The night air outside the gallery was cool and clean; Innsbruck did not sleep so much as it rested; lights dimd, streets quieted, but life remained present, orderly, contained.
The last patrons drifted out in pairs, laughter muted out of courtesy rather than exhaustion. Bruno and Heidi descended the gallery steps without hurry.
No attendants rushed ahead, nor were there any aides waiting on them with folders or schedules. The city belonged to itself tonight, and they walked through it as its guests rather than its masters.
They moved along a broad avenue frad by stately facades, their windows glowing softly. The buildings were tall, but not oppressive.
Ornate, but not ostentatious. Each one stood as if it expected to be there long after the present mont had passed and intended to be worthy of that endurance.
Heidi slipped her arm through Bruno’s, resting her head lightly against his shoulder as they walked.
"I’m glad you didn’t remove it," she said at last.
Bruno did not ask which piece she ant.
"Why?" he replied.
She considered the question carefully. "Because it would have been easy. And because... her story deserves to be told as well.... Even if it is inconvenient for you."
Bruno did not say a word; he simply nodded his head. They walked in silence for a ti, footsteps echoing faintly against the stone.
A tram passed in the distance, its motion smooth, electric, nearly soundless. Overhead, the moon slipped between drifting clouds, its light catching on carved cornices and statues that watched the street with impassive faces.
Bruno’s thoughts lingered where the sculpture had left them. He had long since learned to catalog regret the sa way he cataloged failure: acknowledged, studied, but never indulged.
Yet so monts resisted that discipline. Luxembourg was one of them. Not the annexation itself; that had been inevitable, necessary even.
But the human cost that had followed in its wake, the affections he had neither returned nor properly buried.
There were victories that reshaped borders, and there were victories that left scars. When Bruno had reincarnated into this world, he had lived an entire life with no purpose other than survival.
He had never felt love, nor truly been loved. And he believed that in two lives, Heidi was the only woman who could love him. Many won throughout the years had tried to sway his affections despite his betrothal and later marriage to Heidi.
And yet he had seen right through them all. Not because he was particularly well-versed with the opposite sex and how they processed the world. But because he had presud, rightfully so in most cases, that they were enamored with the idea of who he was, but had no actual love for him as a man.
When Marie approached him, he spurned her advances the sa he had every other princess or duchess who once tried to steal him away from her wife.
But she was more resilient, and for years Bruno had treated that resilience as a vain attempt to gain his support for the sake of her own sovereignty. He had never once entertained the idea that the woman could have genuinely fallen in love with him.
Heidi and he had grown up together; they had molded each other’s personalities in a way that they had beco inseparable. So how could this random woman who barely even knew him genuinely love him?
And yet, all the sa, in the end her feelings were revealed as genuine. And when Bruno finally realized it, he had already condemned her and her realm to their fate. The House of Luxembourg and its Grand Duchy were subjugated as a federated state of the Reich.
And Marie was left alone. As far as Bruno knew, she had never married after he rejected her. And had eventually died alone, leaving her sister to take the vacant throne that she had left behind.
"I sotis wonder," Heidi said softly, as if sensing the direction of his thoughts, "if I weren’t so lucky to have t you when I did... Would I have lived long enough to see the world you created? Would you have married soone like Marie instead?"
Bruno stopped dead in his tracks, grabbing his wife’s hand as he forced her into his arms. Heidi blushed slightly, embarrassed by her own comnts. Not because they were inappropriate, but because they were unnecessary.
They stood together, watching the river flow. The city humd quietly around them, alive but controlled.
There was no shouting, no disorder; even the distant sounds carried a sense of rhythm, as if Innsbruck itself understood the value of restraint.
"There is no life where I am not yours and you are not mine...." Bruno said, more to the night than to her.
"When we first t we were children, and you were a more frightened little rabbit than a girl. I knew when I witnessed the way your father and mother acted that you were in need of protection. It was the mont I stepped forward and volunteered for that position that, for the first ti in both of my lives, I chose sothing worth fighting for. Without you by my side, without the life we built, there is no knowing if I would have strayed from my path early on."
Heidi felt her cheeks burning up in embarrassnt at the words, spoken so boldly and poetically, without the slightest inclination because they were still in a public space.
But she couldn’t condemn the man, for he had already continued. "I built monunts, raised infrastructure, conquered industry, and bent the world to my knee, and I didn’t do it for the petty sake of my own ego, or the vain praises of a history that I will never live to see. I did it for you, for our children, for our children’s children, and to ensure that future generations of our family never have to endure the past I rember. Without you, there is no Marie, because whatever she may have felt for , she wasn’t you."
Heidi pressed her head deep into Bruno’s chest. She had known for so many years how Bruno felt about this particularly thorny topic.
She had never once doubted Bruno’s loyalty, and she knew it was not guilt that haunted him, but how callously he had trampled over a woman’s heart whose affections for him were as genuine as her own.
"Then I suppose I’m the luckiest woman to ever live."
Bruno chuckled as he created so distance from Heidi, grabbing her hand and dragging her forward deeper into the city’s depths as he did so.
"Yeah... You’re really lucky; you had to wait sixty years for your husband to co ho from his war against the world."
Heidi didn’t respond; she simply followed Bruno wherever he was taking her in silence.
They resud their walk, turning down a quieter street where the traffic thinned and the sound of their footsteps beca more pronounced.
Ahead, their car waited unobtrusively at the curb, the driver standing at ease beside it. The security detail remained distant, alert but invisible, shadows rather than sentinels.
Bruno paused before stepping forward, casting one last look back toward the gallery’s illuminated facade.
The thought of the sculpture. Of the impression it had left upon him, the looks on the faces of the patrons as they observed the masterpiece. Stone, proportion, permanence. Art that did not beg to be understood, but waited to be worthy of understanding.
"I wonder if this is how history shall rember . Not as the general who subjugated the fates and carried the Reich banners to the ends of the earth. But as the Prince who had callously trampled over the feelings of fair maidens to achieve his ends."
Heidi smirked, nudging her husband in the ribs upon hearing him voice his existentialism aloud.
"I’m sure history will record all the great courtly scandals of the infamous Grand Prince of Tyrol, his highness the Royal Rake who stole the hearts of Grand Duchesses and Imperial Princesses alike, and left them all wanting. All so that he could stay loyal to his bastard wife. Whom he loved so very, very much that he would deny the dreams of lesser n the world over."
Bruno’s gaze lightened significantly as a smile returned to his face, rustling his wife’s hair as he dragged her in close.
"Maybe in my next life I’ll be allowed to engage in those dreams of lesser n, after all I have already reincarnated once. Who is to say I don’t get a third ti around?"
Heidi looked up at her husband, her playful smile replaced with a hostile glare.
"Don’t you even think about it Mr... When you die I will follow you to whatever world you find yourself in, and you can make damn sure I will bind you to all the sa!"
Bruno and Heidi both broke out into laughter as they climbed into the vehicle waiting for them and drove off to the palace. The night had been well, even if a bit deeper than either of them had planned. And they still had so many more like it to entertain.
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