Chapter 115
Chapter 115
Sharing a single body between two people wasn't as inconvenient as I'd expected.
Sara wasn't much of a talker. She didn't have many complaints, and she never intruded on my daily life demanding I do certain things.
...In truth, it felt less like she lacked desire and more like she had simply transcended life itself.
Sara had given up on living once before. And even the life I returned to her, she dismissed as not her own and handed it back to me. The emotion that faintly bled through was joy, but whether that joy meant she truly wanted to keep on living was still questionable.
Ordinary people possess an intense desire for life, they avoid dangerous places, maintain the bare minimum of health, have hobbies they enjoy, want to learn new things, but I couldn't feel any of that from Sara.
If something pleasant happened, she'd think it was nice in the moment and leave it at that. Even if she wanted something, it ended at wanting. She never felt she absolutely had to have it. A passing attraction never turned into a purpose for living.
Well, it wasn't that Sara didn't have a single thing like that—
As far as we'd discovered, the switch that flipped our personalities was the most intense memory each personality possessed. A memory intense enough to drag a personality buried deep inside out to the surface, enough to make it seize control of the body.
It didn't seem to matter in the slightest whether that memory was negative or positive, so long as it qualified as the most intense memory unlike anything else experienced in that lifetime.
And the surest way to summon that intense memory was to be with the subject of that memory.
"I don't want to."
Sara wasn't very fond of having that switch flipped.
I don't know much about how other people with multiple personalities switch between them. There was no one around me who suffered from dissociative identity disorder, and in fact, our current state was fundamentally different from anything like a personality disorder or identity disorder.
It wasn't a psychiatric issue. By purely fantasy-based logic, an original personality and an outside personality were coexisting inside one person's body.
When it came to moving the body, one of the two personalities took the lead and controlled it. It wasn't as jarring as you might think. I'd already spent the last three months more or less adapted to Sara's body, and Sara didn't really mind me controlling it.
If the two of us were sworn enemies hell-bent on killing each other, it would've been a huge problem. Fortunately, that wasn't the case.
However, that does raise a small question.
During the day, when one of us acted as the representative and moved around, there was no big issue. But what happened after the body fell asleep?
What happened not when one personality led, but when, in some sense, we became equals?
Well, the answer was easy to find.
"To do that, I'd have to meet Mother again."
We were currently in Sara's room.
Its layout was slightly different from the one I'd seen in Sara's memories. The extra bed and coat rack near the entrance suggested this was the room after So-hee had come to serve as a personal maid.
But So-hee and Su-a were nowhere to be seen.
Naturally, since Sara and I were here together.
After the body fell asleep and my consciousness slowly sank into the depths of our mind, we met like this in a space within our psyche.
"Is there nothing you want to do in reality?"
"You're doing everything I want to do for me, aren't you?"
Sara answered my question so bluntly that I slapped my own forehead with my palm.
My body inside this consciousness wasn't much different from Sara's. I'd never used a mirror in here, but our faces were probably similar too.
It seemed Sara was far freer inside the mind than I was. In all the scenes where we'd met over the past few days inside dreams, both the background and my own appearance were always whatever Sara imagined them to be.
Maybe it was because Sara was the body's original owner.
This situation had its pros and cons.
First, if Sara's emotions surged violently inside this body, I got swept up in it too. Sara had played pranks on me a few times, mostly changing the outfit I was wearing into something dazzling. Since she seemed truly delighted knowing she could do such things, I decided to just quietly let her have her fun.
For reference, what I was wearing right now was a shirt covered in lace and black trousers—an outfit that looked exactly like what a male lead would wear in a foreign historical drama set in the Renaissance.
And even though our two consciousnesses were meeting face to face, it was thankfully impossible for us to read each other's thoughts. As the owner of this mind, Sara could fairly easily sense my thoughts and emotions when I was controlling the body, but when we met consciousness to consciousness like this, we had to talk just like meeting another person to convey our thoughts.
Then again, if we could perfectly read even each other's innermost thoughts, we'd both be incredibly uncomfortable in all sorts of ways.
"Something I want to do."
I let out a small sigh and sat down on the bed. Sara sat next to me as if it were the most natural thing in the world, not close enough that we were stuck together, though.
"You know... you really don't have anything like that? Like suddenly wanting to eat something, or wanting to go somewhere specific. Wanting to try something."
I tried my best to explain the concept of "something you want to do," but explaining that notion to someone who had never wished for such a thing was incredibly difficult.
