TMoHS: The Anagram of Suzumiya Kurumi 4
Title: The Anagram of Suzumiya Kurumi
Rating: PG
Length: 3294
Warnings: Time travel, spoilers, book canon, some coarse language and science fiction themes. Gropage.
Summary: Code name Asahina's mission when she's recruited to the S.O.S Brigade. ( Earlier chapters 01| 02| 03)
Disclaimer All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
2003, North Senior High School, Tokyo
Nothing happened. I had held onto the edge of my desk anxiously, anticipating that at any second now someone would come storming into my classroom. Or that I would hear an explosion. But instead, I simply slipped into my classroom as if I'd always been there, and the world was silent. I took observation notes on Kyon when I could, and submitted my reports regularly and calmly. And nothing happened.
Though I had worried that joining a second year class with such little warning would arouse suspicion, it hadn't. I simply introduced myself, and took my desk, to be followed by another new student. The boisterous and unnervingly familiar Miss Tsuruya. So I wasn't that out-of-place. And though I'd been sure that I'd feel foreign in this time-plane, with its old technology, I felt quite at home in my new surroundings.
I'd been warned that sometimes operatives who have travelled forwards become used to a higher level of interconnectivity and convenience, and can go into cultural shock over the clumsiness of old devices. Having attended school three thousand years in the future of my own natural time-plane, I had been concerned that I would be hit hard by the sudden silence and isolation in my own head. Instead I realised that I had been lucky enough to grow up to a certain age without any cyborg brain implants, and in some ways I felt more in common with these classmates and their frustratingly slow technology than I ever had with my previous friends.
I had time, a lot of time, to myself. Which was different. No quick trips back to the agency, or home visits with Mum on the weekends. Just the mission and my cover story and my life. So I thought about all sorts of things, as my classmates focused on their work. I had to pay some attention, to keep track of all the inaccuracies I'd have to keep in my homework and exam answers, but the rest of it was all part and parcel of everyone's basic data package. Sure, you had to pass the exams on your wits alone, but then if you scored high enough you simply downloaded the data to your memory banks afterwards.
Anyway, I had more than enough time to daydream and think. I began to wonder if the problem with our agents really was due to disconnection with their technology. A lot of people in my natural time-plane argued that internet addiction and integrated GUIs in contact lenses, for example, were changing the way that humans interacted and lived completely. But they weren't, not really. They were just a different way for people to communicate. Language, words, music, pictures, data streams, it was all just related to the way we pushed information to each other. The human brain wasn't any more or less complex, even over all the hundreds of years we'd been innovating. Different in some ways, but still basically the same...
A scrap of paper slid onto my desk, folded over a hand-written note. In my last school, we'd run around devising trickier ways to connect with each others' interfaces, to get away with passing notes. But the principle was more or less the same. Distraction, misdirection, and practice.
I opened it. It was from Tsuruya, and cheered me out of my boredom right away.
Nyoro ~ ^_^ Let's go to that store you like today? I need more wool <3
Perhaps the other reason that I was fitting in well was my newly discovered fascination with traditional arts and crafts. I'd always admired their elegance; Mum had some calligraphy scrolls that were breathtakingly gorgeous hanging in the front hall. Now that I had free time, I'd taken up everything I could manage. I'd switched between the various clubs, finally settling for the grace and artistry that the calligraphy club could teach me. But clubs only lasted so long, and in my free time I had fallen into a comfortable habit of testing new techniques and tools with Tsuruya. You wouldn't think it to look at her, but we had a shared passion for experimenting and learning things. Though she did have a habit of selecting garish colours for her craft projects.
Her family was well established, had an old traditional house, and cupboards just full to bursting with old fabric and rich beautiful looking looms, knitting needles, pattern templates... all just so beautiful. As the stress and tension of the danger my mission posed to my own time-plane dissipated, I realised that this was quite possibly one of the happiest times of my entire life. Good companionship, a true sense of empowerment and independence, and peace.
