Ch.7
I found the route from the train station to the church on foot, walking it twice to memorize the turns, and then I walked it a third time at the pace of someone who didn't know where she was going. Slower. More pauses at intersections. Turning back once to check a street sign.
If I were a teenage nun arriving alone in a foreign country with a suitcase and directions written on a piece of paper, this is the way I'd walk.
It was a Tuesday afternoon. The streets around the station were busy with commuters and high school students heading home. A food cart selling takoyaki was parked outside the south exit, and the vendor was arguing with a delivery driver about who had the right to the sidewalk. I bought a bottle of water from a vending machine and drank half of it. I wasn't thirsty. I was killing time.
Ddraig was quiet. She'd been quiet since last night, since the ORC, since Rias's chess piece and my refusal. The presence in my skull was passive, watching, the dragon equivalent of sitting with crossed arms and waiting for me to do something worth commenting on.
I checked the intersection near the uphill road for the third time. Nobody.
Then I checked it again ten minutes later, and there she was.
Small. That was the first thing. The anime had made her look delicate but normal-sized, a teenage girl in a habit. In person she was tiny. Blonde hair and green eyes and a teal-and-blue nun's habit that was too heavy for the weather and slightly too big for her frame. She was dragging a wheeled suitcase that was nearly as wide as she was, and she'd stopped at the crosswalk with a piece of paper in her free hand, turning it sideways, then upside down, trying to match the handwritten directions to the street in front of her.
She looked lost. She looked like she'd been lost for a while and was trying very hard to pretend she wasn't.
I knew her name before she opened her mouth. Asia Argento. Seventeen. Orphan, raised in an Italian convent. Former Holy Maiden of the Catholic Church, excommunicated for healing a Devil, branded a witch by the people who'd raised her. She was carrying a Sacred Gear called Twilight Healing that could mend any wound on any creature, and the Fallen Angels in the church on the hill were going to cut it out of her and kill her in the process.
She looked younger than the anime had shown. The green eyes were bigger, wetter, trusting in a way that had no defense behind it. Her hands were small around the suitcase handle and her knuckles were white from gripping it too hard.
I crossed the street.
"Hey. You look lost."
She startled. Her head came up and she took a half-step back, the suitcase wobbling on its wheels. Then she looked at me, and whatever she saw in my face made her shoulders come down from where they'd been hiding near her ears.
"Ah- yes! I'm sorry, I-" She held up the piece of paper, fumbling between it and the suitcase handle. "I am looking for- the church? On the hill? I have directions but I think..." She frowned at the paper. "I think they are for walking from a different station."
Her Japanese was textbook. Clean grammar, careful pronunciation, with a soft Italian accent underneath that turned the syllables rounder than they should have been. She'd learned from a phrasebook or a missionary manual, and she was speaking like someone reading aloud from a very polite textbook written a few decades ago.
"The church on the hill," I said. "Yeah, I know where that is. You're about four blocks off."
"Four blocks!" Her face fell. The suitcase tilted, and she grabbed for it, and the handle slipped out of her fingers. The case tipped sideways.
I caught it before it hit the ground. One hand on the side, holding it upright. Her fingers were still reaching for the handle and they closed on my wrist instead, small and warm and startled.
"S-sorry!" She pulled her hand back, cheeks going pink. "Thank you, I'm so clumsy, I-"
"You're fine." I set the suitcase upright and held the handle out to her. "Come on. I'll walk you."
She stared at me for a second. Her eyes went wide. Then cautious. Then hopeful. Everything she felt played across her face in real time with nothing behind it.
"You- you would?"
"It's on my way."
It wasn't. She didn't know that.
We walked. I took the suitcase because it weighed as much as she did and watching her drag it made my back hurt in sympathy. She protested for about half a block, then gave in when I didn't give it back.
"I'm Issei," I said. "Hyoudou Issei."
"Asia. Asia Argento." She bowed, slightly, a formal Japanese greeting she'd probably practiced in the mirror on the plane. "Thank you very much for your help, Hyoudou-san."
"Issei's fine."
"I-Issei-san." She said it like it was a test she might fail.
We turned onto the road that led toward the hill. The shopping district thinned out into residential streets, quieter, more trees. A kid on a bicycle rode past us going the wrong way down a one-way street, pedaling hard. Asia watched him pass with a faint smile, like she'd never seen someone break a traffic law before and found it charming.
"Is this your first time in Japan?" I asked.
"Yes. I came from Italy. From-" She paused. Her mouth opened and closed. "From a convent. I was transferred here by the Church."
She wasn't lying, exactly. She believed what she'd been told. The people who'd sent her here had worn the right clothes and used the right words and she'd trusted them because she didn't know how not to.
