video; un: leavegodalone

[necrolord]

Is this thing on?

[ The camera opens on a man, but there is something horribly inhuman about his eyes: they are black from edge to edge, the iris burning with a ring of white light. He is flanked by two skeletons which stand at attention, each with a speck of glowing red in their shadowed eye sockets. ]

Been a while since I had to do this. Hey, hello, kia ora. You face the King Undying, the Necrolord Prime.

[ He claps his hands together. There is something wrong with them: the whites of his metacarpals are exposed, flesh crumbled away like so much ash. ]

But let's not stand on formality, right? I hear we're on a first-name basis, now. So: I'm Emperor John Gaius, creator of the Nine Houses, and also God. Not locally, mind, [ and he gestures vaguely upwards, ] here it's a more crowded playing field. I'll admit, it's been an adjustment. I tried to get a peek at my usual domain... turns out Mariana doesn't like to share.

Now, I get that I've made a few mistakes. [ He says this like funny understatement, hands splayed. It shows the bare red tendons in his palms. ] Let's clear up some misconceptions.

[ He stands accused of baby-killing, human sacrifice, and the destruction of whole planets. He riled Mariana into a deadly storm. But what he says, with all the gravity of a king, is: ]

My wife is that hot.

[ Fantastic. Amazing start. He leans in to regard the camera. ]

Look, I get it: I haven't made myself popular. I'll get a lot of kids at my door screaming log off. We're on, what, bloody retribution attempt six or seven? It's been a constant parade of death lasers and witches and kids with swords. And I see where you're coming from. I put a serious damper on everyone's fun vengeance beach party.

But it's getting a little old, so consider this a friendly warning to all my executioners: I will start losing patience. [ He quirks a smile that does not touch his eyes. ] Not to be all, I have over ten billion confirmed kills, but: maybe do not fuck with me.

Cheers.

[ The skeletons perform an ancient First House salute, and the feed cuts out. ]

Comments

[necrolord]

[ I could've stopped.

There it is again. There it always is again, right? Gideon on the boat, Pyrrha in his study, Augustine pacing and miserable and wrung-out across the echoing wreck of his home. That's the challenge, that's the test set to him. We had the choice to stop. ]

The fact that you have moral grounds, [ he murmurs, voice dropped lower, ] that you want to draw lines, and you only snap when it's about what matters— I know that feeling. You only break what you love, right? I always have. Every single thing.

[ She cornered him into realtalk after all, huh? God blows out a breath. ] Ten thousand years and I've learned a lot of lessons, Faith. None of them are how to stop.

[slayerskiss]

[The hardest thing to do in this world is to live in it.

And maybe that's what it is. Living and stopping... they're the same. Buffy, Faith, Angel, Willow... John, Gideon, and so many others she's met here. Did they ever get a chance to stop fighting and to live instead?

She used to think that the only solution to it all was to die in some immortalized horrible way, to paint herself onto the nightmares of the people she loved. But that's not true. Dying was just the imaginary light at the bottom of the endless hole she kept digging, and she's still digging to this day, just in a different direction.

It never struck her until now, how hypocritical those words are, echoing through her subconscious as an immortalized suicide note, all as the girl she loved most in the entire world jumped to her death nearly a thousand miles away.]

Yeah. [A quiet agreement, a quiet acceptance that that's what she is.]

...I thought I had too. I had more here than I've ever had in my whole life, reasons to want to just... live, I suppose. But it didn't stop me. Guess I was just kidding myself all along. The more I had to lose... the more tempted I was to just ruin it all.

[She knows it's a bad idea, to expose her heart to him. He had Gideon in her head, she could feel her anger. And it's justified. It's all justified. All the righteous anger of all the posts preceding this and all the posts after, they're all right. But...]

You've still got me, y'know. If you'll have me.

[necrolord]

[ Reasons to just live. He has those, too, and knows it: the kids. Augustine. Pyrrha. Alfred, even. It's all an open door, a branching path down a peaceful lane.

It's never been meant for him. He can't fucking bear to just sit in the quiet. ]

Sounds familiar.

[ He lied to Paul, once, sitting with their backs to the sea. This is that same moment, except he's here in the dark all alone with chitin in his bones, and she's somewhere across town licking her wounds just the same. There's a joke or a lesson in that, right? Maybe the space between them stretches out every time he does this. He's always further away.

She deserves better than to think she's on his level, even if she is on his path. ]

I am glad to have you.