You want regrets? We've got regrets.

This would be me, gnashing my teeth at the golden opportunity that Shadow Hearts: Covenant wasted. Ever so slightly AUish, in that 'GODDAMMIT GAME THIS IS WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED YOU SUCK' sort of way.

WARNINGS:
HOLY GOD the spoilers. No, really. If you haven't done all the sidequests and gone into the final dungeon, come no further.
Also requires you to have played through the sidequests.
The faintest hints of not-entirely-savory doings. Otherwise, reasonably safe.

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Karin shivered in the damp and tried not to think about what it must have been like to be imprisoned down here, to lie forgotten in the dark and the wet until you died. Or worse, to be drawn here like this after you died, to wait for forgiveness that might never come--

"Stinks down here," Yuri muttered from behind her, and Karin dragged her thoughts back to the present. There couldn't be much farther to go. The professor had hinted that there was only the one floor below this, right before he'd taken his name and vanished. So whatever she was looking for was down there.

Or, to be more honest, whatever was looking for her. Whatever had planted this barbed dart of come, come, come in her chest and was using it to lure her onwards, drag her down... it was down there.

And then the dim circle of lantern-light found the door, and the stairs, and Yuri's surly presence was a comforting warmth at her back as she picked her way down.

She saw the by-now-familiar glow before anything else, that faint radiance that nevertheless overpowered the lantern's yellowish light. She took a breath and stepped forward into that light, and just like that the compulsion vanished. It flared in her chest and burned out like a spent match, leaving her feeling weak. Her heart fluttered once before its beat firmed again.

The ghostly figure stood at the far end of the room running a hand idly over the damp stone. Its posture was carefully nonchalant, as if at the last moment it had decided that actually seeming to await her was too humbling. It was that very nonchalance that allowed her to recognize him; that, and the careless little flick of his hair as he turned towards her, eyebrows raised in feigned surprise.

"Nicolai," she breathed, and from behind her Yuri said "Eh?"

"Hello, Karin," the ghost said lazily, and he smiled that same damned little smile that hadn't ever meant anything. "Fancy meeting you here."

"Eh? What?" Yuri poked her shoulder in confusion. "Hey. Karin. What'd you say?" She ignored him.

"Hello, Nicolai," she said uncertainly, and took another half a step towards where he waited.

"Fine, be that w--oh, crap." Yuri half-shouldered her aside, scowling as he pointed an accusatory finger at Nicolai. "You again? You're dead, you know," Yuri told him, throwing the words at Nicolai like he hoped they'd hurt. "So why don't you just piss off to wherever it is that dead people are supposed to go and leave us the hell alone, huh?"

Nicolai took in half a breath, as if he were about to protest, and then stopped and laughed a little instead, shaking his head. It was such a Nicolai thing to do that Karin almost laughed with him. "First of all," Nicolai said with an air of great patience, as if explaining God to a dog, "you came to me. I was just standing down here minding my own business when you came thumping in and started being all belligerent at me."

"Yeah, well--" Yuri floundered for a moment, scowling, before pointing at Nicolai again. "--you're still dead!"

"No one is arguing that with you," Nicolai said, and he smiled beatifically at Yuri for a moment before taking another little breath and continuing. "Second of all, it seems that I can't go on quite yet. That's why I'm here, isn't it?" He stopped and considered Yuri for a moment, his head tilted to the side so that his bangs fell disarmingly in his eyes. "You... do know where you are, don't you?" he asked with excellently-feigned curiosity, and this time Karin actually had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing at Yuri's bullish scowl.

"Yeah," Yuri said truculently, folding his arms over his chest. "The Fortress of Regret."

"Ahhh," Nicolai breathed in mock surprise. "He can be taught..."

"Hey," Yuri said, starting forward, his hands balling into fists. "Don't think that just because you're dead I won't kick your ass!"

"Really," Nicolai said, false awe fading to equally false boredom, folding his own arms neatly across his chest. "Go on, then. Hit me."

Yuri stopped, glaring at Nicolai with undisguised mistrust. "... I don't wanna," he finally said.

"Ah, well then." Nicolai flicked his hair out of his eyes again. "Since that's settled--"

"So what do we gotta do to get rid of you for good?" Yuri broke in.

