by Nisioisin
Unexpectedly, Shinobu’s braids seemed to be doing the trick.
Even a glimpse of blond braids is unusual.
Though personally, I’d been ready to be accosted by strangers.
The sun proved harsh since we’d both raised our vampiric levels to allow Shinobu to disguise (transform?) herself, and while it was only May, it felt like we were trapped in a sauna.
Shinobu retained her composure, but it must have been hard on her.
I felt bad and somewhat regretted my overly optimistic prognosis and forcing a disguise on her, but it was too late for that now.
Our forebears tell us: it’s better to regret doing something than to regret not doing it. But when you really think about it, that seems like an incredibly irresponsible thing to say. Shouldn’t it be: don’t do anything you would regret in the first place?
Anyway, at this point it was just a test of will.
A contest, opposite Mayoi Hachikuji.
I will stay planted here right through tomorrow if I have to─
“Excuse me, you two.”
Just as I renewed my determination, someone spoke. To us.
It was a total surprise attack, and having already decided we were in the clear for the day, I couldn’t have been more startled.
“Er, ah, yes?” I responded, barely keeping it together.
Feigning innocence with all my might.
As we’d worked out in advance, Shinobu, acting like an exchange student who didn’t understand Japanese very well, just kept on reading her book.
In retrospect, it was a self-contradictory ploy given that the book was in Japanese (a translation of On the Banks of Plum Creek, to be precise).
“Oh my, what can I do for you? Do you have some business with us not-at-all suspicious people?” I responded nonchalantly.
Enunciating more than was necessary.
What was I, a stage actor?
“You would like me to expound on our lack of suspiciousness? By all means, permit me to explain. Naturally, we are not vampires or anything of the sort. We simply perspire easily.”
“Um…I don’t care.”
Seeming truly discombobulated─like he was actually going to pieces.
The grown man standing in front of me asked:
“Have you seen the girl who lives here?”
Almost as though he hadn’t noticed how suspicious Shinobu and I were.
“A fifth grader…with pigtails, probably carrying a large backpack…”
“…!”
I’d only looked away for a second, but when I returned my gaze to the Hachikuji residence─the front door and the main gate were wide open.
Like someone had rushed out.
No, forget such vague language, this was no time to play the sage and examine every possibility. It was obvious that this guy was the one who’d rushed out.
This guy─was a Hachikuji.
And.
The fifth grader he was searching for had to be Mayoi Hachikuji.
“Uh…no, I haven’t seen her.”
I was just about as agitated as he was, but at least keeping it together enough not to let it show, I dealt with the situation as coolly as I could.
I say keeping it together.
But I wasn’t even lying─I hadn’t seen her.
Though I’d been there watching forever.
“Has something happened to the girl?”
“Sh-She’s my daughter,” the guy answered, looking back at his house. “It seems she’s run away… I thought she was just taking her sweet time to get up, but when I went to her room to check on her, there was a note, and according to it, she left the house around five in the morning.”
“Hachikujiiiii!” I unintentionally blurted out her name.
The guy was startled, probably thinking that I meant him─Mr. Hachikuji. But I couldn’t give a shit about his reaction.
“Where the hell does she think she’s going?!”
Leaving at five in the morning.
She going fishing or something?!
Not considerate in the least!
She felt quite fine overstaying her welcome!
Mayoi Hachikuji.
Even when she was alive, she was an unpredictable girl.
016
First off, I told Mr. Hachikuji to calm down. Respectfully. He probably didn’t appreciate that coming from some unknown high school kid like me, but I couldn’t just abandon a guy who was so discombobulated that he was clinging to that selfsame unknown high school kid. For him to ask the first people that he saw (us) where his daughter had gone, even though he couldn’t have known that we’d been watching his house since before nine that morning, could only mean that he was completely beside himself. To the point that one false move might lead to some sort of incident.
I suggested that perhaps he should try phoning his daughter’s friends and asking them if they knew where she was.
It was a pointless suggestion, of course.
But there was no way I could say, I’m fairly certain she’s headed to your ex-wife’s house, so why not try contacting her?
I couldn’t afford to arouse his suspicions.
Needless to say, it wouldn’t have been all that strange to arrive at the notion that, it being Mother’s Day and all, maybe she’d gone to see her mother, but all the same…
“G-Good idea… Thanks,” said Mr. Hachikuji, returning to the house.
