“…Unh.”
The morning after his date with Mukuro, Shido welcomed the day a little earlier than usual. He didn’t have any appointments or errands to take care of, and he hadn’t set an alarm. He simply hadn’t been able to sleep very well. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Mukuro had said when she left him the previous evening.
His bad dream hadn’t helped. It was so sad, just like the one he had when he fell from space the other day.
…Although in his own case, he’d gotten a cute new younger sister rather than an older one.
“…Mm.” Lack of sleep left him feeling ragged, but he wasn’t going to go back to bed now. He decided he might as well get breakfast ready a little early. He glanced at the clock to check the time and crawled out of bed, yawning.
He strolled down the steps, washed his face, and got dressed. Then he put on a man’s battle garb—an apron—and started prepping the meal with a familiar hand.
Before too long, the delicious scent of grilled fish wafted through the air, and he heard the plap plap of bare feet from the second floor.
Kotori was awake. She’d been on Fraxinus late into the night working on the search for Mukuro and processing the observation data. She had to have been even more tired than he was.
She stumbled down the stairs like a zombie, rubbing her eyes. He smiled wryly and held up a hand.
“Hey. Morning, Kotori.”
“Mm… Moonin’…” She had no sooner started to speak than her eyes flew open wide. “Eeeaaah?!”
“…?! Wh-what…?!” He covered his ears as he turned toward her, baffled. “What’s wrong, Kotori? Are you okay?”
She ignored his questions as she narrowed her eyes sharply to glare at him.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Who are you?! And why are you in my house?!” Kotori shouted in alarm.
✦ ✦ ✦
Now there was an unexpected response.
“…What?” was all he managed, his pupils shrinking to mere dots.
That much was to be expected. Anyone would be at a loss if asked this question, and no one could know how to respond to it when it was posed in their own home. While he and Kotori weren’t blood related, they were still brother and sister, and he’d been living in this house for over ten years now.
“…Um. What are you talking about, Kotori?” He scratched his cheek as he took a step toward her.
“Stay away from me!” she shouted to stop him. “I’m calling the police!”
“Wh-what…?” Still perplexed, he wiped away the sweat beading on his forehead.
What on earth was going on with her? She seemed too panicked to be joking. So, then…
Shido set his mind to work, and Kotori picked up a nearby object in agitation.
“You…,” she growled. “What are you even playing at here? I am. Telling you. To get. Out!” She threw the thing in her hand with all her might.
“Ah?!” Shido hurriedly ducked to one side and avoided it. “H-hey! You could’ve really hurt me—”
“Shut up! And get out! Right now!” she screamed hysterically and reached for her next missile.
He didn’t know what had happened, but he could see that whatever it was, there was no talking to her right now. He hurriedly snatched up his bag and blazer and hunched over as he fled the scene.
“Eek!” he yelped.
“Ah! Hey! Stop right there!”
First she was yelling for him to get out. Now she was shouting for him to stay. He wanted to ask her to make up her mind, but it wasn’t exactly the time. He snatched up the shoes in the entryway as he raced out onto the street in bare feet.
“Haah… Haah… Haah…”
After running for a minute or two, he looked back to make sure Kotori wasn’t chasing him and heaved a sigh. He took a deep breath to calm himself, took off his apron, and put on the school gear he’d recovered from the house.
“Sheesh! I know she didn’t get enough sleep, but that was some over-the-top sleepwalking. Big Bro’s crying here,” he muttered to himself, running his hands through his hair, and glanced around at the road he’d run down.
It was January. He was freezing in just a blazer. He would have liked to go back to the house and change into something warmer.
Given the possibility that Kotori was still half-asleep back there, though, returning to the Itsuka house didn’t seem too smart. She wouldn’t actually call the police, but if she started yelling again, it could spark rumors in the neighborhood again.
While people always get distracted by the newest thing, Shido had been stuck lately in a vicious cycle where the next rumor would start circulating before the last one had completely died out. If possible, he wanted to avoid any bad word spreading.
“Man. I guess I’ll just go to school,” he said, resigning himself to his fate, and trudged down the road, rubbing his hands together in the cold.
After he’d walked for twenty minutes or so, sneezing all the while, he arrived at Raizen High School. He changed into his indoor shoes and headed for his classroom. He hung his bag on the hook on his desk like he always did, pulled his chair out, and sat down.
