After getting thoroughly wasted at the bar, Soren found himself wandering the streets with no real destination in mind, not because he had somewhere to be, but because standing still felt dangerously close to going back.
His steps were unsteady, not enough to make him stumble outright, but enough that he had to correct his balance every few seconds, as if his body was lagging behind his decisions, and every time he righted himself there was a delayed, dull throb in his ribs where the knife had hit him, a reminder that healing incantations didn't erase consequences so much as smooth them over.
The world was softened at the edges, lanternlight smearing into little halos, voices blending together until they stopped sounding like words and started sounding like the city itself, alive, indifferent, moving on, and the alcohol made his thoughts loop in slow circles that never quite landed anywhere useful.
He wasn't looking for anything in particular.
He was just trying not to go back to the dorm.
Because the dorm meant quiet, and quiet meant the only thing he couldn't outwalk.
It wasn't guilt, not in the simple, clean way stories framed it.
He could list the reasons he had done it, he could lay them out like an argument and win every time, and still, the memory would cling to the inside of his skull like wet fabric, heavy and cold, the sensation of the axe biting, the way the man's body had… resisted, the bubbling noise that followed, the brief, awful moment where the world had narrowed into a single decision and he had chosen correctly and hated that it had been correct.
Even now, with his head full of alcohol and his limbs full of that lazy warmth, the images didn't blur properly; they sat there in perfect definition, waiting for the moment his attention slipped.
Soren exhaled, slow and deliberate, the way he had been forcing himself to breathe since the alley, like breathing was a task that required instruction now, then kept walking.
At some point his feet stopped without his permission, and he realised he had been following the street the same way you followed a thought you didn't want, pretending it wasn't happening until it was already too late to deny.
Soren blinked, lifted his head, and the sign above the door stared back at him.
[Mother's Bakery]
The painted colours were warm, almost cheerful, the kind of sign you would expect above an actual bakery with flour on the windowsill and someone inside laughing, not… this, not a place where warmth was sold by the hour, packaged neatly so nobody had to admit they were desperate for it.
A brothel.
The same one he had seen Felix coming out of earlier, with that stupid grin and that pink-faced embarrassment he had tried to play off, like it had been nothing more than a detour on an ordinary day.
Soren stood there a few seconds longer than necessary, letting people pass him by without a second glance, watching the door open and close, watching the casual rhythm of it, as if it were no different from a tavern.
"Should I go in?" he murmured, so quietly it was barely a sound at all.
He had never been inside a brothel before.
That wasn't to say he didn't have experience, but this was a different category entirely, a place where closeness came with a price attached from the start.
Transactional.
Intimate in a hollow sort of way.
Under normal circumstances, he wouldn't even entertain the idea.
He would scoff at it, judge himself for considering it, then move on, but tonight wasn't normal, and his standards had been eroding by the hour, sanded down by exhaustion and the need to stay anywhere but alone.
At this point, he was grasping at anything that could justify staying out longer, anything that meant he didn't have to lie awake in his dorm room with nothing but silence and the sound of his own memory replaying a man's last seconds.
He could imagine it too easily, pushing open the door, buying a room, letting someone's hands distract him, letting their voice fill his ears so his own thoughts couldn't, and the fact that his mind offered it up so readily made him feel faintly sick, not because it was shameful, but because he could see himself using it the way he used the alcohol, not for pleasure, not for connection, just for numbness.
If he were sober, if he were thinking clearly, he would've already walked away, and maybe that was the point, maybe that was why his feet had brought him here, because some part of him wanted to prove just how far he could fall when nobody was watching.
'…Maybe the alcohol is hitting harder than I thought.'
The realisation didn't arrive like a dramatic revelation, it arrived like a small, irritating clarity, a shard of cold air cutting through the warmth in his chest, and for a moment he could feel his heartbeat properly again, could feel the faint tremor in his fingers that the drink had been masking rather than curing.
Soren exhaled, turned away from the brothel, and forced his legs to move before he could reconsider.
He walked for a while longer, letting his feet carry him wherever they pleased, taking turns without thinking about them, following quieter streets as the noise of the busier ones faded behind him.
As the city thinned out he became aware of how tense his shoulders were, how often he was scanning shadows without meaning to, how every alley mouth made his nerves prickle, even though the rational part of him knew the danger was over.
He had survived.
He had survived, and the world hadn't paused to acknowledge it, which somehow made it worse, because if the world kept going then maybe it really had been nothing.
Maybe killing really was just another chore in Ivansia, another line of paperwork and coin, and the only one still stuck in that alley was him.
Eventually he spotted a lone bench tucked away along a quieter path, half-hidden by a low stone wall and a scraggly tree that had started to bud.
He sat down heavily, the wood cool against the backs of his thighs, and leaned into it, letting the bench take some of his weight as if he could hand over responsibility for a minute.
When he tilted his head upward, the sky was beginning to lighten.
Dawn crept over the city slowly, washing the darkness away in pale colours that made everything look softer than it had any right to, and the streets were starting to fill again, vendors preparing their stalls, early risers heading to work, a cart rattling somewhere in the distance.
The world was resuming as if nothing had happened, as if nobody had bled in an alley, as if nobody had been forced to choose.
Soren closed his eyes.
For a moment he just listened, letting sound replace thought, letting the rhythm of footsteps and the murmur of voices act like a thin blanket over his mind, and he tried to keep it there, tried not to reach for the memories, tried not to touch the place in his head where everything was stored too perfectly.
