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Eugeo tossed and turned, stirring in his sleep for what felt like the millionth time that night. Every time he closed his eyes he was haunted by visions of her, her words echoing in his ears, taunting him while he tried to block it out.
He woke with a start, his eyes flying open while he choked on a voiceless scream. He was in bed, Kazuto and Asuna were lying next to him, the door was shut and the curtains were closed. He was safe, there was no way the Administrator could reach him here in the real world - so why was he so terrified that she would?
Glancing over to his partners, still sleeping soundly, Eugeo climbed out of bed, pulling the covers back over Kazuto’s shoulders before he slowly crept out of the room, shutting the door behind him. He couldn’t get back to sleep, it wasn’t worth even trying. The wall clock in the hallway read 1:37AM, he’d managed at least four hours of sleep so he couldn’t complain. It was more than he usually got.
He walked to their small kitchen, dragging his feet along the floor as he went. A glass of cold water would make him feel better. He could barely manage to pour it, cursing how his hands shook, and he nearly spilled it down his chin when he went to take a sip.
He was grateful to RATH for how lifelike they’d made his body - he couldn’t tell the difference between a “real” human body and his own - but at times like this, he wished they hadn’t been so thorough. His fluctlight was more than capable of replicating human emotions, just as it had worked in the Underworld, the downside of that being the fact that he was capable of having PTSD attacks even more terrifying than he’d been able to back then - somehow they were even more confronting now, despite knowing the threats were long gone.
“Eugeo?”
Asuna poked her head around the doorframe, whispering into the still darkness. Eugeo frowned when he saw her, dropping his head in shame. She was the last person he wanted to see him like this.
“I’m fine,” he lied, “Just had a sore throat and needed a glass of water,”
Asuna frowned, “Eugeo, I wasn’t asleep back there. You kept moving around… like you were having a nightmare again.”
“It’s nothing,” Eugeo refused to look her in the eye, “You and Kazuto deal with these things enough, I’ll be fine on my own.”
Asuna shook her head, walking over to him with her arms out. He didn’t know why, but he could never resist Asuna’s hugs. They were always so warm and comforting, Kazuto had once compared them to a fluffy blanket and Eugeo had to agree. So, cautiously, he let her wrap her arms around him, hugging him close to her while he took a deep breath.
Then the tears started, and he couldn’t seem to stop them.
“It’s okay, you can cry as much as you need to,” Asuna soothed, rubbing her hands on Eugeo’s back while he sobbed against her shoulder. He hated being like this, hated that his partners were forced to see him like this. If Kazuto came into the kitchen too, Eugeo might’ve died of shame.
“I don’t know why she’s still bothering me,” Eugeo sobbed, “I’m safe, you’ve all done more than enough to reassure me of that. Why do I still wake up like this? Why won’t she leave me alone?”
Asuna pulled him closer, her arms unintentionally tightening around him as a shiver ran down her spine, his words hitting close to home and his pleas all too familiar.
“Eugeo,” Asuna’s voice took on the soft tone it did so often when she spoke to him, “Did… Did Kazuto ever tell you about what happened to me after Sword Art Online had ended?”
Eugeo noticed the way she inhaled shakily after her sentence and he felt his blood run cold. He didn’t know the full story and Kazuto refused to say anything more than a few basic things, like the fact Asuna had been trapped in another game and he’d had to find her. But… there were other things he’d picked up on too, like how Asuna never liked when one of them let their hands linger too long on her waist, or how her breath caught in her throat every time a certain kind of crime was reported on the nightly news.
Eugeo shook his head slowly, “He said it wasn’t his story to tell. I think I know what happened, though,”
“Oh?”
“Asuna, were you…”
He didn’t want to say the word. There were a lot of reasons he refused to say it about himself, the biggest being he felt like he had no right to use that label for his own experience, no matter how many times he was assured of the fact he could. But for Asuna, using the word felt like it might’ve shattered her. He’d seen how fragile she still was, how Kazuto still tiptoed around the subject, how he frantically changed the TV channel when those news reports came, how the pair of them occasionally had conversations where they cursed a man Eugeo had never heard of before.
Asuna’s head fell until her forehead was resting against Eugeo’s shoulder. They stayed like that for a while, holding each other in their kitchen in deafening silence, neither of them quite ready to speak yet. The word, still left unsaid, weighed heavy in the air and both of them swallowed hard, like the word threatened to gag them if they kept refusing to say it.
