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sweetlywistful · 6 months

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be still my beating heart (gen fic)

I wound up getting blindsided by how much I loved this game, so here, have a 9.7k word condensed re-telling of the game. it's basically all the stuff I imagined going through P's head while I was playing on the true ending/max humanity path. also pls note that P and Carlo share a single identity here instead of them being two separate people!

Summary:

As Sophia placed her hand on his chest, he thought, Can you feel it? I have a heart that’s beating right now. It feels and pulses and hurts just like yours. I have a heart. I’m almost as human as you are. -OR- As a boy-puppet learns to live and breathe, this is what he will come to discover: humanity is what we make of it. The world begins and ends by what we grasp, even if it’s by the skin of our teeth.

Read on ao3

Waking up for the first time was something he had no name for. There was a flutter, sensation stretching across his limbs, and the voice that came like a beacon in the night.

It gave him a direction, and so he went. He walked. Attacked what attacked him, ‘reset’ at the nearest stargazer whenever he fell to a blow, then repeated the cycle until he stood before double doors and the voice was telling him to lie.

Lying was simple. The word “human” spilled easily out of his mouth. What was not so simple was the strange stir that skittered across his springs. Occasionally, his arm or an internal mechanism would twitch, but it was nothing so subtle, or fluttery. This sensation was different.

It felt, vaguely, like waking up.

There was blood on his hand. Blood, not oil. Blood. It was transfixing, the way it clung to his glove and glistened under the light of the streetlamp. It had gushed out of the man so easily, skin and bone so much softer than cold steel.

He thought there might have been a dull roar in his ears. He thought he might have heard the word son.

He looked up and met eyes with the man who would call him exactly that. There was a fondness when Geppetto addressed him that he couldn’t even hope to reciprocate. He was a puppet, after all. How could a puppet express such emotion?

The exchange—or lack thereof—gave him another strange feeling. This one reminded him of trying and failing to open a gate that only opened on the other side. It…wasn’t pleasant.

It clung to him like ichor, which was why it seemed so wrong to tell the woman that her baby was a puppet. He complimented it instead, another easy lie that somehow quivered his springs. She gave him a record for his effort. When he listened to it later, he felt it in his springs again. He decided the sensation couldn’t be a bad thing.

After all, it came about after helping that woman, who would now get to spend her last days clinging to what she wanted most. She wouldn’t die wishing for everything she couldn’t have. She wouldn’t lay broken and bloody on a cobblestone street under the canopy of a bleak, uncaring night sky.

That was good, he decided.

III & IV

Venigni was…interesting. His ‘r’s rolled like the put-put of a motor, only more quickly, and the way he described his own intellect was confident and proud. Venigni had thrown himself into the thick of danger to help everyone by shutting down the factory. He was worried for someone—the puppet, Pulcinella—and wouldn’t leave until they were reunited.

Venigni cared. Venigni was kind. He supposed that was what was missing when the same pride was reflected in Alidoro, the Hound. Alidoro called himself a noble savior, but somehow, it didn’t feel like there was any substance behind the claim. Alidoro wasn’t using his talents to help anyone, like Eugénie and her tinkering with his weapons to make them stronger, or Antonia’s hospitality. The man wasn’t risking himself for others like Venigni in the factory. Alidoro the savior was hiding on the roof while Giangio and Sister Cecile were in the cathedral, terrified and alone.

So, when Alidoro asked him if he knew of anywhere safe to go, he didn’t direct him to the hotel. The lie felt deeper, somehow, down to the very Ergo that powered his joints. Even when he went to check on Alidoro later at Venigni’s workshop, upon giving the man another lie, his Ergo still stirred, like a whisper against an ear.

Sophia told him that lying would make him more human. That felt right. More than right, actually. Like it was already true. Something in him was already human, and the rest of him was merely catching up.

He didn’t know why he felt that way though. Maybe with more lying, he would find out.

He took the Red Fox and the Black Cat’s offer. Given the reception he got when he first made it to the Malum District, he figured a clash between himself and the Black Rabbit Brotherhood was inevitable. It made no difference to him whether he trekked through the district alone or accompanied by the pair. He caught their whispers about him, though: snickers and the suggestion that he was easy to take advantage of. It therefore came to him as no surprise when they bailed, even though Gemini was particularly incensed.

Perhaps it was strange, but he liked that their attempts at deception were so obvious. It made it easier to maneuver his interactions with them. And, he thought, if things had been different somehow, he might have enjoyed teasing the Cat over his supposed aches as well.

But as it stood, he was still a puppet with no frame of reference for what teasing was even supposed to look like. Maybe the thought had come from the same place that stirred when he lied.

The same place that quaked when he found himself before a painting that looked exactly like himself. Portrait of a Boy, it was called, and there seemed to be a deep revelation behind it, tied to the clothes Antonia had gifted him, tied to the way Geppetto’s tone caressed the word son. If his hands had been flesh and blood, they might have trembled when he took the portrait down.

Trembled the way Geppetto trembled, when he brought the portrait to his father, and the man laid eyes on it. With something like reverence, Geppetto hung it in the back wall of the office, in direct view from where the man typically sat at his desk.

Looking into the portrait, especially from its perch in the office, felt so…odd. Disconcerting, even. Like he was somehow staring into a mirror of his own soul. After it was hung, he retreated downstairs to the gramophone. He chose the latest record he had procured and played it.

Somehow, it made him feel warm. He hadn’t known he was cold, before.

Something was different about the King of Puppets. Attack whatever attacked him; that had been his unwritten rule, so when the giant robot had tried to touch him, he swatted the hand away immediately. It then reared its head back and changed its face to an angry one, like he had offended it.

