A Certain Emotion (3)
My mood was strange. It felt awkward in some way, and at the same time, completely natural.
The awkwardness came from how long I'd been away from this place. Just yesterday, I'd been sleeping on the floor with barely a blanket spread out properly.
The reason the five magical girls were constantly fussing over something and chattering away was also because the area was usually so quiet. There was a road, yes, but compared to a highway, hardly any traffic passed through. Maybe a bigger road had been built nearby at some point, making this one unnecessary — people stopped coming and going, and the village simply faded away as a result.
But here was the exact opposite of all that.
Dust wasn't even a concern. The director and the kids living here cleaned diligently on a regular basis. Anything too old or worn out had been replaced with new products and new parts, and everything was thoroughly inspected. I didn't know exactly how the place was being run, but it was clear that the donation money I'd earned had been put to excellent use.
And besides, it wasn't silent like a mountain in the dead of night.
There were just over thirty kids living at the orphanage, Jieun and Jihye included. Of those, Jihye and Jieun were the oldest — five were middle schoolers, and the rest were elementary and kindergarten children.
Not all thirty of them lived together like one big family. Thirty wasn't a number large enough to call crowds, but it wasn't small enough to be intimate, either.
People generally gravitate toward kids close to their own age, so the circle of "friends" naturally formed a gradient by age group.
"You're back."
As I scratched my head and followed Rose out, a kid passing by said that. A middle schooler — a boy not quite at the level where you'd call him a "young man" yet.
Back when he was in elementary school, he'd practically clung to me, but somewhere around the end of elementary school and into middle school, our interactions had abruptly cut off.
I understood why. When I was in elementary school, I'd played with girls just fine too, but the moment I entered middle school, I started feeling self-conscious and embarrassed about it, and those relationships simply withered away.
I regretted it enormously, later on.
"Uh, yeah, I'm back."
He greeted me like someone who'd just stepped out for a quick errand that morning, and I couldn't think of anything better to say, so that was all I managed.
"Unni!"
And then there were the kids who came running while shouting that.
The ones grabbing my pants and hanging off them, looking up at me, were the younger elementary schoolers.
They were the ones I'd occasionally looked after when they were small. No matter how much money the facility had coming in, there were never enough staff, and you couldn't exactly just hire anyone off the street to watch the children. Sometimes it worked better for an older kid in the same orphanage to help out.
Maybe that was why these kids liked me. In truth, they were probably closer to Jihye than to me, but I had been away for quite a while.
Seeing kids who hadn't been visible earlier, when I'd arrived with the magical girls, now swarming around me — it seemed the director had decided it was fine to just let them be.
"Unni, where did you go?"
"Unni, are you really a magical girl?"
As I patted the heads of the kids clinging to me and beaming up at me, I finally understood why the children had been clinging to Rose.
In the world I used to live in, magical girls were characters who existed only in manga and anime. But now they existed in reality too. And the appearance of real magical girls wouldn't make the existing manga series disappear.
With reasons like that piling up, being a magical girl became a coveted profession for many. No matter what the reality was, what people saw was only the polished image that had been created.
I'd worried a little about how people were thinking after all the recent events, but judging by the kids' reactions, the image hadn't been damaged quite so badly after all.
When I made my way to the dining hall, the other magical girls were busy helping out too — serving food to the kids, answering their endless chatter with a mix of bewilderment and patience as the children crowded around them.
By comparison, my popularity apparently didn't run all that deep.
Well, we'd been active for very different lengths of time. Strictly speaking, I'd only officially become a "magical girl" as of today. As long as the new character didn't draw backlash, that should be enough, shouldn't it?
"Thanks for your hard work."
"Ah, oh, it's nothing, really."
When I carried my tray over to where Jua was, she answered with a bit of flustered surprise.
Jua was probably fairly popular too, right?
Honestly, I didn't really know anything about magical girls' objective popularity. The only magical girl I'd ever cared about was Hayun, and at school, Hayun and Jua didn't spend that much time together anyway.
No one ever explained why, but if several magical girls walked around together, the school hallways would be crushed beyond capacity, so it made sense.
But unlike the kids our age who schemed about how to get close to that power, the children here didn't know how to calculate such things. They were almost all little kids, after all.
"Okay, okay, everyone, food first. Let the unnis rest a little."
The director gently peeled the kids away, coaxing them, and pressed trays into their hands.
Jua's gaze drifted toward my waist. The kids she'd fended off were already holding their trays, so unlike the other magical girls, not a single one was clinging to me at the moment.
"I used to live here, remember."
When I said that, Jua nodded in understanding.
They were probably struggling with it in their own ways.
This wasn't just an ordinary house — it was an orphanage. I could roughly guess how a group of magical girls, each with her own flavor of justice, would feel about it.
Helping out like this was probably something they simply couldn't sit still and not do.
I did wonder if I was being too sluggish while everyone else was busily moving around, but honestly speaking, my whole body ached.
