A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, f30 - fic that explores the psyche of a murderer (intentional)
.
.
Pure and Mud
.
.
The afterlife wa filled with ghosts of the past and ghosts are exasperating in the way they didn't let go of former grudges. Him: he just wanted to spark the flame of war – but these guys were relentless hounds that hungered for his blood. Like Neil Dylandy. It wasn't enough he almost got fried by the kid the first time around…though, granted, he fried the kid good and proper in return. And wound up with a persistent successor after his skin who actually manages to roast him on a skillet.
Of all the people to die at the hands of, it had to be Celestial Being, didn't it? And some of its members had to be floating around in the afterlife with him, didn't they? Meister Neil Dylandy was the worst of them, of course: the active night hunter that sought the wine-drink of his blood. But there were others as well and he only knew they were because they'd picked up on Neil Dylandy's hate for him. Like that blonde girl, and that half-metal boyfriend of his. All thorns in his side in a world where nobody can die again.
At first, he entertained the chaos they bring, but he tired rapidly. Just as he tired of Nena Trinity and her two troublesome older brothers – and he's only a little bit annoyed the little princess Louise Halevy hadn't managed to find her way over as well, because she'd have been a wonderful distraction for that Nena Trinity. The rest of the family's probably around somewhere, but he never saw them, and nor did he see the reporter chick he guttered and left in an alley-way in that other life of his.
He saw Soran Ibrahim's parents though. The brat. And his parents were equally hopeless, thanking him for taking care of their son.
He laughed his head off or half the night after that encounter. If only they knew what that meant. If only they realised exactly what – or who – drove their precious little boy to shoot both his parents in the head.
.
The afterlife was filled with shadows from his mind but none of them were familiar, and, at the beginning, none of them were tangible either. Every shadow looming towards him was an enemy machine. Every flicker of yellow light was Kudelia Aina Bernstein. Every splash of blue was the Gundam Barbatos and the bratty quick-fuse pilot with the Alaya-Vijnana System Specialist Major Baudlin had told him about some time or other. Complained about being reduced to "the one next to the chocolate man" and then, later, degraded to "Gali Gali".
If he'd been a little less proper, he'd have doubled over the rail laughing at that. He had the feeling, anyway, that if it had been Specialist Major Fareed who'd been dubbed in such a manner, Specialist Major Baudlin would have physically hunched over and laughed until he cried.
But there was no Specialist Major Baudlin, or Lieutenant Crank Zent, or Captain Orlis Stenja, though after a while he did start to recognise some of those faces.
Weren't people he cared to recognise, though. They thought of him as a space rat, even here. Which was kind of pathetic, considering he outranked them all, even if he'd been raised wearing the Graze he'd been fused to and it had been the painstaking work of many strangers to get him out of it.
When he learned one of them, a Biscuit Griffon, was actually a member of Tekkeden, he raged. And the Graze Ein raged with him, linked to his emotions and his mind and his body even then. But the terrified screams never gave way. Not until a Gundam came out of somewhere and blew it to bits before the afterlife put it back together, one metal plate at a time.
That man's name was Lockon Stratus, Ein Dalton learned, after the battle-lust faded from his mind and left him dizzy and weak and numb. Lockon Stratus: a Gundam Meister for Celestial Being.
.
At some point, he decided the world simply had to be bigger than people baying eternally for his blood and so he carefully hid his Gundam Arche (because it had a handy but also annoying ability to regenerate itself somewhere near him, and therefore served as a homing beacon to his location as well as his primary weapon) and then took a little trip. A little long trip.
The world was a little more different than he remembered. He wondered if the world had simply been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that they were indistinguishable from one another. And there were a lot of Gundam wreckages – and, unfortunately, he spotted one Kinue Crossroad there.
He managed to avoid her, luckily. Last thing he needed was a reporter blabbing about his location to Celestial Being. Even if nothing in particular came out of it, in the end. But it was boring. Tedious. And Ali al-Sachez did not do tedious.
So he roamed around instead. Interfered with more scuffles and territorial wars and hatreds that transcended death more times than he should have – but then again, that was what he made a living on. The chaos was glorious and far more entertaining. Though it always got people on his case until he disposed of them and they came right back like an annoying itch.
