- Chapter 13: My Eulogy -

Haruhi was having a real good time helping Aunt Kanae with her book now. Now that they had down all the notes on the people, they could cover the most exciting part, the adventures. Having Yui on hand to back up the most unbelievable parts and throw in details she forgot to mention made it all the more fun, like a storytelling jam.

Eventually, though, Little Sis finished with her nap and wanted to do something fun. They all congregated around the sofa to discuss plans.

"Saturday's always a good day for shopping," Aunt Kanae offered. "We can drive downtown; there's lots of neat little shops around there."

"That sounds good!" Little Sis said brightly.

"I'm up for that," Yui said.

Kyon looked strangely uneasy, as if he had something on his mind. Well, okay, if he looks that way he probably does have something on his mind. Kyon isn't smart, but he does plenty of thinking.

At last he shrugged. "If everyone else wants to go, I'm fine with coming along. My wallet's a little threadbare, but I don't mind window shopping."

His wallet?! That's what that idiot is worried about? Not that it mattered whether or not he had any concerns about this particular outing, but he could be so disappointing.

It was time to spring her move. "Eh, I'm not in the mood for it right now. You guys go on and have fun. I'll just hang out here."

The last few times she'd done this, there had been no protest, only vaguely saddened acceptance. But then, the last few times she'd visited her aunt, her only companions were her mother and Kanae herself.

"Oh, come on, Suzumiya, don't tease us," Yui objected. "You know it won't be as fun without you."

Kanae shook her head. "Honey, why are you pulling this loner stuff again now? I thought you were all over that. Come on and have fun with me and your friends."

"Come – with – us! Come – with – us!" Little Sis sang, hopping to the rhythm.

Kyon alone kept quiet, but she could tell from the look in his eyes that he wanted her along too.

Haruhi turned her head from them. "If you guys drag me along, I'm just going to be bored the whole time. That won't be fun for anyone."

"Why are you so determined to be bored?" Yui demanded. "That's not like you at all."

"That's ridiculous. Any person can be not in the mood for something sometimes. That's what separates us from the animals. Right now, I'm in the mood for hanging out around here."

"Well, honey, if that's what you want, we'd be happy to hang out here with you," Kanae said.

Urgh. This is not going as planned. "No, you guys should enjoy yourselves doing what you want. Don't worry about me."

Little Sis was still doing her "Come with us" song, varying the melody a bit and throwing in a "Have some fun" verse, and Kanae was opening her mouth for further objection, when Kyon chimed in, "Could we all please not argue the whole afternoon? This is giving me a headache. We all know Haruhi is going to do what she wants in the end, so why don't you guys enjoy your shopping trip like she says, and I'll stay here to keep her company?"

Haruhi blinked in surprise. ...Yeeessss! He gets it!

She repressed her enthusiasm as she said, "Mmm, yeah, that works. Kyon wasn't that excited to go, so he's not missing out the way you guys would be."

"That's not fair, Suzumiya," Yui said, folding her arms. "Bad enough that you're not coming with us, but you're stealing Kyon from us, too?"

Kanae grimaced. "I don't think that's such an appropriate arrangement, anyway... You alone in the house with a teenaged boy."

Haruhi gave that remark an eye roll. "Come on, auntie. You know that at home I have the run of the house for a couple hours every day, so if I wanted to do that kind of stuff, I could have done it a thousand times by now. Besides, Kyon is a completely trustworthy, responsible person."

"Thank you," Kyon said.

"And though he's not very smart, he's smart enough to know that if he tries to put any moves on me while you're gone, he'll be going home in a body bag!"

Kyon didn't appreciate that dictate very much, or perhaps it was the comment on his intelligence that rankled him (but surely he had to realize that he wasn't very smart?), and Kanae had to get in a last few objections, but from that point on the debate was effectively settled. The three shoppers bid their goodbyes and left her and Kyon to themselves.

"Alright." Haruhi rubbed her hands together, brimming with eagerness. "Let's get to it. Her computer is the obvious place to start – maybe too obvious, but I want to save the attic for last."

Kyon held his head at a slight tilt, like a framed picture that hadn't been straightened out after an earthquake. "That sounds like a great plan, but could you explain it to me again, and this time start on page 1 instead of page 10?"

