le père, le fils et l'esprit saint

I realized that despite being a huge fan for years, I have never written OFF fic, so here's a ramble and a yarn with sprinklings of Hannibal references to the track of Wasteland, Baby! A section of this was inspired by obsessivepuppeteer's headcanon of Sugar being Zacharie's puppeteer.

It starts with 'In the beginning', and In the beginning, there is nothing.

The nothing sits in a room made for other nothings like itself. It is drab, cold, and too, too big, for such a small thing like this nothing. Every cough the nothing makes echoes in this room; every stumble feels like the nothing is being laughed at by the four walls; every night the nothing wakes up, throat hoarse from screaming about dreams that aren't really dreams because they sit outside of the nothing's room, the emptiness stares at him and reminds him that mother and father are not here.

Yet, the nothing thinks, in the way lonely, sick, desperate children do.

There is no yet, something in the back of his mind spits, rearing its ugly, broken head. Its voice tastes like acid. Its timbre resonates bitterness. Mother and father are not here.

Mother and father are, the nothing knows. They're just trying their best to help him, and to help him, they have to work and work and work and not stop, because the bills aren't going to pay themselves. The nothing is not going to get better by itself.  

(The nothing is not going to get better. Nothing is going to get better.)

It is a fair price, for the sake of the nothing. It is how they show love for the nothing, the way they pay this cost, no matter how steep it gets. The nothing is loved with every hour they are not in its room. The nothing is loved with every minute the nurses tell it that mommy and daddy can't make it today. The nothing is loved every time one of them can, and mommy has violet and blue and yellow splashed all over her skin. The nothing is loved every time daddy visits and he is silent, and then he is loud, and then he is monstrous, towering, terrifying.  

He is lucky. There are many nothings in this hospital. A lot of them do not have parents who visit them, who still love them, love them black and blue and violet and yellow, and have not given up, because the world is ending, and soon the world, too, will be nothing.

He is a lucky boy, this nothing. His name is Hugo.

-

The first time a child sees the sky, there is a wonder trapped in their ribcages, along with their lungs and hearts and veins and arteries, and this cannot be captured again and cannot be replicated. It also cannot be remembered, once the child grows up, because that wonder turns into a status quo that demands to ignored because it is unremarkable, and it has always been like that.  

The sky is blue. It is vibrant, it is rich, it is how it feels to have cold silk draped slowly and carefully over feverish skin after a long, tiring, exhausting day. It murmurs vastness and exploration. It whispers hand-picked secrets.  

The Vader Eloha stares at the child with this wonder, this awe, and breathes her first breath that simultaneously feels like life and relief. As if she's been waiting. As if finally not existing is a balm to an open wound. She doesn't know what wound, as she has no other cares in the world right now. Right now the world is a small, abandoned hospital room, and a small boy clutching a piece of meat to his chest like it's the only thing in the world he has.

Not anymore, she thinks, kneeling down, folding from her great, great height, to meet her father's eyes.

They're full of fear.

And she feels that fear, so suddenly that it feels like everything inside her is seizing up, twisting, burning, and she wants it to stop. He is afraid, of what is beyond his room; he is afraid, of what is coming next; he is afraid - but not of her.  

No, not of her. She can feel his fear, but she can feel his calm too, at the sight of her. She can feel the fondness (the relief), the love (the desperation), the adoration a child has for his mother (the resignation someone has when they can't get what they want so they settle for the next best thing they can, swiftly followed by the emptiness that comes with dissatisfaction and knowing one can never have what they need, like a son wanting his mother).

Mother.

That is what she is. She is to be his mother. She is his mother.

This is her purpose, and it makes her smile as she learns this, the thoughts bleeding from his wondrously imaginative mind to hers. She is his mother now, and mothers protect, mothers provide, mothers make sure that their children are never afraid again. The nothing (Hugo, Hugo) is afraid of not having a mother, he is afraid of the world, and he is afraid of being alone.

"You never have to be," she says, holding out her arms for him. She looks like a skeleton.

Hugo crawls into them and lets her pick him up. She cooes, kissing his forehead softly, cold ivory against warm, sickly flesh.

She has a sacred mission.

-

For every beginning, there is an end, but before every end - in the space after that beginning and before that end, there is a middle. When the universe breathes its first breath, there is a pause, however small, that it takes before it collapses in on itself and goes dark and cold and empty, like everything else that's ever existed and ever will be. Every story has a beginning, and every story has an end. Smack dab in the middle of it is, well, the middle; and the middle is the life of that prior birth and oncoming death.

In that life, there is a man. He is not nothing, although he also knows he is not something. He is just him. He walks around doing things that please him, and when he tires of those things, he stops and goes to find something else to do, like sleep, or watch the rivers.  

