Chapter 85: Violet’s hope
In the corner of the room, tucked tightly into the far side of the bed, a tiny form was curled up beneath a thick blanket, shaking uncontrollably. Her eyes, swollen red, peered out from the blankets, wide with absolute horror as she realized he was actually inside her room.
"Why... why did you come in?!" Violet cried out, her voice raw from non-stop weeping. "I told you to leave!"
"To see you, of course," Eren said softly, closing the door behind him.
"I don’t need your pity!" Violet yelled, grabbing a plush teddy bear from her bed and throwing it straight at his head with all her tiny strength. "Go away! Leave me alone! I don’t want anyone here!"
Eren didn’t even flinch. He casually caught the flying teddy bear in one hand, tucking it under his arm as he continued to walk toward her bed.
Terrified by his relentless approach, Violet scrambled backward against the headboard, pulling the blanket up to her chin, her entire body trembling. "Don’t come any closer! Please... I’m begging you, Eren, don’t!"
Tears burst from her eyes in unrestrained streams as she tightly shut her eyes, curling into a tight, defensive ball. "I don’t want to hurt you...! I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore...!"
Her desperate, hysterical sob echoed through the quiet room, waiting for the inevitable sound of him collapsing to the floor—waiting for the horrific nightmare of yesterday to repeat itself right before her eyes.
Instead, the soft sound of his footsteps simply halted right beside her mattress.
"Open your eyes, Violet," a voice murmured. It was low, incredibly gentle, and steady for her soul.
Violet’s breath hitched. Trembling, she slowly cracked her tear-filled eyes open.
Eren was crouched down right beside her bed, his blue eyes level with hers. He didn’t look pale. He wasn’t gasping for air. He wasn’t falling unconscious. He was simply sitting there, holding her plush teddy bear in one lap, extending his open, bare hand toward her with a warm, charming smile.
"Look at me. Did I fall like the others? Am I collapsing?"
Violet stared at his open hand, her breath catching entirely in her throat.
"See?" Eren chuckled, stepping closer to bridge the final gap between them. "Your curse doesn’t work on me, Miss Violet..."
Shankily, her fingers reached out from beneath the blanket. She touched his open palm, her fingertips brushing against his skin, confirming that this wasn’t just a hallucinated trick spawned from her own broken mind.
The touch was real.
That point of contact shattered whatever remaining emotional levees Violet had left. The floodgates completely blew open. She gripped his hand with both of hers, burying her tear-streaked face against his knuckles as a torrent of long-suppressed fear, suffocating guilt, and raw agony poured out of her.
"I was so scared...!" she sobbed hysterically, heaving with violent gasps. "I thought... I thought I’d never be able to talk to anyone ever again! I thought I’d be trapped in the room forever...!"
Eren didn’t pull away. He simply sat there on the edge of her mattress, letting her squeeze his hand as tightly as she could manage. He didn’t offer empty platitudes or generic comfort—he just remained an immovable anchor in the middle of her storm.
Minutes flowed. Slowly, the breathless wails quieted down into a series of soft, exhausted sniffs. Violet wiped her swollen, reddened eyes with her sleeve, her nose running as she looked up at him with a deeply embarrassed, utterly miserable expression.
"I-I’m... I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have... dragged you into my pathetic problems, Eren."
"If you’re going to apologize, Miss Violet, at least apologize for violently throwing a teddy bear at my face. I almost died from blunt-force trauma, you know."
A tiny, breathless hiccup of laughter escaped her lips despite the grief still heavy in her chest. "I’m... I’m sorry. And... thank you."
Eren reached down, picked up the teddy bear from the ground, and placed it back into her arms. "Feeling a bit better now?"
Violet gave a slow nod, hugging the plush toy tight against her chest as she curled back up against her pillows. "For some reason... whenever I’m near you... the suffocating feeling inside my chest just... fades away. It feels so much easier to breathe."
She paused, her purple eyes locking onto his with a faint trace of lingering anxiety. "Are you... are you truly completely unaffected by my curse, Eren? You really don’t feel anything at all?"
Eren quieted down for a split second. He let out a small, dramatic sigh, rubbing the back of his neck with a sheepish look. "Well... I suppose I should apologize, Miss Violet. I actually lied to you earlier."
Violet’s heart instantly dropped into her stomach, a wave of icy panic flashing across her face. "W-What...? You... you lied?"
"Whenever I’m sitting within your radius," Eren explained smoothly, gesturing vaguely to his arm, "I do feel a small tingling beneath my skin. It’s like a tiny foreign energy trying to force its way into my body."
Before the poor girl could spiral back into a full-blown panic attack to apologize, Eren held up a hand and continued:
"But frankly? It’s nothing more than a mild itch. I’ve had mosquito bites that annoyed me more. So save your apologies, my desk mate."
"B-But what if it isn’t just an itch...? What if it’s building up inside you right now? What if... what if you slowly get affected, and one day you collapse just like everyone else...?"
Eren let out a quiet, exasperated breath—the kind reserved for overly dramatic plotlines. Instead of offering another speech, he slowly stood up from the bed and extended his hand down toward her once again.
"Then we’ll cross that terrifying, apocalyptic bridge when we actually get to it," Eren said casually, as if talking about a bad menu for afternoon lunch. "Right now, we have a far more important crisis to address. We happen to have another lecture in less than twenty minutes. So, Miss Violet... do you care to accompany me? Sitting by myself in the back row is excruciatingly boring, you know."
Violet looked from his open palm up to his calm, dark blue eyes.
Her instinct screamed at her to refuse—to curl back under her covers, to retreat into the safe, suffocating dark where no one could be harmed.
She was terrified.
She was terrified that her curse would hurt him.
’But...’
She looked at him again.
He wasn’t the arrogant, obnoxious noble who used to harass Alice. He was her sanctuary—the unyielding anchor in a world that had abandoned her to the dark. Even if her curse meant she could never touch another soul for the rest of her life, even if she ended up with only him by her side until the very end... he had given her hope. The courage to step forward.
"Okay..." she murmured, her heart fluttering as she placed her hand firmly into his. "Let’s go, Eren."