Max and Bell walked across the terrace together and sat down on the patch of fake grass. It was soft and too green under the golden lights, and it looked as if someone had cut a piece out of a spring meadow and laid it down on the stone. A small wooden bench stood beside it, and a pot of white flowers swayed in the wind. It was a lovely, peaceful corner. Max had picked it himself, two weeks ago, because it was the best place on the whole terrace to sit and watch the moon.
Now neither of them was looking at the moon.
As they sat, Max noticed that Bell's hands were trembling. They rested in her lap, with the sleeves of his jacket hanging over her fingers, and they would not stay still. He could not tell why. It might have been the vision still shaking her from the inside. It might have been the fear of what he was about to say. Worst of all, it might have been both.
He reached out and tried to take her hand.
His fingers stopped an inch away. Then he pulled them back and set them on his own knee.
'I don't have the right,' he thought. 'I'm the one who did this to her. Not the fireworks, not the party, and not that vision. Me.'
It was supposed to have been a perfect night. He had planned every minute of it. The dance, the food, the walk up to the thirteenth floor, the fireworks that spelled out her name across the sky. And there was one more gift waiting at the end of it, the most important one. He had hidden his violin in a case behind the potted flowers. It was the violin his father had given him when he was a boy, and it was the only thing Max owned that he would never sell, no matter how poor he got. He had practiced one song on it every night for a month, and he had meant to play it for her under the moon. It was supposed to be the last piece of her birthday, the quiet, beautiful ending that she would remember when she was old.
Instead she was sitting beside him with tears drying on her face and a stranger's memory in her head.
He had ruined it. He had ruined her birthday.
Max's fists clenched on his knees until his knuckles went white.
'I should have stayed silent,' he thought bitterly. 'Me and my fucking loud mouth!'
A silence fell over the terrace. It was not an angry silence, and it was not an easy one. It was the kind of silence that stretches over a table when two people both know that something enormous is sitting between them, and neither of them knows how to pick it up. Down in the streets, the last of the crowds were drifting away from the fireworks. A siren wailed in the distance and faded. The wind pulled at the strings of golden lights.
One minute passed.
Max was no coward. He had stood in front of men with guns and had never blinked. But he could not make his mouth move. The words were all lined up in his throat, and none of them would come out.
At last, he reached down and pinched the inside of his left leg, hard, through the cloth of his trousers.
The pain was sharp and clean. It cleared his head, and his voice came out in a low, steady rumble.
"Do you know the game The Adventures of Emiliana, Searching for Truth?"
Bell lifted her head. She looked at him with red eyes and a confused frown, as if she had been expecting almost anything except that.
"Yeah," she said slowly. Her voice was a little hoarse. "I know it. It's an old game, and my mom used to play it all the time when I was little. Well, when all of us were little, me and my siblings. I remember it was a visual novel, and I heard it was a smut one."
Her ears went slightly pink on the last word. It was not the kind of thing anyone liked to say about their own mother.
Max nodded. "You're right. It is a smut one. But what if I told you that I played that specific game back when it was made only for women to play?"
A question mark almost seemed to appear in the air above Bell's head.
"Okay," she said. "So? What about it? What does that have to do with my vision, or this secret of yours? Why are you telling me about a game?"
She looked out at the glittering buildings across the street, with their neon lights and their rows of tiny windows. Her eyes moved over them without seeing them. She was thinking. She was putting two things together in her head, the way she always did when she stood in front of a reaction in the lab and waited for the colors to change.
Then she looked back at Max, and her eyes grew wide.
"Don't tell me..."
Max said nothing.
"You transmigrated into that world?" Bell asked. Her voice climbed. A short, sharp laugh burst out of her, and there was no humor in it. "Wow. Yeah. Nice joke, Max. If this is a prank, then I'm going first, and we're done here."
She stood up so quickly that his jacket slid off one shoulder.
