by Nisioisin
A horrible thing to do, if I do say so myself.
Now there was nothing in my heart I would regret not having done.
There was nothing of my heart I would regret not leaving behind.
With a lightened heart─I could start getting ready.
I took a notebook and a pencil from my bag, sat in the chair, and faced Araragi’s study desk. I wasn’t reviewing my lessons for the day or preparing for tomorrow, though.
Yes, I was going to write a letter.
A proper letter.
I didn’t know how to begin it at first, but then realized there was no point in being awkwardly formal. So I began with a regular opening line:
“Dear Miss Black Hanekawa”
Maybe it wasn’t anything that I actually needed to do.
Maybe I was wasting my time.
Because while I had no memories as Black Hanekawa─Black Hanekawa would have memories as me.
Still, I wanted to express how I felt, and I wanted to do it as me, speaking to the now-independent me who wasn’t me, to her.
In my place, she had taken on the burden of every dark part of me, every black part of me, and I wanted to convey to her─my feelings of gratitude and my final request.
Then.
061
─Dear Miss Black Hanekawa,
It’s nice to meet you.
Well, I guess that’s a strange thing to say. But this is Tsubasa Hanekawa.
Allow me to start by thanking you.
Thank you for all of the backbreaking work you did in my place, both during Golden Week and before the culture festival. I imagine that I’ve been forcing a lot of hardship on you this time, too.
I’m truly sorry for causing you nothing but trouble.
It’s now finally begun to strike me how it may have been my ego that I buried you when you were there on the street that day, run over. My actions that day saddled me with a responsibility toward you that I doubt I am able to fully repay.
Maybe that’s the kind of thing that Mister Oshino really meant by that line he used so much, “people just go and get saved on their own.” Because if you’re not thinking about whether you’re ready to take on the connections, or honestly, the responsibilities that arise, you’re going to have to get through the rest of your life relying on nothing more than one stopgap measure after the next.
Just as Shinobu was bound to Araragi because he saved her, I’ve shackled you, as Black Hanekawa, to me.
And on top of that, I barely let the fact bother me, unlike Araragi. I was living a carefree, peaceful life.
How sinful can one be?
And so I’m really not in a position where I can ask this of you, but I fear that I might end up hurting a very important friend if I don’t do something.
I have no choice but to rely on you.
I have no one else I can rely on.
So I’m going to say it to someone for the first time in my life─save me.
Please save me.
I’ll never bother you again, and I’ll make sure you’re never alone.
Please, I beg of you.
I know that you probably have to do as I say in order to protect me, and that saying this may not change a thing, but it is a sincere request.
I’m going to write down a few things I know about this situation, in case they can be of help. I know that you share my memories, but it seems that you have been completely severed from me this time (I have an idea why for that too, which I’ll explain later), so I think it would be easier for you to understand if you read this in a letter. Unlike your memory, mine is full of holes, so while I can’t be sure of anything, this is probably the truth.
I don’t know everything, I only know what I know.
I’ve used those words with Araragi as a kind of excuse, but allow me to say them to you, too. I’m going to tell you everything I know.
So first, and while I think this goes without saying because it’s something you, as an aberration, know quite well without being told, the true identity of that gigantic tiger, the Tyrannical Tiger, is that it is a new breed of aberration born from my heart, just like you.
Or to be even more precise, a new kind of aberration that my heart cut loose.
This I can state as a fact.
But one major point of difference between the two of you is that while you’re based on an old aberration known as the Afflicting Cat, the Tyrannical Tiger has no base, nothing to which its spirit is bound.
If I had to say it was based on anything, it’s you.
The Tyrannical Tiger is a tiger because you are a cat.
A more primordial creature.
A more primordial organism, a fiercer beast, and that is why after you, a cat, I came up with a tiger.
I guess you could call it a successor?
I should have realized it earlier, but I think that in these past few months, I’d gotten too used to aberrations, including you.
Knowing of aberrations draws one to aberrations.
That’s something Mister Oshino said.
Just as Araragi became familiar with how to use his own immortality ever since spring break, I must have become used to prying loose pieces of my own heart as aberrations ever since Golden Week.
Like someone first starting to put in contact lenses or something─we can get accustomed to anything.
