Chương 411: 190.New Year's Eve 1

"Let me speak first." Maki raised her hand, her tone clipped, as if she'd already drawn everyone's escape route on the map before the meeting even started.

"First: Her Highness doesn't sleep near the windows. Meaning — the rooms facing Platinum Bridge Street, and the whole row behind, are all off-limits." When Maki said this, her expression was flat. Flat like she wasn't assigning a room to a princess on temporary stay, but running some ill-omened damage-control operation on this house. And precisely because it was so flat, no one dared treat it as plain "which room is more convenient to sleep in." The living room went quiet for a moment.

Jess had been propping her chin on her hand, looking ready to contribute an eighty-page fan-reading of this impromptu housing meeting; at Maki's words she only drew her legs in and settled more firmly on the sofa armrest, without jumping in right away. Harvey glanced toward the hallway, as if spreading the house's floor plan open in his head. D said nothing — he just moved his gaze from the window to my face, the look meaning roughly: see? More trouble.

Akari was still standing by the dining table, holding the plates she'd just brought in, her expression half concern, half "should I bring another blanket?" Maki looked at me. The look was brief. But it was loaded.

"Shimo," Maki said.

"What if you move to the windowed room..." She meant the room diagonally across from mine — the one that used to be Aida-senpai's. I followed the direction of Maki's finger and glanced over. My brain turned once before slowly catching her meaning: Hedwig moves into my current inner room, I move into the windowed room across the hall. The riskiest position — mine to hold.... Very much her style. Not cruelty. Practicality. And practical in a way that made it hard to even get out a "why me."

"I could..." I glanced at the time, mentally calculating just how bad a mess my room was right now.

"Cleaning it up will take a bit."

"No need," Maki said.

"Find time tomorrow." That single sentence told me there was no room for discussion tonight. Maki wasn't asking for my opinion. Maki was issuing the arrangement that cost everyone the least trouble. Hedwig gets the safer position first — and me, I suppose, had formally gained a new line on my student-council deputy's job sheet: "when necessary, may absorb window-side firing lines on behalf of high-risk persons." Jess finally couldn't hold it in. She raised an eyebrow at me.

"Wow," she said.

"Hoshino, that's a really sweet arrangement from Maki." I turned to look at her on the spot.

"Is your standard for 'sweet' so broken it needs medical attention?"

"What's broken about it?" Jess shrugged, all smiles.

"Her Highness sleeps in your room, you move out — and the Student Council President assigns it herself. It's got that whole—""Jess." Maki called her name. Not heavy. But enough. Jess dutifully swallowed the rest of the sentence, attaching a silent expression of "okay, I know you're still keeping tally from this morning." Just seeing that expression, I figured that if I managed to fall asleep peacefully tonight, it would count as some kind of mental miracle.

Hedwig stood off to the side, seemingly sensing that while this house's air could still circulate normally, a fair amount of stuff that wasn't meant for deep breathing had already mixed into it. She looked at Maki and lowered her head slightly.

"My apologies for the trouble."

"Stay first, talk later," Maki said.

"Everything else gets adjusted tomorrow." The way Maki said "tomorrow" was flat. But for some reason I kept feeling that what Maki really meant was: — Shimo's already done a lot just making it through today alive. Whatever's left, we'll count tomorrow. I decided to pretend I hadn't understood. That night, the meeting didn't actually run much longer.

Not because there wasn't much to discuss, but because everyone could more or less see my mental state had reached the dangerous edge where one more surprise would make me sit down on the floor and start laughing on the spot.

So Harvey simply flagged the few routes worth watching, D efficiently filled in two blind corners involving the windows and the stairwell's sightlines, Akari went and grabbed clean sheets and pillowcases, and Jess — after being glared at once by Maki — barely restrained herself to the point where only her face was still committing violations.

As for me, I was responsible for standing up and dragging my body — which had been run through school, night duty, the duty room, the underwear incident, the ordnance crates, and an impromptu princess housemate in one continuous chain — upstairs to clear out everything in my room least suitable for royalty to see.

"Least suitable" being, in practice, a few traces that proved I ordinarily lived like a survivor of a disaster zone. A uniform jacket tossed aside. A scarf wedged over the back of a chair. Drawers not fully shut, with notepads and record boards sticking out. And a photocopied patrol manual I'd left on my bedside table a few days ago that even I hadn't finished reading.

