[Notes] TST!Uni: One pierced moment whiter than the rest

Jul 13, 2009 10:41

I think if someone were to tell me that I was doing Uni -- either in Amat or in TST -- wrong, I'd be inclined to agree. And then ask, "So how do you do her right?"

It's a question I've been thinking of for months now, and I still don't have any real answers. But for now: this is how I play her in TST.


For all that she's essentially an original character with a set history -- owing both to lack of canon and the vagueness of the canon we do have, which gives rise to a lot of equally valid theories on who she really is, her role in the Millefiore, and who she is going to be -- I actually find TST!Uni very easy to play. Of course, the points for comparison (Milady, aka seductress/spy/assassin/The Woman Who Will Ruin Your Life, and... well, Aizen is Aizen) don't lend themselves that much to carefree playing, either, but with Uni there's a sort of effortlessness that lends itself very, very well to whatever I want to do with her.

It's not because she's passive; in fact, that's actually a difficulty I keep having to work through when it comes to plots. And it's not because she seems to have lost her will. (Pre-Byakuran Uni was very strong-willed, but right now -- there's something missing. The initiative, the spark, the catalyst to force her out of her inertia. Still, the will is there. She's not frozen into place.)

But rather it's because of how accepting she is of things as they come. How she will give the other person what he or she wants because that's what she's been trained to do, that's how she was broken; because her orders require her to do everything well and thus she will, even though sometimes she doesn't quite see why. And also because of where she is. Right now she's at a crossroads, an instrument lacking instructions, and that's the most dangerous time for someone who considers herself a vessel of another's will the way Uni does: because in the absence of direction she can either hold on to stasis for as long as she can or-- let circumstance or her own choice move her.

And it's the latter that's so frightening for her; because a girl like Uni is defined by two things: death and choice. Her mother's death set her on this path, and until now that shadow hangs over her: having to be the reflection of a woman who was beautiful and brave and above all strong, strong enough to handle all that power and keep Giglionero Corp. together despite outside pressure and troubled times. And, in a way, that began the pattern of Uni basing her identity not on who she really is but on who she has to be for the moment: the daughter of a dead woman, the Giglio Nero heir, the black queen on Byakuran's chessboard, the healer of the Fiertia. She is someone caught in the trap of thinking that what she does is who she is, and so her sense of self is perpetually in flux.

Then: choice. Uni did not go to that meeting with Byakuran because there was nothing else she could do: she chose it. The possible motivations for that choice are manifold, but for TST I'm playing her as someone who chose that meeting out of her desire to do her duty, first and foremost of which was to protect the people under her charge. And I think, even then, she knew that there was a possibility that she would be asked to pay an immeasurable price -- but she did it anyway. Uni did not go into that room blind. She entered it knowing full well that the only sacrifice that would be sufficient to guarantee the lives and security of her people would be her own life. And with it, the power to decide for herself what she was going to do; that final choice was a choice to give up choosing.

Which brings us now to the question of Uni and Byakuran's relationship. She doesn't love or adore him; her devotion is too pure and disinterested for that. Instead she considers herself his the way the people serving the Giglio Nero family are hers: she belongs wherever he wishes her to be. She will be whatever he needs her to be. He has taken her up and remade her, and the creation can never erase the marks of her creator. It's a connection that has long transcended questions of coercion or power. Byakuran may have broken Uni, enough that the cracks on her psyche linger and fracture her way of looking at the world, but the initial surrender, the offering of herself to him, began with her and was made freely. Willingly.

So who is Uni now? No longer entirely part of the world she left behind, but not quite part of Byakuran's Millefiore either; she is a girl in between existences and identities, someone who could be a weapon or a savior or a tool. She switches voices and lines of thought between one spoken word and another. She's as much a vanished princess as she is a damsel in distress, as much a healer as the sort of woman who would order a man's death without batting an eyelash. Uni doesn't concern herself with ideals or morals, not anymore. Her only focus now is to serve and to protect what is hers.

Which she does with a cool, calm efficiency that would probably surprise those who dismiss her as a quiet, harmless person content to stay in the background. As soon as she knows what direction she must take, she moves with all the swiftness and grace one would expect of a girl who has spent her life training to do everything she needed to do -- whether to give a business order, save a life, or poison a target -- as finely and as precisely as possible. It's not speed that is Uni's major hindrance, really, but inertia; this is, after all, a healer who has never lost a patient but is the same person who sent several people to their deaths by the careful administration of the right poison at the right time. She has no problem moving when she needs to. All she has to do is follow her orders and establish or maintain her place amid Byakuran's schemes.

