Re:Zero – Starting Life in Another World. Volume. 10.
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‘Chapter 4:- PARENT AND CHILD.’
Sub-chapter 1.
The annoying cackling, laughing voice made Subaru appreciate that yet another normal morning had arrived.
He was in his own, very familiar room. There was a bookshelf stuffed with manga and light novels on the wall, and the student desk he’d been using since a young age held a variety of small tools and the fruits of various hobbies scattered over it. In the back of the room was an old television used exclusively for gaming, and before that was the very familiar sight of his half-naked father.
Such was the morning scenery surrounding Subaru Natsuki atop the now-unmade bed.
“…”
But amid that very familiar scenery, he felt an odd stirring in his chest—
“Heyyy, are you ignoring me?! If you ignore me I’m gonna cry! I’m your real daddy related to you by blood and no spring chicken. Do you really think I can take that? There’s no way. I’ll die from embarrassment!”
“Same goes for me, then! Or rather, the press just now killed me. Now I will sleep forever.”
Subaru responded appropriately to his half-naked father’s statement and ducked under the futon. Faced with his son’s cold demeanor, his father—Kenichi—groaned out in dissatisfaction.
“Well, whaaaat is this?! Is this your rebellious phase?! Shit, I thought it’d come someday, but I never expected it’d be this morning. I should’ve spent less time preparing breakfast and more time preparing to speak with my own son…!!”
“You say that, but what are you tryin’ to do with a guy’s legs… Hey, wait a— Ow! Owwww!”
“Okaaay, I’ve decided that today, I’ll have a heart-to-heart talk with you! First, let’s talk with our muscles! You just try breaking out of my figure-four leg lock infused with looove! Oh yeaaah—!”
With Subaru’s legs bound in a lock atop the bed, Kenichi lay down facing the opposite direction as he applied pressure to the joints. Unable to resist, Subaru let out a painful cry, which Kenichi greeted with a laugh as he mocked his son.
“Gwahahah! What’s wrong, what’s wrong? You work out every day so you can grow big and strong, so aren’t you ashamed of having such a hard time against one middle-aged ma— Ah, wait a second! Ow! Owwww!”
“You’re a fool to pick a figure-four leg lock, it’s weak against reversals. You’re getting old, Dad! All I have to do is reverse my body and the damage flies the other way! Here’s my revenge for you putting a figure-four leg lock on… Ah, wait! You can’t reverse my reversal… Owow! Owowowow!”
As the victim shifted that morning, painful cries arose, boisterous voices filling the Natsuki residence to the brim. Thus did the horseplay resembling a father-son dispute continue until—
“Put a sock in it, you two. Your mom is getting pretty hungry over here and wants to eat breakfast.”
When an uneven knock and a casual voice flew into the room, the pair engaged in a war of holds came to a complete halt. Both of them teary-eyed from pain, they looked at the entryway, where a single woman stood—a middle-aged woman with a foul look in her eyes.
At first sight, one might think the look grave, filled with considerable displeasure, but in truth, she wasn’t the kind of person to think anything of the sort on the inside, something Subaru knew from seventeen years of being acquainted with her.
Subaru could derive all that from a single glance at her foul look, for the woman appearing was his mother, Nahoko Natsuki.
Nahoko’s words made Kenichi go “Whoopsie!” He stuck his tongue out while leaping to his feet and said, “Sorry, sorry. I lost myself scuffling with Subaru there. You could’ve eaten without us, you know…”
“—? Why would I, when we can eat as a family? It’s better to eat with everyone together.”
When Kenichi turned his attention her way, Nahoko inclined her head with a mystified look. There was neither sarcasm nor resentment in her speech; it was simply how she really felt. His wife’s reply sent Kenichi nodding strongly several times over.
“That’s right, so very right. That’s my bride! You really get it. Breakfast is much tastier when everyone’s faces are gathered in one place! “
“The taste doesn’t change. Everyone eating together means I can wash all the plates at once, though.”
“Ah, you were talking about the cleanup? Sorry, I guess I got overly worked up by my lonesome.”
Kenichi said a rather nice line, but Nahoko’s statement bluntly shot it down. Nahoko looked curious as the blow sent her husband’s shoulders sinking. Then she looked in Subaru’s direction and said, “You’re coming for breakfast, too, Subaru. Your mom worked hard for your sake today, after all.”
To this, she added a thin smile, which only those close to her understood meant she was in a very good mood indeed.
Sub-chapter 2.
“Whoa, this is amazin’, Subaru. It’s a super-special course. It’s like a green forest.”
Thus spoke Kenichi, gone from half-naked to clothed, as he went down to the first floor with Subaru. Standing by his father, who wore comically eye-catching glasses, Subaru gazed at the dining table and sighed.
“I’m straight-up grateful. Mm, I seriously feel that way…but what’s up, Mom? Why is my plate the only one with a big pile of green peas plopped on top of it?”
Just as Kenichi had pointed out, before Subaru’s spot on the dining table was a special course, a large heaping pile of green peas. Incidentally, Subaru really didn’t like green peas. He was bad with green vegetables in general, but especially these.
“Hey now, you’re always saying how you hate green peas, aren’t you, Subaru? It’s not good to be picky about your food, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to make you eat lots and put that whole business to rest.”
“So you relied on a memory you’d eventually forget anyway and decided to correct my likes and dislikes. But what do you mean, this opportunity…? Is today some kind of special day or something?”
“Heh, you’re so naive, Subaru. The day that is today…no, any day, any hour is precious time that will never return again in your life, so today may not be special, but it’s special in its own way…”
“You can, um, stop now.”
When Kenichi wedged himself into the conversation, throwing him for a bit of a loop, Subaru sat down with resignation on his face. Then the first thing he did was push the plate packed with green peas away from him.
“Anyway, I’ll accept the feelings you felt for me on their own merit…but I’ll pass on the green peas. I’m not eating these things even if it’s Armageddon.”
“Sheesh, that kind of like-and-dislike stuff will be a big hindrance to life down the road. Ah, Mom, there’s some tomato in my salad. I hate tomato, so give me something else to eat.”
“That’s my father for you, damn it…the first part of what he says has nothing to do with the second.”
The husband passed the tomato in his salad on to his wife, stealing the boiled egg from her salad in turn. Such trades between husband and wife were always occurring in the Natsuki residence. Glancing sidelong at that, Subaru pressed his hands together over everything on the menu except the green peas, which that morning consisted of tofu, miso soup, and honey toast heavy on the honey.
“I think you’re always doing this, but why the eclectic Japanese-style food?”
“Mom used seaweed as an ingredient in the miso soup. I like strawberry jam on my toast, too.”
The reply was not an answer, nor was it consistent with that day’s menu. If he pointed that out, Nahoko would no doubt simply give him a mystified look. Accordingly, Subaru didn’t trouble himself with pointing it out.
“Mm, this miso soup… That’s Mom for you. You’ve gotten better at this behind my back, haven’t you?”
“You can tell? Actually, I recorded a thirty-minute cooking channel video yesterday over lunchtime.”
“No way she watched it.”
Kenichi’s statement felt strongly appropriate to the moment, and Nahoko’s reply felt incongruous with equal strength.
Furthermore, if Nahoko’s statement were dragged in line with the truth, it would likely go from her having recorded the show to her having only recorded it, most likely never to consider it again.
“Setting that aside, what are you gonna do about this plate of green peas? I tried to pass it to Daddy, Daddy passed it to Mom, and Mom passed it to me, and we’ve been going around in circles…”
“But Mom hates green peas. I hate even looking at them.”
“And you were trying to overcome me being picky?!”
“Ah, don’t misunderstand me, it’s not just green peas that Mom hates, it’s all food that’s little and round like that. It feels icky to put them in my mouth.”
“That’s not a misunderstanding, then—if anything it just sounds even fishier than before!”
Deflated by his mother’s impactful statement, Subaru grudgingly pushed the plate of green peas Kenichi’s way.
“Well, it’s the husband’s place to take responsibility for the wife, so I’ll leave it to Daddy to reap the fruits of defeat.”
“Hey, don’t make me feel all lonely here, Subaru. We’re family getting along like few do these days, right? In other words, if Mom hates it, Daddy hates it, too.”
“Man, I really feel for this forest of green, nobody’s happy with it!”
In the end, Kenichi made a face like a mischievous brat as he said, “Guess we’ll have to plop ’em into pilaf until they’re all gone. Heh-heh-heh…” And thus, how to dispose of them was settled. No longer having to solo the green peas, Subaru readily promised to cooperate in their disposal. For her part, Nahoko declared, “I hate even looking at them,” completely rejecting them in every way.
In the end, it became a competition between the two men to dispose of the green peas, and the family breakfast finally came to an end.
“It was a feast.”
“Oh, it was nothing special. OK, let’s wash all the dinnerware in the sink, then it’s a race to school to help with digestion, Subaru!”
“I keep telling you, give it up with this cliché rushing-me-off-to-school routine. I’m gonna sleep till noon.”
As the dinnerware was piled into the sink, Kenichi made the offer with a glint of his teeth, leaving Subaru to listlessly shake his head. Then, as he watched both parents head off, Subaru scratched his head as he went toward his bedroom—then his feet stopped.
“—Ugnh!”
A throbbing pain ran across his temples, making Subaru strongly rub his head and eyes. The light flashing on the backs of his eyelids made him blink, and he felt like he could hear something hot smoldering inside his chest.
—Something was off. Something about that morning was odd.
“Subaru?”
From the back of his head, the halted Subaru felt the gazes of his parents. Subaru knew just what emotions were infused into his father’s gaze, his mother’s gaze, the gazes of both his parents.
He didn’t turn around. He silenced his head, practically fleeing—no, literally fleeing to his own room.
“What? Why, why am I getting these weird feelings like this…?”
Touching a hand to his own breast, Subaru sensed his rapid heartbeats, and even fear. Practically crumbling, he knelt on top of the futon, focusing his restless mind on the clock mounted on the wall.
The time was eight AM—school started at eight thirty, and it was a twenty-minute jog from home. If he changed clothes, he could just make it without being late.
“”
But Subaru made no sign of changing clothes as he stared at the movement of the clock from atop the futon.
Gradually, the second hand notched forward, and the minute hand moved to ten—crossing the deadline. From then on, he would not make it in time for school to begin. However he might struggle, that was absolute.
“…So it can’t be helped. Yeah, it can’t be helped.”
