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He spreads a thick arm over the balcony, palm upwards as he gestures to the sea. The waves beneath him roll unperturbed, insistent in their power and barren with loneliness. He hates the ocean. Even now, the sound of it sets his teeth on edge. There’s very little that doesn’t, these days, but such is his awareness. He is heightened and he is higher, and with that comes the inability to close things out. The Prince supposes he could try and still the tide at some stage, stick his hands into the piecemeal code until he’s elbow-deep and twist and churn and force it to lay flat and dead before him.
Right now, he has more pressing matters to attend to.
“This was ours,” he says, his voice low and demanding. Had he always been oppressive? It’s hard to tell. Some parts of him, perhaps, but never the whole - but what had wholeness meant when he was made with dotted lines along which the universe was instructed to cut? The Prince as he is and the prince by his side were moulded into the shape of something real from the same cloth, but hollow beneath it. There is a destiny at play, and he has known that for a while, now. “Still is, if you’re looking at it from my view. Which you will, someday. It was supposed to be ours, in the roundabout nature that most things are for me now.”
There is quiet from the young prince.
“I wasn’t supposed to have it, but I was always supposed to take it. It’s a complicated sort of matter, one I wouldn’t expect you to get after just one conversation. We’re not dealing with the kiddie shit now, bro,” he continues, leaning heavily against the railing. “This is the big leagues. This isn’t finding out that your birthright was to destroy, it’s finding out that you can do so and win anyway. There’s going to come a time in which you’re hoping things are going to fall apart just so you don’t feel so fuckin’ out of place, and you’ve got to be the one to put it in motion. This is a story, and it needs to be treated like one. We’re good at narratives. We know how to bring the middling conflict to a crescendo and wrap it up with a neat little bow afterwards. It could’ve only been us. No one else we know has the guts to do it. Maybe Jane, but --” and the Prince’s face darkens, a shadow crossing his stagnant expression. Jane is difficult to discuss, despite the understanding he has for her. The respect he extends is grudging and cold. Things had stopped being personal between them long ago. “Even she likes to pretend she’s better than this, but she’s probably the only other person who gets it. Face it; we’re alone, and we always have been.”
He looks to the boy at his side, his forced slouch, the hands in his pockets. It’s so easy to see fragments of a self in a whole, to dissect his mirror images when they’re in front of him.
“It’s a lot to take in,” he says, more because he feels like he needs to than because he’s sympathetic. Even if it were too big to handle, he’d managed it. He’d come out stronger, with less of a need for attachment and frailty. This is a necessity, and if the kid doesn’t see that, then --
“Wow,” says the young Dirk, simple, yet weighted. He stands a little away from where his older counterpart lounges, a tense bookend to the timeline he’s trying to create. There’s so much to be discerned from the way his brow is quirked, the twist of his lip, and the Prince, so caught up in the close-enough-to-touch sensation of victory, forgets, if only for a second, that the face is his.
“Do you hear yourself when you talk?”
He’d always been a fucking brat. The Prince’s mouth twists. He turns his head like a predator catching a scent. “What.”
A shrug from the boy. “It’s just, I thought when I edited books for Jane I got wordy. Don’t get me wrong, those things were a fuckin’ swampland of syntax, but you outdo me tenfold.” He, too, comes forward to lean against the railing, elbows first. The way he moves, while performative, isn’t so practised. He’s an unfinished sketch of a boy, blurry outlines and hints of shade.
“That’s the point,” the Ultimate says, finding his tone clipped and irritated. He pauses, takes the reins back in his fist. There are many pathways to go down and only one was paved by him. Only one leads to the favourable destination. “I outdo you, but only because you aren’t me yet. Once you become me and--”
Dirk waves his hand from where it’s folded against his lean bicep. “Yeah, yeah, I become Public Enemy No. 1 and slot myself back together like a real high end jigsaw, I get that part. What’s not clicking is the whole relapse into teen angst. From how you’re spinning it, the game is the story. The session begins, the crescendo is the big fight, and then the end is the new world. What you’re describing, dude, the calm after the storm, it’s just that; it’s afterwards. Sounds to me like an epilogue.”
