Vision Of Escaflowne Fan Fiction ❯ Mechanics of Chaos: Butterfly Effect ❯ One-Shot

[ P - Pre-Teen ]

Disclaimer:
If you're stupid enough to think I own anything, you're not smart enough to sue.
Trixie-chan: What about that lady from the detergent commercial?
Crap. Fine, then. I own nothing. There. I just made myself sound stupid.

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If a butterfly flaps its wings in the Fanelian forest, do your brother's cursed wings turn black?

I would wonder, sometimes, if the air around me was alive, if the night itself, or the sunlight, or the ground, or all of them were alive. Sometimes, I remember the feeling of muddy black earth after a heavy summer rain, and I remember I was sure I felt the earth's heart beating under my feet, as if it belonged to a creature pouncing, expectant and very much alive. And I wondered, what would happen if spring had not arrived down south, colors ago? How would that change me? The snow would not have melted into rivers, which would not have fed the lakes, which would not have risen into storm clouds, which would not have fed this black forest-earth it's rain-blood, so its heart would beat. And I kept wondering, thinking whether it had to be something as major as skipping a season; if it could be something simpler. Like a boy chopping firewood, who could prevent beavers from obstructing a river, or some siblings building a snowman that would move the snow from where it fell. Could they change a river's course? And I wondered, again, how many things are completely different simply because I walk this path, this time, and let the dirt cover my bare feet.

And I'd give my five year-old head a nasty migraine.

Brother would ask where that scrunched, pouty frown came from.

I'd answer firewood and a snowman.

I'm still not quite sure that he didn't get the connection.

It's oddly unfrightening how random the events of our lives are. A dragon was feeling cranky, and, as if by magic, I'm the heir to the throne, when I used to be merely his brother. Some scientist gets obsessed with beating death, or fate, or whatever, and three hundred years later, a little girl gets kidnapped. A dreamer, a pendant, and a pinwheel; decades later, I meet her. The connections are completely arbitrary and so improbable, they make sane, logical heads spin. I'm lucky I never had one.

Random, otherwise unconnected events converge in a single point causing a single event, and then lead back off in different directions. You don't need to prove it to know it's there.

Because we don't exist in formation where we move according to some unbreakable pattern established long before we came to be. Because we don't exist independently from the universe, unaffected by what happens far from us. We exist in a living, breathing, massive cloud-collective, shifting and morphing as every particle crashes with another. We live bound by invisible chain reactions, and we cause them every once in a while. Because actions come in a sighing, swaying mass of shapeless beauty, the Universe, where every little piece -the latent earth, Hitomi, Brother's feathers- is just like, behaves just like, the whole, without knowing and without thinking.

It's so easy to see the world at work. Cause and effect, premises and deduction. One thing leads directly to another, and another, and so forth, like a fine tuned melef. You chose to do something, do it, and see the consequences. It's beautiful and poetic. And that is what makes me think that's all fake.

It leaves out the little things, the indirect, sometimes farfetched influences, and those are the ones that end up changing courses. The are the ones that add the unpredictability that keeps this world alive, that keeps the trees breathing and the earth pounding. The world we live in, it is so sensitive to each of us, to each of it's parts, you can't leave any out to explain it's function.

Each instant of each day, the path to the future diverges into infinite branches, and each day some part of us follows each. Every instant something off happens, and changes the entire universe. For it is the same on every level, the infinite and the infinitesimal. Choices are made that have nothing to do with us, by some one who is not us , yet they are vital to our existence.

Random. Arbitrary. Unconnected. Unpredictable due to their simplicity. Living, breathing, pulsing.

These are the Mechanics of Chaos.