Witch Island, morning.
As an exemplary childhood-friend-and-fiancée, Meruru Hikami had always held herself to a fairly demanding standard.
Waking Brother up, helping him wash and dress, setting out a hot breakfast — this routine had been hers for sixteen years now, so well-worn she could do it in her sleep. The helping him dress part, admittedly, was one Brother always deflected, but that was beside the point.
Today, though, something felt off compared to usual.
In the ground-floor dining room of the manor, Meruru stared at the bowl of seafood congee on the table — its warmth already fading — then looked outside at the sky.
It was nearly midmorning.
By her brother's famously regimented schedule, this was an unthinkable delay.
Has Brother still not finished talking things over with the Great Witch?
Meruru tugged at the hem of her habit, her usually rosy little face now filled with worry and anxiety.
Brother had gotten up very early today — so early that he had, quite unusually, not kept her up until the small hours of the morning.
He'd told her it was because he had something important to settle with the Great Witch —
Meruru hadn't dared press him for details. She could manage the occasional murmur of complaint, but no more.
It wasn't as though she had forgotten — Brother had promised her reward time, and here he was, giving it away to the Great Witch who had taken them both in.
She had to admit: last night, just to hold on a little longer against the onslaught of Brother's affection, Meruru had quietly used the very [Healing] magic Brother had declared off-limits in the bedroom — and then the moment she finished casting, Brother had said it was time to rest.
For Meruru, that was functionally the same as nothing having happened at all.
Brother brother brother… mmph~
The golden-haired girl let her mind drift into places it probably shouldn't. Nobody would have guessed that beneath the pristine surface of that nun's habit beat a heart this restless and eager.
— Well. Not just her heart, if she was being honest. The curves that preceded and followed her — ones that radiated a certain kind of warmth even at first glance — were equally restless and eager.
Thank goodness the timeline was unlikely to follow the original plot anymore. Shin honestly couldn't imagine what Meruru might have gotten up to, left alone on Witch Island for six hundred years of pent-up longing.
No, I can't. Once I've had breakfast, I'll go ask Brother to spend a little more time with me~…
Meruru pressed her hands together in front of her chest, doing her best to keep them from wandering anywhere they shouldn't:
This is something the Great Witch herself wants too, so surely Brother will agree~ Heheh~…
But wait — hadn't Brother still not finished talking with the Great Witch?
"That's strange…"
Meruru shelved the sequence of very-much-not-child-friendly images flickering through her mind, but a creeping unease rose in their place.
She thought about the Great Witch's strange and sudden house-arrest order from before. She thought about the grave look on Shin's face when he had given her instructions before heading off to "negotiate."
She was honest with herself: she had been going back and forth on all of this.
Part of her wanted to support Brother without reservation. Another part of her felt like the house arrest wasn't so bad, because with nothing else to do, Brother would have no choice but to stay with her all day.
But if… if Brother and the Great Witch really came to blows over this, if something genuinely irreparable happened between them — what was she supposed to do?
Whose side should she take? Should she help the Great Witch keep Brother here, or help Brother push back against the Great Witch?
Meruru didn't know. What she wanted most, in this moment, was for things to simply keep dragging on — until she no longer had to think about any of it.
"It… it won't come to that, will it…?"
"If Brother really gets into a conflict with the Great Witch… mmph~"
Meruru's mind ran through a string of terrible possibilities — the Great Witch banishing Brother from the island, the two of them having a complete falling-out, Brother coming back and saying they needed to elope like the lovers in all those romance novels she'd read, and then having to somehow choose —
Meruru bit her soft lower lip. The shimmer of tears was already building in her eyes.
She felt like she had transformed into a weeping jellyfish. She blamed only herself for being too small and weak to participate in whatever was being decided between Brother and the Great Witch. If only she could be there —
"Mmmhh~"
A single tear dropped into the seafood congee with a small plop.
"No, no! Meruru, you have to do something, mmmph…"
The more she thought, the more far-fetched and awful the scenarios became.
And so Meruru rose from her chair, crept up the stairs to the second floor, and made her way to the library — intending to check on the situation inside.
But when she reached the library doors, she heard sounds coming from within that struck her as distinctly, inexplicably wrong.
"You're being so rough, Shaya~ ow ow ow~…"
"This is my first time… mmh~~ Can't you be a little gentler? I'm not like Meruru — that child can take anything you throw at her~"
"…?"
Meruru's expression froze. Her heart turned upside down.
Is… is that right?
In a flash, Meruru realized she had overlooked a possibility — the possibility that Brother and the Great Witch had gotten together without her, leaving no place for her in this house at all.
No, no, no! That's not allowed! Wailing internally, she couldn't believe this was happening!
The plan had always been for her to marry Brother. Even the Great Witch she respected so deeply had no right to commit something so contrary to the natural order —
Meruru summoned every last grain of courage she had accumulated across her entire life so far, transforming herself from a weeping jellyfish into a bold white octopus, and shoved open the library doors.
To be continued…