Hiratsuka Shizuka’s rather stylish sedan was now weaving through the evening traffic at a speed far exceeding her usual steady style, racing toward the nearest hospital.
Inside the car, the atmosphere was so suffocating it was almost impossible to breathe.
Hikigaya had been placed in the middle of the back seat, with Yuigahama on his left and Yukinoshita on his right.
The temporary cloth bandage on his left forearm had already been stained a small patch of red by seeping blood—a glaringly harsh sight.
He tried to curl in on himself, to shrink his presence, but the gazes boring into him from both sides made him feel like he was sitting on a bed of needles.
Yukinoshita’s lips were pressed tightly together, the line of her profile taut and rigid.
Those ice-blue eyes were no longer their usual calm, unruffled pools—they burned with unmistakable fury and…
worry.
She had been staring fixedly at the wound on Hikigaya’s arm, as if she could freeze it shut with her gaze alone.
Finally, she spoke.
Her voice sounded as though it had been fished out of an ice cellar, carrying a suppressed tremor.
“Hikigaya Hachiman, are you an idiot?
Or do you think you’re some kind of invincible hero?”
Hikigaya opened his mouth, wanting to brush it off with his usual self-deprecation, but under Yukinoshita’s piercing stare—one that seemed capable of skewering him on the spot—the words stuck in his throat.
“Charging in alone?
Against three adults who could very well have been armed?
Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?!” Yukinoshita’s voice rose involuntarily, carrying a sharp edge born of lingering fear.
“If it hadn’t been sheer luck that only your arm was cut—if that knife had struck somewhere vital—what then?
Did you even consider…”
Her voice stopped abruptly.
The words that would have followed seemed too heavy with grim hypotheticals to be spoken aloud.
She turned her head sharply, looking out at the streetscape flashing past in reverse.
But the faint rise and fall of her shoulders, and her hand gripping her skirt so tightly her knuckles had gone white, betrayed the violent turmoil within her.
Recalling that instant when she’d seen him bleeding—the way her heart had literally seemed to stop—a strange, terrifying sense of fear still coiled around her.
“Yukinon…” Beside her, Yuigahama watched Yukinoshita’s rare display of agitation, then looked at the pale side of Hikigaya’s face.
Her own tears couldn’t help spilling over again.
In a tearful voice, she quietly chimed in.
“Hikki…
you scared us to death…
if something had happened to you, I…
we…”
She sobbed, wanting to reach out and touch his injured arm but afraid of hurting him.
Her small hand hovered in the air, at a complete loss.
The moment she’d seen him bleeding, she’d felt as if her entire world was crumbling.
That clenching, wrenching pain in her heart—it had been stronger than any setback she’d ever experienced.
In the driver’s seat, Hiratsuka watched the backseat scene through the rearview mirror—this “flanked on both sides” arrangement steeped in such heavy tension—and sighed in exasperation.
While keeping the steering wheel steady as she accelerated, she spoke in a tone laced with reproach yet unable to conceal her concern.
“Hachiman, you really were far too reckless this time.
Having a sense of justice is a good thing, but there’s a right way to go about it!
Next time something like this happens, remember to call me first!
Stop always trying to shoulder everything alone.
You hear me?”
She paused, her gaze sweeping over the rearview mirror at the boy trapped in a tight “pincer attack” between the two girls—his face a mix of mortification and the pallor of pain-induced weakness—and couldn’t help muttering inwardly.
‘This kid, always wearing that dead-fish look—didn’t expect him to be so popular with girls…
Still, looking at this situation, he probably won’t be able to avoid some serious romantic battlegrounds ahead.
Hope he doesn’t get torn to pieces.’
With that thought, her foot pressed down just a little harder on the accelerator.
Hikigaya felt the low-pressure fronts and concern radiating from both his left and right, the pain in his arm and the awkwardness in his heart intertwining.
He said quietly, “…I get it.
Next time…
I’ll be more careful.”
He didn’t regret his actions.
If it all happened again, he would probably make the same choice.
But seeing Yukinoshita so angry, seeing Yuigahama crying so bitterly—somewhere deep inside him, a soft spot had indeed been touched.
This feeling of being so intensely worried about and cared for was both foreign and deeply disorienting.
Silence fell inside the car once more, broken only by the engine’s roar and the occasional, barely stifled sound of Yuigahama’s sobs.
