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It’s your third night hurtling through the Furthest Ring when you finally work up the courage to do what you must. The first part, the worst part, is too easy. Their junk and fetishes are everywhere, hidden away in little pockets that seem to be concealing your dead friends behind every corner. High and low, dark and darker, you find their hearts and memories enshrined in chest and in corpse. You know the others have done their gathering. You know it’s time.
When you walk through the meteor’s common area, Lalonde and Strider are at the table, each with a troll at their side. Dave’s got his ridiculously huge puppet ass headphones on, and—ah,there’s Terezi with her nose buried in his personal space like one of Aradia’s mummies in the ground (wow, fuck, don’t think about Aradia. Abandonment hurts, you’ve found), and you allow yourself a moment’s grief over the part you played in the pain she’s trying to laugh away with that bucketlord. You saw her linger on the roof on the day your journey began. No one else was looking, but you saw her wait and look at the streak of blood where Vriska Serket’s body had fallen. She remembered.
Rose is showing Kanaya the beginnings of a book of their games’ lore she is writing. She does not realize that her car is parked squarely in the “Even I Don’t Give A Fuck But I Want Some Of That Perfect Toneless-Skinned Human Nook So I Must Endure” zone. But they are swapping knitting patterns, and what makes Kanaya happy is most important, you know. Same goes for Terezi. You just wish she’d gone for someone, anyone else (like there’s anyone else but you and Gamzee, and come on, Terezi and Gamzee would just be absurd, which is what you tell yourself whenever you remember the gaze of pure, unadulterated hatred she gave him on the roof while Vriska’s blood still dripped from her cane).
But you’re getting ahead of yourself.
No one takes notice of you. They’re all too busy hoping in their desperate fucking bloodpushers for some sloppy interspecies makeouts, and the only reason you aren’t doing the same is that none of the competent humans are here. Nor are any of your friends you can actually talk to, who still have time for you. You are very alone, in many ways. But when you clear your throat and say “It’s time”, and it comes out like your throat is going to shatter with the weight of the words, Terezi gets it, and mouths what you mean to Kanaya. You never dreamed that this would be the situation where you performed this ritual of trollhood, but that’s life, what the fuck ever. Nothing is right.
Kanaya and Terezi fall in step behind you, and the humans follow in confusion. You can hear Strider making jokes, because he’s a culturally insensitive dumbass, but Lalonde knows better. She knows that Terezi would not take off her glasses and be serious for any mundane reason, and she already knows Kanaya well enough to know that she’s jittery, never at peace, nervous enough to power a battleship with her twitches, and that the glassy silence she currently possesses is far from natural.
You ascend to the roof of the meteor. Dave and Rose stop at the top of the staircase, hang back. Now they know this is not a human event, and know better than to intrude. The Green Sun looms in the distance, a point of brilliance illuminating your procession with eerie light. You turn to the meteor at large and yell,
“GAMZEE!” Your voice echoes back into your ears, rattles through horizontal ventilation canals and hallways, down through laboratories, and into your brother’s aural bone-to-fluid conduction system. But he doesn’t come. So you turn back Sunward.
“We honor our dead,” you say, and the whispers from the void around you lull slightly, as if the gods listen to your eulogy for Alternia’s mightiest. “We honor six massive fucking assholes, six god-complex geeks, six of the most shit-snortingly retarded people I’ve ever met.” You pause. “We honor our dead.” You fall silent. This would have been your right, had you become a Threshcutioner—to do final rites for your victims. It’s supposed to be a celebration of conquest, a final hurrah for the death you dealt for the Empress. Those who died because of you. But now it’s those who died in spite of you, those who slipped out of your fingers so fast you didn’t even notice them leave.
“We honor Tavros Nitram,” you say, and decaptchalogue a lance, crusted brown blood covering it almost to the handle. “We honor an animal-loving, spine deficient loser who got legs just in time to lose his life. We honor a guy who thought giving his fucking self-esteem a name would make girls like him. If I’d given a single shit about helping him, listening to him, he’d still be alive tonight.” You lay the lance down like it’s a gift from your lusus, so soft it doesn’t even clink on the floor.
