Someone Who Lost Her Way
The cemetery sat outside the city, so of course the plan had been to head back in afterward... but the mood had been so heavy since morning that I couldn't quite leave it at that. It was still far too early for lunch, and Baek Eun-hwa looked far too unsettled for me to simply send her off on her own.
No—if you only looked at the surface, she might have seemed fine enough. But people are more than what they show. What lives underneath is what matters. ...Especially me. I knew that better than anyone.
"We're not working today anyway. Want something sweet to drink?"
"That sounds nice."
"I'll have an ade, then. What about you, Eun-hwa?"
"...A frappuccino, please."
"Heh. You sit tight, then. I'll take the order and bring it over."
"...Okay."
I brought the downcast Baek Eun-hwa into a quiet little café. It was a small place on the outskirts of the city, so there weren't many people, and the view beyond the windows was genuinely lovely. A decent choice, I think.
Dragging her through some crowded spot right now—or putting her through anything unnecessarily hard—just felt like a bad idea. She needed time to sort through her thoughts. Time to let them out, if she wanted to. Of course I couldn't know everything going through her head at this moment. I just felt like this was what I had to do.
"...Haa."
This was supposed to be my job. But maybe it was because I'd been treating the heroes under my care more closely than usual lately... Even I had to admit I was giving them special treatment at this point, and that made something in my chest feel complicated.
...I knew I shouldn't. But I was only human, after all.
"Haha..."
A bitter smile slipped out of me as I waited for the drinks. Naturally, once I'd collected the coffee and the ade from the barista, I put my usual brightness back on and returned to Baek Eun-hwa.
"I ordered cake too, Eun-hwa. Give it a try. They said it's the signature here."
"Is that so..."
When people are depressed, eating something usually helps. Even if it didn't work at all, at least it wouldn't hurt. So I'd gone ahead and ordered an extra slice of something sweet, and I made sure she was the one eating it, not me.
"...It's good."
Not that I expected a single piece of cake to completely fix a fox in a slump. Obviously she was going to need more time than that. Whatever her mother had done, a mother was still a mother. That kind of existence was special.
...Not that I, an orphan, had any business thinking about that.
"...You're quieter than usual."
"Haha..."
"I'm sorry. I feel like I dragged you somewhere you didn't need to go and made you listen to things you didn't need to hear. I was going to come alone."
"It's fine. All I did was sit in a car a few times."
"If you were really okay, you wouldn't be this quiet. Every time I'm with you, it's always so lively. This is the first time I've seen you like this."
"Haha. Is that so?"
Well, it couldn't be helped. I hadn't gone quiet on purpose. I just... didn't know what to say. Wouldn't it be even weirder to start cracking jokes in a situation like this?
Or maybe not. Maybe throwing yourself into changing the mood was the right call. But at least for me, I couldn't bring myself to banter with Baek Eun-hwa right now.
"...I really am sorry, though."
"It's okay. I can't fully understand what you're going through, Eun-hwa. But I think I understand a little... why you brought me all the way out there."
"......"
"Mmm... Life is full of things that are hard to do alone, right? So many that we meet people, gather together, form groups, build societies. Asking someone for help. Leaning on them. None of that is a problem. Not even a little."
"......"
"We're only human, after all."
In the end, talking was all I could do. Whether I used hypnosis or not... this was my job, wasn't it? I comforted her, but the words I offered were really just an extension of the things I always said.
"......"
At that, her eyes wavered. Those blue eyes, so full of light, trembled, and she couldn't quite meet my gaze. Until now, whenever I said things like this, Baek Eun-hwa would brush them off as just words and move on. But now she was shaken. Properly shaken.
Until now, even when she didn't have an answer, she'd at least say something. She'd never looked away entirely. But now she just...
"......"
...dropped her gaze, said nothing at all, and traced her fingers along the glass holding her coffee.
Watching her, I understood all over again just how deeply that woman—her mother—had carved herself into Baek Eun-hwa's sense of self. Just how powerful a parent could be to a person. I already knew that. But feeling it again, and thinking about what that person had done to a child... honestly, it made me sick.
Normally, when you interpret a name written in Chinese characters, you leave out the family name and just read the given name. Baek Hwa. A person who didn't suit the name white flower in the slightest.
