Just the Two of Us
"That's the end of it."
"..."
"I went back to that place afterward, but there was nothing left."
It had taken far too long — tending the wounds, steeling myself, all of it. I had thought that at the very least I should see to the bodies, but by the time I arrived, people from the kingdom had already come and gone.
Madame Florence had said it wasn't that there was some hidden mastermind they were shielding. They simply couldn't publicly admit to having conducted experiments that inhumane, so they meant to bury the whole affair. I had thought the same. The people who had led the experiments were all dead, and I had survived.
No. I was the only one who had survived.
Every last one of them had died in agony, and I had finished my revenge without a single drop of blood on my hands. I had no reason left to live, but Madame Florence had taken me in and done everything she could to raise me as a decent human being.
Looking back on it now, I wondered if the suspiciously large number of religious texts — and books on morals and ethics — she had pressed on me had been an attempt to set right whatever twisted sense of ethics I had been left with. At the time, I genuinely could not believe in human goodwill. It was only after I had grown a little older that the realization came to me, naturally, of its own accord: Madame Florence saving me — that, quite literally, had been human goodwill, hadn't it?
"This is a little awkward. I'll get dressed."
I fumbled my way back into my clothes.
"Miss Livia, I wanted to say something... wait, are you crying!? Hold on, Miss Livia?"
I'm not even crying, so why are you?
"You're not even crying."
"..."
It was as if she had answered the thought in my heart.
"How did you feel when the Hero party was singing the kingdom's praises?"
"..."
"When they said they were grateful the kingdom had saved them — how did that feel?"
"..."
"How could you work for the kingdom that put a child through that kind of suffering?"
"Hah."
I let out a breath.
"The kingdom itself isn't evil. Far more people live peacefully under its protection. I just happened to fall into the hands of villains — the kingdom wasn't the one at fault. And everyone involved, the ringleaders included, was blown apart on the spot. Not a single one of them survived."
"But the people who knew about those experiments and looked the other way are still alive! They're still sleeping soundly with their legs stretched out, smiling, telling themselves they buried it so it's fine!!"
The Hero's agitated voice was hardly something to praise, and I probably ought to have cautioned her about getting so worked up — but for some reason, I found myself smiling. Hearing my story and getting angry purely for my sake... that didn't feel bad at all.
To me, it was a story that had already become the past. To her, it seemed, it was anything but.
"The ones who instigated it are dead. The ones who carried it out are dead. There were certainly people who covered it up, and that is genuinely regrettable, but—"
"Regrettable, but?"
"Wouldn't it be a waste to spend the rest of my life hunting down whoever buried it?"
"..."
I approached her slowly and wiped away the tears running down her face.
"I'm all right. But having you hear my story, cry for me, get angry for me — that doesn't feel bad at all."
Perhaps I had been thinking about it ever since that day. The figure I had seen beside me had been a monster, and the moment of rampaging Spirit Integration had been terror itself. That was why I had never used this power. Because of how it had looked to me, I had been afraid that in anyone else's eyes, a person using Spirit Integration would look like a monster too.
"Human lives are too short to spend them consumed by rage and hatred. Let's try to live a little happier than that."
"...We might just happen to find them, you know."
"Well then, I suppose we can rough them up a bit when the time comes?"
"Fine. I'll be the one to beat them up."
"I'd appreciate it if you'd at least leave that particular role to me. Though, given how hard you'd hit them, yours might actually be the harsher punishment."
And besides, I hadn't been working for the kingdom. I had merely taken part in a journey to save the world.
"After all that, you still trust people?"
"Do you?"
"..."
"I trust you, Miss Livia. Why wouldn't I be able to trust others?"
"It feels different somehow."
"Does it?"
"Lois. You..."
The Hero looked at me as she spoke.
"..."
This time it was my turn to look at her in surprise. That assessment was the last thing I had expected.
"Why do you think that?"
"Pain hurts everyone. Suffering hurts everyone. You were exposed to pure malice, and even so, you're living kindly. You don't weigh the costs when you help someone. Reaching out a hand is just the natural thing to do, and you don't treat it like some noble act."
"..."
"That's the result of tremendous effort. After everything that happened, you spent your whole life trying to believe in people's goodwill. Trying to believe that people have goodness in them, and that that's what being human is supposed to look like."
I went a little blank. Even Madame Florence hadn't understood that much. She had educated me hoping that would be the case, and perhaps that was precisely why she had never been able to see it.
I had tried.
I had been exposed to malice. I had been born and raised inside it, and believing in anything else had been difficult. And yet I had tried.
Why?