Don't you have enough at home? Though I *do* want to go myself. What colour do you need?
I smiled attentively towards the front of the classroom, made some more simple notes in my exercise book, then found my opportunity to slip the note back to her.
The class passed quickly enough, and I was just reaching into my bag to retrieve my lunchbox, when a slender hand fastened firmly around my wrist. My heart stuttered in my chest. It was familiar, but different. Less strong, less wrinkled, less normal. I hadn't expected her, hadn't expected the feeling of disassociated vertigo that swept over me. Like time sickness, but a little worse.
I held onto that feeling, knowing that the blood had drained from my face, that my eyes were wide in terror. I turned to face her, trying to use my fear to stop myself from falling into familiar patterns of address, or even bursting into tears. My world hung in the balance, on a knife-edge.
“You're so cute! Oh, so cute! What's your name? It's Asahina Mikuru, right? Mikuru-chan? I scouted you, you're joining my club!”
I gaped, and then realised I was supposed to be answering her. Tsuruya looked alarmed and was getting to her feet, ready to defend me. But I had known that this day would come, when something went wrong. Changed somehow. So instead I spoke, to defuse the situation.
“Ah, um.... I... eep!”
Well, all right. So I was still green behind the ears and not really up to the pressures I was under. I shivered and tried to avoid eye contact.
“Mikuru, are you alright? I can beat her up for ya if she's a sexual deviant!” Tsuruya clasped at my other hand, glaring at my assailant.
“I-I'm fine. No, really. Fine. You're Suzumiya-san, correct?”
She beamed, just beamed. That wide mad smile. But there was something wrong with it, so wrong that I couldn't name it. I felt a tremor in my spine.
“That's right! Ahh, you must have been noticing the activities of my exciting new club, hey? Come have a look, I'm sure you'll love it!”
What could I do? I'd recognised myself in the photographs, I'd followed standard operation procedure. I'd prepared myself as best I could for this day. It was inevitable, and now I just had to follow along with it all.
“All right. I suppose.”
Tsuruya, open-mouthed, blinked stupidly. “What about this afternoon?”
I shrugged helplessly, feeling a drag on my arm pulling my body up and out of my seat. Across the room. “Another day?” I called back.
I stumbled on my own feet more than I ever had before, half-falling up stairways and finally being whirled around into a large clubroom. I stared around, my mind trying frantically to catch up to my body, trying to calm the shudders that still shook my body. Like a little baby, I could feel my chest jolt with a hiccup of fear.
I felt more ashamed than I ever had in my life. As I calmed down slightly, I realised that there was someone else in the room. My target. My... the man that would go on to become a father one day in the far future. He was facing off against her with a stern looking face, and that helped heal my fractured mind somewhat. This moment was more than I had ever felt capable of hoping for. Though he didn't know it, he was my father, finally standing up on my behalf against the madness that was my mother. My eyes teared up with the realisation. Even if the world was destroyed, I had finally experienced a father's protection.
“... but that's not all, she's got bigger breasts than me! Big breasts!”
“AHHH!” I flailed. I should have expected such behaviour from her, really. But it came as a surprise. I could feel her young small hands clenching and kneading painfully.
Thankfully, my father was turning aside with a blushing face, probably ashamed at her brazen sexual abuse. “What are you, dumb?”
Her hands stilled on my chest, and her voice came out vindictive and cruel near my ear. “Want to feel?”
I hadn't known my eyes could stretch that wide. I squeezed them shut immediately and continued to fight against her. He might one day be my father, but right now he was only a fellow high-school student. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself for allowing such a perverted and disgusting act to occur.
“Uh, pass.”
