Old Testament: The Book of Ninomae
A cold wind slipped in through the seams of her coat. Almost at once, though, the air around her heated, and warmth came pressing back.
The Li Hexagram. Azure Flame. By another name, Shirase Hikari. Her image had been seared in by the help they received during the Vampire Syndrome incident, and yet, apart from that, she was a demon they had been putting to thoroughly practical use all winter long—for warmth.
"No matter how you look at her, though, she looks like an angel."
"Well. Trace them back to the source, and those things called demons were angels to begin with."
By the Christian faith, every created thing originates in God. A demon, therefore, could only have come from God as well, and fallen. In the beginning, demon was simply another word for a fallen angel.
"Anyway, aren't you cold, Shion? You usually dress pretty light."
"It is true that I do not feel the cold as readily as others. I suspect, however, that the larger part of it is an occupational affliction."
"An occupational affliction?"
"If I bundle up until my movements grow dull, it starts to feel... constricting."
She kept herself in a state from which she could answer an ambush at any moment. It was by no means an ordinary way of thinking. It was the bearing of a Holy Knight who, even among the denizens of the hidden world, had set a foot deeper into the abyss—a resident of a brutal place, where one killed anomalies, sometimes killed people, and might oneself be killed at any time.
Ninomae Hitomi felt the truth of it all over again. She felt it, and so she asked herself once more whether that was why the woman had come to frighten her—and then she took Han Seoyeon's hand.
"Miss Ninomae?"
"Your hand's freezing, isn't it? Here."
She guided the hand she held into the pocket of her own coat. From inside, warmed by the demon's art, a gentle heat breathed out, and Ninomae fidgeted her fingers, softly stroking Seoyeon's cool hand.
Han Seoyeon Margarita—Apostle Bartholomew—was an extraordinary person. A strong person, and one who kept a foot in a world entirely apart from Ninomae's own. And yet she was also a human being whose hands went cold in a winter like this: a person who held Ninomae dear, and whom Ninomae held dear in return. There were times she felt a little far away. Even so, Han Seoyeon had always been somewhere an outstretched hand could reach.
There was no way to think of her as frightening. No—there was no way not to come to like her. Above all, if this was the person listening, then a story of her own past would be a light thing, easily dismissed as nothing much. A story in which no one died and no one was hurt. Only the story of a girl whose heart had not been very strong.
"When I was little, um, I wasn't exactly the sturdy type. I mean—I wouldn't say I'm particularly tough even now, mentally."
She had a fragile side; that was how Ninomae began. Their joined hands stayed in the pocket as they walked side by side down a road where scarcely a soul was out. It was a residential neighborhood, but whether from the awkward hour or the cold of winter, almost no one was about, and along a street where even the line between road and sidewalk was unclear, Ninomae Hitomi went on.
"Honestly, in middle school, my grades were a little on the good side."
A little? Seoyeon tilted her head. From someone who all but permanently sat at the top of her department, it was a remarkably diffident thing to say.
"Maybe because of that, it seems there were quite a few kids who thought of me as 'that annoying girl,' without my even realizing..."
"...I see."
Seoyeon was in no position to answer that such things were common. She had never lived an ordinary school life—a fabricated academic record, arranged for her posting to Japan, was another matter. Even so, she knew that cutting down anyone who strayed from normal was something that happened readily enough, close to human nature itself, and that it applied not only to those who fell short, but sometimes to those who excelled too far.
In that respect, she—Ninomae Hitomi—must simply have been too excellent.
Ninomae gave a bitter smile and turned her head to meet Seoyeon's eyes.
"I only realized there were quietly quite a few kids who didn't like me after I became a third-year."
Ninomae was an exceptionally fine student. Respectable grades, a tidy appearance, brains and beauty both—she wanted for none of those phrases. An honor student and a model student at once. That was the student called Ninomae Hitomi.
Add a bright, gentle nature, and she was already as beloved by her teachers as a student could be. Not only among adults; among the students, too, she maintained reasonably decent relationships, for what they were worth. If she had a shortcoming, it was only that she was no good at physical things, and considering she was a girl, that hardly registered as a problem.
