Chapter Text
Your name is Jane Crocker and only a few years ago, you and your friends saved the world. You are a goddess of life, but no one knows about that other than your friends. In the end, all of you decided it was best not to tell people, at least for a little while; to allow all of you to grow up in the ways that the Game denied you.
You have hobbies. You help out around the house when you visit your Dad. You volunteer as an EMT, as a way to discreetly use your life powers; it would be a shame to let them go to waste when you can help so many people. You like to read murder mysteries, and bake, and you enjoy playing pranks on people with your granddaughter and grandmother that is more like a sister to you than anything; that is to say, with June. You like listening to comedy podcasts and Netflix specials, and you like to play ARGs. The puzzles are fun. Low stakes, with nothing to lose, which is a nice change of pace.
You are enrolled in a local college, and you do not know what to study yet. You're considering going to culinary school, because you were always good at baking, and it’s very familiar to you- a soothing pastime. You like it when people enjoy the things you make.
You tell this to your friends one night. There are four of you- you, Dirk, Jake, and Roxy. You're all in the midst of doing some of what Dirk calls ‘that sweet shabu-shabu’, which you think is a dumb name for weed. When you tell them that you want to start baking again, Roxy laughs- loudly, unsteadily, the way she always does.
“So you're following in your grandma's footsteps, Janey!”
All your blood turns to ice, and you manage a trembling smile that doesn’t crack. Dirk slaps Roxy's arm, looking mildly horrified, but the topic turns easily when you want it to. The four of you laugh away the comment, and for the rest of the night you can't stop thinking about those words.
You have never been under the belief that you are a perfect person, but you had thought you were good; but Roxy's words take you back, to those days of collar with a lock and no key, of red clothes and the simple hum of processing inside your head.
You thought it was behind you; those days of blood and warmth and gold. It took you the better part of a year to truly reconcile with Jake for what you did under Crockertier, but these days the two of you get on fine.
What happened there, that wasn’t you, after all, he’d said, and you held onto it. That was the tiaratop; that was her, talking. It wasn’t you. It wasn’t.
But... wasn't it?
Wasn’t it you, hurting? Didn’t you want that? You wanted so much, you wanted that more than anything- you wanted them to pay attention to you. You were such a broken thing, back then, those five months of your father’s absence in your chest like a physical wound and no one who understood, five months in a session doomed from the beginning, five months of listening to the boy you thought you loved speak of nothing but Dirk, five months of Roxy joking and laughing her unsteady loud laugh as you trembled. Didn’t you want them to notice you, see your hurt like a lighthouse shining madly in the storm of your body? Didn’t you want them always to put you first?
That wasn't Betty, Jane, you think. No, that was all you.
And aren’t you her great-granddaughter in all the ways that matter? Didn’t you grow up at her feet, wanting to be just like the woman who had already subjugated one planet and was working on a second? Didn’t you wear that tiaratop through the headaches because the thrumming red warmth of it felt, sometimes, like- and you want to vomit thinking it- her hands cradling your skull? Didn’t you feel lost those first few months? Didn’t she, too, have a slave-lover, the one she told you about- the man who helmed her ship, as old as centuries, who she broke through torture, whose friends she killed? Didn’t you want to do the same things to Jake?
And Janey, have you scrubbed yourself clean?
There are parts of you that are tainted by her, after all. If you don’t stop yourself, then what will you become? You want to be good, and if you’re not- you think the world of Roxy, of Dirk, of Jade and June and all the rest of the trolls, who you don't know that well- Jake, too, even if time has made you realize that you are far from romantically compatible with him, not in the least because you like girls instead.
You have to stop yourself. You have to turn yourself into something entirely alien from her, until there are no parts of you that someone could find the Condesce in.
You make a catalogue of yourself, of the parts of yourself considered acceptable- what needs to be shed from your skin, cut and carved out like the rot of an infection. You have been a doctor of a sort, and this is a quarantine, a surgery.
The first thing that comes to mind is baking.
