You Know, the Reason You're So Lovely Is
Not a single morning since I arrived in this place had failed to torment me, but today was painful in a special way all its own.
Because of yesterday's massacre, I had dreamed a dream far too happy.
The screams of the people I'd failed to save thanks to my own inadequacy. The ones I'd let slip through my fingers while compromising over trivial sentiments.
I spread out my palm and stared at it. The same shape as yesterday, the same color, the same nature even — and yet somehow, it looked different to me now.
Which was the weaker thing, my heart or my ability?
Could it be that it wasn't this society that was wrong, but me?
"...Ha."
A laugh escaped me.
Pain is long, but the time you have to agonize over it is short.
There was no room to rest. I hauled my complicated, tangled-up mind along and started moving. The place I arrived at was always the same place.
"Hey there~"
The person who was always smiling.
Robin Lydian Musica, the silver-haired woman waving her hand enthusiastically in greeting, beamed at me brightly.
Under normal circumstances I would have turned on my heel and walked right back out, but today I didn't even have the strength for that. I gave a half-hearted wave in reply and left it at that.
"You look rough. Something happen?"
What came back was another smile. Robin sidled up to me and — jab jab — poked my side with a finger as she posed the question.
Setting aside how she kept violating my personal space, I had a question of my own now.
Why hadn't she come yesterday? It was a mandatory summons — what on earth gave her the confidence to skip it?
"...Hey. Why didn't you show up yesterday? What do you think you have to gain from that?"
The question spilled out of me before I could dress it up in better words.
At that, she seemed genuinely caught off guard — those pupils that never so much as flinched at anything quietly widened.
I'd approached the subject obliquely once or twice before, but this was the first time I'd ever come right out and shown concern for her like that.
"The commander's showing her face in two months. Attendance is mandatory — don't go skipping it for no reason. Get there on your own, got it?"
But I owed her more favors than I could count. Even if she'd only lent a hand with an eye to exploiting me later, the fact remained that she had helped.
So I decided to meddle a little longer in return. Tap, tap — I patted her shoulder the way she'd poked me, then brushed past her and headed for the building.
"Seems like something's weighing on you. Am I right?"
To be precise, I tried to head inside.
Robin's hand landed on my shoulder, took hold, and turned me back around to face her.
Those violet eyes, holding some kind of mystery in their depths, still gleamed. It was a little ironic that my own reflection in them looked so murky by comparison.
"Shall we walk together?"
What her graceful fingertip pointed toward was the brightest spot — the exact opposite direction from where I was headed, glimpsed from within the darkness.
I gave no answer, just stood there quietly, and it didn't take Robin long at all to act on her own. Without a word, she snatched up my hand and started leading me away.
For the whole walk, the sounds around us swirled at the edges of my hearing, but I didn't bother listening, so nothing stayed with me.
I turned my head, thinking I might at least take in the scenery. There was a violet-eyed woman staring at me, and nothing else.
"Nothing to say?"
"...About what, exactly."
I put on an unnecessarily prickly attitude. Things had finally settled back into our usual dynamic.
Robin watching me at her leisure, and me guarding against her far more than the situation called for.
"When a wound opens, you have to treat it. Not lie there alone groaning until it festers and bursts."
That textbook-style platitude landed squarely in my chest, and it went straight through me.
I had no logical rebuttal. Pretending to be composed, I simply swept a hand through my hair.
"Zeo, of the past, the present, and the future — which do you value most?"
But her voice wouldn't stop. It was a question with no discernible intent behind it, and yet there was something in that single line that pulled people in like a riptide.
After a very brief deliberation, I could produce an answer.
"The future."
"Why?"
"Because it hasn't been decided yet."
"Mm. That sounds like you."
Heh heh — Robin laughed, short and light.
"Oh, and for the record, I'd say the past. Once something is settled, it can never be changed."
Wearing the same face she always wore, Robin declared her position.
Her meaning was unreadable, so I brushed it off as I did everything else — but what mattered was that this was one of the rare moments where I actually agreed with her opinion.
But that was all. The conversation, as it stood, was completely empty of substance.
"Zeo, you've compromised with your own sense of justice."
Right up until that moment — until she drove a blade into the most painful place I had —
"...What did you just say?"
"Oh, I just threw that out half expecting to be wrong. Guess I wasn't, huh?"
The teasing in her manner stirred up a fierce discomfort, but what struck me more was the fact that she had seen straight through the trembling of my heart.
How could anyone read a person that well? No — come to think of it, she always had.
Every time I stood before Robin, I felt flayed bare.
Was there something about me that I myself didn't know? This was why I hated her. Because she knew me far too well, she could handle me like a toy.
"But Zeo, I don't think compromise is necessarily a bad thing."
And it was at precisely this moment that both our footsteps stopped at the same time.
"There's nothing in this world without a purpose. Everything exists because it's needed — that's what I believe."
The voice she added was white.
"Even the violence that's supposed to be restrained as much as possible in ordinary society — you and I live in a world that was designed so it can't function without violence, you know?"
But the content those words carried was a bitterly dark black.
People passed to and fro around us, but standing still at the center of it all, we held only each other in our eyes. She was blue; I was violet.
"So compromise works the same way. Leaving a problem open and negotiating over it is a necessary act."
"...Why are you suddenly saying all this?"
"Because I figured — you, walking toward the opposite side of what this society demands — you'd try to do some good and end up colliding with reality instead."
She let go of my hand, quietly stepped back, and smiled again. Then she stretched out her arm, extending it as far as it would go, and pointed at something.
I didn't need her to say what she was implying.
The blackest thing I knew. The Shatrira tavern.
"Let me guess. Yesterday, you couldn't stomach the injustice and tried to do the right thing — and ended up just drawing a line instead. How's that?"
