Judging by her steady breathing, Theodora has fallen asleep, her face pressed into her arm.
I rest my chin on my hand. Theodora turns in her sleep, trying to find a more comfortable position, before eventually settling on facing left and forward. Her eyelids are red, in part because of the tears, but likely also because she unconsciously rubbed them with her arm.
It’s been so long, and yet we haven’t grown up at all. Lifting her well-groomed red-brown bangs, I see her childlike sleeping face that could make anyone forget her age.
“That’s enough, Grove,” says Alkes, who was supposed to be at reception.
“I wasn’t planning to do anything. But sometimes people need to change to remain the same.”
In Theodora’s wish to remain the same, I sense that she’s trying to escape her changing self. For more than ten years now since that day, I’ve been watching over her, albeit in a different way from Alkes. He quit the order: I suspect he felt responsible for what had happened. I never left her alone, no matter how much animosity she expressed towards me. Even if it has made reality all the more inescapable to her, I at least wanted to make sure she doesn’t end up driven any further into a corner—to help her feel more than just grief and be able to share the full breadth of her feelings. Maybe I’m just doing this for my own satisfaction, but this is how I’ve acted towards her all along.
After spending so long with her like this, right by her side, there’s something I’ve come to realize: she hates seeing my face. But when we banter, she may be facing away, yet she smiles from the bottom of her heart. Little by little, she regains the ability to do that.
“I’m well aware of Miss Locktiss’s feelings. All this does is put her at her wit’s end.”
“I know,” I utter quietly in reply to his admonition. “I keep beating myself up over the fact I wasn’t the one to go in there that day. We may have the same face, but my death would never have weighed on her in quite the same way.”
“Hey, that’s not a healthy way of thinking.”
“It’s just... I’ll never be as brave as him. He went in there without any hesitation.”
The living can never surpass the sentiments and actions of the dead. No amount of effort will ever change that.
Alkes takes a seat beside Theodora and gazes at her face. I still can’t tell whether he looks at her with the same eyes as me or not.
“She still places white flowers near that wooden carving of a lykos every flower goddess festival.”
That carving? She still has it? On second thought, I should’ve expected as much. She wouldn’t just go and throw away a present from the man she loves. Eruve brought it from abroad as a gift, and though she felt awkwardly happy about my brother’s choice of present, she still complained: “Should I be happy about a carving of a lykos?”
“If we don’t finally leave that day behind, we’ll never get anywhere. Not me, not her, not you.” Alkes changes the topic. “Grove, who do you think made that Time Keeper doll?”
I’ve brought up the topic of the doll with him before. At first we were just talking shop the other day about our assignment to search for it, but we ended up with a working theory of who could’ve come up with it in the first place.
“Not only is drawing those magic circles without anyone noticing very difficult, but no reports of suspicious activity came in at the time,” I begin. “That craftsman, who presumably had his memory wiped by the true culprit, didn’t remember how he had drawn those circles.”
“If he used this Time Keeper, it’s not exactly impossible.”
“Indeed. He could find out the exact time those locations would be devoid of people and use it to prepare the circles. He could also travel years into the past, place magic circles in certain spots, and rig them to activate after a set period of time. It’s plausible.”
If the culprit is still alive, I’m certain Theodora will kill them as soon as she finds them. She’ll show them no mercy, even should they beg her for their life. Till the moment blood stops coursing through their veins; till their body loses all value; till they are history. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of her being just as hell-bent on murder as the criminal she’s chasing. Making sure she doesn’t stain her hands is just one more reason to stick around.
Theodora. When you go for the killing blow, you won’t be alone.