Frustration.
The world always told stories of the bad guy getting their just desserts in the end, the sort of tales that made the audience feel good, happy, and whole by the time they closed the last page.
It was probably a symptom of the world's endless fascination with justice, an almost blinding obsession with setting things right, of karma, even though the real world was often nothing like that.
But wasn't that the point of stories? Of the escape they provided?
Priya had always been someone that didn't like those sorts of stories. Often, she wouldn't finish books or movies, leaving them open-ended.
She could recall many times Zarek made fun of her for it, but he seemed to understand it in ways that many didn't.
Zarek and she couldn't have lived two lives that were more opposing.
She was the wealthy heiress of a family that doted on her so much that she never wanted for anything. Her parents expected a lot from her, which was why she always placed so much pressure on Zarek to perform well in school, but they never demanded too much, and they had reasonable standards by her estimation.
There was simply no way—she felt—that she could be anything other than grateful for what they had given her, and how they had loved her.
She should, by all rights, be someone who believed in those fanciful tales, of those beautiful endings that wrapped up everything in a neat little bow.
But her life outside of her own little bubble wasn't so seamless. Her disease, the bullying she had endured because of it, the fear she had experienced through much of the start of her life, wondering if the next breath she took might just be her last…
It was that suffocating weight that followed her every day, that made her wonder if the only reason her parents were so loving and accommodating was because they also didn't know if this would be the last day they saw their daughter…
Would they be more demanding if she didn't have this disease? Would they even allow her to be with Zarek?
Those sorts of dark thoughts were the sort that a young woman like her shouldn't even have the wherewithal to consider or think of in the first place.
But sometimes, looking at Zarek's life, she couldn't help but be forced to face that mirror.
Zarek had said that he had lived other lives before, that he had "regressed," as he called it, so she had no way of knowing if every life had been like this, but she doubted that it was very much different.
He had no parents, no home, no support.
She remembered a day on his fourteenth birthday when he told her that his father had died in military service at the helm of a meaningless war before he was even born.
His mother didn't receive the sort of support and state assistance she should have. Unable to afford to give birth in the hospital, she opted for a cheaper alternative… a natural birth.
Somewhere in his basement, Zarek still had the kiddie pool she used. It was deflated, but patched up in several places, the sort of thing that one would easily mistake for junk, but Zarek had always kept it.
It was the place his mother had died, the place she chose his life over her own.
Pregnancy complications weren't nearly rare enough, and complications you faced in your own home, in some run-down little apartment with the nearest hospital being a forty-minute drive away…
Well, those weren't pregnancies you could overcome.
The moment Zarek was born into this world, he had no one but the cheap retired wet nurse his mother had managed to get to help that day. It was because of her that he even knew these stories to begin with.
But she was old and didn't have many years left to live. She was a kind soul, kind enough that she took on a child that wasn't her own… but she never managed to see his seventh birthday.
It was after she died that Zarek learned more about her through her will. It turned out that she was about as stubborn as his mother.
The widow of a multimillionaire, she ripped him clean of all he was worth but refused to use a dime of it, choosing instead to live out her life in the same small apartment building Zarek and his mother should have lived in together.
Her plan was originally to one day pass away and have it all donated to charity. She had never wanted the money, she had just wanted that ex-husband of hers to suffer dearly for what he had done to her, and that she managed to do.
But the guilt of it all weighed her down.
If only she had given a small portion of that wealth to Zarek's mother, just a little bit so they could afford to go to the hospital…
Zarek couldn't remember having ever seen so many apologies squeezed into such a small letter. When he was old enough to read it, that is.
Because of that guilt, the old wet nurse changed her will and passed it on to Zarek. He had never had full access to it, but was instead paved a golden path in his education and through life, various people diligently picked by the old woman helping him along at every step of the way, but none of them having the closeness to him that family should have had.
When Zarek learned of this, he never blamed the old wet nurse. How could she have known what would happen that day? Before technology and hospitals were a thing, what kind of birth was there outside of a natural one? She couldn't be expected to take on the burden for that.
The irony of it all was that those millions, meant to come under Zarek's full control after he graduated university in four years from now, would never be his.
Was that a happy ending too?