I'm still not used to being called "Sensei."
It's far better than "god." Even so, it tickles. I'm not someone impressive enough to puff out my chest and say, I'm a writer. Every time she calls me that, I end up looking away.
"You are embarrassed, Sensei."
"I'm not embarrassed."
"Your ears are red."
Koyomi giggled.
Not the perfect smile of the Ice Princess. A looser, warmer way of laughing. Only lately had I started seeing her laugh like this a lot.
At school, things were the same as ever.
Koyomi was still the Ice Princess. When we passed in the hallway, she walked by with her back straight, as if she couldn't even see me. Wearing the face that goes with the formal "I" she uses at school. No one knew she had cried at home, or laughed.
That double life hadn't disappeared.
After school, when she passed by me in an empty classroom, Koyomi would glance my way, just for an instant. Her face still icy, smiling only with her eyes. I will be waiting tonight, too. That split-second gap still made my heart skip.
Her heaviness hadn't disappeared, either.
The scripture notebooks were still multiplying. My update times, my typo corrections, all still recorded without a second's deviation. Honestly, watching from beside her, it was still a little frightening. The obsession that could record three years of one person's life in such vivid detail wasn't going to just vanish.
But.
She had stopped kneeling.
She had stopped looking up at me. When she gave me her comments, she sat beside me. We looked at the same screen and went back and forth as equals: this sentence here is good, did you notice the foreshadowing here? Not as two people gripping each other's lifeline, but as a writer and a reader, waiting for the next chapter.
What lay past where the ice had fully melted wasn't a sweet dream.
It was an ordinary distance, with the heaviness and the danger still very much there. It was just that the shape of our codependence had shifted a little toward something healthier. Even so, it was far better than before. Since we could walk side by side, I felt like we could both go a little farther.
That night, I started writing a new serial.
The first line of a perfectly blank manuscript.
My hands, in their fingerless gloves, stopped over the keyboard. What was on my mind wasn't what to write. It was who to write it for.
I had always written for just one reader. For that one at 12:02 a.m.
That person was beside me now.
Koyomi was quietly watching me write, from a little way off. They weren't the eyes of someone waiting on me. They were the eyes of the very first reader, waiting for the next chapter.
"Sensei," she said.
"I wonder what kind of person this new story will keep alive."
At those words, my hands stopped.
I wonder what kind of person it will keep alive. The Koyomi from before wouldn't have put it like that. Everything my god writes is wonderful, she'd have said. That was all she ever said. Now it was different. She went straight for the very core of the story. It was a question from an equal reader, not a kneeling believer.
Keeping one person alive. She already understood, properly, the most important part of my stories. She was someone who had learned it firsthand, through three years of 12:02 a.m. Not numbers, not fame, but getting just one person through the night. That was the only meaning in my writing.
"Who knows," I said, and laughed.
"But even just one person would be enough. ...Even one person who makes it through the night with this story."
At that, Koyomi narrowed her eyes a little. I could tell she was picturing herself three years ago as that one person.
"I am sure there is someone," she said quietly. "Tonight, too, in some room somewhere, there is someone who thinks the morning no longer needs to come. ...I hope it reaches them. At 12:02 a.m."
"Yeah."
I nodded. I hoped it would reach them, from the bottom of my heart. Some one person, like Koyomi used to be. For that one person, I'd write again.
But it's one.
That starting point hadn't changed. It was just that now, I knew that one's name.
I brought my fingers down on the keyboard.
The very first page of a new story.
Before I started on the text itself, I gently set one line there.
Who I would dedicate this story to.
As I typed that dedication, my fingertips, inside the gloves Koyomi gave me, were just a little warm.