Sleep Talking
A snore. After several rounds of fake sleeping, I finally confirmed the Demon King was actually out. I let a good long while pass, then tried to ease my arm out from under her head so I could slip from the bed.
A sudden clamp.
"Mmmph... this... time... I won't... let you... win... zzz."
She locked onto the arm I'd been trying to wriggle free like an eel, and mumbled in her sleep.
...She's not faking it again, is she?
A squeeze. But the fingernail marks that dug in without fail were proof enough she was genuinely under.
My left arm was a lost cause. Because of the red horn sprouting from the left side of her head, only my left arm could serve as her pillow—which meant she always slept on my left.
Maybe that was why. Lately, the left arm her head had practically taken up residence on seemed to have soaked up a sweet, fruity scent. It was a natural perfume all its own.
...I can't pull my arm out like this.
I'd been planning to get the cooking, the laundry, and the cleaning all done before the Demon King woke up and started bouncing around the castle again. At this rate, I wasn't going anywhere.
I rolled from my rigid, ceiling-staring posture and turned toward her.
...
Wow...
Her face pulled a fresh breath of wonder out of me.
She was beautiful.
It wasn't a word that sat comfortably on someone as infuriatingly jinxed as her—you'd almost think a god had singled her out for it—but the Demon King's looks could fairly be called a divine masterpiece, and that wouldn't have been overselling it.
Maybe the secret of her terrible luck was that every stat that should have been handed out evenly at birth had been dumped entirely into magic power and appearance. That actually sounded pretty plausible.
I kneaded her soft cheek with my right hand. Whenever I opened my eyes, the Demon King was usually poking at my face too, so this was even-steven.
The way my fingers sank into that softness. The elasticity that stretched on and on when I pulled. If I ever went back to Earth, I could put the Demon King in a jelly commercial as the—
"Zzz... heh... zzz... noob..."
—forget the commercial. Let's sell her to the circus instead. Train her with a spiked whip until she can jump through a ring of fire.
What the hell kind of dream was this damn girl having? What? "Noob"? Don't even try it. You were about to call me a fucking pushover just now, weren't you? Always picking up nothing but the worst language.
Not that I used to have a clean mouth myself...
If my potty-mouthed trap deserved a single mitigating circumstance, I'd like people to take into account the years I spent working in Nine's party. My swearing had gone up about tenfold compared to when I was in the military.
And since the Demon King absorbed everything like a sponge... I'd just have to watch my own behavior more carefully.
Squish. Squish. What even were these cheeks. What were they made of that they were this addictive. Squish. Squish.
I could have done this forever and never gotten tired of it, but I stopped. Too much of a good thing. And if the Demon King woke up, my original goal of letting her rest would go straight down the drain.
"Nngh... zzz... today's... game is..."
She moved her pink lips. The pronunciation was thoroughly mashed, but I could still make it out. Apparently she was playing games even in her dreams.
Curious what the game was, I leaned my ear close to her mouth.
"...dinosaur... zzz... train game..."
...A dinosaur train game?
Just from the title, I couldn't picture it at all. The world inside the Demon King's head sometimes housed things that defied understanding.
I remembered a joke she'd told once, something about a donkey going into a kangaroo's belly. Afterward I'd written the sentence down on paper and analyzed it from every angle, but I never did figure out what the punchline was supposed to be.
"The rules are... *cough*... zzz..."
...
What are the rules?
Why'd you trail off in the middle?
Oh no. If she skipped the rules, I wouldn't be able to make sense of any of the sleep talk that came after. Come on. Hang in there a little longer.
"The rules are... huff... you pick a dinosaur train... and... whoever... circles the world... first... zzz... wins."
The miser Demon King who would lick the lids of canned beans had a dream scale that was world-class. Piecing together the words spilling from her mouth, it was roughly a racing game where you picked a dinosaur train and the first to loop the entire world as a track won.
They say dreams unconsciously reflect the desires of waking life. The Demon King, trapped in this cramped, dark castle, always showed me nothing but a bright, positive face. But somewhere in the depths of her heart, she might have wanted, just once, to wander free.
She said she went out to buy medicine, didn't she?
And there had been a wound on her cheek. Had she gotten hurt going outside?
I traced the place where she'd been hurt. It had healed clean, without a scar.
"Nngh, zzz... then... I'll take... this one... the long-necked one... zzz..."
She seemed to have picked her dinosaur train. A long-necked dinosaur? It looked slow even without seeing it. Her selection sense was terrible.
"...zzz..."
A sudden grab.
?
The Demon King had seized me by the collar. The way she shook me, she was probably holding reins in the dream. Which meant she was already in the saddle, ready to go.
"...zzz... heehee... you've got no eye... for dinosaurs... zzz..."
Dream-me had apparently picked some godawful dinosaur train. One corner of the Demon King's mouth curled up in a smirk. That look pissed me off so much that before she'd fallen asleep, I'd drawn a carrot on her forehead with the pen I used to write fairy tales. I was never going to tell her. Not until the day I died.
