170.

“If… what… you… say… is love….”

“……”

“I too… am not… unaware. It’s just… the other person… you… it’s not you….”

“……”

“So if you want to leave… leave alone.”

“……”

“By all means.”

After a long silence. Giovinetta’s voice, mixed with the sound of choking back tears, cut into the nape of Johannes’s deeply bowed head. He sensed the woman who had pushed away his grasp turning to leave.

“That I… don’t know love. Me…. Love….”

Ha…. A soliloquy, difficult to distinguish whether laughter or sobbing, lingered like a long, miserable shadow. In the final moment, the woman reflected in Johannes’s pupils was the back view of her walking towards Xavier. It was a remnant of the past, with a distorted smile-like expression on her tear-soaked face as she glanced back at him. The woman passes like a ghost through Inette, who is kneeling before Johannes, stepping on the white fur fallen at her feet with staggering steps. And then, whoosh. She disappeared like a flame. Without a trace.

“Johannes?”

Inette called to him. But he couldn’t answer. He couldn’t hear. Leave, she said. Leave me alone, without you. That….

Is it possible?

He had no way of knowing what answer Idris had given to Giovinetta at that time.

Only the countless attempts of rushing out of Fort Gustavus as if self-harming were erupting from deep within his mind. The coldness of the living hell where repeated failures led to actual self-harm – hanging, slitting wrists, cutting open his stomach, and waking up alive again – lingered on his tongue as if it were happening this very night.

In this raw fortress where the smell of blood was alive and breathing, he had thought only his fate was cooling like a model. A model face that, even if defeated and destroyed, would inevitably be restored to its glorious times by the next dawn. A puppet stuffed with fake blood, wearing a fake sword and enjoying fake honor, led by the thread of a fabricated fate or curse. The thought that this was his true identity.

That’s why he was even more desperate. That’s why he tried to build a tower within a tower. Perhaps to feel a bit alive. Wanting to embrace her who would vigorously come to life on her own, undeterred by the emotionless smell of his flesh that had surely been cold dead from the beginning. In a hurry, ready to devour her from head to toe.

Any form would do. As long as she would swallow him whole with her lips and tongue. Hadn’t every day and night been unbearably lonely, desperately missing her pulse that had monopolized him like her doll and made even that imitation’s heart pound along? It was surely from that brilliantly dazzling night when she effortlessly opened the wardrobe where he had voluntarily confined himself with those small hands of hers.

On the day he was certain she felt the same way, he resolved to bare even his bare chest. He intended to open it firmly, to point out the vital spot for her dagger to dig all the way to his heart. Here, he would say. Right here, he would say. Split this open, he would say. If he were to die with her knife lodged in his empty heart, it would rather be an ecstatic sensation of life for Johannes. So let’s build a tower and die together inside it, he thought. Let’s die together….

But today.

“Johannes. …My proud brother.”

The tower he had built is nowhere to be found.

“Johan.”

“……”

“Are you perhaps asleep?”

Inette, who had been examining his complexion with round eyes, asked somewhat incredulously. At that call, Johannes’s shoulders twitched and focus suddenly returned to his pupils. Unable to fully emerge from the thoughts dominating his mind, he was like someone who had just regained consciousness.

Barely managing to meet Inette’s straight gaze with his bewildered one, he let out a long, rough exhale. This girl, is she his sister or that woman from the past? No matter how intently he stared, he couldn’t quite come to his senses. He stammered, trying to gather his scattered thoughts.

“Gio… Inette?”

“Here I am, lowering myself and praising you at length, and you dare to be lost in thought, let alone thanking me for my courage.”

“……”

“How rude.”

“Rude…. I….”

Only after mumbling Inette’s reproachful words like a fool did he suddenly realize. This is Fort Gustavus. This is his present. A chill ran down his spine.

Just now, ‘that thing’ which was like a chronic illness had relapsed. The past that tore through his plausible exterior, which had perfectly copied the appearance of his beautiful sister, had attacked him again. It was truly after several years. He knew from experience. It was surely due to his anxiety.

It always returns with the past. It emerges, tearing Johannes himself like a shell. No… it can’t be. No. He frantically muttered under his breath while rubbing his face vigorously.

“Sorry.”

Hiding his face, he apologized almost mechanically. His sister’s presence, reproaching him theatrically with a “That’s fine,” felt as blurry as a scene outside of sleep. Only the fear that he must escape this crisis as soon as possible stood like a wall in his mind.

