A/N: Hey everyone! Hopefully there aren't any big mistakes in this chapter, but I've been tweaking it so much that I don't know if I'd be able to tell at this point. Please let me know if you find anything that's confusing or doesn't seem right. There was a lot to keep track of while writing this because it sets a lot of information up for later in the story.
Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy the chapter!
"You're not having a panic attack," the nutcracker said matter-of-factly. "And you should know, those notes you've been seeing are from me."
My eyes widened. I took a step back but stumbled when my leg hit the bed frame. "What - what are you? Where is your voice coming from? There's no way you're just a-"
"Deus lo vult..." he continued - and suddenly the voice was coming from every direction at once - "Latin for 'God wills it.'"
Suddenly, the source of sound was the nutcracker again. "Do you understand who I am yet?"
I shook my head. "God doesn't exist."
The nutcracker sighed. "It's too bad about his influence over you."
"Who's influence?" My heartrate was out of control. I took some deep breaths, trying to steady my breathing. Surely, I was in some kind of shock. This couldn't really be happening.
"The one you think you love."
"What? I-"
"Tanya. The salaryman who dared to defy me so long ago."
Salaryman? Where had I heard that word before�
Suddenly, I remembered. The night after Tanya first hit me, she told me a strangely specific story about a salaryman - a businessman from some country called Japan, who was pushed in front of a train. He didn't believe in God, and God tried to make him believe through... Shit, I couldn't remember the rest.
"Why did you say 'he' when you referred to Tanya?"
"Come on, now," the nutcracker chuckled. "I know you think you're stupid - I know Tanya has you believing you are, but you're not." He sighed. "It's fascinating to imagine the life you would've had. If only you hadn't met her that day."
I put a hand over my heart. It felt like my entire chest and throat were throbbing. A wave of dizziness washed over me, and I took another deep breath. "Okay...okay, I've heard a story about a salaryman. But why are you saying that Tanya is him?"
"Maybe it would be easier if I showed you," he said.
Suddenly, the strange, fuzzy lighting of the room intensified. Before I knew it, everything was encased in white, and I wasn't in my dorm anymore.
There was a horribly high-pitched sound, like a mechanical scream. For a second, I was reminded of the wind when my family and I took shelter from the storm, but it wasn't quite the same. It was more like...
A train.
Then suddenly, the sound vanished into silence. When the whiteness faded away, I was hovering in the air, looking up at a metal ceiling. I turned to my right and saw train tracks heading into a huge metal tunnel. I looked to my left and saw the train.
It was heading straight for me, lights blaring, glass and metal just feet away. But it was frozen. Across the tracks, I saw a crowd of people looking on in horror. They were dressed in a variety of coats, suits, and casual garb, but not in a style I had ever seen before.
I wanted to scream something, but thought of no words. I glanced around frantically, until one of the people began to move. Well, it was really just his mouth. The rest of him stayed still as a statue.
"What you're experiencing are his last moments before death."
"What?!"
The movement of that man's mouth ceased, and the woman a few feet to his left began to speak. "He was a cold, selfish individual."
The voice switched again, this time to a man who was standing right on the edge of the tracks, just in front of my body. His knees were bent, hands thrusting forward. "He was murdered for his selfishness."
"I came to him, exhausted," said the voice from a new body, "because he lacked faith, just like so many other humans of his world."
"He told me," another body said, "that he didn't need faith, because he had a peaceful life, in a position of power, with ample technology. He told me humans only turned to something like a god when they were desperate."
"So I realized," said a small child holding a teddy bear, "that I should run an experiment. If I took all of those things away from him..."
Suddenly, everyone in the station spoke at once: "Would he gain faith?"
"That man is Tanya," said the teenage boy.
"Or rather, Tanya is him," said the woman.
At first, that sounded absolutely ridiculous, and I began to shake my head. But a memory hit me.
The day Tanya almost died, when my plane was struck by lightning, she kept saying something to me. I had taken it for delirious nonsense, but...
"You shouldn't love me," she had said. "I am the salaryman."
"Tanya fully remembers her past life," the voice continued from a new body. "She's not the fifteen-year-old girl that you think loves you. Her mind is decades older."
"No, no, that just doesn't make sense. Because we're together, and she wouldn't... A man that old wouldn't..."
I looked down at my hands - and screamed. Suddenly, I wasn't myself anymore. I had much longer arms and legs, much bigger hands and feet. And I was wearing a gray suit.
