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002 // text; username: grollschwert

cw: chronic illness, ruminations on death

Fun one for you tonight.

[this message comes in the middle of the night, when no one in their right mind should be awake. but that's never stopped anna. she can't sleep, and if flynn and ruby and everybody are right then she has to at least try not to keep this stuff inside her at all times. sorrow's silence we needn't bear, or whatever.]

You know a girl. Her body is breaking down and her meds are failing her.
She has years left. Maybe months, if it gets worse.
But something happens, and she gets access to amazing new technology. Things that prevent her body from attacking itself.
Things that stop her timer from ticking faster than everyone else's.
Great, right?
You get to know her better. You entertain her little crush on you. Maybe you like her back a little and maybe things aren't gonna be so bad.

But one day, you do something.
Something that sets off a chain of events that you couldn't have predicted. Not in a million years.
Small things collide into medium things collide into big huge massive things.
And after the butterfly version of you is done flapping its wings, she doesn't have access to that technology anymore.
She's back on the timer.

She doesn't know you did anything.
She never finds out.
You can't bring yourself to tell her, and she wouldn't believe it if you did.

She barely recognizes you anymore, by the end of it.
Her family finds your name on her phone and invites you to pay respects.

Do you still go to her funeral?

Did you kill her?

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[wouldn't be wrong. all she did was agree to help an HR guy save the world. it wasn't supposed to end up with her stabbing a giant omniscient dimensional monster in the face while her future self infiltrated an underground soul lab.]

That's good to know. That it's not doing any good to blame myself for it.
I had no idea how it was all going to play out. I just wanted to do what was right.
To try to save as many people as I could.
Just wish she didn't have to be the one person whose life got worse from it.

Holding everyone to cruel and impossible standards for things they couldn't predict... so how was Deerington, anyway?

Ha!
Oh, no, all that was back home.

Deerington...was so very out of anyone's control that I think we all had to learn very quickly to be a little gentler with ourselves and others. Can't control if the town turns you into a monster some month, after all.
Either you find a way to work through it, or you get caught up in one of those endless cycles of revenge killing some people are so fond of.

[.....]

I guess it must be natural to still feel bad, though.
I accidentally helped kill someone towards the end of it. Someone I was trying to help.
I still think about that a lot.

That's about right. Maybe I just have to get used to things being out of my control again.
So many things just happened to people in Recolle without us knowing or wanting it.
But by the end, I felt like I had power over it. Just because I'd seen everything it could throw at me.
It took so much from me that I didn't want to give it another inch, and it still ended up taking more.
But maybe Trench is responsible for that last twist of the knife.

Anyway.
Julia?

Oh, you know about that?
Yeah, her.

I knew that breaking the egg would set Cynthia free from her weird purgatory. I thought it'd be the same.

[Which...well, the only difference was that she was part-human. But Michael doesn't even know if that's what changed the outcome. He has no idea how he was supposed to know. Not that it makes him feel better about it even so - it's not like plenty of other Sleepers didn't manage it.]

What's Recolle?

I've gotten the rundown a couple times.
Think I'm starting to piece the full story together. Or as full a story as anyone knows.

[she'd have to sit down and write it all out, but she has the major beats. and she could always just ask a pthumerian to fill in any unknowns.]

Recolle was my city.
We had... some issues. Long, complicated story. Think stable time loops, eyeball monsters, and eugenics.
By the end of it, I was one of the people who knew the most about what was going on. People came to me for guidance.
Hell, I was basically the right-hand girl for the person coming up with all these wild plans to make things right.

Then I get taken away from the place that raised me and brought here, where I know jack and shit except that the gods are real and they walk among us.

I wouldn't take that too seriously. They're just big immortal people.
Probably exist in part on planes that you can't perceive, but everybody does that.

Sorry about your home, though.
Always feels nice to be the one in the know. I hate not having that here, too.

[Not that he'd had that in Deerington either, but back home - none of his friends could've gotten anywhere without him, and that's just facts.]

I mean, yeah, that's pretty much right. I chilled with CF for a while. He's just a big lonely dude.

Hey, one person who loves knowing stuff about where they are to another.
You try talking to any of the other gods yet?
I mean, one of them's just floating around out there, right? She probably has to land somewhere.

I went and talked with the Tower some. Haven't really tracked down any of the others yet - I'm still setting up some things on my end.

I'd like to talk to Mother Mercy sometime, but they say she's hard to find.

[He's heard some rumors, but Michael's pretty disinclined to do some weird Catholic ritual or whatever.]

I don't know what you know about her, but we spoke once or twice in Deerington too. We weren't friendly, but...still.

Barely anything, or at least not by that name if I have.
Honestly I didn't expect any gods to carry over from Deer with how much that one guy, Stan or Stanford or whichever one he is, was looking for information.
Still probably worth it. You can learn just as much from someone who doesn't like you.

Never Mind leaving a real bad first impression on me, so I'm glad his boyfriend's at least willing to talk.
What's the original architect like?

There's two of them. One is Stan and one is Stanford.

[Very confusing naming scheme. Michael has absolutely confused them in the past, though to be fair he was intoxicated.]

Tall. White. Sort of like my whole head architect gig back home! [lol it's a joke that makes less sense when she can't see him......]
He likes humans and their creativity, too. I think we could probably be friends if we hung out more!
Him mostly being a giant statue makes that a little hard though.

Ha. Hey, now you've got a track record of talking to people made up of artificial stuff.
Maybe it'll go better than you think.

[she, too, can make jokes that make no sense when he can't see her.]

