A Friend That Matters Most
Chapter. 4
The stories of the Dark Matter are not kind ones for their lot.
There are the legends, of course. The stories of the birth of Dark Matter, coincided with the birth of the Star Warriors. Fated to exist on opposite sides of the spectrum, warring in balance. Chaos and peace, dissonance and harmony. The Star Warriors, to keep the universe whole. The Dark Matter, to tear it asunder. They exist for no other purpose.
And there are the lived experiences. Stories that cannot be told by word but by action, the kind only the war-torn can believe.
Meta wouldn’t have believed many of those stories about the Dark Matter had they not been proven to him as a child. So many friends and family, hurt by their claws and eyes and teeth. So much pain, so much anguish, so many terrible memories that even now still give him nightmares and haunt him over his shoulders.
The Dark Matter are not a race that value life. The opposite. If there is a Star Warrior, it is their purpose to destroy them, down to the last, until there is nothing left. Destruction and negativity is all they are. He knows this. Everyone knows this. It’s been proven, time and time again.
And now his nightmares are real, just as they want. Now he sees a Dark Matter, true in the flesh, long after he’d struggled to believe they were gone. And he sees a predator who only wants the death and destruction of his family. The death of the last Star Warrior in the universe.
A monster after his child.
Oh, it’s very convincing. The act is impeccable, the fear in its eyes, the way it starts to shake. Dark Matter can’t feel, but their pretense of it has always been without compare, manipulators of the highest degree. They couldn’t feel, but they could act, and that was more dangerous than anything else.
It doesn’t matter, here, that it looks markedly different from its kin, two eyes and a tongue maybe a bit off-color. Dark Matter vary like everyone else. Their motives do not.
His hand tightens on the hilt of his blade, Galaxia steady at his hip as always she’d been. She’s warm under his palm.
“Dad?”
And Kirby is still here. Still in danger.
His son – the last Star Warrior, far too close, too close – has taken a step back when Meta Knight finally gains clarity to see, miniscule but noticeable, and his wings are hiked upwards defensively as he glances back and forth between his father and his new friend. Noticing the tension in the air, how fearful the Dark Matter pretends to act.
It’s Meta Knight’s own fault for getting lost in his head.
He could strike now, he thinks. Strike before anyone has a chance to move, remove the threat that’s far too close to his child for comfort. It would be the quickest way to end it. Tempting.
…
Kirby is staring at him. Not scared. But close to it.
(He doesn’t ever want Kirby to be afraid. Not of him.)
…
“So,” Someone says from very far away. It sounds pleasant. Easy. Sounds like him. “This is your new friend?”
“…Yeah? Yeah! This is Gooey! I met him at the pond earlier. You know the melon with the card on it, and—oh! The big fish! That was him! Both of them!”
Meta Knight hears words as if they’re underwater, muffled and strange, just behind his ears. Marx is involved, he hears, vaguely – Gooey had been the one to throw the rock at him, Gooey had given him gifts. Gooey wanted to be his friend. Gooey, his child had named it.
Meta Knight’s barely listening. No Dark Matter ever did something kind without a reason for it.
(His Teacher had--
Don’t think about the past. Don’t get lost in yourself. Or you will lose everything else present.)
“Kirby?” Someone says with Meta Knight’s mouth. “Tell you what – you go see your mother and we can talk all about it when we meet up, huh? They haven’t met her yet!”
A hand is lax over his blade, and though it kills him in the worst way to do so, he bids his palm to let go of the hilt completely. Wings slacken, and he thinks he may be smiling.
Don’t let him see. Don’t let him know.
Kirby gives him a guarded sort of look, still yet uncertain. But the man he looks at is a kind person, calm and happy to meet a new face. The man he looks at is his father, who may be stern but wouldn’t ever be mean to any of Kirby’s friends.
There’s nothing to be afraid of, really.
Kirby makes to take a step. Meta shifts, just barely.
The Dark Matter jerks and Kirby freezes as if burnt.
“It’s alright,” Someone says (him, him) and an arm reaches out to – nudge, hold, guard, stay away – the boy on home. “We’ll be right behind you. You know it’s not far!”
