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Chapter 877  Love And Lies 

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Sprawled out on Irene\'s front lawn, the dazzle and pop of fifteen different fireworks at once was probably the alarm clock we all needed to snap out of the stupor.

The night sky was a mesmerizing show of light pollution loud and bright enough to wake any deep-sleeping phoenix from their slumber.

There were a couple of families out barbecuing, noise-making, and contributing their own supplemental supply of gunpowder toward lighting up the deep dark.

Barely anyone had noticed us, and the teensy few that did do a double take only did so to ponder precisely how inebriated they must be to hallucinate that one girl in the middle, spinning and spreading her arms out to the open air, inexplicably on fire.

Eh, probably a trick of the light, or the night. Whichever one sounds more sensible.

"Pretty rowdy bunch this year," Ria shouted over a barrage of blue sparks. "Nothing like a bit of apocalyptical rain to get you appreciating what you currently have, huh?"

Up on her tiptoes, she wobbled and swayed about… kind of looking as if she was trying to get a better view of the sky, and judging by the look in her eyes, she wasn\'t at all wowed by what she was seeing.

"Still falling a bit short of my standards though," she said, frowning, before glancing right at me, and perking back up. "Tell you what - passed by an even bigger showcase that\'s gonna be happening at the park while I was out grocery shopping. Heard they\'ll be firing even bigger and bolder ones \'till the sun comes up. Race you there?"

"Race?" I asked. "What do you mean race - ?"

Before I could finish, the literal sun came blazing and scorching my poor retinas, and then with what little remained of my eyesight, I saw a pair of golden wings take to the skies as the shrill urging squawk of \'get your ass moving\' translated from bird speak faded into the sparkling rainbow night.

So hyper and impulsive… girl would have made a better chipmunk than bird, honestly.

"Here," out of nowhere, the blurry glint of car keys zipped across the air, plopping in my hands only out of sheer luck and pulled joints. "Can you drive us?"

When I looked, Irene was already swinging open the passenger side; I expected her to be a little annoyed at this impromptu goose chase across town, but only complete deep somberness stared back at me from over the roof of her car.

I knew better than to play twenty questions, and just silently got in the car right after her, firing up the engine and pressing my foot against the pedal all the way out of her driveway and beyond.

It was quiet for a while, nothing but the continuous crackles of the new year and the occasional red-green-blue glows ebbing in and out, tinting the color of the windows.

On a junction turning left, kept rumbling in place by a particularly long red light was when Irene gave another sign of life again - slumping her head against my shoulder with a long sigh.

Guess this is the cue for the caring boyfriend to finally step in.

"Which part, hm?" I asked, keeping my voice soft and my gaze even softer. "Was it being treated as a lab experiment her whole childhood, or the reveal that no one in her actually loved and cared for her in the first place?"

Staring forward, the rimmed red of the stoplight had Irene\'s eyes flushed in a deep crimson gloom.

"Neither," Irene muttered, her tone completely empty of the night\'s festive air. "It\'s not anything that she\'s said."

"A tragic story like hers and you\'re telling me it didn\'t get to you at all?"

"It\'s what she hasn\'t said yet," she went on to clarify. "Everything else that I\'ve never gotten to know, to hear. Thousands of years of living, and all she\'s given us tonight is a brief snippet of it all. And as you can surmise from those few years alone, it hasn\'t been easy living. So then how about the rest of her life?"

The light ahead flashed green, and with a slight jolt, I sped us off again, that question she posed joining the muted ambiance of explosion and light, hanging between us like an extra passenger making a ruckus in the backseat.

Irene slumped the other way, further away.

"I used to hate her."

I gave her a look, a small fleeting second\'s glance, but I didn\'t say anything back.

Not yet anyway.

"The Churches. When they found out my father was taking care of me, they killed him. After he died, I wanted someone to blame, anyonebto blame. In my rage and in my despair, I chose her. Or her apathy to be more precise."

"Apathy?"

"It\'s no secret to me why my father would visit her from time to time in her forest. Being young, you tend to like sneaking yourself into conversations that don\'t involve you, so I knew - I knew my father would plead to her endlessly to help deal with Terestra, and I knew she would deny him every single time. They would go on and on over and over again. He\'d give her plenty of reasons why she should, some of them trite, most more than compelling… but no matter what he tried, what he said, it didn\'t stop her from caring any less about any of it."

I drove us slow, like way-below-the-speed-limit slow. It was clear as day to me that Irene had been bottling all this up for too long, so whatever she wanted to say now, I wanted to make sure she at least gets to say it all.

"I didn\'t get it. I always wondered how someone so full of life could care so little about it. She\'d play with me, hug me, and when she heard I fell ill once - she left her forest to supervise me at our place. But for everything else, for the world itself? It was the one thing I never understood about her. Then dad died, and I couldn\'t help but place the blame on her. If only she did something, if she had only gotten off her ass when I ran to her for help… from that day onwards, I abhorred her."

I let out a quiet grunt, letting her know that I heard her, that I understood. From the window, I saw her reflection blink long and had.

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"I\'m not naive. I grew out of it eventually - realized that she wasn\'t any way to blame for my father\'s death. Tragedies happen, like it or not, death is natural," slowly her eyes fluttered back open, and through another flash of light tinting the windows, her expression was shaded in an even deeper red. "But with how she talks, the way she acts, she makes it seem like, to her, death is somehow even less than that."

"Her attitude," I said, inching to a halt at another stoplight. "I know, but you know how it is. She hides behind a shield of snark, but deep down she - "

"It\'s not just a shield," Irene interjected. "If it were, she\'d have stayed - she wouldn\'t have chosen to stay asleep if she actually cared, she wouldn\'t have left us to deal with the Blight."

"She\'s hurting."

"She\'s hurting, and she also doesn\'t care," came her retort. "Not back then, not now, and not never. I realized that about her. It\'s why I\'ve still always kept her at arm\'s reach from me. She can claim to love me all she wants, call me her daughter and care for me as one… she can even believe it herself too. But I know when it comes down to it, and it does come down to it… she\'d absolutely refuse to stay awake a single minute more than she has to."

"Irene…"

"And I still didn\'t get why," she went on. "I told her I did. I pretended I did. But after tonight, with all she\'s said and all she hasn\'t," she paused briefly, breathing deeply. "I\'m slowly starting to."

The stoplight went green a couple of seconds ago, but it was the impatient honk of the car behind us that finally had me slamming on the gas.

We jerked and swayed along the road for a moment, before I eased us back to a more comfortable pace. The driver sped past us and I waved him off with my sincerest apologies. Irene gaze locked with mine as I turned back to the dashboard, and once more, I felt my cue to chime in again.

"And the reason you\'re hung up on this…" I said slowly. "It\'s because, unlike her, you care, don\'t you?"

"I want to hate her," Irene immediately answered. "Things would be easier if I could just hate her. But I can\'t, much like she did with her father before - I can\'t help but believe in her lies."

"And just what if she isn\'t lying?"

"I don\'t know if that\'s any better…" Irene sighed out, swaying her head in a feeble shake. "Because if she\'s this good at acting

 like she doesn\'t care about anything, then how do I know that she\'s ever cared at all?"