The Almighty Has Dealt Very Bitterly with Me (2)
"And the luggage?"
"I sent a familiar to fetch it."
Ninomae said it lightly and glanced out the window. A maid with goat's hooves caught her eye, shot up a crisp thumbs-up, and loaded the suitcase into the back seat of the truck. A moment later the thing dissolved into the air and was gone.
"...Don't those friends of ours seem to be getting more intelligent by the day?"
"They do, don't they..."
Once upon a time they hadn't even had the sense to clean properly unless every step was spelled out for them, and yet somewhere along the way they had become capable of reactions like that. Both women let out an awkward little laugh at the change.
"Do you think they've evolved another step, with faith gathering around them in such excess?"
"I couldn't say. If it comes to that, we can always commission the Oracle again next time."
Han Seoyeon answered so, and pressed a kiss to the cheek of Ninomae, who was fastening her seatbelt.
"In any case, let's be on our way."
"Yes. Let's."
A moment later Ninomae broke into a small smile, an ehehe slipping out with it.
"What is it?"
"I'm looking forward to it. You, coming to my house, Shion."
House, in this case, did not mean the place where she lived. Ninomae was already living with Han Seoyeon, after all. More precisely, it was her old house—the hometown where a girl named Ninomae Hitomi had once been born and raised. Taking a friend to a place like that was bound to stir something fresh in her.
"If we're being precise, I rather think I'm the one who ought to be looking forward to it."
Anticipation, of course, naturally ran stronger on the side of the one going to visit. At Han Seoyeon's words, Ninomae let a little puff of laughter escape.
"I'm worried it really is all right for me to come. I'll be imposing for days..."
"Of course it's all right. You're a good person, Shion, so my parents are going to like you. More than anything, when I called and asked if I could bring a friend, they were incredibly happy."
No matter how she turned it over, it was the reaction of parents whose child had no friends, and that left Ninomae in a distinctly complicated mood. But it was, honestly speaking, the truth, so there was nothing she could say against it.
"Mmm..."
"Still worried? They said it would be fine."
"I keep wondering whether something other than a gift box of traditional sweets might have been better..."
"You're so sure of yourself the rest of the time. Why does your confidence fall right off only at moments like this?"
Or had she always been more or less the same? The thought came to Ninomae all at once. Han Seoyeon went about with phrases like I'm not particularly strong forever on her lips. One could call that modesty, but put unkindly, it could just as well be called a lack of confidence. It simply didn't show most days, because she lived without paying much mind to other people's eyes. Put another way, it meant she had marked Ninomae's parents—the people they were on their way to meet—as someone she absolutely had to make a good impression on. Thinking of it like that made her quietly, unaccountably glad, and Ninomae found herself looking at Han Seoyeon's face for no good reason at all.
"Shall I do the forehead this time?"
Whatever meaning she had read into that look, that was all Han Seoyeon offered.
"...Mm. Yes."
There was no reason to refuse, so Ninomae nodded for the time being.
And then the truck, having started to move, ran off down the road.
She drew in a long breath and let it out again. She fidgeted, pointlessly, with the handles of the paper bag that held the box of sweets, then looked straight ahead once more. What stood before her was a metal door of the sort one might see anywhere in the modern world. Lifting her head to take in the whole of the place, she found a house with nothing particularly remarkable about it. If anything set it apart from the other houses along the street, it would be the owner. Where her glance fell, a nameplate bore nothing but a single stroke.
Not Ichi. Not Hito. Here, it was read Ninomae. In short, this was Ninomae Hitomi's family home, and her parents were living in it. Until she entered university and went up to the capital, Ninomae had lived here with them as well, or so she had said.
"You really are nervous, aren't you?"
"...Yes. I am. I'm nervous."
Ninomae, watching her from the side, had asked, and this was hardly the sort of thing worth staking one's pride on, so Seoyeon nodded and conceded it.
"It's all right, so please relax."
With a gentle smile, Ninomae took Han Seoyeon's hand. In place of the winter's cold air, each other's warmth filled their palms. Han Seoyeon stared blankly at the sight for a moment... then drew their joined hands in and pressed a kiss to the back of Ninomae's hand.
"What is this?"
"You're escorting me. Isn't it rather like a knight?"
"In that case, I think the one doing the kissing is supposed to be the other way around."
Strictly speaking, what Han Seoyeon had just done was closer to a knight's gesture than a princess's. Called on it, Seoyeon seemed to think the matter over quite seriously, then nodded once more.
"The other way around... You mean not the back of the hand, but the top of the foot."
"No, that is absolutely not what I mean!"
Kissing the top of the foot was, traditionally, an expression of reverence and loyalty, but that was not the sort of other way around she had meant. Seoyeon had probably understood perfectly well and was doing this on purpose.
"Haa... Still, if you can say things like that, the nerves must have eased."
"Yes. Thanks to you."
Han Seoyeon met her eyes and offered a faint smile, thin and warm at the corners. Only after she had confirmed that look did Ninomae reach out and press the doorbell.
"Mom, I'm here!"
She called it toward the far side of the door, and a considerable brightness had settled into the voice. From that alone, one could tell how she felt about her family. Before long the door opened with a creak.
"You're early."
"Ahaha... Have you been well?"
The one who appeared in the gap was a middle-aged woman who looked to be around fifty. Her features shared a resemblance with Ninomae's here and there, but the impression she gave was oddly sharp, and the air about her was quite different.