Meta Knight gives a genial smile in the Dark Matter’s direction, at the tree behind them more than anything. They look very, very afraid. A sad little act, but a convincing one anyway.
The boy hesitates, and his father nudges gently, just one more time. Kirby’s glancing back and forth, and truly the creature must have thought his son easy pickings. How vulnerable the child was right now, lonely and upset. Already Kirby’s gotten attached.
Please, leave, someone begs privately in his own mind. Please, don’t watch this. Please.
Meta Knight doesn’t think Kirby will at first. He thinks that Kirby’s going to stay, and the mask will need to come off, and his stomach feels sick at the thought of needing to expose a child to their heritage far too early.
Kirby looks between them again and again, at the smile surely on his father’s face and the gaze the Dark Matter is giving him, desperate and terrified.
And he leaves. Slow, uncertain, awkward.
But Kirby leaves.
And eventually. They’re alone. He and a Dark Matter smaller than his hand.
Meta Knight waits a little longer, head tilted just so to listen and make sure Kirby isn’t getting up to mischief, hiding in the brush. It’s quiet. There are no birds and no animals. It’s frighteningly still, like Pop Star itself waiting with a baited breath. Get rid of the plague on its land, it says quietly.
Meta Knight’s hand lands heavy on Galaxia’s hilt.
The Dark Matter in front of him cringes.
“You’ve got some nerve,” Meta Knight says, and his voice is far more cruel than ever he’s heard, low and cutting like jagged rocks against each other, “to come after my child, Dark Matter. Did you think I wouldn’t know? Wouldn’t see? You must not have been around long, if you thought so.”
Good riddance, then, he thinks, to pluck the weed from the dirt before it can spread roots.
They seize and give a full body shudder, and the discolored matter around them squeezes, stretches, vibrates in place. The two eyes that peer at him are wide, glassy, pupils shrunk to needlepoints. It’s an animal terror that Kes would’ve honed in on immediately.
It doesn’t move. Makes no effort to lash out, or even to run. Just floats, and stares.
And why does it hesitate, he wonders. Why does it not strike now that the child is gone and the pretense for appearance is no longer necessary? Does it think it can still fool him?
It’s either very young to think it can trick him, or it just thinks he’s very stupid. Funny.
Meta Knight grits his teeth and draws his blade.
Galaxia is a blessed artifact that’s carried him through life and death more times than he can count, and while she hasn’t seen much warfare in recent years, her blade still glows with divinity in the light of day. She pulses and hums warm in his grip, an old friend there to the end, and the Dark Matter shrinks in on themselves.
Good, he thinks.
“Your kind aren’t wanted here, creature. Your kind haven’t been wanted since the dawn of the first of them. And I won’t let you continue to destroy everything we stand for.”
He makes to raise his hand, Galaxia abuzz with deadly intent. To get this done with before Kirby can come back and see, to wipe it out into nothing and it’ll never hurt anyone again.
…
It
smiles.
It smiles at him. Smiles, trembling, tongue lolling from its strange mouth. And it.
It cries.
A Dark Matter is a hivemind. A Dark Matter – each and every one, no matter the appearance, the personality – only wants destruction, chaos. The death of everything it sees. It can’t feel emotion, but it can pretend, and it can pretend very, very well.
It smiles and it cries. It’s fake, he knows. It’s fake.
(It reminds him of Kirby, after he’s gotten a cut on his hand and doesn’t want to look like a baby.
Reminds him of Kirby, after Marx has said things no good child should say.
It reminds him of—)
Meta Knight’s hand is frozen, barely lifted, Galaxia pointed into the dirt. He can’t seem to move it.
He doesn’t ask what it wants. He already knows. He doesn’t ask why it’s here. He already knows.
He already knows.
And even now, it’s trying to sink its claws into him, trying to emulate a child in order to survive, to get into his poor heart. It knows how it looks and it’s using that fact to its advantage.
And Meta Knight’s hand won’t move because its little act is working.
Galaxia hums, soothingly, in his grip. She who has been with him for nearly an eternity pulses and reassures, or at least he it brings comfort to think that.
“…Do you know what I’ve lost to your kind.”
