“R-right, sorry. Guess it would be kind of silly for us to hold hands the whole time.”
“I mean, if you wanna hold hands, I don’t mind. Just not like that…”
“It’s fine. Forget it. C’mon, let’s go.” Anzu urged me onward. I started to walk again, but soon something tugged me backward once more. Anzu was gripping the back of my shirt with both hands and standing mere centimeters behind me—to the point that with every little step I took, the toes of her shoes bumped into the backs of my ankles. This had to be the single most inefficient way to walk in the history of mankind.
“Hanashiro, are you afraid of the dark or something?” I asked as we clumsily shuffled along. She didn’t respond immediately. Looks like I was right. I had a hunch based on how oddly unsettled she’d been acting from the moment we met up tonight.
“Yeah, so what? You got a problem with that?” she finally admitted, albeit rather defensively and with a fair bit of venom in her tone.
“Nope, I wouldn’t judge you for that. I was curious, that’s all. Though you seemed pretty okay with it the last couple times we came in here,” I recalled, thinking back on when she had first tailed me here and the time after that. I hadn’t noticed her being spooked whatsoever in either of those instances.
“Well, yeah. That was during the daytime. It was still light outside, so it wasn’t entirely impossible to see in here. That’s the only reason I could hold it together. Now that it’s nighttime, though, all bets are off. It’s pitch-black outside, it’s pitch-black in here. Like, what if both our flashlights died? I think I’d have a panic attack.”
“Wow, it’s really that terrifying to you?”
“Yes, stupid. If anything, you’re the weird one for being totally unfazed. How can you not feel suffocated when the darkness closes in on you? Swallowing up everything else around you, the pressure slowly building as it dissolves your world step by step…?”
As she carried on muttering in fear, I suddenly felt like I had a moral responsibility to do something. After all, I was the schmuck who’d told her to let go of my hand because it kinda hurt, while from her perspective, she was confronting one of her greatest fears and just looking for anything to cling to in order to feel more secure. How had I not made that connection sooner? I was a pathetic excuse for a man, let alone a friend.
I took a deep, quiet breath, then reached back and firmly laid my hand on top of Anzu’s, holding it tight. It tensed and trembled in fright for a moment, but then quickly clasped mine right back. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than three seconds, and neither of us said a single word—but the unspoken emotions conveyed between us in that moment were deeper and more intimate than any she and I had shared before. It didn’t take long before I started to feel extremely awkward and embarrassed about what I’d done, though. I made a desperate attempt to resuscitate our previous conversation so we could both stop lingering on it.
“I’ve gotta say, I’m a little surprised; I was starting to think you weren’t afraid of anything at all, to be honest. Did some traumatic event inspire your fear of the dark or what?”
“Yeah. When I was in elementary school, I got in a fight with one of my classmates, and they shoved me in a locker and locked me inside. Been afraid of dark, claustrophobic spaces ever since.”
“O-oh. I see.”
Somehow, I’d already made things awkward again. I didn’t know why I’d thought past traumas might make for a lighthearted conversation topic in the first place, but this was definitely heavier than I’d bargained for.
“I wasn’t being bullied or anything, for the record. It was just a rare case of me picking a fight and losing, really. I eventually figured out how to open the locker from the inside, then went and whacked the hell out of the kid that locked me in there with a broom, so I still got the last laugh in the end.”
“Ha ha. Now that sounds more like the Hanashiro I know.”
“Is there anything you’re afraid of, Tono-kun?”
“Sure there is. I probably couldn’t list ’em all off the top of my head, but there’s plenty of stuff that scares me.”
“Okay, then what’s your number one greatest fear?”
“Number one? Hrm, let me think…”
It was a tough question. Obviously, I could rattle off a number of different things that terrified me, but trying to rank them in order was the real hard part. Getting eaten by a shark, getting mauled by a bear, earthquakes, contracting a fatal disease… Pretty much anything that the average person would fear, I was afraid of too. I supposed the main thing that connected these things was that they all related to a general fear of dying, or the concept of death itself. That was also a primal, instinctive fear embedded in all living things, though, so it didn’t really feel unique to me specifically. What was I, Kaoru Tono, more afraid of than anything? Was it something to do with death?
The death of a loved one, probably.
“Yeah, I dunno. Nothing’s really jumping out at me, sorry.”
“Really? Huh.”
Anzu sounded slightly miffed by this boring response, but I really didn’t want to darken the mood by delving into even heavier territory. Still, I was pretty sure the answer I’d come to was the right one, even if I wasn’t going to say it aloud.
“Hey, check it out.” I pointed ahead as I caught a glimpse of light coming from deeper inside the tunnel, presumably from the torches on the wall. We were fast approaching the torii. Anzu and I ran the rest of the way at a brisk jog. Once we made it to the first torii, I turned off my flashlight and slipped it back into my pocket—we wouldn’t need it from this point on. Now that we had a reliable light source again, Anzu slowly released her grip on my shirt as well.
“All right,” I said, gulping down a mouthful of saliva. “Now comes the hard part.”
We had a time limit of only two minutes. Once we passed beneath the first torii, we’d run as far as we could in one minute, then spend the remaining minute coming back. I set my cell phone’s stopwatch function to make sure we didn’t lose track of time.
“Okay, we’re all set. Just tell me when.”
“Ready when you are,” Anzu said. Her expression was stern, but there was a hint of hesitation in her voice. Yet she didn’t seem to be afraid—the defiant spark I saw in her eyes as she stared straight down the throat of the tunnel was one of dauntless curiosity and determined aspiration. There was clearly no need to worry about her.