This entry begins covering the eleventh volume of the original “Re:Zero” novels.
In the previous entry we met the lovely Elsa Granhiert, eminent local hitwoman and all around charming lady.
As the rush of sensations floods your brain from the body that you didn’t have a moment ago, you take a deep breath, but the dust that gets into your lungs makes you break into a coughing fit. Even before you stop coughing, the texture of the floor under your forearms tells you that you were lying on the flat stones of the chamber of trials at the witches’ tomb. The blue glow that illuminates the room further confirms that notion. It means that the Witch of Envy has moved your return point again, and now you can’t go back to a moment in your life in which Emilia wasn’t trapped in Sanctuary.
As you swallow to force your dry mouth to produce more saliva, you sit up and confirm that the half-elf is indeed lying face down near the center of the antechamber. Whenever you decide to wake Emilia up, she will shriek in terror and she won’t come out of a delirious state until around an hour after you put her on the guest bed at Ryuzu’s home.
You recall having felt dazed the first time you lived through this, but you are further out of it because you just came back from dying horribly. You have returned to Sanctuary, but everybody at the mansion is going to die. Rem is going to get murdered. Even though trying to figure out how to help Emilia pass the trials by herself had been your previous concern, none of that matters now when you risk losing not only your beloved, but also more people you like, as well as Petra. What can you do, what can you do, what can you do?
First order of things, getting Emilia out of here. You crouch next to the half-elf, sit her up and hold her in your arms. Her facial muscles twitch, immersed as she is in some sort of witch-induced nightmare. You pat her cheeks with one hand while repeating her name. She finally wakes up, but her initially blank expression turns into a grimace, and Emilia shrieks so loud that it feels as if your eardrums are going to burst. You hold Emilia tighter, resting her face on your neck. The raised hairs in your arms slowly go down again. You knew that shriek was coming and yet you had failed to prepare yourself against it. You need to stop that Bowel Hunter woman, even though you are yourself.
You go through the motions, trying to interact with people the same way you half-remember from your first run through this series of events, until you and that Ryuzu elf tend to an incoherent Emilia, who is lying on Ryuzu’s guest bed. She ends up coming out of her delirium.
“Subaru…”, she says as tears run down her temples. “Where am I? What happened?”
You stroke her cheek while you hold her gaze calmly.
“You attempted to pass the trial, but it was too much for you. You fell into a sort of hallucinatory state and we had to carry you to the mayor’s place. You are now lying on her guest bed. It’s alright, Emilia.”
“I… I remember…” You see the pain in her eyes. “I remember why I tried to pass this trial…”
“Yeah, you are trapped in this dreary village for the moment. We’ll figure something out, don’t worry.” You turn to Ryuzu, who is so small that she barely needs to look down from her standing position at the lying Emilia. “Do you have some sort of pyjama that would fit her? It will be uncomfortable to sleep with that fancy dress of hers. And she’s been lying on that dirty floor as well.”
“Sure, Young Su”, Ryuzu answers. “None of my clothes would fit this big lady, but I’ll figure something out.”
After the elf leaves the room, Emilia is looking at you as if trying to measure how disappointed you are. Her lips are trembling.
“I’m sorry, I keep making things so difficult for everybody”, she says with a thin voice.
When she looks away, you take her hand and kiss it.
“It’s alright. It isn’t your fault, Emilia. You just focus on resting for tonight. I’ll have a chat with our friends, as well as with the couple of blackmailers, so we can try to understand what’s going on. Afterwards I’ll return to your side so we can sleep in the same room.”
She turns her face towards you. She looks eager and hopeful, which erases most of the sadness she was displaying before.
“Will you really?”
“Of course. I belong by your side, after all.”
Emilia nods at your reassuring eyes, and pokes her cheek against the palm of your hand, while you caress her gently.
“Thank you, Subaru.”
“You can thank me by getting well soon.”
After Ryuzu comes back with a woolly, crude-looking pyjama that she must have gotten from another villager, you both leave Emilia to change her clothes. You go to the living room, where you sit at the table on the same chair from your first run of this nightmare. Ryuzu goes through the motions of preparing snacks and drinks, but you don’t feel like doing much but wring your hands over the table and look down at it.
“You look troubled, Young Su”, the elf says with a soothing voice.
“You don’t know the half of it, Ryuzu.”