To project such a reaction was only further confirmation that it had an ego. While that wasn’t surprising, he had expected more hate. More…vitriol. Something that would have seemed capable of orchestrating the Frenzy, like the White Lady that hated puppets, but in reverse.

Adding to that the “play” it had almost certainly orchestrated, with the puppets that looked so much like himself and his father…it was painting a strange picture. Venigni had said that the King of Puppets communicated through Ergo, and in that space between blows, where he could momentarily rest or use a pulse cell, he could almost feel it in the air, softly buzzing like a record that was actually a recording of other recordings. Words put through a staticky filter a dozen times over.

In the end, it…almost sounded grateful…

When he took down the puppet that was inside the giant puppet’s shell, he didn’t feel like he’d won a battle. Instead, he felt perturbed. He didn’t think he could trade the puppet’s crystallized Ergo, like he had with the other Ergo crystals he had gotten. Not until he understood more. He placed it in his pack with the object that the King of Puppets had dropped. It had been near the puppet’s face, tucked close to its half-charred visage. Something about the item pulled him, almost like the portrait had, though he didn’t know why.

It was actually a relief to find Geppetto outside the opera house. Seeing his father’s face and experiencing the man’s concern felt grounding, after all the strangeness that had just taken place. It helped to refocus him as he made his way to the Lorenzini Arcade’s stargazer.

That relief evaporated when he transported himself back to the hotel. It was just supposed to be another part of the routine he shared with Sophia, where she strengthened him once he had accumulated enough Ergo from killing puppets and monsters. But then she mentioned the object the King had dropped—the necklace, the Monad Charity House.

To Romeo, your friend C, carefully engraved on the back of the necklace.

Romeo. The charity house. C. He knew those names. He knew those names, and something in him was breaking, bursting with a great and terrible clarity, taking shape right in the center of his chest, impossible and new.

Carlo, he heard, and the world shifted.

VII.I

He didn’t know what to make of himself. His hair was longer, and his body felt different. More human, like Sophia had said. But it couldn’t be possible. He was a puppet with creaking springs and metal bones. He couldn’t be human like Carlo, the boy in the portrait, the boy that Antonia remembered so fondly.

And yet the name Carlo had reverberated down to his heart of hearts—he had a heart now—and slotted into place like a puzzle piece he hadn’t known he was missing. Carlo, the boy that he looked like. Carlo, the one who wore Antonia’s clothes. Carlo, Romeo’s friend.

Carlo, the human turned puppet—

It was too much. He almost wished he could forget that the name Carlo existed. He went upstairs to see Geppetto like Sophia had suggested, looking for what, he didn’t know. Reassurance? An explanation?

Instead, his father was less than pleased. The man knew as much about what was going on as he did, which was close to nothing. To make matters worse, Geppetto had already been bothered, too, by what was happening with the portrait on the wall. When he caught a glance of it before leaving the office, he could see why.

D. Gray must have had a sense of humor. The portrait had grown a long, wooden nose.

For some reason, it reminded him of the novel of the wooden puppet that Gemini had told him about in the library downstairs. The puppet’s nose had grown longer with every lie it told. He didn’t know why he knew that, though; Gemini had never told him such details. Staring at the portrait a little longer, as if doing so would give him answers, yielded no results, so he left the office.

Just as he was out of the door, he overheard Geppetto muttering about how to proceed with these changes that had come unforeseen. Though he had been wondering the same thing, the way that his father had done so felt different. Almost clinical.

Unexpectedly, he found himself accosted by a foreign bitterness, like he was a wounded child that had reached for their parent’s comfort and had gotten rebuffed instead, for what felt like the thousandth time. The feeling was awful, making him want to go back into the office and do…something. He didn’t know. It wasn’t like his father could simply stop him from feeling things. All he could do, he supposed, was to force himself not to dwell on it.

Finding Polendina in the courtyard was a distraction he welcomed wholeheartedly.

VII.II

Sophia was somehow waiting for him at the Saintess Statue after he encountered Simon Manus. She told him the truth about Ergo, that it contained the lifespan and memories of people who died to the Petrification Disease. Ergo was once human, and she could Listen to it—Listen to him.

He…was once human…

The truth settled in him like a sigh.

He was the wooden puppet in the story from the library. He was Carlo, the dead son that made his father tremble. His Ergo had been trying to tell him all along, and the rest of him was finally starting to catch up.

After depositing a Gold Coin Fruit at the Saintess Statue, he went back to Sophia so that she could help him rearrange the strength that came from his Ergo. As Sophia placed her hand on his chest, he thought, Can you feel it? I have a heart that’s beating right now. It feels and pulses and hurts just like yours. I have a heart.

I’m almost as human as you are.

VIII

He still wasn’t sure whether or not he should call himself Carlo. He didn’t have all of Carlo’s memories (yet, a small part of him whispered). He was still part-puppet, with internal mechanisms that twitched, so it felt strange to own the identity of a full human. It was all too complicated to deal with now, with Krat still in need of saving, so he simply continued moving forward.

Venigni told him they needed Golden Ergo to reach the Isle of the Alchemists and directed him to the Barren Swamp to find it. Before he took off, though, he took care of some things in the hotel. He took a cure from Giangio for Antonia’s Petrification Disease at Polendina’s behest, and he convinced the puppet to give it to her, even though she could end up dying more quickly because of it.

He hated to admit it, but she was dying anyways. Just like with Adelina the singer, just like with the blind woman and her puppet baby, he found alleviating her suffering in the time she had left to be the best choice. And who knew—maybe the concoction would cure her completely, and he would get to enjoy her company a little longer.