Perhaps, if there’d been just a little more time until he could harden his resolve, he might have made it to school. But reality had imposed its time limit on Subaru to an exceptional extent.
He’d gone beyond it. Therefore, no more would the choice press upon him that day. And yet—
“…Usually, this would calm me down, wouldn’t it? What gives…?”
His breath was ragged, his heart rate wouldn’t settle, and Subaru desperately tried to suppress the shaking of his body.
This was the time for his daily ritual of fear to come to a close. Even though he knew that the same fear would come every day at the same hour, that day’s had exceeded all bounds.
That morning, no one would censure Subaru any longer. No one would hurry him, or back him into a corner.
Whether to go to school—the time that tiny question would cause such powerful pain to Subaru had come to an end.
It had been several months since he had rejected school and become a delinquent. Though this had given root to a powerful sense of inferiority and self-revulsion, he became relieved every time he confirmed that the time to go to school had passed. This was something Subaru had repeated many times over.
Thus, the palpable sense of relief should have been well ingrained in Subaru’s flesh. And yet…
“What is it, today of all days…?”
The sense of guilt and self-hatred, the clinging sense of unpleasantness…they just wouldn’t vanish.
He didn’t know where the sense of nervousness plucking at his chest was coming from. Without understanding how to set his breathing straight, Subaru agonized on top of the futon, smeared in disagreeable sweat.
Now that he thought back, something had been off from the moment he’d awoken that morning.
His father, Kenichi, hatching schemes like that to wake Subaru up was a daily fact of life. Once Subaru stopped going to school, becoming a good-for-nothing in name and fact, his father’s approach toward him hadn’t changed from before.
And yet, the physical contact, the conversing, the holds from his father, now hurt for a different reason.
Even if his mother, Nahoko, had all kinds of harebrained ideas that strayed from the mark, with those that misfired, like the one that morning, far more common than those that did not, she’d always put Subaru first—always, for seventeen years.
Even so, his mother’s gaze that morning had instilled a sense of loneliness and thoughts of self-reproach well beyond the norm.
Everything was the same as usual, not a thing out of place. And yet, he’d sensed something off about his parents, and about himself.
“The heck. What the heck, what happened? Yesterday wasn’t anything spec— Ugh!”
When he thought back to the day before in search of the cause of that morning’s change in tone, fireworks scattered inside his head. The pain interrupted his thought process, feeling strangely as if it was preventing Subaru’s attempt to touch on his own memory. To prove whether it was so, Subaru would have to challenge the sea of his memory once more—and this he did not do.
There was no special reason for the odd pain that morning. That day, his feelings of guilt had simply decided to assert themselves as pain. Probably he had been unable to look either of his parents straight in the eye because—
“Subaru, can I come in for juuust a bit?”
A voice came through the door, but the door opened before he could reply. When he let out a heavy breath and turned his head toward it, Kenichi was moonwalking his way into his own son’s room. Subaru spontaneously smacked his forehead.
“…Coming in before I answer kind of defeats the point of asking me, doesn’t it?”
“Hey, now. With the hard bonds tying me and you, father and son, together, that’s not really nece— Er, it kind of is! Sorry, I wasn’t considering that you’re in puberty. I’ll come again after you’ve taken care of things.”
“Don’t go back to form and lob weirdly realistic conclusions out like that! I wasn’t even doing anything!”
When a crack was evident in the chain between father and son, he made a show of consideration. When Subaru spoke with a ragged voice, Kenichi went “Reaaally?” with a suspicious air and entered the room once more. Then he sat on the futon and crossed his arms in Subaru’s direction.
“Well, it’s fine. We’ll leave what just happened as a secret shared by the two of us alone.”
“There’s nothing that needs to be a secret! Just be honest, sheesh! All you’re doing is assaulting me before I get back to sleep again!”
“I get it, I get it— So, then. Let’s get to the point. Actually, Subaru, I took time off from work today. Surprised?”
“…Yeah, I figured that. Daddy’s not at the house on a Monday morning very often. And?”
“Don’t be hasty jumping to conclusions. A father-son conversation is like boxing. The jab comes first.”
Kenichi’s laid-back smile and demeanor made Subaru feel like he was just drawing out the conversation. He was dancing around the main issue, using words and gestures to make light of things and giving himself and his opponent time to harden their resolve. This was a kind of habit in interpersonal relations Subaru knew well.
It was not simply because the apple did not fall far from the tree—there was a separate reason, one steeped in incorrigible idiocy.
“—Ow!!”
The instant he embraced that sentiment, a sharp pain ran through Subaru’s head once more. He began to vaguely suspect just what was causing the pain. But Subaru averted his gaze from Kenichi as he said, “…And? Now that you’ve landed the jab, what’s Daddy’s right-handed punch, your conversation topic, gonna be?”
“Yes, let’s see. Subaru, do you have a girl you like?”
“What is this, middle school?!!”
“Ohh, that overreaction is like making a confession, don’t ya know?”
“What gives with you saying that with that smug look on your face? Exasperated sighs of lament don’t mean anything, you know.”
He’d meant to paper over the sentiment, but that blow had been an unexpected one. But, as a matter of fact, the assertion was off the mark, because Subaru didn’t have any interest in such things at that time. He had neither the interest nor a belief that he ought to have one.
“Keh, well, aren’t you boring. I laid it all out when you were little, didn’t I? Girls have a weakness for promises that happened years ago and situations like that, so go make some and set up some flags, damn it!”
“If I sincerely took that as truth, I’d have every girl in town pointing me out as a dishonest bastard. I already have too many sins to deal with…you trying to drive me down into a living hell?”
“…If only you’d inherited my gentle mask. You’ve got Mom’s I-don’t-give-a-damn look, plus Daddy’s short legs and bad jokes. Your status points are pretty low, huh?”
“I’ve been sayin’ that since I had a umbilical cord…”
The tension dropped between father and son as they bantered about their hardwired genetic situations. As the diversion ran its course, Subaru returned to “So?” once more and asked, “What was the issue at hand, anyway? After this, I have an important duty to fulfill: sleeping two to three more hours. So if what you want draws a total beeeep, then talk to Mom downstairs, okay?”
“Don’t brush me off all natural like that. Besides, this talk would just fly over Mom’s head. My wife and your mom is the worst woman at guessing in the whole world. That’s why I can’t let her out of my sight, but…”
The natural way he tossed out fond phrases bored Subaru, his adolescent son, to tears. When Subaru hung his head, Kenichi went “Hmm,” then twisted his neck a bit and smiled mischievously as he said, “Well, it happens to be nice weather out—how ’bout we dress up and have a little father-son talk outside?”
Sub-chapter 3.
“Ohh, Ken. Not often I see you in the morning. They finally fired you, huh?”
“Don’t be stupid. Nothing’s getting done in that place without me. Felt bad to work so much that I’m stealing everyone else’s job, so I’ve gotta lay off once in a while.”
Kenichi lobbed his insult with a raise of his middle finger, smiling toward the owner of a nearby bakery as he passed on his bicycle. He proceeded to toss warm words the store owner’s way as the latter vanished around a bend, adding afterward, “Sheesh, everyone talks like I got fired just ’cause they see me taking a day off. Is it so bad I’m nurturing a loving family here? And if I was fired, I’d get a new job before I got busted.”
“…As a person you’re nurturing, I’m praying you don’t toss any heart-stopping surprises like that on me.”
Hands thrust into his tracksuit pockets, Subaru watched the conversation with the baker from a distance, with sinking shoulders. “Hey, hey,” went Kenichi at his son’s demeanor, adjusting the position of his highly conspicuous glasses as he said, “It’s bad enough in your own darned room, but there you are, making that suspicious face when I’ve dragged you out and the sun’s shining this bright on a nice crisp morning like this. You might get stopped by a cop like that.”
“If I got stopped by a cop, it’d be because Daddy dragged me out at a time like this!! I…said I didn’t wanna, but you twisted my arm anyway.”
“What are you sayin’? That foot dragging was just goin’ through the motions. You really love everything about Daddy, don’t ya, Subaru? Relax, I love you, too. Next after Mom, that is!”
Their stroll recommenced, and Kenichi’s feelings didn’t seem all that hurt as he gave Subaru a slap on his back. Subaru grimaced at the force of it, but that moment, his thoughts were stolen by an even greater ache in his breast.
After all, simply walking close to his father instilled so much pain, he felt like it would crush his chest.
“Don’t be all guarded like that. It’s not like I’m gonna talk about anything scary. It’s an actual legit father-son talk.”
“‘Legit father-son talk,’ eh?”
“Yep, legit father-son talk— Incidentally, Subaru, which would you rather have…a little brother or a little sister?”
“Being asked that at seventeen is nothing but scary!!”
He’d lost count of the unexpected blows, but this one left Subaru aghast, voice coarsened. Seeing his son like that, Kenichi went “I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” showing off his teeth with a smile.
“Well, Mom and I are certainly still on lovey-dovey terms, but at our age we really don’t wanna see more than one of you. So be happy. You’re monopolizing my and Mom’s love.”
“Ahh, right, right. Happy, happy… You really are joking, right?”
“That sounds like the lead up to Nooo, do you hate me that much? and that kind of stuff, huh?”
When the possibility it wasn’t merely a joke finally surfaced, Subaru wordlessly reflected on that possibility. Taking in the insecure, objecting gaze, Kenichi laughed keh, keh as he nodded.
Subaru and his father were walking on a footpath a short distance from home.
Subaru lived in a place with a mildly famous riverside doubling as a spring tourist spot, with cherry trees growing along the embankment. It was currently the wrong season for cherry blossoms, so the embankment was in full leaf instead. Subaru glanced at the trees as he walked with his father around town.
“Ken, what are you doing here in the morning? It’s a late hour for starting pachinko, don’t ya know.”
“Oh my, Kenichi. By any chance, were you seduced by the aroma of curry in the daytime?”
“Oh wow, you’re here, Ken? Now that’s really funny. Isn’t this bad for you? It’s funny, though…”
The bright, sunny, average day made the time fly as father and son walked around town that morning, with numerous voices tossed their way.
—No, the voices were not being tossed their way. They were limited to the father, Kenichi, alone.
Regardless of whether male or female, young or old, there seemed no limit to the people who knew Kenichi’s face. That went for the store owner in the shopping district, the housewife taking out the garbage, the senior high school girl with the ganguro look that was rarely seen nowadays, et cetera, et cetera—
“Kenny, it’s been a while. You still hanging out with Ikeda, hmm?”