The thing stares at him, crying and smiling and he can’t move. He can’t move, so he speaks. He barely hears himself.
“Do you know the kind of damage you’ve done to us all? Since the dawn of time? The loved ones that have been hurt? Because of you?”
He doesn’t know why he’s telling it this. Because he wants it to know? To understand exactly why he has his blade drawn? To dig its face into the sins it’s brought on the world?
He thinks of Shieff. He thinks of his father, of his other teachers, of his father’s guardian.
(Everyone is hurt and his heart beats too loudly. Tears are burning his cheeks and there’s blood on his hands. His throat hurts. There’s a ringing in his ears. Nothing feels real.)
Meta Knight had sworn, taking Kirby under his wing, that he would never let anything happen to him. Even as awkward and reluctant as he’d been to take on a little warrior, to tutor them, he’d sworn it. If not by love, then by righteous obligation.
If Kirby was going to be the last Star Warrior in this universe, then it was imperative that nothing happen to him. And Meta Knight would not allow anything to happen to him. Not to his student.
Not to his child.
His throat tightens.
“Gooey. He named you that.”
The Dark Matter brightens. It nods, fervently, excitedly.
“Then I hope you understand what an honor you’ve been given. You don’t deserve it.”
He’s not cruel. Not like them. He’ll make it quick. For Kirby’s sake. For the sake of the one who thought this creature was a friend, too sweet and pure to ever have known any better.
He is outside of himself, watching as if a distant participant as the Dark Matter jerks and makes a noise and slams itself into the tree. Watching as his body takes one, two steps forward and his hand tightens.
Meta Knight finally, finally, raises his blade. And he prepares to take a life.
And then there’s a scream.
…
Kirby comes back quicker than Meta Knight thought possible.
He yells something Meta Knight can’t understand, words a slur as he panics and flails and tries to use his wings to hurry faster. Begging, he thinks, and the tears here are genuine, precious and pained. It burns to look at, and it about kills him to see the boy skid to a stop and stretch his arms out.
Galaxia is pointing at him. His blade, pointed at his own son.
He wants to be sick.
“Get out of the way, Kirby,” He says, voice empty in its monotone. “This is for the good of everyone here.”
“He my friend, dad! You can’t!” And oh, it hurts. Kirby looks as if he’s the one being threatened at the end of his blade, afraid, terrified of his own father and—he is, isn’t he? At the end of his father’s weapon, afraid of him.
It hurts. It hurts and he wants to scream.
“You don’t know what you’re doing, Kirby. You don’t understand what that thing is. Get out of the way.”
“No! I won’t! You can’t hurt him, dad! You—Y—”
Meta Knight moves before Kirby can finish, before he can break and allow himself to be swayed by anymore of it. The Dark Matter has poisoned the child’s mind. It knows what it’s doing.
Kirby is lifted into one hand, and his shadow looms dark over a Dark Matter that should never have existed. No matter the shivering, the sniveling, the tears. No matter the boy’s shrieking as he raises his blade.
It will kill them all, if he doesn’t do this.
Better Kirby to be alive and hate him than to be dead and feel nothing at all.
It hurts. It freezes like ice in his veins, from head to toe, and he struggles to breathe against the bitter cold of it all.
It freezes him inside. It freezes him. It--
It freezes.
He sees, then, as if in a fog, the frost that coats their surroundings. Ice that makes Meta Knight’s lungs freeze in his chest, roots his feet in place, coats Galaxia like a sheet of glass. Bitter cold stark against the backdrop of Pop Star’s airy summer day.
“Meta Knight.”
Kirby hadn’t come alone.
There are the legends, of course. The stories of the birth of Dark Matter, coincided with the birth of the Star Warriors. Fated to exist on opposite sides of the spectrum, warring in balance. Chaos and peace, dissonance and harmony. The Star Warriors, to keep the universe whole. The Dark Matter, to tear it asunder. They exist for no other purpose.
And there are the lived experiences. Stories that cannot be told by word but by action, the kind only the war-torn can believe.
Meta wouldn’t have believed many of those stories about the Dark Matter had they not been proven to him as a child. So many friends and family, hurt by their claws and eyes and teeth. So much pain, so much anguish, so many terrible memories that even now still give him nightmares and haunt him over his shoulders.
