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 Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2020 12:09 am
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Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2023 12:00 pm
the aftermath Will couldn't sleep.
No matter how much he tried to focus on Holly, to take his mind off what he'd seen in North End Park, to think about anything but the colossal disaster ha had played out before him, he couldn't manage. He laid in bed, arms full, and tried to slow his breathing and calm himself. Tried simply closing his eyes. Tried redirection, tried any number of things.
Eventually, once he was sure Holly was well and asleep and that carefully disentangling himself from her wouldn't wake her, he gave up. Sleep was not coming. Perhaps that wasn't surprising. It had been an extremely difficult night, and there was still so much up in the air. He and Holly had talked big about their own team, but they were just Super Senshi--and Super Senshi brought in from the other side, at that. Will had worked hard to earn his first promotion, had done his level best to prove himself useful, but the one he'd been working to prove himself to might well be gone. So much ash and dust in the Rift, or a monster let feral to kill.
The thought made him feel ill. Faustite had been a grounding constant; there from the first moment Valjean opened his eyes in Hessonite's office and realized that whatever life he had before was over. He'd offered guidance, kindness--in his rough, very thoroughly Faustite way--and trust, which was perhaps the most precious of all. Trust was not something easily given in the Negaverse, and perhaps it had been a small thing--simply the trust to catch Eion when he leapt from a height--but it was still something.
And it had meant Valjean felt as if his life was not over, but rather just beginning. It had helped him adjust to the lack of memories and context. Helped accept that this was his life now, and that it wasn't an entirely terrible one.
Feelings were not his strong suit. Putting a name to what he felt for Faustite, beyond "admiration," was a challenge. He knew he loved Holly, that was easy, but there was something else there that ever tinged his relationship with his irascible General.
Faustute, the one that had destroyed the person he used to be. Faustite, who had seen him remade. Hessonite had done the deed, that was true, but it was by Faustite's will that he lived and was repurposed, rather than being left starseedless and cold in a back alley somewhere his corpse might, perhaps, be found. That was a profound Something to let hang over a relationship.
Will sighed, heavily. Pulled on a pair of boxers. Stepped outside. It was still a pleasant spring evening, or perhaps it was, in truth, stretching into morning now. He wondered, briefly, what the others were doing. Had any oft hem also gone home in disgrace? Had some tried to chase after Faustite, perhaps in a last ditch effort to stop this, or simply to witness his final transformation? That wasn't his place, either way. He wasn't one of Faustite's uncountable number of husbands, the boys he had taken entirely as His. (He wasn't sure he'd have wanted to be, all things considered. He liked Faustite. Admired him. Didn't mind the possibility of sleeping with him. But marriage...mm, a different matter, certainly. And anyway, Holly probably would have been displeased with the prospect of further sharing. She already liked the arrangement little enough, no need to complicate it further.)
And the other side. What must they be doing. How ridiculous it had to be, whatever empty platitudes they were feeding themselves. Yes, there had been some quite spectacular ******** on the Negaverse's part, but it was nothing they couldn't have recovered form, given some damn thought. Not that anyone was thinking particularly clearly out there. Too many emotions running far too high. Too many people desperate to come out on top, to drag Fausdtite with them like a particularly fiery trophy, one way or the other. Albite wanted to keep his husband. Lysithea wanted to "save" her brother. Everyone else was a tangle of motivations, and it had all gone to s**t in the end when all those motivations came together, clashed, crashed, creating an explosive wreck of truly titanic proportions.
He exhaled. Leaned on the balcony railing, looking down over the city. Wondered if there might be news. It surely had to be over by now, whatever was going to happen, and someone would likely have tried to contact his teram. Or, at least, Valjean hoped so. Faustite was their General, after all. They deserved to know his fate.
It was stupid, and he didn't intend to stay powered up for long--no reason to leave a beacon with his and Holly's address on it--but there wa sonly one way to see if some kind fo notice had gone out.
So he powered up, let Valjean settle around him, and pulled out his communicator.
There was indeed a message.
It was not the one he expected.
"You son of a b***h," Valjean hissed to himself, but he was grinning, broad and a little wild.
A new General-King.
They had not, it seemed, lost Faustite after all. No, instead, he had been changed, into something greater and more powerful than anyone could have anticipated. At least, any of them. Perhaps Laurelite had known, distant and untouchable and queenly as she was, with her deep connection to Metallia's will. He wondered if Jet had known. Suspected. Would he have gone fort his plan if he had? OR would he have found a way to keep Faustite closer?
Hard to guess. No point in speculating. In the end, what mattered was:
Faustite was alive. Faustite was transformed. Order's hesitation and Heliodor's overeagerness and Albite's anger had not cost them their General. No, instead, it had granted them something much greater.