“That Ikeda guy? He won big at horse racing and used the money to retire and vanish ten years ago. He still sends New Year’s cards, summer greeting cards, winter greeting cards, Christmas cards, and cards on his mom and pop’s birthdays, though.”
“I wouldn’t call someone in touch that much ‘vanished’…”
When Subaru inadvertently interrupted with a quip, he quickly covered his mouth. Overhearing his murmur, Kenichi and the solidly built old man he was speaking to looked over. The other man was wearing green overalls and a tag with the name of the riverside on it, so he seemed like a caretaker of some sort.
The old man spurring the conversation must have gone way back with Kenichi, his eyes going round as he looked at Subaru.
“Kenny, it’s not often you bring someone along with you… Could that child be…?”
“Ahh, yeah. This is my son. Nah, I should correct that, my beloved son!”
“Ohh, I knew it! Somehow, he seemed like the spitting image of you when you were… Ahhh, maybe not so much. He takes after his mother, perhaps?”
“Errr, ha-ha… I get that a lot. Especially about the look of my eyes.”
Amid the very average construction of his face, he’d inherited Nahoko’s extremely characteristic three-whites-eyes look. In terms of outward appearance, about the only thing Subaru had inherited from Kenichi was the somewhat limited length of his legs.
When Subaru gave that noncommittal reply, the old man eagerly nodded.
“I am surprised, though. That Kenny got old enough to have a boy this big? Guess I’m getting old, too. If Ikeda was drowning, I don’t have any strength in my body left to go swim and save him.”
“Well, I don’t think even that Ikeda guy is enough of a kid to go play in the river and drown…”
“I certainly hope not. Ikeda and your father just won’t settle down like they should at their ages… Did you know they both used to be brats who walked around town kicking up all kinds of ruckus?”
“…Well, kinda.”
Subaru’s reply was on the awkward side. Receiving this, the old man knotted his eyes with a somewhat suspicious look. However, the next moment, the creases of his brow deepened further.
“Come to think of it…today’s Monday, isn’t it? What are you doing with your father at this hour?”
“—!!”
The question he did not want asked, the words he did not want to hear, made Subaru’s heart strongly jump.
Next came the sharp, stabbing pain like that which had visited him in his own bedroom. Spontaneously, Subaru clutched his painful head and closed his eyes, wringing out “I’m sorry” as he turned his back upon the old man.
“Ah, hey, Subaru! Sorry, pops. I’ll come again when we can take our time!”
“R-right… It seems I shouldn’t have said that. Apologize to the lad for me, would you?”
The conversation exchanged behind him did not enter his ears.
At any rate, Subaru tried to run from the pain threatening to crack his skull, seeking a place where he could get the pounding heartbeats in his chest to calm down, fleeing from the embankment with rapid steps.
“It’s nothing you need to apologize for—and the rest is his problem.”
While he fled, he never heard Kenichi utter those words behind his back.
Sub-chapter 4.
“Here, a cold, tasty cola packed with loooove. If you give it a nice, good shake, it’s even tastier… Well, I’d like to say that, but this doesn’t seem to be the time.”
“…No one has time to pack anything with love on the way back from the vending machine.”
Accepting it, Subaru felt the coolness of the can on his palm as he put his fingers on the pull tab. Then, after a moment’s thought, he pointed the can’s lid toward no one in particular before putting strength into his fingers—The instant he opened the lid, the contents spewed out with incredible force, reducing its contents by about a third. And, witnessing this—
“Tch.”
“Don’t click your tongue! I’ve seen this movie before! Aww, my hand’s all sticky now!”
Shaking off his cola-bathed hand, Subaru clicked his own tongue at Kenichi’s childish prank. Then he put the lightened can to his lips, swallowing down and healing his parched throat in one sitting.
He savored the carbonic acid bouncing down his throat, wishing it would wash away even the discomfort welling in his chest.
“So, you’ve calmed down?”
“…A little.”
Replying with a sober look, Subaru sank his weight into the bench upon which his butt rested. As his son proceeded to heave a deep sigh, Kenichi, standing right in front of him, opened his can of cola and brought it to his own lips.
After fleeing from the footpath, father and son had ended up at a desolate public park for children. Naturally, it being morning on an ordinary weekday, there was no sign of anyone in the park, which liberated Subaru from the strange feeling of being backed into a corner.
Even then, the headache was asserting itself, but it had abated to the point that he could converse. He wanted to change the subject, and soon.
“…Incidentally, it took you a bit of time just to go to the vending machine and back. Did something happen?”
“Mm? Ah, nothing big. I just met a high school girl skipping class on my way to the machine. I lectured her about going to school, treated her to juice, traded e-mail addresses, and sent her on her way.”
“There’s no way I’m believing you got to trading e-mail addresses in that short a time!”
He had no words for the notion his father had gotten an e-mail address from a high school girl who was probably just going to the ladies’ room for a few. “Is that so?” Kenichi asked Subaru, and he inclined his head as he said, “It doesn’t take that much for a girl to give out her e-mail at least. My cell phone’s address book has almost three whole pages full of high school girls’ addresses I’ve picked up on the way.”
“Even if I went to a government office or something I’d probably only get two. Daddy, you’re not gonna get caught for some weird offense, are you?”
“Moron. I’m not interested in doing anything indecent with high school girls. They’re children. The destination for my love was set long ago. My passions are for my family alone.”
“Categorizing it like that makes it sound like I’m included, you know?!”
“…Well, I do love you. Like a puppy!”
“Like hell you do! Which one’s the moron here?!”
Kenichi responded to Subaru’s angry voice with a vulgar, cackling laugh.
That laughing voice left no refined echo upon the ear. And yet, for some reason, people didn’t find it unpleasant at all. All Kenichi’s actions were like that.
Everything he did was over the top, deprived of common sense, excessively theatrical, completely the sort of thing other people shunned you for, but for some reason, everyone took it in a really friendly way.
It was just that, merely by their going outside for a walk, the decisive difference between Subaru and his father was driven home to a distinctly painful extent.
“—!”
“Looks like you’re in pretty bad shape across the board. That being the case, Subaru, how ’bout I carry you home on my back?”
“I don’t need that, and I don’t need to go back… Even if I go back, it’ll be together and all.”
If anything, his mother, Nahoko, was home, so Subaru’s condition would probably get even worse.
He was coming to understand the cause of the pain arriving without cease. If his guess was right, the pain began to assert itself whenever he was in the same place as Kenichi and Nahoko, his father and mother. In other words—
“So what, even my body decided to finally chew me out?”
Did it mean his body had finally begun to cry out at the sense of guilt racking him from continuing to flee?
He spent day after day holding his knees inside his room as the hands of the clock reproached him for remaining inside his shell. He had an unpleasant feeling, almost as if someone were railing at him over his procrastination in a loud voice from inside his own head.
I dunno who you are or from where, but what the hell do you know about me?
“Hey now, Subaru. Let’s change the topic—you have a girl you like, or something?”
With Subaru cowed into silence, Kenichi repeated the question Subaru had blown off once before.
The flippant way he asked it wasn’t funny. The first time, Subaru had replied with a strained smile, but now that the question came a second time, it really got on his nerves for some reason.
With the aid of the unceasing headache, he felt like replying to the question with extremely crude language—
“Subaru.”
“Huh?”
Lifting his face, he tried to locate where the whisper in his ear had come from. But, however much his gaze wandered, he could not locate the speaker. The only person in the park besides Subaru was Kenichi.
Subaru’s making that sudden, idiotic-sounding voice put a suspicious look over that very same Kenichi, who said, “What’s wrong? You look like a guy just about to blurt out the name of the pretty girl he’s not supposed to have.”
“I really do look like that, so I can’t say anything about it…but did someone call out my name just now? Daddy, don’t tell me you’ve been practicing mimicking a pretty girl’s tone of voice?”
“Daddy has a variety of little tricks, but that one is not among them. OK, gimme about a month.”
“I wasn’t giving you suggestions! Really, the heck was that?”
The voice had a beautiful echo to it that resonated in the bottom of his heart like a silver bell. It was exceedingly gentle, its reverberation making his chest grow warm, and had such power to it that it made Subaru forget the headache that continued intermittently.
Subaru didn’t know whence it had come, but the voice had saved Subaru.
“So, back to the earlier question. Have a girl you like?”
“…What is it with all this? Even if I had one, why ask her name? Not like you’d know who she is, Daddy.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t know that. For all you know, maybe I have the e-mail address of the girl you like on my cell phone?”
“Even a century-long love grows cold.”
To that blunt retort, Kenichi went “Whaaat?” raining “Boos” upon him in dismay. Glancing at the behavior wholly inappropriate for a man his age, Subaru drank the rest of his cola in one gulp, leaving the can dry.
“You don’t need to put it off anymore. You can come right out and say it: ‘Why aren’t you going to school?’ and whatever.”
“And here I was actually being considerate to someone for once. You’re a son who can’t read the mood— Well, it’s not like you’re wrong, that actually is what I wanted to talk to you about…”
“…I think I’m doing a bad thing to both of you.”
“You don’t really need to think about that. I had a vague idea you had something on your mind, and even if you weren’t thinking, well, I can overlook a decent amount of that, so no need to dwell.”
With Subaru airing his side of things a little, Kenichi drank his own pop can dry and sat on the bench. A gentle, refreshing breeze blew between father and son as they sat side by side.
The two proceeded to stare ahead, neither looking at the other’s face as they wove their words.
“This might not exactly be the prevailing view, but I don’t think school is everything. I mean, you won’t hear that out of my mouth when I didn’t take school seriously, either. I even skipped my graduation ceremony.”
“And that’s why, when you got your high school graduation certificate, you were with a woman two grades below you when she was graduating. My ears are octopuses from hearing that one over and over.”
“Well I’ll make you listen to it till they turn to squids. Since this is me talking, if you don’t want to go to school, I don’t really think you need to. Now that I’m my age, I do think Sure would’ve been nice if I’d taken school seriously, but that’s not something you’re gonna get for a while.”
Kenichi seemed to be gazing somewhere far off as Subaru stared at the side of his face, internally cursing his father for being underhanded. Even though he normally played dumb and showed only his flippant side, he’d set the clownish behavior aside in a place like that.
It wasn’t fair, not fair at all, enough to make him feel like crying.
