Tuesday 14 October 2008

Thy Fearful Symmetry -- Ar Tonelico fanfiction (Mir/OC, 1,400 words, mild aggression, mild intimacy)

I've been hanging onto this one for a while, but here's something from the AT Whistleblower universe, set two days after what is currently Chess' final log. I would have entered it as one of his logs along with the rest, but I thought it was a little too long and too elaborate to be a true blog entry, so I'm posting it as a standalone (though it probably won't make much sense if you haven't read at least his earlier logs).

Probably rates as about a PG-13, American standards? It's unsettling, but in a way that's all suggestion.


Oh, and before we break into the fic proper, a few musical sidenotes (this is Ar Tonelico fic, after all): the dialogue in this was heavily inspired by Want [lyrics|download], a rather villainous little spoken-word track by Recoil, though the song I've found myself associating most with their relationship is Break Me Shake Me [lyrics|download] by Savage Garden. ("I used to move you in a way that you've never known/But then I accused you in a way that you've never known/But you hurt me in a way that I've never known...").

Also, for those who've read Of One Blood, I got recommended a song that befits it wonderfully, Bound in Blood by Hungry Lucy. Lyrics here, and the song is here. It really does match what's going on from Mir's perspective in that fic incredibly well, so I heartily recommend you go listen.

And without further ado, fic time.




--November 14, 3420--

Sunset turns the blood in her eyes into thick, black oil, impenetrable. I search them for some glimmer of life, for some reminder that she's human, but of course, she's not. All I see is the reflected haze of the dying sun, drowning in her eyes like she's drinking it in, swallowing it up. Her gaze is a tractor beam because behind it, there's only a vacuum.

She used to be human, but we tore out her soul, and now she's sucking in life to fill the void, but she's never going to stop being hungry. And soon the world will be a small, dead, shrivelled thing in the palm of her hand, and she'll be alone in nothingness, crying and clinging to dust.

At least, that's what flashes through my mind, the primal part of my brainstem that I try to bury in rationality, when she fixes her eyes on me. I feel like a tiger's prey must feel, stripped of all emotions save wonder and fear; the inevitability of death grips me, and my pulse is sharp and icy in my throat, but I cannot help but marvel at the form, the sinews, the cruel and perfect grace of death's arbiter. Lean, like a starved animal, she's a human with all humanity burned away: all the excess, all the lies. She's less than animal. She is pure intent.

"I would always hear songs... about the stars," she says, and just like that day when I discovered the truth, her words catch me off guard. I'd been so wrapped in my imaginings, my dark-goddess fantasies, that coherent words from her were a surprise. They don't taint the image, though. They fall from her tongue like sour benedictions.

I look where she's looking, and true to her words, a few bright points of light are already visible. The strong ones, not swamped by evening glow.

"I never thought I'd see them. You have to remember... it was thirty years before I ever saw this world, this... real world, outside of corridors and empty cells." Her fingers rub the guard rail, a self-comforting gesture. I see this, and hear her high, frail voice, and I hear the words thirty years, and it doesn't quite fit together. "And when I did, I was so angry."

"Angry... why?" I'm surprised I dared to speak. My mouth tastes of evening dust, airship fuel.

She turns around, and my heart jumps: this is it. "Because it always sounded like humans felt such powerful hope when they looked at the stars, and nature, and all those things. And I couldn't see anything meaningful at all. They were dead to me." She pauses, feeling out her words with the tip of her tongue, letting the meaning sink in for both of us. "And I knew then that they'd taken something I could never get back."

I nod; a poor response. She says it all. There's nothing really left to add.

As such, she changes topic.

"I didn't think I would ever see you again."

I'm trying to make out the tone in her words. It's not relief, not curiosity... there's no fondness to it, no softer emotion. It's almost mocking, but there's something else behind it, some little undercurrent that worries at my veins like a knife-edge. Pure hate I can handle, but now I've lost sight of her intent.

She moves before I can track her, liquid shadow, and my wrists are in her hands. Tiny, thin hands, like a child's. My stomach churns in memory, and she feels me squirm, and she smiles at me, and that is almost fond. Oh, gods. She hates me so much she's almost infatuated with it. I've been waiting for death, but now instinct kicks in. Her hands are all clammy. Please, have mercy I don't deserve, and make this quick.

She leans her head against my shoulder, against my collarbone, hmming softly. An audible smile. "This feeling. This little flash of emotion, in you, now. Is it worth it?"

"Feeling?" My voice is a croak. I don't actually know what she means.

"You know what I mean." She jerks me closer. I wish she had a scent so I could get my bearings, wish she smelt like sweat or soap or ash. Everything feels unreal. "Your desires. Have they been worth the price you're paying, now? Worth my hatred, worth my anger, worth my using you up and throwing you out like you-- used-- me?"

Yes. No. I don't know? I don't have any desires! I just wanted to help... I'm so confused.

"I know you knew." From the sound of her voice I know her teeth are bared, her lips pulled back. There's a dull pain in my wrists, but it's eclipsed by the blood rushing in my ears. "I just wanted you to know that."

