Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 10

by Tappei Nagatsuki

  “For coming to save me.”

  What, what, what, what, what the hell?

  Who, who, who, who, who, who, who was this?

  “—Subaru.”

  His breath caught. His throat was hot. Something was welling behind his scorched eyes.

  “May the blessings of the spirits be with you.”

  His fingertips trembled. He couldn’t put strength into his legs. His lungs convulsed, and his soul began to scream.

  “I think you’re the one who’s reaaally incredible, Subaru.”

  He covered his face with his shaking hands, holding back the sobs in his trembling throat. The welling heat was trickling from his eyes…

  “—Subaru, why do you come to save me?”

  The answers to his questions were already inside him.

  The instant he found them, the ferocious emotions and the sense of discomfort inside Subaru both vanished.

  The skull-splitting pain, the rising urge to vomit, the dizziness making the world grow hazy, the heartbeats growing more urgent as a decision seemed to draw near—where all of them converged, Subaru Natsuki found his answer.

  He lifted his face, wiping away the tears that seemed due to trickle down any moment. As if to shake off the tears of regret on that sleeve, he strongly, strongly clenched his fist.

  And then—

  “Sorry to make you worry. I’m all right now.”

  “That so? If you’re just down in the dumps, that’s fine, but don’t make me worry so much.”

  “Yeah, my bad. Besides, about the question from earlier…”

  Shrugging off the hand of his father supporting his shoulder, Subaru turned toward him.

  As they sat closely on the bench, his father’s face was peering into his own with a look of concern. Now that he thought about it, he realized that even though they’d exchanged words many times that day, he had not looked straight at his father’s face even once.

  Wanting to flee even then, he smiled bitterly at his own weakness.

  “I found a girl I like—so I’m all right now.”

  With the sight of the silver-haired girl still fresh in his mind, Subaru Natsuki confronted his own past.

  5

  “I found a girl I like.”

  When he put the words on his lips once more, Subaru had the palpable sense of his heart walking forward.

  The inside of his head was clear. The pain, like a prolonged curse, had vanished. As he was then, Subaru had resolve sufficient to face his father and tell him everything.

  Before his eyes, Kenichi blinked several times over, surprised by the confession disconnected from the conversation to that point.

  “…Is that so?”

  With a quiet voice, he lent the words of Subaru, the words of his own son, his ears.

  His demeanor was a blessing to Subaru. Even though Subaru ought to have always known he was the kind of man to lend an ear like that, Subaru had continued to hold his tongue. But that had come to an end.

  That was because there was someone gently pushing on his back, urging him forward.

  “What might’ve shaken me up, what might’ve made me curl up in a ball, I remember it all now—no, I knew everything all along. I knew it, but I just pretended to not see the weakness in me that I thought only I noticed… But while I was pretending, someone…”

  He couldn’t hide it by saying someone. He knew who that someone was.

  “I wanted…Dad and Mom to smack me.”

  “…”

  “I was an unsalvageable little good-for-nothing idiot, a complacent piece of garbage, so I wanted you two to smack me…to make me give that up.”

  Without a word, Kenichi gazed at Subaru, his eyes never wavering.

  The face Subaru saw reflected in those eyes was altogether too weak, unworthy of pity, and thus, he continued.

  “I’ve used any petty little tricks I could since a long time ago. Whether it’s studying or athletics, I easily pulled off stuff that not many people can do, leaving the people who can’t do it all mystified.”

  Thinking back to his youth, he could have called what he’d had an adorable sense of omnipotence. At a young age, Subaru had been quicker on the uptake with both athletics and academics than the average person. As if by nature, he was more clever and fleeter of foot than those around him, inevitably becoming the center of attention among children his own age—

  “He really is that man’s son.”

  Thus was Subaru appraised; thus did the adults close to home praise him frequently.

  Since that him was his father, the young Subaru had been proud to be valued as his son. For in the eyes of the son, the father—Kenichi Natsuki—was an attractive individual.

  He laughed a lot, he smiled a lot, he cried a lot, he got angry a lot, he moved a lot, he worked a lot.

  There were always a great deal of people around his father. He was adored by many, and his smiling face was the axis around which they revolved. And that very father announced in public that the two members of family—Subaru and his mother—were the most precious things to him of all.

  Subaru took pride in that. He felt it gave him a special right to a boastful sense of superiority.

  Someday, he wanted to be like his father—to Subaru, that was a natural wish.

  “But at some point down the line… I don’t remember it, but I lost a footrace to someone. I went from being number one to not being number one. Faster, smarter guys than me came out of the woodwork, and I dropped from number one bit by bit… I thought There’s gotta be something wrong with this.”

  The more the wrongness got to him, the more the star above his head seemed to move away, with each and every glimmering star between him and it forming the path he needed to take to get closer.

  He harbored nervousness that the star might disappear. But even with that impatience within him—

  “He really is that man’s son.”

  Those words alone were Subaru’s salvation, the hope to which he clung.

  Even if he was not as fleet of foot, even if he was not as good at studying, those words bolstered the young Subaru’s dignity.

