Work Text:
You remember the first time people told you you weren’t cut out for something. When you were in pawn school, learning things and making friends, and you were well on your way to become a great student; you love to read books, see, and you love to learn things. You don’t always retain all that information, but it’s always nice to sit down with a book and hyperfocus until you were kicked out by the librarian and told to go home to your mothers.
So you were quite a bit surprised when you reached secondary school and you were not sent to the most advanced classes. You asked your teachers, you asked your parents, and the only answer they gave you was you weren’t cut out for it. What happened, did you do something wrong? Has there been a mistake? Were your grades not good enough?
It took you a lot of nagging for them to finally spill out that it’s because you’re a buffoon, the lowest subcaste of pawn out there. You were cloned to be a Courtyard Droll, and nothing else, and because of that, they wouldn’t give you a chair in advanced classes if it meant you were taking the place that could be filled by another young carapace who would grow up to be a doctor, or a scientist, or a member of the royal court. It didn’t sting at first, not as much as you thought it would, because you were still allowed to attend science clubs, and spend your after school time at the library, and although everyone else saw you as nothing but a tiny little clown, you still found joy between similarly-minded teenagers and dusty shelves. For some precious few years, you could pretend you wouldn’t have the most frivolous and expendable job out there, you could pretend your life wouldn’t be measured by how many laughs you could make the Queen croak up.
Only when you were given your job, however, is that it truly downed on you just how much it meant to be a buffoon. When you said goodbye to your parents, and set foot into the Droll quarters in the staff portion of the capital’s royal complex, and you were just met with that sea of carapaces that, all things considered, looked almost identical to you. Some were plumper, some were taller, some were even a bit stouter than you, but you all shared the same voice range, the same overall physique, the same mannerisms, the same forgetful and easily confused mindspace, and suddenly you weren’t the little funny kid who could make a science pun on the spot, you were the weird one that made jokes nobody else understood.
Of course, every one of the Drolls were good at making jokes, and the little identity you had was which kind of joke you were the best at, but even then it wasn’t much to go for. You collected hats to find solace in your life as just another clown in the company; it made you feel special again. You were the droll with the tower of hats.
It wasn't a bad life, for sure. You lived off the taxpayers' money, didn't have to pay rent, and won a little pension at the end of the month to buy "lollipops, or root beer, or whatever the hell your kind is into", according to the Archagent. The Archagent was mean and aloof, and to call him a workaholic would be an understatement. But you could see, on the rare opportunity he stepped out for a cigarette, that he absolutely hated the life he lead. His eyes were full of hatred, for the floor he stood on, the person he served, the busywork he had to do. It seemed like he felt he could be so much more than he was, and this encouraged you to talk to him.
Over the years, you nurtured a casual friendship with him, every time you managed to find him out. It made the unbearability of interacting with nigh-identical copies of yourself every day somewhat tolerable, and he found your anti-jokes hilarious. One day, you vent out how hopelessly unlike yourself you feel, among all the same Courtyard Drolls, and he lets out how he, too, wants change. And if you want in, all you need is to say the word. He’d have your back if you had his.
So, some good three months later, you two, plus the other bishop, and a rook the Archagent recruited, were fleeing on the last shuttle out of Derse in direction to exile; you planted a few explosives around the capital and set it out to blow the whole place up to smithereens, like your new boss told you. Maybe a few too much. Soon enough, if your estimatives were right, there would be no more Derse, and there would be no more Prospit either, if Derse was really knocked out of its place and en route to collide with the yellow moon. So you all fled, to the deserted planet below, to escape probable doom.
What can you say, you have a hell of a gift for eyeballing things.
---
You are now the Cheery Drifter. The scalding sun is almost unbearable, and the unending sea of pink and blue unsettled sand makes your calves ache with every step that makes you sink in up to your knees. You feel like you have no support, and you often fall and get sand all over your rags and your cheeks. However tired you might be, at least you’re not alone. The Heartless Bandit, the Depraved Deadbeat and the Scurrilous Straggler (and his pack of dogs) accompany you. From the inhospitable environment to the lurking creatures of the night, it’s clear to you that this place should not be inhabited by anyone. Yet, the Straggler keeps on going.
He wanted to build a city, he said, and he wanted to build it just in the right place. He could never explain what he wanted, but he always spat out that he’d know when he saw it. For you, it sounded like you were all just tramping in the desert and surviving off scraps and raw meat all the way towards your certain doom. Nevertheless, you keep walking with them, because really, surviving with friends is much more likely to happen than surviving by yourself. You might be stupid, but you’re not dumb.