Your body feels as hungry as it did during your first time living through this night, as well as exhausted. You want to go to bed. You figure that you might as well eat the same cookies, and while you chew on them and try to enjoy their taste, you recall all those many, many iterations of you ransacking your dear Crusch’s wine cellar to steal some more extremely expensive wine bottles. Ah, Crusch, Ferris, Wilhelm, what are you guys doing in this sombre night? Your throat is closing up, and you are trying your best to blink as little as possible just in case your eyes start watering.
Ram is staring at you, studying your movements. You know that she intends for you to reveal that you passed the trial, but you want to tell her to leave you the fuck alone, allow you suffer in peace. While Otto, hoping to get as drunk as possible, laments the pains that Emilia has gone through, you look up to hold Ram’s spartan gaze.
“I know we gotta go meet Roswaal in a while”, you say without emotion. “I’m not doing any of that shit this time.”
Ram sighs.
“Barusu, I have already told him that you requested a meeting. Because he decided that it would happen after Emilia’s attempt, he has stayed up. Do you mean for me to return and tell him that you have changed your mind?”
Your nostrils widen. Ah, you hate it so much. The worst part for you of returning to the past was always having to struggle through making the people around you understand what you desperately need them to know, which you feel they should know already even though you understand that’s not how reality works. It’s such a bother. You need to be left alone.
“I don’t care what you tell the clown, Ram. Truly, I couldn’t give less of a shit. Emilia hasn’t passed the trial, and I know that Roswaal intends to make me a knight as a thank you for doing his fucking job. And I also know that you won’t have sex in a barn, so it’s all pointless.”
Garfiel, sitting to your right, chuckles.
“The hell is that about sex in a barn, half-pint? That a private joke with Ram? How did that come to be?”
“Nothing, Garfiel. Shut up.”
The punk frowns, although he finishes swallowing a fried potato before he snarls at you.
“I ain’t shuttin’ up, not in my damn place anyway. The frickin’ gall of it! If it’s about Ram and sex, I wanna know.”
You shoot him a glance.
“She wanted to have sex with me in a barn.”
Garfiel narrows one eye, then points at Ram and you with his index finger.
“Haah? Ram wanted to screw with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Wait, ya said she didn’t!”
Ram is grabbing her face with one hand as if she wishes she could tear it out and for the pain to rescue her from this conversation. She then takes a deep breath and glares at you intensely.
“Do not involve me in your delusions, Barusu, especially if they are of the sexual kind. There’s nothing going on with me and sex, I assure you.”
You snort. You narrow your eyes at the pink-haired servant as if she’s about to regret having stated that she isn’t getting any, but she looks as if not being involved with sex is a matter of dignity for her. You point at Ram accusingly.
“Oh yeah? Then what was with that proposal?”
You almost expect her to stand up forcefully and storm off, possibly after throwing a plate full of snacks at you. To your surprise, she hunches over and plays along.
“I thought you meant that we should just get it over with. I’m not like you, Barusu, I would never have sex outside of a bed, unless there was a very good reason for doing so. But having sex in a barn, with all the hay and the smell? It’s something only the most debased would do. Only those who are shameless freaks without any dignity or worth would do such a thing. I’m not like you.”
You take a deep breath and slump on your chair.
“You are right, I’m as debased as they come”, you say with a low, serious voice. “I could have someone kneading my intestines and still I would get so hard that I wouldn’t even have to touch myself to come. That’s who I am, and now every single one of you fuckers knows. That’s who you chose to associate yourselves with.”
Ryuzu coughs nervously.
“You are an idiot”, Ram says with a sigh and a shake of her head.
She grabs something squishy from the table and throws it at you. You catch it, and find yourself looking down at a slice of bread. You guess that she’s suggesting you stuff your mouth to keep yourself from saying more things you would regret, or that she simply doesn’t want to hear, so you do so. You try to calm yourself.
“Now now, we are all worried and confused about our current predicament”, Otto says, then shivers. “I’m so unsettled myself that I wish I could pass the trials for lady Emilia. I don’t see how anyone would force herself to try again after the way it made her scream…”
You swallow the bread. Your body forces you to let out a long yawn. And you have to look forward to sleeping in that uncomfortable chair. You’ll be lucky if you don’t get bedsores by the time you wake up.
“No, Emilia will keep trying to pass the trials, even though she won’t improve. She promised to those villagers, and she believes that she needs to succeed at this task to feel like she can face her future as the ruler of this kingdom. It doesn’t matter how much the trials traumatize her.”
Garfiel, whose eyes are unfocused, shakes his head.
