My Beloved, Whom I Desire to Kill - 325

I don’t know why I was so stubbornly determined to live, only to cause pain to both you and me. I don’t have many—or any—good memories of being alive.

Sometimes I was grateful when you told me you liked certain things about me. Even if it was just empty words…

I learned that I could feel like a worthwhile person without having to crush someone else. So I stopped doing those things. Just as you said, I tried to cultivate my own abilities to overcome my inherent inferiority.

You were right. It felt meaningful. It literally felt like I was flying.

But I was wrong. The moment that first truly whole thing I achieved was labeled with the name Edwin Eccelston, it lost all meaning. I woke up from the dream of flying as I plunged down.

…Yes, it’s time to wake up from this futile dream.

I’ve foolishly lived a life aspiring only for the impossible. To become a human, to experience love.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot become anyone other than Edwin Eccelston. Even my declaration of love is labeled with the name Edwin Eccelston.

It couldn’t be helped. I delivered it with his mouth, with his voice.

I am sick of this love, where I must borrow another man’s voice to say «I love you,» and borrow another man’s lips to kiss you, and then must worry incessantly that you—or the owner of this body—might erase my name.

Living a life dreaming only of the impossible is a sickness. A sickness that even harms the one I love. And some sicknesses can only be cured by death.

Natalia, I am going to die now.

I’m not doing this in a fit of pique. I have chosen to accept the destiny that only death can bring me freedom.

I wasn’t born to meet you. My fate was to meet you, face myself, and inevitably die.

You know what? On the day you got engaged, I envied your deceased parents at the cemetery. Although their bodies have long since decomposed, they left behind a trace—a name—to prove they once lived in this world.

I will only remain in your memory. And once you die, even that memory will vanish forever, and no one will know I was ever here… It is so meaningless.

I wish I had a soul, even without a body, but who knows… I suppose I’ll only find out after I die.

Natalia, will you pray that I go to hell when I die?

…No. Just forget me. Like an itch that disappears when you scratch it. Rejoice in that liberation and forget me forever.

—Ah, one more thing. Thank you for calling me a dead ‘person’ to my face. You are an angel.

The woman never opened her eyes once while he confessed. He was lonely, but there was no longer any reason to soothe that loneliness.

The man leaned down towards her gently closed eyelids, then stopped. The final kiss, borrowed from another man’s lips, and the final confession of love, borrowed from another man’s voice, felt meaningless. Expressions of affection were always selfish acts for himself, not for Natalia. Now, there was no reason to indulge himself.

Even as he thought there was no reason left, Lorenz laid his body over hers. The moment his chest pressed down, a bubble of breath escaped through his lips.

Listening to the sound of her breath settling, he pressed his wet cheek against the nape of her neck, where her pulse beat calmly. He gazed at her golden hair, which rippled like a sea infused with the sunset’s light across her pale, soft skin, and closed his eyes for the last time. The warmth that had taught him the meaning of loneliness permeated his skin, reaching Lorenz.

Before surrendering all sensation and perception, he felt the only human he had ever loved for the last time. It is not because he is a shameless wretch, but a coward, that he is making a death that should be painful into a happy one.

He is afraid of death, though he cannot even say he has truly lived. He has no body, so there will be no physical pain, but the fear of the agony of losing existence makes him tremble, just as Natalia did when she sensed her death from the sky.

But what would he feel after death? Pain is the burden of the living, so truly, he is hurting terribly now. Fearing that he might cowardly try to escape death, Lorenz administered the analgesic to himself.

This is the happiest death I am allowed.

He forced himself to suppress the urge to see Natalia one more time, to speak to her one more time, and took his final breath. A breath thick with her cozy scent, a breath Natalia had exhaled.

He held her in his heart, then breathed it out. Just like that, Lorenz abandoned everything.

The man who failed to become human has one human trait: though birth was not his will, death can be an act of his own will.

A fighter jet soaring over the sea plummets. It shatters into pieces the moment it hits the seabed. The wreckage, like sand, is swept away by the current and vanishes.