The exhaustion didn't seem like it would all drain away at once.
I got my rice, sat down at some random spot in the dining hall, and found Jihye and Hayun seated on either side of me. Other kids sat around us, laughing with their heads thrown back.
The place had been dead silent when I'd last seen it, but now it was full of children's laughter. That alone put my heart at ease.
It had also been far too long since I'd had a properly cooked meal. Honestly, the food here wasn't bad — though it wasn't quite as good as eating out, either.
"……"
The speed of my spoon gradually increased. I'd never realized that eating with a settled heart could be such a comfortable thing.
Did I deserve this? Me — the one who rashly decided my own future, who got jealous of my closest friend and ruined everything — was it right for me to feel this happy?
My friend still had no idea where she was, after all.
Misfortune inevitably strikes wherever I exist. That sense of despair had swept up everyone around me, too.
When would I be able to be purely happy and rest easy again?
…Great, these are the thoughts I have while eating.
Holding back the sigh that threatened to escape, I finished my meal a little quickly.
Being in the room kept making me fidget and move around restlessly.
Probably the biggest reason was Jihye's existence.
It wasn't that she annoyed me. It was just that she watched me so steadily, as if she knew that the moment she looked away, I might vanish somewhere, and that gaze made me restless.
On top of that, whenever I tried to do something, Jihye kept trying to help, which made it worse.
After waking from a deep sleep, the first thing I checked was this very room. It was where Jihye and I lived, so it was full of my things.
Whether the clothes in my closet had been damaged by the humans who broke in last time, or not.
If they'd been ruined, I'd have nothing to lend the kids, either—
"Jieun."
Watching me check the closet, Hayun seemed to realize something. She rested her hand gently on my shoulder and called my name.
"There's nothing to worry about. We can get you new clothes."
"……Huh?"
Only after hearing that did I remember that this was Seoul.
Right. This was Seoul — if you had money, you could just buy things. Given the situation, running around everywhere might be a bit hard for us, but deliveries would still come.
The magical girls were away from home, sure, but I didn't imagine they'd have literally no money of their own to spend. Surely the Federation wasn't working these girls for free.
"That's right. Don't worry too much. If yours are gone, you can wear mine!"
Jihye chimed in from the side, and I ended up nodding.
Wondering how to pass the time after that, what I came up with was examining the CDs sitting on the desk.
"Ah…"
As I started looking over the desk, Jihye let out a sound of regret.
"I'm sorry, Jieun. Those are…"
"It wasn't your fault."
I said it while examining the cracked, shattered CD cases.
Right — the fact that this room had been turned into a disaster zone was absolutely not Jihye's fault. It was the fault of those garbage humans.
How terrifying it must have been for her, alone in this room when it all happened. Jihye had done her best to tidy up the wreckage afterward. A lot of my things weren't in good shape anymore, but seeing them still sitting on my desk like this showed how much effort she'd put in.
I tried turning on the CD player.
Fortunately, it seemed to work fine.
Or had Jihye fixed this too?
I picked up one of the CDs. It wasn't a moment for anything too upbeat, but I didn't want anything gloomy and damp either, so I settled on a moderately cheerful classical disc.
The surface of the CD was a little scuffed, but it played just fine.
With the music on, I sat down on the floor.
The room held me and Jihye, plus all the magical girls including Hayun. It would be hard to find a room in the orphanage emptier than this one.
And it would've felt wrong to have everyone sleep lying down somewhere that wasn't a room, so in the end, we all stayed together in here for a while.
…Now that I'd come back, there was nothing to worry about. The only slight concern was whether Jihye might feel uncomfortable around the others — but these girls had all been with me a long time.
When I flopped down onto the floor, Jihye flopped down beside me. The others, who'd been staring blankly at the two of us, then lay down one by one, starting with Hayun.
"You rested like this even normally?"
"More or less, yeah."
There were times I watched videos or browsed the internet on my phone, but if you counted them up, most of my rest days looked like this — lying down, listening to music.
Lying on the floor, soaking in the sunlight streaming in with my whole body…
I think I understood why Jihye had once said it felt "like a scene from a movie." Though with this many people in the room, the atmosphere didn't quite land.
"We were pretty laid-back, as long as it wasn't homework or exam season."
For a moment, we all fell quiet, just listening to the music.
…So, the conversation with the government person is done. Starting tomorrow… what should I do?
They say the scariest moment is when you realize the choices in your life rest in your own hands. The sensation I felt right now was a little like that, too.
What choice should I make?
No — do I even have choices?
"…Tomorrow, maybe I should go to school?"
At my words, I heard the sound of everyone turning toward me.
"I can't just do nothing. I'm curious what things are like at school, too — how they see us."
I… felt a little reluctant, honestly. I'd worked so hard to raise my grades, after all. Hayun had never beaten me once.
