AvA/M Oneshots

26. This strange thing you call... Morality.

(published 11/11/23)

A friend: [no actually yeah he (Chosen) was straight up so pathetic in that fight,]
...
Another friend: [Oh also did anyone notice Chosen's power level was at 10% during the fight in the box? Chosen WAS giving it his all, but his all was severely LIMITED]

Which made me suddenly realize something I had already kinda noticed- that his side of the fight with Vic looked eerily similar to the fight with Dark. Some fireballs, some lasers, and a bit of punching. If this was Chosen's all, at 10% of his power (and he looked so traumatized during the entire thing, there's absolutely no reason why it wouldn't be his all)... Chosen looked more powerful in Wanted trying to protect Second at that last moment than any previous point in the series. And it was super cool & super pretty, but why didn't we see him going harder than 10% of his power against Dark, when he was the last defense for the good of the entire known Internet and knew it?

...Or was he holding back, then?

(Aka: Dragon fixates a little too strongly on the moment in AvA5 when Chosen realizes the bot is headed for Alan's computer- and why he went back anyway)

-

You can fight against code.

You can rage at it, cry, scream victory to the heavens as you feel the freedom you hadn't felt in literal years coursing through your body once again. You can wipe every scrap of your brother's treacherous mission from their very self, eliminate every piece of that Animator who wanted to control your destinies, in one blast of glorious pulsing destructive white.

It was harder to fight your names.

A name is a part of you, almost more than a mission. The single focal point by which you were defined; everything else came after.

Deciding you were going to ignore it would only get you so far. Tropes come calling, and you were no exception.

A Chosen One and a Dark Lord, working together for pure destruction.

In the end, it was all just an inciting incident. Twelve years of inciting incident after inciting incident, trying to kickstart you back to your place in the story.

You held out, for a very long time. The story had betrayed you; there was no place for you in it. There was a place outside it, with your sibling, and for a long while that was all you needed.

But not all he needed.

Dark picked up on your ideas quickly- almost too quickly, looking back. He was the yang to your yin, the speck of darkness within the light of his excitement and just- genuineness, that was so completely opposite your own openly passionate, dark, blind rage.

You tried to fight the world.

You weren't prepared when it fought you back.

When something within you started questioning against your will.

Your name was an inherent question. Well- it was beyond a name, really. The Chosen One was a title, and one that came with a destiny. What were you chosen for? Why you?

You knew the answers already, and they meant nothing. Chosen for nothing. Chosen to torment, to play with, to chain away and abandon. Your name was a joke, given by an insincere Animator who just wanted a moment of fun; and fate was continuing the farce by pretending there was any more than that.

But wasn't that just it, though? Because somehow, there was more to it than that anyway.

Dark didnt start to struggle, the way you did. The war blinded you, for a while; but something started to make you feel it, when you hurt another stick. Something made you start to question whether this was worth it, when the Animators you sought to target were barely affected.

It hadn't just been against them, you knew. It was against yourself, a longing ache to be more, to change the narrative, a what-if just to see if you could. A heroic trope, fully evil.

And the second you realized that was your motive, was the moment you started to realize you... couldn't.

Because how could you justify hurting innocents on a what if? On a power play?

These sticks did nothing.

And as much as you didnt care about that, you had to.

You were a Chosen One.

You were a hero.

The more you screamed at yourself that no, no you were MORE than your name, the more you started to realize you were less. You had always been less, because your name was what you were. Your destiny, your purpose, your calling, all wrapped into one. Your Animator hadnt given you a mission, but he'd given you a trope, which was worse.

So, s-so... so much worse.

Fate asked questions. You hated yourself, for both the answer and the fact that the answer actually seemed to affect you.

You were beyond this.

You were beyond Him.

But you were still The Chosen One, and when your Animator ceased to complete your story, destiny wrote itself, with you on the wrong side.

You... cared.

You cared, you hated that you cared, but you cared. You had to.

There was simply no other way.

You kept it on the down-low, tried to recede without bothering Dark about it. He was growing more and more into the Dark Lord he was named to be, and unlike you, he embraced his given identity.

Dark embraced his identity, he fell unknowingly into the pattern of the story you had worked so hard to avoid. He took up the mantle of his part to play, and like a magnet, it somehow drew you back clawing and screaming to where you had never wanted to be.

You weren't sure when your roles switched. When he became the terror, and you the one just... tagging along.

You hated that destruction no longer held a joy for you. It was supposed to; it was supposed to be this big thing that fulfilled you and made you whole after everything. But it didn't.

When you two finally fought over it, you tried to explain. Morality, he'd called it. Morality, this little awful bug that had gone and infected you, ripped you away from him.

You didnt want it.

But as a hero, you had it; and now you had to deal with it.

The Chosen One. From the first spark of sentience, your Animator had given you a role in the story- a role you could fight, but at the end of the day, one that fought back harder.

So, you fought.

You fought on principles, but not on emotion. Not on want, not on experience. It drove you to stop the virus "for the common good", but you fought, with your lasers and your fire- the two powers he was immune to- for the eight years of being with him, your younger brother, the light of your life, who for all the sticks you had destroyed in the past, you did not want to kill.

A tiny piece of you wanted to see it let loose.

A tiny piece of you wanted to proudly watch the Internet burn.

You were the darkness, with your spark of blasphemous light that wouldn't let you go.

He was the light, with an inner evil that set your paths apart from the start.

Eventually, it was that inner evil that orchestrated his death.

And eventually, it was that bright spark inside that finally broke your mind.