From collecting hats, you escalated to collecting… Anything, really. Any shiny scrap, any sand-eroded article of clothing, any book nearly unintelligible from the apparent millenia it spent untouched. Collecting things made you feel important. Made you feel unique. You could build things with some of them, and invent lore to pass the time around the fire pit in the cold desert nights, which the rest of your crew enjoyed listening to in different degrees. Chances were if any of them needed a knick knack, Cheery Drifter had it, and Cheery Drifter could help them. It felt good to you, for once in your life, to feel like you were actually crucial to your social circle.
With cruciality and social ties came another thing you’ve never experienced in your life: communion. When the sandstorm was too harsh to endure, when your stubby legs struggled to get over a dune, when the sand went in your joints and ground against their bare skin until it was impossible to move, there was always someone there to help you up, to give you support, to carry you until you all could rest, and, almost invariably, that person was your friend Heartless Bandit. The way he smiled down amicably at you when carrying you on his arms, the way his small slits of eyes watched with curiosity while you babbled about your interests around the fire, it irradiated such fondness that made you feel loved, and safe, and protected.
You couldn’t help but reciprocate those feelings, to calm his nerves when you were all desolate and had to sacrifice a (nother) dog to make sure you’d not travel hungry the next day, to hold his fingers tenderly when you were all sharing stories around the fire, to have the sort of emotional connection both of you lacked in your previous life. The big guy might’ve called himself heartless, but he had enough love in him to last an eternity.
He protected your tiny, fragile body from the harshness of desert, and you gave support for someone who’d never received any; the perfect moirallegiance. Your counterparts, lazy beanpole and angry stabhappy bum, didn’t have such an easy time figuring out what their relationship was, even though you tried playing cupid here and there to no avail.
Either way, the four of you carried on, walking over sand dunes, seeking shelter in ruins corroded by time, losing dogs from the pack to the storms and famine, until the Straggler stopped near a rock formation, casting a shadow over a space that, if you were to guess, was literally the same as everywhere else; but he said it was here, and he was absolutely sure of that, so you listened to your boss and you settled, carrying materials and building huts.
Soon, people followed.
---
You are now Clubs Deuce, and many years have passed since you and Boxcars started building huts out of wood pieces and metal scrap under the supervision of Spades Slick, and underwhelming support of Diamonds Droog. Soon, walkways of packed sand became asphalted roads, and simple, fragile huts became houses, buildings, mansions. You don’t take the merit for anything, really - you were just doing what you were told. The buzz of the city was familiar to you, and yet something new and a novelty that you surely appreciated during the nights.
None of you had a penchant for the official organization and the bureaucracies of being leaders of your new city-state - not even your boss himself, who only did what he did to avoid bureaucracy anyway - so you all handed down leadership to the first freeloader with affinity for politics and retired to live in the recently built sewers, first literally, then figuratively, operating your own business more or less parallel to the government. Suddenly, the kind of stuff you did was illegal, and once again your Crew resorted to scheming in the shadows and keeping a low profile. But not for long.
It wasn’t for long because word always goes around, and despite hating being part of government your boss found himself as the forefront face of your outfit, terrorizing minor criminals and speakeasy owners alike. The four of you built a network, a name for yourselves, and, in due time, families, and you were no exception. Boxcars was great company for sure, especially when you needed support, but things were different with your wife, when you met her; you two connected like you’ve never connected to anyone before, or since, and you could never explain why a woman so beautiful like her would feel attracted to a guy so silly like yourself, enough to consider marriage and offspring. Life was good, then, for you. You were at your prime.
Sometimes, when you reflect on it, you think about the scope of life and it dawns on you how long it is and how many things happen in it. Even if you stepped back a bit, you think you wouldn’t be able to fully process everything that happens all at once. It took time and patience, to get anywhere, because next to the infinity of life, you feel like a small little ant walking on a giant, seemingly infinite dinner table, looking for scraps, and that’s not only because you’re 4 feet tall.
You felt tiny too, that fateful day you went into the hospital with a wife and left without one. Tiny because nobody offered you anything besides a word of condolences and a pat on the back. Tiny because you stood there, in front of the double doors, facing the street, and people just walked by you without asking what was wrong. This wouldn’t happen on Derse, because in a clockwork society nobody stops without a good reason, and if someone stops they need to be given a push to get back to work so the clock doesn’t break. Midnight City wasn’t a clockwork society. This was the only real time that you ever missed it, actually.