  More than training to run fast, more than doing his homework, he came to put stupid things first.

  He sneaked into school at night with his friends, wandered aimlessly around the town, chased a famously dangerous stray dog from everyone’s hangout spot—in this way, Subaru ran around protecting his pride to keep everyone from being fed up with him, thus protecting the meaning of his own existence.

  “It’s stupid to work hard. Having fast feet is nothing to be proud of. How I made everyone laugh was a lot stronger, a lot more impressive than that.”

  What others feared, he made his priority; what others detested, he made his own desire. Thus, he continued to challenge himself with precious care, with bold recklessness, so that he did not lose his place.

  “But of course, the longer that continued, the next thing I was gonna do had to be even bigger. I couldn’t do anything that was smaller than what came before it. I didn’t want anyone to think I was boring.”

  Thus, Subaru’s actions had to be more and more extreme.

  Subaru Natsuki had to be braver than anyone, more extravagant than anyone, more liberated than anyone—he had to be someone everyone could continue to look up to.

  That was the veneer he adopted. Using the veneer, he hid the fact that it was a veneer so even he couldn’t notice it, and he had to do more, more, more, to deceive himself and the people around him.

  After all, he was Kenichi Natsuki’s son—Subaru Natsuki.

  “I thought I can do anything. I made myself think I can do anything. That’s how what I did got stupid, just me flailing around without any thought…”

  And so he was like a moth drawn to the flame, seeking light, never realizing that it would burn him.

  However, Subaru was not a moth, and the same went for Subaru’s friends. His friends had gotten it a long, long time ago.

  There hadn’t bee
n any particular trigger for it. The number of friends associating with Subaru’s recklessness dwindled.

  “I thought Those guys are dimwits. You’ll never have this kind of fun if you aren’t together with me. I’d make those guys regret it. They could just idly pass the time away with boring stuff. I was aiming for even higher places.”

  If he continued chasing the star like that, he’d lose sight of the other stars above his head.

  Unable to see all the stars filling up the sky, Subaru desperately chased after the glimmer of the one star that remained, gazing at that star alone as he continued running after it—when he suddenly realized.

  “There was no one left around me but me.”

  Naturally. With Subaru continuing to do things his own way, heedless of everything around him, even the people who’d thought it was funny at first would not follow as he escalated his exploits to new heights.

  Not noticing this, he distanced himself from them, laughing derisively at them and calling them dimwits, but Subaru, now the only one left, found his thoughts harboring worry and doubt, and thus, he distanced himself even more. And thus did the cycle repeat itself until—

  “Even though the sky has so many glittering stars, I lost sight of every last one.”

  Having lost sight of the starlight, and having lost all the friends around him, when Subaru was left all alone, enveloped by darkness, he finally came to realize it for himself.

  —He wasn’t a special person at all.

  “He really is that man’s son.”

  Those were the magical words that the young Subaru had embraced with pride. But somewhere along the line, the words transformed into a curse.

  The curse rotted his heart. When he lost his place, he felt as if someone was chasing him, making him unable to breathe.

  “By going outside, walking around town, I understood. Wherever I went, whatever I saw, there were traces of my dad everywhere… Of course there were.”

  In Subaru’s confined world, he had come to admire his father. He’d wanted to see the same sights his father had.

  To Subaru, who sought the same things his father had found everywhere he went, there was nowhere he could look within that confined world and not sense traces of his father.

  In stages, the world became a scary place to Subaru.

  What simultaneously rotted Subaru’s heart was the realization he himself was mediocre, and the realization he didn’t want either of his parents or any of the people who knew his father to know this; in other words, shame.

  Subaru Natsuki, the son of Kenichi Natsuki, could not become known as a person who shrank in timidity from the public’s gaze, a coward whose head harbored misconceptions and fear about a widening world.

  From late elementary to middle school, through strenuous effort, Subaru managed to pass the time without standing out whatsoever.

  Classmates who knew Subaru from his lower school years couldn’t wrap their heads around the change in Subaru, but even they, children at an emotionally sensitive point in their lives, never noticed the darkness enveloping their fellow classmate’s heart.

  And what put him beyond salvation was that Subaru was crafty where the issue was concerned. Though he passed his school days without standing out, he continued to behave in the same old uninhibited manner at home.

  “Even just remembering it, I shudder at how I passed the time back then. But that’s how I managed to get through middle school… Even though we lived in the same town, most of my classmates stopped going to the same school as me. Guess because of test results?”

  Even Subaru, who’d spent several years in such a backward-thinking fashion, harbored a faint hope from the radical change in environment. When he advanced into high school, the environment, one where no one knew his past, might generate new relationships—and if that was to happen, no one would see Subaru as Kenichi Natsuki’s son.

  Mustering all the meager courage inside himself, Subaru decisively stepped off the beaten path.

  “Even for me, I totally blew my grand high school debut. A guy who couldn’t have proper interpersonal relationships in little and middle school was never gonna cut it in a place with all new faces. I did bold and reckless stuff to shake off the tension, and the result was… Even an idiot could guess.”