The reason I'd ended up at that school was because of Hayun, and the reason I'd kept my grades as high as possible was so that no one could say anything about me being by her side. To be a bit more precise — I wanted to have at least one thing that made me better than the guys who kept pushing themselves at her.
I was probably suffering from an inferiority complex every bit as deep as that. That's just who I was.
That school had been almost impossible to find any good in, but the results of my effort there were still mine, no matter what.
So I wanted to see it through to the end. Even if the current me could no longer maintain those grades.
"…Yeah. Let's do that."
Hayun agreed quietly.
I shut my mouth again. My words had probably already given everyone plenty to churn over. I didn't want to pile on more things to think about.
It wasn't even nine o'clock yet. Having napped so deeply, I honestly wasn't sleepy at all.
But there wasn't anything in particular to do, so we just lay there like that, listening to music for a long while.
"This is the one I gave you as a gift, isn't it?"
"…Yeah."
Hayun said it as if it had just occurred to her, and I answered in a small voice.
She didn't say anything more than that. She simply kept her eyes closed and listened, as if she were truly, sincerely savoring the music.
Rooms were a little scarce, but blankets we had in plenty. Some of the younger kids had come here after suffering abuse at home, and they sometimes wet the bed at night. Without spare blankets, there'd be nothing left for them after an accident.
Besides, this was an orphanage, wasn't it? The population was never fixed. We needed to be able to take in a few more kids if they suddenly arrived.
…They all presumably had parents somewhere, but thinking of it that way — well, it wasn't so different from that kind of situation, either.
We turned off the lights and drew the curtains, but through that fabric — old, worn, and decidedly not blackout — the outside light showed through quite clearly.
But I liked this in-between darkness of the room. Maybe it was just because I'd lived with it so long. Or maybe it was because I was a half-baked villain who couldn't even manage to become truly evil.
"……"
I felt a gaze from beside me and turned to find Jihye lying facing me.
We almost never slept facing each other.
No — wait. That's not right.
When we were very small, I think we did. Jihye and I used to sleep face to face.
Jihye was afraid of the dark. Even though we'd come over from the church together, Jihye feared the dark and I didn't — which struck me as a little strange, but I never dug into it.
Had she said she wanted to be sure I was sleeping next to her?
Once, on a night of thunder, Jihye had been so scared she couldn't sleep at all, and she'd ended up falling asleep in my arms. Though that was a very, very long time ago.
"What is it?"
When I turned toward Jihye and asked quietly, she answered while gazing steadily at me.
"I wanted to make sure you were there."
Because I might suddenly disappear.
I couldn't bring myself to deny that. If it came to it, that's probably exactly what I would have done.
"……"
Jihye slid gently closer to me.
Normally — that is, back when I actually lived here — I would have backed away, taking it as a joke.
But there was no room to retreat now. The kids were packed in tight right behind me.
Just as she had when we first reunited, Jihye shifted closer and burrowed into my arms.
Just like that long-ago time, when a frightened Jihye had clung to me and slept.
Because of the atmosphere she gave off, I couldn't bring myself to push her away, and instead gave her head a gentle stroke. It had been so long that it felt a little awkward. Nearly ten years, even counting my time in this world, right?
Jihye's body trembled slightly, as if she were cold.
I adjusted the position of her head a little. She had come over to my side completely, sharing the same pillow as me. All I could see from here was the crown of her head, but I could feel it clearly — Jihye had definitively burrowed into my arms.
But what I felt toward her was nothing like arousal.
I just felt sorry for the Jihye in my arms.
She was a girl who'd gone through so much anguish because of me. I at least had power of some kind — Jihye had nothing of the sort. She was just an ordinary girl.
"…Were you scared?"
When I asked softly, Jihye didn't answer with words — just nodded her head, small and slight, inside my arms.
"It's okay."
I said it as I slowly stroked her back with my hand.
"It's okay. Now."
I could feel Jihye's trembling easing, just a little.
And my trembling, too.
In the end, I had gained so very much through Jihye's existence as well.
She smelled of a familiar shampoo.
We didn't hold each other like this very often, but lying side by side, you could at least catch each other's scent.
Now I finally understood why, ever since I'd been in this room, my body kept going soft and slack and my heart kept unwinding.
Maybe, on that day, I had been just as afraid as Jihye.
And maybe I still was.
The most frightened person in this room might be me.
Afraid of losing Hayun. Afraid that Hayun, with wings on her back, would leave me behind here and fly far, far away.
Afraid that, chasing after her, I'd lose Jihye. Afraid I'd have to leave behind, forever, the only family I had in this world.
Unable to properly decide either way, I had simply tried to grab hold of everything.
Maybe what I'd really wanted was to break Hayun's wings and keep her by my side.
Maybe I'd only ever seen Jihye as a past I was meant to let go of.
Those thoughts felt like they must have been real. And they must have been so terrifying that this was why I was shaking now.
……
What — what am I supposed to do?
The only reason someone agonizing like that could fall asleep at all was the warm body of Jihye, sleeping pressed against me.