Death and Rebirth: Roleplay with TheNovaSwag #2

Chapter 16

M:   Rowen woke up about an hour and a half later, though he still looked really tired and drained. He sat up and just stared at his hands for a few minutes, deep in thought and not acknowledging Alaric's presence though he knew he was there.

"Do you ever feel like the world is collapsing around you," he eventually said, not looking at the other but definitely talking to him, "do you ever feel like nothing seems to go right and all you want to do is just give up, to take the easy way out so you don't have to deal with the pain anymore?"

N:   "Who doesn't," Alaric replied, not looking up from his book before flipping to the next page, "but what's the point of life without pain? There is no such thing as 'taking the easy way out', otherwise you're no longer a human and just a fool."

 He paused a bit before looking up and closing his book. "I'm sure you have seen a blacksmith at work, since you were a captain, so you must know how any sword is formed. The metal goes through fire, battered and hammered down, and only through that would you see its beauty in the end, but when you mess up the rhythm of the flame, you mess up the sword. The same thing with life. Pain will come at you, that is undeniable, but your response to it is what matters. If you allow it to crush you in the process, you will end up like the broken sword, but you have to fight through it to get a good result. Strength comes through pain and hard work, nothing else." With that, he reopened his book and continued to read.

M:   Rowen looked over to Alaric, taking in his words and contemplating the metaphors.

"A fool huh," he said as he looked away, "I guess that everyone becomes one at some point or another, I know I am, a fool who couldn't do the one thing he was trained to do his whole life, protect his king and his kingdom. I failed everyone, if I just did my job better maybe we wouldn't be in this mess, maybe we could be back home living in peace -" Rowen then took off his boot and ran a hand along his prosthetic, "- maybe my wife and child would be alive if I did better, or maybe if I just wasn't around to begin with they'd be alive."

Rowen threw his boot in blind anger deriving from self-hate, then hid his face in his hands and started crying again, "maybe if I just didn't exist everything would be better." he mumbled.

N:   Alaric looked up and was startled by the boot slamming into the wall, he looked back at Rowen, and he softly chuckled. "Regrets, regrets, regrets," he shook his head, "humanity's worst enemy, the only thing that brings down life."

He closed the book and stood up, walking over to the prosthetic and picking it up, running his hand over the now broken joint, "see, we have a thing in my family, something that is taught to every child. Always prepare to overcome failure, and it was an important thing that we remembered that as we are ... were an influential family. That's the thing you're forgetting, you are prepared for the task, but you were not in the instance you failed, how it would affect you mentally and physically. You had a Plan A but no Plan B."

He placed the prosthetic on the table and continued, "You said that it would be better if you didn't exist, but did you think about how it would affect others? You cannot simply remove yourself from the equation, it would cause a ripple effect of a large magnitude, from removing the love you brought to the person who bore you, to the people who loved you, and to the person you simply brightened up their day in the future."

The Saxon began to wander around the sofa, flipping over what Rowen said, and cruelly laughed, "If this, if that, if you keep in this path you will just destroy yourself. Not everything is within your control, Prussia was going to go to you, so there is no point getting angry over it. You have to count your blessings to stay sane, not your problems. Maybe if you trained more, maybe if you did the right thing, maybe if you should have kept your mouth shut and your wife would still be alive," he caught his tongue before he revealed too much, taking a deep breath in and then out.