The Almighty Has Dealt Very Bitterly with Me (3)
"…So you're saying it isn't that kind of relationship?"
"I've been telling you that this whole time…!"
The man in the padded house robe took an unimpressed sip of his coffee and set the cup down on the kotatsu. With one idle hand he swept back a mop of unkempt chestnut hair, the very image of his daughter's. Eyes worn thin with fatigue moved from Ninomae Hitomi to Han Seoyeon and back again, studying the two of them in turn.
"Kids these days are awfully open about things."
"What on earth has this man been going on about since earlier. I'm sorry, dear. I'll apologize for him."
So saying, Ninomae's mother chopped the back of his head with the side of her hand and set down the refreshments she had brought. She had been on her way to serve tea when her husband barred the way, insisting the girls ought to be left alone together, and she was the one who had dragged him in and planted him in this seat.
"So… what did you say your name was?"
"Ah. Han Seoyeon. The pronunciation is difficult, so I'm usually just called Shion."
"Hmm."
The father listened, then peered for a moment into his cup.
"So you really are Korean."
"Is… is that a problem, by any chance?"
"No, it's only… I thought it was just some detail you'd made up. I didn't realize it was actually true."
"Dad?!"
"Well, can you blame me? Living with a Korean exchange-student friend who holds a post at the Japanese branch of some major Italian corporation and is attending university on top of that—how was anyone supposed to believe a story like that?"
If both parents had reached the point of asking whether this friend even existed, then some of the blame surely rested with Ninomae herself. The thought rose in Han Seoyeon before she could stop it.
"You weren't just thinking something rude, were you?"
"…Who can say."
"Hmph. I can tell, you know."
Ninomae bumped her head against the shoulder of the woman seated beside her, registering her complaint. It didn't hurt in the slightest, and so Seoyeon only watched her with quiet fondness.
"Our Hitomi isn't being too much of a burden, is she?"
"Not in the least."
Han Seoyeon answered with a faint smile.
"Simply having her beside me gives me strength. She is someone very precious to me."
"……I see. So that's how it is."
Ninomae's mother wet her throat with green tea and was silent for a little while. Then, slowly, she spoke.
"Please look after Hitomi from here on."
"I will make her happy. Without fail."
The answer came at once. It seemed to satisfy Ninomae's mother well enough, for she gave a small nod.
"This really isn't the sort of conversation ordinary friends have, is it……."
"Hm? What did you just say?"
"Nothing. I had work I was in the middle of. I'll be getting back to it."
With that, the man picked up a coffee cup already more than half empty and rose. He shuffled out of the room.
"That man, honestly, right in front of a guest……."
"The work you mentioned just now—would that be painting?"
"Yes. Did you hear that from Hitomi?"
"Not exactly. It's only that I could smell the oil paint."
"I happen to have a rather good nose," Han Seoyeon added.
"I see. My husband is more than a little eccentric, but he isn't a bad man, so do forgive him."
"It's quite all right. I have a great many acquaintances of an artistic temperament, so I'm used to it."
Set beside the Apostles she had met before, a person merely lost in his art sat well within the bounds of common sense. It hardly troubled Han Seoyeon at all. She only took a sweet, ate it, and offered a faint smile.
"I'm glad you see it that way. …Could you tell me how Hitomi has been getting along?"
"Of course."
"Um… Mom? You could just ask me that yourself…"
"Because if there were anything that would worry us, you'd hide it, wouldn't you."
"That's……."
At a loss for words, Ninomae turned to Han Seoyeon as if begging for rescue. What came back was not support.
"Om."
Han Seoyeon popped a sweet between Ninomae's lips and took a sip of green tea.
"Where would you like me to begin?"
"Your parents didn't know you were streaming."
"No. They didn't."
"If I hadn't caught on in the middle of talking and steered the conversation away, that would have been a disaster."
Once the brief visit was over and they had come into Ninomae's room, Han Seoyeon murmured as much. She had never imagined Ninomae wouldn't have told her parents about the broadcasts. Recounting things about her, she had come within a breath of blurting out the whole of it.
"Neither of them really knows this field at all. I did hint at it, but I think they only took it as something to do with anime."
"True… a VTuber is a difficult thing to explain."
Even among otaku, the virtual YouTuber was a territory where tastes split more sharply than people cared to admit, and online it was not hard to find the sort who failed to understand the appeal and asked why anyone would watch such a thing in the first place. By the generation of Ninomae's parents, it was hardly rare to hold nothing but a hazy impression of anime itself. Getting people like that to understand what a VTuber was would be no simple matter.
As if satisfied by the reasoning, Han Seoyeon nodded and let her gaze wander the room. There was furniture, and plenty of it, but the place did not feel inhabited. Not because it had been left to neglect, untouched by any hand—rather the opposite. It had been kept so impeccably that nothing in it was disturbed in the slightest.
