Disclaimer: Characters belong to Mortis Ghost. I do not own. End of story.

The Meaning Of His Existence

He stood before a very small figure within a brightly lit room.

"Who are you?" He remembered asking, "What is this place?"

"Papa, you're here! I did it! I brought you to life!" He'd been told.

He recalled asking himself, 'Life? What was that?'

The small figure, a child he later learned, had made his tall, strong, lean form to protect him from darkness and nightmares as he slept and to help his mother, the queen, keep the world pure.

"What does pure mean?" He had wondered.

"Pure is good, the most good thing." The child tried to explain, "It's when everyone is safe and happy, not sick or mad, and the world is bright and pretty and everybody likes each other. Impure is bad, it's when everything's wrong, people do bad things to themselves and others and the world suffers. I made you brave, and pure so you could tell best when something's wrong and fix it. That's what papas do, they fix things."

When he questioned why, the boy described to him how the world came to be. How when he was younger he'd lived with his mother in the ashes of a dying earth, only three others had lived there besides them. The tall mister, the big mister, and the bird. They had been friends but then they left, even his mother had gone. The child told him how they had dreams of making a new and better world.

Then he said he learned how to make his own world, after everyone left, and demonstrated this to his newest creation whom watched him take paper and pencil and draw shapes that came alive.

"You aren't the only person I gave life to like this." His son informed, "Mother, the tall mister, big mister, and bird they're all here. They help mother watch the zones."

The Zones, places he had only heard of but never glimpsed outside The Room that he and the child never left. The Room itself was a strange area constantly shifting and never the same each day. It was where he met the queen for the first time.

"And who is this, my child?" Her regal voice inquired from the door.

"This is papa, mommy!" The boy stared up at her jubilantly, "I made him so we won't be lonely! Do you like him?"

"Yes, look, he has your eyes." She stared at him and saw he was doing the same, "Would you like some coffee, my love?"

She had accepted his role with no question, explaining how The Zones and Room were connected to their guardians, and the guardians to the child, through various switches placed within each area.

"The switch must never be turned off." She had warned him, "It would destroy the son and all we have built for him."

"What if the zones become impure?" He inquired, "Would the boy not become ill?"

"I will deal with it." She had assured him, "I will never allow the zones to grow so dark that the son that brought us into the world should be afflicted. Not on my watch, everything I do I do for him."

From there things were calm, he did not question his duty as a purifier and he lived with the queen and his child-creator peacefully. Time had no meaning for them, he might have even called those days happy.

"A comic? For me papa?" The boy looked up at him adoringly.

"Yes." The man confirmed.

"Hm, the Ballman vs the Boxer?" Giggling, "Come on papa, let's play! You be the Ballman and I'll be Boxer!"

"Ballman?" The mother had said later gazing at him up and down, "You seem more like a Batter to me."

Yet somewhere, something went wrong.

"...papa? I don't feel so good." His son/creator told him while holding his stomach.

The queen checked his temperature, "You aren't running a fever, what have you eaten today?"

"Cake. Papa said I could." The boy moaned.

"How much sugar did you let him have?" The irate mother rounded on him.

"A lot, he said he enjoyed the taste." He was confused, the child had been hungry and he knew the boy liked sugar so he fixed the problem by letting him have as much as he wanted. Wasn't that what he was meant to do?

"Oh, what have you done? See, you've made him sick! No dessert for you!" Her declaration sent a jolt through him. He'd made his son ill? That meant, he hadn't done his job, but he hadn't known that such things could happen. He had to do something about it.

One of the more curious things about The Room was that there were parts of it that had remnants of the 'old world', as it was known, in the form of books along with other odds and ends. It was the place where he'd found the comic one of the few things that had pictures the child would like. It had a scarce collection of novels he'd curiously searched through a few times but couldn't read, he wouldn't let that get in his way this time. So he taught himself how and as a pure being it didn't take him long to pick up what he soon realised wasn't only one language. There was French, English, Dutch, and a few others too. Once he could understand the words, he managed to find a tome all about child safety and deadly hazards. With his new knowledge he was swift to take measures that would be certain to keep the boy safe and, most important of all, happy.

"Can we play outside?" He'd requested one day.

"No. It's dangerous, you might fall into the plastic." Had been the Purifier's reply.

Another day, "Can I help make dinner?"

"No. You might hurt your self." He rebuffed.

And another, "Wee!"

"No running!"

And another, "Bath time, son."

"No, don' wanna!"

Until they started to blur together, "Bedtime."

"But I'm not tired!"

"I said bed. Now."

"Catch me papa!"

"Get down from there."

"See? I'm strong too!"

"Put that down before you drop it."

"Can I-?"

"No."

"Can we-?"

"No."

Then it all came to a head.

"I wanna go outside!" The child stomped his foot on the floor.

"I told you no." He replied sternly knowing all it would take was one little trip and the boy would be plummeting off a cliff or taking a deadly swim in plastic.

"Why not?" He whined.

"We've been over this."

"No! I'm going out!" His son/creator marched towards the door but was stopped by the purifier picking him up.

He struggled in his grip, "Put me down, I wanna go out!"

"I said no and that's final."

"B-but I wanna go!" The boy began crying, "Wh-why won't y-you listen to me? I m-made you. Waah!"

"You'll feel better after a nap." He was impassive in his response.