Oddly enough, her time on the Fiertia is making this very difficult for her. Uni is a girl who lives half in the future and half in the past. She inhabits silences the way other people inhabit rooms; she is quiet because she is always haunted by the voices of ghosts and the people she has left behind. So all this movement and energy -- and more than that, the bonds people are persistently forging with her -- is shattering that tenuous equilibrium. She's given up her life. It's not hers any longer. But these people make her want to take it back and live.

Yet what is life to one so empty? To decide to live is an act of reclamation, to claim the rights and responsibilities and authority she's discarded; to once again take on the burden of those lives. But more than that, to claim herself, to renew her independence and her ascendancy over her own choices -- something so many people ordinarily take for granted but which is to her as rare and unthinkable as exchanging air for water to breathe in. To lay hold of these things she has surrendered, to fill herself again with them, to relearn the daily exercise of hurting and risking and choosing. To learn to feel for one's own sake and not for any other's.

Because Uni... doesn't feel. Not the way other people do. She is no machine, no emotionless construct, but feelings are oddly muted: she experiences everything as if through a layer of thick, unbreakable glass. She is removed from many things by the distance she keeps between herself and others; she's always conscious of that, even if she is being kind or warm or friendly or whatever it's called by others' standards. It's a mechanism for self-preservation because if she allowed herself to feel the guilt over that one fatal choice would slowly drive her mad -- yet it's a kind of cowardice, too. Far easier to execute the bidding of one's master when one feels nothing for other people. Far easier to live without guilt when one is removed from whatever pain is suffered by a man one once loved.

Just as Uni doesn't feel, she doesn't want. Not happiness or freedom or hope; why waste time in wishing for impossible things, after all, and why expose oneself to even more pain? Desire is not something she's immune to, much as she would like to be, but she's had years of practice in the suppressal of it. She doesn't want things for her own sake, but for her master's sake; this is what makes her devotion so pure, what preserves the delicacy of her edge. A weapon that does not indulge in its own wants is capable of the kind of focus that lets it do anything -- and Uni is very nearly at that point. Above skill or subtlety or silence or solitude, it's single-mindedness that makes her so dangerous an instrument.

Because she is an instrument, a weapon, and although the question of whether she is evil in and of herself is debatable, there's no doubt that she'd allow herself to be used for any kind of purpose, evil included. The old moral code by which she used to live had to be excised after the making of that one choice. A hidden part of the bargain. How does anyone, after all, choose to serve Byakuran and still hope to retain any sort of innocence? Uni's answer to that is apathy, indifference: she avoids the immoral by taking refuge in amorality. The only redeeming thing here -- if you could call it that -- is that even after everything there is no malice in her actions. Even when she kills it is an act of service.

This side of Uni is something I haven't had much occasion to use in my TST logs so far. Which is, well, a bit of a relief I think, but it's also something I'd like to explore at a future date, just as I'd like to explore the side of her that has spent years healing people without ever letting go of a single life. There's skill there, a gift born of the grace of her lineage and the thoroughness of Byakuran's reshaping of her psyche, but it's not something that would be very easy to show in logs without risking a mistake or two or three or four... She does have quite an array of gifts, if only she had reason to use them. Or maybe I just want to see someone shatter all these restraints she's placed on herself, these seals limiting how she moves and feels and breathes; but then that's something entirely dependent, I think, on how things progress with the relationships she's managed to somehow stumble into on the Fiertia. I'm not including people from other ships for now, because I'll need to wait for the results of race and post-race logs for those.

Relationships, etc.

A work perpetually in progress.

Yuri Lowell.
Out of all the (admittedly confusing) people aboard the Fiertia, Yuri's the one who confuses Uni most. It's not just the refusal to be called sir or the little not-even-nice gestures that fluster her the way a thousand compliments from a thousand nice young men never could have, but--

What is she supposed to do with him, really? All she knows is that she's there to watch the Fiertia, and she supposes this extends to its captain. It would be very nice if she could avoid him, since he persists in breaking down and shattering all the neat little classifications that have previously formed the basis of her professional relationships. For the sake of her own peace of mind, if nothing else; because when it comes right down to it, Yuri is someone who's been confronted by the corruption in the system, just as she was, but instead of breaking or folding he chose to fight. Which is not something Uni did (or could have done, she tells herself, because the idea that she could have fought but didn't might just break her again) but -- the fact that he did it is already noteworthy in itself.

If she were the old Uni she would have applauded him, probably even helped him. But she isn't, which is why she tries to maintain her distance. Someone like that just might be capable of forcing her to confront things she would really rather not examine. Right now he's her opposite in ways that go beyond the superficial differences in class and manner in bearing. He's impulse where she is all about control and restraint, fire where she tries to be ice. And he is real, real, in a way Uni with all her beautifully calm masks and illusions and carefully constructed facades can never be. The only thing that can break a mirror: substance.

