Returning to No Applause, Only More of the Same

Kreig stepped out of the car. The mission was simple, as simple as any he’d ever tried. Easier than going to the north and retrieving a thing he didn’t even understand.

The house was small. A bit run down, too. Grey and barely painted, nooks and hinges almost falling off in its places. Parts of the roof seemed about ready to tumble off, and what little there was of the garden out front was clearly overrun, filled with weeds that had been allowed to stretch towards the sky, feeding off of the remains of what seemed to be a wilting rosebush. Even the door, white and ordinary, seemed to flake in its colour.

Most damning of all, it didn’t have a mailbox. The only way for him to leave his mail would have to be to leave it on the porch and wait for them to discover it.

But that wasn’t a good idea, even Kreig knew that. These Earthly people weren’t supposed to see these letters, so simply leaving their doorstep was out of the picture. But there were other things he could do to gain the attention of the people inside. An idea bloomed in Kreig’s mind. He pressed the door-bell.

“Kreig, what’s keeping you?” George asked, stepping out of the car to waltz right up to Kreig where he stood. Being a polite man, Kreig turned around to face his brother, letter still in hand.

Before Kreig could tell his brother about his fantastic idea to ring the doorbell and leave the letter on the doorstep before the inhabitants could so much as open the door, he was interrupted by a door creaking open behind him. He turned around, his mind and body numb like ice, and he was greeted with an old, bespeckled little woman, peering out from a small slit in the door. Her eyes shifted from cautious curiosity to alarm in as long as it took for Kreig to fully turn towards her.

“Please,” she said, shaking her head timidly, “I haven’t got any money left. Leave me be, I have nothing to give you sharks.” Her eyes were muddy and dim from years of grief, of holding in what should have been let out.

George stepped closer to the door, giving a salesman-like smile as he tried to excuse both him and Kreig. “No, that’s alright ma’am, we’re at the wrong house, we’ll leave in a-,”

Kreig held the letter out to her. It was small and torn at the edges but the seal was pressed in the most professional way. The title on it read ‘to the relatives of Peter Willowgrove’. The little lady’s eyes widened upon seeing it, her lower lip shuddering, torn between a frown and a flood of words. “Here,” Kreig said. “Take it.” She looked up at him, her gaze flitting between his broad frame and the little letter he held out to her. He pushed it closer to her. “It’s about Peter.” He hesitated for a moment before speaking the last few words, the words he knew would convince her. “-And what happened to him.”

And all of a sudden, her dim, grey eyes, the same colour as a half-frozen, half-dead lake, brightened up in meek hope. A reaction that Kreig had not expected in the least.

“Please, step inside,” she said, opening the door for them.

George gave Kreig an unhappy, desperate look, as if to tell Kreig to just leave the letter and run, but Kreig wouldn’t do it. Since Kreig went inside, George had no choice but to follow. What was presented to them was a house that seemed on the border of loved. Urns, lamps and carpets in warm, friendly colours. Dusty cupboards and corners filled with cobwebs and dead fruit flies. Pictures of smiling people. Framed obituaries.

It was a quaint old home that had forgotten to be loved. Left untouched for so long it had begun to rot.

The woman, Mrs Willowgrove, led them both into a living room, where she left them on the couch for just a minute before returning with a pot of tea and a pair of porcelain cups. She sat herself in the silken armchair adjacent the couch and coffee table. “Tell me,” she said in a whispering tone, “what is this about Peter?” Something in the way she said his name, something in her frail voice, seemed fundamentally broken. Beyond despairing.

Then, Kreig saw it. On the only non-dusty shelf, where a little hand-made tablecloth kept things from touching the shelf, there was a bundle of pictures. Pictures of a young man in glasses that Kreig recognized all too well, right next to a smiling man and a woman much younger than the one sitting in front of them, but with the same pale-blue eyes.

Peter’s mother.

Kreig felt the letter weigh heavy in his hands. He held it out to her. She glanced at it, her forehead creasing in vague uncertainty. Until, finally, she took it.

George, who had not even touched his cup of steaming-hot tea, made to stand. “Well, this has been delightful, but we really must be-,” Kreig put his hand on George’s shoulder. “...Let me go, Kreig. We need to leave.” But Kreig was much too strong for George to deny. And he still wasn’t meeting his gaze. “Kreig, seriously, we can’t-,”

“No, I’d like you both to stay,” Mrs Willowgrove said with such hard ernesty that George, despite knowing full well that what they were doing wasn’t in accordance with protocol, had no choice but to sit down.

