I Don’t Want to be a Villainess

Sharing one body with another was surprisingly not as uncomfortable as I thought.

Sara wasn’t the talkative type. She didn’t have many complaints and didn’t interfere with my daily life or demand actions from me.

…Actually, rather than being devoid of desires, it felt more like she had transcended life itself.

Sara had given up on life once. And even the life I returned to her, she had handed over to me, claiming it was not her own. The faint emotion she transmitted was ‘joy’, but one might wonder if she really thought she wanted to continue living.

There was no sense of strong desire for life that most people typically possess—avoiding dangerous places, managing health minimally, having hobbies, or wanting to learn something new… none of that came from Sara at all.

If something pleasant happened, she would just acknowledge it as nice in the moment, and when she had a wish, it would simply remain a wish. There was never a thought that she must have it. Though fleeting attractions existed, they never became a life goal.

Well, it’s not that she was entirely devoid of such existence—

The switch for changing personalities, as revealed so far, was ‘the most intense memory the personality had.’ A memory so powerful that a deep-seated personality within could be dragged out and seize control of the body.

Whether that memory was negative or positive didn’t seem to matter. As long as it was ‘an intense memory never experienced before in their life’, it appeared to fit the criteria.

And the most reliable way to summon that intense memory was to be with the subject of that memory.

“I don’t want to.”

And Sara didn’t especially welcome the idea of flipping that switch.

I didn’t know how other people with multiple personalities changed theirs. There was no one around me suffering from dissociative identity disorder, and truth be told, our current state was of a different kind from those so-called ‘personality disorders’ or ‘identity disorders’.

This was not a mental problem; under the complete concept of fantasy, the original personality and an external personality coexisted within one person’s body.

When the body moved, one of the two personalities took control and moved it. Strangely enough, it didn’t feel as uncomfortable as I thought. I had already adapted to Sara’s body over the past three months, and Sara didn’t seem to mind much when I moved.

If we were enemies wanting to kill each other, that would have been a big problem, but thankfully, that wasn’t the case.

However, that raised a little question.

During the day, when one person takes charge of the movements, it’s not a big problem, but what happens when the body falls asleep?

What happens in a situation where one is not the designated representative but, in a way, becomes equal?

Well, the answer was quickly found out.

“To do that, I’ll have to meet Mother again.”

The place we were in was Sara’s room.

It was slightly different from the room I saw in Sara’s memories. The presence of a bed and a clothes rack near the entrance indicated it was the room after Sohee came as a maid.

But Sohee and Sua were nowhere to be seen.

That was only natural since it was just Sara and me present here.

After the body fell asleep and my consciousness slowly sank into the mind, we ended up facing each other in this space within the mind.

“Don’t you have anything you want to do in reality?”

“What I want to do, you’re already doing for me.”

Sara responded without hesitation to my question, making me facepalm.

There was almost no difference between my consciousness and my body. I had never used a mirror in here, but I figured my face probably looked about the same.

It seemed that Sara was much freer ‘in her mind’ than I was. Reflecting on the past few days, the background and my appearance were all as Sara imagined.

Maybe it was because she was the original owner of the body.

There were advantages and disadvantages in this situation.

Firstly, if Sara’s emotions moved intensely within this body, I got caught up in that situation as well. Sara had played a few pranks on me, mainly changing the clothes I wore into something extravagant. Knowing she could do that had genuinely amused her, so I chose to just accept it peacefully.

By the way, the outfit I was currently wearing was something with a lot of lace and black pants. It looked like something a main character in a foreign period drama set in the Renaissance might wear.

And although our two consciousnesses faced each other, thankfully, we couldn’t read each other’s thoughts. As the owner of the mind, Sara could pick up on my thoughts and feelings fairly easily when I was moving the body, but during this kind of ‘consciousness-to-consciousness’ meeting, we had to ‘talk’ like meeting another person to convey our thoughts.

Well yeah, completely being able to read each other’s innermost thoughts would make things uncomfortable in many ways.

“Talking about things we want to do.”

I sighed softly and sat on the bed. Sara naturally sat beside me. It wasn’t exactly a tight distance.

“So… don’t you have anything? Like wanting to eat something suddenly, or wanting to go somewhere, or wanting to try something?”

