Chapter 146: Have You No Mind to Date Me?
I must be well and truly out of my mind.
In her room, Hong Yumin clutched a pillow and curled in on herself like a chrysalis.
A whole day, held in his arms…… How am I ever supposed to look anyone in the face?
They would pretend not to have seen, or else never mention it to her face. But the thought of them gnawing on it afterward, a snack to go with their drinks, was more than she could bear.
What have I done……
Ought she to go back into seclusion?
Hong Yumin weighed it in earnest. People had become difficult to face. Let her so much as picture those tepid, knowing stares, and—
"Kyaaaaa……!"
Whump! Whump!
She kicked the pillow. She wanted to plant her face in the dishwater and die. The dignity she had built so carefully had dropped straight into the pit in a single instant, and all of it, no doubt, was the Phantom Thief's fault.
"Grrrrn."
San-gun poked his head in. Catlike vertical pupils, plump cheeks, and a handsomely grown set of whiskers tickled her fingertips.
"Prrrr."
Rumbling a purr, he nuzzled her. The tiger's head flopped over Hong Yumin, and fur tickled her from head to toe.
"Lord San-gun, how am I supposed to go on living?"
"Grr." —And why not simply go on as you always have?
Hong Yumin set her chin on the pillow and grumbled.
"……After a spectacle like that, how am I to live as I always have?"
"Grr." —Everyone has a disgrace of that sort. I have one myself.
"Even you, Lord San-gun?"
"Grk." —Of course. Long ago I was seeing to my business when I caught sight of a kite in the sky and startled myself half to death. Trying to hide, I rolled all over the ground and smeared my whole body in dung. The stink coming off me made me suffer for days.
Hong Yumin let out a stifled laugh.
"Truly?"
"Mrow." —True as true can be. What would I gain by lying at a time like this?
Her heart eased, a little.
"Grrrk?" —Do you dislike him that much?
San-gun asked it gently.
Hong Yumin looked away.
"……There is nothing in him one could like."
As a human being or as a man, he had not a single quality that might win a person's favor. Always the same clothes, always the same mask. He used polite speech and observed the forms, yet his gestures were exaggerated and his tone was cheap. He hid his own heart while reading other people's as if they lay open in his palm. He committed unreadable eccentricities as casually as eating, and because no one could tell what he would do next, he was a constant unease. Every time she looked, his shape went faint, so that he seemed to exist and not exist at once, and now and then he changed into something words could not hold.
How was anyone meant to fasten a heart to a being like that?
"Grk. Grk." —Keeping close to him is a hard thing. His very existence is a danger.
"……If even you say so, San-gun, then you must be seeing much the same thing I do."
"Krrng." —And why wouldn't I? I know he is human, and still, every time I look at him, I forget it. I know that forgetting is wrong. I forget anyway.
"…………."
For an instant Hong Yumin nearly asked whether it was wrong.
San-gun licked the back of her hand.
"Mraow." —I know what you're thinking. But don't make the mistake of revising your judgment to match mine. That would be the thing that's truly wrong. This is only my thought. Nothing more.
Her arm slipped off the pillow. The pillow toppled sideways with a soft flop, and the emptied arm wrapped around San-gun's head in its place.
"……I cannot acknowledge him as human, though he is one. A man who makes sport even of death, who toys with the world itself—how could such a one be human?"
"Kwung!" —He is human. More human than anyone. What you see is not the whole of him.
San-gun's voice was firm.
Strength locked into Hong Yumin's arm.
"Mew." —He is human, and he is a hero. Set the strangeness of him aside, and that fact cannot be denied.
"A hero?"
Hong Yumin asked it again, as if she had misheard.
"Even so, he is no hero, surely?"
"Kehong?" —And why not?
"Because…… he is a being no one can identify."
Like a child who hated to lose, she offered up a shabby excuse.
San-gun's brow furrowed.
"Krrng!" —That is no reason. Deciding good and evil by looks alone—a judgment no better than a fool's.
Hong Yumin's neck shrank in like a turtle's. She looked exactly like a child being scolded by a parent.
The childhood she still kept so purely made San-gun want to laugh. It was a face she would never show in front of anyone else: a face only he was allowed to see.
He spoke again, his voice gone soft.
"Prrrr." —Is he truly unfit to be called a hero?
"……No."
Hong Yumin murmured it.
She called his deeds to mind. He had stopped Sword, come to assassinate the Dan Clan; because of that, no lives were lost, and the peace of a household was kept. He had rooted out the criminal organization eating the nation from within. He had opened a road for the heroes Korea preferred to ignore. He had given a pitiful immortal her family back, and made her a refuge without equal. He had won freedom for Hawaii's sealed goddess. He had halted the march of a great evil that would have burned the world. He had laid low the enemy of the world, the Heavenly Punishment, and saved the immortal yet again.