It bears mentioning that if Byakuran ever ordered her outright to kill this man Uni would most likely sabotage her own attempt, even at the risk of discovery, rather than actually go through with it. I'm not sure if this should be as reassuring as it is.

Sebastian Michaelis.
As much as Uni is capable of trusting, she trusts Sebastian. This is something that goes past her appreciation for his gentleness and courtesy and kindness, the certain consideration he shows her by overlooking the inconsistencies in her presence aboard the Fiertia, the way they can speak in the vague, polite language of Bellcius's upper crust as if each word were articulated in code. Those are the things that make her smile, that allow her some sort of warmth or ease whenever she is with him. But they are the rays of her regard, not its origin.

Rather, this: she trusts him because she knows that he is capable of anything if it is necessary. Oddly enough what others may perceive as ruthlessness she sees as a foundation true and strong enough to rest the precarious balance that is her existence on it. If what is needful happens to be cruel, then so be it: but having both the capacity and the willingness to cut through all extraneous circumstances in order to accomplish what must be done, at the cost of life or heart or morals -- it is a rare gift, more curse than blessing, and a deadly one. Uni has had only a few years to accustom herself to its weight, but she knows enough to recognize someone who bears the same burden. Only -- Sebastian carries it so lightly.

He is not the person on the Fiertia Uni considers herself most connected to, at least when it comes to that strange thing called human emotion. If it comes to languages she thinks Souji's silences are more akin to the voiceless secrets in her mind than Sebastian's delicately expressed refinement. But in case of extreme circumstances or emergency he is the only one, so far, she would willingly turn to for help. He's the only one she would ever willingly expose a part of herself -- unmasked, poison-edged -- to. She thinks, sometimes, that he's the only one who would be able to stand such a revelation without flinching or encouraging that poison. He's the only one who would remain unmoved.

Shion Sonozaki.
One connection I haven't had the opportunity to explore yet but would really like to see in the near future: the resonance Shion's every little expression of devotion or adoration for Yuri causes in Uni's mind. Not because she's interested in the captain herself (it will be impossible to get her to admit anything, not that there is anything to admit, really) but because she knows only all too well what it's like to be utterly devoted to someone else, to surrender one's heart to the mastery of another's hands, and though she believes that she did what she did in full awareness of the possible consequences she's not sure whether Shion's sight is similarly unhindered.

Sympathy is a very rare thing for Uni, but it's all the more genuine because of its rarity. In her mind Byakuran is less a person and more a higher power, an embodiment of an ideal of perfection and purpose, and thus her continued submission to him is like that of a virgin priestess or a sacrifice being led to the altar. But Yuri -- Yuri is human, flawed, full of emotion and reckless daring, so she doesn't quite know whether he'll be as careful or as infallible with Shion. And if Shion breaks, what then? It's not a very good idea, Uni would say (if she could), to entrust oneself so completely to another. This phenomenon called love -- it's merely another form of poison.

I find it interesting how the reaction crazy!Shion provoked in Uni wasn't shock or fear or any sort of repulsion. Instead it was understanding. Grim acknowledgment. Uni's speech patterns are generally a good indication of her regard for a person, though they're often very hard to interpret; I notice that while speaking to Shion in all her terrible, insane glory Uni is very calm, very matter-of-fact, and oddly respectful. The way she would talk to an equal or an opponent. Strange, isn't it? And that is I think perhaps the most important indication that Uni's begun caring about what happens to this person, because no matter what state Shion is in Uni will find it impossible to be indifferent to her. There are too many echoes for her to ignore.

Souji Seta.
If Uni were any other girl and Souji were any other boy I think it would be obvious to everyone else that she has a crush on him. However, Uni is Uni and Souji is Souji, so not only is she entirely ignorant of the likelihood of her being attracted to him, this hypothetical attraction is something that will annihilate itself the moment it comes into existence.

Because he's -- too much like her, in a certain sense, for anything to come of it. The mindsets that frame their ways of looking at the world or dealing with people are completely different and yet eeriely similar. Both of them are, after all, essentially lonely people: but while Uni armors herself in that isolation Souji reaches out of it in an effort to fill that emptiness -- and it's something Uni can't manage but at the same time can't help standing in awe of. If only because he somehow succeeds. If only because reaching out requires a courage that transcends the constancy of solitude.

So there's a certain kind of kinship there, enough affection to be visible, and because (or maybe, despite) of it Uni has a belief in Souji that will not be shaken. She will do her best to find meaning and substance and truth in his words not because of what they are, but because of who he is. Oddly enough while Uni is very conscious of the weight her trust places on Sebastian's shoulders she is totally oblivious to the fact that her faith in Souji is also a burden of a sort. Maybe because she doesn't think her faith matters -- it's only what she believes, after all, and that is something as light and insignificant as a feather placed on a balance, weighed against a heart.