The dolphin turns belly-up, instantly putrefies, and swells like a balloon, rising higher and higher. The moment it hits the surface, it dissolves into seafoam.

The tower that stood stubbornly on the seabed crumbled from below. It, too, turned to sand and was swept away without a trace. A personality, a life, withered away just like that.

He believed that when he died, no trace of his life would remain, but he was wrong.

Why the sea, of all places?

Because it is where life was born.

Another person’s ocean surges towards Edwin like a tidal wave. His world sinks, submerging into a sea where memories, thoughts, and emotions that are not his own drift.

Edwin buried his face in his hands, unable to lift his head.

—Edwin…?

Until Giselle called his name. He turned his head and met her eyes. Giselle blinked her confused, hazy eyes, then smiled softly, like someone who felt relieved.

—I love you.

Edwin momentarily forgot all his anguish and was intoxicated by the joy, missing the hidden meaning in her repeating what he had already said.

Giselle did not know it then, either.

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Edwin sat Giselle horizontally on the sofa, positioning her so that her thighs rested over his lap. One hand was wrapped around her waist, and the other kneaded her bare skin beneath her skirt.

There was no reason they couldn’t be intimate in the living room in the middle of the day, and they had done so more times than he could count on both hands, but certainly not today. Giselle, who had been leaning into him, let out a moan and squirmed her legs, trying to avoid his touch.

—Mmm… that hurts……..

—Bear it.

Because it’s pain you brought upon yourself. He worked his hand mercilessly, and she soon gave up. The woman, who had been quietly reading a letter sent by a comrade from the training camp, suddenly lifted her head, though her body continued to twitch.

—Patricia already returned to duty, she said.

—Not a chance for you.

Her dreams were certainly big, considering she couldn’t even walk properly on her own.

Edwin was following the doctor’s prescription, manually releasing the muscles in her left thigh. Now that enough time had passed for autumn to deepen, the surgical wound had healed well without much scarring, but the recovery of the ruptured muscle was slow. Because of this, Giselle struggled not only with walking but even with sitting.

—… successfully carried out the operation and breached the enemy’s defensive line…….

The radio continuously broadcast news of the victory of Operation Horizon. The war was relentlessly moving toward its conclusion.

Picturing life after the war was no longer a futile dream. Edwin had started preparations for their wedding, but he wasn’t rushing things as much as his heart wished. He had to wait for Giselle to recover completely.

Like anyone, he wanted their wedding, the first and last of their lives, to be nothing but happy. But if his bride, dressed in a dazzling white wedding dress, walked toward him with a limp, would Edwin truly be able to smile?

—We need to revise your wedding vows.

—How?

—To a pledge that you will diligently obey your husband, in joy and in sorrow, until death do us part.

Giselle chuckled softly and retreated back into her letter. The promise not to put her body on the line for him again was something she wouldn’t make, even on her deathbed.

—Ow, it hurts.

This time, instead of saying bear it, he sighed briefly and withdrew his hand from under her skirt. When he carefully lifted and moved her two legs from his lap, Giselle looked at him with curious, fixed eyes. Just as she was about to sit up, she wrapped her arms around his neck. Her lips drew near, perhaps trying to appease him.

The kiss reached the air and stopped. It was because Edwin had avoided it.

Even though Giselle pouted her lips petulantly, he did not kiss her but stood up instead.

—Let’s go for a walk.

She narrowed her eyes, watching the man’s cold, retreating back as he exited the living room to prepare for their outing—which was called a «walk» but was closer to rehabilitation training. Since the surgery, Edwin had strictly refused to kiss Giselle on the mouth.

—Do you know how many wounded soldiers who survive bullets and artillery end up dying from tiny, invisible germs?

He claimed that even a cold would be a disaster. Yet, he was still avoiding a kiss, even now that her surgical wound had fully healed and her stamina had returned.

Asure: Nine episodes left, then it ends.