He had always loved the impassable mountains of Lazon. He had loved being ignorant of what was around him. He loved how the pastures of the Interconnected Mountains of Lazon were connected. The green and brown grasses that grow around them. The sun that rises between the mountains as it gives a warm fuzzy light. Yet one day it all happened as if it was to spite him.

He saw memories. Fuzzy self-fulfilling prophecies that he had been unable to understand. It’s like a part of his head was creating these strange thoughts.  These memories he didn’t understand. Was it a creation of his mind?  Or is it nothing more than delusion of a young man? The more he understood what it was. The more he tried to ignore it. However, it terrified him to the point of having nightmares about it.

You know what happens if you doubt it.

Trust it, but never believe in it.

Believe it, but do everything you can to change it.

There must be something more to it.

There is always a reason.

Mavin woke up when those words sounded out. He looked outside of the window and saw that the dark still lingered. Feeling a bit dry in the throat, he went to the kitchen for a drink. Natalya was on the kitchen counter, sitting on a stool, fancying herself with a spicy whiskey that Mavin was familiar with.

“Mavin,” Natalya said blandly. “Thought you had a bad day.”

“Thought you were sleeping.”

“That bothers me about you. You spent years in that hell and you can sleep well. Mind if you tell me what your secret is?”

“Nothing. Would you believe me?”

“I do. Damn, it isn’t usually this bad.”

Mavin felt her forehead. “You aren’t burning up,” he looked around the kitchen and saw a bottle for himself.  “I don’t usually drink even on my bad days.”

“Your life must have been boring then. We could, well, loosen up, and blur some memories. Then let’s blame the alcohol for it. Better than sleeping alone with nightmares.”

“Do you do that often?”

“Course not, never really tried it. There is a first time to everything.”

Mavin didn’t respond. He poured whiskey on his glass, the rosy brown liquid filling it up. “You shouldn’t do things you regret.”

Natalya pulled the stool next to him. “I was joking. What? Did you think that I would?”

“Who knows?”

He sipped on the whiskey with clouded eyes. Natalya silently drank, listening to the quiet that the night offers. The incandescent light bulb in the middle of the kitchen. The wind pushing against the window panels.

“Not speaking?”

Mavin looked at her. “Do you want me to?”

“I do. In the little time we had spent together. I get the feeling that you don’t like me at all. ”

Mavin held the cup tightly around his hand. “Not at all. I just don’t know what to do with you, Natalya. I am clueless when it comes to dealing with you.”

Mavin knew better how dangerous Natalya Wilde was. No one in the world knows better what she can do if she puts her mind into it. She was the soon-to-be Imperator and even now she was the Lady Bellatrix, a woman who had shown her talents in shooting people from a distance and one of the many people that dodged his bullet. There weren’t many people who could do that, but she did.

“If you could read minds, then that might solve your problem. Ah, are you annoyed that a person now haunts you like a ghost? Really, am I someone who you can’t trust?”

“No, not like that at all. I have no problems with you personally. Like I said, I just don’t know how to deal with you. It’s nothing personal, really.”

Natalya snorted. She shook her glass whiskey and took a sip. “You are like a broken player, Mavin. You utter the same words and the way you speak makes me think if there is something wrong. I hate that about you. I hate that you think that I am petty enough to care about a scar that I had two years to live by.”

“I am not—“

“Not what?” she neared her face, her breath touching his nose. “Is it too much to ask something out of you!? I am USING you, Mavin Tomas. Why can’t you get that through your head?”

He studied her. “You really don’t look good today.”

“Headache, and I cannot sleep,” she blew on his face and stared at the liquid inside of her glass. “That’s why I was asking you for your secret. I haven’t met anyone who could sleep so soundly.”

“I try not to think.”

“That’s not enough for me.”

Mavin almost blurted out that it was not his problem. He thought that saying that would be bad.

“Anyway, my head aches like a bitch. The alcohol might actually make things worse for me if I wake after this.”

“Shouldn’t drink then.”

“It does help. It usually doesn’t bother me. Then I realize that I hate how comfortable the bed is. How delicious the food is and how irritating it was to wear clothes that deny me freedom of movement. I hate how everyone just moved on.”

“Did something happen to your visit?”

“Nothing happened. Sadly, there was nothing to happen. I don’t know why I feel irritated knowing that they got it better. I am bitter about it.”

“Bitter that they are happy?” Mavin took a sip of his drink.

“I am not a lunatic. Not miserable enough to wish that on others. But miserable enough to bring it on you and complain about it.”

“That’s kinda awful.”

“Well, they do say that the same birds flock together. How can anyone possibly understand that we are feeling? I talked to my friend today, and all they talked about was tea, research, and the brand new dresses and shops that I had lost interest. It has been seven years and all I know is how to handle a goddamn rifle.”

