Vestige (17)
I left the church holding Serepina's hand.
Neither of us spoke.
I walked her all the way to the room I had secured for her.
At the door, we stood facing each other without much to say.
As if it were the most natural thing, I bent down and pressed a light kiss to her lips.
Brief. Dry.
Serepina stared at me blankly, then touched her own lips with her fingers.
Her face flushed faintly.
She bit her lower lip and smiled, soft and unguarded.
Serepina leaned a little closer.
Her hand moved toward my collar, hesitated, and she stepped back again.
She clasped her hands behind her back.
"See you next time."
"Yeah. Next time."
* * *
Maybe it was the tangled mess of the situation, but the cigarettes and liquor had climbed back to where they were before the noose. If anything, the excess money seemed to be fueling even more bottles and chains of rolled leaf. The bitter taste lingering on my tongue and the scrape of smoke down my throat prodded at something numb.
Serepina and Estelle. Whenever I checked in with one, then the other, neither would ask outright, but they always pried—how the other was doing, how close she'd grown to me.
It made my head spin.
Still, my mind stayed sharp.
I wasn't floating on alcohol and nicotine. I was using them to flush out the shit and let it drain away.
Today, I had faked my way through the same lectures I'd heard more times than I could count, gone through the motions of light magic practice, and was heading back to my room.
Levina was on the sofa in my room, pouring drink after drink down her throat.
The air reeked of hard liquor.
Her face was entirely red. She didn't even seem to register that I'd walked in.
Her blank eyes were fixed on the empty air.
Only after I'd sat down across from her did she rub her eyes and speak.
"Ah. My master has arrived."
I frowned.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean."
"You hold my life and shake it. If that doesn't make you my master, what would you call it?"
Her voice was soaked in alcohol, thick and damp.
I let out a sigh.
"And what exactly is all this drama for."
Levina ignored me. She poured a generous amount from her glass into a new one and handed it over.
Amber liquid swayed inside.
"Drink."
I took the glass without argument.
Levina clinked her bottle against it in a mock toast and started gulping straight from the neck.
Glug, glug.
She drained the bottle in the vulgar fashion she always claimed to despise and hurled it at the wall.
Glass shattered everywhere.
A few shards caught my face, some lodging in the skin.
A sharp, stinging pain.
More than the pain, the wrecked state of the room annoyed me.
I picked out the stinging fragments and didn't bother wiping the trickle of blood. Rubbing invisible splinters into a wound only makes it worse.
Before I could speak, Levina opened her mouth.
"I killed her."
She smiled.
It held no joy at all.
"The person who terrified me since I was a child. The one who drove me half-mad. I got rid of her, just like you said."
Levina kept going.
"I couldn't have done it without you. I thought I was the master who held your life and shook it. Who would've guessed it was the other way around."
"Are you here to lament?"
"Yeah. I'm dying anyway, so what can I do. I like you better than my mother, Ravin. All she ever did was hit me and spit out vile words she claimed were for my sake."
Levina looked at me, that smile still fixed on her flushed face.
"I'm someone who knows exactly what matters more."
Our eyes met, and for a long while, neither of us said a word.
It felt like dozens of minutes dragged by. No one broke first.
Only the pale moonlight spilling over broken glass and our breathing filled the room.
Levina exhaled and let out a hollow laugh.
"I tied her to the heretics and sent her off. I was going to spare her. All she had to do was stop pulling strings behind my back, let go of all her power, and quietly rot away in some villa. She should've disappeared when she had the chance."
She muttered as if talking to herself.
"Aren't you curious how she died? You hated my mother."
"Not particularly curious. I imagine it was more pathetic than I'd expect."
"You talk like you saw it with your own eyes."
It wasn't so much that I'd seen it as that I'd personally sent her off before, but I didn't bring that up.
"I had no choice. You made me do it. I had no choice. Because I can do anything if it means keeping you alive. Yes. That woman would've poisoned you the moment you set foot in the manor. She would've killed you."
Levina's expression held a smile, but tears were streaming from her eyes.
She wasn't sobbing. Her breathing stayed steady.
That made it eerie.
She wasn't born that way—she was raised into it.
Each time tears gathered beneath her eyes, she wiped them away with her hand.
A long, still-bleeding wound ran across her wrist, fresh enough that it hadn't yet dried.
Levina rose and crossed to me.
"Say something. Tell me I did well. Tell me I'm the only sister you've got. Anything."
I reached out and slowly brushed her cheek with my palm.
Then I slid my hand to the back of her head and pulled her face close to mine.
"What do you want to hear?"
At that, Levina's breath caught. A sharp inhale.
"You know as well as I do—just because you killed the Duchess with your own hands, just because you cut your wrist in some painless little gesture, just because you suddenly act like you've lost your mind, that doesn't magically make something genuine bloom between us."
I stood up too.
I pulled out a rolled cigarette, stuck it between my lips, and lit it.
My foot nudged at the grating shards littering the floor.
Levina clung to me.
"I killed everyone you told me to! Not just my mother—every last bastard who whispered it was time to dispose of you, I tied them all to the heretics and disposed of them instead!"
She screamed it.
Then she shoved me onto the bed with both arms.
I fell back and she climbed on top of me.
"Then why do you still look at me with those eyes. Look at me the way you look at that idiot girl. Why do I always have to be on the receiving end of that gaze."
