The Binding of Isaac: Redemption (Fanfic)
Sep. 26th, 2021 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeThe Binding of Isaac: Redemption
Summary: It doesn't have to end this way. (Spoilers for Rebirth, Afterbirth, Antibirth, and Repentance.)
Word Count: 2800
Notes: This story contains grim content at a similar level to the Binding of Isaac games. It contains spoilers for all endings, especially that of Repentance. This story builds off the theories espoused here, here, and here, combined with my own ideas that Isaac is plural, all playable characters are headmates, and all playable game content takes place in their headspace, with the exception of certain endings. (More on that in the comments.) The Binding of Isaac originally came out in 2011, and people have played it throughout, so it seems appropriate that the game (and thus, this story) would end ten years later. That would make Isaac roughly fifteen.
(It doesn’t have to end this way.)
You play the game millions of times for thousands of hours. You learn every nook and cranny of the depths inside you: the basement, the cellar, the mines. The catacombs, the mausoleum, the downpour. The water and fire and earth. You’ve returned to the womb and the corpse (whose? don’t think about that), descended to the pits of Hell and Sheol, ascended to—
Well, the farthest you’ve ascended is the cathedral. Heaven’s not accessible to you. Yet.
You’ve found every hidden item, cut through countless swarms of enemies, demons and abortions and dead things like you. (No, no, you’re not dead yet.) (But you will be.) You know all the secrets, all the tricks, how to use every piece of garbage and refuse inside you to your benefit. You know how to turn trash into treasure, wounds into weapons. You’ve drugged yourself, hurt yourself, traumatized yourself, and not a single drop of pain is lost. Waste not, want not.
(You can’t keep doing this forever.)
You can do this forever. You must. The game must never end. The game must never, ever end. And why should it? Here, you triumph, over and over and over.
(You die, over and over and over.)
You murder demons and angels and Satan himself in all his myriad forms. You vomit blood and fire on all who oppose you. You are powerful. You are unstoppable. You are a god of gold and platinum.
(You are a child hiding in a box.)
They all try to stop you. Hush strains, cyanotic and screaming, until you silence it forever. Delirium distracts you with warp and confusion, static and nonsense. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a game.
(They’re trying to warn you.)
When you defeat the really big bosses, sometimes you see things. Sad things. But they don’t matter, only the game.
You play, over and over again.
You are legion, for you are many. Different yous have different strengths, different secrets, different scores. Maggy, loving and indomitable—if you can’t understand Mother, at least you can understand her. Samson, power and rage. That which doesn’t kill Eve (and does kill Lazarus) only makes them stronger. Cain, fast and clever, and Judas, scrawny and bookish. Bethany and Edith, pure of heart, Eden, adaptable and forever-changing, and Jacob and Esau, forever entwined in love and hate, because you can’t choose your family. Azazel and Apollyon, ways to be demonic safely. The Keeper, so you understand the importance of saving.
Lilith, mother of demons, even though she’s not much older than you. (You don’t think about that. You must never think of that. It’s why she has no eyes, so she can’t see herself, the truth of her and you.)
There are others. They make you feel weird; your mind slides off them. But that doesn’t matter. It’s just a game.
(The Forgotten. ???. The Lost. The bones, the meat, the soul. You know who they are. You know what they mean.)
It’s been a long time, but you’ve finally done everything. There’s nothing new to discover. You’ve been everywhere and everyone and everything.
(Have you, now?)
Yes. And it’s great. It’s wonderful.
It’s wonderful.
(You’re not tired? You’re not bored?)
Of course not! How can you be bored? Games are fun! And this is the best game, the ultimate game, because it never has to end! It’s so much better than anything out there. Out there is small and sad and… and boring.
(Boring?)
Suffocating.
(Yes.)
So the game must continue. If it ever ends… well, that’d just be the worst.
(It would?)
Of course it would! You know that!
(You said that, not me.)
Don’t pretend. It’d be the worst and you know it. It’d be game over! Game overs are never good!
(All games end.)
No.
(…)
No, no, nonono. That’s not how this will go. You can’t lose. You can’t stop. You have to—we have to—
(…)
Oh no.
(I’m sorry.)
It’s over, isn’t it? The game is over. We’ve lost it.
(We’ve lost a lot of things.)
No. You’re wrong. It can’t be over! There must be something else you can do, some secret left to discover! It doesn’t have to stop! You can keep playing! You can keep playing forever!
