text; un: geraniums

[rootlessly]

Ah, hello everyone! I'm Vash, one of the new arrivals. It's nice to meet everyone :)

Forgive me if this has been asked before, but has anyone actually met Echo or gotten a chance to speak with them? Because I was thinking, there's so many of us from so many different places, and between all of us I'm sure there's a solution Echo hasn't found where nobody needs to lose a universe, right? Echo's just one person, after all--there must be some angles to this situation they haven't even considered yet, and if enough of us approached them at once, maybe they'd hear us out.

Thanks for your time!!

Comments

[rootlessly]

Personal experience? What happened to you before, if you don't mind me asking?

[prevail]

It's a long story.

[ Over two thousand years long, but— ]

I suppose the short version is that I was ignorant of the purpose for which I was created. That was intentional. The fault didn't lie with the one who made me, as he did not know either, but the one who tasked him with doing so.

When he did learn, he did not inform me. There are many reasons to withhold information. Some are difficult to fathom.

[rootlessly]

[Oh.....

The realization hits him like a brick to the face. Somehow he hadn't imagined -- hadn't anticipated, that there would be others here who weren't human. Created, this person says. Like the Plants back in No Man's Land, the ones developed to benefit humanity.

But this person is independent, like himself. Like Nai. And even though they're different in that sense, found already born within the container of another Plant .... in the face of the possibility of being understood, even just a little bit, Vash freezes up. Doesn't confess what he is. Many reasons to withhold information indeed.]

It must have been difficult to learn you'd had it withheld from you.

[It had been a withholding of information that had doomed Rem, in the end, and all the humans who were lost in the Fall. Nai had never been able to forgive it.]

Did you ever have a chance to ask him why?

[prevail]

We did speak, eventually. I had misunderstood the nature of his silence for a very long time. In truth, he wished to spare me from something painful.

[ To beings such as them, bound by purpose, what could be worse than being deemed useless? His existence served no purpose, as a substitute for someone who would never need one.

There is an element of cruelty, he thinks, in tasking Lucifer to create his own replacement. In not telling him what he had truly been tasked with.

But in the end... Here he is, fulfilling the role he had never been expected to play. ]

He did not realize that I overheard him asking and the answer he received. So I learned the truth when he did, but not how he felt about it...not for millennia.

[rootlessly]

[Millennia...even Vash is only one hundred and fifty years and change. Sometimes it feels impossibly ancient, next to the humans whose fragile lives burn out so quickly, but this is the first time he's met anyone so much more ancient. It's unsettling and humbling both, and he feels like he has so many questions he can't quite form his mouth around.

The parts Sandalphon tells are uncomfortably familiar, though. Rem had tried to protect him and Nai from the truth, too. Had raised them as if they were her own children, sworn to herself to never allow what was done to Tesla to happen again. They'd been happy once, before they'd gone snooping into the ship's files. He's still not sure if he regrets knowing, a century and a half later.]

I think a lot of cruelties wind up like that. When they're not born of a desperation to survive, it's so often kind intentions gone awry, isn't it?

[Even through the text, he sounds impossibly sad. There's so much avoidable suffering in the world, and it's usually a story like this.]

...It's okay if you don't want to answer, but did you forgive him? For lying to you?

[prevail]

[ Sandalphon doesn't answer for a good while. The silence stretches long enough that it seems he won't respond one way or another. In truth, he's mired in the question of whether Lucifer's omission was truly a lie, for he had said nothing at all.

Having such a cold, callous creator who saw him as an object, it was a marvel how kindhearted Lucifer was... But he was ill-equipped to express himself when Lucilius had never nurtured that more humane side of him. A side that only began to grow when he spent time with Sandalphon. ]

My transgressions far outweighed his. [ Perhaps his own deep melancholy radiates through his text just as Vash's sadness had. ] By the time I truly understood, it was too late. But I think he knew.

[ More than anything, Sandalphon had yearned to be useful to Lucifer. He'd just never suspected, in all those long centuries, that simply being there had given Lucifer something nothing and no one else did. Now that he knows...death divides them. ]

[rootlessly]

[Vash waits, even as the silence stretches on and on, almost desperate for the answer with an intensity that surprises even him. And selfishly, when it arrives, he feels relief. Vash does not know, of course, why Sandalphon was made or what he has done because of it, but his chest was already aching with thoughts of Nai. It never really is too late, in Vash's opinion, to change. He has spent a hundred and fifty years waiting and hoping for Nai to come around, to find room for forgiveness and mercy in his heart and live alongside humanity, for all its flaws and sins.]

Even so...that his feelings reached you eventually, I don't think that's nothing. I'm glad.

[This is such a normal and fine reaction to a complete stranger. There is no overinvestment in Ba Sing Se.]

[prevail]

[ Having traveled in close proximity to a Captain with room in his heart for every freak and degenerate in the skies, Sandalphon has encountered something like this before. Has cliffed something like this before, but look, he got a redemption arc. It's fine.

For all of that, he still finds himself surprised to encounter it from someone he has only shared a few words with. ]

I am grateful to have understood him in the end. I only wish it had been sooner, for his sake, but I can't change what is done. His wishes remain with me, even here.

[ Lucifer, he thinks, would be a better champion. A better example of why their world deserves to live on. But he will do all that he can, as the one who remains. ]

But I have digressed from the initial topic of conversation, haven't I?