"Must be a big change," I said. "Italy to Japan."
"Yes! Everything is very different. The food, the trains, the-" She gestured vaguely at the street around her. "The signs. I cannot read anything. I studied Japanese for two years but the signs use different symbols than what I learned."
"Kanji's rough. You'll pick it up."
"You think so?" She turned those green eyes on me, leaning forward slightly. She genuinely wanted to know if I thought she'd be okay. She was asking a boy she'd met five minutes ago for reassurance about her future in a country where she didn't speak the language, and she was doing it without irony.
"Yeah. I think so."
She smiled. Her whole face changed, the anxiety draining out and the warmth flooding in, and for a second she looked exactly like the girl from the anime, the one who'd made me sad from the other side of a screen.
She was real now. Standing next to me on a sidewalk in Japan, carrying a suitcase full of secondhand clothes and a picture book from an orphanage, walking toward a church where people wanted to tear her apart.
The road split at an intersection. Left went into the residential area. Right climbed the hill toward the church, visible between the trees at the top, white walls and a small steeple catching the afternoon light.
I stopped.
Asia walked two more steps before she noticed. She turned back. "Issei-san?"
"I have to head this way." I pointed left. "The church is straight up that road. You can't miss it."
Her face changed. The smile dimmed. She looked at the hill road, then back at me.
"Oh," she said. "Of course. You have- of course."
She reached for the suitcase. I handed it over. Her fingers brushed mine on the handle and she didn't pull away immediately.
The stumble happened on the curb. She turned to pull the suitcase onto the sidewalk and her heel caught the edge and she tipped forward, and her free hand shot out and grabbed my arm. My hand went to her waist automatically, steadying her, and my fingers spanned most of it because she weighed nothing and her waist was the width of my forearm.
"S-sorry!" Her face was bright red. She was looking at my hand on her waist and not moving.
"You're okay," I said. I didn't let go for a second. She didn't pull away for a second. Then I stepped back and she straightened up and the suitcase was between us again.
She stood there. The suitcase handle in one hand. The church at the top of the hill behind her. She looked at me with those green eyes and the sunlight was catching the edge of her veil and turning the teal fabric slightly gold.
"Issei-san." She swallowed. Her hands tightened on the suitcase handle until her knuckles went white again. "Will you... will you be my friend?"
In the anime, this line had made me feel a tug. The distance a screen puts between you and a character you care about.
She was standing in front of me. On a sidewalk. In sunlight. Tears threatening behind those green eyes because she'd never had a friend before and she was asking a stranger because there was nobody else.
"Yeah," I said. "I will."
She lit up. The tears didn't come but the smile did, wide and trembling.
"Thank you, Issei-san." She bowed again, deeper this time. "Thank you."
Then she turned and walked up the hill, pulling the suitcase behind her. The wheels bumped over cracks in the pavement. She looked back once, halfway up, and waved. I waved back.
I watched her until she reached the church gate and disappeared through it, and I stayed at the intersection for a while after that, looking at the closed gate and the white walls and the steeple.
Raynare was in there. Freed Sellzen. Dohnaseek. Kalawarner. Mittelt. An entire cell of Fallen Angels who'd brought a seventeen-year-old girl across the world so they could strap her to a cross and rip the light out of her hands.
I had maybe a week. Five days. Seven at the outside. Then the ritual, the extraction, and if nobody stopped it, Asia Argento would die on an altar in a church that God had already abandoned.
I started walking home. The evening was warm. Somewhere behind me, a dog barked at nothing.
"You care about the nun," Ddraig said.
"Yeah."
"You knew her before today. You knew her name, her history, her Sacred Gear. You knew what awaited her in that church."
I didn't deny it. I was done pretending with Ddraig.
"She's the kindest person in this world," I said. "I'm not letting them touch her."
Ddraig went quiet for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice was different. Less interrogation, more assessment.
"You will need help. The Fallen Angel cell has at least four members plus human exorcists. You are one human with one Boost and a healing wound."
"I know."
"The Gremory girl has the forces to assault the church."
"I know that too."
"You refused her offer."
"I refused to be her piece. I didn't refuse to work with her." I turned a corner. My street. Lights in the kitchen window. "Rias Gremory wants me in her peerage because I'm useful. I'm about to show her I'm useful without the leash. If I bring her a reason to raid that church, she'll move."
"And the nun survives."
"And the nun survives."
I went inside. Dinner was waiting. My mother had made miso soup and grilled fish and the house smelled like home, which was still a word I was getting used to using for a place that belonged to someone else's parents.
I ate. I planned. And upstairs, later, in the dark, I started building the timeline that would keep Asia Argento alive.