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29 December 1349 - SOMEWHERE ON A SHIP HEADING TO DAMIR HARBOR FROM PRITZ HARBOR
The weather was quite merciless today as heavy downpour caused the ship to rock sideways and giant waves sloshed around, beating repeatedly at the body of White Agate.
The front deck was empty, save for a lone man. He was wearing a black shirt and black pants and was constantly performing different kinds of exercises in the heavy rain. The black shirt clung to his toned body, making him appear extremely attractive.
This man was around 1.87meters with a bulky build and muscles that were bulging through the wet clothing. His short black hair was sticking to his forehead while his mad, animalistic and predatory olive eyes remained focused on the raging sea ahead.
While he was still busy performing various exercises, a voice came from the inside.
"Excuse me, Mr. Hyde! I understand your enthusiasm for fitness but you have to come inside. It's not safe and against the protocols."
Hyde turned around. His predatory eyes landed on the man dressed in ship-crew uniform and he raised his chin before speaking in a detached tone. His voice caused the crewman to involuntarily straighten his back.
"Amend your protocols."
The crewman stared at him in a befuddled manner. "Sir?"
Hyde raised his chin slightly as rain streamed down his extremely handsome and pale face. "They were evidently written for lesser men."
The crewman's expression tightened. Whether out of professionalism or sheer stubbornness, he held his ground. "Lesser or not, Mr. Hyde, you're still a passenger aboard this ship. If you're swept overboard, the captain will have to turn the White Agate around looking for you."
"No, he won't." Hyde glanced past him toward the vessel, then at the raging sea beside it.
The crewman frowned. "Excuse me?"
"If I fall overboard and cannot return under my own power, then I was never worth turning the ship around for."
For several seconds, the crewman simply looked at him and scrunched his nose. However, Hyde had already turned away.
"And if I can return," he added, lowering himself into another push-up as the deck pitched beneath him, "then you wasted both our time."
29 December 1349 - BACKLUND
[Perhaps, many years from now, I will remember these nights and wonder whether I had exaggerated their happiness. Memory is charitable to what it has lost. It fills empty rooms with warmer light and makes voices sound kinder than they ever truly were.]
[But I do not believe that will happen with her. I remember too much.]
[I remember the first night Nastenka spoke to me as though my presence required no explanation. I remember the absurd seriousness with which she made me promise not to fall in love with her, and I remember agreeing because at the time, I believed such things could be promised. I remember listening to her speak of another man and feeling happy simply because she had chosen me to listen.]
[Then, for one brief night, I believed she had chosen me for something more. She had not, of course, I was foolish. Her letter arrived the following morning. She begged for my forgiveness and asked that I not think cruelly of her. She wished that I might someday meet the man she loved, that we might become friends, and that I would find another woman who could give me the happiness she could not.]
[I still do not know whether she understood how cruel it was. Yet, strangely, I could not hate her. Even now, when I think of Nastenka, I do not first remember her running from me. I remember that, for four nights, I was no longer alone.]
A drop of salty water struck the page as Fors blinked.
For a few seconds she continued looking at the last bit of the book she had just recently bought — a book that had become quite famous with the youths since the past one month — and then another tear gathered beneath her lashes before dropping almost exactly where the first had landed, bleeding into the paper and distorting one of the letters.
"Ah... shit. Fuck!"
She lifted the book away before she ruined the page any further. Across the room, Xio looked up towards Fors and frowned.
Fors had been reading the book for nearly two hours now and, except for periodically refilling her wine, had barely moved since, while the cigarette currently between her fingers had burned dangerously close to the end.
However, what was more concerning was the state of her face. Xio put aside her rapier which she was cleaning and spoke: "Fors?"
"Don't." Fors sniffed and waved her cigarette vaguely in her direction. Xio had not said anything yet as Fors continued. "Whatever you're about to say, don't say it."
"I was going to ask why you're crying."
"I'm not crying. It's just cigarette smoke."
Xio stared at her swollen eyes and narrowed her eyes while Fors took a drink of wine, discovered there was considerably less in the glass than she seemed to remember, and frowned into it before refilling her cup and downing it in two sips.
Her expressions crumpled again and her nose scrunched up. "That fucking bitch."
"Who?"
"Nastenka, Xio! Nastenka! Who else! What a bitch!"
"...And who is Nastenka?"
"The woman." Fors answered in a ridiculous tone, as if Xio had asked her some stupid question.
"What woman?"
"The woman in the book, Xio." Fors pressed the heel of her palm under one eye and wiped the moistness. "Keep up."
"I haven't read it."
"I know. That's why I'm explaining it."
"You haven't explained anything."
Fors opened her mouth, paused for several seconds and appeared to reconsider her words. Xio was right, she had not explained anything and had immediately jumped to spewing profanities at the fictional woman — or so she believed. "Right... Sorry for that."
Xio stood up and walked close to her to Fors. Up close, she looked even worse with her cheeks flushed from the wine, strands of brown hair stuck to the dampness around her cheeks, and the hand holding her cigarette almost extinguished.
Xio took a clean piece of cloth from nearby and held it out to her. Fors accepted it immediately and wiped her cheeks before blowing her nose into it. She looked up at Xio and shook her head. "I'll wash it."
"You better do it."
Fors nodded and placed the book to the side. Taking out another cigarette from the box, she alighted it and sank back. "She's a bitch, you know."
"You've made that clear by now."
"No, but you don't understand. She's... she's horrible. Not horrible-horrible. That's the problem." Fors struggled upright, nearly spilling the bottle of wine. "If she was actually horrible, this wouldn't be sad. You could just hate her, but she isn't. She told him, the main character I mean, from the beginning that she loves somebody else. She didn't lie about that. She waited for this other man for a year, and when he doesn't come back she thinks he abandoned her, and this poor bastard—"
She tapped the book. "—this absolute idiot has been listening to her the entire time. He meets her at night, walks with her, listens to her talk about the man she loves, carries letters for her... he even helps her try to find him."
