Kindness Looks Prettiest When Answered with Kindness
Twenty-one. That was my age, and Baek Eun-hwa's. The two of us were the same age — peers, contemporaries, equals.
One of us had walked into the Hero Association as a staff member the moment she graduated high school, admitted on a special-talent track. The other had been working as an unregistered hero since her high school days, then risen like a storm the instant she came of age, becoming an A-Class hero almost overnight.
I'd never had parents to begin with. In Baek Eun-hwa's case... they were probably gone. Deceased, as far as I could tell.
A genuinely unfortunate pair, you could say. Well — this was my second life, so I didn't think much of it. Baek Eun-hwa, though, would have been profoundly shaped by the way she grew up. Before her mother passed, she'd almost certainly been subjected to a kind of gaslighting.
...What her mother had actually said to her, and why she'd made her this way. I could have asked through hypnosis. I chose not to.
"What is it?"
"...It's nothing."
Morning, after spending the night in the same bed as her. My head ached faintly from the hangover, and my stomach wasn't doing great, so breakfast was just instant ramen.
It was a pretty humble, everyday-person kind of breakfast for an A-Class hero, which was almost funny — but I'd already figured out that, money aside, her tastes were far more ordinary than you'd expect. So I didn't think much of it. Just look at what she was wearing right now: a sports-brand track jacket you could pick up for under a hundred bucks. There was no real reason to treat approaching her as some difficult thing.
"That's boring."
"Haha..."
But her actual problems required a far more careful approach. I needed to break through everything that had shaped her until now and give her something new to be influenced by. The question was how. It was the kind of morning that left me with a lot to think about.
"...Yesterday, I... I showed you a side of myself I shouldn't have. I'm sorry."
"Huh?"
"It's been a long time since I drank that much with someone. And it's been just as long since I had a conversation that personal, so I... I think I let myself go a little."
She offered that apology while transferring the ramen into a serving bowl. I'd been the one who pushed her to drink in the first place, and I'd gotten pretty wasted myself, so there was absolutely nothing to apologize for. It was almost absurd.
She wasn't quite a perfectionist. But maybe she just couldn't stand the idea of making a mistake — of inconveniencing someone else. When we'd been drinking together, she'd looked at least a little more at ease. I'd gotten to see her as just an ordinary person in her early twenties, someone who'd barely become an adult. And now she was back to her usual self, which was, in its own way, a little sad.
"It's fine. I had a good time too."
"Is... is that so. That's a relief, then. I didn't say anything strange while I was drunk, did I?"
"No, you didn't. If anything, once you were drunk you just went right to sleep. Though getting you to the bed was... a little hard, I'll admit."
"...Ah."
She looked even more sorry after I said that. Well, the size difference between us was pretty significant. The gap between me and Batori — even Batori at her base size — was smaller than the one between the two of us. Four-foot-eleven and five-foot-nine, give or take.
"...I'm sorry."
"N-no. It was really fine. I was the one who suggested we drink. Why are you the one apologizing, Eun-hwa?"
"Well..."
She didn't finish the sentence. But whatever she'd been about to say was easy enough to guess, and the atmosphere turned awkward because of it. Baek Eun-hwa looked genuinely sorry and embarrassed, trying to get an apology through to me. I had no intention of accepting it. If I accepted the apology, I'd be letting her believe she'd done something wrong. I couldn't allow that.
"No. This really isn't your fault, Eun-hwa."
"But the process of moving me..."
"That's just how life works. We inconvenience people. We bother them. We make things awkward. You don't need to apologize that much over something that happened because you had a few drinks."
"..."
"And right now, you're just an ordinary person, aren't you? You weren't on hero duty. You were just living a normal day. Besides, if I'd been the one who passed out face-down on the table, you would've helped me too."
"Even so..."
She still wouldn't accept it. It was almost frustrating. Even a shy elementary school kid probably wouldn't apologize this much. It was just a bit of drunkenness, and not even a bad one — the most harmless kind of passing out. That was it. And yet she was this sorry, which only made me more determined not to accept the apology.
"Then I should apologize too, for getting you to drink and keeping the conversation going so you'd keep drinking. If I just hadn't given you alcohol in the first place."
"Isn't that a little too results-oriented? We drank about the same amount to begin with..."
"Then why are you apologizing? You didn't force yourself to drink alone. We drank about the same. There's no reason to apologize that much, is there?"
"Because after we drank, you — my counselor — had a hard time."
"It was just a few steps, from here to the bedroom. Compared to you letting me stay at your house for several days, treating me to dinner last night, and letting me share your bedroom and your bed — it's nothing."
The ramen was probably getting soggier by the second. I said all of that to her without backing down. Maybe I was coming on a little strong for first thing in the morning, but a bowl of overcooked ramen was nothing compared to helping her.
"Eun-hwa."
"...What."
"In situations like yesterday and this morning, you shouldn't be apologizing."
"Then what am I supposed to do? Say nothing to the person who helped me? Not apologize to the person I inconvenienced? Just run away from the guilt?"