If only he knew how right he was. If only he saw the stains of orange ink splattered in wreaths across the cosmos, inescapable, strings of autobiographical fate. If only he knew the sleepless nights and the righteous apathy with which his friend’s lives were planned, then he’d understand. Then he wouldn’t be shaking his head and staring out into the waves like they have an answer for him. They don’t. They never did.
The Ultimate narrows his eyes behind his shades. On him, they look like serpent’s teeth -- thin and sharp and cruel, housing venom. On the boy, they look almost comical, too big for his bony face. Just another thing he’ll struggle to fill out, the Prince figures. Just another Strider shadow for him to grow up shivering in. “It’s not about becoming a public enemy, nor is it about collecting your splinters.”
“Then what is it about?” He asks, sharp as a tack. Intelligence is both virtue and vice when things are still so uncertain, here -- questions are good, but not in that tone. The Prince knows well what disbelief sounds like in his voice, knows how he sounds when he’s already made up his mind. With being so astute comes being bullheaded. It might just be a problem.
“It’s about knowing that you don’t have autonomy,” he decides on, after a small pause. “It’s about knowing that none of your decisions are really yours to make. All this time, you’ve pondered philosophy and free will, and for what? It’s all horseshit. It doesn’t apply to you. You aren’t a person as much as you’re an avatar for something beyond what we’d call ‘canon’ -- beyond the story I’ve told you, beyond what you know. It’s about realising that your splinters aren’t the reason you don’t feel whole. You’re written that way, predisposed to feeling like shit because of the narrative you’ve found yourself in. Someone else dictates that you feel this way because it’s what makes sense for the yarn they’re spinning, and if you take it into your own hands, you can change that. You can get out of the false dichotomy you’re being given -- your options aren’t limited to grinning and bearing it or working forever to no avail. You can take the third option.” It isn’t that easy, but nothing ever is. He shakes his head, as if to clear it, which is strange and aggravating. This place acts as though it is outside of time itself. The years don’t touch his isolated outpost. It makes it harder to hold on, to sift through the timelines like the grains of sand that they are. Something about being here turns them to cement.
Dirk snorts. The Ultimate inhales deeply, feels his ribs expand and strain with the salty air. He doesn’t oft give into frustration, but this adamant refusal to see what is so otherwise obvious prickles over him like little else he’d come across on his quest for ascension. He should have known that dealing with himself was always going to be the hardest part.
“Laugh all you want, Dirk, but I’m the only one telling you straight that, because of the way you’re written, you’re never going to be satisfied. You were right. You’re just not built that way. You’re insatiable and overbearing, and if you stay like this, you’re not going to be happy.”
Another moment of quiet passes, stretches between them with the weight of an eternity. Neither prince looks at each other, eyes to the water. One pair reveres while one reviles.
“Are you happy?”
It’s a simple enough question (But what kind of fucking question is it?). The Ultimate should be able to answer with the same kind of brevity. They’re quiet again as he opens his mouth and the young prince waits. Even if he did have an answer, Dirk doesn’t give him a chance.
“Because to me it just sounds like you’re going out of your way to justify yourself. The thing is, that whole pitch you gave me was filled to fuckin’ bursting with excuses. I’m not going to be shitty and controlling my whole life because I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way. Even if it is just a story -- and, admittedly, that is the most plausible hypothetical you’ve thrown at the wall so far -- I’d feel way better still trying to do my own thing than falling back into this nothing-really-matters, depresso-nihilism garbage. I get that you want your story to be something you get a say in, and you know without me telling you that I want that, too, but you don’t get that by overwriting everyone else. If you’re an asshole and you feel bad about it, that’s your problem. Don’t blame it on a higher power or destiny just because you don’t want to take responsibility for what you’re doing. You said so yourself -- when the game ended, there was a period of time in which you were doing better. Sure, it was hard, but you said you were working. If you fell down, you had it in you to get back up again, and don’t try and tell me you didn’t. It sounds like you quite literally had the choice this whole time. If the whole narrative was yours to write, why did you do it this way, and who’s to say I can’t do it differently?” Dirk’s voice doesn’t waver the entire time he talks. There’s a confidence to him, a tranquil certainty that makes the Ultimate’s skin smart with something akin to fury.
