Night 64: West Wing, North Hall 1-A

[dualistic]

[From here.]

Along with his weapons and supplies, Harvey also had two other very important things with him, and he checked his pockets for them as he moved down the halls. First was his coin, which he wasn't surprised to find was there, as he couldn't think of a time when he'd let it be removed from his person. Second was the bracelet that the talking skeleton extraordinaire had given them. Forgetting the whole morbid quality of it, Harvey had to wonder if it could really be trusted.

On the other hand, Sangamon had made use of that ring and it had never come around to bite him, so maybe it was fine. Maybe every once in a while, this place actually made their lives easier rather than more difficult.

With the hall completely empty, Harvey didn't have to waste any time moving down it toward the meeting spot.

[To here.]

Comments

[maverickhunterx]

X stopped walking, allowing those words to sink in.

"...I was stripped of my position before that. My hubris allowed you and Neo Arcadia to fall into corrupt hands, and ultimately, I died a traitor to the dream you spent your life pursuing."

...A traitor.

Hubris, bad enough to warrant such a fate. Corruption...



"Come on, X! What are you waiting for? This is your chance! You can stop me, if you're willing to shoot through Zero to do it!"

"I...I...!"

"HAHAHAHA!! You can't, can you?!"



"...Hubris, huh?"



"X, wh-what did I...t-tell you...? A-always said t-t-to be more...c-careful..."

"Zero, hang on; don't try to talk! We'll get you back to Hunter Base. We'll fix you up."



Leaning against the wall, X appraised Harpuia silently. He didn't know him that well, nor did he know much of anything about this mysterious future that he had come from, but he knew regret when he heard it. He knew shame when he heard it.

Two things he wasn't exactly a stranger to.

"If it's not too much trouble to ask..."

"What did you do to warrant such a thing, Harpuia?" His tone wasn't accusatory, or even harsh. It was thoughtful, even...sad. "Maybe I assume too much, but I can't imagine that whatever it was, it was done intentionally."

Though it was true: the worst things could be done with the best intentions, or even with no intention at all. But all people could atone if they had the desire to. If they felt remorse, what was stopping anyone from giving them a second chance? Or at least allowing them the opportunity to make up for it, to set things as right as they could?

After all, X himself had so much he still needed to atone for. To be unforgiving to one remorseful person considering his own follies would be hypocritical and wrong.

[lovesthepain]

"My betrayal was very much intentional, Master X. I don't intend to make excuses for what I've done. It's not necessary for you to make any on my behalf, either."

How to explain all the errors he'd made, when X was still in the dark about so many things? Neo Arcadia, the Resistance, the Dark Elf, Omega and Dr. Weil... they wouldn't be much more to X than empty, confusing words. Attempting to explain them, too, would not only be incredibly time-consuming, but perhaps a little dangerous; X may have been optimistic, but Harpuia couldn't say with any certainty just what effect foreknowledge could have. He couldn't imagine that X would be able to shrug off finding out that his best friend was technically the enemy, he himself would end up dying at the hands of a power-crazed drone, and the paradise he would someday build would end up controlled by a madman.

"This is neither the time nor the place to delve into the details, though I don't believe I can give you a clear picture of my mistakes without them," Harpuia told X. "The simplest explanation I can afford for the time being is that while I lived, I was a very foolish reploid. I allowed pride to blind me, and you were the one who ultimately paid the price. I chose what was soothing over what was true, and it was that lie that paved an easy pathway for a sick and evil man to seize total control. I was complacent in dealing with the enemy, and that lead Master X to brand me unfit as a Guardian."

The beam of the flashlight dropped a few degrees; Harpuia bowed his head, diverting his eyes to the ground in front of them. "I became a traitor because I felt I could not forgive the one who controlled Neo Arcadia. I would like to think my motives were unselfish, but if I look at it honestly... I wonder if that's all there is to it. Everything I did was for the sake of humans. Even now, the ideal I believe in remains unchanged. Even if I say that, though... I had very little left to lose at that point. I no longer had a place within Neo Arcadia, and therefore no longer had a reason to exist. At the time, I wasn't sure if Fefnir and Leviathan would live or die, but even if they pulled through... I wouldn't have been surprised if Weil had found a reason to have us declared Maverick. He wasn't the type to be careless."

His walking had slowed a little. Harpuia went quiet, save for a funny little exhalation that... might have almost tried to be a laugh. Sort of. If laughing was even a thing Harpuia was capable of doing. "I'm being horribly morbid, aren't I? It's strange. I used to believe wholeheartedly that I was doing the right thing, but looking back... there's so little that I can be sure of anymore."

