Hello. Allow me to introduce myself before going further, and possibly ruining your idea of me. I know there is a lot of cursing in this piece, but I cannot get it done without it. For some reason, I think that the release of Karin's pain is in her cursing. The release for her is in being a harder person than the near-child who joined Yuri's team so long ago.
I am Silverlocke980, good friend of Tiger5913 (who many of you may know through her noble works, Snapshots and Belated Honeymoon) and a recent player of Shadow Hearts. I loved the game… but Karin's ending! Karin's heart! I love this game. I compliment the makers for such an amazing storyline, but I felt that Karin was not yet over. She may be hurt, may be defeated, but she is not yet over…
So, in dedication to her, I wrote this piece. This was written right before the final dungeon, or maybe even during it; at some point, anyway, before the final battle with Kato. This is Karin's own voice, and Karin's own song. So…
Though I make no apologies for story, I do say that extreme language follows beyond this point. I am sorry.
So, to make a long story short…. It's…
"SHOWTIME!"
Shadow Hearts:
Covenant ShadowsWhy the fuck do I have to die for some stupid rules of Fate? Why does it mean that I have to go away… what kind of twist would that be, to go die before your birth, to know your adult life before your childhood? What kind of life is that?
What kind of fate is that? What kind of twist is that? What kind of thing would dare…
Maybe we've gotten it all wrong. The Ring Soul /bastard bastard bastard hate him hate him fuckers FUCKERS/ talks about me carving my way through destiny. Bullshit. I'm following my destiny, not carving the damn thing up to serve on nice little plates. I'm bowing to destiny, not chopping the life out of it. And maybe that's where we're wrong.
Yuri is religious, I know this. I know he puts it off in public, but I've seen him take out a little cross only he knows about from his pocket and look at it, sometimes, wondering. I know he remembers Alice. I know he remembers God.
Why else would he bear such a crucifix on his back? He bears his cross before the world. Inside of Yuri (and why shouldn't I know about his soul? I mean, I've been there and I love him and I care for him and, oh, I'M HIS FUCKING MOM) there is a man who is actually scared, scared shitless of the things that are floating about in his mind and whispering to him in half-mad little tongues and scared of these things, not because they'll take him over, but just because he's scared. And he won't accept the Devil's comfort and just become one of these things himself. He wants something to take the pain away from him. For him, that happens to be God- though only after Alice died.
Of course, I could be wrong about all this /like I was wrong about thinking this was my life and it wasn't all decided and oh God I'm so scared please take my pain away/ and he could just be a Christian because she was. As Gepetto told us, one night, as we were sitting around the Battleship Mikasa (Yuri and the others were asleep at the time, and only me, Lucia, and Gepetto were up) that Yuri told him in Domremy that this life he had wasn't his, it was hers. So, who knows. Maybe he's being Christian because Alice was.
But you know what? I kind of think the Christians are right. Oh, not the crazy people like Nicolai and Rasputin (which brings up a question- how in the hell did those two sneak past Vatican security? Shouldn't either one of them have made their "evil sensors" go all ding-a-ling and bing-bing-bing, we have a demon here and why the fuck am I thinking like this?) but the guys you actually find in the Bible. (read it in Officer Training to learn more about the Vatican and our dealings with them… never thought I'd think of it again. Go figure.) were always talking about how you have to fight the world and how men will hate you for loving Christ. And that's true, in a way; after all, hasn't everyone who has ever followed Good had to fight? Hell, just look at us. We've had to fight every step of the way.
So is Fate evil?
Yeah, that would be just about right. Like Yuri said in Nihonbashi that night, so long ago… " Fate sure is a strange thing." Yeah, Yuri.
It's pretty fucking weird, alright.
Ah, fuck. What a word. As I look back through this journal, this stupid stupid journal I've kept with me since the start, showing it to no one, the one that kept me sane in the barracks when it seemed like every idiot in the world wanted to annoy the female recruit and no one respected me and then took with me to Domremy almost by accident, almost by accident, writing in it how cute Nicolai looked when he slept and how weird it was to watch him use his holy powers and how bloody strange it was to be fighting monsters and that Ring Soul business, now, wasn't that strange, and how after meeting it my attacks were swifter, my moves were smoother, I was a better fighter, and Nicolai joked that I could at least share the power, and we'd both chuckled in the kind of mad hatred of that place and felt a little better and…
What the fuck was I talking about?
Oh, yeah, now I remember. As I was saying before I got totally off-track and whacked in my head I was thinking that it's weird that I should say fuck so often now, and with such vehemence, when in my earlier writings you'd be hard-pressed to find me saying anything so bad as "damn it" more often than once every five pages. And then it was usually directed at a monster or talking about what someone else had said, and not my own words and my own thoughts. Cursing slips easily to mind nowadays, I find. Joachim even commented on it. He said I was getting rather… mouthy.