And the result of all my proficiency.
Is the Tyrannical Tiger.
I think the differences between you during Golden Week, you before the culture festival, and you this time aren’t individual traits so much as a manifestation of this proficiency.
The fact that you appear only when I go to sleep, reduce my level of stress while I’m asleep, then turn back into me when I wake up without any need for Mister Oshino, Araragi, or Shinobu to “deal with you” makes you far too convenient an aberration, far too much of a blessing.
Then again, of course that’s how it is.
Because you’re an aberration brought forth by me for my own sake.
You’re going to be convenient.
Naturally, and while you may have already noticed this too, though I had it wrong at first, I think you’re here, I think I refused to learn my lesson and summoned you again so that I could do more than just relieve the stress of that house burning down. Yes, it had to be thanks to you that Miss Kanbaru saw me and thought that I wasn’t feeling down the way she thought I’d be─but that’s all incidental.
The fire itself had nothing to do with it─the cause of the fire was the cause.
I’m sorry that I have to say this like it doesn’t involve me, but this is something that happened unconsciously, or actually I don’t have any memory of it at all, but I think I must have relied on you as a way to fight against the Tyrannical Tiger I saw that day.
Just like I’d always been relying on you, even long before my life was ever affected by the Afflicting Cat.
And I relied on you again.
I know that modern medicine has a negative view on the condition popularly known as a split personality, more technically known as dissociative identity disorder, and I’m not a proponent of it either. But while the expression may not be correct, it would have to be the most understandable way to express who I am.
Araragi once told me that I was scary.
Mister Oshino once told me that it was creepy the way I acted like a saint.
But to tell you how I honestly felt when I heard them say those things, I had no clue what they meant.
I felt like there was never a time I was being anything less than my natural self.
Araragi would say that I was forcing myself to be a regular girl, that I was trying to be too ethical. And yes, that line of reasoning must have been pretty close to the truth, but it didn’t serve as a reason why I was able to do something so outrageous.
It’s not something you could simply will yourself to do.
So then why was I able to do it?
It’s simple.
Because I’d l
ooked away from any inconvenient reality ever since I was a child, constantly setting loose pieces of my heart.
Miss Senjogahara described this as being “dull when it comes to darkness” the day before yesterday, and she was exactly right. In fact, I don’t look at the darkness at all.
I’ve averted my eyes from malice and misfortune.
Not as any kind of self-defense. If anything, I think it was self-sacrifice─I’d sever the parts of myself that were inconvenient to me in order to keep being me.
Like how I wasn’t able to see that house from the classroom.
If there was ever anything I didn’t like, I would say it had nothing to do with me and cut it off. No matter what horrible things happened to me, I would say they had nothing to do with me and cut them off.
So there was no way for my personality to become twisted.
There was no way for me to get bent over.
I couldn’t even stop being naïve about the world.
Twistedness of that sort is something that any human needs in order to live, and I just skipped all of that.
Of course you’d feel scared, of course you’d be creeped out.
I know I’d rebutted Araragi by saying that he was going too far when he talked about miracles─but the way I am is the result of something more atrocious and blood-drenched than any miracle.
I understand that the most difficult step of the counseling process for children who were never loved by their parents, which is to say children who grew up abused, is getting them to recognize that they’ve suffered abuse.
How terribly they’ve been tyrannized.
It’s no small feat to accept that you aren’t loved by your parents.
In most cases, children act like the abuse itself “never happened.” This shows itself in many ways, whether it’s a twisted interpretation of the facts or pretending that it didn’t happen at all, but one thing that all of these methods share in common is that they look away from reality.
So let me admit it now.
I grew up abused by my parents.
Every single parent I ever had treated me abusively.
I have never once been loved.
I have never for a moment been loved.
But I never recognized that.
I ignored my pain, saying that this kind of thing must happen in every home to some degree or another. I could be struck in the face, but I never thought that was abuse. I couldn’t think it was. I set that stress loose before I knew it in the form of a cat and pretended that it never happened.
Of course, if you want to talk about what abuse really is, it’s a very easy thing to understand and also a very hard thing.
Abuse can assume forms other than violence. As an extreme example─no, even this is still within the bounds of general opinion─abuse can exist in the form of spoiling a child.
