"I'm sorry, but this seems rather… improper."
Mariela was sitting extremely awkwardly in her room… with Gauche. And she had been for the last five minutes in almost complete silence, which was beginning to cross the line from awkward into outright uncomfortable.
It had been a week or two since that day at the tavern, and Mariela had seen Gauche around the hideout rarely and talked to him even less. She wasn't avoiding him; in fact, it felt like he was doing his best to avoid her. She couldn't deny that she'd been grateful for it, though. It wasn't like she was trying to be alone around him after that explosive episode in the bar.
Mariela knew on some level that she was being unfair. In fact, she had only let Gauche into her very small room in the middle of the night because she knew she was being rather unfair. Gauche randomly attacking someone at the bar—a small, annoying part of her still wasn't sure who, seeing as he technically hit her first—wasn't enough to somehow cancel out the fact that she had a home and income because of him, or the fact that his little sister acted as a guardian for her little brother for nothing other than Mariela's increasingly guilty gratitude. So, she had forced herself to suck it up and let him in. It had been long enough at this point, however, that she was starting to wonder if he'd come just to make up for all the awkwardness they'd both been avoiding the past few weeks.
Clearing his throat, Gauche apologized haltingly, "I'm sorry. I just. Am not very good at this." He rubbed at the back of his neck and looked everywhere but at Mariela.
When he didn't continue, Mariela sighed and said wearily, "You don't have anything to apologize for. We were in a bar; I was being overly sensitive about a typical bar brawl just because it happened too close to me."
Gauche opened this mouth to say something but closed it after a second with a pained look on his face. Opening his mouth to try again, he got out unevenly, "That's. Obviously untrue. So I don't know why you'd even say it."
Mariela looked at him directly for the first time, her eyes wide and startled. Gauche's tone had gotten hostile at his last sentence, like he was angry at her. But that didn't make sense—whether she agreed with it or not, wasn't he here to apologize?
At the look on Mariela's face, Gauche groaned audibly, throwing his head back and rubbing his hands over his face. Without moving his hands, he said with a muffled voice, "Look, I'm here to apologize because I scared you. It obviously doesn't matter if it was valid or not or whatever—which, by the way, it was. It's normal to be afraid of a tankard blowing up in your hands out of nowhere."
Mariela was very glad that Gauche hadn't moved his hands from his face, because she couldn't help the small smile that came to her face at that. He was, as she'd been assured, quite abrasive; apparently, everyone had been right about that. Somehow, it made her feel a little better—they'd also told her that, while he could be an asshole, he was, generally speaking, a good guy. Well, a good guy with a sister complex… but Mariela had yet to actually see any proof of that.
When Gauche didn't continue, Mariela sighed. "Gauche," she asked gently, "Is there any particular reason you're here aside from to apologize for a night that happened somewhere around two weeks ago?"
"Yes. No. I mean…" Gauche groaned, then straightened and dropped his hands. Still not looking at her, he said, his tone a bit forced, "Look, I didn't mean to scare you, and now you're obviously afraid of me. So I'm here to fix that before we all leave to go to the beach, because it'll be weird to invite you somewhere after almost totally not speaking to you for the past couple weeks because I scared you so badly that you had to leave the bar. So how do I fix it."
Though he didn't say it as a question, Gauche still finally looked Mariela in the eyes—and seemed shocked when he saw the laughter there. Before he could misunderstand and think she was laughing at him, she clarified, "I'm sorry, I just think this is rather sweet; if you didn't want me to feel left out, you really didn't have to make yourself uncomfortable or force yourself to apologize or anything like that. Your squadmates have been so kind, it's like they've accepted me as a new fixture in the house without any argument. Asta invited me to go earlier yesterday, and Vanessa invited me right before I came up to bed tonight after she, Noelle, and Charmy took me with them bathing suit shopping this afternoon. Captain Yami was there when she asked and gave it the okay; Finral is taking me over since I can't ride a broom. Really, you don't have to worry about me."
She'd expected that to make him relax—instead, Gauche suddenly seemed more agitated. His hands clenched and unclenched a few times before he gritted out between his teeth, "I'm really glad that so many people have been so kind to you."
Mariela, too distracted by the sudden wave of emotion to question Gauche's strange behaviour, smiled softly down at her hands. "It really has been incredible. Kindness was… not something I had been anticipating in general, at the time I met you, and it most definitely wasn't something that I would have expected to find in a Magic Knight hideout."
