Chapter VII: The Second Checkpoint

"And therefooooore, I thought it proper to grant youuuu a reward for being gracious enough to help our Emilia. Make one request and if it's in my pooooower to grant it, I will," Roswaal flamboyantly explained over the steaming breakfast foods sat out on the table. Rem and Ram stood on either side of him, with Subaru and Emilia sat on opposite sides of the table. Beatrice was there too, though Subaru didn't say anything to her as he had yet to actually meet her this time around. He made a note to find an excuse to wander into her library at some point, though. Subaru stood, bowed his head, and raised his voice.

"If it is all the same to Roswaal-san," he started, not noting how Ram's face flinched at the relatively informal address, "I would like to join the house staff as a butler, please."

The sound of a girl coughing into her hand in complete and total shock could be heard through the kitchen as everyone turned to look at Ram, who was then choking on her surprise and hacking up a lung into the best daintily raised hand that she could make while almost dying on nothing but air. In the previous resets, she had expressed her cynicism by sneezing, coughing, or yawning, but the implication of impropriety with her sister had her particularly against him this reset and it didn't seem to be getting any better. When she looked up and realized everyone including her sister was staring at her, she made a girlish 'ahem' noise and forced down the irritation in her throat, causing everyone to turn back to the table.

"I seeee. Well, if that is what you wish, then weeeeeelcome to the maaaaanor," Roswaal said. Subaru bowed his torso this time to a 45 degree angle, then took his seat again. The rest of the breakfast went much the same as the previous resets had, except Roswaal kept making eye contact with Rem as he shifted his gaze from occupant to occupant during their breakfast time conversation. Well, that and Rem and Beatrice gave Subaru a judging look more than once when he replied to questions about his past and what his goals for the future were, especially when he mentioned that he was still a little slow with reading. He always knew that Beatrice was a bit tsundere, but it looked like meeting her in the library each reset wormed his way into her heart a little bit since the way she looked at him was way worse now than in previous resets.

Breakfast ended uneventfully and he found himself being showed to the baths by a stone-faced Ram, who took only the time necessary to open the door and push him into the bathhouse forcefully enough to knock him over. When he turned around to irately accuse her of bullying the new guy, the door slammed in his face and gave him a bloody nose.

"Gah! You over-ripened cherry blossom! Get back in here or I'll..." he yelled out, holding his nose in agony. She was already gone, though. He had to stop his nosebleed with his poor undershirt. The manor was turning out to be a tough crowd to please this go around, it seemed.

At least Roswaal didn't join him in the bath this time.

When he finished bathing and fixed his nose up right, he went to get himself fitted for his new uniform, although this time Ram disintegrated his bloody shirt... while he was still wearing it, which caused a very painful burning sensation all over his chest, by the way. She also made a bit less of an effort to fit the suit to him well. His eyebrows twitched in displeasure as he fixed his cuffs for the tenth time in as many minutes, walking back towards the bathing area to clean it as Ram had basically ordered him to do. This time he and the sisters weren't doing the same duties, at least not for the most part, as his adopted skills as a butler were better now than they had been in any previous life. She did just do the jobs that were in the area closest to the ones he was doing though.

He hoped that she was choosing to do that in case he needed help and not to spy on him either for herself or for Roswaal, but his analytical mind said that there wasn't very much chance of that. One of the first things he would do between now and the return to the capital, he decided, was win over Ram somehow. He just had no idea how to go about doing that. Stupid brain.

Oh well. He figured he would just do what he did with the residents of the manor every other time and just annoy her until she liked him. That worked on Emilia and Beatrice after all. It worked on Rem too, he reckoned, although he wasn't so sure he annoyed Rem so much as he worried the daylights out of her. No matter, he'd figure something out. Now, to see about the bathhouse...

"Agh, damned cuffs!"

Eventually the day closed and the moon rose against the backdrop of the manor. The occupants, done with their work, returned to their chambers to wind down from their respective stressors and enjoy some private time to themselves. All of them, that is, except for Rem, who used the excuse that she was going to assist Subaru with his reading skills (necessary for his work in the manor, after all) to make her way to his chamber. As she walked to the chamber, though, she missed her sister following her with her eyes in suspicion- not directed at her, but rather at the person she went to visit.

Subaru's door clicked shut and Rem let out a relieved breath at being in the imaginative safety of his bedchamber. The times that she had been alone with Ram this entire time, her sister prodded her about the strange man who had suddenly walked into the lives of the manor's occupants and effectively gotten away with appearing out of nowhere, supposedly to romance the blue-haired oni. Ram apparently didn't buy something about their story, which made complete sense since they had made the whole thing up completely off the cuff.

