Chapter 83: She'd Probably Want a Little Sister, Don't You Think?
...
After the yukibin incident, Maidena did not speak to Tokishikko for three days.
She also maintained a carefully calibrated distance from Kihara — not hostile, not cold, simply... a radius. A personal exclusion zone established by a girl who had learned that proximity to certain topics led to outcomes her nervous system wasn't equipped to process.
Shinobu, for her part, had gathered approximately forty-something boxes of donuts from Kihara's pantry and various other surfaces, tucked them under her small arms, and retreated into the shadow dimension to resume what appeared to be her preferred mode of existence.
Life in Bud Town returned to something resembling normal.
Eshune heard the rumor on a Tuesday.
She didn't know exactly where it had come from — somewhere in the ambient gossip that circulated through Bud Town like weather — but the content was specific enough to land: Kihara has a fiancée.
She didn't stop to say goodbye to her friends. She ran.
By the time she burst through the guild's front door, she was breathing hard enough that the words came out between gasps, and the scene she walked into didn't help. Enome and Kihara were seated across from each other at the low table in the reception area, and the atmosphere between them had a weight to it — the particular heaviness of a conversation that hadn't started yet but was already making its presence known.
"Kihara—!!"
She crossed the room and threw herself at him.
"Eshune." Enome's voice was quiet. "Go to your room and do your homework. Kihara and I need to talk. Grown-up things."
Any other day, Eshune would have grinned and made it into a joke. Today, she just felt the wrongness of it — a cold, specific unease she didn't have words for yet.
But staying and making her mother angry wouldn't accomplish anything.
Her mind moved fast.
"I'll go take a bath first," she announced.
"Then homework."
"Mm. Go ahead."
Enome's attention had already drifted back inward, the way it did when she was quietly turning something over and over, looking for the right angle of approach.
Eshune knew that look. Her mother was still working out how to ask.
Which meant she had approximately five minutes — the time it took Kihara to fill a bath and settle into it.
She ran the water, stepped in briefly, stepped out, put on her pajamas, and padded back to the living room with a towel around her hair, the picture of someone who had simply finished bathing.
"Done~ Kihara, your turn. Mom, you look like you haven't thought about dinner — I'll order delivery."
Kihara stood. "Miss Enome — whatever you want to ask, just ask it directly. I'll answer honestly. You don't need to find the right words."
"..."
Eshune settled beside her mother and watched her face from the corner of her eye.
She didn't hear that. She's completely somewhere else.
Good.
She counted backward from the time she knew it took him to run a bath, settle in, relax — five minutes, give or take — and then, at the precise moment she'd calculated, gently touched her mother's arm.
"Mom. I'm done. Your turn."
"Hm? Where's — where's Kihara?"
"Bathroom."
"Oh... right. I'll go then."
Yes.
Eshune followed at a careful distance, watching her mother drift toward the bathroom in the distracted, unhurried way of someone whose thoughts were three rooms ahead of her feet. She watched the door open. She watched Enome step inside, drop her towel, slide open the bath partition—
She pushed.
Gently. Just enough.
Then she pulled the door shut, turned the lock from outside, and stepped back.
"Eshune?!"
The slip was audible — feet going out from under someone, a sharp intake of breath — and then, a moment later, the quieter sound of someone being caught.
"There are things that need to be resolved." Eshune pressed her back against the door, keeping her voice bright and sensible. "So talk it out in there, okay? No barriers, no distractions. Just honest conversation!"
"This is not an appropriate state for an honest conversation — unlock this door right now—"
"Nope!"
She stood there for another moment, listening to her mother's increasingly pointed requests, and then walked away down the hall before the guilt could accumulate too heavily.
For both our futures, Mom. I'm sorry in advance.
Inside:
Enome had come to rest against the far edge of the bath, towel held in front of her as a concession to dignity, back turned, putting as much distance between herself and Kihara as the dimensions of the space permitted.
Kihara sat at the opposite end and did not comment on the situation.
They remained like that for a while — the steam rising between them, the water occasionally shifting — in the particular silence of two people who are both waiting for something.
Eventually, Enome spoke. Her voice had gone careful, the way it did when she was feeling something she wasn't sure she had the right to feel.
"Kihara-san... is it true? That you have a fiancée?"
