Chapter 298: Dense Forest Borderland

Bai Liu repeats softly, "The war ended fifty years ago?"

Elena looked down, drooping her wrinkled eyelids at Bai Liu: "Maybe more, I'm too old to remember these dates."

"Just remember a long, long time ago, when Alex was still alive, he and that Guy guy wrote me lots and lots of letters." Elena pulls a wad of old letters from her dirty bib-cloth skirt, "Whenever it's time to visit the graves, I read the letters they sent me back then at their graves, so I don't forget them all."

Elena sighed wearily, "You know I'm the only old woman who remembers these things now, and if I forget too, there's really no trace of them."

Bai Liu looked at the stack of letters and politely asked, "May I see it?"

Elena looked at Bai Liu in surprise: "You're interested? No young man wants to hear these old stories anymore."

Bai Liu smiles, "I was Alex and Guy's comrade-in-arms, and it's my duty to help remember them."

Elena gazed quietly at Bai Liu for a long time, then she suddenly smiled, "Boy, even if you are a liar full of lies, you did please me with your lies."

She handed the pile of letters to Bai Liu amiably, tears hidden in her eyes, "Feel free to join me in remembering these two."

Bai Liu held up the letter, "Perhaps you don't suggest I open it and read it in person?"

Elena laughed as she shakily waved her hand, "Of course not, I can recite everything up there backwards."

Bai Liu bows his head and arranges the letters chronologically, then opens them one by one, Elena rambling on:

"...... You know, young people, when people get very old if they are not doing well and are alone, they remember their past over and over again and wonder what they did wrong to end up in such a situation ...... "

Elena's old voice paused for a moment, "Do you know what the most frightening thing about this process is?"

Bai Liu looked up at her, "What is it?"

Elena forced a smile, but tears ran down from the corners of her eyes, "You did do a lot of things wrong."

Bai Liu lowered his eyes to the first letter in his hand. It was from Elena to Alex.

[Tribute to my dear fiancé:

Your filthy, shameless, lowly male lover wrote to me two days ago asking me to forgive him for his vile behavior with you and shamelessly asking for my blessing on your love and marriage.

What a disgusting thought!

Could any god in this world allow two males to unite in his presence?

I even suspected that enemy artillery shells would be raining down on the place where you were getting married as punishment for your breach of ethics!

Alex, why would you, as a doctor studying the mechanisms of human life, the greatest profession on the entire planet, allow yourself to hang out with such a ridiculous psychopath, wasting time going to save lives?

Don't you feel like your future and aspirations are tainted by shit when you're with him?

At least when I got that letter he sent, I felt like my dignity was tarnished by shit.]

Bai Liu opened the next letter, addressed to Alex.

[To Elena:

First, allow me to viciously refute your reference to me; I have never met you, I have never agreed to allow you to be my fiancée without authorization, and your reference to me at the beginning of your previous letter is just plain wrong.

Secondly, there will only be one person who will be my lover, my wife, the one who will be with me for the rest of my life, and that's Guy, not you who came along out of nowhere after Guy and I fell in love.

I don't know where your inexplicable affection for me came from, whether it was from my parents' unrealistic expectations and descriptions of me, or from the pursuit of the only young man in that narrow town who had achieved an advanced degree, or from the complacency and self-congratulation of your own beauty, the ridiculous notion that the prettiest girl in the town would be able to win over the nicest young man.

Let me explain to you for the record, Elena, that I'm not an object that you can win over and parade around, I'm a human being with feelings.

After I gave Guy my love, there was no way I could ever love anyone else until I loved him.

Elena, you're an independent person too, and your worth doesn't need to be labeled by getting me, you can go out and do more valuable things to prove it.

Guy and I have two qualifications to go to a higher university, and I'm going to use mine up myself, and Guy says you're still a young girl who doesn't know any better, and has more qualifications to enjoy the beauty and knowledge of the world than he who doesn't know if he'll make it back alive.

If you have any desire to go to a higher university, Guy says he can let you have his qualifications.

Despite all the shit you said to Guy that makes me feel like shit for saying it, Guy forgave you and nobly said he could give you this opportunity to go to further education and let you have it.

Although I strongly objected to this, Guy was very insistent.

Guy said he could tell you were a young lady with aspirations.

He said you liked me because I was a doctor and you thought I was healing people and was great, so you cast a kind of girlish pining over me.

Guy let me pass on a message to you, if you like saving lives, why don't you try to do it yourself?

