Chapter 104: What About Her?
*/Third Person POV/*
It was Kara who broke the silence first.
She rolled over onto her back, slow, blanket dragged up to her chin, and lay there looking at the ceiling of her own dimly lit room.
And when she finally spoke, her voice came out rehearsed a thousand times.
"I still get flashes of him, you know... The old him. Almost every day."
Nora settled back against the headboard without a word, pillow hugged to her chest, and listened.
"He’s defending that elven kingdom trash with a completely straight face, calling it ’intricate politics’... Or he’s sulking, genuinely sulking, because Tikki fell asleep on my lap again... He’s eating my cooking... Flashes of him spending two whole years mooning over a girl who kept him around like a spare phone charger, while I packed his lunch through every single day of it. Know what I did? Because I knew deep down, she wasn’t even competition..." Kara spoke softly, as though recalling the most fulfilling days of her life. "That Nikki... That’s the one I get flashes of."
"Sis..."
"But one day, I knock on his door... and he looks at me," Kara went on, quiet and even, "... and there’s three years standing between us that I wasn’t there for... And not three normal years, Nora. Three years of fighting for his life in a world gone to literal hell. Every day... A life I still cannot imagine."
She let out a breath at the ceiling.
"And you know why I can’t? Whose fault is it that I can’t? His... Look at us. Since day one, we haven’t stepped outside even once... He gathered us all up and put us into a luxury penthouse with an infinity pool... A goddamn infinity pool." Kara chuckled, " We watched the end of the world from ten floors up, on full stomachs, in heated rooms... I can’t begin to imagine what it’s actually like out there, because he has spent every waking hour making sure I’d never have to."
Her forearm came over her eyes while Kara continued.
"But he lived it... The first time, nobody came to save him. He was just a normal college kid, Nora. Like us... Thrown in this with nothing. And he watched every single person he loved die. One by one. Across three years... How does someone cope with that? I don’t know. I can’t know. But she does."
The word ’she’ arrived without any heat on it at all as she lowered her hand and continued.
"From the end of the first year, Nia was beside him. Every step of the way... through every loss. Everything that turned him into... this. When he learned to do the things he does now, she was the one teaching him. So no, I don’t hate her. Honestly? I’m grateful to her. Somebody was standing next to him in that hell." Kara’s voice thinned. "Even if it wasn’t me."
Nora’s eyes kept widening at her sister while Kara took only a breath and spoke again.
"And I don’t hate this Nikki either... I care about him... deeply. That was never the question... I even understand him to an extent. Why he counts everything, why he plans like other people’s lives matter as little as an ant." She shook her head slowly against the pillow. "But understanding him isn’t the same as knowing him, Nora... Half the time I can’t tell what he’s thinking anymore. The old Nikki, I could read with the lights off."
Kara turned her head then, and looked at her sister directly in the eye.
"My feelings are three years out of date. They were made for somebody else. Thrusting them onto this Nikki wouldn’t be love... He’d just be getting a confession addressed to a dead man. He does not deserve that... I love the man he used to be. Nia loves the man he is."
Nora had listened to every word of it without moving.
The whole speech, the philosophy, the gratitude, the grief of it, all delivered in that soft, reasonable voice her big sister only used when she’d already cried about the whole thing in private and organized the wreckage into sentences.
She took it all in, even nodded at times while her sister let her heart out before finally saying-
"...That’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard."
"Excuse me?" Kara blinked.
"Nikki is still Nikki." Nora shrugged. "Nothing’s changed as far as I see it. He still eats your food like it’s the last meal on earth... He still fights for his trash novels like there’s a trophy for it. He still can’t say no to a single one of us. Tikki still likes you more, and he still whines about it... The only difference is that now he’s strong enough to protect it all. And you just can’t wrap your head around that strength and the commitment to use that strength... I mean the commitment was always there... buried deep within, with a very vicious core."
Nora leaned her head back against the headboard, gazing up at the ceiling while she continued.
"You think your old Nikki wouldn’t have done every single thing this one’s done? Sis, if the old Nikki had a system and magic powers, there wouldn’t BE a second timeline... Everybody would’ve just lived... Hell, forget magic powers. Some basic self-defense classes would’ve done it."
Kara opened her mouth, and closed it again.
And, after a beat of silence, Nora let out a long sigh, hugging her pillow tighter.
"But... fine. If that’s really what you think, then..." Nora swung one leg off the bed.
And just as she did-
"They’re not gone." Kara’s voice rang out.
Nora stopped, half off the mattress, and as she turned back, she found Kara looking straight at her, resolute, chin up over the edge of the blanket.
"The feelings... I never said they were gone. Every last one of them is exactly where it’s always been..." she said. "I just refuse to hand this Nikki a confession that was written for a different man... If I ever fall for the one who came back, then he’ll hear it properly. From the beginning. Addressed only to him."
Nora stared at her sister for a long moment before-
"...And what about that harpy?"
"What about her?"
It came out instantly, flat and serene, and in the dark, Kara’s brown eyes had gone half-lidded with an arrogance so quiet and so absolute that Nora felt an honest chill of pride run down her back.
"There she is-" A grin split Nora’s round face ear to ear.
And just then-
-Kzzzt-!
Both sisters froze.
The handheld from inside the pocket of Nora’s pajamas, synced to the radio station upstairs, crackled.
And then, through the crackle, threaded through every pop and hiss of it, came a voice that sounded exactly, achingly, infuriatingly the same as it had always sounded.
-Kzzzt-!
"Hey there... Anybody up?"
Nora’s hand instantly shot to her pocket, pulling out the handheld.
"Nikki?" Nora called out.
"Kid? Why the hell are you awake? It’s past 2 AM," Nikki’s voice instantly shot back, "Hand the radio over to an adult and go to sleep..."