9. Black and Gold (15)
9. Black and Gold (15)
Back when I was in the orphanage, people hoping to become parents came by fairly often.
Not that they ever came looking for a defective kid like me.
Our orphanage mostly took in children with disabilities, but we had a handful of perfectly healthy ones too.
Those were the ones they came to adopt.
For a couple to adopt through proper channels, they had to sit on a waiting list for at least five years. But a private institution like ours could push an adoption through almost immediately, so long as the local officials played along.
The foundation that ran our orphanage was tied to a cult, and they had a stranglehold on every influential figure in the region.
Politicians, soldiers, civil servants—you name it.
With those people on board, nothing was off-limits, legally or otherwise.
The director sold children by having the would-be parents pay a fee disguised as a donation to the cult.
We envied the friends who got adopted.
Anyone who shelled out that kind of money for a child had to be rich, no question.
Had to be kind people who would love the child dearly.
We figured any friend who went off to a home like that was bound to live happily ever after.
Looking back now, that amount of money was never proof of wealth.
Nor did paying it guarantee a child would be raised with love.
But for us, scraping together coppers begging on the street just to meet our tribute quotas, that sum was a fortune we could chase for a lifetime and never touch.
Parents who would bestow such charity on a single orphan seemed like saints who could never exist again in this world.
We gave our blessings to those who left.
Live well. Be happy.
Yet some of them would come back to the orphanage before long—sometimes within weeks, sometimes months later.
Their adoptions had been dissolved.
The parents dissolving them invariably trotted out the same excuse: "The child turned out to have more issues than we expected."
Ridiculous. As if there were any child in the world without issues.
Even biological parents spent their days agonizing over their children's problems.
If there were issues, they lay with the parents, not the children.
The parents who came to rescue a child fell broadly into two categories: those who had no biological children and reluctantly chose adoption, and those who had lost a child to tragedy and then found one who resembled the dead.
At a glance, you might assume it was the inexperienced first-timers who would rashly accept a child and then buckle under the strain, but the ones who sent their kids back were overwhelmingly from the second group.
To this day, I still don't know what was in their hearts when they adopted.
Maybe they were looking to heal a wound through the child. Maybe pity stirred in them when they saw a child struggling through hardship.
At first, they were surely happy to have a replacement for the one they'd lost.
They must have vowed to pour all the love they could no longer give their dead child into this new one.
Then, as time passed, the truth would have crept up on them.
The child they had taken in was not the child they had buried.
They would have found themselves no longer mourning their lost child and been swallowed by self-reproach.
Setting a counterfeit doll in a child's place, letting the memory of the real one slip away.
By the time they realized what they had done, it was too late.
The love they had poured into the adopted child had, in truth, been meant for the one who was gone.
If they could simply accept that the two were entirely separate beings, that was one merciful outcome.
But many parents went further and denied the adopted child's very existence.
Some interloper was receiving the love that rightfully belonged to their own child.
Some interloper was sitting in the seat their own child should have occupied.
It bred a bewildered horror and an alien kind of rage.
The whole mess was a direct result of their own choices, yet the resentment was aimed squarely at the child.
A man like Lord Fantastic, brimming with pride, would have found it an unbearable humiliation to look at his own mistake every single day.
But dissolving the adoption outright was something his ego could not stomach either—that would mean admitting he had been wrong.
So he chose to freeze Reina out.
He meant to end this counterfeit relationship not by abandoning her himself, but by making her abandon him.
Reina, of course, knew nothing of any of this.
The truth was something she would not learn for another four years.
I glanced over at her, sitting beside the carriage.
Her face was a fortress—solid, impenetrable, betraying nothing.
Even after her father had betrayed her, she was still following his teachings.
But to me, that fortress looked like glass—something a single crack might bring crashing down.
Every so often, when we passed beneath a streetlamp, light spilled into the carriage, and I caught something glinting at the corners of her eyes.
She wiped them away immediately, though.
When friends came back after their adoptions had been dissolved, none of us had known how to treat them.
Should we welcome them back to the orphanage, or should we crack jokes and ask if the home-cooked food had really been that awful?
We weren't bound by blood, but we had shared a deep, sticky bond within those walls.
There was a family-like connection.
As the years passed, though, I began to doubt whether that comparison even held.
Becoming a family seemed far harder and more distant than merely acting like one.
And we could never figure out what those friends whose adoptions had been dissolved had done wrong.
Even now, as an adult who knows the full picture, that hasn't changed.
My head understands, but my heart still can't accept it.
The heart of a man like Lord Fantastic.
"Our villa, you see—it has the most wonderful view from the cliffs!"
"Heh-heh, think of it as a summer getaway and make yourselves entirely comfortable!"
Yurakne and Sven pulled out every stop to cheer our guest up.
She did not crack the slightest smile.
She kept her chin rigidly lifted, feigning a cool composure.
Once we disembarked from the carriage, we stood before the alleyway leading up to the estate.
The villa Anais had secured for us had a garden that opened out toward the seaside cliffs, which let the monster troupe members wander the grounds without drawing outside eyes.
The one drawback was that we couldn't pull the carriage straight in and had to walk a short distance.
"This place is..."
Reina, who had been climbing the alley with us, stopped short when we came face-to-face with a certain cliffside.
I followed her gaze upward.
Wasn't that the largest estate in the area?