"Well, of course. This is the first time I've come back since I started university."
"You were in Tokyo the whole of last year."
"Yes. I was busy with one thing and another for Anathema."
Early last year would still have been before her debut. But from the things she had let slip before, there must have been months of preparation. The debut had been in May… so the timing lined up well enough.
"Sit down first. Don't just stand there wearing out your legs."
"Well, all right. ……Hm?"
At Ninomae's words, Han Seoyeon smiled and sat on the floor. The moment she let her gaze drift to the side, the bookshelf beside her caught her eye.
"Is there something strange? …Ah. That's a graduation album."
"……."
"Yes. You can open it if you like. So please don't look at it with eyes that sparkle like that."
Sparkling, was it. If one insisted on precision, they were closer to a hard, avid glitter. Truth be told, had it been anyone but Ninomae herself, the meaning dwelling in that look would have gone entirely unread.
"Since you've given me permission, gladly……."
With undisguised interest, Han Seoyeon drew the albums from the shelf—the high school volume, and, standing right beside it, the one from her middle school years. She opened the high school graduation album first, and it did not take her long to find Ninomae's photograph.
"……?"
Then some nameless sense of wrongness seized her, and the hand turning the pages came to an abrupt halt. She looked not only at the graduation portrait but at the group photographs gathered in the album as well, and the further the pages turned, the more the pictures changed, the more bewildered Han Seoyeon's expression became.
"Is this… truly you, Ninomae-san?"
The face was the same. No—these were photographs from several years ago, so not entirely the same. The difference, though, was not a great one. Set a picture of her as she was now alongside them, and a hundred people out of a hundred would have said they were the same girl.
"Why would you ask something like that?"
"No, it's only… the atmosphere is a little different."
In every photograph, she was smiling. The Ninomae of the present smiled readily enough herself, and yet, even so, something felt different.
"Ahaha… If it's you, Shion-san, of course I get found out."
Ninomae came up beside her and smiled a wry little smile.
"Would you like to see the middle school photos too?"
"Yes? Well, yes, if you say so…"
At that, Han Seoyeon opened the middle school graduation album. Ninomae's photograph had been placed relatively far back, so it took her a little longer to find than the last.
"What do you make of this one, Shion-san?"
"…It's the same as just now. Among the group photos, there are some where the atmosphere resembles how you are now, but."
If she were to name the other thing that sat wrong with her—
"The photographs you're missing from stand out quite a bit as well."
"Well… I suppose they do. The truth is, in my third year I stopped going to school for a little while."
The dates recorded on the group photographs confirmed it. The pictures Ninomae was absent from fell across one continuous stretch, and the change in her atmosphere began only after she started appearing in them again. Had something happened, with this span of time as the fault line? Even as the thought formed, Han Seoyeon closed the album again without hesitation.
"……Huh? Shion-san?"
At that, Ninomae blinked in puzzlement, a question mark all but hovering over her head.
"Aren't you curious what happened?"
"If you ask whether I am curious or not, then yes, I am……. But you have never once spoken of your past, Ninomae-san."
That is enough, Han Seoyeon went on.
"If it is a story you would rather not tell, I have no intention of prying whatsoever."
"…You really are a strange person, Shion-san."
"Ninomae-san. That one's a boomerang."
Whatever the other left unsaid, they let pass without digging. Han Seoyeon and Ninomae had always been that way.
"Whatever the past may have been, my feelings toward you will not change."
"That's what I'm saying! Please, choose your words a little more carefully…! I feel like I pointed out something similar last time, too. If it weren't me, nobody would think it strange to take a line like that as a proposal!"
So saying, Ninomae pouted and drummed her fists against Han Seoyeon's shoulder in a flurry of protest.
"But I was only speaking my true feelings. For you to say such a thing……."
"Tch. I'm telling you not to do that, you know?"
"Hmm. My apologies?"
"Don't you dare try to paper it over with a kiss when you don't even know what you did wrong!"
"…And yet, even as you say so, you are offering me the other cheek."
"……Got a problem with that?"
And upon that flushed cheek, Han Seoyeon, in the end, pressed her lips once more.
"How could I."
"…Ehehe."
Delighted, Ninomae drew the friend she loved so dearly into a tight embrace.
"I'll tell you. What happened."
"Are you certain?"
"It's all in the past anyway. And it's something I already got off my chest, thanks to a certain someone."
"Thanks to whom?"
"Pfft. You don't need to know."
Ninomae let out a laugh, tipped her gaze up to the ceiling for a moment, and said,
"Shion-san, would you like to go for a little walk?"