There is not much to do here. There is just life and the way things are supposed to be, although that's not really a very complicated list of rules. It's boring, sometimes, but perhaps it's better like this. This is not the way the world was when he came into it, but it's a lot quieter. A lot less like it's trying to end itself, but there is a feeling in the air, like what happens when something that was supposed to have been here a while ago is taking its time. The earth feels antsy. The rivers feel nervous. The air feels anticipation. Something is coming but no one knows when and what and where and if it even will.

It makes him want to throw up. It makes him want to laugh madly. He does neither.

He thinks, sitting in this middle, that the end has finally come when there is news, somewhere far away from this saturated chemical wasteland he calls a home.  

There is a tyrant. He is not like the people who live here. He does not like the people who live here. He wants things to change, to be renewed. The man does not know how things would have to change, and he doesn't know if they even can.

He knows, though, that the earth trembles with the rage of something slumbering for years, and he thinks with a mad sort of glee and a crushing sort of fear that the end is finally, finally here.

It's not. Instead, what's here is not a nothing. But it's a something. She's a something.

She holds out her hand, and she has a bright smile. She says she is ready.

Zacharie takes her hand. He has a sacred mission.

-

She is not happy when the news of the new King, from somewhere that is not here, not home arrives to her. Her son is afraid. He doesn't like the news, and she feels his fear ricocheting all over the caverns of her own head, begging to be let out, and she hates it. She has done all she can to ensure her son's safety and his happiness. She has provided, she has protected, she has made. She will not let all of this fall apart because some - some tyrant has shown up in the horizon calling for something new.

But what can she do? Her people are soft and unassuming; they are not loud, they do not fight, they are polite and timid and at times, even trip all over their sentences. They are vulnerable, gullible, and breakable. They cannot hurt her son.

Except maybe for a few, but they are not hers. They're different. They are like her, but at the same time not. They do not feel the Father as she does, do not adore him as she does, do not build and protect and create for him like she does. They build and create for themselves and for her people, and while the notion is misguided, it works, so she lets them.  

Their zones need them. They are to them like she is to her son, her creator, her father.  

No matter. She is Hugo's mother and she will do everything she can to fulfill her mission. Let the tyrant come, let him march in with the illness of the faraway lands.

She will be ready.

-

She doesn't feel it, the something that is walking the lands.  

The something and the man go around and find what they need, and then, when they are ready, they go to the tyrant.

-

It is like flying, working with the something, and by that, he means that it's something he's never done before, is having a lot of trouble with, but is proving to be rewarding as he continues to carry out what he needs to carry out.  

They are away from home, they are in someplace vastly, vastly different, and it's not boring. It's exciting, even if it's dangerous, and Zacharie loves it.  

Being around one place for so long, no matter how safe it is or how safe it makes you feel makes the brain twist and warp the place into something else entirely. Stay long enough in a certain place after you've exhausted everything, but are unable to get out, and you become bored. Stay long enough in a place of safety but have nowhere else to go, and it becomes a prison. Your mind hates it, loathes it, and longs to burn it to the ground.

He think it is with this frustration that he does his work. He tears down constrictions and builds new systems in its place. He burns down regimes and talks his way into better ones. He brandishes a sword, and he says he slays and leads in the name of freedom; with him, the something claps and giggles. Manic. Satisfied. Proud.

"It's fun, isn't it?" she asks. Her name is Sugar.  

"It is," he is, in that silent awe he has whenever he remembers that he has a purpose, that she was chosen to help him and he to help her. It feels a lot like the waiting and rotting at home has been worth it, to have a purpose to serve, a mission to complete.

Kingdoms rise and fall. Civilizations build and tear down. It's life. It's a cycle.

Zacharie goes to the palace of the toad king, and he says, "Good day, o evil monarch! Leave and return peace to thy people, or taste mine blade and perish at its end."

And the king says, "I am a king, and thou art my subjects. Thou art not to oppose mine will."

Or, at least, that's what it sounds like, to him. At most, it's really just him saying, "Get off the throne." and the king saying, "That doesn't make any sense, so no."

Zacharie brandishes his sword, and slays the toad king, because that is what he is supposed to do. This is his mission, and so he does it. 

Sugar laughs and laughs, the laugh of someone a little mad and all too satisfied with a job well done. She looks at the destruction by his hands, at the blood in the throne room and at the empty throne itself, and decides it is enough, they have done their part.

And she thinks, I wonder what game I should play next, and all at once, it is flying and falling, and Zacharie sees.

He breaks.

-

In the beginning, there is nothing.  

In the middle, there is something.

In the end, there is regret.  

-

The regret steps into the darkness of true nothing, and sees. They are ready.

