by Nisioisin
Was it an authentic dad joke?!
He’d spoken without so much as a smile─and didn’t seem to be getting a kick out of my bafflement… What was I supposed to do? There was nothing I could do, was there?
“I think you’ve heard already, Araragi─but I’m like the very definition of a workaholic. I barely get to spend any time with Hitagi.”
“Right…”
Hitagi, he said.
Naturally, he called his daughter by her first name.
He made it sound so natural, too.
I guess that’s what it meant to be someone’s parent.
“So this might not sound very convincing coming from me─but it’s been a long time since I last saw Hitagi having this much fun.”
“……”
Did he understand what he was saying? He was describing his daughter tormenting a classmate as “having fun”?
Ah, er, Daddy Senjogahara tread water at that point. It seemed that he wasn’t as eloquent as his daughter─if anything, he was a fairly poor speaker.
“You’ve already heard about Hitagi’s mother, yes?”
“…Yes.”
“Which means you’ve heard about her illness, too.”
Hitagi Senjogahara’s illness─he called it an illness, but he was referring to that aberration.
The crab.
The crab─aberration.
The illness had already been cured, thanks to Oshino’s help─but it wasn’t so minor an issue that getting cured meant it was over and done with.
Especially from her family’s point of view, I assumed.
“It’s not the only reason─I’m in no small part to blame for focusing on nothing but my work…but Hitagi really closed off her heart.”
“Yes─I know that.”
I knew that well.
We’d been in the same class throughout high school.
My first and second years.
The first month of my third year.
I knew very well─just how closed-off her heart had been.
“I don’t have any excuse for it─parents might be responsible for what their children do, but children don’t bear any responsibility for what their parents do.”
“Responsibility…”
“When you close off your heart, there are only two categories of people to whom you speak your mind: people you don’t mind being hated by─and people who won’t hate you.”
“……”
When I first came in contact with Senjogahara and she brandished that stapler at me─she had to have seen me as belonging to the former of the two. She threw off her mask of the cloistered princess and revealed her true and terrifying nature to me only because I was an enemy who had learned her secret.
But now?
Did she really put that much trust in me? Even if she did, was I qualified to receive it?
“There’s everything that happened with her mother. And─the illness, too,” Daddy Senjogahara said as though to himself. “She’s someone whose nature it is to love─she just doesn’t know how.”
He wasn’t saying anything outlandish when I thought about it, but I felt like I’d been treated to an incredibly poetic remark thanks to his cool voice.
“Araragi, I think you’re handling someone like Hitagi very well.”
“You think so?”
I did feel hurt each time, okay?
Like I was getting sliced up, okay?
If my figurative heart could bleed, I’d have died long ago of massive blood loss.
“She’s always like that,” I said. “I’m even wondering if it was just to find ways to put me down that she made you accompany us, Dad.”
Oops.
I accidentally called him Dad…
W-Was I going to hear it now? That legendary phrase, “You’ll never call me Dad”?!
“I doubt it.”
He didn’t say it.
A generational thing?
“Well, it might be her way of spiting me,” he suggested instead.
“Spiting?”
…Huh?
Oh─right.
His daughter flirting with a boy he’d never met before in the backseat of his own car couldn’t have been pleasant─obviously. That was the exact reason why I couldn’t take it anymore, but had she been trying to harass her father that way, more so than me?
“No,” I disagreed, “I don’t think that’s true… Even, uh, Miss Hitagi, wouldn’t do that to you…”
“Someone she doesn’t mind being hated by─I’m one of them,” Daddy Senjogahara said. “Whether or not she succeeds, I’m still her father. She did see me in a lot of ugly arguments with her mother… By now, Hitagi probably can’t recall her parents ever getting along.”
“Ah─”
An uncontested divorce.
A single-father home.
Of course.
All this time, he never said “wife,” and every time─it was “Hitagi’s mother.”
“So yes─spite. I could practically hear Hitagi saying that she’d never become like us. In fact─I think she’s right. You two honestly looked like you were having fun.”
“Well… I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t having any fun at all, but…I don’t know, I’m used to her acting like a total nutjob.”
Wait.
Was that an impolite thing to say?
