To Protect Is to Control
“Control is necessary if you want to protect someone. After all, it's how you raised me, Mother.”
It was the day of my discharge.
I was still alone. Delphine had stepped out for a moment.
I pulled clothes from the paper envelope she'd left behind yesterday. I shed the hospital gown and dressed in the familiar garments.
White silk buttoned to the throat, embroidered ears of wheat in gold thread glinting down the collar. Beneath the deep slits on either side of the skirt, gold cords wound up around my thighs.
Fingerless black gloves; on my calves, crisscrossed laces into flat-soled sandals.
The door opened.
Delphine came in cradling a bouquet, white and pale pink blooms gathered in her arms. The same soft smile as always played on her lips, but she held her gaze on me longer than usual. It made the moment feel strangely awkward.
“Congratulations on your discharge, Mother.”
The child smiled and held out the bouquet. I lowered my face to it. Beneath a faint smell of antiseptic, a sweet fragrance bloomed softly upward.
“……Good work.”
The words came out drained of all strength.
Delphine kept smiling.
“The clothes suit you.”
“Do they?”
“Yes. Much better than the hospital gown.”
Wearing these clothes, it felt like I'd become myself again. That was what Delphine wanted, too. For me to come back to who I used to be.
“They're what I always wore.”
Silence settled over the room.
I held the bouquet in one hand, and my other hand found Delphine's, our fingers interlacing without thought.
It was warm.
Her fingers pressed slightly into my palm. Not too hard, not too soft — just enough force to keep me from pulling away.
“Come, let's go.”
Even stepping out of the hospital room, she never said where we were headed. It was the attitude of someone who didn't see the need to say it at all. If anything, she looked relaxed.
She didn't let go of my hand the entire walk down the corridor. She'd threaded her fingers between mine and squeezed gently once with every step.
I followed without a word.
Delphine's profile looked serene. Would her face look different head-on? She was walking a half-step ahead of me, so there was no way to check.
Then she stopped.
It was a door I'd never seen before.
“This isn't my room.”
“No. It's your new one.”
Delphine answered without looking at me, eyes fixed on the doorknob.
“You've been released from your old room. Your things have all been moved as well.”
“……Since when.”
“Since yesterday.”
“You cleared out my entire room.”
“Well, yes. Everything's been packed away. I did it myself.”
She held her smile even as she answered.
I wanted to tell her she'd worked hard, but there was no way she didn't understand what those words meant.
She must have looked under the bed, too.
She'd have been searching for a clue to the truth of that day.
And she'd almost certainly found nothing. As if I would have left so much as a thread uncollected.
Delphine took a key from her pocket and turned it. The lock clicked twice.
The door swung open.
The room was at least twice the size of my old one.
Was it because there were two of us now? Or had Delphine's influence gotten it arranged?
“What do you think?”
Her voice was a touch lower than usual. As if she were gauging my reaction.
Instead of answering, I looked around the room slowly.
The first thing my eyes found was the bed. Wide enough that even standing at one end with my arm outstretched, I wouldn't touch the other. A single bed.
“……There's only one bed.”
“I told you I'd submitted the room-merging request.”
A spacious room, but only one bed. She had it backwards. She'd applied for the large room from the start with exactly one bed in mind.
Delphine took the bouquet from me and set it on the table by the window. She adjusted the angle of the stems twice before letting go. Unusually careful of her — arranging the flowers so not a single petal would fall out of place.
“We could have put in two beds, but I decided there wasn't really any need.”
For a room this size, two beds would have been far better. Family or not, wasn't one bed uncomfortable?
Delphine opened the wardrobe.
My clothes and hers hung side by side. Light colors on the left, darkening toward the right. Even the spacing between hangers was precisely uniform.
“This is your side, Mother. And this is mine.”
There was something in her manner that hoped I would accept this arrangement as a matter of course.
“My greatsword…….”
My greatsword lay atop the desk. A faint smell of oil rose from it — it had been oiled recently.
“I brought your greatsword too. It's been oiled, so take a look.”
More thorough than I ever was.
The grip had been polished clean down to the last inch, and the sheen along the blade was perfectly even.
My greatsword should have become a relic of the dead. I never imagined I'd be looking at it again like this.
“Mother.”
The child perched on the edge of the bed and patted the space beside her with her palm.
When I simply stood there, she did it again.
“Try sitting. I put in a new mattress.”
I sat at the edge of the bed. My body sank deep, then was slowly pushed back up. Good resilience. Brand new.
“Well?”
“Not bad.”
“Thank goodness.”
Delphine leaned into me, natural as breathing. Her head came to rest against my shoulder. A faint scent of soap rose from the crown of her head. The soap I used. A scent she'd matched on purpose.
“Mother, you don't have to sleep alone at night anymore.”
Sleeping alone had never been a problem. Delphine knew that.
And yet, saying it like that meant one thing: she had no intention of letting us be apart from now on.
“……Delphine.”