Her whole face had changed. The tears and the softness were gone, and what looked down at him now was pure, cold anger. In her mind, it was obvious what he was about to say, and she could not believe a word of it. She had read the stories. She read transmigrated villainess manhwa and reincarnated villainess novels on her phone at night when she could not sleep. She knew exactly how these tales went. A girl dies in the modern world and wakes up as the villainess in her favorite game. It was a fun fantasy, and it was a fantasy. It did not happen in real life.
And now the man she loved was sitting in front of her on a fake lawn, on her birthday, telling her that it did.
It was too ridiculous. It was too cruel. Most people would have reacted the same way. It was too much to understand, and much too much to accept.
Max lifted his hand and caught hers before she could turn away.
"It's not a joke," he said.
He was looking up at her. Something had changed in his eyes. The warm amber was still there, but it looked hollow now, like a house after everyone has moved out, with only the echo of the rooms left behind. There was sorrow mixed into the emptiness, a deep, tired sorrow that she had never seen in him before.
Bell laughed again. It was a high, shaky sound.
"Max," she said. "Look. I believe you're a vampire. Fine. I believe supernatural beings exist in this world, and I believe my aunt is a witch. I've seen enough to believe that. But transmigration?" She shook her head. "I may as well believe that cats and dogs are secret agents from that movie I watched last month, Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore! So let go of me this instant, because you're really starting to annoy me!"
She tugged her arm.
Max's grip did not loosen.
"I said, let g-"
"I SAID IT'S NOT A JOKE!"
The shout rang across the terrace.
It was so loud and so raw that the golden lights seemed to shiver. Bell froze with her mouth still open. A pair of pigeons that had been sleeping on the wall burst into the air and flapped away into the dark.
Max had never raised his voice at her. Not once. He had teased her and laughed at her and sometimes sulked, but he had never shouted. The sound of it made her heart skip.
"This is not a joke," Max said again, lower now, shaking. "It's not a prank. I'm not fooling you."
He lowered his head. His hair fell over his eyes, and his shoulders were trembling.
"You don't know how much I suffered in that world," he said. His voice cracked. "You don't know how many lives I lived. How many times I lived them over and over, just to watch my lover die in front of me."
A tear dropped from his face and landed on the back of her hand.
It was warm. It was a very real tear, and there was no acting in it at all.
"Please," Max whispered. He was crying openly now, and he did not try to hide it. "Please, just listen to me. What I'm about to say might sound like it came from outside this world. You might not even be able to understand it. I know that. But please sit down and listen."
He lifted his face.
His eyes were red and wet and full of begging. They were the eyes of a man who had spent years carrying one terrible secret, locked away behind his teeth, and had only just decided to open the door. He had even burned the CD of that game a long time ago. He had watched it melt in a fire, as though destroying the disc could destroy what was in his head. It had not. It only made him lonelier.
Now he was asking her to stand in the doorway with him.
Bell looked at him for a very long time.
The anger in her chest wavered. She was a scientist, and she was a good one, and she knew how to look at a thing without letting her feelings change what she saw. She saw a man who was not lying. His hands were shaking, but they were honest. His eyes were wet, but they were clear. He was not trying to trick her. He was not trying to impress her, either. He was terrified.
She remembered how he had looked on the day he told her she had witch's blood running through her veins. His voice had been just this steady, and just this serious. That claim had sounded insane, too. Later it had turned out to be true.
She shifted her eyes to the side and let out a long, unsteady breath.
"All right," she said. "I'll listen."
She sat back down on the grass. She did not let go of his hand. Instead she gripped it tightly with both of hers, hard enough to hurt.
"Tell me why I saw that vision," she said. "And tell me what really happened to you in that world. But Max..."
She narrowed her eyes. The grey in them was as sharp as steel.
"If I see even a hint of a lie, even a small one..."
She shook her head slowly and fixed him with her coldest glare.
"This relationship is over, and we will never see each other again."
Max did not flinch. He nodded, once, as if she had said the most reasonable thing in the world.
"I wasn't planning on lying to you," he said. "Not since the very first moment I decided to tell you my secret."
Before she could answer, he took her hands, both of them, and lifted them up to his own neck. He pressed her palms against his throat. She could feel his pulse jumping under her fingers, and the warm movement of his breath.