In the end, the Negaverse had won, as assuredly as anything.
Valjean would have to visit his General-King. Pass on his congratulations in person.
He powered back down, turned around, and stepped inside.
He would sleep perfectly fine, tonight.
[1015 words]
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Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2023 12:58 pm
what is a memory There was so much to do.
In many ways that was the refrain of Will's life. He piled up academics, piled up work, piled up Negaverse duties and filled the holes with time spent with Holly or time curled on the couch reading or any number of other things. Idleness was killer, and he refused to pause for any reason. Letting himself slow down would be letting himself give up. Not least because when he was idle, he often felt as if he was failing, somehow. An itch in the back of his mind that told him there was more to do, more to fix, more to find to fill the empty, blank hole that was his life before the Negaverse.
It was only so productive, really, but he could only spend so much time pondering the past before he inevitably began to feel a little ill and uneasy about it. He could be plenty self reflective given the opportunity, but...this did not feel like self reflection, really. It felt more like gazing into the abyss, if he were honest.
And in any case, this time, the "so much to do" felt particularly specific. He was, after all, working on something that he expected would be quite impressive. A second recruitment into the Negaverse, this time a civilian carefully scouted and accounted for. He would not, he hoped, need to overcome any Order lies to win this one over. Wouldn't need to fight with the possibility of leaving family--and that was for the best, really, because Reiki Rokugin, in Will's estimation, would not be giving his family up for anything. Which meant, he supposed, that if it did turn out that Reiki was already magical...well.
Problems, he supposed, would ensue.
There was a twinge of something almsot like guilt, when he thought about that. Will wasn't one to marinate in such things, generally; he didn't like dwelling on regrets or failures, preferred to examine them for as long as it took to get any useful lessons out of them and move on. No point making a lump of himself and getting overwhelmed by a thousand "what might have been"s, not least when pausing to obsess was such a waste of already limited time. But the thoguht of doing to Reiki what had been done to him...it did displease him, in a vague sort of way. Did make him think that it would be cruel to people who had been nothing but decent to him--Reiki himself, yes, but also his mother, who was by far Will's favorite professor, and every other member of his family Will had casually touched base with at Destiny City University. His experience there, honestly, had been better than he realistically could have expected, given that he'd been slid in on fake credentials with the name of a person that didn't exist.
His first semester had been so, so much reading. So, so much catching up. Reminding himself of theory, relearning things that he suspected he must have known before--he'd seen tributes to someone that looked eerily like him, someone with a name that matched the wallet he'd been carrying when he powered down for the first time and had to decide to be William Corday, and realized that even before, he'd been drawn to this school. This department. He wondered what he'd been working on, as the person he used to be, before he was corrupted. Wondered at how eerie it felt to know but not know that you were the face on the missing poster.
But then, he was one of dozens. Destiny City lost countless students every year, he was sure. (Well, someone was probably counting, but it wasn't him.) The person Will Corday used to be was just another name on the pile, and there was no way for him to know what might have been.
And if Reiki turned out to be a Senshi...
That would be another one.
Ugh. He hated dwelling on this. It wasn't his problem, not really. (Except in the ways that it would be, if things went wrong.) And anyway, it was something he could plan for. A known quantity. Perhaps an unlikely one.
Will wasn't often given to hoping himself into any kind of self-delusion, but he did, this time. He hoped that Reiki was not a Senshi, or a Knight. Hoped that he was an ordinary person, that he could become an officer or a Negaverse Senshi, like Valjean, like so many others on their team, with no muss and no fuss and no abandoned lives. That was the best case scenario, and Will supposed it didn't hurt to hope for the best every once in a while, as long as he was prepared for other outcomes.
Besides, he'd managed to do well enough for himself. He'd started with nothing, no memories, no life, only existing by the Negaverse's kindness, and now he was building himself into more of a real person by the day.
Will Corday had started out as a mask, occasionally pulled on because Sailor Valjean could not be Sailor Valjean 24/7.
It had been a struggle. He'd come up with a lie about having moved, after an illness that kept him out of school for a while, so he'd had to play a little catch-up when he got back, and he had been extended far more grace than he could ever have expected, really. He'd taken his time to ease back in, to figure out who he was, and it had been more than a little beneficial. Plus, he'd had weeks of summer to prepare before starting his first semester, and honestly, it had all been well worth it. Studying politics, studying international relations, understanding history and motivations and the ebb and flow of people and power and policy....all of it, Will was fairly certain, would make him far more effective at serving the Negaverse. And if he decided to keep going, to get a day job in academia--and the idea, he had to admit, was actually a nice one, when he gave it some thought--then he'd be in an excellent position to scout new recruits. Smart, motivated undergrads. MAybe the ones that leaned a little amoral in their essays. Maybe the ones that had a lot of obvious passion that could be redirected.