...Come to think of it, this was exactly like trying to persuade someone contemplating suicide. Wouldn't I need some kind of professional knowledge for this? I've heard that clumsy comfort can actually backfire.
Fortunately, I didn't sense any such dark aura from Sara as she stared up at me.
Sara sank into deep thought for a while before answering,
"You're already doing all those things for me."
...Come on.
I dragged a hand down my face.
Well, I mean; it was true that I'd deliberately tried to act that way.
I'd also once thought that life would be easier if someone else lived mine for me. Having someone study for me, exercise for me...
Not that I'd ever studied for her. And to be honest, I hadn't really wanted to exercise on her behalf either.
Of course, things like spending my school days with friends again, or living life by scooping money out of a never-ending bank account and throwing it around, were quite enjoyable.
But separate from all that, I was worried about Sara.
How should I put it... it felt like I'd suddenly acquired a hikikomori little sister who refused to come out of her room.
"...What were you just thinking?"
Sara narrowed her eyes and looked up at me.
Maybe because the original was so beautiful, Sara looked pretty no matter what expression she made. Though when she narrowed those sharp eyes and glared, it was a little chilling. I just felt that brief chill and moved on, but for other people, having the richest teenage girl in the world glare at them like that must have multiplied the sense of dread several times over.
"Oh, it's nothing...."
I let out a heavy sigh.
I knew full well that the reason she so stubbornly refused to come out into the world like this was precisely because of Choi Na-kyung.
Sara loved Choi Na-kyung as family. In fact, looking back at her memories, Choi Na-kyung was more of a mother to her than her biological mother ever was. Her biological mother had passed away when Sara was too young, so she had no memories of her anyway.
Because of that, she loved her. But at the same time, she also hated her. Because Choi Na-kyung was also the person who had wrecked her life so thoroughly.
It wasn't just hatred either. She also felt fear—the fear that someday, that "Mother" might leave her completely, the fear that she might not love her anymore.
It was a terribly complicated feeling, as if she were feeling every emotion in the world toward a single person.
That was the kind of emotion Sara felt for Choi Na-kyung.
Naturally, it was more than enough to act as a personality switch.
But to use it, Sara had to expose herself to those emotions all over again.
Not just once, but every single time the personality was switched.
Since it involved accessing the most stimulating memory, it might even require a stronger stimulus each time the switch was triggered.
And so, this was why Sara was refusing to return to her own life.
I don't know how things would have been back when she knew nothing but Choi Na-kyung, but over the last week, while living the life I'd established, Sara had tasted other emotions from the outside.
Not the negative moods, the violent, emotionally volatile mixtures that amounted to psychological abuse, but the gentle, lovely, and leisurely emotions found in soft daily life.
Because of that, she felt no need to go meet Choi Na-kyung and face those emotions again.
"Can't we just... keep going on like this?"
As I was lost in thought, Sara softly laid her own hand over mine from beside me.
I turned my head and saw her looking at me straight on.
"Spending our days together normally, meeting and talking like this at night... feeling things together and remembering them together. Can't we live like that?"
.......
Yeah, this was also a problem.
It was a little awkward to say because it felt like bragging, but I was the one who had inadvertently saved Sara's life. And in a way, I was also the person closest to her.
So, even if it wasn't to the same extent as Choi Na-kyung, Sara was feeling this kind of emotion toward me.
I was glad it wasn't a sexual kind of emotion, and it didn't feel burdensome either, but it still worried me immensely.
Because she was saying she'd completely entrust her life to someone else.
"Are you... thinking of leaving?"
"......No."
I do know that someday, I will have to leave.
Like the imaginary friends from childhood you often see in American dramas or cartoons.
We can't keep going on like this forever.
No matter how much I've come to share Sara's body, in the end, I am an outsider. I can't be responsible for Sara's life forever.
Right now, Sara depends on me like this, but as time goes on, her horizons will broaden, and she'll experience more things.
Naturally, she'll make more friends too.
Someday, she might like someone, or she might find something she wants to do. And all of those things might not align with me at all.
In that kind of situation, could I really keep my distance and not interfere with Sara?
Could I truly take perfect responsibility for Sara's life from beginning to end without succumbing to my own personal desires?
"Right? You'll stay here, won't you?"
Sara spoke with a smile.
"Yeah. I'll be here."
So, once again today, I told that lie.
...It was truly a relief that Sara couldn't read any deeper into my consciousness than this.