There are those who claim you cannot fight fate.
He himself could have been said to be among them at certain points in his existence.
But fate is, if nothing else, an infinitely malleable thing.
“Who are you, we’ve never seen a person like you before!”
The question doesn’t phase him. The nature of the one asking, does.
“I have gone by many names, young one. Not many could be said to fit me as I am now. So I am simply an ‘Old Man of the Mountain’.”
“An old man? Does that mean that you’re mothers’ grandfather? We’ve never had a grandfather before!”
The statement gives him pause. Incorrect as it is of course, but in the eyes of a child such a thing is logical, he would suppose.
What is it that he should do in this situation? He has been many things, but a paternal figure is not really one of them. To his flock he has been more of a legend, something to be revered, and equally feared.
What the road to hell is ultimately paved with is a thought that he doesn’t have it in him to finish on this occasion.
“What’s the matter grandpa? You seem sad? Is it something we did?”
“No child. I’m just ... lost in thought. But although I am not the Contractor’s father, if it suits you to call me ‘grandpa’, then I will abide such a thing.”
Seemingly placated by an affirmative answer, they run off. Easily distracted by the next mundanity that presents itself.
He himself is afforded no such luxury.
He knew that day as he gazed down at them. Knew who they are, what they are. Why they are.
It is a monstrously unfair thing.
But so it goes, simply how life, and whatever the equivalent that Servants experience, is.
Servants, it is said, cannot grow, cannot change. Not without monumental effort or extraordinary circumstance.
For Jack though, is the chance to even lead a somewhat normal life by proxy not an extraordinary circumstance in and of itself?
In the past he might have simply said that it was something left up to fate, and left it at that.
At this point though, that seems more of an excuse of convenience than anything else. A shirking of personal responsibility.
Have they changed. He doesn’t know well enough to say for sure.
That is a much more difficult question.
If only because he already knows the answer.
You cannot fight fate, in the same way that one cannot change the flow of a river.
Impossible things. Only if one looks at it from the perspective of the narrow use of force.
You cannot beat a river into submission. A fool’s errand. But you can guide its flow; change its current, bring it to places that were once thought impossible, deny it from places it once gathered freely.
Because you aren’t meant to fight it.
Fighting it and changing it are two very different things.
And so here and now, he will bet everything. Himself, his Contractor, even, ironically, the fate of the world itself.
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