I Am The Game's Villain

Chapter 811: Christina Olphean SS [2]

Over twenty years of life, I made many mistakes.

Some were small enough to fade with time. Some wounded only me. Some I might one day have learned to live with. But among all of them, there are two that continue to eat away at me no matter how much time passes. Two mistakes I know I will never truly forgive.

The first was my first and elder brother, Connor.

My first unforgivable mistake was abandoning my brother while convincing myself I had done all I could.

I leaned on him for everything. I placed my grief on his shoulders, my fear, my helplessness, my uselessness, all the things I was too weak to bear alone, and he carried them without complaint. He stood beside me through the worst moments of our lives. He comforted me when I fell apart, steadied me when I could not stand on my own, and gave me a place to rest all the pain I did not know how to contain. I took all of that from him so naturally, so thoughtlessly, because I had come to believe he would always be there to endure it.

And yet when the time came for him to lean back on me, I failed him.

That is the truth I cannot escape.

I can tell myself he rejected my help. I can remind myself that every time I tried to reach him, he turned away, hid things from me, refused to let me in, and insisted on carrying everything alone. But those are only excuses, and no excuse has ever soothed the wound that truth left in me. None of them lessen the loss. None of them erase what I feel when I think of him. They only circle uselessly around the same fact: I should have done more.

Only after he was gone did the full ugliness of my failure settle into me.

I should have insisted. I should have forced my way past his refusals, past his silences, past that stubborn need of his to suffer alone. I should have proved to him that I was sincere, that I could stand beside him the way he had stood beside me, that I could help carry at least a fraction of the burden he had silently taken on for so long. Instead, I stopped too soon. I let his resistance become my limit. I gave up where I should have pushed harder.

And so all I could do in the end was stare at his lifeless body and think, over and over again, about how weak I had been.

How passive.

How useless.

No matter what happens to me for the rest of my life, that is a mistake I will never forgive in myself.

The second mistake concerns Amael.

No.

It concerns Edward.

When he came back to us, only a few months after Connor’s death, wearing the face of Amael, my little brother, I accepted him immediately.

There was no hesitation in me.

I recognized him at once. He looked like our mother. He looked like Connor, too. And the moment I saw him, everything I had buried inside myself broke loose. I threw myself into his arms without even thinking, all the grief and longing I had been carrying erupting at once. I did not stop to think of the moment. I did not ask myself what was right, what was strange, what should have been questioned.

I only knew that Amael was there.

And he embraced me in return.

Amael was back.

My mother and I welcomed him with tears and smiles and all the emotion which had defined us, people who had lost too much and suddenly been given back a piece of what was taken from them. We were overjoyed. Truly overjoyed. After losing Connor, having Amael return to us felt like being thrown a lifeline when we were already sinking. He was my precious little brother. He was my mother’s youngest child. He was one of our own. His return meant more to us than words can ever fully hold.

And perhaps that was exactly why we failed him.

Because of the timing, because of how broken we already were, because of how much we needed him to be Amael, my mother and I accepted what he told us far too quickly.

He told us he remembered a past life.

At first, I was shocked. So was Mother. It should have been something impossible to hear calmly, something that demanded questions, something that should have made us stop and look more closely at the person standing before us. But we did not. We accepted it with far too little resistance, far too little curiosity, far too little care.

That was the first part of the great mistake I made with Edward.

Even after he told us about his past life, I never truly sought to understand what that meant. I never tried hard enough to learn who that other self had been, what that other life had shaped inside him, or how much of it still lived in him now. I asked only what was necessary, no more, and even then I think I did so halfheartedly. Deep down, all that mattered to me and to my mother was that Amael had come back.

He was Amael.

He had to be.

He remembered us, didn’t he?

He knew us, knew our home, knew the bond we shared. That was enough for us. More than enough. We clung to it eagerly, almost greedily, because it gave us something precious to believe in after so much loss. And because of that, I chose not to look too closely at the rest.

He was different, of course.

He was not the same kind, innocent little boy I remembered. Something in him was older, sharper, more burdened. He carried himself differently. He spoke differently. There were moments when he felt both familiar and strangely distant, like someone standing half inside a role he had inherited and half outside it. But each time I noticed those differences, I explained them away.

He had grown up.

He had changed.

That was all, I told myself.

Once again, I ignored what was plainly in front of me. I ignored the ‘other’ influence on him. I ignored the part of him that did not belong to Amael alone. Perhaps I ignored it because I was afraid that if I looked too directly, I would lose him again. Perhaps I ignored it because I simply did not care enough about the distinction.

Because beyond all reason, beyond all caution, what I felt around him was family.

That was what mattered to me.

