And He Said, What Wilt Thou Do? (3)
Between the buildings, a sky flushed with sunset lay open. Ninomae Hitomi stared at it in a daze, and a sigh of wonder slipped out of her.
"Something about this feels strange."
"Strange how?"
Han Seoyeon, whose hand was clasped in hers, had caught the murmur and asked it back.
"It's the same sunset, I'm sure of it. But seeing it in another country, it feels different somehow, and I can't even say why."
"Ah... there is that, certainly."
Strictly speaking, the sky over Italy and the sky over Japan were not the same sky at all. Latitude and longitude saw to that. Hitomi, though, was hardly in a position to tell the difference by eye alone, so it could only be the peculiar psychology of travel—the sense, belonging to foreign places, that everything has been made slightly other. It was not a feeling Seoyeon failed to understand, and she nodded.
"Huh?"
And yet, met with that easy agreement, Hitomi looked rather puzzled.
"What is it?"
"No, it's just... I really didn't think you'd relate."
She had not expected Han Seoyeon to go along with her on a point like this. Seoyeon must have passed through any number of countries, but Hitomi had always taken her for someone far removed from sentiment of this kind. By Wei's account, she had once been a far drier person than she was now. Hitomi had heard that meeting her had changed Seoyeon a great deal... and yet, considering the woman's profession, Italy ought to have been thoroughly familiar ground to the Seoyeon of the present. She did not seem like someone who would still be finding the place exotic.
Hearing that, Seoyeon let out a small, soft laugh. Then she met Hitomi's eyes.
"The sky, as seen from Italy, is a little past the point where I could newly feel it as a sky unlike the usual. I have been here more times than I can count."
But, she added—
"Wh— what is that supposed to be. Saying something that embarrassing like it costs you nothing..."
Hitomi's eyes went round, and she tapped Seoyeon's arm with her fist. There was no strength in it whatsoever. It was a pout, and a cute one.
Whether she found the sight very much to her liking, Seoyeon slipped an arm around Hitomi's shoulders and drew her in. She glanced about... then took the handbag from Hitomi's hand, shielded her face with it, and kissed her.
"...Which way were you even covering?"
A little time passed, and the two of them drew apart again. Cheeks flushed, Hitomi brushed her moist lips with her fingertips. Then a question occurred to her, and she asked it.
Looking around before the kiss, she could understand. If any passerby were in a position to see them, it would have been embarrassing. Hitomi would have checked their surroundings too, and if there had been any chance of a gaze landing on them, she would have done just as Seoyeon had—hidden their faces behind a handbag or the like, and kissed. But that only made sense if you covered toward the direction where someone might be looking. In the direction Seoyeon had covered, there was no one at all. A few meters off, there was only a wall.
"Who can say?"
"A g-ghost? Was there a ghost?"
Seoyeon refused the answer with a faint smile, and something about it left Hitomi uneasy enough to ask. To her own eyes the place looked entirely empty, but an Apostle's eyes might well see otherwise. Wasn't that possible? At the worry, Seoyeon broke into laughter again.
"Ah. It's nothing. The last time I passed through here, I noticed a camera in that spot. The planter hides it, so it isn't easy to see—but it's right there."
So saying, she indicated the planter set along the top of the wall as ornament.
"Th-there was one?"
"Yes. If they don't happen to review this particular hour, it should be fine... but for any number of reasons, it isn't a sight I'd care to have shown around lightly."
Only then did Hitomi press a hand to her chest, chiding herself for a needless worry. She had gone so far as to wonder whether there might really be a ghost.
...And, letting her guard down for a moment in that relief, she failed to properly catch what Seoyeon did next.
The glance Seoyeon cast toward the sniper who had this place under watch, and the index finger she raised before her own lips, requiring silence.
"Shall we head back to the lodging, then?"
They had come out around lunch, and already they had finished dinner. A relatively simple lunch of pizza—which Hitomi had rated very highly—stood in contrast to the rather serious restaurant they had only just left. They had taken a short walk beneath the evening glow, partly to let those overfull stomachs settle and partly to savor the mood, so there was no harm in returning for the night.
At the suggestion, Hitomi seemed to think for a moment, then nodded. There was still time to spare, if time was the question. The trip was set for four nights and five days, and even setting aside tomorrow, which held the Apostles' council, three whole days remained.
And... there was something she had prepared for tonight.
Hitomi turned her face from Seoyeon, and the look that settled over it was one of resolve.
Hitomi came out of the bath washed clean, a gown draped over her. She was still a little damp, still warm, and adrift in that strangely pleasant, loosened feeling, she found Han Seoyeon sitting on the bed.
Seoyeon had a smartphone in hand. It lay sideways, and earphones were plugged in; she was probably watching a video. The videos she put on to pass the time came in roughly four kinds—a live broadcast or a recording, perhaps something edited down to twenty or thirty minutes, or a clip cut drastically short.
"What are you watching?"
Hitomi leaned her head in as she asked, and Seoyeon paused the video and drew out one earphone. Then she slid the screen she had been watching over for her to see.
"A clip compilation. I've seen it before, though."
"Ah, I know that feeling—you've definitely watched it, and somehow you end up watching it again anyway—"
Hitomi nodded, quite familiar with the sensation.
...And then she checked the title of the video, and blinked.
"'CharMary Compilation'..."
Well. She already knew that Han Seoyeon was a dyed-in-the-wool partisan of the CharMary camp, but even so.
Sitting down beside her, Hitomi broached it carefully.
"Shion."
"Yes."
"When you watch things like this... you don't get jealous?"
Her turn into a near-fanatical CharMary devotee must have come before the two of them started seeing each other. It was a matter Hitomi had largely left alone once they were together, but if Seoyeon was sitting here watching a video like this, that inclination did not seem to have changed much. Which left Hitomi a little puzzled. If your lover was being all lovey-dovey with someone else on stream, even granting that half of it was a persona, wasn't jealousy the natural response?
