I Wish You'd Recognize Me
I wish you'd recognize me.
The more I moved, the tighter the cuffs bit into my wrists, wrenching my shoulders into grotesque angles. The sensation was far newer than I had expected. Still, it didn't seem impossible to get free. All I had to do was slip my arms out of the handcuffs.
With a wet, grinding crack, my hand twisted free of the cuff.
It didn't bother me.
My shoulder had crumpled a little. My thumb was bent in a direction it was never meant to go, and blood ran from my hand — but still. The drugs were still thick in my system, so fortunately — extremely fortunately — it didn't hurt as terribly as it should have. Though my vision had gone a little hazy, and I was dizzy, as if I'd been drinking.
The night was terribly dark.
Im Hyeyeon, was that her name?
What was she planning to do if it wasn't me? Just shoot first and figure it out later? Had she intended to untie me and call it a misunderstanding? It would have been pretty awkward, undoing the cuffs after all that. Or maybe people with snow-white hair just aren't that common.
Anyway, I somehow managed to lift my face from the dirt, and the moment our eyes met, I was certain.
The person standing there was my childhood friend.
My one and only friend.
I muttered the words under my breath. But he didn't seem to recognize me.
The two of them were looking at me with hostility written across their faces. Their eyes had the look of someone staring down a researcher who needed to be eliminated — no. A villain.
As if there were some condition she had to meet first, Im Hyeyeon handed the box she'd been carrying to Seojun and drew the sword from her hip. Then she started walking slowly toward me.
Whether it was the drugs or whatever was still binding me, I felt terribly powerless. Before I knew it the girl was right in front of me. She pressed the tip of her blade to my throat and spoke in a voice that was almost a growl.
"If you resist even a little, I'll cut you down right here."
Even as she said it, the tip of the blade was trembling. As if she'd drop it in shock if I just leaned my neck into it.
"The missing students. You killed them all, didn't you?"
So there had been missing students even before I entered this school.
She stomped her foot down on my head and spoke like she was angry.
"Why'd you suddenly show yourself? And pretending to be a student getting bullied, no less. Did you think you could take someone again this time?"
This was the complete opposite of the vacant, dazed girl I'd first met. She wasn't stuttering at all. Her pronunciation was razor-sharp, every emotion laid bare. Contempt. Hatred. Things like that.
What was I supposed to say? Come to think of it, I didn't really need to answer her questions.
"P-please let me go..."
I hadn't done anything wrong. I'd just been jumped out of nowhere by a lunatic pressing a blade to my throat.
Had I even done anything wrong, all this time? Was it such a terrible crime — that an uneducated girl left the neighborhood she grew up in and sold her own body to the Research Lab she knew nothing about?
Someone always shows up out of nowhere to bind me, tie me down, and in the end, try to break me.
I just came looking for Seojun. It took me half a year.
But when I was stuck in the Slums, I'd been abandoned — or, to put it more gently, left behind — and I couldn't get a word to him. I couldn't even go see him. I didn't have enough money to buy a simple drink if I went and we talked about this and that. I could have asked him to buy it for me, but maybe it was pride — the words just wouldn't come out of my mouth.
So I decided to go find him myself. To the school. That's the only reason I went into the Research Lab. And somehow, I made it all the way here.
A lot of things happened. But in the end, all of it — every last bit — was something I did just to see my one and only friend.
And now he's right in front of me. The friend I hadn't seen in so long I'd almost forgotten his face is standing right there, and I can't even look at him. My head is being stomped into the dirt, and no matter how hard I try, my body won't move.
"Talk. Or I'll do to you exactly what you did to them."
"W-why are you suddenly d-doing this to me?"
I screamed like I had no idea what was going on. The foot crushing my head pressed down even harder. Hard enough that I wondered if my skull would split open like a watermelon under a club.
I wish you'd recognize me.
That's why I deliberately left the wounds on my face. Why I left all the bruises covering my body.
Anyway, I heard footsteps, and then Seojun's voice.
"Just calm down for a second..."
"How am I supposed to calm down!? These insect Villains have crawled all the way into the school now!"
"Is this even the right person? The way she's reacting doesn't seem like—"
"I'm sure. She's F-class, and she's the only one with white hair. Besides, have you ever seen another uniform without any insignia on it?"
I twisted my whole body, trying to get free somehow, and this time it wasn't my shoulder that tightened — it was the blade sinking in.