Xio's brows drew together. "And he fell in love with her?"
"Of course he fell in love with her! Look at him!"
"I can't look at him, Fors... He's words."
"You know what I mean." Fors sank back into the cushions. "He's been alone his whole life. Not alone like you don't have friends for a month but like, alone-alone. He walks around the city making up conversations with people in his head. He was that lonely. And then someone finally sits beside him and wants him there. All of a sudden!"
Xio glanced at the book that was bound in brown leather and had the title "Faceless" on top and "Reprobate" at the bottom.
"So she was just kind to the lonely man and made it clear that she loved the other man, as you said. Then why are you angry at her? It's not her fault the man fell for her."
"Because she kissed him." Fors said it with such genuine hatred that Xio was momentarily caught off guard.
"She what?"
"Exactly!"
"I didn't say—"
"She kissed him! She made him believe that maybe she could love him. She lets him think—" Fors stopped and pinched the bridge of her nose. "No. That's not even what bothers me. Well, it does bother me. Obviously it bothers me. Who does that? But that's not..."
Her voice trailed off and she took a huge inhale from the cigarette until it burned the back of her throat. "The thing that bothers me is that we, the readers, never learn his name?"
Xio followed her gaze. "The man's?"
"The man telling the story."
"What was it?"
"I just said we never learn it."
"I thought you meant you forgot."
Fors gave her an offended look as Xio raised both hands slightly. "You've had most of that bottle."
Fors ignored her and began flipping backwards through the book. She moved too quickly at first, passed whatever she wanted, muttered something under her breath and went back three pages.
"Here. He meets her and they talk. He asks her name, which is, of course, Nastenka." Her finger followed several lines. "Then they meet again and again. She tells him everything about herself. Her grandmother, the house she lives in, the lodger upstairs, how she met him, why she loves him, why she's waiting..." Fors turned another page. "But she never asks his name."
Xio's expression slowly lost its bemusement as Fors continued searching.
"Hell, nobody does. No one knows who he is!" She stopped flipping and gave a melancholic sigh. "I didn't notice until the end."
"That's such a strange thing to leave out," Xio said.
"Exactly." Fors stared at the book resting on her thighs. "At first I thought it was some clever writer thing. You know, don't give him a name so anybody can imagine themselves being him. I've seen authors do that before. It's cheap, but it works, you know, wish fulfillment and those kinds of things."
Fors' thumb rubbed against the corner of the page. "But it isn't that."
"How do you know?"
"Because he has a personality." Fors answered immediately, then became frustrated with her own answer. "No, that's not... He isn't some empty character you're supposed to put yourself inside. He's very specific, like annoyingly specific. The way he thinks, what he notices, the stupid things he says when he's nervous. You couldn't just replace him with anybody else, so why wouldn't you give him a name?"
Fors looked down and sniffed. "Unless that's the point."
Taking a sip of wine and a puff of her cigarette, she continued. "Nastenka tells him everything about herself, and he remembers all of it. But she doesn't even know his name. And he doesn't even care!"
"Maybe he does?" Xio was a bit lost, given she was not used to reading stories. Since Fors was drunk out of her mind, she had decided to entertain her a little.
"No. That's what makes it worse. He never complains about it, not even once. He doesn't sit there thinking, she didn't even ask my name. He just... accepts it, it's shown in his unique mannerisms."
Fors' voice had begun to lose the drunken irritation. "You know, I write for a living. I know what people think heartbreak looks like and I've written it enough times. You can make somebody cry, angry, maybe make them smash something expensive, make them say they hate the other person, then you wait a few chapters and have them meet someone better."
A bitter smile appeared on her face and she touched the wet mark her tear had left on the final page. "But this doesn't do that. He still loves her."
Fors breathed in through her nose. "That's it. That's the ending. She leaves him for the man she was waiting for and even after all of that, he doesn't hate her. He reads her letter and worries about her. He imagines her being happy. He hopes nobody ever makes her regret choosing the other man. And that's not something you can invent out of your imagination."
Xio's eyes narrowed slightly. "Ok Fors, I think you should get some sleep—"
"No! Listen to me!" Fors turned toward her so abruptly that some wine climbed over the rim of the glass and wet her fingers. "You can invent being stabbed and shot. I mean, I've killed people in books in ways I would probably faint seeing in real life. But you can't research this, so deeply. The stupid shame of still loving someone you should hate and remembering little things about them and getting angry at yourself. Knowing they hurt you and still making excuses for why they did it and being grateful for the same memory that makes you miserable. Whoever wrote this knows what that feels like. What a miserable soul he must be..."
"Yes, I am sure he's a sad and miserable soul." Xio took the cigarette and wine away from her before slipping her hands underneath her arms. Despite the massive height difference between them, Xio easily pulled her down the couch. "It's time to go to sleep."
"Mmm- Nooo- I don't want to!"
"And what exactly are you going to do? You've read the book already. Just go to sleep. This sadness will all go away in the morning."
"I know it's the alcohol, but aren't you curious? Maybe Nastenka wasn't really called Nastenka. Maybe some things are different and maybe all of it is different except for the grief and suffering? But somebody did this to him. The author, I mean."
"No, I am not curious one bit." With her feet on the carpeted floor, Xio dragged Fors towards their bed.
*****
Author's Note: The illustrations chapter has been given a small update. And a new auxiliary chapter has also been published. They are sitting right over Chapter 1, in case you want to navigate it (for Wattpad readers)
For WebNovel readers its quite straight forward. Just go to the auxiliary section