/A/N/: Warning, this chapter touches on the topic of suicide.

Chapter Two: There'd Better Be a Mirrorball

There is too much. What to organize? What do you, forty years from now, want to know? What do you want to remember? What do you want to see? When you look at this time of youth, and you crave, "What was it like then, before this time?", what do you wish had been answered? I hope I help you. Luigi hopes he helps his future self. Bless you.

He has a beard now, along with his mustache. It is enough of a disguise to let him walk the streets and not be bothered by anyone who might remember him, as one of the old heroes of the Mushroom Kingdom. It is not too much of a concern anyway— he was never well known. The 'green one', he used to be called. This effort, now, this book, is what he will be known for.

He lives in Yoshi City, the largest settlement on Yoshi's Island, which still has a rather small population compared to such places as Mushroom City, New Donk City, and Chai. Terribly small, even. For reference, Yoshi City has about 200,000 residents, Chai in Sarasaland has about 2.5 million, Mushroom City has about 2.7 million, and New Donk City has about 8.5 million.

In an ideal world, so Luigi imagines, he would have the money to live in New Donk City, and have the opportunity to interact with more writers, more ambitious writers, such as himself. It's very expensive to live in New Donk, however, and at this time, Luigi does not believe it is necessary. He takes several trips a year to various writing conventions, and tries to meet people. He has been told several times this is the best thing to do, that living in a place like New Donk is not necessary in the modern age.

Still, he worries.

Why Yoshi City? Shortly after falling into his coma, Luigi was moved, asleep, back near to his hometown on Yoshi's Island. Back near Ma and Pa. After he woke up, stationed in the Yoshi City hospital (better than the podunk hospital in his actual hometown), he arranged what funds he had and moved into an apartment there, splitting rent with a goomba roommate. He wanted to keep costs down. And he was, whatever the circumstances, not going to ask Mario for money.

Complications to explain. One thing that must be considered is that Luigi woke up during the "Night", the pandemic that covered the world for perhaps two years. Civilization momentarily shut down. Waking up in that world, Luigi did not think it was safe to move to a larger city, or useful— people did not want to meet in-person.

Also, Luigi woke from his coma with an injured eye. Something had happened during his sleep, either because of what he had done to himself, or from some other cause in the four years after, that gave his right eye a case of recurrent inflammation. Occasionally (and it had happened three times in the two years following his awakening) his right eye would burst into bloody red, forcing both his eyes shut from the pain of sunlight, and he would be left bedridden for three days.

(...He wanted that little problem to settle down before he moved into unknown territory...)

In his plans, and his dreams, he always imagined he would need to move on from Yoshi City for the sake of his art. Yoshi City was too small. There was too little artistic pursuit. There were too many people living quiet, undirected, unfocused lives. (All very fine. But Luigi was obsessed, burning, craving! This was not his crowd, these were not his people, Where are my people—?)

Why did he feel a "normal life" was not enough? A life where you made money, money to buy food, went home, ate, watched TV or Youtube or Twitch or TikTok, perhaps played with yourself (play with another if you're lucky, golly gee?), then went to sleep.

…Then went back to work?

So he had been a "hero" once, it gave him high standards, perhaps. A desire to "achieve". Obsessed, deranged. Is the "Hero's Journey" something to be celebrated, or a ritualistic self-emaciating performance to watch with shock and awe? (Eh, regardless still, it all happens.)

Now, six years after Luigi's awakening, the "Internet" had become fairly popular in the world. And it had broken out of its local city limits, from its state a few years before— that if you lived in a certain city, you could only access messages and content from that city alone. Now all was connected, and one could watch videos from New Donk City and Chai if they so pleased, even if they lived in obscure Yoshi City. (And this was part of the reason Luigi felt safe staying in Yoshi City, at least for now. That so much culture and new art and content was available, regardless of where you physically lived, via the internet.)

Luigi crosses his arms. In a fanfiction, you can really get away with a lot that you couldn't put in a published novel, at least as a beginner writer. Experimental work, using real songs as chapter titles, stuff like that. You couldn't safely put that in a published work, without an agent or editor stopping you. At least, again, as a beginner.

Also, not even "experimental" work, exactly, but simply masturbatory asides. If a writer happened to love using asides. I, Luigi, do not. Luigi thought to himself, sitting alone in a room, mind wandering as it would.