-

When he breathes his first breath, there is no relief. He does not know what relief is, really, because in order to have relief, one must first know the hand of suffering, and he knows not of the hand of suffering. He knows only the guiding light of Them, and this: he has a mission.  

The world is impure, and it is not enough, not anymore. It has gone on long enough, and has been on borrowed time long enough, and as with all things that begin, it will end. The end is here, and it is him, and it's a comfort to feel that they too, feel the same as he does for this mission. They want to complete it. They're eager to complete it. Excited, even.  

There is a joy in knowing one has a purpose, a satisfaction that comes with the fact that one may be a gear in the machinery, but they are the only one of their kind, and the only one who can fulfill this task. There is no silent awe in knowing that he was made and chosen for them, and them for him, there is only a trust and a confidence that settles deep into his artificial, belief-bound bones, and feels the same thing run deep in his puppeteer's veins.  

A morbid sort of synchronicity at its finest. To the world, they are both the end. To him, they are both salvation.  

(To the world, They are regret. To him, they are absolution.)

They step out of the nothingness, salvation and regret. They are ready.  

They have a sacred mission.

-

The world does not end in loud explosions or rushing rivers. It does not end in shattering mountains or collapsing infrastructures. No, what Zacharie has learned ever since he's put the mask on and has come home, himself and yet not at all himself, is that the world ends in the hearts of men when they decide things they should not be deciding upon.

There are many things that they should not be deciding upon, but men fancy themselves to know what is just and what is right and do not ever consider that perhaps everything is wider than they think it is, that there is a place over the rainbow, and so they decide.  

So he is not surprised when he feels the shift in the air, that familiar shift of something that does not belong suddenly becoming, that tremble of rage rumbling under the earth as something new springs forth from the ether. Except, that trembling is not of rage, this time, it's of resignation. It's the trembling of the fear of the unknown, of what comes after when one has drawn their final breath. It's the trembling of fatigue that finally sinks into the ground as one falls prone, legs giving out and giving up.  

It's the trembling of someone who knows there is only so much one can do on borrowed time and so they've accepted that they've run out.

It's the trembling of a world dying, and Zacharie closes his eyes.  

He feels something resembling peace, for the first time since he's learned of what is beyond what he sees, of what he is and where he is, of where the something had come from. He is alive, and yet he is not, and so he will end and at the same time, not.  

He is not afraid. There is not much to be afraid of, when you've turned the wheel of fortune so many times and stood in a room with boiling, acidic blood on your hands, your shoes, your shirt, your neck, your face, and learned things you never should have and wished you didn't but at the same time thought was for the best.  

It is the trembling of a world dying, and Zacharie thinks he'd quite like to witness it.

He grabs his bags. He feels something shift in the air again.

He has another mission.  

He smiles. It's not as sacred, but it's a mission nonetheless.  

-

She feels the shift in the air like a violent punch to the gut. Physically, she doesn't double over. No, instead, she just turns to where her son is, where he's sitting in his room, holding a slab of meat to his chest, feeling everything she's done in this world, everything she's provided, everything she's protected him from, everything she's created for him. Everything that is about to be destroyed.

It makes a rage bubble up in her, the sort that comes when one's work is being torn down and unappreciated, and is discarded and neglected no matter how much time and devotion has been poured into it. It's a rage of injustice, one that makes her want to cry out, "Why?'

But she doesn't. She feels his fear. He has never stopped fearing, not even when she's protected him. He has never stopped feeling lacking, not even when she's provided for him. He has never stopped being alone, not even when she's created for him. Not even when he's had her.  

He is afraid, but he is tired. Perhaps this is his choice, and perhaps it is not. Perhaps it is just that the nothing heard the cry of its fellow nothing and thus spat out something, or rather, spat out regret. It will roam the world, and then it will cleanse it, piece by piece; leucocytes devouring and eliminating the tar and stench of sickness and illness all over the land.

He is tired, and she loves him, still, even if he is tired. Even if he is afraid. She is his mother, and a mother loves her child even then. She reveres her creator even then, and so she continues her own mission, she continues what she has been created to do.

She is his mother. She stays his mother until she no longer can.

-

They are destruction given form as they search and purify the land.  

It is not exhilarating, it is not exciting. It is just right. This is what is meant to be, this is what the world was always headed for, and so it is happening now. He has just been given the privilege, and they have obliged in helping him, and whatever reverence he feels then with the synchronicity of their actions and their desires is because it is just right.