Of course, that was not to say she had won everyone's goodwill. Ninomae was excellent—excellent enough to become an object of envy. She had never once flaunted her abilities, but whether people took that attitude for modesty or for deceit was each person's own affair, even if Ninomae had not a shred of such intention. And those ill feelings swelled as she grew older alongside the friends around her, and as the other students came to care a great deal about grades, about looks.
They crested in a compound fracture of human relationships that might have happened anywhere: a confession from a boy some other girl already liked. That she had turned the confession down carried no meaning whatsoever. A certain group of girls began to treat Ninomae as an outright enemy.
Even so, it was all right. Even if that group happened to sit rather high in the so-called school caste, it was all right. Some who had found her disagreeable from the start seized the moment and came down on her at once, and others, yielding to malicious slander and the pressure to go along, joined the gossip without knowing a thing—but still. It was all right. She was all right. Whatever anyone said about her, her friends were at her side...
"Hitomi-chan? Ah, um, sorry. Tomorrow's kind of busy. Next week? Mmm, that's..."
"Her? Ah, she's kind of like that, yeah. Always just grinning like she's not all there. ...Huh? Ah, no, Hitomi, what I just said wasn't—I mean..."
...Regrettably, Ninomae was not strong enough to stay composed even up to the moment her friends turned their backs.
It feels a little late to say it again, but Ninomae was one of the clever ones. There was no chance she had failed to notice that her friends were growing reluctant to be seen with her. Some, from a certain point, genuinely did not like her. Others were afraid of being taken for her kind and cast out alongside her. Whichever it was, look back on it and it was thoroughly childish.
The problem was that Ninomae, on the receiving end, was young enough to be wounded by it all the same. It was not that she had been perfectly fine beneath all that malice. Ninomae was not that strong. She had only forced a rationalization on herself: so long as her friends accepted her, that would do. Nor had she failed to notice the change in those friends. She had merely been too frail to look it in the face.
Then came the moment she could no longer turn her eyes away—the day she saw a friend let out a sigh and join the gossip. From the very next day, Ninomae Hitomi stopped going to school.
For a while she did not leave the house unless something truly out of the ordinary demanded it. Most likely she was afraid of running into a student from the same school. It was then, too, that she began to sink into subculture, which until then she had only occasionally glanced at, and only when something became a real topic of conversation. The hobbies available inside the house amounted to little more than the internet, or paging through the folklore books lined up in her father's study.
Looking at the characters in anime set her heart considerably at ease. Not because she received some moving message from them. Simply because they were made-up stories and made-up people. Even if they deceived her, the one watching, it was not malice—they had only been following a script. In short, the taste sprang from a distrust of human beings. It was an escape.
"...Hitomi?"
"Ah, Mom. You're up?"
And that escape ended in a single moment, without any warning at all. Just as Ninomae had one day, out of nowhere, begun to shut herself up in the house.
"Um... I thought I'd try going back to school. ...Ehehe."
When her mother, Fumiyo, came out of the bedroom one morning, Ninomae Hitomi was making breakfast in an apron. That in itself was common enough. But the clothes beneath the apron were, beyond any doubt, a school uniform, and Fumiyo's eyes flew wide. It was the sort of thing that made her wonder whether she was dreaming.
"M-Mom? Why are you looking at me like—ah?"
Her mother was not a woman of many tears. But Ninomae remembered with perfect clarity how, that morning, she had broken into sobs and pulled her daughter into a fierce embrace—and that she herself had held her mother in return.
From that day, Ninomae began going to school again. It was around the time her parents had started discussing whether they ought to move, for her sake, and around the time the minimum attendance required to keep her from being held back a year had grown razor-thin. There were complications along the way, but in that manner Ninomae Hitomi's life returned once more to what it had been.
"...Your mother must think of it that way."
"Uhm... what?"
The remark came out of nowhere, and Ninomae Hitomi's shoulders jumped.
"Don't move too much. You'll throw off the pose."
"Ah, right."
She stared blankly at her father as he went on in that flat voice. Her father, Ninomae Hajime, painted in oils as a hobby, and being asked now and then to model for him was something that had gone on since she was small. She had been cooperating with that hobby in the usual way today when she suddenly heard this.
