[ ] "I choose to live. I choose pain, and death, and tragedy. I choose bloody hands and the possibility of making everything worse. I choose the Ascension War. I choose understanding what I am and what the hard truth is. I choose seeing the people I love and care for die. I choose loyalty to people who will disappoint me. I choose this knowing that eventually I'm going to be back here again and I won't have this choice."
----
He's still lying there, dying, when the dragon's chest starts to rise. From inside the hole he speared into the great newt's chest, John can see its fiery breath build up. Flames lick out of the wound, past its own fang, and the dragon sputter-coughs in agony. Not mortal agony, but true agony, more than any one man should have been able to inflict on it.
It totters sideways for a second before steadying itself, eyes blazing with fury, for another attempt to incinerate him.
[TIME TO TERMINATION: FOUR SECONDS] the
Noble November suit unhelpfully adds.
But here, now, lying shattered, broken and dying before the thing he was always meant to fight, John Kessler finally finds the strength to question himself.
--
"Hey. Sarge." Fitzsimmons looks from where he's perched on the torn-off dragon's wing, picking at the membrane. "Before I answer your second question, tell me something, and be honest with me. Don't I
deserve this?" Here, now, no matter how badly wounded he is, speech is not - and could never be - a problem.
His old uniform crinkling, Sergeant Fitzsimmons straightens up. "Well, John, that depends. There's some things you deserve for what you did, and some things for what you didn't do, and, right now, some things you deserve that some people never get." Fitzsimmons' eyes are without mercy. "Like the choice before you."
Kessler groans, his tertiary lung deflating in the process. "Damn it, you know what I mean.
You out of everyone know what I mean. Don't I deserve this? There's not going to be a better death for me out there. No matter where I go, or what I do.
This is it. They will remember John Kessler." He nods at the gaping wounds in the dragon's invincibly armored hide. "They'll remember that one man stood against a beast like that,
and made it bleed. They'll remember me as a
hero. Goddamn it, Sarge, after all I've done, don't I deserve this?"
Sergeant Fitzsimmons ducks beneath the singular remaining wing, flapping as the ur-dragon tries to stabilize itself - difficult, with a third of its tail and one of its wings torn off. He waves his hands at John Kessler of the Iteration X Shock Corps, swaggering in superheavy PALADIN assault armor with a heavy particle lance in one hand as he treads the remains of the Reality Deviants he particle-lanced in half under his boots. "
Bellator In Machina! Death to Reality Deviance!" the John-that-was shouts before freezing in mid-stride, the hellish light of his lance frozen a handbreadth away from the huddled, weeping hermetic. "You were the
Ultimate Soldier, John. Free of doubt, of emotion. You call out the boss on her legacy of bloodshed while standing knee-high in the blood of the dead."
Fitzsimmons circles around him. Behind the dragon, John sees the catastrophic crash onto Xanadu in the thousand-thousand segmented glass windows of the highrise tower. Each window stills at a different frame of the past. There, he scavenges from the dead, replacing parts of himself with machines that
should not have worked nearly as well as they do. On the third, he kneels before the first cyber-dragon he had slain, sawing the beast's chest open with its own claws, before devouring the beast's biomechanical heart, half-mad with thirst and hunger. On the sixth window, John sees himself bury a lost traveller, innocent and unknowing in their trespass to a realm of extasy and danger. He knows the story that follows. He hunted. He learned. He slew them. Never lying down, never giving up, even when he had to salvage a crashed Void Engineer ship and sweet-talk their food extruder to play nice with the rest of his gastral bionics. "But then, you start ignoring all that. The moment you're on your own, the moment you stand there on the precipice of death, you fight and you struggle and you
survive. No matter the cost."
John grins. Oh, those were the times. A fight to the death just to survive, all day, every day. "Yeah. But what should I've done? Just lie down, waiting to die? I couldn't do that. I had to survive, I
had to go back. There were battles to be fought." A twitch of the head at the dragon overhead, frozen in this timeless perception of the moment.
Sternly, the Sergeant points to the burning, glowing primium god-form of young Henriette, both hands skywards as she roars her final victory. "And yet, when that god-machine rose," and here, now, John can truly understand the dual truth god-like spirit and transcendent machine, "you knelt, and you worshipped, with your skin flaking away and your muscles seizing up. And before you did that, you could have had the fight you so desperately sought. You could have called the Dragonslayer, all of it, in the ultimate defence of humanity against the cold dark of your ideals gone bad."
John groans as the pain of understanding - so much worse than the mere physical agony of a savaged body - starts to seep into him. "But I didn't, Sarge, aye." He raises his eyes to Hollywood's menacing representation of the white-plated machine-god howling above the wormhole in the Umbra, and the half-dozen gun-bristling kill-sats. "After all, 'call down a god-spirit in view of the Void Engineers and get bzorted out of existence by the OMEN network' wouldn't have been an inspiring final chapter to the tale of John Kessler." He grimaces again as life's little lies ablate away under the fire of truth. "And yeah, part of me wants that peace. I'm tired. Tired of the lies, and the paranoia, and the uncertainty, and maybe even the fighting. That part definitely misses the old days, the certainty, the primium boot on the throat of 'Reality Deviants'. That part of me wants nothing to do with accepting that all these views of reality are true. Even the Nu-Woo." He flexes a hand with what little energy he has in his tertiary reserve batteries.
Above, the dragon continues to gather hellfire in its maw for a heartbeat. Sergeant Fitzsimmons stands there, eyes narrowed, arms folded over his chest, silently staring and judging.
"But the rest of me..." John sighs. "The rest of me remembers. All my life I've chosen strength and sacrifice. First for the Union. Then for the Computer." He's talking to himself now, faster, more intent, racing along the paths of his thoughts as fast as he can. "And then," he adds grimly, "for myself. An old hero, battered and worn, fighting an impossible fight, dying an awesome death to enter the legend of the heroes of yore." He shakes his head, power surging through his battered body, and with a groan pushes himself into a sitting position. "But that ain't enough in this world."
Haemolubricant oozing from more wounds than anyone has a right to survive, Sergeant Kessler meets the judging stare of Sergeant Fitzsimmons."But you asked me a question. So have my answer. I choose to live."
Fiber-muscle replacement coils under shredded skin. "I choose to accept the blood on my boots, spilled in the past, and the blood on my hands, yet to be spilled."
Primium-replacement fingertip bones dig into the asphalt beneath torn synthflesh. "I accept that I might make things worse."
One leg twitches, and with a grunt he pops the dislocated joint back into its socket. "And that those around me will never live up to the perfect ideal."
His primary lungs hiss through the claw-rend in his chest as he levers himself to his knees. "I choose the war for Ascension, for humanity's beliefs, and the possibility that I might lose."
His right arm hangs slack, too damaged to be of use - except as a counterweight. "And I *know* myself for who I am, for what I am."
John Kessler plants both feet on the ground. "And in *knowing* that, I accept that I will be back here, one day, bleeding and dying, without getting to make this choice."
His eyes glow ruby-red, reflecting off the dragon's heartscales. "Death is lighter than a feather. Duty is heavier than a mountain. And I will carry my part of that load until my dying day. I am John Kessler, son of humanity, and I
refuse the bliss of ignorance."
