Ordinary D: Lovey-Dovey Chaka-Poko

Chaka-poko, chaka-poko.

The carriage trundled along behind the horse.

The silhouette suggested a relaxed, regal air as it glided through the light and shade of the trees, as elegant as a leaf drifting through the vast expanse of time.

All except for one detail…

The silhouette of the carriage was indeed nothing but a silhouette.

It was black without reflection, the very absence of light. A carriage somehow expanded from a two-dimensional plane of shadow into a three-dimensional object.

It was the kind of carriage that nobles would have traveled in not too long ago, but in this situation, it was like an illustration taken from a children’s book—a pop-up shadow-play children’s book, perhaps.

If anything added to the strangely alien nature of the sight, it was the horse pulling it, which wore a Western-style horse helmet that, like the rest of the carriage, was pitch-black and nonreflective.

Seen through the window of this shadow-play carriage come to life were two figures that couldn’t have been more different.

One was a young man wearing a white coat that stood in stark contrast to the carriage. The other was dressed in a manner befitting the vehicle’s owner—black clothes that seemed to be made of shadow itself.

The woman in black took out a PDA and showed it to the man.

“It’s the first time I’ve tried making a roofed carriage. I guess I can do it, after all,” the screen read.

The man in white beamed immensely. “Of course. Nothing is impossible for you, Celty.”

“It’s hard to take that as a compliment, because you say that sort of thing to me all the time.”

“Unfair! Fine, Celty—I shall challenge the limits of human possibility if that’s what will serve as proof of your hard work. Just give the order: What must I do? I could write a thousand pages of poems about your beloved Ikebukuro and print more copies of them worldwide than the Bible!” he babbled. The woman in black just typed into the PDA in silence.

“Shinra.”

“Mhm?!”

“Shut up for a bit.”

“…Mm.”

The man named Shinra sulked like a scolded child. The woman named Celty shrugged and jabbed at him with an elbow.

“Don’t get so depressed. All the highs and lows are too much to deal with.”

“…But you can’t blame me for being excited!” Shinra said, his eyes sparkling again. “We haven’t gone on a vacation together since I was a kid and you let me ride on the back of the motorcycle!”

“Does that count as a vacation?”

“Well, if you don’t think of that as a vacation, that makes this our very first! It’s incredible—what a historic day! Should I think of this as a honeymoon?!”

“Be careful to behave—unless you want one of those posthoneymoon ‘Oops, I’ve made a mistake’ divorces.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Shinra grumbled, all good behavior. His shoulders slumped, and he looked down—then leaped up off his seat, looking as if a lightning bolt struck his mind, shouting, “Y-you didn’t deny that this was our honeym— Gahk!”

The carriage jolted, and he slammed his head on the interior ceiling.

“A-are you all right?!”

“Owww… I’m fine… Just saw stars for a moment…”

“Are you sure you’re all right? Sorry, maybe I set the ceiling a bit low. I’m not wearing my helmet, so my sense of height is a bit off,” Celty typed into her PDA. She rubbed his head tenderly.

“No, it’s fine. It’s just the right height. It was my fault for jumping up like that.”

“No, I mean, are you sure you’re all right? I don’t really have a good gauge on how much it hurts to hit your head…”

“It’s fine, it’s fine. You’re better off not knowing. Also, that was the third time you asked me if I was all right. Your kindness is the most effective ice pack of all, Celty.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she typed and then turned toward the window.

Oh, Celty, Shinra thought. She must have red cheeks right about now. What a sweetheart.

As a matter of fact, he had no way of knowing if her cheeks were really blushing.

She didn’t have cheeks to flush in the first place.

Celty Sturluson was not human.

She was a type of fairy commonly known as a dullahan, found from Scotland to Ireland—a being that visits the homes of those close to death to inform them of their impending mortality.

The dullahan carried its own severed head under its arm, rode on a two-wheeled carriage called a Coiste Bodhar pulled by a headless horse, and approached the homes of the soon to die. Anyone foolish enough to open the door was drenched with a basin full of blood. Thus the dullahan, like the banshee, made its name as a herald of ill fortune throughout European folklore.

One theory claimed that the dullahan bore a strong resemblance to the Norse Valkyrie, but Celty had no way of knowing if this was true.

It wasn’t that she didn’t know; more accurately, she just couldn’t remember.

