A Hero Needs a Villain
It wasn't long before Rabbit Mask dusted herself off and rose to her feet. Then she just stood there, looking at me for a long while. When I took off my mask, she took off hers as well.
Lee Sihyun, I think her name was.
There was pity in her eyes, but she looked a little angry, too. Face already shining with unshed tears, she came up to me and slapped my cheek. Very lightly — so lightly I barely felt it at all.
"What the hell were you thinking? What if something had gone wrong!?"
Her words called back something the person I'd just killed had said. I mumbled at the floor, head hanging.
"Then it would have been regrettable."
"No matter how strong you are, you're still just a kid. This is the age when people are supposed to love you. When you hang around with other kids your age and look at nothing but good things..."
I lifted my head and found her face streaked with tears. We'd barely just met — why was she already this worried about me? Was it the way I looked? Because I was a girl, for the time being. Not a single scar left on me.
Still, I doubted there were many children my age who had experienced having their arms and legs cut off and then put back on. Or who'd murdered a security guard over what amounted to a petty tantrum.
The way I killed those guards had been such a trivial thing to me — just as locking me in the lab and doing what they did had been a trivial thing to those researchers. Another day's work. Handle the test subjects. Carry on with the research.
"Please don't cry. There isn't anything to cry about."
Then what would be worth crying over? I had howled from the pain, plenty of times — but crying because I was actually sad... well. I suppose I had, at that.
At any rate, we made our way slowly out of the building. There was no one left to stand in our path. They were all dead, after all. The floor and the walls had been painted red, but not a single drop of blood was on my body. Should I have gotten something on me before coming out? If I ever needed to prove to someone that I had worked hard.
After we left the Research Lab, we loaded the test subjects who had no abilities onto a truck, and I climbed onto the back of Lee Sihyun's motorcycle.
Was I a pitiful person? I didn't mind being pitied — but I found I didn't want to become someone pitiful.
On the ride back toward the city I held tight to her waist and leaned, for a long time, against the person who had cried for me out of pity. What I felt was warmth, and for reasons I couldn't name, a faint unease.
"Your name. Tell me."
"Harin. Yu Harin."
I didn't know why, but this time it felt like something I had to say. Before I knew it, my mouth was giving her my name all on its own.
"It's a pretty name."
The compliment sent something welling up in my chest. I must have known what this feeling was, once. Now I couldn't even tell.
The first thing I experienced after we returned to the high-rise apartment was getting scolded. Of course, instead of being dragged onto an operating table and having my limbs sawed off, it was just the two of us sitting across a table from each other, talking.
"If you keep ignoring orders and running off on your own like that, we can't take you with us. I don't care how much you beg."
"Then I shall walk there myself."
"That's not what I'm saying!"
"I'm simply doing something I wanted to do before I start school. Something simple."
"This isn't something a kid should be doing in the first place. It's work for adults."
When I didn't answer, Lee Sihyun let out a sigh and pressed on. She seemed to have become my handler within the organization. Perhaps because we were relatively close in age, and the same gender. I didn't particularly care either way — but it felt as though she had taken on some private mission to turn me into a certain kind of girl.
"Or go find that one friend of yours first. The one you said you wanted to meet. The whole reason you're going to that school. Nobody's going to know you were at that Research Lab. We burned every last file, and everyone involved in the experiments... they're all dead."
Dead was putting it mildly. I had hunted them down one by one and quite literally drowned them in their own blood. Saying they "died" made it sound as though they had simply reached the end of a natural lifespan.
That said, I didn't want to go looking for him first. I wanted to be found by accident. I wanted to meet him under the pretense of coincidence, in some thoroughly inconvenient situation. Something so far from a tearful, heartwarming reunion of long-lost childhood friends that the thought wouldn't even occur to him. Because I had only ever wanted to meet him. I had never wanted any particular kind of meeting.
"You must have lived somewhere rather decent, before you started wearing the mask."
"What's that supposed to mean."
"I would like to live that way as well. I've even thought about wanting to live happily with someone else."
"Then just do that."
"But you see. After spending half a year with people in white coats, one's thinking changes a little. In that tiny space, I tried so hard to stay intact that I took out a loan against my own happiness and spent it all in advance."
Getting happy over the smallest things. Thrashing around so I wouldn't sink into despair. Clinging with everything I had to the hope that someone — my childhood friend, especially — would come and save me. And this was the result.
"It isn't as though I want to do this as some kind of hobby. It isn't as though some great fire of vengeance is blazing inside me, either. Killing researchers was never going to make me happy."
It was closer to the feeling of picking up trash on the side of the road. If you saw it, you picked it up. If you saw it but couldn't be bothered, you walked on by.
"Then what the hell do you even want to do...?"
"I wonder. Why are you paying this much attention to me in the first place? You could simply go and do your own work. A rude, useless girl doing whatever she likes in the corner is hardly worth your concern."
"...Because I had a little sister just like you."
"Please don't project her onto me. We wouldn't have looked anything alike."
"Yeah. You don't look anything like her. My sister took after me. She was a good kid who actually listened, and she was incredibly kind."
At that, the woman's face twisted, and she left the room. She looked as though she were about to burst into tears.
I stared for a long time at the seat she had just vacated, then picked up the remote from the table and turned on the news. A burly man in a blue uniform was spraying spit into a microphone, working himself into a righteous fury.
I changed the channel.
The surviving test subjects who wanted to stay would be raised as members of the organization, and those who wanted to leave would have their identities laundered somehow and placed in a halfway decent orphanage — or so I had been told. They were already dead on paper. Laundering them ought to be convenient.
This time a pretty woman in a crisp suit stood in front of the burned-out Research Lab, microphone in hand, delivering her report in a mechanical cadence.
I changed the channel.
All I wanted was some mindless program with nothing in it — but everyone was talking about the Research Lab I had visited. Come to think of it, everyone was talking about it. Countless people would be hearing this news. Which meant the protagonist was among them, wasn't he?
The protagonist who would save the world. The hero who would defeat the villain. He would have to find the person the news was pointing at as a horrific monster, and he would have to defeat them.
Ah. That's right. I do hope people understand this.
Rather than dying in a basement as Subject 11, known to no one but the researchers — being remembered as a horrific villain in a stark white mask, someone who goes around slaughtering people, is a far more rewarding and beautiful life. That much is certain.
And you can't get that by surrounding yourself with happy people, going off to learn an instrument, playing recitals. That's why you were never really happy, isn't it. Just because you tap at a piano a little, not a single soul is going to remember you. There's nothing distinctive about the sound. You're no genius composer. You just play music that already exists. A reasonably pretty girl sitting at a piano is something that catches the eye — but that's as far as it goes.
You can't get it by squeezing yourself in among well-off people and going to barista school to learn how to pour a decent cup of coffee, either. Just because you make a tasty latte, who's going to care about you?
But if everyone remembers me — remembers you — as that heinous, utterly monstrous villain on the television, a creature who doesn't know the first thing about a human heart — then surely my one and only friend will recognize me too. He'll see what kind of person I became while he was living happily after dumping me in the Slums. He'll see how I live now.
So in a way, all of this is for Seojun. It's all because of him, too.
Ordinary me. The kind and gentle girl I am. Even after sticking by his side for over ten years, I was useless enough to be left behind in the Slums. But surely — surely, if I become the kind of horrific person they're talking about on that television, Seojun will need me.
After all, a hero can only exist if there is a villain.