Death After Death
Chapter 252: Same As Ever

A little over a week later, Simon arrived to find Schwarzenbruck just as he left it. It was a large town prosperous enough to have city walls, but aside from the bridge that was central to the trade route north that it stood astride, there was little that was special about it. It was nicer than Crowvar had ever been, and as Simon approached the place, he couldn’t help but wonder how different his life would have been if he and Freya had been able to settle someplace like this instead of that cursed place.

Still, might-have-beens were dangerous, and he didn’t let that thought linger long enough to make him sad. Instead, he gave money to a few widows who were begging for money by the gate and spent that first day looking for the inn he’d glimpsed in the Oracle’s vision.

He’d only seen it for a moment - she’d forbidden him from following that thread - but he knew that was where patient zero would occur eventually. It turned out to be a dank little place called The Bugbear’s Biergarten, and even though Simon knew it might be years yet before the events he knew were coming played out, he still stayed a few nights there and tried to make friends with some of the regulars while he claimed to look for work.

This time, unfortunately, he couldn’t pretend to be a mercenary, bounty hunter, or any of his other frequent disguises because he had no desire to join a caravan and head further north or south. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Part of Simon definitely wanted to go further north. He wanted to go very far north and understand what it was that was driving the Murani to wage war on the south, but that would have to wait for another life. This one, he was going to fix all the shit he’d just broken.

Simon ended up working a number of odd jobs in the weeks that followed. Mostly, that consisted of manual labor for whoever needed it. He helped the millers sew flour sacks shut and load them into carts, carried firewood, and unloaded beer kegs to various inns, including his least favorite one. Freya hadn’t started working there, at least. Brena still did. She was a little older than when he saw her on her last visit, but she still wasn’t the version of herself that he remembered biting him.

Back then, she seemed like the sort of tavern girl you could spend the night with for a few coins. This one, though, just seemed like a sweet girl, and when he’d finished unloading beer into the basement, she brought him lunch without even being asked. She even thanked him for the help.

Will she become the woman I remember if nothing changes? He wondered. Will Freya work here again in a couple more years?

Simon wasn’t sure. He knew that different versions of the same level played out differently in small ways, but in large ways, they seemed to repeat over and over again until he changed something. Or at least some version of me changed something, he thought glumly as he remembered facing down his doppelgänger at the volcano.

Still, since Brena was the one constant he was aware of, he decided to keep track of her as a sort of science experiment in the months that followed. He became friendly with her, but not in any way that was close or romantic in an attempt to understand why this version of her was so different from the one who’d run him through with a pitchfork in one life, tried to seduce him in another, and who he’d let turn into a zombie in a third in a fit of righteous indignation that he still sometimes felt bad about.

She was hardly his sole focus in that time. During harvest season, he scythed wheat and picked apples. Despite still having plenty of funds, he did whatever he could to blend in with the locals. That was pretty hard to do in a world where pretty much everyone died in the same city they were born, but Simon did his best.

It felt strange not to use his scholar, healer, or mercenary acts, but a strong man capable of odd jobs seemed to fit the bill better in this case. More importantly, it allowed him to touch dozens of lives in that first year. He didn’t quite know everyone in town by name, but it was a close thing. It was weird to see so many people that he had the vaguest memories of saving once upon a time, but he got used to it.

That familiarity, more than any magical sight, was what allowed him to spot what he believed was the pivotal moment in Brena’s life. Until that moment, she was a happy young twenty-year-old. She was even betrothed to a hunter and a woodsman. It seemed like a good match, at least until Simon heard the rumors about what a dog he really was.

He did a little investigating and found out that her fiancée, Rodrick, was worse than a dog. He was cheating on her with several women, including a weaver and a milkmaid in a village north of the river. He had no doubt that Brena would have heard about it, too, if Simon hadn’t decided to stage an intervention.

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A single event is all it takes to ruin someone, huh? He thought as he again tried to reconcile the barmaid he knew with the one he saw these days. He considered all the ways that heartbreak could make someone go crazy and decided that Brena’s reaction mostly made sense. I guess that’s all it took for Freya, too. If she ends up with me, she's a sweet, devoted woman, and if she ends up with Kell, then she’s kind of a bitch.