Speaking of cuffs, she giggled softly at seeing Subaru pulling down on his shirt's cuffs. The things were tailored too tightly and didn't come down below his jacket sleeves like they were meant to, making his jacket sleeves rub gratingly against his wrists. She had caught sight of him tugging at them constantly over the course of the day and figured that without her there to moderate her sister, Ram had decided to make her suspicion- or resentment- of Subaru known in less direct ways than just blasting a hole in his room and demanding to know what was going on.

"Subaru-kun is going to rip his shirt if he keeps pulling it so much," she said, finally drawing his attention away from growling at his shirt like it was the most dangerous monster he'd ever faced.

"Your sister short-changed me on the outfit!" he accused, even dramatically pointing a finger right at her face from his spot next to the bed. That made her smile again and she took a few steps forward, reaching her hand out to show him a needle and some thread, along with a thread remover. He visibly relaxed at the sight of the familiar things.

"Let Rem have the shirt and she will fix it for you," she comforted condescendingly, like a mother chiding her child. Subaru growled under his breath at her, but both of them knew he didn't really mean anything. With a few flicks of her wrist, the cuffs were fixed and the shirt looked much less... saggy and unkempt. He tried it on and was delighted to find that it fit much better than before, perfectly even with his wrists.

"Thanks, Rem-rin. You're a life-saver!" he said. She gave him a slight bow of her head to acknowledge his thanks and then sat down on his bed. He joined her soon after, at which point they launched into a conversation about the parts of his day that she hadn't been there to see. The moon shone on his desk through the window as he exaggerated everything about his day down to the most minute detail, exploding little splinters in his hands and minor squabbles with Ram into some epic war story. Rem smiled along as she indulged his normal eccentric attitude about life. Eventually, though, he ran out of truths to inflate and they settled into a companionable silence.

All good things must end, though, and soon he had to break the silence. He put his hand over hers on her lap and caught her eyes with his own when she looked up at him in surprise. They had made plans for today and he intended to keep them, though he didn't like the thought of hurting her by talking about those resets. It was what they needed to do, though. Not just the ones where she killed him or died herself, but also the ones where he killed himself either out of sorrow or because he simply viewed himself as expendable. They had expended all of the "mundane" resets, like the ones where he died to Elsa, or the ones where he didn't even make it through the city.

"We need to talk about them," he said simply. She looked down at their hands together on her lap, so he continued, "Neither of us will ever know how to move on if we can't handle the things that we've already done- or not done in this case. We need to talk about them so we can look forward to a brighter future. So we can support one another with our arms around one another's shoulders, like our promise. Remember?"

She looked up at him and searched his eyes for something before apparently finding what she was looking for, giving him a reluctant nod and leaning her head over onto his shoulder, wrapping one arm around his upper back. He allowed himself to look surprised for a moment before reaching his own arm around her shoulders and pulling her into him. They sat like that for a few seconds before he decided he would need to be the one to start.

"When I first encountered the curse, it set me back a lot because I made a lot of progress in a few days and lost it all in one move. It was really unfortunate. You all knew me pretty well so I thought that things were going pretty fine, you know? Anyway, I was bummed out about it when I woke up, but it did let me learn a lot about magic, like that I had the Yin affinity. I had no idea what was going on at the time so I spent some time looking for answers, like how someone could kill a guy in his sleep in the middle of the most well-guarded mansion I'd ever seen. Well, the only mansion I'd ever seen, but that's besides the point.

"It was a stressful question because I kept suddenly waking up not knowing what had happened, but after some asking around I found out that what I was looking for was a curse. See, it was the perfect weapon to use against an unsuspecting target, especially in a mansion full of magically powerful people like Roswaal-san. It was pretty obvious that you would be able to heal pretty much anything else if you got there quickly enough. Suddenly I had an idea about what the big problem was. I needed to find out where curses came from, so that was the next target of research. I'm pretty proud of myself for that, by the way," Subaru explained at length. He was rambling, intentionally skipping the part where Rem had killed him the first time. Even though he was sure they needed to talk or else they'd both eventually crumble, it was still painful to think about it with her staring up at him with her big blue eyes like she was.

"So Subaru-kun found a curse that could work in the mansion, that no one could heal. Rem remembers," Rem said, avoiding the same topic that Subaru was like the plague. If the conversation went too long, she'd be able to put off talking about... that... for another day. She chided herself internally for indulging her selfishness and hurting herself and Subaru, but her mind didn't want to think about it.

"That's right. Well, I think all curses are like that, but what I found was that the curse I encountered killed quickly and drained the body. Without detecting the curse early or killing the person responsible, the curse couldn't be broken. No one here could do anything about it," Subaru answered. Rem looked down at her lap.