Finally, they reached the hospital.
Hiratsuka executed a crisp swing into a parking spot, and everyone hurriedly got out.
Just as Hikigaya, flanked by Yuigahama and Yukinoshita, was about to register at the emergency desk, Yukinoshita suddenly stopped.
She said “Wait a moment” to Hiratsuka and Yuigahama, then stepped aside and pulled out her phone.
She quickly dialed a number.
With her back to everyone, she spoke a few words in an extremely low voice, carrying an unmistakable tone of authority.
Hikigaya could only catch fragments—”I’d appreciate it if you could…
arrange as soon as possible…
suturing procedure…
yes, surname Hikigaya…” and the like.
Within two minutes, a doctor in a white coat—someone who looked like a department head—hurried out.
He nodded respectfully toward Yukinoshita, then directly guided the still somewhat dazed Hikigaya past the line of waiting patients and straight into a prepared treatment room.
“The Yukinoshita family…” Hiratsuka observed this scene, raising an eyebrow with an expression of understanding, but said nothing more.
Yuigahama, meanwhile, was wide-eyed with surprise and relief.
She whispered to Yukinoshita, “Yukinon, you’re amazing…”
Yukinoshita didn’t respond.
Her gaze simply followed Hikigaya’s back as he entered the treatment room.
Only when the door closed did she allow herself a nearly imperceptible breath of relief—though her tightly clenched fists still did not loosen.
With the treatment room door shut, only Yukinoshita and Yuigahama remained in the corridor, along with Hiratsuka, who had moved farther away to make calls to the school and handle follow-up matters.
The two girls sat side by side on the cold metal bench.
For a moment, neither spoke.
An atmosphere of anxiety and worry permeated the air.
Yuigahama twisted her fingers restlessly, her gaze fixed rigidly on that tightly closed door.
She murmured, “He’ll be okay, right…
does getting stitches hurt a lot…
Hikki, he…”
“It’s only a flesh wound.
Once it’s cleaned and sutured, proper rest will take care of it.” Yukinoshita spoke, her voice having recovered most of its composure.
But listening carefully, one could still detect a faint, barely perceptible tautness.
She seemed to be reassuring Yuigahama, and also convincing herself.
“Mm…” Yuigahama responded quietly.
After a moment of silence, she suddenly turned her head and looked at Yukinoshita’s profile.
Softly, she asked, “Yukinon, back there…
were you crying?”
Yukinoshita’s body stiffened, almost imperceptibly.
She didn’t look at Yuigahama.
Her gaze remained fixed on the treatment room door.
Her voice was flat as she denied it.
“No.
You were mistaken.”
“Is that so…” Yuigahama, however, didn’t let it go so easily.
Recalling Yukinoshita’s agitated voice and red-rimmed eyes back in the car, she spoke quietly but with certainty.
“But Yukinon, you were really so worried about Hikki back there.
Even angrier than I was…”
Yukinoshita remained silent, neither confirming nor denying.
The cold light of the corridor’s overhead lamps cast a small shadow beneath her long lashes.
Looking at Yukinoshita like this, Yuigahama thought about her own feelings for Hikigaya—that concern and worry she found increasingly impossible to ignore.
A sense of shared kinship welled up inside her.
She lowered her head, her voice tinged with confusion and a trace of bitterness.
“I…
I think I really do like Hikki.
Seeing him hurt—it hurt so much right here, and I was so scared…”
Yuigahama pressed her hand against her chest.
Yukinoshita finally turned her head slightly and glanced at Yuigahama.
The undisguised honesty and emotion on the girl’s face moved her somewhat, and also stirred…
a complex feeling spreading through the depths of her heart.
She redirected her gaze toward that door, as if she could see through the panel to the boy being treated inside.
A flicker of complex emotion—something even she herself could not fully decipher—passed through her ice-blue eyes.
“…He’s an idiot.” After a long pause, Yukinoshita finally said it, softly, as if it were a sigh.
Those words contained far too many emotions—blame, exasperation, and perhaps even a trace of a stirring, a worry similar to Yuigahama’s, that she herself was unwilling to examine too closely.
The two girls, so different in character yet equally anxious over the same boy, sat quietly like this outside the operating room.
In the air thick with the smell of disinfectant, they shared the same silent anxiety and that quietly burgeoning, not yet clarified, special feeling.
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