She treated her mistake like it was some enormous wrong.
"You should be saying thank you, not sorry. Thank you for helping me. It must have been hard — thank you for taking care of me. That's what comes first. Then you can apologize. Sorry I made you go through that. I'll be more careful next time I drink. Those words are fine after. An apology isn't the answer to everything. What you did was a far smaller mistake than you think it was."
"..."
That was why I said those things to her. Advice, so she could start thinking in a different direction — so she could, little by little, change her mind. A week was a longer stretch of time than it sounded. I didn't need to change her completely. If I could just leave an influence, that would be enough. No — that would be the best possible outcome, wouldn't it?
"...Let's just eat the ramen."
Baek Eun-hwa couldn't argue. She couldn't even ask a question. She raised the white flag and, for all intents and purposes, surrendered. The ramen really was getting soggy, sure... but more than that, she just couldn't find a way to push back. Her head was probably a mess. Nobody had ever said this kind of thing to her before. If anything, there'd only ever been one person in her life, and that person had told her the exact opposite.
"Well... shall we? The mood got awfully heavy for first thing in the morning. Sorry?"
"...You're apologizing yourself, so I don't understand why you keep telling me not to. Isn't that the same thing?"
"Heh."
Anyway, watching her fail to properly refute my logic and instead complain like she was sulking... it was kind of nice. At the very least, it felt like my words were starting to get through, little by little.
After that, I spent time with Baek Eun-hwa the ordinary way — just living through the day together. It was only the second day. Day two of seven. There was still so much left to say to her, so much influence left to leave. I was staying in her home, after all, helping her from right beside her. There was no other way it could go.
"Counselor. I've been wondering for a while now. Why do you work at the Welfare Bureau? If your ability is hypnosis... it seems like there would be a lot of places where you could make more money."
"That's sudden."
"Your ability has only been used on me once so far... but from what you've told me, it can have a considerable effect on someone's mind and psyche. Isn't working at the Association a bit of a waste?"
The question came while we were sitting at a window table in a café with an incredible view, enjoying cake and coffee. I hadn't expected a question like this, but in a way... wasn't it similar to the kinds of questions I asked heroes? Like last time, when I'd used hypnosis to ask Baek Eun-hwa what made her decide to become a hero.
"Hmm... I just didn't have that many options, I guess?"
"What do you mean?"
Honestly... Baek Eun-hwa would definitely feel terribly sorry for me. If you looked at my past as objectively as possible, it landed pretty firmly on the unfortunate side. Even by my own standards, it hadn't been a happy, rose-colored life.
"If my ability were the kind of thing where I could just snap my fingers and put someone under, I would've become a hero. It's not that strong. And it's not the kind of thing that can completely brainwash someone on the spot, either."
"...Even so, it seems like you'd still have quite a few options."
"At the end of the day, hypnosis — suggestion — is something where the gap between the person using it and the person on the receiving end is always going to be huge."
I stuck to talking about my ability. If I started in on my origin story, she'd definitely tear up and start apologizing.
An orphan who didn't even know if her parents were alive or dead. The story of going through elementary, middle, and high school with almost no friends because she was from an orphanage, while a bunch of idiots gave her shit for no reason other than that she happened to look decent, which made everything miserable. The story of how, around high school, a fucking disgusting rumor spread that she'd used her hypnosis ability to turn some student into an idiot who was completely infatuated with her — so she couldn't focus on her studies, started just showing up for attendance and sleeping through the rest of the day, and... effectively failed to get into college.
If I told her any of that... she'd react exactly the way I expected.
"If you're a staff member at the Hero Association, people will give you the benefit of the doubt, at least. Regular people have this huge fantasy about the Awakened, you know? So they treat hypnosis like it's full-on brainwashing. A lot of them even thought it was somehow... unclean."
"...Ah."
"Plus, helping people is actually pretty enjoyable, in its own way. It's rewarding, and you get to meet all kinds of people."
Well, it wasn't a lie. Helping heroes like this really was pretty fun, and it really was rewarding. And it was also true that using a hypnosis ability in other fields was... slightly frowned upon.
"You too, Eun-hwa. Setting aside a hero's sense of duty — doesn't it make you happy, helping people and hearing them say thank you?"
"...Ah."
"Heh. That's all it is, really. Just one short sentence from someone — that's what becomes the reason you do the work, the motivation that lets you keep going. Life's like that too."
"...You're right. Counselor... just like you said... I think that's how it is."
"Heh."
I'd just said what was on my mind, lightly, while gently slicing the cake with a knife. And there she was, her face full of thought, turning those words over. I liked that expression quite a bit.
"Eun-hwa, try a bite of my cake too. It's really good."
I just picked up a small piece of the sweet strawberry cake with my fork and held it out to her. She seemed to have more and more on her mind. Might as well think harder while eating something sweet, right?
"...Thank you."
"Hehe."
And she didn't refuse the offer. I'd been planning to transfer it to her plate, but it went straight into her mouth...
Her head was apparently very busy thanks to everything I'd said.