“Shy princess should give up. Would be better for her. People’s minds are like the great br-“
“Great bridge of Ehurradan, I know. Too much weight and the whole thing collapses. That was too easy of an analogy, Garfiel.”
Garfiel snaps his head back, freaked out and with his mouth hanging open.
“What, you thought nobody else would know about that great bridge?”, you ask with a deadpan face, “There are other men of culture out there, you know.”
He turns his head and looks to a random spot on the wall, embarrassed. Then, seemingly having regained his confidence, he smirks at you and scratches his head.
“Crap, but didya know that the bridge was built by orders of warrior queen Tingrifa Essa, who wanted ta cross with an army to kill them migratory mejasoupes, that were burnin’ the whole damn place with their fiery breath?”
You want to roll your eyes. It seems you’ve found an even bigger idiot than yourself. And that’s a feat in itself.
“… No, Garfiel. I wasn’t aware of that much. You win this one.”
The punk beams at you, and puffs out his chest.
“Hah! I knew it! Most impressive thing ’round here!”
You take a deep breath and look down. You want to disappear into your chair, but Ram’s gaze is burning your face. She hasn’t given up on figuring out if you have passed the trial. You look up at her red eyes so you can get this over with.
“You keep trying to get my attention, Ram. Can’t stop thinking about me, can you.”
Ram snorts, then glares at you as if she hates that you insist on sparking emotions of any kind in her.
“My only concern relates to how you have avoided bringing up what happened at the witches’ tomb. You know what I’m referring to, don’t you?”
You squeeze your eyes closed as you hold your breath. You stand up and support yourself on the table with your hands.
“Yes, I went through the first trial, and I passed it. I never got any confirmation, but I felt sure that I had passed it as if I had been told. The trial showed my parents, whom I will never see again, which allowed me to deal with some unfinished business. No, Garfiel, my past wasn’t as traumatic as yours, and yes, Ryuzu, I’m aware that the devious, god-like witch behind these trials might not accept me passing the trials because she wouldn’t want to lift the barrier after a boring person breezed through different stages of his life. Any fucking questions?”
You slam your hands on the table and look out to everyone in the room. Otto is gaping at you with his eyes wide, Ram has her eyes narrowed, Garfiel is grimacing with his mouth open, and Ryuzu is blinking with confusion.
“Now, if you will excuse me,” you add with a tired, annoyed voice, “I’m going to take a shit and then straight to sleep. See you, fuckers.”
You open the door to Ryuzu’s guest room slowly. The light from the hallway illuminates Emilia’s face, as she seemingly sleeps, peeking out from under the covers. While you close the door behind you and return the darkness to the room, Emilia opens her eyes.
“That’s you, isn’t it, Subaru?”, she asks softly.
“Yeah, Emilia. It’s me.”
You shuffle towards the window, the only source of light, and moonlight at that, because the shutters are open at the other side of the glass pane. You rest your forehead on the cold glass.
“Have you finished for the day, then…?”, Emilia asks. “Will you spend the rest of the night here with me?”
“Yeah, it’s late anyway, and I’m tired. Do you mind, though, if I close the shutters? I want as much darkness as possible.”
“Of course not”, Emilia answers as if trembling with excitation.
You hear the sheets rustling as Emilia sits up. You open the window and reach out to close the shutters, blotting out the moonlight. Now you’re in total darkness. You can’t see your own hand in front of your face.
You hear the sheets rustle again as Emilia lays back down.
“Difficult to get used to, isn’t it? Living without light.”
You don’t say anything. You have turned around and must be facing the bed, even though you can’t see a thing. On the other side of the room waits Emilia, the same Emilia who offered you a fairy tale romance. She wanted to make you happy and show you that you deserved to be loved by someone who would never hurt you. But is this Emilia that other one, truly? You wouldn’t be able to reproduce the same conversation, not only because you don’t remember it exactly, but because what you end up revealing to the other person sometimes depends on sudden decisions, sometimes even pushed out by your subconscious. Some lifelong paths wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t blurted out a few words.
That other Emilia is gone, you abandoned her in a reality you no longer belong to. She had pushed herself to the brink to pass a trial she isn’t built to succeed at, and in her weakened, depressive state, she needed you by her side. But you had left on a caravan and died on your lord’s mansion. You hope with all your heart that the realities you disappear from don’t continue. Otherwise Emilia would receive the news that the person she came to love, the only one who would fight for her to the end, had left her forever, which means she would remain trapped in this village. What face did you make when you found out?, you think. What words escaped from your mouth?
