mrgirl

Their movements were rapid and well-practiced, displaying years of training to hone their martial arts. They did their best to avoid touching each other’s hands, but contact was inevitable, each having to negate the other’s attack. Every time their hands met, jets of steam and smoke would hiss from the contact, with Falco’s water coming to a boil, and Viktor’s flesh threatening to crack from the quenching.

Next to him, Viktor was impatiently tapping his foot, and the audience was close to running out of patience. Their frustrated silence turned to cheers when Noah stepped out under the guise of Reiss. Upon seeing him, Viktor turned deathly pale, not unlike the corpse he left behind. His guilt was unquestionable.

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.