Eugeo started trembling in Asuna’s arms, new tears rolling down his cheeks while he wondered just how much longer this pain was supposed to last. If Asuna, a woman stronger than any integrity knight he’d ever known of, still felt haunted by her experience, how was he supposed to move on from his?
Then the fear turned to self-loathing in an instant, words filling his brain like poison. Did he really have a right to be consoled like this when it was his own lack of willpower that got him in this mess in the first place? Did he really deserve Asuna’s empathy for what happened?
As if she could tell where his thoughts were taking him, Asuna stepped back, holding Eugeo’s hand and gently tugging him towards the doorway, “C’mon, I don’t think Kazuto would mind if we took a bath. I think it might help you, they seem to help me a lot when I’m like this.”
She led him to the bathroom, flipping the light switch and letting go of his hand so she could start the bath. She collected a few small bottles of bath salts from the shelf Kazuto had made them, sprinkling a generous pinch of each of them into the bath before replacing them on the shelf with a satisfied hum.
She instructed him to get undressed, leaving the room so he could have a little privacy. Eugeo gave her a weak smile, waiting until he heard her footsteps disappear into another room before he took off the t-shirt he’d been sleeping in and his boxer shorts. Once he’d kicked his clothing into a pile in the corner of the room, he looked over his shoulder - paranoia still playing on his mind - before he stepped into the bath, sinking into the water.
When they’d first decided to move in together two months earlier, Asuna had been adamant on one thing and one thing only - she wanted a large bathtub. Somehow they’d managed to find a decent enough apartment that wasn’t too big or too cramped for a fair price, with a bathroom Asuna instantly fell in love with.
He always wondered why she seemed to disappear in the middle of the night, the nights he’d wake up to the sound of running water and occasionally muffled cries. Some nights Kazuto got up to take care of her, others he had to stay in bed with Eugeo, pain and guilt evident on his face, while Asuna broke down and begged not to be touched.
Eventually, Asuna came back with two pairs of fluffy pyjamas tucked under her arm. She gently pushed the door open, calling ou to Eugeo to ask if it was okay to come in. When he told her it was fine, she stepped inside, closing the door behind her and setting the pyjamas down by the side of the bath.
Then she knelt down on the floor beside the bath, just behind Eugeo. He leant his head back against her, his lower lip quivering. This wasn’t fair to her. It was the middle of the night and here she was looking after him. She’d gone out of her way to run him a bath, to get him a fresh change of clothes, to use the expensive bath salts she yelled at Kazuto for wasting. All because he was afraid of the memories he still had of a woman who could never reach him again.
“There’s nothing to feel bad about, Eugeo,” she soothed, running her fingers through his hair gently, “None of this is your fault. Memories can be painful, especially these kinds. Believe me, I know firsthand…”
“What happened?” Eugeo asked, then bit his tongue. Why did he ask that? It was obvious enough that he could figure out the general idea, why should Asuna have to dig through her worst trauma just to satiate his curiosity?
“It was in Alfheim Online,” she recalled, though her voice seemed like she was someplace distant, trapped in her memories as much as he was, “After Kirito cleared Sword Art Online, I thought I would have died or woken up in the real world. But I woke up in a different game instead, I couldn’t log out of it no matter how hard I tried. I spent so long waiting and praying that Kazuto would come and save me.”
Eugeo felt Asuna’s breath start to quicken. Unable to think of anything else to do, he reached up a hand and placed it on her cheek, smiling gently at her when she leant into his touch. At least it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, at least she was still okay with him touching her.
She continued with caution, “I was held in the game by a man named Nobuyuki Sugou. He worked for my parents’ company and…” she swallowed, “he was my fiance. Arranged, obviously, I hated him since I was a kid. He saw an opportunity to marry me while I was still comatose and unable to object, so he took it. In this world, he pretended to be concerned for me, but in Alfheim… it was torture. Every day was a living hell. He constantly taunted me and threatened me, daring me to see how long I could hold out.”
“I’m so sorry,” Eugeo mumbled. He didn’t know what else to say. When he looked up at Asuna, she seemed off, a combination of exhaustion and lingering resentment still evident on her face. This was one of the wounds that never really healed, maybe she didn’t want it to.
