“Ahh, right, right. Happy, happy… You really are joking, right?”
“That sounds like the lead up to Nooo, do you hate me that much? and that kind of stuff, huh?”
When the possibility it wasn’t merely a joke finally surfaced, Subaru wordlessly reflected on that possibility. Taking in the insecure, objecting gaze, Kenichi laughed keh, keh as he nodded.
Subaru and his father were walking on a footpath a short distance from home.
Subaru lived in a place with a mildly famous riverside doubling as a spring tourist spot, with cherry trees growing along the embankment. It was currently the wrong season for cherry blossoms, so the embankment was in full leaf instead. Subaru glanced at the trees as he walked with his father around town.
“Ken, what are you doing here in the morning? It’s a late hour for starting pachinko, don’t ya know.”
“Oh my, Kenichi. By any chance, were you seduced by the aroma of curry in the daytime?”
“Oh wow, you’re here, Ken? Now that’s really funny. Isn’t this bad for you? It’s funny, though…”
The bright, sunny, average day made the time fly as father and son walked around town that morning, with numerous voices tossed their way.
—No, the voices were not being tossed their way. They were limited to the father, Kenichi, alone.
Regardless of whether male or female, young or old, there seemed no limit to the people who knew Kenichi’s face. That went for the store owner in the shopping district, the housewife taking out the garbage, the senior high school girl with the ganguro look that was rarely seen nowadays, et cetera, et cetera—
“Kenny, it’s been a while. You still hanging out with Ikeda, hmm?”
“That Ikeda guy? He won big at horse racing and used the money to retire and vanish ten years ago. He still sends New Year’s cards, summer greeting cards, winter greeting cards, Christmas cards, and cards on his mom and pop’s birthdays, though.”
“I wouldn’t call someone in touch that much ‘vanished’…”
When Subaru inadvertently interrupted with a quip, he quickly covered his mouth. Overhearing his murmur, Kenichi and the solidly built old man he was speaking to looked over. The other man was wearing green overalls and a tag with the name of the riverside on it, so he seemed like a caretaker of some sort.
The old man spurring the conversation must have gone way back with Kenichi, his eyes going round as he looked at Subaru.
“Kenny, it’s not often you bring someone along with you… Could that child be…?”
“Ahh, yeah. This is my son. Nah, I should correct that, my beloved son!”
“Ohh, I knew it! Somehow, he seemed like the spitting image of you when you were… Ahhh, maybe not so much. He takes after his mother, perhaps?”
“Errr, ha-ha… I get that a lot. Especially about the look of my eyes.”
Amid the very average construction of his face, he’d inherited Nahoko’s extremely characteristic three-whites-eyes look. In terms of outward appearance, about the only thing Subaru had inherited from Kenichi was the somewhat limited length of his legs.
When Subaru gave that noncommittal reply, the old man eagerly nodded.
“I am surprised, though. That Kenny got old enough to have a boy this big? Guess I’m getting old, too. If Ikeda was drowning, I don’t have any strength in my body left to go swim and save him.”
“Well, I don’t think even that Ikeda guy is enough of a kid to go play in the river and drown…”
“I certainly hope not. Ikeda and your father just won’t settle down like they should at their ages… Did you know they both used to be brats who walked around town kicking up all kinds of ruckus?”
“…Well, kinda.”
Subaru’s reply was on the awkward side. Receiving this, the old man knotted his eyes with a somewhat suspicious look. However, the next moment, the creases of his brow deepened further.
“Come to think of it…today’s Monday, isn’t it? What are you doing with your father at this hour?”
“—!!”
The question he did not want asked, the words he did not want to hear, made Subaru’s heart strongly jump.
Next came the sharp, stabbing pain like that which had visited him in his own bedroom. Spontaneously, Subaru clutched his painful head and closed his eyes, wringing out “I’m sorry” as he turned his back upon the old man.
“Ah, hey, Subaru! Sorry, pops. I’ll come again when we can take our time!”
“R-right… It seems I shouldn’t have said that. Apologize to the lad for me, would you?”
The conversation exchanged behind him did not enter his ears.
At any rate, Subaru tried to run from the pain threatening to crack his skull, seeking a place where he could get the pounding heartbeats in his chest to calm down, fleeing from the embankment with rapid steps.
“It’s nothing you need to apologize for—and the rest is his problem.”
While he fled, he never heard Kenichi utter those words behind his back.
4
“Here, a cold, tasty cola packed with loooove. If you give it a nice, good shake, it’s even tastier… Well, I’d like to say that, but this doesn’t seem to be the time.”
“…No one has time to pack anything with love on the way back from the vending machine.”
Accepting it, Subaru felt the coolness of the can on his palm as he put his fingers on the pull tab. Then, after a moment’s thought, he pointed the can’s lid toward no one in particular before putting strength into his fingers—The instant he opened the lid, the contents spewed out with incredible force, reducing its contents by about a third. And, witnessing this—
“Tch.”
“Don’t click your tongue! I’ve seen this movie before! Aww, my hand’s all sticky now!”
