And with those very whispers that had entered his ears, he became the safe keeper of their truths.
"...You won't tell anyone, right?" she asks apprehensively.
He grins back. "You know I wouldn't do that, dummy!"
"You trust me, right?"
"Yes," she replies without hesitation.
"You're my best friend, after all."
We return to our strenuous trek, one that can only grow even more so.
The odious beauty of Hachigo shrinks further back into the surrounding snow as we flee its leering gaze, trudging once again, but not drowning in the treacherous seas any longer. We are safe, and a wave of relief splashes over me instead.
Nana, on the other hand, has a lost air about her. It's like she's possessed by a ghost. A very confused ghost, it seems.
In truth, she hasn't said anything to me since the morning, sans her monosyllabic responses to any inquiries I made towards her. It isn't often that Nana zones out so...easily – sure, she's easily distracted. A lot. But her frequent daydreams are nagging at my own thoughts, prodding my conscience with every step I take alongside her. Every crunch in the snow reanimates the events of our morning in my head: how quiet she was. How selfless she was. How awed she was.
How different she was.
I don't doubt that she has any affection towards me. You see, her selfishness is not the inconsiderate kind, the type found in most of the similar character. When is selfishness ever not inconsiderate, one may ask? It's difficult to explain. Her vanity I know is usually unintentional, accidental, often a backfire from her intended acts of altruism. Nana has no modesty, yet she has no great ego in place of its gaping hole.
It is also difficult to understand. How she sees herself as a brave heroine, how willing she is to take on such a risky mission as our own, how she inspects any flaw she can find in herself, major or minor, and how she tells me she's an awful person. Does she see her self-love as lies she bribes herself with to force herself to carry on, only to unnecessarily punish herself with self-deprecation? Why?
When she cries, she cries of things that she wants. That she thinks she needs. She. I remember her tears when we were told we could no longer stay over at one another's homes – not the nights, anyway – how she bawled over the affair. I remember her father scolding her, then asking her why she was behaving the way she was. She could only answer, "I just want to stay with him," over and over.
As for myself, I hadn't reacted in such a manner. I knew exactly why we were now forbidden from such interactions; surely she must have, too? You've always been more mature than that noisy girlfriend of yours, my mother tittered. I hadn't even bothered to correct her, having been too overwhelmed by Nana's dramatic tantrum.
Perhaps that is a suitable example of her "selfishness". Desire is selfish, but it is not. It's surely possible to want things in the stead of others, is it not? For the sake of others, you can want the best for them, right? Is that selfish?
The journey to the foot of Icicle Mountain is further than the nearest mountain after Hachigo, naturally. It's been about a month since we last left Yukino with our first haul of food. The first mountain had been pure luck, getting that much food in the first climb. But we'd established that the portion of the rescued harvest would only last up to a month if the village were to share it out, and considering our population…
We have to hurry.
"Tired yet?" I ask my pink-clad companion. She shakes her head. I glance up at the faintly clouded sky before observing the shadow on my sundial. It's still the early hours of the morning, at least, the time when others are also awake. It's been an hour or two since we departed from Hachigo, so it's probably the right time for a rest.
I gesture towards a small patch of flora accompanied by some conveniently placed rocks. "Let's stop here. I'm a bit worn out."
Setting my pack beside the stone I seat myself upon, I move to beckon Nana to the rock adjacent to my own, but stop myself when I notice her gravitate towards the one directly opposite me. We remain silent.
Several times, my lips start to move in attempts to form threads of words I want to convey to her. Yet, the moment I conceive the sentences in my mind ("Was I weird this morning?" "What's on your mind?" "Did I scare you earlier?" "Do you-") an icicle seems to plummet down onto me, obstructing my path and preventing me from my own desires. Several times, she notices, and several times, Nana's eyes light up like stars glowing as if she wants to hear what I want to say. But I can't bring myself to say anything. And then her eyes only dim again, returning to the interstellar dream she's engrossed herself in. Her enthusiasm – the only other emotion she's exhibited this whole trek – is the very thing that's pushing me away. Why is her vague joy beaming me away from her?
"You're so silent."
My head shoots up. In uttering my silence, she shatters our own. She demolishes the glass wall built between us by our noiselessness by speaking, and my odd shyness along with it.
I grin back weakly. "Do you like hearing my voice that much?"
"I think it sounds beautiful."
Blood rushes to my cheeks as her statement, like some simple song echoing, escapes into the air, meeting my unsuspecting ears. 'Beautiful' – the word she chose to use. Especially for me? If only. Nana finds a lot of things beautiful. Such is her honeyed outlook on life.
I chuckle nervously, trying not to stumble over the bumps in my tongue's path. "Don't you think that's, um, a bit of an over-exaggeration?"
"Don't you think you underestimate yourself too much?" she replies, as if unsurprised by my own response. "I won't repeat myself."
My brain, unable to conjure up a suitable reply, stuns me into silence. I can only stare back at Nana in amazement, an odd warm but surprising sensation snowing over me. Her reciprocal quietness doesn't make the situation any less...awkward, though. So we just gaze at one another for a little while.
Maybe I'm supposed to start describing everything I can notice about her at this moment as I take in her appearance, but there isn't anything more I can say that I haven't already noticed about her in our long time together. She's still Nana, still the quirky and outgoing girl I met years ago in our childhood days, still with the same inquisitive lilac eyes that so curiously admire the world around her, still with a hop and skip in her every step. These things I've all taken in before. They're the special features maybe only I bother to remember.
Ah. I just contradicted myself.
Finally, she cuts through the silence with a small chuckle, and with that, she's back to her usual self once more. It's quite startling, considering her own prior silence, but maybe she's woken up from whatever dream she was stuck in earlier.
"Oh, well, it's not that deep. You know I love you anyway."
"Yeah, I love you too," I casually reply.
Nana's head jerks up for just a second, eyes widened with surprise – and only then do I realise what I just said. Oh, no, no, no-
"Uh, as a friend, obviously!" Just a friend, yes, yes, yes. And I thought I'd drilled that into my head a long time ago.
"Yeah, I know," she laughs, seeming to play it off. Her wide smile is plastered all over her face again.
It isn't as if it's uncommon for Nana to say that kind of sweet thing to me. She said it all the time when we were little, so I guess the habit's just stuck with her, right? Yeah. I just felt the obligation to return it. It isn't like I don't love her anyway. I do, but if I declare in front of the world's leering gaze, they'll tell me it's more than it actually is.
"Love" is such a weird word. It means a lot of things at once, yet what it means depends on who, what, why, how...so many possibilities, huh. It's a puzzle of my own I've tried to solve for an incredibly long time; for years, I've been missing the final pieces. A mountain of my own that I don't think I can scale myself. When you tell someone you love them, what do you mean? What kind of love is it? What of it when you anticipate their response? Why is it such a scary thing? Love hurts, but it comforts too. Is it some kind of two-faced demon that possesses us all?
"I think we've had enough of a break," Nana points out, observing the faint sun's position in the sky. "We should be able to get to Icicle Mountain before nightfall if we leave now."
I blink for a moment, bringing myself back out from the depths of my thoughts. "Uh, yeah."
"Let's go."
So we set off once again, as the same friends we were before. Nothing more and nothing less.