Sent into the Heart (2)
"I'm home."
"Welcome baaack...!"
"......?"
The moment she stepped inside, her lover came scurrying out to the entryway. Han Seoyeon stared, eyes gone round.
It wasn't as if Hitomi greeting her this happily was anything unusual. Today, though, the desperation of it was something else entirely.
Has something happened? Seoyeon started to ask, then changed what she meant to say. An unfamiliar pair of shoes sat in the entryway—a man's.
"Do we have a guest?"
So that was what she asked instead.
"Ah, Otousan..."
"Hm? ...Ah."
At first she assumed Hitomi meant her own father. He had come up this time on business for the exhibition, and it would not have been strange for him to linger a little longer in Tokyo over some other matter. The dissonance caught her almost at once. If Hitomi had been speaking of Ninomae Hajime, she would certainly have said chichi—the word for one's own father—and not otousan.
The guest, then, was someone else's father. With only two people living in this house, the answer was obvious.
No wonder Hitomi's reacting like this.
He was an exceedingly rigid man. Unless one's gift for getting along with people was exceptional, simply being shut in a room alone with him would have been a bed of nails.
Han Seoyeon smiled wryly and started for the living room. Honestly, he had been barging in without a word of notice every single time, since long ago. The suddenness itself could not be helped, given the nature of that "contract"—but surely he could have managed a brief message beforehand.
When she reached the living room, she found the man seated on the sofa, a mug still sending up lazy curls of steam in his hand. Given his senses, he had unquestionably noticed her approach. Even so, Han Jihan did not so much as turn his head. He stared straight ahead.
"Shishou... no. Master."
She had not had much cause to use the word in a long while, and Japanese slipped out before she could stop it. It was not that she had gone without speaking Korean while living in Japan, but it had been years since she had called out to her father.
Only at the sound of her voice did Han Jihan finally turn his gaze on his adopted daughter. The burns that had marked his face ever since the day he picked her up as a child looked back at Seoyeon.
"What brings you here?"
"To fly the plane."
"...Ah. So you were the one flying it, Master."
A terse answer, but it seemed to be enough for Han Seoyeon. She nodded. The pilot for the plane they had secured last time had, apparently, been him.
"Now that I think of it, you were attending the meeting as a reference witness this time as well, Master. Did you come to see me while you were at it?"
"Yeah."
Jihan nodded as he answered. A blunt reply, but Seoyeon knew perfectly well that it was not because he was cold.
He had spoken as if he were merely offering her a lift, their destinations happening to coincide... but it was nothing so simple in truth. How could it be? He had flown a plane in from overseas to Japan, only to turn around and carry her by air all the way to Italy. Even said aloud, it was an enormously troublesome thing. So she offered no particular reply. She only accepted it, and let it pass.
Then she glanced lightly toward Hitomi and went on.
"Anyway... this is Ninomae Hitomi. We live together, and... she's my lover."
"P-please excuse me..."
At Seoyeon's introduction, Hitomi answered in slightly clumsy Korean and bobbed her head. She had already greeted him quite some time ago, but since she was being introduced, she thought this would look more polite. He was still an awkward person to face. Even so, the mere fact that he was Han Seoyeon's father was reason enough to want to make a good impression.
"I hadn't heard you'd taken a lover."
"It's fairly recent."
Han Seoyeon smiled wryly at that. It had been quite a while since she had been in touch, and yet her father answered as if he had heard every other piece of news and missed only this one. He had probably finished a certain amount of private investigating before he arrived. Even if the subjects were his adopted daughter and the woman she lived with, she could not imagine him being lax about gathering information. If it was Han Jihan, he would certainly have done so. Seoyeon was sure of it.
"A vampire for a lover."
"Strictly speaking, my lover became a vampire."
"That isn't what matters."
The man's pitch-black eyes looked into Han Seoyeon.
"I am the Vampire Slayer."
"I know."
"And you took a vampire as your lover. That is the whole of what matters."
Han Seoyeon looked back at her father with those eerie eyes, dark circles hanging thick beneath them. The two of them shut their mouths, and for a while there was silence.
"U-um, excuse me...!"
Unable, perhaps, to endure that crackling atmosphere, Hitomi clenched her fists tight and cut in.
"Ah, Father...? Um... d-didn't you give us your permission...?"
When he had spoken with Hitomi alone, Han Jihan had clearly said that what sort of person she was was none of his concern. Now his manner seemed almost to oppose the relationship, and she could hardly help being thrown. Frightening as she found him, that was why she had gathered the courage to speak. If she could, she wanted their relationship recognized by Han Seoyeon's only family.
"......?"
