Abduction (1)
The first thing I registered was the smell.
Fabric softener.
A familiar scent, one I had definitely known before. Where had I smelled it?
My head felt fogged over, thoughts refusing to connect in any clean line. I reached for my phone on instinct, but I couldn't find it — couldn't even move properly.
"Nngh?"
My wrists were bound in something like cloth cuffs. My eyelids, heavy from too long asleep, refused to lift easily. I rubbed at them with my shoulder, and when my eyes finally opened, what came into view was—
"Glow-in-the-dark… stickers…?"
As my mind gradually cleared and thought began to turn again, my breathing hitched, then stuttered back into motion.
The soft bed I was lying on. The blue blanket draped over me. The curtained window, and the light slipping through the gap to fall across a picture frame on the desk. The small mirror on the wall, and the certificates hung neatly above it.
My childhood friend Narin's room.
No — Magical Girl Iris's room.
Why?
A dull ache pressed into my back as I tried to sit up, but—
"Kh-kh—"
A cord around my neck was fastened to the bed frame. It gave just enough slack to lift myself a little, but not enough to get free or stand.
I turned my head. Behind me, black wings like a crow's spread into view.
I had clearly dropped the transformation. So why hadn't they vanished?
Worse — the wings were broken, unable to move, throbbing with a grinding pain.
I tried to gather mana to free myself from the restraints, but something inside me was blocked. Mana wouldn't flow. No — the moment it tried, something invisible cinched tight around it.
A faint violet light flickered across the cloth binding my wrists, then faded.
"…Chains?"
What was this? I had never even heard of an ability like it.
Then the door opened, as if someone had caught the noise.
Light spilled in from the hallway, and Narin's silhouette stood framed in the backlight. In one hand she held a tray with a bowl of porridge and a cup of water. The other gripped the doorframe.
Ordinary pajamas. Black hair tied up carelessly. Nowhere in her was the Magical Girl who saved the world.
Narin looked at me and smiled the way she used to, before everything. Her golden eyes were sharp even in the dark — unsettlingly so.
One second.
Two.
Her expression twisted, just slightly. She walked in as if nothing were wrong and shut the door, but her hand was trembling.
"You're awake?"
Her voice was cracked.
"How many days… has it been?"
"Five."
"Could you maybe…"
I lifted my wrists. Narin didn't answer. Instead she reached out and laid her fingers on my forehead.
It was too long, too slow, to be checking for a fever. It felt more like she was touching me simply because she wanted to. Her fingers drifted from my forehead to my temple, from my temple down to my cheek. Slowly. Very slowly.
"The fever's gone."
"Untie me."
"No."
It was closer to a scream than an answer — short, forced out of her throat. Her fingers traced down along my jawline. The moment they reached my neck, I couldn't hold still anymore and twisted away. The wings at my back flared with pain again, but her hand didn't leave. Instead both hands closed around my throat.
"Why are you doing this?"
"Why…?"
Narin laughed. Too sharp to really be called a laugh.
"Because I thought you were dead. You— you!"
Her grip tightened. Breathing grew difficult.
"When the pillar of light vanished, and I found you wrecked in the rubble of a collapsing building— blood everywhere, not even able to breathe—!"
She was the one choking me, and yet she seemed to be the one struggling more for air, dragging in ragged breaths.
"Hah— do you have any idea what I was thinking while I held you?"
"I… I… I saved you."
"Kh— kuh—"
Only when I started to black out did she startle and fall back, snatching her hands away.
"Haa— haa— so you're mine. I saved you, so you're mine."
Narin scrubbed her dry face a few times, then stood. When she came close again, her mouth was smiling the way it had before, but her eyes and brow were knotted tight.
Her hand settled on my wing. Careful, the way you'd handle sugar-work. Over the broken bone. Over the tattered feathers. She stroked them with trembling fingers.
The warmth of her skin through the feathers made the wing flinch on reflex.
"Nnh…"
"Does it hurt?"
"……"
"I'm sorry. But I still want to touch them."
She said she was sorry and didn't take her hand away. I could feel her breathing grow rough again.
When I looked back up, the ceiling was cruelly unchanged from childhood. The glow-in-the-dark stickers we'd laughed over and stuck up together as constellations.
I'd thought it was finally over. That this much atonement might let me rest. I had never imagined a situation like this.
