"I already told you there isn't much to say anyway, but if you really wanna waste yer time, then...suit yerself."
He had in fact told me, thrice. I gathered that though he had intended to tell me everything afterwards, now that the time came to do so, he found it incredibly hard to keep his word. I hadn't asked him to say anything in the first place, he brought it up himself. And now he was entangled in his own thoughts. It dawned on me then, that he had never intended to come out alive from that fight.
We kept walking and walking under the increasingly crimson sky, the illusion was really over. And despite my fears, it never rained. We were passing through a thicket, as the night began to crawl in and Chopper decided that we'd stay for the night. There was a ravine nearby, I could hear the sound of a waterfall as well. Truthfully, it was a lullaby to my exhausted ears. While, I'd have preferred sleep, Chopper instead proposed we wash ourselves from the battle.
I wonder what kind of relief he sought by soaking in cold water like that. I refused to soak in, and just sat beside him after I'd washed up. He didn't find the water "that freezing", and thus a haven for his aching bones.
"Sometimes, I begin to think you are the reason Lady is as rotten as she is", I couldn't help admitting.
"Ain't no way I rub off on that old witch", he denied me ardently.
I, who wasn't in the mood of much dialogue on that matter, remained silent and looked at our fire in the distance, yearning for a good sleep in its embrace. Still, I felt a sense of duty to keep him company while he relished in his nonsensical therapies. I hadn't been feeling this courteous in a very long while, but I suppose some things never leave our core. Hence I sat with him, out of a dreadful obligation.
"I've always been fighting...as long as I can remember", he mused.
I felt that I should have stopped him from stroking his own wounds like this but he too, found it an obligation to keep his word.
"I was...let's see, when was that...?"
He seemed to have a terrible memory of most of his early life. It seemed to me he only really remembered a very small portion of it right. It was rather concerning, as I later thought about it.
"I was a merc until I was around 17. Ah, yeah that...", he would hit upon some piece of memory like this once in a while, "We were a band of some dozen gypsies. I don't suppose you know, back in the day, gypsies were more likely to be hired guns than merchants. It was more profitable that way. I don't remember my mother, but I don't suppose she was from this country. Probably a scarlet woman, y'know. I can't remember much beyond those ruffians bein' family and all. It doesn't matter though."
"To you, that is", I commented.
"In any case, I got into the king's guard right around then...y'know when I was 17. The gypsy band got killed off bad somewhere. I ran away. Some Mercaen soldiers captured me, and before long, I was a part of the king's army. Which is another way of saying that I was a nobody."
"It sounds kind of prestigious though..."
"It only sounds that way, and only when there's no war. Otherwise, everybody's in the king's army. And no one finds that reputable. Well, anyway, I fought and fought and fought...but then the end comes for all that. I ran away again, from a battle. It was pretty nasty for our people, though not as much as the Bloody Fall, perhaps. Our front was pretty messed up anyway, we knew it was a lost cause."
"Was it before the Bloody Fall?"
"Hmm, yeah, way back. We were fighting in Halen back then, when we first lost it."
"You've always been kind of heartless with that place", I smirked.
"Well, now you know why. I was found by the Beast faction. I met Corsen and Wolfe there, you've seen them both now, huh?"
He wasn't really asking a question.
"They were the closest to the king, the Beasts. Everyone knew that. So when the coup turned the tables around, the biggest threat was the Beasts. Their king was dead, replaced by his own brother. And that brother wasn't really merciful. He outlawed them. If found, they were to be killed without mercy. So I left them. There really wasn't a point in staying. I left the war. It wasn't my cup of the tea anymore, I was really that sickened by it. I was rampaging around the city like a madman, back then no one cared about the petty criminals in the alleys. Although...I wasn't that petty, but my work didn't leave much behind to go on."
I later learned from Lady that he was a murderer. He cut so many down in the dark alleys and slums of the capital that some began to think it the work of the devil himself. Despite how humbly he put it to me that day, he was notorious for slaughtering women in the most gruesome ways. No one knew anything about the perpetrator, he was called the Ripper in the papers.
"Then I met that old crone. She's been a nuisance in my side since. She wanted me to join her. Imagine that, in the darkest alley of the capital, the moon can't decide between whether it wants ta come out in the open or cower behind the clouds, you run into a midget with a most disgusting face who asks you to join her in doing who knows what. Ain't no way I'd have accepted that. Then she called me a creep. She wasn't one to talk if you ask me. But then, one thing led to another and we ended up fighting it out. There was a lot of collateral damage and eventually, I lost to the witch."
That was how he met Lady and ended up joining her. He indeed was her pet dog, that she'd enslaved in a fair and square dual. It did explain quite a lot. Still, I knew this wasn't all there was to it. I didn't want to insist, but I couldn't help poking at his heart a little.
"Chopper-san...you know that's not all of it. There isn't much of a point in avoiding the subject, you might as well not tell me anything at all."
He sighed, "What do you wanna hear, kid?"
"I'll ask some questions, then. But to start of... ", he had finally gotten out of the water and was dressing up now, "Are you human?"