  Even though it would be plain to an idiot, to Subaru it was not. The result hardly needed to be spelled out.

  Subaru had never seen examples of how to approach other people beyond those of his father. He had nothing save his father as a reference for how to build relationships in a new environment.

  Even if he knew stuff to make people laugh at a young age, to classmates undergoing psychological changes on the way to the second stage of their lives, it was nothing but poison.

  From the first step into a new environment, he had gone badly astray. Thus, Subaru established his isolated position as a dork, someone who couldn’t read the mood.

  He wasn’t ostracized. He simply spent his school life being treated like thin air. And then, as the days passed, one morning, he thought…

  “I just don’t wanna go to school today. It was a morning when errands meant Dad and Mom were both out, so even when it was past the usual wake-up time, I turned over and nodded back off—I was super surprised when I realized it was just before noon. After that, when I got up to change in a huge hurry…”

  Subaru realized that his own mind and body were exceptionally at ease.

  “After that, it was just a drag. I skipped one day a week, then it was once every three days, then once every two… It didn’t take even three months before I stopped going to school altogether.”

  The days that followed hardly needed to be spoken of.

  Once he stopped going to school, Subaru’s heart was filled with a sense of relief. Yes, he was liberated from the painful times he underwent while at school, but that wasn’t the main reason.

  It wasn’t a big reason, either. He’d become Subaru Natsuki, smug juvenile delinquent.

  Looking at that Subaru, no one would think He really is that man’s son anymore. But more than that, the exceedingly pathetic sight of Subaru like that would make both his father and mother stop loving him.

  No matter how unsightly, how deplorable Subaru had become, both his parents had loved him.

  That’s what scared him the most. Nothing frightened Subaru as much as that fact.

  And then, to Subaru Natsuki, Kenichi Natsuki and Nahoko Natsuki would say—

  “‘I don’t love you. I hate you. You’re…not my child.’ I wanted you to do that, to say that, to throw me aside. I wanted to make you…give up on me.”

  With fleeting hope, he’d looked up at the sky, expecting to find the star that could never have been.

  A human being as pathetic and mewling as Subaru was a fool unworthy of being Kenichi Natsuki’s son. And thus, he wanted to be cast aside.

  Not even Subaru himself realized that was what rested within Subaru’s heart.

  Unable to accept how weak and stupid he was, pushing onto others the task of cleaning up the mayhem that appeared in his wake, he averted his eyes, hating himself all the same.

  In spite of all that, Subaru had not ended up shunned and abandoned by all, because someone had been there to support him.

  “It is easy to give up— However…it does not suit you, Subaru.”

  The image of the silver girl imprinted on the backs of his eyelids now had a flickering blue radiance superimposed upon it.

  With that, a warm breeze blew into Subaru’s heart, making him pledge to move his listless limbs once more.

  “Subaru, I love you.”

  With those words, she had given Subaru a push right when he should have been finished.

  Because he realized that, because he remembered that, he set his heart on walking forward from zero—and to do that, he had to settle things with the past, the minus that came before zero.

  “—Yes. My hero…is the greatest in the whole world.”

  “…” />
  Having listened to Subaru’s long monologue to its completion, Kenichi closed his eyes, sinking into thought.

  —In the end, the same as before, Subaru was forcing someone else to clean up after him.

  Because he lacked the courage to identify his own flaws, because he didn’t want to become the greatest villain in his own world, because he wanted to be the heroic main character, he kept making someone else play the villain.

  He’d believed that if he did that—someday, Kenichi would break the door down, bringing it all to an end.

  He’d spent day after day in foolish sloth, expecting that someone else would handle things.

  It was with that deadlocked mental state that he had arrived in that other world. And, even in a place like that, Subaru had continued his conceited ways, until finally—

  “Subaru.”

  Eyes closed, Kenichi stood before Subaru and addressed him by name.

  When those words brought him back to reality, Subaru looked up at his father. To Subaru, ready to accept whatever Kenichi might say, whatever Kenichi might think, in its full, unvarnished form, he—

  “Father head!!”

  “Gahhh?!”

  Taking an unexpected blow to his cranium, Subaru reeled as fireworks scattered in his eyes. Toward his son, eyes tearful from the sharp pain, Kenichi powerfully thrust a finger and said, “You see that, Subaru? That’s my angry blow, the father head move I’ve filled with love.”

  “Wasn’t that a heel drop?! What ‘head’?! Was that just to throw me off?!”

  “That’s what stretching after a bath does for you. Got my leg pretty high up there, didn’t I?”

  Kenichi began stretching his supple hip joints on the spot. His father’s demeanor defied his expectations, leaving Subaru half in tears, unsure what he should say.

  Subaru had been expecting something else—

  “Gotta say, though, Subaru. You’re, well…a pretty big moron.”

  “Uhh…?”

  Insulted by the rather disconnected words, Subaru couldn’t get a single word out when Kenichi crossed his arms and continued.