The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya (22 page)

“Ouch.”

My head hurt.

Something was wrong. Whenever I tried to think about hard stuff like this, I felt like smoke was pouring from my ears.

“I don’t understand.”

I spoke the truth.

“I don’t see which one is the correct reality—the kid having the accident or surviving it?”

Shaking her head hesitantly, Asahina spoke in a voice like a droplet of water.

“We are not the only ones who have come from the future. There are others who do not wish for our future to exist. So…”

The moss-green minivan. The insane driver.

“Do you mean…”

My memories all screamed the same thing at me.

Ryoko Asakura, for one. She was from a different faction within the Data Overmind.

There was another organization besides Koizumi’s “Agency.” I remembered him jokingly saying something about a secret struggle taking place.

And there was another, much more recent memory. The creator of that house we’d encountered in the mountains. It had been a mysterious dimension that even Nagato couldn’t analyze. “An enemy of the SOS Brigade,” Koizumi had called it.

Which one of those had done this? Our enemy. I didn’t like that word.

They had tried to erase a boy who had originally needed to live. Which meant that his existence was a problem for them.

Others, who do not wish for our future to exist—

Who were they? I asked.

“That’s…”

Asahina’s lip trembled. She tried to speak, but her face soon showed her surrender.

“… I can’t tell you now. Not… not yet.”

She was shifting back to crying mode.

“That’s what’s so pathetic. Really. I can’t do anything. I can’t even help you understand.”

That wasn’t true.

Asahina wasn’t useless at all. She was just being prevented from doing anything. And the one doing it was her future self, Asahina the Elder.

But I couldn’t say that.

During the first Tanabata incident, I’d sat right here on this very bench and promised her I wouldn’t. I’d even pinky-promised.

“You have to keep me a secret from her,” she’d said.

How long I’d have to keep the secret, I had no idea. And if I didn’t know, I shouldn’t tell her. I didn’t understand it myself. I just felt very strongly that I shouldn’t say anything.

I wasn’t sure how my silence was being interpreted, but Asahina spoke in a quiet voice.

“Even before, you were the one who saved that boy, right? It’s strictly prohibited for people from the future to interfere directly.”

Oh, really?

“The only ones who may change the past are those who live within it. Anything else is against the rules…”

Hence my debut.

“I just did what my superiors told me to do, without knowing anything. I didn’t know why I was doing any of it. When I think about it, it just makes me feel so… stupid.”

That wasn’t true.

“I’ve written messages, trying to get them to let me tell you more… but they are always rejected. It’s because I’m so useless, I just know it.”

That wasn’t true either.

I finally opened my mouth.

“You’re not useless. Really—you’ve done so much for me, for the SOS Brigade, and for the world. You shouldn’t worry about it like this.”

Asahina looked up suddenly, but soon she pointed her tearful eyes back down.

“But all I ever do is wear a bunch of different outfits…” Her voice was low. “And even then, I didn’t know anything…” It rose again.

By “then” she meant December eighteenth—

“You’re wrong.”

I was about as serious as I ever get. Asahina seemed to realize that, and she looked up at me, surprised.

Asahina was no mere teatime maid mascot. The buxom beauty that she would become appeared in my mind.

Snow White. She had given me the hint that had allowed me to return with Haruhi from closed space.

Tanabata, three years ago. After traveling back in time with Asahina, I’d gone to Asahina the Elder, who’d sent me to the waiting Nagato.

And she’d helped me restore history after it had been altered.

Oh, right, I haven’t talked about that incident yet. It’s a long story, so I’ll try to keep it brief, but to sum things up, it was right after the winter field trip that we’d done it. Nagato, Asahina, and I had gone back in time to then, where we’d met a dying version of myself along with Nagato’s transformed version before putting everything in order. Asahina should have remembered that much, but what she wouldn’t notice (unlike Nagato and me) was the future version of herself. Asahina the Elder had made sure of that.

What was certain was that they were both Asahina—unlike the Asahina in the alternate timeline, who didn’t recognize me. To put it Nagato’s way, they were temporal variations of the same entity.

This Asahina was only acting on the orders of her boss, that much was clear, and I was sure that boss was in fact Asahina the Elder. The adult Asahina knew exactly what her younger self did and did not know. They were the same person, after all.

If there was something this Asahina needed to know, the elder Asahina would have long since told me what it was. The fact that she hadn’t meant that there was nothing I could say. “You must not tell her who was there,” Asahina the Elder had made me promise.

True enough, I could easily just tell her that an even lovelier version of herself had come from farther in the future to help me. It would be just as easy as it would have been to wake the other version of myself after I’d come back from my second trip back in time and tell him everything. But I hadn’t done that, of course, and he hadn’t done that to me. And because he hadn’t done that to me, it was something I couldn’t do. Instead, I did only what I had to do.

This Asahina would someday return to the future. Then she would travel back in time again, older this time, to help us. It was true that at the moment her calling seemed to be to serve as the SOS Brigade’s lovely maid, but that didn’t mean she was useless. Everything was connected. The future would happen because of the present. If the elements were altered, the future would naturally change.

Thinking on all this, I suddenly realized something.

“Oh!”

I wanted to say it. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. But I felt like I could finally put a name to this itchy feeling.

I thought about the previous summer, during the brigade’s first hunt for mysterious phenomena. I’d walked along with Asahina, and there beneath the cherry blossoms she’d told me she was from the future and explained the principles of time travel, although whether that incredible lecture about time planes was really an explanation or not wasn’t clear.

Back then, no matter what I asked her, she’d always given me the same answer.

“That’s classified.”