That one was especially unfit to appear before Hedwig tonight, because the sight of its cover alone brought back Nikaido Freya's face — the kind that welded rationality into your bones — along with certain images even less appropriate to be thinking about right now. I shoved the things into a box and a paper bag in a hurry. Maki leaned against the doorframe watching for two minutes before finally speaking. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Shimo, that's called hiding, not tidying."

"Making things disappear from visible range counts as a form of tidying."

"That's called destroying evidence." I paused, then turned to look at Maki. Maki's expression was flat. Too flat. I couldn't help a dry laugh.

"Are you in a mood to use everything as ammo today?"

"You've supplied too much material today," Maki said.... Great. The account from this morning was definitely still open. And it was quietly accruing interest, in a way that was very Maki. I rolled up the last jacket and shoved it into the bottom of the box. By the time I straightened, Maki had already walked into the room, casually pulled the curtains shut for me, and checked the window latch. The motion was utterly natural — as if she hadn't come to take over the room, just to confirm it still counted as livable.

"Hedwig sleeps here tonight," Maki said.

"You clean out the room across the hall tomorrow."

"I know."

"And, Shimo."

"Mm?" Maki turned back to look at me.

"About this morning. I'll settle accounts with you later." I was quiet for two seconds. Then I nodded, quite honestly.

"... Okay." Maki looked so taken aback by my compliance that she seemed to freeze for half a beat, then averted her gaze.

"Good that you know." With that, Maki turned and left. I stood in the middle of my room, looking at the half-emptied space, hit by a very strange sensation of weightlessness. Not reluctance. Just... absurdity. Less than two days ago I was only Shimo — rostered for duty over the winter break, sweeping up someone else's mess at the school gate on the side.

And now here I was, standing in what used to be my room, clearing a bed for an Imperial Princess staying over because her year-end guard detail had been recalled, while waiting for the Student Council President to come settle my early-morning underwear incident later. It really wasn't easy keeping human society running. After Hedwig moved into my room, the rest of that night at No. 22 Platinum Bridge Street passed with oddly no major incidents.

"No major incidents" here meaning: no new ordnance crates carried in, no extra identity to keep concealed, and no one discovering in the middle of the night that the storage cabinet under the stairs held enough to support a small coup. There were plenty of small things, though. Like Akari bringing hot milk to Hedwig, her manner as natural as if she were simply looking after a friend who wasn't feeling well.

Like Harvey standing at the foot of the stairs glancing up a few times, then quietly leaving two lights on in the first-floor hallway — apparently re-arranging the night-time sightlines on the spot. Like Jess, despite having been warned, still leaning in as she passed me and whispering with that thoroughly obnoxious smile: "Shimo, as of today, you're officially a woman with property-allocation experience."

I really wanted to shove her into the storage cabinet under the stairs and let her cool off with the recoilless rifle. But regardless, the night did settle at last. Everyone went back to their own rooms. Doors closed one after another. The hallway lights dimmed by two, leaving only the necessary glow. Winter night sounds pressed up against the outer walls, like a thin layer of snow.

And I sat in the room across the hall that used to be Aida-senpai's, facing a hastily made bed and a small lamp that didn't glow kindly at all, with the sudden feeling that someone had moved me house in the middle of the chaos. Not a move of location. A move of rhythm. As if from today on, No. 22 Platinum Bridge Street would no longer be just the place everyone came back to for sleeping, arguing, eating, and the occasional meeting.

It would slowly become a container — more dangerous, more intimate, and much harder to explain. The same people came and went, but the arrangement inside had already changed. And unfortunately, I stood right at the node where that rearrangement had started.... Annoying.

I pulled the blanket up a little and rolled over, doing my best not to think about Maki's "I'll settle with you later," doing my best not to think about Hedwig currently asleep on what used to be my bed, and doing my best not to think about the two crates downstairs that could put this whole house on the local news tomorrow if discovered. Naturally, none of it worked.

So that night I slept the way a person who ought to be exhausted but was in fact being hemmed in by too many realities at once would sleep — fitfully, barely holding on, and knowing the moment I opened my eyes that the trouble hadn't gone anywhere. The next morning, what I got busy with first was moving rooms. No, to be exact: first I got busy facing the consequences of my life that I hadn't planned on dealing with this soon. The room across the hall had been empty, but empty didn't mean ready to sleep in.

