I really love this first song lyric. It's literally this story in a very big, very cracked, very fragile nutshell. And hey, look, the chapters are a reasonable length again XD (meanwhile the updates are getting slower lmao T.T)
(I was debating on using "I'm never going back, the past is in the past" from Let It Go for one of the lyrics last chapter, but I decided it was a little too on the nose XD)
Also, thanks to the guest who reviewed last chapter! I really appreciate it :)
the ghost of your love drills a hole in my heart and it hinders my trust - Sometimes Hearts Break (Nathan Wagner)
o0o0o
"You did what now?!"
As if she didn't hear him perfectly well the first time, Heathcliff repeats slowly, "I scanned my brain using a more powerful version of a NerveGear and uploaded my-"
"I heard you just fine," Karma snaps with no venom, pacing back and forth in the inn room. "So, you live in the internet now?"
He leans back in his seat with his 'I enjoy nitpicking' expression; she missed the feeling of wanting to punch it off his face sometimes. "Technically, I'm dead, but-"
She makes a high-pitched whine in the back of her throat. "Forget I asked." Scowling, she pokes his face experimentally, ignoring when he pushes her hand away. "You seem real enough." And he acts real enough; if he didn't, she would know. "Although you don't look like your real body."
Heathcliff, dressed in his casual long, red KoB robes, simply shrugs his broad shoulders. "This is how you wished me to be—as you remembered in Sword Art Online."
The mention of SAO draws the tension taut in her shoulders again, and she pushes her hand back through her hair with a sigh. "Forget it," she repeats, shaking her head. "I'm gonna go get something to eat. Come on."
He waffles and quietly complains all the way down the stairs, she drags him with her anyways, just like they always did. It's four in the morning in Japan, so the inn is deserted except for the NPC, who doesn't question the late (early, rather) hour and just asks what Karma wants to eat.
"Oh, and can I have some coffee too?" she asks, tacking it on at the end of her order.
Heathcliff slides onto the bar stool beside hers. As the NPC sets the coffee down, he grabs it before she has a chance to and takes a sip before she snatches it back. Yeah, it's definitely him.
"That was mine!" she hisses indignantly; if she was a Cait Sith, her ears would be flat to her head, tail lashing.
"Which certainly didn't stop you from stealing my coffee all the time, Catherine," he retorts flatly, and she glares. "Interesting handle choice, by the way."
"Don't get any ideas...Give me another coffee," she finally says to the NPC.
He ends up stealing half of her breakfast too, apparently not satisfied with the coffee that she's going to end up paying for, and they eat and drink in silence, shoulders brushing occasionally, just like the two of them used to on early mornings, when it was just them in the mess hall as the sun broke the horizon.
In the back of her head, she figures they should probably talk about, well, that. Or something. But right now, it's a comfortable kind of silence, if Karma ignores the memories she can't erase, and she's really good at pretending she's not bothered by things, able to fool everyone, including herself sometimes, except the person sitting next to her.
And there is nothing to say that they both don't already know; the truth is carved in her scars and she knows he'll never forget either. Talk it out, everyone kept saying, it'll make you feel better, but what's the point of reopening old wounds when it won't fix anything? She just got him back; she's not going to risk driving him away.
While gazing regretfully at what's left of her coffee and contemplating ordering another one, she notices suddenly that she's leaned up against him, already settled in her place at his side without even realizing it. After contemplating moving for all of a half second, she lets a little more of her weight slump; he supports her easily, as if silently reminding her that she'll always have a place here with him.
"You've been through a lot lately."
One hand squeezes her empty coffee mug like a lifeline. "No thanks to you," she whispers, unable to keep the sour green bitterness hidden. "Why couldn't you have been there when I needed you most?" Like he always was before.
Before. What she would give to have her days of unknowing back.
"You didn't want me there," he says with a half shrug. "Not nearly enough, at least."
The NPC collects the empty dishes and mugs, and her gloved fists clench on the countertop briefly before unfolding, one hand coming to rest unconsciously at her chest, where something is still missing.
"Do you have any idea," she whispers, "how much you took from me?"
He weathers her storm in perfect stability. "Tell me," he says.
She's tempted. She knows he'll listen.