Mariela's hands flew immediately to her mouth, her eyes going wide. When Gauche looked at her, she shook her head, saying quickly, "That wasn't—"
"Why are you so afraid of Magic Knights?" Gauche cut her off abruptly, and Mariela snapped her mouth shut at the question. She hadn't been anticipating it; if she had, she'd probably have tried harder not to make it so obvious that he was right. When she didn't answer, he pressed, "There are a lot of people who have reasons to be afraid of the Magic Knights; it isn't like that's a secret or it's a sin or anything else like that. Just tell me your reason."
Mariela was silent for another moment, her eyes fixed firmly on the hands she'd folded in her lap. For what felt like an eternity, she didn't know what to say. Then, finally, she heaved a sigh that she felt in her entire body and looked up. She didn't look at Gauche, though she could feel his eyes on her; if she was going to get through these stories, she'd have her best chance doing it while staring at a wall as bleak and cold as the memories themselves.
"It's a long story," she started; it was always more a courtesy than anything else, a final chance for someone to decide that the amount of time necessary to listen to nothing but long lost bad memories wasn't worth the waste. As she knew he would, she caught Gauche shaking his head out of the corner of her eyes. So, she continued.
"My brother and I are from a family that was formerly nobility; we were simply a side branch of the family, but the family itself was… the family name held enough weight that it became a severe problem as, generation after generation, our branch of the family seemed to be getting weaker and weaker in magical power. Every new generation was weaker than the last until the entire branch of the family was disowned and cast out from both the nobility and the family itself. That was a generation before my own; my mother used to tell me stories about growing up on the family estate, before she got sick." Mariela's voice faltered for the first time, and she cleared her throat in an attempt to cover it—a poor attempt, but Gauche was kind enough not to point it out. When she was sure she could go on without her voice breaking, she continued, "The schism in our family was dramatic, and happened while my mother was pregnant with me. She wasn't the only person who had the chronic magical illness that was weakening her so badly; the illness among people on the branch side of the family, in fact, was the final straw that ended in the dissolution of our family ties. In fact, my mother ended up being one of the lucky ones; seeing as we were being cast out of a family whose name was the only reason why so many relationships had been formed in the first place, many of them broke so the partner that still had the chance to return to a noble name without shaming themselves could do so. Apparently, the initial dissolution was a nasty affair; I wouldn't know. By the time I came into being, my parents had already moved to the Forsaken Realm and cut all their family ties. My father had also left the Magic Knight squad he'd been on."
Out of the corner of her eyes, Mariela saw Gauche start at that and waited for him to say something. When he didn't, she continued, voice flat and dead, "I didn't even know not to be happy; I had no idea that I was supposed to feel as though we'd lost anything by having to live in the Forsaken Realm. My parents loved each other. They tended our small farm and taught me how to tend it; they were teaching my brother how to tend it, too. We had some sheep that I used to love to touch because they felt like clouds. There was a little river…" Mariela trailed off, feeling the pressure building quickly at the back of her throat and unwilling to risk pushing any further and letting the entire dam burst. She took a breath, then cleared her throat before she continued with a voice slightly more strained than it had been before, "Anyway. We were happy, and I had no idea we weren't supposed to be. Then, one day, I went with my father to the capital, so we could grab my mother's medication. I'd gone with him before; when I was small, before Marlin was even a thought, I used to love seeing all the different people that lived in the city. That changed, however, the time that my father took me, and we had the misfortune of running into his former squadmates."
Mariela's hands clenched compulsively, and even as she tried to calm herself down, she could feel her temperature rising as her blood started to boil. "They almost didn't recognize my father—we almost managed to get away from them before they saw him. When they did, however…" Mariela grit her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut; it had been so long since that day had happened, but she still remembered every single detail so clearly. "The things they said to him. The taunts and jeers made me start to cry, but my father said nothing—he simply lowered his head and greeted them as meekly as he could as a man with the level of magical power he had. While my mother's family had had their name thoroughly dragged through the mud after the noble gossip circles were through with the story, my father's family were still well-known ice mages. He was simply dishonoured because he refused to leave his wife and, for that, he let them say whatever they wanted, dump their ale on him as he tried to pass—he only made a move in defense when one of the men grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from him. When my father moved to fight them, however, one of them was already threatening me to get my father to stand down. When he did, they took the bags of supplies we'd bought—including my mother's medication—and dumped it all on the ground to light it on fire before they turned and left laughing."
