Even if the Dawn Abandons You - Chapter 37

“Marie”

“… … Yes, Mr. Leo.”

Marie’s small voice came from beyond the door. Confirming that Marie was listening properly, Leonard continued speaking slowly.

“Crying and not crying, both are your freedom.”

If you want to cry, you can cry. If you don’t want to cry, you can hold back. The way people endure sadness is different for everyone, and even the same person can feel differently at different times. The one experiencing sorrow has the freedom to decide how to embrace that sadness with their own body. That’s how it should be. Leo had come to this realization while watching Marie for the past few days. Finally.

“It is also your freedom to decide how long to grieve.”

Marie on the other side of her door didn’t answer, but Leonard knew Marie was listening to him. Your sadness and joy, the emotions you feel and everything that makes them are your freedom. Marcel must have wanted you to enjoy that kind of freedom. And perhaps Anais, though she might not have thought about it yet, would secretly wish the same. She held out her hand, not knowing that she was taking that freedom away from her.

“There was a time when I didn’t know that.”

He added, his tone somber. Leo truly didn’t know. He had always been free, so he didn’t know how to help someone who had lost their freedom regain it, and he didn’t know that the process could even take away another person’s freedom. Maybe that’s why I lost you. He now felt he understood a little of what it truly meant to desire freedom. He wondered if he was so late that he couldn’t catch up to her steps.

“Now that I know… I thought I should tell you.”

Now that he knew, how much did he not know back then?

How did my ignorance reflect in your eyes?

While Leo spoke, he worried that these words might inadvertently harm yet another facet of Marie’s freedom. He was equally ignorant in this matter. But while he might not fully grasp what freedom was, or how sweet and brilliant it could be, leading the world to turn upside down as it had, he knew one thing for certain—it had to be guaranteed to that young child more than anyone else. And so, he had no choice but to begin his confession.

Across the door, to a ten-year-old child.

He never guessed the existence of Anais who overheard his remorse outside the front door.

With a click, the key turned and the door opened. Anais tried to open the door as carefully as possible, but even with that caution, Leonard was greatly embarrassed and hesitated as she leaned against Marie’s door.

“Ana…is.”

Leonard put her name into his mouth, forgetting for a moment that he had consistently called Anais as Miss Belmartier in front of Marie’s ears. Anais’ expression hardened. She looked flustered, like someone who had been punched in the back of the head. And on the other hand, she looked a little sad for some reason.

Seeing her face, Leo could only be sure that Anaïs had heard every word he had muttered to Mary, from beginning to end. So, he thought he should engage in a proper conversation now. Rising from his seat, Leo took a half-step toward Anais. She stepped back.

Anais regretted opening the door. She wished she had pretended not to hear and spent some more time elsewhere. Leo approached her as someone who appeared resolute to anyone’s eyes, and she had already closed the front door. There was no escape. Leo took another step closer to her and inclined his head towards her. His earlier confusion seemed like a welcome in comparison to the determination in his demeanor now.

“There is something I want to talk about, Ms. Belmartier.”

Then he glanced toward Marie’s closed door. It meant that the conversation they needed to have should happen somewhere Marie couldn’t hear them. Anais felt even more disheartened. If they went to a larger room and closed the door, Mary wouldn’t be able to hear them.

But did it really have to be that way?

Could it not be like this?

Since their reunion, whenever they had important conversations, they always avoided or ignored the most crucial parts. Today, Anais wished she could opt out of this kind of conversation. Acting as if he wouldn’t speak the most important things, then acting all candid, and now, why choose this moment to talk? Why now, just when things are so precarious and uncertain? How far are you trying to drag me down during such a fragile time?

“What… do you mean, Mr. Sardieu?”

“There are things I want to ask, and things I need to answer.”

The mention of wanting to ask something made her apprehensive. However, when he said there were things he needed to answer, it hit a chord that she couldn’t ignore. Anais looked up at him, her lips tightly pressed. He still spoke in a serious and weighty manner, devoid of his usual lightness or gentleness.

