Chapter Text
She isn’t twenty-seven. Or twenty-eight, twenty-six - or anything, really.
Happy just… is.
Happy is mechanics and technological advancement. Happy is logic and the use of tools, Happy is the first time man built, created, advanced. When people began to understand the use of stone, they created the wisps that became Happy (which isn't even her name - her name, if she ever had one, is lost now, forgotten by all but that which first breathed it into existence). When man invented the wheel, she was fleshed further still. When metal was shaped and bent to the will of humans, Happy’s laugh were the hot sparks.
On and on and on, Happy was there; because Happy always was.
Happy isn't a god, she was never worshipped for herself. She doesn’t claim to be the protectorate of those who craft, who make, because who wants that responsibility? She never named herself Vulcan (who was an ass), Hephaestus (who wasn’t), Kothar-wa-Khasis, or any of the others. She never gave herself names or depictions. She did not leave legends to linger in her wake. Happy is merely the proof of people’s belief in tools, in objects that can be used to create (and destroy). Happy was just one of many beings called into existence because of belief. But the oldest ones (gods, they called them - humans, what do they know?) are all but gone now, fading from existence when their last true believers die - look-to-the-stars-to-guide-my-thought, tend-the-fruit-to-survive-the-storm, take-my-love-to-the-other-side; each of them lost - not truly dead but unfound, lessened and without awareness.
Happy survives, one of the few from the beginning because men always need logic and creation, have still use for mechanics and its principles.
All those that went before her - where does an idea go when it truly dies? Happy doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know. They don’t have a religion, they are religion. So she chooses to live among them, to be inspiration and muse so that she continues to exist (so many that she knew gone gone gone ). She guides the hands of genius craftsmen when they carve from marble, sells Michelangelo his first tools. She is wave of tiredness that enables Newton’s decision to sit under a tree, directs him down a road with a careless wave. She, in whimsy, wonders out loud if man could walk on water in the presence of Da Vinci.
She takes lovers over the centuries, women with loving smiles and biting words, with nails that paint her back with agonising, devoted love. Men with deep voices and deeper desires, with eyes that sparkle and laughter that fills her soul like smoke. She kisses her wife in the Tang dynasty on a street in Hongcun, she makes love to her husband in Chicago in the 1920s.
Toby? Toby was a pagan, who had sworn himself to a life of silence. He was a firefly that had briefly lighted upon her shoulder one sticky-humid Iowa evening. He was a sobbing child that clung to her legs in Istanbul, an old woman who kissed her hand with reverence on an island that now lies beneath the ocean, a Mayan priestess that had fervently wished to touch the stars. Toby has lived again and again and again and he doesn't remember a thing because that's the way it goes. But his eyes? They remain the same, and Happy (created from thoughts and ideas and inspiration), oh, she knows those eyes and would recognise them anywhere.
It gets a little harder every time - life, sparking into existence and snuffed out in a blink of an eye. It hurts. She can fix things, tools, objects. She can’t fix what is already life. So she tries, every time she finds him or he finds her to avoid being caught up in his story. His life, his tale, it leads to her heartbreak, every time. When he dies of skyflower. Of polio. A gunshot wound. Old age. And yet, every time, she is drawn back into it, because of his eyes, her smile, the gentle flutter of his wings beating a staccato rhythm against her immortal skin. Each time she tells herself never again, but each time she breaks that vow.
She meets Walter, with a mind that races with ideas so bright and persuasive that she finds herself caught in the current of them, almost helplessly so. She finds she can’t bring herself to leave him, or the people he calls family - even when she meets Toby (Alexi, he had whispered in the dead of night in the midst of the February Revolution, Kali, she had shouted over the roar of the Zambezi river) and she finds herself looking into those eyes.
He looks at her with eyes that worship and sparkle and love, and she remembers life after life after life where this has happened before, wishes it weren’t so. I’m going to watch him die again, she thinks, and returns his greetings with bite. It doesn’t last of course, because she’s never been able to keep herself away.
Toby, he’s called in this life, Toviyah, and she fights to remember it (Toby, Toby, Toby , not Annabelle, not Malakai). But for all her strength (and she is strong, she is so strong), she is also tired. She trips up sometimes, when she’s exhausted, when she feels alone in the universe, when she feels lost in time - whispers words to him in the despairing syllables of a long dead language, calls him her baobei and zvezda when the night is old and the day is young.
(They live and love, because of course they do. This is a love song, not a dirge.)
He is her linchpin, she tells him as he lies in a hospital bed, age having caught up with his mind, a life lived on the edge of danger having finally taken their toll on him. He can’t go, she warns him. She won’t be Happy Quinn after this, can’t be - not when Walter has gone, when all their family are six feet under, their souls nothing but memories and stardust.
See you next life, kid, he jokes with a weary smile, relentlessly cheerful to the end. She can’t help but laugh - because he’s more right than he thinks he is. Okay, she tells him. Okay. And when he closes those beautiful eyes for the last time, she tells herself this was the last time - just the the time before that, and the time before that too. It’s the only thing she’s ever been wrong about.
She doesn’t mind being wrong though, not really.