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When Nene Yashiro found herself transported from the middle of math class and onto a snowy nighttime street, she thought, “What the —? The past, maybe? Again?” She shivered, pulling her breezy summer uniform tighter around herself, and shuffled from foot to foot. The snow was piling up all around her, now, and there was a thin layer of ice crusting over the sidewalks, sheer and slick as dark glass.
Nene was gonna have to walk carefully. She was still holding a green mechanical pencil gripped tightly in her hand, mind you, and had been right in the middle of scribbling a note to Hanako-kun before she found herself here. Hanako-kun had been trying to figure out how to weave a “fishtail” braid into Nene’s hair, too — that was a trick Yako the Fox had been teaching him, and probably not the sort of over-the-top thing too many people in her class were gonna notice. Hopefully. Nene had been sitting way in the back of the classroom, anyway, so she’d be mostly out of sight and Hanako-kun could prop his back against the wall if he wanted to. Sitting back there was almost like saving him a seat. They’d been working out a sort of system, lately.
So, “ — and then the episode ended,” Nene had written. “I cried the whole time!”
And Hanako-kun said, “Aw, Yashiro... but it’s been renewed for another season, right?”
But before Nene could write her response — “No! Some higher-ups changed their minds! This cliffhanger is gonna last forever now!” — ... here she was. Dang. Disappeared from right out of her chair. Her braid would have vanished from Hanako-kun’s hands, too, but at least he knew she was missing. Hanako-kun was Honorable Number Seven of the School Mysteries just the same as he was the friend who got Nene in trouble for doodling Godzilla-ish creatures on her math tests. He’d figured out how to get her back from impossible places before. There were plenty of confusing things that had come along with being Hanako-kun’s assistant/messing around with supernatural stuff all the time, but Nene trusted that he’d look out for her, too. There would be a way back home, and Hanako-kun would fuss over her a bit when she got there, rubbing her arms to warm them up before he realized his ghostly hands were probably making her even colder.
Nene recognized some of the buildings around here, now that she studied them. This street was full of popular date spots: restaurants with gold-sprinkled cakes on their menus, and bars with drinks named after famous novels. It was a handful of streets away from a bus stop — she’d be able to grab a bus, probably, and get herself back closer to her school. That could be a step, at least. Hanako-kun was bound to the third-floor bathrooms, back at school, so it would probably be easier for him to sense her presence around there. Even across time — even however far back Nene had found herself this go-round. Hanako-kun and Nene shared two halves of the mermaid’s curse, after all. They had been through darker, stranger things than this together, likely as not.
For all Nene knew, Hanako-kun was fighting whatever creature had teleported her back here right now, smirking with gritted teeth and drawing that kitchen knife of his out of his chest. He could’ve been demanding to know where she was in a low, super-serious voice, so different from the wheedling, playful ones he used with her in casual conversation.
Hanako-kun said he’d been able to tell from the second Nene invoked him — summoning him to grant a wish from that third-floor bathroom — that she was close to the far shore. Close to joining him in death. He had sworn to try and fight that early death off, by now, defying the will of reality for her. Hanako-kun had held onto Nene, shaking, and told her he only wanted her to live. He had thought he couldn’t care about stuff like that anymore, but he really, truly worried about his assistant, didn’t he? Hanako-kun had allowed School Mystery Number Four to create a whole innocent fake world, after all, imagining maybe Nene would be happy living out an equally innocent fake life there. But she hadn’t wanted that, and sometimes Nene found herself wondering about the softness in Hanako-kun’s eyes when he agreed to take her home.
Hanako-kun wanted Nene to live as long and as surrounded by friends as she could, and thinking about him waiting for her... thinking about his stern expression crumbling into relief when she got back to him, waving her arm over her head and calling his name... Nene felt warmed up inside, a bit. She could summon enough of her wits back to stagger off in the direction of the bus stop, wishing she had enough money on her to duck into one of these fancy shops and buy herself a coat. But nope: they were just too fancy.
Nene had been making her way from streetlamp to streetlamp for a while, easing between puddles of golden light, before she saw them. Through one of the restaurant windows, looking so familiar but so changed all at the same time: a woman with long, wavy blonde-green hair tied back in a ponytail, and the man with her. That man had gold eyes and dark hair, ruffled up a little bit, bangs hanging into his face. He was laughing, leaning unsteadily on his barstool so the woman reached over to steady him. She rubbed his back, fondly, and then whispered something in his ear that only made him laugh harder and almost spill some of his drink down his shirt.