The Condesce loved baking. She was able to build a brand off of it, after all; baking was her in, the way she made herself seem entirely human. And that makes sense, because what she made was good- it tasted sweet, it tasted gentle, it was grandmotherly and caring, and it was a deception. She managed to wriggle her way into people’s hearts and minds and then she planted her roots there and broke them from the inside out.
She told you the story of the Psiioniic, you remember that from the Crockertier days. Who he was- a man who loved and followed a Sufferer, a revolutionary, a goldblood with psionic powers that could power the most powerful ship in the galaxy. And what she did to him- killed the man he followed and loved in a brutal public execution that lasted hours and forced him to watch, sold the woman who had been a mother to him into slavery, and then took him and put him in a ship like a glorified battery.
Of course she never told the story like that. She talked about her sweet honeygrub boy, how he was so afraid of her at first, how he tried to hurt her but he was so weak; how she weaned him on her love over time, broke him first with violence and then with the softness of her touch.
“I gave him presents just like he did to me,” she’d told you once, as if she were talking about a holiday or a seduction. “I had to, reelly. He gave me the world- the galaxy and its conquest. So I had the engineers program subroutines- to make him think he had his family with him, so he’d be docile. But first I gave him treats- drugs and the pike, to calm down. It’ll work with your buoy, too, guppy. Starve him first, then give him treats- cakes and baked things and the pike, till he asshoalciates you with good things. Till he can't help but think of the haze of happiness when you walk into the room.”
You stop baking. You throw all your pans and pots away. When Jake asks why you’ve stopped baking, you tell him you didn’t like doing it anymore. It’s not a lie- even just looking at the baked goods in the grocery store makes you feel sick.
Next are the suits.
You stopped wearing dresses when you came out to the others as a lesbian- femininity always hurt to enact upon yourself, and coming out as a lesbian made you realize that you’d never actually had crushes on the mustached men in your favorite TV shows- you didn’t want to be loved by them, you wanted to be them.
But the suits-
You remember your dream of Crockercorp always seemed to include you wearing a bright red suit. And even if the Condesce had fun with femininity- her long mane of hair that almost seemed to be alive, the crown on her head, her painted nails and lips- she wore suits, too. That long, form-fitting black pantsuit. She wanted to be the boss, you are very sure of that- the CEO of the universe, copyright Her Imperial Condescenscion, signed HIC. She wanted to rule the world and run it like an enterprise, and you know that CEOs wear suits- it makes them look more powerful.
And when you think about it, you feel more powerful in a suit too.
So you throw out all the tailored suits, and then you think about it for a second and throw away all your red clothing. You go through your apartment and find every single Crockercorp product that you’ve ever had and have not yet thrown away and then dump those for good measure. You start showing up in hoodies and sweatpants to things, buy a couple skirts for dress events even though it hurts your heart.
The first party you go to wearing a skirt, Rose loudly laments that she is the only butch lesbian there- “Jane, the sense of betrayal I feel is unmatched. In the absence of Vriska and Terezi I relied upon you for solidarity, and you repay me with a skirt?” It’s jokingly meant, of course, but it still hurts- you miss your suits and cardigans and slacks. But those are things that Betty loved too, and so you clench your teeth and laugh and turn the conversation to what crime Vriska and Terezi will commit on date night this week.
Rose looks at you with a strange sort of concern, but you know she would not understand, so when she asks you more seriously later why you’ve started wearing skirts, you say that it feels more freeing for your legs and leave it at that. And it’s not a lie, not really- knowing you are less and less your great-grandmother's tool is freeing in itself.
But not freeing enough.
Karkat wears a V-neck one day and you stop in your tracks at the sight of the edge of that small round white scar from when you impaled him. It peeks out, just barely, but it’s there, and it is a reminder of what you had forgotten.
How could you forget killing someone? You shoved that trident through his chest and yanked it back out and stared dispassionately down at the way blood streamed from it because it didn’t matter, did it? He could still be brought back. And you pulled him from the dirt with the blue shock of lightning that thrummed with Life and he was alive again; and you told him that such things were possible for you, that the very ebb and flow of Life was at your disposal. He was afraid of you, you think.
