author's note: Strange how I'm most productive with fic when I can least afford to be. (Essay! Notes! Essay!) Hao introspection that didn't turn out nearly as well as I had hoped, and it's wiiiildly out of character, but there's something in it that I like - a facet, maybe? Or maybe the fact that it's a lot simpler than Deconstruction, which is going to be a lot of fun if I get the mindgames right, confusing prologue notwithstanding.
Also implied Hao/Anna to a certain extent, which is always nice.
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three facets of desire
i. Wanting is a strange movement of the heart.
It's not like ambition, which Hao understands and uses as fuel and flame and all else that he needs. Desires shift and change, suiting to some inner craving of which the wish he fulfills is only part.
He takes some minor amusement in granting all the small pieces of desire that people ask of him, in seeing all the space beneath their bones that they cannot fill. (Idly, he imagines their hands undergoing a slow transformation to sand, their eyes milky with marble blindness in seeing what they want.)
How they wander without asking direction perplex him, like puzzles constructed without end in view. Surely to know what you want should be simple as the heartbeat, the turn of greed in the throat - but their endless searches, fruitless and blind, have never concerned him. It isn't his business if people play without naming stakes.
Neither does it matter if men with wishes of wax and feathers take flight, forgetting the sun.
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ii. Emptiness in the heart opens to a glance where desire should be.
Despite all that he does, or perhaps because of it, that terrible need which consumes others is alien to him. He sees the way they fall, the fierce brightness that lights their faces, and answers it with the paths he sees before him: roads paved in bone, mortared with the blood of those who oppose him. What they want seems to be something else entirely, and the shape of that thought is strange and angular.
He dreams rarely, and does not speak of them when he does. The dreams he will explain are ambitious, and shaped of him like the crook of his elbow, the sidelong tilt of his eyes. He asks only for the sky open above him, the position of Shaman King, the drifting burst of light before fire snatches another precious object from the grasp of the world. Things that he might see when he wakes, pieces in a game larger than the world moving as he commands.
That knowledge weighs on him, not in satisfaction - which indicates some lesser state before it came - but quiet pleasure, without definition or understanding. Perhaps that is the root - that he is not satisfied - but he doesn't care enough to ask.
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iii. The irony of need is that it is never for what can be had.
Anna bemuses him in the same way, the same strange parallels. Not the girl herself, so tightly wound with her power that she trails it in long drifts like smoke wherever she passes, but the absent-minded desire to reach for her in the mornings, to slip into Yoh's place and watch the taut fierceness of her gaze directed at the world for him. It's nothing like need, an emotion that slips from the mind as if water, but that there's substance to it at all - that desire to watch Yoh's face as Anna turns her back on him - is unfamiliar.
He does not ask, does not consider whether he wants her because Yoh has her, or Yoh has her because Hao wants her.
In the end, it won't matter.
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end
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feedback: aside from telling me how out of character Hao is, crit is always appreciated.
