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Dualscar is dead, and all his things are yours by ancient right. You could take his beautifully embroidered vest, (too big for you), his obscenely fine-wrought rings (too big for you), his commander's coronet (too glubbin' big for you), his cape...
His blood spatters your shirt, your face, your hands: the exact same color as your own.
You've never not plundered one of your victim's corpses before.
You're not sure if the lingering, empty strangeness inside you is due to one or the other. You spit upon his slack face (your face, broader, sterner, older, but you'll get there one day) and you turn on your heel and leave.
You unfasten your own cape (his but smaller, poorer) from around your shoulders, and let it pool on the floor behind you. Your fingers are numb and a bit sticky with blood. You peel each ring (baubles, wriggler-petty trinkets stolen from ghosts) from your fingers and they sound like chimes as they drop hard against the cement, bouncing and rolling into shadows. Your flesh is creased from your long ostentation, and blood from where the rings had torn at your knuckles quickly fills the indentations.
Dualscar is dead. Long live Dualscar--
No. No, no, cod-- god no. You stumble up against a piece of wall and slide down it, your legs like cuttlefish jelly beneath you, and you put your head in your (bloody royal purple) hands. Your hitching, painful sobs rattle you down to your bones then and there in the darkness.
You are nothing without the dream of that monster to live up to, nothing but a child, six sweeps old, who has killed his own god. Killed the man who dared lay hand against his empress, your empress. Even now her sacred fuchsia blood stains the goggles that you'd taken from her haggard brow, her eyes beneath still dazed with the pain and horrors committed upon her from the man who had (until the two of you had met) been your other soul.
Your red feelings for her are gone, washed away with the sight of her own blood on her thighs, her blood cascading down her chest from the terrible adult-sized rents in her shoulder. You had thought oh, so this is wwhat it feels like as you'd touched her bloody goggles with feelings as pale as the knuckles of your hand around your wand. You'd wanted only (finally and far too late), to protect her, and it is just glubbing typical of your whole entire life that it was happening now that you know how precisely how hard it is possible for you to fuck things up.
She'd opened her eyes, sleep-gummed and blurry with tears.
"Fef--" you'd said, and she'd taken one look at you and screamed and screamed and screamed.
You'd run, and you hadn't stopped running until you-- until he was dead and why does if feel as if he's not the only one lying on the cold floor with a hole through his chest?
"I don't trust you 'cause you're me," you whisper with your throat full of knives, "Oh, Fef, wwhat have wwe done?" hands to your face, lips against your own blood, his own blood, and hers-- and you giggle hysterically through the tears. Karkat's petty bitchfights with his future selves don't have anything on this: you have redefined self-loathing.
You've redefined pretty much everything you'd ever thought you'd understood, really.
Kanaya finds you eventually, a sad scrap of empty pain curled up lost in a corner somewhere. You're so glad to see her, so painfully, pathetically glad. If an ex-auspistice could't take a little pity on a guy, who could?
"Oh, Eridan," Kanaya says, kneeling down beside you, taking you in her arms. It's the first time she's ever held you like this, but the tone is blessedly familiar.
"Did I do it right?" you ask. You have to know. "Wwas I right?"
She kisses your forehead, your bloody knuckles. If she licks her lips, afterward, you don't much care. Her arms around you shoulders feel unspeakably reassuring, as if she were redefining all your edges.
"It Had To Be Done," Kanaya says. "He Hurt Our Princess, And He Was A Complete And Utter Nooksniffer, Besides."
"I thought I wwas a nooksniffer," you mumble. "You wwere just sayin that earlier--"
"You Are," Kanaya agrees calmly. "But You're A Nooksniffer Who's Done The Right Thing."
Some part you didn't even know you had of your expanding and contracting bladder system relaxes at that, and you rest your head against her shoulder.
"I can't be me anymore, Kan," you confess, "I only evver thought I wwanted-- wwhat he wwanted and noww that that's a thing that's actually happened I don't-- I don't evven-- I don't know wwhat to do noww that I can't be me."
"Come With Me, Then," she says gently, and pulls you to your feet.
*
She lets you raid her wardrobifier. You rip from its depths a gray t-shaped torso garment, darker jeans, nondescript shoes-- gray, too, you can't bear to look at purple. Karkat's usual look, Sollux's, Gamzee's. Lowbloods and madmen, those that just don't give a flopping fuck about fashion, about the importance of rings or capes or boots or jackets that burn up to utilitarian black under the force of your least-shitty wand.
"Your Symbol--" Kanaya starts to say, and digs her fangs uneasily into her lower lip.
