My Parallel-World Self Has Days I Can't Understand

After grabbing a quick lunch at the Green Mall, the two of us headed toward Higashimachi to hunt for a way to get me home. At this hour, well clear of school letting out or the evening errand rush, there were hardly any people out on the streets.

"Maybe something will happen if we take the same route as yesterday… okay, that's a bit too vague, isn't it."

"I wish we had one of those portals you see in the Marvel movies."

The two of us traced circles in the air with both hands, but naturally no obvious dimensional rift appeared.

"Still… I guess we can at least be glad we've managed to narrow down the location. Beats having no leads at all."

"Forbidden ground: Himurogioka-Higashimachi. If we can pin down the spots where something happens, maybe we can figure out where the worlds touch. It might not be obvious at a glance, so it's probably best to keep a close eye on my phone."

"When it was me, I got so caught up in bad-end talk I didn't notice until I was already home."

For now, my phone showed no active contract. If the worlds switched over, messages might suddenly come through, just like they had for Tsukino.

"Oh, that reminds me."

Tsukino gave a little clap of her hands.

"I asked my uncle about you, Asahi. But he didn't seem to know you at all."

"I see. I ran into Nanaha-senpai a little while ago too, and sure enough, she didn't know me either."

"…I see. She does have a part-time job there, after all."

In "The Eternal Continuation," her contact with Nanaha-senpai had fizzled out. What was it like for the real Tsukino? I couldn't read that far into it.

"I wonder what the difference is between when it was me and when it's you. Anyway, we'd better assume you don't exist in this world at all, Asahi, or things could get dangerous."

"Yeah. So I have no identity here, huh…"

Just off the top of my head, that would mean trouble with all kinds of paperwork.

"We've got to find you a way home soon, Asahi."

I nodded, but as I did, the sight of Tsukino from last night flashed through my mind. Her eyes wavering in the moonlight, and the light that spilled from them. And the feel of our hands laid one over the other.

"…Can I tell you a little more about myself? The me who isn't in the novel. When it comes down to it, that book is fiction."

"It didn't read like fiction to me."

"I wrote it pretty exaggerated and dramatic, you know. As my bad-end novel."

I wondered if all that dramatizing had softened her Eternal HellEternal Inferno.

Under a blue sky dotted with sparse clouds, as we passed near her uncle's house, Tsukino started to speak, light as idle chatter.

"After the accident, I couldn't write anymore. I just couldn't bring myself to cheerfully dream up bad ends."

"Well, of course."

"You'd think I could just draw a clean line between fiction and reality. I had no idea what I should even do."

Tsukino suddenly took a stance and threw a straight punch. The sound of her fist striking the air rang out, clear and unmistakable.

"That's when I took up karate. Oh, and I got my wisdom teeth pulled, too."

"So it wasn't a story I could laugh about at all, huh…"

"You're allowed to laugh at the direction my flailing took, and at my knack for self-destruction."

She cheerfully stepped in and let loose another blow. Even to an amateur's eye, the movement was beautiful.

"And so, after agonizing forever over whether to enter a karate tournament, right around when I finally came back to my senses…"

"You were about to go all-in on karate?"

"I was all over the place, after all. Anyway, that was when Nanaha-senpai gave me some advice. She said, if you think you're in a bad end right now, then try writing it."

She let out a small breath.

"Back then, senpai was struggling too, unable to write anything herself, and yet she listened to me so earnestly. So I told myself I had to write, and I just started hammering at the keyboard."

She kept going, even as she dropped her gaze.

"Once I started, the fact that it was a bad end was exactly what let me keep going. It was a kind of novel I'd never written before, one I wasn't used to at all, but I managed to write it through to the end. Then I sent it to a literary award whose deadline I could just barely make."

"And you ended up winning it."

Tsukino shook her head with a wry smile.

"I just plain lost. It's not that easy, not that easy."

"Really?"

"It was just me writing about myself, after all. Next to the winning entries, it wasn't even a contest. But the editorial department reached out to me. And so, through round after round of revisions, it ended up getting published."

