Aisha was lying on a small but well-made bed. The sheets and blanket were both adorned with Aisha’s favorite kind of stylish pattern, and there were dolls and small potted plants along the windowsill. The sun coming through the window and the gaps between objects illuminated Aisha. Her hair was down.
I looked at Aisha and understood why we’d suddenly been able to find her and Arus. Everyone said that if she really wanted to remain hidden, nobody could find her. Hell, after a year of searching, we hadn’t found her whereabouts.
What had changed? It was obvious on sight: Her belly was visibly large. She was pregnant. Because of her pregnancy, she couldn’t move as breezily as she once had. This weakness resulted in an opening in the shroud she’d cast over herself and Arus.
“This isn’t like you,” I muttered.
It wasn’t like her—someone who never showed any openings—to trip up. Getting pregnant meant she wouldn’t be able to move as she pleased. Aisha should have known that. She’d been with Sylphie and the others throughout their pregnancies, so there was no way she wouldn’t. Even if that reality never really landed with her because she hadn’t experienced it herself, Aisha should’ve anticipated how this would turn out.
“I…feel the same way,” she said softly. “I thought Arus and I could live happily ever after. I thought even you wouldn’t find me…”
I didn’t interrupt.
“But I guess…things just didn’t go as planned…” Aisha said before casting her gaze downward and caressing her belly. “I mean, I love Arus. Even if I knew I’d get pregnant, I wanted to sleep with him. It just made me so happy. I want to make love to him.”
There were bags under her eyes. She must have really struggled with this. She knew what she needed to do, that she had to hold herself back. Even knowing that, her body wanted what it wanted, and things spiraled. She couldn’t control herself.
“Hey, Rudeus? Why do I feel this way?”
“I couldn’t say…but when Sylphie and I got married, we were like that too.”
“Really? Then I guess this is love.”
Love, huh?
I didn’t actually know if that was the case. But I did know that loving someone was inevitable. It was a part of our nature.
“Why didn’t you try to talk to anyone about this?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Did you think they’d be against it?”
After a pause she spoke. “I did. I mean, I’m in the wrong. Nobody would’ve taken my side.”
Was that the case?
Lilia was very against their relationship, but if anything, Sylphie was all for it. Roxy was too, and Eris was only against Arus’s attitude, not their actual relationship. If Aisha had properly laid the groundwork ahead of time, I might not have been so stubborn myself. That also wasn’t like Aisha at all…
My reasons for being against their relationship were related to something she had no way of knowing about. If I hadn’t had my own hangups, I probably would’ve celebrated their relationship without objection.
“Hey, Rudeus? Is Arus okay?”
“Yeah, though Eris beat the hell out of him.”
“I figured. Arus is her precious son, after all… Thank goodness…” Aisha let out a sigh of relief. “But Rudeus, what’s going to happen to me now?”
“I’ve gotta think about that.”
“If nothing else, you’ll never forgive me, right?”
“That’s not true,” I said quickly.
“Why? I kidnapped your beloved son and conceived a child with him.”
“You’re not the only one at fault here. I’m partially responsible for pushing the two of you to elope. Even Arus—”
“Arus didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, cutting me off. “He’s still just a kid. I tricked a little kid and made him do what I wanted. I’m the bad guy here. Surely you understand that, Rudeus.”
I took a second to consider what she was saying. “Aisha, Arus isn’t a little kid anymore.”
Immature? Certainly. But he wasn’t a child, unable to make decisions on his own. He’d made the choice to be here. He didn’t think he was tricked into anything, and I didn’t think Aisha believed that either. She was probably trying to cover for him.
“You’ll never accept our child, right?” she asked.
“I admit that it’s hard, but I do. I have to. You’re pregnant,” I answered.
“Are you going to cut my belly open, pull the baby out, and kill it?”
“Of course not…? I could never do that.”
“Sure you could. In Millis, when the nobility have a child they don’t want, they use medicine to put the mother to sleep, cut her open, kill the child, then use healing magic to put her back to normal. But sometimes the woman can’t ever conceive again if the magic is shoddy.”
“What the hell? That’s terrifying…though I guess I did know about abortions, yeah.”
“Once that’s done, you’ll separate the two of us… No, I imagine you’ll kill me, right?”
“Absolutely not! What the hell? Why do you keep bringing up all these awful ideas? Stop it. Do I really seem like that kind of person? Arus is precious to me, like you said, but so are you.”