He also stopped by Eugénie, and she handed him a gift to give to Alidoro on her behalf. She had been so earnest about it that he knew, if the gift had been meant for him, he would have been rather endeared by the gesture. Despite his initial reservations about Alidoro, he agreed to present it to him, and then he set off for the Barren Swamp.

On the way, he encountered the Red Fox and the Black Cat again. Once again, it didn’t matter to him whether or not they were trying to deceive him. He had plenty of Gold Coin Fruits in reserve, since he made sure never to trade them all at once with Giangio, and he checked the tree for its supply almost religiously. Parting with a single fruit wasn’t even close to a significant loss. He was pleasantly surprised by the sincere thanks he got in return, however, as well as the record that the Fox gave him.

The Cat surmised that the two of them could possibly become good friends, and he found himself silently agreeing.

His encounter with Alidoro, on the other hand, went in almost the complete opposite direction. Something in him flared indignantly on Eugénie’s behalf when the man treated her gift like it was worthless. He knew, already, he was going to have to lie to her later about Alidoro’s reaction to protect her feelings, and the thought made him feel sour.

Meeting Hugo later, after experiencing the earthquake that rattled even his metal bones, only put Alidoro’s inconsistencies in sharp relief. Eugénie had mentioned that Alidoro had lost a finger; pairing that knowledge with Hugo’s observations had him starting to suspect that the Alidoro he knew and the one they knew were entirely different people.

Worser still was the frustrating way Alidoro spoke to him after he took down the giant monster in the swamp. The man kept calling him the perfect bait.

He was not bait.

Out of consideration for Eugénie, he didn’t do anything, but that was the first time he felt like giving someone who hadn’t directly attacked him a good punch. He felt the need to cool off before checking out what happened in the Krat Central Station, so he went back to the hotel. After checking in with Sophia as usual, he then sought out Antonia, and her joy was such a sight for sore eyes.

She thanked him so profusely, even though all he did was get the cure from Giangio. At that moment, he found out what it meant to be bashful. Her adulation made him want to squirm.

Instead, he went to the piano. He wasn’t sure why he did. The last time he was in front of it, all he could do was pluck a few notes. But he supposed, with his increasing humanity came increasing muscle memory, and to both his and Antonia’s delight, he was able to play her a song.

What a sweet experience. He wanted to coat the memory of it in gold and preserve it forever.

The devastation in Krat had become even more horrifying, somehow. He had gone from stepping around pools of blood and ravaged streets to wading through acidic decay, invasive corrosion that somehow birthed monsters, and collapsed streets that had literally split wide open.

The King of Puppets had been holding back the Alchemists, and apparently, this was what happened when the Alchemists were allowed to run rampant. Even though he knew taking down the king had been logical to everyone at the time, he couldn’t help the thoughts that played in his head over and over as he made his way through a ruined Central Krat: This is my fault. I killed the King of Puppets. This is my fault…

He could only hope that somewhere, buried underneath the devastation, he would be able to discover something that would give him an edge over the Alchemists.

However, what he found instead was a horde of enemies and one of the most formidable creatures he had faced yet: a relentless monster that had somehow figured out how to use Ergo to duplicate itself. That, combined with the relatively confined space they were in, made for such a challenging fight that he had ‘reset’ well over a dozen times. When it was over, he felt he could collapse from relief alone.

He got into the nearby elevator, already making a mental checklist for what he would need to resupply and modify at the hotel, but then suddenly, halfway through the elevator’s descent, there was a crash. Wires snapped overhead, and the elevator fell rapidly, smashing into the floor so quickly that he stumbled and nearly face-planted into the wall.

And then came the heart-stopping message from Sophia.

The hotel was under attack.

From then, it was a desperate mad dash to the nearest stargazer. Simon Manus’ message along the way made him grit his teeth. What was the point of a “world of truth” if it caused this much death and destruction—if it meant losing everyone he ever cared about?

He got to the stargazer. It didn’t work. He would have cursed, if he had remembered any of those words from when he was human. That left running to the hotel on foot. Gemini’s panic about what awaited him there didn’t give him pause; if anything, it added more urgency. What if whatever was in front of the hotel decided to attack the hotel itself as well? He imagined the hotel splitting open, like the collapsed street, and the only home he ever knew caving in on itself.

It couldn’t happen. Not while he was alive to do something about it.

The enemy that awaited him was the same large robot that he had fought when he first got to the hotel, only corrupted by the dark infection that had spread through Krat thanks to the Alchemists. Perhaps because it had retained much of its old move set, or perhaps because he was still fueled by urgency, he was able to make quicker work than usual of an enemy of its size.

Finally, he could get to the hotel, unimpeded.

X.I

The first thing to greet him was a massive banner that read “HYPOCRITE.” The second was Sophia, to his great relief, who stood near the stargazer, safe and untouched by the disarray around her. After speaking with her, he immediately went upstairs to check in on everyone else, stepping over the broken mess of split furniture and tossed decorations that the Black Rabbit Brotherhood had made of the hotel.

The others were safe too…all except for his father, who had been kidnapped. When Antonia finished telling him how to get to the Alchemist’s base, he stood there for a moment, silent.

His father was gone. The pristine beauty of the hotel had been sullied. A sickly gray pallor had returned to Antonia’s complexion, while everyone else stood in the office, the remnants of terror still clinging to their faces.

Fury.

That was the emotion he felt surging through him, he realized. He wanted to yell, kick something. He wanted to pay back the Black Rabbit Brotherhood tenfold, smash in the face of each member one by one.

He wanted to make them pay.

X.II

His trek through the Relic of Trismegistus was an anger-filled haze, paused only for a moment, when he answered the phone call from the King of Riddles. It wasn’t long afterwards that he was ascending a flight of stairs to be met with the Brotherhood themselves.

“Accept your fate. Death has come for you,” they said.

