Yoshitsune said that it was time to talk, but she did not speak. Not immediately, anyways. Her expression grew soft and pensive under the heaviness of the silence that draped us like iron-lined blankets. It felt like she wanted to steal my attention while she thought of the right words to say.

“So, you destroyed the Dungeon after all?” Yoshitsune finally asked.

“Well, Passion, the guy who actually made the Dungeon, was going to destroy it regardless. I should at least profit off of it if he was going to offer a reward,” I replied. “And that decision helped save my life. It was that reward that kept my head from being turned into ground beef.”

“It was also that decision that got your head smashed,” she said.

“You know that’s not true. You saw how they were acting when you thought we were innocent,” I argued, keeping my patience firm. “Even if we all declined Passion and, somehow, managed to survive the collapse, they would have killed us and tortured us no matter what.”

Yoshitsune’s face turned downwards to look at the floor. She kicked absentmindedly at the rocks of the cave, knocking a few pebbles loose that scattered in all different directions. I sighed, knowing that I had to take it upon myself to pilot the conversation forwards though it would have benefitted me more to just stay quiet and allow her to drown in the sea of her own thoughts.

“What did you really want to talk about?” I asked.

“You made me kill people that weren’t fighting back,” she replied softly after another brief pause. “You knew what I went through and you still ordered me to do it. Why?”

“We did it for survival. Did you want to end up like Herzblatt? Did you want to die in exchange for demons that you don’t know? Demons that you have no idea what sort of awful things that they did in life.”

“That’s what I told myself when I did it the first time and look where I ended up!” Yoshitsune shouted, her voice on the verge of tears. “I thought that I was better than this. I desperately wanted to be better than this. Even if all those people had done something to be sent down here, is that enough to justify what we did to them? Do you not feel terrible?”

I sucked my teeth. The deaths of those demons, combatants or not, meant nothing to me. If anything, I enjoyed the opportunity to gain some free stats on our way out. But, I knew that was the wrong way to feel. I knew that she wouldn’t like it if I said that I didn’t give a shit and I’d do it again every single time the option was given.

Who cares if that was the case? I needed to tell her how things were and get this over with at some point. If I left it alone, it would only be a matter of time before she made bigger problems for me later.

“I do feel bad,” I lied immediately. “But, they will revive safe and sound. It is not the same as it used to be. You’re not a bad person for doing that. I know how hard you try. You’re alright.”

Yoshitsune turned her back from me to face the back wall of the chamber. I let her be by herself for a moment. It’d be so much easier if everyone felt the way that I did. These hang-ups and mental blocks only held people back from their true potential. Why did it matter that she killed them? She can’t become more damned.

But, I found myself using the same words that I used with Kenny when he shot that bird with a pellet gun. He cried and cried and I didn’t understand why so I reassured him and told my father that I was the one who shot it.

“Thanks,” she said meekly.

“Yoshitsune, these are all things that happened after I promised to talk to you. What did you want to talk to me about when you said that in the first place?”

“I don’t know anything about you,” she answered; far faster than she had for the previous questions.

“What do you want to know about me?”

“Anything,” she said, turning back to face me and throwing her hands up in the air. “I know why you are here, but that’s it. I don’t know what you liked to eat or what you did to relax. I don’t know what used to make you smile or upset you. I barely know what you’re thinking most of the time and I don’t understand the decisions that you make.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“If I told you all those things, would you even understand what I was saying? If I told you what a burger was or football or cars, would you know what I was talking about? Our lives are too different to each other’s, too different from what we have now, to be relevant anymore.”

Yoshitsune threw her arms down and spat some words that I didn’t know the meaning of.

“What about your family?”

“I had my brother, Kenny, and my cousin, Trevor,” I answered. “I didn’t much care for the rest of them. They were stupid and selfish and weak.”

I felt pity from her expression as though she was looking down on me about how things used to be. I didn’t like it. It felt like my organs were thrown from a plane to splat down in a field thousands of feet below.

