The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya (3 page)

Nagato stood without ceremony, then held out her hand and spoke.

“Give it.”

I silently handed her the gun. I hadn’t been able to do anything with it, anyway. I just couldn’t make myself do it. I didn’t want to pull the trigger on any Nagato, at any time.

Nagato took the gun unconcernedly, then aimed it at her collapsed, glasses-wearing other self and pulled the trigger.

“…”

There was no sound, and I saw nothing miraculous fire from the gun, but—

“…”

Nagato (glasses) blinked, then got slowly to her feet. She stood there, ramrod-straight, very much like the Nagato I knew so well—not the girl who had given me the application form for her club, tugged hesitantly on my sleeve, and smiled shyly and faintly.

As though to confirm my thoughts, that Nagato smoothly removed her glasses, then after glancing to me with her own eyes, locked her emotionless gaze on her other self.

“Request synchronization.”

The two Nagatos stared each other down. This incident included, I’d had several occasions to see my other self. My retinas had also been graced with the sight of both Asahina the Younger and Elder. But this was the first time I’d seen two of Nagato, and it was strangely moving. Magnificent, even.

“Request synchronization,” the gunshot Nagato repeated. The Nagato holding the pistol responded immediately.

“Denied.”

Even I thought this was weird—to say nothing of the Nagato who now held her glasses in her hand. Her eyebrows moved a millimeter. “Why?”

“I do not wish to.”

I was stunned. Had Nagato ever so clearly expressed a preference? It wasn’t an excuse. She had definitively and unambiguously spoken words of emotional refusal.

“…”

The other Nagato fell silent, as though in deep thought.

“…”

The night wind ruffled her hair.

The Nagato who had come back from the future with me spoke.

“You will reset the world changes you effected.”

“Understood,” said the other Nagato, but then continued on to say, “I cannot detect the existence of the Data Overmind.”

“It is not here,” replied my Nagato indifferently. “I am still connected to the Data Overmind in my own space-time. I will effect the reversion of changes.”

“Understood,” said past-Nagato.

“After the reversion,” continued my Nagato, “take whatever actions you wish.”

The newly repaired other Nagato looked to me, her head cocked ever so slightly. I was certain of the invisible information her expression revealed. Nobody understands Nagato’s feelings the way I do.

This Nagato is
that
Nagato. The Nagato who appeared at the hospital that night—that is her. The one who made me so angry by claiming that her punishment was being debated.

I also understood why the Nagato who came from the future with me rejected synchronization. She doesn’t want to tell her current self what action to take, when the time comes.

Why, you ask? It goes without saying.

Thank you
—the words I heard from Nagato then are the answer.

“Kyon—” said Asahina the Elder to me, hesitantly, as I stood there, stock still. “Please, take care of her… of
me
.”

She went to pick up her heavy-looking younger self, who was still deeply sleeping. I hurried over to lend a hand, and no sooner had she asked me for help than I’d gotten the lesser Asahina on my back, her warmth and softness just as I remembered it.

“A large-scale time-quake will soon occur.”

Asahina the Elder hugged her shoulders, her face anxious. “This is a larger and more complicated space-time modification than the one that just happened. I don’t think we’ll be able to keep our eyes open this time.”

If she said so, I believed it—but why would this be any different? I asked.

“The first change only changed the past and present. Now, in addition to that, we must take pains to restore time to its original flow. Think back. Where do you remember waking up?”

The evening of December twenty-first—I’d regained consciousness in the hospital.

“That’s right. So we have to arrange things for that to come about.”

My blazer still hanging over her shoulders, the barefoot older Asahina drew closer to me, looking somehow melancholy. She touched my shoulder, upon which Asahina the Younger still rested, then turned her head to regard Nagato. The Nagato who had come here with me now walked over to join us, the other remaining where she stood, and my collapsed other self still lying on the ground.

Asahina the Elder put her other hand on Nagato’s shoulder. “If you please, Nagato.”

Nagato nodded faintly, then looked at her other self, as if acknowledging that this would be their final parting. The other Nagato said nothing. I got the impression that she was lonely, which might have been my imagination, but I didn’t worry about it. I remembered what I’d said—what my other self, still lying on the ground, would soon say. “Relax and come visit me in the hospital. And don’t forget to tell your boss to drop dead.”