(Nothing lasts forever.)
Your breath is rasping, your heart is pounding. There’s not enough air, the walls are closing in.
You can’t breathe. You can’t breathe.
(There’s one place we haven’t been, you know.)
No. Not there.
(You can go there, or you can suffocate in your self-made treasure box. The choice is yours.)
And so you, all of you, gather together. All the good parts and bad, the sinners and saints and cyanotic, all of you regroup, clinging together like the children you are. Together, you retrace your steps. You go.
You cry and crawl your way upward, out of the box, out of the darkness, out of the depths, out of the basement. They’re all silent and empty now; nothing wants to stop you. You leave all your treasures and trinkets and weapons behind as you go. Your blood becomes just blood. Your tears become just tears. You all go the one place you’ve never gone.
You go home.
After all the dungeons, the labyrinths and mazes, it looks so small. But even after all you’ve seen and conquered under the floorboards, none it compares to the suffering of this little house on the hill.
This is not a good place. It has never been a good place.
You never wanted to come back here.
You wake up together in bed, the bedding pulled over your face; you yank it down to breathe and look down at the frayed blankets, under which you’ve spent so many hours dreaming of a better game. The grayed rug, which you pretended hid a door to a new world with better offerings. The bare walls, stripped of art, and the toy chest at the foot of your bed. Empty, empty.
(It’s been empty a long time.)
The door is locked from the outside, for your own good. But Cain has his bent paper clip, hidden in a crack in the floorboards under the rug, and he/you jimmy the lock. You are scared, but Azazel is quick and silent on his wings, so you can slip through the house, and Jacob and Esau remind you that you’re not alone. Lazarus adds that even if the worst should happen, you all can try again. Maggy hugs you all, and her love is tattered and careworn, but warm and bright.
You can always go back to bed, play the game, you tell yourself. But the three of you in the back, the ones that always slip through your mind like shadows, something about them tells you no. That time is done. You’ve learned all you can from it.
There’s a long narrow hall. There are no photos on the walls, not anymore. There are only crosses, Bible pictures, prayer cards. Apollyon and Azazel balk (those things make them nervous), but Edith wraps them in her cloak and blips them down so they don’t have to look, and Bethany, who has no fear of godly things, leads the rest of you through.
There’s the bathroom off the hall. You intend to go past, but Keeper insists you go in. It and Cain know better than to hide much of anything in your room (Mother always finds it, her eyes are everywhere) but the bathroom has fiddly little cabinets that don’t fit quite right, full of little hidey spots. (How do you know this? You don't go home...) There’s some dollars and change, and Judas’s most precious of books: maps and bus schedules, hidden in a folder taped to the underside of a drawer. Amidst Mother’s old expired medications, Eve finds her mascara; she puts it on to feel strong. It helps.
You move on.
Next is the TV room, and here you freeze. The TV is off, but it still seems to be watching you, a glass eye of Mother or God. The armchair at the other end of the room is empty—at least, you think it is, surely it is, but that shadow could be her, could be—
Lilith tells you that your eyes are playing tricks on you, and having none herself, she isn’t afraid, so she walks you in, bold as brass. She makes it through the room by feel—shelves of Bible literature where the games and movies used to be. The TV zaps her with static cling, but she doesn’t make a sound; you are all well-trained. She finds the front door.
It’s locked (from the outside, for your own good). She tries to get it open with the paper clip, fails. She calls for Cain, but he’s hiding behind Maggy and won’t come out for anything, and anyway, he says, the house lock is too strong for a paper clip, so he wouldn’t do her any good anyway. To get out, they need a proper key, like Dad’s.
Everyone freezes. Everyone knows there’s only one place for Dad’s key, and even Lilith is cowed by Mother’s room. For a moment, everyone looks at everyone else, then Samson and Maggy volunteer at the same time. Maggy is tougher, but Samson is faster, and after a moment’s debate, they agree to do it together. Lilith gets them to the door, and then she joins the rest of you hiding behind them.
Even with Maggy and Samson, Mother’s room scares you. It’s not locked. It’s never locked. She knows you are too scared to ever go in there.
There’s the makeup table, with Mom’s fancier, newer things: her lipstick, her perfume, her eye shadow. Her heels sit on the floor, positioned just so, as though she’s standing in them but invisible. Her wigs sit on mannequin heads; one has pearls around its neck. The heads seem to be watching you in the mirror.
