Monogatari Series - Volume 19 - Chapter 7.13

013

The epilogue.

The following day, March fifteenth. The morning of my graduation ceremony.

Roused from bed by my little sisters Karen and Tsukihi as usual, I began walking to school for the last time─or rode my bike. Turning the pedals, yes sir, this feeling. It was the BMX Ogi had lent Tsukihi. Of course, I had to return the bike and could only use it today, but the comfort of riding one after so long was like a rich, ripe reward for making it to the future called today, to graduation.

If you’re curious, when I saw Tsukihi in the morning, she’d forgotten about the reappearance of a cram school that should’ve burned down. Are you serious, I wondered, just how bad is your memory, but to be more precise, she seemed to have filed it away as “one of those mysterious things that happen in life.”

I guess my littler little sister’s days were more colored by trouble than I thought─maybe she couldn’t be bothered about every low-risk event, and I was genuinely worried that starting next school year, she and Karen would be split between middle and high schools.

Despite my sweet dreams of finding my own lodgings in college, even of cohabiting with Hitagi, I couldn’t leave home right away when I thought about my little sister.

What’s more, her case, the phoenix, wasn’t really solved.

And I doubted Hitagi would want to leave her father anyway─not to mention, all of this needed to wait until my exam results were out. In fact, if Ogi’s talk about my answer sheet being a question off was true, leaving for college was a pipe dream. I could even see myself diving straight into a job hunt.

Then again, my parents might just kick me out of the house if I’d failed.

“By the way, Tsukihi, what was your wish? You know, with that hair?”

She’d started growing it out at some point, not that I was one to talk, so I brought it up as I was heading out.

A loose end that hadn’t been tied up.

I’d heard a while back that she was growing it out as part of some kind of wish but realized she never told me what the wish was. If she was still growing it out, it must not have come true yet.

“Oh, right. I guess I can cut it already─I forgot I’d been making a wish to begin with.”

“Now I really want to know just how bad your memory is.”

“I actually made wishes about you getting into college, and about Nadeko─call it a pray-hair to the gods.”

If they exist, I mean, qualified Tsukihi.

What? I had a sneaking suspicion it had to do with me, but Sengoku, too? As her older brother, I seriously needed to learn from her example when it came to friendship.

“Your exams are over one way or another, and Nadeko’s doing better─yeah. Maybe there is a god.”

“Yeah. Since yesterday.”

“Hm?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Okay,” Tsukihi said, easily convinced.

I was dropping a hint, did she just not care? How grand for a petite girl.

“Maybe I’ll get a matching haircut with Nadeko once you find out you passed. Since the Fire Sisters are disbanding, maybe I’ll team up with her next… And you, aren’t you going to cut your hair?”

“Well, you know,” I answered vaguely─touching the fang marks etched deep into the back of my neck, around my nape.

So the fate of her long grown-out hair depended on my test results─but I wasn’t going to think about that today. Today was graduation.

I’d honestly considered dropping out at one point, but I’d made it. Right now, that alone was enough to fill my bosom.

…Oh, and I’d talked to Karen in the morning too.

Siblings talking a lot is a good thing.

“Big Brother, Big Brother. I can’t canoodle with you after next month since I’ll be a high schooler, so let’s feed each other mouth-to-mouth one last time!”

“…”

I worried about this little sister too. Was she punch-drunk from her hundred-person sparring?

I’d never asked her if she beat all of them. I didn’t want to be any more scared of her than I already was.

“Then afterwards, we can brush each other’s teeth!”

“No, brush up on how people with brains act… Um, listen, Karen. Are you planning on fighting for justice even in high school─even after Tsuganoki Second’s Fire Sisters disband?”

“Say no more!” she assured me, sticking out her noticeably larger breasts─I guess her chest was just as full as mine? Though I believe the expression she wanted was needless to say, not say no more…

If she cared, that is.

“Karen. In that case, pause to reflect here and try to sum up your three middle-school years. What did righteousness mean to you in the end?”

“Hrrm?”

“Righteousness. Justice. What is it?”

Doing the right thing? Righting wrongs? Perhaps deciding which side is right?

I tossed a question thrown my way by Ogi straight over to my little sister─cast it to the next generation.

I saw the Fire Sisters’ justice as poetic justice, the defeating of bad guys, but wondered what they saw themselves as performing─and how she planned to proceed.

