#exvitask

KIT GLADIUS BEISEL, THE VERY VERY TIRED BOY. ( matrix universe )

They ripped out your wings before you had the chance to ever fly.

The Bible of older times never spoke of how the Devil was once an angel, of how he once worshipped at the altar of sanctity and praised all that was holy the same way his fellow soldiers did. No one remembers that Satan had once been called Lucifer

No one ever remembers that the Devil was not born, but made.

The same way you were not born for bloodshed, it found you all the same. 

The first thing you remember about childhood is your mother’s eyes, the ones that looked down on you, the ones who saw with horror what happened to restless, reckless hearts when they are left alone, the one who saw how having a heart forged from oil and metal turned you into a machine, a weapon, a legend. It never mattered that your kingdom was comprised of dirty streets or that the altar you worshipped at was at the end of a deserted alley way--you turned Hell into your own kingdom, turned trembling fists into something lethal, no longer a boy but a weapon walking. The chains poverty had wrapped around your ankles bound you to the desolation of a forgotten neighborhood, but what does it matter that the consequences of your birth are such when you have no need to leave? When you’re eighteen, barely on the cusp of adulthood, and already a breathing legend because of what you do with your fists under the dark of the moon? When you’ve spent your life toeing the line between saint and sinner, the shackles of an undeserved punishment barely register. 

They recruit you first in the dead of night. The Rebellion, they call themselves when the shadow finds you after the ring has emptied and all have gone, leaving you alone with the taste of blood in your mouth and holiness weighed between your shoulders. They ripped out your wings, but all that is holy cannot stay. 

You’re still just a boy, and it’s easy enough to remember every time you had to go hungry, every time you clenched your jaw because your mother came home with a bruise on her cheek (courtesy of her Corporate Boss). You’re still just a boy, eighteen and barely on the cusp of adulthood, but the shadow doesn’t treat you like a child. Your life has been a never-ending series of being regulated and relegated, of being made smaller than you know you deserve to be, and being called a “beneficial addition” is the first taste of freedom you’ve ever encountered, the first taste of a life beyond the shackles the corporations had chained you with, the shackles you’d almost forgotten about.   

You’re eighteen, barely on the cusp of adulthood, but it’s that boyishness that allows you to convince yourself of one very important idea: you were born for this. 

After all, you remember God, but more importantly you remember the angel that turned his back to him. You remember God, but it is not the Almighty that you spent your life drawn to. An untainted halo, gold and glowing, was never what you wanted. In this world, if the corporations were supposed to be your God, you destined yourself to be the one who brought Him to his knees, the one strong enough to challenge the unchallengeable. With the Rebellion painting wings on your shoulder blades, you could be the one who would teach the world what it meant to be both monster and saint. 

You’re a man now, and somewhere you lost your fire.

You think maybe that you lost it somewhere between the flames and forgeries, as though the bullets burned it out of you and every time you pretended to be anyone other than yourself (you do this all the time) you forgot what it tasted like to feel passion. 

As though a life dedicated to The Cause had stripped you of yourself. 

They gave you a starship to replace your wings, but all that glitters is not gold. 

Your loyalty to the cause knew no bounds, but for all your charms, even among the people who are meant to be deemed “yours,” you are a creature too filled with darkness to truly belong, a very tired boy turned into a very tired man. Too much sinner to be welcomed among the ranks of the revolution, too much a saint to ever be welcomed back into a life under the corporations, you crafted your own bloodied halo and turned the inferno in your heart towards your palms.

A weapon is a man, a man is a weapon.

Consider this: is it better to live a sinner or die a saint?

The truth is, you’re far too much a glutton to retrain yourself to one, too eager to make people taste the same ash and soot staining your throat and too eager to make yourself the legend the legend your rulers have become. You make people forget, more often than not, that the same hands tracing constellations into the skin of their back have also had the opportunity to play out Mozart Requiem on men’s vocal cords, that the mouth whispering sweet Spanish nothings has also crushed men’s spirits with a single turn of phrase. 

You make them forget, but you remember everything.

And sometimes the taste of that violence enchants, sings your name like larks in the cold dew of an early morning.

Task 002 (ii) — Character Development AU — coming home. 

Her foot comes down, and she thinks nothing of it. Barely audible is the click of a panel being pressed and the mechanical hum of a rebel-made landmine stirring to life. The explosion comes like an egg being hatched; all around her columns of sand heat into glass that slice up and against her, her bones snap, but the flames — this yellow heated yolk — licks the muscle from her skin and leaves her burning. 

This time, Cairo is not accorded the privilege of forgetting. 

She remembers being pulled from the flames and being stripped of her smoldering clothes. She remembers someone’s fists coming together in a knot against her chest, and a mouth, and wishing she would just die instead. How much easier that would have been! But no. Cairo caught enough breath to cough a spray of blood, and through no fault of her own, she lived. 

Though she herself was strewn across the field, all pieces of meat like a horrible butchery, everything was sewn back into place accordingly. Her doctors quipped she was more stitches than soldier, and Cairo tried to smile at that. She really did. A representative from the Corporation gave her a stack of papers, of which her signature would consent to her total transformation into a Synthetic. (Though the Corporation had the authority to convert deceased soldiers, permission was required when available.) Cairo looked at it. Truthfully, she may have considered it, but ultimately she declined. There was something about the fact that her body was still alive, alive and breathing and doggedly refusing to give up on her despite having been shattered over and over again. There was something about stitches. Stitches instead, any day. 

PYRE COREN, STRATEGIC ASSISANT TO ORION VOIX. 

INNOCENCE DID NOT DIE, IT WAS CONQUERED.

Your parents never perish so Eretreia is never born, forged from fire, sweat and tears. ELIANA REYES remains, and she is nothing but ordinary, the child of two miners in a end-of-the-galaxy planet. Lost, forgotten, oblivious. Nothing ever happens so your heart grows and grows, pushing against your ribcage harder and harder until you can’t breath anymore, the air from the desert suffocating your lungs, the fading colour of your parent’s eyes like a knife. There must be more, you, the dreamer, always musing. I need to find it.

Instead of surrendering to a corporate life or spitting in its hand like others, you hold on tight to their giving hand and you take, you take and you take. They see it in your eyes, the drive, the want: to do more, to be more. For nothing to stop you. They see a soldier before they see a human being, an investment before a child, an opportunity before a daughter – so they approach your mother with a grin and a pat on the back, the words “serving”, “an honor”, “free education” spilling from their mouths like honey. Oh, they know. When you’re stranded on a desert for too long, a single drop of water is enough to make you drop to your knees and worship. All hail the corporations, all hail Korbitron.

Not you, not exactly. You are an obedient child so when your parents send you away from the Mines with tears on their eyes, you clench your jaw and you wave them goodbye, fighting the tears but leaving a promise: you will return, you will save them. And you do, they tell you, over and over again, with every e-letter that arrives: We are proud of you. So you make sure they remain proud.

ORION VOIX ; CEO OF VOIX CORPORATION, SYNTHETIC & GOD.

                                                                      “if my mother had lived”

She was her father’s daughter but she’d inherited her mother’s black anger. It burned through her sometimes like a chemical fire, brief and devastating and utterly unstoppable.