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I had finished my last exam for high school. Ever. I stretched my arms over my head as the teacher ordered pencils down. For years, I had dreamed of this moment - the day of a freedom I hadn't known since I was even younger than my sister is now! And yet it felt underwhelming. My fellow students slapped each other on the back as we left the exam room, but soon they were all heading straight for the school gates, like they couldn't get out of here fast enough. It felt like it was all over soon.
I suppose this is why I found my fee taking me to the SOS Brigade club room. After all the time I spent studying and working for this day, it still felt underwhelming. I suppose it's hard to switch from working all the time to doing nothing. A horse that's tied to a pole all day will get so used to it that they'll stay there even when you stop tying them down. Surely, though, if you leave the horse untethered for long enough, they'll start to wonder what's over the horizon?
There was nobody in the club room when I arrived, so I walked to the window and leaned against Haruhi's brigade leader desk, watching the other students walking away. I sat to one side, though, leaving space for one more person to prop themselves up beside me. I had a feeling there'd be somebody else who who wasn't ready to leave, yet. Sure enough, it was only a few minutes before I heard someone at the door, and the fearless SOS Brigade leader filled the space beside me.
"You're here," Haruhi said, surprised. "I thought you'd go straight home."
"It looked like everyone else has."
Normally these days, the SOS Brigade was full to the brim. We gained only one more member in my second year, but by this year Haruhi had fine-tuned her recruitment techniques - or maybe this batch of first-years were just stranger than the last. We didn't have enough space for all the new members, so the room had changed a lot - folding chairs everywhere, cushions on the floor, a whiteboard for Haruhi to draw up her battle plans.
"Well, they'd better come here after the graduation ceremony tomorrow. The club should be prepared to send its founders off in style!"
"Founders? All of us?"
"Both of us. I did most of the work, of course, but you did give me the idea."
"Thanks, I guess."
The weather was cold, and the schoolyard was nearly empty now. I could just hear a few notes from the music club room drifting to us over the quadrangle, but apart from that
"It's going to be strange when they say your whole name at graduation."
Do you even know my whole name?
"I've never heard anyone call you anything except Kyon. Do you remember on our first day, you didn't even say it when you introduced yourself - you just stood up and Kunikida said 'Hey, that's Kyon!'"
Bastard.
"I'm surprised you remember. I thought other humans were so boring, you wouldn't pay attention to anything like that."
"Introductions are the only time it's worth paying attention, to see if there's anyone interesting in your class."
"And it was still boring, huh."
"Yes. Nothing but ordinary humans."
Haruhi gazed out the window at the yard below. Without any students it looked desolate; even the tree was bare of leaves for winter. She'd complained about humans being boring so many times that it had no bite any more.
"Can I ask you something?"
When have you ever asked me before you did something?
"When was the last time anyone called you by your real name?"
Who even knew my real name, any more? My family, and some people from middle school. Your name is so imposing, Sasaki had said, when I saw her last year. So imposing that everyone had to call me by a silly diminutive? Everyone? Apparently so.
"I think it must have been... five years ago. Maybe six, around that time. When I was in middle school. Wow, has it really been that long."
"Look at me," Haruhi said, softly.
I turned my head halfway, but she put her hand to my cheek and held me there. She gazed seriously into my eyes, and I had never felt so certain that somebody was about to kiss me. I felt nervous, and somehow felt right, too, like this was always meant to happen.
But there was no kiss. Haruhi held my gaze with hers and held her face in her hand, and then she said my name. My real name. I felt a click inside me, like a key turning in a rusty lock. And then, the world fell away under my feet.
We were floating, high above the sky. We were in a world of light and colour, like the one where Asakura had once tried to kill me - I had only been there once, but the memory of an alien attempting to stab me remained terribly vivid. We were in closed space, the sky dark and a bright blue Celestial looming terribly close in the window. I must have lost my mind completely, the stress, the fear of leaving school. Or we were being attacked, again, even though I'd negotiated a truce with Sasaki's followers and they'd agreed never to attack again. The only thing I could feel that wasn't fear was Haruhi's hand, still fixed to my face.
"Stop!"
Haruhi grabbed at my tie. Strangely, it was the pressure on my neck that made me feel like I could breathe again. The world snapped back into focus again, the regular old world. But outside, the sky was growing unnaturally dark, although the yard was lit as brightly as ever, as bright as if the sun were still shining.
"I can't believe I did that," Haruhi whispered. "We... were we just in outer space? And I stopped you? You have to promise to take me back later or I'm revoking your life membership of the SOS Brigade."
"I have to promise to take you back?"
Haruhi let go of my tie and I put my hands around her shoulders immediately. I still felt dizzy. I couldn't stand to not be touching her right now.
