"Don't worry too much about it," Sera said one last time before closing the door shut as she exited out of the room.
Alex turned his head away from the door toward the window on his left. After a long moment of anger and crying, of letting the frustration and raw emotion pour out of him, his family had bid him farewell and exited his room, leaving him alone. Reluctantly. They had left reluctantly, and only after he had pushed them away, having eaten through lunch to the point that his stomach was straining and bulging against his clothes.
They had not wanted to leave him alone. They were adamant about staying a little longer, especially his mother and his little sister. They had been watching him with pitying eyes the entire time he was eating, and his mother had even begun spoon-feeding him at the start, because his appetite had all but vanished and he could not summon the slightest desire to eat anything whatsoever.
It had been quite an ordeal to get even a small amount of food down, but after his mother's gentle and persistent coaxing, he had gradually eaten more and eventually taken the spoon and knife into his own hands to finish what remained. There had been grilled seasoned meat, bread, soup, salad, and fruit. They had filled the plate to the brim, heaping it until it seemed near impossible to finish, and under the weight of his mother's intense gaze and his little sister's cheerful shouting, he had somehow managed to devour it all.
"Haah." Alex let out a long weary sigh, unable to understand what lay ahead of him in his life. The view through the window, the deep blue sky stretching endlessly and birds drifting lazily past, did not move him in the slightest. He lifted his arm and covered his eyes, then shut them closed.
Alex bit his lips as his eyes started growing wet again. He had worked so hard throughout the meal to hold it back, choking and swallowing it down more times than he could count. And when his parents had finally stood to leave, he had been careful not to let them see his tears, knowing that he broke down again they would not leave him alone and would stay until he calmed down.
Alex rolled onto his side and then pressed himself forward into the bed, pushing his face into the pillow, rubbing his head against it as though trying to smother the tears that had once again started flowing freely. He clenched his fist, bit down on the inside of his cheek, and gnashed his teeth. It was simply unbearable. The pain. The agony. The loss. Losing the princess from his life was simply too devastating for words.
He had never thought much about their marriage agreement, which was bound by some ancient vow left by the Drakethorne's founding patriarch to the imperial family, and he had never truly given serious thought to his fiancee, to whom he was supposed to marry someday in the future.
Alex had first met her when he was five years old, and back then she had been a teasing little creature who delighted in getting under his skin. Then, through some stroke of misfortune, she had fallen into the gate, and without thinking, without stopping to consider what he was doing, he had gone in after her, unable to bear the thought of leaving her trapped inside alone. Even now he did not know where that courage had come from, because it had been a truly reckless thing to do, charging inside the gate without a second thought.
Inside, they had fought together against the slime, and they had come out the other side bruised and cut but alive, and from that day forward their friendship had quietly, steadily taken root and bloomed.
Over the years she kept coming to visit him. Most of the time she came with the empress, but on rare occasions she arrived alone, accompanied only by her knights.
Slowly but surely, he had found her company something to look forward to, something warm and welcoming that he genuinely enjoyed.
He loved listening to her boastful tales of how she was clearing gate after gate with brilliant success, of how she was already among the highest ranked of her age group.
He loved those stories because they gave him a glimpse of the world beyond those four walls within which he had always been confined, and she always told the stories with a kind of pride and genuine pleasure, like someone who truly loved narrating the story.
Though he loved listening, there was always a small part of him that had quietly envied how freely she could move through the world, even if she was always surrounded by guards and knights. That at least seemed more bearable than what he endured, not even permitted to step beyond the gates.
Alex had suspicions that she had, to some extent, sensed his jealousy. But rather than stop boasting about the outside world out of pity or guilt, she began bringing things back for him, small tokens collected during her adventures.
She brought gifts, things like wooden carvings and a marble jewel with his name engraved into it, which she told him she had found in a small village near the ocean. She described the ocean to him, how the great waves rose and rolled and crashed against the sand and rocks with thunderous sound.
Over time, his envy had softened and eventually faded, because it became clear that she was not showing off for the sake of it but was genuinely invested in sharing the outside world with him, in making him feel like he had been present there somehow, even from a distance.
She seemed to truly understand his pain, and rather than retreat from it out of discomfort, she chose again and again to bring him something real, something he could hold or smell or wear, something that made her stories feel just a little more like his own.
A small smile formed on his lips as he remembered one occasion when she had brought him a woolen shirt she had bought while clearing a gate near the snowy mountains, where the local people kept sheep and spun their fleece into thick, sturdy clothing. She had pressed the shirt into his hands and told him about those people and how they lived, how the cold was a constant enemy that had to be fought every single day, how they dressed themselves in many heavy layers just to survive, just to keep their blood warm enough to go on living.
Lying there, remembering that moment and so many others like it, Alex realised with quiet and absolute certainty that he had fallen for her completely, that somewhere along the way he had started to love her in the fullest and most honest sense of the word.
He did not know when it had begun, could not point to a single moment and say it had started there, but the feeling spreading through his chest as he lay remembering her was unmistakable. It was the feeling described in every book he had read in his leisure time, that sense of a rose blooming open inside his chest, his heart beating a little harder and a little faster, a warmth and happiness rising through him just from the act of remembering the time they had spent together. He found out he had fallen for her utterly and completely, and there was no undoing it.
But it was too late. He never told her about it. He had never found the words, and he was just not sure of his feelings back then to tell her that he had loved her all along. But, now he knew he had loved her all along.
When she had asked him about their relationship, he had stood there in silence, unable to answer, and now the regret of that silence was something he could barely stand to carry. He should have told her that she was a beacon of light in his life, that her visits were the thing he looked forward to most in the world, that he had always waited for the days when her carriage would come rolling in. He should have told her that her smile undid him, that her laughter filled the room in a way that nothing else did, that he had always been mesmerized by her, that his heart leapt every single time she appeared.
He punched the pillow hard, overwhelmed with the grief of knowing that she had left without ever learning any of it, without ever knowing that he had loved her, that he had loved her smile and the warmth with which she cared for him and the way she always seemed to know exactly what he needed even when he did not know himself.
"I love you." The words came out barely muffled against the pillow, and the tears came with them in a sudden rush, flowing faster and harder than before, until he was choking on his own breath and could not seem to stop.
***
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