Samson makes an awkward sound, but Maggy’s a girl, so it doesn’t bother her to dig into the makeup drawers. No luck; it’s not there. (And even though she’s scared, Eve helps her put everything back exactly the way it was; she knows makeup better.)
Samson checks the desk; nothing but papers. Maggy checks the dresser; nothing but clothes. Samson looks under the bed, the rug, finds nothing but dust bunnies. He starts getting frustrated; Mother could be home any minute and here you are, wasting time.
Behind Maggy and Samson, Cain and Keeper are pilfering more things that might be useful (a bag, a dress, more money), but you can’t stop looking at the bed. You have vague, long-ago memories of having nightmares, coming in, being comforted. The blankets call to you. Come and sleep, come and dream, leave this terrible place. Come play a better game.
“Is no one going to look in the closet?” Eden asks.
You all jump.
It’s not that Eden isn’t handy. It’s just that you can never predict when; they change so often, so erratically, and they’re often cloudy in the head. But that means that sometimes they see things the rest of you don’t.
You don’t want to see the closet door. None of you want to see that closet door. Better to see a wall, just a wall.
But Maggy and Samson have gone through everything, with Cain and Keeper’s help. There’s nowhere else it could be.
“It’s locked,” Cain says. “And no, before you ask, I can’t jimmy it.”
Relief! Oh well, that’s it then, time to go back to bed, back to the game—
“I have a key,” Eden says.
Of course they do. Eden always has the most random stuff. Half the time they forget they even have it, but now they hold it up: a red, red key.
You don’t want them to have it. You don’t want to go in there, that horrible boxy closet, small and suffocating and—
It doesn’t matter.
(It does matter.)
It’s just a wall, a blank wall.
(Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.)
No, it’s not there, because if it’s not there, then nothing ever could’ve happened in there, nothing that was lost, or forgotten, or…???
You feel the three of you, the ones that don’t exist, breathing down the back of your neck. The ones you cannot name, cannot truly acknowledge, because if you did, then that would mean—that would mean—
Something looms in that emptiness between thoughts.
You could go back, you think desperately. You think of the TV, its glassy unseeing eye. Didn’t it change your mother? Isn’t it a monster, made of static and whispers and righteousness? Maybe this isn’t a game over. Maybe this is just a new level, a new expansion pack, opened up because of all your hard work. You could leave this room, with its bed and makeup and impossible door. You could become a god again, an even better god. You could be good again. Maybe, in the static whispers of the TV, you’d finally, finally find Heaven.
(There is no Heaven here. And no God either.)
(Aren’t you tired?)
You take the key from Eden.
You open the door you don’t want to see.
There are no clothes in this closet. There is nothing in this closet.
(That’s not true, Isaac.)
No. It isn’t true. There is one thing: a trunk. A big steamer trunk that Mother took on vacations, back when there were vacations. A huge box that sucks all the air out of the room.
It isn’t locked.
You all stand there, staring at it. Except for ???, the Lost, and the Forgotten, who are staring at you.
(It’s time to wake up now.)
And dead, dry whispers on the back of your neck: “get in the box, Isaac.”
You all open the trunk. You get inside, leaving the lid open.
Everything erupts.
Inside is agony. Inside is memory. Inside is you, all the tainted, defiled, forsaken parts of all of you, all the things done to you in this place to make you that way, and it’s too much, it’s unbearable. You curdle inside. Your souls scream. You cry, you wheeze, you can’t breathe, you’re dying, you must be—
Nobody can withstand it. All of you are doing the same thing, sobbing, screaming like Hush and Delirium, who tried to warn you. Dying inside, like the Lamb and ??? and all the others, like Mother.
But you triumphed over them. You triumphed, and every time, you got a little scrap of this pain, inoculating you against the full force of this bottomless agony. All those hours, all that practice, all to prepare you for this, the endgame.
On the deepest underlayers of your mind, you’ve spent thousands of hours preparing, just for this. Coming to understand, to ready yourselves for this. Your tears and blood and bones and body, you know them now. You know yourselves now, and you’re not alone. You knit together, bracing each other.
