“So, Helena has all the magic in the world to make you putty in her hands, to reshape everything. If she gave you simple smile – it doesn’t matter how innocent – you would be happy for days, maybe weeks. I can kiss you, I can hug you. We can share the bed in the most passionate way, but your heart is not moved by me. Jaji—”
“Eppy, you saved my life. When I became the last man, I thought I would kill myself!”
Jacob knew there was a huge wealth of truth in what Epagogia was saying, but she wasn’t telling all the story.
“I was desperate! I was miserable! The only thing that kept me going was what we had!”
“And then you went off to get killed like all the rest of your disgusting race,” Epagogia spat out. This time, with tears in her eyes.
This conversation wasn’t about this life anymore. It was about feelings that had been there for real, for long, in another life.
“And we still shared decades together! I spent barely any time with Helena! I am not even sure we would be a good couple—”
“Jacob!” Epagogia shouted with all her Cultivation base behind her words. “I am the Queen of Devils! I am not a naïve girl on her first ride! Do not insult my intelligence!”
“We lasted for decades”, she continued, “and that’s how good our relationship was! We have proof of it! Are you denying that? Are you denying that we are not fated like you and that fucking Helena are?!”
Epagogia was shouting and swearing, something that was completely out of character for her. Her tears were flowing, too, showing Jacob how vulnerable she was and how delicate he had to be right now.
“I was the last fucking human on the planet, Eppy! Now things are different!”
“And that’s exactly what I’m saying! You could have lived through the apocalypse as the last man on Earth with Helena. HELL! You would have enjoyed having to repopulate the world with the little blonde princess! Helena is your fairy tale, Jaji! I am your backup plan! You cannot say anything that will change my mind!”
Jacob broke down and started feeling tears streak his cheeks too.
He knew that there was some truth in what Epagogia was saying. It wasn’t the whole truth, on. But it was enough for her to justify this conversation. To justify feeling betrayed, feeling useless.
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If this had happened with me in Epagogia’s place and Helena in mine, I would be devastated.
And the simple fact that Jacob needed to use Helena as a term of comparison pretty much told him everything he needed to know.
“I—I” Jacob’s voice broke down. Even if he truly had a love out of a fairy tale with Helena, he had still loved Epagogia; just in a different way. But now, now he had to say goodbye, didn’t he?
And it was hard.
It was really, really hard.
“I—”
“You are a spineless coward who couldn’t tell the Devil he spent all those years together the truth. You couldn’t bear the thought of me leaving you forever because you are a goddamn coward. You want the cake but you want to eat it too.”
“Eppy, I—”
“You disgust me,” she went up to him and grabbed his face in her left claw, tightly squeezing his cheeks. “You disgust me so much.”
She spoke with half-broken words and still crying.
Then, she kissed him.
Jacob returned the kiss.
There was something between them that was hard to explain. Not hard in the same way it would be hard to explain Helena’s magic. No, that was actually simple because it was just pure magic.
But Epagogia and Jacob had gone through thick and thin together. They had fought together before humanity disappeared. They had loved each other, but they had finally been pushed together only after humanity had disappeared.
And she had shared his plight, as he had shared hers.
When you live that long, you start carrying broken pieces of your soul like a keepsake. Sometimes, you look at them—no, you stare at them really intensely, hoping that they could teach you what made them like that. But they were broken, impossible to fix. So, you could only keep it with you, hoping that one day they would be useful for something.
And in truth, they were useful for something.
The broken pieces of your soul would one day be exchanged with a person, who would look at them an know all the bad that was inside your soul. And maybe that person would choose not to look away, but to give you her own broken pieces, so you could stare at them too.
Once two people stared long enough at those broken pieces of soul, they would understand something about the other person, something useless on its own, but that created deep bonds like the one Epagogia and Jacob shared.
They had shared all their broken pieces, and that would bond them forever. Neither of them had looked away. No, they had accepted each other. They had welcome the other in their life, finding comfort from the tragedy of life.
Because that’s what it boiled down to.
Comfort.
Life was too painful to hope to be happy. It was too hard and tragic, too harsh on people. Looking for happiness was just a fool’s errand.
But what instead was a worthy search was the search for a companion, a person that would treasure the pieces of your broken soul; a person that would understand and stay there. Maybe they wouldn’t be all the happiness in the world. But they would be enough for comfort.
So, even in a painful existence, some were lucky enough to find someone to share the broken pieces of their soul with and enjoy a bit of comfort in the fierce tides of existence.
Epagogia and Jacob fell on the ground, still kissing, and with no intention of stopping.
About what happened next in that moment, only those two would know.