Going to the Pool of Siloam (4)
They walked a tunnel walled in glass on every side. Beyond the panes the water stood full, fish drifting through it, while the lights set into the floor struck that water and scattered, until the whole passage seemed to dream.
"...There are so many people, there's no atmosphere left to speak of."
"Mmm. Coming right after they opened really was a mistake, wasn't it."
Show up the moment a major aquarium threw open its doors, and of course the place would be packed. Han Seoyeon sighed, admitting she had failed to think that far.
"Still, it's easy enough to get around thanks to you, Shion-chan, so that's something."
Chiyo, keeping pace at her side, let out a soft laugh and swept her eyes over the crowd. Wherever that gaze landed, people stole a glance their way and quietly put a little more distance between them.
Strictly speaking, they were afraid of Han Seoyeon beside her, more than of Chiyo herself.
"So this is what they mean by borrowing a tiger's awe? I feel like I've got some shadowy organization at my back."
"A shadowy organization, is it."
"But come on, Shion-chan. Right now you've got exactly the look of someone who could pull a pistol out of her coat and nobody would even think it was strange."
"...Well. I do actually have one."
"You have one? A pistol?"
She had tossed it out as a joke, and the answer that came back was not the one she expected. Chiyo broke into a short, incredulous laugh.
"I don't possess a body like the previous Lord Bartholomew's, the sort that pulverized every kind of devil with a single fist. So however lightly I dress, I tend to keep at least a modest armament on me."
A silver hammer and a knife, and on top of those a pistol and a few talismans. For Han Seoyeon, that was close to the minimum.
"So this previous one was a monster even by your standards, Shion-chan?"
"More that every Apostle is. I believe I've said so a few times before, but among the Apostles I rank quite low."
The Prophet, the Preacher, the Pulverizer, the Deceiver, the Visitor, the Seeker, the Strategist, the Pioneer, the Critical Patient. There was not one among them against whom Han Seoyeon could promise herself a victory. Only seats like Apostle Peter or Apostle Andrew, filled with no regard whatsoever for combat ability, sat at a level she could say with certainty lay beneath her own.
"Honestly, even hearing you say it, it doesn't really sink in."
"That's because you haven't met them, Chiyo."
Chiyo let the remark half slip past her with a vague is that so, and in that moment a school of tropical fish rushed by at their side in a glittering swarm. Cries of wonder broke from the people around them.
One child, apparently come with family, pressed a face to the glass and peered through to the other side. Watching scenes like that, Chiyo's smile took on a warm, contented cast.
Han Seoyeon noticed, and murmured almost to herself.
"There really are a lot of families here."
"The rest are all couples, though."
"Not all of them, surely?"
So saying, Han Seoyeon tipped her chin toward a cluster of girls laughing brightly at the far end of the tunnel. At a glance they looked to be about high-school age.
"There are children like that, who've simply come out to enjoy themselves with friends."
"Oh, please. Since when does being the same sex mean they can't be a couple? These days a prejudice that un-PC is just asking to get rocks thrown at you."
"Ah, um... that may be, but..."
Said in front of an actual homosexual, it had perhaps been a careless remark. Han Seoyeon took the thought to heart.
Chiyo, caught in the same lull, shut her mouth and went silent as well. What she had just said had called back her original purpose: to determine, for Ninomae's sake, whether Han Seoyeon had any inclination toward women.
And so Senjoji Chiyo gathered her resolve once more.
...But how?
She struck a wall at once. She had hardened her will to uncover Han Seoyeon's orientation somehow, yet the means of actually reaching that goal remained nothing but vague.
If Han Seoyeon had been hiding her orientation, it would have been easier. Only relatively easier—the qualifier had to follow—but at least a few ways of prying, or of sounding her out, had come to mind.
And what of the situation now? Han Seoyeon had not even managed to define her own orientation. Chiyo was left having to discover a sexuality that Seoyeon herself did not know.
Ugh. Think. Just think...
Agony was, of course, inevitable.
Chiyo traced her own case backward. How had she come to define herself as homosexual? She would probably have to begin there.
...Except there hadn't been anything to it.
She was a woman, she had realized she liked women, and so she had thought herself homosexual. Dressed up in finer language, she had felt a sexual attraction toward her own sex. That was all there was to it.
The grounds were far too simple—a tautology, really, the proposition that liking the same sex makes one homosexual—and so the conclusion drawn from them was bound to run a little extreme.
So... I have to check whether Shion-chan gets turned on by women...?
More concretely, she had to do something likely to draw a reaction if the other person were homosexual—that is, something that would draw a reaction from Chiyo herself, were she in that position. Such was the conclusion Senjoji Chiyo had wrung out of her brain by force.
Anyone overhearing that notion would have demanded to know what on earth she meant. Regrettably, this aquarium contained no mind readers.
A conclusion settled only inside Chiyo's head therefore sprang into action, checked by no one at all.
"Ch-Chiyo...?"
"Uh, uuuum? Why?"
"No, it's just—if you do that all of a sudden..."
She had taken one step closer to Han Seoyeon's side and linked their arms. Not the light drape of someone being escorted, either. Close enough that their bodies pressed flush, and tenderly at that.
