by Nisioisin
“Why are you still talking to me about muscles?”
Karen better wise up soon. How was a meathead like her going to make it in this world? Sometimes I wondered if she thought her noggin was just a tool to be used for headbutts.
“Hrm? Wait, what about Tsukihi? Did she go with you to Mister Donut?”
“No.” Handing Karen the box of donuts I had brought home as a gift, I shook my head─adding yet another layer to the lie.
It was a mille-feuille of lies.
“Apparently, Tsukihi was on the second floor when it happened,” I said. “She kept watch until I got back. But I think the shock really got to her, being so close when it happened─she’s in bed upstairs.”
“Ah.” Karen glanced up with a worried expression on her face─not that she could see through the ceiling or anything. “Tsukihi can be kind of sensitive and delicate.”
“I’m sure you want to talk to her, but she was sleeping pretty soundly, so don’t wake her for a while.”
“Aye, aye!”
“Okay then.”
I finally stood up.
Karen had come back sooner than I’d expected, but that was only good news as far as I was concerned. The quicker we could get this over with, the better.
I started to climb the stairs but turned around once more.
“Karen.”
She’d already plopped herself down where I’d been sitting.
She faced me. “Hmm? What is it?”
“Would you be willing to die for my sake?”
“Of course. But why ask?”
……
It was the reply I’d expected her to give, but the way she answered so readily was pretty gallant…
She really was like Kanbaru.
If she weren’t my sister, I’d be crushing on her.
A big if.
“Then, could you die for Tsukihi’s sake?”
“Of course,” she replied. “I would do it smiling.”
And she actually smiled.
It was such a brilliant smile─it made me think that even if her head were to be lopped off right now, she’d have no regrets.
“Tsukihi is my sister─of course I would.”
“Yeah, of course…” I nodded deeply. “I’d die for your sakes as well. Over and over if necessary─I’d be Dracula for you guys and die as many times as it took to be dead.”
Speaking those words over my shoulder, I walked away and went up the stairs once again, to the second floor─but not toward my desk. I went directly to my sisters’ room─straight to Tsukihi.
I didn’t bother to knock and just opened the door.
Tsukihi was on the top bunk─sleeping peacefully with not even a light snore.
She was a pretty still sleeper. As quietly as I could, I climbed up the ladder and gazed at her face.
A restful sleep. As deep as death.
But─she wasn’t dead.
Tsukihi Araragi was alive.
“……”
After getting her torso blown off by Ononoki, Tsukihi’s body recovered as if none of it had happened─but since then, she’d remained unconscious. Like a bird scared from the bush, she wasn’t coming back.
It had been a mighty struggle, but I’d hoisted her unconscious body onto my back and carried her piggyback up to her room. I could hardly leave her there with her naked upper body exposed.
The difficult part hadn’t been carrying her so much as changing her out of her tattered clothes. I had never put clothes on an unconscious person before, but it was a lot harder than I expected─of course, it was just a yukata, which made it a lot easier than dressing her in Western clothes.
In the end, I wound up wrapping the yukata left over right (seen from my side), like they do for a funeral. Under the circumstances, that seemed more than a little ironic.
Oh boy, she was certainly a handful.
My sister was─such a handful.
“Immortal, huh? Not a vampire─but a phoenix.”
I leaned my weight against the bunk railing and peered into Tsukihi’s sleeping face.
Right now, she looked completely human to me. It was hard to believe she was a fake.
“It’s not even funny─it’s such a hilarious punch line, but I don’t find it funny at all. And that’s coming from me, who’s been calling you and Karen fakes for years.”
But it was the truth. I had seen Tsukihi’s uncanny powers of healing with my own eyes─witnessed real “supercompensation.”
To be killed and not to die─immortality.
Of course, when it came to immortality, I had experience in that myself─it was only for two weeks, but I’d been turned into a creature that could be killed and still not die. Looking at it another way, if it wasn’t for that experience, I probably wouldn’t be buying, even now, that Tsukihi was an aberration. It would be as ludicrous to me as the idea of drawing fire from a well.
I’d have decided that my eyes had deceived me.
Vampire.
Phoenix.
However─there was one big difference between my immortality and Tsukihi’s. Mine had been acquired, whereas Tsukihi’s was congenital. She was born immortal.
While Shinobu clearly didn’t consider vampires inferior in rank as aberrations─according to her, in terms of immortality at least, the phoenix was far superior. The top of its class when it came to not dying.