“Close your eyes, Kyon,” whispered Asahina the Elder. “We can’t have you getting time-sick.”

I took her advice and squeezed my eyes shut.

The next moment, I felt the world twist around me.

“Whoa—”

I’d experienced the weightless, spinning sensation many times, and while I felt like I was getting used to it, the magnitude of the spinning felt different this time. Previously, it had felt like an amusement park roller coaster, but this was like being inside a spaceship that was blasting randomly around and I’d forgotten to fasten my seat belt. But since gravity was not acting on my body, nor was I actually being spun around, this was simple dizziness. Though I wanted to see what was going on outside me, opening my eyes made the drunken feeling terrifyingly worse, so the only vision I had was the flashes of light that sparkled behind my closed eyes. I was very grateful for both the weight of Asahina the Younger on my back and her older counterpart’s hand on my shoulder.

—And then, there was a piercing, dangerous flash of light that penetrated my closed eyelids.

Unable to resist the desire to see, I opened my eyes, and I understood the source of the flashing red light. Only emergency vehicles are allowed to have red lights that revolve like that.

It was…?

An ambulance was parked in front of the North High School entrance. Rubbernecking students looked on from a distance as emergency personnel carried someone out on a stretcher. Two forms walked alongside the stretcher as it moved, two forms whose names I’ll never forget as long as I live. Haruhi looked pale and scared, and Asahina’s face was streaked with tears as they followed the paramedics, with an unsmiling Koizumi trailing behind them.

The stretcher was immediately loaded into the ambulance, and Haruhi got in as well, after a short exchange with the paramedics.
The flashing red lights and siren got bumped up a notch, and the ambulance started to move. Asahina covered her face as Koizumi had a serious conversation on his cell phone. Nagato was not there—but that was to be expected.

Some part of my body felt Asahina the Elder let out a sigh of relief.

“Now we can return to our own time, Kyon.”

The scene faded out. I guessed that was the end of this particular bonus scene. I closed my eyes. It had been worth seeing—a fragment of three days of which I had no memory. That’s right—Haruhi had claimed that it was the brigade chief’s duty to be concerned about her brigade members.

The dizzy feeling started up again. I was desperate for some motion sickness medication—next time, I’d be sure to bring some.

“I’ll aim for the time coordinates you came from. Be nice to me, won’t you? It will take a while before I wake up. Hee hee, you can even kiss me, if you want.”

Asahina the Elder’s lingering, mischievous voice felt very distant.

And then—

When I opened my eyes, I was standing in Nagato’s living room with Asahina on my back.

Nagato stood, facing me. “Sixty-two seconds have elapsed since we departed,” she said, looking up at me. “We have returned.”

To our own time.

I let out a deep breath and lowered Asahina to the floor. Her sleeping face was definitely a top candidate for Most Kissable, but I wasn’t so naive as to take the other Asahina’s words literally. Of course, were this not Nagato’s living room, and were Nagato not currently observing me, I might’ve given in to sketchy behavior. Wait, no—I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t!

Taking my teacup off the table, I downed the remaining tea in one gulp. It had turned lukewarm before we’d started time traveling, but it was still awfully tasty. It was perfect, like having
barley tea right after a bath—it was even a match for the tea Asahina brewed in the clubroom.

“Geez.”

I felt like I’d finally sorted out all the trouble from the previous year. There was nothing more that needed doing. We’d changed the world back to what it needed to be and had gotten back from the club trip that had overlapped into the new year. All that remained was the first temple visit of the year. Oh, sure—Haruhi would probably come up with something strange, but until then I figured I’d be able to relax a bit.

Incidentally, the angelic time traveler didn’t seem to be waking up. The method by which she’d been put to sleep was unclear, but her sleeping face looked as happy as Shamisen’s did when he had a full belly and was curled up somewhere warm, so I was loath to wake her. I asked Nagato to get a futon ready for her in the guest room, then carried her there and tucked her in.

