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If the whole Game thing hadn’t happened, and you hadn’t seen everything you did, and there was still just earth…
No magic, no aliens, no dog people out for your fucking throat…
Would you still believe in life after death? Or be superstitious?
Or any of it?
Well, there is a better question to ask, here.
That question creates a clog in your throat. A dense deposit of pain and longing, the stone that won’t sink no matter how many tethers you tie to it.
That question, in particular, is the reason you’re sitting on a quiet dock overlooking a lake, maybe eighty three miles from anything that could resemble civilization. These quiet places are damn near impossible to find on the crowded planet. You searched for a while to find it. You’re not sure if anyone else even knows that it’s here.
Memories pop up in the rear of your brain, like gold fogged with condensation, riddled with smears and fingerprints. Fish flopping up from the surface of the water, a pink sunset behind a comfortably looming figure, a pole and reel in your fingers and someone’s hands clasped around your own, because yours are too small to wield it alone. You must have been, what? Eight?
Yeah.
That was the year that Dave got that really bad cut on his forehead, and the scar took eons to heal.
Fireflies, light-hearted reminders of both LOWAS and your childhood, go in and out of existence. Occasionally one of them buzzes close to your ear, and you brush your hand out to shoo it off.
The night is lit very clearly by the moon, and the tall grass on the sides of the lake makes a calming static of background to go with the crickets and gently lapping water. Your skin is even whiter against the darkness of the surface, and you see your reflection for a brief moment.
You look older. You look tired, even if your face has yet to wrinkle. You could almost imagine a hat, sitting flat atop your head, and you’d look like –
Recoiling, you sweep your toes through the image. A little fish pops up to nip at your foot for half a second before realizing it’s not quite the food it wants. You came out here in just a holey old tee and some boxers, to get a peace of mind or something. And you even failed at that.
“You’ll want to be careful of the lake,” a soft voice chirps. It almost disappears beneath the chime of insects and static of grass. Needless to say, you’re scared nearly to death (haha) by the presence of another person.
If the new arrival hadn’t caught your arm just now, you’d be off the dock. Breathing hard, you scramble as far as you can from the person, and look up at them with wide eyes and hand poised to defend yourself if needed.
“It’s just teeming with leeches.”
Short, with large horns, and a wispy white dress, you can sort of recognize her. She’s stepped back, running a hand through the impossible amount of hair she’s got to get it out of her face. Who? You guess you recognize her from the windy thing shit. And she was definitely at the final battle. But this one…
She seems different somehow, from the one you saw. Very different. Her skin is almost… it’s weirdly translucent. And when she tilts her head up, you see –
Right! Fuck, by fucking golly.
“Aradia?” you ask, confused.
But she didn’t come with you all when you walked through that door. Did she?
“That’s what I was called, yes.”
And she’s a lot younger than the one you saw at the End. Her white eyes are cherubic in her round features, and she smiles at you.
“Why in the world are you here?” you ask her, settling back to sitting. You remain facing her, and your heart is pounding, but for now it doesn’t really feel like she’s going to cause you undue harm. Right?
“I don’t know what got me here,” she says, and despite your apprehension and scooting away from her, she floats down to sitting on the wooden planks. Her body moves like it has weight, and her dress is tattered, but still falls like fabric. “It might have been a glitch in Sgrub, or something like that. But I’m here.”
“We left you at the gate,” you tell her.
Her eyes widen for a second, and flickers of age-old incandescent rage seem to flare up behind heavy eyelids. It fizzles out so quickly you might have missed it were you not paying such close attention. She’s… she’s dead. But it feels like a different death than the trolls you met in the dream bubbles. Did this happen before the game? Was she dead already or something? So if she’s a god damn ghost, is she harboring anger about something from her life?
“You chose to stay,” you add, hoping that maybe it’ll hold the ghostiness at bay. You’ve seen The Greatest Movie Ever Made, you know how spectral shit works.
In theory.
