Will You Hold Me...? (4)
It was the first time in her life she had ever examined someone's memories this closely.
Adrian knew perfectly well that it was an intrusion. These were things he had never permitted — she had no way of knowing whether he would ever choose to reveal them, whether he would ever want to show them to her.
And yet she reached into those memories all the same, because she wanted to understand how Robert's heart had come to be the way it was. That hollowed-out emptiness, like the mind of a man already dying — she wanted to grasp even a fragment of it, so that she might cradle what remained.
It was work no one else could do. Only she could attempt it. So she would.
Compassion, she supposed one might call it.
A person unlike any she had ever met — one who stirred her curiosity for no reason at all, one her eyes kept drifting toward without her willing it. There should have been no cause for unease around a stranger, and yet somehow, whenever they were together, she caught herself fearing he might vanish at any moment.
And so she was trying to read his memories. Even if what she was about to face turned out to hold little meaning, it would at least help lay this question to rest.
The light seeping from the rosary wrapped around her body, and her consciousness began, little by little, to dim.
Robert's memories of death. It was time to face them.
Even one who read memories could not see everything, from birth to death. At most, she could look a little closer at fragments she had glimpsed only in pieces before. And because she saw not with eyes but with the power of a god, the world held no color — yet the memories it showed her were without distortion.
Her consciousness had scarcely dimmed before Adrian felt the sense of sight return, and she opened her eyes carefully. That sense reacted sharply even to the smallest light. She would be able to keep viewing memories until her divine power ran dry, so it was better to seek out the ones that seemed important, if she could manage it.
The space where memories appeared was the mindscape within Adrian herself. Perhaps that was why there was nothing to be seen around her but a single winding path cutting through the center. And as she walked it, what emerged were the tattered fragments of memory Robert had once shown her.
They were anything but ordinary. Every one of these memories held Robert's death — and a man who had died many times over could be explained by only one thing. Regression.
Then why did the same time repeat? For what reason, toward what end? It was true the concept of regression was difficult to grasp, but she understood what it meant to live a life repeating forever from a single fixed point. This was no explanation anyone had given her. It was a concept she understood the instant she beheld Robert's lives — blooming up alongside her divine power, as though it had always existed — and it helped her comprehend, however faintly, the many deaths of Robert Taylor.
She reached toward a memory that floated in the air like a droplet of water.
Robert's first death. Feeling it seep into her mind, Adrian slowly closed her eyes.
Reading a memory was like surrendering one's body to flowing water. Drifting in over the current of it, she quietly opened her eyes once more.
In an instant the scenery had changed. At the roar of pouring rain she looked up — the dark sky was thick with storm clouds.
Rain was falling. A chill wind swept down from the cold and lightless heavens, and the colorless grassland whipped and swayed aimlessly beneath it. Beside the field stood an enormous mansion, and Adrian knew at once what it was. This was within Robert's memory — so that vast house must be the Taylor Ducal Mansion itself. Yet for all its grandeur, it was filled with nothing but shadow. A dark, turbid aura clung to the place; where her divine power brushed against the darkness, it crumbled away with a faint whisper — and with it came the faint scent of blood.
Why would there be blood here, of all places?
"Are you here somewhere?"
The only color to be seen was the dim glow of light. As though her very existence had been excluded from this colorless world, the pouring rain fell all around her without ever touching her. She did not get wet. Having confirmed as much, Adrian began to move forward slowly. She felt rather like a ghost stepped out of a fairy tale — her body passed through walls, and none of the people she passed sensed her presence at all.
Which was only natural. She had not traveled back through time; she had merely become a spectator of memory. A butler walked straight through her body and she startled for a moment, then steadied herself with a long, slow breath.
Seeing with eyes, people passing through her — not one of these was a sensation one could grow used to easily. If she lost her sight again, would it not be terribly inconvenient after this? Being able to see was, in truth, a profoundly comfortable thing. She could look directly upon the faces of those who regarded her — perhaps she might even see, with her own eyes, the smile she had until now only imagined.