“We honor Feferi Peixes,” you continue. “We honor the Empress Aspirant, a girl who hated to kill innocent creatures but loved her shithive maggots hell lusus. We honor the princess who raised her trident to a childhood friend to defend our lives, and who spoke to the Elder Gods to salvage our deaths. She died because I stood and watched while the guy I was supposed to be pinch-moirailing blew a giant fucking hole in her chest with a glorified stick.” You decaptchalogue a golden trident, place it next to the lance, and step back.
“We honor Eridan Ampora,” says Kanaya, stepping forward. “We honor a desperate, terrified wiggler who raised his wand in anger, hoping that its light would fill the darkness of his ignorance and fear. We honor a genocidal, obsessive individual with an obnoxious accent and an overbearing attitude. I don’t regret killing him. I’d do it again.” She decaptchalogued two sticks, halves of his old wand, still glowing faintly and smelling fresh, and placed them with the other tokens.
“We honor Vriska Serket,” says Terezi, all humor gone from her voice. “We honor a selfish, cruel girl who learned murder when the rest of us were learning our letters. We honor a perpetual cheater, a terrible liar, and the hugest bitch in two universes. We honor my sister. She died because I stabbed her in the back with seventeen inches of wrought steel.” Terezi gently places an eight ball in the pile, and you rush forward again.
“We honor Sollux Captor,” you choke out, “who is far too young to have died so many times. We honor the team hacker, our saint of surly competence, an insufferable prick whose veins run with piss, and whose heart is pure gold. I didn’t get him in before the Glub. I stood watching while his brains flew out of his eyes like a goddamn geyser.” You place an Encryption modus on top of the pile. And then, before you can stop yourself and light the ceremonial flame, you pull out a sickle shaped like a crab claw, thick and red and bulbous, gripping it by the blade. Equius and Nepeta aren’t your dead, so you have no choice but to skip them.
“With this sickle, I lead twelve of the worst people I know into battle against a 12X prototyped Black King. With this sickle raised high, I acted the Troll Napoleon, thought I was big fucking curdled dairy solid. This is the last vestige of my assbrained lusus, and of my cruel, despotic home.” Your voice fucking quits on the last word, and you’re gone, you’re fucking weeping, heretic red snot and tears and all. You squeeze, until the blade slices a deep gash into your hand, groans, and snaps, falling onto the other treasures along with your bright, bright red blood. You can feel Kanaya stare at it. “We honor past me, and we honor Alternia.” You light a match and set the lance ablaze. Shortly, the entire pile is burning, with the flames that burn a brilliant white the moment they touch the wand halves.
“Vor shlekt ah chilt meh bloo far guh. Vee har ing en sha liet ell aey deed. Lee kell vell are vey til lit,” you chant, with Terezi and Kanaya jumping on on the third word. And then it is over. You nurse the steadily bleeding diagonal cut on your hand, a perfect match to the one Jack once gave himself, and walk rank and file with your fellow trolls. Before you leave entirely, you notice Rose pause, turn like someone’s watching her. But she shakes her head and follows you all back to the common room, where Kanaya will stitch up your hand.
If you stayed, you would see a long, lanky figure, all grease and gunpowder, appear suddenly on the roof, moving at a speed you would not recognize unless you were Dave Strider. You would see a purpleblood so tall it hurts your neck to look him in the eye drop a cat hood and a robot head into the fire, “pour one out” with bottles of blue and olive blood for his dead homies. You would see him start to smile, reach into the flames, and captchalogue the lance and trident.
But you do not stay, and Gamzee Makara, unseen, takes his burned hand back into the shadows, where memories of carnage lurk and wait, where eight mighty heroes haunt your home in absentia. You do not stay, because you have burned everything you have left to stay for.