Thou Gavest Unto Me, and Keepest the Firstborn (3)
"Mmm."
Ninomae Hitomi let out a short, thoughtful hum. If they were dropping in on an acquaintance's shrine, wasn't it only polite to call ahead? With that in mind she had already given Akane a word in advance, and then, just to be safe, she phoned again from near the shrine.
She startled once when it wasn't Akane who answered, but another senior — Sakuragi — and startled again when the woman who always wore such an easy smile spoke in a voice uncharacteristically troubled. Wondering what on earth could be the matter, she headed for the shrine all the same. If Sakuragi was at Takaku Shrine, the news would reach Akane soon enough.
"Ah, damn it. You said you were coming today. Completely slipped my mind..."
The third shock was Akane herself, met inside the grounds. The moment she caught sight of Ninomae and Han Seoyeon, dismay crumpled her face; she told them to wait just a moment and hurried off toward the inner precincts.
As Han Seoyeon recalled, there ought to be a house behind the shrine where Akane lived with her family. Family, in this case, amounting to her grandmother alone. It was from the words Akane left behind that they learned Sakuragi was not the only senior visiting.
"I never thought Aki-senpai would be here too. I heard she almost never goes out."
Rokumondera Aki — real name Natsugahara Hina — seemed to be at the shrine as well. For Ninomae, that was a little surprising. She'd heard the girl was a hikikomori who barely stepped outside unless she absolutely had to...
"For someone like that to go out just to see a colleague — is this teetee?"
"I never thought I'd hear that word out of your mouth, Ninomae."
"I was a viewer of the first-gen seniors before I debuted, you know?"
To call herself a fan might have been stretching it. Right beside her stood a devotee extreme enough to need super bolted onto the word again and again —
"Eep?! What are you doing all of a sudden?!"
"Nothing. You were staring so hard at this side that I thought it was what you wanted."
"...Once more, before Tama-senpai gets back. The other side this time."
— which only made the claim sit more awkwardly still. Even so, it was true that among the Etube videos Ninomae had watched before her debut, theirs had taken up a fair share of the hours. She hadn't seriously believed her seniors were like that, of course. She had only shouted "teetee" in play at every heartwarming scene, the way any viewer might.
"Who was your oshi, then?"
"I wouldn't go so far as an oshi."
It had never been anything that grand.
"If I had to name one, though... maybe Aki-senpai. Just by number of videos watched."
No special reason. The videos were simply fun, so she watched them often. That Rokumondera Aki held the top subscriber count within Anathema was probably because she had so many light fans of Ninomae's sort.
"Well, if that senior's here, I can understand how the others reacted."
"From what I hear, her social anxiety is pretty severe."
"Mm, right? But from the way the seniors talk about it on stream, it's... a lot worse than that."
Even in the fandom, a few viewers had gone so far as to suggest she seriously needed to see a psychiatrist.
"You mean things like a fear of people, or panic disorder?"
"Probably, don't you think? Apparently, the first time the seniors met her, she showed up wearing a clown mask."
"That... is certainly severe."
At Ninomae's words, Han Seoyeon pressed a hand to her brow. If that was the sort of person they were dealing with, she could more or less understand why Akane had rushed back inside. This would be Ninomae's first time meeting her in the flesh, and to Han Seoyeon she was a complete stranger. If everything they'd heard was true, it would not have been strange for a woman named Natsugahara Hina to collapse, unable to breathe, in a situation like this.
"They've probably moved her somewhere else ahead of time, right?"
"I would imagine so."
A perfectly reasonable guess.
"Come with me. ...And don't raise your voices."
"Uh... you didn't rush off to send Aki-senpai somewhere else?"
They learned the guess was wrong a short while later.
Akane returned wearing the look of someone saddled with a nuisance. When Ninomae, puzzled by the warning tacked on at the end, asked about it, she heaved a deep sigh and muttered.
"Says she wants to meet you."
"Me?"
"Who else is there?"
Fair enough. Ninomae gave a small nod.
"Like I just said — no loud voices, don't come too close, and don't go threatening her out of nowhere..."
"Is Aki-senpai a baby penguin at the zoo or something?"
"Worse than a penguin, seeing as she isn't even any good at swimming."
"Ehh..."
They were warnings one simply could not pin on a human being, and Ninomae could only stare, dumbfounded.
At any rate, the three of them reached the living quarters behind the shrine and went in. Shoes left in the entryway, a short corridor behind them, they slid the shoji open with a clatter.
The figures inside the room and those at the threshold looked at one another, and the quiet closed over them.
A tall oni, sipping amazake from a paper cup. Behind her, a hooded oddity in a hannya mask, hiding. A shrine maiden with a fierce cast to her face. A pair in red-and-black kimono, the Holy Knight of the two with a Japanese sword slung at her sash. Turn it over however you liked, it was not a gathering meant to share one room. As Akane lamented as much inwardly, Natsugahara Hina, mask still on, shrank even further behind Sakuragi's back.
"Um, so... hello...?"