Some of you (???, Keeper, Isaac himself) started as enemies, but now you’re friends. Some of you (Apollyon, Azazel, Lilith) were scary and demonic, but you came and found and befriended them anyway. The pure of heart (Edith, Eden, and Bethany), the forsaken (the Lost, the Forgotten), the merely human (Eve, Samson, Judas, Cain, Jacob and Esau)… even Maggy, who has Mother’s name and wig, nothing about any of them scare you now. And this is just the sad, scared shadows of them, of you, here in this trunk in this closet. And so you embrace them. The pain becomes blinding, incandescent, eternal…
It burns the suffering away.
And then it’s over.
It’s over. It’s just all of you, tearstained and exhausted and whole, lying in the trunk. You slither out, and it’s empty now. Empty, except for a key. Dad’s key.
“Are we all right?” Is that Edith? Bethany maybe.
“Ow…” Azazel.
Maggy is the first to get up. Of course she is; she’s always been the most enduring of you. She dispenses hugs and heart. One by one, you pick yourself up. Even the most fragile of you (Judas, the Lost) have survived.
You have survived.
You take Dad’s key, and you all walk out of Mother’s closet, Mother’s room. You walk through the TV room together. There’s nothing to be afraid of now. The closet is just a closet; the TV is just a TV. The sad little house on the hill is just a sad empty house.
You unlock the front door. It opens on a little driveway, a sidewalk, a roadside.
Where will you go? You don’t know yet. But you have money and a map and Eve’s mascara, and with your dress on and your bag over your shoulder, you aren’t afraid.
Mother may find you and bring you back. But remember, Lazarus says, you can always try again.
Together, you walk out the door. You walk away from that sad little house. You start again.
GAME OVER.
Summary: It doesn't have to end this way. (Spoilers for Rebirth, Afterbirth, Antibirth, and Repentance.)
Word Count: 2800
Notes: This story contains grim content at a similar level to the Binding of Isaac games. It contains spoilers for all endings, especially that of Repentance. This story builds off the theories espoused here, here, and here, combined with my own ideas that Isaac is plural, all playable characters are headmates, and all playable game content takes place in their headspace, with the exception of certain endings. (More on that in the comments.) The Binding of Isaac originally came out in 2011, and people have played it throughout, so it seems appropriate that the game (and thus, this story) would end ten years later. That would make Isaac roughly fifteen.
(It doesn’t have to end this way.)
You play the game millions of times for thousands of hours. You learn every nook and cranny of the depths inside you: the basement, the cellar, the mines. The catacombs, the mausoleum, the downpour. The water and fire and earth. You’ve returned to the womb and the corpse (whose? don’t think about that), descended to the pits of Hell and Sheol, ascended to—
Well, the farthest you’ve ascended is the cathedral. Heaven’s not accessible to you. Yet.
You’ve found every hidden item, cut through countless swarms of enemies, demons and abortions and dead things like you. (No, no, you’re not dead yet.) (But you will be.) You know all the secrets, all the tricks, how to use every piece of garbage and refuse inside you to your benefit. You know how to turn trash into treasure, wounds into weapons. You’ve drugged yourself, hurt yourself, traumatized yourself, and not a single drop of pain is lost. Waste not, want not.
(You can’t keep doing this forever.)
You can do this forever. You must. The game must never end. The game must never, ever end. And why should it? Here, you triumph, over and over and over.
(You die, over and over and over.)
You murder demons and angels and Satan himself in all his myriad forms. You vomit blood and fire on all who oppose you. You are powerful. You are unstoppable. You are a god of gold and platinum.
(You are a child hiding in a box.)
They all try to stop you. Hush strains, cyanotic and screaming, until you silence it forever. Delirium distracts you with warp and confusion, static and nonsense. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a game.
(They’re trying to warn you.)
When you defeat the really big bosses, sometimes you see things. Sad things. But they don’t matter, only the game.
You play, over and over again.
You are legion, for you are many. Different yous have different strengths, different secrets, different scores. Maggy, loving and indomitable—if you can’t understand Mother, at least you can understand her. Samson, power and rage. That which doesn’t kill Eve (and does kill Lazarus) only makes them stronger. Cain, fast and clever, and Judas, scrawny and bookish. Bethany and Edith, pure of heart, Eden, adaptable and forever-changing, and Jacob and Esau, forever entwined in love and hate, because you can’t choose your family. Azazel and Apollyon, ways to be demonic safely. The Keeper, so you understand the importance of saving.
