by Nisioisin
I still had my thoughts.
“A Sawarineko. A Hindering Cat.”
Oshino said the words─as we climbed the stairs.
A cat.
A mammal belonging to Carnivora Felidae.
Notable for their flexible bodies, sharp teeth, coarse tongues, and claws─they say cats hide their claws, and there’s a reason for that, which is the sheaths they store them in. The soft pads on their paws that humans love to touch play a practical role, too, muffling the sound of their footsteps when hunting prey.
“Also known as a Silver Cat. They’re also called Dancing Cats, but not often, due to another creature with the same name. Yes, Sawarineko would be the customary name. A hindrance that is a cat, or a Hindering Cat. Sawarineko. A cat with no tail─a cat that leaves no trail. An aberration. It’s said that cats entered Japan in the Nara period, during the eighth century. It’s well-known they were once used to make shamisen guitars, but─yes, cats are now entirely pets, even more so than dogs. They don’t catch mice. You never hear of police cats or seeing-eye cats. If we were to discuss Japanese legends involving cats, we would have to mention the three famed tales of bakeneko, Changing Cats… Ha hah, well, you may be one thing, Araragi, but I’m sure this all goes without saying for you, missy class prez?”
“Hey, Oshino. Stop saying ‘You’re one thing, Araragi’ like it’s some sort of refrain whenever you talk about Hanekawa. It’s actually starting to get to me.”
“Well, it’s not like I’m doing it intentionally, but the truth tends to slip out of people’s mouths.”
“You’d better watch out next time you’re out walking at night.”
“No need to worry, I’m nocturnal. Ha hah, and I guess cats are, too,” he noted as we reached the fourth floor.
Hanekawa spoke less and less as we walked up the stairs. And just like Oshino said, Hanekawa shouldn’t need any explanations about this aberration─the exact same words had come out of his mouth during Golden Week.
But─were those memories still there?
It might have been Oshino’s way of checking. Mèmè Oshino was a man who never seemed to be thinking anything but usually was.
We entered the classroom.
First Oshino, then me, then Hanekawa─
Then Oshino went back to close the door.
The classroom was reasonably bright. It was the afternoon, and sunlight was coming in through the window (though I hesitate to call that frame with a couple of shards of glass sticking out of it a window).
Hmm…Shinobu wasn’t around.
It seemed like she wasn’t on the fourth floor very much these days… Oh, and I was forgetting because of the matter with Hanekawa, but I needed to bring up what Hachikuji had told me about Shinobu yesterday…if Hachikuji indeed saw what she thought she saw─
And then.
I turned around at almost the exact moment Oshino took Hanekawa by surprise and tapped her through her hat from above.
It was only a tap.
And yet─Hanekawa crumpled.
She fell to her knees and slumped over, her face to the floor.
Like her strings had been cut.
“H-Hanekawa?!”
“Don’t get so worked up, Araragi. You’re spirited today. Something good happen to you? Like you got to see missy class president’s cat ears, or maybe her in her pajamas?”
“No tacking on actual guesses to your catchphrase! She’ll get the wrong idea!”
“There’s nothing wrong about it. In fact, you ought to be thanking me for ignoring for all this time how missy class prez was on the back seat of your bike and holding her arms around you.” He was looking down at Hanekawa as she lay collapsed on the floor. “And it seems to me that you’ve already gotten her story─look at you, you’re learning. Almost like that experience with missies tsundere, lost girl, sapphy, and bashful wasn’t all wasted on you. And missy bashful’s case the day before yesterday seems to have made an especially big impact on you.”
So Sengoku had become Bashful.
That didn’t seem like enough to describe her, but…
Whatever, there was no need to correct him.
There was something more pressing.
I asked Oshino, “Anyway…what’d you do to Hanekawa?”
“Like I said, thanks to the lessons you’ve learned, there was barely anything I had to do. I skipped a few steps.”
“You did what?”
What did that mean?
Could he do that?
“Though I’d call it heterodox. There’s no time─that’s what you said, right? And in this case…as I think you know well enough, it’d be much quicker to have a direct discussion than to go through missy class prez.”
“…So you want to go direct.”
“We can grill her all we want, but no matter how much of her memory has returned, she still doesn’t remember─we won’t get anywhere. I understand that you might feel upset because I hit a girl on the head when she wasn’t expecting it, but this wouldn’t have worked without the element of surprise. Okay? Your forgiveness, please.”