I started giggling and told him that he had no fucking idea what had happened to me and that getting mouthy was the least of my problems, and then I shut up before I accidentally let something slip and was rather thankful to the next monster that leapt out of shadow, because it was big enough to make anybody (even a kleptomaniac vampire with bludgeoning tendencies) forget whatever they were talking about the minute before. Anastasia promptly stunned it by flashing its picture (which always freaks me out; why in the hell does she just pack around a camera? What is the purpose? What's the point?) and, while the rather dumb thing was just staring and blinking at her, I let loose with Sonnestark. It died within seconds.
Ah, Anastasia. Strangest of my companions, in ways. Youngest of us, most surely, and wielding the oddest weapon- an Easter Egg that comes to life and attacks things? Talk about ends you do not want to meet- but, somehow, I think she is a lot bigger than the rest of us too. Like her name will mean more than ours will ten years from now. Anastasia. My namer and, in a way, my killer. Did you know that, Anastasia? Did you know that, when you said that, you killed me?
Did you know that, when you just randomly picked out a name for me so the authorities wouldn't think I was German, you killed me? Did you know that, in that one act, you changed me, changed me from Karin Koenig, proud daughter of an old noble family, working her way up the ranks of the military, swordswoman extraordinaire, even a minor exorcist (the Fort of Regrets, I believe, counts as exorcism), to Anne Hyuga, simple wife of a simple husband, living for the sole purpose of getting killed in a couple of years because, hey, somebody has to die, and oh look, it taught Yuri all his fusions, and hey, she wasn't all that important anyway! So I'm supposed to go off, merrily tramping along, die in all these years while I'm sitting with Yuri on my lap and naming him Yuri because that was the name of my first lover and fuck a row Yuri himself said that, figured out his own name and my name and my shame and my pain all in one go, in one of those throw-away jokes he's always using, and I guess that fits because he would have always wanted it that way, always wanted to define something totally great and grand in one moment of I'm-too-cool-for-you shrugness. And all I'm supposed to do is die die die die die die die die…
Oh, FUCK YOU!
Fuck you, Gepetto, for being such a bloody freak, holding on to the remains of your dead daughter through the puppet you fight with because you are too weak to try to live for anything better. Fuck you, Joachim, for thinking yourself so noble and then not following through with it by being noble. Fuck you, Kurando, for your stupid self-possessed "oh it's all my fault" nature that makes me want to take my sword and drive it right through your noble, demon-possessed guts. Fuck all of you.
Fuck you, Anastasia, for giving me the name I will bear like a curse. Fuck you, Alice, for being the woman my Yuri always loved, and the reason I will be so fucked in a past life. Fuck you, Lucia, for being so childish and innocent that it's like you can't never grab that we are doing this for the world and for treating even death like a children's game. Fuck you, Nicolai, for your attempted love and for selling your soul for power (and isn't that funny, Nicolai? You and Rasputin were both beaten by a guy who stole the soul of a demon! Isn't it funny? Yuri struck no bargain, made no deal- he just stole the damn monster's soul! The total reverse of the tales we all hear as children, and oh God, did that mean Yuri fought Fate? Oh God, does that mean that…) and for being such a fucking idiot the whole time. Fuck you.
And you, Saki, talking to me as if you've known me for years. Talking as if I'm an old friend who just came back from a long journey. Yeah, it's been one hell of a long journey, all right. First I had to go get killed by demons in front of my son, then I had to go get born, and then I had to grow up and join the army, then I had to meet Nicolai and then I had to go back and then I had to fall in love with my own FUCKING SON and then then then then then then….
And here's the part where I'm supposed to say "Fuck you, Yuri". But no. I choose someone else. The person who is the beginning and end of all my troubles. The man who has nothing to do with them, but who symbolizes all that I have come to hate in my mind.
The man who has taken, will take, and is taking my life away from me.
Fuck you, Jinpachiro Hyuga.
Fuck you, Jinpachiro, for being Yuri's father. Fuck you for being the man I have to marry, because I love Yuri too much to not give him life. Fuck you, Hyuga, for being the man I'll be forced to marry who I can never love. Fuck you for taking away my life.
Fuck you for existing.
I can't take it anymore. I just can't take it anymore.
You watch out, Kato. I'm coming after you. I'm not coming after you because I care about destiny or because I want to save the world or even because I'm in love. I'm coming after you because I'm mad as hell and Destiny is going to give me my life back. I'm coming after you because I'm going to get my fucking life back and the instant I'm through with you, there will not even be enough left for the dogs to eat. I will kill you, Kato.
And then I will get my life back.
You'll see.
Sometime after this letter was written (in a small journal Karen kept with her always, as her way of writing down any interesting events that happened to her on her trip with Yuri) the final battle was waged. Once it was over, each went to their separate heavens, and Yuri was found wandering (with no memory) in Wales.
