It's 3am and I've shifted from Riderposting to thinking about Lancer/Setanta and feeling weepy.
Because it's clear when he turned on us that it wasn't because he hated us. Like. He tried to talk to us. He tried to get through. He empathized with us. Not just his own Master but the mass of us - this patchwork of souls in whole.
And it backfired on him. Badly. Nearly got him, one of the most iconic heroes housed within the Throne, killed.
So it's no wonder he's decided to go full throttle this time around. He can't afford to second guess. Because if he tries the same trick twice, there's no guarantee it'll get the same result. He doesn't know if we'd hesitate, or slip up. If he gives us a single inch, this could be the time we actually beat him. And he can't - or doesn't want to - trust that anyone else will be willing to meet his resolve, to pick up where he left off.
Or maybe he just feels like it's his duty to finish the job. To make sure it's him, and no one else, that ends us.
I don't know whether he's grown to hate us in the time between then and now. But before - he probably just saw it as a mercy.
I mean, if you saw an animal going rabid, wouldn't killing it seem like a mercy? A kindness? Something you, a being with the power to offer this kind of ending, should do for its own sake? Isn't that what was happening to us, as far as we're aware at this point? Going rabid, losing our collective mind. A slippery slope into the depths of Madness, dragging our own Servants down with us like the most hateful kind of leash.
Can you blame him, really?
The curse of Gae Bolg is a curse of ending for the things that Cu Chulainn holds dear. He's already accepted the burden of death. No reason to look to anyone else when he's perfectly capable of getting the job done. No matter what it costs him, personally.
Cu Chulainn already accepted the costs when he chose to chase that star, all that time ago.
Of course, as Setanta - as a boy not yet bound to that fate - he might have other options still available to him. If he's willing to consider them. To see them as any kind of possibility without catastrophe being the likely outcome.
I don't know if it's possible to get through to him at this point. I just hope, before the end - whoever's end it ends up being - we get to at least share one drink with him.
It's also clear that fucking SOMETHING happened to us during our 'investigation' in the Origin War. That we weren't always a walking mass of Rage. Musashi said we were never the personable type, but that as time went on our Madness Infection got worse and worse. And even she wanted to try and save us from it... Not destroy us. Not until she had all that time to herself as a Nameless Shade, to turn her mind to the idea that maybe that was what it would take.
Was it us simply giving in to our nature, or an outside influence for the worse? I think it's a decent question worth considering and pursuing.