She snorted. "It's not complicated. If you want important secret information, you look in places where someone would hide their secrets. Now, come on!" She started marching to the den, where the computer was.

Only to be halted by a gentle but unyielding resistance running from the front of her shoulders down to her waist as her sweatshirt caught on something. She turned her head to look behind her, though she already knew that that something was Kyon's hand, maintaining a firm grip on her sweatshirt's hood.

He sighed, as if already resigned to not enjoying the few hours they had with the house to themselves. "Why do you want to go snooping through your aunt's things?"

She couldn't hide the keen disappointment she felt. Not that she even wanted to, really. "I thought you understood," she murmured, her eyes cast to the floor. "I thought you knew how much fun it is to look through someone's house when they're not around."

He sighed again. "I thought you at least had a halfway decent motive. You're telling me this is something you do for fun?"

"You would too, if you'd ever tried it. Shiro and I have a great time when his parents leave me to babysit him."

"Babysit? I thought you helped him study?"

"Well, if I come over to help him study, and his parents want to go out to dinner, we just kill two birds with one stone. Three birds, really, because Shiro and I get to root through their secret stuff while they're gone. Sometimes we find stuff that inspires him, and we start sketching out these crazy hypotheses and mathematical proofs together." She grinned, wishing for a moment that she had Shiro with her right now, but then she remembered Kyon's grip on her hood and got serious. "Anyway, it's not just for fun this time. Somehow Aunt Kanae managed to live through her whole cancer ordeal without exploding from anxiety over the likelihood of dying. I want to know how, because maybe what worked for her will work for us."

"Right, I'm with you that far. But why don't you just ask her? You two have been talking to each other for hours about that book -"

"She's not telling me what I need to know! And I have to know more than she's willing to just tell me, anyway. I need to see the secret thoughts that she won't share with anyone, the kind of stuff you write in a diary."

"What about her right to privacy? What about the fact that she trusted you, and you're plotting right away to betray that trust?"

"I need to know." She glared at Kyon, silently defying him to hold onto her hood for just five more seconds. "Our continued existence is on the line here, Kyon!"

He let go, but she could tell from the easy way he did it that he wasn't intimidated by her; he just understood what she wanted. For some reason, that made her want to hide her face from embarrassment.

"I'll help you," he said. "But only so long as you don't go too far. We need to try to respect your aunt's privacy too."

"Fine," she huffed, and resumed her route to the den. But after a moment, a smile came over her. Kyon was with her after all.

The den had her aunt's usual mess of papers, notepads, and junk everywhere. She pushed them aside and sat down at the computer.

"Aunt Kanae's pretty old-fashioned in some ways, but if she's planning to get this book published, she has to be transferring her notes to computer at some point," she explained. "Of course, something worthwhile might not be transferred over yet, or ever, so you dig through those notebooks while I work on this." She logged in.

"Sure, toss me all the grunt work," Kyon grumbled, picking up a notebook. "...Hey. How did you know her password?"

"It wasn't hard to guess. Haruhi123." She glanced back at him. "I can already guess what you have to say to that, so keep it to yourself."

"Whatever."

She checked the documents and immediately found the one for Kanae's book, unimaginatively titled "Book". She started skimming through it.

"Hey, Haruhi."

"What?"

"I didn't elect to stay here just to keep you company. There are a couple things I need to talk to you about." He took a breath. "Are you serious about this Christianity thing?"

"What thing? Are you seriously telling me that it bothers you that I wear a cross necklace?"

"Well... yeah. Ordinarily I wouldn't think anything of it, but after you pulled that whole nun routine with Miss Asahina, well, it's starting to look like a pattern."

"So what if it is? Have you got a problem with Christians?"

"Well, no. But if you were to become Christian... Agh, how do I put this..." Hmm. So far this is all stuff about Kanae's childhood. I thought she would want to start right off with the cancer. "...It would make things different."

"What, like you wouldn't want to talk to me anymore?"

"Don't be ridiculous. It would just make things different. And it wouldn't just be you that would change."

"Like what?"

"Well... You inspire people. A lot of other people we know might become Christian if you did."

"Hmmph. I inspire people, but I don't inspire imitators! No one else can be like me, and they know it. What I inspire is for people to follow their own path."