“The day Kazuto found me in the game, Sugou disabled a setting within the game that allowed players to…” she trailed off, giving Eugeo a look that said she wanted him to take the hint, “In front of Kirito, he… I tried to hold on… I tried so hard to be strong and it wasn’t enough… I failed him, I failed Kazuto…”
They both went quiet again. A tear rolled down Asuna’s cheek, landing on Eugeo’s shoulder. Somehow, the tiny droplet of her tear felt sharper than any sword he’d ever been cut by. If Asuna hadn’t been able to move on, what kind of chance did he stand? Asuna, the warrior who practically commanded armies with a single look. Asuna, the woman who effortlessly balanced the weight of the world on her shoulders every day for the better part of two years, then continued even after that.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Eugeo said quietly, “You knew that Kazuto would save you. You held on for as long as you could, didn’t you? So how could you have failed? He managed to get to you, right? He wouldn’t want you to blame yourself for it.”
Asuna gently kissed the top of Eugeo’s head, “You really should start listening to your own advice.”
“For me it was different,” he shrugged.
Unconvinced, Asuna stood up moving her hand to undo the clasp of her bra, asking Eugeo to close his eyes while she got into the bath. He did as he was told, keeping his eyes closed while he heard the sound of fabric - presumably Asuna’s nightgown and underwear - dropping to the floor.
“Don’t look or I’ll splash you,” she warned as she stepped into the bath next to him, sitting down and sighing blissfully as the warm water enveloped her figure, “Okay… you can open your eyes now.”
No matter how many times they’d seen each other bare, Eugeo always felt embarrassed about it. But… this time was different. This time he was hardly focused on either of their states of dress, instead choosing to focus on the fact Asuna was still going out of her way to comfort him, letting herself be vulnerable, physically and emotionally, after revealing her biggest trauma.
“How about you, do you think talking about it might help?” Asuna looked at him with a comforting warmth, absentmindedly pulling water over her arms and shoulders while she tried to keep herself grounded.
Eugeo looked down, too guilty-ridden to meet her eye, “Like I said, what happened to me was different. Kirito and I had made it to the Central Cathedral and we met a girl there, her name was Cardinal. She explained a great deal to us and gave me the explicit instruction to take a dagger and… kill the administrator before she could do any more harm to the Underworld.”
His hands shook under the water and Asuna tentatively held his in her own, “If it’s too much for you, you don’t have to tell me anything.”
“I think finally talking about it might help, especially if it’s you,” Eugeo said, voice anxious yet grateful, “I was at her bed, I had the dagger in my hand, but… I couldn’t do it. I was too weak to strike her and she woke up. She… She was so… Her voice, I couldn’t understand that a woman so delicate could have been the one causing the Underworld so much anguish.”
His mind travelled back to that fateful day, and, leaning against Asuna in the warm water, Eugeo opened the wound he was still too afraid to touch. Cautiously, with Asuna still holding his hands and soothing him when it got too much.
He told her everything. The way the Administrator had used his own insecurities against him, how he felt he’d betrayed Kirito and Alice’s years of unconditional love, the way he never knew how to admit to himself that he didn’t think he was enough to deserve them. He told her how that woman had crawled inside his head, broke his mind, fragment by fragment, then devoured him whole, his hands still clenched in fists as he described the moment she sealed his fate.
“It was only that Kirito was able to break through whatever spell she’d put me under, without him I wouldn’t be here,” he said quietly, shying away from Asuna’s gentle touches as she brushed his hair from his face, “It was all my fault. I gave in. I just wasn’t strong enough. I have no right for you to comfort me like this, especially not after the story you just opened up to me about.”
How many times had Asuna broken down like this and wished for someone to soothe her the same way she was doing for him now? How many times had she woken Kazuto in the middle of the night to provide her with comfort and some kind of reassurance of safety?
“I’m sorry you went through that,” Asuna’s voice was soft, gently weaving her words together like a comforting blanket around his shoulders, “You didn’t deserve that. You think you weren’t strong enough, but the fact you’re alive only proves to me how strong you really are. There’s a lot of strength in living after something happened to you.”
Eugeo knew what she was doing. Her words reached his ears, but they felt more like she was trying to make herself understand them. In a way, her words felt like an apology to herself.
“Asuna… does it ever really get better?”
“No,” she said bluntly, then her tone softened again, “I don’t think that better is the right word for it. You just get used to it. The nightmares start to feel repetitive and, eventually, you’ve relived the memories so often that you learn how to avoid them. You learn when to turn off the news and when to change the subject of conversations. You recognise the build-up in gross movies and TV shows because you’ve lived through it and it’s enough to make you watch something else.”
