See now there's very little I would change about Oregairu volume 7 and very little to include from volume 7.5. Forgive me but I'm really going to have to skip the whole thing. If you're on AO3 you can find a link here. If you're on fanfiction I suggest you google it and read it. It's good. I just don't have any changes to make to it to make the ot3 work.

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I fiddled with the watch on my wrist. It was one of those kinetic powered things. It bled a little kinetic energy off me every time I swung my arm and used that to power it. My father had gotten it for me for one birthday or christmas or another. It was a nice silvery instrument. I rather liked its brutish nature.

"So where were we?" My therapist Torgachi asked.

"The Fermi-paradox. Or if you prefer the Fermi-Hart conjecture. It began with the notion of Von Neumann probes being sent out to colonize the galaxy. In the 1950s we lived under constant threat of nuclear war and had yet to land on the moon. Fermi himself worked on the Manhattan project. So it wasn't that big of a mystery of why we didn't see life in the galaxy or any of its neighbors. Life may get complicated but inevitably destroys itself and is locked into its home planet."

"But that didn't happen. It hasn't happened with us and we have probes all over the solar system these days."

"Correct. And that only sharpens the Fermi paradox. Life may not be doomed and it does appear possible to colonize the stars. Especially if we get a handful more technologies. Self replicating probes which appear all over nature. Controlled nuclear fusion to power our ships, especially if it's more efficient than that of a star."

"Why?"

"Ain't that the kicker? Technologies like that only make colonizing the stars easier."

"What about threats like AI?" She asked.

"You mean besides the internet?" I confirmed. She nodded. "Well AI doesn't only wipe us out. It replaces us with a being more capable of colonizing the stars. Unless light lag is just too painful. In which case it could still go out and gather up all those materials into a birch planet. A planet with the mass of a galaxy. Not burdened by the speed of light and light lag. Essentially every burning star right now does so to emptiness. It's like a quadrillion burning libraries. It's wasteful."

"I thought our universe was fine tuned for life? By god or multiverse theory or whatever."

"A couple of points here." I started. "If the universe were fine tuned for life then life should have begun at the dawn of time and continued practically everywhere. This is not the case. Second I don't like people taking for a given that the fundamental constants of this universe are plucked from a hat, whether that's by divine fiat or random chance. For example, it is difficult to imagine a universe where pi doesn't correspond the diameter of a circle to its circumference. It may be so that these constants are random or divinely chosen, however it is also possible that these things are related. The fundamental proposition of Yang-Mills theory is that physics is an emergent property of geometry. Third this problem wasn't what the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics was original designed to handle. Instead it handled problems like Schrodinger's cat paradox. One universe alive and another universe dead. This is in opposition to the Copenhagen interpretation or super determinism which are other, mutually exclusive, interpretations of quantum mechanics."

"I see," she nodded.

"Do you?" I had to wonder.

"I think so. You're really smart Hikigaya Hachiman. Most people don't get this kind of stuff."

"I don't really get it. I'm a petty calculator. I don't understand things like spin."

"Spin?"

"Fundamental particles have angular momentum like everything else. Point particles spin. Black holes spin. I don't truly understand."

"Give it time. You're still so young."

"I plan to stay young."

"Oh don't give me that. If you were going to kill yourself you would have done it by now."

"Compelling but probably not the way you want it to be. Besides I'm waiting for my sister to be in a good place. Then I'll head out."

"Why?"

"I'm in a lot of pain? Disorientation? Confusion? It hurts. It hurts not knowing the world the way everyone else does."

"But you know so much!"

"But not about the things that really matter. I look at my sister and see a tentacle. I look at myself and see a tentacle."

"You really think the internet is like that?"

"I'm a piece of this thing and I'm not sure how deep into me it runs. Machine learning programs, neural networks, hard code, other people. These are what the internet is made out of. All of them are alive except maybe hard code but that's an augmenting feature. Like using a calculator or abacus."

"Well what can we do about it?"

"We can kill ourselves. We can not play."

"Please don't do that."

"Whatever. You would say that," I dismissed.

"I don't say that just because I'm your therapist. You have a lot to offer the world."

"But you do say in part because you're my therapist. Even if killing myself were the sensible option you'd rally against it."

"So what else can we do?"

"I don't know. I don't really want to live without the internet. That sounds miserable. It'd be almost painful. The way light lag would be painful for a gestalt consciousness."

"Gestalt consciousness?"

"A hive mind. Like us with the internet or bees or ants. I think there's even a rodent species that has a queen and lives eusocially."

