Cold Blood

(nier automata | bipolar nightmare )

He stretches up on his toes to reach for that chocobo-shaped lollipop, and you're about to say no. He senses it, perceptive as his mother, and pouts. "Just one, daddy, just one!"

(How long until you can tell him that despite all the benefits you get from your job, you cannot – as a single parent – afford to send him to the dentist three times a year?)

"No, Dajh. You've already had one yesterday, remember? Control your sweet tooth and daddy will get you a real chocobo chick."

His features light up like the radiance of the sunleth waterscape, and you wonder how you've ever denied him anything. "A reeeeeeeeaaaal chocobo chick, daddy? One that I can keep? One that I can name?" A hop, step and jump: you're gonna lose the boy if you don't run after him. "I'm going to hold you to that promise!"

You don't deserve Dajh as a son: he's too intelligent, too precious, too mature for his age, and above all too pure. The child would give flowers and toys to other boys who had pushed and bullied him in class – it feels like every other day that you'd pick him up from school only to end up yelling angrily at a bunch of other kids, and Dajh would just be standing in his corner with his little chocobo backpack, smiling serenely as he examines this animal poster and that.

"You've got to stand up for yourself one day, Dajh," you chide him one day, carefully putting on his helmet for him as the two of you shoot up into Cocoon orbit. "You can't just always sit there and take everything."

"But what about you, daddy?" Dajh asks, and you wonder if his face is only a picture of innocence, and he had truly been fathering you the entire time instead of the other way around. "Do you fight back too, daddy?"

You are not a fighting man. You know this from her death – when she had told you to give in, to simply let her go instead of spending Etro knows how much money on procedures and clinical trials you could not afford, you had wept, held her hand, made her promises, cooked her favorite food, and kissed her goodnight.

(Promise me you'll see Dajh grow up, she had begged. Promise me you'll see Dajh grow old. Promise me that you'll be the best father and mother you could be, and be there for him when I'm gone.

Always, you had murmured, squeezing her hand softly. She had smiled contentedly through the drowsiness and the pain. I may not be a miracle worker or a hero, but I love the two of you more than anything in the world.

Sazh, I didn't fall in love with a hero. Her voice had been halting but sweet. Did she die that night? The weather had been eerily but peacefully calm, and Dajh had fallen asleep in the doctor's office. I fell in love with a man who would always bring me home.)

(The l'Cie brand on Dajh's hand flares like the dark fine print on his mother's diagnosis paper, and all you want to do is to throw up.)

How did you lay her to rest? It was autumn and you had made sure Dajh would stay in class. There was just you, her, this coldness of the coffin wall between the two of you and the crimson red leaves falling all over your bent-over form. She was no longer that warmth you once knew. You were no longer that cheerful man who would laugh at anything and everything.

Some people could have helped you but didn't.

Some people could have saved her but didn't.

Some people had cold blood.

"The world is unfair," Dajh had nonchalantly said that morning as you dropped him off, and you had nearly choked on your drink and demanded just who had thought they had the right to tell him something like that. "My homeroom teacher! I was telling her that I missed mommy, and she told me that mommy had to go somewhere but she might come be back one day if I'm good."

It would seem that the people of Cocoon just absolutely could not make up fairy tales.

(You wonder. You wonder.

Would you finally fight back against those who had taken your son from you?

If you couldn't even stand up to those people, how could you ever face Dajh or his mother again?)

(The lover taken by the goddess of death and the son flash-frozen in eternal sleep:

Do you dare

Disturb the universe?)

You run in a desperate plea to escape it all – all I've ever wanted was to be a good man, whatever that even means – but there's nowhere to turn. There's never been anywhere to turn.

How much does the universe have to take from someone before they will just watch the world burn?

(The firearm, despite the bullet's searing escape velocity, has always been the coldest and least intimate weapon of them all.)

The ground vibrates, and your vision revolves with it, too. There's a coppery taste in your mouth, a flame and a chill dancing in tandem within your aging veins. The girl is down on her knees, peach-colored hair dull and disheveled in the wind, shivering. Her accomplice is not with her. But her accomplice hasn't lied and taken advantage of you, either.

Dajh's bruises, fear as he was taken away by the Sanctum, the one final embrace that had been denied: a boy's stolen future, and a father's unspeakable despair. You feel the flamestrike in your bones. You can breathe a fire demon, hurl meteors in your rage, wash over the field in blood debt and plasma discharge –

Kill, the rust and heartbeat of the inside of the barrel whispers, vanquish. Slay. Kill.

You draw the gun. It's over. It will be over.

"My name… is Oerba Dia Vanille. I'm a l'Cie from Gran Pulse. So shoot me. For your son."

You think you die and that's that? You think you die and everything will be sugar and rainbows?

Monochrome truth fragments fall bleak and silent as he closes his fingers around the trigger. Machine grease and his own blood – sticky, volatile, raw. Does the girl seek to hide in death of all things? How can one girl compete against her lost smile, flashing startlingly vivid and ghostly in this dream of a thunderstorm? His delicate child's form, scintillating in crystal yet never going to ever stretch and grow? They've both died, gone in an attempt to do something right… and…

You think dying has ever changed anything?

(Crystals can't bleed, but tears and cursed bodies can. And how do we all scream.)

Their taunting laughter builds, a chorus. The darkness of Pulse gazes up at you from its frenzied and maniacal depths. At your fingertips glows finally the full power to take revenge, to bring someone down with you, to watch it all be consumed by flames.

The countdown expires.

Her pulse falls silent.

.

You are not a murderer.

You drop the gun.

.

You love this life, too,

Despite its curses and hopelessness.

.

Lots of things can be excused.

Shooting kids ain't one.