Some days Asch can't take any more. Life is far too normal, too mundane.

It continues on like clockwork whose gears had been jammed up, but that foreign element had been removed. Some wrench in the cosmic plan taken out, and now everything ran far too smoothly for Asch's liking.

He was king, he had married Natalia, his queen. They were happy, had a son who he had insisted that she insist be named Luke, the name Asch had never taken back for his own. At least someone would always remember their personal cosmic wrench, no matter the passage of time.

They did love each other, and loved their country dearly as well. Natalia had never stopped her humanitarian efforts, and had even drawn Asch into some of them. He liked that they kept him busy, and had started a few projects of his own.

But he never wants time to reflect, to think of how much he doesn't deserve, most of the world doesn't deserve, this happy ending handed to them on the funeral pyre of the one who did deserve it.

He's seen the memories, watched them all. The memories that aren't his, or weren't, but are his now, sort of. Watched the painstaking ascent into independence, his own decline into madness.

He had been a stark raving lunatic towards the end, he realizes now, possibly an effect of the deterioration and decline of his body. Possibly merely because he couldn't get over his own issues and couldn't stand watching someone so similar get over his with such seeming ease.

He knows down to every last detail exactly how much better, how much more worthy, the one whose life he had consumed to survive was to live the life he is living now.

Days like those, when he has nothing to do but reflect, he just wants to start walking. He wants to leave the city, and just keep going to the nearest body of water, not even stopping then, just walking right into it and straight to the bottom. He wants to, but he wouldn't.

When the feelings build up and he feels like he can't stop himself from doing so, he turns them inwards. He reaches for the golden power that had resided just outside of himself ever since he was ten, but was now back in its proper place inside him. He turns those feelings into feelings of sinking into that golden power, drowning in it, and he feels compassion and joy radiating from within it, enveloping, embracing him.

He's not here, this isn't some cosmic line to the feelings of the dead. He knows that they're the echoes of feelings, the strongest left behind just for him, because he had known days like these would come, and had seen some kind of merit in keeping him alive.

The feelings, echoes, calm him, making that urge, itch to jump up and leave, fade away. He floats to the surface of the gold power, knowing he could destroy and reform this entire world if he wanted to, but also knowing that someone whose judgment had proven to be infinitely wiser than his had already done so, without even needing to use this power, and out of respect he lets the world be and just floats in the knowing that he could.

He has to come out, back to the outer world, eventually. But that is not now, and this is the only time he doesn't feel like he's still burning on the world's largest funeral pyre, or was it the world's funeral pyre?

He floats, content but never quite happy.