First (3)
First (3)
"You know exactly why I brought up the broken engagement."
Serepina's voice was low and subdued.
It sounded less like anger and more like exhaustion.
Her voice sank into the room's damp air like a stone.
We both already knew the answer to that question.
"Yeah. I know."
I kept my answer short.
Her shoulders gave the faintest flinch.
"When you say it like that..."
She stared at me as if I had no intention of having a real conversation.
Which was fair.
We'd already had this talk a few days ago. This was just a rerun.
"I really don't understand why."
"Do you at least remember the promise you made? That you'd stay out of trouble and get along with people while we're at the Academy?"
"I remember. And I think I've kept it pretty faithfully."
Serepina let out a short, humorless laugh.
There was nothing pleasant in that sound.
"I'd made my peace with never hearing a single good word about your behavior. Your reputation's always been trash. Fine. But Ravin, someone is dead! Everyone's saying it. All those demon-worshipping lunatics got hauled off, but you—only you, the precious Young Master Edelgard—gets to walk away without so much as a slap on the wrist!"
"Everyone? Who? Who exactly is saying this?"
Serepina couldn't answer.
Because to her, "everyone" was just faceless fragments of rumor.
Who were these anonymous masses, this "everyone"? Where did they live? What did they look like? I'd never met them. Maybe I saw them every day. But the fact that I'd never exchanged a single word with them meant the "never met" part wasn't far off.
"..."
"Serepina, you have no intention of believing a word I say. You never did."
The rims of her eyes reddened as she stared at me.
The calm voice she'd been struggling to maintain began to shake beyond her control.
"Because you've always, always been like this! Because you spout pretty lies just to wriggle out of the moment! That's what this is again, isn't it! I don't want to hear it! You just want me to be a fool again, to believe you and get tricked all over again!"
Her body trembled faintly.
"And if I say it's fine, if I say it's nothing, that you just had bad luck and let it slide—then you'll go right back to your insane antics! And you'll come to me and say you're sorry, swear you'll never do it again! Then you'll toss me some cheap little gift you dug up who-knows-where and treat me like some easy woman whose mood you can fix in five minutes! How many years—how many goddamn years do you think we've been running this disgusting, pathetic loop!?"
"I haven't been like that lately, at least."
A bone-deep exhaustion washed over me.
I pressed my palms into my eyes, then slumped back onto the creaking sofa.
I stuck a cigarette between my lips—something I'd never once done in her presence—and felt around for the matchbox.
Maybe I didn't know anymore, but Ravin would never have done this.
He'd always wanted to look perfect in front of her.
Small gestures like this were how I drew the line between him and me.
Because what I wanted was to go back.
Because I was only chasing the reward—being sent back to the place I came from.
The sharp scratch of the match striking cut through her shaking voice.
"Right. You haven't been like that lately. Truly remarkable progress. So why didn't you keep it up? Why are you right back to this mess!"
She snatched the half-burned letter off the floor—the one I'd been reading—and hurled it at my face.
The scrap of paper fluttered weakly and brushed my cheek before drifting to the floor.
It didn't hurt. It still felt like a blade grazing skin.
"This pathetic letter! You suddenly started writing these three years ago, sending them every single day—and what's changed? Nothing! Lately, for just a moment, a brief moment, I thought maybe you were finally different! But you're still—you haven't changed. Not one single thing!"
Her voice finally broke into something like a scream.
It bounced off the empty walls and echoed hollowly.
"What did you want me to change into?"
I stared down at the ash-covered letter and asked.
"Into a decent human being! At the very least—into the boy I used to know!"
"The Ravin you knew?"
I let out a hollow laugh.
Maybe Ravin and I really were the same person. Our habits, our thoughts, our memories, even the people we loved and ached for—all the same. The fact that we were different people was the stranger part. The only thing separating us was that stubborn little feeling left in one corner of my chest: the wish to go back. And that was exactly why I hated thinking we were the same.
"Who was that, exactly? The seven-year-old who climbed a tree with you, got too scared to climb down, and clutched your skirt bawling? Or the ten-year-old idiot who heard you liked lilacs and tore through the family gardens, then got beaten half to death by my parents? Is that the Ravin you knew?"
Someone passing by outside might have stopped and glanced toward the window. Or they might have ignored it and kept walking. Either way, it didn't matter.
"He's been gone a long time."
Sometimes I mocked myself by calling it stealing a body. Though really, it was less stealing and more picking up a corpse that was already dead. Ravin had been out of his mind. So far gone that it warped my own perfectly sane head into this strange shape.
Serepina swept her gaze around the room.
Her eyes tracked over the dust-caked furniture, the bottles rolling on the floor, the ashtray buried in cigarette butts. The contempt and fury in her stare slowly gave way to something colder. Resignation.
"How did we end up like this?"
She murmured it like she was talking to herself.
"Don't know. Maybe we were always like this."
I answered without much feeling.
"Maybe you just chose not to see it."
"Not see it?"
She gave a short, scornful laugh.
"Does this really not bother you at all? That we're breaking off the engagement? That a relationship spanning over ten years is ending. Just like this?"
"You never believe a single thing I say, so what's the point? Being around you makes me feel wretched."
She opened her mouth as if to snap back, but what came out wasn't anger—it was a wounded, stifled sound.
"I'm always the liar in front of you. Always the repulsive piece of vermin. The Edelgard disgrace. You don't believe me. Everyone says it. People, nameless nobodies, this and that. But you're the first one to treat me that way. No matter what I do, you've already decided. I'm garbage. That's your final answer."
She fought to keep her composure.