Mariela could taste blood; belatedly, she realized that she'd bitten her tongue while trying to calm herself down. It had been so much worse than just threatening her or laughing at their cruelty—it had been holding a poisoned knife to a little girl's throat so they could light medical supplies on fire while cackling over the shattered bottle of life-giving medication that her mother had needed to last her for the next month. Squeezing her eyes shut, Mariela thought of the look of utter devastation on her father's face as he had dropped to his knees, too numbed by the entire exchange to even think to put the fire out—it wasn't like he could have salvaged anything even if he had. Instead, he'd pulled Mariela close to him and sobbed into her shoulder as the world moved around them. Sobbed and sobbed until he had finally pulled himself together enough to stand back up and move forward.
"Did your mother get her medication?" It was the first thing that Gauche had said since Mariela had started her story, and it made her jump as he dragged her out of her spiraling thoughts. When she looked over at him, Gauche was patiently looking at her and waiting for an answer.
"Yes," Mariela said finally, her voice barely more than a whisper. Turning her head back to stare at the blank wall in front of her, she whispered, "We sold the sheep and got the medication. I never went back to the capital with my father again."
They sat in the quiet for a moment, neither of them seeming to know what to say. At the back of her mind, Mariela thought mildly that she should clarify—that she should continue on to say that the Black Bulls had been completely different from any other Magic Knight squad she'd ever had to deal with. But even though it was true—and it was true, on both accounts—she didn't have it in her to say the words "Magic Knights" and "kind" in the same sentence right now, couldn't make herself jump to defend any Magic Knight squad… even one that she would typically defend wholeheartedly. Instead, she let herself spiral down the rabbit hole of awful memories—the abuses of power, the callous bigotry, the men who would seemingly go out of their way to show up at the little village their family lived in to do nothing other than cause problems after they'd found out where to go. With the exception of that first story, none of the other dozens of stories she had to tell were even unique; Mariela wasn't self-absorbed enough to think that her family had somehow been special. No, she was well aware that her experiences were mostly the rule, not the exception… which only really made it worse, in her opinion.
"I'm sorry," Gauche broke the silence finally, making Mariela jump. She'd fallen so deep down her own blackhole of bad memories that she'd forgotten she wasn't alone. When she looked at him, Gauche's hands were gripping his knees tightly, the knuckles bone white. He wasn't looking at her; instead, Gauche was glaring viciously at her bedroom wall. His jaw was clenched as he seemed to bite out, "I. I know how awful nobility can be. They're selfish scum—most people are. The only way to stay alive is to take care of yourself and the things that matter to you, and everything else can go straight to hell if it needs to."
Mariela was caught off guard by just how vehemently Gauche had said all that, as if it was a part of a mantra that he told himself to get through life. It was strange; at this point, a questionable amount of people had told Mariela that Gauche could be worryingly selfish, but she still couldn't see it. "Selfish" wasn't the kind of word she'd use to describe anyone who'd done as much for her as he had. It was also hard to believe that anyone who had helped her so much for no reason immediately after meeting her would believe that the only way to survive was to only look out for himself.
As if he could sense her sudden surprise, Gauche glanced at her with a small, almost self-conscious shrug. "You can't tell me you don't think that's true after the life you've lived."
Mariela almost denied it immediately, but then thought about it. She knew that she didn't see the world in the same way that Gauche did—that much was already clear. But what she didn't understand was why she felt that way, because she didn't blame Gauche—or anyone else, for that matter—for feeling as though life would be easier only looking out for themselves, either. Partially because she agreed; life was easier if no one else mattered. "It sounds lonely," Mariela mused out loud, realizing why she didn't feel the same way. "It sounds like a really lonely life, to only care about yourself."
"I have Marie," Gauche said immediately, his tone a bit defensive. Then he added, this time a bit more quietly, "And I don't need anyone else."
Mariela didn't look at him; instead, she just tilted her head to look up at the window in her room showing her a peak of the starry night sky outside. "I wonder if I would feel the same way," Mariela thought quietly out loud, mostly to herself, "If I didn't need anyone else to take care of Marlin."
They sat in the quiet again for another moment; Mariela wasn't quite sure how long, she just knew that when Gauche asked her what she meant, her voice sounded rusty when she answered.
"I'm sure you noticed the last time we were there," Mariela said flatly, "That Marlin needs someone to keep an eye on him constantly enough that I couldn't hope to work a normal job and also keep him safe while he's… sick. And I need to work a solid job to get the money together to find a curse mage who can help him. I need to. He's all I have left."
Mariela didn't realize how much she'd worked herself up until she felt the tears hit the top of her tightly clenched fists. She wiped at her eyes quickly, then turned to smile weakly at Gauche. He didn't smile back.
"Mariela…" he started, his eye searching her face for a moment before he continued slowly, "What happened that night with Marlin? You never told me."
Mariela sighed, feeling the night stretching on and on endlessly before her. "That's a long story, too."