Everybody makes mistakes.
I often glance over to the photograph, faded by now due to the many suns it's seen. Whenever someone asks, I tell them that you're nothing but an old memory.
Which is true. I haven't seen you since that fateful day, when you stared back as you were dragged off by Proclus Global goons, feigning outrage like a seasoned veteran of the stage. Saito believed your ruse of betrayal, and thus his fury was redirected from the three of us to you. Only you.
I knew you'd be captured sooner or later, but I also knew that Cobol wouldn't execute you right off the bat. I thought I had enough time. To fight the onslaught of guilt, I will myself to concentrate on distractions, closing my eyes. But the image won't leave me.
They wanted to use you as bait, to lure me in, because they knew about us. But you told me that you had a way out, that you'd planned for your own escape. My fingers feel hot, as if they remember the parting squeeze, breaking our skin-to-skin connection. The rough texture of your callused hands as they slip away.
You told me not to worry about you, but how could I not? To keep with your plan of deceiving Saito, I couldn't ask for your freedom as an additional condition on our bargain. I had to wait until the job was over to negotiate directly with Cobol.
But due to the strings he'd pulled for me, I was no longer touchable by the company. And they lost interest in tracking me down. I had to go to them, but they refused either to address the issue or, suspiciously, to make eye contact. I wanted to scream in indignation… hoping that maybe you were just beyond the next wall, listening.
Instead I extracted the information on your whereabouts from one of their guards. It was a haphazardly misconceived solo expedition but one I had to take.
As I wove through the sea of projections into the vault of his mind, all I discovered was a slip of paper sitting in the otherwise empty steel cupboard.
It was a facsimile of my photograph: the one from our trip to Italy in which you beamed upon seeing the leaning tower. You said it reminded you of yourself. You said you'd always dreamt of this moment.
Printed on the back of the picture in block letters were two words: Threat eliminated.
I was selfish.
Green polyester carpet covered our own secret nest. It was heart-wrenching to see myself as the cause of your error, to be unable to say a word in your defense in favor of self-preservation.
I was selfish.
I never should have let you bravely trudge into the lion's den, only to be pitilessly massacred. In the perfect vision that is hindsight, it was plain to see that your connections in Cobol would not pull through. That your tunnel out of that prison would cave in.
I was selfish.
I let you be the bad guy, to be pierced with the arrows of my misdeeds so that I could travel forth unscathed. I let myself be fooled into thinking I deserved your sacrifice, that I should prioritize my life above yours. I let you make the mistake of loving me.
But I'm selfish.
And you're the one mistake I would willingly make again.