Yearning (3)
Settling back into everyday life turned out to be harder than I'd expected.
Some might ask why I was talking like a discharged veteran just home from a warzone — but honestly, wasn't I? Being a magical girl didn't mean the fighting was risk-free. Take a hard hit from an enemy and you got hurt, and the people around me who weren't magical girls could be wounded far more badly by those same attacks. Or killed.
My friends had each already brushed up against truly serious danger. Some of them were still in the middle of it.
With Jihye, at least, it had stopped short — an attempt, nothing more.
But "only an attempt" wasn't something I could relax about. Human memories don't wipe clean so easily, and the negative ones stay sharpest and last longest, forever tugging at a person's ankles.
For Jihye, that memory had to be nothing short of a nightmare. Which meant the fact that she could look at me without breaking down was, in truth, close to a miracle.
Besides, "attempted" meant it could happen again. And Jihye, who'd lived through it firsthand, felt that danger far more keenly than I ever could.
And beyond Jihye, there was Pangpang — the one who'd saved me.
Granted, in Pangpang's case it supposedly had more to do with her connection to the Chairman than with me...
But really, after this sort of thing had happened to me so many times, I couldn't help wondering whether it was precisely my involvement that kept dragging all of it into being.
Pangpang had only been rescued yesterday; she was still lying in a hospital right now.
And not in a bed, either — sealed inside a device that sank its occupant into a sleep so deep it left her helpless. Worse, even now, no one could carelessly wake her or take the thing apart.
"......"
Hayun was still by my side. If I went home, I could see Jihye again, and of course the orphanage kids I'd grown so close to.
But as I'd said already, the human mind recalls its bad memories in more vivid detail than its good ones.
It was my first school lunch in a while. It wasn't bad enough to complain about — truthfully, not so different from what we ate at the orphanage. For a private school, they were oddly stingy with the cafeteria budget — was that it? Or maybe the orphanage was the one actually serving decent food. Certainly the quality of my meals had shot straight up once I'd started working.
Even carrying my past-life memories, the body I wore was still a teenage girl's, and come lunchtime it was always ravenous.
And yet, with food actually in my mouth, I could barely taste any of it.
Since we were cataloguing unpleasant thoughts, here was one more: the stares I'd been feeling since that morning were getting to me, too.
Normally we didn't eat in total isolation. The way people sit a seat's distance from anyone they aren't close to — clustered in their own little groups — that was the usual arrangement. Today there was absolutely no one near us at all.
Ridiculous, really. Apparently the two of us looked like, you know, that kind of couple. Even between same-sex friends, people don't kiss each other on the lips.
And, strangely enough, the other girls seemed to think they might get tangled up in the same sort of thing themselves.
Well, by my inclinations I'd rather date a woman than a man — but that hardly meant I'd date just anyone. The world has people with thoroughly open attitudes toward sex and people with conservative ones, and I was, surprisingly, the latter.
To be exact, I'd simply been a coward nobody liked, but let's shelve that for now.
Hayun's expression, for her part, was nothing like her usual school-lunch face. Sitting across from me, she looked completely at ease — as though she considered being able to share a meal like this something to be grateful for.
Was the kiss really nothing to her?
Say — just hypothetically — if the person who could transform that way hadn't been me, would Hayun have kissed them just as gladly? Could she kiss anyone, if it resolved the situation? If it meant winning?
...No. What kind of thought was that — straight out of some adult dating sim, about a friend, no less?
I let out a light breath and was about to continue eating when I heard footsteps approaching our end of the table.
It was Jua.
I'd turned my head toward the sound, and the instant our eyes met, she primly glanced aside — then settled into the seat next to mine as if nothing had happened.
Hayun watched her with a flicker of surprise, but Jua, as though she hadn't registered the look at all, calmly picked up her chopsticks.
I stared at her blankly for a moment, torn over whether or not to bring up the article.
She pretended otherwise, but Jua was a rather self-conscious girl. The way she threw herself into fighting me was one thing, but maybe because she hated to lose, she also kept tabs on her popularity as a magical girl.
So she would have read the article already. She would have felt the stares around her, too.
None of it showed on the surface. Yet.
"What are you staring at like that?"
Jua said, prim and prickly.
"Oh — no. It's nothing."
A strange one, this girl.
She kissed me, then got angry about it; now she was acting as if my looking at her were the strange part. A truly curious creature.
Then again, every magical girl did have her own odd corners.
"Oh, there you are."
It was Rose's voice.
The three third-years came over together, trays in hand. Ordinarily, with the other girls hovering nearby and working up the nerve to speak to Hayun, there wouldn't have been room for three more — but today the space sat wide open.
The three of them claimed it like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"We can sit here, right?"
Asking that after already sitting down made it awkward to say no. Not that I had any real reason to refuse.
Come to think of it, when Hayun and I had eaten as a pair before, these three had never once come over. Neither had Jua, even sharing our grade.
They surely hadn't been eating alone — hadn't they had friends in their own classes to sit with?
When I nodded, Rose broke into a cheerful grin and started in on her food.
"Oh, right."
