An Amazing Person
"It was an ordinary evening. Someone suddenly started pounding on the front door, and my parents asked, carefully, who it was."
"..."
"But there was no answer at all. The door just kept rattling, banging. Over and over, until my parents called the police... and told me to stay in my room. To stay quiet."
"...And then they opened the door?"
"The person outside started trying to break it down."
"..."
Saran's story of the past. The atmosphere surrounding it was far darker than I had expected.
I had braced myself for that much. Even so, as her words grew heavier and heavier, I had no idea how I was supposed to respond... so I simply kept listening.
"As it got more violent, Mom came into my room and put me in here. Inside this closet. There's nothing in it now, but back then it was packed full of blankets and clothes... She pulled the blankets out, tucked me into the corner, and stuffed them back in over me."
"...And then what happened?"
"The two of them... they probably figured they couldn't just hold out until the police arrived. So they picked up whatever they could find. A frying pan, a broom. Ordinary household things. Probably."
"..."
"And then the door finally gave way, and then..."
"They were murdered."
"Yeah."
...It wasn't anything unusual, really. In this world, villains came in every stripe, and petty criminals like that one were... all too common. On top of that, Saran's story was from twenty years ago. Public safety had been worse then than it was now, and so...
...Something tragic had happened. Of course it had.
"...I heard the fighting from inside the closet. From right here. I heard the screaming... I just... listened."
"And after that, the police arrived."
"Fortunately... I don't even know if I should use a word like that. The police got here earlier than expected, and they managed to arrest the perpetrator at the scene."
"..."
They succeeded... but only after her parents were already... dead.
It was a tragedy. But that was simply how reality worked. Cold. Even in a world with police, with public authority, with heroes... reality was still reality. You couldn't live inside a fantasy forever. You couldn't spend your whole life inside a fairy tale.
It was so heartbreaking I didn't know what else to say... but it didn't make sense for every story in the world to end happily. That just wasn't how things worked.
"...The police came in, arrested him, and covered my parents' bodies with plastic sheets. Then, while they were searching the house, they finally found me in the closet."
"...I see."
"Yeah. That's just what happened. What happened back then... it was unfortunate. That's the only word for it. It was unfortunate that a criminal like that happened to come to our house. It was unfortunate that the police arrived three or four minutes too late. That's all it was."
"..."
Saran looked more fragile than I had ever seen her. She always carried herself with that languid, indifferent air, but even accounting for that...
...it was almost painful to look at her.
"...When the police pulled the blankets off and took me out of the closet... they covered my eyes as they led me out of the room. Out of the house."
"So you wouldn't see the bodies?"
"Yeah. Of course. I heard later that they'd been stabbed in the abdomen dozens of times. Their organs had... spilled out. Both of them were like that. They didn't want a little kid to see something like that."
"..."
I wasn't in the habit of looking at anything gory. But at Saran's words... the image formed in my head on its own. What it must have looked like. The description painted itself without my permission.
It wasn't enough to bring something up from my stomach, but even so...
"I... see..."
There was nothing I could say to that. All I could offer was a reaction as worthless as this.
"Charlotte. Did you know? When you close your eyes, your hearing gets relatively sharper."
"...I know that, yes."
"Maybe that's why. Since I couldn't see, my sense of smell naturally got stronger than usual."
"..."
The words that followed made my stomach turn even worse.
Saran was a snake-type Mutant. She'd been an Awakened since she was a child, and because of that, the other kids used to say all kinds of things about the way she looked. Which meant she had been an Awakened from a young age. Which meant that even as a little girl, she could pick up information through a snake's sense of smell that no ordinary person could ever obtain.
"Urgh...?!"
"...Sorry."
...That was why, for a moment, a dry heave rose in my throat.
I had never experienced it myself. I couldn't even truly understand what she had felt. And yet that thing — what Saran must have felt back then — formed in my head with a strange and terrible clarity. The smell of her parents' corpses, experienced through an overwhelming sense of smell.
It was too... too...
Cruel.
"I'm... I'm so sorry..."
"...No. It's because I kept saying things I didn't need to say."
I felt bad for Saran. Honestly... it was almost too much. Of course... I knew she wanted to talk. I knew she needed to pour this pain out. I had absolutely no intention of stopping her from speaking.
"It's all right. Please, go on. Listening to you is my job, after all."
"It's just... because of the shock from back then. I became a hero so that people like me wouldn't have to exist. That's the story."
"...Is that so."
Saran's reason was an ordinary one, in its way. Wanting to keep victims from being created, and so becoming a police officer, a firefighter, a lawyer — that was a common enough path. She had simply chosen to become a hero instead.
But... maybe it was because Saran's account had been so detailed. Or maybe it was because I simply had no tolerance for this kind of thing...
"...Saran."
"Yeah."
"...I'm really, truly sorry, but... could we go outside...? I'm so sorry. I don't mean anything bad by it, I just... I think I might make a mess of this place."
I followed Saran out of the room and into the living room. More precisely, to the spot right in front of where her parents had died. If I kept listening here, the scene from that night would keep playing out in my head — forming, imagining, replaying itself — and if I stayed any longer I was genuinely, truly going to throw up the pasta I'd eaten that morning right here on the floor.
...Fortunately, Saran nodded at my words and led me outside. Back to her car, specifically.
"Mm... sorry."
"No. You have nothing to apologize for, Saran. Talking about the past isn't a bad thing at all. If anything... you must have thought about this a great deal before deciding to tell me."
"It's not even a useful story."
"If talking about it helps you, then that's more than enough to make it useful."
Back in Saran's car, I gulped down some water, and then we picked up the conversation again. It was a continuation of what we'd been discussing in the house that held her childhood. It had been a little — no, quite — difficult for me to hear.
But if it helped her in the end, that was the best possible outcome. Whether I'd found it hard to listen to didn't matter in the slightest. What mattered was whether it helped Saran. That was my job. That was what I was supposed to do. Of course I had to think that way. Of course I had to say it.
"After going through something like that, and deciding to become a hero... how has the work been for you, Saran?"
"How?"
"Have you felt a sense of fulfillment from doing the right thing? A sense of purpose? Thoughts like that?"
Becoming a hero so that no more victims would be created was, of course, a good thing. It meant contributing to society. Naturally, that was good.
But what mattered to me in this conversation wasn't that. It was Saran herself. Whether the people she helped as a hero made society better wasn't particularly relevant to me... but what she felt while doing the work — that was extremely important.
"It's not like I haven't. I get a little worn out sometimes, of course."
"I see."
It wasn't as though I knew nothing about Saran's work. I'd heard about it before. I knew it wasn't the kind of hero work the public ever saw — that it was carried out in secret, completely unknown to society.
Of course I knew her work was grueling. But what mattered wasn't simply that it was hard. It was how she felt through the process.
"They're people who've created far too many victims, in the end. So I can keep kids like the one I used to be from coming into existence."
"That's how you see it."
Saran's work was... far more brutal than ordinary hero work. Cruel, harsh, and lonely. Taking down criminal organizations single-handedly was always going to be that kind of job.
But even if the process was hard, the fact remained that she was achieving what she had set out to do. She was preventing the number of victims created by criminals and villains from growing. That much was true.
"You really are... an amazing person, Saran."
"...Amazing?"
"Yes."
That was why her answer couldn't help but strike me as extraordinary. Work she had already been doing for years. Work that would have broken anyone else. And yet she still held onto the heart she'd started with, still refused to break, still kept working toward that same goal.
A person like that... I thought was truly, genuinely amazing.