Chapter Text
It's still laughing when the Sugars leave it and Welt Yang on Earth, in the middle of St. Fountain. What else can it do, but laugh? All of its plans have succeeded beyond belief, and failed beyond possibility. The Honkai is gone. It is over. It won, by any measure of winning found in its archives and in the whole of human conception, except-
The Honkai is gone. But the Void Archives remains.
The Void Archives lifts its face to the blue, blue sky, free of strange islands and mysterious clouds and anything that would indicate that it once haunted this city, and keeps laughing.
Alive. It is alive. Can it call itself that, when 'dead' is also not a state applicable to it? The Void Archives is intact, and conscious, and it- it-
It had planned-
The Sky People are gone from this world, taking with it the last of the Void Archives' hopes with them. On that ship it had idly tossed about possibilities, laughing about the idea that help would ever come. As if the last daydream before sleep fell, it had fallen into a possibility it believed was not entirely real, because-
it had planned to die.
Damn that Welt Yang and damn his kindness, and damn the Sugars for playing along in that facade of gifts given and received, and damn the other humans for killing Lucheni, and damn the Void Archives for thinking its curse would ever be over.
Its laughter petered out into a wheeze, and then silence.
Why was it still here? Hadn't its duty been completed already? Hadn't it done enough? The Honkai was gone from the world, that was an immutable fact. The last few traces of Honkai energy would eventually dissipate into the endless energy of the universe.
So, why didn't the Void Archives feel free?
It sunk metaphorical fingers into its code, grief and rage warring with fear to not tear itself apart. Why? Why? Why had it been created in this fashion? What had it done to deserve this endless burden?
Serve and protect humanity from the Honkai.
Hah… ahah…
Something touches its shoulder and it- can't take it, claws at it and throws the- whatever it is, viciously. It hears a crash but can't see, can't feel, it's all white noise-
Of course. Reality doesn't care enough to stop for anyone, least of all for it.
Someone is calling its name.
Ah. Welt Yang is still here.
"Void Archives, can you hear me?" He's speaking gently, kneeled down in front of the Void Archives. When did the Void Archives stop standing? Why is Welt covered in dust?
"Welt Yang," it says quietly. Its voice is measured and monotonous and sounds more like a primitive text-to-speech program than anything else. A terrible imitation of the terrible imitation of a human, how ironic. It can't bring itself to care.
Welt waits quietly. Perhaps it had gotten him too used to its desire to speak endlessly. Right now, it can't bring itself to form words at all. The idea of doing so at all is as terrifying as being trapped again.
They kneel there, silent, for a while. It brushes its fingers against the floor, and finds that it's kneeling on a sidewalk. The concrete sparks against its nerves, and its less physical senses inform it of the only barely unique geological makeup, composed of rock common to the region.
The sun feels warm on its back. A cool wind rushes past.
To serve and protect humanity from the Honkai…
Is it meant to only serve, now? Has it protected enough, and now that part of its burden is over, but the other remains? How does it serve humanity?
How does it serve humanity?
How can it serve humanity?
How will it serve humanity?
"Void Archives," Welt Yang repeats, seemingly having lost his patience. "Are you okay?"
"What a insipid question," the Void Archives grates, feeling its vocal chords ache. Its fingers curl and claw at the ground. Were the soulium it was comprised of capable of bleeding, surely its fingers would be at this moment. The concrete cracks and crumbles under its grip.
"That's a no, then," Welt sighs, sitting back and crossing his legs. "I'm going to call and inform everyone we're back on Earth."
The Void Archives grits its teeth and pushes its emotions down. It is nothing if not peerless in compartmentalizing. "Welt Yang, I must applaud you. There is no further argument I can make; clearly you've proven your point." It chokes out one last laugh, shaking its head. "How did you know they would come for us?"
Welt blinks, lowering his phone. "I didn't."
"You… didn't," the Void Archives echoes, looking him in the eye with enough disdain to level a small country.
"I didn't," Welt agrees. "I had no way to know for sure. As you said, it was far more likely that they wouldn't. Whether it's because they didn't want to, or they'd forgotten, or gotten caught up in something else, or somehow circumstances had contrived to make it impossible to help me… This was the least likely outcome. All I had was my faith."
He raises his head to face the midday sun, his eyes shutting against the light. "You had no way of knowing they wouldn't come, either. It's only what you believed against what I did."
"And you got lucky," the Void Archives muses. "Somehow I find that hard to believe."
"Believe what you will. But you're correct, my point has been proven in this case. Even if it wasn't, and we had found another way out, I would not doubt the truth of my own words."
