I'll Be Your Pillar — So Become My Person
I’ll be your pillar. So become my person.
“What do you mean, make a baby? The kid looks like she’s about to shatter right now.”
For a second I wondered why the hell I’d left the drink cooler behind and followed them, but in this situation it actually turned out for the best.
Or maybe not. Thinking about how Seo Eunha had been acting toward Sia, it might have made things worse.
“You two seem to get along pretty well, judging by how you’re matching her rhythm.”
“No, Sia suddenly went into a full panic.”
“Hic… sob… Yujin-nim…”
Seo Eunha crouched down in front of Sia and met her eyes at the same level.
“Hey. Clearance sale. Listen up. I declared that I’d become the villain who smashes every last bit of that ahjussi’s happiness. Since he became my salvation, I said I’d become his daily life.”
“Eunha-ssi…”
“I won’t say a word even if he saves every single one of those magical-girl bitches who abandoned me like a dog, because he saved me. Get a grip. That senior bastard isn’t here. Don’t think about any other man in front of ahjussi. Got it? Don’t forget who saved you. Remember it always.”
“Hiccup… Eunha-ssi…”
Surprisingly, Seo Eunha was comforting her with genuine care.
I finally let myself relax. Maybe they really had gotten closer. Maybe her heart had opened up.
“Before I kill her, that is.”
She always has to ruin it right at the end.
“Okay, can you stand? Let’s get out of here.”
Sia clung to me like a little kid, wrapping her arms around me tightly.
“Sia.”
“Yes.”
“You can’t become the ideal senior you wanted to be. The one you dreamed of.”
I had been afraid of the ending that would rip her heart to shreds.
I had been terrified that if she died, I would be the cause.
I couldn’t accept it because I feared she would only hurt even more.
But after seeing her today, I finally understood.
Her abyss was far deeper than I had imagined.
And her happiness was far closer than I had thought.
“Still, at the very least, I won’t abandon you, hurt you, or look away from you. I’ll be your pillar. So become my person.”
I’d gone a little too far with the baby-talk vibe and accidentally sounded like I was confessing, but I figured Sia wouldn’t take it that way.
“H-how could someone like me possibly date Yujin-nim…!”
Cancel that.
“It wasn’t a confession. I’m asking you to be on my side. So that just as you trust me, I can trust you too.”
“Uwaaa, I’m sorry! How dare someone like me have such impure thoughts toward Yujin-nim!! When we go back I’ll walk by myself!!”
“Want to walk together?”
“Y-yes? But then the punishment loses all meaning!”
Why the hell does she want to be punished in the first place?
I had been planning to head back considering Sia’s condition, but she insisted so strongly that we ended up staying out until the end.
The bonus was that I barely managed to pry the drink cooler out of her arms after she tried to hug it all day without eating.
I still don’t understand how she reached the conclusion that she would die without it.
Even a normal outing would have been exhausting, but having to keep an eye on both Sia and Seo Eunha at the same time left me collapsing onto the sofa like I’d been knocked unconscious.
Damn it. I am never letting those two go out together again.
“Then… if you’ll excuse my rudeness, I’ll wash first…”
The moment a visibly tense Sia disappeared into the bathroom, Seo Eunha spoke up.
“Ahjussi.”
“Yeah?”
“You really planning to save every single magical girl like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“The girl from the convenience store, that big strong woman, and this gaslit kid right here. You keep trying to take care of all of them. Do you think they’re the only wounded magical girls out there? What about the villains? There are plenty of truly rotten ones, sure, but there are tons of girls who fell into darkness just like me. You gonna take care of all of them too? I’m not criticizing you. I just wanted to know if you’re doing this without thinking.”
Seo Eunha leaned in close to my face, her expression dead serious.
“I’m not a saint. I’m not the kind of person who mourns the one I couldn’t save more than the thousand I did. Like you said, Eunha-ssi, there must be a lot of them.”
“Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? I can’t go around reaching my hand out to every single one of them. I don’t have that kind of power.”
“But at the very least, I’ll help the ones within my reach, the ones I can see. I don’t have time to grieve over the one I couldn’t save. I’m too busy saving the thousand.”
“If I take care of a thousand and one of them ends up unhappy, it’ll haunt me. But if I can’t even properly take care of a thousand and I start crying because I couldn’t save one… that would be the stupidest thing in the world.”
“Out of those thousand, at least one will feel grateful that I saved them. If I walk around with a gloomy face just because I couldn’t save one person, wouldn’t that be a huge burden to the people I actually helped?”
I didn’t realize I was talking so much, but in the end it all came down to the same thing: I was just going to keep doing whatever I could. It was an embarrassingly plain conviction.