"Yeah, take me back some day. When you've got a handle on your powers a bit better, I mean."
She was shivering. I didn't think it was possible to shake Haruhi, but she was almost as shaken as me. I suppose that's what happens when you spend all your time looking for the supernatural and then you finally see it.
I've seen plenty of things now that weren't of this world. I didn't know there were still things that could scare me that badly.
"I don't have powers."
The sky outside flickered blue for a moment, and then back to a deep purple.
"Yes, you do."
"I don't. I'm the most ordinary human there could possibly be."
Haruhi shook her head. "You're not. You're the most extraordinary human who has ever been, and they've spent all this time trying to hide it from you, and I'm tired of it."
"I'm nobody."
"No." She looked like herself again, resolute and unshakeable. Haruhi, who had caused so much strangeness in my life for the last three years, was suddenly the only solid thing I could count on. "No, you're not nobody. You have the power to make the world into anything you want it to be. You're a god."
I laughed. This wasn't right. She'd got it all the wrong way around. She was the one who couldn't know about her powers, because of the chaos that might reign if she knew what she could do. But I couldn't tell her that.
And yet.
It was graduation day. We seemed to be in some other world now, or watching the end of this world. Was there any point in keeping it a secret any longer?
"How long have you been trying to figure it out?"
Her eyes narrowed. "Your name? It wasn't that hard. When the rest of the SOS Brigade forbid me to say a word, they had to tell me what it actually was."
"No, that's not what just happened! Haruhi, I'm not the one with the godlike powers, it's you. They've been trying to keep it a secret from you all these years because you want the world to be strange so badly that if you knew, you might... You might make this happen?"
She shook her head. "It's almost right. But Mikuru, Yuki, Koizumi - they've all been lying to you. Their organisations were afraid of what you loved, back when you were in middle school, and how strange your power could make the world. So they hid your true name from you, make sure you'd forget your power, and hoped you'd stop looking for anything out of the ordinary and accept a normal life."
I did stop looking. I was all prepared to lead an ordinary life until I met you.
"No. Mikuru realised that deep down, you really wanted adventures, even though you told yourself you didn't care." She gave a bitter laugh. "They made me a scapegoat, so they could blame all the strange things you did on me."
She turned away from me then, and leaned against the window, gazing out into the strange, darkened, empty world.
Despite the wild ride through different worlds, and the state of the sky outside, this may be the strangest part of my day yet. In the last three years, I've had so many people sit me down and tell me mind-blowing new information about how the world really worked that to me, it had become routine. But I never would have dreamed that one day Haruhi would be joining the list. Or telling me that the thing that would shake the foundations of the world was me.
"So how did you get involved in all this?"
"I didn't want to. I was so excited to find that aliens, time travelers and espers were real, and then all they wanted me to do was keep an eye on some guy they called a god?" She sniffed. "When they told me who you were, I said, not that guy, he's so boring! He's just like anyone else."
"Aliens are exciting, but you think a god is boring?"
"I never especially wanted to meet a god." She sniffed. "I mean, what do gods even do? They don't fire laser beams or travel through time, or move things with their minds."
They could do any of that.
"But they don't, do they? I didn't believe in gods. We only talk about them like they're a thing from the past." She sighed. "Anyway, I didn't want to do this at all. I wanted to tell them all to leave me alone. Or to forget about you and just have them start a club with me, so I could hang out with these three strange people all the time and find out about their worlds. But they would only deal with me if I went along with their plan to control you, and I'd searched for strange things for so long that I couldn't resist, even when the price was that I never got to see any of the strange things that happened."
Except for that time in closed space.
"What?"
"Two years ago. Two and a half, I think. It was a bit like this, though the Celestials were here, those big blue giants. I let you think it was a dream."
She didn't look back at me, but I could see her smile. "Yeah. Except that one."
"Is that why you said my name? Because you were tired of being left out of the adventures?"
"You think I'm childish."
I still didn't entirely believe what she was saying. But even if it wasn't true, it struck me as sad that I'd spent three years trying to keep Haruhi from finding out about the thing that would make her happiest in all the world.
"No, I just want to understand. They told me you had godlike powers, and the world could end if you ever found out. If it was really me all along, then telling me my real name and unlocking all my powers was incredibly dangerous."
"No."
"You know that?"
"Yes. I'm just an ordinary human, but I know that. I know you." Now she turned away from the window to glare at me again. "You're the most responsible person I know. The first thing you'll want to do with your powers is figure out how to make our world return to normal, and I bet you could do it right now if you tried."
