It Is Settled, and So It Is Settled (1)
When she opened her eyes, the room was still dark. The night had trained her sight, though, and so the shapes around her stood out plain.
"...!"
Han Seoyeon drew a sharp breath, startled by the face all but touching her own.
Eyelids gently shut. A small, fine mouth. Brown hair spilled loose from where its owner lay on her side. Ninomae Hitomi was asleep facing her, close enough that their breaths might have mingled.
They had fallen asleep holding hands, so it was hardly strange that a little tossing had drawn them nearer, or that Hitomi had happened to turn this way. Being met with it without any warning, however, made composure a difficult thing to hold.
"Nn..."
"..."
She began to slip her captured hand free and put some distance between them, then went still again. Ninomae had the hand fast and would not let it go.
If she used any real strength, of course, there was no question of failing to pull free. The raw difference in power between them was overwhelming. But the thought that the other girl might wake kept Han Seoyeon from escaping even someone so much weaker than herself, and she could not bring herself to trouble a face sleeping so deeply. Least of all at an hour this early.
Looking closer, she found the eyelashes surprisingly long. That thought made her shut her own eyes. To stare so openly seemed less than polite.
Sight gone, her other senses woke. Warmth lay against her palm, and there was the faint catch of Ninomae's breathing, and her scent: the smell of skin, human and warm, threaded with a thin note of peach, tickling the tip of her nose. The faint trace of sweat that had seeped out through the night, once she became aware of it, came flooding into her mind without end.
"..."
Without meaning to, she parted her lips a little, worked them, and closed them again. Han Seoyeon squeezed her eyes shut and struggled to empty her head. Her uncannily sharp sense of smell, and a constitution that hardly needed sleep at all — both, just this once, felt somehow worth resenting.
"Mm."
Not bad. Ninomae Hitomi lifted a ladle of the soybean-paste soup bubbling on the stove, took a sip, and nodded.
"...Ah."
Then, from habit, she put the ladle back into the pot, and sighed. This was not a meal she would be eating alone. A taste ought to have been poured off into a little dish first, and she had realized it a moment too late.
No — well. This much is fine, surely. She only tried to explain it away because undoing the thing was already too late, and she sank the ladle that had touched her mouth deep into the pot. Muttering that it could not be helped, Ninomae took bowls from the cupboard, filled them, and carried them to the table for two set into the kitchen.
"Um, it's a little late to ask now, but rice is all right for breakfast, isn't it? I think you said last time that you usually have bread."
Raising it after the table was already fully laid really was belated. She had simply forgotten to check beforehand.
"It is quite all right. Even when I eat bread, it is only because that is simpler to prepare."
She was not particular. Hearing the answer, Ninomae smiled.
The meal set, she sat down across from Seoyeon, lifted her chopsticks, and pressed her hands together.
"Thank you for the meal."
Han Seoyeon was scarcely a beat behind. She traced a swift sign of the cross and murmured the same words.
One might wonder whether a Christian ought to brush through grace so casually, but by her own account only the heart mattered, and there was no need to be bound by form. Ninomae, who honestly knew very little of church, decided to let it pass.
"Did you sleep well last night?"
"I did. Thanks to you."
The meal had barely begun before the talk turned to the night before. At Han Seoyeon's question, Ninomae answered with a bright smile.
"I didn't even have a nightmare. I slept so well. Thank you."
"I only slept at your side."
"Even so, that's why I could sleep without worrying."
Seoyeon spoke as if it were nothing to be thanked for, though in truth it could not have been an entirely easy thing for her either. Set everything else aside, and she had still tried to sleep in an unfamiliar bed.
"A night at a friend's house is not a hardship. It is what one would call an event."
"Even so."
"If you truly feel yourself in my debt, then let the repayment be that we go out together sometime."
Seoyeon did not consider it a thing that required payment. Still, a return was sometimes necessary, if only to set at ease the mind of the one who felt indebted.
"But that wouldn't be a repayment at all."
"Why would it not? You would be accepting my invitation on a date."
Ninomae's tone carried a shade of complaint, but Han Seoyeon met it playfully, a faint smile at her mouth. Against that untroubled confidence, Ninomae in the end let a short laugh escape.
"Honestly... do you have any idea how complicated I feel right now?"
The complaint she brought out yet again was full of no small delight.
"The part of me that wants everyone else to know it too — that you're this good a person, Shion, nothing like the way you look — is fighting so hard with the greedy part that wants a Shion like this to be my friend and mine alone."
"The view of a day-one viewer, watching a YouTuber who exploded in growth for reasons unknown?"