“That doesn’t really answer the question-”
“Because I can’t answer the question,” Asuna shook her head as if she was in disbelief and Eugeo was acutely aware of just how much Asuna hadn’t moved on from back then, “It gets better in the sense that I can avoid thinking about it and pretend it never happened. But I’m not any better than I was back then. I can run from it, but that isn’t healing.”
For just a moment, Eugeo was allowed to see beneath the facade Asuna maintained all the time. There, in the stillness of the night, Eugeo was granted permission to see Asuna in her most raw, vulnerable state. The only time she openly admitted that she hadn’t healed and Eugeo wondered if it was possible that they ever could.
“Eugeo, you are so much stronger than you give yourself credit for. Opening up like this was brave, facing it all again was brave. You still being here, fighting and trying to get better is brave. This is scary and nothing that anybody says can make it less terrifying. But you’re not alone. Kazuto and I, all our friends, we’re all here for you. You never have to take on any part of this by yourself.”
“Yeah, we’re here for you,” Kazuto’s voice suddenly sounded at the door, making Eugeo and Asuna both jump. Asuna scolded him for sneaking in on them while they were bathing and Kazuto sheepishly apologised, scratching the back of his head and saying he’d overheard part of their conversation and wanted to check on them.
“How much did you hear?” Eugeo asked, self-conscious.
“I didn’t hear everything, just Asuna saying you were brave. I think I know what you two are talking about, though. Are you okay?”
Without waiting for a response, Kazuto walked to the side of the bath and sat down, cupping water in his hands and gently dipping the ends of Asuna’s hair into it while she leant back into his hands.
Eugeo hesitated. Was he okay? Was he really okay? Had he ever been okay since he was a kid? Sure, he had the two most loving partners he could have asked for, who never once gave him room to question his value in their lives, a group of friends who practically smothered him with love and praise - but beneath all of that, could he truly say that he felt okay about anything else?
“I think I will be,” he said finally, watching as Kazuto combed shampoo through Asuna’s long hair, “But… I think I want to start therapy.”
Kazuto cast him a curious glance, “I’ll talk to Rinko about it, I’m sure she’ll have an idea of who you could talk to. You could try talking to Asuna’s therapist, she specialises in that sort of thing. I just wonder if she’d take an AI patient…”
“We’ll find someone,” Asuna assured Eugeo, then dipped her head under the water to watch the copious amount of product Kazuto had used out of her hair.
“C’mere, I still have some leftover.” Kazuto scooted behind Eugeo, starting to work the shampoo through his blond hair and making a comment that he was still amazed by how life-like it felt.
“I’m jealous of how soft it is,” Asuna remarked, running her fingers through his hair before she leant to kiss the tip of his nose.
Eugeo blushed, “You’re both too kind to me.”
“Nonsense, this is what being in love with someone is supposed to feel like,” Kazuto dipped his head down to kiss Eugeo’s lips, “We’ll show you how it’s meant to feel every single day, I swear.”
Eugeo smiled at them, relaxing back into the water until he was submerged to his chin. This was the kind of love he deserved. The kind of love where, no matter how deep the scars that ran through his mind were, he was loved as a whole, complete human being. The kind of love where monsters that clawed through his ribcage didn’t scare away the chance of finding love, it just strengthened his own resolve - his own personal determination to find peace for himself.
And… to find peace for them, too, he thought lovingly as he watched Asuna flick droplets of water at their boyfriend, while Kazuto attempted to retaliate by tickling her shoulder blades. These two were the most precious people in his life, they stood by him unconditionally. It was moments like this between the three of them, when he gazed on them with such affection, that he wondered if finding comfort and peace was possible for him after all.
“H-hey, Kazuto stop splashing us! The water’s getting cold!” Eugeo laughed as he held his arms up to block a handful of water being thrown at him.
“Then you should both get out and come to bed,” Kazuto motioned his head back towards the door, “We’ll watch a movie in bed, that way if we fall back to sleep it doesn’t matter.”
“Can I pick the movie?”
“You got to pick last time!”
“I never get to pick!”
“Because you always make us watch bad horror movies!”
“It’s funny to see you two react to them!”
“Eugeo, hurry to the bedroom and pick something before Kazuto can!” Asuna laughed, holding onto Kazuto’s arm to keep him from chasing after him.
“Your hair’s still wet, don’t lay on the pillows!” Kazuto called out, but it was too late and Eugeo had already taken off towards their bedroom, still buttoning up his pyjama shirt and laughing the entire way.
And, in those precious moments, Eugeo swore that peace wasn’t that unattainable for the three of them after all.