“Of course I did,” she says. Aradia sighs, as if she needed to breathe, and she hangs her feet over the edge of the dock. “I wouldn’t belong here anyway. I was gone before the Game even started.”
“Maybe the creation algorithm needed to have you leave the session, in some form?” you ask the air. She snorts, like it’s so hard to believe such a logical answer. Maybe it’s not that. Maybe she’s snorting at the irony of choosing to stay behind, and a version of her being dragged along anyway.
A breeze floats by, smelling like the fall that’s approaching.
“Whatever the reason is,” she says, “I’ve been here for a good long time. Been living in an abandoned shack on the north side of the water. Didn’t feel right being close to so many people.”
You find yourself nodding.
It’s a lot.
Even in your newly manufactured suburb, you still feel stifled by the presence of others. Not even the breeze really makes you feel free anymore. It’s just awful. No one comes to see you anymore; they don’t even think you’re at the same home. You haven’t left your house in ages, except trips to come here, or to drift through the clouds.
It sucks.
“Why are you here?”
The question is sudden and practically unbidden, and it makes that clump lodge in your throat once more. Mouth dry, you just kind of breathe, sentences coming to life and then dying again on your tongue. The truth is that you come out here to forget. If she lives on the lake, she’s seen you a few times, maybe resting in the trees and waiting for you to leave.
“It’s a quiet place. The city gets annoying.”
Lying to her is too easy. Inside, you cringe and berate yourself.
“That’s not true,” she says. “Or not the whole truth, anyway.”
Okay, maybe lying isn’t as easy as you thought.
The clog eats up your words, and you feel suffocated, suddenly, before the stars in the sky and the ripples in the wake of the wind. She does nothing. You can feel her watching you, and you know somehow that she’s not blinking.
“I’ve excavated dead trolls who talk more than you,” she observes, blunt and a little annoyed. “I’m a ghost, and you’re the first person I’ve spoken to in eons. What am I gonna do? Tattle?”
Damn it.
“I’m not going to be emotional all over an other person like that,” you snap, and instantly regret it.
But she got words to come out. Maybe talking to her isn’t so bad. She won’t look at you with overwhelming sympathy, or pity, or the raw and painful understanding you get from Rose. She’ll just keep…
Turning to her, you see that she’s staring, just a little twisted in irritation but otherwise, no expression.
She’s… not safe, but.
She offered to listen to you talk. And the fact that you just met her opens a floodgate that you keep closed to protect your friends from your sadness. The clump is still there, in your throat, like swallowing hair or a really dry piece of cake.
Cake.
Shit.
“I’m sad all the time, so I never leave my house,” is the first thing you say.
It’s so shockingly easy, like slapping something out of the hands of an unsuspecting victim.
“Why are you sad?” she asks, as curious as she is otherwise emotionless.
It takes a long time. The knot in your chest is hard to unravel. You have to stop trying to form sentences out loud for a minute. You have to breathe in, and out, and repeat several times. Aradia remains silent and expectant. Her legs move back and forth. The tips of her shoes keep the water in a constant and gentle state of rippling.
“You promise you won’t tell anyone?” you ask.
The words are so close to coming out. You’ve almost got it. They’re like bulls ramming into the walls of their pen, straining to escape and run free and angry and terrifying. Like they’ll burst from your mouth. Even if she says no, you’ll say it. You just need that response, the cue.
“I can’t promise that,” she says, and yeah, you should have expected that.
“Well,” you start, giving yourself a smooth foundation to stand on before continuing. “My dad died.”
“What’s a dad?” she asks.
And wow.
The admittance feels so raw, and she’s there to drop sand on the flayed skin. But somehow it makes it easier to keep talking.
You just talk, and talk, and talk.
You explain human parents, and she compares them to lusii, and you say sure, yeah. Caretakers and non-biological relations and protectors are also mentioned. She mostly stays quiet as you just spill and spill and spill.
Hoarse with it, you don’t even stop to be amazed that the first real conversation in forever has turned out to be with a fucking ghost. Slimer is apparently your confidant. Voice creaking and whining, you reach the precipice of your explanation about the Game.
