The golden lights swayed above the terrace, and the wind carried the faint hum of the city up from the streets. Bell sat on the fake grass with her knees drawn up, still wrapped in Max's jacket. A few loose strands of her blond hair were stuck to her damp cheeks, and her silver-grey eyes were fixed on his face. She was waiting.
Max took a long breath. He had decided to go on, but now he had to find the right place to begin.
"Bell, I told you earlier that I was shot in the head, right?"
"Yeah, Max." Bell nodded slowly. She had not forgotten it. It was one of the things she had been turning over in her mind for the last half hour, like a stone she could not put down.
She frowned and tried to connect the pieces. "And then after that, you transmigrated into Sylan. Right?"
"Mhm. After I transmigrated into that world, do you know what I did?"
"Ummmm... let me think." Bell tapped her chin with one finger and squinted at the sky. "You avoided the main characters of the game. You told yourself you would live a peaceful life in that world, far away from all the drama. You know, that overused fucking cliché."
"Uhh, I'm not like that, Bell."
"No?"
"I mean, yeah, I did avoid them a lot. But that's because I really didn't care about them. I ignored them most of the time. I'm too selfish to give a damn about their romance drama." Max waved his hand. "That's different."
"Then what did you do in your first transmigration?" Bell asked. She raised one eyebrow. "Did you prepare to avoid the bosses? The villainess, or whoever could threaten your life? Because that's what every protagonist of a transmigration or reincarnation story does, no matter what gender they are."
Max stared at her.
He opened his mouth. Then he closed it and let out a long sigh. She was right, and he knew it. She had read too many of those stories, and she knew the pattern better than he did.
"I'll admit that you have a point," he said. "And yes, I tried it. But I'm no protagonist. If I were, I wouldn't have the power of that accursed regression. Do you know what its price is? It slowly eats your emotions, one piece at a time, until you die."
Bell's expression flickered, and she looked down at her hands. She did not say anything. She only filed that sentence away, in the place where she kept all the things she was not ready to feel yet.
"Fine," Max said. "I'll answer it myself. On my first transmigration, I killed myself."
The terrace went silent.
Bell did not move at first. Her face went blank, as if the words had not quite reached her. Then her eyes snapped wide open.
"WHAT THE FUCK?!"
She scrambled onto her knees. She grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and shook him once, hard.
"Are you insane?!"
"Call it insane if you want," Max said. He did not push her hands away. "But I think a lot of sane people would have done the same thing. When I woke up in that world, every rational and logical person would have picked the same thing I did. Not a chance at a life like that. Sylan's life was already doomed, no matter what I did. So I took the shortcut. Which was death."
"Max..."
"And I don't know whether it was a joke of fate, or the Goddess Emilianias's handiwork, but I know that I picked the easiest choice. Because why the fuck would I accept that life? It was already fucked from the beginning."
His voice rose, and the bitterness in it came spilling out, as if it had been bottled up for centuries.
"Think about it! My life as Aurelius. My parents died, and my sister abandoned us. Then my life as Max. My parents died again, when I was a child. That was the most fucked up thing I ever experienced. And then, on top of all that, I wake up in the body of a character whose entire story is a tragedy? Why would I say, 'Oh, wow, I've been reborn into a world where the guy I possessed is doomed. Well, I'll try to survive anyway. I'll just accept it'? Fuck that!"
He ran a hand through his amber hair and gave a short, hollow laugh. It sounded like a door creaking in an empty house.
"That's why I chose death. And after I did it, I found out I had the ability to regress. Which was the most fucked up thing of all. Because what do you mean I can come back? It was like it was my fate to be reborn in that body."
Bell let go of his shirt and sank back onto her heels. She pressed her palms against her eyes.
"That's fucked up, Max," she said, through her fingers. "And it wasn't even your body. I'm not going to lie. That's the part that gets me."
"Yeah. I know." Max nodded heavily. "But I had no choice. So I tried again. And again. And again. And again. For the first ten regressions, I killed myself every time."
Bell lowered her hands and stared at him.
She tried to speak and failed. She tried again. "I don't know which part is worse," she said at last, in a strained voice. "Is it that you did that to a body you didn't own? Or is it that you did it ten times in a row, as if you were trying a different key in the same lock? I know 'fucked up' is a huge stretch, but..."
Her voice climbed higher.
"THAT'S STRAIGHT-UP BATSHIT INSANE!!!"
The echo rolled out over the rooftops. Somewhere below, a window slid open, and someone muttered a complaint.
"I know that's what you'd say," Max said wearily.
"Of course I'd say that!"
"But let me continue first, geez."
Bell groaned and rubbed her forehead. She took a long breath and forced herself to settle down. She was still shaking, but she crossed her arms and fixed him with a hard look.
