Longing (5)
It was only now, with things having come this far, that I finally realized it: whenever Hayun and I met up on our own, she always made a point of lightly covering her face.
She never went so far as wearing an actual disguise — just a hat pulled low, or a face mask. With a face as widely known as any celebrity's, she'd apparently worried about catching people's eyes.
Her hair was pink, but it wasn't so rare a shade that people would stop and stare at it on sight, so the disguise worked well enough in its own way.
Of course, even then, there were still people who recognized her and came up to chat, or who needlessly needled her as they passed by.
Most of that needling amounted to claims that she'd come down with "celebrity disease." I suppose people said it because magical girls aren't automatically celebrities, but for Hayun — whose face was better known and who was more popular than most politicians — it was nothing more than nitpicking.
"Why even bother?"
That was Rose's brazen response when she heard the story.
We were in the downtown commercial district, but it wasn't yet the hour when cafés filled up. It was a weekday, and the after-work rush hadn't started overlapping yet — natural enough, when you thought about it.
Thanks to that, we'd managed to claim a corner of the café for ourselves. The place, which had been a little sparse, soon filled up with people — perhaps because we'd walked in.
A few of them didn't even bother being subtle about it, snapping photos of us with their phones.
"The people who'd recognize us will recognize us anyway, right? Sometimes trying too hard to hide actually makes you stand out — it looks so forced that it draws the eye."
"...Still, if you walk around openly, even people who'd never have recognized you end up recognizing you."
When I put that question to Rose, she nodded.
"That's exactly the point. Once people recognize your face, fewer of them work up the nerve to pick a fight with you outright."
Seeing me blink, Rose smirked.
"What, did you think being famous only earns you dirty looks? Things get smashed all over the place while we're fighting, and after a battle the roads get torn up all over again and cordoned off while they're repaved. Whole buildings collapse in broad daylight, sometimes."
Well... fair. People did occasionally use exactly that as ammunition to curse magical girls online.
"So covering your face only attracts the weirdos. The ones dying to peek under a passerby's mask, and the creeps who want to tail us magical girls around."
Was that so?
I pulled a puzzled face at her words, but Rose didn't seem to care much about my expression and simply carried on.
"Better to just show your face and walk around openly. You know what? The creeps who try something wait for when we're off on our own, alone. Having a few people around actually keeps you safer. I can't speak for celebrities, but there are plenty of people we've 'helped' out there."
Honestly, even after hearing all of that, I could only keep tilting my head.
Then again, I didn't actually know how celebrities lived, so that was only to be expected.
"We're not celebrities. We don't put on shows anywhere, do we? If you insist on a comparison, our job is closer to a firefighter's or a police officer's — except our faces are absurdly well known."
"Does it... really work out that way?"
By that logic, though, we'd effectively quit that job. Didn't that make us fully illegal operatives?
Then again, the government simply wasn't approaching us openly — it wouldn't have been strange to call us half-sanctioned. After we stopped the incident at the Warp Point, we even received an official thank-you.
I hadn't particularly wanted to be persuaded, but listening to Rose, I strangely found myself understanding.
And somehow, I felt a little embarrassed about having recommended the mask and hat to Hayun for our meetups. Like I'd been lecturing her about something I knew nothing about.
"Well, still — if you're going around alone, covering your face isn't a bad idea, I suppose."
Reading my expression, Rose offered me a small defense.
"Jua used to cover up too, because she hated people recognizing her. And you... when you were hanging around with Hayun, you were just a civilian, so it made sense. Besides, I usually went around with these two anyway."
"You mean you drag them around half by force."
Dahlia remarked, sipping her coffee.
In the webtoon, these three hadn't gotten along all that well either, but judging from how they spoke now, things seemed fine between them.
Could the webtoon's timeline be slightly different from the present one? Then again, most of the webtoon ran as episodic, omnibus-style stories without a main plotline, so pinning down an exact chronology had always been difficult.
"You're a magical girl now too. So if you're going to go around with any of us, just do it openly. That's all I'm saying."
At that, I finally nodded.
Granted, if only one of the two wore a mask and a hat pulled low, maybe we wouldn't stand out much. But two or more people doing that while out and about would draw far too much attention. Three or more, and it would just look absurd.
We weren't some bandit gang, for crying out loud.
"Getting photographed is just something you can't help. You saw it yourself — even in that situation, the kiss got snapped and turned into an article. Once you're famous, there's no avoiding it entirely. You have to learn to accept some of it. ...Though I doubt it was a situation you wanted."
"...No. I've made my own kind of peace with it."
One way or another, the fact that I'd ended up in this situation was my own fault. If I'd never become a Combatant in the first place, none of it would have happened.
Things had spiraled so far beyond tangled that here I was — like it or not, accepting it was the only option left.
With that thought, I slurped down the peach ade in front of me.
I felt a gaze and turned my head — Hayun was sitting beside me, staring straight at me.
A smile played at the corners of her mouth, and as always with Hayun, it wasn't the least bit affected.