Set down one after another, he was entirely worthy of the name hero. Had the Phantom Thief been missing from every one of those affairs, the world would have broken—and broken long ago.
Have I been too much a prisoner of my own prejudice?
Hong Yumin admitted it. The Phantom Thief's good deeds.
Of course he was the sort of bastard who irritated people as easily as he ate, who never shut his mouth and turned every trifle into a crisis. Even so, if someone condemned him as evil, she did not think she could agree.
Right. If he were evil, my dear friend would already have cut ties.
A god would have done the same.
"Rorong." —Have you tied the knot, after a fashion?
San-gun looked at her with a kindly smile.
Hong Yumin gave a small nod.
"More or less."
"Grrng. Grrng." —Then how do you mean to treat him next time?
"…………."
Hong Yumin thought hard.
……A hero, and a human. How was she supposed to treat him?
Should I start by settling what I call him?
Or should she draw a little closer, more familiarly?
Would somewhere around Dan Miryu do?
In Hong Yumin's judgment, Dan Miryu was a man to whom one could turn one's back. Character and ability went without saying, and there was a great deal in him worth learning.
That wouldn't do, would it……?
Even a beast offers kindness and affection to one who treats it well. The Phantom Thief had done her favors she would not see again in a lifetime, more times than she could count. To set the treatment of such a man at merely (?) the same level as Dan Miryu seemed gravely wrong.
And when she thought about it, what had she ever done for him? She had granted many requests, but every one of them had come back around as a benefit to everyone. Not once had the Phantom Thief asked for a thing that profited only himself.
Hong Yumin looked down at her own chest.
Two little babes hung there, dangling.
"……Would my chest have been enough?"
A light touch was forgivable, wasn't it?
Smack!
Hong Yumin struck her own cheek.
"……I have lost my mind."
San-gun fought, desperately, against the laugh that wanted to burst out of him.
In this, at least, she is still a child.
Cut off from the world for hundreds of years, she would not be used to dealings between one human and another. Even a dear friend had not easily mended it. She was not the only human in the world, after all.
People who would treat Hong Yumin as Hong Yumin herself were exceedingly rare. Even those who kept company with her ran into a wall they could not go around. Dan Miryu treated her as an elder and a teacher. Pele, being a goddess, looked on every human as a child. Dan Chuyeon was her disciple; someday, perhaps, but not yet. As for San-gun, Hong Yumin followed him as a parent. The rest were beside the point.
Mi Soryeong, at least, had no wall of that kind. Neither did the Phantom Thief pay the slightest mind to anyone's origins.
Less that he declines to use them, and more that he simply does as he pleases.
Which came to the same thing.
All at once, an amusing thought occurred to San-gun.
"Grrrrk." —Do you want to do something for him? Anything at all?
"……Yes? Yes."
Hong Yumin answered, reluctant.
"Grrng." —Then what say you to this?
San-gun offered his suggestion.
"Have you lost your mind?"
For the first time in his life, he was sworn at by Hong Yumin.
His tail drooped.
"Ehhhng." —I'm sorry.
"I—I apologize, Lord San-gun. It was simply too shocking."
Hong Yumin soothed him as his body shrank smaller and smaller.
San-gun would not meet her eyes. Only his tail went thump, thump.
She squeezed her eyes shut and spoke as if coughing up blood.
"………I'll try it. Once."
San-gun's tail shot upright.
"Prrrr!" —You mean it!
"………I needed to speak with him at some point anyway, so it can't be entirely wrong."
A bead of blood formed on Hong Yumin's lip.
"Grrng?"
"It's nothing. A light internal injury."
San-gun looked unconvinced.
Did you hate it that much?
"It's noisy downstairs. Keeping this shut up in my heart will only torment me, so I'll go say it quickly and come back."
"Grrng?" —Eh?
Hong Yumin shot off without a backward glance.
San-gun froze, one paw stretched out in vain.
Sipsado, who had been watching the entire scene from the same room, let out a sigh.
"You, mask."
"Miss Hong Yumin. Are you all right? Here's some sweet-and-spicy fried chicken. Please, sit and eat."
"…………?"
At Hong Yumin's shocking words, the whole room went still.
Tuk. Tuk. A piece of chicken rolled across the floor.
"Hold on."
Pele formed a club and cracked it over the Phantom Thief's skull.
Regrettably, this was reality.