It didn't work.
It never worked for long.
The alley rose up anyway, not in fragments but in full, and he felt the phantom bite of the knife again, cold and sharp, felt his own panic compressing his world until it was smaller than his own heartbeat, and then the axe in his hands, heavier than it should've been, the wet resistance, the sound, the smell, the way the man's eyes had looked at him with hatred and surprise and something else he couldn't name.
He forced his jaw to unclench, forced his hands to stay still on his lap, even though every instinct wanted to wipe them clean.
And then, because his mind had no mercy, it gave him Felix too, Felix's face when the vines erupted, Felix's voice when he said he would handle the mage, that efficient, ruthless calm that didn't match the grinning playboy he always saw, and Soren's stomach rolled as he remembered the moment Felix had finished the unconscious thug afterwards, like it had been nothing more than tying off a loose end.
He hadn't even looked torn up.
Soren swallowed, throat tight, and the bench beneath him felt suddenly too small, too flimsy, as if it couldn't support the weight of being alive when things like that happened.
'Why am I the one sitting here?'
The thought didn't come with drama, it didn't even come with much feeling, it was quiet and flat, which somehow made it worse, because it sounded like something his brain had been asking for a long time.
It tried to latch onto tonight first, the knife, the axe, the way the world had narrowed into a choice and left him alive at the end of it, but the moment his mind reached for a reason, it slid sideways into the only shape it ever really took.
And then…
A woman with long black hair, dark grey eyes, and skin so pale it almost looked sickly under the sun.
'Aria.'
The name surfaced without resistance, gentle and brutal at once.
She was the only person from Earth he truly missed.
The only one whose absence still felt like an actual wound rather than a fact, someone who had been there for him during a time when very few others were, someone who had understood him in ways he had never been able to articulate properly, and the memory of her wasn't even painful in a clean way anymore, it was just… heavy, like carrying water in cupped hands, always losing some, never able to set it down.
Until an unfortunate incident had split them apart.
An incident that was entirely his fault.
He didn't chase the details.
If he did, he wouldn't stop.
His mind still held the memories perfectly, but he had learned that poking at them when he was drunk was like poking a bruise to see if it still hurt.
So he stayed still, eyes closed, and let the old memories pass through him without trying to grab them, letting them come and go the way dawn light did, creeping in whether he wanted it or not.
He might've stayed there until the sun fully rose, half-asleep, half-haunted, if a voice hadn't cut through the haze, soft enough that he could've pretended he imagined it, but familiar enough that pretending would've been pointless.
"Soren…?"
His eyes opened.
That voice.
By now it was unmistakable, and something in his chest eased in immediate, reluctant recognition, like a muscle unclenching before he could stop it.
He turned his head toward the speaker.
Short, light pink hair, soft bear ears perched on top, bright lime-green eyes catching the early morning light like gemstones, and a posture that was neat even when she was clearly trying to approach quietly.
Lilliana Roseblood.
A faint, genuine smile tugged at his lips before he could stop it, surprising him with its honesty, because he hadn't felt much that was uncomplicated since the alley.
"…Good morning, Professor Roseblood," he managed, and he tried to make it polite, tried to make it normal, but it came out tired and rough around the edges, weighed down by exhaustion and alcohol alike, his tongue too heavy to shape the right tone.
Lilliana's expression shifted almost immediately, the professional composure still there, but concern threading through it in a way she didn't bother hiding.
"You're out quite early," she said, voice careful, as if she were choosing each word deliberately, then her gaze moved over him in one quick, assessing sweep, not invasive, but thorough in the way a homeroom professor would be when she had already seen him hurt more than once. "Mr Arden… are you unwell?"
The question was simple, direct, and it landed far harder than it should have, because it wasn't a demand, it wasn't suspicion, it was concern offered without condition.
If it had been anyone else, he would've brushed it off with a half-joke, something easy that didn't invite further questions, but Lilliana wasn't just anyone, and the worst part was that he couldn't even justify why he trusted her this much, he just did, perhaps because she kept turning up at the moments he expected to be alone.
"I don't know," he said, and the words surprised him with how easily they came out, how little resistance there was in him left.
Part of him felt fine, functional, like he could go to class tomorrow and smile at Felix and pretend the night was a story with an ending.
Another part of him insisted that he couldn't possibly be okay after what he had done, after what he had been forced to become capable of, after how quickly the world had asked him to adapt.
Lilliana didn't press him immediately.
She paused beside the bench, not sitting yet, as if waiting for permission rather than assuming it, and even that tiny bit of restraint made something in Soren's throat tighten.
"May I?" she asked, gesturing lightly to the empty space beside him.
He nodded, because he didn't trust himself to speak.
She sat down with care, smoothing her skirt automatically, hands folding in her lap, posture composed, the picture of a noblewoman who had been trained to be correct even when she was worried, and she angled herself slightly towards him without crowding his space.
"Do you remember what I said to you during lunch?" she began, voice soft, formal in structure even as warmth seeped in around the edges. "When I told you that you may come to me if you need someone to speak to?"
He nodded again, throat working.
He remembered too well.
He remembered the gentleness, the hand on his head, the way her mask had slipped just enough to make his chest ache with something he didn't know how to hold, and he remembered promising to be careful, promising as if promises had ever stopped the world from demanding blood.
Lilliana watched him for a moment.
"Can you keep that promise now?"
————「❤︎」————