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Amor Fati (IC)


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She gave him the sort of level, lowered-brow look that said she was not amused. "So all you're doing now is hanging around here, getting me to feel attached to you, letting me and my designers and the other technician heroes put hundreds of man-hours and tens of thousands of dollars of equipment into upgrading you, making yourself a part of the community here, all so you can extinguish yourself in some kind of imaginary blaze of glory because you don't think you deserve to be happy?" Gina sat back in her chair."This is why I spend time with you," she told him. "You make me feel a lot less crazy by comparison."

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"There is no glory in it. No triumph. Simply fate." His voice didn't so much as break on the last word, but Gina could see the look in his lined eyes for a long moment, as he looked past her to the deep darkness of the past. "And I do not wish to die. There are a great many things about this world," he went on, reaching over to put his hand on hers, "that I want to make part of myself, so that there is something in me besides all that has been. Things that I want to have with you...But I cannot live without trying to save those who were left behind. Those who live in death, with their own wills or without. And I think that effort will probably kill me. To war against the Terminus is to one day die. Today, tomorrow, in a decade. It is simply a matter of time."

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"To live at all is to accept that one day you'll die," Gina snapped impatiently, tugging her hand away from his, fisting both hands in her lap. "You say you don't want to die, then in the next breath you talk about throwing your life away in some kind of crazy one-man war against the Terminus. If you want to fight, that's fine. I know we can fight the Terminus. Hell, I've seen what those Young Freedom kids brought back to Prime that made Viktor lose his everloving mind." She got to her feet and paced, a hint of Missouri drawl creeping into her voice as she grew more agitated. "But doing it on your own because you feel like you owe the universe something is suicide and I want nothing to do with it. You can't ask for me to give you part of myself, knowing you're going to throw all of it away like some goddamned self-styled martyr. I didn't come this far with you for that."

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Yes, this is what you deserve, isn't it, Steve? came the voice in his head as clear as a bell. You've killed and killed and killed until your hands drip with blood and your nights with the screams of the dying. It's good you chased her away. You don't deserve her. How dare you love when so many lovers have died at your hands? How dare you know joy, when you have destroyed so much happiness? For a moment, he felt a gulf of emptiness open beneath his feet, the yawning darkness of the soul with which he was only too familiar. The yawning darkness he had known almost all his life.

It was very hard to be alone in the dark. "...the past cannot be changed. The dead cannot be brought back to life."" He fell silent again, a stricken look on his lined face. "I had thought there was nothing more I could lose. But I don't want to lose you, Gina, or all the things that we have together. I will live."

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"You're damn right you're going to live," Gina told him, not seeming that much mollified by his acquiescence. "I've put a lot of work into you, and I don't build anything to break." She paced a few more laps of the breakfast nook, face stormy even in the dim light. "Don't you get it?" she demanded. "Nobody here puts up with you out of pity. Nobody you work with is saying, 'Oh, there's Harrier, he's had a crap life, let's let him call himself a hero till he self-destructs or something.' They call you a hero because you've made yourself a hero and that comes with responsibility. You don't get to throw yourself away. People are depending on you to be around when there's trouble. They depend on you to call when you need help because if something defeats you it makes us all weaker. And I depend on you too, dammit, because when you're around I feel a little less crippled and wrong inside."

She stopped with her back to him and stood very still for a moment, then spun to face him. Her eyes glistened in the muted light, but her glare was fearsome. "If you really want this world to be part of you, then you can't be existing only for yourself. It's not about you, and it's not about the horrors of your past. It's about us, and it's about Earth, and it's about picking battles that you're going to win." She took two steps towards him, closing the gap and looking down at him. "I want you to promise me on whatever matters that you won't go there on your own."

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"I promise to you," said Steve, speaking in the name of one of the people that mattered to him the most, "in your name, that I will not go to the Terminus alone. And that I will do all I can, everything within my power to always stay with you, here on Earth, or anywhere else. For as long as I live." He thought of loves lost and gone lifetimes ago, and said, "I cannot promise to be a normal man for you, Gina, or normal in any other way. But I can promise to be a man for you, as best I can be." He took a deep breath as he looked up at her, altered eyes clear and dry, waiting for her reaction.

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Gina studied him soberly for a minute, then touched her hands lightly to his face, framing it with her fingers. She didn't know if she herself was ready for the kind of commitment he seemed to be expressing, or exactly how she should respond. From someone raised here on Earth Prime, she'd have considered it a proposal, and probably freaked out accordingly. But things were different where he was from, and somehow it didn't sound too bad. And if it meant he wouldn't let a lifetime of painful memories drive him to do something crazy... "I can live with that," she told him softly, leaning down to kiss him on the forehead.

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"Yes. Oh, yes." Steve kissed Gina again, dry lips on hers, and they didn't talk again for a while after that. In her bed that night, deep in the darkest hours of the night, in the darkest part of the house, he held her as she slept and remembered her words from before. Whatever the future held for either of them, he knew the words were true. I can live with this. That night, for the first time in a long while, Steve Murdock slept without the company of horrors, and in the first moment of morning's light, before he moved and felt the inescapable weight of cold steel armor deep down in his very bones, awoke without the past.

“Amor Fati — ‘Love Your Fate,’ which is in fact your life.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

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