Shido didn’t really remember much of what happened that night, but for a while after that, he was troubled by a strange phenomenon—he would begin to shake uncontrollably whenever he saw laundry being knocked around in a washing machine.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Where is Ike?!” Ellen shamelessly, brazenly yelled the second she stepped into DEM Industries head office.
“E-Executive Leader Mathers?!” the receptionist in the lobby asked, eyes widening in surprise. “What happened to you? You’re injured.”
Ellen clicked her tongue unhappily and grabbed the tie around the receptionist’s neck. “When exactly did I tell you to concern yourself with my physical condition? Answer the question. Where is Ike?”
“Eek! M-Mr. Westcott returned to the building earlier. He’s most likely in the infirmary.”
“Is that right?” Ellen sniffed indignantly and marched across the lobby.
Hearing the commotion, several employees turned suspicious eyes her way. They all averted their gazes deliberately—perhaps they realized the person yelling was Ellen Mathers, executive leader of the second enforcement division.
Ellen was not composed enough to concern herself with courteousness.
It had been about three hours since she had suffered her embarrassing defeat in space and come back down to Earth in the half-wrecked Goetia. Her heart was turned upside down with a variety of emotions: murderous rage toward Fraxinus and its crew for their audacity in handing her the first airship battle loss of her career, frustration with herself for letting her guard down, and…
“Ike! What is the meaning of this? You kept an attack on Ratatoskr from me?!”
…angry indignation at her comrade, Isaac Westcott.
She was partially in a daze as she rode the violent waves of emotion, to the point where she had returned to DEM headquarters before getting her injuries treated. She was holding back the blood and pain with her Territory.
Ellen marched down the hallway, her shoulders squared, until she heard a woman’s voice from behind.
“Ellen!”
There was an extremely limited number of people who could call her name so casually.
“…Artemisia,” she responded without looking back to her.
“I finally found you!” The blond-haired, blue-eyed girl quickened her pace to catch up with Ellen. “I went to the hangar, and they told me you’d come to headquarters. I was so surprised! Are you all right?”
Ellen glanced at her and then scowled in very ill humor. “Please, don’t bother with me. Or did you come to laugh at me?”
“This again?” Artemisia rolled her eyes. “Ah, you are hurt. Here, let me see.”
“…!”
Ellen waved away Artemisia’s hand, annoyed, and walked faster. She opened the door to the infirmary.
“Ike!” she yelled as soon as she was inside.
The medical staff looked her way, stunned. And among them…
“Heyo, Ellen. You’re back so soon. Artemisia, a fine day to you, too. Seems the two of you had an unusually difficult fight out there, hmm?”
…was Isaac Westcott, waving a hand in his usual familiar way.
“…! That was my mistake,” Ellen said, stepping toward him. “You may follow up however you see fit. But Ike, you will explain why you would say nothing to me and go to Elliot—”
But halfway to him, her words and her feet both stopped.
The reason was simple. Westcott was waving at her with an arm missing everything below the elbow.
“Wha—? Ike, you’re—,” she stammered.
“Hmm? Oh.” He dropped his gaze to his neatly severed arm, bone and muscle peeking out from the cross section, as though he’d only just noticed the lower half was missing when Ellen pointed it out. “Really got me this time. Fortunately, we recovered the arm, and the cut’s clean. A medical Realizer will have it reconnected and as good as new by tomorrow.”
“M-Mr. Westcott!” one of his treating physicians said, somewhat panicked. Understandably so. A patient receiving medical treatment was suddenly waving his stump of an arm. Any medical practitioner would have been bewildered.
“Ah, yes. Sorry.” Westcott seemed not to feel an iota of pain as he resubmitted his arm to treatment.
“We’ll begin the regeneration now,” the physician said. “Are you ready?”
“Yes. Please go ahead,” Westcott said, before turning back to Ellen. “So you see, Ellen… My apologies, but perhaps we could talk later? You also look to be injured. Might want to get yourself checked out, too.”
“Ah! Ike!” Ellen was nearly pleading, but Westcott didn’t look back as he stepped into the treatment room.
A white door closed automatically behind him. For a few seconds, Ellen stared at it, stunned. Eventually, however, a note of fierce indignation colored her expression, and she clenched her hand into a fist.
“Er. Um. Executive Leader Mathers?” a medical technician said to her hesitantly. “Would you mind if we took a look?”
There was no hidden malice in these words. Perhaps the tech was simply trying to carry out Westcott’s orders. Either way, the staff were no doubt sincerely concerned about Ellen’s condition.
But in that moment, her heart was just barely maintaining equilibrium with the surface tension of a pool of water, or nitrogen triiodide exploding at the merest touch of a feather. Even the faintest stimulation irritated her, and she took all the emotion in her heart, put it into her clenched fist, and slammed it into the wall.
Bam!
And the infirmary fell silent.
“…Aah!”
Ellen groaned as she clutched her fist, and the silence was broken.
✦ ✦ ✦
They couldn’t remember how long it lasted exactly, but for a while at least, after they were taken in by their new family, they had been anxious about what to do with all of their feelings.
The fact that they’d been abandoned by the mother who gave birth to them was more than enough to make them feel that they had no value, and the sense of resignation it produced within them became a defensive wall that just barely protected their heart. They were worthless: No wonder their mother had abandoned them.
No one wanted them. That was just the way it was.
This way of thinking allowed them to pretend they hadn’t been jealous of everyone else all this time.
Then one day, a new mother, a new father, and a new sister appeared out of the blue and said they wanted them. They were perplexed. Suddenly, someone wanted their worthless self.
At first, they doubted the family. They thought the family would eventually abandon them, too, no matter what they said.
Yet as time passed, they came to understand they were the only one who thought this way.
Just as they finally realized this, they began to feel a strange distance between themselves and their family—an awkwardness. They had missed the right moment to start calling the father “Dad” and the mother “Mom.”
It had been in May—Mother’s Day.
Clutching the allowance they had no idea how to use, they went to the flower shop by the train station and bought some carnations. That evening, after supper, they handed those flowers to the mother and very tentatively said, “Thanks, Mom.”
The mother was briefly taken aback before tears welled up in her eyes, and she gently hugged them. The sensation was so soft, so warm, so gentle.
Before they knew it, tears were flooding from their own eyes. The father broke into a warm smile and softly stroked their hair. The little sister saw them and the mother crying and ran right at them. “Don’t cry, Mommy! Don’t cry, Big Bro!”
They couldn’t tell if it was a joyous situation or a funny one—but they laughed, tears still staining their cheeks.