“I wonder if you’d move if I ordered you to.“
He had sat himself down on the floor some distance from Kamukura’s motionless form, his neck forward, legs crossed, fingers twisting in his lap. Eyes crinkling into a smile, or even the start of a shaky laugh. Something like static rolling down his spine.
“I’m not quite sure myself that would do the trick, seeing as there might already be, ah…at least one lonely spider’s-silk thread of understanding between us! I do like to…think that there is…”
He didn’t quite know why, but the giggle finally broke out at that. His gaze stayed perfectly still in its tension. Impasse. Neither blinked. Kamukura—one knee up, seated, petrified.
He steadied himself. Then slowly he inched even further backwards, knowing that even when he tried not to, he took up inordinate space. Being so near to them did feel prickly, forbidden, dangerous. The danger just wasn’t to him.
“And so,” he said, softening his voice, “there’s the basic idea of theory of mind…(where Matsuda-kun said I might be lacking, but he was grumbling over the incompleteness of the model in the same breath, so who knows)…as well as all your superior analytic reasoning, surely. The hope in you is a hope that can preemptively understand what lower lifeforms like me might want from it…that’s my little hypothesis, anyway. From my speech and behavior, surely you know I’d like for you to make yourself comfortable here, right? I’d like you to know you’re in a dorm now, not a…cell in a sterile basement.”
And, puzzling, he said then, “Yet in the daytime, you only seem…”
He held his tongue. They wouldn’t understand if he actually went ahead and said they seemed just as scared as he was.
(Oh, but for all he knew, it was normal behavior! Plain, banal, ordinary behavior!
Komaeda Nagito had never had anything like a roommate.)
