(la vertu par le vice )
"The Virtue of Vice".
Slight one-sided LK. If you blink, you'll miss the irony.
Rated: T, for mention of abuse.
ce que tu vaux . . .
It was cold. The walls were crumbling.
It was never supposed to be cold on Gunsmoke.
The suns were all rising in the sky against that infinitely empty stretch of blue; the mirror image of another planet's sea, long deceased. That Earth-- that plentiful garden of Eden that his Master so longed for -- was rotting somewhere, embellished out and sucked dry, decaying at the very middle of its core. The human race were insects, he imagined; like a disease stretching themselves across the vast face of the desert planet, infecting and absorbing everything. He agreed wholeheartedly with his Master's sentiments about the human race. It thrilled him to no end that it was possible for his Master's dream to one day become reality. For his Master, and His brother, to thrive, somehow, on this pitiable husk of a planet, with all of their remaining siblings, and perhaps make it the solitary heaven that his Master envisioned so constantly and desired so strongly for it to be.
There was no room for him in a space that demanded perfection. He could not ask to be the last flaw on the face of a perfect world. Soon, his time would end and The Stampede's would begin-- as it always should have been, from the beginning, he knew. And so, to want, somewhere within the hollow shell of slavery that he'd become (for devotion, for truth, for shame, for a most melancholic"love") to hold on to some illusionary fragment of his Master, his Ano Kata, his God, that he had never had to begin with, was as good as blaspheme in his eyes.
And yes, he did wish with every ghost and atom of himself to drown within those flaxen strands. To abandon his skin and bodily shed himself at the last gate of his Master's eye, and drift, a phantom through that empty sea, if only just in soul-- unworthy and unworthier still-- for a moment that would be worth any eternity to him, Heaven or Hell.
His upper lip curled in disgust as he recalled these wanton urges, all the vivid desires that sprang to mind and blossomed in the pit of his stomach, scraping the backs of his skin and crawling up from the damp, withered shallows of himself like a black veil of decay. Similar, so similar to a little Death itself. Suffocation and humiliation. Guilt; devoid. The void. Emptiness.
Sometimes-- no; quite often-- he imaged that death would be better than what he had. But he could not abandon the Master just yet; could not escape through the hole in his head just yet, or the ventricles pushing his blood, or the nothingness that would suck away his last breath like the kiss that never gave to him, being all at once his greatest enemy and only friend. There would be time soon for that, but that hour was not yet upon him, and he was powerless to further its forthcoming.
His thoughts strayed toward perversion far more frequently than he would have liked.
Every perversion of the mind against his Master was another reminder of his mortality. He was ashamed to want to end it, still more excited than ashamed, so lulled by the sick, sweet fantasy that was the act of dying as he'd seen it done so very many times before. And sometimes he did desire to be one of those millions. To join that mound of corpses whose count required endless counting.
He would be like the insects that his species so resembled. Doing without thinking. Acting upon instinct, without feeling and without remorse. There could be no justice for anyone, not for anything. He would be shameless. He would be worthless and hated. He would be fucked in effigy and cast aside. He would be blackened, bruised and beaten until he was pure, and he would be a glutton and he would starve himself until he was a thin glass flute, and he would be strong so that he never screamed again like every dehumanization was a crucifixion of himself.
The sacrifice of a life worth nothing-- offered in small pieces on the altar of his God.
His heart and lips would roll over in treacles of pitchfork red, but the black vein-colored myriad would be inside, bursting out everywhere and pooling blackish blue beneath the skin. He would hate his gift from God; love his God. He would hate that which he could never aspire to be. He would hate Vash the Stampede. Show him what it was to suffer. Suffer like he had for this love. He would detach himself-- he would remake himself-- and he would loathe himself and touch himself, wishing that he was more.
And he would never be more. And he could never be more. He would be what he had to be; what that was: a pawn. A slave by choice and not by punishment. If he gave up himself he could, he would, someday, be free. Maybe freedom wasn't what he wanted, in the end. It didn't seem to matter what he wanted. After all, he wanted what his Master wanted. And he had never aspired to peace of mind, to begin with.
He wasn't disappointed. And he didn't feel abused.
The blood rains and it pours, long and slow from the aching throbbing lacerations that trail up his back and down his sides; the pain white hot searing right through his eyelids. And it is beautiful. And it is the last thing in the world that can ever be beautiful. A divine tragedy; he saw the beauty for what it was.
The knives shine out of that perfect white arm, the boiling glassy eyes telling him everything he needs to know and so much more. He is a bloody stump, lying there on the floor as black creeps up into his broken ribs and the ends of his hair tickle the back of his neck. His heartbeat pulses in the arch of his throat and in his mind he feels the Master thrashing and clawing at the edges of his consciousness, spreading His hatred and His anger and His fear and denial everywhere. Because deep down his Master has been driven crazy by His obsession with His brother, and deep down, He is still a child, remarkably cynical, jaded, and naïve, and impossibly in love with His twin-- the only thing that He has left in this miserable wasteland of a world.
And He is still a little boy somehow, cursing and howling as He writhes in the sand, the blood oozing between his fingers and down His arms as He holds His right leg against Himself. The bullet hole that marked the end of everything; feeding a hole much deeper and far blacker in his Master's heart that, in time, he knew, would consume everything that was left of Millions Knives until there was Nothing left at all.
And he cried, and he cried, and he cried, just like his Master did. The perfect fingers shot out and held his heartbeat deep inside his neck like they'd like to squeeze it out-- let it roll around in his gut before flopping on the floor. Legato just smiled.
"Do you know what it's like?" His God demanded. "To love someone so much and have them hate you? Hate you like he hates me?"
His eyes were wild with fury, shining out of His face in the shadow of His fallen hair like headlights in the darkness.
"Do you know how that feels, Legato? Everything I've ever done was for him. All that I ever wanted was for him!"
Knives sneers and tosses him back against the wall, looking like His perfect, perfect hands must have been burned through in the places where their flesh and blood had touched.
"No," He sneered, lip curling. "You could never know. You're one of them, after all. Useless."
One of the worthless human insects that destroyed everything He ever loved.
And Legato cried when He walked away. He tossed head back against the wall and cried, smiling the strange, dark smile that no other living creature ever saw and hoped to live, a smile so twisted and joyous as to stop a dead man rolling in his grave-- he was so. fucking. happy. And he cried with happiness until the blood made its way in a thin trail from his bottom lip and down the front of his chest, and he wiped it away with the crook of his arm, sinking bodily to the floor. And he sighed. For the first time in many years, Legato sighed, and closed his eyes.
Because the irony of his suffering and that of his beloved Master was something that Knives could never come to know.
/finite.