#safu

This side story is mostly in first person.

On the day of Shion’s twelfth birthday, he and Safu are walking home together. A once-in-a-decade typhoon is going to be making landfall soon, and the wind howls as clouds race across the sky.

Shion stops to watch the billowing black clouds, and Safu asks him what’s going on. Shion says it feels like something’s about to happen—he can feel it. Safu explains matter-of-factly the weather report down to exact percentages, implicitly reducing the majesty of the typhoon to mere numbers. She says the storm will hardly affect them at all.

There is a brief interlude explaining Chronos and its nearly perfect living environments, and then the wind tugs at Shion’s bangs. He mulls over Safu’s words about the typhoon having hardly any impact on them. Even though logically he understands this, he still feels in his gut that this storm will change him irrevocably, its winds carrying him far away like the green summer leaves. The idea makes his heart soar.

Safu interrupts his thoughts, saying it looks like he’s waiting for something, or even someone. That idea hadn’t even crossed Shion’s mind, though—he has nothing to wait for. He says he’s waiting for the wind, but isn’t able to explain what he means. Safu calls him funny and unique, then says that a storm is a sorry way to be spending a birthday. Shion says it’s nice, actually—it means it’ll be memorable. Safu questions this line of reasoning, saying that typhoons are most common in September, so he could have any number of birthdays on stormy days. He needs something more that just that if he truly wants to remember this birthday.

As Safu continues, there is another brief interlude about how they are both going to be pursuing their respective fields of study in a specialized course track next month, and how Shion believes ecology to be vital to study due to how limited inhabitable areas are on Earth.

Safu explains that she thinks that the brain struggles to retain memories that aren’t of exceptional circumstances, whether good or bad. Those sorts of memories stay with you for a lifetime without fading one bit. She asks Shion if he has any memories like that, and he realizes he doesn’t. He has no memories that are just as fresh and vivid as the day he experienced them.

He begins to tremble, feeling as if he’s enclosed in a cocoon. If he stayed inside the cocoon, he would be sheltered from everything difficult in life, but at the cost of never retaining any vivid, lifelong memories, or having true human connection. He finds himself suddenly wanting to scream, lash out, and destroy everything. He wonders if he can rip his cocoon to shreds himself.

Destroy.

Smash it all to pieces.

Destroy what?

Safu asks if she said something weird, but Shion says he’s the weird one, and that his head feels a mess. They part ways to go to their respective homes, and Safu wishes him happy birthday over her shoulder.

The scene shifts to 4:00 PM in the midst of the typhoon. Though Shion is in the comfortable environment of his room, he can feel the raging of the storm outside, and he thinks that it will shatter his world and its stability to pieces. He realizes that not even this storm in all its power can even leave a scratch on No.6’s complete immutability and rigidness, and stands up from where he had been sitting on the bed.

He wants, again, to scream, to lash out, and turn everything that confines him into dust. He wants to fight back, and lose himself in violence just like this storm. He can’t suppress the urge, and wonders what to do.

Destroy.

Smash it all to pieces.

Destroy what?

Everything.

Everything?

The scene changes from first to third person, to a narrative voice that might not be Shion's, but it's unclear who it could be. It's written that "the boy" opens his window without hesitation, realizing that he has opened the door of destiny with his own two hands.

The short story closes with three sentences of Shion’s internal narrative looking back on the memory of his twelfth birthday: Nezumi, I still had yet to know you then. And, from here on, I’ll make memories with you I won’t forget as long as I live.