Chapter Text
Your name is Sollux Captor, and you have absolutely no fucking idea where you are.
This is no different than the usual. Blindness may be a recent affliction, but if it means you don’t have to stare at a bunch of copies of your asshole friends every day as they make embarrassments of themselves, then it isn’t that bad. It still manages to suck when you keep tripping over moronically placed, and freakishly useless bubble fragments. The Horrorterrors, despite being gods in their own right, have a sick fetish for making the dream bubbles as inconsistent as possible. As blind as you are, you are nowhere near as talented as TZ when it comes to depending fully on your other four senses, so it’s a damn good thing that you have a guide.
You happen to have the best guide in all of paradox space, but maybe you are a bit biased.
Standing next to you with her arm looped around the crook of your elbow is Aradia Megido, death fangirl extraordinaire and your best friend since wigglerhood. It’s been a long time coming, but you and she are finally the way you were always meant to be. So much time has been spent apart from each other - so many conversations lost due to death’s violent sting. But she has been resurrected, and you have been pushed and shoved in and out of life and death. You are the living among the dead, and she tells you that she feels so very much alive, and you can honestly say that you feel the same way.
Even when you could see, you were so lost without her.
You break the silence as you keep a slow pace alongside her. There is never a need for her to rush, and she doesn’t. Despite the fact that she has wings and a beat to her pusher, she never complains about having to slow down. Your pace is her pace, she says, and you can’t help but feel like you always drag her down. She tells you that it’s fine, that the past is the past and she holds nothing against you. The guilt does not listen to her logic, and you glue your sins against her to your chest.
She breaks the silence as you both come to a complete stop, and you nearly trip over your own two feet. As startled as you are, she would never let you fall. That doesn’t mean it still doesn’t send you into a jolting panic whenever you start to fall, but at least life with Aradia is somewhat exciting.
“You OK, there?” she asks as your muscles relax.
“Besides my face almost eating the dirt, sure, AA, I’m fine.”
She giggles, and you can’t help but smile at the sound of it. There is something so familiar about the bubble that you’re in, but you can’t seem to place what about it is so recognizable. When she stops laughing, an overwhelming darkness clouds your brain, and you feel her arm stiffen. You feel sick, and you no longer hear her breathe.
“AA?” you say, and you can feel her fingers tremble as she shifts her arm to hold your hand. You can tell she’s nervous, scared: feelings you haven’t sensed from her in what feels like sweeps. Sometimes, with her constantly perky behavior, you forget that being alive means that she will experience every emotion that comes with life.
And for once, you feel like you are both on the same page.
You can feel the urgency in her grip, and although you hate the fear that overcomes you, part of you wants to bolt. But you can’t; she needs you, and it’s a realization strong enough to keep you grounded. You have needed her for so long, but your existence has never felt as wanted as it is right now.
“Sollux,” she says, her voice slow with each syllable of your name, and you know exactly what this is. Your mind begins to envision the scene around you. Aradia’s hive in the darkness, the lights that illuminate crooked windows from indoors. Your view as you see her running outside with an excited smile on her face--
And you start to pull away from her hand, turning the other direction entirely as you start walking without her.
“Wait!”
You don’t want to wait. Waiting is the last thing you want to do. You can’t see, but you can hear, and that’s enough. Your mind works twice as fast to fill in the blanks that the sounds around you stimulate. This is a scene that has been all too clear for all too long, on repeat in your mind and accentuated by the doomed voices that haunted your pan long ago.
“No,” you say in complete protest, still walking forward, but your foot snags on a rock and you come tumbling down, your face in the grass. “I already did this once, and I can’t believe I’m saying this right now, but fucking hell, AA, I couldn’t care less about duality right now.”
You hear her weight shift as she drops down beside you, and you can feel her gaze as she sits down. There is a pregnant silence between the two of you, and you tell yourself that you aren’t moving. No matter what she says, you are staying right here.
You hear a soft sigh escape her lips.
“This is hard for me, too, but there is so much that we haven’t seen.”
“I don’t want to see any more, that’s the whole point! I’m blind, I’m not even supposed to see anything. Staying here would be, I don’t know, the worst idea, and I’m not about to writhe around for the enjoyment of some sick as fuck, voidy seabeasts in the sky.”
You spend some time grumbling to yourself, but she doesn’t respond, and you want her to respond. You want her to get you the hell out of here, but something tells you that isn’t going to happen. Without her, you are fairly helpless. The chances that you will run into someone that will help you, much less someone that you want to help you, are slim. There are only a select few people you actually trust, and alternates are sketchy territory. Aradia is the one person that actually seems to understand. Either that, or she is excellent at faking the ability to understand.
“We have to face the past,” she says, and for a moment you feel your chest freeze up because you know she’s able to convince you to stay. “It’s time.”
“You did not just make a fucking time pun. Do you realize how inopportune this moment is, AA? Did it strike you that maybe this is the wrong situation to spout off jokes for no good reason whatsoever?”
You hear her giggle and she reaches out to try and help you up. You reluctantly make it easy for her, since she has brought you this far.
“Could you shut up for a second, maybe? We’ve been avoiding talking about it ever since any of this happened. There are things I need to tell you. I need you to see.”
“See what? Why can’t you tell me?”
“Because I need you to see.”
And just like that, the image in your mind is front and center in your vision.