I didn't answer. Because it was the correct answer.
"And then, convinced you'd compromised your own justice, you sank into a deep gloom and started wondering whether you'd been right after all. Am I close?"
"...You're right."
This time I answered. Because it was the correct answer.
"...I can't guarantee that I'm right — not by any stretch. But at least within this society you're soaked in right now, this is how it is. Goodness is wrong, and violence is right."
Once more, Robin stepped back from me. She drew one of the daggers hidden inside her clothes and scored a line into the ground with it. Long, and thin.
That line divided her from me.
Nothing more than a single hair-thin line — and yet its mere existence made it feel as though an enormous distance had opened up between us.
"It was designed that way, without the slightest regard for anyone's personal will. If you went out there, I'd be the antisocial one, sure — but here, right now, the person walking in a direction this society doesn't sanction is unmistakably you."
"...What are you actually trying to say?"
This time, she closed the distance instead of retreating. But she did not cross the line.
At the same moment, she broke into a bright smile. Wearing the very same smile I was most glad to see from her, Robin gave a soft knock on my chest.
"Even if you compromise — never give up on being good."
As much as I hated to admit it, it was beautiful. Because it was just like her.
But then, conversely, smoke began to rise. The question took on the shape of a gas, filling my head to bursting.
No — it wasn't only this time. It was a sentence I'd always carried inside my chest.
One tangled knot of thread that had taken up permanent residence in my skull since the day I came here — and yet I was too afraid to ask about it directly, too reluctant.
"...Why do you do this much for me?"
It felt like now or never.
"Hm?"
"Exactly what I said. Why — why, over and over, do you keep going out of your way for me? What reason could you possibly have to care this much?"
"... "
The answer that came back took the form of silence.
A knowing look, paired with a smile whose intent I couldn't read — and at least that much, I hadn't wanted.
But strangely enough, it wasn't all that uncomfortable. The stillness was the same as before; the difference lay in the fact that this time, it didn't sting.
"Then let me ask you the reverse. What's your reason for not pushing me away?"
"What?"
"Exactly what I said. You find me unsettling, you're afraid of me, and you dislike me — just a tiny little bit — don't you?"
The words, drawn back like a bowstring and loosed, buried themselves in my chest. Panic spilled over into action, and my hands began to tremble.
Because those words weren't merely hitting the mark — they were piercing straight through it. Exactly as she'd said: I was afraid of her, and yes, I disliked her, just a little.
"And yet, oddly enough, you never shove me away. Even just now, you were worried about my skipping the summons and told me what it was about. So what's the reason for that? Will you tell me?"
A question answered with a question — an absurdly ironic situation, and yet no irritation welled up inside me.
Simply by reflex, my mouth was reciting the correct answer to the question she had asked.
The reason I couldn't treat her harshly, even knowing that she frightened me —
"...Because even so, you helped me."
A single pure sentence without a speck of a lie in it. Her reaction unfolded in three distinct stages.
First, she simply gazed at me with eyes softer than usual. Just for that moment, her gaze didn't feel like a snake's.
Next, the corners of her mouth lifted. It was unsettling. From that instant, she began to feel like a snake again.
And finally —
"...Heh heh. I see. Then it's my turn, isn't it?"
An enormously, supremely satisfied smile — carrying the deepest shade of delight I'd seen from her in recent memory.
"That's exactly it. You're a good person, and you know perfectly well that once you've accepted a debt of gratitude, you can't be cruel to the one who gave it."
Spinning around gleefully, arms spread wide, she swept through one full circle and kept talking.
She was genuinely enjoying herself. My turn never came back around.
This space belonged entirely to Robin now. It was no stage where any existence but hers had the right to make a sound.
"Oh — don't get the wrong idea. I'm not planning to use you or milk you for anything. It's just simply, hmm, well, yes."
An audience member. Yes — right now I was nothing more than a spectator. Holding my breath in silence, listening to her speech: that was the best and the finest posture available to me.
"It felt like finding a stone trying with all its might to shine white, all on its own, in a space this filthy, this shabby, this utterly saturated with black."
As she spoke, she picked up the whitest of the pebbles rolling around on the ground and held it up.
Bits of dirt and dust clung to it here and there, but it was white — unmistakably white.
"Isn't it fascinating? Everyone here is filthy, and this whole area is black through and through, so even if the stone soaked up the color, not a single soul would blame it for it."
Then — pat, pat — she carefully brushed away the dust.
The somewhat cleaner pebble rolled around in her palm. Back and forth, as though pouring out the whole of its existence.
"It's all the same black everywhere, and yet the stone keeps struggling, all by itself, to stay white."
But that was its best. However desperately it rolled, the pebble could never escape her palm.
"No one criticizes it. In this filthy place, not a single person scolds it for getting stained."
One step — she came closer.
"And yet you keep trying, over and over, not to cross the line."
Another step — she came closer. The gap narrowed. She crossed the very line she herself had drawn, and invaded my space.
"From someone who wasn't like this just a few short months ago."
One final step — she came closer.
By now there was barely enough room left between us for a single finger.
A sentence that skewered the heart, arriving together with a fish-belly pale smile — and looking at it from point-blank range took more strength than I had.
So in the end, one step — this time, it was I who retreated.
But widening the distance changed nothing. My heart was still sour with displeasure, and her figure looked more unsettling than ever.
Yes. Like a snake, in every way.
"If I boil it all down, it's just this: I want to see, up close, the parts of you that look like an ordinary person. Your contradictions. Your humanity. There — does it make a little more sense now?"
And with that final nail driven in, the conversation was over. Because Robin had turned around and started walking away.
As if to say, follow me. With her hand held out toward me.