Chapter 16
“Dad…….”
“There, there, Yuria. Daddy’s right here.”
“You know, if I get better, could you grant me just one wish?”
“……Of course. If our Yuria gets well, what wish could I possibly refuse?”
“Someday, even if it’s much later, if I stop getting sick, please let me stay by Big Bro Derek’s side forever……”
************
Sometimes, when you wake on your own rather than being roused by something external, you get the uneasy feeling that something is off.
The moment you open your eyes, a kind of sixth sense kicks in, letting you know at a glance roughly what time it is.
That moment was now, and Derek figured it was about seven-thirty.
He turned his head and looked at one wall.
A round clock hung there, one that didn’t seem all that small to Derek, whose physical capabilities—aside from his inability to get up easily in the morning—far surpassed those of an average person.
Meanwhile, there was a clock on the wall that his personal maid, who spent almost as much time in this room as its owner, always complained was too small to read.
The hands pointed to 7:42.
Whether there was a twelve-minute discrepancy or not, it didn’t change the fact that Derek had overslept.
Derek’s wake-up time was exactly seven o’clock.
What made that possible was that his maid always woke him at the same time.
Sometimes she’d whack him in the side with a fireplace poker; other times, she’d whisper in a clear, heavenly voice. She cycled through methods at opposite extremes, but always at the same time.
That was exactly why Derek’s morning drowsiness vanished in an instant.
One possibility he’d prepared for all this time, but that had yet to happen.
Realizing that this was that very situation, Derek kicked off the covers and raced as if flying toward the small door in a corner of the room.
He’d seen the door open countless times, but since the current owner of this room had moved in, Derek had never once entered or even peeked inside.
But today, for the first time, he had a reason to go in.
Hands as cold as death, unfocused eyes. They were all part of the image of Yuria from his childhood that he remembered.
Just a few years ago, Yuria had been so frail that it wouldn’t have been strange if she’d died at any moment.
She’d recovered to the point of seeming almost too ‘boisterous’ now, but everyone around Yuria, including Derek, always kept a close eye on her health.
She’d collapsed at least once every year, and often tried to stubbornly follow Derek around while sick, so the head maid, who was also Yuria’s mother, had forced her to take time off many times.
Even so, until now, Yuria had never once failed to wake Derek on time, even when she was unwell.
Even looking like she was about to die, Yuria would come in through the door Derek was now flinging open, right on time.
Derek judged that it surely wasn’t an ordinary matter that Yuria hadn’t gotten up by now.
Perhaps he’d yanked it open too urgently and used too much force; the doorknob broke with a crunch.
Derek didn’t care and shoved the door open as though breaking it down.
“Yuria, are you alri……ght……?”
Derek rushed into the room and came to an abrupt halt.
The room had a modest interior, as if its noble owner had no interest in extravagance at all.
An ordinary room, barely a quarter the size of Derek’s own.
In the middle of that room,
“G-go, g-go, get oooout! You son of a bitch, what the hell are you barging in here for?!”
He saw Yuria, unlike her usual self, throwing something.
The instant Derek saw her, he realized something had gone seriously wrong.
Without managing to say a single word, Derek fled the room even faster than he’d rushed in.
He couldn’t simply reverse his actions.
The door he should have closed was shattered, with only one hinge still attached.
Derek ran—not so much fleeing as retreating—until he was somewhere he couldn’t see into Yuria’s room, and finally exhaled.
It certainly wasn’t because he’d worn himself out by rushing back and forth a mere few meters.
Rather, it was more like a kind of awe and excitement at what he’d seen pouring out of him.
Except for her chest, which even her clothes couldn’t conceal, Yuria’s body was usually hidden beneath her neat maid uniform. Her graceful, smooth curves were even more beautiful than those in the erotic illustrations the knights had once shown him behind Yuria’s back.
Most of those curves were defined by Yuria’s dazzlingly white skin.
Only a very small part—for example, the fabric struggling to support two bulges that seemed too large for her frame,
or perhaps the inverted triangle of a region that made him stretch his imagination to its limits—was even whiter than her skin.
Two thoughts dominated Derek’s mind.
One was that Yuria really must be ‘sickly’ to somehow still be able to go around claiming she was a man despite looking like that.
The other was that, as sorry as he was to Yuria, he absolutely had to remember the breathtaking sight he’d just seen.
As Derek tried both to etch the picture into his mind and to suppress the aura blade that had ignited on its own, his attention was briefly occupied.
“Hey, you fucking pervert……”
Derek felt someone poking his arm and turned around.
The breathtaking sight from a moment ago—Yuria stood right behind him, wearing only a skirt on her lower half, her upper half still as before.
