Chapter Text
As life drained from his body, the blades of a thousand tragedies and regrets start to pull out from his body. His throat nor his face no longer contort to let out a pained groan or grimace, only but a rag-doll of a bested man, who laid himself to rest, not waiting for age to be the poison that killed him in his tracks.
Seconds felt like days, minutes felt like years, and days became slower than light itself. Was it a decade? was it ten seconds? Simoun did not care. Simoun no longer cared. His cruel mind, despite its slow dance to oblivion, played moments of his life like a carousel, a last ditch effort to make himself remember the viscous bitterness that once bore its bulbous cancers inside his skin. Thoughts of people, faces he should remember. Elias. Maria Clara. His father. Himself, in a lake, looking at his reflection. The glint of his eyes dying. He has forgotten, yet he all remembered all of it all the same through the sting of emotion that refused to fade. Ah. Now he truly does.
He wondered where were the rest of his people. Elias should be here. Maria Clara too. His father most of all. Yet, nobody was here. The afterlife felt... too lonely for him. Maybe this was hell. Maybe this was purgatory. Maybe it was a place something the people of his time far never would have been able to comprehend, he thought to himself.
There was a nagging feeling on his chest, that told him, no. This isn't your punishment. This was anything but. He was a dead man, so no form of logic in reality bound him anymore. Maybe that was the point. To see the world as it was in the beginning, a nothingness. "Maybe, they're waiting for you somewhere. They were here too. Once. Maybe."
"You tempt fate far too much." He remembered those words. Reverberating like a distant memory. He felt an odd warmth in his chest. Something... Something nostalgic. Grief that has been numbed into anger. Who did he say that to again? He can't remember his face.
"It doesn't matter." He thought to himself once more. "But yes it does... I don't remember why, though. But at-least its something." He blurted out unconsciously, as if a different spirit possessed him, an ancient forgotten will, a forgotten personification of what once was, and what never will be.
The synapses of electricity slowed down in his mind. Was this reality? Was this imagined? It did not matter. He was dying.
"You tempt fate far too much." That thought replayed once more. Burning at the edges. A burning, no. A smoldering memory. It was dying.
"Too bad I am no God." The sepia toned Ibarra grinned, straddling a man, far larger than he ever will be. He groaned, his eyebrows furrowing.. Then tears were found. He was now holding.. Elias' limp body, cradling it as if it were a newly born babe. The vision melded once more, fractals of other burning shattered memories blooming into a cadence of fire. Then there was silence. Then there was him sobbing once more in front of a gravestone, his garb and vanity now one of the similar ones he wore in his curtain call.
If he could, he would laugh at the sheer level of tragedy he has experienced. His entire life was all but a cruel revolution- not one that brought change and truly usurped the old, but the same revolution that happens to our planet every 365 days. The same revolution where one point of a protractor rotates 360 degrees, reaching the same point once more of where it started. He remembered that ancient longing, that ancient loneliness that felt like background noise since he was born. Where he would sit inside his room, reading books in that ornate mansion, that dullness that existed in-between the moments where in his teenager-self when Maria Clara left him to his own devices. That stillness catalyzed with grief and pain once he sat in his jail cell after being excommunicated. That concoction of bitterness that first bore its fangs into his mind, when he saw the Boatman- his boatman's eyes be no longer filled with passion and grief when it was opened, not when it was being hidden away under his eyelids.
The bitterness that became the lifeblood of the cancer of all societies he thought he never had. But in truth, realizing now, even since he was Crisostomo Ibarra- no. Ever since his juvenile mind conceived the world, his virgin sight seeing the gilded walls of his fore-bearer's mansion, But in truth, the cancer had already seeped in his mind, replacing a part of his prefrontal cortex, it crept inside the crevices of his soul, a facsimile of a purpose,
The man in his eternal standstill was roused to stand once more, his corpse- possessed by what was once his lurched forward, the puppet pulled by strings invisible to itself, de-materializing on itself as it tugged Simoun's body to the cold ground.
Once more, the ripples of this ancient murky sea reverberated once more.