They were eating out with friends, it looked like, but they were wearing wedding bands, too. Nene watched that couple for just a second, the edge of her lip twitching up into a smile. You know, the guy had a tiny bit of silver in his hair... and what looked like a lab coat folded over the back of his chair... but at the same time, something about him was a little like Hanako-kun, wasn’t it?
Wait. Wasn’t it?
Nene was shoving open that restaurant door before she thought much about it, then. She had always thought Hanako-kun was, you know, dead. Too dead to go out for drinks with a wife; too dead to grow old the way living humans did, with laugh lines forming at the edges of his eyes. This couldn’t be him, right? But if Hanako-kun had been fated to become a science teacher, before he changed his future way back when, then maybe the lab coat would’ve made sense for him? If Nene wasn’t horribly mistaken, then maybe this woman here looked sort of like an older version of her own self.
Nene stood for a second in the doorway of the restaurant, stomping snow off her shoes, savoring the warmth now that she’d gotten off the street. The woman with that long blonde-green hair glanced over at her and sighed, sort of knowingly. She squeezed the man next to her’s hand and said, “I’ll be right back, Amane — I’m gonna get that girl over there a taxi.”
Amane. That had been Hanako-kun’s living name, before he’d killed his brother, before he’d ever imagined he could be summoned to grant wishes from inside a toilet stall. Even before this other “Amane” turned around to wave and call, “We’re ordering dessert soon, Nene! Be thinking about what you want!” of course she knew who he was. Of course Nene watched the tiny rocket ship swaying on this older Hanako-kun’s keys, hanging off the counter a little bit, and felt a burning pain in her chest that was too much like coming tears.
Her mouth tasted coppery and longing. Look at that, Hanako-kun. Look at that man over there, gesturing with his chopsticks to make a point to his friend, and tell me again that you can never have a future.
“It’s okay,” whispered grown-up Nene, folding her own jacket over her younger self’s shoulders. “I remember when something like this happened to me, so let me take it from here.”
Waiting for her taxi outside on the street, Nene only glanced in through the frost-flowering restaurant window a little, little bit. Ice was smothering out everything pretty quickly, after all, so this older, comfortable version of Hanako-kun was growing harder and harder to see. Watching through the window made Nene imagine some strange things, anyway... it reminded her a little of how Hanako-kun could have ended up, honestly, if School Mystery Number Four’s fake painted reality had been a success. It was easy to picture Hanako-kun sitting on a painter’s stool instead of that barstool, his chin propped on his folded-up knees, staring at the painting that held her entire universe.
Hanako-kun had said he wouldn’t have been able to stay inside the painting with Nene... he’d said it wasn’t right for him to get things, now that he was dead, that he couldn’t get while he was alive. But maybe he would have visited, every now and then. Maybe he would have run a finger along the dried-paint sky, and tried imagining what his friends were doing inside.
Yeah. Looking through the restaurant window reminded Nene a little of stuff like that, and so she stared down at her feet instead. She clicked her green mechanical pencil lead all the way out and then tapped it back in with her finger. Again and again. She had too many questions to ask her other self, and almost no idea how to get the words to fold together right. In a way that made sense. In a way that wouldn’t sound too grasping, or too cruel, or reveal too many of the things she hadn’t even admitted aloud to Hanako-kun himself yet.
“You’re wondering why I call him ‘Amane,’ now, aren’t you?” the older version of Nene asked, voice so quiet, ankles still exactly the same as they’d been when she was a teenager, though maybe she didn’t wear them so self-consciously anymore. She was smiling down at her own folded hands, when Nene glanced over at her. “Or maybe you’re wondering when I knew I wanted to marry him?”
“Yeah,” Nene admitted, “but more than that, I guess I’m wondering how — how — I mean, did you manage to save him, somehow? How is he...?”
The older version of Nene pointed down the road a bit, at a taxi turning the corner, moving slowly across the ice. “Oh, I should’ve known...” she said. “But I’m afraid that one’s no good: if I told you, I might end up ruining it. So no spoilers, alright?”
“Fine,” Nene said. Reluctantly. Exhaustedly. There were so many rules, dealing with cosmic, supernatural forces, weren’t there? Maybe she was too cold to fight with her own self. Maybe she sort of knew that if she scraped at the possibility of all this too roughly, it really could fall apart in her hands. No spoilers. “But... oh well. If I make it back to the school, I can go home?”
“When you get back to the math classroom and call Hanako’s name, he’ll hear you,” the older version of Nene promised. “He won’t want to let you out of his sight for the rest of the day.”
Nene laughed. Just a little, in the back of her throat. She might’ve been able to guess that last part, at the very least, you know?