Epilogue
x
Haru's shoulder isn't that badly injured.
Not really.
Haru knows it. Baron knows it. And yet he still offers to tend to it, and she still agrees. Muta and Toto have both made themselves suspiciously scarce, so it's just the two of them, human and Creation, alone in the Bureau.
It's different from how she remembers it – but, then again, she isn't sure if it has really changed, or if she's just confusing it with how the Bedlam arranged his Bureau. She's sure some of the books have been moved around – and was the grandfather clock always so far from the door? There's small tear in the sofa she currently occupies. Had she never noticed it before? Or had the damage happened in her absence?
"So," she says eventually. "Here we are again."
"Here we are again," Baron echoes softly.
"At least the injury is minimal," she continues. "No stab wounds this time around."
Baron falters in his ministrations. "Haru–"
"I'd ask if that was too soon but, you know, we've all had fresh trauma since then."
"Haru, please…"
"Not funny? Come on, I think since it's my shoulder that's all banged up, I should at least be allowed to make a joke at its expense–"
"I'm sorry."
The rest of Haru's verbal deluge comes to a halt. She had known this conversation was coming, and it would be so easy to dismiss it entirely, forgive him quickly. To tape over the cracks in her heart and move on. But she knows this is something that has to happen.
"For what, Baron?"
"For… everything."
"That's not an answer," she says. "That's the trawler net of apologies. Try again."
He continues his gentle tending to her shoulder, but the movements are slow and inefficient. Haru hears his breath stutter several times, as if he's starting to speak and then thinking better of it. Eventually, he ventures with, "For dismissing you."
Haru snorts. "Try again."
"Figuratively," he adds quickly. "Although, literally too, of course, but… I should have listened to you. I should have let you decide if this was a risk worth taking, not stolen the choice from you to alleviate my own fears."
"Better."
"I should have talked with you, instead of pushing you away at the first omen of heartbreak."
"Ah, yes, communication. Glad to see you've finally learnt your lesson."
"Haru, I'm trying to be serious."
"As am I, but…" And she laughs. "Look, I've imagined this conversation so many times since we parted ways, and I still don't know how I want it to go. I want to forgive you, and I want you to sweep me up into your arms, and I want to be mad at you, and I want to never see you again, and…" Her words trail off into a tired, half-laugh. "It's all so ridiculous, you know? It'd be difficult enough to untangle months' worth of heartbreak, even if I hadn't just survived a monster wearing your face trying to eat my soul."
She stares up at the ceiling, where she can see the chandelier is just slightly off to the left. The Bedlam's chandelier was dead centre.
She closes her eyes.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I don't even know what I want you to say to make things better, so it's unfair to expect you to find the answer."
"I could try."
"And what would you say?"
"I don't know yet. But I'm willing to give it a lifetime to find the right words."
"I might just let you."
She feels – or she thinks she feels – his hand brush against hers, before he returns to the final touches to her shoulder. While they sit in silence, Haru tries not to notice the tea cabinet and how the interior is arranged differently from what she has become accustomed to.
"Would you have agreed to the Bedlam?" Baron asks eventually. There is a kind of weight to his words that implies this question has been with him for a while now. "Had things been different?"
"You mean, had the Bedlam been sincere and not trying to steal my soul, and had the price for staying not been to sew buttons into my eyes and permanently bar myself off from my home world, and had he not kidnapped you all to blackmail me with?"
Baron hesitates. "Yes. That."
"I… maybe. I don't know. The Bedlam might be a soul-sucking monster, but he is very good at telling people what they wanted to hear. Too good, really." The laughter that trips off her tongue sounds tired, even to her. "If he had been a little crueller when there were two of you, I might have mistaken him for you."
"Haru, it had never been my intent to be cruel–"
"I know, Baron." She drops her head back against the sofa. "I know."
Her shoulder is well and truly tended to now, but neither of them move. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the silhouette of Baron, and she knows he is making no attempt to make eye contact. She thinks she prefers that. It feels safer.
When he starts talking, his words are slow and carefully chosen. "When you asked if I would have barred you from the Sanctuary, had you been a Creation, I could have pretended," he says. "It would have been easy to give the same lie the Bedlam did, but we both would have known that's what it was – a lie. You deserve better than that."
"It would have been a nice lie," Haru muses.
"I would have been no better than the Bedlam. And that's all he does – tell the prettiest lies to draw his prey in."