Of course I still didn't know what her circumstances had been, or what kind of life she'd lived before giving birth to Eun-hwa. But I couldn't forgive her. Even if it was true that people who were abused as children often grew up to abuse their own families...
"Let me be honest with you."
"Yes...?"
"...Right now, I have nothing but a terrible opinion of your mother. Even if she's already passed. Honestly, I think she was awful."
"......"
I hated it. I didn't need to ask exactly what Baek Eun-hwa was thinking. I just couldn't stand it. I'd never even imagined starting a family or having a child, and I had no plans to. But this was just... wrong. Common sense said so. You weren't supposed to do that.
"Want me to be even more honest? What your mother did wasn't discipline. It wasn't education. It was abuse. I think it was wrong. No—it just was wrong."
"......"
I said it right to her face. I'd tried to hold it in, but I couldn't. Even if that woman was her mother, she was garbage. And watching Baek Eun-hwa keep trying to defend her, over and over, was just too frustrating. She'd always been a troublesome woman. A frustrating woman. But this was something else entirely.
"...That's how you see it."
"Yes. I don't fully understand how you feel about it, Eun-hwa. But that's how I see it."
"That's... fair enough. It's not as though I don't understand what you're saying."
"Can you still, even now, tell yourself that your mother had her reasons? That you can understand it? That you can forgive everything she did?"
"...And if I can?"
"......"
...I see. Yeah. That was possible too, wasn't it.
In the end, Baek Eun-hwa's childhood would have been filled with nothing but Baek Hwa—her mother. Hating her, resenting her... that would have been hard. In that mix of love and hate, the love probably accounted for sixty, maybe seventy percent.
Right. Her mother wouldn't have only abused her. There would have been ordinary memories too—things you could actually call a childhood. And that was why Eun-hwa couldn't simply resent her.
"If you can forgive your mother—if you can forgive someone who did those things... that's probably where it all starts. The beginning of every one of your worries."
"......"
"You have to judge right from wrong. But the standard you'd use to draw that line is itself too blurry."
"...I take down villains just fine, though."
"That's because they're the ones causing trouble inside the city. Reports come in, and if you have the power, of course you can stop them. But what I'm talking about is what's going on in your head, Eun-hwa."
"......"
"The idea that your mother had her reasons, and that that made it okay. That's where it starts. That's why you put up with the Association piling everything onto you. That's why you quietly, foolishly let them keep adding more to a schedule that's already overflowing. All of it starts from the fact that you've forgiven your mother."
Where there was a result, there was a cause. That was only natural. Everything had a cause, and that cause had a cause of its own. That was how the world worked. I didn't mean it in some karmic, live-a-good-life kind of way. Just that the things we experience in life get tangled together, and those tangled threads tangle again, and the results they produce tangle with still more results. That was all.
"...Then what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to resent a mother who's already been gone for so long? Blame her? Or am I supposed to throw away everything I'm doing now and leave the world behind? A-am I supposed to abandon the place I earned—the place I got by working so hard to become a hero, by getting hurt, by breaking bones, by rupturing organs—and just walk away? I've been clawing toward this... only this... since I was a child. What do you want me to do......?"
"......"
Baek Eun-hwa spoke with several times the emotion she usually showed. Of every conversation I'd ever had with her, this was the one that held the most of her true self.
Someone who had lost her way.
Someone who tried to hold onto herself, yet could never catch the self that simply floated, weightless. Someone adrift.
That was Baek Eun-hwa.
She'd been drifting for a very, very long time. She'd drifted until, almost by accident, she arrived in the sky she'd been aiming for... and even there, she wandered. Baek Eun-hwa, who had thrown away everything on the ground for the sake of a single goal. She'd achieved what her mother had so badly wanted—becoming a "hero who helps people"—but beyond that, she was no different from a child who had never once properly considered what she herself actually wanted.
She was no different from that enormous, flavorless house of hers. At a glance it might look spacious, even lavish... but inside, there wasn't a single piece of furniture she had chosen for herself. Everything had simply been slotted into place.
Which was why.
"I... I......"
Which was why.
That was why Baek Eun-hwa was like this.
She couldn't be any other way.