"And if I do lie," he said quietly, "then choke me."
"What?" Bell gasped. She tried to pull her hands back, but he held them there.
"Choke me, Bell. Choke me until I can't breathe, and keep going until I die. I want it to be you." His voice was calm, and that was the most frightening part. "Not any of the people downstairs. Not the ones who shot me in the head in my second life, which was my first life as Max. If I die, I want it to be at your hands, and only yours."
Bell's eyes went wide. Her fingers went stiff against his skin.
"Wh-what?" she asked.
She had understood about half of that sentence. Shot me in the head. Second life. First life as Max. The words did not fit together. They slid past each other like pieces from two different puzzles.
"I'll explain that part later," Max said. He gently drew her hands down and set them back in her lap. "I promise. But first I need to tell you why you saw that vision. And after that, I'll tell you what I went through before I became Max, and how I found out that my life as Max was never my first."
Bell stared at him. In her head, it all felt ridiculous and confusing at the same time. Nothing he was saying made any sense. But she had given her word, and she kept her word.
"Fine," she said stiffly. "Then tell me why I saw that vision. Tell me why I saw it so clearly."
Max took a deep breath. He looked into her eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was very quiet.
"Because this is the first time I've met you in this timeline."
For a moment, Bell did not move.
"W-what?" she said.
"In the original timeline, I never met you," Max said. "Never. Not once. It was as if you didn't exist, Bell. In that timeline, there was no Bell in my life at all. The only person I ever met from your family was your auntie. I saw her once, and that was the first and last time."
He frowned, remembering.
"And she was different. The Irmela in that timeline was a recluse, just like me. She lived alone, and she was full of anger. She looked like someone who had just lost the person she loved most in the world."
Bell's lips parted. A cold feeling began to creep up through her stomach.
She thought about Irmela's apartment, always filled with the smell of coffee and old books. She thought of her aunt's dry laugh and the way she texted her every single night to ask if she had eaten. She tried to imagine that same woman alone in a dark room, with the lights off and no one to call. The picture was so bleak that she pushed it away.
"That's ridiculous, Max," she said. Her hands had started to shake again. "And what do you mean, original timeline?"
Max looked down.
He had known this moment was coming. He had imagined it a hundred times, lying awake in the dark. And every time, he had hoped that there was some other way. But there was no other way to say it. No soft words could carry it.
"Bell," he said, "in the original timeline..."
His hands clenched. He was sure that if he said this out loud, she would break. She would fall apart in front of him, and there was nothing in the world he could do to stop it.
"...you died young."
The wind seemed to stop.
"You were the girl I saw on the news," Max said. His voice was barely above a whisper. "I was seventeen. I was sitting in my room, and the TV was on. They showed your face. They said a girl in Germany had taken her own life at her own school."
Bell's eyes widened.
"That was you, Bell. In the original timeline, you killed yourself."
For a second, nothing happened.
Then a single tear slid down Bell's cheek, followed by another, and another. They came silently at first. She let go of his hand. She lifted both of her own to cover her mouth, and her whole body began to shake.
"It's hard to believe," Max said gently, though his own voice trembled. "I know it sounds impossible. At first, I thought it was only a coincidence. You and that girl had the same name, and the same face. But after you saw that vision, I knew. I finally understood. You are that girl, Bell. You're the girl who died fifteen years ago in the original timeline."
Bell shook her head. She was crying hard now, and she could not speak. When she finally managed to make a sound, it came out in broken pieces.
"No... no. It's not... it's not unbelievable. After all..."
She pressed her hands against her eyes and breathed in. It rattled in her chest.
"I did consider it," she said in a small voice. "When I was ten years old. fifteen years ago. I thought about ending my life."
Max went very still.
"I had stopped sleeping," Bell said. "I stopped eating. Everyone at school hated me, and nobody at home noticed. I thought that if I just disappeared, nobody would feel anything at all. And I... I was so close, Max."
Her makeup was running down her face in dark streaks. She did not seem to care. She was staring at the grass between her knees.
