Chapter 55.3: Dependably Cruel, Dependably Kind

  If there was one thing Lady Meng wanted Dr. Farid to study, it would be Fanghua’s flamboyance.

  This could never be genetic, Lady Meng thought as she watched on. The interview was conducted in Ace’s room, and Fanghua's eyes had already stripped it bare—furniture, books, a betta fish tank, checkered sheets, a stuffed clownfish toy and striped curtains. She practically plonked Ace onto his bed and made his room her interview studio. What was usually a space private to Ace became a subject of scrutiny under Fanghua’s saucer-wide eyes.

  “Meng Fanghua! Very nice to meet you!” Fanghua squealed as she shook Ace’s hand so hard that his arm could have popped off from his shoulder. She bounced in the roller chair, a wolfish grin smeared across her face. “Founder of The Cob?ea Chronicles, where raw truth is cooked and served with a side of insight!”

  “The Cob?ea Chronicles?” Ace drew his hand away and crossed his legs, covering them with his blanket. “I think I have seen Leonhart and Jude reading it before.”

  “The equivalent of tabloid news,” Lady Meng answered dryly, much to her sister's chagrin, expressed with a sharp click of her tongue.

  “I’ve heard many things about you. To think that I would get a chance to speak to the real deal is a miracle!” Fanghua gushed. “You are the icing on top of the September edition of the Chronicles! I plan to do a write-up on you, which is long overdue, by the way. Could you be so kind as to give your consent to this interview?”

  “Sure.”

  So pliable, so agreeable. Precisely how Fanghua wanted her subjects.

  “Smile for the glamz!”

  Ace gave her a perfunctory smile, and Fanghua whipped out her camera, snapping a picture of him. The flash that went off made him wince a little, but none more so than her headful of neon yellow hair. She assailed him with questions about his home country, his favourite food, books and music. Her pen floated beside her shoulder, darting to the notebook at each wave of her hand, transcribing his answers in rapid strokes while her eyes never left his face.

  The pen was still scratching away when Fanghua slipped in a question clearly engineered to elicit a reaction from Ace: "So, do you have a partner?"

  To which Ace replied blandly, “I’m single.”

  Fanghua stuck out her lower lip and wiggled her finger, which made her pen scribble down some words in her notebook. “A boring man,” she tutted. “Even though you have an interesting visage.”

  “B-boring?” Ace's eyebrows shot up, and he unconsciously touched his arm—something Fanghua caught.

  “About that arm of yours, could you elaborate more on it?” Fanghua latched on without missing a beat.

  “It’s in the official records,” Lady Meng interjected. “What’s there to talk about an injury?”

  “Facts have no emotion,” Fanghua retorted. “How does it feel? Any complaints about it?”

  “No, it’s quite comfortable,” Ace answered. “The Weaponmaster did a good job crafting this armour.”

  Fanghua’s mask was slipping quickly. Such material was hardly enough for a one-column write-up in the Chronicles. “Why are your answers so dry?” she griped, eyebrow ticking upward as she scanned her notes.

  “Do they not answer your questions sufficiently?” Ace cocked his head, bemused. Lady Meng wanted to reach over and ruffle his hair. He was doing a spectacular job of irritating her sister, even if he was not aware of it.

  “Alright.” Fanghua cleared her throat. “Onto the next topic…” She tapped her pen against the notepad, wetting her lips as they began to curl up. “I would like to know more about your involvement in the Yokohama Inferno.”

  “Nothing about the Yokohama incident!” Lady Meng almost exclaimed, but a flare of irritation from Ace made the words dry up in her throat. For a moment, his eyes became hollow; his cordial smile dropped. He stared at Fanghua as though she had reached for something that was not hers to touch. Silence dropped over the room like frost, punctuated only by the protest of metal as Ace's armoured fist tightened.

  “I think that’s enough for today.” Lady Meng's hand clamped down on Fanghua's shoulder. When Fanghua tried to shake it off, Lady Meng spun her around.

  “I’m clearly not done!” she protested. “Experiencing a crisis as a first-year—”

  “You have enough for an introductory article,” Lady Meng insisted. “You’ll be fine.”

  “I need his account!” A silent argument erupted as Fanghua tore into the hivemind they shared. “Scoops like this are hard to come by!”

  “He has suffered enough! The students have suffered enough!” Lady Meng gritted her teeth. “Truth is a privilege, and I’ll gladly deny you that if you don’t back down this instant!”

  “The pursuit of truth necessitates cruelty!”

  “And I can be crueller. Want to test that?”

  Fanghua's lips pressed into a thin line. She pulled back sharply.

  “Thank you for your time,” Fanghua said curtly as she turned to Ace. “I’ll contact you for another interview—”

  “There will be no more interviews unless I allow it.”

  “I’ll contact you for another interview at Second Lady Meng’s discretion,” Fanghua finished.

  Fanghua huffed and excused herself. Lady Meng listened to her heels clack angrily down the hall, back toward her little tower in Yunnan, where she would sulk and write something acceptable.