What if he took it at face value and heard it as an insult? I thought I was almost praising her, but friendly trash talk could be interpreted differently on the receiving end, depending on the occasion… Hmm, I didn’t know where to draw the line.
Hold on, why all this solo wrestling?
Was I being, like, incredibly lame?
“She’s someone whose nature it is to love,” Daddy Senjogahara said, “so she leans in and gives all of herself over when she finds the right person. To love is to demand. I know this is my own daughter I’m talking about here, but I think she’s too heavy of a burden to have as a girlfriend.”
“Too heavy─of a burden.”
That, there.
How ironic.
“Though I couldn’t be any more ashamed of the fact, I wasn’t able to support Hitagi. That’s why she stopped depending on me a long time ago.”
“………”
“I forget when, but she went on a rampage swinging a stapler… I think that was the last time.”
She’d even done that to her father.
Was that domestic violence or…
“But the other day─for the first time in a while, a long, long while, Hitagi asked me for something. She said─she wanted to help me with my work,” Daddy Senjogahara said in quiet contemplation. “And now, this. Both times─you’ve been involved. I think you’re something special if you’re able to cause a change in that girl.”
“…I’m flattered that you think so highly of me, but…I think it’s all just coincidence,” I said at last, unable to take it any longer. It felt like I was being praised due to a misunderstanding. I hadn’t earned it, and to be honest, I couldn’t call that a good feeling.
“Really? I heard you played a part in curing Hitagi’s illness, too.”
“Yes, and again─it could’ve been anyone but just so happened to be me… Anyone else could have taken my place, and Miss Hitagi just got saved on her own to begin with. I ended up being present for it, that’s all.”
“That’s enough. The simple fact that you were there when she needed you to be is enough. There’s nothing more you had to do to earn her gratitude.”
And then, for the first time.
I thought I saw Daddy Senjogahara smile.
“I wasn’t able to carry out my duties as a father─I still don’t think of myself as caring for my daughter. That girl is all but living on her own. I wasn’t able to be there when she needed me. My hands are full trying to pay off the debts Hitagi’s mother created for us, to be honest─even this jeep is borrowed from a friend. But despite all my failings as a father, I’m still proud of my daughter. I trust her eye f
or people. And if you’re the one she brought, you must be the right one.”
“……”
“Take good care of my daughter from now on─Araragi.”
“…Dad.”
Now this─had become a strange conversation.
Still, I thought.
She probably wasn’t trying to spite him.
If anything, Senjogahara might have asked her father to accompany her on her first date because she wanted to show him that she was okay now.
It wasn’t to tell him she’d never become like her parents─
Rather, he didn’t need to worry about her anymore.
I felt like I could hear her saying it.
…But it wasn’t for me to tell him. Not sticking your nose in other people’s family environment─there was that common sense, but more so, I felt like there was no space between Senjogahara and Daddy Senjogahara for me.
So it wasn’t for me to tell him.
That he wasn’t someone she didn’t mind being hated by, no matter how I thought about it─but someone who wouldn’t hate her.
I couldn’t possibly tell him.
There was only one person in the world who should say those words.
“By the way,” I asked, “where are we?”
“If Hitagi’s keeping it a secret, then I can’t tell you. But─we’re in a place…that the three of us visited a few times.”
“The three of you?”
Meaning…Senjogahara, Daddy Senjogahara, and─
Mommy Senjogahara?
“You know, picking this spot for her first date makes me think she’s quite─whoops. It looks like the princess has returned.”
What a dad-like way to put it.
That would have been my retort if I were talking to someone my own age, but I exercised restraint.
Anyway, he said Senjogahara had returned…and indeed, through the window I could see her taking her time walking toward us. Ah, until just a moment ago I’d been meaning to gripe at her when I saw her next for abandoning me to my predicament, but now it was as if an angel were descending from heaven to rescue me.
What a con.
“Thanks for waiting, Araragi,” she said in an unconcerned and flat voice after opening the back door. She then turned straight to the driver’s seat. “Dad, could you give us two youngsters some time alone? Thank you for bringing us here. We should be back in about two hours, so please, do get back to your job.”
“Sure,” Daddy Senjogahara consented and flashed his cell phone. I’d imagined it to be the case, but he’d agreed to interrupt his busy work schedule to drive us around…and he was getting back to work on his phone.
