I Am The Game's Villain

Chapter 792: Miranda SS [3]

MIRANDA

I wonder what happened to you.

After Aunt Oryanna died, you were so broken, so lost, that it frightened me more than I wanted to admit. I still remember the funeral. I remember the look on your face that day, the emptiness in your expression, and the strange anxiety that had already started gnawing at me even before everything truly fell apart. Perhaps some part of me had already sensed it then, that you were slipping away, little by little, becoming distant in a way I could neither stop nor understand.

And in the end, what I feared was exactly what happened.

You became worse.

Not all at once, perhaps, but enough that each new change in you felt like another small loss. And I failed to stop it. I failed to comfort you. I failed to reach you in the way I had once believed I could.

I tried.

I truly did.

I tried for your sake, but also for Elona’s, because she was suffering too, perhaps more than any of us. She had lost so much, and yet she kept standing there beside you, trying in her own way to endure what you had become. I wanted to do the same. I wanted to help both of you.

But eventually it became too much.

Too hurtful.

Too painful.

And so I drew the line.

Even that was not easy. It did not happen in a single day, nor because of one single wound. It took weeks, perhaps months, perhaps even a full year before I truly began to get over you, if I ever truly did. That was how much I had loved you. That was how special your existence had been in my eyes.

And even so, I think I did the right thing by walking away.

With my mother’s death already weighing on me, I do not think I could have survived much more of your cruelty, your bitterness, or the hurtful things you had begun to throw at everyone around you. I was grieving too. I was trying to remain standing too. And there comes a point where love is no longer enough to justify letting yourself be wounded over and over again.

Then, that year, everything changed again.

You appeared before me transformed so completely that it was almost absurd. Not like the child I had once known, and not like the broken version of you I had forced myself to leave behind. You were something else entirely again, someone unfamiliar wearing a face that should have been known to me.

Perhaps that was why, despite how long I had known you, I did not even recognize you when we met again in the Enigma Dungeon.

Looking back, I can only smile at it now.

You had appeared dressed in that ridiculous outfit, hidden behind a mask, lingering around us in such an awkward and strange way that I honestly do not know how I was supposed to recognize you at all. There was something almost laughable about it in hindsight, as if fate itself had decided to mock the years between us by throwing you back into my path in the most absurd manner possible.

And yet, even later, when I saw you again at the academy, I nearly failed to recognize you a second time.

Perhaps your previous self had left too bitter and too deep an impression on me. Perhaps I had grown so used to associating your face with pain, disappointment, and distance that when you returned changed, I no longer knew what to make of you. You seemed different, yes, but did that truly mean you had changed for the better?

At the time, I did not show much reaction.

Outwardly, I remained calm.

But inwardly, I was curious.

Hopeful, even.

And yet there was still something in you that held back. Even as you reappeared before all of us, even as you began slipping once more into the lives you had once shattered, it still felt as though you kept a certain distance. You were there, yet not fully. Present, yet cautious. And when I saw the way you acted harshly toward Elona, I nearly stepped in more than once.

I wanted to.

But I restrained myself.

I was afraid of stepping back into your life too soon. Afraid of making a mistake. Afraid, perhaps most of all, of being hurt by you again.

Still, despite myself, as the days passed, I found myself being drawn back toward you.

You had a strange way of reconnecting with people. Sometimes through kindness, though more often through arguments, insults, and the sort of sharp exchanges only you seemed able to turn into something oddly familiar. You were still, as expected, constantly at odds with the other boys, my brother included. There was always some quarrel with Alfred, Thomas, David, Ronald, Loid, or even John. In that regard, you had not changed nearly as much as one might have hoped.

And yet… it felt different.

Not good, not entirely healthy, not harmless, but different.

Before, when you picked fights, there had been something ugly in it, something mean-spirited and vile that made it unpleasant even to watch. Now, though the arguments were still arguments, they no longer carried that same poison. There was something almost familiar in them, something strangely lighter. Not better in every sense, perhaps, but closer to the boy you had once been.

Closer to the boy I had loved.

And as I watched the others slowly repair their ties with you, whether through closeness or through that rough, stubborn friction that seemed to follow you everywhere, I began to feel an urge I had not wanted to admit.

I wanted to do the same.

I wanted, somehow, to find a way back toward that connection.

But it felt awkward.

Frightening, even.

I was still scared.

Still nervous.

Still uncertain of what version of you stood before me now.

You were not the same Edward I had known as a child. That much was obvious. And perhaps you never could be again. Too much had happened. Too much had been broken between then and now.

Would you still be the same, in some small hidden way?

Perhaps not.

But even so, I found myself wanting something simple.

Not necessarily to return to what we once were, because perhaps that was impossible.

But at least to rebuild something.

Something gentle.

Something familiar.

Something like what we once had with Elona.