"Yeah, their own path. Which just happens to follow right behind yours."

"Idiot. Anyway, it's not like I believe in everything Christianity teaches, or even half of it. But, there has to be heaven and hell, don't you think?"

He didn't answer right away. "...What do you mean, 'has to be'? The way you said that..."

"Well, because there are people who really believe in that, right? I mean, I'm sure plenty of Christians just say they believe in it because they want it to be true, just wish fulfillment, like you said. But at least a few of them must really believe, with all their hearts, that Heaven and Hell are just as real as any place on Earth, and who have worked really hard doing good things and gone through incredible suffering in hopes that they'll get into Heaven. If no one else, then at least the Apostles and the saints, right?"

"I guess that stands to reason," he admitted.

"Well, then if there is no Heaven, that means that after everything they went through, when they die they just get a big goose egg, just eternal death instead of the eternal life they were hoping for and believing in." In spite of her efforts, she found herself getting choked up. "That's not fair!"

She thought Kyon might share her sympathy for the Christians. But he just sighed, "The world isn't fair."

"Well, it should be!"

"Well, it's not," he repeated. "And this isn't like when you were frustrated that there were no interesting clubs at North High, so you formed one of your own. Some things shouldn't be messed with."

"What are you saying? You admit it's not fair, but then you say we shouldn't change it – that's completely contradictory!"

She could hear him gripping the notebooks so hard that the paper crinkled. "Look, yes, in an absolute sense it should be changed and everybody should get whatever afterlife they've earned. But if we were to play God and try to fix it, we would screw it up, because we wouldn't know what we're doing. Everyone who's read a little science fiction knows that."

"Hmmph." She turned her focus back to the computer. "Well, who's to say it needs to be changed, anyway? Maybe the world already is fair, meaning there is a Heaven. And maybe – Hey. What's this?"

"What's up?" He came over to get a look over her shoulder.

"Well, I wasn't finding anything really useful in her book; she hasn't gotten very far yet, which is actually good, because it means she'll have more space to write about us. So I thought I'd just browse through her documents, and I saw this."

She hovered the mouse cursor over a file titled "Eulogy".

"Did your aunt do the eulogy for any of your relatives?" Kyon asked.

"Pretty much the only death we've had in my family is my great uncle, and my grandpa did the eulogy for that one. Kyon, I'm getting a bad feeling about this."

"Don't jump to conclusions. It could be just about anything. Maybe your aunt wrote a short story for fun."

"Maybe." She could feel her heart racing. This could be nothing. It could also be exactly what she was looking for: her aunt's own secret key to victory over death. But it could also be something about Aunt Kanae that she really didn't want to know. Something that, once she read it, she would forever regret reading.

"You should probably ask your aunt about it before you read it, rather than violate her privacy," Kyon suggested.

If Kyon weren't there, Haruhi wasn't sure what she would have done. Maybe she would have done just as he said, asked Aunt Kanae about it, even knowing that her answer could well be a lie, rather than face the potential terror of its contents all alone.

But Kyon was there. And because Kyon was there, there was no question of what she would do: man the guns and go full speed ahead.

She double-clicked the file. The document took a very frustrating two seconds to open, allowing her to read the contents:

My Eulogy

"I want to say a few words about a woman who I knew very well and who is now gone forever. Like me, her name was Kanae Suzumiya. She in fact occupied every part of the life I have stepped into, and I will miss her dearly, but I must also let go of her and move on if I am to live.

"She was, above all, a woman who lived free from fear, a woman who saw an endless supply of tomorrows with nothing in them to chain her, nothing to hold back her creativity.

"I will miss her restless spirit, her constant willingness to try new things. If ever an idea was suggested to her, be it riding a horse, trying a new food, visiting a country where she didn't speak the language, or even scamming her ex-boyfriend with some help from cheap booze, some fake blood, and a friend who was willing to pretend to be a Korean prostitute, she would give it a go."

"I guess immoral, borderline illegal scheming runs in the family," Kyon remarked.

"What are you talking about?"

"Uh, the bit with the fake blood, and other TMI things..."

"What's that got to do with my family? Just get over the fact that my aunt has done some cool things that are too exciting for you to try."

"Instead of 'cool' and 'exciting', I suggest you use 'malicious' and 'stupid'."