"Aaaah," Nicolai said, drawing it out until the word was almost a song. "Well, now we come to the heart of the matter. Third, and finally, that is a matter for Karin's ears only." He paused, the brief silence as sharp as the point of a pin and just long enough for Yuri to grasp what he was saying. Then Nicolai finished driving the barb home with his customary precision. "Not yours."

"... I don't trust you," Yuri said warningly, stabbing a finger at Nicolai again.

"Oh, what am I going to do?" Nicolai said, spreading his hands wide in mock surrender and stepping forward until Yuri's finger vanished into the insubstantial glow of his chest. "After all, as you so perceptively noted, Godslayer: I'm dead."

Yuri yanked his hand back and scrubbed it vigorously against his jacket, as if it was cold. Nicolai flicked two disdainful fingers over his own chest, a silent echo of his usual fastidiousness. "Wouldn't put anything past you," Yuri said.

"Yuri," Karin said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Go wait for me upstairs. I'd... like to hear what he has to say."

"Wh--" Yuri's expression of confusion and hurt was heartbreakingly easy to read, especially after the opacity of Nicolai's careful self-mastery. "Are you sure?" he demanded to know, still absently rubbing his hand against his chest. "I don't trust him."

"Please," Karin said, and then she fell silent, forcing Yuri to make the next move. A heartbeat later she realized that she'd picked that trick up from Nicolai during their months together, and that hurt her in a way she couldn't explain.

"... okay," Yuri eventually said, grudgingly. "But if he tries anything you just yell for me and I'll come make him sorry, okay?"

"I will," Karin promised, letting her hand slide from his shoulder to his chest. "I won't be long."

"Okay," Yuri said again, and after darting one last glare at Nicolai he turned around and trudged back up the stairs. He wasn't done, though. He stopped halfway up the stairs. "We gave your Crest to the dog," he flung at Nicolai over his shoulder, and then he left, thumping heavily up the stairs.

The door clanged shut. Karin hoped it was behind him. She took a deep breath and turned to face Nicolai again, willing her hands to be still, to not tremble.

"Karin," he breathed, and his voice was as beautiful as it ever was (fifteen years in the Vatican's own choir, he'd told her once in self-deprecation after she'd dared to compliment him on it, will make any troll an angel, or else kill him while trying) and she lost the battle, and shivered.

Her voice was abrupt when she spoke again, and she noticed, and in a way she was sorry. "So what is it?" she asked, rubbing her upper arms. "What do you want? Why are you here?" And now she sounded almost plaintive, but she couldn't stop. "I... I saw you die," she offered timidly. Memory (that awful crunching sound, dark blood on Kato's white gloves, the horrible loose flopping of Nicolai's limbs as he was discarded like a rag doll, the burning green of Yuri's chest gaping open) stiffened her voice and her resolve. "You were trying to kill me."

"No," he cut in, not exactly horrified. "I would never. I..." He hesitated. It seemed real. So many things about him had always seemed real. "I was threatening you to lure Yuri closer. I was hoping to kill him."

"Why?" she blurted, and then she waved a trembling hand. "Don't answer that. I know why. But... how could you? ...don't answer that!"

He was silent for a time, and when he stopped looking at her and instead covered his eyes with his hand, she could only blink. "This isn't going well," he murmured, probably to himself, and then his hand dropped and he looked at her, a naked plea on his face. "Karin..."

"Tell me," she said in a bare whisper, and took strength from it.

Nicolai hesitated. Again, it seemed real. "I need you to forgive me so that I can go on," he finally said, and the words ran together abruptly, as if it embarrassed him to say so. "I regret what happened between us so much."

"Forgive you?" she repeated dumbly.

"Forgive me," Nicolai said. "And I am sorry, Karin."

"Why?" she asked, her voice faint, and then a rush of memory stiffened her spine and raised her voice. "What are you sorry for, Nicolai? Using me? Killing my men? Trying to kill us? Releasing the Malice on the world?"

"Yes!" he cried, his voice ringing over hers, and it startled her into silence. "Yes, for all that, and more, I'm sorry," he rushed on, and his hands grabbed for hers, and all she felt was a wave of cool air on her skin. "I did such foolish things all because I never thought I had a choice--"

"Stop it," she said quietly, and for a miracle, he did. After a moment, she spoke again. "Nicolai..."