I apologize for those blind assurances my parents made to you, but I will still reprimand you severely if you make any more inappropriate remarks about Guy.]

Bai Liu then turns the page, and the next letter is from Elena, but this time it's not addressed to Alex, it's addressed to Guy.

[Tribute to Guy:

I apologize for the inappropriate, for the insulting wording with personal emotional overtones.

I've put all the money I've saved from all the labor I've done in the three years since I was eleven years old in this envelope as compensation for my personal mis-export.

I'm not going to take the qualifications you're offering for schooling, I still think you're wasting Alex's time, he could have had more, he invented a potion that slows down the deaths of human beings, how many military men and women who died in the war could have been saved by that?

Everyone in town says he, Alex, could be the next war hero!

But after he met you, all he thinks about now is falling in love!

I still want you to stay away from him, and maybe you can find another true male lover, but that person shouldn't be Alex.]

The next one is from Guy to Elena.

[To the lovely little girl Elena:

Hey, little girl, guess what? I think you're right.

Alex will indeed have a rather bright future, he's a very talented guy, the experimental process of the potion is moving forward very quickly, and his superiors have already given him permission to experiment on wounded soldiers with remarkable results.

I don't deserve him, Alex is great, so I still want to selfishly possess him for a while and have the best memories with him.

Elena, I've seen pictures of you, you're beautiful, but you're too young, only fourteen, and you can't tell the difference between love and yearning.

I have to admit that Alex is a nice young man, but by the time you and he can talk about love, it'll be at least four years from now - and believe me, with your beauty, determination and perseverance, you'll more than likely have met another nice young man by that time who makes your heart sing even more.

Of course, it could be a good girl, I'm not wedded to that.

After the war is over, a romantic, slow-paced love affair in a time of peace is what you and Alex deserve, not a hasty sacrifice of your youth to marry an imaginary war hero held hostage by the townspeople's war-mongering, and Alex's parents.

It's not fair, either to you or to Alex.

I want you to be happy because you deserve it, and I want me to be happy.

Unfortunately, though, there is no God willing to bless the happiness I want.

Hey, Alex told me you're a great wedding dress maker. Can you make me one? Just so I can marry Alex in it?

The last letter Elena writes to Guy is very messy, with lots of tear stains, as if fourteen-year-old Elena was bawling her eyes out while writing the letter.

But her tone in the letter is a very different kind of cold:

[To Guy:

I don't know where you got those rumors that I was forced to marry Alex. There's no such thing. I did it of my own free will.

I won't do the wedding dress, I won't allow anyone to marry Alex before me, you die!]

Bai Liu looked at the wedding dress Elena had placed on Guy's tombstone and asked with a raised eyebrow, "Can I know why you ended up making a wedding dress for Guy?"

Elena smiled wistfully, but the corners of her mouth couldn't stop going down as she smiled as if there was a lot of unspeakable sadness hidden in her happiness:

"...... was too young to know anything at that time, and when the town said they were going to choose a pretty girl to marry the town war hero, and the winner would get a sum of money from Alex's parents, my parents let me go."

"I was the prettiest of all the girls." Elena's eyes grew farther away, "It was easy to be chosen, I was very young at the time, and the law didn't even allow me to marry, so Alex's parents said that I was to watch over Alex's return, and that I wasn't to be allowed to have contact or fall in love with anyone until Alex came back."

"My whole life at that time was being married to Alex the hero, and when someone took him away from me, I totally panicked, I hated Guy." Elena's eyes reddened and her tone was hateful, "Guy was a very smooth talker and liked to write letters to tease me, I just couldn't understand how a man who fought in a war could have so much time on his hands and still smile every day."

"Guy was different from all the men I met, he respected me, encouraged me and said that sooner or later I would do nothing less than Alex, he even helped me with my enrollment so that I could go straight to school when the time came."

Elena tears overflowed from her wrinkles, "The night I wrote this letter to Guy in tears, I secretly made a wedding dress overnight and rushed to the post office to mail it to him."

She said, turning her head to Bai Liu in a daze, "But when I got to the post office, the post office notified me that a new letter had arrived and told me to go get it, I opened it, and it was still Guy's letter."

Elena was in tears, "-it's Guy's obituary and a suicide note."

"Guy was killed instantly after rebelling during an early morning sneak attack, he'd known this was going to happen for a long time and left me an early suicide note to take care of myself and help him take care of Alex."

"I wanted to give him a wedding dress, an apology, and a thank you ......" Elena choked back a sob, the skin of her mouth quivering, "all before he got to hear it."