She ignored that and kept reading:

"I admire her courage in doing those things, and fondly remember the joy she took in them. But she took things too far. Instead of being just brave, she was reckless. When she had a niece, she almost didn't realize it. She just continued her old life of senseless hijinks, not sparing a thought for how it might affect the people she cares about. Her friends tried telling her that her behavior needed to change, but she ignored them.

"Fortunately, her niece is a persistent girl, who could not be ignored for too long. And when she started to get to know Haruhi, that was the beginning of her dying. Because Haruhi was a girl that you couldn't help but enjoy yourself with, and when you enjoyed yourself with her, you started to care about her, and when you started to care about her, you started to worry about her. And Kanae Suzumiya lived by only worrying about herself.

"But what really killed her was the cancer diagnosis. When she heard those words from the doctor, I think a part of her knew that it was over for her. Many people survive those stubborn festering growths, the punishing radiation treatments, the constant knowing that whether or not you will meet death by the end of the year is up in the air, but she never had a chance. She had always lived one way, COULD only live one way, and that was by thinking that tomorrow would never come. And with cancer, everything told her that tomorrow was coming. Tomorrow was coming, so if you wanted to do something, you needed to do it TODAY.

"The old Kanae Suzumiya just couldn't live like that. So she died.

"In her place emerged a woman who understood that it's good to be brave, but that you have to take care of yourself, because there are people who will miss you when you're gone. The old Kanae lived life like an adventure, but what she missed out on was living life to its fullest. She didn't know how precious each day was, because she didn't know that her days are in limited supply. She didn't know how much fun could be had in a day's outing, because she didn't appreciate that her friends could enjoy it in ways that she didn't. To her they were always little more than decoration.

"I'll miss her blissful ignorance. But I'll never forget that what I have is far more precious."

After she finished reading the file, for a moment Haruhi just sat there, silent.

"Okay, there you are," Kyon said. "You've just read your aunt's personal diary about how cancer changed her. Maximal privacy violation. Are we done now?"

Haruhi closed the file.

Then she right-clicked on it, and selected "delete".

"Hey!" Kyon grabbed her arm as she moved the pointer to confirm the deletion. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Ack! Stupid Kyon, what does it look like? I'm eradicating this filthy litany of defeatism and death from the face of the Earth!"

"Defeatism? Death? Did you even read one word of what your aunt wrote there? She's talking about how she moved on and started living better!"

"Yeah, by letting her old self die!"

"It's called change," he grunted, struggling so hard with her that it seemed like talking was an effort. "People do that sometimes."

"Well, I don't want them to! Not like this! Not when it's like losing a whole person and never getting them back!"

Haruhi stopped wrestling with Kyon like the classmates and friends they were and used one of the karate moves she knew for breaking holds from behind. She cracked her elbow into Kyon's jaw, making him spit out "Dammit!" and lose his hold. In a moment, she had clicked the deletion confirmation.

She released a sigh, not sure if it was more from relief or frustration at Kyon's interference. "It's not true, anyway," she said. "I mean, if I had an aunt who changed so much it was like she wasn't even the same person anymore, I'd have noticed. And I can't let her go framing the little changes she goes through in those terms. No good can come of morbidity like that."

"Dammit. What is wrong with you?"

"Huh? I just explained the -" She glanced over at Kyon and involuntarily gasped. He had blood flowing from his mouth, all over the hand that he had cupped to his jaw.

"Yeah, you made me bite my lip," he groaned.

"Well, you shouldn't have attacked me like that!"

"I didn't attack you; I was trying to stop you from committing destruction of personal property!"

"You and your stupid rules. Evil things need to be destroyed, even when they are personal property!"

"Okay, your rule is clearly much stupider than mine."

"Ugh, forget it. We need to take care of that before you bleed all over the floor."

She fetched her aunt's first aid kit and proceeded to sponge up his blood with gauze. Doing that made her feel better; the sight of him bleeding like that made her sick to the stomach.

"Okay, it looks like it's clotting properly. We'd better put on a bandage just in case, though."

He pushed her hand away. "I'd rather not have to talk with one of those things on my lip, if you don't mind. Anyway, thank you for cleaning up your own mess."

"Yeah... A-Anyway, I didn't mean to do it." She tossed the gauze and said, "Come on. I don't think we're going to find anything more here, so let's check her bedroom."