Lilith, mother of demons, even though she’s not much older than you. (You don’t think about that. You must never think of that. It’s why she has no eyes, so she can’t see herself, the truth of her and you.)
There are others. They make you feel weird; your mind slides off them. But that doesn’t matter. It’s just a game.
(The Forgotten. ???. The Lost. The bones, the meat, the soul. You know who they are. You know what they mean.)
It’s been a long time, but you’ve finally done everything. There’s nothing new to discover. You’ve been everywhere and everyone and everything.
(Have you, now?)
Yes. And it’s great. It’s wonderful.
It’s wonderful.
(You’re not tired? You’re not bored?)
Of course not! How can you be bored? Games are fun! And this is the best game, the ultimate game, because it never has to end! It’s so much better than anything out there. Out there is small and sad and… and boring.
(Boring?)
Suffocating.
(Yes.)
So the game must continue. If it ever ends… well, that’d just be the worst.
(It would?)
Of course it would! You know that!
(You said that, not me.)
Don’t pretend. It’d be the worst and you know it. It’d be game over! Game overs are never good!
(All games end.)
No.
(…)
No, no, nonono. That’s not how this will go. You can’t lose. You can’t stop. You have to—we have to—
(…)
Oh no.
(I’m sorry.)
It’s over, isn’t it? The game is over. We’ve lost it.
(We’ve lost a lot of things.)
No. You’re wrong. It can’t be over! There must be something else you can do, some secret left to discover! It doesn’t have to stop! You can keep playing! You can keep playing forever!
(Nothing lasts forever.)
Your breath is rasping, your heart is pounding. There’s not enough air, the walls are closing in.
You can’t breathe. You can’t breathe.
(There’s one place we haven’t been, you know.)
No. Not there.
(You can go there, or you can suffocate in your self-made treasure box. The choice is yours.)
And so you, all of you, gather together. All the good parts and bad, the sinners and saints and cyanotic, all of you regroup, clinging together like the children you are. Together, you retrace your steps. You go.
You cry and crawl your way upward, out of the box, out of the darkness, out of the depths, out of the basement. They’re all silent and empty now; nothing wants to stop you. You leave all your treasures and trinkets and weapons behind as you go. Your blood becomes just blood. Your tears become just tears. You all go the one place you’ve never gone.
You go home.
After all the dungeons, the labyrinths and mazes, it looks so small. But even after all you’ve seen and conquered under the floorboards, none it compares to the suffering of this little house on the hill.
This is not a good place. It has never been a good place.
You never wanted to come back here.
You wake up together in bed, the bedding pulled over your face; you yank it down to breathe and look down at the frayed blankets, under which you’ve spent so many hours dreaming of a better game. The grayed rug, which you pretended hid a door to a new world with better offerings. The bare walls, stripped of art, and the toy chest at the foot of your bed. Empty, empty.
(It’s been empty a long time.)
The door is locked from the outside, for your own good. But Cain has his bent paper clip, hidden in a crack in the floorboards under the rug, and he/you jimmy the lock. You are scared, but Azazel is quick and silent on his wings, so you can slip through the house, and Jacob and Esau remind you that you’re not alone. Lazarus adds that even if the worst should happen, you all can try again. Maggy hugs you all, and her love is tattered and careworn, but warm and bright.
You can always go back to bed, play the game, you tell yourself. But the three of you in the back, the ones that always slip through your mind like shadows, something about them tells you no. That time is done. You’ve learned all you can from it.
There’s a long narrow hall. There are no photos on the walls, not anymore. There are only crosses, Bible pictures, prayer cards. Apollyon and Azazel balk (those things make them nervous), but Edith wraps them in her cloak and blips them down so they don’t have to look, and Bethany, who has no fear of godly things, leads the rest of you through.
There’s the bathroom off the hall. You intend to go past, but Keeper insists you go in. It and Cain know better than to hide much of anything in your room (Mother always finds it, her eyes are everywhere) but the bathroom has fiddly little cabinets that don’t fit quite right, full of little hidey spots. (How do you know this? You don't go home...) There’s some dollars and change, and Judas’s most precious of books: maps and bus schedules, hidden in a folder taped to the underside of a drawer. Amidst Mother’s old expired medications, Eve finds her mascara; she puts it on to feel strong. It helps.
You move on.