And have you ever used your Life powers for good, really? You can’t think of a time. You barely remember the final battle, so if you used them there, then it didn’t count. It was in the heat of the moment, it was instinct, and instinct doesn’t count for anything. Instinct is a series of chemicals in your body. It is a trained response. It means nothing about whether or not you are like her.
But you are doing good with Life now, you remember. You’re saving people’s lives. You’re bringing them back to life, and that’s good- they are alive, and saving people is objectively good. The Condesce tossed people aside and killed them as sport. If ever she saved someone it was because she thought they were useful.
Still, you decide, lines must be drawn. If you are repenting, then you deserve no thanks- you cannot stay with the patients after transporting them to the hospital. They might try and thank you, and your work is not something to be thanked. It is repentance.
As soon as you get people to the hospital, you get on the next call. You do not wait. And sometimes you wonder if the people you helped save ended up okay- sometimes the not-knowing eats at you inside- but perhaps that is the feeling of cutting out the rot.
Next is comedy.
Netflix specials and jokes and pranks aren’t quite the same thing, but the Condesce liked to be funny too. She liked jokes, and pranks, and humor- even if your senses of what that entailed diverged wildly. She had her own personal jester, had an entire Church of Mirth that she surveyed- she had the priests perform regularly for her. And Betty had never sent you jokebooks, but she had told you later under Crockertier that “none of the jokes were finny!” She laughed at you a lot when you were Crockertier. It had not meant much back then. You had not cared.
Her moirail, who you gathered was the leader of the Church for a long time, offered up people to ‘perform’ for her. “If they weren’t finny enough, then I’d cull the beaches for not being good enough,” she told you. “Someday you’ll sea that all on your own, and I won’t need to kelp you." Back then, of course, you had not had any idea of humor, but now that you do, you feel sick that she could take even this from you.
You wonder if she would have liked pranks. You wonder how those pranks would have ended.
You stop pranking June back when she pranks you. You stop watching comedy shows until Netflix stops recommending them. You stop reading jokebooks. You stop pranking other people.
June asks you why you’ve stopped pranking her and you shrug. “I guess it stopped being funny to me,” you tell her, and the look on her face hurts, but you have to be clean.
You toss your love for puzzles next.
The Condesce loved your analytical thinking, how smart you were, how good you were, how helpful you could be. You roamed Derse with Jade and took apart schemes of the smallest revolution brick by brick- you and Jade broke Roxy's spirit- Jade through threats and you with implaceable offers of clemency that you know would not have been followed through on. You remember that Roxy would have been killed if she ever made the matriorb. You remember taking a mailbag from a postwoman full of letters to and from your father.
In the ways she used you, you were the brains and Jade was the brawn. Even though Jade has always been smarter than you, you suppose the Condesce had to find some sort of use for you, after all. She liked you, which is the worst part, and so maybe you weren't so much her tool as something cute and controllable for her. She maneuvered the two of you so well.
In the end you will never know what she thought of you.
All of this to say you cannot be hers ever again. If that means dulling yourself down until you are nothing at all, then you will do that.
Dirk asks you why you left the discord server for the ARG the two of you play together. You tell him it got to be too hard for you, and when he furrows his brow and stares at you with the blank look of his shades, you keep your face steady until he lets it go.
You stop hanging out with Calliope. Playing with trollsonas used to be fun- an easy way to destress. Now all you can think of is the Condesce. The sharptooth smile of Jaynne Crocer looks too much like hers, and the curve of her horns, orange above black hair and gray skin. Even these superficial similarities make you upset. When they message you in concern, you tell them you’ve just been too busy lately, and then you will come by next time.
The next time they message you, you don't respond. You don't know how to explain what you don't want to become, and it's easier this way, anyways.
You stop hanging out with Roxy and Jake. When you think about talking with them you think of the humming warmth of the tiaratop on your skull, the words you spoke to them- you can’t look them in the eye. Your answers to their texts get short, one-word, then one-syllable. You don’t know what to say anymore.