But Kyon was strongly of the opinion that their snooping had already taken an ugly turn, and that in light of that they should cut it as short as possible. She argued the point with him a bit, but the truth was she agreed that things had gone a bit wrong, though for different reasons; he seemed to be thinking of the destruction of Aunt Kanae's eulogy, whereas she was concerned solely with his bloody lip. If he was going to get that violent over these issues, then they should stop before he got hurt any more.

Why does he have to make such a big deal of these things, anyway? It's just a stupid piece of journal writing. Really not worth fighting over.

But they did compromise: They would search one last room, the attic. After all, it would be a shame to stop before they had done the most fun room to snoop in.

Aunt Kanae's attic was reached through a trap door in the ceiling. You had to simultaneously push up on the door and pull down on a string to unlatch it, so Haruhi needed to climb up on Kyon's shoulders to get it open. Actually, she could have just gotten the stepladder out of the closet and used that, but there was something great about climbing on top of Kyon. She felt so powerful with him holding her up.

"Got it," she grunted as the door popped open.

"You realize we wouldn't be able to use this method in the warmer months, right?" Kyon said. "Right now the only thing that's keeping this from being ruled a case of sexual harassment is your wearing long pants."

"Don't say such stupid things, just step back so I can let the stairs down." Idiot. Why does he have to ruin the mood like that?

The trapdoor folded down to release a sliding set of wooden stairs, which they climbed up into a cozy little space with barely enough room for them to crawl around on all fours without bumping their heads on the ceiling. A fact which Kyon discovered the hard way.

"Dammit," he muttered, rubbing his thumped noggin. "What is supposed to be so fun about this, exactly?"

"Are you serious? Just take a look around you! The concealed secret entrance, the crazy sloped ceiling like it was designed for dwarves or children to live in, the boxes of mysterious things, some of which haven't been touched in years or even decades... It's like something out of a fairy tale!"

"You forgot to mention the musty air. And coffins seem more like something out of a horror story than a fairy tale."

"Ugh, why do you have to be so morbid? Coffins are the last thing I need to hear about right now, you know?" She picked a box and opened it up. "Oooo. White Day chocolates."

"This is October. What makes you think they're for White Day?"

"For starters, they're all white." She tilted the box towards him so that he could see for himself. "Aunt Kanae doesn't like white chocolate. I guess when guys give any to her, she just sticks it up here with plans of using it for Christmas stocking stuffers. You can have some."

"It's probably stale."

"Suit yourself." She unwrapped a bar and munched on it. It was pretty good.

"I wouldn't have thought someone her age could get so many White Day chocolates," he admitted.

"They're probably not all from this year. She must have forgot about them this last Christmas."

"Definitely stale."

"Are you blind? I'm eating it right now and it's sweet and delicious, so obviously not stale."

She moved on to the next box, but out of the corner of her eye she noticed Kyon hesitate, and then pull a white chocolate out.

That made her smile. Seeing Kyon live a little always put her in a better mood.

They dug through mountains of old junk and incomprehensible paperwork and pulled out some old photo albums. Then they sat and flipped through them while munching on the White Day chocolates.

"Who's this?" Kyon asked, pointing to a wedding photo.

Haruhi frowned. "I think the girl in the kimono crossing her eyes is Kanae's friend Maetake, but I have no idea who the guy with the bright orange hair she's leapfrogging over is."

"You don't know your own family very well, I take it."

"They're not family! She's a friend of my father's sister, and he's probably just her boyfriend of the time. Statistically speaking, I probably have fewer degrees of separation from the prime minister."

He gave her a look like he was contemplating the idea of her having the prime minister's ear and found it terrifying.

She ignored it. "I'm more interested in who these people are," she said, tilting the photo album she was looking at towards him. It was full of fading black-and-whites.

If anything, he looked more lethargic than usual after seeing the photos. "Does it matter? You're never going to get to meet any of them."

"That's exactly why I'm interested. If the only people who remember them are the people who met them, then their memory is going to just fade away like these photos now that those people are growing old too." She pursed her lips. "Actually, most people's memory and legacy completely fades long before their photos do. That's pretty depressing, when you think about it."

"You could think of it more as a commentary on how miraculous technology is."

