Stuck on thinking about post AoZ and pre 1999 drifter.
Imagine like… knowing that you can only exist for a brief time, and then you’re reduced to a shadow in someone else’s head or you’re back on the Fucking Zariman Again (in eggman voice)
Even if youre able to take the stage for a bit and feel the sun, you cant stay forever.
Besides. Everybody wants the other you. Youre not even a tenno. You’re tolerated at best. Nobody bothers with the title to replace the name you forgot, even though that title is the closest thing you have to one now. Not even the cephalon programed to love you (not you, dumbass, the other you, the wanted one) ever used it once. Despite you asking. (i checked and it made me go :(
It’s not like anyone you helped out really cared, either. The lotus tried to kill you the moment she could. Nobody bothered with dropping by your little camp until the operator came back. Why would they. Its only you there.
So choose.
Be selfish, demand that you get to feel the real sun on your real face, even though you know nobody wants you here, when they could have a better version?
Be nothing, a bystander in the back of someone elses head, watching as they are loved and used in equal measure? (just like you always wanted- but you could never work hard enough in duviri.)
Or go back to hell.
Back to the Zariman with its infinite angel song that you got to know so well that you handcrafted physical insanity from it. Back to a place youve seen for so long that you stopped seeing it. Back to the root of everything wrong with you.
But it needs you. Right? Needs you until other tenno start showing up, and then you’re not Necessary anymore. Because other people can do your job. Take a break, drifter. Relax. Go stare into the void a little more. Go remember.
Or theres always going back Duviri. The place you spent the last thousand years dreaming of getting out of. The place thats killed you in so many ways you started to forget yesterday. The place you were too useless and helpless to ever be able to escape on your own. (And the lotus didnt care about helping you. Didnt want your help either. Didnt want you. Youre not a tenno.)
Didnt Thrax always say there was nothing out there? Nothing but the Zariman. That there was nothing better than this. You only kept going because you needed it to be wrong.
Was it, though? Was it really?
The more I think about it, the more the Lotus kicking the drifter out of the main timeline and into 1999 has a sad sort of mercy to it, directly in line with it simply reaffirming that thrax was right.
Of course the drifter is a people pleaser to the nth degree. They’d rip their own heart out if it meant there was a chance at anyone seeing it.
Of course they’ll be anything and mould themself to any situation. At least it means they’ll fit *somewhere*. At least it means they’re useful enough to keep around, even if only for a little bit.
Maybe if they care enough, do enough, try hard enough, somebody will care about them too. It hasn’t happened yet outside of Teshin, but Teshin’s back in Duviri, isnt he. The only light resides in the darkest ring of hell.