Visions of a past life lingered as a tidal wave, the memories rebelling against the immutability of death. This time, those frayed nerves came alive. Sensation. Vitality. Heart. Mind. Soul all came to being and flooded the man. Those ghosts spoke of a life lived.
Memories of a lover. Bitter tragedies. Quiet mornings. Forbidden love. Paternal Instincts. Insecurity. The sting of self loathing. The sun, the birds, the Jewels that Simoun coveted but hid under the guise of bitter hatred and selfishness. The longing that had never been satiated.
The sounds of Gunshots, familiar grief. The taste of Tsokolate on his tongue, familiar sweetness. The smell of the beach, of the lake-water, of a woman's perfume, that unmistakable sun kissed smell on his lips. The sound of books turning. The smell of stillness. The social gatherings, the stars, the sun,
Oh how he wished he'd all experience it all once more. The tired man let out a small smile, a small tug of his facial muscles he didn't know he missed.
*Oh how I missed being myself too.* A bittersweet longing, a cold chilling feeling he grew accustomed to since... since when? He forgot when he ever felt.. fine. Emotional, but fine nonetheless. Like a strange burgeoning fire inside his chest that made him restless, but stilled his body too. The sort of feeling that reminded him that he was still alive, that he was still breathing.
Has he spent all the past thirteen years in this cold box of his doing? Now that he has done all that he said, now, he remained this small coffin as the wind eroded him slowly.
"Oh how I miss all of you." A voice, despondent and nostalgic. Nothing but the wind responded. The land still desolate. "How I wish I had done things better. But, no point in dwelling in past regrets, right?" That voice came out again, youthful in its tone.
So, he did what all men would do in his final moment of desperation, he prayed. In futility and in the line beyond, the man who spent his life running away from the phantoms of himself, until he became one with the darkness, with all his remaining consciousness, he prayed.
The memories played like a tireless phonograph. But he held it no grudge or petty feelings. He was moved by the Pantheon of his life. The Odyssey of the Jeweler, the subversion of his revolution, the way the cycle turned on itself, and instead of a complete flat circle, it twisted and undulated as a mobius strip. The contortions of Ibarra and Simoun fusing into one strip, one strip that had no sides, that was both the heads and tails of the coin, the night and day, mixing into one beautiful twilight.
"If God permits," No. If whoever was listening to him now permitted, he wished to enter a new pantheon once more. A new droplet into the sea, rippling into the cycle once more. A bubble rippling downwards into the abyss, breaking down into all that was once was and all that will be. His coffin of darkness turned into twilight, as his comfortable eternal life was being broken.
"Send my flesh once more, rend my soul into a flawed body," Yes. He remembered. Why he did all of those things and more. He had let go of it now. All the pain, all the grief, all the longing. He let go of it, not keeping it in his cage as he set it free. Understanding and everlasting peace blooming inside his rib-cage as he started to weep. He wept for life. He wept at the life he now celebrates. He no longer wished for an eternal life as mandated by the Friars that posited that thinking long before he was born.
"I.." Both youth and elder spoke. Becoming one power. Becoming one being once more. Twilight turned into morning. Morning into midday. The revolution has begun once more. No. Multiple revolutions beyond our sight already happened. A soliloquy has now turned into a prologue. Hatred has been washed into Love. Confusion into Empathy and Understanding. From the darkness, a light has been reborn once again.
"I want to go back..!" He shouted, Crisostomo Ibarra shouted, that immature, nervous, terse voice resounded in the heavens, light so bright dared to wrap the world in itself for a second, As he felt his clothes be torn. His body asunder, and after that eternity, that millisecond, that nothingness, that fullness...
Petals flew away from the wind. memories of a fractured flower resounded and shook the world at its core. The longing, the love that it held becoming one with the world. Its atoms reuniting with the universe once more, entering the world, to feel all the love and all the pain as it was wedded to it once more.
And after the light, darkness permeated in that nothingness once more. As if it were never a box, or a mental coffin. There was nothing. Nothing noteworthy. No person. No ripple. Not a single atom remained. After all, it was simply an abyss. It was never meant to contain anything. Simply to be until the next.