gardener // y!dsmp x reader

EPILOGUE XI : KARL

key
trigger warnings!: mentions of death and abduction.

JUST LIKE THE OTHER ELITES, KARL WATCHED within the audience. all the destruction of manberg was right in front of his eyes. he couldn't believe it himself. nobody expected death to be the staple of manberg's festival. it was supposed to be the complete opposite actually—it was supposed to celebrate the new sense of life manberg brought to its citizens. of course, the explosions proved that wrong.

he was trying his best to flee, almost getting stuck under rubble twice. that's when he saw you, a fawn in distress. he tried so desperately with all his might—forgetting about his own life—to reach out towards you, but you were a goner. was it fate that you were meant to die?

y'know something that always interested karl was the intermingled concept of destiny and time. some people believe that their fate is already written out for them (perhaps even in the stars), pleading for time to continue to see what event will unlock for them in the future—or at the very least, they don't think time is linear. they think the word "linear" is more-so a way to properly organize and comprehend time while destiny takes the wheel, leaving us with memories to look back on that will be our very own timeline—either way, destiny determines that.

others believe that every choice and decision that you make is able to control the rippling impacts of your life, feeling at ease with the idea of having full control of your life and what happens with your time. in this sense, if you have this internal locus of control, time may seem more linear and destiny is a natural power embedded in you. but even with an external locus instead, maybe time still is linear- just in a really odd, unexplainable way.

what was real special for karl was that he didn't have to worry about those concepts—or rather it can be put this way: whether he viewed time as eternalism or presentism, or if destiny was an external or internal locus, neither idea ever left scratches or ripples or wounds on him. he could think of them and have a debate about them all day, but the concept of fate never truly affected him. hell if he played his cards right, maybe he can be considered a master of fate. however, the underlying concepts of time certainly did affect his day-to-day life.

karl has a special power that not many know about, but maybe many wished so hard to have: he was a time traveller. he was able to control his life fully, contort the events of timelines, practically sit at the seat of immortality, and travel to whatever place and time he wanted. despite this, wielding the power for so long proved that he couldn't use it often or else the consequences were fatal.

although he was able to retrieve lavish items (especially from vintage eras combined with the future which he loved), stay wealthy forever, and become anti-aging, these blessings covered up the fact that traveling to other timelines can cause much exhaustion, and even trying to contort one little decision or change one little interaction from a timeline for yourself and then travel back can cause great effects. it can open up doors to unknown events for better or for worse, or even destroy an entire timeline—so many innocent potential lives taken and an entire possibility supposedly set up by destiny in one universe suddenly collapsed into an impossibility. it was risky to have such a power and he knew it.

he's tried many times to get married and save his friends from trauma, but his efforts proved no avail. he's realized that he could travel back in time as much as he wanted after his batch of friends and lovers died out, but it only reminded him of his mistakes. it only proved to him that he was wasting away his own infinite stash of time trying to change and erase the wrong things that he did only to open up new mistakes. the infinite possibilities in the universe was truly frightening.