“It will not be a fruitless conversation. I promise.”

? ? ?

“Celine Châtelier… … !”

Slamming the table upon which the map lay, Catherine de Basbourg uttered the name that made her teeth gnash at the mere thought of it.

The participation of the Wisteria army was expected. Kladiev’s army left one officer and his company behind, using them as a means of communication, and demanded control of the entire Eastern Front in exchange. Catherine had accepted this condition.

As expected, the place the Wisteria army was headed was the Eastern Front, where the Kladiev army was mercilessly pushing back the government forces. It was unexpected that there were still mages in Wisteria capable of casting large-scale attack spells, but Catherine decided to focus less on that, especially since they had received assurances that they would take over the entire front.

The problem was the Western Front, which was fully occupied by the Basbourg Resistance. On the same day that the Kladiev army was defeated in the Battle of the Eastern Front due to the unexpected Wisteria Army, the Basbourg resistance army also suffered a devastating defeat in the west by the government forces led by Celine Châtelier.

Unlike Catherine de Basbourg, who sits guarding the fort instead of going to the battlefield and commands the resistance forces on the Western Front, Celine Châtelier is the supreme commander of the government forces who came down to Basbourg. Unfortunately, it happened to be on that day, and the morale of the resistance, having already experienced two defeats in quick succession, had taken a heavy blow.

Catherine de Basbourg was flabbergasted. If she looked back to the starting point, just the fact that she was opposing someone of Celine Châtelier’s rank left her dumbfounded.

Celine Châtelier was Catherine de Basbourg’s junior at the military academy. The military academy in Léans had a high ratio of nobility, and the relatively few bourgeois cadets or commoner scholarship students were often treated as servants or toys to be harassed by the nobility. At the time when Catherine de Basbourg was a senior at the Léans Military Academy, Celine Châtelier was two years her junior and entered the academy at the top of her class.

Celine Châtelier, the daughter of a poor shoemaker, received a scholarship from the Bernard Education Foundation to cover the high tuition of the military academy. Unfortunately, in the year she entered the academy, not only was she the only commoner scholarship student in her year, but she was the only one among all the students in the academy. In other words, she was the perfect prey for the noble students, who were already starving for someone to play with.

At the time, Catherine, who maintained the top rank every semester and was at the apex of the academy’s hierarchy, declared that she would make Celine Châtele her plaything. To put it differently, if Céline could just manage to please Catherine somewhat, she could have at least received some protection from the other students. Unfortunately, such a thing didn’t occur.

The bitter connection between Catherine de Basbourg and Céline Châtele began with a causal order one day, telling Céline to clean her uniform. Céline, who had been peering at the uniform Catherine had thrown onto the desk and mumbled to herself, simply threw it out of the window. Then, with an audacious expression, she replied that she had only cleaned it up since the desk was dirty.

Of course, Catherine was angry, and her anger at the time was equal to the anger of the entire military academy. Celine Châtelier was thoroughly isolated within a month of her admission and she became the target of relentless bullying. It was the result of Catherine’s intervention from behind the scenes.

If the story ended with the shoemaker’s daughter humbly accepting her miserable fate as a punching bag for the nobility, or if she had eventually kneeled in front of Catherine, apologizing for her actions, Catherine might have been satisfied enough to erase Céline’s name from her memory. However, the story didn’t unfold that way.

Celine Châtelier didn’t seem particularly distraught about her isolation, nor did she quietly endure the bullying. However, she also didn’t directly confront the noble students or engage in a one-on-one battle against overwhelming odds. Throwing Catherine’s uniform out of the window had almost been a way of displaying her personality, an act of defiance, as if to say, “Here’s a glimpse of my character before I go.”

From that point on, Celine Châtelier used very clever methods to escape the bullying of the noble students or turn the tables on them twice as hard.