Chapter 208: 208. He Had No Sentence That Could Hold Both Things At Once

“REX…!”

The four women all made sounds simultaneously, which was the compressed version of four different responses arriving at the same moment, followed by silence, and then Talyra was the first to speak.

“What the—” she said, and the word she did not finish was one she rarely used.

Rex remained still for a moment, lying on the paving stones as he stared up at the sky above the market district intersection.

He gave the moment the beat it needed. ’Yeah… he fucked up…’

All the bystanders looked shocked, witnessing Theo suddenly punch an innocent person like that. The rumors would spread quickly and could potentially tarnish the Nightwing household name.

As Rex contemplated the implications of the incident, he recognized that the fallout would reach far beyond the Nightwing family. Rex realized that the entire community would need to reassess their loyalties and beliefs, potentially disrupting the delicate peace they had established.

Theo was still standing where he had been when the swing landed, and his breathing was heavy, like someone who had been carrying something for too long and had just let it go in the worst possible way and was now dealing with what that had caused.

“Hah…! Hah…! Hah…!” He continued to breathe heavily, his face contorted with rage because he had just lost control of himself.

His hand was still in the configuration of the swing.

He was looking at Rex on the ground, and the expression on his face was the expression of someone who was discovering, in real time, that the action they had been certain would feel one specific way was in fact feeling several different ways simultaneously, and not all of them were the way they had planned.

“Ouch…” Rex grinned. “That hurt.”

Diana’s voice carried the same quality as when she was under external control—not because she believed it was the right course of action, but because it was the only way to manage the turmoil beneath the surface.

“Why the HELL did you do that?!” Diana screamed at him.

Theo stared at her in horror, just because it’s the first time Diana screamed at him with a disgusted look.

“What you just did,” she said, in that controlled voice, “in the middle of a public street, was—”

“Diana,” Lily said quietly.

It was not an attempt to redirect but rather a steadying presence, the kind of calm that communicated understanding. The way she uttered Diana’s name carried the weight that sisters often use when they are navigating a situation together.

Theo’s jaw was set in the way it set when he was refusing something. He looked at Rex, who was in the process of sitting up from the paving stones with the unhurried quality of someone who was not injured and knew it and was not performing injury but was also not rushing.

“I…” Theo looked at his fists. “What did I…?”

Rex sat up. He touched his jaw with two fingers, which was the right thing to do after being hit there, and he looked at Theo with the expression he had chosen before the swing came.

This was not the expression of someone who had just been attacked in a public intersection and wanted things to go a certain way.

It was the look of someone who was waiting to find out what had just happened.

“Why…?” Rex said, leaving the sentence open so that the other person could take it in any direction they needed to.

Theo’s breathing was still not normal. His stillness was different from that of someone who was running too many internal processes at once and couldn’t spare the capacity for either full control or full expression.

’Yeah… he’s a reincarnator whose previous life was probably a loser who can’t control himself…’

’I already won this war…’

Rex knew this for sure because he had been watching the specific tells for the last few weeks. What Rex was observing at that moment was the specific crisis that reincarnators experienced when the narrative they had created about their second chance began to yield unexpected results.

Theo entered this new life with a clear understanding of the trajectory of the story. Diana was part of that story, the heroine, the fixed point that gave the early Chapters of the second chance their shape and direction.

He had been building toward something with her for as long as he had been in this life, the way reincarnators built toward their assigned relationships: with the confidence of someone who knew, at a structural level, that it was supposed to work.

But…

Rex had messed up the structure.

Diana had not waited for the structure to work itself out, not because she had a specific plan for Theo, but due to Rex’s behavior with the women he chose to be around and his constant presence.

She had made her own choice, like real people do, not like characters in a story do.

Theo had been holding this since the morning Diana told him and even rejected his late confession.

What Rex was observing was the moment when that restraint finally reached its breaking point.

He didn’t regard it with disdain. Instead, he found it intriguing, valuable, and something he could approach in the way he typically considered things.

“Did I not make myself clear enough back then?” Diana said, and the controlled voice was still there, but the weight behind it had become something that was not going to be redirected. “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time, but you didn’t notice it…”

“That’s why… it’s already too late now,” Diana said, looking away. “I already made my choice, and that’s what I told you then, and it’s still what I’m telling you now!”

She looked at Theo again with the same look she had given Rex in the academy’s guest room before sunrise on the morning he left for the island.

It was the most honest look she could give. “I’m not going to pretend that what you just did was okay…”

“What you did is disrespectful to your position and even to the Nightwing family name!”

“Now that I’ve seen you like this… it seems that my choice was correct.”

Theo made an even more shocked expression upon hearing that; he could feel his heart being stabbed multiple times by a sword. He then looked at Rex, who was now standing on the paving stones with Aisella’s hand supporting him, which he had taken without turning it into anything.

“This is all your fault…!” Theo looked at Rex.

“My fault…?” Rex tilted his head.

“Diana was supposed to be—”

His word got interrupted when Iris arrived in a blink of an eye.

She rounded the second intersection of the market district with a movement that Rex had come to associate with Iris Morr Nightwing; it always seemed as though she had been nearby long before her arrival became apparent.

She regarded Theo with an expression that suggested she had been watching the situation and had now reached a point where mere observation was no longer adequate.

“Stop this nonsense now… Theo,” she said.

The way she said it showed that she had known the person she was talking to since they were very young and had a kind of authority over them that was not formal but also not easy to ignore.

Theo stared at her.

“Tell me why,” Iris said, her tone direct and unyielding, as it often was. “Why did you punch Rex like that, right in front of them and the crowd?”

Theo fell silent for a moment, and that silence felt elongated, as if it held too much weight to fit into a typical timeframe.

“He—” he began, but then fell silent.

He tried again. “Diana was—”

Once more, he hesitated.

Theo realized he had just ’fucked up,’ fully aware that his rage had overtaken him when he punched Rex without any justification. It was already too late for him.

The specific quality of this struggle was what Rex identified as the reincarnator’s crisis. This crisis occurs when the narrative framing that has been shaping someone’s second life conflicts with the reality that second life has produced.

There was no clear sentence available to describe this situation, as any clear sentence would require either the narrative or the reality to be true, but not both at the same time.

“He was there,” Theo said, finally, and the way he said it was not the complete version but was the honest partial version, the version that was accessible from where he currently was. “When Diana told me, she—and I saw, at the dock today, her hand was—”

He stopped, realizing he was only embarrassing himself further. He couldn’t find any good reason for his feelings other than being a jealous loser who was too late to win back his girl’s heart.

’Yeah… you’re too late, buddy.’

Iris looked at him like she understood everything that was being said, even the parts that weren’t, and was trying to figure out how to respond to it all.

“I know,” she said quietly, and the way she said it showed that she knew something that wasn’t being said out loud. “But… it’s her own choice, and you can’t change that at all.”

Theo felt his last defense crumble upon hearing that, leaving him feeling suddenly weak.

After that, she turned to Rex.

“I apologize for my nephew’s behavior, Rex.”

’She apologize for him… what a fucking loser.’

Rex replied, “It’s alright… I’m actually surprised, but it seems like there’s a lot going on around him.”

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