Oh, thank goodness. I have never felt relief that pure and reassuring. But as I was released and they continued to talk beside me, I found I still felt uneasy. I felt something strange and sharp and aching inside me. This girl wasn't my mother. She wouldn't be for years. This wasn't Mum, supernatural investigator of the extraordinary. This was Suzumiya Haruhi, a person of interest to my mission. This wasn't my father, whoever he had been. This was just my mission target. And in the corner? I found my eyes falling momentarily on those of someone familiar. Nagato Yuki. Not Aunt Yuki, who occasionally smiled in short twitches of her lips and who came over once a week or so for dinner. This was a cold, unknown alien in every sense of the word.
“I see...” I had said it aloud before I realised it. I quickly glanced from Nagato, to the smug expression on Suzumiya's face, and the blank exasperation of my mission target. I couldn't even let myself think his name. I realised they were waiting for me to finish what I had started saying. But how could I? I couldn't just say “Oh hi, I've just realised you're not yet who you are going to be in the future,” brightly and shake their hands. I had to say something that actually made sense and maintained my cover.
“I get it, I understand. I'll quit the Calligraphy club and join. But...” I racked my brain, trying to recall what the sign on the door had said. “But I'm not really sure what the literature club does.”
They explained in an oddly synchronous dialogue about the true nature of the club, and in a way that made me feel homesick for my Mum, Suzumiya recited the full explanatory name of the S.O.S Brigade. I nodded and acted as politely as I could, and felt dazed as I sat down at the table before me. I found my eyes drifting to Nagato more than once. She had been named as the “real” literature club member. But I knew somewhat better than to assume she was just that. Android. Alien. While I was a time-travelling cyborg, and human gene splicing wasn't that strange in the future I'd been educated in, the presence of extra-terrestrial life was a bit confronting. Was she a replica of human bio-mechanics, or just a shell full of a higher level of wetware? How was she coping with the data-interfaces of this day and age?
More importantly... if she could synchronise with her future and past selves and transcend the time-plane sequences... was that Nagato Yuki the strange alien sitting there, or my real Aunt Yuki pretending to be Nagato Yuki the stranger?
I'd always been terrible at guessing her moods. She was far too good at maintaining a blank stoic look. I stared down at my hands for something else to do, trying not to sneak too many curious glances up across at my target. When he was named as “Kyon”, I was saved. It had felt a little wrong, seeing his name in clear letters on his dossier. In a way that I couldn't describe, really. I'd stumbled across a whole truckload of information that I possibly shouldn't have, learning all these strange things about my family. But his name was the only piece of information that I felt that I shouldn't know. I wished I could un-see it, in a way. But it had been logged in my augmented memory, and no matter how much I tried to ignore the information, it was there between my eyes. I clung to the nickname like a lifeline, repeated it over and over in my head, trying to use the rhythm of it to keep out any further realisations.
So these were to be my new companions. Suzumiya, Nagato, and... K... Kyon. Koizumi hadn't shown up yet, but I was pretty sure it would only be a matter of time now. More than enough had already gone wrong, and I could remember quite clearly the photographs at home. Mum, my father, Aunt Yuki, and Uncle Itsuki... and me. So really it was Nagato, Suzumiya, Kyon, and the as yet absent Koizumi.
I sighed heavily and let my head droop towards the desk. Kyon and Suzumiya continued to bicker over something. Nagato turned a page in her book, and I wondered if I could just sink through the desk and the floor, right down into the concrete and then dirt that lay beneath the school. Being buried alive would surely be less stressful and life-threatening than this.
Sleep helped a little, though not much. I was still exhausted and drained and dizzy feeling when I was putting my shoes in my locker and hearing Tsuruya's concerned voice as if from a distance.
“Heeeey, Mikuru my dear sweet Mikuru? Was it that traumatic, yesterday?”
I blinked and cleared my head. “No, not really. I just... couldn't figure out a maths problem from our homework, so I stayed up too late.”
I had actually received the unsurprising news that my mission status and objective had changed. I'd been up late catching up on the information. The time-plane was destabilising, and I was to monitor Kyon and Suzumiya carefully. Be prepared to take action to protect the Ideal Timeline at any costs. It was the words “at any costs” that worried me the most.