"Something like that. Or when a work that was never popular gets dug up again out of nowhere."
The joy of a thing one loves, a thing the world had never known, at last being recognized — and then the odd little ache of being left out, which is only the selfishness no one can quite help.
"As for me, to be acknowledged by you alone is joy enough."
"...Nn. That. That's exactly the part."
And Shion has this quiet, oblivious way about her, I swear...
Remarks that ought to have made a person flush came out of Han Seoyeon with perfect ease. Good to the bone, she tossed her consideration off as if this much were only natural, and every offhand kindness went straight through the heart. So kind, and yet with no sense at all of how it sounded to the one who heard it — the sight was enough to make one think that she really was a woman of the cloth.
Leave out the way she looked, and she was the very model of a cleric: gentle, and living a little apart from the world.
...Though the moment one remembered she was a rabid VTuber fan, she was also a human being soaked through with the secular world.
Ninomae turned that amusing thought over, and still, looking at the truly precious bond seated in front of her, she smiled without quite meaning to.
"So back then, Shion—"
"...The two of you truly do get along."
Listening to Ninomae sing Sister's praises, Hyakurenno Yuri let out a sigh.
On the internet she worked as the VTuber Amairo Tsubasa, and for the collab stream they had today she was in a voice chat with Ninomae — Mary Tepes — holding a meeting. A meeting for an ordinary singing stream, however, came down to little more than choosing the songs, and with that finished they were only drifting on through the idle talk of getting along. At times like these, the subject that surfaced without fail was Sister. Shion.
Which is exactly why viewers show up trying to pair her with Sister, who is just an ordinary person.
Ninomae Hitomi, for all her soft, vacant, innocent-looking air, did not actually draw near to other people. Strictly speaking, let some opening happen to appear and she would open her heart at once and close the distance in a stride... The trouble was that unless she had a reason she truly needed, she made no approach at all. No — it went further than that. There was even the sense that she put the walls up on purpose, and so that opening did not come easily.
Colleagues at the agency, with whom some point of contact was unavoidable as a matter of business, belonged to those few exceptions. One might call that fortunate. In any case, the conclusion was that Ninomae's friendships were extremely few. Limited to the university, acquaintance stayed at the level of knowing a face; the only person who had stepped past someone-she-knew into what could be called a friend was Sister.
She was a considerable homebody besides. Factor in how rarely she went out once university was set aside, and of course the moment daily life entered the conversation, that girl's existence was bound to surface. Viewers, naturally, had no way of knowing what lay underneath, and so they simply enjoyed their Sister-and-Mary shipping to their hearts' content. Honestly, she praised Sister to this extent even off the stream. For viewers who could meet Mary only inside the narrow hours of a broadcast, how could it be any less?
"Well, she did go and collect Chisa for me last time. I am grateful to Shion."
"Ah, the maid?"
Ninomae knew that person: a woman who now and then got drunk and barged into Tsubasa's streams — into Yuri's. She was meant to be attendant and bodyguard both, but her conduct did not inspire much trust. Had she not come along with Yuri to the last offline collab, so that Ninomae met her face to face, the doubt would probably still be only half settled.
On stream, her place was much like Sister's on Mary's channel. Permission for Sister to join a broadcast had come through quickly last time surely because that precedent was already there.
"Where did she turn up this time?"
"...Yamato, in Kanagawa."
Quite a distance. Ninomae let out a thin little laugh.
"Anyway. Shall we start setting up for the stream?"
"Yes, let's."
She minded the audio as a matter of course even on ordinary days, but a singing stream asked for particular care. At Yuri's suggestion Ninomae nodded, a gesture no one on the far side of a voice chat would ever see.
The program they usually used let a duet drift, subtly and annoyingly, out of time, so they had another ready and checked their sync against each other. The song was a film score, meant to open the stream: an animated movie Ninomae had gone to see with Shion once before. It had been such a hit that plenty of people marched into it at karaoke full of confidence, only to lose to a pitch higher than they had bargained for.
Ninomae could hold a tune well enough herself, but more than half the chorus sat so high she could only just follow it, and only by forcing her voice up into falsetto.
When raindrops come to rest upon those crimson petals—!
Yuri set the phrase down in a strong voice, as if it cost her nothing at all. Had singing been the work Ninomae lived by, it was a gift she could not have helped but envy. The chorus really was better with her carrying the lead. Even as a shiver went pattering over her skin, Ninomae judged it so.
"Ninomae?"
"Ah — ah, I'm sorry."
She had simply admired it too long, and lost the final phrase. Ninomae apologized at once and laughed, abashed, promising herself there would be no mistake like this once the stream actually went live.