Chapter Five:It Goes To Twelve
"Everything I looked for hid from me until you made
them show themselves?"
"Don't get too down," he told her. "Remember,
closed spaces result from your frustration. All you need to do to make
Koizumi's job easier is be happy.
"As long as you respect the boundaries of other people,
I don't see why you can't be that. Especially since you now know you've got a
time traveler, an esper, and an alien in your club. Isn't that what you were
looking for?"
"And a slider," Haruhi added, struggling to force
a smile.
"It's like my wishes were granted by a literal genie
who was looking for the wording loophole to keep me in the dark ... I mean,
honestly, I'm a bit jealous. It seems that you got to do all the fun things
while I was unaware!"
"I've said it before, and I'll say it again," Kyon
insisted. "The most important thing to me about the brigade is the people
in it.
"There's a lot I don't care about — if we're trying to
keep closed space from forming, if we're just hanging out and playing games, if
we're working on the anthology.... "
"What I do care about is being there with the friends
we've formed. Hey, Nagato explained what happened last December, right?"
"Yeah," Haruhi said quietly, frowning. "I
guess Yuki must have been really mad about me.... She doesn't show much, you
know? And of course, something else to be jealous of — she opens up to you, not
me."
"That's not it," he countered, shaking his head.
"You probably see me as idle and ignorant, but I just try and pay close
attention. I think I'd be a terrible person if I didn't pay attention to Nagato
after she saved my life so many times.
"The only person I can never figure out reliably is
you."
She smirked at that. "Good," she decided. "If
you can solve aliens, time travelers, and everything else, at least there's one
mystery left for you to focus on, right?"
He looked away at the sky. "Anyway," he said after
an extended moment of silence, "I had to leave that world because the
people who made the brigade were there, but the brigade itself wasn't."
"Yeah, Yuki mentioned that.... Hey, I want to know
something about that world — Yuki set it up for you, you know. What was she
like? More assertive? I have a hard time imagining her being pushy."
"Eh ... she was more like a regular girl," he
said, shaking his head. "She was quiet, just like now ... but more
talkative than she usually is."
"Was she cute?" Haruhi pressed, studying the
profile of his face as he stared away.
"She looked exactly the same, just with her glasses on
again," he answered with a shrug. "Except ... well, she was more expressive.
She had a very pretty smile; Nagato doesn't smile, really. That's one of the
three main things that stick with me."
"Hmm," she mused, trying to banish the rising
frustration she felt. Her own fault for asking these questions, she supposed.
"What are the others?"
"Er.... Well, your other self in that world went to
Kouyouen and hadn't cut her hair, so when we sneaked into Kitago, I asked you—
That is, I asked her to put her hair in a ponytail."
She smirked, seeing the faint coloring of his cheeks.
"Oh?" she asked. "Hmm, what do you think
about me making my longer hair again?"
He shook his head, looking at her carefully. "It'd be a
bit obvious," he warned her. Then he hesitated, considering, "But I
guess I can't just say 'no' to everything you want to do. Especially since that
one sounds reasonable.
"What about toning it down a bit and just making it
grow faster? Probably no one will notice if it finishes by the end of, say,
summer vacation."
She counted the weeks in her head. "Almost a full term
away, huh? Well, I'm holding you to that," she decided. Some custodian of
her powers he was going to be, if she could play his biases.
"Why do you want your hair longer again, anyway?"
She coughed quietly, looking another direction. "So,
what was the other thing that stuck with you?"
He shivered, looking away himself. "Being
stabbed."
"Wow, that's pretty short of an ideal world,"
Haruhi observed, trying not to snicker. "You made it out alright, though,
didn't you? Any scars?"
"Of course not," he answered. "My future self
and a future Nagato had to go back and.... Well, things got a bit complicated.
Anyway, Nagato healed the injury. But this was when I was supposed to be in a
coma. A scar from a stab wound when I 'fell down the stairs' seems a bit odd,
don't you think?"
"True enough," she agreed. "Anyway. I suppose
we should investigate Kanae-chan's back story?"
On Michikyuu Kanae's home world, when she was ten years old,
a cataclysm had torn a hole in the sky. Strange sleek metallic things had
rained down upon the city in her hometown, hatching into gracefully curved
reflective metal creatures, no two quite alike, but all very spindly. All very
fast, and quite dangerous.
(Cualquiera)