The three of us together again, as often as it used to be.

Elona had wished for it too.

And despite all my hesitation, despite how often I held myself back and told myself to move carefully, I could never fully bring myself to go to you first. In the end, it was you who came to me in the Enigma Red Dungeon.

That day, after I lost Dylan, one of my closest friends, you appeared before me at the very moment I was the weakest. It is still embarrassing to admit how quickly I gave in, how quickly your words reached me, how little strength I had left to resist the comfort you offered. But perhaps the truth is that I had never truly wanted to resist it at all.

When you embraced me, I broke.

Or perhaps I simply returned, for a moment, to something old and familiar.

I abandoned myself to that comfort as naturally as I had done when we were children, back when I would scrape my knees and you would lift me into your back, sometimes in your arms as if that alone could make the pain disappear. It felt just like that.

Simple and safe.

And that was exactly what I had wished for.

Then later, you saved me again.

At Alfred’s and Aurora’s birthday, when you killed Raisa.

Even now, I do not think I could properly describe how grateful I felt that day. Or how relieved. Or how strangely happy, despite everything surrounding it. Raisa’s death freed me from a pain I had long believed would never fully leave me. She had carried too much of my grief inside her continued existence, too much of what had been stolen from me, too much of what I could never mend. And then you ended it.

You came back to me then too, just as you always had in the stories my younger heart once told itself.

Like the hero I had always believed you were.

Part of me feared, afterward, that you would retreat again, that you would help me and then put that same careful distance back between us, as though whatever had passed between us in those moments had meant nothing. But you did not.

And almost without either of us realizing it, we became closer again.

Not all at once.

Not through grand confessions or some single decisive moment.

It happened quietly, in gestures, in conversations, in the way your presence stopped feeling distant and began to feel familiar again. And I remember how unbearably happy that made me. Happier than I wanted anyone to know.

Around you, in that gentle strength of yours, I felt so many things at once that I could hardly separate them. Nostalgia, relief and happiness.

A kind of peace I had not realized I was still longing for.

And I was immediately eager for us to get as close as we were before, if not even closer.

Perhaps I was already too late.

Layla, as expected, had taken a liking to you as well.

I loved Layla dearly, and I could never feeling anything toward her for that. But because I had known you since childhood, because I knew how naturally affectionate you could be toward her, a small and rather shameful fear did take root in me. I was afraid, perhaps, that you would care more for her than for me. Afraid that while I was trying to find my way back to you, I would discover I had already lost the place I once held in your heart.

And yes, I was jealous.

Only a little, perhaps.

But enough that I noticed it.

And strangely, noticing that jealousy brought me an unexpected kind of comfort. It reminded me of the old days, of how deeply you had once mattered to me, of how alive all those feelings still were beneath everything else. In a strange way, it reassured me. It made me believe that perhaps we truly could do it again. That perhaps this time we could rebuild something better, something truer, something that would not be ruined the way it had before.

But life had never truly stopped being cruel to either of us.

Then Elona died.

And you were sent to prison.

Everything happened so quickly that it left no room to breathe, no room to grieve properly, no room to even understand one loss before the next tore through us. I did not even have time to truly acknowledge Elona’s death, much less accept it. I did not have time to come to you, to comfort you, to hold you in my arms so that, perhaps selfishly, you might also hold me and comfort me in return.

Before I could do any of that, I was taken away by my mother’s family.

Within a single year, within only a few months, really, we had lost both Louisa and Elona.

How was I supposed to endure that and then calmly accept being taken away, as if I could simply step into some new role and let the old life be stripped from me without resistance?

I could not.

And then you left as well.

You left on your own to Sancta Vedelia while I was thousands of heights high.

Perhaps I was asking too much of you. Perhaps I always had. But all I wanted then was to see you, Edward. I wanted to be with you. Not through rumors. Not through absence. Not through half-understood messages drifting between us. I wanted your presence. Your voice. Something real.

Layla tried to explain things to me, things about you that I could not fully grasp. Your letters did the same. They spoke of another life, of what had happened to you, of truths that should have changed everything.

But how was I supposed to react to that?

How was I supposed to make peace with something so immense, so strange, through explanations offered by someone else or through careful words written on a page?

I did not want to hear those things through Layla.

And I did not want to understand you through your precious letters either.

I wanted to hear it from you.

From your own mouth.

I may not have been able to understand the fear that drove you away. I may not have fully understood what had happened to you, what you had become, or what burdens you were carrying in silence. But there was one thing I did understand with certainty.

My feelings for you had always been real.

From the very beginning, they had been real.

And that was why I chose to wait.

No matter how lonely I felt, no matter how abandoned I sometimes believed myself to be, I held on to the hope that one day you would come back to me, not through letters, not through someone else’s explanation, but in person.

Face to face.