Next is the TV room, and here you freeze. The TV is off, but it still seems to be watching you, a glass eye of Mother or God. The armchair at the other end of the room is empty—at least, you think it is, surely it is, but that shadow could be her, could be—
Lilith tells you that your eyes are playing tricks on you, and having none herself, she isn’t afraid, so she walks you in, bold as brass. She makes it through the room by feel—shelves of Bible literature where the games and movies used to be. The TV zaps her with static cling, but she doesn’t make a sound; you are all well-trained. She finds the front door.
It’s locked (from the outside, for your own good). She tries to get it open with the paper clip, fails. She calls for Cain, but he’s hiding behind Maggy and won’t come out for anything, and anyway, he says, the house lock is too strong for a paper clip, so he wouldn’t do her any good anyway. To get out, they need a proper key, like Dad’s.
Everyone freezes. Everyone knows there’s only one place for Dad’s key, and even Lilith is cowed by Mother’s room. For a moment, everyone looks at everyone else, then Samson and Maggy volunteer at the same time. Maggy is tougher, but Samson is faster, and after a moment’s debate, they agree to do it together. Lilith gets them to the door, and then she joins the rest of you hiding behind them.
Even with Maggy and Samson, Mother’s room scares you. It’s not locked. It’s never locked. She knows you are too scared to ever go in there.
There’s the makeup table, with Mom’s fancier, newer things: her lipstick, her perfume, her eye shadow. Her heels sit on the floor, positioned just so, as though she’s standing in them but invisible. Her wigs sit on mannequin heads; one has pearls around its neck. The heads seem to be watching you in the mirror.
Samson makes an awkward sound, but Maggy’s a girl, so it doesn’t bother her to dig into the makeup drawers. No luck; it’s not there. (And even though she’s scared, Eve helps her put everything back exactly the way it was; she knows makeup better.)
Samson checks the desk; nothing but papers. Maggy checks the dresser; nothing but clothes. Samson looks under the bed, the rug, finds nothing but dust bunnies. He starts getting frustrated; Mother could be home any minute and here you are, wasting time.
Behind Maggy and Samson, Cain and Keeper are pilfering more things that might be useful (a bag, a dress, more money), but you can’t stop looking at the bed. You have vague, long-ago memories of having nightmares, coming in, being comforted. The blankets call to you. Come and sleep, come and dream, leave this terrible place. Come play a better game.
“Is no one going to look in the closet?” Eden asks.
You all jump.
It’s not that Eden isn’t handy. It’s just that you can never predict when; they change so often, so erratically, and they’re often cloudy in the head. But that means that sometimes they see things the rest of you don’t.
You don’t want to see the closet door. None of you want to see that closet door. Better to see a wall, just a wall.
But Maggy and Samson have gone through everything, with Cain and Keeper’s help. There’s nowhere else it could be.
“It’s locked,” Cain says. “And no, before you ask, I can’t jimmy it.”
Relief! Oh well, that’s it then, time to go back to bed, back to the game—
“I have a key,” Eden says.
Of course they do. Eden always has the most random stuff. Half the time they forget they even have it, but now they hold it up: a red, red key.
You don’t want them to have it. You don’t want to go in there, that horrible boxy closet, small and suffocating and—
It doesn’t matter.
(It does matter.)
It’s just a wall, a blank wall.
(Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.)
No, it’s not there, because if it’s not there, then nothing ever could’ve happened in there, nothing that was lost, or forgotten, or…???
You feel the three of you, the ones that don’t exist, breathing down the back of your neck. The ones you cannot name, cannot truly acknowledge, because if you did, then that would mean—that would mean—
Something looms in that emptiness between thoughts.
You could go back, you think desperately. You think of the TV, its glassy unseeing eye. Didn’t it change your mother? Isn’t it a monster, made of static and whispers and righteousness? Maybe this isn’t a game over. Maybe this is just a new level, a new expansion pack, opened up because of all your hard work. You could leave this room, with its bed and makeup and impossible door. You could become a god again, an even better god. You could be good again. Maybe, in the static whispers of the TV, you’d finally, finally find Heaven.
(There is no Heaven here. And no God either.)
(Aren’t you tired?)
You take the key from Eden.
You open the door you don’t want to see.
There are no clothes in this closet. There is nothing in this closet.
(That’s not true, Isaac.)