Midway through her side dishes, Rose suddenly opened her mouth like something had just occurred to her.
"The three of you — your photos turned out really well."
"Pfft."
At Rose's words, Jua nearly sprayed the mouthful she'd been chewing. The noise she made was unmistakably a spit-take in progress — and yet, a magical girl was a magical girl, apparently. With superhuman strength she managed to keep everything from actually escaping.
"Looked like something out of a photo spread. The reporter must be using a pretty good camera. Then again, that camera tech has alien engineering baked into it, so I suppose that's the result you'd expect."
Looking again, Hayun's face had gone red too.
It felt like every ear around us had turned toward our table. None of them had physically moved, of course, but the chatter nearby had dropped off noticeably.
"Wh-wh-why-why are you bringing that up here of all places?"
Seriously.
I harbored the exact same question.
She hadn't said a word about it yesterday, had she? Even though she'd sat in that room with us wearing that stiff, awkward expression? Come to think of it, that might have been the first time I'd ever seen Rose's face go red.
Right. I should have gotten suspicious the moment she didn't tease us.
"Yesterday I didn't exactly have the presence of mind for it."
Rose said, lifting a small clump of rice with her chopsticks.
"Here's the thing — embarrassingly enough, I've never had a boyfriend, even at my age."
Didn't seem like anything worth embarrassment to me, but recalling that plenty of kids did date at our age, I could see why she'd put it that way. Knowing Rose's personality, she probably had friends coming out of her ears, too.
"So when you suddenly see kids kissing each other, you have no idea what you're supposed to say. Can you blame me? If it'd been with strangers, maybe — but you three did it with each other."
"......"
I tried picturing a girl I hung out with kissing a boy I hung out with, and honestly struggled. In my past life I'd been surrounded by nothing but men, so I'd never once seen romance bloom inside a friend group — and in this life, there wasn't a single guy in my circle anyway.
Not that I particularly wanted to picture Hayun kissing anyone else.
"I'd been worrying how I was supposed to treat you all from now on — but seeing the three of you gathered together like this, I figured I could stop. At least you're not at each other's throats over it, right?"
Bringing up fighting like that had to be her way of teasing. It wasn't going to work. Neither Hayun nor Jua intended to fight over that particular fact.
"So what's your actual point?"
When I asked bluntly, Rose answered with a laugh.
"That you don't need to let it get to you. Magical girls get every kind of article written about them — that's just how it is. Not just us, either. Heroes in other countries get it too. Lately the hostility's gotten even worse, from what I can tell. Here we are fighting the forces of evil head-on, and apparently we're the ones 'sticking our hands into the Federation's business.'"
"They haven't even done anything wrong, have they?"
"The world's always been full of people whose thinking runs off in strange directions. Eh — we just mind our own work and call it a day. Though if we ever deploy abroad, we might end up cooperating with them after all."
"We finish things here first."
"That's a good attitude to have."
And with that, Rose popped the rice into her mouth.
"Anyway, so —"
Watching her swallow it practically unchewed and pick the conversation right back up, I decided she really was as brash as they came. That was the sort of trait that had a way of putting her at odds with the others — though at least in this world, at least for now, it didn't seem to be happening.
"What about you three, then? Is it really like the article says?"
"Like the article says?"
"You haven't read it? Apparently you're two-timing."
Hayun's and Jua's faces swung toward me.
I glared at Rose.
The girls around us had been sneaking glances our way for a while now. Too self-conscious to stare openly once they realized I'd noticed, they still couldn't seem to stop their eyes from drifting back.
For the record, Dahlia and Delphinium had their heads bowed, visibly mortified that Rose would ask something like that out loud, dedicating themselves wholeheartedly to shoveling rice into their mouths.
"You were closer than any reporter. You saw it with your own eyes. Does it look that way to you?"
Rose looked at Hayun, then at Jua.
Her expression plainly asked: do you two actually think that?
On this particular matter, I'll say it plainly: I was the wronged party.
It's not as if I was the one who kissed anyone.
Even the article made that much fairly clear. Not that it came out and wrote anything like "Blossom stole Lily's first kiss" — the reporter had no way of knowing it was my first kiss at all.
Still, at least in the photo, you could see it distinctly enough: Hayun was holding both of my cheeks and pressing her lips against mine.
Against my cheeks, I mean. It was a relief it didn't look forced.
And while my face had been frozen in wide-eyed shock, Hayun's eyes were closed, her expression one of sheer resolve.
It wasn't that I'd hated it. To be honest, it had felt good. And that feeling wasn't exactly the sort of thing a person could hide. The problem wasn't just that I was a terrible actor — it was that my circuit had been spinning with everything it had, and the photo had captured every turn of it, plain as day.
Any magical girl running on that Hope Circuit would have sensed it without a doubt.
"Hmm, well."
But Rose only smiled, her eyes curving into crescents. How did anyone make a face that infuriating? Going by looks alone, she read as rough, boyish, and brusque — yet of all the magical girls, her personality was the most girlish of the lot.
"But it is true that you kissed both of them, isn't it?"