Shaking off his cola-bathed hand, Subaru clicked his own tongue at Kenichi’s childish prank. Then he put the lightened can to his lips, swallowing down and healing his parched throat in one sitting.
He savored the carbonic acid bouncing down his throat, wishing it would wash away even the discomfort welling in his chest.
“So, you’ve calmed down?”
“…A little.”
Replying with a sober look, Subaru sank his weight into the bench upon which his butt rested. As his son proceeded to heave a deep sigh, Kenichi, standing right in front of him, opened his can of cola and brought it to his own lips.
After fleeing from the footpath, father and son had ended up at a desolate public park for children. Naturally, it being morning on an ordinary weekday, there was no sign of anyone in the park, which liberated Subaru from the strange feeling of being backed into a corner.
Even then, the headache was asserting itself, but it had abated to the point that he could converse. He wanted to change the subject, and soon.
“…Incidentally, it took you a bit of time just to go to the vending machine and back. Did something happen?”
“Mm? Ah, nothing big. I just met a high school girl skipping class on my way to the machine. I lectured her about going to school, treated her to juice, traded e-mail addresses, and sent her on her way.”
“There’s no way I’m believing you got to trading e-mail addresses in that short a time!”
He had no words for the notion his father had gotten an e-mail address from a high school girl who was probably just going to the ladies’ room for a few. “Is that so?” Kenichi asked Subaru, and he inclined his head as he said, “It doesn’t take that much for a girl to give out her e-mail at least. My cell phone’s address book has almost three whole pages full of high school girls’ addresses I’ve picked up on the way.”
“Even if I went to a government office or something I’d probably only get two. Daddy, you’re not gonna get caught for some weird offense, are you?”
“Moron. I’m not interested in doing anything indecent with high school girls. They’re children. The destination for my love was set long ago. My passions are for my family alone.”
“Categorizing it like that makes it sound like I’m included, you know?!”
“…Well, I do love you. Like a puppy!”
“Like hell you do! Which one’s the moron here?!”
Kenichi responded to Subaru’s angry voice with a vulgar, cackling laugh.
That laughing voice left no refined echo upon the ear. And yet, for some reason, people didn’t find it unpleasant at all. All Kenichi’s actions were like that.
Everything he did was over the top, deprived of common sense, excessively theatrical, completely the sort of thing other people shunned you for, but for some reason, everyone took it in a really friendly way.
It was just that, merely by their going outside for a walk, the decisive difference between Subaru and his father was driven home to a distinctly painful extent.
“—!”
“Looks like you’re in pretty bad shape across the board. That being the case, Subaru, how ’bout I carry you home on my back?”
“I don’t need that, and I don’t need to go back… Even if I go back, it’ll be together and all.”
If anything, his mother, Nahoko, was home, so Subaru’s condition would probably get even worse.
He was coming to understand the cause of the pain arriving without cease. If his guess was right, the pain began to assert itself whenever he was in the same place as Kenichi and Nahoko, his father and mother. In other words—
“So what, even my body decided to finally chew me out?”
Did it mean his body had finally begun to cry out at the sense of guilt racking him from continuing to flee?
He spent day after day holding his knees inside his room as the hands of the clock reproached him for remaining inside his shell. He had an unpleasant feeling, almost as if someone were railing at him over his procrastination in a loud voice from inside his own head.
I dunno who you are or from where, but what the hell do you know about me?
“Hey now, Subaru. Let’s change the topic—you have a girl you like, or something?”
With Subaru cowed into silence, Kenichi repeated the question Subaru had blown off once before.
The flippant way he asked it wasn’t funny. The first time, Subaru had replied with a strained smile, but now that the question came a second time, it really got on his nerves for some reason.
With the aid of the unceasing headache, he felt like replying to the question with extremely crude language—
“Subaru.”
“Huh?”
Lifting his face, he tried to locate where the whisper in his ear had come from. But, however much his gaze wandered, he could not locate the speaker. The only person in the park besides Subaru was Kenichi.
Subaru’s making that sudden, idiotic-sounding voice put a suspicious look over that very same Kenichi, who said, “What’s wrong? You look like a guy just about to blurt out the name of the pretty girl he’s not supposed to have.”
“I really do look like that, so I can’t say anything about it…but did someone call out my name just now? Daddy, don’t tell me you’ve been practicing mimicking a pretty girl’s tone of voice?”
“Daddy has a variety of little tricks, but that one is not among them. OK, gimme about a month.”
“I wasn’t giving you suggestions! Really, the heck was that?”
The voice had a beautiful echo to it that resonated in the bottom of his heart like a silver bell. It was exceedingly gentle, its reverberation making his chest grow warm, and had such power to it that it made Subaru forget the headache that continued intermittently.
Subaru didn’t know whence it had come, but the voice had saved Subaru.
“So, back to the earlier question. Have a girl you like?”
“…What is it with all this? Even if I had one, why ask her name? Not like you’d know who she is, Daddy.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t know that. For all you know, maybe I have the e-mail address of the girl you like on my cell phone?”
“Even a century-long love grows cold.”
To that blunt retort, Kenichi went “Whaaat?” raining “Boos” upon him in dismay. Glancing at the behavior wholly inappropriate for a man his age, Subaru drank the rest of his cola in one gulp, leaving the can dry.