"So you really went through a lot."

"It was actually a relief, though, having nothing to think about but the novel. And luckily, it got some buzz, too."

"You showed your face on the posters, and you did interviews, right?"

"You read the interview articles?!"

"No, I haven't read those yet. Figured that'd be crossing a line."

"I-it's not like I said anything weird in them, but… having someone I know read them is still a little embarrassing, after all."

Seeing her blush and look down, I couldn't help getting a little curious.

"You just got interested, didn't you?"

"Same existence! I did, but I'll pass on reading them."

"If it's after I've gone through them and checked which articles are safe to show you, then… that's a different story."

She gave a wry smile, but it slipped away in an instant.

"…But there were times the interviews were a little hard, maybe."

She murmured it softly, barely letting the words out.

"Being asked about my dad and mom over and over and over. Getting my picture taken doing who-knows-what. I stopped ego-searching partway through, but there were tons of people bashing me, saying I was using my parents' deaths to make money. And it's always exactly those people who haven't even read the book, going on and on about things that miss the point completely. At least read it first!"

A straight punch that carried something close to killing intent cut through the air.

"…Though this one's on me, for not having the energy to turn down the editors' requests."

"Even in the same situation, I don't think I'd be able to come up with a reason to refuse either."

"Thank you, me. Anyway, that's how it went. I was tied up with 'The Eternal Continuation' for a good while, and I still couldn't write a normal bad-end novel. I couldn't even bring myself to show my face at the literature club, so I ended up quitting. This part I did exaggerate a bit in the book, though."

That said, to me it sounded like nothing but the honest truth.

"I wanted to do something for Jun, who was lost, and for Nanaha-senpai, who couldn't write anymore, but I couldn't think of anything. And there were more and more days I couldn't muster the will to go to school. Though that's partly because I no longer had a dad and a mom to wake me up in the morning."

A morning with both parents gone, nobody gathering around the table… I couldn't imagine it.

"It was the day I met you, Asahi."

Tsukino cast her eyes into the distance. She spoke of something only a few days old as though it were a tale from years past.

"I couldn't bring myself to go to school, so I slept until noon. I took some documents over to my uncle's house, stopped by to visit the grave, wandered around the lookout park to kill time, and finally headed to that movie theater."

"And there you got the mistaken idea there was a revival screening of 'Infinity Heaven.'"

"Right, right. The moment I saw 'now showing,' I thought, I have to see it now! So I bought a ticket without even checking the other movies."

And so, Tsukino and I met.

"It was fun. It was really, truly fun! All that agonizing over not being able to write bad ends, or even dream them up, might as well have never happened. None of the overcomplicated stuff mattered; that movie, just brimming with the will to gouge out the viewers' hearts and rip them to shreds, was so, so good. I nearly gave it a standing ovation!"

Just like that day when we talked in the café, her voice bounced along, happy from the very bottom of her heart.

Then she drew up alongside me and closed the distance by half a step. Tsukino, her eyes narrowed and her lips softening into a smile, was right there beside me.

"Getting to talk about those impressions right then and there, to share in the same bad end more deeply than I ever had before. It was like something that had been weighing on my heart all that time just melted away, like I could dream up bad ends again. That's how I felt back then."

As we walked, our hands naturally bumped against each other.

"I got to see the literature club the way it was before everything changed, too. Happy-end junkie Jun, creation berserker Nanaha-senpai. The two I remembered so fondly. It made me so happy that you had those exact same exchanges with them, Asahi."

With a bouncing step, Tsukino turned her whole body to face me.

With the blue sky at her back, her almond-shaped eyes narrowed in an innocent laugh, she was radiant beyond measure.

"I'm so glad I got to meet you that day, Asahi."

I didn't know how to answer that dazzling smile. Not even writing a novel had ever left me this lost for the right words.

Back then, I hadn't known a single thing about what Tsukino was carrying. I'd only been giddy that I'd found someone I saw eye to eye with. Guilt clenched deep in my chest.

