There in the kitchen, Haruhi left Asahina to tend the simmering earthen pot, and after taking a moment to gulp water directly from the tap, spoke.
“Well, that’s a bit of a relief. I’d never thought Yuki would miss school, so I was worried this was going to be a worse cold. But she doesn’t have too much of a fever, and once she’s had a nice, easy meal and gotten some sleep, she should be fine.”
“It doesn’t seem she’ll need to go to the hospital,” Koizumi casually interjected. Everybody other than Haruhi knew perfectly well a regular doctor wasn’t going to do Nagato any good, but now that he mentioned it, it would’ve been strange for the possibility not to come up. “I know a fine doctor, so if it comes to that, I’ll have him prescribe some excellent medicine.”
Haruhi wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Medicine only makes you think you’re getting better. What really cures you is spirit.” She’d started lecturing. “The reason medicine tastes bad is to make the viruses or bacteria think, ‘Hey, if they’re gonna start putting nasty stuff like this in here, I better beat it.’ ”
“I-is that true?”
“You bet it is.”
I wanted her to stop brazenly lying in front of Asahina—what would happen if she believed it?
But I kept my comments to myself, sitting at the powerless kotatsu table in the living room with Koizumi and idly passing time.
Once he’d returned from his shopping, Koizumi had immediately been relieved of duty, and since I’d never been given any particular responsibilities to begin with, I was off the hook once I’d gotten a few utensils out of the cupboard and rinsed them clean, at which point all we could do was watch Haruhi and her assistant Asahina set busily about the cooking proper.
I’d known she was good, but watching her like this, Haruhi put a professional homemaker to shame. From her skill at slicing vegetables to her ability at making the broth, I was impressed with how easily she was pulling it off.
“Anyone can do this kind of thing once they get used to it,” said Haruhi, tasting the pot’s contents with a small dish. “I’ve been cooking since I was a grade schooler. I’m better at it than anyone else in my family too. Oh, Mikuru—get some soy sauce.”
“Here you are!”
Now that I thought about it, I realized Haruhi hardly ever brought her lunch from home. Did her mother not make lunches for her? I wondered.
“If I asked her to, she would. Sometimes she wants to, but I turn her down. When I need a lunch, I make it myself.” Haruhi got a slightly complicated expression on her face. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but Mom… I mean, my mother doesn’t have the best taste. There’s something wrong with her tongue. And worse, she always eyeballs spice amounts, and just guesses at cooking times, so even when she makes the same dish, it always turns out differently. When I was a kid I thought that was normal, and I thought that school lunches were the tastiest thing ever. But when I tried making food myself, it was just so delicious. Ah, Mikuru, get the rice vinegar.”
“Here you go!”
“So nowadays I make dinner about half the time. Since my mother works, we just try to help each other out. It’s true what they say, that there’s no substitute for experience. In cooking or anything else, you’ve got to apply yourself to it every day. I didn’t put any special work in, but the more I did it the more I got the hang of it. Mikuru, taste this. Is it good?”
“Sure… oh, it’s delicious!”
“Isn’t it? It’s my original vegetable soup. It’s chock-full of vitamins from A to Z, and great for your stamina. The stuff’ll banish fatigue and dizziness to the rings of Saturn!”
Haruhi rattled off her generic ad copy as she poured the soup into bowls, then turned off the flame under the earthenware pot and covered it. My stomach immediately growled. The fragrance definitely got my appetite going.
“This is Yuki’s rice porridge. Kyon, stop staring so greedily. You can’t have any. Help me bring it to her room. You won’t be punished for doing that much.”
She didn’t have to tell me; at the moment, I was ready to wholly devote myself to public service. In fact, I felt pretty pathetic for this being the only thing I could do.
I set the porridge and vegetable soup that Haruhi had ladled into bowls onto a tray, and carefully prepared to bring it to Nagato’s bedside. Asahina followed, carrying the teapot and cup. Koizumi was next, bringing the herbal medicine that Haruhi had specified along with some water, and Haruhi was at the lead. She opened the door to Nagato’s room.