When someone back in her homeland had stolen her head, she had lost all her memories of what she was. It was the search for the faint trail of her head that had brought her here to Ikebukuro.

Now with a motorcycle instead of a headless horse and a riding suit instead of armor, she had wandered the streets of this neighborhood for decades.

But ultimately, she had not succeeded at retrieving her head, and her memories were still lost.

Celty, however, knew who had stolen her head originally.

She also knew who was preventing her from finding it.

But ultimately, that meant she didn’t know where it was.

And she was fine with that.

As long as she could be with those human beings she loved and who accepted her, she could happily live the way she was now.

She was a headless woman who let her actions speak for her missing face, who held the strong, secret desire to live within her heart.

That was Celty Sturluson in a nutshell.

But even for the very embodiment of the unusual and extraordinary, Celty had her own flavor of ordinary life.

She was a courier in Ikebukuro, taking various kinds of cargo to designated locations for money. Some people treated her like an odd-jobs guy who could do anything you needed, but she considered all of it to be a part-time job. She was not a professional.

Until about a year ago, she figured that if she did this job and traveled all over every inch of Ikebukuro, she might increase her chances of finding her head—but at this point, her dedication to the job was more rooted in just feeling guilty about the people who wouldn’t receive their important items otherwise.

In the past, she took on jobs that might have skirted the law, but now she did her best to avoid things of that nature. It was one thing if she got chased by the police or criminal organizations, but now she had people to care for—people she didn’t want harmed by this trouble.

On the other hand, Shinra Kishitani—the person she cared for first and foremost—was a black market doctor, an occupation designed to attract trouble.

Celty was essentially honest and caring by nature. She took her job seriously and even went out of her way to help people on her days off. She kept herself busy. On the days when she really was at leisure, she played games with Shinra and relaxed around the house—essentially the same things she did after she got home, anyway.

So in that sense, today’s vacation was an actual holiday for her, a real break from tradition.

They were in the mountains, far from the city.

Just a carriage trundling along on a path with a view of a lake.

It was isolated by design; they had picked out the location for this very reason. In the summers, people used the area for haunted house challenges—there were some ruined buildings around that were rumored to contain ghosts.

In that sense, a headless woman riding a carriage made of physical shadow was certainly appropriate, but in fact, even that was out of place: Japanese ghost stories rarely had European-style carriages.

Celty and Shinra were worried about this at first, but they ultimately went with the location and embarked on a day-trip vacation.

The idea had been Celty’s at first, to give Shinra a chance at some leisure time. He did so much for her on a regular basis that a vacation seemed like a good plan.

She fashioned herself a gothic black dress to match the carriage. In place of the helmet she normally wore, she had a ladies’ hat with a matching cape. If they were pure white, it might have looked like an ornate wedding dress, but being made of shadow, they were more like mourning clothes.

But despite Celty’s widow outfit, Shinra was perpetually hyped. At his request, she’d been “trying on” various shadow clothes all day, rather than just her typical riding suit. Given his utter devotion to her, no one could blame Shinra for being excited.

For his part, he wasn’t wearing the usual doctor’s coat, either. It was a special outfit he put together for the trip, albeit just as white-centric as ever.

His eyes sparkled brighter than ever before, and with every new outfit Celty changed into, he raised a cheer of delight.

In this case, “changing into” was more literal than usual: She was merely reshaping the shadow that covered her body.

May 5, midday

“Say, Celty. About the changing, I have a request. If possible, I’d really like to see you remove your clothes each time so I can watch you wriggle your bare arms into the slee— Buh!”

She answered his request with an elbow. “Pervert. What if someone saw me changing inside the carriage?”

“Hey, if you’ve got the goods, show ’em off-aff-ahf-aaah!”

He did his best to smile through the pain of a twisted cheek. “Sorry, I was lying. I don’t want anyone else to see you. Your changing scenes belong to no one but me-hee-haaa!”

The flick to his temple did far more damage than he was anticipating. Meanwhile, Celty had rearranged the shadow she was wearing into a new outfit.

“I’m all done.”

Shinra read the words off the PDA being held in front of his face, then glanced over the device at Celty.

There she sat, looking somehow shy and embarrassed, in a girl’s school uniform of all black.

