Chapter 22: Reconciliation

David came in the next day feeling much better. A large meal and a good night's rest had done him well. He had also noticed that his wounds had healed rather significantly overnight, so he was in much better shape than before. So, he came into work that morning feeling pretty good. There was a lot of work that had to be done now that he was a paladin and he had more than one question for Alice. 

"Why did your father reward me for a mission that was supposed to be a secret?" David asked sternly after he had gotten situated in Alice's office. 

"That's what you are worried about?" Alice said, surprised to see David so passionate about something she considered minor. 

"Of course I am, what's the point of having set up the dubious group called the "Black Hand" if you are just going to reward me for something only a few days later?" David asked with serious concern. Alice sighs. 

"Do not fret my little knight. We already planned for this." Alice said nonchalantly as she leaned against her desk. "What you were rewarded for was the defeat and capture of the "dubious" criminals known as the Black Hand, and your valiant rescue of Maria from their evil clutches." Alice said, making fun of David's choice of words. 

"In essence you were rewarded for the work that never occurred. That was why you got the medal." David looks down at his chest seeing the medal dangling there. 

It made enough sense to him, but it still seemed out of place. He didn't really feel like he did anything to be rewarded for. 

"But there was no reason to make me a paladin, I don't think that there has ever been a human Paladin before." David said exasperated. 

"You are right, there hasn't." Alice said as she took a sip of tea. 

"Congratulations on being the first ever Human Paladin!" She said with a cheeky grin. 

"But even the increase in manpower is..." David began before being cut off by Alice. 

"Completely necessary. This event, as well as your team's handling of the earlier investigations were more than enough proof to show my father how useful your team is. He wanted to immediately give you more men to expand your capacity, but at your previous rank, Knight, you could command no more than 50 men, so the promotion to Paladin was necessary to facilitate that." Alice said as she casually took another sip of tea. 

"Yeah but..." David was having trouble arguing much further; she had a response for almost anything. He sat down in a huff; she had bested him. 

"Don't feel too down," She said in a playful way with a smile. "You'll always be my knight!" David smiled back at her and playfully bowed a little. 

"Yes, my princess." 

The rest of the day was spent in preparation for the coming increase of men. Not only did he have to scout 50 new people, but he needed 12 replacements for the men who perished in the battle. A total of 62 new men would be needed to fill the opening and he had already exhausted his "specialist" options. However, unlike last time where he picked the remaining men from a smattering of a few hundred soldiers presented in front of him, this time he had received requests of transfer and attached resumes. Apparently, the rumor that his squad was a major help in saving Maria had got around. Not only that, but his now Hawk Company, was the only notable human organization in the military forces outside of the main imperial armies. To top it off he was the first ever Human Paladin in the Empire's history. Basically people were now vying for a spot in the prestigious positions in his team. The stack of papers for people wishing to request transfer was enormous. Even with Alice's help it would take all day. Which in fact it did.

By the time David was ready to leave he hoped he never had to see another transfer form in his life. He was about to call it a day after saying bye to Alice when Alice suddenly stops him. 

"David," She asked, slightly timid. 

"What do you think of Maria?" 

"I'd rather not talk about her." David responded quickly, trying to shut the conversation down. 

"Please tell me." Alice begs David. 

"I don't, she just needs my blood, that's all." David said flatly as he started to make his way to the door. That was not right, Alice knew this, she could tell that he was hiding something. She didn't know what it was, but she knew the way he treated Maria yesterday was far too cold. He must have something he was hiding. She wanted to help both her friends greatly. She didn't want to see them at odds with each other, if she could just figure out why David was so distant with her then maybe they could make up. She had no other option, she had to get some answers. 

"David, look at me." Alice said sternly. David whipped around and looked at Alice. 

"What do you really think about Maria? Why are you so distant with her?"

