. . .
"I know you've lost someone, and it hurts. You may have lost them suddenly, unexpectedly. Or perhaps you began losing pieces of them until one day, there was nothing left. You may have known them all your life or you may have barely known them at all. Either way, it is irrelevant — you cannot control the depth of a wound another soul inflicts upon you."
― Lang Leav
. . .
At the look on her face, Rei sighed.
He wouldn't be really surprised if Proserpina thinks he's messing with her right now. But he wouldn't stoop that low to outright lie to her face... not now when she had waited and given him the chance to give her answers.
The truth.
That was his final gift.
That was what he had promised her.
"...Hey. Did you know? Even though you never get to know Autumn in person, you still managed to act so much like her sometimes," Rei tells her, his voice coming out wistfully, suddenly feeling like a tremendous weight was being lifted off from his shoulders now that he finally get to say it out in the open like this.
While she never got most of her mother's looks (sadly, those features she possessed were major contributions from the god of underworld's genes), Rei still likes to think that Winters Veil has gotten her mother's smile instead.
It was something that has always stuck with him the moment they first met on that fateful day so many years ago—although Rei honestly doubted whether Proserpina even has the capacity to remember that memory herself since she was practically a toddler back then—before the fire; before she became an immortal goddess... and before the bloody mess that was the Righteous Purge.
Because the moment Rei saw Autumn's gentle smile on her daughter's precious little face, he had almost bursted into tears as he scooped her up into a hug right then and there, much to her child's confusion.
Proserpina blinks, again.
And Rei thinks something so simple shouldn't hurt him like this so much because he knows perfectly well that while she started out as a demigod like him, she wasn't even remotely human anymore... no matter how much she was still prone to common human gestures such as these more often than not, either to put the other humans around her at ease or to appear more human for her own peace of mind.
He thinks perhaps it was both.
It hurts... because the life Proserpina has chosen to live isn't the kind of life that Autumn would have wanted for her daughter. The Autumn he knows would have fought tooth and nail just for her child to live normally if she had her way. If she had been here.
If she had been alive.
"Do I look like her?" Proserpina suddenly asks.
Rei laughs at that, a dry sobbing sort of sound.
"HA!" he says—and leaves it at that.
She really doesn't, to be honest.
Such a shame...
Proserpina hums in acknowledgment.
And Rei has absolutely no idea what Proserpina thinks she's acknowledging while she crosses her arms for a moment, looks away and stares up to the unmoving clouds past the Izanagi Shrine, as if thinking, "...how did she die?"
"What?"
"How did my mother die?"
Gods, this is really it.
Rei doesn't answer for a moment, couldn't bring himself to as he silently crouches down to pluck a single higanbana that had suddenly bloomed right next to the shrine's steps.
Idly twirling it in his hand, he stares at the sickeningly red color of its spindly petals and tries not to think of the bloodbath that Autumn's hospital room has become, the markings burning red on her daughter's bleeding skin when he finally managed to get there (even though it was late too late he was always too late) but Proserpina deserves to know the truth.
"...Childbirth."
Her shoulders minutely rises up as she suddenly takes a sharp, backward step, her mouth opening slightly in what seemed to be an aborted gasp.
But no sound came out of her.
In fact, Rei thinks she might as well have stopped breathing.
"I wasn't there the moment she... passed away so I can't be really sure how that happened, I only know what Warren has told me," Rei was quick to tell her when he catches—sees the way her hands trembling before they clenched into tight fists, gripping her elbows tight as if to steady herself, "But when I asked around, that's also what the doctors claimed."
"...There's more to it, is there?"
Yup. Not even the fucking tip of the iceberg, he thought, nodding sharply at her, suddenly finding himself at a loss. That perceptiveness of her's could be such a curse more than it was worth sometimes.
Rei swallows, uneasily.
He still feels that lump lodged within his throat.
"Warren told me that the labor had lasted for hours, that it had taken so long the medical staff were seconds away from performing a C-section just to be done with it, but..."
"Did she die while giving birth to me?"
Rei shook his head at her quickly, "No. Your mother was awake during that and even after you were born. Sure, she was bone tired, but—" his breath hitched, "...she was alive. Warren said Autumn even demanded to hold you. She wanted to hold you."
"Then... h-how...?"
...Where it all went wrong?
That was something he wanted to know too.
"Your mother managed to call you 'Winter' before s-she... she..." Rei trails off with a shaky, wistful smile that he forcefully kept plastered on his face, despite the way he can feel his eyes watering, desperately kept his feet rooted to the ground lest he toppled over the shrine steps, the flower of the heavens crumbling in his grasp as he forces himself to finish what he started because he—gods damn it, he promised to tell her the truth and he will see this promise through.
"Then why did she die?" Proserpina demanded, and there was some sort of hysteria laced in her voice now, "She survived, didn't she? She even gave me a name! So how could my mother die after all t—?!"
"You."
The sound of her breath hitching was unmistakable.
"...what?"
"The medical files claimed that Autumn Veil's death was due to childbirth. A heart attack, to be specific but..." and Rei has never hated himself for seriously being the only one left to tell her this (a part of him, much to his shame, suddenly finds himself hating Warren and Summer—and even Autumn and Hades too—for leaving such an awful responsibility to him), but someone has to let her know the truth, no matter how painful it would be.
Proserpina's eyes desperately searched for something in his face, one that Rei's not sure he could even give her, because she was searching for a lie, some sort of deception that his words doesn't even possess.
She looked like she wanted him to stop talking but at the same time, couldn't bring herself to as her eyes glistened with the clear promise of tears while Rei took in another shuddering breath in a useless bid to compose himself, feels the steady stream of his own cold tears running down his face instead.
"The moment your mother heard your first cries, Winters," Rei began, already hating himself all the more for this, "... her heart, for some reason, it suddenly stopped."
