Free PandoraHearts ~Caucus Race~, Vol. 2 by Shinobu Wakamiya Page B

speaker’s voice was partially drowned out by high-pitched squeals and giggles.
    “Hey, Leo. ………What’s all this?” Elliot asked in a small, thoroughly disgusted voice.
    Leo looked back at him. “Umm……”
    Even as he waited for Leo’s response, the girls’ conversation continued.
    “Let me go next, if you would. I think Master Blue Rose is—”
    Elliot kept his voice low.
    “……So they’re setting up somebody from our school as ‘Master Blue Rose’ and getting all excited talking about him? It sounds as if they’re adding some crazy stuff, too, like he’s a vampire—Is that actually fun or something?”
    “They do sound as if they’re having fun.”
    At Leo’s response, Elliot muttered, “Girls make no sense.”
    However, he thought, they could do whatever they wanted. It was nothing to do with him. —Not that he knew who their “Master Blue Rose” was.
    Elliot thought for a minute.
    “Somebody girls like… Would that be Gerald, maybe?”
    “In Gerald’s case, it’s more that he pays too much attention to girls than that the girls like him.”
    Now that he mentioned it, that sounded about right. Elliot looked convinced. Impressed, he glanced at Leo.
    “You really watch other people, don’t you?”
    “Not at all. I’m not even interested in them.”
    Leo shook his head. “But,” he continued:
    “Some things are easier to see when you aren’t trying to look. You
see
them, whether you want to or not.”
    Beyond the screen of his hair and glasses, Leo was smiling faintly.
    Elliot knew that Leo wore glasses and grew his hair long to hide his face, not because he didn’t want to be seen, but because he “didn’t want to
see
” the world. Maybe that was why: Although he was smiling, Leo’s smile didn’t look like a smile at all.
    Elliot wondered whether he’d
seen
what he knew about Gerald and Marcel that way, too. …This wasn’t the time to discuss it, though.
    “Well, never mind. Let’s go. For now, we’ll head back to that room—”
    Just as Elliot whispered, a new voice began to speak inside the room.
    ‘Today, I saw a teacher summon Master Blue Rose to the guidance office.’
    At those words, Elliot remembered his noon recess that day. He’d also gone to the guidance office, summoned by oneof the female teachers. Since he was a member of the House of Nightray, his teachers also paid a lot of attention to him, and they sometimes asked him about this and that.
    However, many students were summoned to the guidance office every day.
    Students who’d earned warnings for being tardy to class, students being scolded for breaking school rules… Apparently “Master Blue Rose” had been one of them. Elliot had no sympathy for him. The fact that they were having their discussion at his expense this way, amusing themselves with him, meant that, in other words:
    The guy gives them way too many openings!
    ‘I’m quite certain that teacher is after him. When he enters the guidance office, she tries to seduce him. ‘Now then, Elliot-kun. Come to me’—”
    Elliot-kun? …………What, ME?!
    He felt a violent sinking sensation, as if he were falling.
    Then a storm of fierce emotions welled up.
    ……Wait! Wait wait wait wait. Why!? Why are they talking about me like this? Openings? I don’t
have
any openings! ……Well, I was prepared for people to talk about me, but as a Nightray, a member of the four great dukedoms, not as…… Or is that why? Did my brothers and sister, or—I can’t see it, but—even my father, go through this? Is this the duty of the elite?!
    Elliot’s spine was quivering.
    He couldn’t sense anything like malice in the voices he heard. Quite the opposite, in fact.
    That didn’t mean he could feel happy about it.
    The being he called “himself” was being put to selfish use and used to entertain the girls, as if it were a stuffed animal or something. On his pride as a man, Elliot didn’t think he could take it. The urge to barge in yelling