Monogatari Series - Volume 19 - Chapter 7.12

012

“You’re actually me.”

You’re me.

Ogi Oshino─is Koyomi Araragi.

The moment I said it, rebuking her, it appeared.

I’d seen it before─but really, that’s not the right word. Nothing more than a shade, a hole that sucked everything into itself, a lone, pitch black, darkness─nothing but darkness.

The Darkness.

Nothing was there.

A nihility, an absence.

So black, though, I couldn’t call it emptiness.

Overwriting, blotting out the world’s typos─a black, black blackness.

Black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black black.

Black─engulfing black.

“Well, that was fast. The main attraction, already on stage? Were the lies that serious, the crimes so grave?”

In contrast to my stunned state as I flashed back to my previous dramatic escape from it, Ogi was coolness itself─even smirking.

I knew this’d happen, of course. I’d been told.

If I exposed Ogi Oshino’s true identity─which is to say, my own deceit, the Darkness would appear and swallow her up, according to Miss Gaen’s plan.

I thought I was emotionally prepared, but the Darkness that I was facing once again had appeared with such astonishing abruptness.

“To think that I tried to play the part of this─I wasn’t in my right mind, if I do say so myself. I imagined I was hewing to stricter standards than the real thing, but…not even close. It wasn’t even a decent impression. I suppose being more unyielding than the world’s rules, and dubbing myself the cosmic law, was unreasonable to begin with? I did hope to be dark matter.”

I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off the Darkness, which had entered the classroom with an impact that threw perspective out of the window, but Ogi had no problem looking away and faced me as she spoke.

Her composure seemed to imply─a critique of my own weakness, even now.

“Don’t worry, I won’t run or hide. I do love mystery novels, after all. Nothing more shameless than a culprit who doesn’t know the score─in fact, I’m one of those old-fashioned readers who want it to end with the criminal’s suicide.”

“…”

“Oh, but cool and collected doesn’t cut it either. It’s a buzzkill in its own way, it just pisses me off, when they’re calm even as they’re confronted with the truth. Given that I’m about to disappear, I’m trembling on the inside. Annihilation, matter and anti-matter colliding. I’m trying to put up a bold front because you’re watching, but I have to wonder, what’s that like? Does it at least beat getting sent to hell?”

Ha haa, she laughed.

I was halfway out of my chair, but she showed no sign of standing up from hers.

“Suicide…” I began, my voice actually trembling. “But you knew this’d happen, didn’t you? If you’re me─that I’d be waiting here, having realized your true identity. So then why did you come? You could’ve dropped your criticism of Tsukihi’s case and run away.”

“Run away, like where? I just do what I need to do, even if it’s pointless─remember? I’d leave some unfinished business behind, but no regrets. In that sense, it really is suicide,” Ogi said with a beaming smile. “Sometimes you have to fight even if it’s a losing battle. While we may never agree on anything, if you’ll allow me something like my final words, I think I straightened your life out, in my own way. In a good way─though life might be going too far when I only spent a brief six months correcting a brief six months’ worth of deeds. How about youth? Even if I didn’t make yours any better, didn’t I make it more just?”

“If this is what you call just, then I don’t need my life to be just. Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused?”

I’d resolved not to blame her─she’d done it all because of me─but the words slipped out of my mouth. I was being critical toward my self-criticism.

With the all-engulfing Darkness next to us, with nonexistence existing right there. With less than a minute left to exchange words with her.

“For Senjogahara, for Kanbaru, for Sengoku, for Hanekawa, for Shinobu, for Oshino, for Miss Kagenui, for Ononoki…for Kaiki─do you know how much trouble you’ve caused them? Do you have any idea just how much harm you’ve spread?”

“If they did suffer harm, it was nothing more than comeuppance,” answered Ogi. “I didn’t do anything─don’t you know that yourself? Trouble, harm, misfortune, they aren’t something you can come to terms with so easily. Even less so difficultly.”

“But you can, if it’s justice? You can neatly pack up what’s right and wrong?”

“Impossible─which is exactly why I worked with you, as a team. Even if you can’t determine what’s right, can’t you still decide which side is right?”

“…”

“Regarding Sodachi Oikura’s case, I was wrong. Regarding Nadeko Sengoku’s, I was right. Tadatsuru Teori’s was maybe a dissatisfying draw─I knew he and Izuko Gaen were connected, believed a one-on-one match was winnable. Nor did the kind of rift I wanted between you and Yotsugi Ononoki ever materialize.”