“Nagato—do me a favor and take care of her until she wakes up, okay?”

Nagato was certainly getting her fill of sleeping guests, but she looked at me and nodded.

I would’ve loved to stay until Asahina awoke, but to be honest I was utterly weary myself. If I didn’t get home soon and ameliorate my exhaustion via a good bath and my own bed, there was no way I’d be able to be up tomorrow morning by nine, and I wanted to put an end to the evaporation of my wallet’s limited resources. Five people’s worth of New Year’s cash would’ve been a crushing blow.

It would’ve been nice to crawl into a futon next to Asahina, like I’d done back when I’d slept through three years after Tanabata, and while I’m completely confident that I would’ve fallen immediately asleep upon putting head to pillow, I couldn’t help but feel that nobody was asking for me to sleep there.

It was kind of nice that the time traveler was crashing at the alien’s place.

“See you tomorrow.”

“Understood.”

Nagato saw me off with a gaze that put me at ease, her tranquil pupils fixing on me from behind her bangs.

“Good work today. Sorry we caused you so much trouble.”

Asahina had done her part, but Nagato (and her counterpart in this apartment, at Tanabata four years ago) had put in the most effort.

“It’s fine,” she said, her expression unchanging. “I was the cause.”

I watched the alien until the door closed. I had wondered if she would possibly smile, but unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—her pale face and small frame were as impassive as ever. And yet you can thank my keen eyes for noticing that there was a hint of something different.

I rode my bike slowly home after leaving the apartment building, and I fell asleep immediately after falling down on my bed.

Somehow I got the feeling that the dreams I had in my exhausted sleep were really great ones, but thirty seconds after I woke up, I’d forgotten them entirely. But the lingering feeling told me everything.

I’m sure it was about an alien and a time traveler enjoying a pleasant tea together.

And so it was that just as I’d lowered Asahina off my shoulders, I’d planned to cast off my worries and enjoy a relatively peaceful January.

But a single problem remained.

Her sleeping face had been so lovely that it entirely slipped my mind—that precisely
because
the sleeping Asahina was asleep, from her perspective she’d seen and heard almost nothing of what Nagato, Asahina the Elder, and I had done that December
eighteenth. As far as she knew, I’d suddenly told her that space-time had been altered, and, half disbelieving, she’d taken us back in time, only to see my other self be immediately struck down and be immediately rendered unconscious herself—and when she woke, she’d already be back in her own time.

As far as I was concerned, she’d fulfilled her role perfectly well, by doing something only she could do, but Asahina herself evidently didn’t see it that way. Now that I thought about it, ever since the winter break had ended, she seemed to be constantly getting lost in thought.

This is all connected to the melancholy Sunday pseudo-date she’d asked me out on, where we’d barely saved the boy in glasses from a traffic accident. If I had to take a guess, I’d blame it on Asahina the Elder’s policy of secrecy. While it was true that anyone who would make Asahina cry deserved a thorough pummeling, I wondered if I hadn’t been more often the cause of her tears myself. Maybe I needed to get Haruhi to go to a boxing gym with me. A little bit of punching and getting punched might do me good, I thought.

In any case, the Sunday of tea shopping got me thinking about the future of the SOS Brigade, and it also succeeded in lifting Asahina’s spirits. To be honest, I’m not sure how much she figured out, but we reached enough of an understanding that detailed explanations weren’t necessary—at least, not to
this
Asahina.

Just as I don’t mention the name John Smith to Haruhi, I’ll never tell Asahina about the existence of her adult self. It’s a trump card, only for emergencies.

And should the time come—

Well, I don’t
want
that time to come.

…

…

…

As we enter February, our story returns to its beginning.

Toward the end of the school year, the mood around the school changes somehow—you start to see the seniors around less, for example. Most of them were now toiling in the depths of their college entrance exams, which makes the teachers’ room a tense place to be. Come the year after next, I’ll be a senior myself—that’ll be me. If this year’s senior class doesn’t rouse themselves to beating the municipal high school’s college acceptance rate, the principal is going to be pushing extra classes or mock exams that cancel the school anniversary, which will only serve to annoy me, since I’m still two years away from seniorhood.