Work Text:
Guy Miércoles sat in his dingy hole contemplating the path of his life.
The world was turning.
The world was burning.
One day, people had simply stopped talking to each other, stopped thinking about facts or calling out incongruities and blatant lies and manipulation. Now they all attacked one other on sight, destroyed things at random. Some were angry and demanded one set of laws, others were equally angry and demanded the opposite laws, still others were angry and demanded a reset or no laws at all or a case by case laissez faire approach. At every turn though, they were all angry, and some seemed blindly intent only on burning it all down.
In the end, it boiled down to only one decision before him: to talk to those without ears to hear nor eyes to see, to try to bring them around to reason and help save what remained before everything fell down around them all — or to pick up his bag, shake the dust from his feet, and become a hermit.
It would be a little easy, a little hard. He had his bag packed and ready, though with little doubt of loss or damage soon to follow. People weren't the most upstanding individuals, after all, and he'd surely be beaten for the shirt on his back soon enough. Even if he made it out of the city with his necessary minimum of gear, there was no guarantee that he'd find anywhere safe to hide, with water and game available.
Where he lived wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. Light came in through the window, gravity kept things nicely in place, and nobody yet charged taxes for the air from the trees.
He'd once had dreams, and had even gotten fairly well along the path to those goals. One day someone had torn the book of his life apart and inserted a different ending, but he'd gotten by since then. That wasn't by dint of great effort or a persevering soul, but rather only through plodding robotically along thereafter and giving so little a damn about things that life had defaulted to his resigned acceptance of things as they'd become. Now even that was falling by the wayside — and in no way related to his own mistakes or anyone acting against him beyond a background social entropy — so leaving behind what little remained represented no great loss as such.
And yet, he sighed.
Is it nobler to suffer — silently and with dignity — the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or should one instead take arms against a sea of troubles?
Hamlet, he snorted, thinking of a bucket of crabs. When you toss crabs into a bucket, they don't escape, or help each other out, instead pulling one another back down each time that one of them manages to claw its way up at all.
More sirens screamed by outside. They used to come perhaps once per month. These days, they were every two or three hours, most of the time.
Was it too late already? Was it too soon, and there was yet hope that things might indeed change for the saner? Would it really matter, one way or another?
The shadows on the wall crept slowly along as Guy Miércoles continued contemplating the path of his life.
O ~~~ O