“Helping people.”

Making no attempt to understand my question, Karen responded reflexively─a straightforward and easy-to-understand answer, hard to argue with, but just as hard to carry out. That was her answer.

“Oh,” I said.

I climbed on a nearby chair, reached out my hand, and patted her head (can’t reach without climbing one).

A submissive gesture for vampires, all it signified here was affection for my awful little sister.

“Well, why don’t you start by helping yourself?”

You better.

That’s how our conversation went─but whatever happened, my bigger little sister’s high school life probably wouldn’t suck like mine.

May Karen Araragi continue to be unbroken by righteousness…

So I happily creaked along, pedaling an unfamiliar bicycle, when a figure stood before me that I recognized at once─a pigtailed fifth grader wearing a large backpack.

Had I come up on her from behind, I might have spent another five pages pretending to hesitate, like a true virtuoso, before going to embrace her, but sadly she was facing me and walking in my direction.

Even I couldn’t tackle that.

“Hey, Hachikuji,” I called out to her like a normal person.

“Please don’t speak to me,” she said with a visible frown. “I’m a god now.”

It went to her head! And she was back where she started!

“If you have to speak to me, bow twice, clap twice, bow one more time, then present me with an offering like you’re supposed to for a god.”

To begin with, Hachikuji didn’t look any different even if she was a god─she wasn’t wearing the garb of a shrine maiden or any traditional attire.

Maybe in the future, but I guess aberrations, like humans, don’t change overnight. Only gradually.

“So why’s a god wandering around town? Don’t tell me you’re lost.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m on the side of saving the lost now, unironically at that.”

“Who’s being ridiculous? I gotta admit though, it’s quite a promotion…”

“I’m taken aback that you’d call this wandering around. Observing the lowly creatures of the world below is one of the more trivial duties of a god.”

“This god stuff has really gotten to your head. Don’t change so much overnight. Gradual change, I was saying.”

“Is your commencement ceremony being held today, Mister Araragi? I’d like to congratulate you on all your hard work,” Hachikuji lauded me at last and bowed her head. “I’d love to attend and help you celebrate, but my divine presence could disturb the unwashed masses, so I abstain out of consideration.”

“You know, no one’s coming to worship at your shrine. This town is going to end up godless again.”

“Ha ha ha. Don’t say that. Come by whenever you’d like. All are free to worship at Kita-Shirahebi, do come over to play anytime.”

“Sure. I’ll come over─to play at your house.”

“Yes, to my house,” Hachikuji said and walked off in the direction I came from─she wasn’t kidding as far as the bit about observing our town.

“…”

I saw her off.

Well, she wasn’t the type to sit quietly at home. Interacting with her took me back but also seemed normal.

It was a normal that had required no small effort.

In any case, Miss Gaen’s terribly reckless plan to deify Mayoi Hachikuji seemed to have worked out in the end─honestly, I’d had my doubts about such a forced solution, but you might say that’s what the big boss of the experts was capable of.

“Capable? You mean you, Koyomin, because I sure didn’t expect it to end this way. Please, I’m begging you, don’t go around spreading stupid rumors that I was envisioning an ending this slapdash from the start,” she’d told me the previous night.

Did she have to go that far?

“Seriously, I haven’t been this shocked since I mentioned Nostradamus’ prophecy just to pander to a kid and was told, ‘I wasn’t born yet in 1999’─guess I’m getting up there.”

“I’m not seeing your point.”

“There’s no particular point. Just that we’re living in a future that didn’t end then.”

“Okay…but Miss Gaen. A lot of the credit for getting to our slapdash ending should go to Hanekawa.” I mean, if not for her, wouldn’t Ogi and I have died in a double suicide? Nothing interesting about that end.

“Right, she does deserve my thanks for finding that amateurish junior of mine─I can only raise a white flag to her. What’s really amazing isn’t that she found him, but that she found him and brought him back.”

“…Because she broke through the barrier? But it wouldn’t affect Hanekawa, who’s a resident of this town─the Lost Cow can’t make you lose your way if you want to go home.”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” Miss Gaen brushed my lay opinion aside with a shake of her head. “She managed to make him feel like it.”

