Chapter Text
♈︎
You know how the story ends.
You know what happens to them both, and then what happens to you.
But you understand, now, what your jailor meant, when he spoke to who you eventually learn was the 海賊’s descendant. That the source of his power, in a way, the foundation of his omniscience, is the things he does not know.
You had no idea that you would ever meet them. It was written in no prophecy. It is not essential. It closes no loop, fulfills no paradox. It means nothing.
But it is essential to you. Both their company, in and of itself, and the knowledge that your existence contains within it things you cannot foresee, things that do not add to your suffering.
Your path is long. Your life, immortal, stretching through all of this universe’s history, in mockery of all others of your blood. All the time in the world, the thing all rustbloods dream of, but every minute of it, you are a slave.
But when you are with them, one or the other, or the three of you together, in the timelocked solitude of the helmsblock, the chains loosen their grip on your limbs, for just a bit. You keep the law-woman alive, stop her from breaking - and you do it to ensure that she will arrive at her fate, but you do it also because you do not think you could do otherwise. You visit the helmsman, through both of your eternal lifespans, and together, your suffering is just a bit lessened, distributed across both your shoulders. She laughs, too loudly, and gives you terrible name after terrible name, and you hurl East Alternian obscenities at her for it, and you hope that she never stops. He complains, endlessly, and lists both your faults in exacting detail, and though you are doomed to be who you are, as all beings are, you listen, and he is rarely wrong. The law-woman loves him, with a devotion no less great than yours to your terrible master, but it is a devotion of her choosing, and it cannot take away all of his pain, but it is pure.
Their love gives you something you have never had, and often, you wish that you could return it to them, that you could accept them into your body, into your nook and between your lips - but you can never bring yourself to it - and they allow you that.
You have never been afforded such respect.
Without them, you are unsure if you would have had the strength to make it to the end of your road. To the moment you find the same blessed release the Signless’s mother found. The Knight, and the Heir, who will, one day, beget the Seer and the Mage. Your pale, and your red and your black, and sometimes, when the weight of “天命 becomes too much, sometimes even your ash.
Your friends, such that you can have friends. Your companion in eternal pain. Your sister in the service of death.
Your pillars of shadow.
Your path is long. You do not choose its beginning or its end. And you cannot change theirs. You cannot make their ends any less inevitable. But the universe and all its history, all its time, are your garden, you are both the water and the current that pushes it. There is no need for your path to be linear in its inevitability.
The law-woman’s life is short before her time. But she has many sweeps to her still, more than many in your liberator’s empire receive, and within those moments there are all the moments you need in which to visit her. The time before her end can always be your after, and even after time has seen her destroyed? You are still there, in her past, in your present.
Her end is predestined, but in you? In your experiences? She is immortal.
Both of them are. Latula Pyrope, and Mituna Captor.
For she is the Knight, and he is the Heir, but you are the Witch of Time, and Time has both all the power in the world over you, and no power at all.