The Dark Matter are not a race that value life. The opposite. If there is a Star Warrior, it is their purpose to destroy them, down to the last, until there is nothing left. Destruction and negativity is all they are. He knows this. Everyone knows this. It’s been proven, time and time again.
And now his nightmares are real, just as they want. Now he sees a Dark Matter, true in the flesh, long after he’d struggled to believe they were gone. And he sees a predator who only wants the death and destruction of his family. The death of the last Star Warrior in the universe.
A monster after his child.
Oh, it’s very convincing. The act is impeccable, the fear in its eyes, the way it starts to shake. Dark Matter can’t feel, but their pretense of it has always been without compare, manipulators of the highest degree. They couldn’t feel, but they could act, and that was more dangerous than anything else.
It doesn’t matter, here, that it looks markedly different from its kin, two eyes and a tongue maybe a bit off-color. Dark Matter vary like everyone else. Their motives do not.
His hand tightens on the hilt of his blade, Galaxia steady at his hip as always she’d been. She’s warm under his palm.
“Dad?”
And Kirby is still here. Still in danger.
His son – the last Star Warrior, far too close, too close – has taken a step back when Meta Knight finally gains clarity to see, miniscule but noticeable, and his wings are hiked upwards defensively as he glances back and forth between his father and his new friend. Noticing the tension in the air, how fearful the Dark Matter pretends to act.
It’s Meta Knight’s own fault for getting lost in his head.
He could strike now, he thinks. Strike before anyone has a chance to move, remove the threat that’s far too close to his child for comfort. It would be the quickest way to end it. Tempting.
…
Kirby is staring at him. Not scared. But close to it.
(He doesn’t ever want Kirby to be afraid. Not of him.)
…
“So,” Someone says from very far away. It sounds pleasant. Easy. Sounds like him. “This is your new friend?”
“…Yeah? Yeah! This is Gooey! I met him at the pond earlier. You know the melon with the card on it, and—oh! The big fish! That was him! Both of them!”
Meta Knight hears words as if they’re underwater, muffled and strange, just behind his ears. Marx is involved, he hears, vaguely – Gooey had been the one to throw the rock at him, Gooey had given him gifts. Gooey wanted to be his friend. Gooey, his child had named it.
Meta Knight’s barely listening. No Dark Matter ever did something kind without a reason for it.
(His Teacher had--
Don’t think about the past. Don’t get lost in yourself. Or you will lose everything else present.)
“Kirby?” Someone says with Meta Knight’s mouth. “Tell you what – you go see your mother and we can talk all about it when we meet up, huh? They haven’t met her yet!”
A hand is lax over his blade, and though it kills him in the worst way to do so, he bids his palm to let go of the hilt completely. Wings slacken, and he thinks he may be smiling.
Don’t let him see. Don’t let him know.
Kirby gives him a guarded sort of look, still yet uncertain. But the man he looks at is a kind person, calm and happy to meet a new face. The man he looks at is his father, who may be stern but wouldn’t ever be mean to any of Kirby’s friends.
There’s nothing to be afraid of, really.
Kirby makes to take a step. Meta shifts, just barely.
The Dark Matter jerks and Kirby freezes as if burnt.
“It’s alright,” Someone says (him, him) and an arm reaches out to – nudge, hold, guard, stay away – the boy on home. “We’ll be right behind you. You know it’s not far!”
Meta Knight gives a genial smile in the Dark Matter’s direction, at the tree behind them more than anything. They look very, very afraid. A sad little act, but a convincing one anyway.
The boy hesitates, and his father nudges gently, just one more time. Kirby’s glancing back and forth, and truly the creature must have thought his son easy pickings. How vulnerable the child was right now, lonely and upset. Already Kirby’s gotten attached.
Please, leave, someone begs privately in his own mind. Please, don’t watch this. Please.
Meta Knight doesn’t think Kirby will at first. He thinks that Kirby’s going to stay, and the mask will need to come off, and his stomach feels sick at the thought of needing to expose a child to their heritage far too early.
Kirby looks between them again and again, at the smile surely on his father’s face and the gaze the Dark Matter is giving him, desperate and terrified.