"N-no, no, no, no, no!" The child beat his little fists against his creation's chest, "I hate you! I wish I'd never created you!"

That was the second time a jolt went through him. He paused in the hallway and set his creator down.

"Go to your room." He ordered coldly and whimpering with tears in his eyes the boy obeyed.

The door slamming sent another jolt through him and he leaned against the wall, finally settling on the floor, and stared off into space. A touch to his shoulder brought him back to find the queen standing over him.

"What has happened, dear?" She asked.

"I don't understand." He looked down at his hands, "I was made to protect him. Have I not done so?"

"You do not believe so?" She wondered.

"I had." He admitted, "Am I not also here to make him happy?"

"Is he not?" She inquired.

"He hates me." He told her, "Said I shouldn't have been created."

"Oh," She knelt next to him and lifted his chin turning his head to face her, "He does love you."

"I doubt that." He denied, "He has never given me a name, like the Elsen he commonly makes."

She sighed and guided him into an embrace, "Let me take him with me tomorrow. I'm sure once he's calmed down you can work it out with him. You both just require time."

So the next day he spent alone, the first in his existence. The Room was so quiet and eerie without the boy there. He went back to the library to pass the hours, until the mother and child returned, reading through what books he hadn't before. Questions plagued his mind. Why wasn't his son/creator happy while he was kept safe? Was that not his purpose? What had he done wrong? Why couldn't he be the papa the boy wanted him to be?

A passage in one of the books caught his eye.

'Art has always been an expression of a person's innermost self. Formed out of intangible ideas that are given shape to help us grasp the things that can both be reached yet cannot be touched. Drawn out in the abstract or as caricatures of life art allows us to bring to life that which is not real.'

An expression. An intangible idea given form. Caricatures of life. Not real. Did this not describe his existence? He, a drawing brought to life? He was struck faintly cold with the realization that he was nothing more than a child's idea of a father. An idea that could never be real since the boy had never told him what his actual father from the 'old world' was like, only his mother. The queen had always been far more expressive than him. So, he could not be what the boy wanted, but he still had one duty left to him.

Purification.

It was just after that understanding had settled that the queen and his creator returned. He closed the book, set it back on the shelf, and thought no more on the matter. He would fulfill his purpose when the time came.

Many days passed, rather than resolve the rift that had begun to form he distanced himself from the child instead. Attempting to grow closer now would only result in repeated failures. The queen questioned his seeming disregard but he stayed silent on the matter, he had no wish to shatter her perceptions of herself, and rather let her be the boy's comfort while he gazed at his creator with a neutral understanding. So much time passed in this manner that the child's eyes began to look at him so full of fear and he and the queen would argue.

Then, one day…

*Cough, cough*

He watched the queen stroke the boy's head his small body wracked with fever and painful sounding coughs.

"He is ill again." He'd stated.

"It's the Zones." Said she, "There are problems with the reconstruction."

"Do you need me?" He had asked.

She shook her head, "I will see to the problem in the Zones. He needs medicine, however, to help him fight it. See if you can find some for him."

He had done as requested bringing the child a bottle of pills scrounged from the 'old world' remnants. He read the label carefully and divvied the correct dosage, holding onto a small hope that his creator would recover and he would have no need for his last resort. However, the boy grew sicker and sicker over the next several days in spite of the medicine and the queen's efforts to root out the impurity affecting The Zones. Most of their nights now were passed in tense silence, and attempts to abate the sickness.

"Perhaps we've been looking at this all wrong." The queen suggested on one of those nights, "It occurs to me that we've never given him a celebration and he has not seen his friends in a long while, it would cheer him up."

"What would we celebrate?" He wondered.

"His birthday." The mother nodded to herself, "Yes, we shall celebrate that."

She stayed less and less after that to plan the party, while every day the child grew worse and worse, the bottle of pills he'd found would soon empty and he could not find more.

The last time he saw the queen, as he knew her, her form had twisted into something inhuman as she left to oversee The Zones, and he knew. He could not wait any longer for things to get better. It was time.

So, on the day he left, he went through The Room one last time and found among the 'old world' remnants a box that represented to him good memories of his existence and a visual reminder of what he would have to become to succeed his mission. Donning the white and black clothing, the cleated shoes, and hat he weighed a baseball mit and bat in his hands. He recalled how The Ballman enjoyed destroying the things The Boxer tried to protect. He would not. He discarded the mit and hefted the bat, the name Harold etched in its iron. This, this was who he was now.

The Batter.

He left to begin the purification and never looked back. One way or another he would fix this.

That's what papas did, right?

This was partly inspired by a drawing I saw on Tumblr.

So, yeah I went with the headcanon that Hugo created the world of Off through drawings. In that manner I pictured the Batter as someone who tried but do to the limitations of his origins he could only imitate life and not actually be alive. Once he understood his own nature he made no more attempts to be something he wasn't. I sort of view him as having a partial resentment towards the queen for letting things get as bad as they did to where he was needed as I don't feel that he hated his father in this instance.

I also went with the idea that Hugo and his world are closely tied together, such that should the zones decay it would make him ill. The process of Purification then, while getting rid of what made him ill, was also causing detrimental effects to where he was irreversibly dying by the time Batter gets to the end. I think Hugo knew that, I mean you would think the person who created you would be able to easily erase you as well, but he never fought back.

Hope you guys appreciated all the little references to the Batter and Queen's battle.