"Don't look at me like that. I saw it with my own eyes. She killed kids from our class with some kind of red thing."
"...Even if you're right, we don't have any evidence."
"Why do we need evidence? We caught a Villain. We just dispose of them. Isn't that what this school is for?"
At that, Seojun answered back, angry. It had been so long since I'd heard his voice. The tone had changed a little, but it still pulled me into old memories — similar to the voice that had gotten angry on my behalf, the one that had smashed a baseball bat into the back of the neighbor's head while that man was beating me so he could force himself on me.
"That's not what you said at first! We were supposed to catch the suspicious person, tell a teacher, and hand them over to the Investigation Bureau, weren't we?"
"If we hand her over there, they won't dispose of her."
The two of them kept arguing, raising their voices for a long time. It was a deserted alley anyway, so there was no chance anyone else would notice.
My face was still pressed into the ground. He was so close, and I still couldn't look at his face. I tried to lift my head, hoping he'd look at me and know me, but my jaw — barely raised — felt like it would shatter, and I just slammed back into the dirt.
I can't even talk to you.
I can't even ask you to run around and play like we used to.
You're talking to the girl who suddenly tied me up and started hitting me and stabbing me, and you won't even spare me a glance. You're only looking at her.
I thought if I just found you, everything would be okay.
There's a fairy tale my mother used to read to me when I was little. It was a story about how, as long as there was love, you could recognize the other person no matter what they were wearing. That even if a prince came looking for you dressed as a beggar, you'd know who he was right away.
I guess there was no love between the two of us. Not even the romantic kind. I mean the love between friends.
Has my voice changed that much? Is it because my hair color changed? Maybe it's because the atmosphere around me is different. The experiments changed me a little, but not that much. No matter how I think about it, my face, my body — they still look about the same.
Or is it because I can grow things back even if you cut them off, because I can move the blood flowing through my body a little, that you can't recognize me?
Or maybe the old me was just trash you dragged around, not even worth remembering...
"H-hey, I-I don't l-like being tied up. I-I just..."
All at once, my entire body went cold, and I started trembling. The drugs must have worn off. Pain I hadn't been able to feel came flooding in, and I felt like I was crumbling apart.
A faint warmth spread through my lower body.
She clicked her tongue and kicked my head. She kicked me so hard I flew nearly five meters.
But the sensation had returned to my body, so even as I gasped for breath, I managed to get up. I stood on trembling legs, my arms still bound behind my back as if I were clasping my hands there. Then my strength gave out, and I collapsed right back down.
I could see Seojun grabbing the girl's wrist as she came at me again, about to kick me. But he didn't even glance my way.
Maybe because the drugs had completely worn off, my consciousness was fading too.
I just came because waiting was a little lonely. Because I wanted to be with you.
It all turned out so ridiculous.
Two days ago, Hyeyeon came to find me. She said she'd found a Villain hiding inside the school. She was gasping for breath, her eyes slightly unfocused.
She'd told me once that she'd lost her father to a criminal organization. I'd heard he was a high-ranking official, and an extremely righteous man. He'd driven every last terrible villain into a corner and wiped out countless organizations. The result, in the end, was revenge.
Hyeyeon had been kidnapped as a child. He'd been an incredibly powerful Awakened. He managed to rescue her somehow, but then he died right in front of her, pretending nothing was wrong even as his entire body was riddled with holes.
Normally she was vacant, pointlessly righteous, and looked like she wasn't thinking about anything at all. But the moment anything involving Villains came up, she became a completely different person. It was like she just gave up on thinking.
At the very least, the white-haired girl currently being crushed under Hyeyeon's foot, making nothing but pained groans, didn't look like a Villain to me. She looked somehow familiar. She'd been swaying like a drunk.
I'd run into those people a few times, and they were never this sloppy. They didn't beg, and they weren't so weak that a few hits would knock them out. Even the small fry would launch suicide attacks like it was the most natural thing in the world, right before they died.
She had to be mistaken. This was a kid with a huge wound in her heart, just like that child from back home.
Unlike other places, this school actually encouraged violence, so fights between students — or bullying — were usually let slide as long as nobody died. But this seemed like too much. Hyeyeon was grumbling that she'd just been eliminating a Villain.
I made up some excuse about needing to interrogate her first, and for reasons I couldn't explain, I took the unconscious girl who felt like someone I'd met somewhere before and headed for the infirmary.