Chapter Text
Omega
It is amazing how quickly your perception of the worst that can happen, can change. How one fraction of a moment, one single decision, can alter your entire world. I’ve had more of those moments than most, beginning with the day that I died and the boy who brought me back to life, and continuing through love triangles, reincarnation, alternate futures, murder, betrayal, and a decades long war.
But none of those moments, or series of moments, no matter how painful or traumatic or heart breaking, none of them could compare to this moment, to this destruction of everything I had ever known and everything I would ever know.
“Victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat,” Malcolm S. Forbes said that, a businessman and politician who had only seen battle in the boardroom or the campaign trail. Perhaps that is why he failed to mention that defeat is hardest when you’ve known victory, and that defeat caused by victory is the bitterest possible pill to swallow. I had tasted defeat before; in some ways the past three years had been a string of never-ending defeats with only the occasional victory to balance the other side of the scale. A scale now so far tipped it will never recover.
The moment of our greatest defeat, of the world’s greatest defeat, was preceded by a victory in which we decimated our enemy, leaving only two survivors of a force numbering in the hundreds despite numbering only six ourselves. It was sweet, a strike back against three years of frustration and impotence in which we finally took charge of our destinies, finally accepted who and what we were and what it meant for our lives.
We should have known better than to rejoice.