It was a simple question. Almost mundane.
But for Ed, each syllable was laden with overwhelming weight. As if it were an ancestral command etched into his bones, a mandate that activated every fiber of his nervous system. As if the universe itself had decided to pay attention to him for the first time in his life.
Fear and need collided inside him. Two titanic forces fighting in the tiny ring of his chest.
What-what-what is it I desire? he repeated the same words in his mind, over and over, as if wanting to understand every letter, every syllable, every nuance. That means… that means he will listen to me.
He kept thinking, and the thought was a lifeline in the midst of the shipwreck.
So, if I don't speak now, when will I? I don't think I'll get another chance like this. No, I won't.
Mr. Ed Tonor, at that moment, did something he hadn't done in months.
He gathered all the courage he had.
All that he had stored in the deepest part of his being, in those corners that even alcohol couldn't flood. All that his mother had taught him as a child, all that his father expected to see in him, all that he himself had buried under layers of failure and disappointment.
And he spoke.
"Please… don't go," he stammered.
And then his shoulders sank.
As if the hinges that held them, the muscles and tendons that for years had maintained the facade of a functional man, had suddenly broken. As if someone had cut the cables that kept him upright.
His entire posture collapsed.
His head, which before he hung in alcoholic shame, under the weight of alcohol and defeat, now hung from a different weight. More personal. More devastating.
It was the posture of a man who had hit rock bottom.
And who discovers, with horror, that the bottom is lonelier than he ever imagined.
"I beg you, please," he pleaded, his voice trembling like a leaf in autumn, but also clear, strangely clear despite the alcohol. "Continue telling me the story."
Wait…!
Samael was surprised.
And a lot, truth be told.
But he didn't show it. Outwardly, his expression remained almost the same: the same calm, the same inscrutable serenity. But inside, in the core of his being, something moved. Something that hadn't moved for a long time.
He likes this story so much, he thought, watching the collapsed man in front of him. No, I wouldn't say "like." Rather… he seems to find something in what I'm telling him. Something that perhaps… I don't know, that fills him.
He searched for the right word.
Maybe it's not "fills." Maybe it's something else. But there's something.
Tonor paused. A silence that stretched long enough for Samael to think he wasn't going to continue.
But when he spoke again, it was as if he had decided to show the open wound. The real reason for his desperation. The reason—or another reason—why he wanted to keep listening to that story.
"I don't even… I don't even have anyone waiting for me at home," he began to say.
His gaze drifted to an indefinite point on the table, to the grain of the wood, to the circles of spilled beer.
"I have family, but they're far away. Very far. And after what happened to me…" he paused, his voice fading more and more, like a receding echo. "After they saw how I drowned in my grief, how I didn't want to listen to anyone, how I locked myself away… they didn't kick me out. No, they didn't do that. But I can't go back like this. Not like this."
His eyes were glassy. But it wasn't the alcohol. Not this time.
"And my girlfriend…"
He paused. You could tell something lurched in his chest. A physical, real movement, as if his heart had shifted out of place.
"You know. She left me. So I'm alone. Completely alone."
He looked up and met Samael's eyes. For the first time all night, he didn't avoid them.
"That's why… please."
Young Samael closed his eyes.
For Ed, that blink stretched into an agonizing eternity. Several centuries of waiting condensed into a heartbeat. The laws of time, those rules that govern the universe, simply seemed to cease to exist in that blink.
When Samael opened them again, something had changed.
And this time it wasn't just internal. It was external.
It wasn't warmth in his gaze. No, not exactly. Warmth would be too much, would be false. It was something else.
It was… recognition.
As if, for an instant, Samael had looked at Ed and seen not a pathetic drunk, but someone. Someone real. Someone who, in his misery, had shown a truth that few dare to show.
And then, for the first time since he had entered the tavern—with his aura of contained storm, with his eyes like an abyss promising silent violence if necessary—Samael did something completely different.
Something no one in the tavern had seen him do.
He smiled.
It wasn't a wide smile, nor a happy one, nor even particularly warm. It was a slight curve, almost imperceptible, at the corner of his lips. A movement of millimeters that, on anyone else, would have gone unnoticed.
But on him, on that face that until now had only shown serenity and danger, it was an earthquake.
A smile that didn't reach his eyes, but that completely transformed his expression. That made him seem more human. And at the same time, more inscrutable.
"Is that all you wanted to tell me?" Samael murmured, his voice tinged with something that could have been pity, or perhaps just weariness. Or maybe a mixture of both. "Is this the reason you called me?"
Those words struck Ed deep in his heart.
With the force of a hammer.
Not just any hammer. A hammer wielded by a giant, by a forgotten god, by all the forces of the universe concentrated into a single point.
Is that all?
For him, it had been a cataclysmic confession. The final cry of his loneliness. The open wound he had shown the world after months of hiding it.
Was it so little to someone like Samael?
He looked at the young man, at that fifteen-year-old boy in front of him, and felt his own smallness. His own insignificance. His problem, his drama, his misery… wasn't even like the floor the boy was stepping on. It was less. It was nothing.
But before despair could drown him again—before the black pit could swallow him once more—Samael spoke:
"But… well. Alright."
Just that phrase.
"But… well. Alright."
It wasn't a forgiveness. It wasn't a blessing. It wasn't a promise of eternal friendship nor a false, empty "everything is going to be okay."
It was an acceptance.
A permission to continue.
And it was enough.
A wave of relief swept over Ed. So intense, so overwhelming, that it almost made him cry. It was as if he had been holding his breath underwater for months and suddenly someone had given him permission to come up for air.
The happiness that bloomed on his face was no longer the ephemeral, false flame of alcohol. That drunkard's happiness that lasts as long as the drink's effect and then leaves an even worse hangover.
It was genuine relief. Bittersweet. Deeply human.
He was not alone. At least for this night.