Work Text:
Ace is the result of powers she shouldn’t have, and it hits her every day he seems to see not the world in front of him but something bigger.
Gods of the past are primitive ideas, even if their sources are real. People of these eras don’t understand the truth, they even assume the Desire Royale is done by something so very on high.
In turn, to the people of the future, gods are entertainment as any other past human. Nothing more than figures on a screen. She hears they have one displayed at a Museum, but she can never remember his name. It didn’t interest her.
Gits?
…regardless. Gods are a foreign concept to those of the future, but her love looked at her, and Ace, and he said “you must be a goddess.”
And she believed him.
And Ace - quiet, happy, loving Ace, must be a god himself. She sees it in the way the plants beneath his bare feet heal as he walks. She sees it in the way he was born knowing the world is bigger.
It terrifies her, sometimes.
Because he’s also so human. He deserves to live a happy life, as a human. A god is entertainment, inevitable doom.
She doesn’t want him to be too much like her. Or his father.
She doesn’t want him to be forced to perform.
Ace is a star player in every life.
In the Desire Royale, a memory that comes to her slowly, she remembers an Ace who stands tall in duels and shows mercy. She thinks he is so painfully human, then. Gods, the way her love described them, do not show mercy.
Mitsume can’t show mercy, when wishes are cruel, or when they are fed to her and burnt until she grants them.
In the Desire Grand Prix, when she can begin to think and breathe again, Ace wishes to see her, a wish that fails. Ace wishes to become a hero, a plan he set up from the start.
Ace goes through game after game. Rarely, he loses. Sometimes, he dies.
And yet there is the boy who made grass grow stronger beneath his feet and laughed as bright as a bell. Brighter, certainly, than the bell that chimes when wishes are forced from her, cruelly.
And yet, every time he needs it and believes in it, a miracle trips past into his hands, into his plans. As natural as breathing.
Mitsume looks at him and sees something inhuman. A performer. A god. A star.
She used to call him that, sometimes. Little star. Made of light, digital code. Made of performance, her and her love both.
She never wanted this for him.
She knows the truth of her power was love, was combining her heart with her love’s and catching some divine force’s attention until it was one with her. She’s never known how.
She sees Ukiyo Ace low himself to bond with other players. He’s tried before, and it’s never ended well, but somehow, this time, the miracles go beyond him. Or maybe tie into him. He knows in an instant that Nago is like him, a modern human made with touches of Mitsume’s era. He looks at Buffa and seems just as sure that the man is an unstoppable zombie, and that becomes true. He trusts a young man who seems normal and loving in all the best and worst ways, and—
She has long since accepted she could not save him. How could she? She’s a corpse haunting her own mind.
But he stands before her, a god.
And a little boy in a field of flowers, who makes them bloom brighter even as they fade away.
He’ll be okay.