The only differences were her face, redder than her lips, and her pitiful posture as she desperately tried to cover her underwear-clad chest.
No matter how Yuria huffed and fumed, her face bright red with anger and embarrassment, Derek didn’t turn away; he took in her appearance, especially her cleavage, with both eyes.
Strictly speaking, Derek had never actually experienced this sort of stimulation, since he’d always been focused solely on Yuria. The sight before him was so overwhelming he couldn’t even think to turn his head away.
Derek heard another string of colorful curses spill from Yuria’s mouth, and seeing her move to conceal her increasingly imposing presence, he finally came to his senses.
“……Fuck, th-that, th-that thing! Give it back! That’s my only other shirt, come on! You fucking pervert, how long are you going to stand there staring?!”
Only then did Derek realize that what Yuria had unconsciously thrown at him a moment ago—and what he was still holding—was her maid-uniform shirt.
The moment Derek held out the shirt, Yuria snatched it and dashed straight back into her room.
Derek was at a loss over how he should apologize to Yuria, but at the same time, he was too busy replaying in his mind the two balloons that had bounced violently when she reached out and snatched the shirt.
************
As it turned out, Derek’s choice hadn’t been entirely wrong.
The morning incident had happened so suddenly that his thoughts had been completely occupied by Yuria in her underwear, but as he replayed the scene etched into his mind over and over, he could see that Yuria’s lips had already turned blue and cold sweat had been pouring down her face.
Her movements had been slower than usual, and even as she spat curses, her voice had grown somewhat small and hoarse.
That was why, despite the morning’s incident, Derek was able to sit by Yuria and hold her hand.
“Mmm……”
“Are you awake, Yuria?”
Derek hurriedly replaced the wet cloth on her forehead.
One of the other maids assigned to Yuria or the doctor could have done it, but he’d volunteered for the task, even at the cost of canceling his entire day’s schedule.
And everyone except Yuria herself, who was groaning in pain, considered that only natural.
“The doctor already came by. Thankfully, it’s just a pretty bad bout of aches and fever. You got back from the inspection tour and went straight into a report meeting, then played with Maria without even resting. No wonder you came down with something.”
“……You fucking asshole……”
“No, well, it was, uh, all just an accident. An accident.”
In any case, the incident had happened because Yuria hadn’t been able to get up on time due to her poor health, but Derek deliberately didn’t remind her of that fact.
Even though it wasn’t Yuria’s fault, once she was feeling better, she would blame herself for not properly fulfilling her role, just as she had when she’d collapsed from illness before.
Strictly speaking, the bizarre symptom of insisting she was a man wasn’t the only remnant of the illness Yuria had suffered as a child.
Her obsession with her work and her excessive awareness of other people’s whispers were also among the darker sides Yuria occasionally revealed.
Derek thought it would be better for him to take one more round of abuse than for Yuria to turn her attention to those things for no reason.
“You bastard, you, cough, cough! Hoo…… You don’t have the concept of knocking in that thick skull of yours? Fuck, did the aurora’s geomagnetic field mess with your brainwaves and cause a communication failure in your neurons? Cough, cough……”
“If you talk so much while coughing, your voice might give out. Why don’t you drink some water?”
Derek didn’t understand a single thing she said after the beginning, but he casually ignored it and brought a straw to Yuria’s mouth so she could drink while lying down.
After confirming that the water in the cup had gone down a little, Derek continued before Yuria could open her mouth to grumble again.
“I did knock. I knocked once, and the door just broke.”
“Since when did our Northern customs change to knocking on doorknobs? Are you planning to proclaim it as Emergency Measure No. 1 when you succeed to the Grand Duchy—and did you apply it retroactively ahead of time?”
“……You’re pretty sharp for someone who’s sick.”
Of course, Derek seemed rather pleased by that, too.
Yuria almost never spoke to Derek alone in the soft, gentle manner she used with others, but if you looked at it the other way, didn’t that mean they were close enough for her to show her true personality when they were alone?
Derek knew well that the meaning of ‘being close’ in Yuria’s mind was quite different from what he himself meant.
But Derek had not the slightest intention of pressuring someone who was ill into doing what he wanted.
His hand, still holding Yuria’s, gently tightened.
Only then did Yuria seem to realize that her hand was clasped in Derek’s.
“But, cough, cough, what’s with this hand?”
“This? You grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go when I laid you in bed, looking like you were about to collapse. So I’ve been sitting here like this the whole time.”
“……I did? I did that? Why?”
Yuria frowned and looked dumbfounded.
Strictly speaking, what Derek said wasn’t untrue.
He simply left out the fact that he had no intention of letting go either.
After talking with Derek for a little while, Yuria had once again drifted off into sleep.
Even then, Yuria’s hand remained joined with Derek’s.