"Let me go home."
Kisaragi didn't answer my words right away.
With the night view at her back, she was silent for a while. Then she quietly lowered her gaze to the leather-bound journal she held.
"...Would you listen to just one thing?"
I couldn't nod. I just stood there.
"Why I do all this. That is what you want to know, is it not?"
She had hit the mark. I was afraid because I didn't understand the reason for kindness I didn't deserve.
Kisaragi raised her face. The mask of the sub-zero heiress was no longer there. Just a single girl about to make an important confession, looking straight at me.
"I—"
It was her plain, unguarded "I." Not the formal one she uses at school.
"I was saved—by your novels."
The air in the room went still.
The light of the night view faintly outlined her silver hair. Her profile was calm, yet somehow seemed to be looking at a faraway place.
She said nothing more. When, where, what had happened. What kind of night it had been. Not a single word that would serve as a reason followed.
Couldn't she say it? Didn't she want to? Or was it still too deep to put into words? I didn't know.
Only that one phrase fell into my chest, carrying an unmistakable weight.
Saved.
It didn't sound like a joke, or an exaggerated metaphor. In her voice there was something that left no other way to say it. The desperation with which she had shielded three years of records before her own body, even in the rain—the truth of it was condensed into that one phrase. Beneath that single word, "saved," she had folded away something much deeper, whole, and hidden it. That was how it felt.
I felt I had touched something I shouldn't ask about. I couldn't even imagine what kind of nights she had passed through. I only understood that it was not a place to step into lightly.
I was at a loss for words.
What I had been writing were muddy stories no one read, with single-digit PVs. A dream people laughed at as cringe.
Those stories had held the girl in front of me to this world.
I couldn't believe it. If I believed it, I felt I would end up affirming my own three years. That cringey dream no one read—I felt I would end up admitting it hadn't been a mistake. I didn't think I had the right to.
I think I was afraid. The fact that I had swayed someone's life that much was too heavy for me.
"...It's not anything that great," I said, in a hoarse voice.
"My stories don't have that kind of—the kind of power to do anything for somebody's life—"
"That is not for you to decide."
Kisaragi cut me off quietly, yet firmly. Her voice alone had returned to the Ice Princess's unshakable tone.
"You do not have the right to decide whether your novels have value. I am the one who was saved. So this is something I will decide."
No rebuttal came out.
They should have been the words I had always wanted. I had wanted someone to tell me that what I wrote meant something. And yet, now that someone had, I wanted to run away. I just couldn't believe I was the kind of person who could accept those words.
I couldn't bear to be in this room anymore. The weight of her faith, the fact that my stories had held someone to this world to that extent—for me right now, it was all too big. I didn't yet have the vessel to receive it.
Too much had happened in a single day. Dumped, found, worshipped. My head and heart were stuffed full; it didn't seem like a single thing more would fit.
I wanted to go home, just once. Back to that cramped place of mine, where no one expected anything. I felt like there, at least, I could breathe a little.
"...I'm going home," I said, backing away.
"Sorry. I'm going home today. Let me go back to that cramped room of mine."
Kisaragi didn't come after me.
She didn't try to stop me, either. She simply bowed deeply and said, gently,
"Yes. Please, go home."
—It was far too quiet an acceptance.
Maybe it would have been better if she had clung to me more. If she had grabbed my hand and said don't go, I could still have been afraid in an easy-to-understand way, shaken her off, and run.
But she didn't. She just bowed her head deeply, about to see me off.
That quiet, for some reason, followed my back colder than the rain. It was a quiet as if she were certain—that no matter where I went home to, in the end it would all be the same.