I Start with a Bad Hand!

It was late at night, an unexpected visit. His neat face was a mess with rainwater.

“I can’t accept this.”

The droplets falling from his hair lightly tickled my cheek. He hesitated as if asking for my permission, then followed my retreating steps into the room.

“This isn’t something you need to accept.”

Little puddles formed in the wake of his footsteps. His eyes, reddened, also brimmed with water. Struggling to steady his voice that was becoming choked, I looked him straight in the eyes.

“…Is there really no way I can change your mind?”

“No.”

Ha, my response was so resolute that, as if in disbelief, he roughly swept back his wet hair. The swollen skin around his revealed forehead was visible.

I turned away from him. If I kept looking into his eyes, the resolve I had hardened seemed like it would soften and follow him.

‘I mustn’t.’

As I averted my gaze, he entered the dormitory with anxious steps. Whether because of the rain or his anger, although his voice trembled, his footsteps were firm.

“Even if I never… never see you again, is it too much to wish for us to just live happily somewhere?”

“Don’t act like a child. No matter what you say, my decision remains the same. I’ve explained the reasons why it must be so. If you still can’t understand… it doesn’t matter. Because from the beginning, I didn’t consider….”

Damn, my throat was blocked and my voice barely came out.

“…your feelings.”

Frozen by his words, we both remained silent for a long time. The sound of the rain continued incessantly, and after a while, he finally spoke.

“Reckless.”

“…What?”

His eyes, reddened, were filled with resentment.

‘This is bad.’

This might really make me want to hold onto him. As I instinctively took a step back, he grabbed my hand urgently.

“If that’s how you felt, you shouldn’t have barged into my life.”

I looked at the hand he had grabbed and slowly pulled away. But I couldn’t step back. His eyes looked so sorrowful it was suffocating, the tears falling seemed to literally take my breath away, and I could no longer distance myself from him.

“If you were going to disappear, you shouldn’t have made me want to keep living because of you.”

His voice cracked, unrestrained, as he pressed his forehead against my shoulder. The shoulder that was becoming damp felt warm with the moisture. Unable to console him, unable to stroke his trembling back, I felt the warmth leaning on my shoulder and thought.

‘Where did it all go wrong.’

Just slightly below the median, my life, which had always comfortably nestled within the ‘ordinary’ range of the spectrum, began to collapse when I slipped on the office stairs.

It felt shattered.

Lying sprawled on the cold floor, I quietly assessed my condition.

It definitely seemed shattered.

Indeed, if one falls down the stairs like that, it’s likely something would be utterly destroyed…

As I endured pain so severe I couldn’t even groan, I felt my consciousness slowly fading away.

The screams from afar gradually diminished, much like my consciousness.

***

As I slightly opened my eyes to the sound of a pen scratching on paper, I saw an elderly foreign man scribbling something next to me. Even with a global mindset, this foreigner, not wearing a gown, didn’t seem like an emergency room doctor.

“Crazy company… Shouldn’t they have called 119 instead of bringing me here?”

Did our company even have foreign employees? I wondered as I slowly got up. Noticing I was awake, the elderly foreigner’s expression hardened.

“Miss Dietrich, are you… all right?”

Dietrich… Miss…?

It was an unbelievably awkward honorific flowing fluently from the mouth of the unfamiliar foreigner. Yet strangely, the name didn’t feel unfamiliar.

As I tried to understand the situation, looking around, a middle-aged foreign couple who seemed to be a couple stood pale-faced looking at me.

‘Foreigners… Buyers have discovered me?’

As I tried to get out of bed, pain excruciatingly shot through my left leg again.

“Dietrich, be careful! Your leg…”

The middle-aged woman, unable to finish her sentence, gasped for breath, and I realized something unbelievable had happened to me.

Could it be… that… Dietrich?

I had been enjoying a novel recently—a fairly readable academy school romance novel that had provided me with some vicarious satisfaction since I hadn’t felt much joy during my school years from adolescence to university graduation. While reading it with a light heart, there was a character in the novel who became a hindrance to enjoying the campus life in the story.

Her name was Dietrich. The very villainess I had become in the novel.

In the early stages of the novel, it was ambiguous to even call Dietrich a villain. She didn’t directly harm the protagonist, Roxanne, but merely hovered around her from a step back.

Somewhat irritating and gloomy, but not quite definitive. However, from the middle of the novel, continuous misfortunes befell Dietrich, and eventually, she boarded the express train to villainy.

One day, Dietrich, claiming that ‘she took everything from her’, sneaked into Roxanne’s dormitory to harm her but was barely thwarted by a member of the duke’s household. Eventually, Dietrich became the main villain…

The maid who had helped her enter the duke’s dormitory committed suicide by poison, and Dietrich, by throwing herself from the academy, brought an end to her role in the novel.

What began as a refreshing romance fantasy ended in a brutal school story with the first part, leaving me with a heart gone cold, unable to grasp my emotions, and I eventually gave up on the novel.

It wasn’t merely the fact that someone in the novel had died that saddened me, but rather the detailed process leading up to Dietrich’s suicide, which was more than just the downfall of a villainess; it was heart-wrenching.

Tricked by the orphanage director into being registered as the lost daughter of the duke, Dietrich, who bore no resemblance to the duke’s people, subtly experienced discrimination. Then, after the real duchess Roxanne appeared, she was miserably expelled. She spent her time at the academy without being able to mingle with anyone.

And at just 18 years old, she died a lonely death by suicide.

“Did she really deserve to die for what she did?”

I couldn’t accept this development, scrolling up and down several times. It seemed an excessively harsh fate just to die like this. Yet, the characters in the novel seemed quite satisfied with Dietrich’s death.

Upon learning of Dietrich’s death, Roxanne felt as though the nightmare that had haunted her was finally over. However, on rainy days, she tearfully says she can still hear the sound of Dietrich, limping with her injured leg, approaching her. Even in death, she is remembered as a gloomy and unpleasant character.

But feeling pity for a character in a novel doesn’t mean I wanted to live Dietrich’s life.

So in other words, with long black hair, grey-blue eyes, and a somewhat sinister expression, limping around the protagonist,

banished like being thrown out to a baron’s estate in the borderlands as punishment for deceiving the powerful ducal house of the Thomple Empire,

Dietrich, who had nothing—no money, no title, nothing at all—I had absolutely no desire to inhabit her life.

So, to put it bluntly… it was messed up.