“Inette. For now, I… understand your intentions well, so let’s talk again later….”

Struggling to collect himself, Johannes raised his head after rubbing his forehead and bridge of his nose until they were all red. His eyes met Inette’s, who was looking down at him with a mysterious expression. And at that moment, Johannes’s eyelids widened painfully.

“Is there anything more to say?”

Inette asks nonchalantly.

It was strange.

His sister didn’t seem to notice.

Johannes, having confirmed his surroundings, almost screamed.

Was it a nightmarish image transposed onto the present? The inner walls of his bedroom were melting. The gray stone walls shrouded in night shadows and the brilliant contours of the decorative shields faintly reflecting the golden candlelight were oozing like viscous bodily fluids. The surroundings, which even seemed to throb in sync with Johannes’s rapid heartbeat, resembled the cross-section of a beast’s intestines. It looked as if thick arteries might bulge out at any moment.

While Johannes, panic-stricken, was at a loss for words, all the chests lined up against the inner walls of the room, the scattered jewelry on the floor here and there, and even the four-poster bed on its raised platform, all gave way to their original darkness and vanished like illusions. They melted away piece by piece down to the floor.

Finally, even the sensation of the carpet touching his legs disappeared with a crash, and now in the space that had found its true black color, only Johannes Valdemar’s slender sister remained, looking down at him like a sacred ghost, half-kneeling in the black air. Ah, damn it. Damn…. Johannes’s entire body shuddered with fear at the empty sensation beneath his feet. I’m dying. I’m dying right now. He toppled forward. There was no strength left to hold on.

Instinctively reaching out, Johannes immediately buried one cheek below Inette’s chest. From her slender waist to her back, he clung desperately like someone hanging off a cliff’s edge, looking down with a terrible feeling at the pitch-black maw gaping below his knees.

Is this also a hallucination? There was no leisure to consider or analyze. And Inette seemed startled by his sudden contact.

“Jo-Johan?”

“Wait…. Inette, wai….”

“Hmm?”

“…Hold me.”

“I’m not in a position to hold you.”

“No, don’t…! Don’t move. Just for a moment. Don’t let go. Don’t, don’t go….”

“I’ll say it again, Johan…. How can I not go and stay?”

“Huh, ah… Please. Just for a moment. Even if just for a moment. Please.”

Driven to extremes, his breath came out in irregular gasps, huh, huck, making his whole body shake erratically. Eventually, he buried his forehead into her stomach, turning away from the darkness outside. Inette. I, nette…. He desperately called her name as if it were a chain. It felt like the moment he let go of her, he would fall into that bottomless abyss and drown.

But his sister, true to her innate nature, is dull-witted. She’s a person who shows no interest in anything unless her temper is provoked. With Johannes clinging to her, she stood with her arms spread wide, looking quite bewildered, then soon burst into laughter as she gently embraced the head persistently burrowing into her lower chest.

“Why are you… acting like a child today of all days? Where has the usual dignified Johannes Valdemar gone?”

“……”

“Hey, Johannes.”

“……”

“Hey. Precious young master of Gustavus.”

“……”

“Won’t you answer me?”

Johannes couldn’t respond. Even though the arms embracing her were so tense they might break her slender waist, the trembling wouldn’t stop, so how could he? Like someone with only their head stuck out at the threshold of the afterlife, he couldn’t see front or back.

He focused all his nerves on the touch that slowly, slowly stroked from the crown of his head down to where the ends of his hair touched his neckline. Inette. Inette. The moment he sensed one of his sister’s hands, which had come down to below his nape, slightly pulling away, he quickly grabbed it and put it back on his head. He himself was not even aware of this action.

Inette, who had been silent for a moment, perhaps surprised by this behavior, let out a sigh mixed with a smile.

“I didn’t realize until now that you’re also capable of acting spoiled like this. That you’re someone who can do that.”

“……”

“Perhaps that’s why….”

“……”

“You can’t easily understand my choice.”

The resigned tone at the end of those words seemed to somewhat blame him. Is this child going to leave me again? Just as Johannes’s complexion was about to turn even paler with urgency, Inette’s hand began to scratch his head.

Shh.

Shh….

A gentle breath settled on the crown of his head. Inette seemed intent on patiently, docilely stroking him until his convulsions subsided. His entire body, clinging with all its might to the slender pillar that was her, suddenly trembled anew.