“All done, Yuki! Sorry to keep you waiting!”
“…”
Nagato sat slowly up, and she regarded us with silent eyes.
“First, drink this medicine. You’re supposed to take it before a meal. In my experience, this stuff works the best. Then, food. There’s plenty, so eat as much as you like. You missed lunch, right?”
Haruhi’s positive energy was something to behold. It was easy to imagine a cold virus packing up and skipping town when confronted with this power, if it had any sense of self-preservation at all.
“…”
Nagato started to try to get out of bed, but Haruhi stopped her. Koizumi handed over the sachet of medicine and the cup, and after gazing at it as though dubious of its efficacy for a moment, Nagato dutifully drank it.
Haruhi looked as though she would have preferred to feed Nagato, but Nagato refused, taking the soup bowl and spoon in hand. She filled the spoon, sipped, and swallowed.
“…”
Nagato was barely chewing at all as she swallowed the spoonfuls of porridge under Haruhi’s intense gaze. It wasn’t just Haruhi staring either—Asahina, Koizumi, and I were all watching.
“…”
Nagato looked down at the bowl in her hand as though watching for a color change in a starch that had been touched with an iodine solution, and yet—“Delicious,” she said in a small voice.
“Really? Great. Eat more. Eat it all up! Here, have some vegetable soup. I would’ve liked to simmer it longer, but it should be flavorful enough as it is.”
Nagato took the bowl that Haruhi thrust so energetically upon her, and from it she drank.
“Delicious.”
“Isn’t it?” Haruhi seemed extremely happy as she watched Nagato eat her meal.
Nagato continued to pick steadily away at her food. It wasn’t clear whether she was particularly moved by Haruhi’s home cooking; she did seem to be savoring more than she did her usual huge servings of pre-made curry, though she might just have been forcibly repressing her lack of appetite. She would eat anything put in front of her, even if she didn’t need to.
The whole situation was hard for me to watch.
Maybe because Nagato was still in bed, still wearing her pajamas, or maybe because she was eating Haruhi’s food in total silence, or possibly because though she was close enough to touch, something about her aura seemed especially diluted.
“Sorry,” I excused myself to no one in particular. “I’m gonna use the bathroom.”
I left the bedroom and headed for the bathroom without waiting for a reply. I wasn’t letting it show, but if I looked at Nagato any longer I was going to be overcome by a directionless rage.
I sat down on the neat little toilet seat cover and chewed the inside of my lip. And I thought.
My salvation was the fact that I knew exactly who it was I needed to interrogate, and fast. It wasn’t clear what I would have to do, but whatever I did, I couldn’t let this go.
I had to do something about that Kuyoh girl. The fact that Nagato had collapsed while she was totally healthy was completely unfair. Some balance somewhere had been upset. It was unforgivable. First I’d contact Sasaki—
“Wah—!”
My cell phone vibrated in my blazer pocket, and I nearly fell right off the seat.
I looked at my phone’s display wondering who could be calling me with such suspiciously good timing, and I saw that it wasn’t an incoming call, but rather a text message.
“Huh?”
The sender’s address was completely scrambled. Who the heck was this? I opened my inbox.
“Wha?”
My screen suddenly went dark. Surely it wasn’t a virus of some kind? Crap. It’d be a real hassle if I lost the data I’d put in my phone.
In the midst of my panic, I saw a white cursor begin to blink at the top left of my phone’s screen, and I felt a wave of nostalgia that almost made me dizzy. Somewhere along the line I’d seen a computer monitor look very much like this.
After a few seconds, the cursor began to move smoothly across the screen, leaving characters behind it. I’d seen this kind of smoothly inputted text before too.
yuki.n> There is no need for worry
Nagato… it was Nagato.