“I brought the red scarf from home and tried wearing it, but it just made me look like a girl at one of those brothels, I think…”

The fact that she had no head made her more like the victim of a freakish school murder mystery than a prostitute, but Shinra did not mention this. He assumed a very serious look and folded his legs atop the carriage seat.

“What’s wrong? Is it weird after all?” she asked, uncertain what this reaction meant. She was about to reform the shadow clothes to the usual riding suit when Shinra suddenly bowed his head, tearing up.

“I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you. Will you go out with me?”

“That’s really creepy, Shinra. What’s gotten into you?”

Maybe that blow to the head earlier really did a number on him, she wondered, suddenly worried. Perhaps she ought to turn the carriage around and rush him to a hospital.

Shinra wiped his tears and grabbed her arm. “No, no, I’m sorry. See, I always wanted to make one of those high school declarations. I used to dream of how I would ask you out if we went to the same school…”

Celty shrugged and typed, “You’re a lot of trouble, you know that?”

“Even when other girls asked me out, I had to tell them, ‘You’re nice and all, but you still have a head on your shoulders’…”

“Go track down those girls and beg forgiveness, right now. Also, is the insinuation here that you would take any woman without a head?” she shot back.

Shinra shook his head violently. “No, not at all! I would love you without reservation, Celty, whether you had a human head, or a cardboard head, or some amalgamation of slugs and earthworms!”

“That’s disgusting!”

Actually, I’m kind of amazed that there were girls who liked this freak, Celty reflected. You’ve gotta be a real eccentric…

“But once the rumors got around, the girls got creeped out and stopped approaching me. In fact, Shizuo once unfairly complained to me that the girls were avoiding him, too, all because of me.”

“That’s not unfair at all.”

“It isn’t? Well…I guess you’re right. Of course you are,” Shinra said and laughed like a child.

Eccentric? she thought. Well, I guess that does describe me. The eccentric who loves a woman without a head, and the eccentric who fell in love with him.

Smirking inwardly, Celty typed away on the PDA’s keyboard.

“Why are you so focused on clothes, anyway? Something tells me this is more of a male thing than you specifically.”

“I don’t know about other guys. All I know is my own reason. To me, you are unlimited possibilities. If I’d been born in a different time or place, I know we would have met all the same, just under different circumstances. And I want to experience all those possibilities!”

“I didn’t realize it was such a grand vision.”

“Oh, that’s just my excuse. The truth is, I just want to see you in all different outfits so I can get all horn…,” he said, stopping in the middle of his sentence and bracing himself.

“What happened? Can’t you go on?”

“Oh, I j-just figured I’d get another elbow… Wait, I seem to recall another instance of this, a few months ago…”

Celty tried to remember. That’s right. Things were happening just like this, and then…I think that was when Emilia rang the doorbell and interrupted us. She just grabbed Shinra and hugged him. I could barely believe it.

She could laugh it off now, but at the time, Celty had been on the verge of jealousy. She felt both ashamed of that behavior and secretly pleased at the reminder of how much she loved him.

Honestly, I wonder…why did I fall in love with him?

In her past, somewhere among the memories locked in her head, had she experienced a life like this one, as a proper fairy back in Ireland?

On a vacation with her lover: a very picturesque moment of bliss, according to a human being. Had she ever experienced bliss like this in her old life? What was her life like back then?

She couldn’t deny being curious. But…

“What’s wrong, Celty? Are you feeling bad?!”

“No…,” she replied, looking at Shinra’s face.

At this point in time, her present life was far more important than whatever was in her past. She decided to enter a teasing message into the PDA and placed it on Shinra’s knees.

“And what were you going to do…after you got all horny?”

“Huh…? …!”

“If you get all horny here in this carriage, what’s going to happen to me?”

“…”

Huh? He’s not saying anything, she realized. Normally, he would act surprised at first, then burst into excitement. Instead, he merely stared down at the PDA in silence, his face neutral, if not downright serious.

Uh-oh… Did I tease him so much that he got mad?

She was going to snatch back the PDA to type out an apology when Shinra clutched her hand.

“Celty…”

He looked deadly serious, which was not his normal way. But the redness in his cheeks was kind of creepy.

“I, erm… Thanks.”

Oh…

“Thank you…Celty.”

He’s thanking me?!

“I’ll try my best!”

Your best at what?!