Let Not Man Put Asunder (4)
Round tables spread with snow-white cloths stood scattered through the hotel banquet hall, and even at a glance the effort to look expensive hung thick in the air.
This was also the place where Ninomae Hitomi and Han Seoyeon's wedding reception was being held.
A Japanese wedding reception runs long. It amounts, in practice, to a second ceremony—no, there are even those who will insist that if anything, this part is the main event.
The culture does not invite a great many guests to the ceremony proper, and so the reception is bound to be small as well. No one attends the reception without having attended the ceremony. The reverse, perhaps.
And so a reception becomes a matter of lavishing care upon a handful of guests. Consider that the ordinary form is to serve a full course, modest in scale if in nothing else, and the feel of the thing should come clear.
It costs a great deal, of course. Set beside Korea, Japan asks far more of its guests in congratulatory money, and even so the couple themselves are often left with nothing remaining.
That reckoning, admittedly, takes in the cost of the wedding as a whole and not the reception alone… even so, there is no question that the reception claims a considerable share of it.
Put another way, to agree to attend such a reception and then fail to appear is a serious discourtesy. In many cases a guest list is drawn up beforehand and assigned seats are given out besides; set one chair down empty in the midst of that, and how could it fail to catch the eye?
"Hina still isn't here?"
Which was why, finding Natsugahara Hina's seat empty, Akane could only ask it, puzzled. A phone call out of nowhere had already made her late getting into the hall, and Hina was later even than that.
"Hina-chan went home~"
To the question, though, Sakuragi Oka only answered in a loose, grinning drawl. Set beside the discourtesy of a reception no-show, the tone was remarkably light.
"Well… I suppose that figures."
But Akane did not remark on it. She rubbed at the nape of her neck and went so far as to accept the thing as only to be expected.
In the closing stretch of the ceremony, an unplanned bouquet toss had turned every eye in the room onto Natsugahara Hina. Considering that she suffered a truly severe fear of people… it was fair to call it a miracle that she had not sprung from her seat and fled on the spot.
"Still, I'm impressed she sat there and stuck it out."
"By her own account, she fainted for a little while?"
"…So she wasn't sticking it out."
She had been about to praise it as growth, then pressed a hand to her forehead at what Guroyuki Sui said next. Hina had not refrained from running. She had not been able to run at all.
"Anyway, she still looked awful after that, so we just sent her off. Ninomae-chan will understand this much."
"True enough."
If anything, Hitomi was the sort to be grateful that Hina, fearful of people as she was, had come even just to the ceremony. No—there was a better chance she would feel sorry instead, convinced she had thrown the bouquet poorly and put Hina through distress.
"There's another empty seat, so perhaps it's fortunate it won't stand out too badly."
Eyeing yet another vacant place from the side, Guroyuki murmured it quietly. The fortunate part was that Hina was not the only one who had failed to appear.
Who the other was, exactly, she couldn't say…….
"The Vampire Slayer isn't here."
The one who went on to answer that question was Marbas, seated at the same table. The table was made up of the first generation and those accompanying them—Marbas, for Guroyuki, and for Oka her younger sister, Honoka.
She swept a quick look over the people sitting there, and spoke.
"The Vampire Slayer?"
"Han Jihan. Margarita's stepfather."
"Ah. Right."
Only after hearing that did Guroyuki nod. Now that it was mentioned, Han Seoyeon's adoptive father, the one she had seen at the ceremony hall, was nowhere to be found.
"Where do you suppose he went?"
"Who knows. Wouldn't be strange for that one to have gone anywhere."
This was no ordinary matter—not some stranger, but a parent of the couple, absent. When Sakuragi Oka asked in that trailing voice, Marbas snorted once and gave her answer.
He truly was a man who might appear at any time, in any place, and it would not be strange. That he would, in the end, arrive wherever the vampires were—that much was certain, but…….
"On his end, it's a wonder he even made the ceremony."
Thinking of Han Jihan's patterns, that he had somehow scraped together the leisure to attend the nuptial Mass itself was the surprising part. When Marbas said so, Oka began arriving at a peculiar sort of understanding.
"Kinda the same as Hina-chan, huh!"
Marbas could have corrected her easily enough, but she never found a reason that made it worth the trouble, and before long she shut her mouth.
And while that was going on, two figures showed themselves in the banquet hall. A newlywed couple who, until only a little while ago, had been nothing more than lovers. The protagonists of the day appeared with their hands clasped tight.
When Han Seoyeon and Hitomi entered still wearing what they had worn for the ceremony, applause poured from seats all around. Hitomi, shy, waved to them; Han Seoyeon, if one set her expression aside, was not so very different.
