The guide looked a little dejected when he just jumped down away from her. “My kind? But I’m your kind.” The guide peeked over the rafters at this new Lewis.

Simone sighed a bit, “I’m not leaving and you are feisty as hell Lewis.” She was quick to take the dagger off his belt before he could almost like she had done it a few other times. She played with it in her hands. “Xeik knows me. We met while I was out on a job.” It was a lie easily. “Said you would be more than willing to house us for the time being.” She spun the dagger on her finger with some skill. “This is the guild isn’t it?”

Her gray eyes were focused on this Lewis. “Catch,” she tossed the dagger towards him in a way that Lewis had taught her how to do. “It needs to be sharpened a bit more. You won’t cut much of anything with it if you don’t, the one side is dulling. Unless you actually want to try against me,” she tilted her head a bit. “I’m just a woman what can I do?”

A fuck ton.

The guide simply watched on at the younger Lewis grimaced, catching the dagger with ease. “You sure know a lot for a nosy woman,” the boy said. “The dagger would be sharper if we could afford it.” His eyes locked with hers. “Xeik barely deals with adults…” There was a moment of hesitation. “You can stay, but I can’t afford to feed you.” He turned on one heel, and signaled for the boys to go back to their rooms.

“Except you two,” he said as he stopped two rather large boys. “Guard duty tonight. Trade off with Richard and Nigel. The usual time.” He looked back to the Simones. There was a silent communication between them, but it was obvious what he was saying. Keep an eye on them.

Envy walked back up to the Simones. “One room. Last on the right. No locks…sorry, we aren’t exactly rich here.” With that, he jumped back into the rafters, and pulled out a map, looking it over. It was obviously going to take a little more with this version of Lewis.

“If I was nosy that would imply I would know a lot wouldn’t it?” Her eyes watched him. She pulled up her skirt just a bit and took her own dagger out. She tossed it to him and took the one he had. “You need it more than I do trust me.”

“BUT!” The Simones were crowding her. “What if we get attacked!”

“I don’t need a dagger,” Simone narrowed her eyes to them. She tossed the dull dagger between them and they began to fumble it trying to catch it.

“We don’t know how to fight!”

“That’s what the dagger is for!” Simone waved her hand at them. “All you have to do is just stab the person assaulting you. Do it in a weak spot preferably a joint and disarm them.”

“What will you do?” The Simones were worried but they realized she was talking about her magic.

She shrugged, “What I always do. I’m not too worried about a lock on the door. As for food,” she was a little hungry after everything.

“We’re hungry what will we do?”

“Do you two have any useful skills besides bitching?” Simone was agitated but she took a breath and closed her eyes. “My apologies, that was harsh. I’ll cook.” Simone turned the guide around and there was suddenly a bag. Her eyes met the younger Simone and she nodded. It wasn’t anything to make the food appear that she would need almost like they had been to a market.

“May I?” The older Simone moved over to a small kitchen station and began to chop the items up and cook.

“When did you learn that?” The Simones were so curious about their other self, they beckoned the Guide Lewis to follow them.

“The slave camp. Women were forced to learn how to cook. I wasn’t there long though. Ten years?” Simone thought about it and shrugged a bit. “It wasn’t the worst. There are worse things than being sold. Do what you are supposed to and nothing happens to you. Speak up and that’s when things happened.”

“How did you get out?”

The older Simone paused for a slightly alarming amount of time before she went back to making the stew. “Fire, the man who was hunting me did it.” She neglected to say the fey lord in the small Simone’s presence. “He didn’t have a reason to do it. He did it because he thought it would scare me.”

“Did it?”

“No, I jumped into the fire to get away from him and burned alive. Better than whatever he had in store.” The other Simones were impressed with her. “The man doesn’t and never did scare me but the one time he took advantage.” Her eyes met the guide Lewis’s for but a moment. “When you spend almost your entire life alone or never feeling anyone was permanent you begin to take measures to protect yourself. Even if it means desecrating your body so others can’t have it. Why are you asking me so many questions about my origins?”

“Because, we want to know who we are!” The guide answered.

“Don’t, jaded and bitter at the world isn’t the way to go if you don’t have to. Isn’t he protecting you so you don’t need to be like me? I gave you life of your own so you didn’t need to relive the things I did.” Simone looked again at the envy Lewis and held up a bowl. “Come get some. You are hungry right?” The guide was almost a slob while she ate and the younger Simone was savoring the taste. “Now, enough questions about things that don’t matter. The past is the past. It’s simply what makes us who we are. Good for reflection to calculate the moves we make in the future and that’s it.”

“BUT WHAT ABOUT LEWLEW?!” They yelled at her.

