If You Abandon Me, I'll Kill You
I knelt in front of the bed, keeping my voice steady.
“I will never abandon you. That’s my responsibility. You barged into my life without permission, but the choice to hold on and not let you go was mine.”
Technically the villain girl was the one who kept refusing to go home and returning to my place, but still.
“Is that all?”
“Huh?”
“Is responsibility the only reason?”
It wasn’t.
It wasn’t simply a matter of responsibility.
The traces I had erased from this house.
The traces I erased to forget a magical girl.
The scars that had torn my heart apart—scars I could never erase in my lifetime.
Even after nearly two years, the wounds still bled.
“Yes. That’s exactly why I won’t abandon you.”
I smiled as I spoke.
“Even if I told you to drive out every other magical girl?”
“That’s…”
I paused for a moment.
Han Yeeun. Kim Hayoung. Lee Sia.
One villain girl I’d been living with for a few days, and three magical girls I’d only met once each.
Could I really weigh them on a scale and choose to cast her—or them—out?
“Never mind. Get out.”
“I can’t. How am I supposed to leave when you’re this depressed?”
“Ahjussi.”
She poked her face out from under the blanket.
“Ahaha…”
“That’s enough. Get out. Call me when the food’s ready.”
I stayed where I was for a moment.
“You asked if protecting you was just responsibility, right? You probably think the same about the magical girls.”
“Yeah.”
Especially the reason I hadn’t contacted Han Yeeun much.
The reason I’d let her into the house but deliberately kept her at a distance.
“It was two years ago. That was the last time I met a magical girl privately.”
“So that’s when you started running an abandoned-animal shelter?”
I deliberately ignored her jab and continued.
“While I was working part-time at a convenience store, there was a girl who came in every day at eleven to buy chocolate milk. She was exactly my age.”
“The store wasn’t that busy, so the time she spent with me gradually grew longer.”
“She confessed to me. That she was a magical girl. That after working for over three years and getting worn down, that convenience store was her only refuge.”
“Back then I was still filled with hatred toward magical girls. She was the one who helped me let go of that anger.”
“I never asked what her exhausted parents were like. I just waited for her to open up first when she was ready.”
“There was only one time I spoke up first. I asked her to go out with me. To go flower-viewing. I told her I wanted to go with her.”
“She turned me down flat. She said not to like magical girls, to meet an ordinary girl, fall in love with an ordinary girl, and be ordinarily happy.”
“But the next day she contacted me. She said let’s go flower-viewing together. That even though she was a magical girl, she would let me love her ordinarily and make me ordinarily happy.”
“That evening, eleven o’clock came and she didn’t show up. No call, nothing. My heart was about to burst from anxiety when I turned on the news.”
“It said she had died in battle against a villain. Her name was right there on the screen.”
I stopped talking.
Because if I kept going, the tears would clog my throat.
The girl didn’t say anything either.
“A few days later her parents came to see me, crying. They brought her diary. They said it looked like the person she wrote about was me.”
“There were pages and pages of agonizing over whether someone like her—who risked her life every day, who was brutally treated by the Magical Girl Management Bureau, whose body and mind were both broken—had the right to be with me.”
“She hadn’t actually died in battle with a villain. It was drug addiction from the brutal training and excessive physical enhancement drugs, sleep deprivation, and overwork that lasted for hours.”
“I should have realized it when she kept coming even on weekends. But I was stupid enough to think she was only coming because she liked me.”
I dragged out the thoughts I had forced myself to bury, the ones I never wanted to remember.
“I killed her. I should have taken her hand. I should have told her not to leave.”
“Was it a blessing or a curse that I never saw her final moments? What was she thinking? What kind of expression did she have?”
“I still can’t forget the last line she wrote in her diary.”
“That she was so excited to go flower-viewing with me tomorrow.”
“My time is still frozen in that summer day.”
After pausing for a moment, I forced a bright smile.
“Ta-da. Pretty lame, right? I’m the idiot who can’t forget a dead girl who wasn’t even my girlfriend, who tried to force himself to forget her but is still covered in scars.”
“You asked if it was responsibility? No. I’m just overlapping you and the magical girls with her. I didn’t protect you.”
Gulp.
“My twisted guilt and the fear of losing someone again are what protected you.”
“Her diary and photos are still in the storage room.”
“Still, I’m trying not to think about it on purpose these days, and I’m trying not to remember her when I look at other magical girls, so it’s gotten a little better.”
“……”
I couldn’t tell what the girl was thinking.
Was she going to get angry and call it emotional manipulation?
Or apologize for asking something she shouldn’t have?
“Replacement… What I felt for her was clearly love. If you take love out of it, maybe I am treating you as a replacement. I said I took care of you and the other magical girls because of my guilt, but I’ve never been the type to hesitate to help others anyway. I probably would have helped even if she hadn’t existed. Ah, but I was forcing myself to forget lately. Guess that was too much to ask.”
The girl suddenly emerged from the blanket, grabbed my collar, and pulled my face close.
“I was abandoned by my parents, abandoned by magical girls, and abandoned by myself.”
“Your meddlesome kindness was my only salvation.”
“You overlap that magical girl with me?”
“You protected me out of guilt and fear?”
“If that’s what you want, I’ll play the part of that dead girl as much as you like. Whether you look at me and see her or see me, it doesn’t matter.”
She pulled me into her arms and whispered in my ear.
Seo Eunha’s hand gently cradled the back of my head.
We stayed like that for a while, motionless.
“Ugh, damn it. This is so embarrassing. Whatever. Get out. Call me when it’s time to eat.”
She had been so gentle just a moment ago.
“What about my ordinary happiness?”
“I don’t know. I changed my mind.”
I looked down at Seo Eunha with a faint smile.
“Chicken?”
“Seasoned.”
She still didn’t seem to realize.
Meeting her was already my ordinary happiness.
Even so, I felt like the bleeding wound in my heart had healed just a little.
“Oh, you’re out?”
“She was sulking so hard I had to bribe her with a trip to the amusement park this weekend. Do you drink?”
“Well, I…”
“?”
“It’s okay. I can tell you anything, Yujin-nim. My senior would hit me every time I drank. She’d say magical girls heal from anything anyway. That since I could block villain attacks, getting hit by her was no big deal…”
Why did every single thing she said feel like stepping on a landmine?
“If you don’t like it, I won’t make you drink. I don’t want to make you anxious, Sia.”
“No! If it makes you feel better to hit me, I can endure it as much as you want. No, you can hit me. Hehe.”
“……”
Everything that came out of her mouth was so bewildering that when I tried to scratch my head, she flinched in surprise. What the hell.
When the chicken arrived a little later, I knocked on the door.
“Chicken’s here. Seasoned. The old-school kind wrapped in foil inside a cheap box.”
The door burst open.
“I thought I was going to starve to death… You’re still here?”
“I-I’ll just… I’ll eat by the front door. Or actually, I can eat alone out on the street…”
“Eat here. Seo Eun—Song Chaeeun. Stop tormenting someone who has nowhere to go and sit down quietly.”
Seo Eunha glared at Lee Sia, glanced at me for a second, then plopped down at the table and started opening the packaging.
Damn it. If she’d told me her name sooner, I wouldn’t have to keep getting their names mixed up like this.