How funny. They took the words right out of his mouth.

The fight between himself and the Brotherhood was brutal. They had laced their weapons with things they hadn’t used before. One chose searing fire, another chose electricity to try to short his mechanisms, and another chose acid so that every cut from their knives would burn. For his part, his slashes were heavier than before, fueled by a bristling energy he hadn’t known he was even capable of producing.

He made good on his resolve to cut them down one by one, even when they brought in their eldest sibling—somehow reanimated by the Alchemists into something more monster than human. With this newfound viciousness, even the eldest soon fell to his attacks.

And stay dead, he thought, as the man crumbled to a heap on the floor.

All four members of the Black Rabbit Brotherhood were now nothing more than corpses. It was sobering, then, to realize that he had just wiped out a family.

A family that had gone after his own. They got what they deserved, as far as he was concerned, though he couldn’t help remembering a broken and bloody body, abandoned on a cobblestone street.

X.III

He broke his unspoken rule.

Not only did Alidoro admit that he had betrayed the hotel by helping the Black Rabbit Brotherhood, but he wasn’t even the Alidoro that Eugénie so admired—the one that saved so many people after the Workshop collapsed. No, that Alidoro was killed and replaced by the one before him. Alidoro—or rather, his true moniker, the Parrot—cared about nothing but money and saving his own skin, consistently met Eugénie’s kindness with contempt, repaid Antonia’s hospitality with betrayal, and even implied he was going to kill Eugénie for her resemblance to the original Alidoro.

He was already fuming, hand clenched around the grip of his weapon, when the invisible noose around the Parrot’s neck was tightened by the Parrot himself.

The man goaded him yet again, this time reducing him to a mindless puppet bound by the Grand Covenant that couldn’t attack the Parrot even if he wanted to.

For the hotel. For Eugénie and Antonia.

He proved the man wrong with brutal efficiency, cutting him down in one fell swoop.

With that, nearly everyone responsible for the attack on the hotel was dead. He realized, then, that his rule hadn’t been truly broken. Somewhere along the way, without him knowing, it had become attack whatever attacked him or anyone he cared for.

X.IV

Back at the hotel, he made the usual rounds he did whenever he was about to venture into a new area. He resupplied, got Eugénie to strengthen his weapons, and went to Sophia.

Sophia spoke to him first before she helped him, and what she said had a knot of worry forming inside his chest. She told him that she was ready for him to see her “real self,” and soon afterward, she disappeared as if she had never been at the hotel at all. Perhaps she truly hadn’t been; in all his time at the hotel, had anyone other than himself ever interacted with Sophia?

Heeding her warning about the difficulty of the journey ahead, he made sure he didn’t leave any matters unresolved before taking off. He took a brief detour and transported himself to the Barren Swamp to teach the Broken Puppet some more emotions. Then he did the woman Belle a favor by finding her partner. The man was already thoroughly infected by the time he found him, however, skin blue and sloughing off, barely capable of speech.

When he got back to the hotel, he honored the man’s request to tell Belle that her lover had already died fighting, then watched her heart break in real time as she processed the words.

The record she gave him, titled “Why,” felt appropriate. He didn’t know the first thing about offering comfort to those in grief, but he played the record on the gramophone. He hoped it would help her.

His final stop before going to the Isle of Alchemists was Venigni; he needed Venigni to decode the cryptic vessel that the Parrot had dropped.

Venigni had already been quite giddy about something though, and before he could bring it up, Venigni was already talking. Apparently, the man had finally decoded the Ergo wavelengths the King of Puppets used to communicate.

When Venigni began playing the recording, though he didn’t know why, he braced himself.

“Carlo, I hope you can hear me,” he heard, and his heart dropped to the floor. So that was why. A part of him knew, but didn’t want to admit it, when he saw the words carved onto the back of the necklace.

Romeo, Carlo’s friend, was the King of Puppets.

And then came the worst revelation of all: Law 0 of the Grand Covenant. All puppets had to obey their Creator—all puppets had to obey Giuseppe Geppetto—

Giuseppe Geppetto was the one who ordered the Frenzy.

His father ordered the Frenzy that devastated Krat long before even the Alchemists had a chance to do so.

The walls were shaking, the whole world trembling and losing its color, as he stood there, shocked into a stupor. He was sick. He wanted to lay down and cry, even though he wasn’t capable of producing tears. A body was lying on a cobblestone street, broken and bloody—half his face charred to a crisp—killed because they knew they knew they knew—

Venigni asked him who ordered the Frenzy, and so dismayed was he that the truth slipped out before he could even consider a lie.

Afterwards, when Venigni handed him the recording, he went to the stargazer. He listened to it twice. There, under the banner that read HYPOCRITE, it dawned on him that the accusation held a modicum of truth.

When the King of Riddles had asked him if he was a killer, he had said no.

XI.I

Sophia was there to meet him when he arrived at the Isle of the Alchemists. She explained to him that her true self was trapped inside the base, but that she was able to meet him with Ergo projections. Sophia had also been the cause behind his ‘resets’—she could use Ergo to manipulate his time, so whenever he fell, whether to an enemy or to a hostile environment, she turned back his time so he could try again.

She also gave a roundabout apology, confessing that she initially hadn’t woken him to save Krat, but to save herself. She then asked him to save both herself and Krat all the same.

“Please, give me peace,” she said.

In truth, there was no need for her apology. She was the voice that woke him, after all. She was the savior who had kept him from dying countless times over, strengthening him at every significant turn until he could do it himself at a stargazer. Krat or no Krat, he would have strived to save her regardless.

Sophia sent him off with a final word of guidance: a warning that the Isle could produce echoes of the past through its high concentration of Ergo.

