Conference room - end - revival

“Every day since the day you’ve left... You were like a lantern preventing me from walking too far away into the darkness, I couldn’t stand it being gone.”

I was spellbound with the depth of the green cosmos held together inside the pair of glass beads. In their corners, two small transparent droplets were forming.

The initial strange looks that Nero and Violet had sent my way bounced off me, changed to incredibly confused ones and focused on Viktoria. Her being brought to tears was almost as rare as father raising his voice.

“Wha-... what do you mean?”

I asked while trying to shake off the uncanny bewitchment and wipe out my tears, but new waves were constantly flowing from the still resonating core of my soul. It was as if a link between the two of us had been established, I couldn’t get a grasp on the correct way of understanding it and instead it started to fill me with fear. The closest thing I could compare this to was the moment when Votr had put the geas on me, but this description didn't fit this situation or feeling at all, there simply wasn't anything better.

“Everyday, before sleep, I take a revolver with a bullet inside, spin it and try to blow a hole in my head wondering if I still deserve to live.”

With each of her sentences, she walked a step closer to me, but each of her moves was preceded by an approval-seeking gaze directed towards our father. She moved only when he didn’t react in any obvious way - apparently lost in thought.

“But… I’m so glad that it finally went through. I’ve kept calling... Every day, every hour-”

“Viktoria, that’s enough.”

“Yes, father.”

Gregory’s voice stopped her from reaching out her hand to me and instantly turned back Viktoria’s enchanted gaze back into a normal one. The same could be said about me, I also got a hold of myself and finally stopped shedding tears.

What... the hell was that?

Even when she returned to her seat, I still had a strange tingling sensation at the back of my head. It got a lot weaker, almost to the point of me not being able to perceive it, if I didn’t focus on it consciously, but it was there. It couldn’t be entirely labeled as feeling sympathy towards her.

Nowhere in my memories was anything that could explain Viktoria’s behavior or even give me a hint. Sure, she was always hard to predict, dangerous, cunning and full of needles, nevertheless, I still could see at least bits and pieces behind her reasoning, but this? This was an entirely new level of being unpredictable and indecipherable.

Father clapped once to gather everyone’s attention.

“I was planning a second part of our meeting, but it’s not important anymore. Violet, Victor, you two may return to your flat, ask the chauffeur to give you a lift. Martha, call some other maids and take Vincent to his room, he needs his sleep. Viki, wait for me in the study. Nero, do you want to stay for a drink or are you going home?”

“I’ve got some things to prepare for tomorrow, so I will take my leave.”

This was an unquestionable end of this meeting, with no place to ask any additional questions. I stood up, prepared to follow after Violet, but got stopped by father’s voice ‘Victor, catch’, after which he tossed me a small key. When I was putting it inside my skirt’s pocket, a small orb brushed against my fingers - the small shard of the past.

For a moment I thought about using it on either father or Viktoria but decided against. The exact way it worked in was a mystery and I just survived one nerve-wracking situation, getting myself into another was simply stupid. Not to mention that I wanted to forget about my momentary lapse in reasoning.

Viktoria walked slowly. I saw her trying to carefully move one of her tears from the corner of the eye onto the fingertip as if she was hoping to preserve it but under Gregory's stern look she quickly wiped them out and left the room.

Laura took me back to my old room together with Violet without asking any questions. Vio didn’t say anything and we started packing our things in silence. Only when I saw her still looking for something, despite the fact that we had packed everything I recalled that her phone was still in my pocket and gave it back to her.

She swiped it out from my hand and murmured ‘fucking thief’. The fact that she didn’t try to scorch my hand or set my hair on fire was promising.

We took our stuff and soon we were on our way back home.

Sitting in the car I was thinking aloud about the whole chain of events that started with us going outside yesterday. Partially to sort my thoughts, partially to take Violet's mind off from thinking about revenge.

How I had decided to use the house-sized mana spot and the following events inside it, an extra importance was put on my incoming fight with the wraith.

How we had been close to a quarrel due to the Wicked Voice and praised her for the courage to pick it up back then.

How I had been worried about her conquering the first mana spot and highlighted how her ability had helped to keep us from freezing on the cemetery.

How brave she had been during the fight with Adam and how her quick thinking had saved the situation. To this, Violet reacted with an unpleasant face, being shot by the taser must have really hurt.

The events of the discussion in the conference room were still fresh in our minds, there was no point in bringing them up and we were already close to home.

We forgot about the today’s deliveries, luckily they hadn’t just dropped everything off in the corridor and had left a note saying that they would try again tomorrow between 8 and 9 AM.

“We’re back. Listen Vio-”

“Stop, you’ve already bootlicked me enough, it’s hard to listen when it’s coming from someone with my own face, but you know what’s even harder?”

She interrupted my attempt at explaining myself while we were unloading all our luggage in the corridor. In a worried tone, prepared for an onslaught, I asked:

“What’s harder?”