"We don't reproduce that way though."

"No. We have sillier reproduction conventions. Humans have so many things they do just to get laid. Art, music, poetry, even mathematics."

"That's not why you do those things though."

"No, I do those things because I want to live and understand. I seek comprehension."

"Of what?"

"Yeah. That's a good point," I agreed.

"I wasn't even making a point!" She protested.

"Well you made it anyway," I chuckled darkly. She gave me a sour look at that.

"What can we do when we're consumed by these kinds of thoughts?" She pressed.

"Listen to music. Find distractions. Do some math and attempt to comprehend."

"What do we do when we can't 'comprehend'?"

"We suffer," I answered naturally. "Naturally." I continued.

"That can't be the only way. What about thought diversion and thought challenging?"

"What about what now?" I asked.

"We can challenge our own thoughts and come away with something new. It's a coping strategy."

"Oh, like dialectics."

"Dialectics?"

"It's continental philosophy," I explained. "First you have a thesis. A set of ways of thinking about the world. Then arises the antithesis. The negation. And finally you're left with the synthesis. A new way of thinking about the world which has the best parts of the thesis and the antithesis. It's often attributed to Hegel but that's wrong. He never used the words 'thesis', 'antithesis', or 'synthesis' in Phenomenology of Spirit. Though he does describe a similar process, it has become known as the Hegelian Dialectic."

"Yes. I suppose. It's easy to forget how much you know Hachiman."

"I read a lot," I shrugged. I was currently working my way through Lolita. There were parts of the book that made this jurist literally gag.

"I want you to try challenging your thoughts more. Especially about the internet and other people. Not everyone is out to get you or trick you."

"Unless they are," I pointed out.

"But they aren't. People are preoccupied with themselves."

"Solipsism. The loneliest philosophy." I grinned. It rather fit.

"I want you to work on this and we'll pick up there next time."

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I often told little lies. Little half truths. There are many kinds of lies. There are lies to parents, as much as they need to know, there are lies to children, as much as they could handle. But the worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. 'I can do it.' 'If we just make it to Friday.' 'I can make it to the end of the school year.' It all did depend, I suppose, on what one was willing to give up to accomplish these things. I'd give up my soul for the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis and hyperreality. It probably wasn't a good sign that I was thinking that way, but I was.

So when the devil came into my ear and started promising me esoteric knowledge I took it up on its offer. Now I was going to hell. And the worst part was that it was my own fault. I didn't even get hyperreality out of it. I got this weird thought experiment basilisk. The devil had thrown a basilisk so intense at me that it woke god up and now I was going to hell. That's what this nightmare was.

What an unpleasant morning.

The clear weather skies were accompanied with a chilly wind that softly shook the windows. In the room was a relaxing space that invited napping temptations. Really, what an unpleasant morning. It was the Monday after getting back from the field trip that finished up the break.

Mondays gave preemptive rise to feelings of melancholy. After I forced my sluggish body out of bed, I squirmed my way towards the washroom. I looked at the mirror with half-awake eyes. Reflected every time was me. …Hmph, the same as always. Indeed, I was as unchanging as ever to the point that it was sort of anti-climactic. Everything reflected in the mirror compromised the basic fundamentals of what made me: the feeling of not wanting to go to school, the feeling of wanting to just sit around all day and do nothing, and the feeling of oncoming homesickness moments after I leave the house.

But there was something different.

My parents had left early for work to avoid the commuting rush. The upcoming seasons were prime time for when people would barely make it on time to work or when people took late hours since it was unnecessarily crowded. As expected, people were still weak to the winter mornings even after becoming an adult. After all, anyone would want to stay cooped up in their futon until the very last second. Even so, they all had a reason why they needed to continue working. There was little doubt there were people who acted based on proactive reasons.

But, on the flip side, there were people who only acted that way because society had demanded that of them. To avoid being the odd one out, they went with the flow but at the same time, making sure it was a natural transition.

In short, people acted only when there was something to gain and nothing to lose.

My face that was reflected by the mirror was clearly as normal as any other person. But my eyes that stared directly back at me wasn't by all means ordinary; the rottenness in the eyes were nothing short of being at the pinnacle of all high schools throughout. But that was what made it me. That was what made it Hikigaya Hachiman. Satisfied with my unchanging self, I left the washroom.

When I entered the living room, my sister Komachi was standing in the kitchen. She took a daunting pose as she stood in front of the teapot. Since my parents had finished their breakfast early, the menu was already set to be Japanese. Once Komachi brought out the tea, everything was ready.

