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It doesn’t hit Noah until much, much later.
He’d seen Guernica’s wrinkles, of course, and had been as aghast as the others as he admitted to being sixty—a whole six times longer than Noah would ever get to live, but it doesn’t hit him how little time he has until he’s in the City. He watches people from all walks of life, all different ages, living out absurdly long lives where they live, die, and love at the mercy not of greedy Consuls or all-powerful Flame Clocks, but of their own volition. People here choose whether to fight or to live in peace and Noah wishes he’d been lucky enough not to be born in a cycle of senseless violence, but instead here, in the City, where he’d be allowed to be his own person. He wonders, then, would he have still fought in the conflict? Attempt to become an Ouroboros Candidate? Maybe even succeed? Or would he have dedicated himself to his music, providing for the City not in combat, but in the arts like so many people he sees?
Noah knows there’s no use in thinking of the what-ifs. The circumstances of his life are just that—circumstance. But Queen’s wings, if he isn’t jealous as all hell. He’ll never admit it out loud—just like none of the others will, this is their lot in life and they learned a long time ago to just accept it—but he wishes he’d gotten this life. He thinks back to the memories of the war he’d participated in out of necessity that torment him and wishes he’d been luckier.
But people here are disillusioned, he starts to realize. The people Monica had mentioned—those that wanted nothing more than to live their idyllic lives in peace, damn the soldiers of Keves and Agnus—make him indescribably angry. They don’t understand what the real world is like. How intense the violence, how bloody the carnage. Moebius feeds off of their lives and their souls in order to persist and how anyone, regardless of how far they are from the conflict, can ignore that baffles him. Though he (just up until two months ago, how time flies) was a central part of that conflict, he tries to rationalize how people can look at the war and still turn the other cheek. It baffles and infuriates him in equal measure.
Noah wants to live, he realizes. He wants to live a long, happy life where he isn’t shackled by terms and sucking the lives from others. He has a year left, but a year is such a scant number in the grand scheme of sixty of them. Maybe even seventy, or eighty. Ninety if he’s lucky. But he doesn’t get that much time. He has a year, and he has to make the most of it. And if he doesn’t make it…well, maybe some poor sap like him will come along and see off his husk, and then it’s back into the cycle with him.
He can’t imagine how Mio feels, only with a little over a month left and seeing lives that will persist beyond her own. Now he understands why Monica had the sad, pitying look in her eyes when she looked at them. They’re children to her—a ragtag team of children playing at soldier, slaughtering each other and killing to survive. How cruel, he thinks. How evil of a world it must be to make children into soldiers and use them as fodder to perpetuate an eternal war of Moebius’s own benefit. No wonder people look at them with so much pity. No wonder people looked at them with so much contempt. Who could condemn children to slaughter? What kind of child could kill another child?
It’s odd, looking at the war from such an outside lens now. On one hand, he cannot separate the part of him that is still Kevesi, the part of him that will always hold the memories of Crys and Joran’s smiles as they doomed themselves to premature death. The part of him that killed to live so the Flame Clock would be merciful enough to grant him another day. On the other hand, he is Ouroboros now. The war has a different feel to it now. He feels almost detached, like a member of the audience and it disgusts him to watch the conflict and the battles persist even after the havoc he and the others wrecked on the Flame Clocks of either side. He is both a part of the war and a spectator to it—a participant with only a year left on his clock.
How bitter. How cruel. How beautiful.
“Noah?” Mio calls and it takes Noah a moment to tear his eyes away from the City’s shopping center and the children playing in the fountain to look at her. Her voice is full of concern—he wonders just how long he’s been standing there. “Are you coming?”
“Yeah,” Noah’s mouth feels like it's packed full of cotton. He remembers there’s a job they have to do. A prison to break into and a daughter’s key to obtain before Mio’s time runs out. “Let’s hurry.”