Yet every stretch of that dark corridor raised the same question: where was everyone in this vast ducal mansion? People passed by now and then, but Robert's face was nowhere to be found. She remembered his appearance perfectly, from the glimpses she had caught in earlier memories — that face with its cold eyes, which had nonetheless smiled so gently at Mirajane.
—"There was someone I held in my heart."
Did those words mean Mirajane? The two of them must have crossed paths any number of times in this life already, and it was impossible he felt nothing. Then what thoughts did he carry? With what eyes did he look upon Mirajane, who had been his lover in a life before this one? The question surfaced unbidden, and Adrian's brow creased.
It was none of her concern. Those were feelings Robert himself would have to decide; her worrying would change nothing. Pushing aside the thoughts pressing to fill her head, she walked on down the silent corridor. Gliding through a stillness where even footsteps made no sound, she felt her unease swell and swell. What she sought was the memory of Robert's death — was it not strange that such a memory should live here, in the mansion?
It was a little later that Adrian, walking the breadth of the ducal house, stopped dead. A faint voice rising from somewhere below froze her in her tracks.
"You've always been this way. Pathetic, useless, and foolish — every single time."
A cold, dark woman's voice. The instant Adrian understood it for Yuria Taylor — Robert's sister — she started walking again.
Descending to the underground was not difficult. She channeled divine power and her body lifted, weightless; stretching a hand down toward the floor, she watched the scene of the cellar below come into view. She let herself sink through and landed upon its floor.
Tap.
Feet on stone, Adrian looked quietly around. This cellar was no single room — it seemed to descend on and on, ever downward. Iron doors, one after another, and people locked behind them; she frowned at the sight, and yet understood at once. The tangled, buried secrets that great noble houses always carried. One might have called it the sort of rumor that spread like a city ghost story: every exalted noble family keeps something hidden in its depths. Disposing of those who betray them, abducting threats with their own hands. That this reality lay spread before her eyes was startling — but she pressed her mouth shut for a moment and turned her head away. The time she could remain in the memory was not long, and right now, finding Robert came first.
Raising a silent prayer for the fallen behind those doors, she set off again toward the direction of Yuria's voice. And as the voice drew closer, she found it was no longer the only sound. Someone was screaming — a scream brimming with agony, pleading for forgiveness, for something.
A dry creak — the sound leaked out between clenched teeth. She knew that voice. Robert Taylor. The scream of the man who always spoke to her so gently drained her face ash-white; gnawing at her trembling lips, Adrian looked cautiously ahead.
What she saw was too cruel for words. A man bound to a chair, coughing up blood — and a woman watching him without a flicker of feeling. Who would believe the two of them were brother and sister? Torturing her own kin by her own hand, and feeling not even a trace of guilt for it.
"Robert..."
Adrian's voice did not reach him. Screaming as blades bit into him, screaming at the agony of heated iron searing his flesh — Robert's eyes had rolled back white. Tears stained red with blood streamed from them. Lips chewed through until they simply tore, wounds cut and gouged so deep that bone gleamed through — his body was covered in them.
"Sister... please, I was... wrong. This is all a misunderstanding— you know I never even meant to raise treason... forgive me... please."
"How am I to believe you never meant it at all?"
Thunk.
The iron skewer punched through his thigh, and another scream tore out of Robert. And yet he looked now to be past even screaming. Brief final spasms leaked out of him now and then; beyond that, there was only a faint breath and his head slumping forward. That was all.
"...Why. You're family."
Treason — she could not begin to fathom it. But whatever the truth of that charge, this much was simply beyond understanding. No wrong, however grave, could justify torture like that. At least by anything Adrian knew of the world, no crime existed that warranted doing this to a person.
His fingernails and toenails had all been torn out — she could see it plainly. Blood dripped down in fat drops, pooling into a dark lake that spread across the cellar floor. Even so, Robert was still begging forgiveness. She did not know what sin he had committed. But no sin deserved a punishment like that. Flesh torn away, tortured to the very brink of death and past it — and still, the words Robert murmured never changed.