“Is that it? Did you not have a wife or a child?”

“I had a son, yes, but I never met him and I never got married either,” I responded quickly. “I was going to buy her a really nice ring, but she wasn’t getting better and I thought she’d sell it for drugs. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Why was she being so quiet? Did she want to put me to the microscope and then make me feel like shit about it? I felt nasty feelings rolling through my body like nails on a chalkboard. I bit on my lip to freeze the irritability that was raging inside of me, the taste of blood slightly grounding me.

“What about you?” I pressed. A trace amount of venom drenched my words. “Did you ever have that sort of life for yourself before you went to war?”

“No,” she answered calmly. “I was married, but I only met them when I was impersonating my brother. They were not someone that I liked. They had no humility nor patience nor softness about them. If he could not treat those that he served with properly, how do you think he was going to treat me when the battle ended and I was to join his estate?”

“I think you could have handled him, even without the lightning powers,” I joked.

She did not seem to be listening to me anymore. Her mind retreated into its own world to leave me standing around like an idiot on the outside. If I smashed her head open, would I understand what she was thinking?

No.

“Do you think that you’ll meet her again?”

“She’s never harmed anyone, but she isn’t very kind to herself,” I admitted, thinking about the person she became. “Even if she did arrive here, would we be able to recognize each other? Would the magic that stole our names come and take those memories as well? I would almost prefer it if I did not get any of those answers.”

“Do you…still love her then?”

What? Like pulling the emergency brake on a tractor-trailer going full speed, my brain came to a catastrophic halt. The tone of the conversation had changed entirely and I could not make sense of it. We were fighting, weren’t we?

“I suppose I do,” I admitted and Yoshitsune’s expression became crestfallen.

Thoughts of her still made me feel good inside, though it seemed that all my good memories ended a year or two after we graduated high school. Even though her addiction had made her thin and jittery, she still smiled at me the same way. It didn’t feel the same way anymore but that emotion didn’t exist anywhere else. Not with the women at the bars, not with Jaime, not with anyone.

When she got better, I thought that it would fix things. She was acting the same way again and then I’d feel the same way again. Her health returned and she hugged me while holding a pregnancy test and I was convinced that that feeling would reignite that tingle in my brain that disappeared.

And then she relapsed and I turned her dealer into a slop.

“But we hadn’t been together for a long time,” I said. “And I sincerely hope, for her own sake, that I never see her again.”

“Then…why don’t the two of us…”

She was terrible at this. I knew exactly what she was getting at, but there wasn’t any confidence behind it. Though her personality wasn’t that seductive, I had to admit that, hands aside, her mostly-human figure was pleasant to look at. Well, I’d rather have too many hands than bony, flaming hands.

“I’m not against it, but I’m not sure how that would work,” I said to myself, thinking about that aspect of my transformation.

That small amount of encouragement was all that she needed. She stepped closer to me. My brain still had not caught up to reality. I thought about rejecting her. My attachment to Miranda only hurt me and I could not see how an attachment to this woman wouldn’t give my enemies a weapon to hurt me with.

But, I did not say anything to discourage her. I was a human once. I knew the needs the body had that I had neglected for a long time. Frustratingly, the thought of Capitaine and the luxury they allowed themselves to feel human bubbled up in my mind. I wanted the nice drinks and the nice smokes and the nice women. It wouldn’t make sense for me to be a person and not have those desires.

“We will figure it out,” she reassured.

As I felt her numerous fingers press against my scaled skin, I continued to convince myself that it was the correct decision. All of the things that I was worried about could be easily resolved by doing this. She would be more loyal, more willing to overlook my darker actions out of affection and an even greater fear of being left behind. Plus the obvious physical benefit, prison is cruel to those that miss women. There were no downsides.

“You’re a piece of shit,” Miranda scolded me from my memory.

“Yeah, yeah I am.”