Part of Blood like sunlight, my series of PT oneshots based around random music. This is where the literary stuff comes out of the woodwork. I'm rather proud of this one.

Song: Eric's Song

Artist: Vienna Teng

Album: Waking Hour

Focus: Fakir, Fakir/Ahiru

Scenario: In-series, somewhere around episode 21

Rating: PG (K+)

Warnings: Implied violence, mild swearing, shamefully bibliophilic literary analysis and mythological references, very brief reference to lust

Notes: There are two songs from the musical version of Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame (not the Disney movie) in the series. Neither of them, other than the emotional situations, have anything to do with the story. This is a haunting, beautiful song that has nothing to do with Hunchback, so of course I base it around that. I'm including the passage Fakir was reading after the story, for some clarification. If you don't know about the novel or Greek mythology, don't worry, it's fully explained.

My reasons for defying reason

The bell echoes in my ears, announcing that school's out. I look down, and I'm still on the same page I was five minutes ago—how long has it been since I came here?

The library's going to get busy now, with students studying and chatting, and I'm still here, trying to find answers in these musty old books. I should be writing. This isn't going to help me.

I stand up, put the books back, look up to register the sunlight, then leave.

I'm halfway to my house when I stop. There's a page in my mind, clear as a picture, and it's not the one that leaps and screeches across my dreams.

How stupid can you get?

Not the book—the book's sort of boring, but it's okay as classics go. But my connection to it. I'm not like him, at all. There's nothing there, the thread I'm drawing is only in my mind. I'm the one that's stupid.

And I'm walking back to the library, moving the ladder to where the novel is, getting it off the shelf, and flipping to where I stopped.

Only to find myself staring at a page of alchemical ranting. In some ways the book is stupid, in its caress of the sciences and languages and arts above the humans that explore them. It takes a simple, tragically romantic view of people, and then devours the rest of the world.

Besides, I'm not attempting to turn light into gold. Making words into truth is so much harder.

"'Where women are honored, the divinities are rejoiced; where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God,'" the archdeacon quotes at me. "'The mouth of a woman is constantly pure; it is a running water, it is a ray of sunlight.'"

Two days ago, Ahiru drowned and sunburned and excommunicated me, all with one sentence. She couldn't have known. Her fairytales are beautiful and always end in redemption. But in my fairytales I watch Mytho grow the wrong kind of wings.

In my fairytales, the knight swings at her. She collapses and lies in a mess of bloody feathers on the ground. She cries that she can't help anyone. She cradles Raetsel's head in her lap while the swordsmen surround both of them, and even though I stand in front of her, trying to keep Mytho away from her, it's her scream that saves my life.

"Damnation! Always that thought!" I whisper with Frollo.

I hold the hammer and the nail, but the magic word won't come, and so the earth will never swallow my demons.

She's not Esmeralda, I've got to keep telling myself that. Esmeralda is stupid, and, alright, Ahiru's clumsy and awkward, but I know when she looks at me she sees more than she lets on, and it drives me crazy.

I have to be her knight, but I'd give anything to be her Frollo. To watch her and never speak and write words on the wall about how I can't escape this, and then go institution crazy and try to save her and kill her in turn until I succeed at one.

That's easy. To be eaten inside is easy. But I know Ahiru better than some Virgin Mary. She thinks too much and believes too readily and she's still struggling to understand that Mytho isn't perfect anymore.

So I can't go that road. Walking the path I was pushed onto, my "I'm terrified of failing" is becoming "I'm terrified of failing her", and it's just as hopeless.

Of course I want to grow old with her, but who the hell am I kidding? She's a duck, I'm a human who is a knight who is going to die.

Anake. Not only fate, but inevitability, compulsion, necessity.

According to the Greeks myths I've researched in my quest to map all the world's beginnings, so that maybe it's easier to predict the torn-out ends, the world began as an egg. Anake and Kronos, her husband, time, wrapped around the egg as serpents, pierced its fragile balance.

I think, when I was a little kid, I was whole. I don't remember much of it, before coming to Charon's, and after two days ago the feathers and broken glass and Father pressing me into his chest and then shoving me out the door, and the sickening sound of claws on flesh and Mother's hair rising and falling as she struggled to get off the ground before she curled up and lay still.

Even after that, I was able to pick up the pieces, put eggshell in eggshell, and pretend. But the snakes had already gotten my chick.

Now I have another—a duckling—a girl with boundless enthusiasm and limitless kindness, and I can see the snakes circling. They've almost torn her down. When she talks about Mytho, I know.

