MOTHER 2 and 3 SPOILERS even if they are a little vague

I wrote this as a way of working out my thinking for Porky/Pokey through the course of events in the two games. The title is from "The Waste Land," which is really pretentious of me but hey. Disjointed first person writing style is deliberate, an effort to reflect a somewhat demented mind.

I hope you enjoy. This is my first Mother fic. Please let me know what you think.

And of course, thank you for reading! - Aqua Karen

I guess I started hating you sometime when I started looking at your eyes and they'd turn into the sky. Right there, in your face, I'd be trying to talk and all of a sudden you'd light up and the sky was blue to the edges of the horizon and the grass was all rich and dark green and it was a summer day no matter what was going on around you. And it didn't matter if you were laughing or crying or you'd been playing with those idiots in their 'secret clubhouse' or you'd just had hamburger steak for dinner, there in your eyes it'd be hiding and just waiting for the chance to come out again. Summer days forever, all seasons.

I remember having a black eye once when we were smaller. It wasn't a big deal, I got in a fight and kicked the other guy's ass, I had an accident, it's none of your business, my dad lost his temper and what did you expect me to say asking a stupid question like that? My eye hurt, and I wasn't supposed to talk about it since it wasn't like it happened all that often, he was just drunk. And I looked at your eyes and there was genuine concern. Behind it, I could hear birds chirping and see trees swaying a little in the wind and there weren't any clouds so I punched you in your eye.

It didn't connect very well, I hit you more off on the side of your face than anything. And then I ran, because I didn't know how to hurt people then, and you just stood there and I can't even imagine what you were thinking. If you could hear yourself think over crickets at evening and laughing while you chase fireflies. I don't have the weird mind powers you do. But I found out I had fists and that was nice to know, after I stopped feeling sick about it.

Not everybody was summer even if you were. You couldn't understand because it was just the way you were born. I was spring, which sounds pretty until you really figure it out, so I was careful and didn't want anyone figuring me out. Everything's new and not ready yet, the weak die off early, the old died off in winter and their bodies feed the growth of spring. I fed myself well too. The worms come out again, opportunistic, looking for something dead or dying to hide in and feast on. I found that too, until you came along and brought summer with you, drying up the moisture of decomposition and cutting the flowers down from 'cloying' to 'tolerable.'

So even when you had no eyes, and I'd given my body up to spring cleaning, you were shining like the summer sun on the clear day. Blue, blue…

And summer comes after spring, but I came after you. Backwards, but maybe time travel changes the way those things work. It didn't matter. You could blast my brains out with your mind if you wanted to, but you never did. I could have just shot half your friends from behind before they'd have even known I'd jumped a time tunnel back through to visit, but I didn't, and that confused me because I'd meant it before. I wanted you dead and justified it because summer ends spring so it was all self defense, right? But analogies don't excuse things, even I know that. I just didn't care. But I still didn't kill them.

It wasn't right, wasn't right, because summer came into complete bloom and I was still decaying in my own childhood, a chick rotten in the shell. I saw you marry her, saw you all together like a family. You had a lot of families in all. I never bothered to call my dad and tell him how I was doing, not after he showed up in Fourside to try and get something out of it. I didn't get homesick for my mom for a long time, either. Longer than you could imagine. I saw you growing up and the world stayed lit with your shine for years.

I came and went. I thanked myself that I'd hit puberty before I started time traveling and froze myself, because at least I could enjoy pretty girls; spring's mating season too, right? But I only had one son and it wasn't with a woman.

I'd made little marks and dents but the world was always meant to be your sanctuary. After your bones were dust and your kids only knew about you in fairy tales and the tech I stole from Giygas wasn't quite so outlandish to the locals, I popped in and another group of people came and sent me off again. It wasn't right, though. It should have been you. For years I went back and forth, like a yo-yo, sometimes coming to spy on you when you were as young as I looked, sometimes harassing you after some other version of me had just left, sometimes leaving gaps in the visits so you wouldn't be sure. Children I didn't kill came along to the congratulations of the friends I didn't kill either. I could have said, "I just came back from fighting his great great great granddaughter," but I didn't. Did you notice when I started growing facial hair?

Summer echoed loud enough to drown out the Cave of the Past and Giygas's death cries for centuries. I went back there too, saw myself, saw myself seeing myself, started to get a little unhinged. It happens. I don't know that it's happened before, but it must happen, because it did, and if I'm the only test case it happens 100 of the time. At least I knew I was coming unhinged, but it didn't bother me. It was getting harder to move without the help of the mech. I used it to build more, better ones.

Fall winter spring all ate you up until there was nothing left but I could still go and see summer anytime I liked. I was immortal so you were immortal too. I played around with other times, other places. Your song echoed another one, and after that it was the sound of Mother Earth, vibrant summer's song. I heard it again and again in whispers. The last time, the last time I heard it…

I don't even know what they did to me, but the tunnels wouldn't work for me, and I'd fled as far as I could. End of the line. The place where the singing stopped, it turned out. I was all right, in my mech, but the sky was grey and the grass was burned and the trees were burned and everything was ash meeting ash from horizon to horizon. This was winter, falling in ash instead of snow, and I had known winter would have to come but I hadn't expected to be trapped there. I never met winter, you know. I just saw the aftereffects.

And there was a small place left in a corner of nowhere and that was the only place at all where people were alive, and they were all a bunch of cowards. I'd gone out there and walked around in it, as well as I could walk in anything, and they were living in a fake paradise and whistling to themselves about how nice life was and pretending nothing had happened at all. Nothing at all.

Spring follows winter. I came to them. They were meant to be mine. Of course I couldn't go back; this was where I had belonged forever. To eat the dead and bring new life, and all the people on that island were dead, they were just still moving a bit. My cute monster, my dead son. His brother who sang a new song altogether. And me, showing those idiots what it was like to really play pretend, with everything I could have dragged through the time tunnels brought to me. My own shrine to summer, in gaudy detail. Rooms where the skies were forever blue. Not even my song, but it was meant to be there, and I figured I'd give them a reminder of what they'd really destroyed before coming to their fake paradise. Before I destroyed them too. Before I finished the job and it started over.

But they managed to hold me, the one who'd seen before the start of things and who'd come to after the end of things, the one who was an old man and a young child, the one who couldn't free himself of the combination of living and dying at once. And all I could do was hear it when the dragon came out of the earth and the bastard, I'd thought him dead long ago, started singing at the top of his lungs. Singing it properly, not like my echoes. Simple as could be.

Someone came to my little tomb while everything was being born again. What could I do? I wasn't loud enough to speak through it, so I shook it a little, like a nod. Of course it was all back again, I hadn't even needed to do a thing. Summer always follows spring.