It would all be worth it. Will was sure of it.
But he might still end up adding to the pile of the missing. Might give someone else the same fate that had been given to him. It wasn't entirely a pleasant prospect, he had to admit. He had any number of complicated feelings about the way he'd ended up coming into the Negaverse; hated it a little, loved it a little. It had been an entirely fresh start, yes, but if Will were entirely honest, he sort of wished that he'd been able to start there. That instead of the ill luck of being found by an Order cat, he'd had the good luck to get found by one of the Negaverse's many Mauvians. Haymitch, perhaps, could have had him on the correct side from the first. Then,h e never would have had to become someone new. That was a nice prospect, in some ways.
But what would he have done with that? Did he even know how to exist as a whole person, unfettered by the loss of memories? He honestly wasn't sure. Perhaps it wouldn't have mattered, if he never had to find out. Perhaps he would have continued on perfectly fine, and just....been a Corrupt from the beginning. Served with his first breath. But what a different person he might have been.
He wondered, often, what he'd been like before. It was a strange thing, to not know oneself, to have to guess at one's own history. But even knowing a piece of it, knowing there were people he could ask...it seemed ghoulish, to consider doing so. Yes, there were people at Destiny City University who had known the person he used to be. Yes, he probably could ask a few questions--or he could have, when he first started, maybe; it would be strange now, nearly a full term in, to ask about someone who vanished so long ago. But what would it do, really? Invite him to make pointless comparisons or judgements. Invite him to interrogate a life that was long over; a life that was, in every possible way, no longer his. And what would that serve, really? Except for self flagellation that disguised itself as self examination?
The person he had been was gone. There was no bringing that man back. All that was left was Will, and who he made of himself, from the ashes of who he used to be.
That was what mattered. That was what he had to remember. That he was himself, whole and entire, even without his memories. That Murikabushi was wrong; he was not somehow lesser for his loss.
And if he had to inflict that on someone else to further the Negaverse, then so be it. He had adapted. Reiki, or whoever he became, would have to as well.
[1527 words]
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Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2023 1:29 pm
game on He'd started out with no intentions of doing anything but idly browsing Steam. Will didn't exactly have many hobbies; books took up most of his free time, studying and adding to the Negaverse database took up another chunk. But of late, he'd decided that it might be worthwhile to try video games. The problem was, he truly had no idea where to start. There were simply too many options, and so he spent more time idly scrolling throguh Steam, wondering if something actually was as interesting as it sounded at first glance, and often finding that it was not.
RPGs were fine. Taking up another role, following quests, exploring, all of that: perfectly good entertainment, but Will often found that there was an itch unscratched. The War Table in Dragon Age Inquisition had started to itch it, but it just wasn't big enough. There weren't enough details, and he didn't feel as if he was seeing his army "on the ground," as it were. There were so many lost opportunities--Adamant Fortress was great, but the inability to actually control the placement fo Inquisition troops had him frowning at the screen. And truth be told, while the story was all well and good, it only held his attention so much. Ancient monster, destroy the world, gotta stop him because we all collectively keep our stuff here, blah blah blah. Fine, good, but not for him.
He'd tried Civilization, too, but it felt far too zoomed out. Truly more about building...well, the civilization. And as funny as it was to develop nukes and blow your enemies away, that only lasted so long, and you could only do it so many times. World conquest was not all that interesting when it only took so much effort.
It had started as an impulse purchase, really. Some game called "Crusader Kings III." He'd been intrigued by the historical aspect; diving into the intrigues of a Medieval court actually sounded incredibly fun, as far as Will was concerned. And then it turned out to be so much more than just that. There was so much to do. Marriages to arrange. Assassinations to plan. Dynasties to guide and build. A whole world to shape, right at his fingertips. This, he realized, was both the answer he sought and also incredibly dangerous. Far, far too easy to get far, far too wrapped up in all the minutiae and suddenly it had been quite a lot longer than he thought.
Really, it was a good thing that he had plenty else to occupy his time, and a girlfriend who needed occasional attention, because it wasn't hard for him to see how he could easily get deeply wrapped up in this. An entire nation, his to conquer and command. An empire to build. A world to bring to its knees.
There was so much there. So many opportunities. And here it was, the thing Will had been looking for; a game that scratched as many itches as possible. Perhaps this would be something that could fill whatever free time he let himself have, when everything else was done.
[518 words]
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