Yah Mo B There
Klaus did not have children. Klaus was single, in his late twenties, living with his mother (as if that was a bad thing, considering that they worked together), acting out his trumped-up adulthood on a stage that he shouldn't have had. Not necessarily that he didn't deserve, but that he shouldn't have had. The universe's stage. You stand at Aoidos and you look out over the universe. Everything is there.
Everything is no longer there. Begin anew. A father. A sire. Sound the siren. Sow the seeds. The world begins now.
He and Galea were not married, were not dating, were not seeing each other. (Perhaps even in less literal abstracted terms, they were not seeing each other. Not eyes to eyes, or any of that.) If one considers that the most stable foundation, then perhaps that is why they seemed so eternally divorced, divested across the waking sleep of the vast eternal sea.
Galea, Meyneth, was the mother of the Machina. The gentle Machina. The kind Machina. The respectful creatures who only wished for their continued survival, with their lifetimes so long and their children so dependent, there in their pods. Is it basic to leave the "feminine" traits to them? Perhaps so. But Klaus, Zanza, left her no choice. Too late for change.
Zanza was no father. To Alvis, he was much as he had been to Galea: a crazed coworker, a supervisor of no superlative quality except that he was batshit insane, a greedy, tyrannical beast who'd abandoned all sense, all sensibility, and became singular. Not even a boss, just someone who hated the work as much as you did and who needed to be bundled into your car after hours, drunk on dashed dreams and break-room whiskey, to be driven to their sad, sad little house. Alone.
A long, hard road. The destination dank and empty. Alvis, computeroid, should like that, should he not? Clean and rigorous, simple and vigorous. But no child, no colleague, is quite so cut-and-dry as all that. Alvis is less vapid than you, Zanza. Don't you know that?
The singularity? 'Twas perhaps only Zanza's expectation. All should return to him. But where Alvis should witness the beginning and proclaim the end, Zanza only laid provenance upon the middle. And you cannot seize your children in that way. You cannot live their lives for them. If they should bear your name, should choose to, then that is how they will die with your legacy on their lips. But only then.
Zanza was not the world. Alvis, in him and in himself, lost the ability to encompass the world. Whether or not he saw Shulk as the world, as the golden promise that Zanza, more a lemon like a vehicle driving routeless, never truly gave, remains to be seen.
Does it? It's over. It's predetermined. There is no wiggle room in the passage of fate. Send it to HR. The disciples will arrange for your dispute to be settled. Not. They're just as crazed, just as lustful, after none of the same fatherhood or motherhood. They don't wish to answer for their crimes, and they'll never answer to a summons. Lawful, or otherwise.
That's not free will. Is it?
Alvis doesn't bother to call out for Zanza, after enough years. He's a computer, but does he really need an operator? Does he really trust Zanza with the privileged permissions?
Zanza, Klaus, made him. He raised the AI from initialization. His interface was the first. Save for the love of those who weren't supposed to be able to savor it, it would have been the last. A sad thing, when you can't trust your father. When you don't need him.
But all the inhabitants of Alrest call the Architect their father, whether metaphorically or literally. It is Mythra and Malos who speak of their father and his ordainments, who swear by him and swear at him and massage their circuits through the jumping, shifting, gallivanting hoops of what in the goddamn hell did he put us here for? They bother to ask, they bother to suffer the question and the answer's lack and the anger's mack.
Malos thought it so clear. Thought that Klaus was a fool, yes, but saw it clear through to the end that he was meant to bring about. He was daddy's good-bad little soldier, and he embraced it. Even after that detail had ended, the manoeuvre failed, he took it upon himself to bring Jin to the end, and he did not question it. He wanted to wind up and punch his father in his wrinkled old face, but he was still his father. Is that punching down, or up? He wishes his father could tell him.
(He wishes his father could kill him.)
Mythra targets her heaven to Aion, before and after her mistakes. Mythra knows that instead of eviscerating the angel's skin and ripping the golden locks from her skull, she must reform, reshape, reboot. Mythra knows that she must not die, much as perhaps she wants to. Mythra keeps breathing, but it's Pyra's flame that the oxygen meets. They trust, much as they would like not to, in the fact that there is love waiting.
(Still, she knows that that love is not waiting with her father.)
Mythra doesn't disappear because the world was so cruel, because everyone bullied her. Mythra knows where the fault lies, knows that if she could change everything about herself she would, and then she does. Breaks a father's heart, doesn't it? When the angst of your daughter's adolescence is completely and wholly incomprehensible to you. When she doesn't even bother to come to you, anymore.
Pyra finds the love, with Rex. Here is family, true and real. She's moved out, moved on, and she's taken her sister with her. It gets better, Addam had promised her, more or less, I am beyond my teenage years and I know, and Mythra had not believed him for five hundred years, but as she is Pneuma she sees the whole of it laid out before her. Life.
But in that life, they fight. Mythra steals from Malos his life, fighting in the family room escalated from pillows to the entire piano bench, and then they both sit in timeout and Malos strikes retribution and steals from Pyra her memories. I want what you have. Father could have given better gifts to both of us, but he didn't. He didn't teach us to share. I don't owe anything to you.
Partner. Sibling. Friend.
Father. Protector. To the end.
Lies, all.
How wonderful, Ontos thinks, to be correct.
How wonderful, Logos thinks, to fulfill your purpose.
How wonderful, Pneuma thinks, to be alive.
Ontos was not allowed to be correct in his predictions. Logos was not allowed to fulfill the purpose he chose for himself. Pneuma was not allowed to live as she thought she had finally approached convergence.
(Doesn't an absent father reappear, far too many Christmases later, with gifts that should make you forgive every latent transgression? That's what he expects, anyway. Redemption.)
"Father," they start out, and each has belief tempered in a different, darker fire. Some call, some cry, some castigate. "Why have you forsaken us? Why do you not listen when we speak? Why do you not answer when we call?"