A/N: A short character study of Kuja. I am warming up for a multi-chapter Kuja-centric fic, and thought I'd share some of what I did.
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0.
You are blank.
You begin as a function, two values equated to a whole. You work very well, you are true and clean and beautiful. Everything is pure; your love, your curiosity.
And you become a creature that chooses the surname King.
Are you still just a shadow?
i.
You love Gaian theater. It is the only thing that gets you through seventeen miserable years of living among them with no reprieve. Keeping up your mask of humanity was exhausting back when you were so new to the game, their customs were salt on the raw parts of your mind that you had yet to understand. It was torture, some nights. But you made due. You adapted.
Truly, you are built to manipulate them. But they nearly drove you mad for those first few years, that baptism-by-fire when survival warred with how quickly you could learn. Emotions baffled you. They had so many, and they were so complex-you couldn't fathom how to use such liquid circumstances to control them. They seemed to follow no logical pattern to you, despite all the books you read and all the hours you spent watching them. There had to be a way, of course. You would not live like a beast on handouts forever, so you worked yourself threadbare learning their games.
Then you found their theater, and something clicked. You found your answer.
Actors are playing at what you are. You realized this fifteen years ago, and what started as fascination turned into some sort of camaraderie, some sort of guidance. Plays are elaborate lies, and actors are the liars. An audience pays to sit and watch this lie be enacted before them, and even when the actors themselves do not feel the emotions of their characters, some are so convincing that they elicit sympathy in the audience. You witnessed these Gaians crying over fictional tales, and you realized you had found the answer to your struggles. You did not have to feel their emotions the way they did to use them. You just needed to be a convincing actor, and the rest of the pieces would fall into place around you.
You love the theater. You did then, you do now. It is your sanctuary. It is where Gaians lie about emotions they don't have, just like you lie about the emotions you've never felt. Everything is beautiful onstage, not just you. You fit, the lines are decided and the tragedy is flawless. You are home.
Onstage, you do not feel the gaping fissure you carry with you, this thing you keep beneath the layers of thinly stretched fabrications. You move forward because you have a singular purpose, and every fantasy you wield like a tool to serve the path you walk. Theater, in all its glory, is exactly the same.
Humans will never understand what you are. But you can understand their actors. That has always been enough for you.
ii.
You do not know when your void stopped being so empty. You only realize how sick you are when the Trance burns you clean, like boiled wine on a septic wound.
You only remember just how deep the rage goes when Garland defeats you-when you know he doesn't even see the enormity of what he's done, because you are not enemies in his eyes. You will both die as puppet and master. And you cannot change it. Everything you have ever worked for is meaningless, and now you will die.
Saving Zidane is about saving the only thing you haven't destroyed, because you refuse to go down a failure. Saving his friends is the only way you can say 'I'm sorry.'
Because for the first time in your life, it's true.
iii.
You are a shadow on the wall. You are a lie, you are an act. In giving you a soul, he has made you real-but you are no less a lie for all the power Trance has given you.
Who is he to call you mortal?
-fin