If You Don't Have a Mother, Just Make One
…I understood what Baek Eun-hwa was thinking.
There were things in this world that hypnosis alone could never fully uncover, and nothing was more certain than hearing it straight from the source. Of course, I had been deliberately stingy with the hypnosis to begin with. In all the time I had spent drawing out Baek Eun-hwa's true feelings, I had used it so rarely that I was starting to wonder if the ability was even half as useful as I had thought.
"Why did you bring me back here?"
"Haha. It is a pretty random place, isn't it? I don't blame you for being confused."
"So… why?"
"Well… because I want things to go well for you, Eun-hwa."
"……?"
After our talk at the café, the place I had brought Baek Eun-hwa was none other than the cemetery park where Baek Hwa's grave stood — the same grounds we had already visited before heading to the café. I had suggested we go back to the grave, and we had arrived in her car.
The moment we returned, her mood sank even lower than before. She had already looked thoroughly depressed at the café, and now she was worse… but I was certain the payoff would be worth it. I had no idea whether there would be any immediate positive effect, but I was sure it would do her life a world of good in the long run.
"Hehe."
"…Do as you like. I picked a place of my own choosing, after all. You're more than entitled to do the same."
"I'm grateful you'd think of it that way."
A volume of classic literature I had read a long time ago drifted into my mind. I had picked it up as a child in my previous life, and honestly I barely remembered the contents — something about the protagonist doing dirty things with his childhood friend's mother, that was about the extent of it. Full of slander and fabrication, of course. Still, there had been one passage in that book.
"What?"
"It's a line I heard a long time ago. I wouldn't go so far as to say it left a deep impression, but…"
It suited Baek Eun-hwa perfectly right now. That was what I thought, so that was what I said.
"It means that to become your true self, you have to break free of everything comfortable and stable that surrounds you — you have to fight it. I'm not exactly gifted when it comes to literary interpretation, so I may not have it precisely right."
"…And you're telling me this now because?"
"Because that is exactly the stance you need to take, Eun-hwa."
"…It's not as though my life has been particularly comfortable."
I understood why she would find that hard to follow. But what I was talking about was not her day-to-day existence — it was her way of thinking. She needed to stand up and fight those thoughts. Completely shattering the habit she had of endlessly justifying her mother — that, I had come to believe, was where the real beginning lay.
She must not understand. She must reject it. No matter what reasons there might have been, trying to understand a person who was already dead only ever cost the living. The living, after all, still had to live.
"I'm not you, Eun-hwa. I'm not Baekyeou, the A-Class hero, either. I'm basically just an office worker."
"…That's a funny thing to call yourself, considering you don't actually do any work at the office."
"Heh. You've got me there. Anyway, the point is that I'm a far more ordinary person than you are. A different person from you entirely. But the job I have to do is help you."
"……."
Which meant that a little… shock therapy was unavoidable. Stronger than the time I had cheered Batori on so furiously her face had gone past scarlet and looked ready to burst.
"What do you think you're—!"
"Hehe."
"What on earth are you doing on someone's grave?!"
So I set my foot on the headstone. I was well aware that this sort of thing generally counted as a serious desecration of the dead. But this was someone who, while still alive, had heaped every kind of abuse and humiliation on a living person. Did I really need to behave morally toward someone like that?
"Eun-hwa. The person buried under here is dead. She's already dead."
I was not a moral person, and mine was not a profession that required me to act morally. I was assigned to heroes, and I helped them — but that help did not have to take a strictly moral direction. Roughly speaking, if I solved a hero's problems… that was good enough. And this woman really was dead. That was a fact, no fabrication required. If anything, spending your life fretting over a dead person's lingering grudges and other such nonsense was just more hassle, more suffocation. In the end, people had to live their own lives.
"That thought you keep having — that she must have had her reasons, that she must have been struggling too, that she couldn't possibly have done it because she hated you? Throw it away."
"……."
"She was just a bad person. This is not the time to be worrying about your dead mother's corpse. It's the time to worry about you."
I spoke far more harshly than usual. That was the point of shock therapy.
"You're not a child, Eun-hwa. How long are you going to let yourself be jerked around by nothing but your mother's influence? You're an adult now. Twenty-one — it's been over two years since you came of age. Do you really need to be ruled by someone who's buried under here with nothing left but bones?"
"……."
"Look at reality. Think about reality, and think about yourself."
"……."
I had been quite harsh. A small part of me felt sorry even as the words left my mouth… but the fox curled up in a tight little ball atop her mother's grave needed to hear them. This was how she would take the hit, however small, and realize something. In the end, Baek Eun-hwa herself had to hear me and change her mind. I was not the one who would break the egg. She was.
"I don't know how the person under here ended up buried. But if she came back to life, do you think she would tell you that you grew up well? That she's grateful you turned out so pretty and so kind?"
"She would…"
"She wouldn't. She would tear into you with some bizarre criticism instead. Starting with why an A-Class hero is doing this and not doing that, and then every other kind of garbage she could think of."
I contradicted her more thoroughly than I ever had. And the more I spoke, the darker her expression grew, her gaze sinking toward the ground. Standing before her mother's headstone for the second time today, Baek Eun-hwa had not managed a single bright look — she had been like this ever since leaving the house this morning. But was any of what I was saying getting through to her, even a little? I hoped so.
"Do you think everything I've done until now has been wrong?"
"Yes."
"…You didn't even hesitate."
"I only told you the truth. Being honest with you like this seemed far better than bothering to argue."
"…Is that so."