"I haven't yet!"
Jua shrieked.
This time it was my face that whipped around.
A brief silence drifted past — and then Jua's face slowly caught fire.
Even Rose, who'd spent the whole meal doing the teasing, turned faintly pink herself.
"...Yet?"
Rose echoed.
"Ah, that is — I mean — not the lips, but, right next to them..."
How to put this.
She seemed far more embarrassed than she would have been simply admitting a kiss on the lips.
And honestly, she had every right to be. She'd said it with her own mouth.
There's a world of difference between a thing surfacing in an article and stepping forward to confirm it yourself. Why do you think celebrities caught in a scandal dig in their heels until every last detail is exposed, and only then apologize? There's a reason. Obviously.
"No, wait — so 'yet' means you're planning to?"
At Rose's words, Jua's face turned redder still.
I gave Jua's sleeve a little tug and steered her back into her seat. She buried her face in her hands and hung her head. Beneath her neatly tied ponytail, the soft nape of her neck showed — and even that was burning red. In all my life, the only people I'd ever seen flush crimson to the neck were friends drunk out of their minds.
"...More importantly."
Watching her was, if anything, making me the level-headed one, so I glared at Rose and spoke.
"Why are you saying all this here, of all places? You could've waited until after school."
"Well, you see."
Rose — who had, entirely without meaning to, set Jua off like a firework — looked a touch sheepish.
"You're one of us now, aren't you?"
"...And?"
"I mean — I just wanted to show that we all mix together like it's nothing. Sometimes it's better to own something openly than to let some weird rumor fester, don't you think?"
"......"
At that, my mouth fell open.
No — I understood the intent.
With me joining the team in such an unusual fashion, it wouldn't exactly be strange for reporters to cook up something ugly. If talk of a rift between the magical girls started circulating — rumors of this feud or that discord — life got tiresome in a dozen different ways. Thankfully, no one had come charging at us with microphones the way they do with actual celebrities.
But pretending we'd heard nothing was a losing game when this many people believed whatever they read. Human beings are creatures who crave attention even in the middle of their worst thoughts — curious enough, at least, to search their own names on the internet.
"I figured a rumor that we were simply too close for comfort beat the alternative. Mm."
If you could seal off every crack someone might exploit to twist things somewhere ugly, that would work as a strategy too. Things had just already gone far, far beyond that.
"Next time — if you're going to say things like that, warn us first. You took us completely off guard."
"Sorry, sorry."
When I said it glaring at her, Rose waved both hands in a flurry.
"...Oh. I see."
And then Hayun, who had been listening quietly to the whole exchange, dropped that out of nowhere.
When I turned to look, she was nodding along to herself with a remarkably serious face.
"She's right, Jieun. It's because I've been so wishy-washy all this time that strange people kept latching onto you."
"Huh?"
"After you disappeared, I heard about it. That there were girls picking on you."
"......"
Oh.
I mean — I had considered that she might have found out.
"And — I'm sorry. That was probably my fault too, for taking such an ambiguous stance. If I'd only made it unmistakably clear how close we were, no one would ever have dared treat you that way."
I looked around.
The girls hastily averted their eyes and turned away. This time, they looked genuinely rattled.
Couldn't blame them.
Right up until now, they'd had me filed away as someone who merely orbited Hayun and shooed off anyone who came near. That assumption had just been obliterated.
If what they suspected was true, then the girls who had picked on me had made one colossal mistake.
Well... strictly speaking, the magical girls of today might be risky people to approach. The girls who'd been circling us until now had all been operating on the assumption that Korea would join the Federation — kids hoping to grab the rope the Federation had lowered down before anyone else could reach it.
But the magical girls had walked out on the Federation.
Taken at face value, that erased our usefulness — except that we now also stood in a murky, many-stranded cooperative relationship with the government. And at the moment, there were far too many uneasy loose ends for Korea to actually join the Federation. Politically speaking, public feeling toward alien-born figures might be one spark away from detonating.
Which meant no one could afford to cut ties with us entirely.
...Though somehow, Hayun seemed to have grasped the situation a great deal more simply than all that.
"If they'd known we've known each other since we were little, they never would have done that to you."
"Uh..."
"If they'd heard the stories — how you always listened whenever something weighed on me, how you'd rush to comfort me whenever I was truly heartbroken — they wouldn't even have dreamed of copying me."
"Um, Hayun?"
I whipped my head around again.
The other girls weren't even looking this way, so I couldn't tell what their faces were doing. Frankly, I didn't much care.
But I could see the magical girls' faces just fine.
The longer Hayun went on, the redder they burned.
Childhood friends or not, wasn't this just a little too embarrassing to air at lunch?
Why did she always run off the rails like this?
And if there was a problem, it was that the circuit on my wrist was spinning away with everything it had.
"So from now on, let's be a little more honest with each other."
Hayun said it with a beaming smile.
"There are so, so many things that alone would fix."
"Uh, uhh..."
That was the answer I managed in the end —
— though, well, I still had feelings I needed to keep hidden.
Sorry, Hayun. I don't think I can manage being completely honest with you.