"...How do you do."
Meeting her eyes at last, Han Seoyeon offered a careful greeting. From the flow of the conversation, and from the circumstances, that would be Ninomae's mother. The woman turned her gaze on Han Seoyeon without a word and looked her up and down several times. Still silent, she pushed her crooked glasses back into place.
"...So. Not an imaginary friend."
"Mom?!"
At the mutter that followed, Ninomae let out a shriek. Even she, it seemed, had not expected to hear a thing like that from her own parent.
"Well, what did you expect? She's the friend you brought up every time you happened to call, Hitomi."
"No—if I talked about her that often, wouldn't the normal reaction be to assume she was real?!"
"But you hated people so much, Hitomi. You were always keeping everyone at a distance."
At her mother's words, Ninomae quietly closed her mouth. From the way she kept stealing glances at Han Seoyeon, it didn't seem like a story she particularly wanted known.
"I never imagined you'd have a friend you'd talk about even to me—much less one you'd bring all the way home. Of course I took it for a story you'd made up to put us at ease."
"...Well. I understand that I brought it on myself."
"Anyway... welcome. Don't just stand there. Come in."
"Ah, excuse us. And this..."
"Oh my. How thoughtful. You didn't have to bring anything like this."
When Seoyeon held out the paper bag, the mother accepted it with a light smile. The two of them were shown through to the living room. It was the ordinary layout of a Japanese house, rooms lined up in a row along a hallway, and the living room itself was a tatami room partitioned by shoji.
"Hang your coats on the rack over there. Now, your name... it was Shion-chan, wasn't it."
"You knew?"
Han Seoyeon did as she was told, took off her own coat and hung it up, then took Ninomae's as well and hung that for her. At the words that followed, her eyes opened just a little wider. Ninomae might well have given the name over the phone, but for a woman who had reacted as though she were an imaginary friend to have memorized it was unexpected.
"She's a child who's particular about her settings... She really didn't need to take after that man even in this."
"I'm telling you, Shion isn't a setting..."
"Well, that's what I believed at the time, so it comes to nearly the same thing, doesn't it?"
It seemed that even while taking what Ninomae said for a lie, she had tried to play along regardless. Seeing a consideration like that, one couldn't help thinking that mother and daughter really did resemble each other.
"Rest for now. I'll bring tea. You went to the trouble of bringing such nice sweets."
With that she stepped back out of the room. Left alone, Ninomae and Han Seoyeon looked at each other a little awkwardly, then carefully sat down before the kotatsu.
"You take after your mother a great deal, Ninomae."
"I've often been told our atmospheres are different, though..."
"The impression was a little different, yes."
Set beside Ninomae's soft, rounded air, her mother did have a sharp cast to her. Even so, a brief conversation was enough to suggest she was not as cold a person as she looked.
"And if we're speaking of appearances, I'm hardly in a position to say anything myself."
"Shion, you're... um. Well. Yes."
Ninomae seemed to have been reaching for some other words of comfort, but honestly nothing came to mind, and she trailed off into a vague mumble. If the president of her agency looked like something that had crawled up out of the abyss, Han Seoyeon was a person who radiated, in every direction, the air of someone who had surfaced from the netherworld.
"Even so, I like you like that, Shion."
"Yes. I know. And that alone is enough."
"Pfft. You could stand to be a little worse with your words."
She grumbled it, and yet a crooked little grin sat on Ninomae's face all the while. Then she quietly leaned her head against the shoulder of Seoyeon, seated beside her.
"Aah, you're messing up my hair."
"I'm sorry. I didn't think."
Han Seoyeon, who had been toying with Ninomae's hair between her fingers, apologized for it and then kissed her forehead.
"...Was this without thinking, too?"
"Yes. Without a thought."
"I might make a little mistake myself, you know. Several times."
"Is that so?"
Han Seoyeon only looked at her, wearing what passed, for her, as a bright smile—a faint change indeed, set beside her usual expression. At that attitude Ninomae put on a slightly sulky face, but only for a moment, before she set her lips against the nape of Han Seoyeon's neck. She strung short kisses upward, as if climbing the line of that neck, and only after she had passed the jaw and reached the cheek did she draw Seoyeon's shoulders into an embrace. Han Seoyeon held her lightly in return, and then...
The moment she lifted her head, her eyes met those of a shaggy-haired man beyond the half-open door. He was peering into the room with a mug in one hand, steam curling up from it. For a while nothing passed but silence, and he, his face as blank as ever, brought the cup to his mouth. A slurping sound rang out, and only then did Ninomae register the third party's presence and whip her head around.
"Ah, Dad?!"
"...This father of yours shall respect your tastes."
"Dad?! No, wait, that's—that's not what this is!"
"Sorry for interrupting."
Rattle. Thud. Ignoring Ninomae's scream, the sliding door shut, and the man was gone. Footsteps went off down the hall, growing steadily more distant.
"Ah, auuu..."
"Hmm. It seems we've been rather strangely misunderstood. ...Ninomae? Can you hear me?"
Ninomae, her expression utterly vacant, remained with one hand stretched toward the doorway her father had left through. Even when Han Seoyeon waved a hand in front of her eyes, she only stayed frozen where she was.
"Hello? Ninomae—? Ninomae?"
"Uuu..."
"...Nom."
"Hnyaaaht?! H-hey, what are you doing biting my ear all of a sudden?!"
"Ah. She's back."