"All you did was kill one stupid woman who knew nothing except tormenting a child."
"Even if that stupid woman was my mother? I did it for you."
"Sure. It was all for me. Everything you did before, everything you're doing now—all of it."
I grabbed Levina by the collar and pulled her down.
Then I kissed her.
Not much different from last time. Levina, clumsy, just pressing her lips together.
"Well? Does it feel good?"
When I pulled back, Levina's face had gone slack for some reason.
She didn't answer, just nodded.
"Don't enjoy it. It's disgusting."
I slapped her across the cheek.
She stared at me with bewildered eyes, like she'd never expected to be hit at a moment like this.
Levina clutched her struck cheek.
The marks on her wrist stood out more clearly now.
She murmured under her breath.
"I even killed my mother and came here, and I still don't get any comfort."
"Comfort feels a bit absurd, doesn't it. I don't know what kind of reaction I'm supposed to give someone who murdered her own mother so she could fuck her little brother. Sister."
At the word sister, her expression softened again, just a fraction.
I pulled the dazed Levina, hand still pressed to her cheek, back into my arms.
I stroked her hair.
Her shoulders started trembling.
"Did I... do something that wrong? All I wanted was for you to stay by my side. Was that such a terrible sin that I deserve all this? I don't know. When I'm in front of you, I can't tell right from wrong anymore."
I studied Levina's unfocused eyes for a moment, then leaned my face close again.
"Yeah. It was wrong. Your very existence is wrong. Being born from a woman like that is a sin in itself. Why not just find a convenient spot, hang yourself, and be done with it? You'd only get in the way when I become Family Head."
"......."
At that, Levina only gave a small, choked whimper.
"It's a joke. It's what you used to say to me, Sister. It just popped into my head. Felt like saying it."
I whispered into her ear.
"Open your mouth."
Puzzled, Levina obediently parted her lips.
I kissed her again and slid my tongue inside.
And I took my time, tangling it thoroughly.
Levina had frozen up. With her mouth blocked, she breathed only through her nose.
The hot burn of alcohol and the scent of wine hit me all at once.
I held her like that for a long while.
The moment my tongue entered, her eyes flew wide open and she tried to pull away, but whether it was the liquor or something else, her expression turned hazy and her eyes slowly began to glaze over.
When I finally separated from her, Levina sucked in a ragged breath.
She pressed the back of her hand to her lips and stammered.
"Th-this is... wh-what kind of shameless, lewd...!"
I pushed her down onto the bed.
"Stop babbling nonsense and sleep."
I got up, wiped my mouth with my sleeve, poured a glass of water, rinsed, and drank.
Not long after lying down, Levina fell asleep.
Her eyes were abnormally sunken, dark circles smeared heavily beneath them. She looked like she hadn't slept in two days straight.
I opened the drawer and took out the revolver.
One by one, I picked the cartridges rolling around at the bottom of the drawer and loaded them into the cylinder.
Fully loaded, I lowered the hammer.
Without putting my finger on the trigger, I aimed the muzzle at the sleeping Levina.
The only person who could run the Edelgard household competently was Levina. And with the demons' invasion to consider, Levina needed to stay alive.
I turned the barrel to my own temple.
If I pulled the trigger right now, Rineta would come back to life.
And I could kill the insane piece of trash who made his sister murder her own parent, then scolded her before kissing her. I could kill the vermin who did nothing but wound the Saintess and the childhood friend who'd been by his side for over a decade, taking everything and giving nothing back.
Maybe Levina, having watched her brother kiss her and immediately blow his brains out, would change just a little too.
Though knowing how stubbornly consistent that woman is, I'm not sure how she'd change.
The moment of pulling the trigger would probably feel pretty electrifying.
Enough to shake off a little of the exhaustion.
I tossed the gun onto the table.
I had to stay alive and see things through. Whether it was demons or whatever else came, whether things worked out on their own somehow.
If this run were the last one, would it become an established fact that I crushed Rineta to death with my own hands?
For everyone else to live, the world needs to stay intact.
Rather than waiting for someone to save me, if I die enough times, maybe I'll eventually...
Anyway. Even if I do go back, can I save Rineta?
Honestly, it seems like she's got her head pretty well twisted around.
[Collect the Endings. 5/?]
[Currently collected rewards: Lingering Fragrance, Afterimage, Lingering Trace, Lingering Soul, □□]
[Reward: Salvation]
I swiped through the floating text to dismiss it and, just as Levina had done, sat on the sofa and drank straight from the bottle.
Then I pulled out a rolled cigarette, lit it, and smoked.
This isn't the worst.
It still isn't the worst.
If anything, this feels like the next-best option.
No one else besides Rineta has died. The situation hasn't spiraled into total shit like it did last time.
It's just my heart that's twisted out of shape. Nothing's actually ruined.
But I've died how many times now. Settling for the second-best option feels a bit pathetic.
Anyone else looking in from the outside would call this the worst. It's strange that I'm accepting it as the next-best thing.
Life has been so relentlessly shit that my threshold for suffering seems to have dropped.
Anyway, if I just keep helping Kyle enough to prevent him from failing to save the world, I'm bound to figure something out eventually.
And if it looks like everything's about to end anyway, I can just kill him from behind and be done with it.