Leaving the outside gate, if not the front door, wide open.
I watched him go inside─then started running.
At top speed, with Shinobu clutched under my arm.
“Dammit! We should have spent the whole night hidden behind that telephone pole, no matter how suspicious we’d seem!”
“Nay, methinks this be what ye might call the compulsion of history. However much I may have tried thy patience with my prattle, I too thought we might put off the lass’s demise until the morrow, but like as not she is fated to be struck by a car and to die on this day, come what may.”
Clutched under my arm, Shinobu had transformed back into her little girl form without my noticing─seemingly for ease of portability. Noticing this, I transferred her from under my arm to a standard piggyback position.
And I bent double.
To minimize air resistance.
Because I was in vampire mode, my overall physical strength was enhanced─this wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I bolstered myself, of course, but I suppose you could call it a side benefit.
As I was, I could run a 100-meter dash in under five seconds.
However…
I was aware that, even so, I couldn’t catch up to Hachikuji if she’d left the house six hours ago─it wasn’t even an hour on foot from the Hachikuji place to the Tsunade place.
Even if they were a child’s feet─we were too late.
It was exceedingly likely that the accident had already occurred.
We were too late.
Unless we could have that time back again─
“Fate, my ass! I refuse to accept such a fate!”
“Let me warn thee now, my lord. Leave off with thy video game-generation thinking that if thou hast failed, thou canst but turn back time and try once again. If ye insist, I could accomplish it for thee. But were the motion to go awry once more, we might yet time slip to, if not the utter catastrophe of five hundred million years ago, then the age of the dinosaurs, never to return.”
“I get it already…”
I wasn’t so selfish as to think that I would get umpteen chances at this.
It was a one-time miracle.
Not a bonus game, just a glitch.
No way to reproduce it.
“Shiiiit!”
Which is why, even though I understood that it was clearly too late, I continued running with all my might, never slackening my pace.
Along the way, I thought about Hachikuji’s father.
Her father.
The kind of father who, after the divorce, kept Hachikuji fr
om seeing her mother in spite of the law, never speaking a word about her mother inside the house─who tried to make Hachikuji forget about her mother completely.
What can I say, from hearing those stories I had constructed an image of him as some kind of vile demonic fiend, but─it didn’t jibe at all with the man I’d met who was so shaken up by his daughter “running away from home.”
Regular.
He was─just a regular father.
Huh.
So that was a father.
A father could get so concerned when it came to his daughter, appearances be damned?
It was really something.
Between the two, my sympathies had lain entirely with the mother, Mrs. Tsunade, and I had viewed Mr. Hachikuji as the enemy who was trying to tear Hachikuji and her mother apart─but now.
Now, for his sake too.
I wanted to save Hachikuji’s life.
I wanted to prolong the time he had with his daughter for a couple of days, or just a day─a few minutes, even.
“My lord!”
If Shinobu hadn’t wrung my neck and cried out, I surely would have missed it.
At that particular moment I was starting to notice that if I regulated the angle of my turns just right, Shinobu’s ribcage rubbed against my back in a pleasant way, like I was scratching an itch with a backscratcher.
Moving on─it was that park.
The park with the unpronounceable name.
In the course of running from the Hachikuji place to the Tsunade place, I was about to pass by the park without so much as a glance.
Wringing my neck from behind, and in so doing twisting my head to the right, Shinobu forcibly shifted my field of vision─
Allowing me to discover a lone young lady perusing a residential map installed in the corner of the park, a look of intense concentration on her face.
A lone young lady.
With pigtails, and a big backpack slung over her shoulders─somehow reminiscent of a snail.
Somehow brimming with a poignant air.
An adorable girl.
“………nkk!”
I tried to put on the brakes, but blew it.
And fell flat on my face.
Having run at an unthinkable speed for a human being, I went down as if I was the one hit by a car.
With her enhanced reflexes, Shinobu was able to jump clear before I fell, flipping through the air in a sort of moonsault and sticking the landing like it was all perfectly safe (it wasn’t safe at all). But I didn’t think that’s cold, or there must have been some way for you to stop me other than wringing my neck.
After all, I was in vampire mode, so any scrapes I got from falling over would heal in the blink of an eye.