"I'm... sorry."
"Your behavior changed of late, so I watched you for a time. I thought I had finally seen the possibility of one worthy of the name Taylor. And yet... to think you would stoop to something this pathetic."
"I'm... sorry."
The blade carved straight through his thigh. The blood showed no sign of stopping. Then a clear liquid was poured over the wound, and as Robert writhed in fresh agony, Yuria smiled — a small, quiet smile.
Adrian understood, then, that the smile was joy, pure and simple. Joy at Robert's suffering. Joy at this reality — him fallen so low, being broken at her hands. She was rejoicing, purely and simply. She looked as if she had long wished for precisely this. Adrian's legs gave out beneath her; she could no longer walk properly at all.
If what she was watching was truly Robert's memory, then he had endured this — again and again and again. This was not the first death he had met, was it? The deaths she herself had seen already numbered more than ten. And still he could smile at her, so gently? Was that even possible?
Her trembling hand rose toward the empty air. She could not walk; she could not reach him. But the tips of Adrian's fingers stretched toward Robert all the same — toward the man bowing his head before Yuria Taylor, clinging to consciousness by a single thread.
Of course it did not reach. The hand extended toward his cheek passed straight through him. Even the blood pooled on the floor would not stain her.
It was only natural. She was merely revisiting memory; she could give Robert no help at all. Nothing. She could not heal those wounds. She could not strike Yuria Taylor down for him. All she could do was watch.
The deaths she would witness after this would surely be the same. However many times she looked — the same. However many times she turned it over — the same. She could offer Robert nothing at all. It was only natural. So why did it sit so ill in her chest? She clenched the hand resting against the floor.
A long while passed, until her hand had gone white to the bone; when Adrian finally pried loose her trembling fingers and lifted her head, Yuria Taylor had already vanished. In the silence broken only by the sound of her own breathing, Robert's faint voice pierced through.
"...This time, too. Nothing changes."
Those half-open eyes were not the empty voids she knew. Not anger, not resentment for his own pain — only a quiet, brimming pity for the Yuria who had disappeared. She found it strange; but his words went on.
"This time, too... you won't believe me."
The tears on his cheek fell to the floor below. Unlike when he had writhed in agony, they ran clear. Regret, perhaps, for something. And hearing them, Adrian understood — this life was not his first. He had already passed through death any number of times, and still those eyes were not empty. Then the Robert she knew... had he endured things worse even than this?
It was a truth too hard to believe, and one she did not want to believe. But before she could add a single word, the scene began slowly to change. She stared, dazed, as the scenery crumbled away like smoke — then, noticing that the rain was still falling, she turned her gaze.
Shhhhhh—
"The execution of the criminal Robert will now commence."
At the sight of Robert bound to the execution platform, waiting for death, Adrian's face went white all over again. A countless crowd gathered to gawk at the spectacle — and bound at its very heart, waiting for death, Robert. An execution staged like entertainment in a great circular arena. Adrian squeezed her eyes shut.
"Robert, wait—!"
She shouted even knowing the voice could not reach him. Even if she exerted her power, no one would see it. Even if she poured out her divinity and shattered the scaffold, Robert's gaze would remain fixed on empty air. His expression held no lingering attachment to anything. As though he had sensed that everything was over now, his closed eyes showed not the faintest hint of opening.
Tat-tat-tat—
Crying out a voice that could never reach him, Adrian dashed through the crowd — and at last arrived before Robert. She was close enough now to see his face, whole and unhidden. For a moment she stared, dazed, at how composed he remained even facing the death before him; then, catching sight of lips parted ever so slightly, her eyes narrowed. He seemed to be trying to say something. Like a vow spoken to himself, Robert — watching the blade come for him — moved his lips without a sound.
"...Next time. Without fail."
Did those words speak of the lives still to come? Adrian could not understand. She could not make sense of this memory she had never expected — and still, it went on. Like dust scattering on the wind, the world began to fall apart around her.
And then she understood. That Robert's deaths were far, far from over.