“Fine, you have me there. Shut up and eat.” She pushed their heads back down towards the bowls. “You too if you are hungry,” she told the guide Lewis but Simone wasn’t eating. She was worried which was ruining her appetite. She left the small group and went to the room that envy had pointed out. She fell onto the bed. There had been worse. She held her hand up and created a small blue flame. In the darkness of the room, it was almost comforting.

There was a flicker of the blue flame, and suddenly Envy was in the room with Simone. She had to have known this was coming. The young thief crossed his arms, looking her dead in the eyes. “Not a few days after Xeik leaves, claiming he’s being hunted by assassins, and suddenly you show up, claiming to know him.”

The boy walked up to her, her dagger in his hand. “I’ve never seen such a well made weapon before…it’s not something just anyone can afford. If you’re here for Xeik…he’s long gone, and I’ll die before I tell you where he is.” There was truth in his words, but there was also an apprehension. Dying for something you believed in was one thing, but there was a new emotion that he had been feeling lately.

He didn’t know what it was. It was a strange, almost longing feeling. But, of course, he had no idea that he was feeling Envy.

“So why are you here, then…spill it.” There was an ‘or else’ look that he gave, but he wasn’t exactly sure what he could do to the woman that could make her talk. He had never been in a situation like this before, and it was, in a way, almost exciting.

She pulled herself up into a sitting position and sat on the bed to be as close to him as possible. “Xeik was a special meeting. I didn’t harm him I promise. He was more concerned about my health actually.”

Tilting her head she thought about how best to respond to him, “Now why would I have given you my weapon, given the girls your dagger, and left myself wide open knowing full well this was going to happen.” She blinked a bit. “Xeik is of no interest to me. I was never here for Xeik.” She leaned forward and she looked at him in the eyes, “I came here for you but not to hurt you.”

She held out her hand and took his hand with the dagger. He would find her grip a lot stronger than she led him to believe and she put it to her throat. “Would I let you do this if I was here to cause problems? Hmm? A woman who is built on survival and knowing each step to take. You are right, it is a nice dagger. My husband made it for me. He’s in trouble right now and I want to save him. That empty feeling of missing my other half. Being so close but not enough for me to touch. I feel very empty and as much as I try to act strong and move forward – It hurts.”

She was being sincere with him, “So I came to find you because you can help me. It just depends on how open you are to the possibilities. Xeik is your idol. A gold-hearted boy who sees things in white and black. Who saves sex slaves and is distraught when they go back to their way of life. He saved you and gave you a purpose. Whether you choose to believe me or not doesn’t matter in the long run, all I need is a spark. A single spark of resonance.” She held her hand up and the blue fire formed again.

“And this person that I am trying to save. My husband. Made me feel alive in a way I hadn’t felt in such a long time after being so alone. What he forged me into to save me. I am very grateful to him. Like I said though it depends on how open you are to the possibilities of what I am saying to you. I do know Xeik but he was more screaming at me to get away from my husband.”

Looking at him she made the fire disappear and leaned on the bed a bit, “Right now, you are thinking about what you could do to make me talk. It’s exciting you and it’s brand new.” Her eyes were studying him. “But you don’t have to torture me to get answers, Lewis. I will freely give them to you. Like I said before it’s only if you can begin to understand what I have to offer.”

The fact that she was half talking like a crazy person, and half spilling truths that he could only know only agitated him. The dagger was still pressed against her neck, and he used that to his advantage. With a quick leap, he was on top of her, straddling her chest as he pinned her to the bed, the dagger still at her throat.

“Tell me things? What could anyone like you possibly tell me? You’re here to save your husband? Like I give a damn…all I care about is that I’m here to protect these children, just like Xeik wanted me to.” There was rage in his voice, but Simone could pick up the sadness of it too. “What could you possibly offer me?” His voice cracked, and he took a breath, trying to steady himself.

“I have a home. A family. Xeik told me…left me here…so I could protect them. He trusts me to do it.” But that wasn’t why he was hurting. Deep down inside, he knew what he wanted, but couldn’t say it.

That was it…what Simone needed to latch on to.

She went easily enough back as she relaxed under him. Simone wasn’t scared of him not in the least. “You miss Xeik. Without him, you feel lonely. It doesn’t matter how much family you have Lewis if that one person you rely on so much is missing. Everything goes to hell. You are anxious about fucking up and Xeik being mad.”

The woman closed her eyes a bit, “In the future, you will find your calling in life. You will kill people. Bad people, because that’s what you are good at. Xeik will get mad at you because despite how he sees the world you see it differently. Because in order to protect sometimes you have to take out the people who are the problem.”

Opening her eyes she seemed a bit sadder, “And you’ll stop talking with him after a fight. You close yourself off and hate practically everyone. Until the day you get hired to kill someone and she doesn’t die. Your pride doesn’t let you just walk away and so you take her with you with the expressed purpose to kill her permanently.”