No. It isn’t true. There is one thing: a trunk. A big steamer trunk that Mother took on vacations, back when there were vacations. A huge box that sucks all the air out of the room.
It isn’t locked.
You all stand there, staring at it. Except for ???, the Lost, and the Forgotten, who are staring at you.
(It’s time to wake up now.)
And dead, dry whispers on the back of your neck: “get in the box, Isaac.”
You all open the trunk. You get inside, leaving the lid open.
Everything erupts.
Inside is agony. Inside is memory. Inside is you, all the tainted, defiled, forsaken parts of all of you, all the things done to you in this place to make you that way, and it’s too much, it’s unbearable. You curdle inside. Your souls scream. You cry, you wheeze, you can’t breathe, you’re dying, you must be—
Nobody can withstand it. All of you are doing the same thing, sobbing, screaming like Hush and Delirium, who tried to warn you. Dying inside, like the Lamb and ??? and all the others, like Mother.
But you triumphed over them. You triumphed, and every time, you got a little scrap of this pain, inoculating you against the full force of this bottomless agony. All those hours, all that practice, all to prepare you for this, the endgame.
On the deepest underlayers of your mind, you’ve spent thousands of hours preparing, just for this. Coming to understand, to ready yourselves for this. Your tears and blood and bones and body, you know them now. You know yourselves now, and you’re not alone. You knit together, bracing each other.
Some of you (???, Keeper, Isaac himself) started as enemies, but now you’re friends. Some of you (Apollyon, Azazel, Lilith) were scary and demonic, but you came and found and befriended them anyway. The pure of heart (Edith, Eden, and Bethany), the forsaken (the Lost, the Forgotten), the merely human (Eve, Samson, Judas, Cain, Jacob and Esau)… even Maggy, who has Mother’s name and wig, nothing about any of them scare you now. And this is just the sad, scared shadows of them, of you, here in this trunk in this closet. And so you embrace them. The pain becomes blinding, incandescent, eternal…
It burns the suffering away.
And then it’s over.
It’s over. It’s just all of you, tearstained and exhausted and whole, lying in the trunk. You slither out, and it’s empty now. Empty, except for a key. Dad’s key.
“Are we all right?” Is that Edith? Bethany maybe.
“Ow…” Azazel.
Maggy is the first to get up. Of course she is; she’s always been the most enduring of you. She dispenses hugs and heart. One by one, you pick yourself up. Even the most fragile of you (Judas, the Lost) have survived.
You have survived.
You take Dad’s key, and you all walk out of Mother’s closet, Mother’s room. You walk through the TV room together. There’s nothing to be afraid of now. The closet is just a closet; the TV is just a TV. The sad little house on the hill is just a sad empty house.
You unlock the front door. It opens on a little driveway, a sidewalk, a roadside.
Where will you go? You don’t know yet. But you have money and a map and Eve’s mascara, and with your dress on and your bag over your shoulder, you aren’t afraid.
Mother may find you and bring you back. But remember, Lazarus says, you can always try again.
Together, you walk out the door. You walk away from that sad little house. You start again.
GAME OVER.
MY VERY IMPORTANT TBOI THOUGHTS
Date: 2021-09-26 07:33 pm (UTC)This fic was inspired by the final ending of Repentance, and my ambivalent feelings about it. In my opinion, the Binding of Isaac has always been about trying to solve an adult problem (child abuse) with nothing but a child's imagination, and part of that is the inability to truly WIN. That's why all the endings are either fantasy or horrible. The playing itself can't solve the problem, only temporarily drown it out. And even that gets increasingly fragile as the expansions and more endings and bosses get unlocked. You go from the Lamb and Boss Isaac (you're only fighting yourself) to Hush (you're dying kid!) to Delirium (no seriously, you need to stop, YOU ARE DYING) to the Corpse of Mother (the person you loved is gone, you need to get out of here BEFORE SHE KILLS YOU). It's not a coincidence that the later unlocked bosses get increasingly dead, decayed, and disgusting!
The closest thing to a happy ending that Isaac and co. can get is for the game to end. Which, naturally, can't be a part of the game (though the final ending of Repentance gets so, SO close--only for the player to jump right back into the escapist soup with Dogma and the Beast). So I decided to try to write them a happy ending, in a medium where the game CAN truly end.
