tushanshu | [video] the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner

[It's video, so it's clear that Dorian looks the same. Still the bright roses of youth on his cheek, still the crisp dark curls on his head. The candour of youth in his face, and 'youth's passionate purity' in his smile. To look at him, you'd think he had kept himself unspotted from the world—even if all that the blue smoke around him is from one of Lord Henry's opium-tainted cigarettes.

But that is the visual half of things. As for the audio half?]

1986. The summer. [For audio, there is something torn in that low and musical voice, something of electrohouse's wretched distortion ripping the guts out of the base and leaving the jagged beat in its wake.

Dorian laughs.] It was 1986, it was the summer, and Highlander came out for UK audiences. Crooned over scenes of loss, Freddie Mercury asks a question he'll never need to answer: "Who wants to live forever?" [The cigarette held away, conductor holding the note to let the question hang.]

[And callously, we're back.] Contemporary efforts in medicine might suggest 'just about everyone,' but in stories about immortals, the weariness is always more loss of people than loss of time. It's more that you're watching your granddaughter's funeral than it is that the shop beside the graveyard is a chain electronics place instead of the private member's club where you met her grandmother decades ago.

[Another drag of the cigarette. He is still smiling a pleasant, youthful smile.] But it occurred to me, speaking with Rebecca, that that sense of loss, of friendships brief as mayfly lives, is one we all get to share here. It's not a curse of immortality, something known only in a long term. It's frequent, repetitive, and to all intents and purposes, mundane. We foreigners just lose people, over and over and over and over, and there is never any resolution to any of it. Like the workroom of a perfectionist, it's a slaughterhouse of unfinished stories, and the corpses just keep piling up. Only corpses would give more closure than disappearances, and we aren't likely to be here ourselves by the time we can hold a funeral.

So we get used to it. We cope and we carry on. [Cigarette between his fingers, he gives a salute that somehow doesn't come across as sarcastic.] Congratulations on all the recent efforts, and good luck to everyone still with us in the future.

[Dorian holds up a mobile phone (circa 2007) with all lightness of touch and tone.] Does anyone have anything to for a mobile's battery? I left the charger in the 21st century, and I'd like to get my music off of this, but it gave out.

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[As strange as the voice is compared to the usual, Dorian understands that shift in voice very, very well. He's silent a while before answering.]

Is it better that it doesn't?

I don't know.

[He laughs faintly, a little weakly, and sighs.] I...really don't know.

Me either. [Dorian shakes his head, his laughter of the same species as Sei's.] Look at it this way: we have all the time in the world to work it out.

You know, I don't think that's actually comforting?

[He sighs. It's not meant to be an admonishment, just a helpless little plea to the cruel designs of fate.]

...Have you ever seen it? The...Outside of the world, I mean.

[Another genuine question, he's on a roll tonight.]

[There is a soft sigh.] I don't even know if our worlds have the same kind of Outside.

It would...depend, I guess. The way I learned it, the space in between all worlds is the same. You can...You can see everything. All realities, all at once, spanning as far as the stars in the sky but rushing in, because to stand in between them is to exist nowhere at all, and every world rushes to grab you and pull you into it's own...reality.

[He pauses, and sighs.] It was...it was a year, I am told, I spent outside in there. And not once did I see any flicker of a reality where anything...['Like me', he swallows, and quietly changes the end of that sentence.]

...Where longevity did not inevitably come with being alone.

[The words unspoken are still heard, and finally, here, with this boy he doesn't even particularly care for, his voice breaks:] He was supposed to be different. He was supposed to live forever. With me.

[Here, this boy he doesn't care for, a maddening man who thinks to know and judge Dorian—still, Sei is the one to whom he admits the pain. Who else is there? Everyone else who understands is gone. At least Sei knows what it's like to always be abandoned.]

...Ithuriel killed him to draw me out. Anna...[Sei hesitates...swallows. Equal for Equal; if Dorian has said it outright, then he must finish what he's started and the wound is raw and bleeding.]

She died rather than let me save her. I could have. I could have cleared her lungs of that blackness as easily as breathing out. I could have noticed Ithuriel sooner. I could have never come to New Orleans.

But I did, and they are dead, and I cannot ever understand what it's like to face down Death like the last stop at the end of the line because it has never been, and never will be.

[He understands Dorian. But for Sei it becomes clearer and clearer that Dorian cannot understand him.

Sei was never offered a choice. Sei doesn't have a way out. Dorian does, abysmal as it is, and they both know it.

There is no escaping the immortality he was born with, not for Sei.]

[Dorian doesn't offer banal sympathy. He just presses his head in his hands, and he breathes.]

I don't believe we're any good for each other, Sei.

I'm not much good for anyone, Dorian, and I never have been.

[He laughs kind of weakly.] I don't even know you well enough to bother disliking, I don't know why I'm...

[Why is he telling this to Dorian? Because there's no one else he could? Because Bryn or Will's pity or worse yet, revulsion, might actually hurt him? He doesn't know.]

Perhaps because we don't have much to lose, telling each other.

[He is just so, so tired.

After a moment, in a voice that wears both its ages, he says,] Do you ever wonder—I know there are things we can change. That we could lead better, happier lives than we have. It must be possible.

[Right?]

...I could rewrite the whole of reality, at home, at least. That...isn't really intact here, but...I suppose that would include writing my own happy ending.

[He goes quiet for a while, considering it. And in the end, he can only come to one conclusion.] But, I don't think I have a choice, not really. You still do. You're still---you're still human. Choice comes with humanity, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't.

I'm just a weapon that refused my purpose. In the end, it...doesn't really matter how I feel about that. My existence is defined, from the moment of conception, by what my father is and has done. Will do.

[Dorian's very quiet for a long time.]

There are, in the world, better people than I am—people who could answer that as it should be answered.

...It's not something I'd ever tell a good man. I've grown...tired of what things 'should' be, anyway.

What do you want, Sei?

[He hesitates, because he thinks of a thousand answers, none of which he can admit to Dorian. Instead, his tone becomes more neutral, more distant, when he finally does answer.]

...I know that you saw him there, in my memories. He asked me what my purpose was, if I were not the End, what possible reason I had to keep on living and fighting for a world that cared nothing for me. And she...she asked me what the point of human struggle was, if I could simple rewrite it all to be nothing.

...I suppose, if nothing else, I'd like to find an answer.

[For a moment, Dorian says nothing.

Then, quietly, simply, sincerely—] Good luck, Sei.

[video] the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner

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