Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 11 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue: friEND

Why had I decided to go rushing to Andou’s side? How had I actually managed to reach him? There were more than a few mysteries revolving around both of those questions, but an explanation for everything fell neatly into place the moment I found him: by that point, the battle was already over.

Most likely, it had been finished at the moment I’d resolved to go find him. In other words, by that point in time, Lost Regalia had already stopped influencing my actions. Akutagawa’s artificial city had seemingly been dispelled as well, which was fortunate, since otherwise I never would’ve been able to make it here.

“Sagami,” Andou said as he noticed me jogging toward him out of breath from the run I’d just been through. He was sitting on the floodbank by the river, and he slowly stood up as I approached him. Tamaki was lying on the ground nearby as well. She looked completely unharmed at a glance, so I assumed she’d just passed out.

I took a moment to gasp for breath before speaking up. “Huh...? Wait, Andou... Did you win?”

“I mean...kinda? Close enough, anyway.”

“Wow... That’s certainly something. How on earth did you manage to use your power to come out ahead?”

“I bluffed,” Andou replied before launching into a casual explanation that was remarkably devoid of any bragging or self-congratulation.

The flames of Dark and Dark of the End had been sealed in an alternate dimension, where they’d kept burning and growing up to this very day...was the story that Andou had fed Tamaki, apparently. She’d known all about his power’s hidden ability thanks to Aki’s recon, but Andou had managed to turn that disadvantage on its head and use it in his favor. Tamaki had known that he had an uncontrollable power that would burn himself to ashes if he dared to use it, so a bluff that would have come across as nonsensical absurdity if he’d pulled it out of nowhere had instead seemed downright plausible.

Of course, in Andou’s words, “I-It’s not like I was totally bluffing about the part where it’s still burning to this day, for the record! I have, like, a feeling that it really is! It’s like...like an intuitive sorta thing, y’know? I mean, I haven’t actually checked or anything...but I think it’s probably still burning! I mean, I want it to still be burning. It’d be just plain sad if it couldn’t even manage that much.” For whatever that was worth.

But, I digress. The point is that since Tamaki had fallen for Andou’s bluff, the shock she’d felt as she’d plummeted through Chifuyu’s Gate had been too much for her to take, and she’d passed out. That meant that she’d never learned the location she was actually falling toward—in other words, the dimension Andou had actually asked Chifuyu to send him to—that being a pool filled to the brim with stuffed animals. The two of them had gently plopped down into it without sustaining so much as a mild bruise.

“Oh? That’s quite impressive. I’m surprised you managed to come up with all that,” I admitted.

He’d found a work-around to suppress his opponent’s power, used his own theoretically worthless power to his advantage, and brought the battle to a conclusion without harming a hair on his opponent’s head. Of course, it wasn’t like he’d come up with it on the spot. He’d spent an eternity planning the whole tactic out long beforehand. It certainly wasn’t a conventional way to win, but it was about as Andou-like as you could get.

“By the way...I see you’re not surprised,” I noted.

“By what?” asked Andou.

“By the fact that I know supernatural powers are real, and that I know what your abilities can do. You don’t seem startled in the least.”

“Hah! You knowing something you shouldn’t hasn’t been surprising for ages. In fact, I don’t think there’s anything you could tell me that’d really surprise me anymore. That’s just how it goes with you,” Andou explained ever so caustically. “Come to think of it, what are you even here for?”

“I came to save you.”

“You... Huh?”

“I came here to save you, Andou. I knew you were in trouble, so I came running, fully prepared to put my life on the line to save yours. Shame I didn’t make it in time, of course.”

“...”

“Well, you don’t have to be that surprised about it.”

He was giving me a look that screamed “Who are you and what have you done with Sagami?” so loudly that I was actually a little offended. That fact that he’d literally just finished saying how nothing I could say would surprise him anymore didn’t exactly help either.

“Yeah...it’s weird, isn’t it? This isn’t like me at all,” I admitted. I hadn’t meant to voice my doubts—they just slipped out. Ugh... Expressing myself like this is certainly more embarrassing than I gave it credit for.

