117

Chapter 117: Interlude 11-b: Tautological Mercy

Interlude 11.b: Tautological Mercy

When she came to, the world burned around her.

The flames had largely banked. Most of what was going to burn had already burned, and what fire remained was low and smoldering, slowly making its way through whatever was left that would ignite.

The spot where she had fallen unconscious was mostly untouched, as though the flames had intentionally avoided her little alcove amidst the silvered flesh of the Other. The blade of the knife that was gripped loosely in one of her hands hadn't even warmed up, that was how thoroughly her spot had been spared.

Slowly, Contessa sat up, feeling the aches and pains of her injuries, relatively minor as they were, and cast her gaze around the massive room. No, perhaps it really would be more accurate to call it a grave, because here lay not only the Other's corpse, but the corpse of the organization known as Cauldron.

How long had it been? The smoke and the thinning oxygen made her head throb and her thoughts feel slow. Hours? Days? How long had she lain there, unconscious, dead to the world all but literally, as the Other slowly burned away around her?

Had everything already ended? Was Scion dead, or had she merely been spared for last so that he might savor the kill?

Then and there, there was no way to know for sure. No golden light glaring menacingly down at her from above, no golden corpse, ashen in death, hung from the rafters in clear view.

She could find out in an instant, if she liked. All she had to do was call out for a Door, and if Doormaker still lived, could still make one for her, then it meant that they hadn't lost, that Scion hadn't wiped everyone out.

Yet.

The thought galvanized her, and she tried to stand, stumbling on legs that felt weak. She opened her mouth, tried to form the words, but her lungs seized on the smoke-heavy air and she coughed instead as her knees lost strength and she collapsed back to the ground.

Path to —

The fine hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and Contessa at length became aware of a presence behind her, like a gazelle that had sensed the presence of the lion that stalked it. There was a weight to it, an indescribable feeling of gravity, and she didn't need to turn around to know who it was that stood behind her, well out of reach of the deadly knife in her hand.

"Hello, Contessa."

Contessa closed her eyes. "Hello, Taylor."

"Water?"

"Please."

A metal thermos landed next to her with a dull thunk, and she let go of her knife to reach for it, unscrew the cap, and her fingers were shaky and unsure as she deliberately refused to use her power to open it. The cool water inside was like a balm as it flowed down her throat.

"Scion is dead," the woman behind her announced. "So are the Doctor and Alexandria. The Counterpart, as you can see, is little more than scraps, now. Both Cauldron and its entire reason for being are gone."

Contessa took a deep breath. Forced herself not to break off into a coughing fit halfway through. "I see. Thank you."

The feeling in her chest… It couldn't quite be called relief, but it came close. Satisfaction, maybe. Closure. The sense that the job, the goal she'd been working towards for thirty long years, was finally done. Over with. Complete.

Sometimes, she hadn't been sure it ever would be. Sometimes, she thought she'd be old, gray, and infirm before everything came to fruition and the fate of all life on all worlds was finally decided.

But those had just been moments of whimsy. She'd always known that in reality, her life would probably be cut short long before she could ever truly feel the pangs of old age. That it would all be over before she found even her first gray hair. Otherwise, she would have found some way to slow the process, reverse it, so that she could keep going as long as possible.

"You knew it would come to this. Or at least, you knew this part would happen, I expect. Not that I would be here, but that Cauldron wouldn't last past the final battle, one way or the other. You probably even expected that most of you wouldn't even survive — this is just a happy accident, isn't it?"

Contessa tilted her head back. Felt the distant heat of the dying flames on her face. "I suppose it is."

Because Cauldron's survival had never been part of the plan. Not from its inception, not at any step along the way. It had always been far more likely they would be snuffed out when the final battle came. Always.

The only thing that mattered was that they kept going until the final battle, that they saw things through and beat Scion, no matter what it took from them. After that, Cauldron didn't matter, so whether or not it survived that final battle wasn't important.

"So I guess it's my turn to ask it, this time. The difficult question, the one everyone asks at the crossroads. Some get seventy years. Some get fifteen. Some get forty. Enough time to grow, take stock, do things they might not be so proud of, when they look back. Enough to have regrets, when time finally runs out. Was it worth it, Contessa? All the evils, all the bad things, all the wrongs committed and lives ruined? Was it worth it, in the end?"

Contessa chuckled. It felt like razors in her throat. "I'm supposed to say yes, aren't I? But…you'd know if I was lying, wouldn't you, and that would give you the answer anyway."

She took another sip of water. It soothed the ache, for the moment.

"That doesn't mean there's no worth in actually saying it," Taylor said quietly. "If you knew this was where it would all end up, if you knew from the start that everything you did would lead to this moment, would you still do it all again exactly the same way?"

Contessa sighed.

