#mazzarò realizes his constant desire for riches and land and goods meant nothing as hes slowly dying

[randomwriteronline]

Thinking about volo and cogita living like a fuckton of decades but still eventually. You know. Dying. And how that would fuck up volo specifically.

Like this guy is absolutely driven by one thing and one thing only. Hes 100% ready to spend his entire life looking for a way to get up to God's doorstep to ask it why he wasnt chosen to be its most specialest boy, and the fact cogita is always sort of somewhere next to him metaphorically or literally is like an afterthought. She's his only semblance of family through one way or another and also old as balls and looking just fine for her age so of course shell just always be in her tent drinking tea, using unfathomably powerful ancient artifacts to cut the vegetables for her evening soup that she will serve to him while berating him for being an idiot with delusions of grandeur when he comes back after another useless search.

Except one day he walks in and shes laying on her chair completely still. Her hat is on the floor and her pose is absolutely graceless. Shes cold. Unmoving.

Shes dead.

And he looks at her and doesnt even check, theres a layer of dust on her gloves and everything else, and the water in the cup that shattered on the floor is completely dried up, and there's a pungent smell of sorts that he didn't realize drenches the whole tent. Shes dead. Shes been dead for a bit of time now.

And volo stands and looks at her dead; he buries her with no thoughts, and then he sits at the same chair she sat in when she died, at the same table she sat before when she died, and he realizes, hes alone; and he realizes, dear God, i will die too eventually.

And he goes insane.

But its not his kind of boisterous and excessive deranged sort of show, where he makes himself a little outfit and a stupid haircut and screams at the heavens and siks a giant ghost worm from hell on a teenager, its a perfectly quiet madness that makes him feel incomprehensibly small and meaningless and powerless against everything: against nature, against others, against himself. Hes alone and he realizes cogita will not chastise him, and it feels good; he realizes he doesnt know how she makes her soup, or her tea, how she keeps her calligraphy so neat, how she dealt with not having an heir for ages, how she dealt with having such an incomprehensible heir, how she handles enamorus (who doesnt even show up to volo when spring comes, and simply never comes back) or what she thought of her own myths; and he feels like shes resting her hands on his shoulders with a weight that will crush him, and he realizes, dear God, i will die too eventually, and nobody will even know i existed.

Maybe he just needs to find God. Maybe he just needs to find Arceus. Work harder on it. So he can ask it everything. So he can figure out how to never die, or how to exist forever.

And when he finally does it (because the times change and life has many doors, johnny boy) and he finally stands out of time and space and reality and he has Arceus right before him and so many questions, his mind wanders to ask about where enamorus is now, and it brings him to the image of cogita cold and graceless and unmoving, just dead, and replaces her body with his, and he spends the precious time he could use to question god in perfect silence, drawing the biggest blank of his life.

And then before he knows it its over and he has no second chance.

And he realizes, dear god.

I am going to die alone.

And decades later his only granddaughter forgets to visit him one day, and shows up the next with a book of myths under her arm as an apology, and she finds him slumped over his chair cold and still and graceless, with a broken cup of water drying up still on the floor.

And Cynthia looks at him and thinks, very slowly: dear god.

I will die too eventually.