Helena clutched herself, staring at the ground with her teeth clenched. “I’ll become your queen. I’ll do whatever you want. Just please, leave everyone else alone.”
“No deal.”
She looked up at him, feeling the ground falling away from under her feet. “What?”
Xavier stood up and strode over to her. “You heard me. I don’t accept your offer. I told you that I would win your heart. You think I’ll make you mine so that you can simply play the martyr?”
“But… wasn’t that the whole point of tormenting Sophie? Weren’t you trying to blackmail me by holding her hostage?”
“Of course not. That would be too easy. If you become my queen so that you can sacrifice yourself to protect your friends, then you haven’t really given in to me. You still consider me your enemy. We’ll be in bed, our bodies intertwined, and you’ll be thinking ‘better me than Sophie’.”
“But then… why? Why would you hurt her like this?! Why would you turn her and her sister against each other?”
“That was actually totally unexpected. I never would have guessed she would turn into such an obedient little sadist. But as for why, tell me something: Which was worse when Sophie confronted you? The pain you knew she had felt?” He stepped forward and lifted her chin, looking into her tearful eyes. “Or the fact that I lied to you? Helena, I’m the Antichrist. What could possibly make you think that you can believe me when I say “trust me”? I originally made Sophie my victim to weaken your resolve, expose you to depravity, and use her to make you go through those trials. I resumed tormenting her simply so that I could lie to you.”
Helena fell to her knees, robbed of her strength. “Why?”
“Instead of asking me why, ask yourself. Why did you trust me? Why did you believe me? Why did you believe me over your own instincts? It’s because you needed to find some good in me. You needed to find some redeemable aspect in me so that you could use it to justify your feelings. No matter how much you resist it, you have developed feelings for me. You hate me because you think you’re supposed to and your pride and beliefs are telling you that I am your enemy, but your heart cannot turn away. You know this, so you tried to justify that desire by saying “at least he’s a man of his word, I can appreciate that”. You could like one part of me and hate the rest, guilt-free.”
Helena covered her ears and shook her head. “No! No, that’s not true! I hate you with every fiber of my being! You’re evil! You’re a monster! You hurt the people I care about!”
Xavier grabbed her by her shoulders and dragged her to her feet as if her body was weightless. “Then why did you smile and laugh on our dates? Why was I able to make you happy? When you thought I had erased Sophie’s memories and stayed away from her, you struggled to find a rational reason to hate me. No matter what you had seen me do, the fact that I was able to clean it all up and not leave even a single scar behind slowly crept into your mind. You began to realize that it wasn’t nearly as big a deal as you thought.”
He dropped her back to the ground and snapped his fingers, with a small spark of darkness popping. “There, I just erased her memories of everything I or her sister did to her and replaced her with happy ones. She’ll look back on that vacation and smile at all the quality time she spent with her family. Shall we go back to your room so that you can see her humming and thanking God for this beautiful day?”
He snapped his fingers again. “And now she’s back to being traumatized. She’s probably sitting on her bed, contemplating suicide.” He snapped his fingers over and over again. “Happy. Sad. Happy. Sad. Happy. Sad. See how insignificant it all is? All the suffering she’s gone through can completely disappear and she can be even happier than before.”
“You can’t just deny everything you did to her! All of the pain you’ve inflicted!”
“What pain? She has no scars, her virginity has returned, and right now she’s thinking back to eating dinner with her family. She doesn’t even know I exist. Back home, her sister is the sweet and pure-hearted girl she was before she met me. Does it matter now what I might have done to her? Tell me, which would be more evil? Torturing her and making her miserable every day of her life, then on her deathbed, give her memories of the happiest and most fulfilling life she could have possibly lived, or to let her live that happy life, then on her deathbed, give her memories of absolute hell?
Half of reality is what happens, the other half is how we perceive it. Right now, what you think I did to her is nothing more than a fantasy, a delusion. According to her, she’s been happy all this time and nothing bad has happened. People don’t care about the real world. They simply care about their own happiness. They want the things that make them happy, even if they aren’t real. It’s why it’s so hard to convince someone that they’re wrong or break them free of their ideology. They don’t care about reality, as long as they can continue to live in the delusion that they are right. It’s the same thing when they say they want the truth. They don’t really want the truth. They just want what they want to hear to be the truth.”
Helena didn’t reply, having no idea what she was supposed to say. Xavier’s words had smothered the flames of her anger. Her heart still ached from the pain she knew Sophie had gone through, but if Xavier really had erased her memories… was that pain even real?
“Like I said, the real reason you’re angry isn’t because I hurt your friend. You’re angry because I lied to you. I will say, though, that that was the first lie I ever told you and I will work to abstain from lying to you again. I really don’t take any joy in lying to you.” A minute passed, in which Helena remained kneeling on the grass with Xavier standing behind her. “Let’s go get a coffee.”
Helena didn’t know how Xavier got her out to that café, but there they were, sitting in the shade of an umbrella, each with an espresso.
“Tell me something, have you honestly considered my offer? I would be disappointed if you said no to me in the church and never bothered to actually think afterwards.”
“I won’t do it.”
“Tell me why.”
“Because you’re evil, because you hurt people. How could I ever love someone as demented as you?”
“You love God, and he isn’t any better. In Africa, a thousand children will die today from war, from disease, from starvation. They’ll cling to the bibles that the missionaries gave them out of guilt for living their rich, white lives in leisure. They’ll be told that God loves them while they suffer. In some country in Eastern Europe, a single mother with three children will be raped by a police officer. She’ll clutch her crucifix and beg God to save her. No answer comes, even when she finds out she’s pregnant, when she’s denied an abortion, and when she dies from complications in the pregnancy and leaves her children to be snatched up and sold into slavery. In the hospital three miles away, your friend lies in what would have been an irreversible coma. He had suffered debilitating brain damage that would have left him as a vegetable until he died of old age or his pancreatic cancer got him. He was a man of the church, a priest who helped hundreds of children like you find a home in Rosewood University, yet God didn’t protect him, heal him, or save him. I did.”