Mavin could understand some of her woes. Though he had been able to return to society after five years of fighting in the war. It took him two-years to integrate back to civilian life. There were days where a simple start of an engine could rattle him. He had thought that she was stable.

“Well,” Mavin sat closer. “If you do need someone to talk to. I guess you might as well use me.”

Natalya smiled at him. “That’s one of the reasons I am using you.”

“Glad to be of use then.”

“See? It isn’t hard to act like you care. We don’t know much of each other than a few days we had spent.”

Mavin’s smile stifled. He drank his glass with a mouthful and filled it up again. Natalya raised the glass close to her nose. Mavin shook his glass and thought how he would like some cubes in his glass.

“Neighborhood is quiet here. I used to live in the dorms of Arkadia, so I don’t know what the city was. The Wilde’s properties here were merely rented, and considering the situation. I don’t think anyone would want to rent a house I can stay in. Even staying in someone’s house would be worse, knowing the relationship of the Republic to the Empire.”

“The Grand Duchy isn’t really part of the Republic, right?” Mavin pointed out.

She nodded, “It isn’t. There is a reason we still call it the ‘Grand Duchy of Wilde’ despite being part of the Empire. We are merely partners to the Republic and from the start we were only helping our ‘partners’ from their war.”

“Do you think that the republic is right?”

“I don’t really care for their reason. The commoner would say that it was because of the freedom for the people. Freedom, bah, they keep spouting that nonsense when it’s the same. The common is ruled by the powerful, and the weak serves the powerful. A President is merely a King who was voted to it. But isn’t the Empire like that? The Hundred Nobles approves the next-in-line who is born to rule the Empire. There is a reason that this Empire lasted. Because it didn’t allow the popular to lead. It tested all of its heirs into becoming worthy of the throne. They throw them into the pits and when they come out they either break or become someone who can lead this nation.”

“Then do you not agree about the reason they fight for?”

“It is only the reason they use to fight. There are many reasons why they would dare to attack the Empire despite the rapid advances the Empire had done. Our world is getting smaller and it was sixty-years ago that we learned that we have other neighbors other than the Turian continent. Peace? Liberty? Freedom of the masses? It may work on the farm-tilling man, but it never does on people who had at least got educated on how dumb that sounded.”

“And we still fought despite it all. We volunteered.”

“I did. Hey, did you believe that you’d survive?”

Mavin just nodded. He didn’t want to answer that he did. Because he had spent years preparing for the war and how to survive it. He was alive because he had been prepared. He knew that without the boons he had received, then there was no way that he could leave unscathed from the field of battle. Not to mention that he was always in places that were the ‘safest’ in terms of battle. He had earned merit because he knew how to shoot and his boons allowed him to become a Ghost in the field.

“Most of us did. But most of us left parts of us when we did. I should be home right now, caring for my heart’s wounds, but here I am trying to make friends with a broken record player.”

“Gee, thanks?”

“You should be.”

Mavin nodded. She looked at him with a steely gaze and declared. “I think I might hate you as well, Mavin.”

“Huh? You do?”

“Yeah, I think I do.”

“Then why are you still here?”

“I don’t know either. I hate you enough to annoy you?”

“What’s up with that?”

“This is the part where I start blaming the alcohol.”

Mavin looked around the kitchen. “I don’t think you’d been here long enough to be drunk.”

Natalya didn’t answer and rubbed her head. There was something about her expression that bothered him. He didn’t know what to say to someone who had been doing well in hiding what she wanted. Mavin feared that the moment he did believe in her.

She might become someone that he needs to talk down or possibly kill in the future. The ‘memories’ told him of how chaotic her mind was. How there was always something that drove her into doing what she wanted. Mavin didn’t want to gamble on the chances. At the same time he didn’t want to judge someone who was branded to be evil by ‘memories’. He had seen that there can be changes in the ‘memories’. These changes were something he could not predict. He couldn’t possibly guess what happened to those people when the ripple of changes affects them. He didn’t think that he was smart enough to make a prediction on whatever will happen to them. He had looked for Erich Baldwin with the thought of talking to a willful revolutionary. But what did he find? A broken man who wanted nothing more than to kill the person that made him want to change the Empire. Somewhere along the line, the revolution failed, its people unable to rise up. He was expecting quite a struggle and yet when he found Erich Baldwin.

Mavin was disappointed and saddened at the state of a person who, in the memories, wanted to change the Empire truly. He had ended Erich Baldwin and snuffed the last embers of the so-called revolution before it became even big enough.

How am I supposed to try and befriend you, knowing what you might become?

 Mavin Tomas didn’t know how.

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