Simon waited until the man had drunk more than he should in the bar one night, and then wrapped tightly in his cloak, he struck. “You really know how to get around,” he said, stepping out of the shadows and delivering a right cross that staggered Rodrick before he even knew what was happening. “Pity you never learned how to keep it in your pants.”

Schwarzenbruck wasn’t a very big place, but it still had dozens of streets and allies, and once the sun set and the shutters closed, all of them were pretty dark. Simon could have struck anywhere, but he chose a place near the center of town so that someone would find and help the man when all was said and done.

Rodrick grunted in pain before he took on a more defensive stance. Then he spat, “What’s it to you, pal. Who I fuck is between me and the beauties in my bed, not a prick like you.”

“It’s not enough that you gonna marry one of the prettiest girls in the whole damn city, but you have the nerve to bang my wife too?” Simon roared, feigning righteous anger as he threw a fake right toward the man's face before he delivered a left to Rodrick’s stomach that doubled him over a second time.

Both of the women the man was reputed to be having affairs with were married, and it was entirely possible there were other women besides them. So, that useful red herring became the focus of the beatdown. He swung at Simon a couple of times with his big meaty fists, but after drowning himself in beer, the hunter’s reaction time was for shit, and Simon sidestepped both before landing a couple of jabs to put him back on the defensive.

Rodrick was a handsome man who was powerfully built from the time he spent logging and hunting. All those muscles were meaningless when he had no practice hurting people, though, and Simon took him apart one punch at a time.

“Listen, if you-you want me to stop fucking—” he gasped, holding up a hand defensively as he tried to step back, Simon didn’t let him. He might not be a trained boxer, but his opponent was hammered, and at that point, he had a killer's instincts no matter what weapon he used. At this point, it was harder for him to pull his punches and settle for breaking the prick’s nose than it was to do something more permanently disfiguring or deadly. He didn’t want to kill the asshole. He just wanted to put the fear of god into him.

“I’m not here to take a deal from a reprobate like you,” Simon growled, grabbing the woodsman’s shoulders so that he could slam his knee into the man's chest before letting him slump to the cobblestone street.

“Go on,” Simon yelled, hoping to draw some attention to the fight now that it was all but over. “Get up. I’m not finished messing up that pretty face of yours yet.”

Rodrick waved with his hands in an attempt to ward off any further blows, but that didn’t stop Simon from kicking him hard twice in the ribs before a nearby door spilled light into the street. Then, he retreated quickly before anyone could identify him and let someone else help the prick get back on his feet.

The rumor about the fight spread quickly. It would have been hard to hide, given how bad Simon had hurt him. Brena was upset about that for weeks, but she never found out the truth, and to the best of Simon’s knowledge, he never fucked around on her again, which made the effort worthwhile.

Simon used a word of lesser healing on his knuckles to hide any evidence he’d been involved, but other than that, he stuck to his quiet, unexciting life. That winter, he learned to butcher pigs and make sausage, which were not skills he’d ever thought to learn before, but they were interesting trades.

Really, the butchery, more than anything, reminded him that he had a ways to go on learning human anatomy. Art had gotten him almost to where he needed to be to try to use more flesh-bending magic, but if he wanted to know even more than he already did, he was going to need to dissect some cadavers and do some studying.

That would be an easy way to get branded as a necromancer yourself, he told himself as he quickly decided this was not the right life to do that in. Still, he learned what he could from slaughtering animals, and if anything, he found he had a knack for it.

That spring, shortly after Freya started working at the inn he always found her at, he actually attended Brena and Rodrick’s wedding. It was a simple affair with wildflowers and a swearing of vows under an open sky. Simon gave the newlyweds a small purse of silver and well wishes for their future together. He saw Rodrick flinch when he mentioned the word fidelity, and that was enough for Simon to feel like the man had learned his lesson for a while, at least.

He’d managed to fix one future, no matter how minor and unimportant it was, and he felt good about that. He saw no sign that Brena would ever become the awful woman that he’d known before. If he could keep the zombies from ever overwhelming Schwarzenbruck in this timeline, she’d probably even have a few kids and a nice life. It wasn’t quite enough to make him feel completely absolved in the way he once let her become a zombie, but it was a nice start.

Despite that normalcy and the fact that he might yet have years to wait, Simon felt accomplished. So, he was surprised when, only a few weeks after that, he finally saw the adventurers he was waiting for stroll into town for the first time.