“Oh-hoh!” Tsuruya smiled and shook her head fondly. “Want me to talk you through it later on?”
I winced and demurred, waving my hands in what I hoped was a gentle and not at all frantic way. “Ah no, I've got a um, a tutor. So I'll just ask... her... um, on the weekend.”
Tsuruya seemed to be a little taken aback for a moment, but then she smiled in a confusingly knowing way and clapped me on one shoulder. “Right you are, then! So anyway, I went without you to get the wool in the end. And I saw this really brutal pattern for a coin purse! It's in my bag, I'll show you during roll call.”
“You... went without me?” I followed her to our classroom in a bit of a daze, my indoor shoes squeaking slightly against the floor as we rounded a corner sharply.
“Well yeah. I mean, now that you're committed to the S.O.S brigade, I can't really expect you to be free this week. I've heard that Suzumiya can be a real ball-breaker, you know?”
I stopped completely, and stared as Tsuruya took a few steps away from me. Dazed, my voice came out even weaker and feebler than it usually did. “But... I haven't told anyone yet.”
Tsuruya opened her mouth, looked away from me, shut it, and then opened it again to speak. “Well, I heard Kyon muttering about it on the way home. I was walking down that blasted hill at the same time he was, you see.”
“Right.” I smiled, but began to wonder if there were more persons of temporal interest in my life than Miss Miruku and my superiors had seen fit to inform me of. Still, Tsuruya was a nice girl. And the pattern she'd bought was adorable and really clever. It would be better for me to keep an eye on her than it would be to suddenly start avoiding her. It would be safer, and I might figure out what was behind everything with her.
Also, it would be nice if I could at least learn that nifty stitch before anything went pear-shaped. It looked very useful and I'd be able to use it for much more than just coin purses.
The day was all right. Nothing further seemed suspicious about Tsuruya. I clung to the slow moments of the day, the feeling of sunshine on the skin of my arm through the classroom window and the sound of the teachers' droning voices. Anything to distract myself from thinking about what would happen as soon as the bell rang.
Suzumiya wouldn't be grabbing my hand today. I would be voluntarily and calmly walking to the clubroom on my own two feet. Though you could argue that my future mother's enthusiasm for madness like this club was what had pushed me into a career of time travel at so young an age, and that it was her distant hand pushing me along this path...
Uweeeeh, I was getting dizzy from it all. I took a deep breath and steadied myself by clasping my bag tightly and taking measured regular steps out of the classroom and along the hallway. Still the trip went by far too quickly, and before I knew it I was in the clubroom and being turned about by Suzumiya. With Kyon beside us, we were driven into the nearby computer clubroom by Suzumiya's unstoppable force of personality.
I was, all things told, beginning to worry about the chemistry between the two of them. Kyon seemed to just be alternately exasperated and nonplussed with her, and she didn't seem to notice anything of the sort. My own conception seemed like a far and distant dream. Would this be my mission? Was I supposed to work against all likelihood of success and aliens and ESPers and other time travellers, just to get my parents together?
It seemed ludicrous, but at that moment I would have believed anything. I was a little too caught up in my thoughts, distracted, as I saw Suzumiya grasp the wrist of the head of the computer club, and then thrust his arm forwards. I felt someone's, a stranger's, hand twitch reflexively and painfully around my breast. In Suzumiya's eyes was manic glee, as she dug a finger into the poor boy's elbow and forced his grip even tighter.
But that wasn't why I screamed.
It was Suzumiya's voice, loud and clear as she cried out “Now, Kyon!”
And the sound of the camera shutter as Kyon took a photograph and shattered all my stupid dreamlike naïve hopes that I would ever find a sympathetic father figure. It wasn't just the scream of a young girl being molested and exploited, but one of someone whose family and hope had been ripped away like a painful plastic adhesive bandage.
