Episode 77: The Fated Person

The train sways and my body sways with it, just slightly — but the distance between us is far too close for that to matter, because Shion is pressed right up against me. That part is the same as always; since the end of summer break she’s been leaning into me with an especially clinging weight, damp and close. The distance itself hasn’t changed.

What’s changed is the atmosphere. From the end of summer until yesterday, Shion had been so sunken — in the music room, on the way home in the train — that it hurt to look at her, and now I can read it clearly as the weight of hiding the competition result. She’d been carrying a grief so heavy it had me worried sick.

But now.

Without me needing to say it in narration, Shion’s voice rings out.

“Hey, hey, Uta.”

She pokes at my shoulder with her fingertip, voice bouncing.

“…What is it?”

I shift my knees sideways to turn toward her. In the movement, our skirts overlap and brush. Looking at her — Shion grips my arm tight and gazes up at me.

“You write novels, right?”
“…I do.”
“What kind of novel?”
“I told you — a novel with piano as its theme.”
“Mm. Does it have any characters based on real people?”
“…You.”
“Hm~?”
“So — I admired the version of you I saw as a child, and I’ve been writing this whole time because I wanted to put that beauty into words…”

Wait, what is this, some kind of torture?

At karaoke just now I was desperate — I wanted to ease even a little of Shion’s pain, and I had no room left to feel embarrassed.

But now, going back over each fact one by one, up to and including the part where I confessed it to the person herself and she is now asking me about it — I want to die of embarrassment. Writing had become so much a part of my daily life that I’d gone numb to it — but what I’m actually doing is unilaterally worshipping a friend, venerating her as the ideal of beauty, and turning her into a novel, continuously. I’m just… a genuinely alarming person, aren’t I — the kind of objective self-assessment that ambushes you at the worst moment.

And Shion, who keeps laying out these facts one by one, is utterly transformed from yesterday — bright and gleeful throughout — so her words don’t stop.

“So that means — before you met me, and after you met me, you’ve been writing me into your novel the whole time…!”
“…That is what it amounts to, yes.”
“That’s so — it’s fate, isn’t it.”

Shion says it and presses herself into me, hugging my arm with happy warmth, her whole body leaning in. The impact isn’t sharp at all — it’s soft, it doesn’t hurt — but the impact of what Shion said is far greater.

Fate.

It was nothing more than me being drawn to her unilaterally, from before we ever met — just that — and Shion puts that fact into the most beautiful word available.

“Shion — doesn’t it bother you, having someone write you into their novel without asking? Didn’t you find it strange?”
“I didn’t. Because I want to become Uta’s words. From the day we met in the music room — no, from long, long before that — I’ve been playing piano for Uta.”

Shion’s words ring out, and at the same moment the in-car announcement says the train is approaching the next stop. The carriage rocks with the slowing. But compared to the way my heart is bouncing, that motion is nothing at all. The only thing I was worried about was whether my pulse — against the arm she was clinging to — was being transmitted to her. The wish that it wouldn’t reach her and the wish that it would pulled against each other, and I was in the centre of that heartbeat going back and forth.

Caught up in being tossed around by my own pulse like that, Shion lets more words fall — her voice, like transparent water, trembling.

“Uta, thank you for giving me a reason. I’ll keep trying to become Uta’s words. So…”

Keep watching me.

As the train drew to a stop, Shion’s words and my still-running heartbeat were the only things that kept on sounding.

◇◇◇

I came home and wrote what had happened today into the novel. In the story, the heroine had been playing piano all along — so it became something like a renewed declaration of intent, a restart.

Honestly, as a plot development it might have been a little forced. What happened today is too close to the actual personalities of me and Shion, and there were many elements I couldn’t carry over into the story. Maybe to readers it looks like a puzzle with several missing pieces.

But I wanted to put what happened today into words — imperfect as that might be. I wanted to write it down so I wouldn’t forget: the pain Shion had been carrying, the secret I’d confessed, everything that came from all of it.

It started as a self-serving story — I wanted to write the image of the girl I admired, I wanted to put Shion’s beauty into words. But even within that, I wrote and published something built especially from my own private feelings.

So I’d told myself the response would probably be smaller than usual — and then, contrary to that expectation, the notification light went red almost immediately. Without thinking, I tapped it — and there was a name I hadn’t seen in a long time.

“I’ll do my best to catch up to your words.”

Otonashi-san’s comment was there, for the first time in so long.

The same enigmatic phrasing as always. Perhaps she means she’ll read the episodes she’d missed. The real intention isn’t clear.

But just seeing Otonashi-san’s name there made me unreasonably happy — and, belatedly, as if noticing it for the first time now, I thought: her way with words is a little like Shion’s.