It was right then, as if to sever my thoughts, that a sound rang out. A familiar sound.

The sound coming from my pocket was a LINE notification.

I hurried to pull it out. A pile of messages had come in from my parents, Jun, and Nanaha-senpai.

We'd just reached the area around the park where we'd been bad-ending. A few kids back from kindergarten were playing with their parents.

"Does your phone connect?"

"No, it's back to having no contract. And replying on LINE… I can't do that either, huh."

Every message was someone worrying that I hadn't come home. Quite a few were from my family.

"My phone's connected, so this is still my world, then."

"Then we must have passed through my world for a moment. Or else there's a point of contact somewhere, and my phone connected for just an instant."

Looking around, all I saw was an early-afternoon residential neighborhood stretching out around us.

"It's pretty much certain it's this area. It's okay, Asahi. If we look into it little by little while keeping an eye on your phone, we'll definitely find the connection. I managed to make it back, after all."

"Yeah. Compared to when we were going all the way out to the lookout park, we've narrowed it down a lot."

"Mm. I'll definitely… get you back to your dad and mom, and to Jun and Nanaha-senpai, Asahi. This time it's my turn."

Tsukino raised her eyebrows. Yesterday's tears overlaid the firm resolve I saw in her gaze.

I let out a breath, the dead phone in my hand.

What should I do now? If I wanted to get home, maybe I ought to spring into action right away.

But—

"Tsukino, I have a favor to ask."

I said it.

"Your father and mother. I want to go to their grave."

I wanted to know the Tsukino I didn't know, this same existence of mine who was supposed to know everything.

It was an impulse straight from the heart.

 

*

 

Rows of gravestones stood lit by the peaceful early-afternoon sun. From somewhere drifted the smell of incense and flowers.

Maybe it was the hour, but the cemetery held almost no visitors, and even sitting under the sun it felt nothing but lonely.

Right beside the entrance, a water tap and buckets sat ready for changing flower water and washing gravestones. This wasn't my first time at this cemetery. During Obon I'd come with my parents to visit the graves of my late grandmother and our ancestors.

That said, since I always came with someone else, I only had a hazy memory of where the Masumi family grave actually was.

Tsukino cut across the cemetery without a moment's hesitation. It was easy to see she came here often. I followed her, and in no time we were standing before the Masumi family grave.

The gravestone, with its freshly carved names, was impeccably cared for. Its surface, without a single speck of grime, gleamed in the sunlight. The flowers set in the holders were wilted, but even so you could tell they'd only been changed a few days ago. She must have changed them when she visited, before she wandered into my world.

Tsukino had bought flowers right near the cemetery. Vividly colored chrysanthemums.

"Do you want to make an offering too, Asahi? Normally there'd be no way for my parallel-world self to offer anything, so I think they'd be happy. …Oh, but. You'd have reservations, wouldn't you. Your parents aren't dead, after all."

"No, I don't mind. If anything, I'd like to pay my respects."

"I see. That makes me happy too."

Tsukino removed the old flowers and changed the water as well. From buying the flowers on the way here to getting the bucket ready to tending the gravestone now, she did it all with practiced ease. I didn't know any of the steps.

At Tsukino's prompting, we each set flowers into the holders, one on the left and one on the right.

Then, side by side, the two of us pressed our hands together before the gravestone engraved with the names of parents who, unlike in my own world, were gone.

The two of us tend to end up making wishes, whether at a shrine, a temple, or a grave. But what we were doing now, though similar to that time at the shrine, was different. Back then, I, for one, had wished for Tsukino to be able to get home. And she had made it home, and now I was the one adrift.

So this time, I supposed, I ought to wish for my own self to be able to get home.

"The Eternal Continuation." Nanaha-senpai, her hair gone black. The utterly at-ease look on Tsukino's face as she dozed in bed. They all churned inside my chest.

"It's fine even if we never find a way for me to get home."

The words spilled out on their own.

"Huh?"

