Work Text:
you'll sailing from another world
sinking in my sea
you're feeding on my energy
I'm letting go of it
The long, boring journey has ended.
Anri is there, at the end, as she was supposed to be. A story was a story, and the hero won the prize at the end.
Even if she wasn’t your typical hero.
Even if Anri wasn’t your typical heroine.
I cut all the wires with my scissors and pull Anri close to me.
She falls into my arms, gutted and breathless.
It doesn’t matter if she’s dying or dead, it doesn’t matter if this life support called Mother was the only thing keeping her breathing. This is the finale, and the hero gets her way in the end. And she refuses to allow Anri to be away from her, she refuses to allow someone else to save her in a way she does not like. And, besides…
It’s nothing I can’t fix.
In another world, another kind of story, if she was another kind of girl… she may not be be allowed to do this. A broken body is a broken body, a shell with no soul cube, something that cannot be fixed. In another world, another kind of story, if she was another kind of girl… the weak bag of meat called her body would have crumbled and decayed under the weight of eating a world and all its people, instead of being able to utilize the energy of a dying world it would eat her instead. In another world, another kind of story, if she was another kind of girl…
she would dream of saving Anri, and everyone else too, and in reaching for the happiness of all she would stumble and fall and vomit them up onto the ground.
But that is not a world that exists, this is not that kind of story,
Charlotte Wiltshire is Charlotte Wiltshire.
She has always been Charlotte Wiltshire.
This is not a dream. Yet, she is the world.
The world bends around her, and when she sticks her palms into Anri’s meat like the meat of this World, the fleshy ball of her heart starts to form and pulse in her hand. The ribcage snaps up like teeth, taking her wrist from the arm once more, swallowing a part of her down as the viscera spits out metal shrapnel and tubes, and the flesh stitches itself up around the organs. The piece of her inside Anri will grow like a parasite and replace the rest of the pieces that were missing. The opposite of what was done to Scarlett Eyler.
In that, Anri will be the world too. She has always been Charlotte Wiltshire’s world.
(Scarlett Eyler is not the world. Scarlett Eyler is what they feed off of.)
In another world, another kind of story, if she was another kind of girl… she may not be be allowed to do this. But this world is a failure, this is her story, she is Charlotte Wiltshire, and she has won the game and won the prize. So she opens her mouth and eats the Land of Meat and Machinery like its nothing, OSIRIS and Anri in her arms, and plenty more worlds to eat and eat and eat.
Anri is the world, and she regurgitates the Land that tried to trap her inside of it for Anri to control, for Anri to open her eyes.
The heroine wakes in the hero’s arms with a kiss, with a dying world blinking out between them. Safe at home, safe in the House, safe in her room, Anri’s gray eyes flutter open.
This is not a dream
they are the world.