When the Violets Wither - 5
I find myself thinking back to the first time I met Theresia.
Those were the days before I knew what regression was — the days when I still strained to win my father's favor. Yuria still looked upon me with undisguised displeasure, and I remember it as a time when, unable to shake free of the shock of losing my mother, I was struggling in every way a mind can struggle. That was when Theresia came to me.
The day I first met her was the day she spoke to a boy standing all alone on a balcony, dragged along to a social gathering he never wanted.
Creeeak— the old hinges groaned as the door swung open, scattering dust into the air. In the aged mansion there was only a single living presence.
Theresia. I take another step forward, that name in my mind.
"How could you be so cruel? Whatever I'd done, how could anyone treat a person like this...!"
She was the first person who had ever raged over the wounds I bore, the first who had ever sympathized with my lot. So my heart was drawn to her. Perhaps that was only natural — was it not inevitable that, after my mother, my heart would turn to the first person who had ever held me up?
At the very least, I believe I was sincere. Through my first death, and through the several deaths that followed it. Theresia was the handhold that kept me standing through those successive deaths. There were times it was Mirajane instead — but that is a story from a little later, isn't it?
I remember it was around my fifth death that the word fiancée lost all meaning for me, and I first tasted betrayal.
When I died the first time, my only thought had been to devote myself to the family. Being framed for treason by the Crown Prince was an injustice, but I judged that once my family trusted me, such suspicions would dissolve in no time. This was the empire's only ducal house, after all. If even that house denied it, then not even the Crown Prince himself could force through a charge of treason.
And yet nothing changed. Whenever I earned my family's trust, something would twist in some strange quarter, and everything would come apart. The cause I eventually traced was Theresia.
No. It couldn't be her. I searched with that denial in my heart, and in the end I learned exactly what she had done under the name of Taylor.
"I'm sorry. I never dreamed I'd be caught like this — you startled me. Just how long had you been digging into everything behind my back?"
That was how swiftly a person's mask could be swapped. The woman who had always worn a gentle smile showed me a cold sneer unlike any she'd ever worn, and in her eyes there was no affection left at all. The woman who had smiled at me, who had loved me and promised me a future — she simply was not there.
I refused to believe it. This cycle is only an aberration, I told myself, and I went on repeating deaths that never needed repeating. If Theresia ran such schemes, I died. If she showed the faintest sign of such intent, I died. And whenever I saw her once again stripping away the family's assets, I hanged myself.
What I came to understand across those endlessly repeated lives was that I had never been loved at all.
I think I drifted rather badly from around that time. I kept a fiancée and courted Mirajane all the same, and for a while I made Mirajane the refuge of my heart. Even after Mirajane died — even after the season when I took up the sword once more had come and gone — I still kept Theresia as my fiancée. There was no sentiment in it. I merely meant to pore over every variable in pursuit of the precise reason why I died.
I died even with the family's backing. Even when I turned a blind eye to Theresia's atrocities — even when things went so far as marriage — nothing changed. And so my gaze turned to the Crown Prince himself, until I arrived at a single goal: killing him.
I thought something had gone crooked somewhere. There were things no effort could reach. Whichever way I walked, whatever means I employed, time always flowed toward the one ending in which I died.
If only. What if. Even as I lived with those words hanging from my lips, I always kept Theresia at my side — and thus, only now, am I living in a time without her.
The floor buried in dust was slowly coming clean again, revealing its true color as though someone had walked these halls before me — and from it, I realized Theresia was drawing near.
If we met, what should I say first? Yet when I actually turned the thought over, I found I had nothing in particular to say to Theresia. That was natural enough; I had never once imagined we would meet again like this. On the road to kill Theresia, what words does one offer the person one means to kill?
"No letter today, I see. I might be a little disappointed."
Climbing the spiral staircase, I let memory climb alongside me. The memories I shared with Theresia were hardly few — perhaps they even outnumbered those I had with Yuria. The recollections of the brief time I had trusted her had always been the ones to gnaw at me, and so I laughed, bitter, beneath the flood of them filling my skull.
"If the Young Matriarch torments you again, come tell me. I'll manage something, whatever it takes."
Having heard those words, Yuria sealed me away in the cellar. I never knew it was something Theresia had engineered. I simply believed — and perhaps the only one to blame was the me who believed.
Believing was the sin. Trusting someone, thinking that person would be good — that was the crime.
"Isn't it the one who believed who's at fault? I really can't imagine why you ever thought someone like me would love you."
If that were true, then was there a single soul in this world who was no sinner? If yearning to be trusted was a crime — if nothing more than picturing a future where everyone survived was the act of an idiot, a defective mind — then I would rather have been a fool.
I have given that up now. The man who tried to become a fool no longer dies. And the future that Robert, in his hundred and first life, is drawing will be far bleaker than that.
Rumble— At the end of the staircase, a colossal door came into view. Unlike the rest of the aged, crumbling mansion, it was pristine and sleek, as though finished only moments ago. As if it had read my movements, the door parted its own seam and came to me, and so, slowly, it opened. Even as the wind spilling out from it whipped my hair about, my gaze stayed fixed, unwavering, on the woman seated beyond.
The first time regression began, there was a greeting I heard in the garden, staring blankly at Theresia.
"Good morning, Robert."
"Good morning, Robert."
The voice was colder than back then, a shade more funereal — but the words themselves were the same. What lay before my eyes, however, differed in nearly everything. Words that had always reached me against a backdrop of sunlit greenery, and now I heard them inside a room dyed red.
I took hold of my sword. With a hand trembling at the knuckles I clamped down hard on the hilt, and looked at Theresia just as I was.