Where does she start? Ever since she woke up, she's wanted nothing more than to tell someone; still, the one person she thought she could confide in was nowhere to be found, and so even as she cracked from the inside out, it all stayed bottled up. Grief, for the way things once were. Longing, for the contentment born of ignorance. Loneliness, even when surrounded by her family and friends, because none of them understood the way she ached for a world that wanted her dead, a world in which she had real power; none of them understood the way she fell so inextricably in love.
She wanted to tell someone about the guilt that she was forced to drag with her from the virtual to the real world like a bag of rocks tied to a noose around her neck—guilt for everyone she's killed, guilt for everyone else she was too slow, too weak, too ignorant to save, guilt for wanting to hurt someone and then following through on it. And the weight only got heavier each time that she had to hide everything from Megu when she would've once balked at the idea of keeping even a single secret from her, no matter how inane it was. It got heavier when she knew that everyone else was happy, her parents were happy, Megu was happy that Karma was back, everything was supposed to be great; it got heavier knowing that Karma was ruining it all.
Everyone said it was time to move forward, yet they could never know the weight of every step and every breath; she carried an entire castle's worth of memories, all of a sudden dead weight, on her shoulders, around her neck, until she couldn't breathe anymore.
She wanted to tell someone, but it was missing, her ability to trust other people, because he took it with him when he left.
And he's back now.
It's everything she wanted. He's everything she wanted. He's everything. He is her grief, her longing, her loneliness, her guilt, and most of all, her trust.
The tiny little part of her that screams self-preservation, worn down a little each day, tells her to keep her mouth shut. To not give him anything more that he can wound her with, because if he does, she's not sure how much she has left in her to give before there's nothing left to take.
And the much, much bigger part of her that's everything she was forced to keep bottled up in an unaccepting world, is so lonely.
Humans don't handle change well. Every part of her rebelled when she was forced to leave what she'd come to regard as her home; she only made that choice because she had hope for a better future, but it turned out to be only just a dream. And now she's been given a chance to have her life back all over again.
And in the bottom of her heart, shot and stabbed with so many holes that there's barely any of it left to give away, she knows that little part of her has lost when she asks in a tiny voice, "How do I know you won't hurt me again?"
"You don't." And he knows her so, so well, like nobody else in the world does. "But I think you already knew and accepted that when you made your choice."
And the worst part is that she knows that he would never hurt her just for the sake of it. She isn't worth that effort. That held true even in Aincrad. He was never trying to hurt her for something as superficial as causing pain. It just happened when he followed through with his plans despite knowing the outcome. It was just a side effect.
She was just...a side effect.
It's a little pathetic, knowing that her pain was so completely pointless to both sides.
Megu would yell at her, warn her that he's trying to manipulate her, get in her head, but he never left it in the first place.
Maybe this isn't smart, and maybe it doesn't make any sense at all, and maybe it's the worst decision she's ever made, trusting the very person who took everything in the first place, but it's a habit, almost, one that she picked up the moment she met him, and habit is easy. It's simple.
Karma has always tried her best to think with her head and not her heart, and to save her own neck, she's done her best to never make the same mistakes twice.
But the world isn't black and white, and neither are rules; they exist to have exceptions.
And she needs to know.
o0o0o
As Japan begins to wake up, people start to log in. Karma sits by him, perched on the balcony of the Salamander keep, watching people start to mill about. She doesn't feel like one of them anymore, not when they're the ones living an alternate life.
"Do you think they'll find me in here?"
At this, Heathcliff shrugs one shoulder, leaning on the sandstone next to her. "Well, first, they would have to know which game you're in, and any AmuSphere game works in the NerveGear, so that doesn't narrow it down by much, given the device's popularity."
"Mmm…" She hadn't thought about that before making her choice. Hadn't thought about much at all, to be honest.
"And the NerveGear should still work as it did with Sword Art Online," he continues. "They won't risk pulling it off your head, and it can run on a separate battery if they try disconnecting it from power. And if they couldn't figure out how to force a logout from outside in two years, I think you've got at least some time."
"And when that time runs out?" she mumbles, mostly talking to herself, but he hears her nonetheless.