Gilbert Weillschmidt.
Probably one of the strangest connections Uni has somehow stumbled into during her time aboard the Fiertia. Uni regards Gilbert with a mixture of dread, subdued horror, and barely concealed dismay, but I think if she were a little more honest with herself she'd find that there's actually affection for the man mixed in there somewhere. A fondness that means she'd go to the effort of finding syringes that don't look quite as intimidating as her present ones, just for him. Or that he's the only member of the crew she could deliberately, consciously, inflict some form of suffering on without feeling a trace of guilt. I promise this is not as horrible as it sounds, since by "suffering" Uni usually means "being ordered around by her".

But it's funny, how human she is around him. By human I mean -- well -- less cool and calm and more easily irritated and capable of humor, morbid and twisted as Uni's particular brand of humor may be. Part of it is an effort not to be overwhelmed by all that bluster, true, but there's also a part of it that's half-horrified and half-amused by the sheer... straightforwardness of Gilbert's cheerful insanity. She can't deny him if the request is outside her jurisdiction -- she's too conscious of his superior rank for that -- but while she may sigh a thousand long-suffering sighs she doesn't actually find him as burdensome a companion as she might pretend. And that in itself is pretty surprising; that Gilbert can get even Uni to exaggerate. Granted, Uni exaggerates her resignation and her "do not want", so I'm not sure that's a good thing, but still. It's something, especially if you're talking about a girl who can declare death sentences or congratulations in the same indifferent tone.

Also, if I remember correctly Gilbert was the one who made Uni laugh -- real laughter, not the sort of artificial, polite giggle she learned during her time in Bellcius -- for the first time in over a year.

Gilbert is Uni's favorite patient. In the sense that she is his favorite doctor, of course.

Headcanon and other assorted things

Things I might or might not use but remain part of my headcanon Uni anyway. Just TST-verse. These would be awful if they weren't in an AU setting.


The last person Uni has killed (as of this writing) was a young boy, the scion of a very influential family, she had brought back from the brink of fever only a week or so before his death. The boy was very taken with her and -- quite uncharacteristically -- she often passed her time by his sickbed telling him stories. When Byakuran ordered her to kill him to ease his acquisition of a certain company Uni was unable to reply with a confirmation message for over a day, the first time she had allowed such a delay. She eventually did it some time after the boy recovered by giving him a sweet-smelling "medicine" that, exactly thirty-six hours after it had been ingested, caused severe hallucinations in the victim. The boy climbed over a railing and jumped from an airship several thousand feet in the air before anyone -- it was past midnight at the time -- could stop him. This incident was also the last time Uni wept. Tsuna, when he was still in the game, reminded her so much of the boy she could hardly stand it.

Uni's first time was with a young man who belonged to one of Bellcius' major political clans; his family had been plotting for years to forge an eventual marriage alliance before Uni simply... disappeared. Byakuran was in the room watching, and as soon as the act was over he went over to the bed and ran the young man through with a sword while calling for servants to whisk Uni away and get her cleaned up. Uni thinks the young man died, but he's quite alive, although he has managed to rewrite his memory of that night as one in which Uni was utterly lovely, utterly charming, and making love to her did not involve any sort of stabbing. He might still be a little in love with her, who knows? It's a moot point, in any case, as he found another girl to marry. Uni on the other hand has allowed herself to be used time and time again in all sorts of entrapments, but as her skill with drugs and assorted substances grew these little trysts often ended with the other person dead, disabled, or unconscious before he (or she, as the case may be) could lay a finger on her.

Uni's weaknesses in physical terms: piercing eyes, intense expressions, callused hands. In emotional terms: the passionate, the headstrong, the sincere, the very foolish and the very brave; someone who will tell her the truth instead of what she wants to hear; someone who can convince her on a course of action not by coercion or dominance but through fire and will alone. In mental terms: clarity, truth. We note that these are characteristics that do not belong to Byakuran. Rather, they're taken from another person: Gamma.

And speaking of Gamma: I think Uni did genuinely love him and if she had stayed there might have been something, eventually, between the two of them. But at the same time, I think she chose duty over love and as a result had to sacrifice him in order to protect him, because it's true that nearness to her in her current state is dangerous in more ways than one. At the slightest sign of affection for him, or the wavering of her resolve to lead a life separate from the traditions of the Giglio Nero, she knows he'd be the first to pay the price. She doesn't love him anymore; she thinks of him very often, but no longer with yearning. She's learned to stop hoping for something she cannot have. Only resignation and a wish, unvoiced, that he'd somehow find his happiness elsewhere. She knows it's impossible for him to do that. But she would rather have him forget her and be happy than remember her and keep on waiting for her return.

notes: & relationships, * mia, setting: tides-verse, notes: character teal deer, character: uni giglio nero

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