A burning pain tightens your chest, and you feel the tears rushing to your eyes. Not only that version of Emilia is gone, but Rem dies as well. It’s so heavy on your heart that you can barely face it. If you don’t prevent it somehow, that terrifying contract killer will murder them all. For all you know they are already dead, and that woman is enjoying the luxuries of Roswaal’s place as she waits for you to wander into her nest.
You hide your face in your hands even though nobody will see you cry. You clench your teeth to avoid sobbing, but your lips tremble. Although you need to whimper and blubber, to let your body produce the noises it needs to push out of itself, you don’t want Emilia to address any of it.
Emilia must have been paying attention with her heightened hearing to every tiny noise you made.
“Subaru…? Are you okay?”
You close your eyes tight and dry your face as slowly and noiselessly as possible. You hope that your voice hides your gloom.
“Emilia, do you want me to sleep next to you?”
She lets out a noise of delight.
“Yes. Come here with me.”
You take off your shoes and socks. You walk slowly in the blackness towards the bed, with your arm stretched. As soon as you touch her flesh, Emilia pulls you by the hand to lie beside her under the covers. You do so, and she embraces and snuggles with your chest and stomach. Her smell fills your nostrils. The sudden warmth that envelops you makes you want to cry again, but you force yourself to close your throat. You cross your arms behind her back. Emilia’s body slackens from head to toe against you as if she had been tense every other second of her life, and she exhales deeply and warmly on your neck. Her eyelashes brush against your skin, making you tingle. In fact, everything is tingling, particularly towards your crotch.
You swallow the burning sensation in your throat.
“How does it feel to snuggle with the person you love?”, you murmur.
“It feels like I’ve always wanted to be with you, Subaru, even before I met you. Now that you’re here, I feel whole. I don’t ever want to let you go.”
Your insides are melting. You hug Emilia tighter.
“I’m glad I can make you happy, Emilia. You’ve made me happy too.”
Emilia stretches her legs, wriggling them against yours while your erection strains against your underwear. If Emilia hugs you closer, your dick will get squeezed against her crotch, possibly right between her folds, like nature intended.
She reaches her arms up and holds your head against hers, rubbing her cheek against yours. You close your eyes and focus on the sounds of her breathing, the feel of her lips touching your skin, and the warmth emanating from her body.
“I love you, I love you, I do”, she says softly.
You want to let go of every thought, every memory. You want nothing else but to be enveloped by this warmth for the rest of your life. Both of your hearts are beating so loud that when neither of you speak, those heartbeats along with your heavy breathing are the only things you hear.
Emilia whispers right in your ear.
“Let’s get married, let’s take care of each other, and let’s be happy, forever, together.”
She wraps her slender legs around your own. Her thighs tighten against yours and she pulls your pelvis forward so that you can feel the heat of her pussy through the fluffy fabric of her pyjama.
“I need you so bad, Subaru…”, she whispers.
Your heart is beating irregularly. Your palms are sweating profusely. Emilia has nestled the length of your erection along her pussy, and she begins to rub herself with it slowly while she hugs you tight.
You are terrified and excited out of your mind. You don’t want anything else but what she’s making you feel.
“I… I want you too… I want you too…”, you murmur.
Trembling and nervous, your fingers of one hand clutching the bedsheets, you start to push yourself against Emilia’s pussy while she rubs herself with your erection. That movement had started as a small, almost imperceptible motion, but now she’s masturbating. She’s smearing her hot saliva on your cheek as her wet lips slide. She moans softly.
She’s moving her hips more violently and in a more rapid way now, and that pace is what you have begun to follow. You’re stuck to her like a pair of magnetized dolls. The sweat falling from your face stains her brow. Your nose rubs against hers, and as your gasps for air find their way into her mouth, she kisses you so warmly and greedily as if she wants nothing more than to twist her tongue against yours and share the hot wetness of each others’ mouths forever.
Your ears are almost deafened by the sound of your hearts thumping. The bed is shaking. Your spine is tingling, and you know that if you both continue, you will end up coming. That’s good, you feel. You want for both of you to come together.
You take a deep breath, stealing Emilia’s air straight from her nostrils. You pull yourself away from her tongue, from her mouth, from her embrace, from the hotness of her pussy through her pants. You throw the covers off the both of you, then roll Emilia so she lies on her back under you.