"Then we'll deal with it when we get there," he states calmly, and she can't help but feel a small glow of reassurance at the word 'we'. It's a strange sensation, this feeling of security, and she's not quite sure she trusts it yet after going so long without, but she'll get used to it. There's time.
The sun is rising over the eastern horizon, and she soaks up the warmth, basking in the realism of the pleasant heat. Deserts get freezing at night, but they warm up in the blink of an eye during the day.
"The sun feels the exact same as it did in Aincrad," she says out loud, holding out her cupped hands as if to let the sunlight pool in them.
He looks unsurprised and simply nods, holding out a hand as well, the light pouring through his slender fingers. "Do you know what happened to Argus?"
"...Argus?"
He gives her a mildly disbelieving look. "The company that produced Sword Art Online, and the NerveGear. I worked for them for over half a decade."
"Ah." She quickly looks away, lowering her hands, twisting her fingers together absently at the mention of his real identity. Now that she knows, what is there to hide, after all?
Some part of her still wishes she didn't have to know.
"Argus was shut down, unsurprisingly," Heathcliff sighs, not sounding too put out about it either. "The SAO server was transferred to the ownership of another company, RECT, which produced this game using the data from SAO. Alfheim runs on the same exact system that Aincrad did."
Her gaze snaps to his. "Do people know?"
"Would they play it if they did?"
"But—that's plagiarism."
He looks mildly amused at her shock. "Of course it is. But the ones behind Alfheim never really cared about that."
"That's not fair!" she snaps, like a petulant child. "They just—they stole it?!"
Now Heathcliff looks really entertained—as much as he can, anyways. "Are you trying to defend me?" he asks, giving her a funny look.
"Aincrad," she corrects him, standing up on the crenelations, one foot propped up on the higher part to point dramatically at him. "Defending Aincrad." He stares, and she sighs, dropping her arm. "So yeah, basically."
He snorts quietly and tugs at her cloak, making her sit back down. "Does it matter? You made your choice already. What does knowing this change?"
Nothing. It changes nothing. Indignation and righteous anger burn inside of her for this facsimile of the world she loved, the world that he poured all of himself and more into—that they all poured some part of themselves into—but he's right. What is there to do?
She has no choice but to stay, however fake it might feel.
"It's just disappointing," she complains, turning to sweep her gaze over the horizon, form the dark mountains of the Imps in the east, to the lush green Sylph forests of the west. "I guess nothing about this place is real." She makes a face. "Least of all the people. You know how many roleplayers are in here? I thought the ones in Aincrad were bad enough, but these people are mildly insane, and it's ridiculous."
His eyes glitter like glass shards, a razor thin smile on his lips. "Aren't we all playing make-believe in one way or another?"
Her fists clench, stretching the bright red fabric of her gloves, and she rolls backwards off the balcony without another word, with him right behind her. She slows to let him catch up, then flies literal circles around him, laughter coming so easily to her with him by her side; she missed his one of a kind look of unimpressed affection.
It doesn't matter if this is make-believe, it doesn't matter if it's fake; it feels real, this lightness in her heart, compared to the weight of the real world, and that's all that matters, and she'll tell herself this until it becomes true.
o0o0o
With a fierce war cry, she beheads the desert cobra's head, landing in a perfect crouch as the body thrashes for a moment before exploding into pixels. Beneath the wash of triumph, a tiny bit of discomfort pulses at the use of the exact same death sound and visual effects as SAO.
Heathcliff ambles over, having been a comfortable spectator the whole time. The mobs never targeted him, never gave him a single glance. Of course, Karma had no problem dealing with them all by herself, given her overpowered stats, but she's starting to get a slight nagging feeling…
"See? It's everything I had from SAO," she says, swishing her sword through the air a few times before sheathing it at her hip again.
"It must have something to do with the NerveGear," he says thoughtfully, brow furrowed, "and the identical system. It likely recognized your SAO avatar and ported over what it could."
She hums. "Yeah, I was thinking the same thing...I'm not complaining, though. It'd suck if I had to start from square one. This way, I get to do what I want." If she had to level up relying on the stronger members of her faction, she'd be bound by more rules and regulations, forced to be part of their machinations out of debt.
