[13] Chapter 2. The Desired Appearance (6)
It seemed that Ilyas had been awake for a while because she had made noise in the bathroom. When Fernciana came out of the bathroom after dealing with the incident, Ilyas was also up.
Fernciana was about to apologize for being noisy in the middle of the night, but Ilyas’s worried expression came first.
“Did a wound open up? Why is there so much blood? Did you wake up because of the pain?”
“Ah.”
Fernciana awkwardly laughed, seeing the bloodstained towel in the dim light, and turned the towel behind her back. Ilyas seemed to think she was trying to pretend it wasn’t that, so he questioned her more urgently. Fernciana first raised her hand to stop Ilyas and then cleared her throat.
“Well, that’s…”
“Let’s apply the medicine first. You…”
“Ah, no. It’s not something to apply medicine to.”
“Do you keep doing this? Even if applying the medicine hurts a little right now…”
“No, I mean, it’s that.”
“Huh?”
Ilyas seemed worried about her anyway. Fernciana swallowed her embarrassment and finally spoke up.
“That, I mean, it’s… menstruation, so even if you apply medicine, it won’t stop the bleeding…”
“…?”
After struggling to answer and slightly raising her head, Ilyas was looking at her with a face that seemed to have no thought process going on in his brain.
It seemed like he overloaded himself by naturally hearing something that didn’t make sense. Fernciana narrowed her eyes. Ilyas finally came to his senses and spoke with an awkward smile.
“Ah, no. I was just surprised because you suddenly said that… Hey, no matter how much you don’t want to apply medicine, that’s for wo…”
“I’m a woman.”
“What?”
Did he not know? This time, even Fernciana was a little surprised. Ilyas looked like he had been struck by lightning. As if he had never imagined it at all.
‘Did he really not know?’
She had also been deceiving him, but she thought the other person had already noticed and was pretending not to know, so she talked about it with a light heart without realizing it herself. But seeing his face as if he had never heard such a thing in his life, she was suddenly overwhelmed by the intense sensation that she had been deceiving him.
“…Didn’t you know?”
“Know… know what?”
“That I’m a woman?”
He didn’t know, Fernciana realized and made an awkward expression with her lips tightly closed. She could tell just by looking at his utterly dumbfounded face.
“Sorry… Actually, I was a woman…”
“Oh, ah, uh… uh…”
“Ahaha, actually, I wasn’t really into dressing as a man…”
No one seemed to think she would be a girl when they saw her, but she hadn’t tried hard to look like a boy either. She didn’t have the energy for that. So she thought that if someone was quick-witted, they would have noticed.
“…You had no idea at all?”
“I had no idea at all!”
Ilyas shouted. His vision seemed to go dark. Fernciana unknowingly let out a chuckle, but after receiving a glare from Ilyas, she quickly cleared her throat.
“I had no clue even in my dreams…”
“So, I’ll probably have to continue traveling alone anyway. That’s why I just cut my hair while I was at it.”
“Your hair…”
She had never seen Ilyas’s face so disheveled, so she kept wanting to laugh. Fernciana suppressed her laughter. She had no right to laugh as the one who had deceived him. At that moment, Ilyas suddenly came to his senses and jumped up from his seat.
“Ah, menstruation… Does your stomach hurt a lot?”
“Oh? A little…”
“Do you need… do you need anything?”
“I have something I prepared just in case.”
“Ah, I see…”
Ilyas sat down again. Then, there was a quiet silence between the two. And before Fernciana could say anything, Ilyas opened his mouth.
“Is there anything else?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, is there anything else you didn’t tell me? Is there more?”
Fernciana just stared at Ilyas silently for a moment.
It was the middle of the night, and in the dark room where the only light came from the dim lamp on the side table and the light from the bathroom, there were only two things that shone. Ilyas’s brightly shining hair and his pitch-black eyes. The saying that black eyes shine sounded like a play on words, but nevertheless.
“…No.”
Fernciana shook her head, and Ilyas didn’t say anything for a while. He seemed to be thinking deeply about something. Well, it made sense. If a companion he had believed to be a boy all along suddenly said, “Actually, I was a woman,” overnight.
“But you really didn’t know?”
“I said I didn’t know!”
“No, I thought you were the best information merchant in the capital.”
“The information merchant doesn’t have ‘The boy named Peirun you’ll meet in Ronen is actually a girl’ written in it, you know?”
“But other than my short hair, I don’t think I particularly pretended to be a man. My physique too… So I thought you would have noticed.”
“If I had noticed! If I had noticed, I would have immediately gotten separate rooms for us!”
As Ilyas went through each point, he seemed to feel a sense of self-deprecation, unable to understand why he hadn’t noticed at all. Fernciana suppressed a laugh even as a dull pain rose from her lower abdomen.
“…Can you make it to the capital?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Fernciana nodded. Although it was throbbing and her body was drooping, she couldn’t ask to delay the schedule to the capital, and it would also be difficult to stay behind alone and go up slowly. It would be better to push through for a day.
“…This is shocking…”
“Huh?”
While Fernciana finished dealing with the bloody situation and was tidying up her clothes, Ilyas was still sitting in front of the table with a dumbfounded face.
Fernciana fiddled with her almost completely dry short hair with her fingertips and tilted her head, and Ilyas looked at Fernciana with a half-crying face.
“How could I really not have noticed?”
He seemed to be shocked by that part. Ilyas was now even sighing. Fernciana nodded in agreement.
“Yeah, actually, I was surprised too. I really thought you had noticed.”
“I must have lost a part of my intelligence when I hit my head.”
Even after reaching an extreme conclusion, Ilyas was still agonizing. Fernciana spread the towel wide on the bed and chuckled softly. At the sound of that laughter, Ilyas, who had been agonizing for a long time, lifted his head with a dazed face and started packing his luggage.
“Huh? Where are you going?”
“We need to get separate rooms.”
It was a reaction as if it was a natural thing to do. Fernciana shrugged her shoulders.
“Even though you’ve crawled into my bed until now, pretending to take a nap?”
“That! That was because I thought you were a boy!”
Ilyas raised his voice, truly dumbfounded not by the fact that Fernciana had hidden it, but by the fact that he hadn’t noticed even though he had crawled into her bed right next to her and slept, just as she said. Then his shoulders drooped immediately.
“I didn’t know… you were a girl…”
“It doesn’t change much.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t change much?”
Ilyas said that, then saw Fernciana sitting on the bed and let out a deep sigh. Fernciana just blinked and looked up at Ilyas. Ilyas hesitated for a moment, then firmly pressed down on Fernciana’s hair once. At least that was no different from usual.
Fernciana pointed to the bed where Ilyas had been lying.
“How are you going to find a new room in the middle of the night? Are you going to sleep on the roof with the stars as your blanket?”
“That’s what I have to do, then.”
“Forget it. Just go to sleep, big brother.”
“You little…”
Even after hearing that, Ilyas tried to leave the room, but Fernciana caught him and sat him down on the bed.
“I have a stomachache, I’m tired, and I’m sorry for lying, so I’d appreciate it if you would just sleep obediently, Mr. Ilyas.”
“…”
“Understood?”
With those words, Fernciana returned to her own bed and buried herself in the blanket. Ilyas stared at her for a long time, then dropped his body onto the bed with a sigh.
There was a thud. And another sigh filled with lamentation. Fernciana wrapped herself in the blanket and stifled her giggles, and Ilyas threw a pillow towards her.
“You’re laughing after completely deceiving your big brother!”
“Ahem, I didn’t laugh.”