  Ace hopped down from his bed. The hollowness in his eyes had receded. He looked composed again, almost placid, as if he had simply flipped a switch. “Did I say or do something rude?” he asked, clearly miffed by Fanghua’s sudden retreat.

  “No, you did just fine,” Lady Meng replied, though the strange feeling in her heart would not settle. “You seem tired. I’ll leave you to rest.”

  As Lady Meng closed the door behind her, a shadow dropped from the roof, landing without sound. Lady Meng strode on, aware that the conversation was meant to be conducted out of Ace’s earshot. The figure followed, his footsteps silent. He kept his masked face tilted toward the ground throughout.

  “What does she want this time?”

  “First Lady Meng wants me to let you know—Dante Alexander Higashino discharged himself against medical advice.” The voice told Lady Meng that she was spoken to by Meng Jun En, First Lady Meng’s most trusted manservant.

  Lady Meng froze. She spun on her heel, demanding to know where Dante had gone, but Jun En had already vanished without a trace.

  However, after a moment's thought, Lady Meng deduced the only place Dante could have gone.

  ***

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  The well-oiled hinges of the gymnasium doors were as silent as Lady Meng’s footsteps. Lady Meng crept inside in stockinged feet, heels clutched in one hand, and eased the doors shut behind her. She paused just past the threshold, letting her eyes adjust. Dust motes danced in the twilight of the setting sun that slanted through the high windows, which illuminated the vast space before her. Trampoline mats covered a good portion of the polished floor, training dummies stood in neat rows against the walls, and suspended from the ceiling at the far end of the gymnasium were a pair of still rings, their grips caked with chalk.

  The air was thick with the smell of rubber and faint sweat. As Lady Meng tiptoed her way in, she swore she could feel the faint warmth of a body that had been pushing itself to its limits. It did not take long for her to locate Dante, betrayed by the light spilling from what she presumed was a storage room.

  Lady Meng pushed her way in, finding Dante shirtless, one hand frozen halfway to his duffel. Startled, he made a choked noise, hands flying to cover his chest as though he were a woman caught without her bra on. Normally, Enigma would have shrouded him in an instant. But this time, his power did not come.

  The first thing Lady Meng did was to stare. She raked him from head to toe, taking him in since the last time she saw him at Yokohama Highland Hospital. The muscles across his sweat-slicked chest and shoulders looked carved down, sinew more visible than bulk. His pants sagged at the waist despite the belt. Her eyes found the rectangular scar, narrow as a coin slot on a pachinko machine. She remembered Macau. Remembered him offering himself to the Berserker’s Coin without hesitation a decade ago.

  If Fanghua were here, she would have gone feral. Despite his weight loss, Dante was still the kind of handsome that turned heads. Felix, on the other hand, possessed an almost ethereal quality, his long auburn hair framing features refined enough that people paused on whether to call him beautiful, handsome, or both.

  But it was the scars that Dante bore on his back that made Lady Meng’s heart ache.

  “Could you… stop staring?” Dante squirmed, eyeing the towel that hung next to her head. The skin of his neck and chest was reddening quickly. “Please.”

  “Should have kept the doors locked.” Lady Meng unhooked the towel and tossed it to Dante. “You have been overexerting yourself, haven’t you? You can’t even manifest Enigma.”

  Dante covered his front with the towel, avoiding her gaze. He sidled up to the wall, clearly intent on not showing her the scars on his back.

  “I was there,” Lady Meng said softly. “You don’t have to spare me from the sight of them.”

  Dante went still for a moment, then bowed his head. The rigidity left his shoulders, replaced by something closer to resignation. The towel flopped uselessly onto his arm, and he made no second attempt to cover himself.

  “Why did you discharge yourself?”

  Dante spoke without ever meeting her eyes, “Didn’t want to impose on your family.”

  “We have plenty of manservants at our beck and call. Manservants who would nourish you so that you can heal quickly.” The cramped room grew even smaller around them. “But that’s not why, is it?”

  Dante did not answer her question. Instead, he asked, “Does he know?”

  “Texted him the moment I started making my way here,” she replied.

  Dante’s face tightened. Lady Meng opened her mouth, but quickly mashed her lips together. She realised, suddenly, that this was the first time they had spoken alone in a decade. “Setting that aside…” she pivoted topics, ripping Felix out of the picture. Unlike her sister, she had no talent for doing it naturally. “How are you finding life in Singapore?”

  They stood in silence. Dante's height made the already-small room feel suffocating, his frame filling too much of the available space. Lady Meng stared up at him, waiting for his answer.

  “Good.” A sigh escaped Dante’s lips. “I obtained citizenship. The notebook you gave me… helped.”

  “William Whispersmith?”

  “Mm.”

  Lady Meng exhaled sharply through her nose, a smile dancing on her lips. “Whatever happened to it?”

  “Imbuement wore off,” Dante replied stiffly. “It’s still in my bookshelf, if you want it back.”