"It was my aunt who stopped me," she whispered. "She found out. I don't know how. She came all the way from another city in the middle of the night. She sat beside me, and she held my hand, and she begged me not to do it. She cried. I had never seen her cry before."
Her voice cracked.
"If what you say is true, then in that other timeline, she wasn't there. Or she was too late. Or I didn't listen. I didn't listen to her when she begged me not to, and I..."
She did not finish. She did not need to.
Max could not stand it any longer. He crossed the distance between them on his knees and wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tight against his chest. She came without resisting. She buried her face in his shirt and cried, and her shoulders heaved with every breath. He held her head with one hand and rubbed her back with the other, and he said nothing. There was nothing he could say.
For a long time, they stayed that way. The wind blew and the lights swayed, and the sounds of the city floated up from far below.
When her sobs finally slowed, Bell pulled back a little. She wiped her face with both sleeves of his jacket, sniffling. She looked like a mess. Her eyes were swollen and her nose was red, and her blonde hair was stuck to her cheeks. But there was something steadier in her face now. It was the look of a person who has been hit by a wave and stood up again.
She took a long, shuddering breath, and she straightened her back.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm okay."
"Bell..."
"I'm okay," she repeated. She wiped her eyes one last time and took a deep breath. "If that's true, then tell me the rest. What does it have to do with my vision? Why did I see that man? Why did I see that place?"
Max searched her face. He wanted to be sure that she meant it. After a moment, he nodded.
"Bell," he said, "the girl I met in that world..."
He hesitated, then went on.
"I met her when I was Aurelius the Second, Van Valraven. Most people know that name from the game as Sylan Armada Von Noctis."
Bell's eyes widened at once.
"Wh-what?!" She lifted her head sharply. The tears on her lashes were forgotten. "His real name is Aurelius the Second Van Valraven? Wait. Don't tell me he's the son of Auranium Van Valraven? He's the crown prince of the Raven Empire? The one whom the people of the empire call, in the game, Ee Vassileía too Kórakos?"
She said the last two words in a slow, careful voice, as if she were sounding out something she had read a hundred times and never dared to pronounce out loud.
Max blinked. Then, in spite of everything, a faint smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
"Yes," he said. "That's right. You know your lore."
"My mom played that game for ten years," Bell said defensively, wiping her nose. "I learned a lot by osmosis."
"Then you'll understand what I'm saying." Max's smile faded again. "I bet you saw a scene in your vision, didn't you? A man sitting at a long table, who asked you your name? And then he called you Tina, because it rhymes with tuna."
Bell stared at him.
"Y-yeah," she said, and a chill rolled down her back. "I saw it. That's exactly what I saw. How do you know?"
Max did not answer right away. He turned his face up toward the sky. The moon had climbed higher while they talked, and the stars were bright around it. He watched them for a while, as if he were looking for a face among them.
"Because I was there," he said quietly. "I was the man with the red hair."
Bell's mouth opened, but no sound came out.
"Bell," Max went on, "the one who told me why you died in the original timeline, the one who told me about how you were bullied and ignored by your own siblings and your own parents..."
Her hands flew up and pressed against her chest. Her heart had begun to race. It pounded against her palms so hard that it felt like it was trying to climb out of her ribs, faster and faster, as if it already knew what was coming.
"...was you, Bell."
The word you hung in the air between them.
"I'm not the only transmigrator in that world," Max said. "You were one too. You were living there, in a body that wasn't yours, with a life that wasn't yours, just like me. And you told me everything. Your name in that world was..."
He paused. He had never said this name out loud in this lifetime. It tasted strange on his tongue, like a spice from a country that no longer existed.
"Laurentina Farnese dei Acquaviva y Aragona."
The wind blew across the terrace, and for one long moment, nothing else moved.
Bell sat frozen on the grass, with her hands still pressed against her heart. The golden lights shimmered on her wet cheeks. The name rang in her head like a bell struck in an empty cathedral, and every echo seemed to open another door she had never known was there.
She looked at Max. Her grey eyes were huge and unblinking.
"W-what?"