If I turned my head the other way, Jihye was watching me with the exact same look; and straight across from me sat Jua, facing me head-on. Jua, well — as always, she wasn't smiling at me, but she was shooting me a bit of a sidelong glare instead. I honestly had no idea what I'd done wrong.
...This was strangely uncomfortable. It felt like I'd been dropped into the middle of a love triangle. To be precise, it felt less like being one of the vertices and more like being stranded alone in the center of the triangle.
Rose, Dahlia, and Delphinium seemed to have picked up on the situation too, but none of them looked particularly bothered.
Hm...
Maybe I'd just play dumb.
For some reason, the body heat of Jihye and Hayun pressing in from either side felt awfully warm, but I decided it was all in my head and busied myself slurping down my iced tea.
Still, a few days into living together, everyone seemed to be finding their own ways of passing the time around the orphanage.
Somehow it felt like if we stayed too long like this, the place would turn into our hideout for good, but no better alternative came to mind at the moment, so we simply stayed put.
The building the government offered to lend us was far too suspicious, and we couldn't exactly rent somewhere else with our own money on short notice.
Rose seemed quite taken with the kids — and the kids, apparently, were quite taken with her.
The girls, naturally. And the boys too.
At a glance, Rose's personality ran a little brash, but she wasn't boyish for all that. If anything, you'd call it the lively energy befitting a girl her age.
She had a good figure, too, so honestly, I suspected a few of the boys who hung around playing with her had already had their first loves bloom. Not that I could do anything about it, so I had no intention of saying a word.
Dahlia and Delphinium were popular with the children as well.
Dahlia wasn't the type to bounce over and strike up play the way Rose did, but she couldn't bring herself to turn away the kids who came up with questions, or who brought their homework and asked her to teach them.
When she helped the elementary schoolers with their homework in particular, she even looked like she was genuinely enjoying herself.
Delphinium wasn't so different in that respect. Her air was cold enough at first glance that the kids didn't flock to her the way they did to Rose or Dahlia, but perhaps because of that quiet presence of hers, the quieter children at the orphanage would come sit down beside her.
What the lot of them were doing together in silence, only they would know.
Hayun and Jua were every bit as popular. The two of them seemed to prefer staying by my side whenever they could, but apparently they couldn't bring themselves to refuse the kids clinging to them, and in the end they got swept up in Rose's wake, playing with the children.
Which meant Jihye and I were, for the first time in a long while, left peacefully alone together.
"Looks like I'm not popular."
When I said it in mock exasperation, Jihye burst out laughing.
"No, that can't be it."
"Yeah?"
"Mm. Even with their first love right there, when celebrities show up, everyone's attention shifts that way for a while. That's just how it goes."
"First love..."
I had become the object of someone's first love?
Well, it wasn't strange. The person called "Jeong Jieun" was pretty, with a good figure. I'd never once been confessed to by anyone my age, but looking back, I had been fairly popular with the kids.
There were even a few boys who blushed whenever they looked at me.
I was truly sorry to those boys, but even once we were all adults, there was no way I'd date or marry any of them.
"Right now everyone's looking elsewhere, but later on you might really get a confession or something, you know?"
Though for someone saying that, that pubescent little brat who'd coolly asked "You're back?" on the day I returned here was currently off playing with Rose.
I snorted in disbelief.
"And have you ever gotten a confession yourself?"
I asked the question sprawled out on the floor of the room, and Jihye's eyes blinked.
"Me?"
"Yeah."
"I go to an all-girls school, remember."
"I know that. But there are those guys, you know. The ones who loiter outside all-girls schools and confess."
"...Were there actually guys like that?"
Were there not?
I could have sworn I'd seen it in dramas or movies.
...Come to think of it, there hadn't been any at my school either. It wasn't really that kind of place to begin with. Sure, you could hover by the front gate and confess, but to the students, that was no different from a total stranger asking them out.
Maybe that had worked in romance films from twenty or thirty years ago, but these days, unless the guy was handsome enough to make you disregard every single risk involved, it wasn't a method with much chance of success.
...Or was I simply so far removed from romance that I didn't get it? Whatever — it hardly mattered. Romance wasn't something I was starving for at the moment.
"There were."
But somehow a mischievous streak stirred in me, and that was how I answered.
Jihye's eyes went wide as saucers.
"There were? Really?"
"Yeah, well."
I'd meant to call it a joke on the spot, but her reaction was funnier than expected, and before I knew it, I'd answered like that.
If Hayun had been in front of me, I wouldn't have teased her this far, but this was Jihye, after all. We'd been playing mischievous pranks on each other since we were little.
Though that dynamic had started with Jihye teasing first and me firing back.
"So you've been confessed to too?"
"Yep, sort of."
At my words, Jihye froze completely.
Suddenly her face filled my field of view, and I flinched in surprise.
She hadn't climbed on top of me or lain down right beside me, but kneeling close by with both hands planted beside my face, looking down at me — that expression carried a certain force.
Jihye's short hair hung down, lightly tickling my face.
"What, is it really that shocking?"
When I asked, exasperated, her face finally drew back a little. Jihye seemed a bit flustered by her own behavior.