"Rem didn't know that part," she said softly. She was passingly familiar with curses, of course, but they weren't something that she had put too much time into learning about aside from the fact that some came from demon beasts and they were supposedly very hard to cure. Apparently impossible outside of some difficult exceptions, according to Subaru.

"It's okay! It took me a while to find out too," Subaru said. He looked out the window at the moon and sighed in mental exhaustion, "Almost too long. I had to find the source of the curse too, which took a lot out of me. I probably tried a dozen or more times. Nothing really important happened except for one or two tries, though..."

Rem shifted uncomfortably next to him with her arm around his shoulder. Subaru himself felt uncomfortable at how close they were straying towards the inevitable moment that they would have to breach the topic they were both dreading. He took a deep breath in and then exhaled, letting the moment wash over him as he prepped himself.

Ram, eyes wide and tears falling from her face, stepped back from the door through which she had been eavesdropping. She quickly rushed to a corner out of sound range and held her hands to her mouth in an instinctual last ditch effort to avoid vomiting before emptying her stomach onto the cold floor. After a few seconds, when her ability to think returned to her she looked at the door she had just left with tear-filled eyes and then quickly looked away, ashamed.

The two of them, this Subaru person and her sister, they were talking about such dangerous things... A curse that could kill someone in the mansion, but who? Why would her sister have private conversations with a strange man about killing someone? Why were they both so blasé about it!? They specified that the curse had to work in the mansion, and that magically powerful people like Roswaal wouldn't be able to heal it. Her mind went reeling as her total lack of understanding what was going on with her sister caught up with her, until her tumbling brain finally brought her a confused and disgusting conclusion: Natsuki Subaru, or whoever he was, had a way of manipulating her sister to kill Roswaal.

Ram fell back onto the ground in shock.

He squeezed Rem's shoulder to him tightly and felt his palms get sweaty as he considered the weight of the conversation that they were about to have on top of how exhausted they both probably already felt. He felt her do the same with his own shoulders, though, and that brought him a good bit of courage to move forward. His brain stopped speeding through the bad things that could happen if this talk didn't go the right way, he put together what he wanted to say, and then he sent it.

"When I was... attacked... I didn't know what was going on the first time. I thought I was doing pretty well in the manor, getting to know Emilia and the rest of the manor pretty well on top of what I already knew from my first bunch of tries. I had asked Emilia on a date to the village, I had made it a few days without resetting, and I knew what I wanted to do from then on. I got sick, though. Could tell that my head wasn't on straight and my stomach was churning. Couldn't make it to the restroom. Then..."

"I..." Rem eventually broke the silence with just the one word, losing her verbal tic. He drifted out of his nebulous retelling and looked at her. Her eyes were pained and she looked like she wanted to disappear from the room. He squeezed her again and gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile, before he looked straight ahead at the wall.

"You..." he sighed, pressing on, "It took me by surprise. I woke up screaming. It scared you and Ram and you spent that reset suspicious of me from the very beginning. I made the mistake of asking to be a guest of the manor."

He felt Rem flinch more than he saw her do it, but he knew that she had all the same. It really was a stupid move on his part, making himself suspicious by contributing nothing to the manor and picking the one thing that would separate him from the rest of the staff. In hindsight he was sure it was the second dumbest decision he'd made that reset. The first...

"Yeah, I know. I was stupid. I told you earlier that I also asked people about curses, and that's true. I asked Beatrice and I guess she reported me to one of you. A few days later I decided to leave the mansion so that whoever attacked me wouldn't get one of you too," he continued, looking back over at his partner in sorrow. She looked physically ill at that revelation, so he stopped for a few seconds so she could take deep breaths. The farther he pushed into his story, the harder it got for him to keep going and the more she seemed to stir in self-loathing, so he pushed on to get it over with.

"You came after me and I tricked you into showing who you were. It was... devastating. I felt like an idiot and like I'd been betrayed at the same time seeing you. It's NOT your fault," he cut himself off sternly as she moved to stand up, pushing her back down with the arm wrapped around her shoulder and then wrapping his other around her front, hugging her to him, "It's not. I made terrible decisions and you regretted every moment that you spent trying to find out who I was. I heard it in your voice. That wasn't you. It was what I forced you to be by being so damned stupid."

"..."

She shuddered in his arms and he could hear her sniffling. Every time they had a serious talk, it seemed like he made her cry. He beat himself up on the inside out of remorse for how badly he had messed up, but he couldn't afford to hate himself right now. He needed to be mature, he reminded himself, to make sure he was the best version of himself for everyone in the manor and especially the girl who had joined him on his resets and fixed his loneliness.