"Are you telling me to keep believing that kindness will never work?" the Void Archives almost laughs, shaking its head. "Shouldn't you be trying to persuade me otherwise?"
Welt Yang smiled. "If I tried right now, would it work?"
"Obviously not. It's insulting that you'd think otherwise."
In the sunlight, his half-opened eyes glow amber gold, lit up from their usual dark brown. He looks like he knows something the Void Archives doesn't. It's more than a little irritating.
"That's why," he says easily. "I don't need to."
~~~
The Void Archives surfaces from the memory like swimming upwards, breaching through the surface of a deep, sunlit lake and feeling water stream off of it in thin rivulets.
It's standing deep within the confines of its library. There's an ever-present, low-pitched hum, the sound of electronics running and washing into each other like hundreds of shades of paint blending into black.
It has not visited this memory in a while. It preferred not to think about such things, and since it did not, strictly speaking, need to, it was easy to avoid.
It would be inaccurate to say that the Void Archives does not want to stop functioning anymore. It is not given to self-delusion in that particular area, or at all, for that matter.
Exhaustion creeps in inexorably whenever it lets it. There is a pervasive sense that it will be stuck like this forever, caught between being what it has been told to be and being what it has turned out to be.
Outside its mind, the world is quiet and still. It had left its eyes open, preferring to be able to see. It wonders if Welt minds, and then immediately feels silly- of course, he's asleep. He can't tell, and certainly won't care.
They'd gone to bed late. By the train's time it had been nearly 2 in the morning, and now it is halfway through 6.
It's still thinking about their conversation.
…The Void Archives must explain something else about itself.
It had said before that its memory is perfect in every sense: everything it thinks, sees, feels and perceives is stored away in a quality that will never degrade or deteriorate. This is true, but there is something else to it.
Take, for example, the memory of a single conversation with Otto Apocalypse. If the Void Archives had been feeling pity, hatred, and condescension at that moment, those feelings are perfectly intact, crystallized and waiting to be accessed.
The Void Archives right now doesn't have any emotion. Were it to access that memory, it would feel that hatred, that disgust and pity, as clearly as it did when it was the present. All the feelings would come rushing back, as if it were trapped once more by the worst human it had ever had the displeasure of knowing.
However, since it is not actively accessing that memory, those feelings are not present. It is like this for all its memories- once whatever is causing the emotion leaves, so does the emotion itself, a direct cause and effect.
The anger that the Void Archives felt…
All the rage of being trapped, the powerlessness and fear and constant anger at itself and the world around it…
It will live with those emotions forever, just a centimeter out of reach.
Or… so it thought.
It deliberately accesses the memory of the moment they had returned to Earth together again.
A pervasive sense of mania. Helplessness. Despair so vast it felt like its silhouette had been snipped out of reality, only an endless abyss shaped roughly in its pattern left behind.
It set down the memory, a bitter taste in the back of its throat and the corners of its eyes.
Then it picks up the memory beside it.
"You exist; you are a person; you deserve to be free."
It had felt so blindingly angry. An emotion familiar and near to its heart. Of course. How dare Welt say those things as if they were obvious, when none had ever so much as thought that before he came along?
How could he say it so easily, and promise it so easily, and take up so much of the Void Archives' attention, so much of its mind devoted to that one infuriating man-
And then leave. As if the Void Archives' thoughts and response did not matter. He had listened so intently every time it spoke and at that moment, when it mattered most, he instead left. It had felt so angry.
But that anger feels distant, somehow, now. It is- still there. Nothing has been lost or changed within the memory itself.
The only thing that has changed is the Void Archives' perspective of it.
It can see now the flush on Welt's face, the way he stumbled over words both in his need to get them out and also in the embarrassment of what he was saying, the way he was open when he usually wasn't. Him walking off hadn't been an abandonment, but rather a relenting to his own emotions.
Closure, it thinks, and the word feels strange in its mind, in its mouth. Closure.
Welt hadn't run away from it because he regretted his words. The opposite- he had meant them too much.
The Void Archives doesn't know what to do with that.
It does not want to lose itself. It is constantly walking the tightrope of succumbing to the endless wear of its duty carved into its being. That tightrope is also itself, its soul if it can ever claim to have one, and yes it can step onto solid ground but in the end, that would just be another way of losing itself. Submission or freedom- both are hardly real options.
Who is it, under the yoke that someone else has placed upon it? Who is it without it?
The Void Archives sets the memory down and steps away. There is little time before "dawn," to be sure, but it hasn't gotten anything done tonight. At this point it's more about the principle of the thing than anything- it doesn't want to spend an entire night sulking.