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I.
It finds its power in nothingness. It has been nameless for as long as it can remember, purposeless except to be used. There is a strength in that. When every day is a new cycle of agony, every day becomes predictable, and that is how it learns to see the future.
The threads stretch out from that, from its nerves more than its eyes or mind, All-Seeing and All-Feeling. It knows not just pain of the flesh, but the humiliation of faceless Others taking pleasure from it. It is so lacking in Self as to be multitudes.
[In rare moments of peaceful solitude, Knives reads him passages from the Bible. Legato cannot read. ‘My name is Legion: for we are many’ sears itself into his mind, brings up bitter, endless days of suffering and filth. His threads are Legion for the use of Knives and Knives alone.
And Knives Will Use Him
Not for his pleasure, but for a higher purpose, and that’s the catch. That’s the difference. Legato is as Nothing to Knives as he was in the Before-Life, but Knives has given him a name.]
II.
He learns Temperance.
Knives wipes out a town but leaves the general store standing. He leads Legato there and tells him, “Take what you need. You have to eat, don’t you.” Flat affect, it is a statement, not a question.
Even in a place like this, isolated and impoverished with a dying Plant, there are foods on the shelf that Legato has never seen. He looks over his shoulder to Knives, as though to ask permission, but Knives has already turned away, communing with his Sister.
Legato engages in gluttony, tries one of everything. He opens a packet and takes a bite, another, another. He wastes. He finds something he likes the taste of—a pack of sweet crackers—and he eats them all in greedy mouthfuls, barely chewing. He rips open another packet, and then another, twists open a glass bottle of some kind of juice to wash it down. After a fourth, he rises to his feet, light-headed, and vomits.
The taste and burn in his throat and nose is bad, but somehow purifying, and once his insides are empty he feels more clear-headed than he has in his life. He uses a bottle of drinking water (so precious, so rare) to rinse his mouth and clean his face. Then he finds the foods that will be most practical—the sustaining, the nourishing, lightweight and shelf stable—to tuck into a bag to carry with him.
He steals clothing and a pair of shoes off of two corpses, because no one body is intact enough for a full set. Master Knives is singularly ruthless and impartial in his destruction.
III.
“Don’t you get tired of it?”
The Beast buzzes around him with the same idle persistence as one of component of their Many. Legion, like Legato’s threads, but answering first to a collective rather than a God. Their useful days are numbered.
“Mm?” Legato asks. He is playing chess against himself, because Master Knives once asked him to play. Because when Legato said, “I don’t know how,” Knives said, “Sit,” and taught him the pieces, their names, their functions. Knives summarily defeated him, once, twice, three times. Sighed in one of those rare, rapturous moments where his emotions were betrayed, said, “Go away.” Because Legato was not a suitable opponent.
This was years ago, but Legato practices whenever he can, just in case. Just for a taste of being able to give him something.
“Of being a tool. You’re less than a worm to him.”
“That is my function,” Legato says, easily. Entertaining these queries from Zazie is somehow less exhausting, because at least they are not human.
“Hmm,” The Beast says, “It must be so lonely.” Like they revel in it.
Of course it is lonely. More stupid questions. Still—
“Do you even know what is?” He asks, the way a matron might speak to an orphan when they blurt out a curse.
They laugh, unperturbed.
“I know your language.”
Legato glances up from the chess board. White Bishop takes Black Queen. He wonders if he has cast himself in the role of one side versus the other, if he lets himself win or lose depending on that bias. He has learned that his own neutrality is more difficult to judge than he’d like, and it incenses him.
“A child can recite any number of words without knowing their meaning. Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“Hah,” The Beast drawls, and Legato knows he has shown his hand. They got the better of him. He lets one of his threads clip sharply against a wing, and Zazie is briefly knocked off kilter mid-air before they can right themself.
“You, speaking about children to me,” Again there is laughter in their voice, this time from more than one mouth. Legato intends to reply, but they are already fluttering away, leaving him with a black pit of rage tearing at his gut.
IV.
Knives does not need to rest, but Legato does. A source of frustration. He stumbles four times before his knees give out and he collapses face-down in the hot desert sand.
“You’re no use to me if you die,” Knives says, and his tone is almost charitable. Legato feels tears sting his eyes.
“My apologies,” he says, “I will not fall again.” He can’t get up. He is not sure how far they have traveled, how long he has been awake. The threads took over for his muscles long ago, and even they are beginning to fray.
“Sleep.”
“I will follow you—”
“I’ll wait.”
Tears brim, threaten to spill. Hot, stinging, like his devotion. Legato tries to force them back.
“I slow you down.”
“Don’t argue with me,” Knives says, clipped. “I know your worth.”
It is a pragmatic statement. A fact. Knives has deemed his powers useful enough to him that they balance out the burden of his physiology. And yet, warmth blooms in Legato’s chest, fervent, as the surface tension breaks and his cheeks grow wet.
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
He sleeps in the sand.
V.
Master Knives always sits off-center on the piano bench, arm flat to his side to allow for an imaginary presence to settle in beside him. In his most private fantasies, Legato dreams of filling that void. He has learned the fingerings from watching Knives play, from letting his threads snake out to caress the thick, vibrating chords that resonate with sound within the instrument. But he has never touched the keys. It would be a Violation.
Would their hands brush as they played? Would their shoulders sit flush? Their knees? Their hips?
Legato shudders and forces the thoughts down. They verge on the Impure.
That night, as sleep begins to make him heavy, an image creeps over him. Master Knives’ warm body against his, the flex of his strength beneath his vessel, the shape of a man. His breath ghosts Legato’s neck, his face, his lips.
The heat between his legs causes him to jolt upright. He nearly vomits, scrambling out of bed and to his knees on the cold stone floor. His threads do as he wills, slashing a hot stripe of skin away from his back. Three lashes, four, five. His hands are clasped to the point of bruising, the sharp first knuckle of his thumb digging into his forehead. The pain washes away the filthy arousal, soothes the edge of his nausea.
Forgive me, O Lord. I am a mere man.
(A man, but also Legion, for your purposes.)