sintruths ! !
he knows this face ( before the timelord god they stood, tasks given ) & how he’d ached — still aches — knowing that perhaps the recognition would be but on his own side. his task was to break the limits of time & space ; his companion sent to cause evolution. as if z - one knew ( of course he did, there was nothing that the timelord god could not see ) from the start the failure of the grand experiment. the loss of a friend. now, he knows not what name to address his friend as — & antinomy is his friend, dear to his human heart. dear to the artificial one. antinomy is his dear friend, but bruno is a stranger. two facts that cannot exist & yet here they stood. antinomy & paradox, survivors of the apocalypse with an unbreakable bond. bruno & elian, a pro duelist & a physicist who had never crossed paths.
❛ do you remember ? ❜ tentative, fearful of overstepping some bound. of breaking something, causing something irreversible ( he’d not worried about such things before ; why now ? ) — ❛ we’ve met before. once — ❜ spent years watching the world burn, but he would not say that. not without knowing — ❛ a while ago, though. i can’t fault you if you’ve forgotten. ❜
@acchro ( sc. )
there’s only pain in his heart when he sees the man, only agony which grasps at his chest like a vice with a feeling opposite of the pulling sensation experienced through the black hole. it squeezes breath out of him, destroys false lungs with flooded memories and fears which he’d assumed were once lost with the victory yusei had surely attained. that future which he’d hoped to release, to forget with this new life which he’d been blessed with... it stands before him with paradox --- with an individual whose name he’s not sure he can remember. perhaps once, he’d known it, but memories did fog when it came to a few things. it’d matter not, for the most important thing was that bruno knew.
demons haunting him make him wish to deny such truth, to pretend as though he didn’t remember, to act as if this was their first meeting. such a strong desire to continue living in his fantasy, to be who he’d always wished, to be the kind man he’d always desired to be... but to shut out an old friend was too much, too cruel for a true kind heart to take. reflexively does a hand clutch where said heart would’ve been. bruno breathes in to calm himself, feels the guilt from forgetting weighing him once again, and struggles to make eye contact.
in the end, he can’t even do that.
“ i... do. ” voice box cracks under pressure, even if synthetic. the way bruno spoke was reluctant, showing how much he’d like to forget --- how much he’d like to return to such blissful ignorance he held before. “ if you’re talking about what i think you are, then... then i remember. ” there’s something that makes him not want to continue, something that makes him wish he could run, but he remembers how dear this companion was to him. how would he feel, knowing that the alter ego of one of his closest friends ran?
in fact, how did he feel? how did paradox feel, seeing antinomy like this? even if he wasn’t antinomy at the moment, they are still one and the same; the ideal and the truth, wrapped into one android which could switch between such appearances when he’d so desire. bruno is his comfort and he wonders if it’d be better for him to speak as a person the other was familiar with. would it be alright, just to switch to such a form in the middle of this conversation? should he ask?
“ if you need me to, uh, do anything, since... ” since that’s how’d they’d known each other, from what he could recall now. a number of details fail to be said. “ you know. just say the word! i don’t mind! well, of course i wouldn’t, but... well... ” would paradox understand what he was saying?