Hm.
Which meant…his chaperoning ended here?
“Okay, Araragi.”
Senjogahara extended her hand toward me. I took it, with fear and trepidation in my heart. I exited the car as if Senjogahara were pulling me out of it.
She let go of my hand a second later.
She really was chaste.
“I appreciate it, Dad.”
Finally thanking him, she closed the jeep’s door.
Well─not that it meant anything, but…at last we were on a normal date. I felt a little awkward about leaving Daddy Senjogahara in the parking lot when he’d taken us all the way into the mountains on a weekday night, but he seemed to have work he could do, so I let it slide.
“…So, where exactly are we, Miss Hita─”
Oops.
I could drop that now.
I did feel a little reluctant to let it go.
“Senjogahara. Where are we?”
“Hmph.” Senjogahara tossed her head to the side. “Have I ever once answered any of your questions?”
“……”
Um.
Yes, I think so?
Senjogahara’s attitude toward me was so brusque that I began to think that maybe I was one of those people she didn’t mind being hated by.
“Asking me a question,” she spat. “I think you’re getting a big head.”
“I’m not even allowed to ask you questions…”
“I don’t remember allowing you to so much as kneel.”
“I don’t want to kneel!”
“You mean you’d rather kowtow?”
“Do you have some kind of issue with me standing?!”
I could quip to my heart’s content now that her father was out of the picture.
Koyomi Araragi was firing on all cylinders.
I followed behind Senjogahara as she briskly forged ahead. We may have been in the mountains, but the scattered streetlights in the parking lot meant it wasn’t what you’d call dark… Wait, do you still call them streetlights even in the mountains? The inconsequential thought ran through my head.
“I’m glad the weather turned out to be nice, though.”
“The weather? Is that important?”
“Yes.”
“Huh… Well, they do call me Mister Sunshine.”
“Sorry? Mister Dumb Swine?”
“There’s no way you could have misheard me like that!”
“Look,” Senjogahara said around the time we left the parking lot. “Do you see the sign over there? Try reading it.”
“Hrm?”
Ordering me in such an offhanded, almost sulking way… But I did as Senjogahara said and looked where she was pointing. There was indeed a sign there, and written on it were the words “Home of the Stars Observatory.”
An observatory?
In other words…
“Hiya!”
Senjogahara used her right hand to stop my head when I reflexively looked up toward the sky. Grabbing my head from above, she kept it in place.
“What are you doing?” I complained.
It was pretty humiliating to have that done to me at my age…
“You can’t look up yet, Araragi. You can’t look ahead, either. Just look down at your feet as you walk. This is an order.”
“I can’t follow such an unreasonable order!”
“Well, if you won’t, I’ll start screaming and crying and run back to that jeep where my dad is waiting.”
“……”
“Or maybe Kanbaru will meet a bit of an unfortunate fate tomorrow. Which do you like better? A high school girl cosplaying a kindergartener, and taking classes─or a high school girl with a sign that says ‘I’m being punished because I’m a very slutty girl’ hanging from her neck, and standing out in the hall?”
“…I’ll do it.”
You hear about using the carrot and the stick in negotiations, but she was appallingly all stick… Lowering my head instead, I gazed down at my feet. Hitagi Senjogahara didn’t let go of my head, though. With her hand still in place, she said, “Shall we?” and began walking again.
Oh god.
I was like a dog being walked.
“…You really are s-scary, you know that?”
“What’s the extra ‘s’ for? But think of it as part of my brand of hospitality. I want you to feel a bit scarred.”
“And you added an extra ‘r’! Listen to you, you say the meanest things! Treat me some with heart!”
“I sure can, with heat.”
“That’s where you got the spare ‘r’ from?!”
“Oh, stop whining. It’s only polite to add a little espresso to any conversation.”
“Too bitter for a high school student’s palate…”
Of course, the right word was esprit.
It grew dark as soon as we left the parking lot.
Even so─we were by a mountaintop observatory, and I could tell even without looking up that it wasn’t pitch-black, thanks to the starlight. We lived in a fairly remote town, which meant we could at least spot the constellations in the sky at night, but it was probably no match to out here.
Oh.
That’s when I finally remembered.
“You know, about Kanbaru.”