If she had said no, I had been ready to come down even harder. But the fact that she was starting to wrestle with my words was a good sign, and through that wrestling I hoped — I really, truly hoped — that Baek Eun-hwa would break the egg herself. Using hypnosis to make her forget every memory of her mother… that would have been too cruel. My hypnosis was not capable of anything on that scale to begin with. And even if it had been, I had no desire to put that kind of coercive suggestion on her.
"But, um… could you take your foot off the headstone first? I did polish it quite carefully. Having it stepped on after barely an hour is…"
"Ah."
…I had left my foot up there this whole time without even noticing. I genuinely had not realized. In the process of talking to Baek Eun-hwa my own thoughts had piled up, and while I was busy persuading her I had absentmindedly kept my foot planted on the stone.
"Haha…"
I lifted my foot and, in the same motion, took a wet wipe from Baek Eun-hwa and started scrubbing the headstone with real dedication. She made a move as if to say she would do it herself — but I was the one who had made the mess, and besides, I wanted her to just stand there and think until she shattered her own twisted reasoning.
Squeak, squeak. I polished that headstone until it shone. Personally I felt I was going a bit overboard for a girl this hung up on her mother, but then again, stomping on a mother's grave and leaving it filthy right in front of her daughter would have been a whole different kind of strange.
"……Handler."
"Yes, Eun-hwa. Shall we head back? We've ended up spending far more time here than I expected. It was only a light conversation, and somehow… thirty minutes have gone by."
I stood up after finishing my thorough scrubbing, and that was when she called out to me. Summer was winding down, so the day was cooler than it had been a few weeks ago, but it was still hot. Heading somewhere with air conditioning would be nicer. We had somehow ended up back at the grave, and in the process enough time had passed that it was a perfectly reasonable hour for lunch.
"You said something a moment ago, didn't you? That to become your true self, you have to fight. You have to break free. That's what you said."
"I did. It was an interpretation of the passage, but yes, that's the idea."
"So I need to change the way I think about my mother. Even if stomping on her headstone was a bit much… I need to look clearly at everything she's done to me all this time. That's what you mean."
"I'm truly glad you understand."
"…Right."
But when I came to stand in front of her, what came out of that line of thought was a question. A question about the things I had said. And that made me genuinely happy. She may not have understood perfectly, but the mere fact that she was thinking about it that way was more than enough to make me glad.
"I've lived my whole life listening to my mother's words, thinking by her words, measuring everything against her words. So what am I supposed to do now? Am I supposed to throw away everything she ever told me and just… live? The way I live as a hero — all of that was because of her, too."
"Hmm…"
"That I have to help people. That I must never refuse to help. That I must never even speak of refusing. That I have to put other people first, always, no matter what… If I throw all of that away, how am I supposed to go on…?"
…And then came Baek Eun-hwa's dilemma. A dilemma born from my own words. Thoughts that amounted to a rejection of the life she had lived so far. I felt considerable joy at that — and at the same time, I could not help growing complicated myself. After more than twenty years of clinging to one person's words, simply discarding all of it and living on was bound to be extraordinarily difficult. If someone could actually do that, I thought, they would have to possess the mind of a superhuman. And even a superhuman might find it hard.
"Hmm… That's a fair point. It's a genuinely difficult subject. I've thought this before, but the kinds of worries you carry, Eun-hwa, are the kind that force you to think deeply."
"…So there's no answer I can have right now."
"Hehe……."
But I did not have to think for long. There was a truly simple method, after all.
If you did not have a mother you could lean on — a mother who would help you, a mother who was kind — then you just had to make one, didn't you?
…Make was a slightly odd way of putting it. But in Baek Eun-hwa's case, nothing could have been more certain.
I stepped right up in front of her. No more than an arm's length away.
"If you're worried about how you're supposed to live from now on… the person who can help you with that is standing right in front of you, isn't she?"
"…What?"
"My job in the first place is to take charge of heroes and help them, and you are a hero. So why should you have to worry about it at all?"
I stretched both arms forward. My fingertips were a breath away from touching her, and Baek Eun-hwa's face filled with considerable confusion at what I was doing. She was someone who had been through so much pain. There would be just as much that needed holding, and far more still that needed mending. I had never imagined any of it would be solved in a day or two. It would take a long time yet.
But helping that hero — helping Baekyeou — was my job, and the thing I had chosen to do. And there was nothing sadder than a person who helped others being unable to receive help herself.
"I'll keep helping you from here on, Eun-hwa. I'll take responsibility for making your life happier."
"…What?"
"So that there will be more joyful things than hard ones. So that in the middle of that busy daily life of yours, you'll feel happiness more often than exhaustion. I'll make sure of it."
"What are you even—"
"I'll do that for you. Just trust me."
"……."
That was what I said. And then I wrapped my arms tightly around Baek Eun-hwa, who was staring at me with the dazed, bewildered eyes of a complete fool. She was much taller than I was, but in every way that mattered she was no different from a child, and I stretched my arms up as far as they would go to stroke the back of her head.
"……."
"Hehe…"
"……."
"I'll be in your care from now on, all right?"
"……All right."
I kept stroking that snow-white fox, and it was a long while before the answer finally came — long enough that a smile spread across my face. It only felt like we had cleared stage two, but… well. That was life for you. This was just how life worked.
"Hehe…"
"…How long are you planning to stay like this?"
"Are you embarrassed?"
"…Yes."
Even so, I held her and kept stroking her for another ten minutes. Doing this in front of the grave where her dead mother was buried was a little absurd, I had to admit. But she was dead. So there was no need to care, was there? Besides, I was about to start freely undoing every last thing that disaster of a mother had ever taught her. There was even less reason to worry about something as small as this.
……Put that way, I did feel like I was doing something pretty awful.