There was a reason, of course. Because I had wanted it to be true. I had wanted to believe that goodwill passing from one person to another was the way the world was meant to be. That people were beings who could hurt someone for no reason at all — and at the same time, beings who could help someone, who could save them.
"I..."
I opened my mouth, slowly.
"I might have saved you because I wanted to believe in that goodwill."
"Well, that doesn't matter."
"Doesn't it?"
"You said it yourself. You called me a noble person. That it didn't matter what I was thinking or what I felt when I saved people — all that remained was the result. That I'd saved countless people. That I'd saved the world."
"..."
"It's the same for you. Who cares about the reason? Even with a past like that, you didn't surrender to malice. You believed in goodwill, and you believed in me as I am now."
I stared at her, dazed. Simply dazed.
"You're an incredible person. That power that's as good as a mark of shame to you — you used it to protect people. I'll be the one to tell you that you're noble."
"..."
"You know, you said I was noble, right? So I, the officially certified noble Hero as recognized by you, will acknowledge that you're noble too. What's the big deal? You save people and you believe in them. That's what nobility is."
She grinned. Her smile was like the sun, and before I knew it, I was smiling too.
Seeing how much she had changed was moving, and at the same time, I had thought of her as someone I could never reach. And yet that person had heard my story and still called me noble. It wasn't a bad feeling in the slightest.
"I suppose I really did try."
After that, I hadn't been able to trust anyone. I had hated everything. I had even hated Madame Florence, the woman who had saved my life — because she hadn't even given me a reason to die. More than anything, I had hated myself. I had pretended to be detached, pretended I had given up on everything, and yet the moment an opportunity presented itself I had clawed and struggled to stay alive, unable to escape this hellish existence.
But at some point, it all went hollow. I had already survived. What meaning was there in wasting a life like this? The ones who had made me suffer were dead. The ones behind them were dead too. So why was I the only one who still had to hurt?
That was why I decided to believe. I tried to become someone who could. I pretended to believe. I clenched my teeth and tried, as much as I could, to look at the good in things.
I put on a mask — a mask of someone who believed that goodwill passed from person to person, the way it was supposed to. And then a woman came along and took that mask off. I had been afraid. Afraid that the ugliness of a man who couldn't trust anyone would still be written on the face beneath.
But that woman said, in so many words: Look at that. We're the same. And she laughed, as if it were nothing.
That was—
"...Livia."
"Huh? What? ...Wait, what did you just call me!?"
Livia, who had reacted with her usual confidence, went huh? and what was that? and ran it through her head a second time — then flushed scarlet in an instant. It was exactly the reaction I had been hoping for, and I found that I didn't mind it at all, so I smiled.
"Livia. What is it?"
"Uh, well... you've been calling me Miss Livia this whole time."
"Was that improper of me? I wanted to show you, in my own way, that I've opened my heart to you. If you'd rather I didn't, I can go back to calling you Miss—"
"No!"
She came straight up to me. Her face was red all the way to her ears, plainly embarrassed, and yet she still came at me head-on. That, if nothing else, was so very Livia.
"Livia is fine. I want you, at least, to call me that."
"..."
"Hehe."
Madame Florence had raised a puppy once, and I was fairly sure it had grinned in exactly this way. I smiled along with her.
"Did you fall for me? Want to make it official? I'm fine with it whenever."
"Well... it's a little complicated."
"This guy is impossible...!!"
"Haha."
I laughed. It wasn't as though my heart hadn't raced. It wasn't as though there wasn't something about her that occupied my thoughts. But if you asked me whether it was love, it was still a little too soon to say.
"But you know..."
"..."
"I think I've become able to imagine a future like that."
"...!"
I rose slowly, and Livia stood with me, smiling.
"Great! Next we make it real, not just imagined! Let's go! Come on! To Elvenheim!"
"Yes, we should. This is our journey for now, after all — just the two of us."
"Yeah. Thank you."
"For what?"
"It's not Olivia Reinhardt's journey anymore. Now it's Olivia Reinhardt and Lois's journey."
"..."
Come to think of it, I had told her last time that this was Livia's journey. Had that been bothering her? I hadn't meant to draw a line.
"It's a journey for two."
"I see. Incidentally, if we were to become a couple, what is it you'd want to do?"
"Get married."
"Ah. So once you achieve a goal, a new one presents itself."
I decided not to ask what came after marriage. Livia had virtually no social skills to speak of, so I needed to keep a reasonable amount of distance. If I wasn't careful, I'd get eaten before we even became a couple, never mind getting married.
In the sexual sense.
I gave some thought to what I could possibly do if a Hero who was, for all intents and purposes, the strongest in history decided to pounce on me. The conclusion I reached was that there was absolutely nothing I could do.