a single twitch of an eyebrow.
“Finally─I’m getting you, Araragi.”
“…What?”
“It looks like I was mistaken about you. No, not mistaken. I had a creeping, or maybe nagging feeling about it─I guess you could say I’m no longer under any illusions. Araragi, hey Araragi. Last Monday, thanks to a slight misstep on my part, you found out about the problem I’d been living with… And that day, that very same day─you reached out to me, yes?”
I might be able to help you out.
I reached out to her, saying so.
“Honestly,” Senjogahara said, “I’ve been having trouble figuring out what your action signifies─why would you ever do that? It’s not like you’d get anything out of it. You had nothing to gain from saving me─so why? Could it have been that you saved me becaus
e it was me?”
“……”
“But that wasn’t it. It seems not to be. Instead, it’s simply that…you’d save anyone, Araragi.”
“Save? I wouldn’t go that far. You’re exaggerating, anyone would do what I did in that situation─and you said it yourself, I just happened to have a similar problem, just happened to know Oshino─”
“Even if you hadn’t had a similar problem or known Mister Oshino, you would have done what you did─right? It sounds that way from what he told me.”
What did that bastard tell her?
A bunch of lies peppered with half-truths, I was sure.
“At the very least─” she continued, “I wouldn’t think to speak to a grade schooler I’d never met just because I’d seen her standing in front of a residential map twice.”
“……”
“When you’re by yourself for long enough, you start to think that maybe you’re special. After all, when you’re on your own, you aren’t merely ‘one of them.’ But it’s because you can’t be, that’s all. What a joke. Plenty of people actually noticed my problem in the two-plus years after I came across the aberration─but whatever the end result, the only one who was anything like you, Araragi, was you.”
“…Well, sure, I’m the only person who’s me.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
Senjogahara smiled.
Then, although it must have been a stroke of luck that the angle was right─Hitagi Senjogahara stared straight at Mayoi Hachikuji.
“Araragi, I have one last message for you from Mister Oshino. He said, ‘I bet Araragi is going to spout starry-eyed nonsense, so being the kind, kind person that I am, I’m handing down a little trick that ought to work just this time.’”
“A little…trick?”
“Really─like he sees through it all. I don’t have the slightest idea what that man thinks he’s doing with his life.”
Okay, let’s go, Senjogahara said, straddling my mountain bike with ease. With practiced ease, like the machine was already her property.
“Go? Go where?”
“To Miss Tsunade’s home, of course. Being good Samaritans, we’re taking Hachikuji there. I’ll lead the way, so follow after me. Also, Araragi?”
“What now?”
“I love you,” she said in English.
“………”
Pointing at me, in the same tone as ever.
………, I thought for a few more seconds, before realizing that I seemed to have become the very first man in Japan whose classmate confessed her love for him in English.
“Congratulations,” Hachikuji said.
The word was out of place and off the mark in every possible sense.
008
Then, an hour later, Senjogahara, Hachikuji, and I got there─the place where, ten or so years ago (I don’t know exactly how many, but around there), the living human girl Mayoi Hachikuji tried to go on Mother’s Day─to the precise address written on the note.
It took some time.
Still─it was easy.
“…But, this─”
Yet─there was no sense of accomplishment.
Absolutely no sense of accomplishment given the sight in front of us.
“Senjogahara─are you sure this is the place?”
“Yes. I’m sure of it.”
There seemed to be no room to argue with her statement of fact.
Hachikuji’s mother’s home─the Tsunade family home.
It was a clean, flat─plot of land.
Surrounded by a fence, with a sign thrust into its bare earth─private property, no trespassing.
Judging by the rust on the edges of the sign, it seemed to have been in that state for a long time now.
Residential development.
Town planning.
It wasn’t quite a road, like Senjogahara’s home had become─but like hers, not a trace of it had been left behind.
“…Is this seriously happening?”
The one-time trick that homebody Mèmè Oshino had proposed was so utterly plain and simple that hearing it made you think, Oh, of course. The Lost Cow may have existed as a snail, but if it was a ghostly aberration, then it couldn’t accumulate essential new information as memories─supposedly.
Basically, these kinds of aberrations don’t exist.
Existences who don’t exist as existences.
If there is no one to see it, it isn’t there.
To apply that to what transpired that day, the exact moment I happened to sit down on the bench and glance at the map─was when Hachikuji presented herself, came into existence─supposedly.
Likewise, as far as Hanekawa was concerned, the exact moment she happened to pass through the park and glance at the spot next to where I was sitting─was when Hachikuji presented herself, logically speaking. Presenting itself the very moment it’s witnessed, rather than leading a sustained existence as an aberration─in that sense, with the Lost Cow, “encounter” is only half-accurate a term.
Being there only when it’s seen─the observer and the observed. I’m sure Hanekawa would have displayed her scientific knowledge unabashedly with an appropriate metaphor, but I couldn’t come up with a good simile, and while Senjogahara must have known one, she wasn’t going out of her way to tell me.
Anyway.
Information stored as memories─in other words, knowledge.
Not to mention me, who didn’t know the area, the snail was able to cause Senjogahara, who was only accompanying me and who didn’t even see it, to lose her way─and it was also able to block cell phone signals. As a result─the target would continue to be lost forever.
But.
What it didn’t know─it didn’t know.
In fact, even if it did know, it couldn’t react accordingly.
Take, for example, town planning.
The neighborhood looked nothing like it did a year ago, let alone ten years ago─so if you didn’t take a shortcut, didn’t make any detours, and of course didn’t head straight there─
If you used a route made up of only new roads─a modest aberration like the Lost Cow couldn’t do anything about it.
An aberration is unlikely to gain in years─a girl aberration always stays a girl─supposedly.
It will never become an adult─
Just like me.
Hachikuji was in fifth grade ten years ago…so rearranging the timeline would make Mayoi Hachikuji older than both me and Senjogahara. Yet she spoke of getting up to no good at school like it was only yesterday, and incremental memories in the usual sense didn’t exist for her.
Didn’t─
Exist.
And so─and so.
New wine in an old wineskin─that’s what he’d said, apparently.
Oshino, that damned annoying fellow, truly sees through things─even though he hasn’t beheld Hachikuji in person or heard her circumstances in detail─barely knowing anything about this town, at that, he goes off and acts like he knows it all.
But in terms of results, it was a success.
Picking streets with dark, black asphalt that had to be new, like we were following a treasure map, avoiding old or merely repaved streets as much as possible─along the way, taking that street, too, where Senjogahara’s home used to stand─after an hour of this.
Under normal circumstances, it was less than a ten-minute walk from the park, probably less than a third of a mile as the bird flies, but after over an hour─
We reached our destination.
We reached it, but.
What we found─was a clean plot of land.
“Guess you can’t expect everything to fall into place…” I muttered.
Right.
How could it─given how much the town and its streets had changed, our destination couldn’t be the one thing that hadn’t. In less than a year, even Senjogahara’s home had become a road. We wouldn’t have been able to put the stratagem into practice in the first place if there hadn’t been new roads around our
destination. There was a strong chance that the destination had changed, too; it was implicit from the start─still, not even that much falling into place would spoil everything, wouldn’t it? That would make it all pointless, no? If that part was a bust, for goodness’ sake, so was the whole plan.