There was absolute carnage everywhere. It wasn't made of flesh, but rather of anger, hatred, anguish, despair, confusion, and a few more things he couldn't quite identify. It scattered and intertwined with the shrapnel littered around the wires of the Devil's Machine in patterns of bloody red tendrils arranged in the pattern of something like a scream.
Had Pokey believed in such a thing as love, he would have surmised that the only emotion of Giygas that had not been splashed across the cavern was the love that Ness and his friends were reciprocating back at him through their prayers, of all things. How stupid of them.
The only thing Pokey could possibly see as worthy of being prayed to was Giygas himself, and that was only if he was given no more than superficial awe at the immense power he had caused to course through the veins of time and space. There was nothing Ness could possibly perceive as more worthy of prayer than Giygas, or so Pokey thought. Appealing to any other being was ridiculous.
However, Giygas was an it, not a he, as the almighty idiot had fallen prey to his own turmoil. Giygas was at once everything and nothing, but still lacking some intangible something that left it starving.
The Apple of Enlightenment hadn't managed to stave off Giygas's hunger, so he destroyed himself. That ultimately made it much too pitiful to get any sort of prayer from anyone; it couldn't help itself, so how could it possibly help anything else?
Prayer was useless. Ness should be dead now.
And yet, he wasn't.
He was in a stupid metal body fighting a stupid futile battle with his stupid powerful friends for a stupid useless earth using stupid, stupid prayer, and he was still fending off the embodiment of chaos.
In the red glow of the battle at the end of everything, Pokey smiled. The eerie luminescence glinted off of his teeth and back at Ness. He smiled wider.
Perhaps he was smiling because it had made him happy, and perhaps he was smiling simply for the sake of it. The point was that he was smiling when there was nothing to smile about.
Watching his friend struggle and overcome time and space had been exhilarating because Pokey felt sure that Giygas could, if at its full potential, easily consume them all in a sad attempt to fill the hole within itself and end everything right here. He could've been smiling for that, although he didn't feel like that would warrant his toothy reaction.
Either way, it didn't really matter; he was smiling all the same.
The red ooze clouded Pokey's vision as the Devil's Machine broke down a little more. The crimson tendrils were not actually something he could see or touch, he knew, but they wormed their way into the cockpit of Pokey's Spider and wrapped themselves around his heart through the gaps between his teeth.
He smiled because there was no other expression that could possibly come close to expressing the sea of emotions that frothed in his heart.
On the red horizon, Ness stood with a calmness that was beyond the stoic attitude of a robot. He was perfectly placid, a complete Sea of Eden amidst the anarchy of existence. In Ness, Pokey saw himself as he was without any illusions of grandeur or superiority. Pokey hated it, so he grinned to scare it away.
But he also grinned because he had made Ness come after him. Ness had come across barriers of impossibility because Pokey had wanted him to. Ness had come for him. All this way, and Ness had still come for him. The other reasons didn't matter. The other three children didn't matter, either. It was all just Ness to him.
Ness.
Ness.
Ness. Ness. Ness.
—
Pokey was trembling now, and he did not know if it was because he was scared or because he was simply...
H...A…P…P…Y…
He bid his adieu with that sick smile still on his face.
After all, he would see Ness again. He'd come after Pokey again.
In retrospect, Giygas was not held together by love at all. Rather, it slashed his love across the reaches of forever in the hopes that someone would accept and return it, just like it did with pain and happiness. Giygas was a Pandora's Box of mankind's demons, with emotions that settled upon Earth in horrible manners when they were let loose. But like that box of legend, there was one thing that remained inside. At the core, Giygas was neither love nor hate, but hope.
Giygas longed for love, to be sure, but it was an undying hope that truly sustained it until the Chosen Four came.
Pokey held the same hopeful conviction within himself.
…Ness was still coming, right?