A life to live
He stands there in front of me. With a smirk on his face and an eyebrow arched in conceit, he looks at me with amusement on his face and pure, clean loathing in his eyes.
Why is he here? Isn't he supposed to be dead?
Or else. Aren't I supposed to be alive?
Everything feels weird. Like in a dream. Unreal and mute. Am I sleeping…or did I finally join those who I slaughtered?
I take a look around. The hills around me are bare and dead. Like the sunless, cloud-covered sky above me. Dead like the blond warrior who now stands in front of me and who I killed. No, who a mislead faith and a betrayed love had killed. Like so many before him.
"What are you doing here, Hagen?" I ask.
"What are you doing here, Cygnus?" he throws my question back at me.
"Am I dead?" I ask and cringe at the hollow sound of my own question.
Hagen folds his arms over his chest in all calmness. His smirk widens and then he laughs out loud.
I feel the fury well up in me, replacing the confusion, which until now seemed to seep through every cell of my body.
"Stop laughing!" I yell and the outburst catches in my throat, and scratches there, triggering a coughing fit, which shakes my body and burns my lungs. I topple over and hold my hands over my mouth, riding it out.
When it stops, my hands come away splattered with fine droplets of blood. If I am dead, how can I bleed? The thought comes forward as fast as it disappears again, pulled apart by Hagen's new barked out laughter.
"Blood on your hands, Cygnus?" he taunts.
Anger gets hold of me again and I rub at my hands, but the blood doesn't come off. It only smears further, tainting more of my skin.
And then, in a heartbeat, Hagen stands besides me.
I never saw him move.
"You won't get rid of the blood," he whispers into my ear and I can feel his warm breath on my skin. How can I feel that, when I'm dead or asleep?
I give up on the blood and look straight into those blue eyes in the face mere inches in front of my own. I can see the spark in them. Is it satisfaction or hate? Or, maybe both?
"What do you want from me?" I don't like any of this. No, not at all. It just feels so wrong. Hagen scares me. I'm afraid of this thing that stands here, smirking at me and seeming just as wrong as all the rest. As menacing as everything here feels.
"I want you to regret," he says.
He doesn't have to wish for that, I think with a flicker of bitterness. I regret enough as it is. No waking day, no freaking, nightmare-filled night that I don't regret. Still…
"I would do it again," I answer and hold his eyes which now lose some of that spark and become thoughtful.
"I know. So would I."
Then we only look at one another for what seems an eternity. Both entrapped in the intensity of the other's gaze, both unable to free themselves from it.
"You lost the fight, back then, Hyoga," he says and again leans close to whisper in my ear again. "You had to live with it."
And this startles me. He is right. Living isn't something that holds much appeal for someone like me. Having practically everybody that I care about dead is hell. Being responsible in their deaths is worse. The remorse is eating at me every day, gnawing away my happiness and ravishing my soul.
But this here is death, right? Peace at last. It must be…
"It is only a choice," Hagen tells me as if he's reading my thoughts… maybe he is. "I can't live with it, and so you must."
Again I know that he's right. Even if it's hell, a living nightmare with only my brothers there to keep me sane. Even if knowing that I might lose them too any day in another pointless war drives me mad all over again, I have to live with it. It's the only point to all there is. The only thing to justify all those deaths. I owe it to them. It's my punishment to have murdered them.
"Go, and live with it," Hagen says again and it sounds like a verdict.
The surroundings start to blur and my vision darkens out, accompanied by Hagen's satisfied laughter.
Voices.
Urgent spoken words drift into my consciousness.
"Come on, Hyoga, breathe!"
I suddenly realize the agonizing weight on my chest. Panic. Suffocating panic.
My eyes snap open and I take a deep, shuddering breath, releasing some of the pressure on my chest and ignoring the stabbing pain that comes with it.
"That's it, Hyoga. Breathe," I hear a vaguely familiar voice, but to find out whom it belongs to would be a too great of an effort right now, so I leave it be.
There are shapes of people around me. Someone is leaning over me, his hand on my chest. Ikki, my befuddled brain informs me. I ignore it, as well as I ignore my four brothers around me. I look up at the blue sky and the sun that burns its heat down at my battered and broken body.
I have been hurt badly, I now remember. My ribs broken, pain in my chest and then suffocating. But I couldn't die. I had to live.
This is my verdict.