Midnight City was a place where you didn’t have to be bound by your caste, or by your job. You could be anyone you wanted. And yet, you suddenly felt like you were chained down, and not able to be who you chose to be, the strong, smart mobster, the wise, caring father. You were just a buffoon in a hat, who had to come home, look down to two kids and tell them they didn’t have a mommy anymore. You were the clown that put them to bed, and that let them sleep on yours fifteen minutes later. You were, as you looked in the mirror after getting up from bed, a fraud, you weren’t cut out for doing this, at least not by yourself. Getting up at seven in the morning, getting kids out of bed and out to school, then sit back at the couch and… Stare at the mantle for a few hours until the kids came home. Looking at your wedding picture, fixating on it even though nothing substantial went across your mind at all. It made time go faster, even when you were full of stuff to do. You couldn’t be bothered to do it, hypnotized you were staring at the mantle.
Of course, you’re not a stranger to alcohol. You make the stuff, anyway, and you can hold your liquor pretty well. More than ever, it felt a rather attractive idea to lock yourself in your shed, with your chemicals and prototypes and knicks and knacks, and have some shots of the barrel of distilled you kept buried under some mildly organized bomb materials until you passed out on your desk. Made time go even faster, to just sit there with your forehead on the rough wood surface, until a tiny someone knocked on the door and told you it was dinnertime. Then you, hungover at 6 PM, would pop an Advil, or two or three, and cook what you could for the three of you, and then stay up late not really doing anything until you passed out. The kids noticed you were spiraling out of control; of course they did, they’re not stupid. But they didn’t know how to help, surrounded they were by their own individual versions of grief. You became irritable, and distant, and if there was one thing they feared was whenever you felt like you needed to raise your voice to get your point across; it crushed your heart to see them recoil back and grow silent, or run away to their rooms, because you weren’t in the mood to cater to their child quirks.
Soon enough, the Crew noticed what was happening too, even if you told them everything was okay. You can’t help but be an open book, and they couldn’t say they didn’t notice how vaguely present you always were, how snappy you became, how you looked tired almost every day. Boxcars came to your aid, as he did so many times before, letting you rest, taking some of the responsibility you had off of your back and onto his own. You told him there was no need, that this was really just a phase that you would get out of soon. He said that he didn’t see it. That if you didn’t let anyone help you this would just become routine, and he hated to see someone that brought so much joy into his life to be so despondent like that. It felt very, very wrong.
He was right. So you let him help.
---
Life takes turns between being good and bad. You’ve learned this perhaps the hard way, but then you’ve come to understand that neither of these two aspects hog your life forever. Being miserable and being ecstatic are temporary feelings, that come and go, replace each other, resignify things in your life, forming a complicated and cathartic dance of highs and lows.
You are not Clubs Deuce anymore. You’re not the Courtyard Droll, nor the Cheery Drifter. You simply are, now that you’ve closed your eyes and found the Door to the Afterlife. Here, it is quiet, it is calm, you can sit down, have some tea, and take a well earned rest. You didn’t die young - not as young as other people like you did. You got to see your children grow, you got to play with your grandchildren, you were able to reap the fruit of the seeds your Crew planted long ago, as the City grew, as more cities formed, as the world became more and more livable. Despite everything, it was a good life.
You participated in a lot of things, and were a key player in many historical events; they don’t talk about you in History books, though - not that you wish they did, anyway. When it came to public attention, you were always in the shadow of your boss and his right-hand, and that didn’t matter for you in the slightest. You content yourself with being the Tritagonist, a helping hand, just beside the spotlight, because this kind of thing doesn’t matter to you, and it’s weird, considering you’ve battled a third of your life to be anything else but a common everyman. You’ve figured out that what was important to you was to know who you were, not that other people knew who you were. And you came to know that - pretty well even. So for that matter, you didn’t care about being denied credit on things.
Sometimes, you like to think about what sort of Eulogy people did for you, when you passed. You thought it wouldn’t feature everything you did, that would make the speech so long! But it would feature what you were, the building blocks of your character. What you were, what you came to be, and what you meant for other people. It makes you smile fondly.
Truthfully, you couldn’t hope for anything more appropriate.