"Is this...him?"
The train scene faded away, and before I knew it, I was encased in whiteness again.
"It's understandable that you're in denial. But you've known all along that Tanya couldn't possibly love you the way you love her."
I shook my head, and the pounding of my heart began to return. "No, nononono." I was panicking because it all made sense.
She never did act her age, always seemed to know things I didn't, talked down to me like I was a child. Hell, she even once said she thought I was "too young" that night we first slept together. A sick, heavy sensation began to spread through my stomach.
"So you're telling me she's really an adult man? But I'm fifteen! Fifteen!"
"Now you're understanding," the voice said. "Do you believe who I am now?"
"...God. You're God?"
Suddenly, the whiteness disappeared, and I fell a few inches onto the mattress of my bed. I was in my room again.
"Yes," said the nutcracker.
I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head slowly. "No, you can't be."
"What?"
"Because what kind of god would run such a sick experiment?! And let all of this happen to me, too?!"
"Things have been much more complicated than I initially expected. I will admit that."
"I still don't understand - if you're God, why can't you just make her believe? Can't you control everything?"
"I cannot control the direct actions of living beings once their soul takes on an incarnation. I only have full control over their fate when they are not alive, and their souls are in my possession. However, I can never control their thoughts. Because of Tanya's free will, it has been very difficult to convince her of my existence - she doesn't want to believe in me. That's why she's in the situation she's in now. If my theory is correct, the more hardship her soul endures, the more she will be forced to believe."
"So you want her to accept you as her savior...from hardship that you subjected her to. What's the point of looking to a god for hope when all that god does is make your life a living hell?" I asked. "And...if everything you've said so far is true, then all of the 'DEUS LO VULT' notes have been from you. So you're responsible for the death of my family! Why?!"
"Now, Lillia-"
A-and, for some reason you ruined my Fokker Dreidecker too. Y'know, Tanya and I were finally about to be...happy together. Why'd you even have to tell me all of this? You can't be God, because you've destroyed everything I have! It wasn't Tanya who stopped me from being a believer - it was you, when you took my family from me!"
He didn't seem to respond to my rage. In fact, he seemed to completely brush off what I had said. "When you were born into your current incarnation, I had no plans to interfere with your life at all, Lillia. The circumstance in which you met Tanya - that internship at the Elenium Arms facility - had nothing to do with my will. But when I saw a potential romantic relationship between you two, I thought you would be good for her. I thought you would help her connect to her own humanity, and that would aid her in becoming a believer. When you two parted ways after working together at Elenium Arms, I used my influence to bring you back to her, because I thought her selfish and stubborn behavior would fade if she found herself in love."
I shook my head. "By 'bringing me back to her' do you mean killing my family so that I had nowhere to go but the military?"
Again, he seemed to ignore my anger. "The plan didn't work, however. She didn't fall in love, and she didn't start believing in me."
I took a step toward the nutcracker. "Wait, despite reincarnating her with all the memories of her past life, making her mentally decades older than me...you still wanted her to be with me?!"
The nutcracker didn't respond.
"A-and what do you mean she didn't fall in love? How do you know she doesn't truly love me?!"
"Lillia, you're in denial, but you understand this in your heart. You don't really think an adult man, whose life is his career, with no interest in children or a wife, could really fall in love with a teenage girl. You are an object to him. A matter of entertainment."
"But we've been through so much, so-"
"She has told you, time and time again, that she does not value you as much as her own ambitions."
I swallowed my spit. "But..."
"She has made it clear. You will never be a priority to her."
"Just SHUT UP!" I knocked the nutcracker off the windowsill and it broke into pieces across the floor.
Suddenly, I was laying in my bed.
What? It was dark outside - how much time had passed? I was still in my uniform, but I felt like I'd just woken from a deep sleep. The light seemed to be refracting normally again, and the edges of each piece of furniture were sharp and defined.
There was a loud, rapid knock at the door.
Did...that conversation really happen? I wondered.
"Lillia," Tanya's voice came from behind the door. "It's me."
"One...um, one second." I took a few deep breaths, blinked hard a few times, then moved to get out of bed. As I did, I noticed the note sitting on the mattress beside me.
"DEUS LO VULT."
I picked it up slowly as my stomach sank.
"Lillia, please." Tanya's voice sounded off. Something was wrong.
"I'm coming," I said, throwing the note down on my bed. I took another deep breath, then finally opened the door.
