Vestige (14)
The color drained from Serepina's face the instant she saw Count Belluz.
Her grip on my hand tightened almost reflexively.
The faint tremor in her fingers traveled straight into my palm.
"Why have you come?"
Serepina's voice was parched dry.
"A father needs a reason to visit his daughter?"
The Count answered.
Serepina's shoulders jerked at that.
She raised her head to face him.
"You cast me out of the family."
"Cast you out of the family. I never said you were no longer my daughter."
Count Belluz's expression remained blank.
I wanted nothing more than to be anywhere else. Another man would have withdrawn his hand and fled to his own room.
Serepina's trembling fingers around mine made that impossible.
Count Belluz stood rooted in the doorway, unmoving, until Serepina surrendered with a sigh.
She released my hand and approached the door.
A latch clicked open.
"Well? Come in," she said.
She stepped inside and looked back at us.
Count Belluz entered the room without a word and turned toward me. His look said I was expected to follow.
I let out a short breath and stepped inside.
"A modest room."
Count Belluz's voice resonated low in the cramped space as he surveyed it.
Serepina took teacups from a small cupboard. She spoke as she conjured hot water out of thin air to fill the teapot.
"I had to switch rooms to stay at the Academy."
Her voice was steady.
The only seats were two worn chairs. I sat on the edge of Serepina's bed. The springs groaned.
Count Belluz gave me a sharp glance but said nothing. Breaking the silence would only earn me sneering remarks.
Serepina set three cups on the small table and lifted the teapot. Only the soft stream of pale brown tea filling each cup broke the silence in the room.
Count Belluz wet his lips at the rim of his cup and spoke.
"You truly have no intention of breaking the engagement to this ruffian? The last time, you agreed readily enough."
Serepina, seated across from him, set her cup down.
"That's right. None."
"Why?"
"It would be a lie to say my heart never wavered. But whatever anyone says, I've come to understand... if Ravin is gone... I can't go on living."
Serepina's voice held no tremor.
Count Belluz glared at me again. As though every bit of this were my fault. It might well have been, but I resented being blamed all the same. I am, after all, a petty and selfish creature.
"Serepina, a life with him will most likely not be an ordinary, happy woman's life," the Count said. "If it is a matter of looks, I will cast the widest net and find you a good man."
Serepina looked at her father as if she could not comprehend him. And Count Belluz looked at his daughter as if he could not comprehend her either. Both of them looked unbearably sad. Since the problem originated with me, I found none of it particularly pleasant.
Count Belluz studied me as he spoke to Serepina.
"Do you truly love him? Not his face, not the years you've accumulated together. Just him."
"I don't love only Ravin," Serepina answered. "I love the face anyone would like. The years we've shared since childhood. The little habits only I know. And the countless flaws, too."
Count Belluz released a long breath.
"If only I hadn't gone so far as to cast you out... I'd have torn you apart by force."
He murmured it as if to himself.
"How will you live going forward? I will not take you back into the family. Even if we could understand and accept you, you burned more than just the manor. You burned the tenant farmers' wheat fields too."
Serepina stared at the floor at that, scraping at it idly with the tip of her shoe. She sighed before she answered.
"I suppose... I will take Ravin and make a life with him."
"Then it'll be just the two of you. When will you marry?"
Serepina smiled an awkward little smile and gave no reply.
Count Belluz turned his head and leveled his glare at me once more. He looked ready to wrench my jaw off my face. The hand holding his teacup trembled; a flush crept across his face.
"Ravin has... seduced the Saintess."
Serepina's voice was perfectly flat.
Count Belluz did not ask her to repeat it. Whether he thought it was the truth or dismissed it as ravings and simply could not open his mouth because she looked too pitiful, I couldn't say. He stared at Serepina's forlorn expression. The tip of his nose and the rims of his eyes reddened. He stepped closer.
"Child... may I hold you?"
Serepina nodded. Count Belluz drew near and wrapped her tightly in his arms. He patted her back and kept murmuring the same things over and over: everything's all right, how on earth did you fall for a man like that. He comforted her like that.
Once the atmosphere had eased a little, Serepina ventured a cautious question.
"The house... what's become of it?"
"We sold a villa by the shore. It's nothing to worry over much."
"I'm sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry for."
Watching them reconcile so naturally, I felt out of place and ill at ease. As though I were standing alone in a different room.
"You don't stammer around your father," I said abruptly.
Serepina and the Count both turned to look at me.
I wasn't sure what expression Serepina wore as she looked at me. With me, she was never her whole self. A lovely girl raised with that much love met someone like me, and this is what she'd become. There were times I'd blamed everyone around me — Serepina, Estelle, Levina — but that had slipped out of my grasp now. You can't blame the people you love. It does seem to be me who's the problem. How is a man who doesn't want to be the problem supposed to act?
I forced a smile.
"Glad you don't have to break the engagement."
And then, to Count Belluz: "Thank you. Though I don't imagine you want to trade words with me."
He still had the look of a man who wanted to beat me to death.
"This is your reunion with your beloved daughter after a long time. I'll step out."