[maverickhunterx]

"No, you're fine."

Complacency leading to an evil man to seize total control. Harpuia had allowed pride and a lack of foresight to cause a great calamity to occur, and after losing his rank, had turned against the city that had shaped his entire existence in order to fight it.

A lot of what Harpuia had said was confusing, a bunch of words and concepts that were unknown and foreign to him from this mysterious future of his, but X gleaned that much.

And if some words were changed around ('pride' replaced by 'naivete', for instance), and some of the roles swapped...

That wasn't exactly the sort of nostalgia that X was expecting.

"Though I am confused about one thing: You called yourself a 'traitor' to my dream, and that after you were stripped of your position you turned against Neo Arcadia because of the evil man who had taken control of it. But how is turning against an evil person who was perverting Neo Arcadia being traitorous to the Dream that supported it?"

If he had been mentioning just the establishment, that would have been one thing, but...

Dreams were intangible things, made of beliefs and ideals. It was hardly something that would be concentrated on a single object, or all within the confines of a single city.

"You said you were prideful before, and that it was your complacency and inability to accept the truth that had allowed his rise to power in the first place and your loss of position. But regardless of whether or not your intentions were pure unselfishness or desperation, you still turned against it and stuck to your beliefs once you realized what was happening. You wanted to help Neo Arcadia and the humans who lived there, didn't you? You wanted to redeem yourself for the mistakes you made, maybe even fix them. At least, that's how it sounds to me, if you don't mind me saying so.

"You may have turned against the establishment of Neo Arcadia, but I don't think you turned against my dream. If that were the case, then wouldn't you have just sat around and let Neo Arcadia fall? You could have said 'well, this doesn't have anything to do with me anymore', and just went on with the knowledge that it was happening, but you didn't. You still did something."

If that was a laugh, then it was a humorless one.

"In your position, I probably would have done and felt similarly."

[lovesthepain]

Harpuia hadn't had much time to come to terms with the circumstances that had brought him to his death. Given the chance to repeat his last moments, he was sure he would have made the exact same choice. Even if it meant treason, he'd pursue the justice he believed in. Even if it was someone who he clashed with, he'd give his life to shield a person he believed in. His ideals were the only things he had left to hold onto -- all the rest had crumbled in his hands.

More than anything, he suspected, he just wanted to know that it had all meant something -- that even if the cause he'd fought for had been an illusion, his struggles had still done some good. To no longer be living was not such a crushing thing. Harpuia, after all, came from a society where even high-class custom models like him were considered some degree of expendable. To have lived in vain, though... that was the idea he was struggling with.

It may not have been a very significant remark to X, but hearing him say that he would have done the same in Harpuia's shoes struck deeper than he was willing to say. He wasn't so vain as to think himself the next Mega Man X or the inheritor of X's will, but "What would Master X have done?" was a question that had guided Harpuia's decisions many times in the past. His betrayal was still a shameful, disgraceful thing, but... if that was the same path that X himself would have taken, then Harpuia knew that it hadn't been a waste. Not just him -- Fefnir and Leviathan, wherever they were... they could all hold their heads high.

Harpuia came to an abrupt halt, head bowed, the flashlight's beam dropping all the way down to the ground at his side as his arm fell to his side. He'd always been the type of reploid to show the gravitas that suited a soldier. Sentiment had no place on the battlefield, after all. This, however, wasn't a battlefield; just for a quick moment, he'd let himself slip a little.

"...I think that was something I desperately needed to hear," he told X quietly.

[maverickhunterx]

Oh, Harpuia.

X didn't fully understand his circumstances. He didn't fully understand the things he was saying to him, and could only piece together Harpuia's circumstances in a patchwork piecemeal of events and ideas that sat in a very loose, coherent pattern.

But he understood enough. At least enough to feel a hard tug of sympathy for the man he was looking at now, slumped as though a great weight had just been lifted off of his shoulders for the first time.

X stepped forward.

One step. Two. Three.

Standing at Harpuia's side, X dared to place the hand without the glass shard in it on his companion's shoulder, giving it a squeeze (Wait, that was his injured hand, wasn't it? Ow, ow. Probably not the best of his ideas). Awkward, unsure, but still in hopes to be comforting all the same.

After all Harpuia had done for him so far, it was the absolute least he could do (and it wasn't exactly in his nature to ignore anyone's plight, regardless of how small or insignificant it was).

"I...I'm glad to have been of help."

He threw him an encouraging smile. If he needed to say more, X was willing to listen.