Oh mother, father, anyone! What did I ever do to deserve this?!
( part five)
Rating: PG
Length: 3294
Warnings: Time travel, spoilers, book canon, some coarse language and science fiction themes. Gropage.
Summary: Code name Asahina's mission when she's recruited to the S.O.S Brigade. ( Earlier chapters 01| 02| 03)
Disclaimer All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
2003, North Senior High School, Tokyo
Nothing happened. I had held onto the edge of my desk anxiously, anticipating that at any second now someone would come storming into my classroom. Or that I would hear an explosion. But instead, I simply slipped into my classroom as if I'd always been there, and the world was silent. I took observation notes on Kyon when I could, and submitted my reports regularly and calmly. And nothing happened.
Though I had worried that joining a second year class with such little warning would arouse suspicion, it hadn't. I simply introduced myself, and took my desk, to be followed by another new student. The boisterous and unnervingly familiar Miss Tsuruya. So I wasn't that out-of-place. And though I'd been sure that I'd feel foreign in this time-plane, with its old technology, I felt quite at home in my new surroundings.
I'd been warned that sometimes operatives who have travelled forwards become used to a higher level of interconnectivity and convenience, and can go into cultural shock over the clumsiness of old devices. Having attended school three thousand years in the future of my own natural time-plane, I had been concerned that I would be hit hard by the sudden silence and isolation in my own head. Instead I realised that I had been lucky enough to grow up to a certain age without any cyborg brain implants, and in some ways I felt more in common with these classmates and their frustratingly slow technology than I ever had with my previous friends.
I had time, a lot of time, to myself. Which was different. No quick trips back to the agency, or home visits with Mum on the weekends. Just the mission and my cover story and my life. So I thought about all sorts of things, as my classmates focused on their work. I had to pay some attention, to keep track of all the inaccuracies I'd have to keep in my homework and exam answers, but the rest of it was all part and parcel of everyone's basic data package. Sure, you had to pass the exams on your wits alone, but then if you scored high enough you simply downloaded the data to your memory banks afterwards.
Anyway, I had more than enough time to daydream and think. I began to wonder if the problem with our agents really was due to disconnection with their technology. A lot of people in my natural time-plane argued that internet addiction and integrated GUIs in contact lenses, for example, were changing the way that humans interacted and lived completely. But they weren't, not really. They were just a different way for people to communicate. Language, words, music, pictures, data streams, it was all just related to the way we pushed information to each other. The human brain wasn't any more or less complex, even over all the hundreds of years we'd been innovating. Different in some ways, but still basically the same...
A scrap of paper slid onto my desk, folded over a hand-written note. In my last school, we'd run around devising trickier ways to connect with each others' interfaces, to get away with passing notes. But the principle was more or less the same. Distraction, misdirection, and practice.
I opened it. It was from Tsuruya, and cheered me out of my boredom right away.
Nyoro ~ ^_^ Let's go to that store you like today? I need more wool <3
Perhaps the other reason that I was fitting in well was my newly discovered fascination with traditional arts and crafts. I'd always admired their elegance; Mum had some calligraphy scrolls that were breathtakingly gorgeous hanging in the front hall. Now that I had free time, I'd taken up everything I could manage. I'd switched between the various clubs, finally settling for the grace and artistry that the calligraphy club could teach me. But clubs only lasted so long, and in my free time I had fallen into a comfortable habit of testing new techniques and tools with Tsuruya. You wouldn't think it to look at her, but we had a shared passion for experimenting and learning things. Though she did have a habit of selecting garish colours for her craft projects.
Her family was well established, had an old traditional house, and cupboards just full to bursting with old fabric and rich beautiful looking looms, knitting needles, pattern templates... all just so beautiful. As the stress and tension of the danger my mission posed to my own time-plane dissipated, I realised that this was quite possibly one of the happiest times of my entire life. Good companionship, a true sense of empowerment and independence, and peace.