"Fine! You're right! I don't believe you! How am I supposed to? What have you ever shown me? Nothing but trouble, lies, and running away! That's everything you've ever shown me—what part of that am I supposed to believe!"
But emotions you fight to swallow always find their way back up.
"Every moment of my life tangled up with you disgusts me, Ravin. Do you get that? You—you just get to live out your miserable vermin's existence and that's the end of it. But I don't. I have to walk around wearing the hideous label of your fiancée, smiling at people, pretending everything's fine!"
Serepina paced the room in jerky, agitated strides. Her heels struck the old floorboards—click, click, click—grating against my nerves.
"Do you know what people whisper behind my back? 'Poor Lady Serepina. Engaged to a wretch like that.' 'Did you hear the Edelgard disgrace caused another scandal? What did that fiancée of his ever do to deserve this?' The pity, the mockery, the voyeuristic stares—all of it, because I'm the wretch's fiancée! I've been your shadow for everything you've ever done! Making excuses for you, defending you, taking your side in front of everyone else!"
Serepina was crying now, almost theatrical in her delivery as she mimicked the "people" she quoted, gasping for breath but refusing to stop. As if she were playing the tragic heroine in some overwrought drama.
"So. It's my fault?"
"Whose fault would it be! Did I break into the Forbidden Archive and set a monster loose? Did I pick a fight with a classmate and cause a duel uproar? I never did anything. But because I'm your fiancée, whenever you caused trouble, I had to apologize for you. Whenever you disappeared, I had to hunt you down. Whenever people asked about you, I had to pretend I knew nothing—or pretend I was protecting you. I had to lie!"
Then again, it didn't sound all that different from what I got. She was stuck with a miserable villain. And the villain was just some pathetic idiot who took the blame for things he didn't even do and kept his mouth shut.
"And if I'd married you, I'd have to do it for the rest of my life. Until I died."
Gasping for breath. Refusing to stop.
I watched her without a word. Cigarette smoke blurred my vision.
"How many more times do I have to spew that same bullshit—'Oh, the real Ravin wasn't like that'—when even I don't believe it anymore!"
Had I ever loved her? Had she ever loved me?
"I never asked you to do any of that."
"...What?"
I exhaled a long stream of smoke. Her face twisted, wounded.
At the very least, Ravin had loved Serepina more than anyone. I inherited those memories whole, and when I first met her again, I genuinely believed I'd fallen in love. Every time her words scraped past my ears, my chest had ached like it was being torn open. Right up until the engagement was called off, I was thrown out of the family, and expelled from the Academy.
But none of that mattered. Not in this moment.
What we had wasn't love—it was closer to a toxic debtor and a luckless creditor.
"The unbearable fact that I was your childhood friend! The memory of once—when we were so young, when I didn't know any better—of actually liking you! This entire reality where I got engaged to you—it's so hideous I'm losing my mind!"
Serepina glared at me, breathing hard.
A single tear carved a path down her cheek. It trailed down, clung to the edge of her chin, then fell and soaked into the floorboards.
I listened to her words and felt nothing. Not emptiness. Not resentment.
I let out a long sigh and stubbed my cigarette out in the ashtray.
"If you've said everything you came to say—you can go now. Serepina."
Nothing I said would reach her.
I didn't have the energy to do what I'd done last time—dredge up Ravin's memories, dig up the faded, frayed scraps of our past, and tear them apart all over again just to win a fight. Digging a corpse out of its grave to stab it a few more times—not many people in the world would find that satisfying.
"What did you say?"
"I asked you to leave. I'm tired."
At my answer, Serepina seemed to lose her words. Her lips parted and closed, speechless. In her unsteady eyes, I caught a flicker of confusion, a larger flash of fury, and—faint beneath it all—the raw glint of hurt.
"So just go. Do whatever you want. Break off the engagement. Find someone else. It's got nothing to do with me anymore."
She'd probably expected me to cling. To get angry alongside her. To offer up some pathetic excuse at the very least. That's what I'd done before. I'd gotten angry—really committed to it. We'd thrown every vile word we could think of at each other, ripped into each other's most wounded places, said things that should never be said.
"You... you really..."
She couldn't finish. She just stared at me, dazed.
Serepina's eyes took on a strange, almost possessed look. She spoke, her voice low.
"Every morning when I opened my eyes, I wished you were dead."
"..."
"I prayed for it every night before I slept. That you'd just vanish from this world. That I could erase you—this stain, this hideous mistake—from my life completely."
The moment the words left her mouth, she flinched as if she'd startled herself. She stopped breathing.
Serepina stared at me blankly, then turned her back. She fled through the door, slamming it behind her.
The sound of the door closing reverberated through the room with a heavy finality.
I sat motionless for a moment, sunk deep into the sofa, letting the echo of that sound wash over me.
Serepina's words had never been wrong.
I'd wished I were dead, too.
And I'd died—and, spectacularly, failed at it.
I rose from the sofa and walked to the window she'd flung open. The cold afternoon breeze brushed my cheek, which was soaked in sweat, liquor, and cigarette smoke.
Outside the window, the Academy's peaceful, tedious landscape spread out like a painting. Students laughing and chattering as they passed, green lawns rippling in the wind, the spire of the library in the distance. Everything was so tranquil it felt unreal.
Because it was. At least for me.
On the spot where Serepina had stood, the half-burned scrap of paper she'd thrown at me lay on the worn floorboards like a fallen leaf.
I walked over slowly, bent down, and picked it up.
A faint scent of lilacs—the ones she'd always loved—clung to its singed edges, mixed with the acrid reek of my cigarettes.
Without thinking, I shoved the scrap into my pocket.
Then I opened the drawer and stared at the revolver for a long time before closing it again.