The Big Comedown


Notes

Once again of course, the lyrics are not owned by me but rather by NIN. Do not sue me as I am pathetically broke.


It was raining. Water fell to commit high-speed suicide upon the ground, shattered liquid carcasses forming puddles in the dirt. The lights of the inn were warm and welcoming in the downpour, a safe haven for those who had coin enough to pay the price charged for a room.

Zelgadis Greywers sat at a chair in his room, paid for with the last few gold pieces he possessed. One palm cupped his chin as he gazed out morosely into the rain-wrapped night, his sapphire eyes as cloudy as the sky. He sighed to himself. Looked like he was going to have to find some means of making money quickly. Quests, no matter how fruitless, were never cheap. Perhaps the city of Zolar was in need of a sword-for-hire...

There is a game I play
Try to make myself okay
Try so hard to make the pieces all fit
Smash it apart
Just for the fuck of it

He sighed again, his thoughts inevitably turning to the one thing that haunted his soul every moment of every day: his curse. Unconsciously his hand tightened into a fist and his eyes narrowed at the faint ghost of his reflection that the windowpane created. Rezo... Damn! How he hated the Red Priest for turning him into what he was; a monster with a human heart, shunned by all who saw him. And how he hated himself, for begging for the power that his monstrous body afforded.

Zelgadis closed his eyes, his fist uncurling slowly. He just had to find a cure for his condition! He wasn't sure how much longer he could live in this body, forever trapped inside a shell that brought only hatred and misery. The fact that he was physically repulsive wasn't the worst of his worries either. He was a man not divided, but split into three: human, golem and demon. Trying to keep all three warring sides of himself from tearing him apart was growing steadily harder, as each separate being seemed to gain a voice of its own. All three of these voices insisted that they were his true nature, and he knew that two of them were lying.

The Mazoku in him whispered slyly that it was he who granted him his magic, and since that was such an integral part of his life he must be Zelgadis' true self. The golem informed him emotionlessly that his cold demeanour, one of his better weapons against fools who would waste his time, was truly his soul reflected upon the outside world, making it the true nature of his self. The human, what Zelgadis knew to be the REAL him, cried out in despair as it was slowly but inexorably silenced.

He was beginning to think that if he didn't find a cure soon he would have to kill himself.

Bye bye ooh
Got to get back to the bottom
Bye bye ooh
The big come down isn't that what you wanted?
Bye bye ooh
Find a place with the failed and forgotten
Bye bye ooh
Isn't that really what you wanted now?

"You want power, Zelgadis?"

Those hateful, hateful words. The man who had uttered them was now long dead, but still his voice clanged through the shadowy halls of memory. His own stupidity was highlighted forever in his own mind.

A curt nod, no real thought put behind the gesture. He had agreed without pausing to consider the fact that the old man seemed to be losing touch with reality lately, his desire had eclipsed all rationality.

The searing pain, the hideous sense of his form being changed... And he had wanted it. Gods, he had WANTED it!

There is no place I can go there is no way I can hide
It feels like it keeps coming from the inside

Only regret now. No matter where he travelled, and no matter whom he was with, Zelgadis found he could not escape his own shame at what he had allowed himself to become. He was a monster, a prisoner of his own flesh and he hated himself. Every day was a hell of his own making.

There is a hate that burns within
The most desperate place I have ever been
Try to get back to where I'm from
The closer I get the worse it becomes
The closer I get the worse it becomes

Hatred was what kept him fuelled now, hatred for Rezo, hatred of his body, hatred of his own weakness. This anger, this self-loathing, it pushed him forward when his legs were screaming for rest and his mind cried dully for sleep, it gave him the determination he needed to search every old library and two-bit magic shop he encountered in the dim hope he might find some clue... anything.

His life was a never-ending quest to be able to take back a decision made in the heat of desire because he did not want the consequences that came with what he had been granted.

There is no place I can go there is no place I can hide
It feels like it keeps coming from the inside

"I don't recall being asked to be turned into a chimera in the process!"

"It was simply the most efficient way of giving you what you wanted..."

Zelgadis pressed his forehead to the window, eyes screwed tight against the phantom voices that refused to be banished to the dark recesses of his mind. Damn him, damn him, damn him... After a while he wasn't sure if he was cursing the late Rezo or himself.

It was still raining.


Fanfiction