“…Shinobu, over here.”
I kept my voice low─even though I didn’t think the lone young lady could hear us at that distance─and as discreetly as possible, I took Shinobu by the hand. Since there was no other place to hide nearby, we had to content ourselves with lurking behind a tree.
I was having a busy day, concealing myself behind trees and telephone poles.
“Shinobu, stick to me. She’ll see us.”
“Roger, ribs ribs ribs.” Making a mysterious frog-like sound, she cozied up to me and said, “Is it…indeed her? I halted thee reflexively, but to tell it true, I can barely distinguish one human from another. I made my judgment based solely upon the giant backpack she wears.”
“Well─it’s not the sort of backpack most girls carry.”
It was one of her trademarks.
Imagining myself as a ninja, I tried to confirm the girl’s identity again from behind the tree, just to be on the safe side─it was quite some distance, but that was irrelevant.
My emotional attachment to Hachikuji was, in this instance, also irrelevant, as at the moment my vision was materially─or immaterially, absurdly enhanced, thanks to being in vampiric form.
At that moment, I could have distinguished the pattern on a little girl’s shirt from a mile away.
“Must it be a little girl?” asked Shinobu.
“It was just meant to be an easy-to-understand example.”
“What kind of person─nay, aberration─thou art is easy to understand, at least…”
Letting that go in one ear and out the other.
I confirmed that Hachikuji was indeed Hachikuji.
“…”
Maybe this goes without saying, but─she looked exactly like the Hachikuji I had met eleven years into the future.
Not a single difference.
Even so─even without any difference, I felt like living Hachikuji was somehow different from dead Hachikuji.
Was that─was this the difference between being alive and being dead?
“I thought maybe she was already hit by the car, and this was Hachikuji-the-aberration…” As the girl shook her head exaggeratedly, wholly intent on the residential map, I whispered to Shinobu. “But it doesn’t seem that way, somehow. How can I put this? It’s hard to express, but she just seems so…full of life.”
“Hmm. Aye, I concur.” If the aberration slayer, who could convert aberrations into energy, said so, well, there could be no doubt. “And her shadow appears human, not snail-like.”
“That was only in the anime adaptation.”
“Yet ’tis baffling. Why should this lass, after departing at five o’clock in the morning, remain holed up in this park?”
“I don’t think she’s holed up…”
“She departed six hours ago. Nay, earlier?” reminded Shinobu, looking at my watch. Her severe expression indicated that she really did find it baffling. “At five o’clock this morning, thou wert at the high point of thy devotion to performing on my ribcage. As thou ’twere thy climactic solo.”
“There must be a better analogy.”
“At six o’clock, well, thou wert continuing to strum my ribs ’til such time as ye might awaken.”
“If that’s true, are you sure your ribs are okay?”
There’d be more than just a handprint.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d broken some bones as if they were strings on a guitar.
“Kakak. I expect a hand-printed apology.”
“Quit ribbing me,” I said, then returned to Shinobu’s earlier question. “Though I’m not certain…”
“Mm?”
“She’s probably lost. She said it was her first time venturing far from home…”
We had accounted all along for the possibility that Hachikuji would get lost, but we never thought she would get this lost.
However─we could consider this fortunate.
A real life-saver.
I was the one hoping to help her out.
But instead it felt like I’d just been saved.
“…”
A sense of déjà vu washed over me as Hachikuji returned her gaze again and again to the residential map and compared it to the note that, I assumed, had Mrs. Tsunade’s address written on it.
I’d been─shown that note.
That Mother’s Day.
I couldn’t help but recall that Mother’s Day when I met Hachikuji─though at the moment, it wasn’t déjà vu at all but a reality that would occur eleven years hence.
What I had to do now was to make sure that it stayed a mere sense.
I.
“I remember it all… Gently approaching Hachikuji as she struggled there, then guiding her to Mrs. Tsunade’s house…”
“Thou art forgetting something important.”
“What do you know about it?”
I’m pretty sure you were still hugging your knees in the abandoned cram school back then.
Are even my memories transmitted through my shadow?
If so, then I don’t have even a sliver of privacy.
“Don’t worry,” I assured, “in such a serious scene, even I─no, especially I, won’t make the same mistake twice.”