Greed (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ossifragant) wrote2014-08-11 03:57 pm
ossifragant) wrote2014-08-11 03:57 pm
008 Things Aquired - [text;]
So here's a question for all of you. What's the furthest you've been from home? Before coming here, I mean. This place doesn't count. I want to know how far people have traveled before coming here.
The name of the place you're from, the name of the place you like going. What your favorite city is called. Things like that.
I've always liked traveling. But I used to spend years in one place, even so. Always found myself drawn back to where I was born. It's one of those interesting things about people. I don't exactly miss the place, but I do find myself thinking about it sometimes. What it would be like if we could go back with memories of this place instead of forgetting everything.
So there's a second part of my question, I guess.
Say you go home, but you remember everything from here. What would you do with that information?
What if you arrived home at a time before the last thing you remember?
The name of the place you're from, the name of the place you like going. What your favorite city is called. Things like that.
I've always liked traveling. But I used to spend years in one place, even so. Always found myself drawn back to where I was born. It's one of those interesting things about people. I don't exactly miss the place, but I do find myself thinking about it sometimes. What it would be like if we could go back with memories of this place instead of forgetting everything.
So there's a second part of my question, I guess.
Say you go home, but you remember everything from here. What would you do with that information?
What if you arrived home at a time before the last thing you remember?
[Locked Text 2:2]
If I went home and remembered what I have had here, then I would try to see if any of the others from my world who have been to this place remember. If they do, then there will be a few who will at least know what I feel and what I have experienced. There will be others with memories of Envy and you and perhaps others.
But I don't think this will be the case. If I am the only one who remembers, then I will keep my memories to myself. I will grieve. What I have with Envy here is something I could never have back in my world. But I will not hope to return to here. The State shall always remain.
If I somehow end up in my own past, it will depend where I end up. If I end up a day or so before, it will make very little difference. Rome was neither made nor fell in a day. Further back
[Here is where France stopped for a long moment. He stares at the screen before writing:]
It is dangerous for such a creature as me to think about such things.
[He chooses not to integrate that sentence into what he had originally been writing.]
locked forever
[He's not sure what else there is to say on that subject. How deeply lonely such knowledge must be.]
Believe me when I ask this, I don't say it to be rude. What are you? Why is it dangerous for someone like you to be thinking of changing the past? Or having someone you love?
If someone like me, someone like Envy is capable of and deserving of love, you deserve the same thing. We all do. It doesn't mater that we're not human.
locked forever
[He has to.]
I am a creature defined by others yet far beyond any single person or group. I am a set of ideas constantly changing and always mutable. Even to call myself a Nation or a country or the state or anything at all is at once true and false. What I am understood to be now is nothing like what I was a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand. To think of changing the past, I have to pick a point in time and an understanding of myself, and there was never one point with one understanding. I would have to choose, and that would change my very essence. I would no longer be me nor what anyone like me has ever been. I would be something entirely new.
That is what makes my existence here so strange and wonderful and terrifying. I can be one thing at one point. I am as I was in the moment I came here. My thoughts are linear; they are my own. There is no incessant clamour or niggling reminder that there is an opposite opinion that must be equally relevant to what I see and hear and feel. This is why when I originally woke here I thought I had died.
For a creature like me, I cannot simply have love. For each ounce of love there is hate, and to be made out of ideas so mutable means I must experience both and all. But here I am only me. I can choose and cherish and not be a million things at once. So I can look at Envy and feel only love. I can look at you and remember who you have been to me as well as see you as who you are now and be only happy to be able to see you. I am only what I see and experience, not the millions of ideas and opinions and components that is the Nation State Country Republic once Kingdom of France.
All beings are capable and deserving of love. I do not deny this. It is the core of all I believe. But you must understand: to experience love as love without having to experience the opposite and all what lies between is not something I can dare hope for if I go home.
no subject
What sort of person the other Greed is doesn't matter in the long run because he still strove for his own individuality, something Greed himself had spent his many years struggling to understand and to put words to.
Even with all of his time being a slave to Dante, Greed had never experienced anything like France is describing. The idea is terrifying.]
Then I hope you never go home, for your sake. To live chained to something, to live as a prisoner, that's not something I want anyone to experience. To actually be truly free is something I've yearned for for three hundred years and I've finally found it.
That's the reason I broke the chimera out of prison. That's the reason I saved Kimbley's life. It's why I would save his life again even though he betrayed me. Before coming here, it was the first time I found a kindred connection with a human. It was the first time I realized it was possible. I'm three centuries old and before Kimbley, my only friend had been Envy. Now I know I can be connected to people. Even people who aren't like me.
I don't want that taken away from me.
I can't let that be taken away from you.
no subject
[When he does respond, his fingers are clumsy and too fast. The poetry and careful prose broken down, threads stretching and fraying.]
Let me tell you a story:
When I was born, the world was not new. Humans and those like me had walked the Earth long and it was marked and not beautiful at all. And I know not if I was born and if I was how because that is not how creatures like me come to be. There are those before and those who are after and that is my world. It was not new and never will be.
But the story. When I was very small but not so small that there were still the ancient nations of my lands, there was a man. His name was Charlemagne and he conquered all that I would ever dream of becoming. But it was not my place to love him, nor his sons, nor his grandson. I was Francia occidentalis, West Francia, a piece of what was once a greater, larger, short-lived body that had once been Rome and once been Gaul and still other things and names long forgotten. And I was and had been also Regnum, Kingdom, and perhaps I was still of the Rhine or the Seine or maybe I've never stopped being any of these things. So it goes.
But Charlemagne. Or Jeanne. Louis. Napoléon. They say great figures make history. They do and they certainly don't. It is easy to love and hate them. Did they conquer? Did they rule? Yes and no. Did they die and kingdom empire fall? Yes and no. And of the between? Maybe, perhaps, so-so.
Many more and a thousand years plus roll by. I sat on thrones, astride steeds, sacked kingdoms, robbed bodies. Lain in fields, tilled the earth, begged for rain, rejoiced, drowned. I burned for my sins and got away, judged and punished others deserving or not. Choked on gas, flew up through beyond the sky. Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
And yet, for all of it, my breadth of experience and beliefs, it is not mine though I may claim it. It is my people's and even then it is not perfect. True freedoom, true equality, true brotherhood: I am this and so very much not. For the words are imperfect and the vision changes with each blink of the eye. That is me and what I am. I am free, and I cannot be free. I cannot be anything but what I am and always have been. It cannot be given. It cannot be taken. It is. It is not.
I cannot be free, not even here when I am myself, because to be truly free would be my unmaking. But I can experience freedom in all it is because it is a part of me and what has crafted my very essence. And this isn't much of a story now that I've written it down, but I wanted to tell you this:
I am so very, very happy to have met you.
no subject
He can't understand that, he's never experienced anything like it. He never will. Maybe to an extent, in some way, the other Greed would be able to relate, but he doesn't think so.]
You haven't told Envy this, have you? I think he would be deeply saddened, if he knew.
[The desire for individuality is so strong in the homunculi that he knows Envy would struggle with it as much as he is. But it's also not his place to say anything.]
No, never mind. You don't need to tell me. It's none of my business. I'm glad I've met you, too.
no subject
No, I haven't told him, and precisely because I know it will sadden him. I don't want him to be sad. I'm sorry to burden you with this, too. From what I understand of your world, it is a very sad place.
Even though I always tell people that honesty is the best route in a relationship, I am a hypocrite. But I suppose that is just how I was designed.
no subject
So long as the both of you remain here, you'll both have happiness. That's good enough for me.