The warning turned out to be necessary. There, in the sand and mist beyond the edges of the surf, he rediscovered pieces of himself that he had lost.

His mother’s voice and his first friend. His bitterness at his father’s neglect. His boyhood dream and the way it had been crushed by his death. He was sick all over again, remembering how close he had been with Romeo, and then remembering his relief when Geppetto had met him after he had defeated the King of Puppets.

The way his father consistently asked him to be a “good boy” gained a new, harsher light.

He made his way into Arche Abbey, taking down a huge, hulking creature he had trouble believing was truly once a man, then used its keycard to infiltrate the base. Once through, he took down every mutation in his path as he progressed further and further upward, until he was in a large room, flooded with water that reached his ankles.

The Black Cat stood at the other end, warning him as he approached that the Cat didn’t want a fight but would attack if it meant protecting the Fox.

The Fox and the Cat had aided in the attack on the hotel. They had been the ones to drag his father through the Relic of Trismegistus to be held captive on this island. By all means, attack whatever attacked him or those he cared for should have long been springing him into action. But. But.

A body was lying on a cobblestone street. His best friend was half burnt and crumpled on the floor.

He held out a Gold Coin Fruit to the Cat instead.

With genuine surprise, the Cat took it from his hand and thanked him, and he could hear the smile in the Cat’s voice as he reiterated that they truly could be friends.

Perhaps one day, when Krat wasn’t a broken facsimile of a city, they could be.

He carried that with him as he continued up the Abbey—the promise of something better. A revived and restored Krat as recompense for their effort; a place he could live, not merely survive in, with all the people he knew. A city where Venigni, Eugénie, Sophia, Antonia, and even Polendina and Pulcinella could roam free; a city where he could fulfill the dream of a dying boy and become a true Stalker.

He wanted it, he realized, and not just because others had asked it of him. Much like it had for Sophia, it had evolved into a personal goal of his.

This was the unspoken vow he made to himself as he took on Laxasia, the Complete: I will save Krat. I will save Sophia. I will end this madness.

XI.II

Witnessing Sophia’s death was something he had no name for.

He had walked into the room after defeating Laxasia expecting to continue ascending. He hadn’t expected a pristine carpet and furniture and functioning lights; he hadn’t expected to find a room that seemed suspended in time and space, divorced from the ruin of the rest of the Abbey.

He hadn’t expected the utter horror that was Sophia’s body.

She was sat inside what almost looked like a human-sized butterfly cage, and her hands—her entire lower half—were a mass of viny, oozing ichor, of the same kind as the dark ichor that had spread the infection across Krat. Dozens of blue butterflies that came from her Ergo powers were dead and fused to her. She was pale and motionless, head bowed, with ichor-colored tear stains dried on her cheeks. What used to be her hands were suspended in the air with dark ichor-strings and wrapped around the cage where she sat, shackling her to her prison.

“Save me,” she said into his head, voice so much weaker and feebler than it had ever been before. “It hurts so much… I want to be free… Please…”

Sophia’s life was a night-terror made real.

“Oh God,” Gemini had said, appalled, upon seeing her.

Oh God, he mirrored in his head. What had Simon Manus done to her?

And more importantly, how could he save Sophia with her body so far gone?

He couldn’t, he realized. The revelation felt like bile. Even if he cut her away from the cage, she would still be suffering. She wouldn’t have the peace she had begged him to give her. It was a horrifying situation with no good choice before him, but a decision had to be made, nonetheless.

Sophia asked him to take her Ergo, and so, he obliged.

There was a tremendous weight in each step he took as he neared her, the world falling away as it became just him and the girl who woke him. Just as she had for him countless times, he placed his hand on her chest. He should be crying, he thought, as something in him pulled, and her Ergo flowed into him. He should be crying, he thought again, as he stepped back and her body began to disappear.

His heart was pounding so hard it was a wonder it hadn’t split in half.

That was two of his friends, now, that were dead by his hand.

XI.III

His body had changed again. His hair was gray, and he hardly even felt his mechanisms anymore. He breathed properly now, too. He took notice when he rolled to dodge a blow, and the impact had his breath leaving him with a sharp oof. He hardly cared, though, for what worth was his transformation if it came at so high a cost? He simply continued his fight against the Alchemist-made abominations in his way.

Each hit from his weapon was punctuated with a name: Romeo, Sophia, Antonia, Polendina.

He had gone back to the hotel after Sophia died, both to resupply and to seek out Antonia. He had wanted to check on her health, but he also felt that hearing a warm, sympathetic voice at the moment would have done him well. Instead, his situation was made all the worse by Polendina’s announcement: Antonia was dead, and the puppet couldn’t handle the weight of the grief and was going to delete his personality.

Numbly, he walked upstairs to see with his own eyes, and it was true. Antonia was gone, her Petrification Disease already having finished the process of converting her body into Ergo. She had left him a letter; at the end of it, she said that the time she spent with him was like pure light.

He should have been crying.

On his way out of the office, he had noticed that the nose on his portrait had grown to an absurd length, glowing faintly with a golden light. Intuitively, he knew that some sort of process had been completed, the same way he had known that he was connected to the portrait. He had taken ahold of the nose and pulled, and as he had, it broadened and lengthened until what he held in his hands was a weapon.

It was a polearm made of deep brown wood and glittering gold, with golden leaves and coins at the ends that looked strangely as though they had been taken from the Gold Coin Tree. It was embedded with the name Golden Lie, and when he swung it experimentally, it felt as though he were wielding an extension of himself.

It was this weapon that he used now, mourning even as he fought, every strike a name of someone he had lost.