"Who cares about technology? What good are these photos to the people in them, to the people who took them, or to anyone else, if there's no one left who remembers who these people were?!"

"No good at all, I guess. Are you worrying that you'll be forgotten again?"

"No... I'm sure I'll be remembered... It's just, it's sad that not everyone will be remembered, you know?" She pointed to a photo. "And there. Look at her. Doesn't she seem like she would be a really interesting person?"

"Can you tell just by looking? I mean, I've always thought that just by looking at you, someone would think you were a normal high schooler."

"Hmmph. You just don't have a good sense for these things."

"I happen to have plenty of good sense. The difference is you -"

"No! You have no good sense at all!" She snapped the photo album shut, startling both of them. The emotion that she suddenly felt spilling out had been bubbling beneath the surface, through all this talk of eulogies and coffins and photographs of people now dead. Because as much as death in general bothered her, there was one particular death that bothered her far more than anything.

"You just... You just throw yourself into the jaws of death for no good reason at all!" she sputtered out. "Any time someone's in danger, you dive into the middle of it!"

He stared at her. "This has to be the seventieth time I've had to ask this since we've met, but what are you talking about? I've never done anything like that."

"Yeah? How about trying to fight three bullies at once to save Mikuru? Or stepping in the path of some sort of vaporization attack by an alien girl who was trying to kill me? Or taking a bullet for me on that subway ride?"

"I... Wait, an alien girl? Are you saying we've found aliens now?"

"Well, no, but... Urrgh! Anyway, the thing with the bullies definitely happened! And come to think of it, that time on the remote island, when I slipped off the cliff edge... I fell first, so I should have landed first. But when I woke up, I was on top of you!"

"So?"

"There's only one possible explanation." She leaned over and jabbed his forehead with her index finger. "You grabbed me mid-fall and twisted us around so that you'd take the brunt of the impact, didn't you?"

"That's your 'one possible explanation'? You've been watching too many action movies."

That would be a valid criticism if it weren't for the fact that, like I told Aunt Kanae, you're practically a real life action hero. "Of course you did. That's exactly your sort of thing, getting yourself hurt or killed, usually in some lame-brained attempt to help someone else. Do I even need to mention your whole coma?"

"That wasn't my fault."

"We're not playing the blame game here!"

"Then what are we doing?"

"I'm telling you that here and now, I want it to stop! I won't accept you getting yourself killed, no matter what the reason!" Her face firmed up. She had to let Kyon know she wasn't fooling around. "You need to promise me. Promise me that you're not going to throw yourself into the path of gunfire, or extraterrestrial photon beams, or whatever, and you're not going to let yourself fall just so you can use your body as a landing pad for someone else, ever again! No matter who you're trying to save."

"Except if it's you, of course."

"No, especially if it's me!" she snarled, seizing him by the collar of his shirt. "If you haven't noticed, you're not much good at helping people in general, so you're certainly never going to be able to save me. If there's ever a danger so terrible that even I need someone to save me from it, then you're certainly not going to be able to stop it! All you're ever going to accomplish by trying to save me is getting yourself killed instead! That's worse than pointless!"

He was clenching his teeth, like he wished he had some rebuttal for what she was saying, even a weak one, but had nothing.

"So promise me, now! Promise me you'll never throw yourself into danger like that ever again!"

She could feel him squirming under her scrutiny. His teeth still clenched, his eyes showing that he knew she wouldn't let him just weasel out of this one.

But then why... What was it in his manner that was making her feel so painfully afraid?

She shook him by his collar. "Promise me!"

For a moment, he met her eyes with a look that said he knew exactly what she was feeling. And then, with an air of abject defeat, he turned his face away from her. "I... I can't."

Author's notes: As part of my research for this fic, I read the book The Cancer Misfit by Saskia Lightstar – or rather, the first four chapters of it, because it proved less useful than I had hoped. However, it did have this interesting part where Ms. Lightstar shares a eulogy for her old self that she wrote after finishing chemotherapy and encourages other cancer survivors to write their own eulogies. Too appropriate not to use.

I indulged a number of detours this chapter, which I hope did not try anyone's patience. The thing about Haruhi and Kyon is it feels like I can throw them together in just about any setting and their resulting conversation will entertain me.