"What are you doing out so late at night?" Thalia asked, wearing a white top with black half-shorts and running shoes, her white hair falling loosely past her waist. Her pale eyes studied him as though she were having trouble understanding what Alex was doing still dressed in his academy uniform at such an hour.
"I am trying to find the dormitory building," Alex answered, his face flushing pink with embarrassment.
"Huh?" Thalia wore a puzzled look, though her eyes searched his face carefully, trying to determine whether he was deceiving her or not. Sweat dripped all over her body as though she had just returned from a long run or a training session, her clothes damp and clinging tightly to her frame.
Alex quietly averted his gaze, knowing that his staring could easily be misinterpreted, and that Thalia, who was a cold person and regarded him nothing more than a dust beneath her feet, could become infuriated with him in an instant.
"I am returning to the dormitory as well. I will show you where the boys' dormitory is," Thalia said and, without waiting for his response, she started walking ahead of him, not sparing him so much as a glance over her shoulder.
"Sure," Alex replied. "Thanks."
Thalia neither returned his thanks nor looked back at him. She walked as though she wanted nothing to do with him, which puzzled Alex deeply. The girl just moments before had seemed relatively normal, even if her expression had carried that indifferent edge that he had grown familiar enough with to stomach. But now she looked as though she regretted ever having found him standing there at all.
Alex did not know why, or for what reason, Thalia seemed to harbor such a deeply rooted indifference or hatred toward him, and he found himself wanting to ask her, to uncover the reason buried beneath all of it.
"Do you hate me, Thalia?" Alex asked, quickening his pace until he was walking beside her.
Thalia immediately slowed but did not stop. She kept her face pointed straight ahead and did not turn toward him, nor did her expression shift even slightly. Yet Alex noticed how her hands and legs had faltered for just a fraction of a second before gradually resuming their rhythm.
"I do," Thalia said. "The stories told about you were all lies. Fabricated. I had spent so long believing you were something extraordinary, something truly worth admiring, only to find out it was nothing more than rumour and exaggeration, and that you were far beneath everything those stories had painted you to be. After all, you are still stuck at level one." Her voice rose steadily with every word that left her mouth, and she looked as though she despised herself for ever having believed those stories in the first place.
"Why hate me if the stories were false? I was not the one who spread them," Alex replied, keeping pace with her as Thalia walked faster, though not fast enough that he could not keep up.
"I don't know. But I do not want to associate myself with you, because if I do, you will only make me weak and only make me regret myself for believing in those stories," Thalia replied, her voice turning cold and distant, like ice that had never known warmth.
Alex nearly faltered at the sound of her voice, hollow and devoid of any emotion whatsoever. "Then why were you looking so interested in me when we met for the first time?" Alex pressed on, trying to find the reason behind her mood swings, trying to settle something about her that had been quietly unsettling him since they had first crossed paths.
Thalia stopped in her tracks and turned toward him sharply. Her white eyes, pale as snow and so alike her older sister's, slowly grew glassy, and tears welled up in them steadily, one by one. "Because I thought you could heal my mother, who has been ill and bedridden since the day I was born," she said, biting her lower lip and clenching her fist at her side. "When I first heard the story of how you had healed your own mother, I thought to myself, why couldn't I do the same? You inspired me. But, reality was more cruel than my determination. No matter how hard I trained, I could never learn any skill to heal her, never managed it even once, and yet I admired you, the boy who had pulled his mother back from the very clutches of death. I began seeking out every tale I could find about you, about how you had healed her, how you were the prophesied one."
She paused, her voice breaking apart in uneven pieces. "So when I saw you for the very first time, I felt that maybe, just maybe, if I befriended you, I could learn how to heal her, or if not that, then perhaps you yourself would heal her. But when I saw that you were just level one." Tears began sliding freely down her cheeks, one after another. "I had been lied to all this time. I had been betrayed by false hope. You were nothing more than a fraud, you were just in level one, and your tale of healing had been nothing but rumours all along. I hate you for giving my younger self false hope, for making her believe that she could heal her mother, for making her think that if she grew strong enough, like you, she could one day find you and ask you to do what she herself could not."
"I was betrayed. I was lied to all this time, and you turned out to be nothing more than a fraud." She stammered at the end, choking on her own breath as the words refused to come out whole.
Alex found himself standing completely frozen, watching her cry like that. He wanted to reach out and press his hand gently to her face, to wipe the tears from her cheeks, and if it were at all possible, to stop the tears that had completely overtaken her eyes. She was shouting at him even now, telling him how much of a scammer he was, how his tales had been nothing but fabricated stories that had manipulated her younger self into believing she could save her mother, and how even after failing to learn any healing skill of her own, she had clung to the idea of finding him one day and asking him for help.
Alex wanted nothing more in that moment than to heal her mother, to undo whatever illness had wrapped itself around the woman so tightly that even the grand ducal house with all of its power and resources had been unable to lift it. He wanted to help her, genuinely and completely, but he did not know how to, because he himself did not understand how he had managed it the first time, as an infant who had barely drawn breath. He still could not bring himself to fully believe his parents' words when they told him that they believed he had healed his mother at birth.
Alex clenched his fist tightly, his fingers pressing hard into the palms of his hands. "I am sorry," Alex said softly. It was the only thing he could bring himself to say as she looked at him with trembling, tear-filled eyes, her tears flowing without pause down her cheeks. "I hate my naive self for believing that story, and I hate that I ever admired you." With those last words, she turned and ran, disappearing swiftly into the darkness ahead.
Alex stood still as a statue, watching as her anger poured not outward at him but inward at herself. In the end, she did not say she hated him. But, instead she said she hated herself, and the weight of that, the fact that she turned her pain inward and hated the child she had once been for daring to believe in something, settled heavily in Alex's chest. Making him take short quick breaths.
Alex could only hope as he saw her dissolving into the darkness that by morning, the girl would find her way back to her strong self.
***
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