"Do you think it's easy to do that?" David began, his hand in a fist over his heart. "Do you think it's easy to live with these confusing emotions that tell me that all I want is to see her smile? That all I want is to be near her? To see her every day? Do you think it's easy to try to get her out of my head every night before I fall asleep? I have these emotions inside of me telling me one thing, but I know for a fact that she was part of the reason I was tortured. She was the reason I was force-fed. She was the reason I was summoned here in the first place!" David was beginning to get heated right now. 

"I had a life, family, friends, I had a home! And that was taken away from me by her! Because of her stupid blood curse!" David was practically yelling now. 

"I should hate her, I should have nothing but malice when I look her in the eyes, but all I see when I look at her is pain, the pain of not being near her!" David's head was starting to hurt, he didn't know why.

"It hurts me to be near her, it hurts me to be away from her. I just want it all to stop! I can't even tell what's real anymore!" The pain in his head was getting worse, it was nothing major, but it was growing. 

"You asked why I'm distant with her? It's because if I'm not I may not be me anymore, the me that makes sense, the me I was before I came, the me I should have been!" David had finished, he felt as though he yelled his heart out. The pain in his head was disappearing now as well.

Wait, why did he tell Alice? He never wanted her to know. He had always planned to keep these feelings a secret because even he didn't know what to do with them. He wasn't even sure if they were his or not. He had remained distant with Maria because he couldn't rationalize being close to her but wouldn't be able to bring himself to be any further away. It had been an emotional turmoil that he had been going through since he had arrived. But he just told Alice, why?

He looks up at Alice who is standing there with a few tears in her eyes. But as he noticed the tears in her eyes, he also noticed a faint red glow coming off of them. Hypnotism! She had hypnotized him, that was why he told her! He was furious now, she had promised to never use her powers on him again, and she had not only used them on him, but she had forced him to tell her a secret he had no intention of sharing. It was an absolute invasion of privacy.

"Alice!" David shouted visibly angry. "You promised you would never do that to me again!" He was yelling at her; he had never been this mad at her before. 

"David I..." 

"No!" David shouted, cutting her off and slamming his fist on the table. "Just because you have the power do you think it's okay to go rooting around my head like that? Do you think that's fair to me?" 

"I just wanted to know why you didn't get along with her..." Alice said more tears streaming down her face now because of David's outburst. 

"Well now you know!" David yelled still livid. "Do you feel better? Because I don't!" David paused for a moment as he stared at the floor angrily. 

"Alice, you have invaded my mind, and forced me to speak when I did not want to. You are no different from the mage who brainwashed me... You have broken my trust." David then headed towards the door without looking back, leaving a now tear stricken Alice sobbing on the floor.

David did not come into work the next two days; the timing was bad since all the paperwork was at Alice's office so other than his side projects, he couldn't get anything done. He wasn't even mad for as long as he thought he would be, of course he had not fully forgiven her, she had clearly broken his trust, she had broken a promise to him. However even on the second day he wanted to go back to talk to her, but he didn't go, he needed more time to organize his thoughts. Much of what he had told Alice was the secrets he was keeping within him, but some of it even he had not realized. Of course, he was upset with her, but what she did caused him to confront some emotions that had been bottling up inside him all this time. As much as he hated that she forced them out of him, at least now that they were out, he could sort them properly. And, as much as he didn't want to, he could consult with Alice about them. So, when the morning of the third day came, he headed back to the Palace.

When he entered the princess's room, she was already standing there, expecting him, bowing. She was not curtsying, she was not doing a polite bow, she was hanging her head as low as it went as if she was asking for forgiveness. This kind of thing would be unheard of for a princess to do. Her head was so low he could see the back of her neck. Even if David was still not in the highest of spirits, he could not let others see this, so he quickly entered the room and shut the door behind him.

"Alice I..." 

"Please let me go first." Alice said, still bowing. 

"I have overstepped my bounds and broken your trust. I used my power on you when you did not want me too. And I have caused our friendship to be strained. I do not ask for forgiveness; all I ask is for the chance to make amends." David does not say anything for a moment. This was not what he expected. He hadn't come into her office imagining how it would go, but if he did this would not have been it. He had never seen Alice like this, she was completely sincere in her apology. It was actually shocking to see the princess apologize like this. But he already knew what he was going to tell her before he entered the room. 

