We'll Just Hold Hands Tonight
Somehow—really, somehow—I ended up sharing a bed with Baek Eun-hwa. It wasn't as if I'd forced some strange meaning onto the situation, and it wasn't as if I'd stripped anything away, either. We simply, genuinely, literally lay down on the same bed and fell asleep.
"...Hmm."
Of course, we'd already spent a whole week sleeping side by side before. It wasn't even awkward, not really. What felt strange—what felt puzzling—was simply that Baek Eun-hwa had been the one to bring it up this time.
"Hahh..."
I hadn't thought much of it before. But last time, I'd seen her all but naked, right there in front of me. I'd even touched that body, for what it was worth. And I'd always been someone whose mind preferred women over men by a wide margin.
Well, I'd been a man in my previous life. I'd been living in a woman's body, sure... but I'd had a man's mind since I was little, and growing up hadn't changed that much. Naturally, my tastes had settled on women and stayed there.
"Are you going to wash up? I'm done with the bathroom. You're welcome to use it if you want."
"Ah, I already showered before I came over. I didn't even break a sweat while we were out, so I should be fine."
"I see."
Her hair was still heavy with water, and the only thing covering her was a single white bathrobe. I couldn't help it—my eyes wavered the moment she stepped out. I did my best to keep them in check, but they drifted toward her all the same, before I even realized it.
"I had a new bathtub put in a few weeks ago. You should try it. You're really not going to use it?"
"Ahaha, even so, it wouldn't feel right for a guest to just help herself. I didn't sweat at all, honestly. I'll just take my makeup off in a bit and that should be plenty."
"Hmm... If you say so."
Eun-hwa felt different today. I'd noticed she'd been treating me more comfortably lately, but this—having me sleep over at her place, walking out in nothing but a bathrobe—was a step beyond. It was so unlike her usual self that it almost felt like she was trying to seduce me, and my thoughts started spinning whether I wanted them to or not.
Not that it was seduction. Almost certainly not. From Eun-hwa's point of view, I was just an ordinary friend of the same gender—and her assigned handler, on top of that. The far more reasonable guess was that she was simply letting her guard down around me.
"Handler. Want a beer?"
"Oh—sure, why not?"
"It's not like we're going to sleep this second anyway."
Unlike me, Eun-hwa treated me more or less the way she always did—same tone, same manner. The only difference was that she was wearing nothing but a bathrobe over bare skin, which meant that if the tie came loose, there would be nothing left to the imagination.
"Eun-hwa, shall I dry your hair for you?"
"Ah... no. You don't have to do that."
"I don't?"
"I can take care of it with a little sorcery. It does wear me out, but... like this."
Her hair was soaked, the way anyone's would be after a shower, and I'd fully intended to dry it for her. Instead she shook her head, undid the loose tie holding it up, and kindled a small flame in the palm of her hand.
A blue Fox Fire.
"...Whoa."
She fed it a little power, and the flame took the shape of a fox. Then it came apart, scattering across her white hair in a fine, glittering spray—
"...Wow."
Whatever those fragments were—shards, sparks, I didn't have a word for them—they settled into that snow-white hair, and the water simply vanished.
Sorcery. It was sorcery, exactly as advertised.
I'd seen plenty of footage of Baekyeou in action, plenty of her fights, but her sorcery almost never showed up in those clips. And even when it did, the cameras were usually so far away you couldn't make anything out. So this was what it actually looked like.
I couldn't take my eyes off it. A pretty blue flame becoming a fox, the fox coming apart into something that was just... beautiful.
"That's how it's done. I don't use this method much, honestly—it takes a bit out of me. I just didn't feel like putting you to the trouble."
"Whoa... that just now, that was so pretty...!"
"Was it?"
"Yes—yes. It's a completely different feeling from the sorcery I see when you're fighting. Not flashy so much as quietly, softly pretty, if that makes sense? Seeing it right in front of me like this is amazing."
"...It's nothing special."
She could call it nothing special all she wanted. To me, it was as mysterious as real magic. I'd even started to wonder whether her ability wasn't a simple nine-tailed-fox transformation type at all, but something much broader.
If using it wore her out, that meant she was drawing on some kind of energy to work her sorcery—mana, ki, something in that family. Which meant she didn't just have a transformation-type ability. She had an energy-type attribute as well. The kind of well-rounded power you'd expect from an A-Class hero.
"Handler. Is my sorcery that fascinating?"
"It is. It's incredibly fascinating. Energy-type Awakened who work as heroes usually feel pretty different from actual magic, you know?"
"Hmm... Then I'll show you more."
"Whoa..."
And that was how I ended up watching Baek Eun-hwa's ability up close for the first time—really, truly up close. I'd seen her transformation magic plenty of times, the way she changed her hair or her clothes, but that never came with any special effects. Everything she showed me now, though...
"This is Fox Fire. It's the foundation I use whenever I work ordinary sorcery—fire-aspected sorcery, to be precise."
"It's beautiful. Can I touch it?"
"...I can adjust the temperature. It takes the shape of fire, but it isn't really fire, exactly. It's hard to explain. I can bring it down to something merely warm."
"So I can touch it, then?"
"Go ahead."
With her permission, I reached toward the Fox Fire—and I understood at once that it was something else entirely. It looked like flame, but it wasn't hot. Just warm. And she'd already told me she'd lowered the temperature considerably, which only made it stranger.
"That's incredible..."
"I'll show you something else."
She kept going, one trick after another. She shaped the Fox Fire into a tiny fox and steered it around, then used it to do a dozen other things I didn't even have names for.
"A glowing fox...!"
"...It's fire. Of course it glows."