"Fine," she said. "But I'm telling you. I'm not even religious, and I know it's a grave sin. If there's any kind of afterlife, you'll be punished for what you did to that body."
"I know," Max said quietly. "I know."
He looked up at the stars, and his voice dropped to something almost inaudible.
"After all, I'm certain I'll burn in hell for eternity for everything I've done."
Bell heard it. She almost asked what he meant. The question rose to her lips, and she held it there for a moment, studying his profile in the moonlight. Then she closed her mouth. She had pushed him enough for one night, and she knew the look of a door that had been shut on purpose.
"Anyways," Max said, and the lightness in his voice was a little too bright. "On my eleventh regression, I tried to kill myself again. And this time, someone appeared in front of me."
Bell blinked. "Someone?"
"It was none other than Sylan himself. His spirit, or whatever you call it, appeared in front of me."
"What?" Bell whispered. The cold ran down her back. "How is that possible?"
"I have no idea. But as I remember, this is what he said."
Max closed his eyes, and the terrace melted away.
It was a bedroom in the Von Noctis manor, a large and gloomy room with heavy curtains drawn over the tall windows. A single candle was burning on the nightstand. The bed was a mess of twisted sheets, and the floor was cold under bare feet.
A young man stood in the middle of the room, shaking. He was thin and pale, with tousled hair the color of red wine, shot through with thick streaks of silver. His eyes, in the mirror across the room, were crimson. He held a small knife in his unsteady hand, and he was not breathing.
He had done this ten times already. He knew the weight of the room around him, and he knew the pale quiet that came after. He lifted the knife once more.
"STOP!"
The voice cut across the room like a bell.
"Just stop. Please... just stop killing my body."
The man with the knife froze. He turned his head slowly.
Someone was floating in the middle of the room, a few inches above the carpet, with a faint, sickly glow around his edges. It was a young man with the same face as the one in the mirror. His hair was the same red-wine color with the same silver streaks, and his build was identical, as thin and tall as a young tree in winter. But his eyes were different. They were golden, and in the center of each iris, where a pupil should have been, there were tiny turning gears, like the face of a clock. They ticked silently, round and round, as if they were counting something that the man who owned them was afraid to name.
The man with the knife did not know what to call them. They looked like clockwork. They looked like time itself.
Sylan was crying. He did not seem to notice that he was. The tears ran down his translucent cheeks and dripped off his chin without making any sound.
"I know," Sylan said, and his voice broke. "I know that my life is over, no matter what you change. I know that it's too late for me. But please, just stop. Life is precious. I'm not asking you to take it back. I'm not telling you what to do. But please, just stop for a moment and listen to me."
The man with the knife stared at him.
"Ho-how is this possible?" he stammered. The knife trembled in his fingers. "How are you still alive? I already took your body!"
"It's not..." Sylan began.
"No. This is better." The man shook his head sharply. He lowered the knife slowly, then raised it again. "Just go back into this body already, and let me die in peace, you fucking piece of shit!"
His voice cracked on the last word, and the cracks showed something raw underneath.
"Do you know how painful my first life was?" he shouted. "HUH?!"
He was shouting at a ghost, and his whole body shook with it.
"Do you know how much I suffered?! I trusted one stranger. One fucking stranger! And because of that, I lost my parents when I was young! I lost them, and I became an orphan, when I was just a kid!"
Sylan flinched but did not speak.
"Of course you don't know!" The man's lip curled. "Because you had a family. Even if they didn't love you, at least they supported you! And what did you do? You didn't pay them back! You paid them back by being a disappointment, an ungrateful brat, and a fucking delinquent!"
Sylan's hands curled into fists.
He did not agree with a single word of it. He wanted to speak, but something heavy and dark swelled in his throat. The man in front of him had only the story that the game had given him, a few pages of text and a handful of illustrations. He did not know the truth. He did not know at all.
"How dare you," Sylan whispered.
"Like I care. Just take this body already, goddamnit!"
"HOW DARE YOU CALL ME THAT!"
The scream shook the candle on the nightstand, and its flame leaned sideways. The glow around Sylan flared, and the gears in his golden eyes began to spin faster. His voice was a raw, broken sound.
"How dare you call me an ungrateful brat! You don't know my story! You don't know the first thing about it!"
The man with the knife stopped.
He had not expected that. He had expected silence, or a sneer, or a ghostly wail. Instead, the spirit in front of him was shaking from head to toe, with tears streaming down his face. He tried to wipe them away with the back of his hand, but it passed through his own cheek.
