The silence Eva gave Emerald was so profound and good, that even Emerald, with Zinan's restless spirit within, didn't dare to break it. Sucking down her ridiculously large milkshake with aristocratic precision, Eva offered a sight that was both absurd and intensely magnetic. After finishing the milkshake, which took her around an hour, she finally spoke. From the moment Emerald saw her at the college entrance to here, she hadn't uttered a single word to him.
"Hope you're doing good," Eva finally said, her voice smooth and measured.
"Yah, good. What about you?"
"No need to answer, big boy. From here on, you're gonna be my boyfriend. Unlike those who roam around with you back in the country, these people dig deep, and to run a smooth business, a cover is good, right?"
Emerald started to laugh, a genuine, booming sound that felt strange in the Swedish air. Hearing something so strange and formally delivered from Eva, of all people, he couldn't hold it in. "Okay, my lady, what should this servant be indebted with now?"
"Boy, drop it. I'm a noble, so don't ever make fun of my way of speech, understand?" she warned, her eyes flashing with mock sternness.
"I'm a lord, Prince, to be honest, so respect, Lady," Emerald countered, hitting her back with royal sarcasm.
"Prince in the kingdom, here you're my boyfriend."
"Same answer, Eva."
Eva kept a low, intense gaze upon Emerald after the reply, clearly annoyed but amused. "Emy, you can call me Emy from now on."
Emerald, seizing the initiative, got up to order some more to eat. He went over to the counter. He kept looking at the guy working there, who was none other than Isak, the friendly student he had met earlier.
"You work here, huh?" Emerald asked.
"Yah. That aside, what's she doing with you?" Isak asked, his curiosity overriding his customer service protocol.
"Ohh, she, she's my, my…" Thinking about every possibility, from "bodyguard" to "secret agent," he just went on and said it with theatrical certainty: "She's my wife."
"That's great." Isak managed a tight, polite smile, the look on his face clearly suggesting he wanted to laugh off the ridiculous lie but couldn't.
Emerald took his seat back across from Eva. "Why did you say I'm your wife?" Eva asked him out of cold frustration.
"Thought it's cool."
"Cool my ass! Just look around you, half of the people here are your colleagues!" Emerald gave a quick scan around the café and kept looking at Eva, wearing the unconcerned face of a soldier in battle.
They got home. As any gentleman would have done (or as Zinan's memory of chivalry dictated), Emerald asked her politely, "Care to crash here?"
Eva gave her reply as any frustrated millennia-old noble would have done. "When did the big, bad boy come to care for the girl?"
"In or out."
"It's my property, so of course in! Where do you think I'm gonna stay, crack head?" Eva snapped, stepping into the luxurious house.
Eva spent the evening bench-pressing her frustration, meticulously outlining the next social plan she had to pull off, while Emerald sat there, completely focused on going through today's college lecture notes.
"You... a smart guy?" Eva asked, genuinely curious, looking at his rapid assimilation of complex engineering concepts.
"Nah, just hanging in there, that's all."
"You know, you can just skip classes, right? Since you're going Ghost."
"There's a little you understand, and a little you don't."
"Hmm. Educate me then."
"You died, right?" Emerald asked bluntly.
"Nahh. I'm a natural born vampire," she corrected, with a hint of pride.
"Means you died. Vampires are dead creatures clinging to life as they see fit. But a human isn't like that. He learns, fights, loves, grieves, and then dies. Unlike vampires, who see things the way they want it to be, humans see things to its fullest."
"How does that work?"
Emerald dropped his notes and got up. He went to the kitchen and grabbed some snacks. He turned on the massive TV and asked Eva, "Have you seen this movie?"
"No," she replied instantly.
"That's where the problem is. How old are you, again?"
"It's a rude thing for a gentleman to ask the age of a young lady."
"Whatever. Just take it as two hundred years. You have lived two hundred years without knowing a movie that has been so famous for almost two decades. So here's the thing, Eva Brown: you people take your immortality for granted. You don't really rush to that end since you know you don't die tomorrow. But humans are different. They don't have an assurance over the air they breathe, which makes them more pushed to find the end of things. And it will take them to enjoy the life—which will be less than a century—to the fullest."
"You know, you're quite touchy when it comes to talking or literature."
"I know, but there's no guarantee in the talk, Eva. All that brain and time, where does it get you? With me."
"Your point."
"Nobody knows their end. Each of us lives on the hope that it will never happen, until it does happen... you call it destiny, God's plan, or whatever."
"I believe in God."
Emerald gave a classic pause and side-eyed her. "Just stop right there. The God topic is some other time. Now, the first topic, good, darling?"
"Whatever. Just play the movie, and no 'darling,' understood?"
"Yah, understood."
Emerald started to explain the aspects of each and every word and frame they came across on that magical cube. He spoke with the passion of a professor and the nostalgia of a film lover.
He traced the cycles of humanity: When the Homo sapiens got bored of the raw meat, they started cooking. Once the cooking became a mess, they started to have someone to cook for them. Truly an interesting story. Once the human race accomplished something, they tried to understand it. Once they did, they wanted to change it, and they accomplished it. The sad fact here is, the cycle never ends: Invention to innovation and then to destruction.
In all this carnage and insanity, they crafted the time to be happy about. They lived to see the amazing tomorrow that never came. That is where the human race triumphed over the superior supernatural. That doesn't change the fact that the supernatural's existence was, in truth, an accomplishment of the human race, a path of immortality that ended without a cycle.
(To be continued)