Don't you have enough at home? Though I *do* want to go myself. What colour do you need?
I smiled attentively towards the front of the classroom, made some more simple notes in my exercise book, then found my opportunity to slip the note back to her.
The class passed quickly enough, and I was just reaching into my bag to retrieve my lunchbox, when a slender hand fastened firmly around my wrist. My heart stuttered in my chest. It was familiar, but different. Less strong, less wrinkled, less normal. I hadn't expected her, hadn't expected the feeling of disassociated vertigo that swept over me. Like time sickness, but a little worse.
I held onto that feeling, knowing that the blood had drained from my face, that my eyes were wide in terror. I turned to face her, trying to use my fear to stop myself from falling into familiar patterns of address, or even bursting into tears. My world hung in the balance, on a knife-edge.
“You're so cute! Oh, so cute! What's your name? It's Asahina Mikuru, right? Mikuru-chan? I scouted you, you're joining my club!”
I gaped, and then realised I was supposed to be answering her. Tsuruya looked alarmed and was getting to her feet, ready to defend me. But I had known that this day would come, when something went wrong. Changed somehow. So instead I spoke, to defuse the situation.
“Ah, um.... I... eep!”
Well, all right. So I was still green behind the ears and not really up to the pressures I was under. I shivered and tried to avoid eye contact.
“Mikuru, are you alright? I can beat her up for ya if she's a sexual deviant!” Tsuruya clasped at my other hand, glaring at my assailant.
“I-I'm fine. No, really. Fine. You're Suzumiya-san, correct?”
She beamed, just beamed. That wide mad smile. But there was something wrong with it, so wrong that I couldn't name it. I felt a tremor in my spine.
“That's right! Ahh, you must have been noticing the activities of my exciting new club, hey? Come have a look, I'm sure you'll love it!”
What could I do? I'd recognised myself in the photographs, I'd followed standard operation procedure. I'd prepared myself as best I could for this day. It was inevitable, and now I just had to follow along with it all.
“All right. I suppose.”
Tsuruya, open-mouthed, blinked stupidly. “What about this afternoon?”
I shrugged helplessly, feeling a drag on my arm pulling my body up and out of my seat. Across the room. “Another day?” I called back.
I stumbled on my own feet more than I ever had before, half-falling up stairways and finally being whirled around into a large clubroom. I stared around, my mind trying frantically to catch up to my body, trying to calm the shudders that still shook my body. Like a little baby, I could feel my chest jolt with a hiccup of fear.
I felt more ashamed than I ever had in my life. As I calmed down slightly, I realised that there was someone else in the room. My target. My... the man that would go on to become a father one day in the far future. He was facing off against her with a stern looking face, and that helped heal my fractured mind somewhat. This moment was more than I had ever felt capable of hoping for. Though he didn't know it, he was my father, finally standing up on my behalf against the madness that was my mother. My eyes teared up with the realisation. Even if the world was destroyed, I had finally experienced a father's protection.
“... but that's not all, she's got bigger breasts than me! Big breasts!”
“AHHH!” I flailed. I should have expected such behaviour from her, really. But it came as a surprise. I could feel her young small hands clenching and kneading painfully.
Thankfully, my father was turning aside with a blushing face, probably ashamed at her brazen sexual abuse. “What are you, dumb?”
Her hands stilled on my chest, and her voice came out vindictive and cruel near my ear. “Want to feel?”
I hadn't known my eyes could stretch that wide. I squeezed them shut immediately and continued to fight against her. He might one day be my father, but right now he was only a fellow high-school student. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself for allowing such a perverted and disgusting act to occur.
“Uh, pass.”