Each went off to a separate land- each created, almost by accident, a new world, born from the old. But Karin alone was not allowed to have a new land. Karin went back in time to the moment when she was destined to meet Jinpachiro Hyuga and fall in love with him. Jinpachiro never told anyone, but the red-headed, beautiful Russian woman was one of the most bitter people he had ever met. It was her beauty alone that let her win over Jinpachiro- and though they were often making love in the earliest parts of the relationship, after Yuri's birth his wife almost totally withdrew into herself. It has been said by a nurse who was there that she broke down into sobbing laughter when she named him Yuri in the hospital. It had been a name that Jinpachiro had heard his wife speak in her sleep, beside him, as she stirred in his arms and moved against him, suddenly tensing, suddenly snarling into the night. He never knew why.
Soon enough, the fateful trip to China occurred, and Karin, wanting to preserve one of the few memories she could think of that made her smile (the day she talked with Yuri in Nihonbashi), said nothing, merely watching as little Yuri listened to the sounds of the ship. She thought she'd cry on the trip. Jinpachiro, who did love Karin in a way, merely assumed she was sad that they were leaving Japan. He never said anything either. Because of this, Yuri did remember the sound of the ship in the water, leaving for China, for the simple reason that it was the only thing he could listen to. Nobody was talking on that trip.
Karin stayed in China, moving around as her husband performed missions and gradually grew into a silent, powerful, noble man. Karin never did love Jinpachiro, but in the end, she saw him for the nobility that he was, and forgave him. After all, he had nothing to do with it. Fate, on the other hand, did.
Karin watched, and the odd fact that her memories were actually the future and she was living in the past gave her unusual insight into the way things worked. Jinpachiro, for instance, once went off on a mission and came back with an unusual perfume smell about him; Karin, eyes lighting up with sudden knowledge that came to her like a gunshot, suddenly saw all of Fate's strands lighting up at once. The perfume was Italian; it was called Manmaria, and Lucia had been particularly fond of it on their trip, often wearing it when they were traveling to different villages in hopes of enticing straight men (or annoying gay ones; Lucia was very fond of bothering the Magimel brothers when they met, which for some reason was still one of the funniest things Karin remembered from her original journey). Karin remembered it, and when she saw the way Jinpachiro was acting, she knew something was up. She quite quietly wrote down in her journal that she thought that- though she couldn't be sure, there was too much involved, it was too much damn coincidence- but she thought that Jinpachiro Hyuga was Lucia's father. For some reason, she could just see it- a spice vendor coming up the Silk Road, entering China, Jinpachiro meeting her, being enticed by her beauty, probably tired from all the things he had to kill, just meeting up with her for one night of pleasure in a land of setting suns and forever-stretching rice paddies… and boom. Years later, Karin meets up with Lucia, daughter of her husband, bastard child produced by the man she had married for the sole sake of producing her loved one. And, of course, Lucia entrances her own half-brother at their first meeting without realizing it. Fate was cruel, fate was malicious, and fate was… perverted.
It was in that moment Karin was freed. With the revelation from Good that Fate was nothing more than an old pervert sitting on a bag of bones and playing with himself, Karin realized that she could fight her own fate. And fight it she did.
She'd lost her swords years ago, but in the half-year since the revelation that Jinpachiro was Lucia's father and that Fate was nothing more or less than the Devil so much of the world hated, Karin practiced and trained in the combat styles she'd seen her husband use, finally managing to get a cheap Chinese combat sword from a local vendor. She never could do Sonnestark again, but Heulverk and Bullenfogel came easily enough to her, and even Geuschbent was not entirely beyond her reach. She thought she could fight.
She was wrong.
When the demons came, she immediately knew there were too many of them- oh man, there were hundreds of the things out there- but she resolved to die fighting anyway. Since she knew- or thought she knew- that her son would take care of them by herself, she decided to focus solely on pounding the ugliest demons herself. She wanted to be the last thing the worst of them ever saw.
And she was- mostly. Unbeknownst to her, if Karin had not fought as fiercely as she had, Yuri would have died there too. His powers, fueled on rage and the mad perfection of childhood, of innocence, gave him the ability to slaughter the demons quickly and easily… but if the strongest of them had lived, they would have killed him. As it was, Karin died, saving Yuri's life one last time.
The crazy thing was, it wasn't the end of her story. Karin lived on, her spirit borne into time by the will of God to live on- because it was not yet her time. When she prayed, in the dark of the night, that she be given one more chance, she had no idea someone was listening. And when He heard her, He answered.
Fifty years passed before her spirit came back into the real world again. When it did, it found itself in the hands of a young woman from Italy named Vera, who had taken up an amazingly beautiful sword she'd found outside her small house and had been admiring it when Karin's gruff, grouchy voice echoed in her ears. Rather bemused to have become a spirit, Karin stepped back into time, found a way to transmit her essence from the sword to other objects, and by possessing a doll the still-living Roger Bacon made for her, and joined Vera on a quest to save the world.
And this time, she got to be the leader.
Fate weaves its strands and plays its games. Unfortunately for it, God happens to be on the side of good, and not the world.
The world itself matters not. It's the heroes inside it who matter most. And when Karin finally died, when her puppet finally let go?
Her first words to Yuri were "Hey, asshole. It's been a while, huh?"
Fin