You stop wearing glasses- you remember Betty Crocker’s old cats-eye nanny glasses all too well, their bright pink frames and how they never sat crooked on her face, even when she was splattered by blood on the ground with a sword through her chest, flapping the blue flag of Roxy's mask. You wear contacts instead.
You wonder how long it’ll take for you to feel clean again.
Then after all this you move back in with your dad.
You remember the stories that the Condesce told you about her mother- if you could call a giant horrorterror living under the sea with the ability to annihilate all of trollkind with a single glub a ‘mother’. “Everyfin started to go right with me as soon as I left her,” she told you. Maybe that’s the key- maybe you need to be reined in by someone, under your father’s watchful eye.
The Condesce bent to no one, you remember that. She’d cull someone for stepping out of turn, for not bowing properly, for an out-of-context comment. She didn’t have anyone to rein her in- maybe that was the longevity of her lifespan, the way everyone faded to pale nothingness under her long eternal lifespan. You are immortal too, but you can raise your father from the dead long enough for the purge to stick.
(You wonder suddenly about immortality. What if the purging doesn’t work? You cannot go on like this, and no death would be considered Heroic, or Just- maybe if you do this long enough, if you try your best to purge yourself and it doesn’t take, would a sacrificial death be permanent?
If it comes to that, you decide, then that is what you’ll do.)
So you move back in with your dad, in the house where you lived for most of your life- during an apocalypse, during a childhood of unintentional villainy. Here is where the evil in you was born, and here is where it will die. Here is where you'll bury it, kill it, until it stops twitching at your lungs.
You stop answering texts. You stop answering calls. You live with a sister who only resides at this house in name, who practically lives at her girlfriend's house instead. June barely spends time with you, preferring instead to pass her days playing pranks and watching bad movies with Jasprose. You think it is funny that just when June came out of her shell and started being happier, you retreated into yourself.
God, you are a piece of work, aren’t you?
You’re jealous. You are a jealous bitch. You hate that June is able to be happy and in love with another girl, who cares for her even through the veneer of her pink-purple pranks and jokes. You hate that she’s happy and you hate yourself for hating that June is happy, because June- regardless of the fucked up familial connections between you- she is your sister, and she loves you. You hate yourself for hating June's happiness, because in the end, you love her, you do.
It's not just June, though. It's all of them- everyone who got something you didn't. Who got a happy ending, while you waited for them in the background, hands crackling with the only thing you're ever able to provide- with the rush of blue light that brings someone back from the dead. You stayed behind to watch them win, and picked up the pieces afterward, and it's not like you deserved better, but god does it rankle at you.
You hate that you resent Roxy for killing the Condesce. Maybe killing her would have cleansed you; maybe seeing her on the ground with a red trident through her chest would have been a balm of its own. Maybe it would have saved you. Instead you have to do this bit by bit brick by brick and you hate Roxy for doing this to you and you hate yourself for hating her, because you love Roxy more than anything.
You hate that you’re jealous of Roxy and Callie in equal measure- the two you loved so much but could never say anything to, who fell in love with each other and never gave you a second glance. You hate that when Roxy used to lean over and pass you a joint, your mouth would tingle with the knowledge that she’d touched it, like the stupidest middle school girl dreaming of indirect kissing. You hate that you used to dream of maybe making yours and Callie’s trollsonas kiss, like a pathetic little girl who can’t have what she wants in real life and so takes it in fiction. You hate that Calliope was everything to Roxy and you were not. You hate that Roxy was everything to Callie and you were not. You hate yourself for being jealous. You hate a lot of things, but you hate yourself most of all.
You are trying so hard to be good again, so why is it that you are so full of hate and hurt that tangles and aches; too big to fit in your chest, so large you feel entirely consumed by it? You are trying to be clean and instead you drip with dirt and rot and poison, so much that you hardly know where to begin anymore.
Some nights you lie awake and wonder how you will ever be clean.