"Alice, raise your head." David said softly. She does so, looking him in the eyes.

"When you hypnotized me, you did break my trust, you did strain our relationship, but after thinking about it for a few days I have decided. I forgive you." Alice looks confused. 

"What?" 

"I'm still upset that you forced me, but you clearly know what you did was wrong. I realized that there were things I said that I didn't know were true, I had buried it so deep inside of me it was a secret even from me. What you did was wrong, but I may have overreacted, and for that I'm sorry." David said and then he too bows low. Alice laughs to herself as David pulls up from the bow. 

"Thanks for not ending our friendship, David." David laughs a little too. 

"You are my only real friend in this world, and we have been through a lot. If one mistake was enough to end it, I would be a much lonelier man." David said with a soft smile. 

"Besides, because of you I... had some time to think and realized that I have to sort out these feelings at some point." Alice's eyes lit up a little when she heard him say this. 

"I'm glad you think that." She said as she gestured to the door. From outside Maria enters, she does a light curtsy. David's mood immediately dropped again. 

"What is she doing here?" David asked flatly. 

"David, those feelings you have need to be resolved." Alice began with a worried tone. "You won't be able to resolve them until you sit down and talk them out with Maria. Please even if this is what breaks our friendship, I just want you to be happy. Just do this... for me?" Alice pleads, while David stares at Maria. After a moment he turned to look at Alice again and sighed. 

"Didn't I already tell you Alice." He said with a faint smile. "Our relationship isn't that fragile." He paused for a moment more. 

"Fine, we will talk."

A few minutes later, Maria and Alice are sitting on one couch and David on the one opposite, there is tea in front of all of them but only Alice seems willing to touch it. 

"Well, what did you want to say?" David said sternly to Maria. 

"Alice told me what you said to her." Ah, that hurt, having his best friend tell someone else his greatest secret, was not a pleasant feeling. Of course, he was not blind to the reasons, but it still hurt. 

"But I wanted to hear it from you, why are you avoiding me?" 

"Because no matter what I may feel, I should hate you, but no matter what I do I can't, so I just ignore you instead." 

"This is not off to a great start" Alice thought as she watched from the sidelines. But this talk had to happen, these two needed to get their feelings across, otherwise they will remain at a crossroads forever. Still, although she knew she couldn't get involved, it still bothered her there was nothing she could do but watch.

"Why do you feel you should hate me?" Maria asked calmly. 

"Isn't that obvious, it's because of you that I was tortured, It was because of you that I was snatched from my home, it was because of you I was force-fed in that dungeon!" David said, getting slightly heated. 

"No one had any idea when we went through with the magical ritual that you would appear, much less that you would be stolen from another world. All we knew was that it was the cure for my blood curse and that something "otherworldly" would appear." 

"That doesn't change the fact that I was tortured." 

"No, you are right, that fact is true, but that was not my doing, that was my father's, I begged him nearly every day to stop your torture, but he ignored me."

 "I don't believe you! I heard from your father the day I ran away that you yourself were the reason I was being force-fed." 

"That is untrue!" Maria said lightly slamming her palms on the table. "I found out you were being fed moldy bread and spoiled soup and then I demanded my father give you a proper meal, and then when I found out he was force feeding you we got into fights almost every day about it!" She said emphatically. David thought back to the one proper meal he had been given while he was in the dungeon, the day where he couldn't go without water anymore. That was her doing? 

"But I heard your father say that the force feeding was your idea!" David said he is beginning to lose faith in this fact as well. 

"I don't know how, or where you heard my father say that, but I had nothing to do with it. As soon as I found out about it, it became a point of contention between us whenever we saw each other. I hated the fact you were being treated that way." He didn't want to believe it, but hearing her say it, no matter how hard he tried, it just made more sense that she didn't have anything to do with it.