When I was with him, I felt the same deep certainty I had felt with Connor, with my mother, that closeness of blood and belonging. And my mother felt it too. To both of us, Amael was our family. He was my brother. He was my mother’s son.

And within just a few days of returning, he rooted himself so deeply into our lives that it almost felt as though he had never truly been gone at all.

That was the comfort.

That was the happiness.

And that was also the beginning of the mistake.

Everything fell apart when the man I had believed dead, my father, returned and showed me the truth.

Or perhaps not the truth in the simplest sense. It was something stranger than that. A different time. A possible future, or perhaps a possible past. Even now, I do not know what name to give it. I only know what I saw, and what I saw destroyed whatever fragile certainty I had been clinging to.

He showed me Amael.

No.

He showed me someone wearing Amael’s face.

That was the most unbearable part of it. The face was my brother’s, the features I knew so well, the same likeness to our mother, the same shape I had welcomed back into my life with tears and relief. And yet everything else was wrong. The expression was wrong. The eyes were wrong. The way he spoke, the way he smiled, the way he moved, it was all wrong. He was not the little brother I had loved. He was something colder, crueler, more merciless.

And in that vision, he killed us.

One by one.

Without hesitation. Without remorse. With a smile so cruel that even now remembering it makes something inside me go cold.

That could not be Amael.

It was not Amael.

That was the explanation my father gave me, and the one he had already given my mother. The boy who had returned to us was not Amael. Not the Amael I had known as a child, and not even the Amael I had convinced myself I knew in the present. He was someone else entirely, someone who had taken my brother’s place while wearing his face.

And yet there was one thing that connected that monster from the vision to the Amael who had lived beside us these past months.

He remembered a past life.

That detail, which I had once accepted so easily, suddenly became impossible to ignore. It stood there in front of me like a door I had refused to open for months, and once it was forced open, I could no longer pretend not to see what was behind it. If he carried another life, another self, another past that should never have belonged to my little brother, then how could I still insist he was truly and exactly that child I had known?

He was not.

No matter how I wanted to deny it, no matter how much I had trained myself not to even consider that possibility since the day he returned, the truth rose up all at once and flooded me. Every conversation we had shared in those months came rushing back. Every smile. Every gesture. Every word. I found myself looking back on all of it with new eyes, comparing him without meaning to the innocent child I had loved and lost years before.

And the more I remembered, the more the differences stood out.

It was true.

The brother who had come back to us was not the same child I had once parted from.

After that, even though my mother had returned and our family had, in theory, been reunited, we were more broken than ever. What my father had shown us did not mend anything. It split us open further. My mother, especially, was devastated by it. I think my father showed her even more than he showed me. There was something in her face afterward, something so hollow and shaken that I knew she had seen horrors I could only guess at.

I would be lying if I said I was any better.

The questions I had spent months refusing to face, questions I should perhaps have asked the day he first spoke of his past life, rose in me all at once, and in the cruelest way possible.

And he saw it.

Amael, or rather, the boy I had called Amael saw it in a single glance.

I wanted to accept him. I wanted to deny everything my father had shown me. I wanted to hold on to what we had and act as though nothing had changed. But my face betrayed me. My eyes betrayed me. Whatever wish still lived in my heart, it could not hide what had already begun to crack inside me, and he saw that too clearly.

I still remember the look he gave me.

Broken.

Lonely.

As though I had reached into his chest and torn something vital out of him with my own hands.

I do not think I will ever forget that expression.

From that moment on, I tried to reach out to him, but he refused me. Every attempt I made ended in distance. He asked questions I could not answer, questions I had no right answers for, and with each failure the gap between us only widened.

And because of that, some part of me kept sinking deeper into the very conclusion I was trying to resist.

That he was not my Amael.

His distance seemed to prove it. His coldness seemed to prove it. The more he withdrew, the more my fear fed on itself, and the more I hated myself for letting that happen. But even then, I kept trying. I could not simply let him go. I could not look at everything he had done for me and decide it meant nothing.

My mother, meanwhile, seemed barely able to process what had happened at all. I was certain my father had shown her and told her more than he had me, but in the end that difference hardly mattered. Whatever she had learned had broken her in ways I could not reach.

My father called him a parasite.

But I refused to believe that.

I could not.

For all those months, for that entire year, he had stood beside me like family. When my mother was taken away, he was the one who supported me. Without him, I would have broken completely. I know that. And I refused to accept that all of that tenderness, all of that care, all of that loyalty could be explained away as nothing more than Amael’s lingering influence over some stranger inside him.

It could not be that simple.

If as my father had said, that other life had shaped him that deeply, then that other life had loved me too. It had comforted me. It had carried me. It had given me the same warmth and protection I had needed so much. I could not erase that. I could not reduce it to something false just because the truth had become inconvenient and frightening.

