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The bus at night was a quiet place.
Drowned were the red of its guts in the cool of the late sky, submerged in the relative quiet of the slower section of the nest they've stopped in. The glow of the streetlights close to the bus streamed in through the bars of the windows – stretching long shadows into the dark.
The night watch was never anything Dante was opposed to, their office oft proved more stifling in the twilight, too filled with the paperwork that hardly meant anything concrete to them. Twas windowless, as well, and despite the ever burning star in their vision, they always hated being too far from the sky for too long. It incited something alike a homesickness.
Inviting the Sinners in made their office less strangling, but surrounding them with evidence of the all consuming jobs after hours instead of their own personalised rooms always left a small weight like guilt in their heart.
Here, though, in the main bus, they felt more at home than anywhere else – even if they changed seats each shift in what could constitute variety.
Hell, they didn't exactly need to sleep to function like everyone else on the bus – a fact discovered after five sleepless nights spent bumrushing some late arriving, post-bough documents. If them taking on the duty let their Sinners sleep a bit sounder, they'd hardly utter a word of complaint. It was a solution fit for them all, even if some of the Sinners tried to pester them into having more of a proper rest.
They looked down at their PDA, switching it on just to check the time. It had been about an hour since they've started and they had plenty more to go until the early risers got up, and then a bit more time for all the Sinners to congregate for breakfast.
Yet as they looked again, to the sky outside, they found their gaze met by a brighter shade of blue, sunken in his eyes and whipping behind him, both.
Be it his own self or an illusion of their own mind, they faced him, Demian, again. Unlike the previous times, though, he seemed to gesture for them to come outside to talk, rather than starting on his regular riddles. With a quick check behind them into the depths of the Corridor, they got up and did a little jog right over the bus console to open up the doors, letting themselves out and allowing the cold night's breeze to replace them in the bus’ insides.
Even in person, there was something particularly odd about him, compared to everyone else they knew – in general and of his companions. It was almost like he had an inherently nostalgic quality about him, reminding them of memories they no longer had and a past they never witnessed. Not helped by his manner of speech, mind, always talking as if they knew what they didn't, all while explaining himself if they picked his words apart enough.
Perhaps he was talking to two people at once, sure felt like it sometimes.
He spoke to and of their past and present both, with an intentionality that implied some greater purpose to his prose.
Maybe it was three then, that he spoke to. Past and the present and the future all the same.
Outside he leaned on the edge of the bus, casual as if there was nothing that could weigh him down, and he turned to them ever so slightly as their shoes hit pavement.
'Dante.'
Truth be told, they never actually remembered giving him their name, and their coat was in too bad of shape to read it on there when they first met. Or at least when 'Dante' first met him.
He knew their past self – rather well, at that, if they went by word of a promise they didn't remember – but 'Dante' was not their name before, not with how unfamiliar it sounded when Faust first told them it was.
They looked at him, with his abyssal eyes, and nodded, a form of acknowledgement for him in this unwavering night.
<Evening.>
‘Hm.'
'Say someone asks two people to sculpt something for them, something they've had in mind for a long, long time.'
'First, the person describes to the first sculptor what they want the sculpture to be. What material it's made of, the size, its time, the shape and all the details engraved on its surface. Every detail they've thought of for so many years.'
'Perhaps as well some illustrations of what not to do, or a drawing of the details they can't trap in words.'
'Their words would haunt the sculptor's process as the thoughts had haunted them.'
'Then, the commissioner turns to the other artist and then tells them of how they think, the connections they make and so on. Like showing someone in detail how the engine of a car works – pointing out what fuels what else or propels this or that.'
'It'd let them sit down and recreate the whole thing again from scratch, all to reach that same destination.'
'They make the artist step down the same path they did by making the artist's thoughts match their own,'
'Which one is that true object?'
The air around them had the chill of January upon it. Demian's breaths each created themselves small clouds that floated off and dissolved into cool nothingness. His scarf looked rather warm.
It was almost comforting to have these confusing conversations. For Dante to shed their coat and uniform like skin and become one who was lead instead of leading – by one who talked to them with the promise of later understanding and not choked, still, with shackles and binds much like their own, and of the same makers.
They could see why they used to know him so well. Not how, never how. But he had a vested interest in their success outside of the company or its will, and thus was as close to an outsider ally as fate or flow seemed to allow them.
<...>
<There... is not one true thing for all three.>
<For the commissioner, their idea is the truth. For the first sculptor, it's both what they've been told and what they've made. The second has both the truth of their thoughts and what they've made.>
<Because 'truth' is relative,>
'Because there is no one 'truth' in a world like this, with three dimensions and other people's eyes.'
Even Dante themselves, when they had their memories cleaned away with a new head on their neck, couldn’t see anything close to objective truth. Lack of experience is an experience, turns out, and people tend to soak up any information they didn't have before from wherever they could. Even and including a man eating but and all who rode it, bound to the inferno.
Besides that, their eyes were backlit by the light of their star, and who they once were still stained a topic or two in faint shades.
<...But.>
There was something they'd like to ask. He's listened to them before, so...
<For some things, things never made before but released for everyone to see, is that first use not its true purpose?>
'For humans, it's purpose is what it can do, not what it must,' He was looking at them, the them in the close past people call the present.
It took a moment for them to realise he was smiling, and not in the neutral one he always wore. 'So it stands that a star gets a new name after falling, and that nothing with one form here stays that way for long.'
‘It was the price of human ambition. It was the crime of human greed. It was the miracle of human ingenuity.’ They heard, but he did not say.
Dante looked up at the stars, at the sky, at the City lights. Would a world of one or myriad truths be the better? They didn't know this one or that hypothetical other well enough to make an answer, but the Star cleared their mind when they looked towards it.
They looked again at the sovereign-to-be, and he at them.
'I cannot give you something you'd define as truth.'
They'd have to answer that themselves.
'But you will know what that truth is.'
When they can draw him a sheep. When they know their truth and eyes and world enough to put its shadow to paper.
And then he was gone, with faint loneliness and a lambs cry in his wake. The night was less cold. It was not much closer to morning light.
With their communion over, Dante sat back down in the empty-still bus, leaning back. Thinking, ticking, alone in the blackness of the dark.