Abuse that’s called education. Abuse that’s called discipline.
Abuse that’s called an upbringing. Abuse that’s called a parent-child relationship.
One can ultimately make a case for the view that abuse is anything a parent does to a child, and maybe we should listen to that case instead of rejecting it out of hand. Parts of it may bear merit depending on the way it’s made. You wouldn’t argue that it isn’t abuse if the person in question is all right with what’s happening to them─so while it’s a vague conclusion, you simply have to judge every case as a whole.
Which is why I can make this assertion.
I can look away and say all day long that I wasn’t abused.
I wasn’t tyrannized.
I wasn’t neglected.
I have no such recollection.
They did the bare minimum as parents─
No, you couldn’t even argue that in bad faith.
They only ever did the minimum as parents.
They only ever did the worst they could do.
That’s how I should have thought about it.
They’d abused me in the most heinous way, by not loving me─I’m sure they had their excuses.
But what did those kinds of excuses have to do with their child?
A parent’s love for a child isn’t a duty to be fulfilled, it’s a feeling, and you shouldn’t get married or have children if you aren’t capable of feeling it.
If you never had to feel pain or know sadness, then you’d be free of stress and always perform well, whether in school or in athletics, whether it’s ethics or morals.
If you never had to feel the pressure of failing or anxiety over meeting a terrible fate, if you could ignore all pain whether physical or mental, you could be perfect all-around.
That is the truth of Tsubasa Hanekawa, model student.
The boring answer to why I have been me.
I could ignore the taste of blandness.
How unfair could it get, right? I was tossing the darkness and suffering that every person is burdened with onto someone else’s shoulders.
I bet Miss Senjogahara would be furious if she heard that.
When I think of her two years of suffering─when I think of her two-year fight to in fact acquire her pain, and then look at myself and the way I put it all on you, never having to know suffering, never having to feel pain, never having to fight.
“Frustrating” doesn’t begin to cover it.
And while it’s very interesting that the form known as Black Hanekawa would be created by a person like myself getting involved with an aberration called the Afflicting Cat, aberrations are nothing more than triggers as I said earlier.
You are you.
Of course, this third edition of you is more powerful than the last two, and you seem to be severed from me. As I said earlier, I’m getting “better” at this the more I do it.
When I asked Tsukihi what the trick was to making a house of cards, she told me, “This kind of thing is just about practice. It’s not about technique, it’s how many times you’ve tried. I’m sure you’d be good at it if you did it twenty times,” and the same goes for everything. So I must have uncoupled you from my heart better than I did my first and second times.
I made you into your own personality.
Call it nonsense if you want, it’s a terrible story.
No, it’s more terrible than a terrible story.
After all, like I’ve been saying, you’re not the only thing I cut loose from my heart as an independent aberration this time.
Should I call it another one?
Or should I call it another breed?
I unleashed the Tyrannical Tiger before I let you loose.
If you are an avatar of my stress─then the Tyrannical Tiger is an avatar of my envy.
Just as I wouldn’t have come upon the idea of a new breed of aberration if I hadn’t talked to that library employee, I never would have come upon that keyword had I not talked to Karen and Tsukihi. But now that I have, it seems so fitting it feels like the only possible word for it.
Envy.
To be honest, though, I really had no association with this word, envy, until just two days ago.
I didn’t even need to cut it loose.
I’d never envied anyone.
Because I was a disgustingly good model student able to ambitiously tackle any problem without feeling any stress at all.
I never felt like I begrudged others.
If anything, what I did feel was something like dissatisfaction: “Why doesn’t everyone try harder?” or “They should all just do more.”
The feeling had been enough to make Araragi mad at me, and now I realize just how self-absorbed I was. Unlike me, everyone else had to battle their stress as they lived their lives. He didn’t need that from a cheater like me.
“You can do anything if you try hard enough.”
I’d been able to do anything without trying, precisely because I wasn’t trying, and I must have been looking away from even Araragi’s feelings as I uttered those words to him.
Which is why I never needed to have anything to do with envy.
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No, I wouldn’t say that envy and I were completely unacquainted, but the amount of envy I had felt, that had built up in me must have been far less than any regular person’s.