“Fuck it…”, you murmur with a raspy voice. “Fuck everything.”
Emilia lets out a noise of dismay.
“S-Subaru, what’s wrong…? Don’t leave…!”
In pitch darkness, you slide your hands down Emilia’s chest towards her waist, then under the band of her pyjama pants. You slowly stroke her pubic hair. She gasps and her whole body arches slightly. You crawl down the bed, hook your fingers onto her pants and pull it down with one quick motion. The warmth and wet smell of her insides make you salivate. You lower your face and lick her pussy from bottom to top, savouring her taste, before you plant your lips at the top of her mound. You suck on her little button.
Emilia squeals, and her whole body convulses. She grabs your head and holds you in place as if she fears you will pull away. Her legs tremble, her waist and chest start heaving. The smell of her sex fills your nostrils, the taste of it fills your mouth. You tongue her button while your hands grope her thighs and sides. Your member throbs so hard it might rip through your underwear. You are losing your sense of time, and you wish you were stuck in a loop in which you do nothing else but eat out this delicious pussy forever.
Emilia no longer grabs your head, and instead she runs her fingers of one hand through your hair slowly and lovingly. Some time later you don’t feel her hand on your hair any longer. Her body twists, her hips gyrate in circular motions. She begins to pant as she reaches her peak. Her muscles convulse around your tongue.
After Emilia lets out a cry, you feel a warm liquid flow out. Her whole pussy tightens, then relaxes, then tightens again, three, four times. Her knees curl up near her chest. She releases a huge sigh, long and slow. You lap up the overflowing juices that stream out of her, and when no more come out, you rest your face on her groin. The warmth and smell emanating from her hot insides make you feel at home. Her taste makes you never want to move.
She runs her fingers through your hair.
“That was… intense”, she murmurs, almost breathless.
“Yeah”, you say while raising yourself up.
Some of her juice still remains in your mouth, and you swallow it. As you move on top of her, she reaches with her hands to pull you down to her, hugs you tightly wrapping her arms and legs around you, and she shoves her tongue into your mouth. Your dick is hard, almost painfully so, and it strains against your underwear as you rub it along her slit.
Emilia pulls down your pants and underwear laboriously with her heels, not wishing to loosen her embrace, and you help her with the arm you aren’t supporting yourself on. As soon as you rest against Emilia again, the length of your dick gets drenched with the hot wetness of her hole. Emilia flinches a bit, then lets out a pleasured noise against your ear.
“It’s so warm. Make me yours, Subaru”, she murmurs.
“Of course. Anything you want, my princess”, you say, truly meaning it.
You push the head against her slick opening. She winces as she feels it parting her lips, then she grunts as you slowly push yourself inside of her. Once you are past the crown, you stop to let her stretch around you. She shudders as she breathes through her nostrils. Slowly, you pull out a bit and then push back in, doing it again and again until your hips are soon rocking against her.
She licks your earlobe as her nails dig into your back.
“I’m yours and you are mine”, she whispers. “Nothing will change that.”
“Nothing.”
You thrust into her harder, and she lets out a gasp as you hit her deepest places. Soon, you’re pounding into her as she shakes and spasms under you. She moans and grunts, but soon she goes silent, only to end up letting out a hum of contentment. She strokes your back and neck, digging her fingernails in.
You feel like your heart is going to explode as the pleasure hits a peak.
“I’m… I’m…”
“Come inside. I want all of you”, she pants.
You release yourself into her as she clenches her legs and arms around you, keeping herself from bucking forward. Once you finish, you are just barely able to keep yourself from collapsing on her. You pull out and roll over without realizing that you should have rolled in the opposite direction, because you fall face up onto the floor.
You lie there for a moment, trying to get your strength back. You feel Emilia’s warm hand on your chest.
“Are you okay…?”, she asks softly, but amused.
Your heart beats in your neck. You breathe deeply through your mouth as you stare straight into the pitch darkness.
Note from December of 2020:
At around part eighteen of this strange, AI-fueled retelling, I was on team Rem for life, and I didn’t think back then that the protagonist would give Emilia the time of the day. However, this is how things turned out to be by themselves. Honestly, with his girlfriend in a coma possibly forever, and someone like Emilia aching to have you for herself, who would have resisted? I wouldn’t. Then again, both the protagonist and myself are scumbags. Also, I mostly listened to NIN’s “Mr. Self Destruct” as I wrote that last scene.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 