It was just like when I’d been trapped in closed space with Haruhi. Which meant I should be able to respond in kind. I pressed keys frantically. Was she telling me not to worry? That was crazy. I had to reply. I futzed with the tiny keys, painstakingly composing it.
“Your fever is because of those Heavenly Canopy jerks, right?”
Immediately after I sent it, the reply came.
yuki.n> Yes
All I could think of was how careless I’d been, and I wanted to freeze my head in liquid nitrogen and shatter it with a bat. I’d seen the doll-like Kuyoh lined up harmlessly with Kyoko Tachibana and assumed she was harmless. It was my own fault for jumping to conclusions. I’d been so sure they were only interested in me and Haruhi.
I’d figured they wanted to do something about Haruhi’s power, and that was all they cared about when they contacted me. I was the emperor of unwarranted, careless assumptions. Just as Koizumi had said, Nagato was the greatest bulwark the SOS Brigade possessed—how could I not have seen that our enemies would strike at her first?
yuki.n> I will not allow them to harm you or Haruhi Suzumiya
I mashed buttons in frustration.
Who cared about me or Haruhi? We could handle ourselves, and were in perfectly good health at the moment. Nagato was the one they were harming. And she had to make them stop, I typed.
Send. Then, the immediate response:
yuki.n> this is part of my dutidata
ormindttempt communicatenly canopy dom
The characters abruptly stopped.
What’s wrong? I typed.
The few meters that separated Nagato’s bedroom from her cozy bathroom suddenly seemed terribly distant, and the few seconds before her reply felt like an eternity.
yuki.n> my operaä,
I wondered if my phone was broken. I hoped it was.
yuki.n>
I broke out in a cold sweat. It was totally unprecedented for Nagato to send me genuine nonsense. Was she that bad? What if she couldn’t be cured…?
My vision dimmed. It would’ve been easy for my hand to slip and drop the phone in the toilet, and I could hardly blame it if it did.
But before I could turn my phone into a useless object, another line of characters appeared on the display.
yuki.n> going to sleep for a bit
The short sentence appeared briefly, then faded out as though melting. The message was simplicity itself—very Nagato-like.
I’ll say it again: How could she expect me not to worry? How the hell could I do anything else? Sorry, Nagato, I’m not that good of a person. You overestimated me.
I dashed out of the bathroom and ran straight back into the bedroom.
“Nagato!”
Haruhi took one look at my crazed state and was momentarily shocked. “Kyon, be quiet! Yuki just fell asleep.” She glared at me with a severe look. “She fell over as soon as she was done eating, and went to sleep on the spot.”
Just as Haruhi said, Nagato was still, her eyes closed. She was like a frozen princess; you couldn’t even tell she was breathing.
“I’m sure she feels better. It’s times like this when living alone’s no good. You’ve gotta have other people around. Even if you sleep alone, having the feeling of other people moving around in the house is really important. It’s just pleasant, y’know? No matter who it is, just having someone nearby is—”
I turned my back on Haruhi’s entirely reasonable explanation. I wanted to listen, but at the moment I just didn’t feel like it. My body moved on its own, without my head’s input.
“Kyon, where are you—”
I dashed out of the bedroom and picked up speed as I headed for the front door. I didn’t feel like waiting for the elevator to take me to the ground floor, so I took the stairs. Passing through the entrance, I left the apartment building at a flat run.
I had no idea where Kuyoh would be at this hour. But she’d been wearing a Koyoen Academy uniform. If she was anything like Nagato, she’d be very careful about attending school every day, so she’d have to be there. I didn’t care what the security guards tried to do to stop me; I’d get past them by hook or by crook. Even if I managed to get into the staff room, there was no telling whether her address would be on the student roster. I’d just have to cross that bridge when I got to it.
The one thing my body wouldn’t let me do was sit still and do nothing.
Eventually my stride started to feel unsteady, as though I were wearing winged shoes bestowed upon me by a goddess—this had to be thanks to my good-for-nothing cardiopulmonary system, which resulted in my running out of breath right in front of a rail crossing.