But it was a tough finding an opening, this girl never lets her guard down─Oshino said.
Well, that’s Hanekawa for you.
So Oshino had been studying Hanekawa and searching for his “opening” this whole time?
“You said a direct discussion…”
“I don’t think there’s any need to explain. Let’s do a good job here, Araragi. We’re going to be facing off against someone as smart as missy class president. If we aren’t prepared ourselves─well, even I was taken by surprise over Golden Week. But we’re not going to make that mistake again. And speak of the devil, she’s here already, Araragi. The lust-besotted cat has made her appearance.”
Then, when I looked at her.
Even as Hanekawa lay there facedown on the floor, her long hair, normally tied in braids─began to change color.
It changed color.
No─it lost color.
It went from a solid black to a near-white silver.
As if all life were being drained from it.
“………”
No words.
I had somewhat of a feeling this would happen from the moment we went to visit Oshino, and I thought I’d prepared myself to a degree─even so, I couldn’t hide how shaken I felt now that I’d been reunited with her so suddenly.
I really was shallow.
Shallow and weak.
I was going to be there for Hanekawa when she needed me, no matter what─wasn’t that the promise I’d made?
Then, lunging─
She leapt to her feet.
The hat flew from her head from the momentum.
It flew away─exposing it.
Her white hair, cut in straight bangs.
The pair of white cat ears protruding from her little head.
“Myaa-hahaha!”
And then─
She narrowed her eyes like a cat and flashed me a catlike grin.
“What a surpurrrise. I never thought we’d meet again, human─and I see ya still haven’t learned, ya bad little kitty. Getting aroused by my myaster’s breasts, you’re so purrsistent. Trying to get yourself eaten alive?”
“………”
A single outburst that succinctly conveyed her character traits and positioning─
It marked the second coming of Black Hanekawa.
006
It feels like there’s no need to go into a flashback after Black Hanekawa gave such a beginner-friendly explanation of herself, but allow me to invite you to the first day of Golden Week anyway, April twenty-ninth, one morning about a month and a half earlier, in part to help set the stage. Back in the days when my hair was still at a vague and uneasy length as I grew it out to hide the bite marks on my neck.
April twenty-ninth.
Morning.
As someone who hates any day that isn’t a regular weekday, I left the house and was wandering around as usual on this holiday, ridi
ng around town on my mountain bike, still going strong in those days before Kanbaru destroyed it. Unlike Mother’s Day, it felt as if I had a clear destination, but I don’t remember very well. And even if I did, the fact that I’ve forgotten it means it couldn’t have been that important.
No.
It meant that what ended up happening while I was on the road─was just too big.
Personally speaking.
So big that everything else ceased to matter.
I just so happened─to come across Hanekawa.
I first got to know Hanekawa over spring break─as I’ve said many times up until now, it was then she’d saved me.
Both physically and mentally.
I was more grateful for the latter at the time, as I was immortal─but in any case, she was my savior.
She’d saved my life, and she’d saved my mind.
She’d been there when I needed her to be.
That’s what I think.
I really do.
About as much as I’m glad that I happened to be standing on the landing that day Senjogahara slipped on the stairs─I’m really, truly glad that it was her, Tsubasa Hanekawa, there at that moment, and not anyone else.
Anyone else and I’d never have been saved.
I’d have never been released from hell.
Hanekawa and I ended up in the same class after spring break. She forced me into the position of class vice president. She put me under her management because of her mistaken assumption that I was a delinquent, and that was her way of rehabilitating me. There isn’t any way she was planning to help me with my studies at the time─and normally I’d have shoved her away and told her to get her nose out of my business. There’s nothing I dislike more than people who seem to impose on me because of a big, fat misunderstanding.
But I accepted it.
Because she was Hanekawa.
So after that─over the month of April─Hanekawa and I, as class president, as class vice president, and as class president and vice president, began to get along to some degree as we made arrangements for school events and class matters. I hadn’t done anything that felt like it in a while, and I found myself getting uncharacteristically into it─so, of course.
If I saw Hanekawa walking around in her uniform on a holiday, I’d say hello to her at least.
It was the normal thing to do.
But I flinched for a moment.
A large white piece of gauze concealed what felt like half of Tsubasa Hanekawa’s face as she walked there on the street.