They keep walking while her wings recharge, and she talks aloud while she walks, glad to finally have someone listening. "I got all of the desert cobra skins for that Leprechaun, just gotta deliver them to Arun now...Said I'd go with a small guild in Parasel to help them clear a higher level quest…"
When night falls, they stop near a few spurs of reddish brown rock to eat. Karma shows him the world map, explains how she's been exploring the world for the past two weeks or so. He offers advice, looking at the world from angles she wouldn't have thought of, and they talk long into the night, planning routes and jobs to earn money and also do some sightseeing—after all, the world might be fraud but it's still a pretty one. She talks over him sometimes in enthusiasm, memories sparking with a newfound excitement at the prospect of revisiting them with someone so close to her heart.
His presence next to her patches up the gaps; some of them were worth worlds and many more were pinpricks in comparison, but there were so many tiny things that she'd gotten used to as part of her life that without him, the infinitely small voids that each one left amounted to something that took away so much of herself.
It's in the way he finishes her sentences, and vice versa. It's in the way that he knows what she's thinking before she can put it to words. It's in the way that she doesn't have to think twice before letting her head drop to his shoulder when she's tired; it's in the way he automatically shifts just a little like he always does to make her more comfortable.
It's in the way he looks at her, like he admires and respects her, like he knows her, like she's worth something; he looks at her like he's glad she's here, regardless of everything that came before, because he doesn't care about that and maybe he should care like a normal person would, but it's easier that he doesn't.
It's in the small things, and it makes her happy to exist.
She was happy in the real world too, for a little while. But that happiness felt like the kind that just kept her alive, nothing more and nothing less.
This feels more like living.
The fire pops and crackles merrily as Karma lays back to look up at the stars. They form different constellations than the ones in Aincrad, which were different on every Floor, each constellation with different tales of its own.
"I miss your office in Granzam," she admits, exhaling as she closes her eyes. "Even your stupidly expensive desk."
He snorts quietly. "Well, I don't. Especially not all of that paperwork."
"I don't get why you programmed so much of that, only to have to do it yourself," she says dryly, trying to get rid of the bitter taste in her mouth. It's just...different now, now that she knows everything, but different doesn't always have to be bad, she tells herself repeatedly.
"I don't either," he says, his tone flat as a cutting board. "Although many of them were messages from other guilds and such, not part of the game itself."
She hums, closing her eyes, chest rising and falling peacefully. It's funny—breathing isn't even a necessity in VR, and yet it's ten times easier to do so than it was in the real world. She's breathing freedom now.
(It doesn't taste as sweet as she thought it would, but she'll get used to it. She will.)
The wind picks up, and she coughs and spits as sand flies over her face; the texture of it is disturbingly like real sand, and she's reminded, again, why she likes the rest of Alfheim so much more than Salamander territory.
"I can't wait to get out of this place," she grouses, pulling her cloak up over her mouth.
Heathcliff moves so he's blocking most of the sand flying into her face. "Get some sleep. I'll keep watch."
Not that he needs to. Karma has camped out in the open fields before, her sixth sense waking her up whenever mobs spawn near.
Karma narrows her eyes at him. "Oh, great. Do you actually, seriously not need sleep anymore? I can't make fun of you about that anymore?"
His silver eyes roll as he reaches over and pointedly tugs her hood down over her face, to her indignation. "Go to sleep."
"I miss making fun of you for that," she whines, curling up under her short cloak.
And he would never admit it, but she takes his silence for 'me too'.
The moon crawls higher and higher into the sky as the wind gusts over the open deserts, quietly moaning as it passes through the rocks jutting out from the ground where they're camped. Heathcliff sits so still, he could pass for an unmoving stone statue.
Karma is reminded of when they were still in the lower floors, before the KoB had been officially created, and they were all equals, sharing most of the same duties, slogging their way from town to town through the wilderness of the dangerous, mob-infested fields. They would take turns on watch duty. She would always be near him, waking up for a few fuzzy moments while he took over watch to drag her bedroll over before curling up again, secure in the knowledge that he was near.
She ponders this for hours and hours, until Heathcliff finally sighs and says, "Let's just press on to Arun."
Something aches in her heart as she silently pushes herself up. It's not guilt; it's not, she tells herself. It can't be. She came here to escape it all, right?