  “Nice to know, but no—I don't need it anymore.” Lady Meng shifted her weight. “Sounds like you have your ducks in a row… Life’s been going alright for you.”

  “Life's been uneventful otherwise.” A pause. Dante's mouth twisted slightly. “Well. Was.”

  “Was?”

  This time, bitterness crept into the edges of Dante's voice like poison. “Until he came knocking on my door half-dead,” he said. “Shoved the replicas of my Regalia down my fingers, stuck around for too long.”

  Just like that, they were back to Felix. Lady Meng felt foolish for even trying. This hatred had opened with a denial of death, and she saw no end to this vicious cycle. Though she was part of the beginning of this tale, the majority of the burden was borne by Felix over the years. When Felix returned from Singapore, breathless and giddy that he had found Dante, she had only seen his tremulous hands and the way his smile never quite reached his eyes. She did not know the details, had never asked, but standing here now with Dante, she wondered if she had been wrong to stay silent. If ignorance had been kindness or cowardice.

  Lady Meng watched as Dante turned his ungloved hand over, fingers spreading apart—bare, ringless. “Shouldn’t have bothered. They were hindrances,” he muttered, his lips barely moving.

  He might as well have used that same hand to punch her in the gut.

  Lady Meng stood, dumbstruck.

  She had handed the rings to Felix before he left for Singapore.

  She had chosen the silk pouch that the rings sat in for years.

  She had brought the broken rings to a jeweller to be repaired. "Miss, are you sure these are yours?" the jeweller had asked. "They are far too big for your fingers." She had to conjure the memory of Dante's hands in hers just to guess at the right size.

  Lady Meng's nose prickled. The sensation was achingly familiar—the same helplessness she had felt that rainy night when Dante left the Sanctum, when she cowered behind a pillar as he and Felix brawled, shattering the very rings Dante was now relieved to have gone.

  Lady Meng swallowed hard. “I had them repaired.” Her voice came out thin and strained. “The rings. I found every piece on the ground and brought them to a jeweller that night. I got them fixed and gave them to Felix.”

  The confession sucked all the air out of the room. Their eyes finally met. “It was me,” she finished.

  Dante's face went slack, all the hardness draining out of it at once. The green in his eyes—usually so sharp—grew soft, and ever so slightly, dimmer.

  Be cruel to me! Lady Meng wanted to charge up to Dante and pound her fists on his chest. I begged for your life all those years ago, just as Felix had!

  But Dante was clutching his bare hand close to his chest. Blood had drained from his lips; his Adam’s apple bobbed, as though he wanted to take back his words and swallow them.

  This was the true nature of Dante’s blade of cruelty—dependably kind to her, yet merciless to Felix. Unfair in how it cut only him and never her, even when she committed the very same offences he despised Felix for.

  Why? Lady Meng wanted to demand, but the sound of doors slamming shut broke the silence between them. A babble of voices reached them, voices belonging to the students.

  “Oh, hey! Nova’s up there!” Kazuya chirped, meowing to get the cat’s attention.

  “Hm? Dante’s not here,” Leonhart observed.

  “Maybe he’s doing some prep work,” Jude replied.

  “It’s great that there’s class today,” Ace said. “I need to stretch my legs out…”

  Dante hurriedly yanked a clean shirt from his duffel and threw it on. “Contractual obligations,” he muttered, already heading for the door and out of the storage room before Lady Meng could snap, “The contract only states Ace!”

  In the end, Lady Meng stuck around for a good half-hour before she slipped out of the back door. When she ran into the students at the Santum’s Beacon later that night, she asked with feigned brightness, “How was class today?”

  “It was alright,” Ace answered. “But he was a bit…”

  “A bit…?”

  “Spacey?” Leonhart chimed in.

  “Distracted,” Jude remarked, and Kazuya nodded his head vigorously.

  “Distracted…” Lady Meng trailed off.

  “Is everything alright?” Ace asked.

  Lady Meng quickly rearranged her expression. “No, I’m fine. Just a bit tired.”

  “Aww, we were looking for you. Wanted to ask if you wanted to join us for supper,” Kazuya said. “Mapo tofu in Sichuan.”

  “But you don’t like spicy foods,” Lady Meng reminded.

  “But it’s tasty!” Kazuya insisted. “The more I eat it, the tastier it becomes! Strange, isn’t it?”

  “Hate it until you love it. It’s not that strange,” Jude said pointedly.

  “Does it work the other way? Love it til’ you hate it?”

  “Does it?” Leonhart mulled over Kazuya’s question for a moment. “Perhaps.”

  The four students soon found themselves caught up in another lively debate about food as Lady Meng said her goodbyes. For the rest of the night, she sat at her desk, running her fingers through lines of words she did not read. She turned over every word, spoken and unspoken, her thoughts lingering most on Kazuya’s remark.

  Love it til’ you hate it.

  Lady Meng’s heart ached. They had loved one another once, in those student days when there were only three of them—or at least she had thought so.

  Perhaps he had loved her. Perhaps he had loved Felix so deeply that the love had become hatred.