The water began boiling as soon as I pulled out the chair. Komachi poured the water into the teapot and quickly raised her head.

"Ah, morning Big Brother."

"Yep. Morning." We exchanged our morning greetings. After, Komachi spoke with an impressed tone.

"…You seem kinda wide awake today." I titled my head when she said that.

Was I normally that bad of a morning person? Wait, no, on second thought, of course I'd be weak in the morning. My blood pressure wasn't low by all means but you probably couldn't say the same for my motivation. That said, Komachi wasn't always entirely wrong when she pointed something out to me. But true enough, I really was fully awake today.

"…Aah, well, the water was pretty cold when I washed my face earlier." I blurted out the first thing that came to mind as my reason and Komachi looked at me dubiously.

"Uh huh… I'm pretty sure there's nothing different with the water though."

"It got pretty cold all of a sudden, didn't it? Anyway, hurry up and let's eat so we can go to school."

"Ah, okay." She carried the tea kettle over to the dining table while making a lot of stepping noises with her slippers on. It seems that my family did not pick Ayataka as the brand of tea to be in the tea kettle.

After we sat in our seats, we clapped our hands and gave thanks for our food in sync.

During the winter season, the Hikigaya household Japanese meals consisted of primarily warm meals and miso soup. The miso soup's purpose was to warm up your body before you head out.

Overflowing love from mom, I suppose. I blew at my miso soup to cool it down since I was the owner of the sensitivity of a cat's tongue. When I looked at Komachi who was doing the same thing, our eyes met. Komachi placed her bowl on the table gently and slowly spoke up.

"…Hey."

"Hm?" I responded and gave her a glance that suggested her to continue.

When I did, Komachi asked me as if she was probing something. "Did something happen?"

"Nothing at all… Instead, think about this. Absolutely nothing happened in this life of mine. They say that an evil may sometimes turn out to be a blessing in disguise. So, on that assumption, it might be better for something to happen after all. Like, if you contracted some chronic disease, you'll end up going to the hospital often but on the contrary, you'll end up being healthy. In that sense, if nothing happened then that means there might possibly be a storm brewing up soon." I spat those words in one breath only to have Komachi blink at me in surprise.

"What's wrong, Big Brother?" Completely normal. A completely normal reaction. She asked without the slightest hint of being affected. I mean, everything I said was completely stupid, but aren't you going to say something about it? I really had to rack my brain to come up with all that too… As expected, Monday completely threw me off.

"Well, you know… Basically, nothing happened." I carried the sunny side eggs up to my mouth with a quick motion. But still, were sunny-side eggs more of a Western dish or a Japanese dish? After hearing my reply, Komachi answered indifferently. Komachi pushed her tray aside to learn forward and peered into my face.

"Heey, did you know?"

"What's this now?"

Or maybe she was a sheltered cat which meant she was a sheltered princess.

As I convinced myself, Komachi let out a short sigh. "Big Brother, normally you say the most pointless things, but when something's wrong, you actually say things that are even more pointless than the usual…"

"Aah, right…" Harsh critic as always. Being told what you said was pointless makes it hard to respond. Well, it was true that I was only saying pointless things anyway. But still, analyzing me in fine detail from my speech and conduct, was she some sort of psychological investigator or something? What's with that profiling?

"You know…" Komachi poked at her salad with her chopsticks and looked like she was going to say something only to be stopped by her hesitation. She rolled around a nearby tomato on her dish. I had an idea of what words were lodged in her throat likely thanks to our bond as siblings. Or maybe because I ended up realizing the same thing she did. Komachi gently put down her chopsticks and asked about me.

"Did… something happen with Yui-san and Yukino-san?" I continued to eat in silence while listening to her. I was taught to not talk while eating after all. I took my time swallowing my food. After that, along with various feelings, I gulped down my miso soup.

"…Did they say something?"

"Nope." When I asked her, Komachi shook her head slightly. "They're not the type to talk about those things and I'm sure you know this too, right?" When she brought that up, I had nothing to say.

Whether it was Yukinoshita or Yuigahama, while they were both pretty critical about the most worthless things, they definitely wouldn't blabber about worthless things to another person's sister.

"I just thought something was going on." Komachi spoke and eyed my reaction. Living together for a long time meant that there would be things that the both of us would notice about each other, be it good things or bad things.

But there were things you didn't want noticed either. "I see." After I answered her with empty words, my eyes hovered towards the clock on the wall. I picked up my chopsticks and continued eating. In contrast, Komachi was taking it slow.