It had been close to a year ago. Right around here, I’d listened to Haruhi deliver a long monologue.
I focused on breathing in an effort to recover, and happened to look across the rails—at which point both my gaze and my feet froze in place.
Kuyoh Suoh.
Nagato’s enemy and mine stood directly opposite me across the tracks. As though she’d been there all along.
“—”
The black uniform, the wide fall of hair. And the transcendently blank expression.
The crossing gate’s warning lights started to flash. Simultaneously, the bell that announced an approaching train began to ring, and the crossing gate started its reluctant arc down.
Why was she here? It was like… it was like she was waiting for me…
Kuyoh did not move. She maintained her distance from me, so rooted to the spot that a cardboard robot cutout would’ve had more visible humanity.
Ding, ding, ding—
The gate had completely lowered, and the rumbling tracks and rushing air heralded a train’s approach. I stared at Kuyoh, with no idea what it was she was looking at. This timing was impossible. This was not a coincidence. She…
She had to be waiting for me.
With a gust of wind the train rushed past, hiding Kuyoh behind it. Though the train did not have so very many cars, it seemed as though time had come to a stop. I had the terrible illusion that I could look at the peering faces of every one of the train’s passengers, which then led to a powerful premonition.
I was as sure as though I’d already seen it that once the train had passed, Kuyoh would be gone. And she would be standing behind me, her ghostly white hands reaching out…
A terrible hallucination.
When the train passed and the red warning lights stopped flashing, their duty complete, Kuyoh’s dark form was still across the tracks. Was she being strangely cooperative, or was this some sort of performance? Or were such notions too human for her to even conceive?
As I waited for the yellow and black bars to squeakily rise, Kuyoh started to move, as though walking through water. She was coming toward me. I wanted to know how she managed to walk without disturbing either her hair or her skirt.
Like some insubstantial hologram, her form stopped a few meters away from me.
My hands hung at my sides; I balled them into fists. “What did you do to Nagato?”
Kuyoh’s huge, marble-like eyes stared through me. My instincts warned me not to meet her gaze. She’d suck my soul out with those eyes. That’s what it felt like.
“I wanted to learn about humans… No”—thou
gh we were still separated, her voice sounded like a whisper next to my ear—“no, that is wrong. What I wanted to learn about…”
She cocked her head. The strangely human gesture tripped me up.
“… Was you…”
What?
“Will you… come with me…?”
What was she saying?
“I don’t mind…” She reached her hand out to me.
The alien.
Ding, ding, ding—
The crossing signals started to ring again. The red lights started their alternating flashing. These were the indications of an approaching train, but for me it felt like a warning of something far more terrible than being struck by a runaway locomotive. It felt like an emergency. What was this? What was going on? There wasn’t enough coherence to this story. What was this sudden transformation, as though a witch had magically brought a lead figure to life?
Kuyoh’s hand continued to approach. It came closer, closer, this thing that looked like a human but was not.
This being with which mutual comprehension was impossible, which had come from a place beyond the galaxy and beyond human knowledge, whose visible form was inconceivable. This girl with hair like fluttering wings…
Her eyes black as a new moon. No, don’t look. The world would go dark.
Stop—I wanted to say, but my mouth wouldn’t move. It was pathetic. To come all this way, and…
“Stop right there.”
The voice that stopped Kuyoh’s hand was not mine.
And again I found myself stunned.
I heard the voice directly behind me, and it brimmed with imposing confidence and an obvious cheer. It was a girl’s voice, one I hadn’t heard in quite some time, and I can’t say I’d ever hoped to hear it again.
“I won’t allow you to approach any closer. After all”—the voice laughed sparklingly, right at the nape of my neck—“this human is my prey. If your kind means to have me turn him over, I’d rather do this.”
An arm reached out over my shoulder. It was clad in a long-sleeved North High uniform, and its hand grasped an object I was rather familiar with—a razor-sharp knife, its blade flashing wickedly.
The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 2