I rose from my seat. Behind me, Serepina said something, but I shut my ears to it and left the room. The moment the door closed, I broke into a run down the hallway.
I shoved a cigarette between my lips the instant I reached my own room and lit it, dragging the smoke in deep and sharp. It seared all the way into the bottom of my lungs. I'd been certain Count Belluz and Serepina would be so estranged they'd fight to the point of never seeing each other again. Somehow, naturally, I'd assumed that was inevitable. I'd once believed that all human relationships were already festering and rotten underneath — that people just kept painting over them so they looked intact until the veneer peeled away, the ugliness showed through, and everyone blamed each other and never met again.
'We'll never live a proper life.'
Levina's voice brushed my ear.
'Someone like you shouldn't be allowed to grow up around other people. Think of the child raised by your hands, and think of the people who suit you. The closer anyone gets to you, the more they end up like you or me.'
A hallucination of Levina murmuring the same things as she drifted past. I was revolting and repulsive to myself. I was so jealous that Serepina had patched things up with her father, held a sane conversation, even had her love acknowledged — so jealous it curdled into envy. I was always someone who took away from Serepina rather than someone who could give her anything. I want to give her love, too. Not just words, not just a body — there's so much I truly want to give... there just isn't much I can do. My excuses amount to the world being on the verge of annihilation by demons, and the fact that I've already died again and again, which is the sort of talk that would land a man in a mental ward if he were lucky.
How can I believe myself?
I crushed my half-smoked cigarette against the wall and snuffed it out. A black smudge remained on the wallpaper. If I'd been there instead of 'Ravin.' If my mother, my father had been like them. If my mother were still alive, at least. Absurd thoughts, but they kept branching out in strange directions through my head. I scrubbed away those meaningless thoughts and went looking for Levina, who would be buried in paperwork in the Student Council President's office with her head in her hands. It was one of the things I had to do to survive. A chore, either way. No particular need to do it now, and nothing good would come of it for Levina except making her miserable — but Levina could stand a little misery.
I pushed open the door to the office. She was buried in stacks of documents.
"You said we're the only two who can understand, and we grew up under parents like ours, so we'll live like this our whole lives," I said.
Levina lifted her eyes from the papers and looked at me.
"...Cigarette smoke. No. Have you been taking something?"
"I wish."
"What's this about, bursting in out of nowhere?"
I walked up to her and slapped her across the face.
"Shut up and listen."
Levina stared up at me, her face blank with shock. I wore the same smile she used to give me.
"I denied it back then. Now I don't think I have any choice but to accept it."
"Wh-what are you trying to say all of a sudden...?"
"So kill the Duchess. Right now. Go twist her neck yourself, or slit her throat with a shard of glass, or beat her to death — I don't care how. I'll love you if you do. I'll love you. We never learned how, so it won't be a proper love, just like you said."
"You came here to tell me to kill my own mother?"
"Yeah. Because you can do it. And you'll do it if I tell you to."
I seized her arm and hauled her to her feet. Levina still wore a dazed expression as she slowly stepped closer, placed a hand on my shoulder, and looked into my eyes.
"A proper love... I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. Love is love."
Her voice was eerily calm.
The answer nearly drove me out of my mind, but I held myself together and smiled. This run was going better. It would keep getting better. Next time I'd do better still, and better after that... I didn't know how long I had to keep getting better, but all I had to do was get better. The future would improve as time passed. Life was a process of progress and refinement—a linear approach toward a better destination. Even if I were just going in circles inside the same span of time.
"I don't know why you're doing this out of the blue, but calm down first. When you stare with bloodshot eyes like that, it's genuinely frightening."
Levina rubbed her slapped cheek as if it stung.
"You, frightened? You're capable of that?"
"I've got more than my share of things that scare me."
Her legs were pressed together. She was trembling slightly.
"Just tell me why you're acting like this all of a sudden."
"Nothing. I just... I think I am exactly the kind of person you said I was. Trash like you described, a wretched piece of vermin, the disgusting son of a whore, a bastard with no sense of his place, good for nothing except trampling over scraps. So I thought I might as well do this."
I'm not that person. The one Serepina loves, the one Estelle loves. I need to be someone worth loving. Not the garbage I just described. I can't just throw myself away and stagger around making an even bigger fool of myself just because my head aches and phantom thoughts rise up. If not for myself, then for other people. What can I do for myself? But in front of Levina, it seems I have to be that person. In front of her, I'm not myself.
I went on, pausing only to breathe.
"So,"
I slapped her cheek again.
"Stop arguing,"
Another slap. My own hand ached more, the sting sparking my temper as I grabbed her face and held it tight.
"Shut up and do what I tell you."
Levina made a tearful face and tried to retreat, but I shoved her head back and struck her cheek once more as she staggered. Clutching her face, she curled in on herself and started crying in choked little whimpers. Her eyes, though — they held a strange gleam.
From the floor, looking up at me, Levina asked in a small voice,
"What if I don't?"
"You'll die."
"Dying by your hand doesn't frighten me."
"I'll die," I said.
Two people who never learned how to love looked at each other.