And he leaves. Slow, uncertain, awkward.
But Kirby leaves.
And eventually. They’re alone. He and a Dark Matter smaller than his hand.
Meta Knight waits a little longer, head tilted just so to listen and make sure Kirby isn’t getting up to mischief, hiding in the brush. It’s quiet. There are no birds and no animals. It’s frighteningly still, like Pop Star itself waiting with a baited breath. Get rid of the plague on its land, it says quietly.
Meta Knight’s hand lands heavy on Galaxia’s hilt.
The Dark Matter in front of him cringes.
“You’ve got some nerve,” Meta Knight says, and his voice is far more cruel than ever he’s heard, low and cutting like jagged rocks against each other, “to come after my child, Dark Matter. Did you think I wouldn’t know? Wouldn’t see? You must not have been around long, if you thought so.”
Good riddance, then, he thinks, to pluck the weed from the dirt before it can spread roots.
They seize and give a full body shudder, and the discolored matter around them squeezes, stretches, vibrates in place. The two eyes that peer at him are wide, glassy, pupils shrunk to needlepoints. It’s an animal terror that Kes would’ve honed in on immediately.
It doesn’t move. Makes no effort to lash out, or even to run. Just floats, and stares.
And why does it hesitate, he wonders. Why does it not strike now that the child is gone and the pretense for appearance is no longer necessary? Does it think it can still fool him?
It’s either very young to think it can trick him, or it just thinks he’s very stupid. Funny.
Meta Knight grits his teeth and draws his blade.
Galaxia is a blessed artifact that’s carried him through life and death more times than he can count, and while she hasn’t seen much warfare in recent years, her blade still glows with divinity in the light of day. She pulses and hums warm in his grip, an old friend there to the end, and the Dark Matter shrinks in on themselves.
Good, he thinks.
“Your kind aren’t wanted here, creature. Your kind haven’t been wanted since the dawn of the first of them. And I won’t let you continue to destroy everything we stand for.”
He makes to raise his hand, Galaxia abuzz with deadly intent. To get this done with before Kirby can come back and see, to wipe it out into nothing and it’ll never hurt anyone again.
…
It
smiles.
It smiles at him. Smiles, trembling, tongue lolling from its strange mouth. And it.
It cries.
A Dark Matter is a hivemind. A Dark Matter – each and every one, no matter the appearance, the personality – only wants destruction, chaos. The death of everything it sees. It can’t feel emotion, but it can pretend, and it can pretend very, very well.
It smiles and it cries. It’s fake, he knows. It’s fake.
(It reminds him of Kirby, after he’s gotten a cut on his hand and doesn’t want to look like a baby.
Reminds him of Kirby, after Marx has said things no good child should say.
It reminds him of—)
Meta Knight’s hand is frozen, barely lifted, Galaxia pointed into the dirt. He can’t seem to move it.
He doesn’t ask what it wants. He already knows. He doesn’t ask why it’s here. He already knows.
He already knows.
And even now, it’s trying to sink its claws into him, trying to emulate a child in order to survive, to get into his poor heart. It knows how it looks and it’s using that fact to its advantage.
And Meta Knight’s hand won’t move because its little act is working.
Galaxia hums, soothingly, in his grip. She who has been with him for nearly an eternity pulses and reassures, or at least he it brings comfort to think that.
“…Do you know what I’ve lost to your kind.”
The thing stares at him, crying and smiling and he can’t move. He can’t move, so he speaks. He barely hears himself.
“Do you know the kind of damage you’ve done to us all? Since the dawn of time? The loved ones that have been hurt? Because of you?”
He doesn’t know why he’s telling it this. Because he wants it to know? To understand exactly why he has his blade drawn? To dig its face into the sins it’s brought on the world?
He thinks of Shieff. He thinks of his father, of his other teachers, of his father’s guardian.
(Everyone is hurt and his heart beats too loudly. Tears are burning his cheeks and there’s blood on his hands. His throat hurts. There’s a ringing in his ears. Nothing feels real.)
Meta Knight had sworn, taking Kirby under his wing, that he would never let anything happen to him. Even as awkward and reluctant as he’d been to take on a little warrior, to tutor them, he’d sworn it. If not by love, then by righteous obligation.