"I'm thankful that it was you and not some rando from three villages over," he cut in, causing her to take a deep breath and look up at him questioningly, eyes red and puffy. He swallowed the bile he felt rising in his throat from being the cause of that and pressed on, "It changed my outlook on life... Lives, that is. You lied to me and said you hated me, said that you wanted me gone. I saw right through it- you're a terrible liar even though I gave you plenty of reason to dislike me- and realized what a horrible mess I was. It was part of what made me want to save you."

"... Save me?" she asked almost inaudibly. Her voice was weak and it cracked halfway through the first word. Subaru winced.

"You already know that you died once. It was right after I found out you were the one who attacked me. I was determined to figure out the curse and decided not to go to the village. You got bitten by that puppy thing and died during the night. Ram... decided I was to blame and chased me. I couldn't stand the thought of you dying and everyone in the manor hating me for killing you. I realized that I could save you if I died, but I didn't want to go out because someone else killed me. I wanted to take my fate into my own hands, actually have control over the returns, so I jumped off a cliff when your sister caught up with me," he explained, his voice hollow. That was his least favorite memory. The feeling he had inside when everyone looked at him like he was a murderer all while he felt unstable inside at the thought of Rem dying was unbearable to him and he hoped to never repeat it.

"You aren't expendable!" she said as furiously as she could through her tear-broken voice. He sighed for the umpteenth time and nodded timidly once. She didn't seem satisfied so he continued.

"I know. Now at least. But neither are you, and you died! I couldn't stand it! Everything around me felt like it was collapsing in and I had one chance to make everything right, so I took it, and I'd do it again. I'm not expendable. My life means something, but so does yours," he hissed back just as furiously. She took in a sharp breath of air and was about to retort, but thought better of it, letting her breath go through her nose, acquiescing to the point.

"Subaru-kun won't reset himself unless someone dies. He promises," she said, staring at him and daring him to disagree. She was normally softer with him, but he felt touched that she was so adamant.

"If that's what you want, then... Then yes. I promise I'll be more careful," he contritely agreed. There was a time and a place for resetting to fix things, he thought, but she was right about this. He was hurting himself by treating his life so carelessly. If he kept on he would be a shell of a man by the time he made it through whatever was happening to him. To them, he reminded himself. She looked for any signs of deceit in his eyes for a moment before turning away to look at the wall across from the bed. Then, when he was about to start talking again, she gave out an exhausted yawn. He found himself copying her, then looked outside and saw that it was far too late to still be awake.

"I know it hurts, but we should think about what we went over today and go over our emotions and thoughts about it later. More than we already did, I mean. You know pretty much everything that we held back on talking about now, so there shouldn't be anything big to take up our attention for the next few days. Just... don't beat yourself up, okay? I've already told you I don't blame you for anything. Just remember that. That's your promise for me," he said, pulling on what he hoped was his exhausted idiot charm. Thankfully, it seemed to work.

"... Okay. Rem will try," she managed. It wasn't a glowing response, so he resolved to check on her whenever he got the chance. Sensing the shift in the room and sensing a dismissal, she stood to leave the room. Again she was stopped, though this time not by him pushing her back down onto the bed. Instead, he had wrapped one hand around her wrist and was holding her on the floor by the bed. She looked at him and his eyes were conflicted. It looked like a war was going on in his head over two or three different things, until eventually she saw him make up his mind.

"Stay. Just for tonight, please. I want to make sure you're okay," he slowly got out. He struggled to say the words, they were so improper, but she saw them for what they were. She felt flutters in her chest, still, but recalled they had already spent the night in the same bed once, though accidentally. This time it was her turn to have a war in her head which she swiftly lost to herself. She found herself stepping back towards him and shyly sitting down on the bed next to him again.

Hesitantly, he brought her in for another embrace.

Subaru ran desperately through the hall of the manor, letting out panicked breaths as he sprinted as quickly as he could towards the parlor stairs. The wall beside him shattered and blasted him to the side as a powerful wind spell lashed out at him and barely grazed him. On his back with his elbows on the floor, he reached up and felt the back of his head, pulling his hand off to reveal that his fingers were coated in blood- his own blood. The sleeves on both of his arms were torn and his wrists were covered in cuts, deep and shallow. He was bleeding out.

He let out rapid-fire panicked breaths and scrambled backwards as a shadow loomed over him, slowly walking towards him. A dainty hand pointed at his face from a distance of no longer than the height of a man, perhaps a little more. Between his legs, a girlish pair of legs stepped ever closer, forcing him to back away on his elbows and rear until his back collided with the destroyed wall.

