Day 23409 6:40 PM
“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“You are beautiful.” I feast my eyes on Manuella as she slips from her dress and steps into the pool, holding the rail in a provocative way.
“I am a crone.” She smiles nervously. “Could you help me in? I am afraid I might slip and break a leg.”
I get up, my half-mask still covering my deformity. The water splashes as I move towards her, it is warm, perfect for sore muscles, from which I have not suffered in decades.
I give Manuella my hand and help her in. Her eyes reflect my face, she hesitates for a moment before speaking.
“May I see your face? Please?”
“It will only frighten you, my dear.” I try to dissuade her, but she shakes her head.
“Please.”
We stare at each other for a silent moment before I yield. I have refused her request for decades, but I cannot do it now. My fingers find the thin leather straps and push up, removing the mask.
Manuella gasps, and I move to replace the mask, but she stops me.
“Sorry,” she says as tears fill the eyes in which I can see my mutilated features. It looks better than it did when the scars were fresh, but even I am disturbed by the gaping hole replacing my eyeball.
“I am so sorry. Your face, your eye, your arm, you gave them all up for me.”
“You are worth it,” I grin, but when I see my teeth through my cheek in the fearsome reflection, I set my lips into a straight line, reducing the hole.
“May I put it back? Please? I feel naked without it.”
Manuella nods, and two seconds later, I am decent again.
“You really feel no regret?” she asks, seating herself in the pool.
“To be honest,” I say with a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood. “I was more sorry I let that griffon slip from my grasp, than I regretted maiming my arm. Just imagine having a pet griffon.”
“It might have attacked me or the children. Just look at how the beast savaged you.”
“I do not believe so. Grif was,” I pause, trying to find the right words. “I believe he could have been a good partner, had I not mistreated him. It took years to see it, but I think that all this is my fault, or well, the fault of my lack of experience with taming griffons.”
Manuella gives me that look, it seems like it pierced through decades just to be delivered by that young woman who hardly knew me.
“You have not looked at me like that in years.” I smile, but she deadpans back.
“You did nothing to warrant it.”
That is mostly true. We have hardly left the castle in ages. After ten full years of campaigning, we came back home, hoping never to leave, and if not for Vic and Nate, I would never have picked up Batsy again, nor moved more than a dozen miles away from the castle.
I have so many things I wish to say, but the words refuse to come out. The moment is peaceful and wonderful. Just the two of us in a tub in which I think we have conceived at least three children. The memory makes my blood rush.
“I do not know what it is with the tubs that—” I clamp my mouth shut as Blunt tries to take over. Manuella’s advice worked, the flaw does negligible damage if I do not think improper thoughts, but sailing down the river of memories, sharing a bath with her, it evokes a lot of improper past experiences.
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“You are incorrigible.” Manuella rolls her eyes, but still smiles.
“I am fairly certain persistence is a part of my charm and success.”
She gives me a flat stare. “You drop everything the moment you meet the first obstacle. The memoir, vegetable gardening, sculpting…”
“Only the unimportant things!” I protest, and she laughs. “The memoir can wait, and besides, there are books upon books about what I have done with eyewitness testimonies. As for vegetable gardening, I employed people to do it in my stead. Everyone, you included, kept shouting about more important things I should attend to. As for sculpting,” I pause. I have no excuse for stopping that one, other than the obvious.
“It was a tedious, boring hobby, which had me dusty, and besides, it requires fine depth perception, which we one-eyed men lack.” I allow Blunt to whine its heart out. “I have no idea what came over me to even try.”
Manuella looks at me without sympathy. “You were trying to make sculptures of me, constantly groping because you complained about depth perception, meanwhile using every chance to knead my breasts. I believe we both know why you did it.”
Right. I forgot.
“Do you mind coming over?” I ask. “I want to confirm something.”
She suddenly bursts into laughter.
“Aang, you are insufferable,” she says, still laughing. She opens her mouth to make excuses, but I swim towards her splashing water, and she screams in laughter.
“You are insane.” She wipes herself with a towel an hour later, her eyes beaming. Even if it was mostly fooling around, we have not enjoyed such time together in years.
My smile dies on my lips. I forgot why I was doing this, but the realization that we only have two more weeks together slams into my head like a sledgehammer. Luckily, Manuella chose that moment to wipe her hair, hopefully missing my grim face. I plaster a smile back on. We have two weeks to enjoy ourselves fully.
“What do you want to do after dinner?”
“I have letters to write to our children and one for Aboy as well.” Manuella looks at me with slight hesitation, but still speaks her mind. “I cannot believe they named your firstborn son Aboy. The name is not that uncommon, but it is usually given to a son finally born to a father of many daughters.”
I smile, glad that Manuella has taken a liking to my and Leanadra’s child. It makes sense, the boy is witty, charismatic, and well mannered, like the rest of my children. Well, save for one.
“I wondered about the name when I first heard it. I thought it was a joke, and later confirmed it was a real, albeit rare, name. I discussed it with Leandra later, apparently the Hassels originally intended to claim Aboy was not Leandra’s son, but her bastard half brother.”
We chat about irrelevant matters, recalling the good old days, and I cannot believe how old we are. Manuella and I have both kept busy throughout the years. Sometimes spending days together, but often spending weeks hardly seeing each other, save during the meals and in the bedroom.
The more I think about it, the more I realize how foolish I was. I had a goddess, a saintess, right next to me, and I spent my days listening to tripe delivered by irrelevant courtiers and foreign dignitaries.
I have wasted a lifetime, and there is no taking it back. No redo.
“What do you think, if I die while Redo is red, do you think I will die for good, or start over from the start, before we met?”
Manuella places her knife and fork down and looks at me over the candlelight.
“If you did everything from the start, what would happen with the children? Do they get born again the same as they were, grow into the same people, or do you think they will never be?”
I frown. That is an oddly specific question, but I entertain it nonetheless. Given how making babies works, the amount of cells and variables involved in the process, the odds of Victory being born as Victory are close to zero.
“I believe they will be different people, even if we aim to conceive them at the exact same moment. Which is almost certainly impossible.”
Manuella sighs with relief, further confusing me.
“Do not misunderstand me, my love, but if we cannot have the same children, who grow up into the same people, and if you do start over and want to spend another lifetime with me, for the love of the Lord of Light, please, please, insist on anal sex. Always. It is literally the only contraception we found effective, and we have tried everything known to man.”
I gulp. Manuella has had a rough time. We saw a lot of doctors, both of us drank all sorts of tonics, used accessories, positions, everything, yet we conceived without error every time, before defaulting to the obvious.
“And,” she continues, “please do not let Luck happen. I love him, like all of them, I swear, but having a baby at sixty-two is traumatic for everyone involved.”
I open my mouth to agree, but Manuella speaks before I get the chance.
“We thought it was safe, that I was too old, and the late Master Thunderwax thought it was an ulcer, gas, and finally a lump for the first seven months.”
A laugh escapes me, that was a comical moment of our lives, getting a child younger than our great-grandchildren.
“It is not funny!” Manuella shouts. “You wanted to name him Lump!”
In all honesty, it was a spur of a moment joke, but I kept pretending I was serious, seeing how out of her mind Manuella was.
Blunt uses the moment of inattention to speak. “It is a better name than Ulcer or Gas.”