A match. That’s how Ogi described it.

Okay… Then our face-off had begun as soon as we’d met─was every one of our conversations, and not just the three rounds she mentioned, a kind of duel?

A duel to test─not what’s right, but which side is right.

That’s what rightness meant to her…and maybe it was closer to justice than righting wrongs─however.

“What was the record in the end, then? Which of us ended up being right?”

“Since I’m about to be annihilated like this, I’d say you. Congratulations.” With this, Ogi finally stood up from her chair. “What you’ve been doing wasn’t wrong.”

It was right.

Her saying so hardly made me feel any better. It was more like a fistful of salt in my wounds.

It was Ononoki who’d hit me where it hurt with her remark that I was seeking forgiveness by forgoing happiness. Since I was so pitiful, I ought to be beyond reproach─if that stance gave rise to Ogi, who’d unleashed so much fury, it put me deep in the wrong.

But maybe fury isn’t correct─or right, when she’d been trying to pacify our town.

Just like Miss Gaen, in that they both sought to install a god at Kita-Shirahebi. Ogi’s point of view was expansive, as if in reprimand of my inability to see past the end of my nose.

If she’d been righting my wrongs all this time, I needed to be thanking her─but I couldn’t.

Even if this was goodbye, an eternal parting.

I couldn’t allow myself to thank her─Koyomi Araragi and Ogi Oshino could only exist in opposition, critical of each other. We could only affirm our own existence by denying the other’s.

And that existence would soon vanish. Go away─in atonement.

The imitation Darkness swallowed up by the Darkness.

“The end of youth, we might say. Or maybe of a tale. Well, nothing serious. It’s not your life ending here, and nowhere near the end of the world. One of your many stories concludes, and it’s not even the finale. I’m glad I could disappear before you graduated, great work,” Ogi snuck in a mystifying bit─and dipped her head down in a bow. “Bye, Araragi-senpai.”

“Bye, Ogi.”

And now.

Ogi Oshino, who came on as Suruga Kanbaru’s junior, threw my life into as much chaos as possible since second term, pulled strings behind the curtains all throughout town, crawled between the lines to dig up everything foreshadowed there, rehashed what had come to an end, demanded self-understanding and atonement, self-flagellation and silence, feared no opposition, flinched at no hostility, allowed nothing to slide with her sneering, unforgiving attitude, and forgave nobody.

Ogi Oshino, who appeared wherever I went, like my shadow─everywhere.

Her crime of self-falsification tried, her true identity exposed, like the many deceptions she herself had punished, Ogi Oshino, whom I could see anytime, would be swallowed up by the true Darkness, which virtually didn’t exist, as though she never existed─leaving behind neither shape nor shadow, she’d vanish.

Her rightness and my wrongness.

My wrongness and her rightness─annihilating each other.

Done and gone, ceasing to exist.

All that she’d been up to was about to end.

So I’d say it again─I’d never allow words of gratitude to come out of my mouth, but I could at least see myself off with a recitation of my farewell.

Bye, Ogi.

Goodbye, my youth…

“Nope, no can do!”

I leapt.

Forcing my human body that dared not budge, using the strength in my human legs to stand from my chair, I put my mass to work like a human and ran like a human─in other words, as a plain human.

I leapt at Ogi and shoved her to the floor.

As if to dodge the Darkness, which was only inches away, I shoved a high school girl down on the cracked floor of an abandoned building. I wasn’t even sure if the Darkness had been moving, but it did pass over my head.

I─saved Ogi Oshino.

“A-Araragi-senpai?! Wh-What…”

For the first time.

For the first time now─Ogi let out what sounded like a panicked voice. No, thinking back, maybe this was the first time ever that I’d seen her truly shaken.

“What are you thinking?!”

Okay, maybe she was just angry.

But I couldn’t respond to her anger─to her criticism. Not because I didn’t know how to put my feelings into words.

I couldn’t speak because I was in pain.

“…gh.”

As if to dodge the Darkness, I’d said, but I hadn’t actually─it had grazed my right arm.

A graze was all it needed to take the whole thing: my upper arm down was gone like it had never existed.

The bleeding wouldn’t stop.

Naturally, it didn’t regenerate.

I was nothing but human now.

The degree of pain probably wasn’t too different from back when I was slightly vampiric, and I should’ve been used to it, in terms of tolerance─but the sense of loss was something else.