Oh, thank goodness. I have never felt relief that pure and reassuring. But as I was released and they continued to talk beside me, I found I still felt uneasy. I felt something strange and sharp and aching inside me. This girl wasn't my mother. She wouldn't be for years. This wasn't Mum, supernatural investigator of the extraordinary. This was Suzumiya Haruhi, a person of interest to my mission. This wasn't my father, whoever he had been. This was just my mission target. And in the corner? I found my eyes falling momentarily on those of someone familiar. Nagato Yuki. Not Aunt Yuki, who occasionally smiled in short twitches of her lips and who came over once a week or so for dinner. This was a cold, unknown alien in every sense of the word.
“I see...” I had said it aloud before I realised it. I quickly glanced from Nagato, to the smug expression on Suzumiya's face, and the blank exasperation of my mission target. I couldn't even let myself think his name. I realised they were waiting for me to finish what I had started saying. But how could I? I couldn't just say “Oh hi, I've just realised you're not yet who you are going to be in the future,” brightly and shake their hands. I had to say something that actually made sense and maintained my cover.
“I get it, I understand. I'll quit the Calligraphy club and join. But...” I racked my brain, trying to recall what the sign on the door had said. “But I'm not really sure what the literature club does.”
They explained in an oddly synchronous dialogue about the true nature of the club, and in a way that made me feel homesick for my Mum, Suzumiya recited the full explanatory name of the S.O.S Brigade. I nodded and acted as politely as I could, and felt dazed as I sat down at the table before me. I found my eyes drifting to Nagato more than once. She had been named as the “real” literature club member. But I knew somewhat better than to assume she was just that. Android. Alien. While I was a time-travelling cyborg, and human gene splicing wasn't that strange in the future I'd been educated in, the presence of extra-terrestrial life was a bit confronting. Was she a replica of human bio-mechanics, or just a shell full of a higher level of wetware? How was she coping with the data-interfaces of this day and age?
More importantly... if she could synchronise with her future and past selves and transcend the time-plane sequences... was that Nagato Yuki the strange alien sitting there, or my real Aunt Yuki pretending to be Nagato Yuki the stranger?
I'd always been terrible at guessing her moods. She was far too good at maintaining a blank stoic look. I stared down at my hands for something else to do, trying not to sneak too many curious glances up across at my target. When he was named as “Kyon”, I was saved. It had felt a little wrong, seeing his name in clear letters on his dossier. In a way that I couldn't describe, really. I'd stumbled across a whole truckload of information that I possibly shouldn't have, learning all these strange things about my family. But his name was the only piece of information that I felt that I shouldn't know. I wished I could un-see it, in a way. But it had been logged in my augmented memory, and no matter how much I tried to ignore the information, it was there between my eyes. I clung to the nickname like a lifeline, repeated it over and over in my head, trying to use the rhythm of it to keep out any further realisations.
So these were to be my new companions. Suzumiya, Nagato, and... K... Kyon. Koizumi hadn't shown up yet, but I was pretty sure it would only be a matter of time now. More than enough had already gone wrong, and I could remember quite clearly the photographs at home. Mum, my father, Aunt Yuki, and Uncle Itsuki... and me. So really it was Nagato, Suzumiya, Kyon, and the as yet absent Koizumi.
I sighed heavily and let my head droop towards the desk. Kyon and Suzumiya continued to bicker over something. Nagato turned a page in her book, and I wondered if I could just sink through the desk and the floor, right down into the concrete and then dirt that lay beneath the school. Being buried alive would surely be less stressful and life-threatening than this.
Sleep helped a little, though not much. I was still exhausted and drained and dizzy feeling when I was putting my shoes in my locker and hearing Tsuruya's concerned voice as if from a distance.
“Heeeey, Mikuru my dear sweet Mikuru? Was it that traumatic, yesterday?”
I blinked and cleared my head. “No, not really. I just... couldn't figure out a maths problem from our homework, so I stayed up too late.”
I had actually received the unsurprising news that my mission status and objective had changed. I'd been up late catching up on the information. The time-plane was destabilising, and I was to monitor Kyon and Suzumiya carefully. Be prepared to take action to protect the Ideal Timeline at any costs. It was the words “at any costs” that worried me the most.
