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Mar. 20th, 2009 08:35 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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kh_drabbleChallenge: [180] Narrator
Title: My Truthful Accounts
Word Count: 350
Spoilers: KHII
Characters: Ansem the Wise
Notes: Ansem has always struck me as an unreliable narrator in his own reports
I believe that, at some point in time, you will come across these, my truthful accounts.
Ansem paused, pen hovering over the nearly-complete text of his final report, to consider whether he could honestly make such a claim. It was, in the strictest sense, true; his accounts did not contain any unsubstantiated claims or untrue statements of fact.
Even a fool knew this to be insufficient. A truthful statement could no more avoid relevant facts as contradict them, and the details of his own involvement were something that Ansem very much wished to avoid.
He wrote of how his apprentices' studies on the darkness of the heart had grown out of hand. He did not write that he had accepted Xehanort's first proposal to study the effects of excess darkness on the hearts of laboratory rats – he could not bear for the King to read of that – or of the origin of the hearts that he had kept on his desk.
He wrote of how he had ordered his apprentices to cease their secret research and destroy the results as soon as he learned of it. He did not write that, before he learned of its full extent, he had himself been sorely tempted by Xehanort's request to extend the behavioral research to willing human subjects, and had even let the boy believe that his experiment proposal was being legitimately considered.
He wrote of how his mission was the only way to repay the world for his sins. He did not enumerate his sins, in any direct way, apart from the questionable sin of foolishness.
No, Ansem thought, it would stretch the meaning of truthful to apply it to his reports. But, he supposed, it would be no less truthful than the reports themselves, and he could not bear the King's – his friend's – last impression of him to be so negative.
He put his pen to the paper again, and wrote the last words of his report.
How I wish I could have chatted with you again. I was a fool obsessed with revenge.
Forgive me.
Title: My Truthful Accounts
Word Count: 350
Spoilers: KHII
Characters: Ansem the Wise
Notes: Ansem has always struck me as an unreliable narrator in his own reports
I believe that, at some point in time, you will come across these, my truthful accounts.
Ansem paused, pen hovering over the nearly-complete text of his final report, to consider whether he could honestly make such a claim. It was, in the strictest sense, true; his accounts did not contain any unsubstantiated claims or untrue statements of fact.
Even a fool knew this to be insufficient. A truthful statement could no more avoid relevant facts as contradict them, and the details of his own involvement were something that Ansem very much wished to avoid.
He wrote of how his apprentices' studies on the darkness of the heart had grown out of hand. He did not write that he had accepted Xehanort's first proposal to study the effects of excess darkness on the hearts of laboratory rats – he could not bear for the King to read of that – or of the origin of the hearts that he had kept on his desk.
He wrote of how he had ordered his apprentices to cease their secret research and destroy the results as soon as he learned of it. He did not write that, before he learned of its full extent, he had himself been sorely tempted by Xehanort's request to extend the behavioral research to willing human subjects, and had even let the boy believe that his experiment proposal was being legitimately considered.
He wrote of how his mission was the only way to repay the world for his sins. He did not enumerate his sins, in any direct way, apart from the questionable sin of foolishness.
No, Ansem thought, it would stretch the meaning of truthful to apply it to his reports. But, he supposed, it would be no less truthful than the reports themselves, and he could not bear the King's – his friend's – last impression of him to be so negative.
He put his pen to the paper again, and wrote the last words of his report.
How I wish I could have chatted with you again. I was a fool obsessed with revenge.
Forgive me.
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