Page 73 of Gunslinger Girl
He smirked. “Not much. Don’t worry. Luster didn’t say anything.”
“Then how did you—”
“Pity…” His tone turned serious but not unkind. “I’ve seen how you look at Max. And it’s nothing like how you look at me.”
Her cheeks burned. “Oh.”
Was it really that obvious? There was no mistaking what she felt around Garland. But even now her attention was drawn below, to where Max worked. It was Max who always seemed to rise to the surface of her thoughts, along with that brief moment on the night of her debut when he seemed to kiss her back.
“I’m…” A wave of embarrassment overtook her, so strong it brought frustrated tears to her eyes. “I’m sorry about the other night. I never meant to…”
“Hey, stop. Don’t get upset.” Garland reached over and pushed a loose strand of hair away from her cheek, a touch that felt more like a comfort than a temptation. “We’re friends, right? There’s no need to make it any more or less than that.” His hand fell away. “But there’s something else bothering you, too, isn’t there? Luster thinks so, and she’s always right about these sorts of things.”
I almost died. I killed two men. There’s a bounty hunter still hanging around who may have been sent by my father. Max… The reasons jumped to the tip of her tongue, each one good enough to serve to Garland… but all fell just short of the truth.
“I missed.”
“What?”
“When the assassins attacked, I missed.” A full confession in two words. Her hand tightened into a fist around the bullet. “More than once. More than twice. If it wasn’t for Beau…”
Garland blinked at her. “Is that still eating at you? It wasn’t the show, Pity. It must have been terrifying—of course you missed a few times!”
“It’s more than that!” She stared at the ground, her voice rising uncontrollably. “I could have done more. I should have done more. I just watched when Finn was murdered… I could have saved her and I didn’t. And then the attack on Selene… I’m not helpless. I’m not!” Every word pained her to say, as if they were fresh bruises on her soul. “So why does it feel like I am? Why is it so easy in practice and when I’m performing? Why do I only fail when it really matters?”
For a long moment Garland was silent. When she finally looked up at him, she found the warmth gone from his features. In its place was something else, something Pity recognized but couldn’t name.
“You didn’t fail,” he said, his voice hollow. “You did the best you could in the moment. It’s just that sometimes… that’s not enough.”
At first she didn’t think he was going to say more. Then he took a breath and let it out slowly. “Y’know, before I came to Cessation, I lived on a settlement. It got sick… really sick.”
That’s when she saw it—the nothingness. Pity knew it from the commune, a dark souvenir of the war. Women and men who had seen too much, lost too much; some deep part of themselves had withered away, no more likely to grow back than an amputated limb. “Luster told me. I’m sorry.”
“So was I. Nothing we tried slowed the epidemic—not medicine, not prayer. My whole family died, and the only thing I could do was dig their graves in the ancestral land my people had barely begun to reclaim. I remember finishing the last one knowing I’d never feel at home again.” He shrugged. “So I left. But there was nothing I could have done about it.”
“Except…” Pity shook her head. “It’s not the same. You didn’t make your family sick. But I could have saved Finn.”
“Maybe,” he allowed. “Or maybe you would have tried and ended up dead, too. Do you think she would have wanted that?”
Pity’s jaw tightened. Run. That’s what Finn had told her to do, the very last thing she ever did. Run. “No.”
“Everybody loses, Pity—sometimes it’s a little, sometimes it’s a lot.”
Pain shaped Garland’s voice. When she reached out and squeezed his hand, though, his wolfish grin returned. For the first time she noticed how it didn’t really touch his eyes.
“Can’t do anything about the past,” he continued. “Today’s what we’ve got. And at the rate you’re going, you’ll run out of people in Casimir to not avoid. It’s not really my business, but you can’t pretend you’re helpless about whatever’s gone on between you and Max.”
Something unknotted in her chest. He’s right, she thought. Max may not care about you the way you want him to, but he’s still tried to be your friend. And he’s not the one letting a little wound fester. “Lord, you must think I’m ridiculous.”
“I don’t,” he said. “But I do think Luster is right—you need to learn to relax a little. It’s an ugly world, and we need to take what happiness we can, when we can.”
“I wanted to ask… the other night…” Her cheeks burned again, and not entirely from embarrassment. “When I said I was fertile… it didn’t occur to me at the time that it didn’t matter. Because you’re not, right?”
Garland rubbed his shoulder. “Starr gave me my booster shot a few weeks ago.”
“So why didn’t we…?”
“You didn’t want it to go that far.”