Realizing that he was gone hurt more than anything you could imagine. Jane’s dad tried and mostly failed to take his place in concept. Like a doppelganger in sheep’s clothing is what he felt to you. He’d never be your dad.
Aradia gets really fascinated when you talk about museums in the human world, focusing mostly on the place itself rather than the memory you share with her about your father. It’s okay, though. She’s still listening, even if she doesn’t give a shit.
It’s almost better that she doesn’t care.
Eventually, though, after what feels like a bajillion years, you stop.
At one point you almost started crying, and the tears threaten at the bridge of your nose and eyes. But you suck ‘em on back.
It’s quiet, for a long time.
Maybe minutes, maybe seconds, maybe hours. It’s hard to catch your breath, but once you do, there’s no sound but the bugs and trees and grass again. Aradia, when you glance at her, is simply staring out over the water. One of her eyebrows is cocked, like she’s waiting for something, and even if they’re all white, you can feel her eyes rolls right on over to you.
“What?” you ask. It creaks like the dock beneath you. You need a lozenge.
“Well?” she asks right back.
“Well what?” you jab, a little more accusatory than before.
“Aren’t you going to ask?” she says. And she’s smirking now like she’s got some kind of evil plan you’ll only be privy to if you answer her riddles three. Her head turns toward you.
“Ask what?” you return, feeling a frown crease your brow.
“You want to ask me what it’s like to be dead,” she says.
Oh.
Before she said that, you hadn’t even considered it. But, maybe –
Maybe if she tells you what it was like to die? Maybe she knows something about your father? But no, not everyone turns into ghosts, right?
“That’s right. Only some of us do. And no, I know nothing about your ‘dad’,” she fills in, into the conversational void.
Instinct makes you lean back from her, moving your hand to cover your cheek, as if stung.
“You were saying half of that out loud,” she answers the unasked question. Right.
It feels like she’s lying but you shrug it off.
But you’re defensive, struck, and prickly. She doesn’t flinch when you snap at her for the third time tonight.
“So? What’s it like to be dead?!”
The words come out without your permission, almost, and they hurt you, too. You feel like you need to apologise, but hold it back. No. Bad habits.
“It’s lonely,” she answers.
You almost hadn’t expected her to tell you after that, so it takes you a little off guard. It’s open and honest coming from her. And it hurts, but in the same way that most inevitable truths do.
“It’s lonely?” you ask softly.
She replies even softer.
“Yeah. It’s lonely, and you can’t sleep,” she continues. “You spend a lot of time wishing you’d done things a little differently.”
“Ah.”
“But I have unfinished business,” she tells you, after a beat. “That’s why I’m here. Or rather, why I wasn’t gone before the Game.”
“That… makes sense?” you say, not sure what to do.
“It does,” she answers. “I’m sure your father felt no differently at the time of his death, than he did the last time he saw you.”
“He was angry with me, for being rambunctious,” you admit to her. “He was worried.”
“I’m sure he would be happy for you being here,” she says, matter-of-fact. Her blank eyes blink at you, and her mouth turns upwards in a smile that’s not quite reassuring so much as content with the subject matter. She must have been pretty morbid in life. “You beat the Game, and defeated the odds. Who wouldn’t be happy with that?”
Huh.
A bead of warm and wet slides off the tip of your chin.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
A hand touches your shoulder. You look up from rubbing the heels of your hands into your eyes, and she’s leaning toward you. The touch of her hand grows a bit firmer, and she grins in that same weird way. “He’s not waiting in the aether for you. No one is waiting for you there. No need to worry!”
The words are strange when put together, and she’s obviously entertaining herself quite a bit. But they help. He loved you when you saw him last, and he loved you when he died. And if he went in the typical fashion of your father, he was fighting.
He’s gone.
And that’s the way it’s supposed to be, right now.
And it’s okay.
Before you even know what you’re doing, you reach out and pull her into a tight hug. Aradia freezes, clearly uncomfortable, and her body is solid, but fairly cold. Right. Trolls don’t do the physical affection thing without a quadrant, right?