"You should chew your food carefully. Anyway," Komachi looked intent on continuing the conversation. It seems she predicted I was going to cut the conversation short. Her stare looked into the day after tomorrow and she looked like she suddenly remembered something. "Remember something like that happened before?"

"Really now?" As I said that, I became completely aware of what she was talking about. What she was alluding to was the incident in June. Speaking of which, I get the feeling Komachi did the same thing back then; pointing something out to me. Oh. I haven't changed at all. That's me for you. Not even the slightest growth or change, nothing at all.

Nevertheless, Komachi gripped her teacup seemingly to warm up her hands. She was doing that even though there wasn't a tea stalk floating atop; that, I could see clearly. "…But, I think it might be a bit different than last time."

"Well, of course. People change day to day after all. Even cells get replaced all the time. Given five or seven years, people will change, probably. So basically, you know, humans are..."

"Okay, okay." Komachi smiled in resignation and tried to play it off. After she let go of her teacup, she put her hands on her lap.

"...So, what did you do?"

"Why are you asking as if I was the one who did something?"

I responded back, but Komachi continued to look at me in silence. That expression told me that she wouldn't settle for anything stupid coming from me. I scratched at my head quickly and averted my eyes. "…Nothing happened. There was nothing at all in the first place."

Komachi sighed. "Even if Big Brother isn't aware of it, there's always the possibility that you did something. Okay fine… try talking about something one by one."

"So you say…" I thought for a little bit. Although it's been a few days since I got back from Kyoto, I did do my fair share of thinking. I asked myself whether there was something wrong with my actions or whether there was a problem with something I did. I most certainly did reflect on my actions. But regardless, the only thing that came to mind was a solution that was the most effective that paved way for a conclusion that was guaranteed to be safe. Given the limited options we had available, I thought the end result was more than enough. The worst possible situation was avoided and we even managed to clear another request at the same time. As for whether the actual process was something to be praised or not, that was up for debate but ultimately, we had reached a conclusion. But, there wasn't a need to explain in detail of all those things to Komachi.

As long as I was aware of it, that was enough. "No, never mind, it's nothing." I shrugged it off. From there, I signaled that that was the end of this conversation and proceeded to wolf down my food. Despite that, Komachi continued to face me.

"Oh you. So, what happened?" Komachi tilted her head dubiously, rested her chin on her hands, and jokingly laughed. As cute as the posture she was in, there was a strong sense of purpose behind it. It was a stance that wouldn't allow the conversation to end on a vague note.

But, at that point, it was starting to get a little grating. Normally, I wouldn't get irritated at this level of nosiness from Komachi. Typically, I'd laugh it off and go with the flow and just say something random only to confuse her. But if we're talking about normally, then Komachi wouldn't be this obstinate about her business.

When I tried to act like I always did with Komachi, consciously trying to enact how I should be, I grew aggravated. "...You're being annoying. Enough already."

"..."

My words unintentionally sounded rough to Komachi's surprise. However, she was only shocked for a split second and her shoulders started to shake. She suddenly opened her eyes wide and yelled out in a loud voice. "…W-What's with that tone of yours!?"

"I don't sound any different than usual. Truth of the matter, you really were being annoying." These words definitely weren't the ones that I wanted to say. I definitely wanted to just play it off. But once the words came out, I couldn't take them back. No matter when and where, you couldn't take anything back. Komachi narrowed her eyes and glared at me.

Eventually, she dropped her eyes to the table. "…Hmph, okay. Fine, I won't ask about it anymore."

"Please do." After that, there were no more further conversations at the dining table. We both continued to eat in silence and the time that passed slowly felt like it was frozen. During that time, Komachi quickly gulped down her miso soup and stood up. She stacked her dishes and plates in a hurry and carried them to the sink. She then walked briskly to the door and stopped. Without looking at me, she spoke quickly. "I'll be going first. Make sure to lock the door."

"Okay." I gave her a short answer and Komachi slammed the door closed.

In that moment, I could hear a small voice. "…Something did happen." Left alone in the living room, I grabbed my tea. The tea already lost its warmth and when I sipped it, it was lukewarm. It's been a few years since I've seen Komachi act like that. It was too late but I wonder if I got her mad…

… I got worried. Komachi doesn't get angry very often. But when she does, she was the type to stay angry for a while. In addition to that, she was a girl right in the middle of puberty. When she comes home, I don't know what kind of face she'll make.

Even though she's my actual sister, I don't know.

It truly was difficult to get along with other people.

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-WG