He was thinking about fanfiction at this time, because he planned to make his first published novel an adaptation of a fanfiction he had written many years ago. The fanfiction was for a game he had loved to play as a child, and he had enjoyed creating original characters for. As it was, the story he ended up writing, about ten years ago, was of an utterly different tone from the original game, mostly involved characters of Luigi's own creation that did not exist in the game, and even ended up with its own original mythology separate from the games. As such, Luigi believed with some mild editing, he could make the story an entirely original novel, and publish it as a new "epic fantasy" work.

So had been his focus since waking up from his coma: the work of finishing this novel and getting it published. To speak more accurately, it would be a four-book series— a tetralogy, as the cool kids say. He wanted to get the first volume in a perfectly publishable state, get a literary agent to pick him up based on this work, and then finish the final drafts of the rest of the series from there.

This was where all of his energy was directed. Every task he planned, nearly every action he took, was attached to the question: How does this help me towards my goal? Am I remembering my goal? Am I moving towards my goal?

As such, an absolute blade of focus had replaced the void of meaninglessness that had made for his life in the years before the coma. That sickly meaninglessness that had sunk in during the last few years of saving Peach from Bowser. A repeated song, a story with no ending. Bowser would kidnap Peach, Mario and Luigi would go to rescue her. They would beat up Bowser. Take Peach back to her castle. Peach would give Mario a kiss. Luigi would get a handshake from Toadsworth. Maybe two months later, Bowser would come back and kidnap Peach again.

One of the things that broke Luigi, thinking back in the long run, happened during one of the last kidnappings. Maybe the fifth from the last. Luigi had been in Mushroom Castle when Bowser had swooped in piloting his stupid clown copter, grabbed Peach, and began to fly away with her. Luigi was there to witness all of this. In the moments before the copter had vanished out of sight, through the clouds, Luigi had caught a glimpse of Peach's face.

She was wearing a little smile. Peach had a little smile of enjoyment.

At that moment, Luigi had ripped the sight out of his mind. He suppressed it, quickly. It was unimaginable— that Peach enjoyed being kidnapped?

Then Mario had arrived at Luigi's side, fist held out. The expression on his face was not much more comforting— there was a hint of a smile there too.

"Rats, that Bowser took her again!" Mario looked out at the clouds where the enemy had disappeared. Luigi's brother looked like he was planning a road trip. "By golly, we've got to save Princess Peach!"

It was not clear to Luigi if such a keen sentiment was appropriate on the second instance of such a kidnapping— not to mention what was probably more like the fortieth. Luigi had stared at his brother, not quite registering the sense of horror that was draping over his heart. He tried to cover that up, too, but something bleak was crouched within him, like a ruffling crow.

He realized later the source of his horror. To skip the poetics, it was simply: Luigi was apparently the only person in this kidnapping business who didn't consider the whole matter a game. He had been quite seriously upset for Peach, upset for the constant disruption and chaos the Mushroom Kingdom suffered from Bowser's attacks. When he was younger, when the kidnappings first started, Luigi would stay up late at night. He would try to plan out how peace could be achieved. There had to be some way to reason with Bowser. Later, he realized that Bowser was truly, truly in love with Peach. But Bowser was not a human. It couldn't work.

There was an almost mythological tragedy to the situation. Luigi realized then that there really was no alternative to the violence. That as long as Bowser came back, Peach would have to be defended. For Luigi, empathizing with both sides, it was all horrible, horrible.

But then, after Luigi saw Peach's smile, he realized the situation was horrible in a quite different way. The truth was that Luigi and Bowser were the only ones who didn't realize a game was being played. Or at least, didn't unconsciously enjoy the game. Bowser could not stop kidnapping Peach for the sake of love. Luigi wanted to save Peach from her suffering.

But in actuality maybe it could be said: That for Mario and Peach, all the years of struggle had essentially been an extended series of dates.

How cute.

It took some time for all the pieces of these realizations to gather in Luigi's mind, but they did, and they formed something like a poisonous portrait in his heart. Mario and Peach had been having fun this whole time. Luigi engaged in these brutal adventures, thrashing koopas and goombas, as a matter of duty. Of justice. There was a life of peace and pursuit of art he had wanted to lead, but he put that aside. He wanted to be a 'good person'. He wanted to be 'noble'. He went to help Mario save Peach, because it was 'the right thing to do'.