Trying to explain the concept of ‘things we want to do’ was incredibly difficult to someone who had never wished for such things.

…Thinking about it, it was like trying to persuade someone contemplating suicide. Isn’t there a need for specialized knowledge? Carelessly trying to console might backfire.

Fortunately, I didn’t sense any such energy from Sara, who was looking up at me intently.

Sara, after a while of deep thought, replied:

“You do all those things for me anyway.”

She answered that way.

“….”

I wiped my face in frustration.

I didn’t mean to act that way intentionally, but…

I had thought about how nice it would be if someone lived my life for me—doing my studying, exercising for me, and so on…

Well, I had never substituted for studying, and to be honest, I didn’t particularly want to substitute for exercising either.

Of course, reliving school days with friends or living off an unending bank account would be quite delightful.

But aside from that, I worried about Sara.

It felt like having a hikikomori younger sister who wouldn’t leave the room.

“…What were you just thinking?”

Sara looked up at me with half-open eyes.

Maybe because her face was just so pretty, whatever expression Sara made, she looked beautiful. Though, if she narrowed her eyes and glared at me sharply, it could be a bit eerie. I might feel a fleeting sense of fear, considering it was a ‘teenage girl with more money than anyone else in the world’ glaring at me.

“No, it’s just…”

I sighed deeply.

I knew perfectly well that the reason she was so adamantly refusing to manifest physically was because of Choi Na-kyung.

Sara loved Choi Na-kyung as family. In fact, if I traced back her memories, she’d appeared more motherly than her real mother. Her real mother had passed away when Sara was very young, so she had no memories of her.

That’s why she loved her, but at the same time, she also hated her. Because it was Choi Na-kyung who had ruined her life.

It wasn’t just hatred; she was feeling fear too. The fear that one day that ‘Mother’ might completely abandon her. The fear that Mother might not love her.

It was an incredibly complex emotion, feeling everything the world has to offer in relation to one person.

Sara’s feelings towards Choi Na-kyung were those feelings.

Naturally, that was enough as a switch for personality change.

However, for that to happen, Sara would have to expose herself to those feelings once again.

And not just once, but each time her personality changed.

Accessing the ‘most stimulating’ memory means that changing personalities might require more stimulation each time.

That’s why Sara was refusing to return to her life like this.

Maybe back when she only knew Choi Na-kyung would have been different, but after the past week, she had felt ‘other emotions outside’ while living the life I had built for her.

Gentle and beautiful feelings within a soft daily life, rather than the extremely mixed and mentally violent negativity of various extreme emotions.

Thus, there was no need to meet Choi Na-kyung to confront those kinds of feelings.

“Can’t we just live like this…?”

As I fell deep in thought, Sara gently placed her hand over mine.

When I turned to look, she was staring right at me.

“Can’t we just go about our days together normally, like walking together during the day, and talking at night… feeling together and living on with our memories?”

“….”

Yeah, this was a problem too.

It felt a bit awkward to say it sounded like showing off, but I was the one who inadvertently saved Sara’s life. In some sense, I was also the person closest to her.

So, even if it wasn’t to the same extent as Choi Na-kyung, Sara was having these feelings towards me.

At least it was a relief that these weren’t sexual feelings, and that I didn’t feel burdened too much, but still, it was incredibly worrisome.

She was essentially saying she wanted to completely entrust her life to someone else.

“Are you thinking about leaving?”

“…No.”

I knew I would have to leave someday.

Like a childhood friend from a fantasy that appears in American dramas or comics.

I couldn’t continue like this forever.

No matter how much I was with Sara in her body, I was still an outsider. I could not take full responsibility for her life forever.

Right now, Sara depended on me like this, but as time passes, her horizons would broaden, and she would experience more.

She would obviously make more friends.

She might one day find someone she likes and develop interests she wants to pursue. And all of those things might not match with me.

In such circumstances, could I simply sit back and not interfere?

Could I truly remain perfectly responsible for Sara’s life from beginning to end without yielding to personal desires?

“Right? You’ll stay here, won’t you?”

Sara smiled as she said that.

“Yeah. I’ll be here.”

That’s why I lied like this again today.
…It was a relief that Sara couldn’t read the deeper parts of my consciousness.

Thud!

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