Part IXGrowing Pains

“Hwuuu…”

The distant sound of someone sobbing echoed familiarly.

Was a banshee crying again?

The voices that sounded were quite a bit different from one, though.

“Hwuuuuu…”

“You can stop.”

Oh, was it just a dream?

A dark room slowly became clearer. I’d seen this room before.

As the darkness surrounding me gradually ebbed away, I saw a woman crying, standing in front of a balcony and rubbing the heel of her palm against her chest. A man was moving closer to her.

I couldn’t see their faces, but a strange sense of familiarity washed over me. The thought of having met this couple somewhere else passed me by.

Oh, that’s right. I had had a dream like this once before.

Yes, in another place, at another time, that woman had been smiling wickedly, and that man…

“Isn’t it time you stopped with the bad acting?”

The woman quit her wailing. “What if I don’t want to?”

“Ah, you’re really driving me crazy.”

“As expected, it doesn’t work on you,” I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the woman sneering. “You’re so annoying, you know that, right?”

The sadness ailing her vanished in an instant, something menacing gracing her features instead. I still couldn’t see what she looked like, but I felt the aggression dripping from her echoing and settling in my bones.

The man looming over her seemed to be very angry. “You turned the court banquet into a damn circus show. Have you no shame?”

“That girl was asking for it. What did you want me to do?”

“Did you fight with her just cause she asked you a question? Why don’t you pick a fight with the entire world then?”

“You weren’t even there, so what do you know? Right, it must’ve been your little sister that told you. Of course, she must have chosen her side again. She always does.”

The woman gave a bitter laugh, the air turning sullen.

“Watch your mouth.”

“Oh, don’t deny it, you know it’s true. And what if I don’t watch my mouth? Will you hit me? Don’t even joke around, because we both know you won’t.”

I was starting to worry a little for the woman.

She was deliberately targeting her opponent’s weak spots, his rage already reaching its breaking point. The harsh breaths he took was the only sound that could be heard in this dark and empty room.

“You’re such a bad f**king girl.”

“And you’re so handsome,” she swooned, ridicule but also honesty honeying her sweet voice.

“Consider it an honor then, if you’re willing to admit it.”

“Hah! An honor? You?”

“Anything you’re dissatisfied with? Tell me, since I’m your so-called husband.”

“I’m dissatisfied with your existence itself.”

“I’m also dissatisfied with your existence, you wicked woman!”

The mood was strange.

The two were seriously fighting, but they couldn’t take their eyes off one another either.

It was as if one of them would turn around any minute now, storming out of the door if not taking swings at each other before that. Instead, it was the distance between them that was dwindling, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on warming up the desolate room.

They were almost chest to chest now.

“Then, it must be my appearance you’re at least not dissatisfied with, my wife.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. It just came out like that, it didn’t mean anything. There are a hell of a lot more attractive men much better-looking than you in my hometown.”

“What are you doing here, then? Hurry up and go back home.”

“You’re a damn j*rk.”

“Couples resemble each other, right?” The man came closer, as if there was still space left between them. “Visit her tomorrow and apologize.”

“Only if you don’t participate in the stupid Match.”

“Hell no!”

“Then I won’t either!”

Panting in frustration and moving swiftly, the woman raked her fingers through the man’s hair and dug her nails into the back of his neck, pulling him close to her. There was nothing separating them anymore.

The man was twice her size, but he went willingly.

I couldn’t help but wonder where I was, who these people were, and why I was here, as I took in the scene of the man and woman’s passionate entanglement.

The cold room had been heating up for a while now, and the sounds of heavy breaths and desperate kissing filled the dark chamber. The only source of light came from the moon raining down on the couple clutching each other tightly and hungrily devouring one another.

It was romantic, yet macabre. Sad and hopeless and wretched all at the same time.

The woman’s eyes turned to me.

She could not have seen me. I was only a ghost in this dream, after all. Someone from the outside looking in. I wasn’t truly here.

But somehow, that woman smiled at me—a meaningless, sad smile.

Something in my chest broke and smashed into pieces. The face I hadn’t been able to see previously finally became clear.

The woman was me.

Rudbeckia de Borgia, that’s you… That’s me.

Then, that man is…

I wanted to check, to see, to make sense of it, but it was as if someone had turned me to stone. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t call out to him.

The moonlight flickered and waned, and the room plunged into darkness. The man and the woman vanished and I lost myself to the shadows in this empty and desolate room.

***

Bright white shining right into my eyes had me twitching, trying to blink it away.

The first thing that came to me was the heavy feeling in my head. I tried to lift my hand, but it dropped down to the bed I was lying on like a ton of bricks.

Where am I? Who got me here? What happened at the end…

Fumbling through the broken fragments of my memories as I slowly woke up, I turned my eyes to my right, the feeling of someone else’s arm underneath me jostling me fully awake.

I wanted to cry.

I was overjoyed to see him safe and lying next to me, looking like he hadn’t just gone through hell and back, but there were no words coming from my dry throat.

I just looked at him, taking him in, my eyes leaving no part of his face untouched. He did the same.

He looked miserable, though.

