The Story of Raising Her
Was it because I had always laid the bluster and the swagger on too thick?
What I got from my classmates was less surprise than this asshole, at it again.
"Come on, hyung. If we actually bought that bullshit about you wiping out twenty bandits in Cambodia, you could at least have known when to quit."
"Not Cambodia—Congo, you dumbass. And what bandits? How many times do I have to say it? It was an organized terrorist group after a uranium mine, and it was a genuinely dangerous situation. And I didn't kill twenty people. The jungle-model armored personnel carrier I came in on—"
"All right, you're loud, so drop it. Talk. What do you mean you raised the Empress, oppa?"
She only half believed me. Even so, she knew that for all my showing off I had never once talked pure nonsense, and her eyes were bright when she asked.
The moment it concerned Iron Empress, she couldn't hide the instinctive pull. A serious case. She must have thought she was hiding it just fine.
"You wouldn't know it from what you see on television now, but in elementary school the Empress was—what do you call it. An outcast. I mean, usually, when a kid's powers come in that strong, parents either send them to a special institution or fit them with a suppressor and send them to school, right?"
"Almost no parents in this country choose the special institutions anymore, hyung. Maybe somewhere in Europe—Northern Europe, if anywhere—but the UN-designated facilities look practically like prisons from the outside, and the inside is nothing you'd ever believe was meant for children. That conspiracy freak earlier, going on about the UN locking villains away? People talk like that because they build the kids' schools that way in the first place."
"Exactly. Lim Yeri's parents decided that was the one thing they wouldn't do, so they locked cuffs—this big—onto her hands and sent her to school."
It was a story I had spent three years not wanting to remember. Give me an opening and a little alcohol, though, and the words came out more easily than they should have.
"Whoa. Cuffs on a kid would be so heavy... and everyone would see them. Especially someone on Iron Empress's level. Even as a child her power must have been ridiculous. Super strength, high-speed movement, super senses, beams on top of all that. Those things must have been practically shackles."
"Kids learn by watching adults, don't they? Starting with the teachers, they treated her like a monster. They never said it out loud, but they made it blindingly obvious they were scared, so what were the sharp kids supposed to learn? Adults all think they aren't showing it. They show every bit of it. Out loud it's all it's safe, get along, and they sure know how to run their mouths, but every one of those so-called teachers was the same."
"Still, if I were the homeroom teacher, I think I'd sigh and wonder why it had to be me."
"In this day and age, seriously—if you can't handle being given a superpowered kid, quit teaching. I'd rather finish a teaching course and do the job myself than leave it to people like that."
She was a fan of the Empress, and the anger in it sounded almost exaggerated.
"You just want to get mentioned in some interview later as the mentor of a cool, powerful hero. That's the little scheme."
"I'm not even asking to borrow money. I'm not allowed a motive that small? Anyway. So back then, were you at least in the same class as Iron Empress?"
"Same class? As if that were all of it. Me—the truth is..."
I had started to say something about powers, and I stopped. That was the one thing I didn't want to tell.
"The truth is, in elementary school I was pretty much the only kid without that kind of prejudice."
"Well, you can tell the tree from its first leaves. A lunatic with the grades for college who joined the UN forces the moment he finished high school—I doubt elementary school was any different."
"So you're the type who enjoys danger?"
Enjoys danger. Maybe I did. People hadn't avoided Yeri so much because they hated her. They avoided her because she looked dangerous.
She showed up with heavy cylindrical restraints locked around both arms, and she moved as freely as if they weighed nothing. Few children could look at that and not be afraid.
Even the ones who had been edging closer, little by little, out of curiosity stopped coming after Yeri rested her arm on a desk by accident and smashed it in half.
It hadn't happened because her control slipped. The restraints on her arms were simply too heavy. Even so, after she reached middle school and those restraints were swapped for lighter devices, people still did not come near her.
One day I said to Yeri,
"Sometimes I honestly can't tell whether this country wants to raise heroes or villains. They push a kid into being alone and then don't clean up a single thing afterward. What are they even trying to do?"
At that, Yeri covered her mouth and laughed.
"Hehe. You're right. If it weren't for you, Taehyun, I..."
"Don't say things like that. It's scary. If I think about you becoming a villain—god, that would be seriously, actually..."
I didn't truly believe a thing like that was possible.
Yeri was a good child. I hadn't made her that way. She had been good from the start. And so now, after I had left, she...
She had become a rather rough hero, one who defied the philosophy of the United Nations and killed dangerous villains outright. Even so, she was still a hero.
A superhero who helped the weak when she saw them, stood on the side of ordinary people, struck down evil, and kept the peace.
Which meant that I... had not actually mattered. She had been fine without me.
The moment I thought it, even the urge to boast sank clean away. On the television they were broadcasting Yeri from the Netherlands, giving an interview now that the hearing was over. On the screen she lowered the sunglasses she was wearing, just enough to bare her eyes, and answered.
The grey eyes revealed past the sunglasses seemed to pierce straight through my heart. I turned my head away.
"But hyung, that alone feels a little thin if you're going to say you raised Iron Empress. There's more than that, right?"
"Did you maybe teach her how to control her powers? You've got a bit of a power yourself, don't you? Nothing much these days, but still."
"Maybe it was more like mental therapy than power control? If you were only at the same school for a little while in elementary, even you wouldn't talk it up that far, Taehyun-oppa."
"We went all the way through together. Elementary, middle, and high school. I'm Kaesong born and raised."
"Right. Hyung was North Korean."
"It's been over forty years since reunification, and you're still saying North Korean, you crazy bastard. The Empress got all her primary and secondary education in Kaesong too. She's a Kaesong native."
"Wait, so you've known each other for twelve years. That's straight-up childhood friends. Why have you spent all this time on boring army stories and never mentioned this? Come on, tell us properly. What did you even do, that you'd go so far as to say you raised Iron Empress yourself?"
"Seriously. You should have told us something like this ages ago."
Should I tell them? Call it shaking off every last regret, and give them all of it—from how I had come to be close to her, to how it had ended? If I truly had no lingering attachment to her, wasn't that exactly what I ought to do?
But the heart doesn't lie. I couldn't open my mouth.
If I poured the whole story out in front of my classmates, I knew I would settle it in myself—that the story between her and me was really over. I couldn't give them a cleaned-up version of it.
So instead I said this.
"Nothing to it, which is why I kept quiet. Sometimes we ended up in the same class by chance. That's all. If anything had actually happened, I'd have told the story ages ago, wouldn't I? Saying I raised her was just bullshit I talked because I was drunk. And you dumb bastards believed it..."
They laughed as if they'd expected exactly that—of course—and I felt a small relief. I was the one who had brought it up, and yet there I was, catching myself with a hand pressed to my chest, glad I wouldn't have to say any more.
Right up until the voice I had spent so long turning away from drove itself, sharp, against my eardrum from just beside my ear.
The glass I'd been lifting to my mouth stopped in midair. Even my racing heart froze, if only for a hundredth of a second.
The voice that should have been coming from inside that television was coming from behind me—not even a handspan from my earlobe.
My heart could freeze for all the good it did. My ear went on receiving her.
"All of it was true. It wasn't bullshit. I told you plainly. That I was able to come this far because of you."
Slowly, I turned my head and looked up behind me. The woman who had been in court in the Netherlands that very day stood looking down at me, the very image of someone who had stepped out of the television.
She took off the sunglasses—absurd things to wear at a drinking table in the middle of the night—slipped them into their case, and asked me,