Despair. The room was buried in a palpable aura of pure, overwhelming despair, blotting out all else.
It seemed that time had started back up again when Kiryuu and Leatia left. The muffled singing and music from the next room over had started to filter into our room again, but the poppy, up-tempo tunes were powerless to overcome the hopelessness consuming us. Not one of us so much as attempted to speak.
It had all been fictional. All hollow and vacant. It was like everything I’d valued—everything that had seemed so purposeful and brilliant to me before—had slipped through my fingers as it’d rusted, rotted, and crumbled away to nothingness.
What was I supposed to believe anymore? There was no way of knowing how much of the reality I lived in was truly real and how much was a fabrication. Could the path I’d walked up to this point truly have been manufactured, from beginning to end, by a third party? Could decisions I thought I’d made with my own free will have been nothing more than me dancing to an author’s tune? Could everything I’d felt—all the joy and excitement, all the rage and sorrow, all the hope and despair, all the pride and jealousy, every last emotion that had budded within me—have been nothing more than artifice?
And was it really not just me? Were we really all fictional? Did that mean that everything was a lie? That everything was fiction?
Were Tomoyo, Hatoko, Chifuyu, and Sayumi simply antagonists designed to play a role in the final battle? Were Tomoyo’s latent chuunibyou, Hatoko’s long-standing friendship with me, Chifuyu’s indefinable eccentricity, and Sayumi’s wisdom unbefitting a high schooler all simply parts of their backstories? Were they nothing more than the sorts of character traits you’d read about on a Wikipedia page?
Was the only reason I cared about all of them so much in the first place because that was how I was written? Was the only reason we had those bonds because the author decided that the villain squad genuinely caring for each other would make us more compelling characters than if we were self-serving monsters who’d stab each other in the back on a whim?
And, if it was all true, and we really were no more than fictional characters, were the commonplace lives we’d led up until now utterly pointless and valueless...?
I shook my head. No. That’s not it. That can’t be right. Even if we are just fictional characters...well, so friggin’ what?!
I already had the answer I needed. I was a chuuni—someone who longed for the fictional world more than anyone else—and that meant that I understood the true value of fiction all too well.
“Fiction lies within your heart!”
Tomoyo’s words rang out from deep within me, reverberating throughout my entire body.
Of course. This is nothing to despair over. There’s nothing for us to be anxious about at all.
Even if everything that had happened up to this point was nothing more than a storyline that had been laid out for us, that would do nothing to change the fact that everything we were in that moment was unmistakably and undeniably real. Saying that everything was fictional wasn’t the same as saying that none of it mattered. The distinction between a replica and an original was meaningless. We were us, and that meant that we were, and could only be, real.
So it didn’t matter. Even if what I was doing right now was just an aspect of a fiction—even if my defiance were just another aspect of my character profile—it still didn’t matter. I was me, and the feelings and emotions that were welling up within my heart were neither meaningless nor purposeless. Even if I was fictional, I was not a lie.
And so, I rose from the depths of despair, ready to shout out words of encouragement to my friends and urge us along on the path we had to take...but before I could, a thought struck me: Wasn’t I bouncing back from all of this, like, a little too quickly?
And before I could follow that train of thought to its conclusion...
“H-Hey...Juu?” Hatoko said as she tugged at the hem of my shirt. I looked over, expecting to see an expression of deepest despair...and was surprised to find one of abashed awkwardness instead. “So, umm...can you explain what exactly’s going on right now?”
“I... Huh?”
“Tomoyo’s brother said a bunch of weird stuff, and then you looked really shocked and got all gloomy, so I was trying to play along and act depressed too...but to be honest, I don’t actually understand what any of that was about,” Hatoko explained, concluding with a sort of embarrassed giggle.
M-My god. Could it be...? She didn’t get it?! Kiryuu dropped our biggest plot twist to date, but it sailed right over her head? But she acted like she understood, just so she wouldn’t ruin the moment?
“Oh, come on... You’re kidding, right?” I moaned.
“W-Well, what did you expect?! It didn’t make sense! He just started babbling all this gobbledygook about authors this and fiction that out of nowhere! What about you, Chifuyu? Did you understand anything Kiryuu said?”
“Not at all,” Chifuyu replied. She sounded sort of proud about it, confusingly enough. “I didn’t understand even a little bit of it. I was thinking ‘What’s this guy talking about?’ the whole time.”
“Right? It was total nonsense, wasn’t it?” Hatoko agreed.
“Oh... Okay, then,” I sighed.
This was, perhaps, to be expected. Memory alteration, time manipulation, and world modification were all sci-fi-riffic concepts that I dove into with glee on a daily basis, so Kiryuu’s speech had made complete sense to me right away, but since Hatoko and Chifuyu weren’t deeply familiar with all those concepts, it was probably just too complicated for them to grasp all at once.