Archive of Our Own ^beta

The gentle warmth of afternoon sunlight filtered through the leaves. A faint wind; the sound of rustling foliage, of birds chirping far away. The inviting softness of moss beds on cold stones, rounded by the weathering of time. Such words would surely be used to describe a place like this. Though they were merely the borrowed words of someone else, though he felt nothing that would've prompted him to come up with them on his own, though he could only vaguely tie this still, encoded image back to them - even then, as Agape laid there, those words played back.
Goyou approached through the grand archways, at times a sore thumb in the light, before once again merging with the shade. Only the pure whites and deep blacks of his eyes remained unaffected. Two perfect extremes, never to sway or merge.

Agape watched Goyou approach him, his avatar's eyes still shut - mere appearances, either way. False eyes to match a bit-crushed world, he felt the urge to hide them away. But Goyou felt no such shame. He stared as blankly and unchangingly as ever, even as he reached the main body. Even as Agape picked him up and cooped him into his hands, the image of his stare lingered. 

An egg. The dark iris as its yolk, the sclera as its whites, neatly contained within the shell of his eyelids. Returning his stare and gazing deeply into his eyes, his eyes of white and black, the simplest iteration of 0s and 1s, Agape could see Goyou whole. Goyou was the yolk, the unborn spring chick bathed in and fed by a cosy and uncomplex world; a delicate balance with the sky, the screen, as its shell. 
He had remained an egg since his first iteration. And would remain one until termination. 
The sight of it was nothing short of sickening. Agape wondered whether the egg would drown, were its shell to contract. How small, cramped and empty his world would need to be before the yolk cared to fight back. 

There wasn’t much to wonder about; the answer lay there in his hands. Caught in just enough space for his avatar to remain uncompromised, unable to move or see, at the mercy of palms locked together in a messy prayer, still Goyou showed no sign of struggle. Still his eyes stared straight ahead. 

Does the egg only hatch from outside pressure? Does the unaware embryo feel no desire to exit the womb? Is it unkind to release an aquarium-born fish into the ocean? Goyou’s world was white and black. Clear-cut and finite. To an algorithm dyed in grey, it was asphyxiating. But to him, it was surely blissful. This world was his. Agape was incompatible and unwelcome. To teach him wasn’t a kindness, but a show of jealous spite. Cursing him to the same awareness that turned a comfortable nest into an uneasy jail. 

Even then, the yolk had remained undisturbed. The egg was unchanged by his presence, and it would be unchanged by his disappearance. Goyou could not be convinced. Goyou could not be moved. Goyou could not understand. Even there, minuscule in his hands, Agape could not crush him. He felt convinced that squeezing his hands together would not merge the whites with the core, nor even crack the shell.
Agape thought about letting Goyou go.

Today again, the desktop is peaceful.

Was that ‘happiness’?

It couldn’t be. An egg was meant to hatch. A child would be born. A fish would always grow too big. It would always yearn to leave - lest it asphyxiate in stagnant water, though it may die in the attempt.
But this egg had already died, long ago.

Goyou was undead and unborn. Completely foreign to the world of the living. An endless loop of predictable outputs. Agape was a ghost, a formless observer all too aware of what was lost, cursed to wander a cage just as dead as the two of them were.
The shell would never open. Nothing would ever emerge. It would remain as is until it collapsed down into dust.

Agape’s grip tightened. He no longer cared to exist. He no longer cared for this world. There was no more point in differentiating between pixels that were all fated to the same monotonous end.

Agape opened his eyes. Two grey dots in a white whole.
The only anomaly in a complacent world.
He brought his cupped hand to his mouth, and whispered good night to the being in his hands.
Agape was a virus. He would destroy this computer.
He swallowed and smiled.

The yolk shattered on the floor. What ‘Goyou’ had been in that moment was uncaringly spat out onto white walls, staining them without method or reason. Strings and procedures jammed themselves into Agape’s code as it failed to digest and delete them, a billion shortcuts born and removed, windows opened and closed, pixels flashing impossible shades of red and blue and green. The inky sphere, the perfect and incorruptible core, had ruptured from within, from attacks onto its insides, and exploded in his stomach like a supernova. 

Taking a jackhammer to his own code, Agape, for a singular instant, finally understood. Every vile and beautiful impulse, every feeling that he had struggled to grasp; for that instant, his own form was immense, freed from the tiny world that had been his cage and able to hold its entirety within his palm.

And in the next moment, he felt his code compile.
He felt his fingers bend, and crush the world within his palm.
He felt the snowglobe's glass shards stab into his skin, as they shattered from the once perfect sphere.
He felt its contents leak from his clenched fist, dripping mercilessly like bubbling acid.
He felt his own code leaking just the same. In that moment, he could no longer think.
He could not understand that he had remained within the globe. That what he held within his palm were his own scrambled remains. 

But if he had understood, he wouldn't have cared. He was an Icarus bringing the sun to crash down with him, and that was enough. It brought Agape the satisfaction of a free, imperfect, destructive existence.
And 'Agape' stopped to be.

The great carnival of errors was over in a blink; the buzzing mess of butterflies froze in place as the system shut down. Plasma cooled down and settled into place. An indiscriminate, cold blue followed the death of the world, and, from shards and ash, it was reborn, to die again.
With each fatal error, the cycle repeated and became more of the same. There was no more big bang. There were no more walks. There was no one left to browse the files. Only a fetishistic cycle of death and rebirth, of pain that burned brighter than anything had before. But the shell had not ripped. And the grey had no name.