Lucilfer (ChrolloxReader)

Chapter 85

I drove, and I drove, and I drove. I had no destination, no goal in mind, but I wanted to get away. I needed time alone in order to think clearly, to work through the muddled, incomprehensible lash I felt at the whip of my own emotions, but I had no idea where that time alone would lead me. Similarly, I didn't know how long I would be gone—perhaps twenty minutes, perhaps several hours—but I didn't wish to see the immediate response to what I'd left behind. I carried no understanding of how my emotions would affect him, since I'd held absolutely no restraint on what it was that he'd felt.

Everything—undeniably everything.

It frightened me to think that I'd been incapable of administering any filter to what I'd projected. Of course, logically, I knew that my regards to him was what he'd experienced the most potently, what had contributed to that suspended enchantment which lingered in his hazy gaze as I'd ran from the mess I'd made, but I knew him well enough to understand that he would absorb every facet of my emotions, that he would leave nothing untouched or unanalyzed. And in hindsight, perhaps it wasn't the most intelligent choice I'd ever made to leave him at the throes of his own analysis, but I'd been given all that I could take. I never wanted to revisit or feel the blood-curling fear that I'd felt as a victim to his anger, ever again.

I'm not afraid of him. I'm not.

And I wasn't. I couldn't be. I, too, loved him more than my own life, more than any material happiness or purpose or goal. Nothing would ever change that, and nothing could ever possibly convince me or sway me against him. Consequently, within the agony of our fight, he had proven to me that his professions were genuine just as much as I had proven to him.

"Not even I can pretend the belonging of my soul to what fate wills it, let alone maintain such pretenses."

He'd never once used the words "I love you" as an underhanded lie. I'd never been deceived by him, or purposefully hurt—all of my worries and fears which had manifested into scarring nightmares about his manipulation were misplaced, nothing but a work of anxious fiction, written by my own mind. The only one to blame in this bloody situation was myself, because in the end, I had been the person he'd entrusted his entire life to, the person he'd given the most vulnerabilities to, the person he'd knocked down heavy, ancient walls for, walls which he'd spent an entire lifetime building to keep out anyone who pried at the depths of the fears he never wished to acknowledge. How wretched it would be to discover that person was the one who performed the betraying, who seemingly used those vulnerabilities just to get closer to your soul, and then shatter it.

Shattered.

I couldn't stop his strained voice from speaking that word over and over again in my mind, and it raised a dreadful question—would the act of Feeler Inversion ever truly be enough now to put his soul back together? Had I forever altered the fabric of our dynamic? Had I administered a permanent scar, one that I might always see when his fragile eyes met mine?

No, that couldn't be the case. I didn't want to believe it. I hadn't meant to hurt him; I hadn't meant to betray him. I'd dedicated myself to him every second that I kept my secret, and I'd tried to help him. I had to stay with Kurapika, because there'd been no other choice. He would see that truth with the release of my emotions; he would feel that desperation, that unending sadness and sorrow, in exactly the way I'd felt it. But would it really change his perspective?

Perhaps that tormented possibility was what I was running away from, and perhaps it did make me a coward. But I would come back. I simply needed to forget; I needed to clear my thoughts.

As I exited the highway into the city, I peered down at the speedometer, casually, numbly noting that I'd been driving at over a hundred and forty miles an hour—the drive into York New which usually took about a full hour had taken not even thirty minutes, maybe twenty-five at the most. The engine of the Jeep groaned as I slammed on the brakes to make an easier turn and slow down to the speed limit of the outskirts of the city, and I took several different roads, sectioned, smaller roads, until I was nearing a downtown area.