the sandman: the kindly ones

from the longest story arc... the kindly ones

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MERVYN: There ya go again, Loosh - you can't just come right out and say it, huh? Now me, I'm a straightforward kinda guy, y'know? I mean some of us aren't afraid to call a spade a goddamn shovel.

~
MORPHEUS: I don't recommend revenge. It tends to have repercussions.

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Rose Walker's Journal: I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love someone. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich, or how to be poor.
They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying.

They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

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LARISSA: Destinations are often a surprise to the destined.

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ROSE: Have you ever been in love?

DESIRE: You might say that.

ROSE: Horrible, isn't it?

DESIRE: In what way?

ROSE: It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...

You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.

Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "Maybe we should just be friends" or "How very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way to your heart.

DESIRE: How picturesque.

ROSE: It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that.

Especially not love.

I hate love.

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MORPHEUS: Did you have a particular boon in mind? When you summoned me here?
NUALA: I wanted you to stay. I... I wanted you to love me.

MORPHEUS: And do you think that love is a gift? Like a bauble, or a trinket? Something I can reach into a pouch and present to you?

NUALA: I gave all my love to you. Years ago.

MORPHEUS: Did you? I did not realize... On reflection, while I cannot give you the thing itself, I could give you a dream of my love.

NUALA: I already have that, my Lord. Please go.

~
DESTINY: Very well. Events will fall as they must. As the events happen, the conflicting destinies will merge into a whole. As the events take place, the conflicting destinies will cease to exist.
This will be felt across worlds and days as a reality storm; and as it plays its course, conflicting realities will fall and spin and shatter across time and existence.

All this is destined to happen. Events that never did happen and now never shall, will cast their conclusions out into the worlds. Cause and effect will jostle, unable to tell quite which came first. The event horizon will come closer and closer. Wrecks and mirages of time and occassion...

Am I the true Destiny?

Are you?

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MORPHEUS: Rules and responsibilities: these are the ties that bind us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must.

~
LUCIFER: I had the hubris originally to regard myself as a collaborator, as a co-author. Very rapidly I found myself reduced to the status of character, following something of a disagreement in the fundamental direction of the Creation.
Now I sometimes feel I'm simply waiting around to see which of us was right, which was wrong. But even if it turns out that I was right, what good does it do me?

So -- what -- I get the thrill of standing at the end of the universe, and saying "See, I was right all the time?" No, I'm better off out of it.