She Who Kindled the Army (3)
She woke and looked up at the ceiling. The light was off, but the room was not dark. Morning had come. Spring had already slipped past its beginning, into the season when the cherry blossoms bloom, and though the sun rose earlier now than it had in winter, getting up after daybreak was, by the measure of Han Seoyeon's life, a rare thing indeed.
It was because she had spent the night thrashing in anguish over what had passed between her and Ninomae the day before, and had only managed to fall asleep in the small hours of dawn. She was the sort who, once sleep refused her, would simply stay up through the night. No—more precisely, she had once lived by the conviction that there was no need to sleep even when she could. Sacred healing had made that possible.
Since the two of them had begun sharing a home, however, Ninomae worried over her health so relentlessly that sleeping an hour or two a day, so long as nothing was amiss, had become the ordinary course of things. She had courted sleep even as it refused to come, and somewhere in the trying she seemed to have dropped dead away for several hours.
Han Seoyeon rose and left the room. By now Ninomae would already be awake. She came thumping down the stairs and glanced toward the bathroom. Ninomae's scent faded out somewhere around there, and from the faint sound of water she was probably in the shower.
"Hm?"
She had settled onto the living-room sofa with that thought when the doorbell rang. Telling herself no one ought to be calling at this hour, she opened the door anyway, and a man stood at the entry with a styrofoam cooler in his arms.
"Would you be Han Seoyeon?"
"Yes. That would be me... A delivery?"
She hadn't ordered anything. Even as she tilted her head, she looked over the sticker on the box. The sender was given as Mika Eru. From the packaging it might have been something meant to be kept cold, and yet she still could not begin to guess what it was. There was, however, no one else who would be using a name like that. Han Seoyeon signed to confirm receipt and sent the courier on his way.
Ninomae came out of the bathroom right about then. Still in her robe, she looked at the box set on the table.
"Oh. What's that?"
"I'm not certain... I wasn't told she meant to send anything."
The robe brought last night back to her without her willing it, and Han Seoyeon looked away. Ninomae, as if she had no notion of what was moving through Seoyeon, hummed to herself and started opening the box.
The posture of it thrust her hips back, as though to put them on display, and Han Seoyeon's gaze lurched all over again. This time, unlike yesterday, Ninomae never noticed. The rite, after all, was already several hours behind them.
"Huh."
Ninomae lifted the lid of the styrofoam box, and tilted her head. Inside sat three hefty plastic tubs. They bore no labels. She picked one up, opened it, and a milky-white liquid sloshed within.
"It's milk?"
She put her nose to the rim, sniffed once and then again, and said so. Why send a thing like this by delivery? It didn't even look like something sold in a shop.
"Does Mika Eru run a ranch, by any chance? Either way, we'd just run out, and I was thinking I'd have to go buy some, so this is perfect."
Among Han Seoyeon's acquaintances from church there was someone who kept an orchard and sent figs without fail. Well. It was probably something along those lines. A good thing was a good thing, and with that Ninomae hurried off to the kitchen in quick little steps and came back with a cup.
"No. Not that I recall her doing anything of the sort..."
"Then maybe someone in her family has a ranch? A relative?"
"That would not be the case either. Like myself, she was an orphan without a soul in the world to call family."
Then what, exactly, was the source? Even Han Seoyeon could not produce an answer. Right up to the moment Ninomae poured the milk into the cup and drank, the smell only struck her as strange, and the question swelled, and no clear solution ever came.
"Huh. It's awfully sweet. A little thick, too... Condensed milk? No, not sweet to that extent..."
By then Ninomae had felt the wrongness of it herself. It simply was not the taste of ordinary milk. Not so heavy as yogurt, but perhaps fermented, in its way. It tasted good enough that, puzzled as she was, she went on taking little sips.
"Hm? There was something under the tubs."
Han Seoyeon peered into the box and found what had been laid beneath the plastic containers: a sheet of paper, postcard-sized. Thinking it might be a letter from Eru, she picked it up, and it did not take long to learn that the guess was wrong. It was a photograph of Mika Eru herself.
"Uh, umm...?"
"Shion, this is...?"
Eru in the photo was caught inside the frame of a mirror. The phone lifted all the way to her face made it plain she had taken a selfie of her own reflection. The trouble was the outfit. A black-and-white cow-print bikini, revealing to a very considerable degree, and neither of them could help going rigid with shock.
No. Wait.