Andou really did look shocked, but before long, he let out a sigh. “It’s really weird, yeah...but eh, not in a bad way or anything. That’s just how it goes with you, right?” he said, using almost the exact same words he’d said to me just a moment before. “Hey, Sagami. Do you remember how you took me to the hospital to visit your mom that one time? Like, in the spring of our third year in middle school?”

“Yes, I certainly did that.”

“And when I asked you why, you said that you’d just wanted to see how I’d react, right?”

“I did indeed.”

“Back then, I assumed that you meant that you thought my reaction would be funny...but that wasn’t right at all, was it? You didn’t want to see my reaction—you wanted to know what it would be.”

Seeing...as opposed to knowing?

“Back then, you weren’t watching me the way you usually did. You were watching me carefully, observing how I’d react, because you cared. It was sorta like, I dunno...like what drives people to look themselves up online, I guess.”

Looking yourself up—in other words, searching your own name online in order to gauge your reputation and see what people have written about you.

“They say that manga artists and novelists tend to look themselves up all the time, you know?” said Andou. I didn’t reply. “In other words, writers watch readers in the same way that readers watch writers. Back then, when you took me to that hospital, you were acting like a writer, not a reader. You were anxious about whether or not I’d accept you, and you were expressing yourself like, well, like any other person would.”

Somewhere within me...was a writer. A writer who I’d thought had died long, long ago. A writer whom no one had managed to discover—whom even I had failed to notice...and yet Andou Jurai had unveiled him before I knew it.

“‘If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,” said Andou. It was a true chuuni classic quote if I’d ever heard one. “Sagami. You’ve been watching me for a long time...and that whole time, I’ve been watching you too.”

“Have you, now...?” I said. I closed my eyes, and gave him a silent nod. “You know, being watched might not be so bad after all. I’ve spent so long focused solely on the fun I could have watching others...but it’s true. Having someone else see me is surprisingly nice.”

As readers, we evaluate. As authors, we are evaluated. Both sides of the equation have their own sources of distress, and both sides bring their own sorts of joy, as well.

Just then...

“Mnh... H-Huh...?”

...Tamaki’s eyes fluttered open. There was a look of bewilderment in them—surprise, presumably, at the fact that she wasn’t dead. She turned her head from side to side, inspecting her surroundings...and soon, her gaze met mine.

“Sh-Shizumu!” Tamaki gasped. Her eyes shot wide open, and she scooted back away as if she was scared of me.

I, however, stepped toward her, and Andou...didn’t stop me. Considering everything I’d done up to that point, it would have been completely reasonable for him to assume that I was about to cast her right back down into the deepest pits of her own personal hell, but he made no attempt to hold me back.

Most likely, he expected better of me. As a reader, Andou had genuinely high expectations for me as a writer. He was setting the bar high, sitting back, and watching over the conclusion of our rom-com. A work that had been consigned to a seemingly eternal hiatus by the circumstances of its authors was, at long last, about to begin its final chapter.

“It’s been a while, Tamaki,” I said.

Tamaki didn’t reply. She couldn’t even look me in the eye.

“Let me start by saying this: I’m not going to apologize,” I said. Tamaki cowered away so fearfully, you’d think I just slashed her with a knife. “Three years ago, the two of us broke up...and I don’t believe I have a single thing to apologize for when it comes to that. No matter what reason she has—no matter what sort of scumbag her hero may be—a heroine must never let herself be claimed by another man. My standards for purity would never allow me to love someone who would make that mistake, regardless of the circumstances.”

When all is said and done, people simply don’t change that easily. Infidelity was something I couldn’t bring myself to ignore. I couldn’t look past it, and I couldn’t stop it from destroying all attraction I had for her. Within my reader’s mind, Tamaki was over and done with. I would never fall for her again. It was a truly egotistical, arrogant, and hypocritical sense of values, and yet...