“If you have a nightmare, you can wake me. I'll be right there.”
I'd never once complained of nightmares. I'd never even mentioned one.
The room caught the sun well, so I could watch it darken in real time.
Outside the window, the sun slipped away little by little.
Delphine rose and walked to the door. Click. The sound of the room being locked echoed in the silence.
“I'll keep it locked at night. It's dangerous, after all.”
The child slipped the key into her pocket, then patted it with her palm, making a show of it.
“I didn't make one for you. You'll be going everywhere with me from now on anyway.”
I stared down for a moment at the pocket where the key had vanished.
There was no point in asking where she'd learned it. She'd been that kind of child from the very first day we met.
“……Delphine.”
“Yes.”
“It's inconvenient.”
“What's inconvenient about it? We're family.”
She sounded remarkably calm. Like a rehearsed answer. She'd clearly anticipated every objection I might raise and had her responses lined up in advance.
The Delphine of the past would have been reading my face for approval. This one was completely different. She carried on the conversation from a single premise: that her decision was right.
“What about bathrooms when we're out?”
“We go together.”
“…….”
“What? Is that strange?”
The child tilted her head.
It looked like a performance of innocence, and at the same time perfectly natural — as if she genuinely couldn't see anything odd about it. Either way, the back of my neck went cold.
“You have your own life. There's no need to throw everything away for my sake. The wounds will heal, and then…….”
“And once they heal, what then?”
While I fumbled for my answer, Delphine never once took her eyes off me.
“……I go back to how things were.”
“Go back? Looking like this? Oh, Mother. How can you even say that.”
Delphine smiled faintly. Only then did I begin to understand why that smile chilled me to the bone.
“The 'how things were' you're talking about means going to the training grounds alone, eating alone, falling asleep alone.”
“That's just my usual routine. Nothing special about it.”
“And that cursed routine is why you walked into the abandoned village alone.”
She'd put every ounce of weight on that word alone.
Delphine stood with her back to the window, looking down at me.
Backlit, her expression was hard to read.
“Do you know why I only had one key made?”
“…….”
“Because if there were two, you might lose yours.”
What kind of reason is that.
A joke, surely. That was what I tried to tell myself.
“But the real reason is something else.”
Her face emerged from the backlight. She was smiling, brilliantly.
“When I imagine you opening this door and walking out without me, it makes me sick to my stomach.”
“Delphine…….”
“Am I imprisoning you? I've thought about it. But no matter how I turn it over, I can't find any fault in myself.”
“……I'm not at fault either.”
“Then why are you hiding it from me?”
“I already told you — I didn't know about it either.”
“Right. So that makes you old and weak now, doesn't it.”
“You think one defeat made me weak?”
The word defeat caught in my throat. I had never lost. I had simply asked. Not that I could ever say it aloud.
Delphine tilted her head slightly.
Evening light filtering in through the window stained the tips of the child's hair.
“In this world, a single defeat leads to death. That's how it works.”
I couldn't argue.
Because those had been my own words to her.
“Do you remember what you said when I first took up a sword, Mother?”
“…….”
“Lose once, and it's over. So don't you dare lose.”
I remembered. It wasn't something a child should have had to hear. But I'd had to say it — because the world outside was exactly that kind of place.
She stepped in front of me. Her shadow fell across my knees.
“I lived by that for years. Training, real combat — it was always me who fought the enemy and won in the end.”
“I know. You're strong.”
“And yet you lost, Mother.”
Delphine reached out and took hold of my wrist.
“You broke the very rule you made.”
“…….”
“So now it's my turn to protect you.”
Our pulses beat against each other where our wrists touched. One slow, one a little faster.
The faster one was Delphine's.
“You call this protection, Delphine? This is obsession.”
“That word choice hurts my feelings a little.”
Still gripping my wrist, she extended her other hand and cupped my cheek. Her fingers slid down to the nape of my neck, tracing along the edge of the scar that hadn't yet healed — careful never to touch the wound itself.
“Control is necessary if you want to protect someone. After all, it's how you raised me, Mother.”
“I never once locked you in a room.”
I never controlled her, either. I believe I set her free.
“This is simply my way.”
The fingers around my wrist loosened, one by one.
I stayed where I was, sitting.
The room darkened around us. Delphine went to the window and drew the curtains shut.
“Are you hungry? I'll bring your meal.”
She said it in a voice of perfect calm, as if nothing at all had happened.
Meals weren't supposed to be brought to the room and eaten here. There was a dining hall for that. Was it because I was still technically a patient? I wasn't so frail that I couldn't make it there. Not anymore.
“Oh, that's right.”
Her head turned toward the desk as she headed for the door, where my greatsword lay.
“It's oiled and all, but don't even think about gripping a sword for a while. If you push yourself and the wound tears open, we'll have real trouble.”
“…….”
“Think of it as decorative, and just look at it with your eyes. Your sword is too heavy for me anyway — it doesn't suit my style. I have my own weapon, so it's no matter.”