Once again, they stand on a rooftop in a war with themselves.
“It’s easy to say that before it’s happened to you,” The Prince says slowly. “It’s easy to think I’m the one that gave up, but I -- we -- never had a chance in the first place.”
“Maybe you didn’t,” Dirk says, “But I do.”
The world lurches on its axis. The Ultimate rears away from the railing of the balcony, the too-bright silver glinting in the afternoon sunlight. Dirk looks at him, really looks, and finds himself blinded no longer by the thick layers of pretense, by the smoke and the mirrors. He looks and sees bitterness coiled around deep and permeating upset, a kind of hopelessness he has wrestled with far too many times to count and far too determinedly to let it pin him now. He wraps his fingers around the rail until his knuckles are white, and he breathes out slowly.
Something changes hands. It’s hard to grasp, Dirk finds, because it isn’t as tangible as something solid, or obvious as the dynamic between them switching. Something is simply different, like a room going from dark to light. He doesn’t feel heavier. There’s no weight on his shoulders, no grey curl in his hair to mark him as a veritable Atlas -- he knows, instinctively and easily, that he has something he did not have before, something the self-proclaimed Ultimate has lost unto him.
“You’re me,” the Ultimate says, almost in disbelief. He is the one to decide, but the way he’s being shifted is out of his control entirely. The tilt is gravitational only to him. Dirk watches, eyebrow raised. “You know that isn’t going to be the way it ends.”
“I’ve got a long time before that happens,” Dirk says, nonchalant. Something in his gut is shifting, like the sea on the metal girders below. It’s akin to nausea if nausea was solid, could rattle around inside him like something frantic waiting to be freed. It’s something he’s felt before, if only fleetingly. When he holds the AR in his hands, when he programmed the co-ordinates into the sendificator to gift Jake the head of Brobot, he’d experienced this same pull, this same weight. The familiarity grounds him, lets him plant his feet more firmly and inhale more deeply. The stinging freshness of the air burns all the way to the back of his throat, and the corners of his lips twitch. He loves the ocean. “Listen, dude. Maybe, way back, you were me, but that was a while ago. I ain’t gonna be you.”
The Prince’s image flickers, turning from solid flesh to chalky lines and back again in a blink. Dirk does not flinch. If this is a story, if everything is already pre-written, then so be it -- but if he has the power to warp those words into something else, into something bigger and brighter for his friends -- for Jane, who may slip, but won’t tumble, for Roxy, who may falter, but won’t fall, for Jake, who may doubt, but won’t give in -- then who is he to throw a fit, spit out his pacifier because he might not be happy?
If he can do this for them, he will do it as he does most things; determinedly, and with very little regard for himself.
“I think you forgot something about us. About me,” Dirk’s smiling, now, private, out to the horizon. The Ultimate -- the one who called himself whole -- flickers again, flesh to technicolour to charcoal to chalk, like a flipbook in a tornado. Whatever’s dragging at him is stronger by the second. Dirk feels it, somewhere around his chest, the heart that resides there instead of on his sleeve.
“I may splinter, dude, but I don’t break.”
With all the brilliance of a bubble bursting, he’s gone. One moment there had been presence and power, fragile and transparent, oily in the light, and then there had been nothing at all. Dirk empties his lungs, releases the railing from his grasp and presses his palms against each other.
He doesn’t know what the future looks like, not really. He doesn’t know how many times he’s going to make the wrong choice when it’s presented to him. He does, however, know a great many things, the most important of all being that his splinters, more often than not, are complete assholes.
It’s going to be hard, he figures. He’s going to hate it, the way that dealing with his mind feels like an uphill battle all because something out there assigned him Heart. It’s going to be possible, though, and Hell if some socks-and-sandal-clad jerkoff with a monologuing problem was going to tell him otherwise.