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Beats. Tunes. Stories. Lives.
(Jonny was sitting in his room, drumming drumming drumming his fingers. Humming a long-forgotten tune to some song Ivy would certainly know. He’s exhausted. He can't fucking sleep. So he was thinking, musing even, about life, about stories, about his own wayward tale)
The story of the universe is a long one, so long that once upon a long-ago time Jonny knows that no matter what wild dreams that kid (who he can hardly remember being anymore, Jonathan Vangelis, who even was that compared to what he became?) would never have been able to grasp it. Not as he does now.
He never would have been able to see its shape, or, more pressingly, its patterns.
A million times a million times he’d talked to Carmilla (his mother, his savior, his kidnapper, his creator, his killer, his jailer, his keeper, his enemy, his dear friend, his mother) about the universe.
Or rather, she’d talked to him about it. He’d sit down, eating dinner like a normal person and she’d perch across from him and launch into some sort of rant about redshifting stars or nonsense about voids or ‘elder gods’ and what not.
At a certain point, he stopped caring enough to listen.
He knew he’d never understand her… her perspective. For lack of an easier word. He understands she’s old. That she’s old old. That if you took his age and squared it or cubed it or dodecahedron’d it, it still wouldn’t compare.
Because she’s old old. Because she’s an old immortal.
And, even after a million or two years, he was a baby compared to her.
Because hell, she doesn't view a fucking millennia long at all.
So like hell if he’d ever understand her.
But he’d talked to her about it, and one time, she’d explained the universe like it were paths. Not paths laid by any higher being, but the paths created when you walk over the same bed of plants in the same line long enough. They all die, and a path is created. Or something along those lines, he’d never really been the best at listening to her when she got all poetic, much less when she talked at length for hours and hours.
But he’d gotten the gist of it. And it made sense. As a kid, the entire Christianity thing had been drummed into his head. God has a plan for everyone. Everything that happens was planned—
(He’s still, in the nights where somehow that scrap of faith in his chest ignites again, convinced that if God is real, God never planned for Carmilla to come and… (Adopt? Steal? Spirit away?) take him to space, much less put his heart in.)
—and when he combined the whole paths analogy with what he still sometimes thinks about God and coupl that with all of what he’d managed to make her cough up about magic, he came to his own theory about it all.
His own thoughts on how this universe works.
He knows if she ever heard it she’d laugh in his face, (Nastya has, in fact, laughed in his face about it.) but hell, it makes sense.
To him at least.
The universe is made of stories. And over time, in the fucking infinite expanse of time, they repeat.
And the more he’d pondered this over the thousands of years he’d unfortunately lived, he’d concluded that everything is a story, including himself, including her. Carmilla herself.
And he’s part of the story of the universe. Everyone is, technically, but he’s important in it. He knows.
And how that he’s older, so much older he can see and identify where the stories repeat, he can sort of see how it all links together. Like finally finding all the outer pieces of an extradimensional puzzle.
The story of the universe. The story of him, in a distant way.
It’s not unlike the beats in a song.
He’s in a story. He is a story. He’s part of a story. He’s the end of some stories, and the beginning of others. He’s exposition, prologue, an epilogue, and pages and pages of prose.
And he’s a story himself, if he reduces himself down to troupes. A fucked up kid in the middle of nowhere who was picked up and cared for by someone better than what and who he had before. Happens all the fucking time. His story isn’t special.
The universe is stories, is tales, and he is, while not the center, part of the main one.
Or so he theorized in the insomnia plagued nights when not even shooting himself will keep him down long enough to rest.
Sometimes, moreso now than when he was younger—
(what is younger to an immortal? What is younger when you are infinite? He will be thrice his age eventually, and then will he look back on himself now as he looks back on how he looks back on himself now? Is he young now, at hundreds of thousands of years? Carmilla would say yes, but god, he doesn't feel young.)
—he thinks that Carmilla is the main character. Because if there is a main character of this shitshow, it has to be Carmilla.
And she has to be, right?
She came first, she’s the only true immortal he knows, and well..
Stories don’t follow her, and she doesn't flock to them like—
(like bees to flowers, like vultures to carrion, like flies to rotting food, like light to a black hole)
—like her children do.
…
(He lays there, pondering, because so much of what he knows is story-based. Carmilla would laugh if he told her all this, but he’s certain it's true.)
A story isn’t so different from a song.
Well, songs are more similar to tales that are happening rather than being told.
Stories, tales, no matter what, have a beginning, a first word, an ending. The universe taking your hand and spinning you down a path you’ve already wrought, until the ending, death, peace, war or a new beginning.
Songs arent all that different. A first note, a first word, a baited breath as the instruments fill in.
Both end.
Both end.
Well, he thinks, most end.
Some don't.
His story won’t. Despite the fact, his end is well overdue. There’s no other arcs left in him.
He should have died in the tragedy he was meant to die in. That heart attack.
But he didn't.
Carmilla saved (condemned) him.
…
Songs have a beat to them, have a path they take. Written out in notes and in words. And over time, Jonny’s realized many stories do too. Every beat in a song carries it towards it's ending, every beat in a story carries it towards the climax, towards the end. And every heartbeat carries someone closer to their death.
…
(He can't sleep. He can't stop thinking. He can't stop his racing mind.
All stories end, and logically, his will to. But where is he in his story? The middle? He can't be in the exposition, he can’t be, and the beginning is long over.
Everything has been the same for eons.
He swore the climax was Carmilla leaving, but things haven’t calmed down, they just keep on going. )
…
Maybe he’s not in a story. Maybe he’s in a song.
Songs have beats, and so do hearts after all.
So do hearts.
And what is he, if not for a golden heart? If not for the immortalized beat of a song?
(He shoots himself again, before he can dwell more on his heart.)
(Maybe this time he won’t wake up until after he got a bit of sleep.)