“…”

“As far as I know, Mèmè Oshino isn’t the type to make a ‘Special Cameo Appearance’─and when I say as far as I know, it’s a fact… By the way, are you sure about this, Miss Shinobu?” she asked the golden-haired, golden-eyed babe (and not little girl) standing next to me. “If I’m being honest with you, your decision pleases me, as an expert, but your desire to be sealed in Koyomin’s shadow again is one I have trouble understanding. If you have some kind of aim here, I’d like you to make it clear.”

“I harbor none─is tiring of battle and wishing to be regarded once more as harmless so mystifying to an expert? I think not. Kakak!”

From little girl to bewitching woman. She now wanted to go back to being a little girl. Our link hadn’t been restored yet, but as she answered with her gruesome smile, I could tell she wasn’t lying.

“If my master, who fast removed all traces of vampirism from his form, doth protest against becoming a mockery of a human and of a vampire, I defer to his wishes of course─having healed his arm, I shall retreat to a mountain mayhap to live as a recluse.”

“Like I’d ever let you,” I spoke up before Miss Gaen could. “You know there aren’t any Mister Donut branches in the mountains.”

“True.”

After this exchange─and naturally, after I vowed not to err and become a vampire again by offering excessive blood libations, or rather donations, my link to Shinobu was fixed for a third time. Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, who hadn’t enjoyed her full form since spring break, was sealed off in my shadow once more as Shinobu Oshino, a harmless eight-year-old kid.

During spring break, there was no choice─but this time was different.

Of her own will.

She sealed away her existence─and wasn’t lying or faking it. She, who’d rejected godhood four hundred years ago, chose to be a little girl, four hundred years later.

Well, maybe there was no choice. At least, I didn’t have any future that involved not living alongside Shinobu.

Not that we’d forgiven each other, needless to say─a time to forgive, and to forget, might come after four hundred years; for now, that’s where our relationship stood, whether you call it collusion or caprice, custom or compromise.

“If you want to die tomorrow, I’m ready for my life to end tomorrow─if you care to live for today, then so will I.”

“If ye were to die the day after tomorrow, I shall live until the day after that─to speak of thee to another. I shall speak, and they shall listen to the tale of my master.”

I arrived at school.

I passed through the gates decorated for graduation and headed toward the bike racks─to find Tsubasa Hanekawa waiting there.

Maybe model students were exemplary in terms of stamina too. Outwardly, at least, she’d made a complete recovery from last night’s state of exhaustion─even the bags under her eyes had vanished. I was impressed.

“Good morning, Araragi.”

“Good morning, Hanekawa─so you made it to graduation. I thought you’d be dead all of today.” Was tough even the right word? Who knew, maybe she was the most immortal of us all. “And you’re in the bike lot because…”

“I was waiting for you, of course─there’s a lot I want to talk to you about.”

“Yeah?”

“I need to leave as soon as the ceremony is over, so I thought this would be the only time we could really talk.”

“…”

What an active girl. If she was going to say that, I needed to talk to her too─about a mountain of things. Or rather, I wanted to compare answers with her.

“Do you have a plane to catch? Is that why you’re leaving so soon?”

“Mm. Mmm. Well,” Hanekawa demurred somewhat. She ran her fingers through her hair, now significantly longer since she cut it during first term─it wasn’t speckled, of course, because she dyed it black for school. “In bringing Mister Oshino back from Antarctica, I kind of sold off my brain.”

“You sold your brain…”

What the heck─that didn’t sound safe, at all.

“Jet-setting, I guess you’d say?” she went on. “That’s about the only way I could charter a fighter plane─don’t worry. I sold it to a relatively scrupulous agency.”

“…”

What kind of international adventure had she gone on, exactly?

But no surprise that she was outsized in the real world too.

It felt quite strange in the first place for her to be at school in a uniform─though this would be my last time seeing her in her school uniform.

I felt like I should ogle her when I thought about it that way.

Ogle, ogle.

“Don’t make me knock you down.”

“Yikes.”

Was it overseas, too, where she acquired this level of defense?

If she’d learned how to fight, she was perfect at this point.

“Speaking of fighting,” I said, “Miss Kagenui seems to be at the North Pole. It took Miss Gaen all of five minutes to find out after she learned Oshino’s location.”

“Oh─I decided to go with the continental choice out of a vague hunch, but I guess I wouldn’t have been wrong if I’d chosen the North Pole,” remarked Hanekawa, the tension seeming to leave her shoulders─that part really must have been a gamble.