The world is sick and the world is dying. He can see that, and they can see that. He sees the fumes of the smoke mines, and they think, like the acrid burning a pan makes when you've scraped the bottom of it for fuel and yet are still going. He sees the melt and the pop of the plastic and they think, like a planet that's decided to lie to itself and think that the scorching sun is providing for it from its own sins. He sees the cleaved cows and the metal inside of them and they think, like cancer cells, wandering around places they should not be and trying to do their jobs. Livers growing in lungs. Fungus growing in craniums. Metal growing in cows. He sees the rush and the squelch of the rivers of meat and they think, like the slaughter of everyone who's ever been thought different, like the blood of young people that has been paid for the price of the war of their elders who hide behind their desks and their masks.

The world is sick and dying. The world is already dead. It has been dead for a long time, and it is time to finally put it in its grave.

"You got a shovel?" they ask him, off-handed.  

He raises his bat like a spear, and they laugh and laugh and laugh. It's the only thing vibrant and alive he's ever heard in this place.

-

In the beginning, there is nothing.

In the middle, there is something.  

In the end, there is regret.

It's pretty standard, as far as stories go. At first there is only the absence, and then that absence is filled, and then whoever put it there realizes it never should have been there in the first place, but it's too late, and perhaps the only way to remedy it is to do away with it altogether. This is why the seas rise, and why libraries are burnt down and why toad kings are slaughtered and spectres are purified and children with no mothers and fathers are left in hospital rooms, to sit through the end of the world, and perhaps die when everything has run out.  

The adults know the truth and the truth is that there has been no hope for the child at all. That is why there are things they don't put in incubators, even if they feed it and clean it. They just put it somewhere, and they hope it dies. That is why there are children put into their hospital rooms, coughing black smoke and tar, eyes bloodshot and bleeding, skin sallow and infected, while outside, the tide washes against the cliffs, only a second and a breath between the waves and the tops which will soon become shore; while outside, another island sinks; while outside, the smoke plumes continue to thicken ever black; while outside another bomb goes off; while outside, the world dies.  

These children do not have a future, and so the adults lie to them. They say everything will be alright, and then it's not, and then somehow, one of these wretched little futureless things somehow survives, like the monsters not put in incubators and are hoped to die but still live anyway.

One of these hopeless, disgusting little monsters that spits black, infected blood with every cough, walks out into a world that's more greyed out and exhausted than green, and he is nothing, in every sense of the word. He is nothing to his parents because he's going to die anyway. He is nothing to the world because he's a child and thus has no worth and the world is dying. He is nothing to his peers because he doesn't have any. He is nothing to the world because it has no use for little bastards like him.

And then, the nothing creates, and from that nothing, there is Her, and She is Creation.  

And from Creation, there is life, or a bastardization of it. The world is quiet, and the world is sickly, but between the beginning and the end, there is a pause and a song and a dance and a rise and a fall and a heartbreak and a love, and in that, there is the middle. In the middle, the world exists and the world simply is.  

In the middle of that is the mundanity of everything, like a girl walking into the world with a purpose, a girl who sees what's going on and knows that something has to be done about it. If there is a tyrannical regime, there is always to be a rebellion. This is how you prevent stagnation. This is how life goes on, and so she goes, stepping out into the world with this mission in mind, and she finds the one she's been assigned to, someone neither nothing nor something. It's a simple thing, really. All they have to do is be there. All they have to do is live, and so they do. They tear down and rebuild and they fell a king, and then the man she's supposed to help learns the scary truth that there is no such thing as reality as it is only ever how everyone perceives it to be.  

To her, it's a game. To him, it's his life. In reality, neither are right and neither are wrong, so the girl lives life and the boy plays games, and the girl plays games and the boy lives life, and Sugar puppets Zacharie and Zacharie wipes the burns from the toad king's blood off of his mangled, mottled, disfigured skin and face and neck, puts on a mask and goes home, with a smile on his face both painted  on ceramic and hollow on skin.

And then, when life has run its course, regret comes, silent, and like a thief in the night. Life goes on, and it arrives without warning. With it is a man who knows what he has to do.  

Regret roams a world that is not theirs and will never be and learns about it, falls in love with it, cradles and hopes the best for it, and then destroys it, with the man dancing at the end of their fingertips and yet at the same time with both their hands laced together. He knows the steps just as well as they do, perhaps more, and so he leads and they lead, and they step forward and he follows. Blood blooms under the soles of their feet but it is no different from the rivers that run in this godforsaken world, and screams ring around metallic in the air, not quite human and they dance both to the beat like it runs through their very soul, like it commands them to.  

They talk to the man with the mask, and if the Batter senses anything off with their merchant, he says nothing else. They talk to The Queen, and if the Batter senses that she too is different, he says nothing as well. They all have roles to play. After the beginning, there is the middle and after the middle, there is the end.

There is him, and there is them, and the death of all things.

Hence, nothing remains, except for our regrets.