The Godfather's Comfort and a Drunken Confession
Haru brought the glass to her lips and took a deep pull. Whether it was the whiskey's blunt impact or the sweetness that clung stubbornly after it, her brow knit hard.
"Haa... damn, this is strong."
She let out a rough breath and set the glass down. Soaked in alcohol, her voice had dropped, lower and heavier than before.
"You've got a real talent for getting under a person's skin. Serving a drink like this."
I answered the pointed remark with a faint smile. Slowly polishing the Negroni glass she had just emptied with the cloth in my hand, I spoke.
"Do I? I've never gone out of my way to make someone angry."
As if my shameless answer were too much to stomach, she jerked her shoulders and burst out laughing.
"Pfft—hahaha! You're a real funny bastard! Hey, where'd your conscience go? If those network jerks had heard that just now, they'd have pinned Liar of the Year on you on the spot."
Haru didn't even wipe the moisture gathered at the corners of her eyes. She lifted the glass again and tipped what remained of the Godfather into her mouth. The drunkenness must have climbed all the way into her blood, because she began spilling things the usual Haru would never have let past her lips.
"Hey... you don't get it, do you? How much of a pain this body is. I didn't used to have... these watermelon-sized lumps stuck to my chest, and I'd never once worn a short skirt like this.... But I just begged to stay alive, and the world went and made me into this."
She jabbed roughly at the swell of her chest, bared to the limit above the off-the-shoulder neckline, and as the slurred words left her, the trim of the short cheerleader outfit swayed slowly with the motion.
"Know what's even funnier? Wearing this flimsy cheerleader getup... Cheering? Haa... who the hell am I supposed to cheer for? I'm not the type who wipes somebody else's ass. But every time I cheer, the girls around me say strength just wells up in them. They say looking at me pumps them up... what kind of comedy is this?"
Haru folded forward over the bar, laying her upper body across it. The white shoulders left bare by the off-the-shoulder top had flushed red, holding the heat of the liquor.
"But you... you don't tell me to hang in there. You just feed me strong drinks... and tell me your pathetic hangover stories... Maybe that's why... I feel really... weird."
Mumbling, she turned her head toward me. Her eyes, blurred and soaked in alcohol, barely managed to fix on some point of my face.
"Youuu... seriously... you're annoyingly relaxed. And here I am, guts turning inside out."
She grumbled with her heating cheek pressed to the cold surface of the bar. Every rough breath carried the whiskey's sharp, unmistakable scent.
I quietly drew the empty Godfather glass in front of her toward me and spoke.
"Is that so? If strong alcohol let you forget reality, even for a little while, then I suppose I've done my part."
Clink. The ice left in my glass tapped lightly together and broke the sanctuary's stillness.
Haru blinked slowly, as if turning the answer over, then let out a small laugh. How to put it... the smile was too fragile to be a sneer, and somehow too relieved to be a sob. A strange, unsettled curve of the mouth.
"Done your part? Yeah. Nice work... damn nice work. Thanks to you, this cumbersome body, those goddamn camera lenses... I can't remember a single one of them right now."
She looked my way with her cheek still against the table. Moisture gathered in her eyes, catching the counter's faint light in fine glints.
"Buuut... don't watch the broadcast tomorrow. No—just don't turn the TV on at all. I... don't want you seeing me... like that."
The tail of her mumbling trembled, just barely. She raised both hands to hide her face, as if to cover the shame, but the ears showing between her tangled fingers were already ripe red.
"Don't worry. Hiyori calls me an old fossil. That's how little I know about any of that."
The answer must have caught her off guard. Haru's eyelids blinked, slow. She stared at me blankly for a long moment, and then a thin laugh leaked out between her lips with a hiss of escaping breath.
"Pfft—! Hehe... you really... are an old fossil? Figures. Sometimes, the way you talk... you do sound like somebody's grandpa."
Mumbling, she buried her face again in the cold bar top.
"Yeah... better if you don't know a thing... Just stay a dumb old guy who doesn't know smartphones or apps or any of that crap. Then... at least when I open the door and walk in here, I'll be able to breathe."
She wrapped both arms tight around herself, curled in, and kept on mumbling.
"Give me... just one more drink. This time... something that'll really stop me thinking... insanely strong, and nasty, something like that..."