"Fuck it," you say. "Wwho's gonna care?"
She frowns at you, still uneasy, and so you rummage around until you find a tube of her lipstick.
"I alwways wwondered," you tell her, "wwhy us kids greww up all on our owwn, you know? A wwhole planet of kids until wwe get rounded up to go out to the stars, wwhy didn't they at least havve the Empress around, sorta thing, teach us wwho we were suppose to be. I alwways thought maybe it coulda been easier, growwin up, if wwe kneww wwhat wwe wwere gonna be, afterwward. If wwe kneww wwhere wwe wwere growwin--"
"And Now You Know?" Kanaya asks, almost not even a question, eying your-- her-- lipstick in your hand. Now you know...
"None of us wwould wwant to groww up, wwould we?" you ask. It's not even a question at all. "Wwe'd take one big fat glubbin look and say no wway, no howw, no thanks."
You set it to black and draw a big circle on your chest, a circle just like the one you've punched through Dualscar.
"There," you say, "Zero, a big fat no-thank-you-zero. Isn't that wwhat all the dead kids are sportin these days?"
You close the lipstick, and toss it back to her.
"Oh, Eridan," she says again, and you turn your back on her and her concern and stalk off to her bathroom. Your face peers back at you from the mirror above the sink as you wash away the blood, your too-large eyes in your child-round cheeks, the soft, unscarred fins flaring gently away from your narrow jaw. You dig your nails gently into them, squinting, and the ghost of your future glares back out.
Your horns are just the same. They'll only have to get bigger. Your horns--
She had screamed, the very moment she saw you. She had screamed.
Your shirt is just like Karkat's. Your pants, your shoes-- you put your hand to your horns. Snapped horns, unlike teeth, do not grow back. They scar over, the jagged edges growing rounder every sweep (and
Karkat Vantas has never been anyone but himself) and maybe you could cut off your fins, trim down your hair, snap off your--
And then Kanaya is there.
"No," she says.
"They're his," you snarl, "they're his they're his they're his!"
Her hands are cool against your own, as soft and calm and steely-hard as the rest of her.
"They're Yours," she says clearly.
"But Fef-- Kanaya, you didn't see her screamin, you didn't see--"
"She Might Be Upset Right Now, But I Refuse To Believe She Would Want You To Mutilate Yourself Out Of Some Misguided Desire For Penance." A smile touches her dark lips, small and grim. "And In Any Case We Already Have One Karkat. We Don't Need Two Nubbyhorned Assholes In This Rumpus."
"I could just do one a them, then," you offer, that same gruesome smile tugging at your own lips. "Evvery rainboww rumpus could use a feww l00dicrous swweaty broken h00rned pervvs, huh?"
Kanaya snorts, indelicately, and shoves you by the horns face-first into the mirror.
"Don't Even Joke," she says, sounding almost fond.
"Be %sative, Miss Maryam," you say, shoving back against her, "It's hard, being a kid and gr00wwing up and-- and--" it sticks in your throat, burns in your eyes again. Oh, god. Oh god, what have you done?
"Shh," she says, hugging you again, wiping at your purple tears. "Shh, Shh. I'll Get You A Towel."
You giggle at that, despite yourself, and sniffle inelegantly into her elbow.
"Gross," she says, pushing you gently away.
"So sorry if my regal highblood mannerisms are too much for your sorryass commoner self," you tell her, and wipe the rest of the contents of your nose on your new sleeve.
"Ugh, gross," you say. "But seriously, Kan, wwhat am I suppose to do now?"
She pulls your scarf out of her sylladex, the unraveling chains of her fetch modus loud in the quiet.
"Some Part Of You Has Always Been Entirely Yourself," she tells you, wrapping it around your neck. "Be That Part, And The Rest Will Follow Apace."
*
"He hurt her," you'd told them, as they turned from their monitors to stare at you, you with your wild eyes and your hand clutching her bloody goggles. "That monster, he hurt our Fef. Please, somebody, anybody, go help her."
Ten pairs of eyes stared back at you, shocked, upset, suspicious--
"And what are you going to do, blugestain?" Karkat challenged, stepping forward. Sollux was at his back like a vengeful shadow, his glasses glittering like live things in the darkness. If only she'd chosen him instead, if only she'd listened to you first--
You had drawn your wand. "I'm going to get evven," you told them, with every drop of dignity in your six-sweep old frame. They nodded, one by one, children just the same as you but some traditions were immutable, some dignities sat easily on the narrowest shoulders.
They let you go.