"Fine." David said, admitting the fact he may have been wrong. 

"I'll change to the second reason I avoid you." He said as he calmed down a little, already feeling better now that he learned she had nothing to do with his torture. 

"Have you ever read the fairy tales about the Blood Sigils?" David asked. 

"Of course." Maria responded, not sure what his point was. 

"Have you ever noticed that they all end the same way? The two always end up falling in love. No matter how fat, ugly, unlikeable, evil, lecherous, womanizing, or uncaring either of them are, they always fall in love. Have you ever thought about that?" Maria thought this over, in fact she had noticed that the stories always ended in the two falling in love, but she never thought about the details about how. 

"Aren't they just children's stories? So of course, they need happy endings." Maria said after thinking it through a bit. 

"If that were the case then why not turn the man who murdered his siblings into a gallant knight, why not turn the lecherous old man into an upstanding gentleman, why not make the woman who cared about nothing into someone who grew from her experiences?" David pauses a moment to let that settle. 

"Children's stories are supposed to teach a lesson, a moral lesson about how to live their life, and while some of these stories have morals most don't. You know why? Because they weren't originally children's stories, they were real events that occurred over the course of many millennia." 

Maria and Alice were shocked to hear this, of course they now knew that Blood Sigils were real, but to imagine all those other stories were real as well was shocking. 

"I found old records of the same events that occur in history to also occur in the stories and then used the time period I found to link the two dates. And do you know what I found? Mentions of rituals being carried out, events from the stories occuring. There were no specifics, the details were always shaky, but everything lined up." Both of them were shocked to hear this, he traced back the time period and found evidence of it occurring? The only places with records that go back that far are found in either the Palace Library restricted section, or the Ducal houses. 

"So, during the time he was at my house that was what he was reading?" Maria thought to herself with a bit of admiration for his achievements and shame for not noticing sooner. 

"But that's still just circumstantial right?" Alice said accidentally butting in when she originally didn't mean to. 

"Perhaps, but here's the important bit." David said as he touched his neck in the same spot where the Blood Sigil first appeared. 

"Why did the righteous Vampire countess marry the sibling-murdering man, why did the human-hating Marquis marry the lovable and gentle human? The answer is simple. Because of the Blood Sigil. The entire time I was a slave at the Manor although I hated every person there, I could not hate you. Even after I "learned" that you were the cause of the force-feeding I still could not hate you. When I was drugged and kept in the dungeon of your home I still could not hate you. Do you know why?" David pauses for a moment. 

"It is because of the Blood Sigil. It feeds the person artificial emotions to dull any negative feelings the person has to the other holder and increases the positive ones. In essence these are not my real feelings, they are fake." David said, finally stopping. Alice sat there stunned, so much of what she had just heard went completely against her conventional knowledge of how the old stories went. Not only that but him saying that it was giving him "artificial" feelings was a hard thing to dispute. However, while Alice felt deterred by his statement Maria only gained conviction. 

"Perhaps what you said is true and the Sigil gives us artificial feelings. Perhaps these are not my original emotions." She said as she then looked up at David with a determined look. "But now, these are my feelings. This is how I feel now. I don't see any sense in denying that." David stands up angry. 

"It's because these are not MY feelings! It is nothing more than chemicals in my body telling me to think something I am not!" 

"Even if that is so, it is still a part of you, you can't just deny it." Maria said, still calm. 

"That's exactly what I intend to do, I don't see why I should bow to the whims of magic cast on me! I didn't do it when they tried to brainwash me, and I won't do it now!" 

"The thing my father did to you to make you subservient was deplorable and wrong, but this and that are two different things. These feelings are now a part of you, and if you continue to deny them like I did, then you will only suffer." Maria said with a bit of depression as she thought back to all the nights she spent crying over her broken relationship with David. 