I tried to move my weak hand and run my fingers through his bangs, the movement taking everything out of me, but my want was greater than anything else at the moment.

“Why…” His voice was low and hoarse, almost a whisper in the soft breeze. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I wasn’t really thinking of anything. It felt like it didn’t really matter, none of it.

Everything I had done in my previous life and everything I had done in this life, all of it flashed before my eyes, like a movie stuck on repeat in my head.

I felt like a stranger in my own body thinking about it all.

So, just like him, the voice I answered him with was low and hoarse as well, a whisper I breathed out. “Because I thought you’d change.”

“What…?”

“I… I’ve been broken for a long time. I’ve never really been me. All I was, was an illusion. Once it broke, everyone changed. It’s always been like that.”

It was something I knew very well, something that had revealed itself to me time and time again.

How disappointed my adoptive parents had been with me once they realized I wasn’t what they had wanted me to be. When my brother had had enough of my sniveling and groveling and breaking down, when I wasn’t the perfect sister, always composed and worthy of the family name like he had expected me to be.

“It’s always been like that…?”

“Always.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw and his lips curled into a mean snarl. I knew it wasn’t me he was directing it at. “Were all the people around you blind and stupid?”

“I mean… I’m already in a situation where I’m hated without doing anything. I can’t seem to win.”

I traveled around his eye with my numb finger, gently at first until I pressed hard on the bone of his cheek, wondering if he hated it.

Even after cracking such a silly joke, Izek still kept on gazing at me with that same brokenhearted look in his tired eyes.

His other arm was free, he could embrace me fully, enveloping me in his warmth, but he did not move.

So I moved instead, putting my own arm around his wide torso and burying my head in the juncture where his shoulder and neck met, breathing in his masculine scent.

I didn’t understand why my head felt so heavy.

I had a dream, but I didn’t remember it at all.

“Iz, don’t look at me like that. Because it’s not your fault. It’s not always all about you, you know?”

This suffering-from-main-character-disease arrogant man, I swear.

I was trying to joke around to lighten up this solemn mood, but Izek wasn’t having it.

“I’m neither blind nor stupid. I knew. I knew it for a while.”

I knew that he’d know at least a little bit, but hearing it come from his own mouth still made me tremble with anxiety. Unwitting tears welled up, but I tried to blink them away.

“The night we became a couple?”

“No. Before that.”

“Really? Since when?”

“The stables.”

His big hand fiddled with my messy hair, twirling little locks of it around his calloused fingers.

Oh, I see… “Was it that obvious?”

“Yes. You didn’t realize?”

“Not at all.”

“It was so obvious.”

Slapping his hard chest, I huffed out, “Don’t make fun of me. If it was so obvious, why didn’t you say anything?”

“I thought you’d leave me.”

I stopped breathing.

Lifting my head to look at him properly, my eyes shaking and swimming with tears, Izek had already folded the other arm over his face.

As if he were trying to hide.

“If I tried to dig into what you were so desperately trying to hide…” His voice broke, as did my heart. “I thought you’d stop pretending to like me and disappear somewhere.”

I wanted to pull his arm away, I wanted to see him, but I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t know why I thought like that, so I just tried to find it all out by myself. There wasn’t anything in particular, but I thought I’d know for sure during this festival… After meeting Cardinal Valentino.”

Was his chin trembling or was it just my imagination?

“But I couldn’t see you as you while you were next to him anymore. You… You were like a completely different person. A woman who was neither anxious nor trying to hide something. You were just smiling, like it was normal. You never smiled like that with me.”

It was only natural that my acting skills shined the brightest when I was with Cesare! Because I’d been dealing with an older brother like him my entire life! Because men like them were the ones I couldn’t break down in front of, no matter what!

But I had never been with a man like Izek before. When I was with him, I didn’t need to act. Not anymore.

“I’m… Iz, you knew I was pretending to like you?”

Sure, I used to pretend once upon a time, but that wasn’t true anymore!

He still hadn’t removed his arm.

He sighed as he pulled us both up eventually, the bitter sound of it sitting heavy in the air. “You were afraid of me from the very beginning.”

“From the beginning? No, that’s not…”

“You were always looking at me as if I were the Grim Reaper himself, coming to take your soul. Your husband is a Paladin, you know. You can’t be a Paladin and an idiot that can’t distinguish between fear and love.”

That was because you were definitely going to be the Grim Reaper taking my soul, you main character!

The scariest part of this was that everyone I’d ask would agree with me on this husband of mine being the Grim Reaper! Definitely everyone would agree, no doubt about it!

Oh, I was going crazy. He had to be lying, no? I couldn’t even explain all of this to him.

“So, you knew because you’re not an idiot?”

“No, I was still an idiot.”

“What do you mean?”

His big hand stretched over my cheek, holding me still for a while, and he grazed his thumb under my glossy eye in a way that I’d become so familiar with.

“I didn’t want you to leave me, so I was foolish. Even if you tried to hide it, I still wanted to know everything.”

T

/N: We will post 4 chaps next week~ ALSO FINALLY SOME RUBEK FLUFF T_T (yes I just named the ship Rubek, suggest better ones if you have any xDDD)