So you yank yourself away from her.
“Thanks,” you say, and she smiles beatifically.
“Sure thing, windy,” she tells you, and before you can say anything else she’s sinking through the wood of the dock. Uh.
Okay.
It doesn’t matter that you’re alone anymore, though.
You’re blasting off the ground, zooming through the air with the wind at your back helping propel you even faster. What feels like minutes later, you’re busting through the front door of your house with a burst of air.
The incoming sunrise nearly blinds you as you toss open every window. The curtains are torn down, the blinds pulled open, and the panes cracked to let in the fresh air. You jet streams of air through the rafters, ceilings and doorways of the house, removing dust and spiders and a few pieces of paper that weren’t tied down.
It makes you sneeze about seven times before you stop, and set about taking out the Hefty and getting rid of all the trash. Every light in the house is turned on, no furniture left unturned, no window left unwiped.
It’s a few hours later, and you’re adding the last dish to the pile, when you realize you’re crying. Big, sloppy tears, choking sobs. The weight of your father and the weight of being in the game, being lonely, having to be a leader no matter what you wanted. It all crashes down on you.
You curl into a corner of the kitchen, hands wrinkled from water and the sweat from the inside of the rubber cleaning gloves you found in the pantry.
Everything is clean.
The washing machine is going, the dryer is taking care of the second load of clothes and towels, and you’re… done.
You don’t have to feel any of that pressure anymore.
And so you just let yourself cry.
The midday sun is making a warm patch on your shoulder when Dave and Karkat rush in and find you there. They say things about the neighbors calling into the news station about the strange activity. And they made sure it wouldn’t circulate, but they came to you as soon as they could.
Jade stomps in right after them, loudly complaining and toting two baskets of fruit that she sets on the counter.
Somehow they get you to a chair, and Dave is in front of you, asking you some simple questions. But you’re too tired to give complex answers. Karkat says something about being able to tell that you’re doing better. Dave tells him he’s full of shit, and Karkat looks like he might punch him.
Jade is cooking something to stave off her worry, but you can see her tail between her legs.
Then Rose shows up.
She sits and watches you, commenting only on the fact that the house is surprisingly clean and stinks of Lysol. Otherwise she glues herself to her mobile, and it’s obvious that she’s telling everyone to show up. Nothing of yours has been charged for months. The group chats were.
They were too much.
But now, they feel fine.
Dave is pulling you in, and he’s so warm when you hug him back. He’s painfully thin but you feel a bit of belly pudge, now. Karkat’s been taking care of him. Karkat keeps his distance, instead choosing to wander about the house. He collects all the trash bags.
Next to show up is Kanaya, who brings with her Jane and Jake. All three have different pieces of paper that had blown out of the house. Jake has an old Ghost Busters poster, and it makes you start crying all over again.
Everyone hovers, worried. But Dave shoos them away, and Karkat enforces the mandate, and your best friend makes you drink some water and a glass of milk from the few groceries Jane brought in. Jane’s dad isn’t there, and that’s okay. She sets about helping Jade in the kitchen. Jake helps Karkat put all the furniture back where it belongs. He also hope-ifies a very big lock for your dad’s study. (that’s a thing you don’t find out until later)
Roxy and Dirk come in, and Roxy is all over you in an instant. But her voice is soft and her arms are softer, and you let her hug you for a minute.
You’re still not registering words.
It’s okay, though, since they manage to make themselves busy, too, with your technology and wi-fi and stuff.
Before you know it, it’s evening, and you’re surrounded by people who are folding your laundry, and looking through your bills, and making sure you know that you have to eat and do laundry. You know Jane will have somehow made a zillion casseroles and stashed them in your freezer. Plus cookies (not cake). And Dirk and Jake clean up the kitchen.
You’ve eaten food, and there are sprites messing around in the yard, tormenting each other. Everyone is gathered around your table, crowding in and reaching between bowls and dishes and you feel so warm.
You feel…
Happy.