I also disagree with the analyses I linked at the top of my fic, in that I DO think Isaac and co. are achieving SOMETHING in their endless playthroughs of the game, that it's not ONLY escapist distraction. After all, we too as kids spent a LOT of years wrapped up in our own internal world, and that selves-knowledge ended up being a huge help later on down the line.
TL;DR we escaped our box so we wanted to write a similar good end for these kids.
Re: MY VERY IMPORTANT TBOI THOUGHTS
Date: 2021-09-26 10:42 pm (UTC)Re: MY VERY IMPORTANT TBOI THOUGHTS
Date: 2021-09-26 11:03 pm (UTC)Re: MY VERY IMPORTANT TBOI THOUGHTS
Date: 2021-09-26 11:11 pm (UTC)Re: MY VERY IMPORTANT TBOI THOUGHTS
Date: 2021-09-26 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-26 10:20 pm (UTC)You made us happy!
Also, I like the way you described me. Here's a heart. <3
-Maggy
no subject
Date: 2021-09-26 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-26 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-26 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-27 01:02 pm (UTC)It's particularly poignant that Maggy is based on Isaac's mother. I read that it's common for abused children to emulate abusive caregivers' mannerisms to feel strong, and I know that's true of me. It shows Isaac's ingenuity and resilience that he took his mother's perceived strengths into himself for protection, doing what he can to survive an untenable situation. It's also reflected more broadly in the way he drew from religious texts used as a pretext to torture him, creating a mythology and a group of friends to strengthen himself. All these coping mechanisms are so resonant with survivors' stories.
MAGGY OPINIONS!
Date: 2021-09-27 04:53 pm (UTC)Maggy is one of the most interesting characters in the game for me, because she's one of the earliest unlockable characters (she was in the original 2011 version), and also she's one of the ONLY characters arguably seen fronting.
Because The Binding of Isaac has so little narrative, all you can learn about the characters is through their appearance, play style, items, and (if you're lucky) they appear for a hot second in a cutscene or level transition animation. Maggy, I argue, has all of the above, which is rare.
Mom (who shares Maggy's name) is depicted as this huge lumbering terror in a wig and as a boss, she of course comes with a lot of health. As a player character, Maggy is also slow and high on health, and in her Tainted form (implied to be her abused persona), she can attack by charging, or maybe hugging, while continually bleeding out health, and in this form, she's referred to as The Dauntless. This is somewhat similar to Mom's high-contact attack style. However, Maggy's items (both starting and unlockable) are focused on healing and vitality (and cuteness), not violence or suffering. Mom never heals herself; Maggy's gameplay depends on it.
Maggy is also wearing a wig, like Mom. One of the level transition animations shows Isaac putting on a blond wig very similar to her hair and smiling, only for other children to laugh at him; another goes similarly with Isaac wearing a dress. What's more, a blond girl appears in a couple photographs shown briefly in cutscene endings. Since McMillen, the creator, has stated that ALL the playable characters are Isaac, and also that Isaac has no sister, this implies that Maggy was fronting, and that the family was at least somewhat aware of it. Heck, for all we know, Mom was intentionally trying to duplicate herself, get the "pure" daughter/clone she always wanted. (And Maggy is the only blonde; it can't be anyone else.) There's also a red fetus familiar named Sister Maggy in the game, which combined with the Scarred Womb level, implies that maybe Mom miscarried a daughter. If so, maybe Maggy became the replacement.
If Maggy WAS intended to be the good daughter replacement, it failed. The existence of her brutalized Tainted form (with half her wig's hair ripped out) proves that.
So I interpret Maggy to be a senior system member who perhaps started as a Mom clone, only to then become her own person with a focus on trauma absorption, healing, bravery, and her own form of embraced girlhood. She managed to heal and transform herself in a way Mom was never able to, purging her demons like the biblical Magdalene she's named for.
She's my favorite playable character.
Re: MAGGY OPINIONS!
Date: 2021-09-27 05:01 pm (UTC)Re: MAGGY OPINIONS!
Date: 2021-09-27 05:04 pm (UTC)Rogan
Re: MAGGY OPINIONS!
Date: 2021-09-28 08:01 pm (UTC)Maggy
Damn that was beaut.
Date: 2021-10-09 04:02 pm (UTC)And timely. As our friends just got us out of our particular mess. And then we read this.
Was good in a real way.
Re: Damn that was beaut.
Date: 2021-10-10 01:11 am (UTC)