"Hellooo~ How long's it been?"
When Ninomae offered an awkward greeting, Sakuragi beamed one right back, then tipped her head and tapped Hina's shoulder with a fingertip.
"Come on, Hina-chan, your turn. You said you were scared, but you still wanted to see her face to face, didn't you?"
"U... um, ah, h-hellooo..."
Had the awkward air not been so perfectly still, and had they not already been fixed on her, the voice was small enough that they might not have caught it at all. It was a murmur thin as ants crawling to begin with, and the mask muffled it further.
"Yes. It's nice to meet you, Aki-senpai."
Small as the greeting was, it seemed welcome enough; Ninomae smiled brightly.
"You really are a fan, aren't you?"
"I told you I'm not."
Han Seoyeon and Ninomae traded the words even as they sat down on the tatami. Akane shut the door, took her place, and the five of them ended up huddled around the low table.
"This one's Mary. Name's Ninomae Hitomi... and this is her friend. You'll know her better as Sister."
"It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Han Seoyeon. Shion or Sister — whichever is easier, please use that."
Ninomae had already greeted them a step ahead, so Han Seoyeon bowed her head in turn. Hina peeked out from behind Sakuragi just long enough to bow as well.
"...Uu, uuum."
Even after that brief greeting, Hina seemed to have something more she wanted to say. Seoyeon had expected her to dart straight back behind Sakuragi the moment the hellos were done, yet she stayed where she was, fidgeting.
"It's not..."
Then, as if she had finally made up her mind, she got the words out in a voice that shook.
"It's not... the first time... I mean, um..."
"Have we met somewhere before? I'm sorry. I can't quite remember..."
"Oh? Don't tell me Sister-chan and Hina-chan know each other?"
What she stammered out was terribly thin on content. Even so, Han Seoyeon's eyes opened a little wider, as if she had caught the gist of what the girl was trying to say. Her sanpaku eyes were unsettling enough already; opened further still, they made Hina flinch back with a tiny eek.
But with courage scraped from the very bottom and wrung out however she could, Natsugahara Hina lifted her head again.
"Actually, I... I used to be an idol... Um, uuh... a group called Placeholder..."
"...Ah."
"Huh? You've actually met before, Shion?"
Han Seoyeon reacted like someone who had an idea, and the attitude was unexpected enough that Ninomae turned to look at her. She already knew that the woman inside Rokumondera Aki was a retired former idol. The group name, though, she had never heard. Whether it was a story no one had uncovered yet, or whether word of that past life was already circulating online and Ninomae simply hadn't gone looking, she couldn't say.
Quite apart from any link between Aki and Hina, the name Placeholder was not in her memory. It hadn't been a group famous enough for even people with no interest in idols to know. And Han Seoyeon knew it? She couldn't help finding that strange. Try as she might, she could not picture a Han Seoyeon steeped in idol culture. More than that, if you listened quietly to the way she spoke, this was not something she had vaguely overheard in passing. It felt as if she had met them in person, back when they were still active. She turned it over once more, but she also couldn't imagine Han Seoyeon attending anything like an idol fan meeting.
Shion said Mary was her first and last oshi. Someone that sincere would never lie to me and cheat... Right. Of course she wouldn't.
Ninomae's subconscious worked very hard to set aside the fact that simply having more than one oshi was not really cheating at all — and that, if you checked the timeline, the odds she had met the other girl first were overwhelmingly high.
"Well, yes..."
Han Seoyeon did not deny Ninomae's question. Having reacted like that already, hiding it would have been hopeless in any case.
"Two years ago... no. I suppose another year has to be added now. Entirely by chance, at a 'church event.'"
It was a new year, so that made it three years past. Han Seoyeon added as much, but when it came to the details she only talked around them. Ninomae did not press any further. She had called it a church event, but it surely meant Holy Knight business, and that, of course, meant anomalies. Mixed into this room was an ordinary person who, oni blood or not, had nothing to do with the hidden world. Because of the Secrecy Protocol, spelling it out here and now would be difficult. Ninomae guessed as much, and so she didn't pry; she simply stayed quiet. Seoyeon would tell her later, when there was a chance.
I completely forgot her real name.
Meanwhile, in that silence, Han Seoyeon stared at the woman in the hannya mask. She had barely heard the real name even back then, and had forgotten it clean.
A four-member girl idol group: Placeholder. Under the stage name they used at the time, ReM. They had held a respectable place in the middle of the industry, only for the bad blood among the members to worsen until a stabbing broke the group apart — an ill-starred name. That was the story known on the surface. In truth, they were victims of Vampire Syndrome.
That Placeholder Incident had also been the trigger that brought Seal-class measures down over Vampire Syndrome, and Stage One of the Holy See's special measures. In other words, the starting point of Apostle Han Seoyeon's dispatch to Japan. And the sole survivor was the girl before her now — Natsugahara Hina.
So that was why something like the smell of a corpse had seemed to cling to her. Beneath the deadpan of her face, Han Seoyeon smiled bitterly where no one could see.