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Middle Ground

There were times when Sol Badguy didn't understand his own former species.

Sol had seen a lot of weird shit in his time. It was his curse. Weird shit followed him like an ill wind. So occasionally he stepped in to put a stop to it. Occasionally he'd been the cause of it in the first place. Timeshifts, magic, demons, Gears, massacres, extra dimensional dealings, whatnot and what-have-you, he'd witnessed a damn lot of whacked out crap during his exciting lifetime. Such things eventually ceased to baffle after the initial shock wore off.

It was the little things that still mystified him.

Take now, for example. In the middle of some nameless city, on the edge of some nameless street, he stood outside waiting for a bus. Outside in the cold, waiting for a bus. The wind was chill as it playfully tugged at his ponytail. There was a leather jacket stuffed somewhere in the bag he had slung over his shoulder, but he made no effort to locate and dig it out. He was a Gear. He didn't have to acknowledge the cold.

The stick thin man with glasses who stood a few meters away, however, was an entirely different story. He was shivering, clutching at the straps of his backpack.

Sol recognized the unpleasantness of the temperature well enough. He simply chose to ignore it. The reedy guy stood there like a moron and shivered and rubbed his hands together to try and warm them, steadfastly refusing to go into the heated shelter of the bus station only a few feet away.

He stood outside freezing because Sol was. Because people, like sheep, flocked around anyone who appeared to be taking charge or in the lead, and copied them, witlessly assuming that they knew what they were doing. If Sol suddenly turned on his heel and went inside, or left altogether, the man would without a doubt gravitate to the shelter on his own. If Sol took it into his head to wait for the bus in the middle of the street, the guy would probably end up out there eventually as well.

Sheep. Or maybe lemmings.

He just didn't get it.

Another kid jogged up, huffing a little. He looked at the two men standing in the bay, then longingly at the inside of the station, then back out at the empty street. The wind kicked up, ruffling Sol's bangs. The guy with the backpack shivered harder. His teeth were actually chattering. Sol stood straight backed, unmoving.

The kid took up position behind the thin man and shivered too, evidently coerced by the strange sheep magic of his own inherent nature to stay outside and freeze his ass off just because he saw two other people doing it.

Sol pretended he didn't care. But really, what sort of idiot would put himself or herself through physical discomfort just for the sake of conformity? Did those two really think that if they didn't stand outside here with Sol, the bus might not show up or they wouldn't make the five feet between the station and the bay to catch it when it did show?

Sol tried to remember if he'd ever done anything as dumb. Surely not since he'd become a Gear. Maybe before. In stereotype scientists were too preoccupied by their work to bother with the rest of the world, but he couldn't vouch for sure about that, because most of his memories from that time were conveniently fuzzy. Things came back to him sometimes in startling clarity, but usually that period took on the muddled, hazy sense of something he'd dreamed rather than experienced. Maybe he'd been an idiot when he was human. He'd like to believe otherwise.

Then again, there was always the shining example of his joining the Seikishidan. The original Lemming Brigade. That couldn't have been anything but a stupid move, even if it had been with ulterior motives in mind. There were other ways he could have stolen Fuenken without integrating himself in with a bunch of prissy Crusaders.

Sol acknowledged that the whole lemming theory was the foundation of his conflict with authority in general and the military in specific. Everyone simply followed everyone else, none of them realizing they were all marching straight off a cliff. It was dumb. It was irrational and illogical. It was basic human nature. And yet, similar blindly stupid behavior was usually associated by humans with the lowest level Gears, conveniently overlooking their own guilt.

So he couldn't say he had joined up because he hadn't yet recognized the inherent stupidity in such an organization. He'd gone in knowing how these things operated and how basically useless they ended up being. He'd left with that knowledge completely, unequivocally, utterly re-affirmed.

Mostly by a blond brat named Ky Kiske, Holy Knight Lemming In Chief of all the Holy Knight Lemmings.

Which was unfortunate.

It didn't bother Sol to think of Ky as a brainwashed zombie for the Great and Noble Cause of Blind Justice. The boy had nothing to do with Sol's mission. It was just the principle of the thing that he found irritating, he told himself. A waste of talent. A waste of damn fine capability on the useless posing and futile maneuvers of government sanctioned authority. Just ...a waste of otherwise perfectly good life.

It reminded him of Frederick. Frederick the idealist. Frederick the firm believer in humanity's great potential. Frederick the genius, so proud of his life changing accomplishments.

Frederick the incredibly fucking dumb. The man almost certainly had to have been a lemming, even if Sol didn't remember it.

Well, he'd learned his lesson since then. Learned it in blood and fire and paid for it with a stolen, unnatural existence. A Gear that killed other Gears. A human ghost in a monster's body. He was a one man army now, and neither needed nor wanted guidance or support from the rest of the world. Let sheep worry about sheep. He was a dragon among wolves.

In some vague back corner of his mind, he wondered if Ky would ever figure out the same lesson. Lemmings died young. Sol was over 150 years old now.

But he supposed if they weren't lemming-like, they wouldn't be human. And his humanity was the thing he thought he missed the most, when he got to brooding about the things he thought he missed. It was hard to miss things one didn't remember clearly.

So. Lemming or dragon.

A pretty girl approached from the other side of the street, sensibly wearing a jacket. She eyed Sol appreciatively before walking past him and the thin man and the kid towards the bus shelter. Once inside, she sat down and took out a book.

Completely ignoring the fact that the three of them stood outside.

Sol blinked, the first movement he'd made since showing up to wait.

Or maybe there was a middle ground to be found after all.