“Trying to save people when you aren’t even immortal…” Ogi’s indignation continued unabated. Still on the floor, she glared at me with her black eyes. “I-Is that who you are in the end? You throw your life away for others on a whim? You’d even save someone who only ever criticized you, who only ever attacked you? Why die here, what good will it do? Why save me here─you’re wrong, after all. There’s something wrong with you as a person. You’re scum─”

“I wasn’t trying to…” Despite everything growing hazy due to the blood loss, her rough dressing-down helped me hold on, and I replied haltingly, “…save people. I saved myself just now.”

Miss Gaen had misjudged this one. The lady who knew everything was, how else to put it─wrong.

Hard on myself and hard on others? That wasn’t me.

Self-sacrificing, self-critical, self-flagellating.

I, who couldn’t stop throwing my life away for other people─self-centered for once.

Egotistically.

Saved myself.

Not caring what people wanted or how I looked, selfishly true to desire, to instinct─I saved myself.

Showing my true colors.

Self-staged, was what this was. Nothing more…

I’m hardly praiseworthy or great, and since I was such a weakling, if I didn’t save myself─

I was going to die, wasn’t I?

“Hitagi…” I said deliriously. “Hanekawa…Shinobu…Ononoki…saved me… They all saved me, so how can I not? How’s that okay…”

“…”

Silently.

The ever-talkative girl silently and gently touched my wound─and the bleeding stopped. Using some aberration’s power that she’d inherited, whether from Seishiro Shishirui or Toé Gaen I don’t know, but anyway she stopped my bleeding.

Maybe this was pointless.

As pointless as shielding Ogi’s body─we’d survived the initial strike, but now that I couldn’t move, the Darkness might just swallow me up as well.

None of my muscles was responding to my will. Even if I reconsidered and chose to be strong and unforgiving, it’d be too late to abandon Ogi and run away─and I liked that it was too late. Getting swallowed up along with someone who’d worked so diligently on my behalf seemed like the least I could do.

“My goodness, Araragi-senpai. I was planning on offing myself, and now it’s a double suicide. You do realize that I’m not a little girl?”

“Fine by me… You’re still like a six-month-old…baby…aren’t you.”

According to Miss Gaen, defeating Ogi was easier than taking candy from a baby.

But you don’t take candy from babies, you’re supposed to protect them, like I was doing.

“If everything I’ve done so far wasn’t some mistake, then I bet this isn’t a mistake, either,” I said. “I’m not doing things wrong.”

Yes. Just as you’re not.

Maybe it was because the bleeding had stopped─my words were miraculously clear. When Ogi heard them, that smile returned to her face.

No. This was another first.

It was a smile she’d never shown until now. A bit bashful, and somehow embarrassed, smile.

“You really are─such a fool.”

“Not really.”

Then.

I heard an unbelievable voice. Not mine or Ogi’s, but a third party’s─when I looked in its direction, which is to say at the door Ogi had opened to enter the classroom, I again couldn’t believe who was standing there.

I thought Tsukihi had returned at first, but it was no one like my little sister, a middle-school girl who was adorable at least in appearance─a Hawaiian shirt.

A middle-aged dude in a Hawaiian shirt.

“It’s nothing to sneeze at. You finally fought for yourself─I respect you, Araragi.”

Easily, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

Mèmè Oshino─uttered those words.

“…!”

I thought I was hallucinating, that on the verge of death, I was seeing the phantom of a man who couldn’t be present. Yet under me, Ogi was looking in the same direction with a shocked expression, so it couldn’t be a convenient delusion.

Well.

If Ogi and I were the same person, then surely, pushed to the limit, we could hallucinate the same thing─and witness a convenient mirage, like a party of travelers seeking out a desert oasis.

From behind the middle-aged delinquent, however, wobbled another figure, like a newborn fawn─or rather a dying fawn, with trembling legs. Spotting this second individual, I realized it was no convenient delusion or mirage but simply the result of honest effort.

Effort.

On the part of a girl with mottled hair who looked ready to fall flat on her pale face at any moment, bags carved so deep under her eyes that I could see them at my distance, her layers of clothes in utter disarray, just drained and depleted and dead on her feet in general─Tsubasa Hanekawa’s outlandish effort.

“Ten all-nighters in a row was pushing it…”

She nevertheless wrung out her last bit of energy to force a victorious smile and point a provocative finger at Ogi, who lay under me.