"He doesn't always need to, though. Lie, I mean. Sometimes the truth is enough." She tilts her head towards him and finally meets those emerald-green eyes. Even now, after everything, part of her is still surprised they're not buttons. "After all, he didn't have to lie that you had pushed me away. And he wasn't lying about the likeliest outcome for love between a Creation and a mortal. And that is why you closed the Sanctuary off to me, isn't it? To save yourself grief tomorrow by grieving today."
"My mistake."
"Yeah, it was." The headrest on this sofa is just a half-inch taller than the one in the Bedlam's. Haru sighs and says, "But an understandable one."
"It still hurt you."
"It did," Haru agrees. "The point is, for mortals, grief is an inevitable part of love. Death, or distance, or loss will end everything – we grow up with that truth – and even we struggle to come to terms with it. Often we ignore it. But that's not the case with Creations, is it? I mean, if you fell in love with another Creation, in theory, it would never end."
"In theory," Baron echoes. "Barring our lack of common sense."
Haru laughs beneath her breath. "Something like that. The point is, I understand that the idea of entering into something knowing it can only end one way is… difficult, especially if it's not always a given, but… that's what makes it important. And you're not the only one here. Even though you don't age, I still have to live with the fact that one of these days you might get in over your head and I'll lose you for good. Both of us are taking a risk with grief here. That's the deal with love."
She closes her eyes again.
"Did you mean what you said back there?" she asks.
"I said a lot of things. You may have to be more specific."
"You told me that you love me." She feels her chest go tight at the words, but attempts a dry laugh regardless. "You know, I wasn't actually expecting you to say anything like that. I thought we'd escalate into a full argument, and then I could palm the penknife off on you in the heat of the row, but… yeah, I hadn't planned for that. So, did you mean it?"
"Of course I meant it. Why wouldn't I?"
"I thought it perhaps might have been another show for the Bedlam." She cracks her eyes open. "Or I thought you might want an out, now the danger has passed. After all, love confessions in a life-or-death situation are easy to say in the heat of the moment, but can be less easy once you realise you're not, you know, actually going to die."
His hand curls around hers. It feels odd. Unfamiliar.
She realises she was expecting the Bedlam's hand.
It's going to be a long time for things to get back to any semblance of normal, she thinks.
"I meant it," Baron says softly. "Haru Yoshioka, I love you."
"Oh," she can't stop herself from saying. "That's good."
Baron's hold loosens, just a smidgen. "That's good?" he echoes.
"I mean, it's a relief." She's vaguely aware she's not improving matters, but her tongue seems to have staged a coup and bludgeoned her brain in the process. "It'd be pretty awkward if that wasn't the case, after everything we've both been through. I mean, you're not required to return my feelings, but I'd kinda already guessed and – oh, this is getting stupid."
She kisses him.
"I'm very tired and I've had a very long day," she says when she breaks away, "and I somehow want to cry from fear and sorrow and joy all at once right now, but for what it's worth, I admire a man who speaks from the heart."
Baron's brow furrows. "Why does that last line sound familiar?"
"It's what you told me after I told you I had a crush on you after the Cat Kingdom fiasco."
"Ah."
"And then you promptly jumped off the roof."
His confusion doesn't lessen. "So is this a… rejection?"
"What? No! No, I just – I thought…" Haru groans and drops her head against his shoulder. "I love you too, you prize idiot."
"Oh. That's good."
She snorts. "Just don't get any noble ideas of saving me from myself again, please. Rescuing myself, and the rest of you in the aftermath, once is quite enough for me, thank you very much."
Baron chuckles and leans his head against the top of hers. "Now that, I think I can do."
x
A/N: Thank you to everyone who joined me on this ride (especially you ffnet-only folk who patiently waited for the much-belated updates), for every lovely comment and encouraging remark, thank you. Thank you especially to lin-iva, whose Coraline AU art was the inspiration, and who was kind enough to give me their blessing in creating a full fic of my own for it.
I am almost solely on AO3 now - find me under the same pseudonym of "Catsafari". I'm still writing; in fact I'm currently 7 chapters deep into a superhero AU that I originally started 5ish years ago, and then abandoned/deleted, and now am tackling it anew. If people are still following me only on here, let me know, drop a review, and I'll backlog update it to here too.
Again, thank you to everyone who offered their support to this fic, in whatever way worked for them. You keep us writers writing 3
Cat