She had a point. When you thought about it, there were plenty of ways to kill a vampire─sunlight, wooden stakes, garlic, crosses, and so on. Whereas, with the phoenix, no weak points immediately came to mind─everything Shinobu said while riding in the front basket of my bicycle made sense, but I still couldn’t recall any legends about anyone putting an end to a phoenix.
Of course, that may have just been ignorance on my part. In fact, it probably was─considering the fact that Kagenui and Ononoki had attacked. That onmyoji two-man cell must possess a strategy of some sort to exterminate Tsukihi Araragi, the Shidenotori.
Kindly adding new ventilation to the entrance to our house with Ononoki’s Unlimited Rulebook must have been the outcome of a trial run─a test of Tsukihi’s immortality and a sort of calling card.
Scarily enough, that had only been the beginning. They were experts on immortal aberrations, after all─they surely knew how to kill a phoenix.
“This is all happening so fast I don’t know which way to turn… Just this morning I was having fun, letting Karen carry me on her shoulders. And now… Tsk, I’m not even sure what I should be worrying about most,” I muttered, brushing Tsukihi’s chin lightly with my fingers.
I must have sounded pathetic.
It indeed was pathetic.
Not even sure what I should be worrying about? How dumb could I get?
What was there to worry about? There was no need for angst.
The Shidenotori. The lesser cuckoo.
A bird of omen─an aberration.
The flip side was that this Shidenotori was just an aberration─an aberration, with no clear will of its own. At the end of the day, aberrations were no more than phenomena.
Even when manifested, even when made real─they were phenomena.
Transitory.
The will and consciousness of Tsukihi Araragi belonged solely to Tsukihi Araragi─and every kernel of Tsukihi Araragi saw herself as human. Naturally, if she didn’t, she would be incomplete as a fake.
In other words.
Tsukihi Araragi had no idea she was an aberration.
She was born as the true Tsukihi Araragi.
Raised as the true Tsukihi Araragi.
She lived as the true Tsukihi Araragi.
She would die as the true Tsukihi Araragi.
A fake Tsukihi Araragi─who was every bit the same as the true Tsukihi Araragi.
“Hmph…”
So then, how was she different from the real thing?
Exactly the same in every single way but still a fake─did that mean like a synthetic diamond? Something with the exact atomic structure as the real t
hing but with a value as different as heaven and earth, night and day…
It was Hanekawa, of course, who taught me about the uncanny valley.
I think it was during art class─the idea is that when a depiction of a person too closely resembles the original, it can inspire extreme discomfort rather than appreciation.
For instance, the fear felt at the sight of a mannequin. Or at a robot that too closely resembles a human being.
When something not human takes the shape of something human, the closer it resembles the original, and the more exquisite the fake, the deeper the sense of primordial rejection in the viewer─those coordinates are what is known as the uncanny valley.
Man, there sure were a lot of these terms.
If Hanekawa only knew the things she knew─then as for me, I didn’t even know what I do know.
I didn’t even know─about my own sister.
After being attacked by Shinobu, thrust head first into hell, and transformed into a vampire─all I wanted was to become human again.
I risked my life for that. Offered my life up to that end.
But when push came to shove, I remained irresolute, returning instead to an imperfect half-vampire, half-human sham. In Tsukihi’s case, however, she didn’t even have an original human state she could revert to.
Tsukihi Araragi had always been in the aberration column. As a human, she was a sham from the outset.
“I thought I was supposed to be like a phoenix to the flame─but really it was you, Tsukihi.”
A fake family─an imitation sister. Without even being conscious of it, simply by existing, Tsukihi had been deceiving us all this time…
“Uhn…”
I kissed Tsukihi on her sleeping lips.
“What the heck are you doing?!”
Her eyes flew open.
Just like Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tale─immediately shoving the prince (i.e. me) off her as hard as she could and sending him flying from the top bunk was where the stories diverged.
Tsukihi bolted up with a start and began scrubbing at her lips frantically, nearly in tears.
“I-I can’t believe it! I-It’s a lie! My first kiss! The kiss I was saving for Rosokuzawa!”
“Heh…the same reaction as Karen.”
“The same… Wait! You mean…”
You did the same thing to Karen?!
With that anguished cry, Tsukihi glared down at me on the floor where she had tossed me. Her eyes were brimming with tears.
Drooping, tearful eyes were some crazy peepers.
“I knew things were funny lately between Karen and Mizudori, but I would have never imagined the reason why!”