"Yes. And she's not the only one."
She absorbed this. Her lashes, faintly damp, lowered toward the water. Something moved across her expression — not quite hurt, not quite resolved, something in between. "...So everything you said when we first met... you meant all of it."
"I did."
A small pause.
"We first met in a bathroom too," she said, quieter.
"We did."
The steam curled between them. Outside the door, pressed against it with one ear flush to the wood, Eshune was barely breathing.
"Kihara-san..." Enome's voice had dropped further. "I think... I've changed my mind about entrusting Eshune to you."
A thud from outside the door. The sound of someone sitting down abruptly on a hallway floor.
Eshune bit her lip, hard.
Kihara, say something. Don't just— don't give up on us—
"Miss Enome." His voice was unhurried. "It's you I want to pursue."
Eshune's fist found the air in front of her.
There it is.
Enome was quiet for a moment. "I'm sorry. I just... I think Eshune and I have built something good, the two of us. Something that works." The honesty in her voice was uncomfortable, the kind that comes from saying something aloud that you haven't fully admitted to yourself. "This world doesn't require monogamy. But I'm not sure I want to step into someone else's... I'm not sure that's right for us."
"I won't stop trying," he said simply. "Miss Enome."
"..."
The silence that followed was long and comfortable in the strange way that silences become comfortable when everything important has already been said and neither person wants to be the one to end it. It stretched until the lock clicked — Eshune, from the hallway, quietly releasing it — and Kihara rose and let himself out.
Eshune had been certain, in that moment, that everything was ruined.
She was wrong.
The next morning she came in to help with the guild records — a school holiday, her usual routine — and found Enome at the filing desk making the kind of errors she never made. Wrong documents in wrong folders. Names transposed. Dates entered in the wrong columns. Small things, the kind that only registered because Enome didn't make small things.
She's still thinking about it, Eshune thought, watching her with quiet relief.
Distracted was good. Distracted meant still processing. Still processing meant it wasn't over.
Then Enome's eyes went glassy.
Then she went down.
"Mom—?!"
Eshune was beside her before the thought finished. She pressed a hand to her mother's forehead — burning — and felt the cold run down her own arms. Enome's breathing was shallow and fast, her cheeks carrying a flush that had nothing to do with emotion.
Eshune's hands were shaking when she found her phone.
"Eshune—"
"Kihara. Get here right now. Mom collapsed."
"On my way."
Three seconds.
That was how long it took for the guild door to open, for Kihara to cross the room, gather Enome in his arms, and disappear again.
Eshune stood in the empty hall for a moment.
Her phone buzzed. A message: a photograph of Bud Town's small hospital building, and beneath it:
"We're here. Hold down the fort. Don't worry."
She stared at it for a long moment.
Don't worry.
She exhaled. Sat down in her mother's chair. Began collecting the scattered records from the floor.
Something in her chest — the cold, tight thing that had been sitting there since Enome hit the ground — loosened, degree by degree, until it was gone.
Her instincts, which had never once been wrong about something that mattered, were quiet.
He's got her.
Hitamuki and the others arrived about half an hour later, breathless, having apparently run from the training grounds the moment the news reached them. They filled the doorway in a cluster, firing questions before they were fully inside.
Eshune told them what she knew, which was: Mom collapsed, Kihara has her, she's at the hospital, we wait.
So they waited.
The doctor spoke briefly, quietly. Kihara thanked him, closed the ward door, and turned.
Enome was awake. She was watching the door with the focused attention of someone who had been watching it for a while.
He crossed the room.
"Miss Enome. How do you feel?"
She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she reached up — slowly, deliberately — and took his hand, and drew it toward her, and pressed it flat against the soft warmth of her chest.
Held it there.
Her eyes, looking up at him, had something in them that hadn't been there before the bathroom. Something that had made a decision, even if the rest of her hadn't caught up yet.
"Kihara..." Her voice was quiet and entirely serious. "Do you think... Eshune would want a little sister?"
"...Hm?"
From outside the ward window, several floors below, a certain short figure in pajamas who absolutely should not have been anywhere near the hospital sneezed once, looked around
with suspicious eyes, and then went back to eating the vending machine snack she'd bought while waiting.
....
Thank you for reading.
(T/N:Sorry for the delay update, I'm kind of busy today.)