Those occasions had not been weddings, granted, but her station being what it was, she had found herself at formal gatherings a handful of times before.
Receiving the applause, the two of them walked out between the tables and made for the place prepared at the very front. Unlike the round tables where the other guests sat, they stood side by side at a table set in one straight line.
A wedding cake, prepared ahead of time, rested upon it. They were looking at it when Senjoji Chiyo, serving as master of ceremonies for the reception as well, came over and held out a microphone.
Seoyeon took it, tapped it lightly with a fingertip to check the level, and spoke.
"We thank all of you who have graced this gathering to bless our marriage. A great many of you have come from very far away, and we are deeply grateful that you attended even so. We have prepared a meal, modest though it is, and we hope you will dine at your ease, enjoy yourselves, and return home well."
She said as much and bowed her head once, and applause broke out again.
Chiyo, taking the microphone back from her, carried on smoothly. Before long the mic turned toward the two guests of honor who had been given the foremost table.
"Today these two have entered into an everlasting covenant before our gracious Lord, and before a community that loves them without reserve—"
"Truly. I never imagined our first in-house couple would come this far."
The usual course of a reception, it seemed, was for a superior from one's workplace, or someone to whom one had long been in debt, to offer a few kind words, and so the two people engaged were Han Seoyeon's other teacher, Giacomo Marchisio, and the president of the company the couple belonged to, Nakabashi Gyokichi. A casting that could not have been improved upon.
When their well-wishes came to an end, another brief round of applause followed in the hall.
"Hitomi."
"Yes. All right."
At once the two of them took up the knife laid beside the wedding cake. Hitomi gripped it first, and Han Seoyeon's hand came to rest over hers, overlapping.
Taking it for the first thing they would do together as a married couple, Hitomi found her heart, for no reason she could name, beginning to pound. Han Seoyeon, pressed close, noticed the flush rising in her cheeks and smiled, just a little.
"We'll cut."
"Yes."
It was only a cake, and still a strange tension held them. The blade sank in with a soft give and drove slowly downward… until at last it met the plate with a clack.
They drew the knife back out of the cake in one smooth slide and, still clasping it together, looked at one another. They had not meant to, but as it happened their eyes met exactly.
On every table sat one or two unlabeled bottles. The table where Han Seoyeon and Hitomi stood, the wedding cake set upon it, was no exception.
Some of the guests, breathing sighs of admiration at Chiyo's explanation, examined the bottles; others were comparatively unmoved. Most of the latter belonged to Anathema Production—guests who had only recently come into contact with the hidden world.
"That thing?"
"Ah… well. I don't see why not."
And then, out of nowhere, Chiyo had made the suggestion. It had not been in the script, but the others, judging by their reactions, seemed quietly interested, and so Han Seoyeon nodded.
The wine bottle sat nestled in a bowl packed with ice. Take it lightly in hand, and the palm went quite cold.
Chilled to this point, it ought to be fine. Even thinking so, Han Seoyeon spun the knife from the cutting a few times and dropped it into the bowl.
Whether that would help, she didn't know, but it seemed better to chill the blade as well. She was also a little reluctant to use it with cream still smeared on the steel.
"Would it be better if I shook it?"
Ordinarily that would have bordered on nonsense—asking whether one ought to beat the fizz out of a fizzy drink—but the grain of it, in this case, was a little different. The moment one committed to sabrage, the aim was already to lift the mood.
Champagne shooting upward with a pop made for a respectable spectacle in its own right, did it not? At the question, Hitomi nodded, bright with delight.
Neither a champagne eruption in full force nor a bottle opened by the blade was a sight one came by easily.
Having confirmed Hitomi's opinion, Han Seoyeon shook the bottle this way and that, then set it down on the table. She drew the knife from the bowl once more and took her stance. If one had to put a name to it, the posture was closer to iaido—to battōjutsu, the art of cutting in the same motion as the draw.
This was nothing like what she had pictured. That was the moment Chiyo, voice gone uncertain, tried to ask.
Han Seoyeon swung the knife. The neck of the bottle sheared away clean and went pinwheeling through the air, and in the instant after, the carbonation blew—champagne fountaining upward.
For a moment, silence swept the banquet hall. However one looked at it, that was not sabrage in any ordinary form.
It was not a matter of striking the top away with the proper knack. It was closer to having simply cleaved the bottle in two, physique and technique and nothing else. A single stroke so clean it seemed not one shard of glass could have flown.
Only, that was plainly nearer the method of a beheading than any art of opening a champagne bottle… and those unaccustomed to her strength in a fight could only stare at the sight with their mouths hanging open.
Only after the force of the jetting champagne had fallen away did Han Seoyeon slowly turn her head and look toward the emcee's stand.
"……Uh. Was that not it?"