The drunkenness that had risen to the ends of her veins slowly unraveled Haru's voice. The fingers that had been scratching meaninglessly at the bar crept a little closer, near enough that they might or might not touch my hand.
"You're drunk, Haru."
I hadn't even finished the words. Haru's head, mid-reach toward the glassware as she demanded something stronger still, dropped with a soft jerk.
A slide of cloth. The thin off-the-shoulder fabric that had left her shoulders bare, and the hem of the short miniskirt, collapsed across the counter. She rested her flushed cheek on the cold bar and sank into a deep sleep, dead to the world. Only a thin, steady breath filled the quiet air of the secret bar.
A supporter who lifts the morale of the Magical Girls around her with dazzling cheers and amplifies their power. That was the role the world had forced on this one, and the entire reason that thin, precarious cheerleader uniform existed. But looking quietly down at her sleeping face, I couldn't find a trace of the put-upon employee who, only minutes ago, had been throwing back hard liquor and pouring out every grievance she had against her job and her boss.
"There's a room of mine on the second floor. You should rest there."
No answer was coming, of course, but I murmured it anyway and stepped in close. I bent one knee to the floor and carefully slid both arms beneath her bare shoulder and under the knees the short skirt covered, then slowly put strength into my legs and rose. The weight gathered in my arms was far lighter than the figure suggested. The faint alcoholic heat rising off her warming skin, and the sweet scent spreading beside her cheek, tangled together and slipped in between my breaths.
I climbed the stairs slowly, careful not to break the even rhythm of her breathing. I opened the door to my room on the second floor and lowered her onto the soft mattress. When I drew the thin blanket up to her chin, Haru curled in on herself as if the bed had always been hers and breathed a shallow, snuffling sleep.
I turned the knob with care, shut the door, and took the stairs back down to the sanctuary on the first floor. I considered killing even the music that had been drifting softly, so she wouldn't stir upstairs—but I still wanted the results of the Magical Girls' ranking tournament, the one that came only once a year.
Leaning on the counter, I took out my phone and opened the broadcast. Unfortunately, the competition was already over. At the center of the screen stood the winner, a Magical Girl in a sharply tailored uniform. As she accepted a golden trophy with a solemn face, Magical Girls in every kind of outfit crowded around her and applauded.
"Quite the personality in the outfits over here, too."
I murmured it, looking down at the screen. Frilly dresses and magic wands—the things the words Magical Girl usually called to mind—were nowhere to be found, no matter where I looked. The closest thing to the fairy-tale heroine I used to know was probably Yui. Aside from her, walking around with that star-tipped wand, I doubted I would ever again see a Magical Girl who fit my old prejudice.
A bright fanfare rang briefly through the phone's speaker. The event had ended, and along with the announcers' thoroughly excited voices came a ceaseless stream of minor aftermath about Magical Girls I didn't know. The winner's indifferent face in her uniform, and the exaggerated cheers from the broadcast booth, sat far too strangely against the air of this quiet mountain sanctuary.
I didn't linger on the screen. I pressed the power button on the side, and with a click the phone went black. I slipped it into my apron pocket and stretched both arms overhead.
After a rough tidy around the bar, I headed for the display case, meaning to set out tomorrow's ingredients ahead of time. I pushed the liquor cabinet—the one that had offered up the night's hidden refuge—back into place. The seams locked tight, and it returned to an ordinary stretch of wall.
BOOM!
A roar that shook the whole building climbed up through the floor. Fine dust sifted from the ceiling, and the wood grain under my feet creaked as if it were screaming.
The second floor...
It was the sound of my room being smashed apart. I looked up at the ceiling on instinct, swallowed a short sigh, and turned toward the stairs. I had no idea what I'd done wrong, but the moment Haru came down, apologizing first—no questions asked—was probably the safer play.
Thud. Bang. Bang! The sound of the stairs being stomped nearly to pieces closed in, savage and fast. What remained of a whirling gust poured down the steps and scattered everything on the counter into the air.
Then our eyes met—hers, at the bottom of the stairs. The frills of the cheerleader outfit were a wind-torn mess. What caught me more than anything was her face, red enough to burst from the tips of her ears all the way down the nape of her neck. Haru's pupils shivered violently as she glared at me.
I drew a short breath, brought both hands neatly together in front of my chest, and spoke.
"I don't know what I did wrong... but I'm sorry, first of all..."