But the truth was, it wasn't really a matter of justice, or goodness. Peach liked getting kidnapped. Mario liked saving her. They were doing this on purpose. What Luigi considered grave, life and death, Mario and Peach considered a game of sex.

Even if they didn't know it. Even if they denied it, confused expressions on their face. The cyclical idiocy alone was evidence enough to crush a blaarg.

He remembered thinking he was just paranoid. Then one day he confronted Mario, shortly before the second-to-last kidnapping happened.

Mario had denied it was all a game. He said, with a very serious look on his face, that Peach needed to be defended.

"Then fucking defend her!" Luigi felt himself losing control. "Live at the castle, and protect her! Don't let her get kidnapped!" His face felt hot. He almost never screamed. "God damn you. I'll do it, then. I'll sleep outside her room—"

"No." Mario grabbed Luigi's arm, and actually looked serious for once. "I mean…" He seemed to catch himself. The mask had fallen off for a moment. His true motivations had shown. The idea of his brother sleeping so close to Peach… "It's fine. The toad guards are installing some new defensive measures."

"The toad guards?" Luigi ripped away from Mario's grasp. "The toad guards?"

Mario was still speaking of the toad guards, after Peach had been kidnapped more than forty times. He was playing the game. He played the game, that the toad guards did anything to keep Peach from getting kidnapped. He was assuring, right there, that Peach would get kidnapped again.

It was all just fun. Everyone was having a fun time, but Luigi.

He was so upset he wanted to scream and tear at his hair. It wasn't just this moment, this was the last straw. He felt the truth of the entire conspiracy stabbing right through his torso, tearing the space below his stomach into flaming shreds. He wanted to rip his hat off, and let himself lose control, like when he was very young, actually grab at his brown hair. Maybe tear at his mustache. Just let the panic take him, let it drag his mind down into the abyss.

How long have they been doing this? How much stress and time had Luigi lost to the Peach, Mario, and Bowser dynamic?

Not to mention Bowser. Poor, poor, son of a bitch Bowser. Luigi, sensitive idiot he was, wanted to cry twice over just for Bowser. Luigi didn't care that Bowser was an angry, selfish brute. The Koopa King really had been motivated by a helpless love all this time.

It was horrible, so, so horrible. And what made it even worse was that to Mario and Peach, it seemed like no harm was being done. They were just enjoying themselves. This surface-level game was a mask for a "dance of love" from their perspective. In a sense, they were too happy and satisfied to be able to empathize with anyone around them.

Everything had been twisted around, and no one could be clearly blamed.

This was much of the revelation that originally broke Luigi, that nearly drove him mad, a fire that ended in an intense apathy, a sense of mocking depression toward all of life. That all his serious efforts of the last ten years, the unhappiness he had suffered and the desired life he had denied, had been for the sake of someone else's fantasy.

This destruction of his world gave him the belief that nothing was real, everything and everyone was just a mask, and there was only emptiness beneath it all. It was the path that led him six years ago to stare into a noose, standing atop on an old stool, breathless eternity before him. All the wasted sadness and confusion come to an end.

And it almost was the end. Ironically it was Peach who came and saved him, intuiting that something was wrong with Luigi— that he had become reclusive, had taken on a dismal air, had some wretched plan on his mind. Not too long after he had blacked out, swinging, she had cut him down.

That knife…

So he had heard later. Then he was taken away, back to a hospital, and hooked up to machines. He, and Bowser.

Oh yes. Bowser had decided to leave the world too. His despair was much less existential, so it seemed to Luigi— Bowser had finally realized that he was never going to have Peach. He was, from his perspective, never going to have love. Maybe he was right. Certainly, his heart had been set on the same woman for ten years, suffering all sorts of hideous pains in his pursuit. But he never gave up. He never gave up— until finally, he did. And he was utterly broken for it. Utterly broken.

Six years later, two years after waking from the coma, it all brought about some twinges of sadness to Luigi's heart. He believed strongly at this point that no one was good or evil— people could only obey their hearts, and often, if they hurt others in their pursuits, they were ignorant of it. Evil was ignorance.

Apparently, though he too had tried to end things, Bowser had not fallen into a coma at all. He had left the same hospital Luigi was left in just days after the attempts, and wandered off alone. He left a note promising he wouldn't try to kill himself again. Whatever else he planned to do in the vast, empty, seemingly loveless world— was left unsaid.

It seems he had fulfilled that promise. It was about two years after Luigi awoke from the coma that he first got a letter from Bowser.