I wanted to tell him that.

I needed to tell him.

I needed to say that it did not matter, that I would accept him, that I was done lying to myself and done pretending that only one half of him had value. I wanted, for once, to be honest with him and with myself. To admit that I had loved not only Amael, my little brother, but also the other self inside him, the one who had chosen to care for me when I needed it most.

But I was too late.

He avoided us. Avoided me. And by the time I saw him properly again, by the time I was finally face to face with him with no more lies left to hide behind, it was at his death.

As my father had wanted, Amael, my little brother was returned to us.

But the other part of him, the one who had also loved me, the one who had supported me, the one who had become precious to me in a way I had been too cowardly to admit in time, died right in front of my eyes.

Alone and broken.

And all I could do was watch.

I remember the tears then with painful clarity. I remember thinking I could not possibly cry that much again, not after Connor, not after all the grief I had already endured. But they came anyway, hot and blinding, streaming down my face until I could barely breathe through them.

Amael was there beside me.

And yet all I felt was loneliness.

A terrible loneliness, as if someone deeply important had been taken from me and I had only realized his true importance at the moment of losing him. That was the cruelest part of it. Not only the loss, but the lateness of my understanding.

And so once again, I was left carrying the burden of my own mistake.

The mistake of ignoring my heart.

The mistake of waiting too long.

And once again, just as with Connor, I had not been as insistent, as forceful as I should have been. I had hesitated when I should have acted. I had held back when I should have reached harder, spoken sooner, refused to let him slip away from me.

In the end, it was too late.

That should have been the end of it.

At the very least, that was what I once believed.

And yet, by some strange blessing, or perhaps by some cruel wish I had never dared voice aloud, I was given another chance to see him.

To see him truly.

Edward.

Not Amael, not the little brother whose face I had clung to, not the illusion I had hidden inside for my own comfort, but Edward himself. The other self. The one whose existence I had spent an entire year living beside without ever truly acknowledging him, without ever properly honoring all that he had done for us, all that he had given me.

When I learned he was alive, I felt a real jolt of joy taking me.

I had not expected such happiness to still exist in me. After everything that had happened, after all the grief and regret I had carried, I thought there were certain kinds of hope I had forever lost the right to feel. And yet, the moment I knew he was there, alive somewhere in this world, something inside me lit up with relief. I thought, foolishly perhaps, that this was a chance granted by the gods themselves. A chance to repair what I had broken. A chance to finally speak honestly.

To explain.

To apologize.

To thank him for everything I had failed to see while it was still in front of me.

I wanted to make it right.

I wanted to tell him how sorry I was, not only for my words, but for everything deeper than words, for the rejection in my eyes, the hesitation in my heart, the loneliness I had left him to bear. I wanted to tell him that I had understood too late, that I had failed him too cruelly, and that if there was still even the smallest opening left between us, I wished to step through it and reach him properly this time.

Most of all, I wanted something new.

Not a return to what we had before, because I now understood too well that even in that year we had both been hiding behind half-truths. But perhaps something honest. Something different. A new bond, shaped not by denial, but by understanding. I wanted to thank him, apologize, and seeing him accept it like he would have before. I wished of us finally speaking to one another as we truly were.

It was a stupid wish.

A naive one.

A selfish dream.

Because when I found him again, nothing happened the way I had imagined.

“E—Edward!!”

I screamed his name.

Tears were already running down my face, blurring my vision, and I could barely breathe properly enough to form the sound. My chest was tight, my breaths shallow and broken, my own tears slipping over my lips until I could taste the salt of them.

Ahead of me stood a man with silver hair, his back turned toward me. For one brief instant, I could only stare. His presence alone felt different and cold making my whole body freeze. Around him crackled purplish ribbons of energy, warped and violent as if reacting to his emotions, something so ominous it sent a chill racing down my spine.

And beneath his foot was someone’s head.

My father’s.

My father was on the ground, bleeding and beaten.

Edward’s foot was pressed against his head, forcing him into the dirt with such brutality that my mind rejected what my eyes were seeing. But Edward did not care in the slightest. If anything, he pressed the sole of his boot harder, grinding him further into the ground.

No.

No, this was not how it was supposed to be.

This was not the moment I had imagined.

This was not the reunion I had prayed for.

It was not supposed to happen like this.

At the sound of my voice echoing, Edward stopped a moment.

Only for a moment.

Then, slowly, he turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder.

And when I saw his eyes, something inside me went cold.

His silver eyes held none of the warmth I had once known, none of the pain I had seen and had hoped to reach, none of the loneliness I had also seen and had wanted to soothe. There was only a coldness so deep that I could not recognize him in it at all.