"Uh... isn't that what we've been saying this whole time?"
At once, both of them turned puzzled looks on Hitomi.
"...Pardon?"
For the first time, Han Jihan's face showed something like an actual emotion. Seeing it—so this was the resemblance; he really was Seoyeon's family—that impression lasted only a heartbeat. Hitomi's eyes went perfectly round, and her mouth fell open in a daze.
"Uh, uhhh...? I'm sorry. How does what you said just now turn into that...?"
"It felt like, 'You know I'm the Vampire Slayer, and you still dare take a vampire as your lover?' Didn't it?"
She pressed on, her voice thick with disbelief.
"That's right."
Han Seoyeon agreed, confirming that this was not a matter of Hitomi misunderstanding because her Korean was still lacking.
"How is that giving us permission for our relationship?"
"The heart of it is that I love Hitomi enough to 'dare such a thing,' isn't it? He was saying that if the feeling is that strong, there is nothing further for him to say about it."
No, how does that follow at all. Hitomi barely managed to swallow the words that had climbed all the way to her throat.
Neither the man speaking, nor Han Seoyeon, who grasped what lay beneath his words at once, possessed anything like ordinary values. Blood or no, they really were father and daughter.
"To begin with, Master may have that nickname, but he isn't someone who slaughters vampires without distinction. He does so only to evildoers who disturb the order of society."
"U-umm... well, I'm glad you're acknowledging our relationship, at any rate."
In the end, Hitomi had no choice but to take it that way. If it was a remark she was never going to understand, she might as well think of it positively.
"So."
As if confirming her reaction, Han Jihan returned to his conversation with Han Seoyeon.
"When do you mean to hold the ceremony?"
"...Pardon?"
"Whaaat?!"
The trouble was that the remark he produced, once the talk came back around, had veered wildly off its original course. Even Han Seoyeon had not seen this ambush coming; she murmured blankly, and as for Hitomi, her face flushed red in an instant.
"You're the same sex, so a legal marriage registration would be out of the question. But I hear that holding a wedding ceremony itself isn't especially rare."
"We... haven't talked about going that far yet."
"I see."
Jihan nodded. For a moment it seemed he would accept that much and let it pass...
"Better to decide quickly. A holy knight never knows when the work will turn busy, or how, so a thing like that ought to be settled in advance, while you still have the leisure."
"Urk...?! Ah, Father! That really isn't the sort of thing that works out just because you decide it in a rush..."
"Do you intend to part later?"
"It's not that, but... mm."
Marriage was a considerably important matter in a life, and deciding too hastily was no good. Hitomi had heard as much countless times. Wondering how she ought to explain it, she hemmed for a moment.
"Certainly, there are cases of people ruining their lives, swept up in a moment's fever."
Whatever he made of that silence, Han Jihan took another sip of his coffee and went on.
"Yes. I've heard those cases aren't just one or two."
Of course she was certain that this love with Han Seoyeon was nothing like the foolishness of youth. Even so, the notion that marriage was something to be weighed with care and only then decided sat lodged firmly in Hitomi's mind.
"Which is why I ask. If you hold the ceremony and then part, what is the problem?"
"Huh? No, that's..."
Obviously there was more than one problem. Hitomi opened her mouth to say exactly that...
"...Eh?"
And then, realizing something, she froze with her mouth hanging open.
"Ehhh...?"
Hitomi's eyes darted rapidly from side to side.
"Hitomi?"
At her reaction, Han Seoyeon looked at her with a measure of worry. That was how stricken her face was.
"What's the matter?"
"There's... no problem...?"
Hitomi stammered on.
Even if they went so far as a wedding and lived regarding one another as spouses, it would not be a marriage with any legal effect. They were, in short, free of most of the troubles that beset people who come to regret a hasty marriage. The moment Hitomi grasped that, her eyes clouded briefly with confusion... and then she whipped her head around to look at Han Seoyeon.
"Let's get married! Let's get married, Shion...!"
"H-Hitomi? I must say, your eyes seem to have gone a little mad just now...?!"
"Now that I think about it, I think this would be fine even if it's a bit hasty!"
"No—let us calm down first, shall we?!"
She shouted it with her face thrust right up against the flustered, flailing Han Seoyeon. Han Jihan watched the scene with the same deadpan expression as ever.
"Tell me once the date is set."
"Master, if you pour oil on the fire at this point, what exactly am I supposed to do?!"
"From where I stand, you've already stacked a mountain out of gunpowder."
A little oil, at that stage, was hardly more than a rounding error. He did not say the rest aloud, but his eyes did.
...In the end, it was quite some time later before Hitomi regained her composure.