"Sniff. Sniff." Sylan hiccupped and drew an unsteady breath. "You don't know, because you've never been looked at by the nobles. Because you've never been called the illegitimate child of Duke Xavier Aegor Von Noctis. You don't know how I felt when my own cousins stayed away from me when I was a child."
His voice dropped.
"They believed that I was the reason their mother, who was a princess of Lunaria, went back to Lunaria and left them behind. They thought I was the cause. You don't know what it's like to be a little boy and have your cousins look at you like you're a stain on the wall."
"I..."
"You don't know how it felt to be bullied by my own classmates. They called me a dirty bastard. They said I was the reason the Duke and his wife's marriage was falling apart." A shuddering breath. "But the truth... the truth is that I wasn't even his son."
The man with the knife went still.
"I was his nephew," Sylan said. "I was his adopted child."
'W-what?' the man thought.
His heart started to beat very fast. The knife in his hand suddenly felt like something foreign. He had played that game. He had read every line of its lore. He knew the Von Noctis family tree by heart. And there was nothing, not a single word, not a footnote, that said anything like this.
'This isn't part of the plot of the game. What the fuck is going on?'
He swallowed. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse.
"Then who are your parents?" he asked. "If you're his nephew, and he adopted you, then who were they?"
Sylan stared at him. His fists had not unclenched. He was still furious. This man had been carelessly killing his body, ten times over, as if it were a rental. The pain of that was still raw.
"Why would I tell you?" Sylan said coldly. "You judged me. You judged me by the way I was portrayed in the game you played."
His golden eyes narrowed. The gears turned and turned.
"Fuck. I still don't want to believe that this world is a game."
The man stiffened.
'Did he get that from my memories?' he thought. Then he shook his head, a little ashamed. 'Of course he did. Come on, Max. That's common sense. We share the same head now.'
The silence stretched. The candle crackled. A dog barked somewhere outside the manor and went quiet again.
Slowly, the man lowered the knife. He set it down on the nightstand, very carefully, beside the candle, as if it might go off. Then he turned and faced the ghost, and for the first time, he really looked at him. He looked at the wet golden eyes, at the thin shoulders, and the shaking hands.
"All right," the man said. His voice was low, and it was steady. "I'm sorry."
Sylan said nothing.
"I mean it. I'm sorry. I thought... no. I'm so sorry, from the bottom of my heart. I judged you because of how you were portrayed in a game. I judged you without knowing your true story. That was wrong of me. I'm sorry."
It was the truth. The man had been a hitman and a heartless killer for most of his adult life. He had broken bones and ended lives without blinking. But even he knew when to show sympathy and empathy to the right person. And he knew that he owed this boy an apology that went deeper than words.
Sylan did not want to accept it. His first instinct was to turn his face away and drift out of the room, to leave this stranger and his sorry. But he had seen things, too. Their minds had touched for those few strange weeks, and Sylan had seen the little boy at his parents' funeral. He had seen the orphan with the empty bowl, and the nights spent alone in a cold room. He had no right to judge or ignore that suffering, either.
He let his fists relax, finger by finger.
"My mother's name," Sylan said at last, very softly, "is Bethany Elmina Von Noctis."
The man's eyes went wide.
He knew that name.
It was nothing more than a background name, a line or two in an old codex that most players never even opened. Bethany Elmina Von Noctis. A woman who had died long before the story began. And yet, even in the game, she had left a mark. There had been a ghostly, mournful quality to the way her name was written, a shadow that clung to the pages around it.
The lore had said that Duke Xavier fell into a deep depression because of what happened to his family. His older sister, Bethany died after giving birth to Sylan, while their eldest sister had been gangrape by the Solanians. The Solanians had taken their eldest sister, and what they had done to her was written in only a few grim lines the same as Bethany did. Xavier had never recovered from it. The game described him as a man who never stopped looking over his shoulder, and who never again trusted anyone who smiled.
And now the ghost in front of him was saying that she had been his mother.
"W-what?" the man whispered.
His knees nearly gave out. He caught himself on the edge of the nightstand, and the candle flame shivered.
"You're her son?!"
On the terrace, Max opened his eyes.
The golden lights were still swaying. The wind was cold on his face. Bell was still kneeling on the fake grass in front of him, with her silver-grey eyes wide open, and her lips slightly parted. She had been so completely caught in the story that she had forgotten to breathe.
She let out a long breath. "Bethany," she murmured. "Bethany Elmina Von Noctis."
"Yeah," Max said.
"I remember her, a little. She was in the codex. The one who..." Bell stopped, and her mouth tightened. "I remember."
"So did I," Max said. "That was the moment I knew that everything I'd thought about that world was wrong. It wasn't just a game. It was a world. It had people in it. And Sylan was one of them."
He looked down at his hands, and for a long time he did not say anything more.