“These days, human beings seem to live till they’re eighty years old. Isn’t that great? If you have eighty years, you can get one or two of ’em back while you’re still young. Luckily, I earn some pretty decent money. Like this,” went Kenichi, tracing a circle with his finger as he laughed with a vulgar look. Subaru didn’t even make a sound to Kenichi to show he was keeping up, but his father nodded several times, showing no sign of caring.
“Going through life, you bump into questions without answers that leap out at ya. In my case, I move around and go looking for ’em, but for all I know, maybe you can find answers to some questions rolling around in your room. If you’re mulling something over, I ain’t gonna complain. If you give up, though…then I might give ya a piece of my mind.”
“…Why?”
“Hm?”
“Why did you feel like talking about this all of a sudden today? It’s not like it’s some kind of special day, right? It’s just a…green peas commemoration day.”
“That plate sure was full of ’em, huh?”
Though he’d emptied the cola just moments before, it suddenly seemed very dry inside Subaru’s mouth.
As Subaru seemed to gasp for air, his father patiently waited for a reply.
Watching from the side as Subaru became agitated, Kenichi went “Hmm,” twisting his neck several times before saying, “Why, I wonder. I just happened to be off work, and I was wiping myself with a dry towel this morning, and I was like…the horoscope said Aquarius would have a great day, plus there was the look on your face this morning… Somehow, you looked just a little better, so I figured you might be up to talking about it.”
“My face looked better?
“I’m talking about the expression on your face. Your face itself is the same, and you still have that villainous look in your eyes just like your mother.”
Setting the three-whites-eyes business aside, Subaru touched his own face with a hand as he mulled over Kenichi’s words.
There was no proof for what his father had said. That his face was better meant that there had been a change. But whence in Subaru’s way of life to date had such a change come about?
Nowhere. Therefore, Kenichi had to have misread him. Nothing had changed yesterday, nor would it tomorrow.
That was fine, and that was what he intended. If he kept it up, no doubt at some point Kenichi and Nahoko would realize it—just what, exactly, Subaru was really after.
“—Nhhha!”
The moment he thought it, an impact shot through his brain enough to make him think fireworks had gone off in front of his eyes.
His heart rate became like an alarm bell; he could hear the exaggerated sound of blood flowing through his eardrums. The world going hazy before his eyes and his having a rising urge to vomit had a common cause: the unpleasant feeling inside his chest had begun to assert itself once more.
The sharp pain in his head, the uncomfortable feeling in his chest—both were trying to tell Subaru something.
“Hey now, you seriously look like you’re having a hard time. Are you all right, Subaru?”
Naturally, Kenichi couldn’t ignore the sight; he reached out a hand to Subaru’s shoulder with a worried look on his face. When Subaru felt the touch of his palm, he lifted up his face, sweat on his brow as he tried to think of some kind of reply.
“It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it?”
“—?!”
Subaru’s entire body ran hot when the silver bell voice made his ears quiver once more.
It was a voice full of affection and sympathy. The voice seemed to melt Subaru’s strained heart, impeding his suffering as the swelling heat swallowed up the pain and the cracks therein.
The voice was scorching him. He chased after it. Without restraint, he clung to it to take back—
“Thank you, Subaru.”
“You’re…”
The sight of silver hair dancing in the wind was seared into his vision. She gazed straight at Subaru with eyes like radiant, violet gemstones. The words she wove with her lips were all filled with loveliness.
“For coming to save me.”
What, what, what, what, what the hell?
Who, who, who, who, who, who, who was this?
“—Subaru.”
His breath caught. His throat was hot. Something was welling behind his scorched eyes.
“May the blessings of the spirits be with you.”
His fingertips trembled. He couldn’t put strength into his legs. His lungs convulsed, and his soul began to scream.
“I think you’re the one who’s reaaally incredible, Subaru.”
He covered his face with his shaking hands, holding back the sobs in his trembling throat. The welling heat was trickling from his eyes…
“—Subaru, why do you come to save me?”
The answers to his questions were already inside him.
The instant he found them, the ferocious emotions and the sense of discomfort inside Subaru both vanished.
The skull-splitting pain, the rising urge to vomit, the dizziness making the world grow hazy, the heartbeats growing more urgent as a decision seemed to draw near—where all of them converged, Subaru Natsuki found his answer.
He lifted his face, wiping away the tears that seemed due to trickle down any moment. As if to shake off the tears of regret on that sleeve, he strongly, strongly clenched his fist.
And then—
“Sorry to make you worry. I’m all right now.”
“That so? If you’re just down in the dumps, that’s fine, but don’t make me worry so much.”
“Yeah, my bad. Besides, about the question from earlier…”
Shrugging off the hand of his father supporting his shoulder, Subaru turned toward him.
As they sat closely on the bench, his father’s face was peering into his own with a look of concern. Now that he thought about it, he realized that even though they’d exchanged words many times that day, he had not looked straight at his father’s face even once.
Wanting to flee even then, he smiled bitterly at his own weakness.
“I found a girl I like—so I’m all right now.”
With the sight of the silver-haired girl still fresh in his mind, Subaru Natsuki confronted his own past.
Sub-chapter 5.
“I found a girl I like.”
When he put the words on his lips once more, Subaru had the palpable sense of his heart walking forward.
The inside of his head was clear. The pain, like a prolonged curse, had vanished. As he was then, Subaru had resolve sufficient to face his father and tell him everything.
Before his eyes, Kenichi blinked several times over, surprised by the confession disconnected from the conversation to that point.
“…Is that so?”
With a quiet voice, he lent the words of Subaru, the words of his own son, his ears.
His demeanor was a blessing to Subaru. Even though Subaru ought to have always known he was the kind of man to lend an ear like that, Subaru had continued to hold his tongue. But that had come to an end.
That was because there was someone gently pushing on his back, urging him forward.
“What might’ve shaken me up, what might’ve made me curl up in a ball, I remember it all now—no, I knew everything all along. I knew it, but I just pretended to not see the weakness in me that I thought only I noticed… But while I was pretending, someone…”
He couldn’t hide it by saying someone. He knew who that someone was.
“I wanted…Dad and Mom to smack me.”
“…”
“I was an unsalvageable little good-for-nothing idiot, a complacent piece of garbage, so I wanted you two to smack me…to make me give that up.”
Without a word, Kenichi gazed at Subaru, his eyes never wavering.
The face Subaru saw reflected in those eyes was altogether too weak, unworthy of pity, and thus, he continued.
“I’ve used any petty little tricks I could since a long time ago. Whether it’s studying or athletics, I easily pulled off stuff that not many people can do, leaving the people who can’t do it all mystified.”
Thinking back to his youth, he could have called what he’d had an adorable sense of omnipotence. At a young age, Subaru had been quicker on the uptake with both athletics and academics than the average person. As if by nature, he was more clever and fleeter of foot than those around him, inevitably becoming the center of attention among children his own age—
“He really is that man’s son.”
Thus was Subaru appraised; thus did the adults close to home praise him frequently.
Since that him was his father, the young Subaru had been proud to be valued as his son. For in the eyes of the son, the father—Kenichi Natsuki—was an attractive individual.
He laughed a lot, he smiled a lot, he cried a lot, he got angry a lot, he moved a lot, he worked a lot.
There were always a great deal of people around his father. He was adored by many, and his smiling face was the axis around which they revolved. And that very father announced in public that the two members of family—Subaru and his mother—were the most precious things to him of all.
Subaru took pride in that. He felt it gave him a special right to a boastful sense of superiority.
Someday, he wanted to be like his father—to Subaru, that was a natural wish.
“But at some point down the line… I don’t remember it, but I lost a footrace to someone. I went from being number one to not being number one. Faster, smarter guys than me came out of the woodwork, and I dropped from number one bit by bit… I thought There’s gotta be something wrong with this.”
The more the wrongness got to him, the more the star above his head seemed to move away, with each and every glimmering star between him and it forming the path he needed to take to get closer.
He harbored nervousness that the star might disappear. But even with that impatience within him—
“He really is that man’s son.”
Those words alone were Subaru’s salvation, the hope to which he clung.
Even if he was not as fleet of foot, even if he was not as good at studying, those words bolstered the young Subaru’s dignity.
More than training to run fast, more than doing his homework, he came to put stupid things first.
He sneaked into school at night with his friends, wandered aimlessly around the town, chased a famously dangerous stray dog from everyone’s hangout spot—in this way, Subaru ran around protecting his pride to keep everyone from being fed up with him, thus protecting the meaning of his own existence.
“It’s stupid to work hard. Having fast feet is nothing to be proud of. How I made everyone laugh was a lot stronger, a lot more impressive than that.”
What others feared, he made his priority; what others detested, he made his own desire. Thus, he continued to challenge himself with precious care, with bold recklessness, so that he did not lose his place.
“But of course, the longer that continued, the next thing I was gonna do had to be even bigger. I couldn’t do anything that was smaller than what came before it. I didn’t want anyone to think I was boring.”
Thus, Subaru’s actions had to be more and more extreme.
Subaru Natsuki had to be braver than anyone, more extravagant than anyone, more liberated than anyone—he had to be someone everyone could continue to look up to.
That was the veneer he adopted. Using the veneer, he hid the fact that it was a veneer so even he couldn’t notice it, and he had to do more, more, more, to deceive himself and the people around him.
After all, he was Kenichi Natsuki’s son—Subaru Natsuki.
“I thought I can do anything. I made myself think I can do anything. That’s how what I did got stupid, just me flailing around without any thought…”
And so he was like a moth drawn to the flame, seeking light, never realizing that it would burn him.
However, Subaru was not a moth, and the same went for Subaru’s friends. His friends had gotten it a long, long time ago.
There hadn’t been any particular trigger for it. The number of friends associating with Subaru’s recklessness dwindled.
“I thought Those guys are dimwits. You’ll never have this kind of fun if you aren’t together with me. I’d make those guys regret it. They could just idly pass the time away with boring stuff. I was aiming for even higher places.”
If he continued chasing the star like that, he’d lose sight of the other stars above his head.
Unable to see all the stars filling up the sky, Subaru desperately chased after the glimmer of the one star that remained, gazing at that star alone as he continued running after it—when he suddenly realized.
“There was no one left around me but me.”
Naturally. With Subaru continuing to do things his own way, heedless of everything around him, even the people who’d thought it was funny at first would not follow as he escalated his exploits to new heights.