“… Hmm?” As he sighed with relief at the warmth of the classroom, he felt something was slightly off. It was almost like he’d accidentally gone to the wrong classroom. His classmates kept glancing at him curiously, some beginning whispered conversations.
“Huh?” He tilted his head and looked down at himself, worried he was still wearing his pajama bottoms or that he’d put his shoes on backward because he’d been chased out of the house so unceremoniously.
From what he could see, though, everything was in order. Just in case, he touched his hair, too, but he couldn’t feel any noticeable bedhead.
“Hmm.”
Maybe they thought it was weird he’d come to school shivering without a coat in the cold weather. He settled on that as the explanation, and he put the matter out of his head as he started to pull his pens and notebooks out of his bag.
“Hohn-ho-hohn, ho-ho-ho-ho—koff-koff—ho!” A boy with an incredible amount of product in his hair, humming a strange song (and coughing in the middle of it), came over. Shido’s frenemy, Hiroto Tonomachi.
“Hey, Tonomachi,” Shido said, standing up.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah, morning,” Tonomachi replied casually. “Been a while, huh? Been ages.” He paused. “Actually, okay, sorry, man. I didn’t wanna be rude, but like, who are you? Sorry.”
Tonomachi looked more and more uneasy as he spoke until finally he bowed his head apologetically.
Shido gaped at him. “Uh?”
“No, for real, sorry,” Tonomachi said. “Oh! Were you at karaoke that day? It was such a huge gang; I couldn’t keep track of everyone.”
“…No. Wait,” Shido said, frowning. “What are you talking about? It’s me. Shido Itsuka. We’ve been in the same class forever.”
Now it was Tonomachi’s turn to look at him curiously. “Uh? The same class?”
“Tonomachi?” Shido frowned. His friend did make weird jokes that sometimes didn’t really land for Shido, but the look on his face seemed different from usual. Almost like he really didn’t remember Shido.
And unless he’d gotten really good at acting without Shido knowing…
Shido looked around and then called out to another group of students. “Hey, Yamabuki, Hazakura, Fujibakama.”
“Uh?”
“Huh?”
“Whuh?”
Three girls sitting and chatting nearby turned their faces toward him. One tall, her uniform slouching around her; one with an average physique, whose distinctive feature was that she had no distinctive features; and one small with glasses—the famed trio of Grade Eleven’s Class Four, Ai-Mai-Mii.
“Tonomachi’s messing with me again,” Shido said. “You guys know me, though, right?”
The three girls stared at him blankly before shooting looks at each other.
“…Um. Who are you?”
“Whoa! Are you trying to pick us up? Classic!”
“For real, wild. We’re finally going full duckling to swan here. So which is it? Which one of us are you after?”
Ai-Mai-Mii immediately started buzzing with excitement.
In contrast, Shido felt all color drain from his face.
“You don’t…know me?” he said, his voice hoarse, as he looked around. No one was speaking up in objection to Tonomachi or Ai-Mai-Mii. In fact, some students were even looking at him just as curiously, tilting their heads ninety degrees.
This was clearly an unusual situation. Either he was still dreaming, or his entire class was pulling an elaborate prank. His once-familiar classroom suddenly seemed foreign.
“Oh! Morning, everyone!”
“Morning.”
Two girls called out greetings as they stepped into the classroom. Tohka and Origami.
“…!”
The second Shido saw them, he raced over entreatingly. “H-hey! Tohka! Origami!”
“Oh?! Wh-what on earth? You scared me.”
“…”
Tohka reacted with exaggerated surprise, while Origami simply turned her face to him, her expression unchanging.
“O-oh, sorry,” he said. “Listen. Everyone’s being really weird. Actually, it’s not just the class. Maybe Kotori wasn’t half-asleep.”
“Mm…?” Tohka only furrowed her brow, puzzled.
Shido felt like his heart was being wrung. His pulse raced and sweat erupted from every pore on his body. He was overcome by a violent dizziness and nearly crumpled to the ground. He could hardly breathe.
Yet neither Tohka nor Origami noticed this state of panic. They were painfully merciless in their responses.
“Sorry, but what are you talking about?”
“Who are you?”
“…!”
Shido froze in place.