A curious thing started happening the more he used the weapon: he began to remember. He remembered in bits and flashes the book that had been read over and over until the edges of the pages were frayed. He remembered a young boy who had clutched a Gold Coin Fruit and wished fervently upon a star that he could be like the wooden puppet—that he might have a father who loved him, too.

A mother on her deathbed had given her boy a book about an old fairy tale, and the book became the boy’s sanctuary and lifeline.

He should be crying, he thought again, as he climbed a set of dusty stone stairs. Part of him was so furious that he wasn’t.

The Red Fox met him in the hall that followed, and his exchange with her went in much the same way as it had with the Black Cat: instead of attacking, he gave her a Gold Coin Fruit as well.

She surprised him again with her earnest apology. “You’re the only one who’s ever been kind to us,” the Fox said remorsefully, and it stuck with him.

He hadn’t been considering kindness at all as he acted; he had only been doing what felt right to him. He supposed that meant he was kind, if saving people and avoiding fights when possible were what felt right.

He wished his father had shared some of that kindness. Perhaps then, the man wouldn’t have ordered all the puppets in Krat to kill so many people.

He found Geppetto’s cell and unlocked it, a complex wave of emotions passing through him when his father was so overtly relieved to see him. Geppetto warned him about Simon Manus and urged him to go and stop the man from completing his mad plan, unaware that he would have done so regardless of whether or not Geppetto had asked.

He had a vow to fulfill, after all, and it was the urgency behind its completion that held him back from confronting Geppetto then and there about the Frenzy. After Simon Manus was dealt with and everything was over, he was going to have a long conversation with his father.

Before sending him off, Geppetto asked him if he had been a trustworthy father.

The question was startling, not least because the answer came to him quickly and easily, even though he had never considered it before.

“No,” he said, because his father had asked him to say the truth, and beyond freeing Geppetto from his cell, he didn’t want to afford any more kindness to the man who orchestrated the Frenzy and sent him to kill the puppet with his best friend’s Ergo.

Even more startling was Geppetto’s genuine remorse upon hearing his answer. “I wasn’t a very good father to you,” Geppetto said, somber and low. “I gave you more loneliness than love.

“Son, you’re all I have.”

What right had this man, to only now say what a young boy with a wish had wanted so ardently to hear, after the boy was already dead and remade into a shell of his former self? What right had this man to look at him so vulnerably and promise to be better, when it was already so late, and so many horrible things had happened?

He left, hating, hating with everything that he had, that he could not cry.

XI.IV

The sun was setting on the horizon. Crisp, salty air, heavy-laden with Ergo, whipped at his cheeks. The Golden Lie was steady in his hand, ready to make its mark.

There, at the very top of the Abbey, was Simon Manus: the madman with a plan to become a god. Earlier, he had gone back to the room where Sophia was kept to glean more of Simon Manus’ motivation, only to discover the man’s nauseating fascination with Sophia, as well as a complete disregard for her agency. Simon Manus, discontented with the amount of Ergo already contained within the Isle and the Relic of Trismegistus, had built a machine—that cage—to siphon her power, which resulted in the eventual degradation of her body.

This man had helped to destroy Krat on nearly every possible level, was the direct cause of Sophia’s suffering, and was the originator behind the plague that infected nearly everyone who wasn’t killed by puppets, all in the name of a perverse idea of evolution.

He advanced forward, his vow playing through his head like a broken record.

Grotesquely misshapen though Simon Manus had become, the man’s attacks still hit crushingly hard. He made sure to return what he received in kind, though, the Golden Lie swinging quickly and viciously at the man’s bulbous flank whenever possible.

Then, shaken and nearly beaten, Simon Manus split himself open, and a new, inhuman torso reached for the sky—

And a flood of Ergo answered, taking the shape of a giant hand.

He witnessed, then, the birth of an Ergo-stuffed monster that thought itself a god. Simon Manus’ attacks went from hard to near overwhelming, until suddenly overwhelming wasn’t just near anymore, and he had to reset.

And reset again. And again.

He should have found it frustrating, having to restart the fight so many times, but instead, he only thought of Sophia.

Though she was only a mass of Ergo now, her power still persisted—her intent to be with him until the end still persisted. The force behind every swing wasn’t only his own, nor the intuition that told him when to dodge and when to advance. He could feel it, like a sweet, low thrum: her Ergo inside his Ergo, her heart inside his heart, closer even than the air he breathed.

Sophia wasn’t fully gone, and with each reset, he found himself more and more determined.

I will save Krat. I will save Sophia. I will end this madness.

At a certain point, even Simon Manus took notice of Sophia’s intervention, saying, “Aw, our blue fairy adores you so. Pathetic.”

Simon Manus didn’t know how taunting him in such a manner would help contribute to the man’s own downfall.

Sophia had been willing to transcend even her own death in order to stop a maniac who caused untold amounts of pain and killed hundreds of people for his own gain. To hear her effort minimized in such a manner incensed him, to the point that there now was a near reckless level of aggression in his attacks that hadn’t been there before. Soon enough, the added aggression proved to be the eventual key to his victory.

A savage flurry of hits struck well and true, and Simon Manus fell.

Good. He hoped that each blow hit hard enough that it would still be smarting in the afterlife.

With life steadily trickling out of the man’s body, there was only moments left until the leader of the Alchemists was dead. To his muted surprise and to Simon Manus’ credit, that time wasn’t spent in anger or cursing him for having thwarted the man’s plans. Instead, those moments were spent speaking about Sophia.

When Simon Manus asked him what he had done with Sophia, he answered truthfully.

He gave her what Simon Manus never could: peace.

And then Simon Manus disappeared, not with a lamentation, not with regret, but with a warning for his sake, the one whom the blue fairy chose. “Watch out for Geppetto, puppet.”