What I was feeling now was surely the same thing she’d felt then. I couldn’t tell her.

“Asahina.”

I still wanted to tell her something.

“Yes?”

Asahina gazed up at me with big, wet eyes.

“Um… look. You’re… how do I put this… you’re not just some toy for Haruhi—er… huh. Like, there’s another layer, or like a background… thing. Hmm…”

I trailed off, my thought unfinished as I failed to find the right words. It was no good; no matter what I said, I ran into something I shouldn’t say. It was damn annoying. I couldn’t think of words that would comfort her but also be safe to say. I’m sure if Koizumi were here, he’d be able to condense a whole lecture into a dozen words. But I had to keep myself from always running to him or Nagato for help. This was my problem.

But just like giving a computer to a monkey doesn’t mean he can use it, my mind couldn’t conjure up the vocabulary I needed to abandon the status quo.

“Um… look…”

Thinking some physical stimulation might get the ol’ neurons firing, I knocked on my head with my fists. And yet—

“Er… uh…”

I just wound up rubbing my temples as I groaned.

Until Asahina spoke.

“Kyon, it’s okay.”

I looked up and met her glittering eyes, but they were definitely smiling now.

“It’s okay, really.”

She repeated herself.

“I understand. What you’re trying to—”

She understood? What did she understand? I didn’t even know what I was trying to say.

“You don’t have to say anything. It’s enough.”

Asahina’s once-closed lips opened, her gaze full of kindness. In her eyes there was a faint but unmistakably gentle understanding.

I finally got it.

What, you ask? Wasn’t it obvious?

I had realized that she had realized.

Perhaps she’d understood from my stuttering manner what I couldn’t plainly tell her. It was something that would take her feeling of powerlessness and throw it far, far away. But I couldn’t say it. So what could it be? There weren’t many possible answers.

“Oh—”

As soon as I opened my mouth, Asahina calmly moved her hand. Something at once cold and warm touched my lips—it was her index finger, cutting off what I was about to say.

It was enough.

There was no need to say any more. She had received the message I couldn’t send. I understood that. There was silence between us.

“Mmm.”

Asahina slowly removed her finger, then put it to her own lips. She winked clumsily.

“Yeah.”

I left it at that.

We didn’t need any words. It was true. No pitcher in the world had to call out his pitches to the catcher. The world was full of convenient signals. If you didn’t need words to convey a simple message, then why use them?

There were other ways of communication that more than sufficed.

I wondered if that wasn’t perhaps a special property of emotions. Think about it—we shared sympathy without words. So there wasn’t any need to say more. Words were superfluous. Saying more than necessary was meaningless, a waste of breath.

Asahina smiled.

I returned her smile.

That was enough. Our feelings made up for what our words couldn’t say.

The next day—Monday.

After school, everybody gathered in the SOS Brigade headquarters as usual, and after drinking the tea Asahina and I had bought just the previous day, the brigade chief spoke up.

“So, Kyon.”

I had taken care to enjoy the tea more than usual, while Haruhi, who had never learned about being thankful, downed the entire scalding cup in three seconds. One hundred grams of that stuff cost six hundred yen—it wouldn’t have killed her to savor it a little.

“What?” I answered, glancing at the smiling Asahina, goddess among maids, out of the corner of my eye.

“Oh, would you like more tea?”

Just as Asahina hurried to pour more tea into Haruhi’s empty cup—

Haruhi leaned forward from the reclining position she’d assumed in her brigade chief’s chair, then rested her chin atop her clasped hands, her elbows on the table, and said a strange thing.

“I have this strange habit of talking to myself.”

Did she now? I never knew. This was the first I’d heard of it in close to a year.

“I don’t even pay attention to the people around me when I do it.”

Well, you should probably get that looked at before someone decides to publish a collection of your “wisdom,” I thought.

“So I’m just gonna talk to myself for a while. You’ll probably hear me, but don’t worry about it.”

Before I could point out how stupid that was, Haruhi started talking in a strangely casual voice.

“So a little ways from my house, there’s this really smart kid. He wears these glasses like a miniature professor, and he’s got a super clever-looking face. His name’s—”

Haruhi mentioned a name I had definitely heard recently. My back broke out in a sweat, and it wasn’t because of the heat.

Just as she was tilting the teapot to pour, Asahina froze.

Haruhi seemed unaffected, and she continued.

“Aaaanyway, sometimes I help the little guy study. Like yesterday, for example. And so he says to me, ‘I saw the bunny girl with a boy.’ ”

Haruhi assumed a truly unpleasant grin.

“Apparently he saw us when we were doing location shoots for the movie last autumn, and he really remembered seeing Mikuru in her bunny outfit. And so while we were on the subject, I asked him what the boy she was with looked like. And here’s the composite sketch.”

From somewhere, Haruhi produced a piece of paper torn from a notebook. On it was a rough but relatively skillful sketch of—hmm, somehow it looked like the face I saw every morning in the mirror. I mean, it was me, definitely.

“Heh heh heh.”

Haruhi laughed meaningfully.

That talky brat was surprisingly good at drawing. Wasn’t he supposed to become a scientist or something in the future? Was he aiming to be an artist? If I’d known, I would’ve bought him off to still his wagging tongue and scribbling hands.

My gaze swam for about three seconds as I held out hope that someone would come and save me.

Asahina simply stood there and trembled, her voice having apparently lost all function. It seemed very unlikely that a new character would burst into the clubroom, so my options were limited.

“…”

My eyes met Nagato’s, which had warmed to about minus-four degrees Celsius. For some reason, my stomach hurt.