The fire is still burning as a few tiny embers pulsing, and with a little mental willpower, she closes her fist to snuff it out, a wisp of smoke leaving the ashes, forlorn.
Neither of them make eye contact, or bring up why she hadn't been sleeping. They don't have to; their ability to read each other has barely changed at all—for better or worse.
As perhaps a sort of silent apology of sorts, she clasps his hand in hers as they kick off, doing their level best to leave that all behind on the ground.
o0o0o
Karma quickly realizes that her suspicions are correct—no one else can see him. Not monsters, not NPCs, not players. He can interact with the world (read: he can steal her coffee), and yet no one can see him still. She has no idea if they just see her coffee mug disappearing, or if something...glitches and causes them to forget? And she might've seriously considered that she was going insane and hallucinating all of this, except some of their behavior very much indicates that they are aware of his presence.
Somehow, everyone seems to walk around him, and the one time someone accidentally stumbled into their path, they walked right through him, which was definitely weird to watch. And in a crowded tavern where she was trying to find more jobs, the house was packed because a popular NPC musician group was there, but the seat right next to her was always occupied by Heathcliff. If no one could see him, there should've just been an open space, but no one ever asked if they could sit down, instead electing to stand.
The space that always surrounds her is bigger than it should be for one person, isolating her from the rest of the world in yet one more way. It's fine, though. It's what she wanted.
"Why is this happening?" she muses out loud as they leave the tavern.
"Is it a bad thing?"
"No," she admits. "It makes things easy. And it'd raise some questions I don't feel like answering. I just want to know why."
They can't see the moon from within the shade of the World Tree, but the stars are still out, twinkling merrily down at them. They're so much brighter than they were in the real world without light pollution, and gazing at them is much more enjoyable without the stench of car exhaust and the distant sounds of traffic to distract her.
"I think it's fairly simple," Heathcliff finally says, and she turns to look at him, both of them pausing in the middle of the street.
"Oh? Do tell."
He shrugs his broad shoulders, stepping a little closer, hands clasped behind his back. "I'm all yours, aren't I? Isn't that what you wanted?"
She opens her mouth, then closes it, swallowing hard.
Yes, that's what she wanted, with all of her heart. But...it feels raw, without some sort of buffer between them. It's almost like nothing has changed, but everything has changed, yet he still knows everything about her—how she thinks, what she wants. And she wanted that; she wanted someone who understands her like he does, and he's the only one-
She's not scared of him, never was, but it's scary how well he knows her as if not a day has passed, as if he never turned her world upside down, and she's scared of what he might do to her in his indifference (again). And the fear is foreign; it feels wrong, especially to associate it with him.
Everything is exactly how she wanted it when she decided to put on the NerveGear and never look back, but it still feels wrong, and she doesn't like that.
Finally, she gives a quiet hum of agreement, turning to continue on through the nighttime streets of Arun.
o0o0o
I can still see your face, looking back through the flames, and I search it. was it worth it? - Hindenburg Lover (Anson Seabra)
they say heaven is a place where our pain is washed away, with no room for all the torment of the choices that we've made - Honest (Thousand Foot Krutch)
This whole story is just me letting them make bad choices and then going 'eVeRyThInG iS fInE'.
Anson Seabra's music is amazing too, by the way :D If Karma and Heathcliff have 'theme songs', I'd choose Sometimes Hearts Break for Karma (hence the title) and Hindenburg Lover for Heathcliff.
On a related note, I sort of got the idea for Heathcliff's reappearance from Anohana, actually (which, by the way, still makes me cry like a baby). At one point, I wrote a little AU (an AU for my OC, yes) where Karma died in Aincrad (while saving Heathcliff's life) and left him behind, only to come back to him later as a glitch or hallucination or ghost or something that only he can see and hear, making him wonder if she's real. Oh and also, I just remembered that in Wuthering Heights, (spoiler alert) Heathcliff is constantly haunted by the ghost of Catherine after her death, so there's that :D
By the way, 'waffles' is a surprisingly fun word.
Anyways, the last few chapters have been...not so happy. I know my favorite past time is making more grief for Karma, but do not worry! Things are going to start looking better.
Looking better.