“But, I-I…I went against you!” Aisha burst out. “I took someone you care about, someone you were willing to fight Sir Orsted to protect, without permission! I tried to make him my own, even though I know all too well how much you love your family, and that you’ll never forgive anyone who does harm to them! I saw how angry you got a year ago! I realized by putting my hands on someone you care about, I did something awful! I made an enemy of you… It was all well and good when I thought I could get away, but my belly just kept getting bigger, and it got so hard to move. I couldn’t use the mercenary band the way I wanted to anymore, I couldn’t control the flow of information anymore… I got scared, I stopped sleeping, and even though I knew you’d come eventually, I couldn’t do anything. Even today, I froze from fear…!”
Aisha’s voice was full of sorrow. The Aisha I knew wasn’t a pessimist like this. What had changed in the last year?
Well, it was possible that this was just baby blues. I needed to calm her down a little.
“Aisha, this was just a little fight between siblings. Yeah, you took it pretty far, but I don’t for one second consider you my enemy.”
“But that day, you looked terrifying. You had the same look on your face as when you fought Sir Orsted. When that one nobleman called Roxy a dirty demon.”
I instinctively touched my face. For real? When I heard Roxy badmouthed, I’d really snapped. I was making the same face at Aisha?
Well, in that moment, I was acting on emotion. Maybe I had made that face. Of course she’d been scared.
“Wh-what about now?” I asked.
She looked at me. “You seem…like when Norn wasn’t leaving her room.”
“Then we’re all good, right?”
I sat myself down on the side of the bed. Aisha’s legs were uncovered, so I gently rubbed one of them. Aisha’s body twitched, but she didn’t reject my touch. Her legs were slender but tough. She must’ve walked a ton in the last year. Her skin was a little dry, and she was shaking.
“Aisha. I don’t think it’s good for siblings to be involved romantically.”
“Right…”
“That’s because…I had a similar experience in my past. But in my case, it was much more dirty, one-sided, and unforgivable. People were rightfully furious with me, attacked me, and lost their faith in me. Because of that, this kind of thing is just totally off limits for me,” I said. As I’d expected, the words flowed naturally for me, far more than the other reasons I’d come up with in the last year.
In a sense, that event was the origin of how I got here. I turned out pretty okay, but that didn’t erase the fact that that horrible event led to my death. Ultimately, I never even got to apologize.
How was I going to broach the topic of my previous life? Considering how heavy this situation was, would she really believe me if I suddenly said, “Actually, I came from another world!”? Would she look like I was up to something?
“Did that happen in the world you used to live in?” Aisha suddenly asked, and the hand I was using to stroke her leg stopped.
“When did I tell you about that?”
“I talked a lot with Nanahoshi. Also, just a guess, going by how you and Sir Orsted act.”
“Ah… Well then.” I guess she, of all people, would figure it out. She was always watching everyone.
“You’re keeping it a secret, right?”
“I’m scared…to tell people. Especially Mom. I mean, she’d be grossed out if she learned the son she had was a filthy middle-aged man, right? What did you think?”
“Not much, really. Sir Orsted’s got memories from a previous life. It might be uncommon, but I’ve heard there are other folks like that too. It’s not like you changed into another person in the middle of your life. You’ve always been my brother. Sure, you’re older than you look, but that doesn’t change who you are to me.”
I paused. “I see. Thanks.”
That was one way of looking at it. Yeah, including Orsted, there were plenty of folks in this world who had been reborn. I was just another one to add to the list.
“Everyone kind of has a feeling that’s the case, you know? Both Sylphie and Roxy… Eris doesn’t quite get it, though.”
Eris heard about what I’d gone through, so she should’ve known. It depended on her memory, but I doubted she’d actually forgotten. She said she would keep it a secret, so I suspected she was just keeping her promise.
“You think?” I asked, feeling reflective.
“You’re not going to tell everyone, are you? I’m sure they’d say something like ‘Yes, and?’”
“I’m Rudeus Greyrat now. Hell, you’d be grossed out if you found out the child you’re carrying is a middle-aged man with memories of his previous life, right?”
“I mean, if he cared about me the same way you do, no.”
“Oh…”
Was that how it was? If it were me, I wouldn’t want that, but…that was probably because I hated who I used to be. I couldn’t help but think that it’d be someone similar. I was disgusted when I imagined them trying to live in this world as though it were a game, like I once had.
Aisha sat up, shuffled over, and rested on the mattress beside me. “Could you tell me everything that happened back then?”
“All right.”
I brought over a chair from nearby and set it in front of Aisha. I sat down and looked at her round belly. She seemed close to full term.
“I was a piece of trash in my previous life. I was a normal kid, but around the time I entered middle school—”