"I don't know," she admitted frankly. "I…want to say yes, because it would mean knowing…knowing for sure that we'd win, that it would all mean something and it wasn't pointless, but…"

Taylor seemed to know what it was she was trying to say.

"It's scary, thinking about all of the ways it could have gone wrong. How any one thing you did differently could have meant we lost. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes, exactly. There are…things I wish I could have done differently, things I told myself were necessary evils, and yet… If I could have reached the same ending without all of those atrocities, I…"

"You focused too much on the goal and not the people trampled to get there," Taylor said knowingly.

"Yes."

"And if the ending was uncertain either way?" she asked. "If you had the chance to try again, not knowing the outcome of either path, but knowing that one was dark and filled with suffering, and the other spared more people their pain?"

"I…"

The words wouldn't come.

She thought of that little girl, so far out of her depth, wading through the horrors of mutated people, leaving her family behind to do what must be done, because she knew it must be done, and that terrible knowledge drove her forward towards the dying godling whose life she had inevitably taken. She thought of what that little girl had accepted as fact, back then, and how narrow a path she'd walked. She thought of the choices that little girl had made.

She thought she should have said that yes, of course she would have taken the better path. But she didn't know if she actually would have. She didn't know if she could have believed in a better path, even if she would have gladly accepted one, as long as it didn't mean losing where it counted.

Taylor chuckled briefly. "Of course. Because you made yourself a monster for the sake of mankind's future, but no matter how you stained your hands, your heart remained pure. Dented, scratched, worse for wear, perhaps, but clear and unclouded. Your brutal calculus was only for the goal of saving as many people as you could."

"You give me too much credit," Contessa said.

"Oh?"

"I'm not some poor, misunderstood anti-hero. I went into it knowing exactly how evil I'd have to be. Everything… It all started with a murder. How else was it all supposed to go, but with countless gallons of bloodshed?"

Taylor chuckled again.

"Now, you're the one giving yourself too much credit," she said. "You were there at the beginning, at the moment the entities first landed on Earth thirty years ago. That's when you first got your power, isn't it? A little girl, maybe ten years old, burdened with the terrible knowledge of the dark future. You didn't trust your power to make you a leader, so you enlisted your first accomplice to head your organization and make all of the tough decisions, and then you retreated into your power so you could work towards your end goal."

She paused for a moment.

"So, after living like that for thirty years…how much of Contessa is the girl, and how much is her passenger?"

Contessa jerked and gasped as though she'd been slapped.

"You can't have missed the parallels, can you?" Taylor asked. "A six year old girl, taken from everything she knows and loves, forced to spend the next six years in the care and company of a psychopath who encouraged her to lean into her powers at every turn. There are nuances, and it's not one-to-one, but the comparison is obvious."

"Doctor Mother is not Jack Slash," Contessa said, but she already knew it was unnecessary.

It was more…reflex. A response that came to her without prompting, even though, when she considered it, she didn't find the insult to the Doctor stung nearly as much as she expected it should.

There'd been too much compromise. Too much "necessary evil." It may, through sheer accident of circumstance and utter dumb luck, have led to the world they needed, the powers they needed, the hero they needed, but the contrivances and coincidences that had piled up to make it all possible had been so far removed from their actions that finding any causal connection at all was laughable.

And so all of those horrible things they'd done, all of those stains upon her soul, all of them might have been meaningless after all. She herself may not have been able to do any better, had she chosen to take control from the start, but nearly all the blood on her hands was there at the Doctor's direction.

Contessa thought… On some level, she begrudged the Doctor those stains.

"Nor are you Bonesaw," Taylor agreed. "But, like her, your powers came to you at a very young age, and you spent the time from then to now using them constantly. Thirty years where every day was spent walking one predicted path or another, without time in between to simply be you. It's a wonder there's anything left of that little girl at all."

Contessa closed her eyes for a brief moment. Let out a long breath. "There was no other choice. Without me, without Cauldron, Earth Bet would have…"

She'd lost count of the number of fires she'd had to put out, metaphorically. How many things she'd had to do to keep civilization, at least in some parts of the world, from collapsing in its entirety. How much manipulation had gone into keeping the Protectorate alive, how much she'd had to invest into the PRT to make it functional, how much time and effort spent to prop up as many governments as possible so that everything didn't collapse in on its own weight. How many lives she'd had to take and ruin and irrevocably alter, just so that they could all limp on until the end came and it was time to leverage everything they had.

It all came back to that, didn't it? Over and over again, doing whatever ugly deed was necessary for the greater good, simply because she'd had to weigh it all on a scale and choose the side that resulted in the best chances for a future.

Sacrificing her own happiness, her own chance to live a full and fulfilling life…was perhaps the fairest thing she could afford to trade to those mountains of corpses that could be laid at her feet.