I was completely gone. The things she was showing me had swallowed my attention whole. It really was incredible. I'd met all kinds of Awakened, and I'd even seen a thirty-year-old Magical Girl, but sorcery like this—so free, so effortless—was something else entirely.
"Hahh... Shall we leave it there?"
"Ah—was that a lot? You said it wears you out, but I don't really know how much..."
If using sorcery wore her out, that meant it cost her physically. I'd completely forgotten. I'd been so absorbed in watching that it had slipped my mind entirely.
My own ability never did a thing to my body when I used it. But some Awakened paid a price, and for Baek Eun-hwa, that price was the drain that came with her sorcery.
"...Ah. So that's why."
And looking at her now—worn down after putting on a show, a little frayed around the edges—I understood one more reason she always seemed so exhausted. It wasn't just the physical demands of fighting with a nine-tailed fox's body. The stamina cost of her sorcery was wearing her down on top of everything else.
"It's not as if it has no effect."
"..."
It was a tangled problem, and I felt a flicker of helplessness just thinking about it. But in the end, Baekyeou's problem was that she took on far too much work. Cut the workload, and the sorcery would ease off with it. What I needed to do was help her stop saying yes to every job that came her way like some kind of doormat—and help her learn to accept herself as she actually was.
"Using sorcery itself isn't that difficult. I just used a great deal of it today. In a fight, and then again on set. I'm only more tired than usual."
"Haha..."
I still felt a little bad. No—I felt quite bad. I didn't fully understand the way the drain worked when she used her sorcery, but she'd worn herself out because of me. I was sorry about that. I was also, if I was being honest, delighted. It had been a feast for the eyes.
"So the stamina you lose using sorcery... the energy, I guess? How do you get that back? Do you just eat well and sleep it off?"
"Generally, yes."
"Generally?"
She'd answered the question, but the wording left a gap I couldn't ignore. "Generally" was the kind of word you used when there was an exception.
"...There is an exceptional method for restoring energy."
"Which is?"
"Just... contact. With another person...?"
"Whoa. That's kinda dirty."
"..."
It was a startling method, coming out of nowhere—but then, it wasn't a common one. It lined up perfectly with the traits you saw in energy-type Awakened. Her ability's foundation was still transformation-type, no question... but what I'd been thinking for a while now was true. She had an energy-type attribute as well.
"That's a really fascinating ability, though. Awakened can have all kinds of traits, of course, but still..."
Even allowing for that, it was fascinating. Batori and Saran, the two I was closest to, didn't have anything like an energy-handling trait at all.
"So what's the threshold? How much contact are we talking?"
"Even just holding hands seems to refill it, little by little."
"Ah..."
Holding hands. Lighter than I'd expected. My guess was that anything beyond holding hands would naturally yield more energy—but this was skinship we were talking about. She'd probably mentioned holding hands because that alone was enough.
"Then shall we hold hands while we sleep?"
"...What?"
I'd already made her burn through energy she didn't need to spend. And even setting that aside, this was something that could actually help her. On my end, well... I'd be lying if I said the idea didn't make me a little giddy. But for Eun-hwa, it wouldn't be a big deal.
Girls holding hands with other girls was far more ordinary than people thought—much, much more ordinary. I'd seen it constantly, from the orphanage through middle school and high school. Not that I'd ever really done it myself.
I'd held Batori's hand while we tore through a department store, and I'd held Saran's now and then when we were out walking somewhere. But it wasn't as if it happened often.
"Haaahm... We did meet later than usual. I'm pretty sleepy."
"...Yeah."
We talked over our beers for a while, about this and that, and then we naturally made our way to the bedroom. Teeth brushed, faces washed—the whole routine, done properly. On a truly exhausted night I might skip the face-washing entirely and just plant my face in the pillow, but I wasn't that tired, and doing that in someone else's home would have been an unforgivable crime.
"Mmh... I've always thought so, but expensive beds really are something else. It's ridiculously soft, isn't it?"
"Want me to buy you one?"
"...I don't need anything like that."
And so I found myself lying on Baek Eun-hwa's bed again, for the first time in a while. I'd sat on it plenty of times when I came over to her place, but actually lying down like this was rare. The mix of awkward and familiar was almost funny.
"Eun-hwa. Your hand. You have to give it to me, you know?"
"...Fine."
"Hehe. We'll just hold hands while we sleep. You don't have to worry about anything weird. You trust me, right?"
"...Why are you suddenly talking like some creepy old man?"
"Because you've looked tense this whole time."
Holding hands with another girl might have been ordinary, but holding hands through the night was a different matter entirely. I could understand why she seemed a little awkward about it.
"Your hand is so warm."
"Stop saying weird things and just go to sleep already."
"Shall we? I don't know what you've got planned for tomorrow, but... you did go out of your way to borrow my time."
She was the one who seemed far more awkward about all of this. But the two hands we'd joined were wonderfully warm, and that felt good. In my whole life, I had never once simply held someone's hand and gone to sleep. It was a first for me too, and I was a little awkward about it myself—but it was a good kind of awkward.
This was Baek Eun-hwa. If she was going out of her way to borrow my time, there had to be a real reason. For tonight, the first order of business was letting her recover her energy. Come to think of it, this was a kind of treatment I'd never tried before. If holding hands through the night turned out to work better than I expected—if she looked better than usual tomorrow—then maybe this was a method worth using more often.
"Good night, Eun-hwa."
"...You too."
And so, for the first time in a very long while, I held someone else's hand. And then we simply slept. Nothing more.
I didn't have a precise grasp of my own sleeping habits, but no one who'd shared a bed with me so far had ever complained, so... it was probably fine.
Probably.