It was time to go meet his father. He couldn’t withhold a surge of dread within him.

XI.V

He treaded slowly, carefully, towards his father, each step on dusty white stone resounding to his ears with the same sobering significance as the strike of a judge’s gavel.

There was a mad elation to Geppetto’s countenance as the man received him, talking about every “ingredient” being in place. The man talked about resurrecting him—resurrecting Carlo—as a human.

But I’m already alive, he thought, but didn’t say.

The man talked about using the item Simon Manus had used to transform himself, the Arm of God, in combination with the mountainous amount of Ergo still saturating the air.

Simon Manus turned into a monster. You want to turn me into a monster.

And then it came, the merciless deathblow to any goodwill he might have had left for his father.

With an outstretched hand, Geppetto said, “Give me your heart, son.”

His father wanted to rip his heart, still beating, out of his chest, and all he could think of was Sophia’s heart in his heart, her Ergo in his Ergo, still waiting to be saved.

“No,” he said, with resolute finality.

Later, he would look back and realize that this was the impetus for the ultimate tragedy behind what would ensue: he was both Carlo and the wooden puppet, created by Geppetto twice over, and in neither life did his father ever take him or his sentiments seriously.

“I believed you were a good boy…but you insist on breaking my heart,” Geppetto said, his visage morphing into something ugly and angry.

He listened to his father scold him like he was a misbehaving child, and then reduce him to a mere “puppet that would bring his son back to life,” as if Carlo hadn’t risen to his consciousness from the depths of his own heart, as if the little boy who had held a Gold Coin Fruit and wished for a better father had been a stranger.

Perhaps his father was at least partially right, he realized, brandishing the Golden Lie as he readied himself to fight: he might not have had all his memories as Carlo, but he certainly had a far better grasp on his personality.

He was going to make his father see that he was his own person, even if he had to fight his own reanimated corpse to do it.

The fight that ensued between himself and the corpse-puppet controlled by his father was difficult, but manageable, though he had to grit his teeth through the demeaning reprimands his father tossed at him. It wasn’t long until he was familiar with the corpse-puppet’s patterns of attack, and he was actively able to create openings for himself by briefly stunning it out of Geppetto’s control with the Golden Lie, and then rapidly switching to a blade that had been reinforced to its maximum strength by Eugénie.

With a heavy attack fueled by his own righteous anger and determination, he swiped through the corpse-puppet’s head, and the top of its skull fell clean off, the rest of it surely soon to follow.

Or so he assumed.

Something was wrong. He felt it even in his bones, when the corpse-puppet clutched its head in a silent scream, and with a wild burst of Ergo, it took over the strings that Geppetto had been using to control it. Its very Ergo had made the air around it tremor, distorted by something that felt heavy and oppressive.

He realized what it was when the puppet proceeded to overwhelm him less than a minute later. It was hatred.

Geppetto had to have been utterly blind to everything except what he wanted to see. There was no way that putting his heart in that would result in anything other than a Carlo-shaped monster.

He brandished the Golden Lie and steeled himself to try again. Though he made it farther this time, this fight went much like the last, and he was forced to reset. And then do it again and again.

Over and over, he tried to beat the corpse-puppet, tried to discern its attack patterns, tried to pretend that it didn’t sting to hear his father say time and again, “You’re just a puppet, nothing more!” All to no avail. The corpse-puppet was faster than him, hit harder than him, and he wondered if this was the nigh-poetic end he was meant to meet: defeated by his own damned corpse, the embodiment of a past he could not overcome.

In a moment of weakness after nearing two dozen resets, he briefly contemplated giving up and allowing Geppetto to take his heart. It would have been so easy. All he had to do was call out to Geppetto and tell him he’d changed his mind.

I will save Krat. I will save Sophia. I will end this madness.

The reminder of his vow immediately shamed him into shutting that line of thinking down. He had to live, for both Sophia’s and his own sake.

He went out to fight again for the umpteenth time, but the vow had raised in him renewed purpose and vigor. This was what he told himself, as he summoned the strength to start anew: he wasn’t going to let his father win. He wasn’t going to let the man decide that he wasn’t human, or that he didn’t have a say over what happened to his own heart. His humanity was his alone to make of it, even if no one else ever saw him as anything more than a puppet, even if he had to grasp it by the skin of his teeth.

He was going to fight this corpse until there was nothing left of him.

The fight this time was different. Perhaps it was a trick of his mind, or perhaps it was simply his own Ergo whispering to him, but he could swear he could hear the words of people he had met echoing in his ears as he fought.

Eugénie’s first time meeting him. Antonia’s warm voice, reminiscing. Venigni calling him someone who didn’t give up. Romeo’s parting words, drudged up from the depths of his consciousness. Simon Manus declaring a world of truth—a place where he wouldn’t have to lie to prove he was human. And finally, Sophia, who had promised to do everything she could to help him, and then kept that promise.

He would reset a million times, if that was what it took to preserve the life he had built after he awoke that fateful night.

The corpse-puppet was still too strong, but the knowledge and experience he gained from each attempt was finally catching up. This fight had gone on the longest so far, and he had managed to whittle down the corpse-puppet’s constitution more than with any other attempt.

The reverse was also true, though—the longer the fight went on, the more the corpse-puppet seemed to aim for his heart. As if through the cloud of hatred it operated under, the puppet could perceive that it was the source of his ability to defy death.

He narrowly avoided a sharp jab aimed right at the center of his chest, and he thought, somewhere, he might have heard a gasp.

Just a little more. Just a little further, and the corpse-puppet would fall, and he could prove to his father that he was more than what the man thought he was. He stunned the puppet once more with the Golden Lie. This had to be it, his chance for the decisive blow—

The stun was a feint.