"Once I started I couldn't stop," he said, the misery in his voice almost matter-of-fact. "I would have done anything to have Russia for my own. And my plan was a good one, it was all going so smoothly, and then the demon showed up in Domremy--"

"--Yuri--"

"--and after that things unraveled faster than I could fix them," he finished, as if she hadn't spoken. "But if he hadn't gotten tangled up in things it would have been fine. I could have kept Astaroth under control, Russia would have been mine, no one would have had to suffer..."

"Stop it!" she cried, striking blindly out at him and cringing back as her hand encountered nothing but cold. "How dare you! Is this how you plan to get me to forgive you?"

The door at the top of the stairs banged open at her cry. Yuri charged down the stairs like a bull, bellowing, and Karin rounded on him in fury. "Yuri! Go back upstairs at once! I'm not done here!"

"But--"

"Go!" And, God help her, she actually stamped her foot at him, and Yuri stumbled back a step and more or less fled back up the stairs in confusion. Karin stalked over to the foot of the stairs and made sure he was gone, then stalked back to Nicolai. "And you," she said, pointing a finger at him. "You haven't learned a damned thing, have you? You're already dead and you're still whining about how everything is Yuri's fault!"

Nicolai stared at her, silenced. Karin's fingers clawed the air in her frustration. "You and your ambitions, Nicolai! Stop making excuses! You did all this to yourself! That's what you should be regretting!"

"I," he started to say, but Karin rode right over him, taking full advantage of her headful of steam. "You and your stupid little plot--all right, your stupid huge plot--and all the horrible things you've done... I liked you! How could you?" She choked on the last word and repeated it. "How could you?"

So he told her.

After the first minute she found herself backing away from him, and a minute later she was actually pressed into a corner with her arms up, trying to ward off the stream of words, and he just stood there in the middle of the room and kept speaking them, horrible words, poisonous words, and God help her but she could actually see why he'd done it, God help her but she understood--and still he kept telling her, of his mother and how she'd died, of his father and his vast royal disdain, of starving in the Russian winter, of the man who'd rescued him and sent him to the Vatican at age twelve with the single cold instruction to 'sink or swim', of the roles he'd played and the things he'd done to do just that, to scrabble together any sort of power of his own at all, even just enough to have a bed to himself and a scrap to eat, and now she was crying but still those words kept slamming into her, a verbal portrait of a pretty little boy in a silver paladin's mask kneeling in confession to receive some sort of blasphemous communion she didn't even want to understand, and all she wanted to do was to make the words stop, make them stop, but just like Nicolai she didn't have any power here at all, her only two choices were this endless horror and something that was even worse but shone with that distant, tantalizing promise--

"Stop," she sobbed, and he smiled coldly and said, "Make me."

So she did.

"I forgive you!" she cried, and took advantage of the sudden silence to scrub her palms over her eyes.

When she took her hands away he was looking at her again, the same Nicolai she'd always known, the same Nicolai she'd liked so much, who'd spent two months of his life charming and entertaining her as they rode an endless series of coaches and local trains towards the Vatican and back--neither the helpless child nor the helpless monster. His edges were already beginning to fray. "Thank you," he said in wonder, holding up a tattering hand and staring at it. "I wonder where I'll go."

"I don't know," she said, drained. "Nicolai--"

He was dissolving, he was leaving her behind. For a single moment she wished she could have loved him.

"You said you needed me to forgive you..."

Yes, he said.

"You wanted me to, too," she said, trying out the words and discovering that they rang true. "You really did... regret that."

Yes, he said.

"Why?"

I love you, he did not say, and he flicked his hair out of his eyes one last time, while he still had both. Something cool touched her cheek, and then he was gone. She stood and waited for him to come back, to tell her it had all been a mistake.

Numbed, finally, she turned to go. Her foot struck metal. When she looked down, it did not surprise her in the slightest to find his sword there, laying across the bottom step--the sword of Galahad, they claim, but why they'd give such a priceless relic to someone like me is beyond me, he'd told her with his customary self-deprecating humor once during those endless two summer months, laying it nonchalantly in her hands like a carnival prize. I suppose I don't really believe it, but stranger things have happened...

She picked it up in trembling fingers, setting the lantern down. The blade sang as she drew it; it sang her name in a voice like an angel's.

And then... it wasn't him! Lame! Copout! Seriously, game, the Sword of Galahad should have been Karin's ultimate weapon and that's how she should have gotten it and YOU SUCK.

I have issues.

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