"Why in the world would I be jealous?"
And that was Seoyeon's answer, at once. As if the basic premise of the conversation were incomprehensible to her. As if, before the question of whether she would be jealous, there were no reason for jealousy to exist in the first place.
"Mmm... I know you keep me as Ninomae Hitomi and me as Shuttang neatly apart, Shion, but still..."
Watch the broadcast as a broadcast. A famous maxim, where internet streams are concerned. But widely known advice tends to exist precisely because people do not actually follow it. In practice, very few manage a perfect distinction between a broadcast character and the person behind it. Even Hitomi, the one doing the acting, could not wholly separate Mary from herself. By that measure, Han Seoyeon was a highly unusual case.
"But Charlotte... the way I am with Tsunashi isn't concept and acting from beginning to end, you know? So wouldn't it normally bother you?"
She was absolutely not harboring romantic feelings for Tsunashi Tenka. That much was certain; the feeling never left the realm of friendship. But viewers were the sort to take even the smallest gesture that made closeness feel real and inflate it—squeeing that it was all too sweet, declaring that this was already no different from a marriage. Keep watching reactions like those, and it was not strange to worry that your lover might be tempted, even a very little. Or was the division of characters inside Seoyeon's head so thorough that she separated the real from the virtual even at that depth?
Hitomi turned the speculation over, but—
"...Mmm. I'm sorry, but."
Seoyeon scratched her cheek and went on.
"Even if it were not as Shuttang—even if you yourself, Hitomi, came to like Tsunashi—I would not consider it a matter for jealousy."
"...Eh?"
The answer that came back sat in territory she had not imagined at all. At that wholly unexpected remark, Hitomi's eyes went wide.
"D-don't tell me you're into that sort of thing, Shion...?"
"No. It isn't that. It is a matter of your feelings."
Surely she wasn't harboring one of those proclivities, the kind that starts with N? For an instant Hitomi even entertained the suspicion, and Seoyeon waved a hand as she spoke.
"No, that's— I mean— uhhh..."
As logic, it was not wrong. Emotionally, though, wasn't it a complete collapse? Faced with an answer that seemed to have erased the very concept of possessiveness from the brain, Hitomi fell into confusion.
And she reached a conclusion. This person was plainly twisted. She might show a perfectly ordinary face from time to time, but in the end Han Seoyeon was a human being who had strayed far from the common measure.
Yet that never came to Hitomi as something negative. Bewildering, a little—but if anything, the reverse. A person outside the universal. Someone society might well refuse and cast out. Precisely for that reason, Hitomi herself had to be the one to take her in and hold her close.
...Hitomi, in the midst of thinking this, remained entirely unaware that she too was the owner of considerably crooked feelings.
Of course, both of the people in that room were human beings knocked out of true somewhere, so there was no one present who could have pointed it out. The members of Italy's Tombstone Unit, charged with watching the Apostles, were at least refraining from peering into the lodging, on grounds of privacy.
...Strictly speaking, this owed less to ethics than to caution. Infringe upon their private life in such a fashion and give offense, and Rome might well evaporate.
At any rate, remarked upon by no one, Hitomi resolved to carry out the plan she had laid in advance.
She drew a long breath... opened the bathroom door, and stepped out.
This was not a mistake. Hitomi was already seated side by side with Seoyeon, outside the bathroom—and yet she stepped out of the bathroom once more.
Seoyeon's eyes widened, just a little. What that gaze found was another Ninomae Hitomi, freshly emerged from the bath.
A duplicate body, wrought by combining the power of a True Ancestor and a demon.
The mere fact that Hitomi could do such a thing was, of course, something Seoyeon already knew. Even so, the surprise on her face had two causes. The first was that she had not expected a double to be produced in a situation like this. The second... was that the double which had stepped outside was wearing a wig and a costume.
A long, straight platinum-blonde wig. A red dress, frilled, and yet possessed of a curiously old-fashioned air. The eyes were dyed red—whether by colored contacts or by a vampire's power, who could say. There was no possibility that Han Seoyeon would fail to recognize what this was meant to cosplay.
"Shuttang...?"
"Yes, it's Mary Tepes!"
So saying, the double briskly threw up a V-sign... and then immediately flushed and hunched in on herself. Duplicate or not, it was Hitomi operating it at the root of things, and shame had simply arrived first.
"...W-well, honestly, coming here together like this is kind of a honeymoon, too. And if it's a honeymoon, I thought... maybe that sort of thing ought to be part of it, after all... uuuh."
Seoyeon turned her gaze back to the Hitomi seated at her side, silently requiring an explanation, and that one fidgeted with her fingers as she spoke.
"I don't know how to put it. Since we were doing this anyway, I thought I might let you indulge in a luxury like this, Shion, as something to remember it by... mm..."
"Hitomi."
"...If that isn't enough, then... w-would it not do, as a reason, that I want to do it with you?"
Having said that much, she could no longer bear the embarrassment. She snatched up a pillow and hid her bright-red face behind it.
Seoyeon stared at the sight without a word, blankly. And in the next instant she caught the pillow, yanked it aside, and fell upon her, mouth to mouth.
She pressed her tongue in, thick and clinging, forcing Hitomi's lips apart and slipping inside, then searched through that mouth as if she meant to claim the tongue itself. Even as she did, she turned her eyes aside—toward the double in the Mary cosplay, standing there awkward and hesitant, not quite committed to staying or going. Then Seoyeon crooked the fingers of the hand that was not wrapped around Hitomi's shoulder, beckoning.
In those eyes, at some point unnoticed, a predator's hunger had come to dwell, burning hot.