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The breeze in the window, the air blowing in and circling around what few objects laid in the room, a chair, a dresser and a bed, no desk, no decorations. The wind meaning to be pleasant to most but this fact was not entirely welcomed in a state of wanting to be completely unbothered, even considering the fact that he bothers most people with his mere existence. Clef didn’t care for many others but himself, that much was true, everything rot away under his hands eventually, he’d lived long enough to know that.
But there was one thing, one person that he’d never let rot, not in his infinite and tireless life. One that couldn’t let go even if it were his fate to, and that was his daughter, the most precious thing Clef has ever held in his life and the only thing that had ever made him feel scared, not for his life, or a job or some kind of terrifying overarching power just ready to pounce, terrified to hurt her. To let her see the world outside of the covent or that squeezed room in the foundation but he knew that a growing girl needed freedom. That was something all humans needed, and that’s what they needed to treat her as instead of some kind of monster to keep under lock and key.
Forget people’s phones and the foundations fancy technology, those were easily shot through with a bullet, easily shattered when dropped, why lock up a teenager for unintentionally breaking something that the world was on route to ruin themselves? It made no sense, the world needed protecting from her? No it didn’t, she needed protecting from the world. While technology is a useful tool, it’s not everything. Clef ranted on and on in his head, thoughts swirling like a typhoon, his internal rants reminiscent of a teenage girl’s blabbering in her diary, fitting for the topic at hand.
And yet, something felt inexplicably missing from everything that he was thinking about, in all of his years, in everything. Why couldn’t he understand it? Why couldn’t he know what was missing? Instead, he decided to take his mind off of it, heaving himself up off his bed and taking a look around.
The room was barren, that much was his fault, not taking care to decorate it to make it look more than a bare bones apartment like one you’d see in a listing on a shady website, smudges of blood against the wall from things even Clef couldn’t remember. Maybe it was for the best, if the doctor had gotten anything, he would have just broken it in a fit of rage or just to keep himself entertained, that was a reason that he broke a lot of things in his life, human, person, goddess.
That seemed more like Clef’s problem, his need to do something, out of boredom, rage, being any kind of upset, happy or excited. He needed to break something in order to feel the rush constantly coursing through his veins, and it usually worked, he usually got the satisfaction of a man dead at his hands or something indescribable laying unmoving on the pavement of a burnt out city with nobody but a singular rabbit or a flock of birds flying overhead to pay attention to the event itself.
Footsteps rang across the little space that Clef had to move in the cramped room, as he walked to the corner, a small suitcase filled with a couple of belongings mixed together, mostly novelty or just for fun. Dr Clef began by bending down, his knees to the floor shortly after, he moved a hand up to unzip the suitcase, taking out a small phone, not much bigger than his hand. He flipped it open, the small black phone doubling in length as he snapped a picture of the window and then decided to move onto messaging.
See, Clef believed that if he couldn’t go to sleep as early as he wanted, than nobody else could. So he decided to start typing out a message, straight from the heart and onto his keyboard, which took much longer to type than a normal and modernised cellphone but then again, Dr. Alto Clef hadn’t been normal for a very long time, so to think he would have any kind of normal belongings would be a severe understatement. Even his ukelele was much older than people even thought about, mainly since nobody thought of his ukelele as anything more than a means to annoy the people around him.
‘ Ur ass is GRASS. Watch ur back simon. i know where u ARE.’
That is what Clef eventually came out with after a tremendous amount of time, about ten minutes, to type a single message as simple as that, maybe it was the fact that Clef didn’t text people that mucha well except when he wanted to terrorise fellow foundation staff to the point of a breakdown like a kind of high-school bully with a shotgun and a ukelele. Much more intimidating than the average bully though. The world would never know why Clef acted the way he did, but he will. Until the end of time, no matter the way Clef shapes and bends reality around him, he will always be at the center of his own world, both equal parts terrifying and uplifting.
A chime erupted in the silence of Clef’s thoughts as he sat motionless, kneeling near the suitcase. That chime, of course, was because of a message back he’d gotten from Glass.
‘ Please stop.’
That was all the message said, that was little underwhelming after a whole three minutes of waiting for a response, Clef decided to just chuck the phone back into the suitcase, not bothering to close the suitcase or the phone itself as he waltzed back to his bed, head held up high at another day successfully went through with. He wasn’t dead and he’d killed a few people, that’s what Clef had decided a successful day was. Most of the people he killed were expendable anyway, their lives falling away like sand between his fingers as he took an undeniably sick pleasure in the fact that he was in control of whether the d-classes or the researchers or just the people around him lived to see another day.
And as Clef laid down in bed, his head filling with thoughts once again, he found himself just pondering what would have happened if the foundation had never captured his precious daughter, if they had let her live her life. Would some catastrophic event happened? Would humanity really have regressed? Even if she was struck with the opportunity, she wouldn’t do that to the people around her, Clef was sure if it. She was a good kid, a really good one, under the guise of a god she believed in, she was the sweetest person Clef had ever known, the only one he’d never felt anything negative towards, she was his little girl after all, no matter where she came from. No matter what she could do.
Clef decided to write another letter when he woke up that morning, his decision final as he dozed off. Maybe he’d have the courage to give it to her this time instead of letting the thousands of letters scribbled on stolen paper pile up with the guilt of not saving her from a life of captivity with the cold foundation that had taken him captive too.
And with that, Clef’s eyes closed and his consciousness faded away.