"...zzz... staaart..."
The starting siren for the dinosaur train race must have gone off. Riding her long-necked dinosaur, the Demon King gripped my collar—no, the reins—tight, as if afraid she'd fall off.
Still asleep, she wore a look of concentration. The way her forehead twitched and folded the carrot drawing was so funny it was almost too cute.
"...ooh. zzz... at this rate... they're gonna catch... zzz."
The Demon King's dinosaur train, which had been in the lead, already seemed in danger of being overtaken. I couldn't see the race, but her descriptions and her face were so real I found myself getting invested.
"...ah, no. zzz..."
It'd be nice if she could win as much as she wanted in her dreams... it wasn't like she got to dream that often...
I was having that generously understanding thought when she started whispering.
"...l-long-necked dino... zzz... hit my friend with your tail... send him flying. zzz... it's okay... take him out."
The Demon King was whispering some scheme to the innocent long-necked dinosaur. Even in her dreams, she was just as cheap at games as she was in reality.
"Zzz... nngh... aah... he dodged with a jump... zzz... I-I don't know. I never... did any tail-swipe."
And then playing dumb after doing it, too. Having failed to knock me off, she pretended she had nothing to do with it. How could a person be this consistent? She was a friend as evergreen as a pine tree.
Was this even sleep talking? Why was it so loud? Just in case, I pressed the back of her hand, but the fingernail marks that appeared certified it as the genuine article.
"...zzz."
After that she was quiet for a while. A peaceful stretch of the course, apparently. Judging by the last few minutes, she should already have been overtaken.
"...zzz... heheh... zzz... this is so nice. All the places... I always wanted to... go."
Winning and losing didn't seem to matter much. Riding a dinosaur around the world, the Demon King laughed, savoring her freedom.
"...zzz..."
...Is it that wonderful...
What if.
If I went to Earth with the Demon King... combining two things that had never overlapped, pleasant pictures welled up all on their own.
The Demon King and the sea. The Demon King and a festival. The Demon King and a train. The Demon King and a food crawl. The Demon King and camping. Pair her with any word at all, and the only scenes that rose were happy ones.
And... if I took the Demon King to a PC bang or an arcade... she might be so happy she'd die of shock.
"...Hehe. My friend's... almost there... zzz."
Even in her dream, she seemed to have lost. Painfully honest, this girl... or so I thought.
That wasn't it.
"...zzz..."
"...zzz... kihi. Thought you won... didn't you?... this one's neck... zzz... is so long..."
Hm?
"...long-necked dino... now... lower your head... zzz..."
She let go of my collar. In the dream, she must have dropped the reins.
"...zzz... zzz... if I slide down this... zzz..."
"We're here!... First place..."
So in other words...
To roughly summarize her fantastic dream: the long-necked dinosaur's neck was so, so long that she slid down that enormous neck like a dinosaur slide, overtaking me just as I thought I'd won, and snatching first place.
"...Kihihi... uhihi..."
...That's so her.
These were the kinds of things she imagined, she who usually lost to me so often.
As a courtesy to the winner, I reached out and stroked her hair.
"...Hehe."
Was someone stroking the head of the dino-racing champion Demon King in her dream, too? She grinned, thoroughly satisfied.
"...zzz..."
"...zzz... Paper Crane... dinosaur train game... so... much fun."
The hand in her hair stopped dead, as if someone had caught it.
It felt like a blade had come flying and buried itself in my heart.
The game that had made her happy all day long in her dream... seemed to have been born from the Paper Crane I'd given her, transformed.
Haah.
The Demon King woke a little while later. Still beaming from the happy dream she'd just had, the moment she opened her eyes she started casting buffs on the Paper Crane.
For a long, long time.
Dinner.
"...Hey. Is the kimchi stew not good?"
The Demon King asked with a worried face.
"No way. Who do you think made it? It's delicious."
I slurped.
"...Good, good. I thought my friend was being picky about the side dishes. Here—this is your reward!"
And she transferred a tower of carrots she'd piled on her spoon over to me.
"...I'll eat more carrots. Give me more."
"Wha—!? F-for real? What's gotten into you? You've finally grown up!"
The Demon King, who had been reading the room as she portioned out carrots, launched a full-scale carrot excavation from her own bowl.
The carrot was still drawn on her forehead. Looking at it didn't make me laugh the way it had before.
"Hey."
"...Yeah?"
She answered without looking up from her carrot mining.
"Have you picked our next travel destination yet?"
"...Travel!?"
The Demon King had gone outside to buy medicine.
I hated this world.
This world hated me too, and it would hate the Demon King even more.
But if she wanted it anyway.
"There are plenty of places with hardly anyone around. If meeting people makes you uncomfortable... we can go somewhere empty."
The Demon King, who had been stacking carrots onto her spoon for me, jerked the spoon over. All those carefully picked carrots sank back into her rice.
She answered with a bitter little smile.
"Yeah."