Her eyes were stolen by that daring costume only for a moment. Han Seoyeon understood the meaning of the photograph a beat too late, and her face set hard. She had remembered what Mika Eru had let drop, oh so lightly, the time before.
"Pffft—?!"
"Ninomae?!"
And that old conversation, it seemed, had not been a necessary clue for reaching the truth. Ninomae, who could not have known it, realized the facts as well, and sprayed the milk(?) everywhere.
"Cough... Eh? Ehh, uh...?"
Even then she flushed, wearing a look that said she still did not quite understand. Which was fair enough. Han Seoyeon, for her part, snatched tissues from close at hand and made to wipe her clean.
Skin showing through the parted front of the robe. Milk spattered across it. For an instant, she froze.
The freeze lasted only a moment, and she did wipe around Ninomae's mouth directly after. Going any lower was a resolve she simply could not make. She only lingered about the chin, spending time there as though that were the whole of the task.
"Shion?"
Their eyes met. Seoyeon flinched, shoulders jumping for no good reason, as if the indecent turn of her thoughts had been seen clean through. But Ninomae, far from scolding her for it, flushed and smiled a smile whose meaning would not settle. It might have been the face of a little devil. It might equally have been a coy, tempting look. Perhaps it had been a smile with no intent at all, and Han Seoyeon's vulgar wanting had only painted some strange meaning over it.
"H-here are the tissues. I need the bathroom for a moment...!"
"Shion? Ah, yes. Of course."
And then Ninomae drew her shoulders back and pushed her chest forward. Embarrassed as she was, she was surely urging that this, too, be wiped, and quickly. Han Seoyeon only floundered, and in the end she could not endure the hammering of her heart. She held out the tissue box entire and fled where she stood.
It had not ended at the offering of an upper body. Ninomae, very carefully, had begun to undo the sash, moving as if she meant to throw the front of the robe wide open.
She ducked into the bathroom and set her back against the door. Then she slid down the face of it and folded to the floor. It had been a very long time since her legs had given out beneath her. Her heart was still lurching. Her face burned, and without thinking she covered it with both palms.
It had been an astonishingly bold thing for Ninomae to do. The two of them had believed they were already somewhat used to skinship, and yet ever since yesterday's possession rite it felt as though they had stepped a pace past even that usual. Thinking back, she had resolved to get to the bottom of it come morning—the reason she had never managed to ask properly, Ninomae having fainted before she could. She had forgotten, and only now remembered, and this was no longer a moment in which she could turn around and put the question. Not unless Ninomae had wiped herself clean and set her clothes to rights first.
And so, in the end, Han Seoyeon let this day pass as well without ever managing to ask. Small wonder. Why she had grown so seductive was not a question one could easily bring oneself to voice, whether the other woman's conduct had been intentional or not.
"...So that's what happened."
The woman let a thoughtful hum slip and looked at the person before her. Ninomae Hitomi wound a finger through her chestnut bob, watching for a reaction.
"Hitomi-chan. So what's the anime called, the one with that plot?"
"I-I told you, this is a serious consultation!"
"No, but come on. Even hearing that you did some grind-up-against-her dance to seduce Shion-chan, or splashed milk around and tried to bare your chest..."
Honestly, she had doubted her own ears more than once while she listened. Even Senjoji Chiyo, who launched a sex joke into every crack she could find, had no choice but to sit there dumbfounded at the claim that someone had actually carried out a scenario fit only for a fanservice scene in a particularly blatant comic. All the more so when one considered that her own sexual talk, at bottom, almost never stepped outside the realm of words.
"Well. I know Hitomi-chan isn't the type to joke about this sort of thing, so of course I believe you, but..."
By that same measure, though, it was equally true that she was not the type to do it. Senjoji Chiyo let out a small sigh and smiled a bitter smile.
They were in a collaboration cafe marking the third anniversary of the first generation's debut, and the shop's run was just now entering its last days. Running into Ninomae by chance in a place like that had been surprising enough. The story she had brought out under the name of a consultation was more surprising still.
"Before any of that—why did you act that way at all?"
"That's... um."
At Chiyo's question Ninomae hesitated a moment, and then she said it.
"I-I could tell from the way she was looking at my chest. Shion is definitely interested in a woman's body."
"...Shion-chan is gay?"
Well. She had carried a rough sense that it might be so. More precisely, a feeling that the spectrum reached, at least partway, into an attraction to women. The skinship the two of them were said to share on ordinary days was enough to tell you that. Most likely, even people who did not know them—if you filmed something like twenty-four hours of that life and showed it—would ask whether they weren't gay.
