“Oh wow, wow, wow…” Ami groaned, rubbing her eyes. It definitely is them.
She had hidden herself in the shadow of a streetlamp. From her vantage point on the riverside sidewalk, she could see the two suspicious shadows making a huge commotion and raising splashes of water in the snow. Hiding her mouth with the oversized sleeve of her sport coat, she turned a cautious gaze on them.
Ahhh, it’s cold! I’m gonna die! My leg’s stuck! Ahhhh! Pull me out! I can’t reach you! Taigaaaaa! Ryuujiiii! AGHAHHHH!
After getting to this point, her disinclination to get involved was at its max. They seemed unexpectedly energized, and she was almost ready to go home, but…
When her feet tried to cold-heartedly change direction, she couldn’t do it.
“Tch…”
In the end, her feet wouldn’t move.
Ami clicked her tongue and flipped her phone open. She stomped her feet in the cold beneath the lamplights and counted the number of times the phone rang. If he didn’t pick up after five rings, she was definitely going home. She noticed that the toes of her mouton boots were damp and cold, wrinkled from the fallen snow. No waaay, she thought, contorting her face just when her childhood friend came on the line.
“Yo, hello! I’m in front of Takasu and Aisaka’s houses right now. I tried ringing the doorbells, but of course no one was home in either place. Where are you?”
“At the riverside… Actually, I found them. They’re by the big bridge. They’re in the middle of the river. I’m horrified.”
“What?! You’re serious?!”
“Yeah. They look like they’re in big trouble.”
Ami brushed off the snow that had collected on her shoulders, thinking how she should have at least brought an umbrella. She stuck one of her hands deep into her pocket and leaned back against the streetlamp.
“They couldn’t be doing that, could they?! I’m scared to even say it out loud—are they doing that thing we talked about, like, th-that double suicide thing, were things that serious?”
“Nah, it’s more like they’ve lost their minds.” When she glanced at them again, the crazy couple were continuing their midwinter bath.
“So they’ve lost their minds! Anyway, I’ll head there right away!”
“Can I gwo home now?” Her voice sounded nasally, not because she was faking it, but because her nose was actually stuffed up. She felt like she was coming down with something; she had been thinking of going to bed early that day. With the snow, she hadn’t felt like going on her daily jog and was thinking of sinking into a nice long bath with a proper face mask on.
She hadn’t been planning on thinking about what those two were doing after that, but…
“You can’t! If they’ve gone mad, you have to hurry and bring them back to sanity again! I’ll be there right away, okay? Oh, and let Kushieda know, too!”
“What? I don’t know her phone number anyway.”
“Liar.”
“It’s true, though… Hey, he hung up! I’m telling you not to mess with me… What is this, seriously?”
Her childhood friend had made things sound so alarming, so urgent, that she had stuck her feet in the new boots that were already out in the entryway and run out like this without so much as an umbrella. Cursing to herself, Ami unlocked her phone with her numb fingers. She searched her address book and hit call. She heard the phone ring. The person on the other end came on after just two rings.
“Oh, hello.” She spoke as dispassionately as she could. “I found them near the big bridge by the riverside. Yuusaku said he’d come right away,” she said quickly.
The person on the other end finished her reply in just four phrases—no way, seriously, I got it, I’ll be there. It sounded like the girl was running, her breath uneven.
Ami put her phone away in her pocket and breathed pure white into the night sky, thinking about what to do next. There were still shrieks of deathly agony coming from the middle of the river. Actually, if they could make that much noise, they had to be fine. She decided she would just watch them for a while longer, like an outsider.
The roads she’d run on to make it here had been deserted, so quiet it frightened her. She looked at the blinking lights from the opposite side of the river, where the idiots were making a huge commotion, thinking that it was probably quiet there, too. The snow, which came down from the heavens without pause, started to feel like a soundless curtain. She felt cut off from the world.
Which side should she be on? Was it here with the incredibly idiotic racket where the shrieks echoed, or there, the place that was so far away it seemed to blur?
“Oh?! It’s Dimhuahua!”
“Whoa?! You’re right, it’s Kawashima!”
No way… Ami cautiously turned around. She hadn’t misheard. They were there, half-alive and half-dead, looking desperate as they paddled through water up to their knees in the middle of the river, dripping with so much water that they might have been sporting icicles. Takasu Ryuuji and Aisaka Taiga were waving their hands fervently at her.
“Diiiiiiiiiiiiimhuaaaaaaaaaaahuaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
“Kawashima! Heeey! Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!”
She pretended she didn’t understand them. I wonder if a snow fairy is talking to me? Her expression suggesting that she was seriously considering something of the sort, Ami turned the other way. She did so because she was very obviously afraid.
“Ahhhh! That Dimhuahua is pretending like she can’t heeeeaaaaar us!”
“Ahhhhhhhhh, you’ve got to be kidding, we’re practically on the verge of freezing to death!”
You devil! You devil! They yelled at her, but she didn’t have the faintest idea what they could have meant. She knew there was a classy princess of a celebrity here, a natural beauty who was the prettiest of them all, kinder than them all, but she didn’t know about any devils.
“Oh, it’s so cold,” she said, “maybe I’ll go grab a coffee.”
“Whoa, she’s actually planning on leaving! Wait, Dimhuahua! I said wait! Don’t leave! I said don’t leaaaaaave! Help meeeeeeeeeeeee!” Maybe because her reputation had turned to embarrassment and her pride was shattered, the Palmtop Tiger, at long last, half-cried as she sent out an SOS. The cheeky, arrogant Tiger called for help.
Ha ha. Ami snorted, in spite of herself. Tiger should have done that to start with. She stopped walking and turned around.