If she dies before they can kill her…

Fate and Time split the world in two, and the lightest particles floated up to become the sky, the heaviest falling to the dirty earth.

She will touch her heart and her eyes will be full of tears and she'll say, "I love you, prince," and then a twinkle will light the sky and be gone with the wind.

I will scream as the claws of the raven sink into my chest. Blood will splatter from me, and I'll fall, slowly, slowly hitting the ground with a grotesque spasm.

That's what the story wants, what Mytho and Kraehe want. In the battle, the crow-soldiers rose from the ground, grabbed my feet and tried to pull me under, keep me still.

I can't be still anymore. Even if that's what the story wills, I don't care if I die, I just have to try my hardest to keep my innocent. Even if she was never innocent, I just want her alive.

I get it, Drosselmeyer, Adrasteia. Inescapable, another name for Anake, didn't think of that, did you, perverted old priest? I have my own story, and maybe someday I'll be able to write it.

And if I say the crows come and attack me instead of her, and they do, I'm prepared to not be able to fight them off, again. As long as I try.

Because if I close my eyes, I can see in my mind coming home to a little yellow duck who isn't going to get tossed around for some sick tragedy anymore. I can see it, and it's goddamn impossible, so that's what I'll have to do.

Frollo, you fool, your own choices trapped and plagued you. Go to Esmeralda, take up a sword, a pen, a bell, a strength despite hideousness. Try your hardest to save her. Then when she dies—and it was her own fault, she shouldn't have trusted Phoebus—hold her corpse until you're one beside her.

Then maybe they'll put your name on the cover.

I close the book. I have better things to do. The ending's probably torn out, anyway, as if it isn't famous.

But Victor Hugo didn't write it for Quasimodo and his doomed love. He wrote it for Notre Dame, the cathedral that, at the time, was falling into disrepair. And with his words, his praise of its architecture and history, he created a renewed interest that led to a renovation.

She's peeking at me from behind a shelf. I turn and fix her with a glare. If she tries to talk to me now, I might just tell her something stupid about destiny and dreams. It's definitely the gothic prose getting to me.

And, okay, a little bit has to do with hope. Anger, desperation, witnessing degeneration, I can handle that pretty well. This hope thing is something new. It's not even all that hopeful of hope. One of the outcomes I'm trying for ends with me dead, after all.

But as long as she's there, it's hope, all right. She gave me that, and if I wasn't willing to fight for it, what type of tragic archetype would I be, anyway?

Notre Dame de Paris, known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame in English, is a classic novel with no copyright. It's available for free online if you go to Project Gutenberg (where this is from) or another classics-hosting site.

This is the passage Fakir was reading.

Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo

Excerpt from Chapter IV: Anake

"Hence," continued the priest, "one wretched thought is sufficient to render a man weak and beside himself! Oh! how Claude Pernelle would laugh at me. She who could not turn Nicholas Flamel aside, for one moment, from his pursuit of the great work! What! I hold in my hand the magic hammer of Zéchiélé! at every blow dealt by the formidable rabbi, from the depths of his cell, upon this nail, that one of his enemies whom he had condemned, were he a thousand leagues away, was buried a cubit deep in the earth which swallowed him. The King of France himself, in consequence of once having inconsiderately knocked at the door of the thermaturgist, sank to the knees through the pavement of his own Paris. This took place three centuries ago. Well! I possess the hammer and the nail, and in my hands they are utensils no more formidable than a club in the hands of a maker of edge tools. And yet all that is required is to find the magic word which Zéchiélé pronounced when he struck his nail."

"What nonsense!" thought Jehan.

"Let us see, let us try!" resumed the archdeacon briskly. "Were I to succeed, I should behold the blue spark flash from the head of the nail. Emen-Hétan! Emen-Hétan! That's not it. Sigéani! Sigéani! May this nail open the tomb to any one who bears the name of Phoebus! A curse upon it! Always and eternally the same idea!"

And he flung away the hammer in a rage. Then he sank down so deeply on the arm-chair and the table, that Jehan lost him from view behind the great pile of manuscripts. For the space of several minutes, all that he saw was his fist convulsively clenched on a book. Suddenly, Dom Claude sprang up, seized a compass and engraved in silence upon the wall in capital letters, this Greek word

ANArKH.

"My brother is mad," said Jehan to himself; "it would have been far more simple to write Fatum, every one is not obliged to know Greek."

The archdeacon returned and seated himself in his armchair, and placed his head on both his hands, as a sick man does, whose head is heavy and burning.