The blood-drenched woman was looking back at me. I had braced for eyes brimming with nothing but hatred — instead they were filled with something I could not name, and they were aimed at me.
"...It really has been a long time."
By the time Robert found her, every memory had already returned.
Theresia laughed softly. The wounds covering her body — wounds she herself had inflicted on Robert — made her think how remarkably he had endured all of this. Even with the power she now held, it hurt. To think he had borne it in the body of a mere human.
She had learned that he was living his hundred and first life — for she too, in the end, belonged to that hundred and first — and she knew now, as well, that the Robert coming to kill her was nothing like the boy she had first met. Had it not been for that, she would never even have raised the matter of breaking off the engagement.
"Should I say it's been a long time — or that we've met altogether too many times? Honestly, I'm rather mixed up at the moment."
"I doubt you can even be called human any longer. Did you want your revenge on me that badly? Casting aside even your own identity — killing people along the way."
Robert's gaze settled on Theresia's body itself. It resembled less a human figure than the demonkind the Evil Dragon was said to have once summoned: skin drained past pallor into gray, and eyes steeped black. He had known she bore the Evil Dragon's influence — but flesh that regrew without cease could not, look as he might, be called human.
"I had no choice. Everything fell apart because of you."
With that, she burst into a short laugh. The mind that had been in turmoil as the memories returned had more or less righted itself. It had been she who killed the family; she who cut down the servants. And her elder brother's death — in the end, had that not simply been coincidence stacked upon coincidence? Robert had watched her brother die over and over across the loops, and so he had brought his revenge upon House Violet to a flawless conclusion without laying a finger on a thing himself.
There would be no revival. Now that she had touched the Evil Dragon, House Violet could never rise again in this empire. If anything, it was remarkable that he had never abandoned her, not even through a hundred deaths. Had she been Robert, she would have disposed of the traitor first of all.
Remorse — at that, Theresia gave a small laugh. If the feeling she now carried could be called remorse, it was, even by her own judgment, a singularly vile emotion. Had she not approached him from the very start without one thread of love? Then she had been caught, and things had twisted, and this was where it had led. There was no reason to be sorry. And yet — this repulsive thing stirring in her chest was something far more tangled than that.
It was a feeling strung together through repeated regressions; one earned by killing Robert again and again, and tasting that anguish with every death. Her heart, which had wanted nothing but vengeance, had grown fainter at the edges, and the eyes she turned on Robert wavered, just slightly.
"What a pitiful man you are."
Would pity be the right name for it? For a man who had staked his life on a fool's errand and died a hundred deaths for it — and for herself, who had killed that man time and again, it was perhaps a laughable emotion to harbor. But now she had grasped how warped she herself had become, and she knew that none of it had ever been Robert's doing. So she could finally look at him through something like an objective lens.
"I can't quite tell what you find so pitiful about me."
"When a person dies a hundred times and still goes on living like that, I imagine anyone would think so."
"...What—"
It was the most expressive face she had ever seen on him. Watching his whole body jolt, she smiled thinly. Perhaps no one, in all this time, had ever uncovered his memories of the previous cycles. A dry cackle leaked out through her torn lips. Robert's eyes grew a shade graver, and those blue eyes — devoid of any trace of expression — fixed upon Theresia.
"So you have remembered. The past."
"I remember all of it now. How I killed you — and how you died."
She gazed steadily at the fingers that had pierced a temple, then gave a small laugh and added,
"I remembered everything."
"So that is why you have been so composed. I half expected you to have gone mad."
"Why would I go mad? Every bit of it was my own doing. Besides, dredging up memories changes nothing."
Rumble— The ground began to quake. The power granted through the Evil Dragon's favor was a special thing — a strength no ordinary person could carry, the kind of power that belonged only to those called mages. Before long, red tentacles came writhing up out of the earth, and the corners of Theresia's mouth twisted.
"You can't expect me to die a quiet, graceful death for you here."
Shing— At the sight of the sword clearing its sheath so cleanly, something unaccustomed stirred in Theresia's eyes. That blade was no ordinary one. It was not the weapon of a Robert without any martial strength, but of a man who had, at some point along the way, attained mastery of the sword. She had not seen every life he had lived; she had only glimpsed those in which she had a hand in his death — the ones in which she died to him.
If this feeling were called regret, she thought the name ill-fitting. This was resignation — simply the fruit of finally acknowledging what she herself had done. Now she could let all of it go and feel nothing at all. A woman who had murdered her own family had nowhere left to return to. Even if she went on living here, she would die somewhere, someday regardless. And if so, then dying at the hands of the fiancé who had shared so very long a road with her — there was nothing bad in that at all.
"...Ah, but there is one thing I should tell you."
At the whisper of that bewitching voice, Robert's body flinched once more. The sight of him reacting to her every word was, quite simply, amusing. With what heart was that man standing there, she wondered. A man who had once loved her sincerely, if only for a time — and who had since learned how completely he had been deceived. With what eyes was he looking at her now?
"When I said I never loved you — I meant it, every word. And in every one of my lives, I imagine everything you ever heard from me was just the same."
Theresia could not understand Robert. No doubt he could not understand her either. But of one thing she was certain: this would end only when one of them died and was gone. And if it came to that, dying by Robert's hand did not seem so bad. Theirs had been a bond woven from ill fate from the very beginning — and if her death were to cause him pain... well, surely that was the cleanest ending of all.
"Theresia."
There had been a man who once whispered her name so tenderly. And there had been a woman who meant only to use him — who had even gone so far as to kill him. Remembering the letters that had always arrived for her, Theresia smiled faintly. Before long that laughter swelled and swelled, until it was nothing but the cackling of a madwoman.