The insistent buzzing of the cell phone brought Taki Tachibana out of sleep. At first, he resisted opening his eyes until he could no longer bear the sound. He reached out a hand and clumsily found the phone and silenced it.
"One more minute," he thought, his eyes still closed.
But suddenly, a girl's face appeared in his mind, as if she was fading away in a dream.
"Mitsuha!" said Taki aloud, opening his eyes and shaking off the drowsiness he still had left.
And there she was. Her face was smiling at him, looking up at him with a somewhat mischievous smile.
Taki could only gawk at the face of the woman he loved, happy that it was the first thing he could see in the morning...
Then, the image of the digital portrait holder began to blur with a sophisticated fading effect, and changed to another image where he and Mitsuha were smiling at Taki's camera, who was taking the selfie.
"No!" he cried in annoyance at the device for the inappropriateness of the change. He would have preferred to keep looking at Mitsuha's face in the previous photo.
Already sleep deprived, and somewhat frustrated, Taki sat up in bed and picked up his cell phone.
It was 7:03 a.m. on Thursday, April 14, 2022.
Taki operated the device and unlocked it. He went straight to the messaging app, and searched for Mitsuha's contact. He looked at the last connection time, and it showed that it was at 21:40 the previous day.
"She must still be sleeping," he thought.
He closed his eyes and imagined her for a few seconds in her pajamas. Somehow, the memories of the teenage Mitsuha in her pajamas that he saw in a mirror in Itomori years ago when he was waking up inside Mitsuha's body, and the recent image of the grown-up Mitsuha he had woken up with just last Saturday, mingled in his mind in a somewhat confused way, as if they were competing to be the dominant image.
He opened his eyes somewhat confused, and when he thought about it for a while, he felt that he actually preferred the Mitsuha of today. The flesh-and-blood woman that after so many years he had finally been able to meet.
He looked at his phone again, and started texting her.
«I woke up today thinking about you. And I opened my eyes seeing your face. Thank you for giving me that picture frame. But now I miss you more»
Taki pressed the send button, and left the phone on his bed. He stood up groggily and began to stretch while giving a long yawn, which was abruptly interrupted when the phone rang alerting him that he had received a message. He pounced on the phone and opened the messaging app again.
«I miss you already too» Mitsuha had written, followed by a sticker of a small blushing hedgehog.
Taki smiled, and without much thought, wrote a reply.
«But I'd like to see you more like when I woke up last Saturday»
And pressed send.
A second later, he was regretting his stupid outburst of sincerity. Had he been too brazen? He felt himself paling, and watched in anguish as the phone indicated under Mitsuha's name the indication of...
'Writing...'
Then the information message disappeared; then the indication appeared again; then it disappeared again...
Taki began to imagine Mitsuha being angry at his bold comment...; the thought of her being angry at him made him sick to his stomach. He was about to start looking for Mitsuha's contact to call her back to apologize when a new message from Mitsuha popped up:
«Me too». And a second later a sticker of a hedgehog hugging a heart.
Taki collapsed on his bed, relieved. He felt the blood circulate through his body again. Without moving from that position, he sent one last message.
«I'm going to the job interview Tesshi got me today. Then I'll be free, see you in the afternoon?»
No more than ten seconds passed before receiving Mitsuha's response.
«Pick me up at the office. I'm going to count the hours to see you»
«Me too. Don't forget me» wrote Taki.
«Never again» wrote Mitsuha. And many hearts.
Taki dropped his arms to his side, and stared at the ceiling of his room. He felt so good that he didn't know how to explain to himself how he had been able to endure his life until before last weekend. He closed his eyes and thought of Mitsuha again. Today he wanted to take her somewhere special. Today would be a great day, one more of the best week he had had in many years.
Next Chapter 10: "Who is him?". To be published on September 1st, 2023
AUTHOR NOTES: if you have come with me to this point of the story, you'd have notice that this Chapter 9 is a very short chapter, closing the first arc of the Itomori story (Chapters 1 to 8), but it is also a jump start to the second arc of "Echoes". From now on, Taki and Mitsuha's endeavors will take the stage again.
As you also should have noticed, the first 8 chapters can be read as a standalone story. But this work is a sequel of a previous fic: "Rediscovering the Future". This chapter 9, and Chapter 10 and all next to come will heavily rely on the events narrated in that previous fic; if you have not read it before, I beg you to stop here, read "Rediscovering", and just then come back here to continue reading this story.
Please let me know in your comments if you have enjoyed this story so far, especially the events of the "Mayugorô's Great Fire", a story that as far as I know no other fanfic writer (or even canon material) had ever addressed, so it is a novel material that I hope can inspire and expand the Kimi no Na wa universe even more.
Thank you for read it!
KralizecCL. August 1st, 2023.