“You don’t need to put it off anymore. You can come right out and say it: ‘Why aren’t you going to school?’ and whatever.”
“And here I was actually being considerate to someone for once. You’re a son who can’t read the mood— Well, it’s not like you’re wrong, that actually is what I wanted to talk to you about…”
“…I think I’m doing a bad thing to both of you.”
“You don’t really need to think about that. I had a vague idea you had something on your mind, and even if you weren’t thinking, well, I can overlook a decent amount of that, so no need to dwell.”
With Subaru airing his side of things a little, Kenichi drank his own pop can dry and sat on the bench. A gentle, refreshing breeze blew between father and son as they sat side by side.
The two proceeded to stare ahead, neither looking at the other’s face as they wove their words.
“This might not exactly be the prevailing view, but I don’t think school is everything. I mean, you won’t hear that out of my mouth when I didn’t take school seriously, either. I even skipped my graduation ceremony.”
“And that’s why, when you got your high school graduation certificate, you were with a woman two grades below you when she was graduating. My ears are octopuses from hearing that one over and over.”
“Well I’ll make you listen to it till they turn to squids. Since this is me talking, if you don’t want to go to school, I don’t really think you need to. Now that I’m my age, I do think Sure would’ve been nice if I’d taken school seriously, but that’s not something you’re gonna get for a while.”
Kenichi seemed to be gazing somewhere far off as Subaru stared at the side of his face, internally cursing his father for being underhanded. Even though he normally played dumb and showed only his flippant side, he’d set the clownish behavior aside in a place like that.
It wasn’t fair, not fair at all, enough to make him feel like crying.
“These days, human beings seem to live till they’re eighty years old. Isn’t that great? If you have eighty years, you can get one or two of ’em back while you’re still young. Luckily, I earn some pretty decent money. Like this,” went Kenichi, tracing a circle with his finger as he laughed with a vulgar look. Subaru didn’t even make a sound to Kenichi to show he was keeping up, but his father nodded several times, showing no sign of caring.
“Going through life, you bump into questions without answers that leap out at ya. In my case, I move around and go looking for ’em, but for all I know, maybe you can find answers to some questions rolling around in your room. If you’re mulling something over, I ain’t gonna complain. If you give up, though…then I might give ya a piece of my mind.”
“…Why?”
“Hm?”
“Why did you feel like talking about this all of a sudden today? It’s not like it’s some kind of special day, right? It’s just a…green peas commemoration day.”
“That plate sure was full of ’em, huh?”
Though he’d emptied the cola just moments before, it suddenly seemed very dry inside Subaru’s mouth.
As Subaru seemed to gasp for air, his father patiently waited for a reply.
Watching from the side as Subaru became agitated, Kenichi went “Hmm,” twisting his neck several times before saying, “Why, I wonder. I just happened to be off work, and I was wiping myself with a dry towel this morning, and I was like…the horoscope said Aquarius would have a great day, plus there was the look on your face this morning… Somehow, you looked just a little better, so I figured you might be up to talking about it.”
“My face looked better?
“I’m talking about the expression on your face. Your face itself is the same, and you still have that villainous look in y
our eyes just like your mother.”
Setting the three-whites-eyes business aside, Subaru touched his own face with a hand as he mulled over Kenichi’s words.
There was no proof for what his father had said. That his face was better meant that there had been a change. But whence in Subaru’s way of life to date had such a change come about?
Nowhere. Therefore, Kenichi had to have misread him. Nothing had changed yesterday, nor would it tomorrow.
That was fine, and that was what he intended. If he kept it up, no doubt at some point Kenichi and Nahoko would realize it—just what, exactly, Subaru was really after.
“—Nhhha!”
The moment he thought it, an impact shot through his brain enough to make him think fireworks had gone off in front of his eyes.
His heart rate became like an alarm bell; he could hear the exaggerated sound of blood flowing through his eardrums. The world going hazy before his eyes and his having a rising urge to vomit had a common cause: the unpleasant feeling inside his chest had begun to assert itself once more.
The sharp pain in his head, the uncomfortable feeling in his chest—both were trying to tell Subaru something.
“Hey now, you seriously look like you’re having a hard time. Are you all right, Subaru?”
Naturally, Kenichi couldn’t ignore the sight; he reached out a hand to Subaru’s shoulder with a worried look on his face. When Subaru felt the touch of his palm, he lifted up his face, sweat on his brow as he tried to think of some kind of reply.
“It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it?”
“—?!”
Subaru’s entire body ran hot when the silver bell voice made his ears quiver once more.
It was a voice full of affection and sympathy. The voice seemed to melt Subaru’s strained heart, impeding his suffering as the swelling heat swallowed up the pain and the cracks therein.
The voice was scorching him. He chased after it. Without restraint, he clung to it to take back—
“Thank you, Subaru.”
“You’re…”
The sight of silver hair dancing in the wind was seared into his vision. She gazed straight at Subaru with eyes like radiant, violet gemstones. The words she wove with her lips were all filled with loveliness.
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 10 Page 18