If you were separating Oshino and Miss Kagenui, though, she had to be the one at the North Pole─she couldn’t walk on the ground, after all. Ogi had no choice but to send her there where it was all icebergs and no ground.

“Ononoki wanted to go get her, but apparently Miss Kagenui is having a blast fighting polar bears, a training method I’ve heard of somewhere, and is fine for now,” I told Hanekawa.

“What an incredible lady… I’m glad I didn’t end up going there. Wait, then what about Ononoki? What’s she doing now? Has she left our town, like Miss Gaen and Mister Oshino?”

I shook my head at the question. “She’s still at my house.”

“That’s…”

Hanekawa had a subtle look on her face.

And I couldn’t blame her.

I did realize that Ononoki’s prediction that Miss Kagenui had gone off on a journey to better herself, while still wrong, wasn’t too far off the mark. Maybe she’d come closest to the truth.

I hate admitting that.

“I guess it’s more like Miss Gaen and Oshino left too suddenly─adults are always so busy,” I said.

All too soon.

The way Miss Gaen took off with an “Alrighty, bye-bye” after installing Hachikuji as the god of Kita-Shirahebi and sealing Shinobu back into my shadow was one thing, but before I knew, Oshino had left without a word yet again─as if to disappear along with the ruins Ogi had created.

Truly like some mirage, he flat-out, flatly vanished.

Without the time to so much as reminisce before parting anew─but we’d been reunited after he’d gone all the way out to the South Pole, so I knew we’d meet again in the not-too-distant future.

Still, scramming before I could even thank him for everything, including the Tadatsuru business, was pretty unforgivable.

And in this way─whatever way this is─I gained custody of Ononoki for the time being, pending the conclusion of Miss Kagenui’s training. Assuming Miss Gaen hadn’t just forgotten the familiar, maybe it meant continued surveillance.

I’m not complaining. I did mess up.

Personally, I felt like I’d cleaned things up, but not everyone out there would agree.

Least of all, her─myself.

“Adults… Aren’t we also going to be adults starting tomorrow?” asked Hanekawa.

“Hitagi and I will still be students. You’re the only one becoming an adult.”

“Hitagi?” I thought I’d dished out a snappy line but had only slipped up, and Hanekawa latched onto my misstep gleefully. “Huh, I see. I see─while I was gone.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Don’t jump to any conclusions. It hasn’t gone as far as you might be imagining.”

“Good, good─I can leave with my mind at ease,” Hanekawa said and started walking.

She’d wanted to talk to me before she left Japan again─was that it? She really cared about her friends…or just worried too much.

You could say she’d singlehandedly solved everything this time─indeed, everything since August. Forget about due credit, maybe it was all hers.

Exactly a year ago.

If I hadn’t met Hanekawa then, what would my last year of high school have been like? I couldn’t help but get sentimental.

Not making friends.

Because it’d lower my intensity as a human─leaving those words behind, I might’ve graduated alone, in silence (or failed to).

It might’ve been fine in its own way. But now, I could only picture this way.

“Oh…right.”

“Hm? What’s the matter, Araragi?”

“Well, I know it’s a little late to bring it up, but I noticed something… The reason Miss Gaen was so sure Ogi would make a move on Tsukihi on March fourteenth.”

Ogi had said it herself, too. She wanted to put an end to it before I graduated, the point, her read, being: before my youth ended.

While still in high school.

As much as Ogi needed an opening in my schedule, she also needed Tsukihi to show an opening…but my littler little sister is full of them. Surviving without doing a thing really makes her a phoenix.

As I headed to my classroom alongside Hanekawa─we ran into Hitagi Senjogahara by the building entrance. Catching sight of the two of us together, she grimaced for a second─no doubt because Hanekawa had managed to ambush me first.

Please, no odd battle between friends…so damn uncomfortable.

Sure, Hitagi had a stubborn complex when it came to her, but given how Hanekawa had soared to a height that neither of us could reach, curbing those feelings little by little would only be wise…

Not that I was one to talk─in spite of singing her praises, somewhere inside of me I too saw her as a rival in that I’d given birth to Ogi Oshino, who couldn’t stand her.

“Good morning, Araragi.”

“Oh? You don’t call him Koyomi?” Hanekawa asked before I could reply. She’d gotten a little meaner after being knocked around by the world.

