Reborn! fic - Consolidation
Title - Consolidation
Rating - PG
Characters - Byakuran
Notes/Warnings - Major spoilers for chapter 252 and beyond.
This was formerly titled Unborn Chicken Voices as a reference to the Radiohead song "Paranoid Android", but I've given it a title change since I'm pretty sure it was squicking too many people out. XD
Summary - There is always noise.
---
She crosses the street, and doesn’t.
Black Gucci heels make their way across the busy intersection, picking up their pace when their owner realizes the light has turned red again. Two-thirds of the way across, they pause when something slips out of the woman’s purse and hits the pavement with a wince-inducing snap of plastic. Cursing, the woman crouches down to retrieve her wayward mobile phone. The man driving the car doesn’t catch sight of her until she straightens again, sees him, and screams. He slams on the brakes, but it’s already too late.
There’s a thud, a sort of ‘oomph’ sound, and the sound of tires screeching to a halt as witnessing passerby gasp and utter cries of horror. For a second, no one moves, the unreality of their situation freezing them in their panic. Then a man dashes over to where the woman now lies in a darkening pool of her own blood, and one by one, the rest of the crowd begins to follow. All but one man, who stands alone on the corner of the street by the Don’t Walk sign, seemingly still caught up in shock, his gaze slowly making its way back and forth between the opposite corner of the street, where the woman began her fateful crossing, and the spot on the road where she has just met her demise.
The man who was driving finally emerges from his car, eyes wide, slowly shaking his head back and forth as if trying to will the scene in front of him to disappear by the sheer force of his denial. “I didn’t see,” he says quietly, and begins to repeat it, as if caught up in a trance. “I didn’t see her… I didn’t see her…” No one else is even listening, their attention still caught up in the tragic scene. Several members of the crowd have by now pulled out their own cell phones to dial 911 (and in the case of some of the more morbid witnesses, to take pictures).
The man on the curb begins to rub at his temples with one hand as the light turns green once again. The crowd is getting louder and more agitated, the guilty driver’s mantra is becoming more urgent (“I didn’t see her!”), and sirens are beginning to sound in the distance. He closes his eyes, rubbing at his head more insistently now, until a voice suddenly breaks him off from his thoughts.
“Are you all right?”
He opens his eyes. A woman is standing in front of him, looking slightly concerned. He smiles, and nods. She returns the gesture, then continues on her way. Black Gucci heels clap along the sidewalk past him, unaware that their owner is still lying in the middle of the road. Unaware that their owner is now dead.
And not.
Byakuran surveys the scene in front of him for a few more moments, then turns and continues on his own way, still rubbing absentmindedly at his temples. He’s beginning to get a headache.
---
A lesser man would have been driven insane long ago. It’s not simply that there’s too much information to process, it’s that so much of that information is contradictory. His existence is a paradox; he is in a million different places at once, living a million different lives, throwing a million metaphorical darts and watching them land in a new place each time. And each of the hands throwing the darts is different, yet each one is still his.
He is always sleeping, and always awake. The countless different circumstances of his life (lives) have taken him all across the globe; he is in Africa, in Europe, in America and Asia. Hot and cold, day and night, rain and shine; all these of things exist at the same time.
He compensates by letting the less significant details slide, pushing them to the back of his mind to concentrate only on the important changes. The little things, like the weather, he hardly even notices any more. Rain and cold are real, yes, but no more real than the sun and the heat. He barely even feels them. Pain is much the same. Even smell and taste, although a sweet tooth is something he shares across all his existences, and he’s not above indulging that every so often.
But in the end, what really matters is information, not mere sensations. Witnessing a natural disaster in one world is barely consequential. Learning how to predict and even prevent that same disaster in other worlds is useful. So he retains that knowledge so that he can recall it when needed, and disregards the rest. It is in this way, by prioritizing what he takes in, that he prevents his mind from collapsing under the sheer weight of sensory overload.
He won’t crumble so easily.
---
There is, however, a limit to how much even someone like him can take. He can feel it, pushing at the back of his mind whenever he experiences something particularly jarring. Loud. His existence is always overwhelmingly loud, never silent, never peaceful. There is always noise, something new to process, something new to file away for later use. His mind is never at rest.
And, he suspects, someday there will come a point when even he won’t be able to take it anymore, when even his disciplined mind will falter, overloading after trying to manage one contradiction too many. There is simply too much. The human mind is an incredible thing, but still finite, and the universes are infinite.
He realizes this. Realized it from the moment his ability first came into focus. Too much. The universe is split endlessly, and keeps splitting, a new world for every possibility. Every time a leaf falls one way but could have fallen another, a new universe is made. Too much. If he lets the worlds continue like this, he will drown in that infinite sea. He is a constant. The universe isn’t.
His only option is to change that.
Fortunately for him, the cause of the problem is also the solution.
---
Knowledge is power. It only stands to reason, then, that a man possessing an endless wealth of knowledge would have little trouble taking over the world.
And he doesn’t. On the contrary, it’s almost too easy at times. It’s easy enough to assemble a puzzle if you know where all the pieces fit, and Byakuran is happily gifted with the ability to see the entire picture. He knows who to manipulate, who to tempt to his side, and who to eliminate altogether. He knows where to strike, when to do it, and how to attack. He knows when to intervene, and when to sit back and watch his enemies destroy themselves. He can predict things before they happen, because there’s always another world where they already have. Again and again, he maneuvers his way to the front of the stage.
A world under his rule is a world he can control. And once he has control, he can manipulate things exactly to his liking. Arrange things over and over again so that they are the same. So that they, too, become constants.
And slowly but surely, things start to become muted. Once a world is his, it ceases to be of any importance, and he can shift his focus to the next world, and the next. That which is conquered fades into the background, taking its noise with it. And each time, he feels something closer and closer to relief.
He has no remorse over any of this. There’s no need, because after all, everything he does is ultimately negated by some other, opposite universe. People live, and those same people die. That woman in the Gucci shoes has no idea that the choices she didn’t make led to her death. Nor is the dead woman really, truly dead. Whether she lives or dies doesn’t matter, because she exists, again and again.
In fact, one could argue that that’s the whole problem.
---
He no longer recalls when he first heard the legend of the 7^3. No longer recalls when he first discovered the legend was not just a legend, either. What he does remember is the feeling of excitement he had when he first realized that all of the worlds, every single one of them, had a single, tangible source, a lone foundation on which they had all been built. Another constant.
He remembers, also, the spark of desperate longing that was ignited when he realized that the very same force that had created the universe could also be used to bring about its undoing.
It is not madness which fuels his need to destroy the cosmos. It is a very lucid desire to not only mute the noise, but finally wipe it out, once and for all. No more paradoxes. No more contradictions. Just oblivion. Blessed silence, forever.
That desire is what spurs him on, giving him the will to keep consuming the knowledge of worlds, to force his mind to sort and remember and forget. He can push on past the endless whirling feedback because he has a goal in sight: to turn everything into nothing.
And it’s not easy, of course. None of it. A lesser man would have been driven insane long ago.
But after all, Byakuran is not just a mere man.
He’s a God.
I was trying to work on my fics for khrfest, and somehow I ended up writing this instead. XD
...soooo, that Byakuran. What a crazy guy, huh.