“Hitting someone with my own face, that’s like a first step to embracing the M side… I was really worried, you know?”

She came closer and hugged me tightly. It was quite unexpected and quite different to how she normally clings to my chest.

“Taser hurt, being taken to the mansion filled me with worry, spending an entire morning with father in TET was scary as fuck, revealing my problem at school was super humiliating, almost as much as when you allowed everyone to experience the perverted stuff you did to my body and what the hell was that at the end with Viktoria? I’m sure that father cut the entire thing short because of that. But I’m back… both of us are back safely home. We’ve won our first serious battle and this… this is more than enough to make it worth enduring to this point.”

I returned her hug tightly and patted her head in the way she liked the most. Now when we were the same size we fit into each other arms like two spoons.

“Remember how I’ve told you that about my suicide? Something in Victoria's experience resonated strongly with mine, to the point that I’ve got no idea how to treat it. Well, it turned out to be her playing the Russian roulette for fun before sleeping.”

“But it’s alright now?”

“Yeah, no problems.”

I hope…

The echo of that tingling was still there, but I didn’t want to worry Vio about this and ruin her moment of basking in the glow of victory.

“That’s good, now we can focus on exterminating those five bitches in my school. Onee-chan, please remind me how long are you going to stay in my form?”

“Till next Friday.”

“Should be long enough, we can start working on getting rid of them from Monday and… to tell you the truth maybe I could offer you a tip or two… you suck.”

In the middle of her sentence, she switched from a serious tone to a playful one.

“Wait, where did that come from?”

“Your technique, moves, places you focused on, why were you so fixated on my b-bre-, anyway, it didn’t feel even twenty percent as good as it should.”

She whispered it bashfully into my ear and bit the earlobe tenderly. It sent a really pleasant shiver down my spine.

“VIO?! Are you for real?!”

How do I even respond to this?!

I tried to take a look at her face kept on my shoulder, but couldn’t - she clung to me too tight and there was the double storm of curly blonde hair on the way. I felt her reaching for something from her skirt pocket.

“Hmm~? Hentai power is strong in this one. Getting so worked up with own little sister’s body? Scum-ni-chan. Complete trash. Maybe I should burn you after all, for the sake of the entire human race. A picture of your real face should be next to the word ‘incest’ in dictionaries. At least you won’t try to steal my underwear since you can produce your own version, panties a la Victor gender-bender style. Fucking sick degenerate, I really should have stabbed you when I saw you transform into me. You’re so fucking lucky that I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror, training my acting skills, and know how each emotion looks like when it’s reflected on my face. If you weren’t my dumb-ni-chan I would have thought that you shapeshift into people to kill them and steal their lives, but you’re too stupid for that and too much of a coward. And a pervert like you would never pick a man’s body to shift into by choice… and I d-don’t want it to be t-true...”

Since she didn’t want to hurt me physically anymore, she switched to a mental assault and released a long stream of insults that in the middle turned into something entirely different, but all that time, she held me close. Violet was warm, soft and had a sharp penknife in her hand, poking me with it strongly between the shoulder blades.

“Weren’t you going to poison me and not stab?”

“I’m r-running low on p-poison lately.”

“You’ve got me, but I feel that I still owe you a lot. To make up for it let me tell you a secret. There’s a geas bounding me. Something like your contract with the demon, I have to keep every single promise I make. Let me tell you this. I promise that I didn’t kill your brother. If this was a lie then by now I would probably drop dead.”

I didn’t panic nor got angry. If she really planned on doing this, I wouldn’t be even able to notice anything before it was too late. It was just an echo of the dark thought she had when she saw my passive ability for the first time.

Vio snorted slightly and moved a step back from me. She was scary, in a totally different meaning - scarily cute. Watching her like that, brushing aside a strand of her blonde locks, with tears forming in the corners of her emerald eyes I realized that no matter how strong she tried to appear and how many profanities and insults she shot out without batting an eye, there was a deep bond forming between us with roots beyond the easy to perceive superficial layer. After all, I could understand her without putting much effort into it and react to a situation like this with a warm smile.

“Is that true?”

“It’s up to you to decide that, I’ve got no easy way of proving it.”

“Then… I will go make you some tea, wait for me in my room. I can at least teach you how to massage girl’s legs properly and not knead them like a brute.”

When she turned back with a happy twirl of her skirt, I quickly wiped out my forehead and took a deep breath. It was a given that she saw the signs of me not being even half as calm as I claimed to be and it only made her more satisfied with this kind of revenge.

I don’t get it, how can someone bully a girl like that? Or is she the type that one day brings a gun to the school and start shooting? Nah… she retaliates right away.

“Alright, I will be there but it’s going to be loud for a moment. I have to release the left hand of my esper group, you’re the right one by the way. She has been screaming her lungs out for the last few days, I want to tell her that it’s ok to stop now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The magical phone we’ve retrieved, you will like her.”