Snippet #1687240

He followed in the wake of his Father, and perhaps wake was the most appropriate designation for his place. Behind, but with the slightest implication of death and decay. Mourners hold a wake because they are left in one, he walks in a wake because he can be nowhere else. His footsteps are not poetry on pavement, unless silence is a poetry all its own. Ghasts flitting about after the lord of the damned should not strive to themselves command the attention of the unfortunates he stops to greet, the pained wailing souls whose cheeks he brushes with slickly-pale fingers. They should merely wait to be given command, and perhaps somewhere, in their secret little ghost-hearts, be glad that they are not treated so.

Looked at another way, he supposes that perhaps they are the really despicable ones. The harbinger does not choose the arrival he heralds, after all, but Vincent is unwilling to concede that the Father did not choose this in some sense. There is always a choice, even if it be just the one between doing your job well and doing it badly. Here, they have made the same choice, and the success of their endeavors makes it obvious which it is. The drive to excel, to succeed, exists independently of the morality of things, and some would rather be an exemplar of wickedness than a two-bit hero. He, he supposes, must be among them, else why would he insist on executing his tasks and targets with equal, exacting precision?

At least he does not pretend he does good. He does not pretend to know what good is, either. In the grand scheme of the universe, what gives one mortal being the right to decide such things? Naught but arrogance, and of this he possesses surprisingly little. One might expect that the striving, the position, the company would compel him to the very heights of foolish pride, but it does not. If Vincent falls, he will do it quietly, unobtrusively, and so very well, as he does everything else. He is not so self-centered as to believe he needs a stage or an audience to do it.

The Father is different, and it is easy to tell. The way he speaks alone is enough. The words are not from one man for his own reference, nor the knowledge of his followers. They are words the Cruzzola have heard before; there is nothing new about them save perhaps the exact formation in which they are passed from throat over lips to the space in which they subsist for a moment longer. And in this moment, Vincent comes to a realization: the Father is dependent. Upon them to listen and reaffirm, yes, but most of all upon Nike to stand in opposition to him. He is not a pillar but a parasite, and if that logic holds, then she off him as well.

It is troubling, in a way, to finally put to words that feeling. Even the Father needs something, needs someone, and thus perhaps it must be the case that Vincent is dependent also. But upon what, whom? He has never known the feeling of attachment; if everyone he had ever known were to drop dead this very moment, he knew quite well that he would not grieve, not in the truest sense of the word. A common feature of everything, of humanity and the Cruzzola and the Descendants alike, and yet he could not self-identify as having it. What did such a thing mean?

He meets that father's eyes through his shaded ones, and though the familiar unease of childhood torment bubbles to the surface of his mind, it is attached no longer to deep fears and resentments. Because the Father is dependent, the Father needs and requires and desires and feels, and Vincent does none of these things.

But what, what could that possibly imply?