Maybe Hitagi thought resistance was futile. “Good morning, Koyomi,” she corrected herself, cheeks mildly aflush. “And welcome back, Tsubasa.”

While she was at it, she also first-named Hanekawa─who looked surprised but returned, like the genius she was, “Glad to be home, Hitagi-chan.”

Hitagi-chan…sounded so cute.

Probably because they’d be talking taking girl-to-girl in due course, Hanekawa didn’t get into how she’d be leaving soon after the ceremony, and the three of us walked to our classroom.

The school’s atmosphere felt different too─but that just had to be me.

“Koyomi. It seems like Kanbaru got us a graduation present.”

“Oh, yeah? A present from Kanbaru? I’m worried.”

“She wouldn’t prepare a weird surprise for something like this, not even her. I did ask in so many words, and it seems to be a regular bouquet of flowers.”

“Flowers, huh.”

Hitagi was worried too if she bothered to ask─meanwhile, not putting any questions to me, as we conversed, was very much like her. No attempts to ferret out whatever happened last night or how we cleaned things up.

She waited for me to tell her.

It wouldn’t put me in a flattering light, it wasn’t anything I was eager to volunteer─but she needed to hear about everything.

I hoped it would come across as a funny story.

I hoped I could tell it to her with a smile.

“By the way, Araragi,” Hanekawa said. “How many points short of a perfect score were you on your exams?”

“…”

Who asked such a question?

She meant it as a joke, of course.

I told her I seemed to have filled in the wrong bubbles by one question for math─and Hanekawa was pensive for a moment.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I contacted Miss…someone who took the same college’s math exam and already asked about the kinds of test questions you had. This wasn’t the kind of answer sheet where you could lose your place.”

She was way too proactive. Just how concerned was she about me, anyway?

But…not that kind of answer sheet?

True, I’d wondered how I could be off by one question when there hadn’t been that many, but why would Ogi…

I’d assumed it was true since she said it.

“That is so Ogi’s way of being mean,” commented Hitagi. “I could never imagine you pranking anyone like that.”

Was that right? No, she said it precisely because I never would─I’d burdened her with doing what I couldn’t and wouldn’t do.

All this time until now, and probably going forward.

I was reminded of Kanbaru, who’d gotten us flowers─Suruga Kanbaru, a distant, underlying cause of Ogi Oshino’s birth, who had no direct knowledge of the Darkness but, compared to me, had far more of what it took to exert self-control.

Above all, a direct descendant of Toé Gaen─in some form, a disposition that gave birth to aberrations must have been passed down their lineage.

Which meant Kanbaru, too, might experience being in the throes of her youth.

Her own Ogi Oshino could appear before her─would I be able to support her when that happened?

Just as Hanekawa had done for me?

…Well, I’d just have to do my best.

I’m only me, after all.

Not just as Oshino, nor just as Hanekawa, but just as me, I’d lend my support.

So that someone could go and get saved on her own.

I thought these things like I’d come to a great understanding as I finished climbing the stairs, and just then, it happened.

I crossed paths with a girl─a student who descended the stairs without looking our way. A first-year, judging by the color of her scarf. She had to be here for our graduation ceremony, but why was a first-year in the third-year area?

The girl looked so pale, however, that it quashed any such questions─and her wobbling, unsteady gait got me worried about her mental state as much as her physical condition.

She looked drained.

Possessed.

At that notion─I stopped.

Hitagi and Hanekawa turned back to look at me and shrugged in resignation. Their movements synchronized, the best of friends.

“Go ahead.”

They spoke in unison as well.

“Yeah. Could you pick up my diploma for me?”

See you, I said, handing my bag to Hitagi and leaping down the whole set of stairs I’d just climbed─in pursuit of the first-year student. With the eyes of the two girls watching me off at my back, I hit the landing, pivoted, and rushed down another set of stairs.

Searching where the girl might have gone, I ran through the first-year halls, past another student─who had pitch-black eyes.

Like darkness itself, she sneered.

And said, “You never change, do you, Araragi-senpai.”

No.

I do.

But no matter how much I change, I’m going to be me.

“Long, long ago, in a distant land, was an odd fellow named Koyomi Araragi─aye, and is still.”

Happily ever after, my shadow recited, running alongside me.

If the story continued, I couldn’t wait to hear what happened next.