"And all you had to do to keep the world spinning was sacrifice yourself on the altar of an alien god."

She said nothing. What was she going to do, deny it? She'd discarded the name Fortuna specifically so that she could harden her heart and become the person needed to save the world. No, so that she could become the machine known as Contessa, balancing the future of the world on the edge of her knife. She'd poured everything she was into getting everything she could out of her power, without a care for what she had to give up in return.

In that sense…maybe the comparison to Bonesaw wasn't all that inaccurate after all.

"So now, with the big bad beaten and your purpose in life gone, we come to the most important question: where do you go from here?"

"I…" Contessa floundered, drew up short. "I don't know."

There'd never been room for the world after. Never time to consider it, never a moment where she dared allow herself to even believe there might be one. It would have made her soft. It would have stolen some of the steel from her spine. She might have hesitated, started questioning if it would all work out. If she actually believed there would be a life for her after the end…

And so she hadn't. She'd resolved herself to death — to the idea that she would die in the fight against Scion, or else be killed by those she wronged in the aftermath. There would be no life for Contessa, when it was all over. Knowing that, she'd been able to keep going without regret. Resigning herself to dying for the sake of mankind's continued existence had given her a strange kind of strength and a twisted sort of peace.

"Because you gave everything to the fight," Taylor mused. "Everything. Your life, your future, your innocence, even your own freedom and free will. There hasn't been anything else for you since that day."

Contessa didn't answer. She didn't need to.

"Why does it matter?" she asked instead. "You came here to kill me, didn't you? To see that Cauldron was brought to justice, for the sake of building your new future?"

She wouldn't even begrudge it. She could call it penance, if she was being poetic, but at the end of the day, maybe she was just tired and ready to finally rest. She'd been prepared to die for the future since she was a little girl; dying for it now made little difference, except that she had no reason to fight it.

It was all finally over. Scion was dead, the world was saved, mankind could move on. If part of that needed Cauldron to finally and fully be stamped out, if all those who had been the core of Cauldron needed to be cut away like so much rot, excised and destroyed, then it was nothing she hadn't already resigned herself to so very long ago.

"I could," Taylor acknowledged. "Some might even say I should. But in spite of all of that, in spite of everything you've done and all the blood on your hands… I think you can come back from this. I think you have it in you to turn everything around. I think you can leave Cauldron behind, leave Contessa behind, and become a better person. Live a life outside of this ugliness."

Contessa closed her eyes again and let out a slow breath. She didn't say the word in her heart, naive, because it wouldn't have made anything better. Wasn't that naiveté, that insistence on a fair world where justice was rewarded and almost anyone given a chance at redemption, part of what she admired the most about this young woman?

Because Contessa hadn't been able to believe in that kind of world for a long, long time.

"Part of that is my responsibility," Taylor went on. "I could help you, or I could stop you from troubling anyone ever again. Part of that? It's up to you to take control, to take the first step out of the shadows and start living the life you gave up. To stop your passenger from taking everything again, leaving you nothing but a shell walking a path for a reason you don't even understand."

Everything clicked together, all of the pieces, and it dawned on her then, exactly what this all was. Ah, Contessa thought, so this was what her other self had done for that other Taylor at the end of it all in that far flung alternate timeline. When it was all over, she offered solace to a broken tool, one who gave everything she could, even the things she shouldn't, all for the sake of saving the world and everyone in it.

From one broken tool to another, that Contessa had come to Khepri at the end of it all and given her closure. Closed the loop, and spared her the pain of having to lose any more than she already had.

"It's okay," said Taylor. "I've already made up my mind."

Contessa let out a breath. A weight was lifted from her shoulders. She closed her eyes and waited.

The first spell hit her like a bullet to the back of the head and ripped through her, tearing her apart bit by bit, moment by moment, thought by thought. The second came a moment later, before she could topple, before there could be any pain, and everything dissolved away.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

NOTES

Thus ends the main story of Essence, and the final bits are the epilogue.

I'm not as happy with how this interlude turned out as I'd like to be, but it hits the important beats and says mostly what I wanted it to say, so I guess I have to live with it.

Two week break between this and the finale, so I'll see all of you on the 20th for Denouement E.1.

And of course, yesterday was my birthday. The cake was good, but it was kinda lonely, and I was kinda hoping the government would at least let me know if I could expect a late present, but all signs point towards "not until March," which is... Yeah. "Inadequate" is a good word.

Special thanks to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best.

If you want to support me and my writing, you can do so here:

P a treon . com (slash) James_D_Fawkes (If you're in it for the long haul!)

ko-fi . com (slash) jamesdfawkes (If long term commitments aren't your thing.)

Or if you want to commission something from me, check out my Deviant Art page to see my rates.

As always, read, review, and enjoy.