She was hesitant about going on but she did so anyway, “Eventually, a bond grows with her and you hate it. You think that if you just kill her it will go away. She wants you to kill her too. She’s suffered for too long and she thinks she is nothing but a burden to you. As a last request, you will marry this girl and three days later slit her throat. You lied to yourself that it was the resonance that was making you feel the way you did. You make it two weeks before freaking out and screaming in a goddess’s realm. You make the request to bring this girl back and it doesn’t matter what you have to do for payment. So she does it. You reforge her and eventually, you begin to adopt children to save them from the life you had in Hoja Mesto. So you could give them a safe place. You grow a lot in the three years you are with the girl. You don’t feel alone anymore. You have someone to share with and someone who won’t leave you. Always someone to back you up.”

She motions for him to take her necklace, “Open it. I wasn’t going to show it to you but maybe you will believe me if you see for yourself aye? The locket, open it. It was a present because I get sad when you leave us and pout entirely too much when I know it's a long job.” Inside was a tiny painting of a small family. “That’s Everett. We got him when he was a day and a half old. I can’t have children of our own because of what happened to me but you had all the right answers when I was upset about it.”

As Simone spoke, Envy’s facial expression never changed. He stayed against her, his blade pressed firmly to her neck, unmoving. To anyone who may have been watching, it would seem as though the woman’s speech had fallen of deaf ears, and had been ignored. But Simone could see Envy’s hazel eyes staring back at her, and she knew the look well.

It was the look that Lewis had when he woke up from the nightmares. The look that he shared with Simone about how afraid he was, even without using words. Even without a resonance, Simone knew well that pain he felt was something so raw and powerful that he had no idea what to do with it, or how to make it manageable. In the end, he would fall back asleep in her arms, still afraid…

“How could you possibly know how I feel,” he uttered as the dagger wavered ever so slightly. As Simone mentioned the necklace, he took in a quick breath of air. There was fear in his eyes, but without moving the dagger, he pulled the necklace off of her, ripping the cord, and popped it open.

“It’s….” He fell back, still staring at the picture.

What is this?

Envy had dropped the dagger, and instead was holding the small locket with both hands. “Why is he so happy…” There was a look of pain and confusion on his face. “Why does he have the right to be this happy…?” Envy’s eyes watered as he quivered, never letting his eyes leave the picture. “I don’t…understand. What is this feeling?” The door opened, and the guide Lewis walked in, followed by the Guide and Younger Simone.

“I see you’ve managed to do…something,” the guide said as he leaned against the entryway, his arms crossed. “But what exactly, I’m not sure. Have you formed a bond?”

Simone got off the bed and knelt down by Envy, “I’m not sure if I have or not.” She pet Envy’s head. “He is you. Eventually. It will be a hard road Lewis. There will be lots of challenges along the way but nothing is easy or easily obtained. Right now, this very moment that you are living I am stuck at the bottom of a lake. I would be stuck there another seven years before I was pulled out and made the wife of a duke who didn’t love me. He threw me away like garbage Lewis. You didn’t though. We were able to make something of ourselves.”

She hesitated for a moment before she put her forehead to Envy’s. “Let me show you okay?” Just enough. She had to send just enough of her resonance in. The magic pulsed through to the younger Lewis as she showed him their bad moments and their good moments. Everything leading up to Everette and the kids. Even Lewis grounding her from jobs. “See? Everything is always worse before it gets better and as long as I have you I’m not scared. As long as you have me you aren’t scared. Especially when you have nightmares and I have to hold you.” It wasn’t something they talked about in front of the kids.

“You are going to fall in love with these two,” she pointed at the younger versions of herself. “And by doing that you set me free to exist with you. Together forever. Always. I will protect you even from yourself because you are mine and I am yours. It will take a long time but you will get there Lewis.” She was hesitant but she hugged Envy to her just like she did when he was hurting.

As Simone held Envy, the resonance sparked within both of them. It wasn’t long before the resonance burned him away, and there was nothing left.

“Three down,” the Guide said as he clapped his hands. “Congratulations. Let’s get moving, then…” He walked up to Simone, and held out his hand to help her get up. “Time to go, Simone.” As she got up, the Guide made his way to the doorway, and looked out. “It looks like the other doors are here.” He glanced back to guide Simone and Young Simone, “Well…are you two coming? I doubt this space will remain once we leave.”

Awaiting them were three unique doors, each of them in the place of the tavern rooms. “Looks like…the Observatory, an airship, and….a…” The guide looked confused. “An…alleyway? I can’t really tell. Not really a door…but it’s probably important.” He shrugged, and stepped aside for Simone. “Your choice. Let’s hurry though…I don’t really like it here in the tavern.”