I thought about running.

It was a strange how sensible it seemed, in the long hour that I was trapped in the room, unable to even pace up and down. All I could do was stretch my limbs a little to ease the cramp - just moving about the house was difficult. Perhaps it was because I was confined to such a small space, unable to make even the slightest movement, that running away seemed like such a sensible idea. Or perhaps it was because there was literally nothing I could do except think.

I could disappear, and Haruhi would never know what had happened. I'd leave no note, nothing, or perhaps a fake one, something that would fool her somehow. She had seen what had happened to me, but she had no way to prove it, not even to herself. I could forge a note to the landlord, suggesting that I'd been evicted! Perhaps even followed by one from me, asking her to deliver my essay for me while I hurried to find somewhere else to live. Or perhaps I had enough time to set up the apartment to look as though I had never lived there at all. With no reason to believe otherwise, what could she really do?

How else could I erase the fact that Haruhi had seen me like this? She had finally found what she'd always wanted, something that defied the laws of nature, and by the logic Itsuki had always used, the safety catch on her powers was now off for good. How else could I keep the world from going completely mad except by trying to change her memory, and convince her that it had never happened at all?

What if trying to trick her just led her to turn the world into an even crazier place?

The window in my room faced the east, so there was nowhere I could escape from the sunlight that was now filtering through. I kept the blinds drawn, but several rays still managed to pierce my eyes. All I could do was turn away and let the sun fall warm on my bare back. It was hard to believe that it was still morning. The world hand changed forever, it a way that could bring about its end, and yet the day had barely begun.

I needed a better plan, but the others had left me with nothing. The only options I could see were to try to keep up an obvious lie, or to leave and tell Haruhi that this had never really happened. The first would fail, that was obvious. The second option was an unknown quantity. Trying to make my way around in the world like this would be difficult enough, but what effect was fooling with Haruhi's memory going to have on her? Would her confusion made the effects of her powers work, turning the world into a more and more unstable place?

And even if they were successful, they all had the same end result for me. I'd finally gotten Haruhi to really talk to me, for the first time since university had started, and no matter what I did, success would mean a swift end to that. It almost seemed worth running away just to see if she'd follow me. But in the end, all I did was wait. I wasn't brave enough to find out whether she though I was worth chasing.

By the time Haruhi returned in the late afternoon, I'd expected something else in the world to have shifted by now. Something in her mind had to have changed from seeing this way, something that would forever alter the way the world worked. Any moment, I thought, I'd feel the ground shifting under my feet, or look out the window and see a dragon flying by. But when I heard her keys in the door again, the world was still more or less the same place it had been when I woke up.

She padded softly into my room in her socks and handed me a cup of coffee and a bread roll, just like that. Then she sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, and just waited. No questions, no touching, no grandiose declarations of her greatness – just patience. I watched her the whole time I was eating, but she didn't seem about to do or say anything drastic at all. She just sat there quietly, watching me right back.

"So," she said, at last, once I'd finished eating. "How do you feel?"

It wasn't the question I expected. "Fine. I mean, not fine. Terrible, I guess. I can't go out. I don't know what I'm going to do with these things. I'm going to fail this semester. " It was almost funny that the first thing I thought of was university.

She looked at me, then the wings, her eyes following their curve from my shoulders to the elbow joint well above my head to the longer flight feathers draped over the floor.

"I can understand that," she said, softly, when her eyes found their way back to mine. "It's a shame. They're so beautiful. But I can understand why you'd want to get rid of them."

The thought dashed through my mind that maybe it wouldn't be so bad, if Haruhi were still here to look after me. If the wings meant she'd pay attention to me.

"There must be a way to fix this," she said, getting up and walking around me in a full circle, looking at the wings from all angles. "We'll figure this out together, Kyon! I don't want you stuck inside being miserable for the rest of your life."

Of course. Haruhi doesn't need the burden of me being stuck and needing her to do everything for me.

"Don't be an idiot," she rolled her eyes and flopped to the floor in front of me again, suddenly looking a lot more like herself. "They're so cool! I'm really jealous of you. And even if they weren't awesome, as if I'd be annoyed about having to look after you. You're my friend. I'm trying to help you get rid of them because they're making you sad, that's all."

It was odd to think of the wings making me sad, as though having them attached to my shoulders had somehow changed the chemistry of my mind so that I could never be happy again. That wasn't the way it worked.

"Uh-huh." Haruhi was unimpressed by my philosophical digression. "Let's just get to the point. How the hell did you get wings in the first place? Why don't I have wings?" she added, as an afterthought. "You got any more cans of that stuff?"

"You know energy drinks can't literally make you fly, right?"

She hesitated for a moment, then gave me a small, wry smile. "I know. I really do, Kyon, I just... it's nice to make believe it could be true."

It was something I'd never, ever seen Haruhi do before – maturely, gracefully accepting that no amount of wanting would ever make her fantasies come true. How had she grown up so much without me noticing? As admirable as it was, it would almost have made me sad to see her give up on those dreams the way I had long before I met her.

Before I could comment on her change of heart, though, she banished the wistful expression from her face and clapped her hands together, businesslike. "So! How did you really get wings?"

"I don't know. If I knew, don't you think I would have done something about them by now?"

She looked at me for a moment, her expression unreadable, and I wondered for a panicked moment whether somehow, impossibly, she knew that I was lying.

"Okay then, if you say so," she said, dropping it without further comment. "We don't know where they came from. We still have a couple of ways to try to deal with them, right?"

"Right."

"Obviously, we can try to cut them off."

I'm sure I must have winced visibly - I could feel the wings close protectively around me - and Haruhi snickered.

"I didn't literally mean you and I could cut them off," she grinned. "I meant finding a surgeon who'd be willing to do it. If we were lucky we could get someone to come here so you didn't even have to go out where people can see you, although we might have to shift you to somewhere with more space."

I really didn't like that idea. As new and foreign as the wings were, they were still my body.

"Fair enough. Can't blame you. It'd probably have to be a pretty dodgy surgeon to agree to that." Haruhi nodded. "Okay then, there's obviously something odd going on with your body for them to appear so suddenly, so there's always the option of finding some biologists to look into it. There might even be someone at the university who would... no?"

I was shaking my head before she even finished talking. "No. We can't do that. They won't want me fixed, they'll want to keep me this way so they can write groundbreaking research papers and get lots of grant money. You know how scientists think." Or at least she should. She spent enough time drinking with them.

"Well, okay, you're probably right." She nodded again. "That does bring us back to the surgery option, though."

"But I don't like that either. Anyway, a surgeon probably won't be any better, they'll want to study me and write me up in a medical journal too."

"Well unless you want me to cut them off for you, I don't see any other option, and you don't like that idea, do you?"

The situation was starting to feel so hopeless that for a moment, it really did seem like the best option. But no, I couldn't possibly let Haruhi hack off a part of my body! What was I thinking?

"I'm sorry, Kyon, that's all I've been able to come up with," she said, starting to look annoyed. "We can try to think of something else but I don't have any other answers right now, unless you want to spend the rest of your life hiding in people's spare rooms."

"Of course I don't!" I snapped. "But there has to be a better answer! I can't do any of these things!"

"Then tell me how you got them!" she snapped back.

"I told you, I don't know!"

She sat there with her mouth open for a moment, just breathing. She swallowed.

"You do know," she said, her voice wavering, which on its own would be enough to throw me off guard. "Or your name isn't John Smith."