"No, it's not that, but..."
If anything, what surprised me was that Jihye had never been confessed to.
In Hayun's case, her position as a magical girl meant she'd never had the chance for that sort of thing — but Jihye was just an ordinary, ordinarily pretty girl, wasn't she?
At a coed school, having a boyfriend wouldn't have been strange. She could have been introduced by a friend, too.
...
Hm...
But actually picturing Jihye with a boyfriend left me feeling strange. In a not-very-good way.
You could call my motives ugly, but honestly, maybe I wasn't so thrilled about the girls around me getting boyfriends. Don't tell me, even in this situation, I was still looking at them as potential romantic partners?
"S-so, what was that person who confessed like?"
Jihye asked.
"Taller than me, broad shoulders, small face. Unless someone was that confident, a confession wouldn't come easy, would it?"
You did hear the occasional story about a forty-something man confessing to a college girl working part-time at a café, but that was a different problem entirely.
The only ones who could confess to a teenager were other teenagers. No matter how capable or handsome a man was, the moment he confessed to a high schooler in front of the school gate, didn't he simply become a criminal?
Even a college freshman confessing to a third-year high schooler made the whole mood turn strange; no matter how brimming with confidence someone in this world was, I couldn't quite bring myself to believe such a person was sane.
...Which was also why I couldn't let myself think that way about the girls.
Yes, in this world I was a teenager too, but the feeling still lingered a little — you know how it is.
It was precisely because that mindset remained that I still couldn't see men as romantic prospects.
"...So, what did you do?"
Jihye asked with such a serious face that I gave the question some genuinely serious thought.
Then I answered.
"Well, I turned him down. I wasn't thinking about dating yet. Besides, I'm not naive enough to go out with someone I'd never even met."
In truth, I'd just been too scared and said no.
"There's also the whole 'let's start as friends' thing, you know."
"Hm, well."
I did believe men and women could be friends. I had no intention of declaring such relationships forever impossible.
But that was only possible when one side felt no romantic feelings whatsoever for the other — or at the very least, hid them flawlessly.
Someone who'd confessed and been rejected saying "then let's be friends first" — those words carried no persuasive power whatsoever.
"Anyway, I have no desire to date anyone. Not yet."
"I see..."
Jihye answered with a slightly dazed expression.
Hm.
I was starting to wonder whether I should come clean about the lie, but this time it was Jihye whose face had turned far too serious.
"Actually—"
"I see. So you've had confessions too, Jieun."
"Hey, hey."
Perhaps a little shaken by the fact that I'd received the confession she never did, Jihye kept muttering to herself, so I hurriedly sat up and said:
"It was a lie, a lie. When would I ever have gotten a confession?"
If I left it there, she seemed like she'd actually believe it, so when I said that, Jihye looked at me with a dazed expression and asked back:
"A lie?"
"Yeah. Of course it was. Who on earth confesses to someone they only know by face?"
It probably happened somewhere, but at the very least, it had never happened to me.
"Really? You've never been confessed to, not even once?"
"Nope."
"Not at the school gate — like, while waiting for the bus, or something..."
"Like that would ever happen? Hayun was beside me every single time — go ask her. No, wait, more than that, we usually walked from the orphanage to the bus stop together anyway."
"That's true, but..."
"Worried I'll start dating someone? Why? Afraid I'll have less time to hang out with you?"
I asked playfully, on purpose — but Jihye's answer fell outside my expectations.
"Yeah."
Far too decisively, Jihye nodded at me.
"Huh?"
"If you get a boyfriend, I'm worried you'll only ever play with him."
"...Me?"
"You've stayed out late with school friends and come back late before."
"Hey, you think I did that because I wanted to?"
But even as I answered, my face was slowly turning red.
To Jihye, those words probably meant nothing beyond what they said. But to someone like me, who'd spent a previous life with zero immunity to women, they were lethal.
Even with the kisses I'd experienced. Honestly — I knew she hadn't meant it that way, since we were both girls, but it was exactly the kind of remark that made you misread it as her liking me.
...
Seeing Jihye turn her head away, looking a little sulky, startled me.
It wasn't as if we'd never fought growing up, and it wasn't as if she'd never sulked like that before — but at least she'd never sulked this hard over one of my light jokes.
"Sorry. Was the joke too much?"
"...No, it wasn't too much."
Only after I said that did Jihye, looking a bit flustered, turn back to face me.
"I was just... a little surprised, that's all."
"What's there to be that surprised about?"
I asked back, baffled.
"Dating isn't such a strange thing to talk about, you know."
"Right... it's not strange, which is exactly why I was more surprised."
"How does that even work?"
"Mm. You're pretty, Jieun. It wouldn't be strange for boys to like you. I said as much just a minute ago, remember?"
"I see..."
Hearing Jihye say that only made my face worse.
"Ha... honestly."
In the end, all I could manage was that vague noise and flopping back down onto the floor.
Pretty, she says. Honestly.
I hadn't known hearing it from someone else's mouth could be this embarrassing.
It was a line I used all the time when comforting Hayun.
...I'd better cut that out from now on.