I watch as she drops me at all once, walks back to the railing and takes hold of it again with bloodied nails. I can tell now: she's restless, erratic, like a tiger in a cage. She doesn't seem to know what she's doing or what she's after. She's boiling over with heated emotions, and they're breaking the surface in tiny molten trickles. I wish the sun were a little higher so the image would be complete, evening's crimson making magma of her tears.

I don't know why I'm looking for poetry in this. I shouldn't be caring about how it looks, should be wanting to help her. But I don't really care, I think, about much any more. That's why I want something to move me. I'm looking for some symmetry in her anguish, like she's looking for hope in the stars.

Likely neither of us will get what we want tonight.

"Hold me."

I laugh, disbelieving, as I walk over to her. Only a goddess like her could threaten to tear out my throat one minute and want me to hold her the next. And only someone as dead inside as me could comply. I wrap my arms around her naked shoulders. She's shivering; her damp skin is drying in the wind.

"I thought you hated me," I say.

"I want to stop hating," she says. "But I can't."

"It's funny." As long as we're being honest, I suppose. As long as my life's on the line anyway. "I want to feel something, but... I don't think I can, either."

"I wish you could take all my burning." She wraps her fingers, tacky with my blood, around my arm.

"I wish I could know what it's like. I've forgotten."

She looks up at me. From all but this close it's easy to forget she's so small. "Maybe this will help you remember," she says, and plants a searing kiss on my lips. There's desperation to it, but it's not lustful. It feels more like she's trying to pour herself into me.

I think I smile as she pulls away, out of sheer incredulity. I don't really understand, but... all right. Whatever you want. "Maybe it will help you forget." Instinctively, I tangle my hand in her dark hair, stroking the back of her neck as I coax her closer to me.

"Unlikely," she says, sadly, but she closes her eyes anyway.



She clings to me, wrapped in my coat, as we lie out on the deck. I'm sure she knows how to acquire clothing, but her mind's too disorganised for her to follow the whole process through. She probably tried before, and ended up pacing up and down some alleyway somewhere, eating stolen fruit and looking for something to kill.

She's crazy. Crazy, and that makes me immoral, but we're already so broken it hardly matters any more. We've already torn each other to pieces. If we hurt each other a little more, it's not going to make that much difference.

Her eyes are glassy, reflecting the blue-black dome of the heavens, and all the little lights therein. Without warning, she presses closer to me, and her shoulders hitch.

"It's... really beautiful up there," she says, crying like she doesn't believe and like she knows it's true all at once.

I feel my heart wrench, and a cold agony balls in my stomach. No. It does matter. It matters so damn much.

We're still alive, and as long as we're alive, there's a chance that we can be saved.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aww. I like that line about the stars.

By the way, am really liking your use of unreliable narrator in these fics. Especially the way you used it in the Shurelia fic to get inside her mind and show us how she must've felt about what was basically some data being written to disk. But this one too, really-- you can just see the confusion dripping off of Chess, his self-contradictions, everything that shows how little he knows about what's happening even while he tries to tell it.

Ayulsa said...

Yes! Thank you so much for getting it. I really hoped that people would understand Shurelia and Chess for what they are here; people telling their stories, the stories they told to themselves, that may or may not be true. Of course, Mir's not 100% reliable either; the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, in many cases.

I'm really glad Chess came off well. He's a bit of a complex character; he's not entirely a good person, always, and he ties himself in knots trying to justify that, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't...

thundercloud82 said...

Good stuff. Keep the fics coming! ;)

Anonymous said...

Ah, you're welcome for my getting it, insofar as it was up to me whether I got it or not.

I do enjoy stories like this that show a viewpoint, rather than just objectively narrating some sequence of events as they actually happened. This way you can get inside the character's head and see how they formed their biases and why they thought those ideas were true, rather than just looking at them from the outside and not knowing why they miss what seem to you to be obvious truths. You get to understand characters better that way, and often you don't so easily write them off as nasty or foolish as they otherwise might have seemed, because when you get inside their head that way, you can see why a fairly reasonable person, given the circumstances they were in, might have arrived at the conclusion they did.

Ayulsa said...

Indeed, yes. A lot of the people I'm drawn to writing about in Ar Tonelico are people who'd be either wrongly idealised or wrongly demonised (or sometimes both, by different groups of people) if you couldn't see things from the inside of their head and know both their flaws and strengths.

Part of what I actually like about the game is that despite the fact that you expect a dating sim to be pretty straightforward in this regard, there are a lot fewer clear-cut heroes and villains than you'd expect. Mir isn't just a misunderstood villain, she's a fundamentally kind misunderstood villain. Shurelia, the much-admired administrator of the Tower, is also someone who's too tightly programmed to deal with human emotions very well and hurts people because of it. Lyner is in some senses the hero, yet his complete wilful ignorance hurts people. Ayatane's willing to kill and betray for his mother, yet he's not callous or cold, he just loves her. With my original characters, I've tried to create similar personalities; conflicted people, people who'll do terrible things yet have their reasons for doing them, people who aren't all bad or all good but are flawed and harsh and hopeful and beautiful.