Not noticing this, he distanced himself from them, laughing derisively at them and calling them dimwits, but Subaru, now the only one left, found his thoughts harboring worry and doubt, and thus, he distanced himself even more. And thus did the cycle repeat itself until—
“Even though the sky has so many glittering stars, I lost sight of every last one.”
Having lost sight of the starlight, and having lost all the friends around him, when Subaru was left all alone, enveloped by darkness, he finally came to realize it for himself.
—He wasn’t a special person at all.
“He really is that man’s son.”
Those were the magical words that the young Subaru had embraced with pride. But somewhere along the line, the words transformed into a curse.
The curse rotted his heart. When he lost his place, he felt as if someone was chasing him, making him unable to breathe.
“By going outside, walking around town, I understood. Wherever I went, whatever I saw, there were traces of my dad everywhere… Of course there were.”
In Subaru’s confined world, he had come to admire his father. He’d wanted to see the same sights his father had.
To Subaru, who sought the same things his father had found everywhere he went, there was nowhere he could look within that confined world and not sense traces of his father.
In stages, the world became a scary place to Subaru.
What simultaneously rotted Subaru’s heart was the realization he himself was mediocre, and the realization he didn’t want either of his parents or any of the people who knew his father to know this; in other words, shame.
Subaru Natsuki, the son of Kenichi Natsuki, could not become known as a person who shrank in timidity from the public’s gaze, a coward whose head harbored misconceptions and fear about a widening world.
From late elementary to middle school, through strenuous effort, Subaru managed to pass the time without standing out whatsoever.
Classmates who knew Subaru from his lower school years couldn’t wrap their heads around the change in Subaru, but even they, children at an emotionally sensitive point in their lives, never noticed the darkness enveloping their fellow classmate’s heart.
And what put him beyond salvation was that Subaru was crafty where the issue was concerned. Though he passed his school days without standing out, he continued to behave in the same old uninhibited manner at home.
“Even just remembering it, I shudder at how I passed the time back then. But that’s how I managed to get through middle school… Even though we lived in the same town, most of my classmates stopped going to the same school as me. Guess because of test results?”
Even Subaru, who’d spent several years in such a backward-thinking fashion, harbored a faint hope from the radical change in environment. When he advanced into high school, the environment, one where no one knew his past, might generate new relationships—and if that was to happen, no one would see Subaru as Kenichi Natsuki’s son.
Mustering all the meager courage inside himself, Subaru decisively stepped off the beaten path.
“Even for me, I totally blew my grand high school debut. A guy who couldn’t have proper interpersonal relationships in little and middle school was never gonna cut it in a place with all new faces. I did bold and reckless stuff to shake off the tension, and the result was… Even an idiot could guess.”
Even though it would be plain to an idiot, to Subaru it was not. The result hardly needed to be spelled out.
Subaru had never seen examples of how to approach other people beyond those of his father. He had nothing save his father as a reference for how to build relationships in a new environment.
Even if he knew stuff to make people laugh at a young age, to classmates undergoing psychological changes on the way to the second stage of their lives, it was nothing but poison.
From the first step into a new environment, he had gone badly astray. Thus, Subaru established his isolated position as a dork, someone who couldn’t read the mood.
He wasn’t ostracized. He simply spent his school life being treated like thin air. And then, as the days passed, one morning, he thought…
“I just don’t wanna go to school today. It was a morning when errands meant Dad and Mom were both out, so even when it was past the usual wake-up time, I turned over and nodded back off—I was super surprised when I realized it was just before noon. After that, when I got up to change in a huge hurry…”
Subaru realized that his own mind and body were exceptionally at ease.
“After that, it was just a drag. I skipped one day a week, then it was once every three days, then once every two… It didn’t take even three months before I stopped going to school altogether.”
The days that followed hardly needed to be spoken of.
Once he stopped going to school, Subaru’s heart was filled with a sense of relief. Yes, he was liberated from the painful times he underwent while at school, but that wasn’t the main reason.
It wasn’t a big reason, either. He’d become Subaru Natsuki, smug juvenile delinquent.
Looking at that Subaru, no one would think He really is that man’s son anymore. But more than that, the exceedingly pathetic sight of Subaru like that would make both his father and mother stop loving him.
No matter how unsightly, how deplorable Subaru had become, both his parents had loved him.
That’s what scared him the most. Nothing frightened Subaru as much as that fact.
And then, to Subaru Natsuki, Kenichi Natsuki and Nahoko Natsuki would say—
“‘I don’t love you. I hate you. You’re…not my child.’ I wanted you to do that, to say that, to throw me aside. I wanted to make you…give up on me.”
With fleeting hope, he’d looked up at the sky, expecting to find the star that could never have been.
A human being as pathetic and mewling as Subaru was a fool unworthy of being Kenichi Natsuki’s son. And thus, he wanted to be cast aside.
Not even Subaru himself realized that was what rested within Subaru’s heart.
Unable to accept how weak and stupid he was, pushing onto others the task of cleaning up the mayhem that appeared in his wake, he averted his eyes, hating himself all the same.
In spite of all that, Subaru had not ended up shunned and abandoned by all, because someone had been there to support him.
“It is easy to give up— However…it does not suit you, Subaru.”
The image of the silver girl imprinted on the backs of his eyelids now had a flickering blue radiance superimposed upon it.
With that, a warm breeze blew into Subaru’s heart, making him pledge to move his listless limbs once more.
“Subaru, I love you.”
With those words, she had given Subaru a push right when he should have been finished.
Because he realized that, because he remembered that, he set his heart on walking forward from zero—and to do that, he had to settle things with the past, the minus that came before zero.
“—Yes. My hero…is the greatest in the whole world.”
“…”
Having listened to Subaru’s long monologue to its completion, Kenichi closed his eyes, sinking into thought.
—In the end, the same as before, Subaru was forcing someone else to clean up after him.
Because he lacked the courage to identify his own flaws, because he didn’t want to become the greatest villain in his own world, because he wanted to be the heroic main character, he kept making someone else play the villain.
He’d believed that if he did that—someday, Kenichi would break the door down, bringing it all to an end.
He’d spent day after day in foolish sloth, expecting that someone else would handle things.
It was with that deadlocked mental state that he had arrived in that other world. And, even in a place like that, Subaru had continued his conceited ways, until finally—
“Subaru.”
Eyes closed, Kenichi stood before Subaru and addressed him by name.
When those words brought him back to reality, Subaru looked up at his father. To Subaru, ready to accept whatever Kenichi might say, whatever Kenichi might think, in its full, unvarnished form, he—
“Father head!!”
“Gahhh?!”
Taking an unexpected blow to his cranium, Subaru reeled as fireworks scattered in his eyes. Toward his son, eyes tearful from the sharp pain, Kenichi powerfully thrust a finger and said, “You see that, Subaru? That’s my angry blow, the father head move I’ve filled with love.”
“Wasn’t that a heel drop?! What ‘head’?! Was that just to throw me off?!”
“That’s what stretching after a bath does for you. Got my leg pretty high up there, didn’t I?”
Kenichi began stretching his supple hip joints on the spot. His father’s demeanor defied his expectations, leaving Subaru half in tears, unsure what he should say.
Subaru had been expecting something else—
“Gotta say, though, Subaru. You’re, well…a pretty big moron.”
“Uhh…?”
Insulted by the rather disconnected words, Subaru couldn’t get a single word out when Kenichi crossed his arms and continued.
“In the first place, there’s a lot that rubs me the wrong way, but there’s one thing that’s the biggest. You’re the one who thought you’d get me to hate you. The way you did it was by rejecting school. And you thought, somewhere along the line, your dad would blow a fuse and yell at you… That’s stupid on a fundamental level, you know?”
“I can’t really say I disagree, but…”
“I mean, if you want me to abandon you, you’ve gotta be more proactive about it. Who abandons his own kid just because he crawls into his own shell? If you want me to hate you, you should commit genocide on half of humanity for no particular reason. Then I’ll hate you.”
“That’s a crazy thing to ask for!! You don’t see many villains like that even in shonen manga!!”
“To me, what you wanted me to do is just as crazy.”
The blunt retort silenced Subaru.
“Got it? Even if you were as slow-witted as a snail, a big idiot who can’t even pick a banana hanging in front of his face, or even someone who bragged about harming yourself on some big high-profile blog…”
“I ain’t that slow-witted or stupid…”
“But even if you were slow-witted, an idiot, or a moron, I wouldn’t hate you or abandon you. That’s how it should be, right? I’m your father, and you’re my son.”
Exhaling in exasperation as he spoke, Kenichi made a nggh sound as he stretched his back. When he sat, and Subaru, dumbfounded, gazed up at his father, Kenichi closed one eye.
“It’s my son’s twisted nature to be just short of dumb, just shy of an idiot, and on a straight line toward being a moron. If you really want, I can smack that out of you by force, but…”
“…”
“It seems like you got up again after breaking down to the point that I don’t need to.”
Perhaps Kenichi had seen something in Subaru’s face. His words made Subaru slowly get up. When father and son faced each other head-on, the son’s expression made the father moisten his lips.
“This morning, I thought You’ve changed from before all of a sudden. What happened to your face?”
“…I told you. I found a girl I like.”
A silver radiance led Subaru Natsuki by the hand.
“Besides, there was a girl who said she would love even a guy like me.”
A warm, blue light gently pushed on Subaru Natsuki’s back.
“Those girls, they don’t know me as the son of Kenichi Natsuki. When I’m with them, I’m just Subaru Natsuki… No…”
Shaking his head, he gazed firmly at the father before him and went on.
“I was Subaru Natsuki in front of everyone. All on my own, I worried about being some poster child and ended up crushed by a weight that wasn’t even really there. I finally get that now.”
“Took ya long enough. I’m the central pillar of the family. A guy who didn’t inherit the job had better not carry any social burdens like that till you’re a full member of society. I’ll slap you silly otherwise.”
“This coming from a guy who dropped his heel onto my head just now?!”
When Subaru complained again about the painful blow, Kenichi went “Sorry, sorry,” smiling without a shred of guilt. Then Kenichi’s eyes became tense. “More importantly, you said you found a girl you like, and you said there was a girl who said she likes you… What’s up with that? Are you two-timing them? A guy like you…?”
“Whaddaya mean, a guy like me?! To be honest, even I think I’m not qualified! But I can’t help it! So I have two number one stars, what’s the big deal?!”
It was unforgivable no matter how he might frame it, but at the moment, those were Subaru’s honest feelings.