"What is it?"
"That's our accommodations."
She looked squarely at me as she said it.
Her expression said she'd just pieced something together.
"The Golden Carnival's?"
"...Yes."
"Heh. We're neighbors, then."
So the noble's villa the Golden Carnival was using turned out to be right next door.
That was a relief.
Watching Ella walk over to the Golden Carnival's camp in the auditorium had left me uneasy.
By the rules, I was supposed to get her back in two weeks.
I knew plenty of good people were in the Golden Carnival.
Out of the 99 supporters who appeared in TT1, more of them belonged to the Golden Carnival than any other troupe.
But seeing Reina standing there looking so wretched had planted an ugly thought in my mind.
I worried Lord Fantastic might do something cruel to Ella as well.
"Old man, please follow Ella. In your capacity as a healer."
"Yes! It's enemy territory! I'm uneasy sending her alone!"
Yurakne chimed in, but Gaston pulled a sullen face.
"Weren't we agreed? No healing."
Oh, now the old man was playing petulant?
I made the request again, this time tacking on the word "master."
Gaston's expression turned smug, but he quickly straightened his face and shook his head.
"No! An old codger like me has something called Denture Virus—I get too close to a teenage girl, and it's a catastrophe waiting to happen!"
Delivering that kind of nonsense with a face that dead serious.
At first I thought he was being sarcastic.
But little by little, I caught on that something was off.
"You're serious?"
"Hah! You doubt me, boy? This circus troupe has always been a disgrace to the proper order of things. Wouldn't you agree, elder brother?"
Gaston's head swiveled.
We all looked at Sven.
He let out an awkward laugh, his jawbone rattling.
"Haha... I didn't think a few little jokes earlier would end up like this..."
"Denture Virus!"
Gaston hollered at the top of his lungs, his eyeballs rolling wildly.
I let out an inward sigh.
Sven's Inspira: Clown's Falsehood.
His lies, delivered deadpan, exerted a weak hypnotic effect on people outside the troupe.
It wore off with time.
The villa's caretaker had once spent three days drawing up plans for a summer trip to the North Pole before realizing he'd been duped and came storming back to find us, fuming.
Sven had tried to prank him again, but it didn't work on someone who already knew the hypnosis was coming and was on guard against it.
Because it was only a "weak" hypnosis.
Sven had told me earlier he'd planted the hypnosis on Gaston to keep him away from Ella for a while.
Denture Virus, of all things.
A harmless prank, probably, but now it had made the situation worse.
"What do we do? If we send Ella alone..."
"If it weren't for the Denture Virus, I'd be the one going!"
Gaston raised his voice like a drunk.
Now that I thought about it, I could smell hard liquor on him, too.
Seemed the alcohol had made the hypnosis sink in even deeper.
I realized there was only one option.
Only one way to instantly undo Sven's hypnosis.
Bring Gaston into the circus troupe.
I informed the competition organizers that we were forfeiting our second draft pick.
Then I accepted Gaston into the troupe.
['Gaston Haliwooden' has been added to the member roster.]
The moment the notification window appeared, Gaston blinked.
The same man who, seconds earlier, had been loudly warning Maya to keep her distance due to the grave dangers of Denture Virus, now tilted his head in confusion.
"Wh-what the?"
I explained Sven's Inspira to him while he stood there flustered.
I also informed him that he was 59, not in his nineties.
"You—you bony bastard! Why, I ought to—!"
"Heh-heh, my sincerest apologies."
"And earlier you told me my vodka was flat beer—!"
I held Gaston back before he could grab Sven by the collar.
That wasn't what mattered right now.
"Please go to Ella. Quickly."
"Ah... fine, fine."
He set off for the Golden Carnival camp at once.
The weight of his titles—Master of the Alchemy Guild, former caretaker of the Tomato Greenhouse—carried real force.
When he presented himself as Ella's personal physician, the Golden Carnival couldn't refuse.
Ella's name still appeared in the Member Management roster.
Fortunately, the system still classified her as one of ours.
That meant I could use the Sound Room for voice communication, and the Member Quest function should still work as well.
Now that I knew her location was right next door, we could rush over at any moment if things got urgent.
I gave Reina the room Ella had been using.
She looked at me for a moment, then bowed her head low.
"Thank you. From this side's perspective, I suppose I am an uninvited guest..."
I smiled and waved a hand.
"Ha, not at all. Playing along with the mischief—isn't that what devotees of Kirkeus do? Heh. The trade is happening in two weeks regardless. Don't think of it as a burden. Until then, Miss Reina, you are our guest."
"...Yes."
"If you need anything, ring the bell and a ratman will attend to you. Someone's on standby in shifts, even in the small hours, so don't hesitate."
"...Yes."
Seeing the gloom that hung about her, I wanted to offer some words of comfort.
But I couldn't run my mouth carelessly.
It would be absurd for an outsider like me to pretend I knew the details of a father-daughter situation.
More than anything, playing the role of the Golden Libra, she wouldn't be able to accept shallow consolation like that.
"For now, get a good rest tonight. We'll talk properly tomorrow."
"Thank you."
I closed the door behind me.
Just before I started down the stairs, I caught something like the sound of weeping from the far end of the hallway.
Mixed with sobs, it seemed.
I hesitated for a beat, then let out a thin sigh and descended the stairs.