One of those guys was an analysis from something called Tekkeden called Biscuit Griffon.
He'd entertained the notion of turning cannibal just to test out if the boy tasted as good as his name suggested, but it was too difficult to manage with weird afterlife rules that meant the dead resurrected as good as new – or as good as they'd been alive before they died, if the half-metal boy was any indication.
And somehow, the idea of eternally devouring the same corpse made him lose his appetite for the idea fairly quickly. Which was altogether reasonable, when he knew he'd only get bored later down the track anyway.
.
He and the Graze Ein were more or less inseparable, but he could do little bursts outside of it. It was rather silly, sometimes. Some grandmother thought a handsome young-sounding man like him (and how would they even know if he was handsome or not) shouldn't spend all their time in a machine.
But he was only a torso and a head and without the life support of the Graze, he could only talk and breathe until he died. At first, he hated the very idea but people were stubborn. He could only cut them down so many times, could only bear to cut them down so many times with a clear mind, before he gave up and let them have their way with him.
And, after a while, it became refreshing.
The Graze was a machine, after all.
And it reminded him of Major Specialist Baudlin again. His words. How he hated the idea of linking humans with machines because it took away the very things that made them human. And yet there was something wrong with that, because he was more machine than man by the end: almost entirely machine – and hadn't the Major Specialist been so vexed at the pilot of the Gundam Barbatos for having the Alaya-Vijnana System implanted, without even pausing to consider whether it had been of their own violation or not? So how had he come to possess the system himself? How had he turned into the Graze Ein when his last memory before that was intercepting a strike that would have sliced the Major Specialist in half.
Unless there was a higher chain of command that made even the wishes of the heir of one of the great families irrelevant. Because there was a complex war he'd forgotten about… and when had he forgotten about it?
As he spent more short bursts outside the Graze Ein and died and reincarnated again, he felt his mind growing clearer.
And hindsight was a painful process of realisation.
And it was at that happy moment that Crank Zent finally stumbled across his old protégé.
.
Eventually, he heard about this killing machine that had stopped killing. And that was a pity, he thought, because a killing machine that could stand up to Gundams was a tough thing to find, especially when they managed to kill the same guy thirty-seven times before then and outrunning the guy because he'd tired of the endless loop.
Still, the tale lacked a certain finesse he was sure he could coax into life.
Then, of course, he found out more. About how the "poor soul" was stuck in the machine for perpetuity – for, at least, as long as one cycle of life for if he left it too long, he crumbled and died and was reborn in the machine again.
Boring, he thought, unable to move one's body except with the mind, and even then it's only a Graze: one of those hundreds of different types of inferior mobile suits. It really was too bad the world didn't allow for any permanent advancement. Someone could have looked at equipping him with something more versatile, or more destructive.
He could have looked at investing himself into such a project, because the Gundams could cause a glorious amount of damage. The EM particles had diminished in importance though. Their permanent mutating effect was wasted in a world that seemed to be able to repair itself without pause – and in this world, there were too many trigger happy people (like him, and like Celestial Being who starved for his blood) to get any lasting effects form the irradiation.
And maybe he could have played the part of the old remorseful guy – since people's minds and memories were the only things not reset in this place – but he loved war and chaos too much. It was like an exercise regime now, or a stress reliever.
Hunting down the Graze Ein, on the other hand, was for his own sanity.
He always needed something new and chaotic to spark another flaming red battlefield.
.
Lieutenant Crank was understandably baffled at first, wondering how such a thing had happened to his protégé – and even moreso because he pitied the idea of children implanted with the Alaya-Vijnana System in much the same way as Major Specialist Baudlin despised them.
But his pity came from his kind soul and the innocent blood that stained his soul in a way he was permanently aware of (and never mind that worse people were painted far more densely and never seemed to notice, nor care).
But anyway. There was a whole story buried in between the times he'd seen Lieutenant Crank, include his rather self-obsessed stint of revenge he realised, with a single glance of the Lieutenant now, had been entirely self-absorbed.
But Lieutenant was old and wise in the way that mentors – or even fathers – were. And he bore the punishment on his body.
Or badge of honour, because he'd saved someone's life with that body too.