"The bracelet."
Narin, red-faced, still touching my wing, froze exactly as she was.
"It's gone."
"You're lying."
"…I have it. And I'm not giving it back."
Our eyes met. I hadn't noticed how close she'd gotten. A few strands of her hair spilled down onto my cheek as she looked down at me.
Those golden irises held something I hadn't seen in a long time — not hostility, but feeling.
"You're already wanted."
"You can't get out with those famous wings of yours now that you can't even fly, can you?"
She already knew. She was asking while knowing — slyly, because she wanted the answer she wanted to hear.
"Looks like they branded you a traitor and they're hunting you from that side too."
"You've got nowhere else to go but me, right?"
I didn't answer. Or rather, I couldn't. She was right — walking around with these conspicuous wings that refused to vanish even after the transformation dropped would be suicide.
Narin pulled the blanket up over my shoulders. The wings stuck out past the edge, but she laid her hand over them anyway — as if cradling the broken wings, as if ready to seize them tight at any moment.
"There."
She said it quietly.
"You don't have to go anywhere anymore."
Somewhere between comfort and a sentence.
I closed my eyes.
"You must be tired, so I'll hold back for today."
Even as I fought to stay awake, the fatigue piled in my body closed over my eyes.
"You're up?"
As if to prove yesterday hadn't been a dream, the ceiling I opened my eyes to was the same one.
"I felt bad you didn't get to eat yesterday, so I reheated it."
Narin was sitting beside the bed I was lying on — how long, or from when, I didn't know. She stepped out briefly and came back with a bowl of porridge in her hands.
"Come on, eat up. If you're going to take your punishment, you need to keep your strength up."
"Punishment…?"
"You did a lot of bad things as a Villain."
"Thanks to me you won't go to prison, but you still have to be punished."
I shut my mouth in bewilderment. Narin forced my lips open and began feeding me spoonfuls of porridge she'd cooled just enough.
Having mana and not having it was the difference between heaven and earth. My mouth was pried open whether I liked it or not; I stopped resisting and swallowed. Warm, mild porridge slid down my throat.
"How is it? I made it myself."
"…"
When I didn't answer, Narin seized my wing hard.
"Ghk—"
"Answer me, please. I'm asking."
She let go.
"…Hey, Siwoo. While you were a Villain… you really did a lot of bad things, didn't you?"
She set down the empty porridge bowl and began climbing onto the bed, little by little.
"Destroying cities, hurting people… and I suffered a lot too."
It was clearly directed at me, and yet it also felt like she was talking to herself — as if trying to plant guilt, or to justify herself.
Softly, fully, her body came up onto the bed. She knelt over my stomach, settling my body between her legs. Then, as if to check the sound of my heart, she slowly lowered her upper body until she was lying over me, ear pressed to my chest.
"So… shouldn't you be punished?"
"Right?"
She pushed herself up again, pulled the blanket aside, and began undoing the buttons of my shirt one by one. Her eyes were unfocused. Her breath was hot.
"W-wait, what are you—"
The hands working the buttons stopped, then closed around my throat again.
"So… so you're saying you won't take the punishment? After everything you did?"
"Because of you… because of you… I—"
"Hah… hhk…"
When the hands left my neck, a rush of air flooded my lungs all at once.
"You're the bad one."
"Even so, I can still hold you."
Her hands moved again, slowly, finishing the last of the buttons, then began to stroke down my bare chest.
Our eyes met. The color had changed, but the feeling in them was no different from when we were children.
"Why are you doing this…"
It was closer to a mutter than a question. But tears were starting to gather in Narin's eyes.
"Why…? When you disappeared, when you became a Villain and showed up in front of me, when I had no choice but to fight you…"
"And at the end, when I only understood everything right before I lost you — do you have any idea what that felt like?"
Her voice rose, growing more violent, and her eyes no longer seemed fixed on me so much as lost somewhere in the past.
"I'm done. With all of it."
"Magical Girls, Villains, the Association, people — I hate all of it."
Narin looked at me again, and with a face full of tears, she kissed me.
Like a beast that had lost its reason. She bit my closed lips just short of pain, forced her tongue between them, and roughly, clumsily, swept through the inside of my mouth.
The wet sound of mixed saliva. Ragged breathing that made the air in the room thicker, stickier.
My first kiss tasted of salt and tears.