Chapter One: “The Clod of Earth Awaits the Snow” — Part Thirteen

“…I kept watching funny videos.”
Kai answered without meeting my eyes, leaning toward the window.
She made no effort to hide that it was a lie.
“What kind?”
“Animals living peacefully in the countryside.”
“Oh…”
Whatever she said, I couldn’t get a grip on whether it was true or not. Like light snow on the shoulder, it dissolved the moment it landed and left nothing behind. Combined with Kai’s almost alarmingly slight frame, everything about her felt like something out of a dream.
“You like animals?”
“As long as they aren’t aggressive.”
The way Kai said it struck me as considerably more aggressive than any animal.
Had that waking panic been the movement of something afraid of attack.
…From whom.
“Those eyes of yours…”
I started to murmur the thought before I could stop myself, then closed my mouth. Kai followed my behaviour with her eyes but didn’t press it. Instead, as if in compensation, she called me by a name that wasn’t mine.
“Yuki-san.”
“…Anyone there? Yuki-saaan?”
“Yuuu-ki-san.”
She kept calling it, amused with herself, and I ignored every instance and drove on.
As before, I pulled over when the gate of Kai’s house came into view. The moment the car stopped the rain intensified as if it had been waiting, beating against the body of the car and the windscreen. The house, and Kai, and rain.
Perhaps there was some strange affinity between them.
“Thank you very much.”
“Mm…”
I threw back a voice entirely unlike Kai’s pale one, something like a muddy snowball landing flat. The halting sound of it was full of hesitation. Closer to reluctance than anything else.
Something in me was leaning half a step forward, unsure.
There was something I had been wanting to ask for a while. About what those otherworldly eyes brought her.
If my presumptuous guess was right, well, even if it was, what would I gain from knowing. Only that someone else who carried a striking feature like that had gone through the same thing, and perhaps knowing that would bring some comfort. That it wasn’t only me.
It was a question that looked back at my own past as much as it asked about her.
“…Those eyes of yours, do people say things about them… at school, or…?”
When would I come to regret it.
Having asked that.
I looked sideways and down, watching for her reaction.
Kai didn’t answer with words. Instead she leaned toward me, as if something had occurred to her.
“What are you doing?”
“The eyes… or the hair, I wonder.”
The searching words and look pressed directly against my heart, and my breath caught.
I understood the implication. I understood that I had asked something I shouldn’t have.
“Don’t touch.”
I moved my hand to brush her away, but Kai’s hand came back for me straight away.
She touched my hair with easy familiarity, hair I tended to every day without fail. Nothing but bad memories there.
“If you’re sensitive to that kind of thing, I thought perhaps you’d had that kind of experience yourself.”
She had hit the mark. This girl was not stupid, not at all.
She saw the world clearly.
I took hold of both of Kai’s wrists, and just like that her hands went still. Kai’s wrists were so thin they put me in mind of bird bones. Those slight hands, even held, hadn’t given up. Resisting, trying to pull free. But with only a small increase in my grip, the resistance was snuffed out.
Entirely fragile. The eyes that overwhelmed people had nothing to do with it, the difference in strength was exactly what it looked like.
Confronted with that plain physical reality, for a moment my back went cold.
I didn’t know what feeling had surged through me, but something close to a chill came with it.
“Which one are you hiding? Or both?”
Kai asked with certainty. A straight unobstructed bridge extended between us, the kind that offered no room to deflect. Nowhere to put up a barrier, only a road made for running straight down.
This was my own careless mistake. I had asked the wrong thing, and now I would accept what came and let it show.
“…My hair.”
Though she hadn’t touched it, I felt my hair lifted by Kai’s gaze as if by a hand, and my neck prickled.
“Oh?”
Kai’s face was close. Both wrists still held, she stretched her neck toward me like a dog straining at a chain. She looked over my hair from up close with undisguised curiosity, and when I tried to pull back there was nowhere to go in the car. Kai, those two green stars, came closer, cutting through the night sky.
And just before she collided with me, a voice spilled out like the last light of a collapsing star.
“You really are beautiful.”
“…What?”
“For an oba-san.”
“Excuse me?”
I was slow to receive praise but quick to react to a slight. I thought, so she finally said what she actually thought, and moved to snap back, but couldn’t.
The mouth I’d opened closed, and the feeling swung cleanly through empty air and retreated.
“…………………………………”
Two large yellow-green stars grazed the surface of the earth, and pulled away, leaving only wind and impact behind.
“I won’t touch anymore, so will you let go of my wrists?”
“…Yes.”
I released them as told. Kai drew herself back, and touched her lips softly with one finger. At the corner of my eye, white noise, lines crossed and crossed, tracing any number of ×’s.
To put it in plain terms: our lips had touched. It needs no name. No name is needed.
I can’t connect it.
I faced forward, hands on the wheel.
Through all of it, the wipers had gone on faithfully keeping back the rain.