His mind continued to steady, particularly when the Lieutenant stuck around. He didn't have his machine. He'd died with a gunshot wound point blank, after their duel had finished. And, finally, Ein learned the whole story behind that. How he'd lost a fair duel and the opposition had opened their cockpit to ask what price he'd claimed.
And Lieutenant Crank, realising he was only a powerless officer under the horn of Gjallarhorn with far less pitying and more power-hungry people near the top and all he really had to offer the scattered remains of the GCS was his own life.
It wasn't an execution but an offering they accepted.
How blood-soaked and hate-ridden the world looked through rose-coloured lenses. But now his eyes were clear again.
.
There was no Celestial Being in the area and Lieutenant Clark Zent was at a tavern sharing a drink with Captain Orlis Stenja and his brother.
Ali al-Sachez in his Gundam Arche engaged the Graze Ein.
Ein's mind was clearer, but he still possessed the Alaya-Vijnana System that was, aside from facial expression and his voice, his only form of mobility. So of course he fought. He could never escape it. And he had no desire to try. The Lieutenant mentioned a man called Savarin Canule who desired to escape from fighting – but if there was a piece of this afterlife that was not plagued by a war they couldn't kill due to their own immortality, it was yet to be found.
So he fought, but his mind wasn't consumed by battle lust. He didn't feel the need to rip his opponent from limb to limb and every yellow glint wasn't Kudelia Aina Bernstein and every blue glint wasn't the Gundam Barbatos and its Alaya-Vijnana System equipped child pilot. His opponent was red but maybe that was just because they had the dying sun in the backdrop and maybe he looked like a red blur to his opponent as well.
But aside from the clashes of their blades and the sparks they threw, there was also his voice on the battlefield. 'Who are you? Why do you challenge me?'
And the pilot of the Gundam roars with laughter. 'Challenge you? I'm not here to challenge, but to see a good fight.'
The observer didn't get a very good view from the middle of the battlefield.
It also didn't answer either of his questions.
'I'm bored.' The man roared with laughter again. 'I lived by inciting war, but in this place, a clash between two people can last forever and that's boring after a while, you know?'
Yes, he did know. It was a cycle that could dampen even the thickest visor of battle-rage. But seeking out more fights was hardly the way to go about fixing that, and the man simply laughed again.
He was insane.
Then again, it took one to know one, even if he thought he'd gotten his mind into a pretty good working order now, considering it still spent lifetimes hooked up to the Alaya-Vijnana System.
'Eternally fighting is no way to live,' he declared.
Even in this body of his, he was able to enjoy simple conversation, and the fresh air on his face before the exposure killed and raised him in the Graze Ein once more.
But the man simply laughed. He only saw a world drowning in the red flames of war, and so he outflew him as only a man that was more machine could manage.
And then he asked Lieutenant Crank to take him out of his cockpit and maybe allow him a sip of that drink as well. And when asked why, he said he was celebrating even as the world darkened around him. Because that was a milestone of sorts for him: flying away a machine and coming back a human who wanted a drink after a mission, and he could remember Specialist Major Baudlin practically forcing him to drown a few pints in the first few days of their meeting.
But that hadn't been a celebration – or if it had, it'd been a celebration of a tragedy.
Then again, this was a tragedy too. A tragedy that was his own death repeating again and again, because he couldn't survive as only human for very long.
.
Pathetic, Ali al-Sachez thought, as the Graze Ein vanished into the horizon across the sea. Completely and utterly pathetic.
But he shouldn't be surprised. He may have had an adult's voice but he was a child and his words proved it. A child filled with as much naivety as Celestial Being: those fools who thought they could eradicate war. He wondered if they'd gotten a clue yet, if they'd realised this world perpetuated war in a way even their original world couldn't quite. A war between two people could last forever as they killed each other and were reborn while locked in the same fight. A war that didn't even require someone like him to pull the strings – but none of that changed the fact that he was bored and this particular plan of his hadn't borne fruit, so he either needed a new plan or a new draft version to make the Graze Ein go ballistic as the older stories told.
He'd figure one or the other out. He had an immeasurable amount of lifetimes in this red-glazed but ultimately pathetic world.