Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Written back when I first took Unknown X as a character. Omega perspective on his dearly departed "father."



Mordred's Soliloquy


When I was newly activated, I used to go every day and stand at the desert's edge like a child waiting for his parents to pick him up from school and take him home. I would stand under the scorching sun and watch the sandstorms, and wonder at every mirage that appeared on the horizon.

But you never came to me.

My creator, my mother, told me that I shouldn't torture myself so with a futile hope. She told me it was obsession to wait for you there every day. I think she was concerned that I would go looking for you, and be swallowed up myself in the wastelands.

She needn't have worried. I didn't like the desert. It was a black hole of never ending emptiness, absorbing light, water, life itself and burning them to dust under a barren sky. It had taken you, after all, closing its barriers of sandstorms and dead earth behind you. I used to be terrified that if I stepped across that boundary, I would be sucked down into the sand and never seen again.

Like you.

My mother told me that desert had not always been there. She said once it had been green and blue, the way the whole planet had once been green and blue. I didn't believe her, when she told me that, but she showed me the old pictures that had been taken from space.

I asked her why everything had changed. I later learned about the Great Wars, and the ruination of our planet during them, but her answer that day was something I never found in a data file.

"Because our hope died," she said softly, and her eyes were on the wastelands where you had disappeared.

She was wrong, though. Hope never dies. It changes forms, taking on aspects that no one would ever have predicted, but it does not die. It survives with the stubborn persistance that is life.

I had hoped that you would appear to me some day. I had hoped that you would be able to answer my questions. I had hoped that you would come back to restore the Summer Kingdom on a green and blue planet. You were our Pendragon even then after your initial disappearance, and all of us awaited your second coming breathlessly. We watched the decline of the world around us and were afraid, but we were also steadfast in our faith. I most of all.

So we waited, and I endured the sandstorms to watch for your return at the desert's edge, and my mother cried every night. She tried to keep her tears from me, but I saw. And I was much better than her at hiding my own.

But you know the end of this story, don't you? Time passed, the sun rose and set over an arrid expanse of nothing that crept inexorably closer to its goal of swallowing the Earth. I watched, I learned, and I came to realize something.

You had no intention of ever coming back. For me, or for any other reason. It was -your- emptiness that devoured the planet, grain by grain of desert sand, and it would never stop until eveything had been consumed. The Summer Kingdom you had promised was fading, and the thing that approached now on our horizon was a kingdom of death.

It came to me as I stood in the midst of a storm, letting the grit abraid my synthetic flesh until it was bloody, letting the dust blind and choke me, letting the hot wind dry my tears. It came to me that this was all you were. A force of destruction, even in your absence. You were a relic of the ancient world and everything left of you in our reality brought us ruin. The hope I had in you died, and was reborn as something new. Rage, and a deep seated certainty.

Your time was over.

And who, you ask could have justified that decision? Who could have dared to build the Summer Kingdom again in your stead, taking your place and assuming your authority? Who was worthy to claim your throne?

None but the unwanted, illegitimate, half fey child Mordred. Pendragon's only son and heir, despite the darkness clouding his bloodlines and upbringing. Mordred the shadowed, hidden forever by his father's light.

Myself.

I will not wait any longer for you, father. Your kingdom is crumbling, your Knights leaderless and astray, your people without faith. Your Lancelot sleeps like the dead in his silver coffin. I do not wield Excalibur, but my mother has given me a Buster Cannon of my own, and it will serve just as well. She pines for you still, and tells me to stay from the warrior's path that ultimately brought you to ruin, but I am her gift to the future and I will fight to rebuild this world.

With or without you in it.

This is my time. This is my future.

And I will not suffer Mordred's fate, father. This time I will win.