I stared out at the sky. I didn't believe this. I didn't believe any of it. But I tried, anyway. I willed our world to be normal again. And slowly, I saw the sky turn from purple back to blue, the same sky I'd lived under my whole life. I even tried to picture a rainbow above the school and it gradually faded into view - thin and wavering, but there. It looked like I needed some practice.
"You see? It's graduation day. We become adults this year, with all those adult responsibilities. You should know who you are. You're old enough to handle this without destroying the world."
I gripped the table, and then fumbled for her hand. This was so much to take in. Too much. I felt like I was going to faint.
"But what am I supposed to do with all this power?"
She shrugged. "Nothing, if you want. You can let the world go its own way. Sounds boring to me, but it's your world."
I could do that. I could pretend this never happened. If what Haruhi said was true, I could make her forget it ever happened.
"Or," she said, interrupting my thoughts. "You could travel to space, or travel through time. Or you could go on adventures through the deep sea and punch the Loch Ness Monster."
That's not even where the Loch Ness Monster lives!
"See, you care enough to know!" She crossed her arms. "You always wanted adventures and creatures and magic in the world, you just pretended it was a huge bother. Now you could have it."
"As long as I take you, right?"
She turned away again, frowning. "I mean, it's up to you. You're the god and everything. I don't care."
Ha. Haruhi, not caring whether I took her monster hunting with me, or out into space? It was easier to believe I was a god than to believe that Haruhi wouldn't care if I had fun without her.
I thought about it. I thought about keeping the world as normal, pretending today had never happened, but it was too much to think I could do that forever. Not when I had to lead the rest of my life with these powers. There would always be a day when I got bored enough that I'd want to just get up and fly away. I wouldn't keep my feet on the ground when I knew had just go.
And yet, Haruhi was only half right. The things I always dreamed of wasn't just for aliens and time travellers to exist - it was for there to be a surprise.
"I wanted to solve mysteries, though. I wanted to have to hunt for aliens and time travellers. If I just make things happen myself, and I know I'm the one doing it... doesn't that ruin the surprise?"
"Well, you might not always know it's you. Isn't that what Koizumi and the others always told you about me? That strange things happen because of things you desire, not things that you ask for? But if you think being a god is too much and there wouldn't be anything to surprise you, why don't you share your powers with me?"
"What? Can I do that?"
"I don't know, but you can try." She held out her hand, smiling. "You thought I was a god all this time, and you handled it fine. Don't you trust me?"
"Don't you just want the power?"
"No, I want to surprise you. With two of us making our weird dreams come true, we'll never know what's going to happen next?"
It was the biggest, silliest decision I've ever made.
I still didn't hesitate for a moment before I took her hand.
We stood there for a moment, just holding hands. The music club had started playing again, and a faint tune drifted to us across the schoolyard. The world was so close to normal again that if it weren't for what I'd seen earlier, I would think that perhaps this had all been a delusion, or a joke. It couldn't possibly be real.
Haruhi frowned. "Aren't you going to do it?"
"I think I already did. I thought about sharing my powers, anyway. I don't know if it works. Can you tell?"
"I don't know. I don't feel any different."
She looked at the corner where Mikuru's tea set usually sat, and reached out her hand. The teapot promptly exploded.
"Is that what you were trying to do?"
"No, I was trying to make it fly through the air to me." She sighed. "I guess this will take some practice. Maybe you should go first."
"Go first at what?"
She opened the window.
"No."
"It'll be fun."
"I'm not going to test this out for the first time by jumping out of a window."
"Okay, well try to fly in here then. See if you can float yourself off the ground. I bet you can do it."
"This is stupid."
I tried anyway. I closed my eyes - it seemed like the right way to try to fly. I closed my eyes and imagined being light, or weightless, or soaring above the town. Hey, imagine if I'd known this sooner - I could have flown to school every day instead of walking up that stupid hill!
Then I hit my head on the ceiling, and swore as I rubbed the spot where I hit it. I didn't have time to panic about the fact that I was floating two metres off the ground before Haruhi flew up with me. She was smiling so hard, she could have been floating out of sheer delight.
"I think it worked," she said, drifting closer to me. "We can both be gods together. At least for as long as you want."
This time, she really did kiss me. I thought nothing could surprise me as much as flying so high I hit my head, but Haruhi had managed it. I had forgotten, in all this talk of gods and power, that an ordinary human thing could make me so happy, too.
"Oh no," I croaked, when she pulled away. "All this time I thought you were making chaos because you had these powers. Then I finally find out that you're an ordinary human and the next thing I did was to give you powers, too? What have I done?"
"Something amazing," she said, taking my hand. "Because I knew, despite everything you said, that you didn't really want your life to be boring."
Then she pulled me towards the window and we both soared outside, above the school that had nurtured and confined us for the last three years, and into a bright blue sky.