“Maybe those thousand were just unlucky. Getting saved by someone like me. There might have been a much cooler prince on a white horse out there.”
I forced an awkward smile, trying to brush away the suddenly heavy atmosphere.
“Do you even realize how stupid that sounds, ahjussi? You’ll take care of anyone you see? What if I start dragging new villains in front of you every single day? You gonna take care of all of them? Your house is gonna burst at the seams.”
“Then you’ll just have to help me out a little, Eunha-ssi. Didn’t you say you’d smash anything that gets in the way of my happiness?”
“…Ugh.”
Seo Eunha’s face instantly flushed red. She pulled back and turned her gaze away.
She wouldn’t actually refuse to help, right?
“Just hypothetically, ahjussi. If a girl shows up who’s so broken that even you can’t handle her… the kind of girl who would drag you down to the very bottom along with her… could you still say the same thing? What if saving her means you can’t save a hundred others?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to see it when it happens… but after thinking and thinking and thinking, I’m pretty sure my actions would end up the same.”
“That’s called obsession.”
“I don’t want to experience losing anyone else. I lost my family. I lost her. I don’t want to lose anyone again. Even if I do lose someone, I refuse to just stand there helplessly. I’ll struggle and fight with everything I have.”
I don’t know if this mindset will ever change, but until it does, I want to help as many people as I can.
As many as possible.
“This got way too serious. I can’t even save one person properly right now and I’m acting all arrogant.”
“Ahjussi, do you even hear yourself?”
“Huh? Oh, I know I’m not exactly eloquent, so it probably came out all rambling and weird. Is it that strange?”
“Never mind. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”
Seo Eunha turned her head without another word, staring off somewhere else, then suddenly wrapped her arms around me from behind.
“Suffer just the right amount. Because I’m the one who’s going to break my bones trying to save you. Understand?”
Click.
“I’m sorry, I took way too long in the shower. The fact that I won’t get scolded for taking more than three minutes… Yujin-nim?”
“It’s not what it looks like!”
While Sia stood there frozen, staring back and forth between us, Seo Eunha smoothly detached herself and plopped back down on the sofa.
“D-did I interrupt something?”
“Didn’t I just say it’s not like that?”
“I’m sorry!!”
Sia kept bowing her still-damp head, apologizing over and over.
Much later I learned that she always dried herself with an already-used towel instead of a fresh one, which was why she still looked a little moist…
“Even if we both sink into that abyss together someday, I won’t be able to save you.”
“I won’t ask that of you, Eunha-ssi. Especially not if the other person is a magical girl. I never want to see someone I saved fall again because of me.”
“What? So you’re saying you don’t need me?”
Earlier she said she’d just watch with her arms crossed.
Whether it was because she was a sensitive high-school girl, because she was going through puberty, or simply because she was Seo Eunha…
“Are you really okay with this?”
Right before we stepped out the front door, I checked on Sia one more time.
After everything I’d seen over the weekend I had been worried at first, but surprisingly she only looked a little tense. There were no signs of panic or trembling.
If anything, I seemed to be the one who was more anxious and nervous.
“Yes. If Yujin-nim goes with me… and anyway, I’m just secretly taking my luggage. Senior is just a normal person and I’m a magical girl, so we probably won’t ever run into each other again.”
“That’s a relief, then.”
I was still uneasy about the possibility of contact or visits later, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
For now, we decided to keep Sia’s belongings from her senior’s place at our house until we found her a new place to live.
She had thrown a huge fit about wanting the room next door, but the unit next to ours had some circumstances.
It was at the very end of the hallway, so there wasn’t even a neighbor on the other side.
Wait… didn’t I just screw myself? If Han Yeeun comes over it’s going to be a disaster. I can maybe entrust Seo Eunha to her for a bit, but what about Sia?
“…Let’s go, then.”
…I’ll think about it later. It’s not me who’s going to suffer, it’s future me.
And so we arrived at that senior’s studio apartment. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of treatment Sia had received behind this perfectly ordinary front door.
Even Sia, who had been fine until now, took a deep, shaky breath the moment we got here, clearly anxious.
Beep beep beep beep beep—
Contrary to my expectation of the place reeking of alcohol and cigarette smoke, the interior was surprisingly clean.
Well, a little messy, but it didn’t feel abandoned. She had probably made Sia do all the cleaning.
The only dirty part was the kitchen, which looked like it hadn’t been properly cleaned since Sia left.
“Let’s pack quickly and get out. Throw away the clothes and only take the valuables.”
“Y-yes.”
While I stuffed the things Sia brought over into a large suitcase, I kept anxiously watching the front door like a meerkat.
Not that staring at it would change anything.
Beep beep beep beep beep—
I kept praying that person wouldn’t show up.