Kreig had no good reason for doing this. For denying his brother and dancing to his own whims. It was childish and unusual and he absolutely had to do it.

Of all the Five Bodies, Peter had been the most liberal. Refusing to be trained to obedience, denying the will and needs of his superiors. The only one he listened to was the White Pope, but even then, as soon as he left his presence, Peter wasted no time analyzing his orders critically. And if he didn’t like the work given to him, he usually told Kreig to do it instead. A dog’s work, but it was this part of Peter that Kreig truly admired. Not his intelligence, not his wit, not his faith. His freedom.

If it was in his name, Kreig was sure he could muster the courage to go through with his own will. And right now, that will of his, so muted it might as well not exist at all, was telling him to stay. To explore the strangeness of the situation.

After all, this wasn’t how this place should be. This wasn’t the kind of woman Peter had described when he explained why he didn’t mind coming to another world.

“They won’t mind,” he’d said. “All they care about is work and good grades and all those frivolous things that define the rigid structure of that modern, sterile hellscape we escaped. Sure, this place is no paradise, but compared to back there… isn’t it Heaven? No nagging mothers or strict fathers. Nobody to tell you that you’ve gotta stop reading manga and get back to doing schoolwork. Nobody to complain about how nothing gets done. Just you, and what you can do. Isn’t it fantastic, being free for once?”

An absent father and a negligent, careless mother. That was the home life Peter had painted. And now, Kreig was allowed to witness that home life.

A mother whose entire face was much older than it should be, eyes dragged down by unshed tears. Pools of murky water in her eyes. Kreig had to know if the story Peter had told was a mere falsehood or something else. What this woman held.

Her hands trembled, eyes downcast. Focused on the letter. “...If I were to read this, what would I learn?”

“What truly happened.”

“God preserve us. Please, have some tea. Forgive my silence as I read,” she said. Her trembling fingers slid over the smooth envelope before pulling off the wax seal and removing the four carefully folded pages inside. The handwriting on these were in a bold, clear cursive, using black ink that Kreig had borrowed. Mrs Willowgrove let her wry eyes slide over the words for a moment before looking up, a vague smile blooming on her lips. Her eyes fell squarely on Kreig. “My, you do have a beautiful handwriting for such a large man.”

George twitched. Kreig knew that George knew that she knew that Kreig wrote it. And still, Kreig wouldn’t leave. Wouldn’t even try to change her mind on it.

He simply sat there and watched wordlessly as she read each page.

Her demeanor changed ever so slightly after each paragraph, each word she read. The reserved, cold exterior seemed to peel back, and when that softer layer beneath was finally made bare, when her eyes started to tremble and her lips quivered, yet another layer was removed as she read more. Found out another detail of the life her son had lived without her. From the very moment he rose from the casket to when he decided that being a priest was dumb, to the time, after over five years of strict atheism, that he finally accepted his new God.

She was the half-way point of the third page when she looked up, a trembling smile pulling desperately at her lips, her eyes bleary and wet, and asked, in the most hopeful way possible: “He got married?”

“...Yes.” In truth, when it happened, even Kreig had been surprised. But she was a fantastic woman who admired Peter for more than his wit, and they had gotten along beautifully.

Mrs Willowgorge smiled, a deep, fond unhappy smile that seemed only to regret not being there. “I see. I’m glad. I had always thought he’d never find a woman, he was always holed up in his room, never finding any friends. God, I’m glad. Thank God.” A single tear dropped from her eye, and she turned back to reading. As she finished the third page, her smile turned mournful and tragic. Her joy turned to bitter sorrow as she read Peter’s role in the Holy War and the Unholy War.

War was never pretty, especially not for the soldiers. It had been harsh on Peter, but he never had so much as a chance to recover. As one war ended it transformed seamlessly into the other. Ten years of war. Ten years of suffering.

She got to the last part of the last page. This was where she broke down.

The dam was broken, the icy lakes in her eyes shattered, and they flooded out onto the page in her trembling hands. She buckled over, clutching the wet papers close, holding them to her heart as if to bring the life her son had lived without her into it. The life he had lived, those thirty years that had made him into something so different, a fully grown man she barely knew. It was a tragic sight to see.

She wept, and she wept, and now Kreig could not honestly accept that this had been a cold, callous mother who felt nothing for her child. Peter had been wrong.

And he never knew it.

And that hurt Kreig far more than Mrs Willowgorge’s breakdown did.