When I opened my eyes, morning had crawled in through the cracks in the station.
Gray light spilled across the concrete floor. It painted over dried blood and broken silence, softening what had happened without erasing it. The platform looked almost normal.
Almost.
Araragi still lay there, chest rising and falling now—barely, but enough. His color was returning. His limbs looked whole, if unnaturally still. I didn't know what stage he was in. Was he dreaming? Dying? Becoming?
I didn't ask.
My attention was somewhere else.
Someone else.
She was gone.
Not vanished—but no longer there, in that spot, in that form.
Where the Iron-Blooded, Hot-Blooded, Cold-Blooded vampire had once sprawled—grand, ruined, adult—there now sat a girl.
Tiny. Pale. Long golden hair pooled around her like a sun melted into silk. She wore the same white dress she would later be known for, her bare feet tucked beneath her on the bloodstained floor like she was just a child waiting for her ride home.
But her eyes?
Still gold.
Still burning.
Still her.
"You're awake," I said.
She didn't respond. Just watched me. Quiet. Calculating.
"I guess you needed to conserve energy," I added.
She blinked once.
"I do not like being small," she said. Her voice was higher now, sharper, like wind through a flute—but the weight behind it was the same. "But I hate being dead more."
I nodded. What else could I do?
She looked down at herself, then flexed her tiny fingers with mild disgust.
"I despise this form. Children are weak. Slow. Soft." She flicked her wrist, as if trying to summon claws that wouldn't come. "But it is efficient."
"You're... healing?"
"Slowly."
She glanced at Araragi. "His blood was enough to keep me from dying. No more."
"I see."
I sat again, across from her, a careful distance between us. Something about this new form made it harder to look directly at her—not because she wasn't terrifying anymore, but because she was almost familiar now.
Like she could be mistaken for human.
And that was far more dangerous.
She tilted her head, watching me like I was a beetle pinned under glass.
"Why do you keep staying?" she asked.
"I don't have anywhere else to go."
"You lie," she said immediately. "You have not asked where this place is. You have not asked how you got here. You have not even asked what I am."
"I already know."
She narrowed her eyes.
"That is the second time you've said something you shouldn't know. Who are you, really?"
I paused.
This again.
"I'm just a guy who watched the wrong thing and ended up in the middle of it."
She didn't seem satisfied with that.
"You are not Araragi Koyomi," she said. "But you are not nothing."
"Thanks... I think."
"I am still deciding," she said.
The light shifted. A train rumbled overhead—not stopping here. Not even close.
We sat in silence.
Then, without warning, she asked:
"Do you pity me?"
I blinked.
"No."
She tilted her head the other way.
"Why not?"
"Because pity is for people you think are beneath you," I said. "And I know better than that."
She studied me again, longer this time. Then—
She smiled.
It didn't reach her eyes.
But it was real.
"You are strange," she said. "And that is dangerous."
"Dangerous for who?"
"For both of us."