“...Hatsune.”
Yukinari muttered her name, coming closer. When he got about four meters away from Hatsune, he stopped. They couldn’t have touched even if they had both stretched out their arms. It was more than close enough, however, for each to perceive the small changes in the other’s face.
Hatsune found this vexing. It seemed to represent the relationship between them at that moment.
“I guess... it would be strange to say it’s been a while,” Yukinari said, his voice hesitant.
“Not at all. It has been a while, my dear Yuki.” She gave him a broad smile. “I so wanted to see you. For so long, I wanted to...”
“Me too,” he said, almost reflexively, but then he shook his head. “But given how things have turned out, I wish I’d never seen you again.”
“Why, what are you saying, my dear Yuki?” She looked at him quizzically. “Did you decide you don’t want to see your big sister anymore? But you’re the one who called me here. You’re so selfish...”
Yukinari opened his mouth to say something—but then he closed it again, looking somehow disappointed. She thought he looked distinctly unhappy. Was he really that sad about this?
Yukinari stood silently for a time, searching desperately for the right words. But finally, all he could come up with was:
“You said you would kill everyone, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Just because I made some friends without you?”
“Yes.”
She nodded, smiling. But Yukinari, in fact, seemed upset by this.
“Please, stop, Hatsune. Please—I’m begging you. It doesn’t matter how many people I have around me. My big sister is the most important thing in the world to me.” Then he looked at the ground. “...Was the most important thing.”
“Past tense?”
He didn’t answer, so Hatsune decided to take this in the way she found most convenient.
“That makes me very happy. You’re more important than anything in the world to me, too, my dear Yuki.”
“In that case—”
“So let’s—just the two of us, together—die again.” Her smile as she spoke was so sweet and bright.
After a very long time, Yukinari said, “What...?” He had a completely dumbfounded look on his face; she took it for surprise. “H-Hatsune...?” He spoke as if he couldn’t believe the words coming out of his own mouth. “What do you mean... again?”
Apparently he hadn’t understood yet. That disappointed Hatsune very much. Perhaps dying had robbed Yukinari of his perspicacity. How much a person could change in such a short time. She concluded that the people of this world had been a very bad influence on Yukinari.
“No... You mean that fire...”
“Did you really do not know, my sweet Yuki?”
She looked at him as closely as she could. He looked like he might burst into tears at any moment.
“I set that fire.”
“Why?!” Yukinari’s voice was nearly a scream. “Why would you—”
“We were siblings. There was nowhere in that world that we could be happy, was there?”
However much, however deeply, they loved each other, society would never accept them. They would forever be branded aberrant. Especially when—
“I kept it a secret, but I... I was carrying your child, Yuki.”
“Wha—?!”
“When I realized that, I thought... You and me, and that child—there was nowhere on earth we could be truly happy. So I thought perhaps we could at least all die together. Then we could enter eternity together. We would never have to be apart. It’s true... That’s what I believed.”
Yukinari had frozen, his face pale. Hatsune smiled at him.
“Yes. It really was that simple. I wonder how you could have not noticed.”
He reflected on how foolish he had been. It was so simple...
“So, my dear Yuki, let’s die together. Once we stop time, we’ll be together forever. Our feelings won’t ever have to change. No one will have to come between us. We’ll be invincible. We’ll be two invincible lovers.”
Yukinari said nothing.
“But in order to do that, we have to get rid of the people who are too close to you. We mustn’t besmirch our eternity with impure things. If there’s someone around you, they might take you from me. So let’s die, somewhere where there’s no one else.”
Then Hatsune raised her right hand. A rapier emerged from her palm: first the tip, then the blade, and finally the hilt, which she grasped in her thin, white fingers.
“Our two spirals of time will come together into eternity. Like two cranes flying side by side, or two trees whose branches have grown together.”
Cranes were said never to part from each other once they had mated, and the image of the two trees was likewise a traditional expression for devoted lovers. Things which were two, but one. Phrases that referred to a man and woman whose love would endure forever. When she had first heard the expressions, Hatsune felt that a fog had lifted; it was as if the words had been created for her and Yukinari.
“Hatsune...” Yukinari was nearly groaning. “We’ve already died once. We aren’t siblings connected by blood in this world. We don’t need death to tie us together...”
In Hatsune’s estimation, this thinking was naïve in the extreme.
“But if we stay alive we might change our minds, or someone might come between us, right?”
In fact, just such a group of people had coalesced around Yukinari in this world. Even though he didn’t need anyone around him but her, nor she anyone but him.
“I’m telling you, that’s just—”
“If we die together, we don’t have to worry about that... right?”
She looked at her beloved brother, who seemed so at a loss, and smiled sweetly.