Disclaimer: fiction here, just fiction, not mine, nothing to see, move along, move along ...

This is a story that took place just after the beginning of my second year in high school.

It's important to slot events into their correct time and place in the big puzzle box of life. Otherwise how can anyone understand what just happened? So, then. It was April. A certain double series of days had just climaxed with pseudo-chaotic hijinks in the literature clubroom, such that I finally understood the definition of catharsis, and the resulting anticlimax and resolution had left me totally exhausted.

In other words the SOS Brigade had triumphantly routed the pretenders to Haruhi's power. Though according to Koizumi, all the real work had been done by Haruhi's subconscious.

I didn't really care. I certainly hadn't understood that frenzied final scene in the clubroom, but life rolls on, and I'm not the sort to want to endlessly revisit the past. Time-travel just messes with your inner ear and makes you want to puke on your sneakers. Trust me, it's no fun.

But I did have a problem to do with time-travel.

I'd woken up in the wee hours three nights straight, sitting up in bed with hands covering my face, remembering. A certain detail about that confusing time kept resurfacing in my mind. I couldn't dismiss it. I wanted to, but my conscience wouldn't let me. I still had work left undone.

Yeah, I had something to do.

Haruhi, meanwhile, was in her element.

I'd seldom seen her so full of joie de vive. She'd come up with the crackbrain idea of staging a playlet at the upcoming Tsuruya flower-viewing party, and no matter how shamelessly I whined and pleaded, she just wouldn't give up on it. But of all the things! Why pick Sleeping Beauty?

I mean, really.

So twisted.

Before I knew it, she'd already written a one-act adaptation—though she hadn't let us read it yet—and was sketching out backdrop ideas on the clubroom whiteboard. There are enough disturbing undercurrents in that particular fairytale to qualify it as fantasy horror, but that didn't seem to phase her. She'd written our names along one side of the whiteboard, each name followed with a string of question marks. And she'd written her own name up there too. So, not content to be merely the playwright, director, and art designer, she intended to step out into the lights and take the lead role.

Three guesses who was gonna be dragged onstage to play her love interest.

Yeah.

"Gender bender is the way to go here," Haruhi said with evil nonchalance, leering like a crocodile at an already-trembling Asahina-san. "The prince has the biggest part, so I'll handle that. Anyway, look!" Whipping out a cardboard shipping box, the label sticker still dangling. "Look, Mikuru! 'Sexy Princess'!"

We all looked.

"Er ... what S&M site did you order that from, Haruhi?"

"Kyon. Shut up, okay? It's Sleeping Beauty, so the princess has to be in some kind of nightgown. Edgy stuff is also very much in these days. Stop crying, Mikuru. You're going to make a magnificent Beauty. And it's not like you're going to be forced to kiss a guy or anything."

While Asahina whimpered in the corner, she lined up the rest of us and walked up and down eyeing us, frowning. Me, Nagato, Koizumi. She stared at us relentlessly. "I already have a prime role in mind for Yuki. But you two ..."

I remembered that Koizumi doesn't like being on stage that much. His smile was brave but ragged.

Gender bender Sleeping Beauty, with Haruhi playing the role of the prince. Just how far around the bend does she want to take this?

Am I gonna be forced to wear a dress?

No. No, I refuse—although Haruhi can run faster than I can. I edged toward the door anyway.

Her iron grip clamped on my elbow. Recently, I'd made a resolution to act my age and face the future with eyes open, so I didn't avert my gaze from her smile. One thousand percent purest sunshine, was it? That smile. It's so her, and it only grew wider as I stared back, feeling transfixed.

Hey, Haruhi. You're hurting my arm now.

She suddenly let go. We jumped back from each other. "I have to think about this," Haruhi said. "I'll sleep on it."

I woke up late that night, just like the previous night. Bolt upright, cold sweat, heart hammering. I looked at my bedside clock's glowing display: 12:18 AM. Yeah, roughly the same time every night for four nights running now. And always with the same creepy feeling.

It seemed different tonight, though. I remembered the dream that woke me.