He loved Emilia. He loved Rem. They had given Subaru the strength to stand, to walk, and to face his own past, even in front of Kenichi.
The light that the pair gave off rivaled the starry sky Subaru had once had above his head.
When Subaru was outside his room, unexpectedly invited to another world, he became desperate, suffered pain and anguish, cried out in tears, lamented and raged, laughed in delight, and finally obtained a new sky filled with stars.
“Well, it’s fine if you can get by without making the two of ’em cry… By the way, don’t make ’em cry. If you can manage that, I won’t object. Looks like you’ve got your own way with people.”
“If I had that, my high school debut wouldn’t have been such a black stain on my past. I can’t do it like you, Dad.”
“Do you really think that? You’re my son, y’know. Besides, seems like you’ve got a bunch of misunderstandings about me, but that one’s the worst, I figure.”
“That?”
As Subaru inclined his head, Kenichi wagged a finger atop his crossed arms.
“Yeah. I’m all bouncy like this in front of you and your mom, but Daddy completely behaves according to time, place, and occasion, okay? Maybe you wouldn’t know it because I’m always in full-throttle family-love mode in front of you, but what, you think Daddy can pull an act like that and it’ll just work on everyone…?”
“Wait, wait, hold on…”
“Ain’t it obvious? No one wants to get close to a guy who’s that high tension the first time you meet him. That’s why you’ve gotta keep your collar straight until you get along better. You’ve gotta wait a while before you undo the buttons. If you start in April, gotta hold out until the end of June for that.”
The Shocking Truth: Father Revealed to be a Man of Common Sense and Appropriate Conduct.
Ignorant of this until now, Subaru had been shallow enough to believe he could just mimic his father to become a popular guy.
“Why’d I agonize for all that time, then…!”
“Aww, don’t worry about it. It’s my fault for not noticing how much you looked up to me because I’m simply that awesome. Sorry that I’m just too big a presence in your life!”
“Even though it’s true, I really don’t feel like acknowledging it!!”
Patting the lamenting Subaru on the shoulder, Kenichi did what he always did: step on the naive parts of Subaru and grind them underfoot.
As he quipped at his father, Subaru felt something hard and heavy inside his heart fade away and vanish. The dark recesses were brightening with the approach of daybreak, and his vision opened to greet the dawn.
Subaru had confessed that he was conceited and self-serving, and yet the result was only relief.
Facing his past like that was making a statement: parting ways with his weakness and embracing what he wanted for himself in the future, his current self could walk forward with pride from now on.
That was why—
“Ha-ha-ha. Don’t blush so much. You’re still my son with my blood in ya. I’m sure you’ve got it in you to be half as cool as I am.”
“Only half, eh? Normally, your genes get refined as you spend time in the world, right?”
“But half of you comes from your mom, y’see. Even if you’ve got my coolness in ya, the Nahoko part cancels it out, so I don’t feel like I can expect much from the final judgme—”
“Sorry, Mom, he’s got me there!”
Unable to stand up for his mother, who wasn’t present, Subaru put his empty hands together and apologized. Laughing at the sight, Kenichi let his shoulders sink in exasperation as he moved on.
“This should lessen the burden on your shoulders a bit. The rest is talk about the future. It’s all ahead from here.”
“Ahh, yeah. Err, I really am sorry for causing you all that tr—”
“If you feel sorry for it, just spend a proper amount of time paying us back. You’re the oldest son, so you’d better take real good care of me and your Mom later in life.”
—When those words were spoken to him, Subaru was unable to move.
“…”
He’d had the resolve to apologize for how he had been to date. He’d had the determination to confess his current feelings.
These things, he had accomplished, finally dissolving that which had haunted Subaru for many long years, making him think he could face his father and mother again with sunny feelings.
He’d confessed everything about himself to date—
“Ugh!!”
But the instant the conversation broached “from there on,” what permeated Subaru’s entire being was—
“…I-I’m sorry…”
“Subaru?”
“I’m s…I’m so…I’m sorry…s-sorry, sorry…shorry…!!”
From in front of him came Kenichi’s bewildered voice. But Subaru didn’t see his face.
The flood of tears pouring forth clogged Subaru’s vision, making the contours of the world vague. He covered his face with his palms, desperately trying to wipe the overflowing tears. However, as much as he tried, the tears were unending. They wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop them.
“I’m sorrrryyy… I-I…can’t be together with… I’m so…s-sorry…”
He’d realized it.
Somewhere in his heart, he’d realized it long before.
He’d been invited into another world. The first instant the dazzling light of its sun shone down on him, making him squint, it had been like a revelation, and somewhere deep inside, Subaru had known.
He’d probably never return to his own world again.
His parents had raised him well enough for him to find the strength to repent before his father like that, confess the dark emotions roiling inside his chest, and yet gain forgiveness. All that was underpinning his resolve to walk forward once more.
“But in spite of that, I…haven’t given anything back… I’ll probably never see you again… I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
“…I’m sorry. I’m shworry. I’m sorry.”
The tears would not stop. There, that moment, ferocious emotions seemed to churn inside him.
Yet even so, Subaru remained standing, not crumbling to the ground. Here, there was someone who held Subaru as he cried.
Supporting his son, now almost as tall as he was, he patted Subaru’s back with his big, strong palms like he would for any crying child.
“…Goodness. No matter how much time passes, you’re still a high-maintenance son.”
Sub-chapter 6.
“You’ve calmed down?”
“—Yeah, sorry. I really caused you a lot of trouble.”
“Ya sure did. Look at my shirt. I’ve got tears and snot all over the middle of it. I can’t walk around and have the neighbors see me like this, it’s embarrassing.”
Subaru was no longer crying when Kenichi flicked his forehead with a finger, the corners of his mouth curling into a smile. With that grin on his face, he gazed at Subaru who, after bawling his eyes out, wore an expression that was equal parts sad and apologetic. Kenichi sighed as he spoke again.
“I’m not sure what you were sobbing like that for, but it’s embarrassing, so I’ll keep it a secret. Be grateful to me for that at least.”
“…Yeah. I’m grateful. Truly, from the bottom of my heart, more than anyone in the world.”
“If you put it that way even I’m gonna blush…”
When his father scratched his own face with an embarrassed smile, Subaru lowered his listless gaze. Kenichi’s shoulders sank when he saw his son’s demeanor. Then he waved as if shooing a fly away as he pushed on.
“OK, crybaby, head home already. Daddy’s still in the mood to stroll around a bit, so I’ll head back after a little detour. I’ll get weird looks if I’m walking around with a guy crying like you.”
“…They’d wonder what in the world that father and son are doing at their age, huh?”
“Damn right they would. If I go back home with you together now, I’ll get embarrassed by weird rumors between my friends, so…”
“You know, those are, like, famous last words, so watch out, okay?”
Poking fun at his father’s statement reflexively, Subaru felt painful nostalgia running through his heart. Gritting his teeth and biting it back down by force, Subaru went, “Later,” raising a hand Kenichi’s way. “I’ll head back first, then. Just make sure the cops don’t stop you for anything, ’kay, Daddy?”
“Sorry, I ain’t biting on that joke. Everyone round these parts knows me already.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
Once again, he was saved by his father’s unchanging demeanor. Subaru hated himself for that.
Just how much did he crave the chance to depend on and wish to be indulged by others? He really was incorrigible.
“…”
He didn’t want to show Kenichi such weakness any longer.
Taking a single, deep breath, Subaru then turned his back on his father, setting his mind on becoming a stronger person. At that rate, he was set to walk out at a rapid pace, departing as quickly as poss—
“—Hey, Subaru.”
From behind, Kenichi’s voice brought his feet to a spontaneous halt.
“I’m sure you’ve got a lot of stuff goin’ on, so I only have one thing to say to you.”
“…”
“Hang in there—I’ve got high hopes for you, Son.”
Subaru had always clenched a worry of betraying his father’s expectations without ever letting it go. So to Subaru, his father’s expectations were fear itself—
“—Yeah, you can count on me, Daddy.”
His back still turned, Subaru extended an arm. He thrust a finger toward the heavens, speaking in a loud voice.
“My name is Subaru Natsuki. Son of Kenichi Natsuki—I can do anything, and that’s how it’s gonna be. Your son’s hot stuff.”
“Yeah, I know. I made half of ya, after all!”
“Hee-hee,” went Kenichi, his faith-filled, laughing voice showering Subaru from behind.
When he heard this, Subaru’s own lips broke into a smile.
Back still turned, he set off.
His knees weren’t shaking. His heart wasn’t wavering. He simply stared straight ahead as he walked forward.
Behind him was the man he had looked up to for so long. This time, Subaru would let that man watch his back as he walked on.
He did that while thinking to himself how much strength he had needed from others to achieve that one simple thing.
Then Subaru Natsuki continued walking forward, never to stop again.
Sub-chapter 7.
With his arms through the sleeves his freshly ironed white shirt, Subaru put his legs through his good-as-new slacks. Waging a difficult battle, he tied his deep-green necktie in front of the mirror before finally putting on his navy-blue blazer.
“Student Subaru Natsuki, complete… Man, it’s been around three months, huh?”
Checking his completed version reflected in the mirror, Subaru breathed out, his face proclaiming that one task was done.
There hadn’t been a Subaru wearing his long-sleeved student uniform reflected in the mirror for quite a while. He recalled that tying the necktie of his blazer-type high school uniform every morning had been a real pain in the butt. Flicking a finger off the flat knot of the necktie, he turned his back to his reflection and picked up his schoolbag.
For all appearances, that much, at least, looked well within the realm of perfect preparation by a student preparing to attend high school.
“Unfortunately, it’s about time the third homeroom period started. Ain’t well within at all.”
Scratching his head with a bitter smile, Subaru stretched his hand out a little on his way out of the room. Stopping just before he left, he looked back.
To Subaru, who’d never experienced a change in residence, that room was the only place he could call “my own room.” Since entering middle school, he’d spent over five years in that room.
It would be the last time he saw that place, too.
“”
Subaru said nothing. He merely lowered his head in silence.
That single gesture contained five years’ worth of feelings in it.
When his long, long period of bowing ended, Subaru lifted his head and departed the room with sunnier feelings. He proceeded to head down the stairs to the first floor, pushing open the living room door. And then—
“Oh my, when you asked me where your uniform was, I thought you might burn it, so I made all kinds of preparations…all for nothing, it would seem.”