"Anyway, your mother is comparatively dull about these things. And her daughter had only just managed to get back on her feet, so she wouldn't have had the room to be suspicious."
"I... Dad. I'm not really sure what you're talking about. If you mean that whole thing, I've sorted my feelings out on my own, somehow, and I've more or less made up with my friends..."
Half listening to the excuse and half not, Hajime went on sketching across the canvas in pencil, then abruptly stopped his hand.
"Pretending not to know won't help. It's all an act."
The awkward smile she had been wearing, as if she didn't understand, froze where it was.
"So what is it you're talking about..."
"If that's how you want it, we'll leave it there."
With that, her father set the pencil moving again. Ninomae's face, gone rigid, never quite found its way back. He had struck the mark dead on. A bitter taste seemed to spread through her mouth.
Ninomae Hitomi, the girl who had refused school, had returned and was living an ordinary life. One might well call it a miraculous comeback.
"But my daughter isn't that sturdy a child."
Scritch, scritch. The graphite wore its own body down, stitching black across the canvas.
"You're simply softhearted enough that you couldn't bear to watch your mother grieve any further. Or perhaps you couldn't stand the thought of what would happen if you truly were held back."
Every word from her father came at her as if gouging into her chest. The glances he sent her way now and then were surely only to check the composition of his subject, and yet she had the illusion that they were seeing straight through to somewhere deep inside her.
"So you put a mask on."
Ninomae had started attending school again, but her reputation had not particularly improved. If anything, the verdict of her as an annoying girl had grown a little worse. The reconciliation with her friends, too—though they had been the ones to speak first—was hard to take as pure goodwill. It was closer to an attempt to escape responsibility for the fact that Ninomae had stopped coming to school because of them.
But she was no longer hurt. Just as she had heard from her father's mouth a moment ago, all of it was an act, and nothing more. She was only performing on the basis of a made-up character. So even if those words, that behavior, that personality drew someone's blame, it was not aimed at "Ninomae Hitomi." There was no need whatsoever to be wounded. It resembled, in a way, the rationalization of someone who never truly did their best, and so tells themselves a bad result is no cause for grief.
"...Dad."
"I don't intend to pick it apart. I don't think it's a healthy choice, but if it's a means of protecting yourself, I won't force you to stop. Above all, it's a choice you made yourself."
Even a parent could not change it at will. At least, that was how he saw it, Hajime added.
"Someone might be able to help you break the shell. It won't be me. It won't be your mother, either."
He kept the pencil moving, still without any particular change of expression.
"If there's anyone who can change you as you are now... well, it would be love. Love is the only thing that changes a person. If you meet someone like that, grab them at once, my daughter. If you can make it a fait accompli, all the better."
"...That was almost cool for a second, but the conclusion is pretty weird, don't you think, Dad?"
"I'm telling you not to waste time failing to notice your own feelings and denying them. That is love. They may call this the age of living to a hundred, but life is short. Don't forget your father is always looking forward to his grandchildren's faces."
"Dad????"
"—It must have been hard."
When Han Seoyeon, who had listened to Ninomae's story without a word, at last opened her mouth, that was the first thing she said.
"What? No. It's an old story. Compared with the Holy Knight work you do, Shion, it literally started as a children's fight..."
"But you yourself were in pain, Miss Ninomae. Whether the scale is great or small means nothing. Still less is it something to be compared. Each person has their own hardship."
So saying, Seoyeon drew Ninomae into her arms and patted her back as if to comfort her. Held like that, it was surely a thing already past, a thing she had already poured all the way out—and yet, somehow, something hot seemed to surge back up from her chest.
"You have endured much, Miss Ninomae."
"...Thank you. It's thanks to you, Shion."
"No. Comforting a person who is grieving is only what one human being owes another."
"That's not what I mean. I mean it's thanks to you, Shion, that I was able to let the whole thing go completely..."
Ninomae got that far, then closed her mouth without meaning to.
"Thanks to you..."
Well, it would be love. Love is the only thing that changes a person.
Why, in that instant, was it her father's words that passed through her? Ninomae's eyes quivered. A moment's thought would have told her it had nothing at all to do with now—
"...Hweh?"
Huh? Without meaning to, Ninomae laid a hand over her chest.
Huh? H-huh...?