An injury.
Everyone gets injured.
But an injury to the face, as well as an injury of that scale─that was a rare sight. There was also the fact that the gauze was over the left side of her face─there seemed to be a story behind it.
Maybe I was overthinking things.
It could have been that my violent spring break was driving me to brutal thoughts. Most people are right-handed, and if they were to hit someone else in the face, their fist would land on the left side of that face─those kinds of thoughts. But even if I didn’t think of it like that─how could you manage to hurt just that part of your body and nowhere else? Hanekawa, a third-year, couldn’t have decided to throw herself into some after-school sport the day before─
But as I was thinking.
Hanekawa noticed me back.
“Oh,” she said, approaching me. Her attitude was as friendly as ever. “Howdy, Araragi.”
“…Howdy.”
“Hm? Oh.”
And then.
Hanekawa looked as though she’d failed at something.
Now that I look back at it, it seems unbelievable─for any regular person, maybe it couldn’t be helped, but you could call it a major blunder from Hanekawa, the master tactician.
Or no, maybe you could call it a success.
And if you did, a major success.
After all, Hanekawa would have been trying, trying so hard, trying so desperately hard not to think of the gauze on her face─and so.
Calling out to me like nothing was amiss, without worrying about the gauze, like it was another day, was a major success worthy of the “real” Hanekawa.
But, of course.
It was a failure when you looked at the big picture.
I tried to gloss over this─I pretended not to notice Hanekawa’s failure and want to say I asked her about something stupid. The same kind of stupid that I treated her to every time we’d met over the past month. Hanekawa always went along with it.
But.
She just couldn’t that day.
“You’re so kind, Araragi,” she said. “You’re such a good and kind person.”
That’s right.
I was told this─back on that day, too.
Hanekawa had.
“Let’s walk. Just for a little,” she invited me.
I had no reason to say no.
Well, I wouldn’t have ever said no. Hanekawa had never invited me to do something like that before─I’d say she must have wanted company.
She couldn’t bear being alone.
She didn’t invite me because it was me, it could have been anyone.
It just so happened to be me there at that moment.
I probably wasn’t the best person for the situation from Hanekawa’s point of view─I doubt she’d have chosen me had she been the slightest bit calm. Unlike Mayoi Hachikuji, whom I’d come to meet later, I wasn’t what anyone would describe as a good listener. I’m too quick to become emotionally involved, I can’t keep my mouth shut when I’m being talked to, and I interrupt other people’s stories all the time.
But Hanekawa was a good enough talker to make up for all of that and more, and was able to take it without much issue. Pushing my bike, I walked alongside her and listened to her talk.
First off.
Tsubasa Hanekawa doesn’t have a father.
Yes, biologically speaking she’d have to have a father, but socially speaking she was born to a mother who was entirely on her own. Hanekawa still didn’t know her father’s whereabouts. She had no interest in trying to find out more, but even if she did, she most likely would have arrived at a guess at best, nothing with any degree of certainty.
Tsubasa.
The name she’d been given─“wing.”
The character “Tsubasa” has connotations of covering and aiding, as in a bird using its wing to protect its eggs or chicks─
Taking under one’s wing.
That thought didn’t come to me at the time, though.
But─shouldn’t the person who named her have been the one aiding her at that moment? What could her mother have possibly been thinking when she gave her that name?
What kind of task had she given her daughter?
She apparently had a different last name at the time.
I didn’t ask what it was.
Well, it was more like I couldn’t ask.
Hanekawa tried to tell me, but I stopped her. Yes, she understood right away and continued her story.
Hanekawa’s mother had her, then married right afterwards.
She was getting married for the first time.
In any case─it sounds like she needed the money. Raising Hanekawa on her own must have been tough. This all happened nearly twenty years ago, so the social welfare system must not have been as robust then, either. Even I could imagine how tough it would have been for a single mother and a single child to live on their own without anyone’s help.
A mother.
A father.
But, right after the marriage─her mother committed suicide.
She’d married for money, and the marriage had failed in no time at all. It sounds like she was in a delicate emotional state from the beginning. Like she was the kind of person who found living with others to be agonizing─turning Hanekawa into a single child with a single mother into a single child with a single father.
A father she wasn’t related to by blood.
But still, her fat
her.
This father’s last name─wasn’t Hanekawa, either.