“Your son asks where his uniform is and the first thing you think of is burning it? Wait, when you guessed I’d burn it, your ‘preparations’ meant getting sweet potatoes and sausage skewers ready…?”
The reclothed Subaru was met by his mother, Nahoko, who seemed quite disappointed her off-the-cuff prediction had not borne fruit. Behind his mother, he saw that she was done preparing for a barbecue in the cramped kitchen.
After parting ways with Kenichi, Subaru had returned home and asked Nahoko where his uniform was.
Having shaken free of his past, her son had made the statement with a sunny look on his face—and this had been his mother’s reaction.
“I give up on whether it’s good guessing or bad, but this angle is definitely not what I expected…”
“Yes, yes, it looks very good on you. The outfit cancels out the foul look in your eyes. You look rather calm…”
“Mom, your current approach is taking all my serenity away from me!”
“—? What are you all riled up about? Hey, want to glug down some mayonnaise with Mom?”
With a mystified look, Nahoko presented the mayonnaise she’d placed on the table. The mayonnaise in the Natsuki residence was somewhat famous to all local mayo lovers.
Kenichi, Nahoko, and of course Subaru employed various mayonnaises, and glugging mayo was a daily sight during mealtime, getting out of the bath, and sometimes even in the middle of the night. Indeed, when Subaru fell into distress from lack of mayonnaise in that other world, he’d used modern knowledge to successfully re-create mayonnaise on that end.
Mayonnaise was inseparable from the Natsuki family. It was a must-have item.
“But right now, I don’t feel like…”
“I suppose not.”
The mayonnaise had SU written on the lid, marking it as belonging to Subaru. When he gently pushed the mayonnaise offered to him away, Nahoko gave a knowing nod.
“I mean, Subaru, you really don’t like mayonnaise that much, do you?”
“…”
“You were just licking it with Dad and Mom because we like it so much, weren’t you?”
Placing the mayonnaise marked for Subaru on the table, Nahoko murmured thusly in roundabout fashion. Hearing this, Subaru gasped in surprise. He breathed in, virtually wringing out his voice before gingerly posing a question.
“Wh-what basis do you have for…?”
“Well, Subaru. If it was the world or mayonnaise, which would you choose?”
“Er, probably the world…”
“You see?”
“That’s a really bad example! Don’t go ‘You see?’ with that smug look! Anyone picking mayonnaise there isn’t picking out of love for mayo, but hatred for the world!!”
As he raised his voice at Nahoko’s rather off-the-mark view, Subaru’s shoulders heaved with heavy breaths as he glared at the mayonnaise on the table—on the inside, he wasn’t calm in the slightest.
Whether he was a card-carrying member or not, Subaru had pride as a mayo lover, enough that if someone asked him to pick between it and a deserted tropical island, he’d pick mayonnaise in a heartbeat.
But if asked the reason he was so hung up on mayonnaise in the first place, he’d have to say—
“I guess I hard-core have a complex for a happy family…”
“You’d slap super on it?”
“That’d make it a Super Family Complex aka Sufami, and that just sounds wrong.”
Having engaged in such absurd conversation, Subaru let out a long breath with a pained smile.
Then he slowly picked up the mayonnaise atop the table.
“Ah…,” Nahoko began.
“Mmm, delicious! Genuine mayonnaise really is way different! Can’t enjoy this taste anywhere but my homeland! Over there isn’t bad, either, but it’s a pale shadow compared to the real deal!”
Wringing off the lid from the nearly full mayonnaise jar, he guzzled it down in one go. The tasty acidic flavor atop his tongue raced through him, with heat shooting down his throat that seemed to burn his chest.
This was the supreme, a-mayo-zing taste that mayo addicts could not help but love.
“Maybe I don’t love mayonnaise as much as you two do, but I’m still a genuine mayo lover. I swear on the mayo lids of all the mayo I’ve licked to this day.”
Incidentally, Subaru had kept the lids from his old mayonnaise jars, stuffing them into a corner of his room. They actually numbered 776—
“And this makes triple sevens. I’ll have to stick it in my collection later.”
“Ohh, congratulations on your third seven. Your father was really happy when he got his fourth a little while back.”
“My love’s literally incomparable to his!”
Nahoko accepted the empty mayonnaise bottle with an amused look. His mother’s comment made his sense of accomplishment feel somewhat tarnished, but Subaru immediately smoothed over his feelings.
“Well…guess I’d better head off, then.”
“Ah, if you’re going to the store, I want some cream puffs, so make sure to buy some.”
“You see me like this, put your guessing gears in motion, and you say that?!”
As he spread both arms out to show off his school uniform, Nahoko went “I’m kidding, I’m kidding” and smiled at her son as she said, “Ah, you’re going to school now? Mom’s happy for you, but…won’t you stand out in a bad way? If you can put it off till tomorrow, why not put it off?”
“Hey, stop putting a damper on your son’s enthusiasm like that. Even if others are strict with me, I’m soft on myself and a slacker to the core, you know.”
“If you were really like that, your mother wouldn’t have such a hard time, Subaru.”
When Subaru quipped at his own expense, Nahoko pretended not to get it as she shook her head. Her reply made Subaru narrow his eyes, but Nahoko went “All right then” and straightened her back as she said, “Well then, hold on a second. Mom’s going to get her coat.”
“What do you mean, wait… Hold on, you’re coming with me?! Having a parent go with you to school when you quit being a hermit is, like, a level worse than a humiliation game!”
“I’m not going all the way to school. I’m just going out to the store to buy mayonnaise and cream puffs. What, I can’t indulge you that much?”
“Huh?! That makes it sound like I was asking you to come with me?!”
The incomprehensible flow of events made Subaru’s eyes bulge. “Yes, yes,” said his mother in a perfunctory reply as she headed to her own room. It felt like a prelude to having a parent chaperone him to school for sure.
“No, no… Man, gimme a break here.”
As he spoke those words, Subaru’s cheeks faintly relaxed from relief.
At that point, even Subaru was aware the reason for his relief was that the time when he’d have to say goodbye to his mother had been pushed a little farther down the road.
Sub-chapter 8.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve walked side by side with you, Subaru.”
“I suppose so. We were together when you went shopping at night quite a bit.”
“Sigh. You know, given the flow of the current conversation, I’m speaking about daytime, not nighttime. You really must pick up on the context and the literary intent.”
“Where that subject’s concerned, you’re the only one I can’t accept hearing that from, Mom!”
Nahoko Natsuki was truly bedeviled by one of the world’s dullest senses, possessing world-class bad guesswork. This was well understood by both men in the Natsuki family; indeed, it was virtually 100 percent certain that hypothetical or humorous conversations wouldn’t work on Nahoko. That said, she herself was unaware of how complete her obtuseness was, which exponentially increased the stress arising from speaking with her.
Even understanding all that, though, Subaru happened to like speaking with his mother.
“I’m glad that it’s warm today. What did you talk to your Dad about?”
“Ohhh, there it is, Mom’s beginner-level ‘first half disconnected from the second half’ conversation topic! I know you don’t mean anything special by it, but ummm…”
As they walked side by side on the way to school, Subaru tried to wrap his head around the question his mother had posed.
The details of his conversation with Kenichi involved Subaru’s confessing his embarrassing internal complexes and bawling his eyes out, but that didn’t amount to a proper explanation. Also, he didn’t want to say it in those words.
It had been a necessary conversation, but he’d cut himself off from the emotions he imagined were unique to that place. No way in hell was he going to start crying again on a public street.
“Ahh, it wasn’t really anything major. Actually, we talked a bit about old times with Mr. Ikeda.”
“Ahh, Ikeda, yes. He moved after winning at the horse races, and his young wife there swindled the shirt off his back, so he had to do manual labor until the sun scorched his skin pitch dark, didn’t he?”
“The tragic development in the second half of that is news to me!”
“Ill-gotten money really is no good for you. His heart may be in sorry shape at the moment, but his mind is still holding up, so he sends letters.”
“So you experienced being stripped bare in an unfamiliar land, Mr. Ikeda… I can relate!!”
Though Subaru had been in a different world rather than a different country, he’d experienced things not so different from what Mr. Ikeda had been through. Though Mr. Ikeda was little more than an acquaintance whose face Subaru had known when he was little, for some reason, he harbored a strong feeling of fellowship with the man.
Subaru inwardly prayed for his good health. Beside him, Nahoko made a mmm sound, then said, “So, talking about old times made you want to go to school?”
“Ahh, well…that’s the simple version, yeah. There were a whole bunch of triggers making me look back, and that led to it.”
“So you stopped trying to do anything and everything just like your Dad, then.”
“…”
When Subaru tried to keep things vague, Nahoko spoke with a gentle tone that did not permit him any escape.
A wry smile came over her, making it look as if she was about to break into a hum. The look in her eyes was the only sharp thing about her, but you could never tell what his mother was thinking by looking at her. However, Subaru had the distinct feeling she’d cut him off at the pass.
“You’re a hardworking type, Subaru, and you do all kinds of things in haste. Thanks to your father blindly taking interest in so many things, you’ve had plenty of opportunities… It wore you out, didn’t you?”
“M-Mom…how much did you realize I was…”
“Now, now, Subaru.”
The true feelings Subaru had continued to conceal, even to himself, had been plain to Nahoko all along.
Subaru was still at a loss for words when Nahoko, pulling slightly in front, turned back to face him.
“It’s often said the child looks at the parent far more than the parent thinks.”
“…”
“But the reverse is also true. The parent is also always watching the child, much more than the child thinks. Subaru, even your mother has been watching over you the whole time, you see?”
Truly, he could do nothing but gape dumbfounded.
He’d been so convinced he’d kept his inner feelings hidden, but in truth, it had all been in vain. This in spite of the fact that he’d thought himself lonely and miserable with not a single person the wiser.
“I had to put suppositories in you when you were little, so I’ve seen everything, including the hole in your butt. Mom’s even seen your body’s intestines, something you’ve never seen, Subaru.”
“Umm, I’m sorry, the conversation was flowing in a good direction, so I really didn’t need that information.”
Where one’s intestines were concerned, that wasn’t something one had many chances to see, let alone those of parents or siblings. Though Subaru had been graced with the occasional opportunity to see his own intestines…
But in any case—
“About the mayonnaise, and the reason for not going to school…”
“If your mother could have done something about that, you can be sure she would have. Mom felt that no matter what she tried, it probably wouldn’t work. But…”
Nahoko tossed in a little smile as she stared straight at her son’s face.