I really did not see that one coming, though.
Just normal creativity? Not, like, a demented kind where he gets to create creepy rivers filled with blood where you confront all your regrets?
Man, what does that flock of ravens see in him. Ineffable.

My best friend back home is an artificial vessel of all the knowledge in the universe.
Not actually sure what she's made of, I'm not an engineer...

[But! Point stands!]

We didn't really talk about the blood river.
He likes taking care of the birds, though. Apparently you can make friends with them, and they'll just do that.

Metal, wires, blood that definitely shouldn't be in there with the metal and wires. Just a guess.

Anyway, what the hell, I'm already friends with a Qrow.
Ravens just make sense for a next step.
And they're just normal birds? They like seeds and shiny things?
I don't have to feed them, like, magic flower petals or blood.

Nah, they'd definitely melt.
Spontaneous manifestation of blood actually indicates a specific issue. I read through the troubleshooting guide once.
She's never had that, but I've heard of different Janets going through it.

Seem to be.
I'm not too familiar with normal birds, we don't have them in Hell.

Hm. That's a problem for future me to figure out, then.

Damn, first the Morning Star and now you.
How many devils am I getting the attention of?
Is this my reward for renouncing Catholicism and becoming a huge lesbian? I get to chill and talk about mortality with immortals?

Oh, I didn't mention that, huh?
Well, I don't really care about Catholicism. It isn't real in my world.
I guess it is for some folks - I've met other demons who have some issues with it - but human religions aren't important to me as long as they aren't being dicks about it.

[Privately, he does think they're sort of silly and she was probably right to exit. But he wouldn't really care if she still was Catholic.]

We also don't really care about which humans want to sleep with which.
Although lesbians are real.

Oh my god, dude.
PLEASE find a way to go back in time and tell my parents all this.
'Cause you aren't gonna find bigger dicks about it than them.
Especially the "lesbians are real" part, I think my dad needs to hear that one big time.

Ha, fuck, sorry. I bet you get stuff like this all the time.
I should've figured it out sooner. I mean, what else are you gonna call trying to blame someone for every butterfly's wingbeats for all of humanity except Hell?

Edited 2021-11-17 17:47 (UTC)

They objectively are, though?
I mean, I understand that some people complain about it, but they are literally just there.

Heaven?
They're just as culpable.
Almost more, if you ask me - of course Hell wasn't doing anything about it, but they were the ones who were supposed to give a shit about people.

[Maybe he doesn't have any religious feelings, but that doesn't mean he's not bitter about literal angels and Heaven and stuff.]

God.
What's it feel like, having to pick up Heaven's slack for them?
Guess they got all the people they thought were cool up there and stopped caring.
"What's up, dog, we got Socrates and he's chugging this barrel of hemlock, the rest of you can figure it out on your own 'cause this is gonna be hilarious!"

Or do I have your cosmology just totally wrong?
I generally figure there's a balance to this stuff, but who knows.

They stopped admitting people sometime in the 16th century.
Socrates didn't make the cut - I think he just lost too many points for being annoying.

It was a numerical points-based system.
For example, you'd always lose ten for telling a lie, regardless of what it was or why you told it.
The Good Place had an absurdly high points requirement, so even if you were more "irritating" than "evil", you'd still never make it.

Plus, with the rise of global capitalism, basically every choice available to everyone contributed towards harming somebody somewhere.
It basically became mathematically impossible to go to Heaven.

Damn, score one for Comrade Marx, I guess.
That stupid min/max bullshit sounds exactly like the kind of thing they'd do up there, honestly.

Actually, now that you mention it.
If it really is impossible to do anything without hurting someone, somewhere, even without knowing you're doing it...
That kind of makes my whole.
Like, the whole reason we're talking, that kind of makes it a pointless question.

Yeah.
Even back in the day, you really had to somehow rack up a lot of big-ticket good deeds at a young age and then immediately die before being a normal person could drag you down.
But that's its own thing. Most people are just never in a position to save a bunch of lives or whatever.

[Plus there are many people who did and still didn't make it, so like]

Yeah. Maybe.
Sounds like it was a little more immediate and personal for you.

[Also he's like attempting to show empathy?]

Yeah.
It's like. I don't know.
Even if I decide to play by the stupid rules that big G and the kids' table up there set up and I'm heading down anyway,
It helps knowing that someone like you is taking the time to, like.
Listen to me. Try to help me out.
Like the most human demon I've ever run into.

God, I'm making this into some moral thing.
It doesn't have a damn thing to do with good places or bad places.
I don't give a shit where my soul goes in the end of it. Either soul.
I just wanted to get it out there so I didn't have to deal with it alone for a while.
Sorry for getting too in the weeds with the heavenly scorecards.

No problem. I can get a little intense about all of that. They're problems I've been working to help solve for a while.

[It's so incredibly easy to get Michael to go off about all the afterlife nonsense. Even when it's not usually relevant to anybody here.]

But thank you. That means a lot.

I can't really speak to any other worlds' afterlife, at the end of the day.
It's better for everyone if they just focus on the lives they're living right now.
You should share your problems with people, if it helps. I think it does.

You know what, you're right.
The life I'm living right now has a lot of bullshit inside it.
But it's also got, like. Squid stuff. New town. New people to meet and protect.
Probably a new world to save, if the trend keeps up.

Shit's still gonna live with me for a while, but I don't know.
Maybe now I'll regret this whole post a little less once I wake up.

Name's Anna, by the way. Hits better than grollschwert.

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eudaimonikos - 2021-11-22 02:52 (UTC) - Expand

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