“I win.”

With that, Hanekawa collapsed.

So dramatically I thought she might’ve died─but she’d only fallen asleep.

“I don’t believe it. Miss Hanekawa really brought him…from Antarctica. How did she even get there and back?” Ogi muttered in a feeble whisper I could barely make out─hm? Antarctica?

Antarctica, a frozen land that even an exceptional aberration at her full strength, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, could not tolerate and evacuated─a place absolutely devoid of aberrations.

In other words, a place absolutely no expert would visit.

Is that what she meant by…a reverse approach? We’d only searched places where Oshino might go, but should have tried places where he wouldn’t, instead? Hiding a tree not in a forest but on the ocean floor─was legitimate. Yes, but it was human psychology to look for it in a forest. Who’d go dredge the ocean, other than Hanekawa…

I was speechless─she hadn’t said a paid man, Hitagi.

Depaysement.

So Hanekawa’s two possible locations had been Antarctica and its opposite, the North Pole… Beautifully winning that coin toss, she had tracked down Mèmè Oshino and, moreover, made it back to Japan with a day to spare.

“Her head’s messed up.”

This probably wasn’t referring to the jumbled speckles of white and black─but Ogi Oshino admitting defeat to Tsubasa Hanekawa.

Come to think of it, Ogi had been wary of her from the start, which made total sense, since I knew better than anyone how incredible Hanekawa is. If Dark Koyomin was an answer to Black Hanekawa, no wonder they didn’t get along.

Miss Gaen and Hachikuji’s read on the name Ogi was that it played on fan─it seemed forced, and I realized belatedly that it wasn’t just forced but tacked-on, a bit of misdirection to put it in mystery novel terms. Wasn’t the point that you obtained Ogi by adding the character for portal on top of the feather in Hanekawa’s name?

All that wariness, all the countermeasures did have an effect but could only buy time and got breached, futile in the final analysis─Tsubasa Hanekawa.

Just how Tsubasa Hanekawa was she?

“Araragi,” Mèmè Oshino said with a grin, not so much as glancing at Hanekawa, who’d collapsed right next to him. “In an abandoned place like this… What’s the idea, shoving my cute li’l niece down to the floor─so spirited, Araragi. Something good happen to you? You’re acting awfully suspicious with a junior when you have a girlfriend.”

What a ridiculous thing to say, look at the situation we’re in, I nearly shot back as I always used to in this classroom, but before I could─it was gone.

Not Ogi’s form. The Darkness.

The law of nature that seemed ready to engulf us at any moment vanished entirely─the existence, or nonexistence, we could neither see nor feel in the first place.

The Nothingness was no more.

“Ah…”

Niece? He just said that. About Ogi.

Mèmè Oshino said that.

In other words, he recognized her as a relative─meaning her actual existence.

Her presence was no longer a lie or fake.

Hence─the Darkness disappeared.

“…”

Ogi could say nothing, dumbstruck.

Even Ogi Oshino, who acted like she saw through everything, must not have imagined being saved like this, not by someone whose return she thought she’d resisted by putting up a barrier, to keep her true identity under wraps.

But that’s the kind of guy Mèmè Oshino is.

The original and progenitor─when it comes to acting like he sees through everything.

“You saved us there…Oshino,” I thanked on behalf of the speechless Ogi─though speaking for her simply meant saying what I felt.

“It’s not like I saved you. You just went and got saved on your own.”

Well done.

When I heard those words.

I reached my breaking point and crumpled, no longer able to support my own weight─and Ogi, who had to bear all of it, groaned. Geh─the moan sounded real, with nothing cute about it, and perhaps proved her existence. She had substance.

Became real the moment her true identity was exposed.

Ogi Oshino became Ogi Oshino.

So ended my, Koyomi Araragi’s, youth─a period when not caring for myself meant loving others, and even sacrificing myself to save someone made sense─that weak thin inebriation, that sweet deception came to an end.

But it was only the beginning of my bitter, gruesome, and evenly pitched battle against Ogi.

Neither brightly affirming myself, nor blindly negating myself.

I’d not stop thinking, and not be afraid to act; I’d not hesitate to try again, no matter how frustrating, scrutinizing my constant trials and errors, experiencing remorse and regret as if to split every hair, but taking on yet greater challenges and gambles; recouping every loss with three times the gains─an endless battle in pursuit of happiness, hereby begun in earnest.