Dust had gathered by the window, the desk drawer still held washi tape and a few notebooks Aida-senpai had left behind whose covers looked like nothing but top-grade students, and the closet even had an old jacket clearly far above my fashion level hanging in it. All told, it wasn't my room — at best, a container temporarily housing my body and my fatigue. And inside that container, I moved my things while pretending not to see the way Hedwig moved in and out of my old room — matter-of-fact, quiet.

Honestly, it was stranger than I'd imagined. Not aversion. Not awkwardness to the point of being unable to coexist. More like a corner of your home that had always been private, suddenly being borrowed by a presence that was very clean, very polite, and very hard to say no to. You know it's a reasonable arrangement, and you know the other person isn't deliberately stepping on anything — but with every glance, your brain automatically detours half a circle anyway. Maki was busy that day.

Too busy to come settle my account right away. Which only made me more uneasy. Because if Maki blew up on the spot, at least I knew how to deal with it. Once Maki started compressing her emotions into a schedule, things usually only got worse. Jess, meanwhile, spent the whole day looking like she was holding in some kind of special move. Every time she saw Hedwig and me standing a little closer, or me casually fetching her something, her face would take on that "oooh—" expression that begged for a beating.

That expression was worse than outright mouthing off, because you couldn't plug the leak — all you could do was watch her keep polluting the air through pure facial artistry. Luckily, over the next few days, everyone had other things to be busy with. Schedules kept running. People came and went. Someone was on duty by day, someone rotated through the night. No.

22 Platinum Bridge Street slowly adapted to the rhythm of one more person, and inside that rhythm, I learned to try not to think about whether some of my own everyday motions had become too natural. Like passing through the living room at night and instinctively checking whether Hedwig was still there. Like when someone mentioned windows, night duty, wind, or security, my gut going straight to which room was innermost.

Like Maki occasionally glancing at me, and me running a mental inspection of what I might have done today worthy of a private conversation later. And so time started being carried forward by winter's rhythm. Pages of the duty roster turned one after another. The people of the house came back when they should, went out when they should. Some conversations were left behind, some accounts remained unsettled, and some things were temporarily pushed back by mutual understanding.

And in those days of "moving forward while feeling certain things weren't really over," it slowly occurred to me that year-end was a lot like a cut-rate version of a battlefield handover. On the surface, everyone was preparing for New Year. In practice, everyone was just trying to hold down whatever hadn't exploded yet before the year closed. Then, in a blink, it was that morning. Not some especially dramatic dawn. No bigger snow than usual, no one knocking early at the door.

Just that when I woke, the light outside the window was very white — white with that particular emptiness of year-end. The house was still quiet. Someone was passing with lowered footsteps somewhere down the hall, and from downstairs came the soft sound of a kettle just beginning to heat. I sat up, stared at the ceiling for two seconds, and slowly remembered what day it was. — December thirty-first. The morning before the New Year.

And for reasons I couldn't name, just thinking the date made me sigh internally first. Because by rights, year-end should carry a sense of closure. People and things should be drifting toward some ending. But for someone like me, such a day usually meant only one of two things: either there were accounts still unsettled, or new accounts were about to begin. And today, of course, was probably both. I slid into my slippers, got out of bed, and pushed the door open. The air in the hallway was cold and still.

Hedwig's door was still shut; a faint light leaked from the living room direction. The whole of No. 22 Platinum Bridge Street seemed not quite awake — and precisely because it wasn't awake, everything looked as if it had paused in place, waiting to see who would touch it first today. I stood in the middle of the hallway with a very clear premonition. Today was not going to be peaceful. Not from superstition, and not from some year-end unease. Pure experience.

Because in just a few days, a person had gone through: Night duty, the cracking shell, borrowing clothes, the underwear incident, a princess moving in, rooms being rearranged, ordnance inside the house, and Maki's morning account still unsettled to this day — if December thirty-first could still wrap up cleanly under those conditions, that would be the genuinely abnormal thing. I leaned on the hallway railing and glanced downstairs, then smiled very slightly. The smile wasn't happiness.

More like a person finally admitting: fine. Since I'm here, I'm here. The morning before New Year, No. 22 Platinum Bridge Street was very quiet. And I knew: the quieter it was, the more it meant something was waiting later today. On the last day of December, the daytime city had a kind of unpleasant honesty. The light outside the window was white, cold — as if someone had dunked the whole city in water once, then hung it out to dry lazily.