A shuffling footstep. Hoarse breathing. Opening my eyes with a start, to see a shadowy form looming over my bed; my bedroom door was open about five centimetres, a glow coming from the hall. I'd relaxed and started to sit up, to ask my little sister what the hell game she thought she was playing—had I slept through my alarm again, was it morning?—but then I'd heard her voice.

She'd spoken, and it had knocked me shuddering out of the nightmare into the waking world. Good grief that was frightening was all I could say about it.

Weird stuff. Was I even at the right time in my sleep cycle for REM activity? Didn't think so.

12:22.

12:46.

1:09.

I couldn't get back to sleep. I ended up lying flat on my back with my arms crossed behind my head, just like on the three previous nights, thinking. It was that one detail from that series of events in the clubroom that plagued me. No—not one detail. Probably three insignificant little details that had passed right over my head at the time.

Back then, I'd totally lost it. The shadow of Haruhi had fallen upon us, everyone around me had freaked out (except Koizumi, who'd seemed to be having the time of his life) but what I mostly remembered was how I'd chewed the scenery for what seemed five minutes straight, then screamed and jumped out of the window.

Humiliating. So uncool. Being caught in the hand of a Celestial was no consolation. Right after, I'd lost my hold on Haruhi, then been bounced all over the future and ended up landing mysteriously atop her in her bed, one month onward.

Over a week had passed since my return. The one-year anniversary of the SOS Brigade was coming up fast ... well, I still had three weeks. Two and a half. Plenty of time to pick out Haruhi's gift. Still didn't have a clue what to get her, though. That was probably why I was now having nightmares.

But still.

As I was thrown forward in time, I'd heard Asahina the Younger's voice.

It had definitely been her voice. So she'd been there, in that closed space. So ... it must have been Asahina who forced me into the future. I'd experienced flying sensations at the time too, a gentle experience of floating. Add one and one, and even the slowest math student could come up with two eventually.

Asahina the Younger: because she had been there. I'd heard her voice, hadn't I?

Koizumi: because Asahina couldn't enter closed space unless an esper took her there.

My thoughts chased each other like hamsters.

Was this a fixed event?

Yeah. Probably.

But Koizumi had been busy elsewhere, with Asahina the Elder. And he can't be in two places at once unless a time-traveler helps. Hence Asahina will need to move him through time, so that he can take her into closed space at the proper moment.

But the likelihood that the two of them would work together unless forced to—well, zero was the word for it. I suspect that Koizumi and Nagato have double-teamed me from time to time, but never Koizumi and Asahina.

But it was a fixed event.

But it probably wouldn't happen unless somebody (me) told Koizumi and Asahina what they needed to do.

But I really, really don't want to see Koizumi's orgasm face when I tell him he's gonna go time-traveling at last.

"Crap, I'm even boring myself."

I gave up on it and finally got back to sleep.

Morning came far too soon. Not achieving my proper quota of sleep leaves me feeling foggier than any zombie, but I got myself upright and dressed, reversed my blazer at the breakfast table and put it back on right-side out, and headed out to school.

I halted on the doorstep. My little sister, her schoolbag swinging, ran happily away in the direction of her school. Somehow she hadn't seen that Koizumi and Nagato were waiting just across the street.

He sat on the curb, head down, nursing a thermos between his hands. She stood behind him, immobile. Her expression was several microns toward the perturbed, ie., the same expression as usual except that she was gazing at me instead of at the sidewalk. I headed for them, and Koizumi lifted his face and gave me a thin, terrified smile.

I concluded that the 200-metre gorilla named Haruhi had been on the loose.

I didn't know how bad it was yet, though. Not until Koizumi said, "There was closed space surrounding your house last night. And not the normal kind of closed space either—this was the kind that we couldn't penetrate."

The end-of-the-world kind.

Nagato said in her monotone: "It lasted two minutes nine seconds, ending at 12:18 AM. During that time, you were not in this world."

My nightmare about my sister. Right then I knew the worst:

That hadn't been a nightmare.

That hadn't been my sister.