For David this caused him to falter, this whole time he was only thinking about how he felt, how the feelings affected him, he didn't once think about how they must be affecting her. If he was feeling terrible because of his refusal to accept these emotions, then he can only imagine how she must feel to be rejected by him every time. 

David sat down, still not settled but no longer in a rage. 

"I have a proposal." Maria said calmly. "Be my friend for a day." 

"What?" David said a bit aggressively and confused. 

"For one day you will allow yourself to feel your emotions and spend a day with me like you spend time with a friend, like you would with Alice." She said as she gestured over to Alice who was just listening, too afraid to butt in. 

"Why?" 

"So, we can both give a chance to see what would happen if we accept these emotions. I know that you, like me, are being eaten inside by these emotions you call "artificial." But for one day we will put that aside and accept them and see what happens."

Overall it didn't seem like too bad of a plan, if he could save himself by accepting these emotions then it clearly was the best course of action, but he had been afraid this whole time because he could tell they weren't his. But perhaps if he just gave it a chance, he would learn to be happy with it. After all, Maria doesn't deserve his ire, she did nothing wrong, it was her father that was behind all his suffering. So perhaps he could give it a chance. 

"Just one day." David said after a while of silence. "In one week, we will spend time together as friends and we can decide then what we will do." David said as he started getting up.

"Just remember, when they write our story, I will be the crazed human who went on a rampage and killed 12 Vampires, and you will be the innocent daughter of a Duke." He said trying to dissuade both him and her from staying on this course. Instead she just smiles sweetly. 

"Then I suppose we will have to make the story better before it gets written." David just looks at her for a moment before looking away. 

"I'm leaving now, I need to go hit something with my sword for a while." And with that David exited the room. As soon as he is gone Maria and Alice turn to each other and give each other a hug.

David was on his way to the training field when he came across Sovern, without his buddy Reynold, which was an odd sight by itself. This was the last guy David wanted to see right now, he was in no mood to be bullied, but it seemed like Sovern had him in his sights as he headed right over to him.

"Hey!" Sovern said to David crossly. "Come with me!" David most certainly did not want to go with him, but he didn't really have a choice he was probably going to get beat and he would just have to get it over with. He is then led to an unused part of the training field, far away from most prying eyes. It was then that the beating started. David had gotten rather used to this of course, but this was far more brutal than normal. Perhaps it was because Reynold wasn't around with him, though he doubted that Reynold was the more levelheaded of the two. Sovern kept beating him further and further down, each attack seemed more violent than the last. But David just kept enduring, he knew that all he had to do was outlast him and he'd go away like always. But the beating didn't seem to stop. Even though David had learned to, somewhat, control the amount of pain he feels, the vampire was using most of his strength to inflict pain, so David felt every blow, and it was beginning to hurt a lot more.

Then David got a sudden pang of anxiety, no, an instinct to move his head over to the left in that moment. So, he did just that, he did not know why he felt like he had to, but he did so anyway. Then as if to answer his question, the blade that was on Sovern's hip came flying straight at his face. Landing inches away from his head, right where it had been before he moved. 

"Oh, I understand now, he is trying to kill me." David thought with calm in his voice. It all made sense, he is alone, he brought him to a deserted area, he was hitting harder than normal, he never had any intention of letting David leave here. Suddenly anger started to well up inside him. 

"No! I refuse!" David was done being beaten around all the time, he was done being stepped on and cursed at, he was done being looked down on by the so called "superior" vampires. He was already nettled after today's events, but this got a rise out of him. He was sick of it, sick of it all. 

As soon as the sword landed near his head David moved, he moved with a swiftness he didn't know was possible, unsheathing his knife from his belt he swung it upwards and made contact with Sovern's neck. He held him up by the knife for a few seconds before letting him drop on the ground, knife still in neck. From now on David was done taking shit from Vampire and Nobles. He was done playing complacent, he was done "waiting it out." From now on he was done being a punching bag for any vampire who comes along. And with that thought David walked off, leaving the dead body of Sovern laying there on the ground, the knife still in his neck.