Han Seoyeon, of course, could only startle.
"Th-this much is fine... isn't it...?"
"It isn't that it isn't allowed, but..."
Nor was Chiyo herself anything like composed. It was an action she had chosen, and still she flushed faintly, embarrassed—only after committing to it had she been able to see what she was doing from the outside.
Linking arms was something even friends or family might do in play. The trouble was that Chiyo knew perfectly well what her own intention had been.
To put it bluntly, it was no different from swishing her tail in a bid to seduce the woman. Recognize that a beat too late, and shame came rushing in to set her cheeks burning.
Even so, backing down now would leave the whole thing a ruin. In the end Chiyo decided to brazen it out and see the closeness through.
D-did she react? Or is she just thrown because it was sudden? I really ought to watch how this goes a little longer...?
All the while, Han Seoyeon was failing in her own way to climb out of her bewilderment.
What is this, seriously? She's always been the type to cling on in play, but isn't this far too different from usual? Was she always this shy? Don't tell me she's interested in me, the way Colonel Evans likes to go on about... No. Common sense says that can't possibly be it...
Caught in a magnificent crossing of wires that did not even rise to sharing one bed and dreaming different dreams, the two of them sank into a silence that in truth could not have lasted long, and yet felt psychologically immense. Not a silence of words alone. Their very movements had locked stiff, and stayed that way until a shark flicked past beside them and cleared the air.
"Sh-should we quit standing here and move?"
"...That would be better."
So saying, the two of them set their feet going again, never noticing that the looks around them—once nothing but fear and wariness—had shifted, somehow, into the gaze people turn on something young and sweetly budding.
"So after the aquarium, a movie theater. As date courses go, that's... ordinary enough, I suppose?"
"Mmm. Was there some problem?"
"No. The truth is, I've never actually been on a date either, so I wouldn't know..."
At the question turned back on her, Chiyo looked aside. A homebody from her student days, and a sexual minority besides—for her, an experience like this was as good as nonexistent.
"That's... all right. Aside from Ninomae, I've hardly ever gone out with just one other person either..."
"I appreciate you trying to comfort me, but it only makes me feel more pathetic, so forgive me..."
"Ah. I'm sorry."
Learning that her romantic history ran roughly even with someone raised as clergy from childhood was no comfort at all. Chiyo's expression grew more wretched still.
Han Seoyeon looked at her, and just when it seemed she might hesitate—
"Chiyo. Would you look this way for a moment?"
"Hm? Why so sudden—eek?!"
In the instant Chiyo turned her head, Han Seoyeon kissed her on the forehead. At the ambush, Chiyo's shoulders jumped.
"I hope that was some comfort."
Whether Chiyo truly had feelings for her, Han Seoyeon could not be sure. Even if she did not, the tendencies Chiyo usually showed suggested she would be plenty pleased by a gesture like this.
"U-uhehh...?"
"Mm..."
...I didn't think she would be happy to this extent.
The longer they stayed arm in arm, the more the heart that had only just adapted began to pound all over again. Chiyo's face burned hot once more, and though the corners of her mouth seemed to be smiling, they went loose and foolish, giving her a faintly indecent air.
A reaction like that, shame and delight snarled together, tickled at Han Seoyeon's sadism in a curious way, and she had to fight down the impulse to do it once more.
"Let's go and get the tickets. It would be a problem if we missed the time."
"Ah, uh, y-yeah. Let's. We should."
Only after Han Seoyeon pressed her like that did Chiyo catch hold of her wits again.
Soon the two of them went up to a theater clerk to reserve their seats—and stopped short, staring at the clerk's face with utterly vacant expressions.
It was not because the clerk was a blond, blue-eyed foreign man. That alone would have been startling enough, but the greater reason was that this particular person was someone Han Seoyeon already knew.
"Oh. If it isn't Lord Bartholomew?"
"What are you doing here, Philotanuss?"
No—strictly speaking, ought she to call him not a person at all, but a demon? Han Seoyeon turned a look of pure disbelief on the sight of the demon contracted to Ninomae, presently working a part-time shift at a movie theater.
"You ask why I labor in a place such as this? Why, the answer is only natural, is it not."
Philotanuss, however, paid that look no mind, and only broke into a great beaming smile.
"It is so that I may ask a pair of women who seem on excellent terms, yet are plainly not lovers, whether they might be a couple—and then inform them that if they are a couple and reserve the couple seats, a discount promotion renders the price quite the bargain!"
Han Seoyeon's eyes surrendered still further to disbelief.
"In a case such as this, one generally finds the type who titters and calls it delightful, and the type who flushes and demands to know what one is saying. Whichever it may be, the thrill of failing to resist the discount and reserving the couple seats is a pleasure on which I could eat three full bowls of rice."
"Excuse me. Are you, by any chance, a pervert?"
"A demon, yes."
With that, Philotanuss smoothly held out the tickets.
They were for the couple seats.
"I accept no refunds."
"We didn't even place an order."
"Now, now! No refunds!"
Han Seoyeon pressed a hand to her brow, thinking that if he were anyone but the one contracted to Ninomae, she would have exorcised him on the spot.