As soon as I was alone, I began to run, recklessly. There was no need to, but I could not sit still, and so I ran. Before I knew it, I ended up high in the murky mountains. I slipped through the trees, passing by wild animals, and came out on the bank of a river. The rain poured down on my body, all the thoughts gone from my head.
In this form, I never grew cold. I was not cold, but I felt myself shivering, deep down inside. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, but the trembling would not go away.
Sad. Sad. That’s so…sad.
I couldn’t get her smiling face out of my head.
I had accomplished what I set out to do that night. I had apologized. And I believed that she forgave me. That should have been a good thing.
And yet, I was shivering.
Yano-san had said it was sad that I was afraid of her.
The bullying, the fact that things had become so bad for her, that I had stepped on her precious birthday present, those things were not sad.
She said that it was sad that I was afraid.
I wasn’t so stupid as to have no idea what she meant, once I thought about it. If someone was afraid of me, wouldn’t I be sad? If someone wanted me to stay away from them, wouldn’t I be sad? It wasn’t so hard to imagine.
Especially if it was someone that I believed in.
Someone who, even if it wasn’t the whole of them, there was at least some part I could believe in.
I’m sure that Yano-san probably believed in me.
No, not in my normal self. She believed in the me who would come all the way to the school at night to apologize, even after having done such a terrible thing.
So she had asked which was the real me—my day self, or my nighttime self. Surely, she hoped that my night self was my true self, which meant that the one who apologized to her was the real one, and the one who had done that awful deed was a fake.
But that wasn’t the truth.
I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt.
As I walked along the riverside, I saw two creatures before me: one great, one small. Thinking that I might be witnessing a hunt, I let out a roar, and both animals fled in separate directions.
And then I thought of Yano-san, who had stood her ground both before a larger classmate and before a monster.
Just what exactly had I hoped to accomplish in apologizing? Did I intend to apologize and then do the same thing tomorrow if something else of hers landed in front of my feet again? Did I hope to say sorry, even though I would ignore her again tomorrow?
I was trying to create some point of compromise, all on my own.
I had hoped to apologize for my sake alone, so that I could pretend to be a kind person. So that I could pretend to be a model student.
“…I’m sorry.”
I don’t know who I was apologizing to, all alone there in that darkness. All I knew was that I was a far more hideous creature than the people who bullied Yano-san outright. The beast that hunted those weaker than itself in order to extend its own life was the most honest. The people who attacked those that they did not like, who made their stances clear, were the most transparent.
I abruptly looked down at my six feet as they crept along the ground. The black droplets skittered around the dirt, like countless tiny insects bringing their bodies together to form a living being. The longer I looked at it, the more repulsive it was.
Which was it?
Yano-san had surely been waiting for me. For me to come and see her during midnight break. For me, who, even if only at night, was like a friend to her. For me, who saw something in her.
For me, the monster.
She had waited for me, in this terrifying form of mine.
She had been deceived. I was a horrible creature.
I climbed the mountain, my eight eyes reflecting the pure darkness, my four tails swaying behind me. My field of vision, wider than that of any other living thing, was already so immersed in my own thoughts that I could not see the animals that cut across my path, nor the great trees rooted in the rock, nor the little flowers blooming quietly on the mountaintop.
Which was it?
Was it my form at night—a form of gathered black drops, sprouting six legs and eight goggling eyes? Was it my form during the day, my human form, which took part in bullying just to fit in? Or was it the tainted thing that nested inside of me, that always had, which had grown so large now as to consume the me that Yano-san had believed in?
Which one was it?
What truly was a monster?