“It wasn’t my fault. The reader’s never to blame.”

Tragic though it might have been, cruel though it might have made me, I was myself—a reader—to the end. The fact that I still didn’t feel so much as a hint of guilt, even after everything that had happened, was as clear of a sign as there could be that I was irredeemable.

Tamaki had started crying before I knew it. She was crying so hard, you’d think I’d gouged open an old wound just to rub salt in it. Her grief was palpable, and I felt nothing at all upon seeing it. Just like when I watched my mother slumber away, I felt like it was all a work of fiction, happening in some other dimension that I had no part in. It didn’t occur to me at all to reach a hand out to her, or offer her a hug.

“But...”

And then I said it. I said the words that I’d forgotten to say—the words that I should have said. That one, single phrase that a reader has to offer to the works that they consume.

“Thank you, Tamaki.”

“Huh...?”

“Thank you for falling for me. Thank you for everything you did for me. Thank you for accommodating me. Thank you for doing so, so much to make me love you.”

John Lennon said that love is wanting to be loved. I’d never understood those words, but now, I finally felt like I was starting to get it. The reader within me could never have comprehended them, but the writer within me stood a chance.

Everything she’d done, she’d done to make her boyfriend love her. Everything an author did, they did to make their readers love them. It was wrong to belittle it all as acting, flattery, and lies. There wasn’t so much as a hint of dishonesty to the feelings that drove them. Those feelings were proof of the connections that we forged with one another, and they were truly something to be celebrated.

“Thank you, Tamaki. I really was happy to have you as my heroine.”

Tamaki let out a gasp...and tears streamed down her cheeks like a waterfall. It felt like somehow, purely on a whim, I had said the words that she had always wanted to hear from me.

Oh... I guess I probably should’ve done this from the very beginning. Whenever Tamaki did something for me, I should have just told her “Thank you.” I should have acknowledged all the effort she put into making me love her.

Maybe if my voice had reached her, we could have warded off our story’s cancellation. Maybe its serialization would have lasted for at least a little longer. Maybe we would have wrapped everything up in a final chapter worthy of all that came before it. It was all too late now, of course. I was no longer in love with Tamaki, and I would never fall for her again. The same went for her—she’d surely be better off without having a guy like me in her life any longer.

“Let’s change, Tamaki,” I said.

I’m sure people would tell me it was far too late for that. They would say I had no right to even suggest it. Nevertheless, I played the role of the me I wanted to become, expressing myself using my own words.

“Let’s stop letting the past hold us back—stop leaning on it like a crutch. Let’s look to the future and take a step forward. I’ll...do my best to make an effort, right along with you. It’s terrifying and humiliating to even think about...but I promise I’ll give it my best shot.”

“Yeah... Let’s!” Tamaki said, tears still flowing down her cheeks as she gave me a powerful nod. She finally looked up now—looked at me, and at Andou beside me—then bowed her head. “I’m so sorry...”

It wasn’t my place to decide whether or not she should be forgiven. That right rested in the hands of the one who’d really been harmed today—which is to say, Andou. I looked behind me, wondering what he would say...and found him bawling his eyes out. He had his arms crossed and was trying really hard to look stoic, but he was still crying so much, it was almost disturbing. I mean, he was probably crying harder than Tamaki herself!

I almost cracked up then and there...but at the same time, a thought struck me: the ice had begun to melt. Andou’s heart—his capacity for romance that had been frozen by the trauma of his time in the eighth grade—had finally begun to thaw. The glacier of regret and guilt that had long hidden the love within him was turning to water and flowing down his cheeks...

Okay, no, that’s probably going a little too hard on the flowery metaphors. Hmm. I’m starting to think that I might not have much talent as an author after all.

Meanwhile, as I was preoccupied by that truly trivial line of thought, a pair of grins began to grow upon Andou and Tamaki’s faces. Finally, the two of them burst into laughter. I couldn’t even say who started first...and speaking as their friend, I couldn’t have been happier to see them smile so brightly.