“It seems like you managed somehow with the help of someone besides your mom or your dad. I think that’s a very good thing. I really must thank that person.”
“…Yeah, I suppose so. That person saved me from my incorrigible ways. She’s the one who told the incorrigible me I wasn’t incorrigible. That’s why I can walk forward like this now.”
When Subaru awakened to his own foolishness, she’d accepted him even so, so Subaru was able to stand there and face his past—and his father and mother with it.
“She’s an amaaaazin’ girl. Almost to the point she really is wasted on me.”
“But you’re not giving her to anyone, are you?”
“Damn straight. It ain’t an issue of being the other’s equal. If anyone’s gonna do it, equal or not, it’s gonna be me. I’ll just raise my own worth from here on out.”
“Yes, yes—you really are that man’s son.”
To Subaru, just how much meaning did those words carry?
This was the mother who knew the things inside Subaru of which he’d never spoken a word to anyone. Probably Nahoko had seen right through him. If she knew, and she was speaking those words with that knowledge, then…
“I wonder, if I can really do it right…if I can really have kids with her and do things right…”
“It’ll be fine. I mean, your mother may be half of you, but if you act half as cool as your father, you’ll do all right, yes?”
“You’re acknowledging your own genetic inferiority in my body’s makeup?!”
“I said you can act half as cool as your father…the other half, why don’t you just be yourself, Subaru?”
Unmoved by what Subaru blurted out, Nahoko indicated that the path forward was very simple.
Upon hearing her words, Subaru was dumbfounded, thoroughly beside himself.
“So, Subaru, your mother thinks you will hang in there in your own Subaru-ish way.”
“…”
“Incidentally, what happened to your father after the stroll together? Did you ditch him?”
“You ask that now?! Uh-oh, we’re up to Mom’s intermediate-level ‘question that resurrects the past midconversation’!”
If Subaru cordially indulged her and ended up explaining the circumstances under which he’d parted with Kenichi, all his prior work would be undone. In the end, before being forced to speak about his bawling his eyes out, Subaru ignored the context surrounding the words and echoed his mother’s words.
“In my own way, huh?”
“Yes. Over the course of thinking, I wanna be just like Dad, you’ll end up just like Subaru.”
Even though he’d ignored the question, Nahoko acted quite satisfied with the conclusion Subaru arrived at. Then his mother headed forward, but her feet suddenly came to a halt.
Having arrived at a fork in the road, Nahoko indicated the path to the right.
“Well, the convenience store is this way, so this is as far as Mom’s going with you… Will you be all right?”
“I haven’t been…maybe I have been wounded deeply enough for you to worry, yeah.”
He couldn’t laugh it off as Nahoko’s overprotectiveness. Even if Subaru wasn’t pathetic enough to completely lose heart, the concern with which his mother gazed at him did not cease. Therefore, to put his mother at ease, Subaru said, “I’m all right. There’s some things I need to do and some things I want to do, but I’ll chew on ’em all. I don’t have even one reason to shut myself in anymore.”
“That so? I’m glad to hear that. Good luck, then.”
Apparently pleased with Subaru’s reply, Nahoko nodded, then headed down the right path with a visible skip in her step. Subaru went down the left path, parting from his mother.
They were going their separate ways. Probably for far, far longer than his mother thought, at that—
“Mom!”
Unable to bear silently gazing at her back and watching her go, Subaru brought his mother to a stop with a loud voice.
His mother’s feet, skipping as she sought more mayonnaise, came to a stop; she twisted her hips and looked back. Subaru seared the ever-normal, never-changing image of his mother into his eyelids.
“Ah…”
Goodbye. He needed to say goodbye. But Subaru hesitated to speak the words.
Even if he said goodbye and parted ways there, his mother still had no idea just how long she and Subaru would be apart. With his mother not knowing they would never meet again, Subaru would be spared seeing her cry. He didn’t want his final memory of his mother to be her crying face, so was it not best that he leave his mouth shut?
Pulling the wool over her eyes out of consideration for her, and himself—
“There’s something I have to do. So it’ll be a long goodbye.”
—was something the heart of Subaru Natsuki would not permit.
“…”
Nahoko greeted the spoken words with silence.
There, before she could react in some way, Subaru continued his words.
“It’s kind of far away, so I won’t be able to stay in touch. I think you’ll probably worry about a bunch of things. I…can’t firmly say I won’t do anything dangerous. If push came to shove, I’d say it’s all pretty dangerous, because the girl I’ve gotta save gets herself in all kinds of dangerous messes.”
His mouth moved rapidly. The information he wanted to enumerate, the words he wished to speak, poured out of him.
“I think Dad and Mom are both gonna worry about me a lot. You’ve worried enough about me where you can see me, and now I’ll be somewhere you can’t. But I’ll be thinking of you no matter where I am, and I’ll never forget about either of you…”
“Subaru.”
“I’ll never think I don’t wanna be Mom and Dad’s child ever again, and I’ll never hate myself again. I know those words don’t really let you send me off with peace of mind, but…”
“Subaru.”
Even Subaru no longer understood what he was saying when Nahoko called out to him from very close.
When he looked up, his mother was standing right before his eyes. And then—
“Subaru—it’s all right.”
“…Wh-whaddaya mean, all right?”
“I know exactly what you’re trying to say, Subaru. So you don’t need to try so hard to find the words.”
“You…know…? But how…!”
“Because…I’m your mother, Subaru.”
There was not a single shred of logic behind the statement. So why did it feel irrefutable?
The backs of his eyes grew hot. He’d sensed the same thing only a few hours before.
Just how many times would Subaru need to bawl like a little child? How many tears had to flow before he could regain an unshakable heart of steel?
“I-I’m like…a little kid here… So lame…”
“If it’s lame to cry when you need it, then that makes every single baby born in the world lame as well.”
“That’s not…what I mean…”
“Yes, yes, I told you, I get it. From Mom and Dad’s point of view, you’ll be our child no matter what your age, Subaru… When you want to cry, go ahead and cry.”
The world began to blur. Tears came running out. Subaru hid his face behind the sleeve he used to rub it so his mother wouldn’t see it. Out of respect for Subaru’s stubbornness, Nahoko didn’t peer any closer.
All she did was slowly stroke the short hair on Subaru’s head.
As she stroked him, Subaru straightened his back.
“…Sorry, Mom. In the end, I can’t do a damn thing for either of you.”
“You know, I didn’t give birth to you because I wanted something from you. I gave birth to you because I wanted to give. Subaru, your mother gave birth to you because she wanted to give you love.”
How much of this, the very definition of love, Subaru had already received from her was simply incalculable.
“If you really want to do something for Mom, take those feelings and give them to someone else. And if you happen to give that love to a girl you like, Subaru…isn’t that wonderful?
“…Yeah, it’s wonderful.”
“Of course it is. What your mother says is never wrong.”
With a satisfied smile, Nahoko toyed with Subaru’s forelocks with her fingers. The feeling of those fingers tickled Subaru, making him smile back at her with his tear-marred face.
“Aw man, I’m super pathetic, just crying and crying…”
“It’s fine to cry. Subaru, you cried so much when you were born. At first, everyone cries in an ugly way. A lot of things happen, and you cry in lots of places.”
“”
“But if, after crying a lot, you end with a smile, everything’s all right. What’s important is not where you start, or what happens midway, but how it ends.”
“So if the results are good, everything’s OK, then?”
“You’re taking that the wrong way. Consider this homework from your mother.”
An opportunity to revise his answer would likely never come.
In the name of homework, she had offered him words of farewell. Accepting them as such, Subaru took them to heart. Surely, the day would come when the answer would emerge, and he would understand it, as if by natural design.
“”
It was neither a very manly nor a very valiant farewell scene.
Neither father nor mother—faced with a son who’d holed up for so long before saying goodbye while unable to even say where he was going—had spoken a word of resentment; instead, they were able to send him off with smiling faces.
For him, this place and his parents who were both too good for him—they were things he loved.
“—Well, I’m headin’ off.”
“Mm-hmm, go ahead.”
Turning his head back at the end, he forced his cheeks to move and make a smile. Leaving that awkward, smiling face behind for his mother, Subaru turned his back to her and walked forward.
The commute to school would be anticlimactic. After the fork, all he had to do was go straight down the road, then up a hill, and then the school campus would come into vi—
“Ah, that’s right. Subaru, Subaru, I forgot.”
Then, just when he was all hyped up to get going, a scatterbrained voice called out to him from behind.
Subaru, worried about what the very, very end might bring, turned to see his mother raise a hand as she said, “Come back soon.”
Then, with a little wave of her hand, his mother spoke those words with a pleasant smile.
The last night before he had been summoned to another world, before heading out to the convenience store, his mother had surely seen Subaru off the exact same way.
But at the time, Subaru, perhaps being in a sour mood, had said nothing, simply opening the door, and…
“”
This was the last chance for him to wipe away his regrets from that day.
His mom’s advanced-level conversation piece was, “No matter how many detours you may take, you will always arrive at the right answer in the end.” The instant he remembered that, a genuine smile, not a forced one, broke out as he called out to her.
“—Be back soon!!”
Sub-chapter 9.
At the school campus, he didn’t see a single student, or teacher, or anyone.
When he headed from the entrance to the foot locker, he opened the ill-fitting door that had remained closed for a while. He switched from outdoor shoes to indoor shoes, then walked into the linoleum-floored corridor.
Third year, sixth class, seat twenty-two. That was Subaru Natsuki’s spot in school.
The classroom for third-year high school students, the senior class of the school, was on the first floor. His own footsteps echoed down the silent corridor as Subaru wasted no time heading to his own classroom. Then he stood in front of the door and took a deep breath.
“…”
Putting his hand on the door, he slid it sideways, opening it wide in one go. That instant, Subaru, blatantly arriving so very late, had reproachful stares converge on him from all over the classr—
“—I must say, you came far sooner than I expected.”
No such thing happened.
When he surveyed his classroom after so long, the seats, including Subaru’s own, in the back row and against the window, were empty everywhere he looked—save a single seat filled in the very center.
Then the individual sitting in that seat turned toward Subaru, seat and all.
“Welcome— Tell me, what did you gain from the time you spent facing your own past?”
Stroking her own white hair, such was the question that the Witch of Greed posed to him, her eyes filled with inquisitiveness.
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Diamond. Diamond. Diamond.
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