“Oh-hoh!” Tsuruya smiled and shook her head fondly. “Want me to talk you through it later on?”
I winced and demurred, waving my hands in what I hoped was a gentle and not at all frantic way. “Ah no, I've got a um, a tutor. So I'll just ask... her... um, on the weekend.”
Tsuruya seemed to be a little taken aback for a moment, but then she smiled in a confusingly knowing way and clapped me on one shoulder. “Right you are, then! So anyway, I went without you to get the wool in the end. And I saw this really brutal pattern for a coin purse! It's in my bag, I'll show you during roll call.”
“You... went without me?” I followed her to our classroom in a bit of a daze, my indoor shoes squeaking slightly against the floor as we rounded a corner sharply.
“Well yeah. I mean, now that you're committed to the S.O.S brigade, I can't really expect you to be free this week. I've heard that Suzumiya can be a real ball-breaker, you know?”
I stopped completely, and stared as Tsuruya took a few steps away from me. Dazed, my voice came out even weaker and feebler than it usually did. “But... I haven't told anyone yet.”
Tsuruya opened her mouth, looked away from me, shut it, and then opened it again to speak. “Well, I heard Kyon muttering about it on the way home. I was walking down that blasted hill at the same time he was, you see.”
“Right.” I smiled, but began to wonder if there were more persons of temporal interest in my life than Miss Miruku and my superiors had seen fit to inform me of. Still, Tsuruya was a nice girl. And the pattern she'd bought was adorable and really clever. It would be better for me to keep an eye on her than it would be to suddenly start avoiding her. It would be safer, and I might figure out what was behind everything with her.
Also, it would be nice if I could at least learn that nifty stitch before anything went pear-shaped. It looked very useful and I'd be able to use it for much more than just coin purses.
The day was all right. Nothing further seemed suspicious about Tsuruya. I clung to the slow moments of the day, the feeling of sunshine on the skin of my arm through the classroom window and the sound of the teachers' droning voices. Anything to distract myself from thinking about what would happen as soon as the bell rang.
Suzumiya wouldn't be grabbing my hand today. I would be voluntarily and calmly walking to the clubroom on my own two feet. Though you could argue that my future mother's enthusiasm for madness like this club was what had pushed me into a career of time travel at so young an age, and that it was her distant hand pushing me along this path...
Uweeeeh, I was getting dizzy from it all. I took a deep breath and steadied myself by clasping my bag tightly and taking measured regular steps out of the classroom and along the hallway. Still the trip went by far too quickly, and before I knew it I was in the clubroom and being turned about by Suzumiya. With Kyon beside us, we were driven into the nearby computer clubroom by Suzumiya's unstoppable force of personality.
I was, all things told, beginning to worry about the chemistry between the two of them. Kyon seemed to just be alternately exasperated and nonplussed with her, and she didn't seem to notice anything of the sort. My own conception seemed like a far and distant dream. Would this be my mission? Was I supposed to work against all likelihood of success and aliens and ESPers and other time travellers, just to get my parents together?
It seemed ludicrous, but at that moment I would have believed anything. I was a little too caught up in my thoughts, distracted, as I saw Suzumiya grasp the wrist of the head of the computer club, and then thrust his arm forwards. I felt someone's, a stranger's, hand twitch reflexively and painfully around my breast. In Suzumiya's eyes was manic glee, as she dug a finger into the poor boy's elbow and forced his grip even tighter.
But that wasn't why I screamed.
It was Suzumiya's voice, loud and clear as she cried out “Now, Kyon!”
And the sound of the camera shutter as Kyon took a photograph and shattered all my stupid dreamlike naïve hopes that I would ever find a sympathetic father figure. It wasn't just the scream of a young girl being molested and exploited, but one of someone whose family and hope had been ripped away like a painful plastic adhesive bandage.
Oh mother, father, anyone! What did I ever do to deserve this?!
( part five)