Several days had passed since I started sleeping in the same bed as my sister. During that time, I hadn't been to school. My sister had forbidden me from going out alone, saying that she didn't trust me not to attempt suicide again. She stayed by my side constantly, and though I sometimes wondered if this was really okay, I figured it must be, since my sister was making sure of it.
These days, I was living through what could arguably be the most uneventful period of my life. But eventually, I began to wonder about something. What had my sister done after I died in the previous loops? Had she been as calm and collected as she was when our parents died? I couldn't find the answers on my own, so despite being a little scared, I decided to ask her directly.
"Nee-chan, can I ask you something?"
"Of course, what is it?"
"After I died in the previous loops, what did you do?"
"...That's not a very interesting story, you know."
"It doesn't have to be interesting. I just want to know."
After some persistence, my sister finally agreed to tell me.
"Sigh... I don't think it's going to mean much, but alright. Let's start with this: do you remember how many times you've looped? Even just which life this is?"
Well, in the first loop, I didn't realize I was looping. In the second, I became aware of it. In the third, I passed the entrance exams by remembering the questions, and in the fourth, I gave up and became friends with Mai-san. Then this is the fifth, so that makes this my sixth life.
"I've looped five times, so this is my sixth life."
"I'm the same. Well, let me start from the beginning. In the first life, when you committed suicide, I had no idea why. It was a complete mystery, and it haunted me. But there was nothing I could do about it, so I followed our parents' expectations, got into the best university, and started a part-time job. But one day, while I was just doing my job as usual, I got fixated on by some strange customer and was killed."
"R-Really?"
"Ah, but don't worry about it. It was my fault for not handling the situation properly. Anyway, when I woke up next, I was shocked. You were alive, and I seemed to have returned to being a child again. I couldn't understand what was happening, so I dismissed it as a bad dream and continued living. But then, you committed suicide again, and I was devastated. I regretted not trusting that 'dream' and wondered if I could have stopped it. After that, I followed the same path to university but avoided working part-time and focused entirely on my studies to forget everything. However, one day, I was suddenly killed again—maybe someone had a problem with my research."
"That's terrible..."
"When I looped back again, I saw it as a chance. My life after you died felt so colorless. This time, I was determined to save you and avoid that regret, so I tried to reach out to you, to connect with you, and prevent you from taking your life. In the previous two loops, you died in your third year of middle school, so I thought if I could figure out the cause by then, I could stop it. But then you died before even entering middle school, and it was heartbreaking. That's when I started to suspect that you might be looping too. Your behavior was just too different from everyone else's. In the next loop, I studied psychology and many other things, thinking I could be prepared. Fortunately, I had already mastered the school curriculum, so I had plenty of time. But I pushed myself too hard and ended up dying after getting hit by a car."
My sister... has died so many times. I'm not sure if I should be saying this, but is this normal?
"Well... Oh, it's already this late. Let's continue this after lunch, shall we?"
With that, my sister went to the kitchen to prepare lunch. It was hard to imagine everything my sister had gone through after I died. I always assumed that when I died, I looped back immediately, so I had stopped caring about what happened to others after my death.