Up the arm that now glowed menacingly at him was the pink-wreathed face of Ram.

It had all started the day after Rem and he had the long discussion about the resets that he had been dreading. He had woken up feeling refreshed and relieved and was happy to note that Rem looked a lot better than she had the night before as well. When they woke up, he was splayed out on the bed with one arm wrapped around her waist and she had her ear pressed against his heart, almost as if to confirm that he was still alive and his heart beating. Getting ready for their day had been such a breeze that he felt himself bounding with newfound energy. While he thought he was relieved before that conversation that someone else finally knew everything about his resets, now he truly felt as if his burden was cut in half at least.

His morning routine through breakfast and into hall cleaning was just as uneventful as he liked it and he threw himself into his chores with gusto, happy to be back to something so familiar and heart-warmingly simple as taking care of the manor often was. He swept the halls, dusted the furniture in the west wing of the manor, refitted some of the rungs on one of the stairway bannisters, and even got the chance to check on a chandelier that he thought looked a little rusty- it was fine, by the way.

It all ended, though, when he stepped out of a supply closet after putting away some tools. Ram stood there in the hallway, looking at him oddly. She had been giving him unreadable glances throughout the day that to him felt different even from the suspicious ones she seemed to always give him now. He felt uncomfortable with her looking at him so intensely though anyone who didn't know her wouldn't be able to tell the difference with her bored expression, so he gave her an awkward wave and went to move on. It was his first mistake. A blade of wind sliced the sleeve on his forearm from wrist to elbow, opening up a shallow cut all along his arm and slamming his hand back into the wall.

"Urk! What the hell!?" he shouted, looking down at his wounded hand. He pushed off from the wall and went to run, but was slammed back into the wall by a powerful gust of wind.

"I won't let you manipulate her anymore," Rem's scathing voice cut into him from outside his mind. He barely registered the meaning behind her words as his breathing picked up its pace, but he pieced what he thought she meant together slowly.

"Manipulate her!? Rem!? What the hell do you mean!? I'm not manipulating her at all!" he shouted indignantly, crying out in pain as he felt his other arm splatter blood over the wall behind him. Another scalpel of wind had sliced off the sleeve and taken a chunk out of his arm cleanly. She was playing with him like Rem had when she thought he was a threat, he realized too late.

"I heard you last night. You won't manipulate her ever again," she coldly responded. Unlike with Rem, he could clearly see that he wouldn't be getting through to her at all. There was no bond there, real or imagined, that he could use to try and convince her to spare him. He had to try, though.

"I don't know what you mean by manipulating her! I care for her! We're together!" he shouted desperately, trying to play the part of the panicked lover to the best of his ability. Unfortunately for him, he was at least partially lying, and Ram detected it easily. Her eyes narrowed and he cursed inside his head. He decided there was no amount of talking that he could do now that could get him out of this situation. Instead, he did about the only other thing that he could think to do.

"Shamak!" he shouted, a burst of black smoke bounding out from underneath him and filling the corridor with thick plumes that caused Ram to completely lose her sense of direction. He knew that he wouldn't be able to fight her and that the smoke would only hold her for so long, so he took off down the corridor. Unfortunately for him, it was obvious from the blast of wind that went over his head that his spell had only given him a split second to run. He made use of it to the best of his ability, though, and put his well-exercised legs to work.

His back hit the wall and he felt himself slide his back up its rough face, his hands clinging to the hard surface for any chance of escape and finding no purchase. He left a trail of blood down up the wall as he continued to bleed out his essence into the hallway, thick droplets falling from his arms and soaking the intersection between the wall and the floor. Ram took one step closer so that her hand was just out of his reach and it started to glow. He felt himself go stock still, his joints seizing up as he turned his head away from the glowing appendage, as far away as he could get now that he had failed to get away.

"Who do you work for?" Ram asked bluntly. The glow in her hand picked up in brightness with her voice. His eyes darted around the hall to try and find a way out, but there was none.

"I don't know what you're talking about. I don't work for anyone! Please!" he screamed. She narrowed her eyes.

"That was the wrong answer."

The light in her hand glowed and he saw her spell fire off straight towards his face.

The door slammed in his face and gave him a bloody nose.

"Grk! Fuck!" he shouted in a mixture of pain, fear, confusion, and adrenaline. He tried to look around through the tears in his eyes as he brought his hands up to his nose and held it clamped shut. His breath was heavy and it felt like he had just ran a marathon at a dead sprint. Eventually he blinked the wetness in his eyes away and saw where he was.

The bathing area in the mansion was really not his favorite spot to wake up.