And yet Ninomae, and Chiyo with the rest of them, had never been entirely certain. Not because they knew the pair poorly, but precisely because they knew them well. The relationship between the two had never been an ordinary one.
Did Han Seoyeon love Ninomae, or did she not? That much could not be sworn to. One feeling turned toward Ninomae, however, was past all doubt. It was faith, and it was worship. For Han Seoyeon, the being called Ninomae Hitomi was absolute—an object with which no compromise, with any other thing, was possible.
Chiyo herself had guessed at that crooked veneration well enough that she had never quite managed to set the thought aside. With those two, they could gnaw on each other and mouth away like that even if there wasn't any romance in it at all, couldn't they...?
But according to what Ninomae was saying now, she had become firmly convinced that Han Seoyeon inclined toward women. Which was to say that the first and worst of hurdles—the one that rises when a woman who loves women comes to love someone, the chance that the other party rejects same-sex love from the very start—had, somehow, been cleared.
"So that's why you made up your mind to go for it."
"...Yes."
By this point Chiyo had no choice but to understand, and at that guess Ninomae nodded. It was certain now that Han Seoyeon was not a perfect heterosexual. That, however, was only the beginning: nothing more than standing on the same starting line as everyone else. If a matching orientation were enough to bind two people, every man and woman in the world would already have been paired off.
How to make Han Seoyeon come to love her in return. That was the next step set before Ninomae, and Ninomae's answer to it had been a direct assault with her own body. Certainly, tempt most people with that chest and they would be gone in the instant they let their guard slip. Chiyo glanced, without meaning to, at Ninomae's chest, and swallowed.
No. What are you looking at her like that for, Senjoji Chiyo? NTR is a genre that turns into nothing but tragedy the moment you drag it into real life!
She smacked both her own cheeks and jolted herself awake. Ninomae stared at her, startled, but Chiyo only smiled again and turned the talk aside.
"But lust and being in love don't always show up as a pair, do they? Shion-chan's clergy, on top of that, so on that front you might want to come in a little carefully."
"Yes. After I saw how Shion reacted, I thought an approach that was too aggressive would only end up being poison."
There are people who recoil if you come at them too suddenly. Ninomae nodded as if to agree. She was doing it because she wanted the relationship to be a better one. If it only grew awkward on account of that, the whole thing would be precisely backwards.
"Then... what should I do?"
"No. Hitomi-chan? I feel like you forget this all the time, but I'm a woman whose years without a lover equal her age, you know?"
"But you're a lesbian too, Chiyo... If it were you, couldn't you at least tell me what would make you want to go out with her?"
"Uh, umm..."
Ninomae pressed her hands together tight before her chest and pleaded. Asked with eyes like those, refusing was a difficult thing. So Chiyo thought, and thought hard, and at the end of it she produced an answer.
"...If a pretty girl with an outrageous chest came at me body-first, I think I'd be conquered on the spot?"
"Uh, um. Yes. I... see...?"
"Sorry for being such an easy woman I'm not even useful as a reference..."
The answer had been so painfully sincere that Ninomae smiled, stiff as the smile was, and reassured her that it was all right.
"Th-that's beside the point!"
Being comforted only made the ache in her chest worse, and so Chiyo changed the subject.
"How much would it cost to buy a photo of a currently enrolled blonde gyaru schoolgirl in a dairy-cow bikini—and the milk to go with it?!"
"No—however much of a perception block you've put up, your voice is far too loud! And more to the point, have you been thinking about that this entire time?!"
"But... but! It's a thing you can't get even if you pay for it...! For Rin-senpai's merch, you can just drink coffee until you pull it! If it really won't come, you can even borrow the power of those wicked scalpers! But a chance like this doesn't come around...!"
"Aaah, I understand, so I'll at least bring it up—please let go of my hand! ...And 'until you pull it.' Don't tell me, what number visit is this?"
"...The fourteenth, I suppose."
"...At that point, wouldn't it be better to just buy it online?"
"But I'm of the school that thinks you have to pull this sort of thing yourself..."
It wasn't that she failed to understand the feeling. Even so, it was a troublesome creed, and nothing else. Ninomae smiled bitterly.
"Yahoo! That's Fortune God Mary for you! I love you! Marry me!"
Well. Fifteen commemorative autographs, one for every visit to the collab cafe, was more than anyone could be made to sign—and so, in the end, Ninomae helped her anyway.