If Kirby was going to be the last Star Warrior in this universe, then it was imperative that nothing happen to him. And Meta Knight would not allow anything to happen to him. Not to his student.
Not to his child.
His throat tightens.
“Gooey. He named you that.”
The Dark Matter brightens. It nods, fervently, excitedly.
“Then I hope you understand what an honor you’ve been given. You don’t deserve it.”
He’s not cruel. Not like them. He’ll make it quick. For Kirby’s sake. For the sake of the one who thought this creature was a friend, too sweet and pure to ever have known any better.
He is outside of himself, watching as if a distant participant as the Dark Matter jerks and makes a noise and slams itself into the tree. Watching as his body takes one, two steps forward and his hand tightens.
Meta Knight finally, finally, raises his blade. And he prepares to take a life.
And then there’s a scream.
…
Kirby comes back quicker than Meta Knight thought possible.
He yells something Meta Knight can’t understand, words a slur as he panics and flails and tries to use his wings to hurry faster. Begging, he thinks, and the tears here are genuine, precious and pained. It burns to look at, and it about kills him to see the boy skid to a stop and stretch his arms out.
Galaxia is pointing at him. His blade, pointed at his own son.
He wants to be sick.
“Get out of the way, Kirby,” He says, voice empty in its monotone. “This is for the good of everyone here.”
“He my friend, dad! You can’t!” And oh, it hurts. Kirby looks as if he’s the one being threatened at the end of his blade, afraid, terrified of his own father and—he is, isn’t he? At the end of his father’s weapon, afraid of him.
It hurts. It hurts and he wants to scream.
“You don’t know what you’re doing, Kirby. You don’t understand what that thing is. Get out of the way.”
“No! I won’t! You can’t hurt him, dad! You—Y—”
Meta Knight moves before Kirby can finish, before he can break and allow himself to be swayed by anymore of it. The Dark Matter has poisoned the child’s mind. It knows what it’s doing.
Kirby is lifted into one hand, and his shadow looms dark over a Dark Matter that should never have existed. No matter the shivering, the sniveling, the tears. No matter the boy’s shrieking as he raises his blade.
It will kill them all, if he doesn’t do this.
Better Kirby to be alive and hate him than to be dead and feel nothing at all.
It hurts. It freezes like ice in his veins, from head to toe, and he struggles to breathe against the bitter cold of it all.
It freezes him inside. It freezes him. It--
It freezes.
He sees, then, as if in a fog, the frost that coats their surroundings. Ice that makes Meta Knight’s lungs freeze in his chest, roots his feet in place, coats Galaxia like a sheet of glass. Bitter cold stark against the backdrop of Pop Star’s airy summer day.
“Meta Knight.”
Kirby hadn’t come alone.
-End Chapter 4-
<< Chapter 3 | Chapter 5 >>
Artist Comment:
Date: 03-01-2023
-----------------
As expected, Kirby befriending a Dark Matter does NOT sit well with Meta. Especially with everything he's been though with Shieff, and the GSA- it's only natural for a father to protect his son from the evilest creature to ever exist. But...is Gooey really that evil? Kirby doesn't seem to think so. Hmmm...
It looks like someone stopped Meta before he delivered the final blow. I wonder who Kirby brought along. >3<;;
---
The literature written for this illustration was commissioned by my good friend, Dogblog. (dA- Shadowrealmprincess) ^v^
Date: 03-01-2023
-----------------
As expected, Kirby befriending a Dark Matter does NOT sit well with Meta. Especially with everything he's been though with Shieff, and the GSA- it's only natural for a father to protect his son from the evilest creature to ever exist. But...is Gooey really that evil? Kirby doesn't seem to think so. Hmmm...
It looks like someone stopped Meta before he delivered the final blow. I wonder who Kirby brought along. >3<;;
---
The literature written for this illustration was commissioned by my good friend, Dogblog. (dA- Shadowrealmprincess) ^v^
Species © Nintendo/ HAL Laboratory
Interpreted characters created from said species © Rhylem
Interpreted characters created from said species © Rhylem