Too quickly for him to react, the corpse-puppet split its weapon in two and swiped at him, its superior strength sending him flying backward. Now he was the one who was stunned, all the wind knocked out of him as he landed on his back, perfectly vulnerable for the coup de grâce that was sure to come.

But when it came, he was stunned again, for all the wrong reasons.

His father stood there before him, sword stuck straight through the man’s torso.

There was a horrible wet cough, words he could hardly hear through the heavy rush of his own heartbeat roaring in his ears: “Were you…going to destroy…Carlo’s heart?”

And then his body was moving. With a searing energy ripped from a place inside himself he didn’t know he had, he rammed his mechanical arm into the puppet’s chest.

His hand came clean through the other side, wrapped around the puppet’s p-organ. He yanked his arm back, allowing the puppet to fall, and then collected energy into his arm until the mechanical heart was pulverized in his hand.

Something in him was restored as the corpse-puppet’s Ergo flowed into him. He couldn’t pay it any mind, because suddenly, behind him there was a thud.

No.

His father was on the floor. Everything was off-balance, off-kilter, nothing making sense as he fell to his knees next to Geppetto. His father wasn’t supposed to love him like this. His father wasn’t supposed to be willing to die for him.

Slowly, so slowly he felt as though he himself might break, he lifted his father’s head to see the man’s face more clearly. Geppetto coughed, and blood splattered from his mouth.

No, no, no.

Now, finally, was when the tears began to flow from his eyes.

Geppetto’s gaze fixed on his face—fixed on the tears that fell—and something like realization passed through the man’s face.

With the last bit of strength Geppetto had, he said, “I’m sorry, son.”

And then Giuseppe Geppetto breathed his last.

A dam within him had been smashed to pieces. He didn’t know how long he stayed there, head bowed low over his father’s corpse, sobs shaking out of him. It was irrational, but he begged Sophia to turn back his time. He begged to be allowed to save his father.

Nothing happened, of course, because the resets had never worked that way. He had never been able to restart a fight he had already finished.

And besides, what reason would Sophia have had to help him save the man who started the Frenzy, who knew his son so little that he was willing to destroy his son to “resurrect” him?

It didn’t make sense for him to care so much about Geppetto, he knew. Memories he didn’t have before flashed through his mind: his father never having time to be home, missing his graduation, sending birthday gifts through the mail instead of bestowing them in person. He should have hated Geppetto for all that the man did and didn’t do, should have spat on his corpse and walked away, like Romeo would have.

But he couldn’t.

He was forever Carlo, the boy who wanted his father to love him, and he was the wooden puppet, the one who realized that his father loved him far too late.

Something began to shift underneath his trembling hands. He watched, transfixed, as Geppetto, just like Sophia, disappeared into a glittering trail of Ergo. He wouldn’t even get to bury his father with his mother, then. Bitterly, he surmised that taking his father was fate’s cruel manner of reminding him that he couldn’t stay there forever. The fulfillment of his vow was still incomplete.

Though the grief was still there, burrowed into his heart, and he felt as though a part of him would remain crying forever, now was not the time to be rendered useless by his emotions. There would be time to mourn later. Now that Krat was saved, and the madness was over, he needed to save Sophia.

It was hard, scouring Arche Abbey for a way to bring Sophia back. Not because the place itself was almost labyrinthine, nor because he didn’t have any leads—he found that within an hour or so in the area where Sophia had been kept—but because of his own body.

His head was pounding. He felt as though each limb were being weighed down by anvils. He was tired.

Whatever happened to himself being powered by Ergo? He didn’t feel a single mechanism within him anymore, nor did he have a clue whether, if he were to be cut open, what would be found inside his body would be cold steel or flesh and bone. Would he have to sleep, or eat, or use the latrine? Could he even call himself a puppet anymore?

What could he call himself?

The answer wouldn’t come to him until later, when he returned to the uppermost portion of the Abbey. He was treated to a full view of the sun coming up over Krat’s skyline, its morning light sweeping a bright, shimmering trail over the ocean. A different kind of dawn arose within him as he held his hand over his eyes, shielding his face from wind and too-bright sun so that he could take in the view in its fullness.

He knew who he was now.

The wooden puppet had become a real boy.

The revelation played through his mind, curled around his heart as he came across a hidden path in the upper levels of the Abbey that led to an area outside. Finally, he found it: the puppet body that Simon Manus had commissioned in the perfect likeness of Sophia, but had wound up discarding, dissatisfied with how doll-like the body was. The man had likely kept Geppetto alive so that his father could make another one that was a near perfect copy.

As he beheld the puppet, he knew that it would suffice. It had her face, her hair, even the gentle manner with which she carried herself in its demure posture. This was the girl who had woken the wooden puppet, and then helped the puppet become real.

He was Carlo Geppetto, son of Giuseppe Geppetto, and he was alive thanks to her.

Just as she had for him countless times, he placed his hand on her chest. Something in him pushed, and all that was Sophia flowed from himself into the puppet.

And then everything caught up to him at once, and Carlo fainted.

iii

Waking up in this body was something Carlo still had no name for. He was back in the hotel, and when he didn’t see Sophia there, he nearly panicked. He checked around, first downstairs, and then upstairs in his father’s study, withstanding the sharp pang he felt at its emptiness.

On his father’s desk was something that hadn’t been there before. It was a letter from Sophia. Carlo took it, fingers brushing the delicately woven ribbon that bound it, and then smiled at its kindred familiarity.

Thank you for giving me a new life, it began.

#lies of p #lies of p pinocchio #lies of p carlo #lies of p spoilers #my writing #tried to make the narrative evolve with p's humanity #i really hope this game's fandom isn't as dead as my blog

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