Tsukino's eyes went wide, as if she were looking at something she couldn't believe.

Even so, I couldn't stop myself.

"I think it's okay if I can't get back."

I looked the startled Tsukino straight in the eye and told her.

"I can't leave you all alone, Tsukino. I'll stay right here, just like this."

"No!"

An anguished cry rang out through the early-afternoon cemetery.

She stepped toward me, hard. Through her disheveled black hair, I glimpsed her wide-open eyes.

"Why would you say something like that? Of course it's not okay!"

She shook her head violently.

"I know it's for my sake. But… no. Absolutely not. It's out of the question!"

She hung her head, her shoulders trembling.

"You're alone right now, Tsukino. You lost your father and mother, you've drifted apart from the literature club… you're lonelier than I could ever possibly understand. That's why I… I can't just leave you behind."

Tsukino's shoulders shook harder than ever. Her bangs hid her expression from me, but a single shining drop fell to the cemetery ground.

"…You're exactly right."

Her voice was hoarse.

"I'm lonely. Even with my uncle being so good to me, I'm lonely. Seeing everyone the way they used to be, in your world, made me even lonelier. It made me realize I really am all alone. But even so!"

She snapped her face up. Anger seeped into her tear-soaked eyes. It was the first time I'd seen her truly angry.

"You still have all of it, Asahi! Your dad, your mom, the literature club…! Everything I lost! There's no way it's okay to throw all that away. I won't allow it!"

 

 

Tsukino's hand seized the front of my shirt.

Tears spilled from the eyes glaring up at me. Sobs mixed into her breathing, and the hand gripping me trembled in tiny shudders.

"Don't throw away your own happiness, Asahi. You, vanishing from your dad and mom's lives. Nanaha-senpai and Jun, thinking on and on about a you who's gone… there's no way a world like that could ever be okay! I won't have it! I understand that sorrow, that loneliness, all of it!"

It was shock enough to make my head spin. Deep down, I couldn't truly imagine what Tsukino felt, having lost the people most precious to her. But at the very least, I found I could imagine what would happen if I disappeared from my own world. Even though I should have been prepared for exactly that.

I was the one who looked away first. After a while, Tsukino let go.

"…Sorry."

She said it in a faint voice, and slipped past me.

On reflex I started to turn and call her back.

"Don't stop me."

She said it before I could, and I couldn't move. Unable even to turn around, I listened to Tsukino's footsteps. The gravestone before me, and the flowers the two of us had offered there, stood as if nothing had happened at all.

"Just let me be alone for a little while."

Those words hung there, an unmistakable rejection, as her footsteps faded into the distance.

After a long silence, when I finally looked behind me, Tsukino was nowhere to be seen.

"…What should I have done?"

The sun dimmed all at once. It was nothing more than a cloud passing by. The gravestone where Tsukino's parents slept had no answers for me, and there was nothing I could do about their deaths.

Same existence though we were, the me of now no longer understood everything about Tsukino.

There came a soft rustle of something falling at my feet. Several wilted flowers lay scattered there, blown over by the wind, it seemed. The chrysanthemums from the earlier offering.

The flowers we'd just offered at the grave and the fallen ones were the same thing, yet with the passing of time they'd become something else entirely. Even the number offered and the number on the ground were different.

And yet, the fallen flowers, wilted though they were, were still beautiful. The feelings Tsukino had poured into them hadn't changed.

Tsukino and me. My world and Tsukino's world.

"Tsukino and I are different. And even so, Tsukino and I are the same."

Over these past few days, I must have felt that in my bones time and again. We'd connected over bad ends, gone More Bad together, laughed at More Hell. We'd even opened up kinks in each other that neither of us had known were there.

At the cemetery entrance I put the bucket back and said my goodbyes to the flowers that had served their role.

And with that, I broke into a run.

Precisely because I'm me, I knew the one thing I could do for Tsukino right now.

"That's me for you."

Unlike Tsukino, I kicked off the ground as best my utterly untrained body could.

I already knew exactly where I was headed.