“Who cares about that? The real surprise is that you and Karen reacted in the same way.”
“That’s what you care about?! What kind of big brother ruins his sisters’ love lives with stunts like this! Who cares if our reactions are the same─we’re sisters, of course we’d react the same!”
“Yeah…” Of course. Because─they were sisters. “Haha… Ahahaha!”
I couldn’t hold it in. I burst into full-throated laughter without meaning to…
Without missing a beat, Tsukihi snarled, “What’s so funny?! What kind of person steals his little sisters’ first kisses and then laughs about it?! A hamster is more principled than you! It wasn’t an accident either, was it?! You were clearly aiming straight for my lips! I bet you attacked Karen in her sleep, too!!”
“No, you’ve got it all wrong. I kissed you in your sleep, but I kissed Karen while she was too sick to fight back.”
“That’s terrible! Listen up, neighbors, we’ve got a real degenerate here! The kind of low-life miscreant who sexually abuses his own family!”
“Come on, don’t be like that. I’ll explain everything to Rosokuzawa and Mizudori.”
“Oh, thank goodness. Now I can rest easy. Once my brother explains things─I’ll never see my boyfriend again!”
“Hahahaha.”
“I thought I asked you what was so funny! Is our heartbreak so hilarious to you?! Does it just fill you with delight?!”
“No, I was actually just thinking about how I didn’t feel anything when I kissed you.”
“Huh?”
“It didn’t make me happy, or make my heart flutter in my chest, or anything like that.” Which was all I needed to know. I got off my ass and stood up slowly. “You really are my little sister.”
“Huh?”
Tsukihi stared at me suspiciously. She seemed to have no idea what I was talking about─the disturbance at our front door must have been completely wiped from her memory. I guess that made sense since her brain had been blast away, too─how convenient.
Better if she forgot.
Not just about the blond Lolita. The less she knew about those other two shady individuals, the better.
Or about who she really was.
A fake or real, she was still my little sister.
There was nothing─uncanny about it.
“Tsukihi, did I ever tell you there was a time when I wasn’t your big brother?”
“…? What do you mean?”
“There was a time when I wasn’t Karen’s big brother, either. For the first three years after I was born, I was an only child, and for the next year after that, it was just me and Karen. I had to wait four years to become your big brother.”
“Well─okay.”
Tsukihi seemed confused.
It was only to be expected.
Even under the best of circumstances, this wasn’t exactly the kind of conversation a person was used to waking up to─and after the wakeup Tsukihi had gotten, asking her to process everything I was saying was probably asking for the impossible.
I continued, regardless. I was only saying all of this because I wanted to get it off my chest.
“The thing, though, Tsukihi, is that Tsukihi Araragi was always my little sister, from the moment she was born. My little sister, and Karen’s too. There hasn’t been a single moment where that wasn’t true.”
“……”
“A kiss with me doesn’t count. That’s part of being brothers and sisters, all right? Just think of how many times I promised to marry you and Karen while we were still little kids.”
That would have been polygamy, of course, I noted.
Tsukihi pouted, unhappy that I’d stirred up ancient history. “What does way back then have to do with anything? You think you can distract me so easily?” Averting her eyes, she muttered, “You’re making me dagnabbit mad…”
If I recalled correctly─that meant she was only a bit mad.
Not that I cared.
“Hahaha,” I laughed again, telling Tsukihi she should get a little more sleep─and exited my sisters’ room.
She probably didn’t even know why she was asleep so early in the evening. Perhaps compelled by my peremptory tone, she nodded with uncharacteristic docility.
Next I returned to the front door.
I guess Karen had changed her mind while I was upstairs, because she was no longer sitting in the doorway. Instead, she was standing at stiff attention like some mythical gatekeeper.
She could be very capricious.
From the front gate to the front door, the whole entrance to our house was in shambles. And now there was some crazy person standing watch. What was happening around here?
What was up with our family?
“Hey, Karen. I’m going to head out for a little while.”
“Mrr! Brother or not, none shall pass!”
“You’re turning into a weird character, you know…”
“If you want to defeat this, you’re gonna have to pass through me first!”
“I can pass through you?”
What did that mean exactly? What would count as passing through her?
Looks like the words got switched around.
Besides, if I defeated the doorway, our house wouldn’t be half-wrecked anymore, it could totally collapse.
“Ah, forg
ive me, forgive me. This is a great time to try out that new gag you taught me the other day,” Karen said as if she’d just remembered something.