Chapter Text
The night air was cool. He could tell it was despite being indoors because it was third autumn, when the planet was gearing up to plunge its inhabitants into a snowy hellscape for perigees. There wasn’t a time he didn’t think that being outdoors was equivalent to being torn apart by angels, mind, but there was a very particular circle of punishment just waiting for those who went out at a time like this.
He hadn’t been doing anything. Lines of code blurred over by lack of sleep and lack of nourishment danced on his screen. Just one more line, he kept telling himself. Just needed to close the loop while the perfect way to do it was still in his pan, then he would go and grab something to eat and let his body slip into the sopor at long last.
But he needed to leave. There was a nagging, pulling sensation, like a thread winding around his mind. The sound of feverish typing stopped. He tried to shake it off. He stood up from his chair, gritting his teeth, oculars sparking because this was usually so easy to be done with, but the thread only wrung him tighter.
He stepped out of the view portal. He caught himself with his own power, of course, but when he was under the control of someone else, he could hardly call it his. She was in his head, as if he was dancing on her strings, or if she was watching him wriggle in her web. The night air was cool.
Shit, this dream again.
Now that he realized that it was a dream, he could try and stop it. The operative word being ‘try’. He wanted to scream to shock his brain into freeing him, but his vocal cords refused to obey. He tried blinking repeatedly, but while he had control over his own eyelids, the motion did nothing to stir his waking body. He was travelling faster now, the blur of the hive stems melting into open plains that only looked like smears of green-grey paint on a canvas, but he had known these plains; he had flown over them a few times before.
He could see the hive in the distance, and--
“Hhh!”
He rose with a start, the twin sounds of his phone alarm blaring and heartbeat thundering enough to bring him back to reality. Automatically, he tapped the snooze button, but his pulse would not be quelled as easily. Groaning, he unceremoniously fell back down onto his bed, but he flinched a little when his horns just barely missed scraping against the wall.
Wait, that was wrong. He entertained the idea of running his hands through his hair, just to double-check, but doing so would only make him feel more like he was losing his actual mind. He just needed a moment to himself.
He would get one, because he lived in an apartment by himself.
His name was Sollux Captor. He was 22 years old and freshly graduated with a Bachelor’s in computer science. He mostly did freelance work, but if he could land a job with better pay so that he could move out of the shitty apartment he called home, he wouldn’t complain. There were, in fact, several projects waiting at his computer that he could be working on right now, but at the thought, his mind flashed back to the alien glow of the screen he had been working at in his nightmare.
“Can’t get a break even in my own fucking mind,” Sollux groaned to himself. Especially in his own mind, he added internally.
Thinking of which, this time it was the fourth night in a row that he had had that specific nightmare. It almost felt like prophecy, if he could deign to believe in such a thing. He didn’t know why his subconscious decided to plague him with nightmares stemming from the planet that the Two Goddesses came from, but he was going to find a way to make them stop.
Sollux sat back up in bed, being careful not to move so quickly as to trigger a headache. Once he was up, he reached for his phone again, only to squint at it as he set the brightness to the absolute lowest it would go. The window blinds were shut, so he wouldn’t have to worry about conflicting light making his eyes more fucked up than they already were.
It was a Saturday, and despite Sollux being able to work effectively whenever he wanted, he still needed the occasional break day. The money was nice, sure, but even looking at the screen of his phone made his stomach turn. Part of him was waiting for when the numbers and letters in front of him would change to inscrutable characters of Alternian that he could somehow decipher regardless. He had better make this quick.
As much as he didn’t want to get out of bed, he equally did not want to turn the entire day into a depressionfest of doomscrolling on his phone. If he fell asleep again, he ran the risk of having that nightmare again, and the reminder of how his heart beat in his chest as if it was about to burst was enough to get him out from under the covers. Moving to stand, he held his phone in one hand while using the other to turn on the overhead light. He let his eyes adjust to the new brightness for a moment before walking over to his work desk. It was also just his desk, but it sounded like he knew where his life was going if he called it a work desk.
Sollux took some sticky notes from the top drawer, set his phone down next to them, and opened up the map app. The letters on the screen flickered in his vision, but he managed to scribble down the address he had saved.
“Ram’s Skull Bookstore and Metaphysics
100 Derse St.”
He also took down a basic list of directions, because he knew he wouldn’t be in the mood to check them on his phone when he was outside. The walk would take him about fifteen minutes or so, and in a rare show of optimism, he let himself hope that he would have his head on straight by the time he arrived.
With a goal in mind, it didn’t take long for Sollux to get ready for the day. A lukewarm shower did little to help with his mood, as did the rest of his personal grooming, eating, and dressing, but having on his tinted glasses helped with his photosensitivity. They also hid his heterochromia, which he was thankful for. He was enough of a freak of nature as was, and didn’t need to give strangers even more reasons to stare.
When he stepped outside, he felt the familiar tingling of a migraine start to sprout from the back of his skull, but he let his eyes adjust while he was still in the shade. When the feeling died down, he started walking.
The walk actually felt kind of decent once he got used to it. An object in motion stays in motion, he supposed. He hardly ran into anybody else until around the halfway mark, which was when he started to hear someone yelling. It was only one voice, and it didn’t sound as if they were mad, but rather like they were projecting to reach a wider audience.
As he got closer, he saw the source of the sound: A middle-aged looking man, wearing a sandwich board featuring a particularly vengeful rendition of The Ram. Her eyes were pure maroon, her horns curling so much that they were cut off by the board, and she held flaming meteors in each of her hands. There was some kind of text written at the bottom, but he couldn’t read it, as they were at opposite sides of the road.
“The end is coming! The Maid shall cleanse this world of its living in forty days! We shall be ushered into her eternal night in forty days!”
Had to be someone with the Cult. Only followers ever referred to the Two Goddesses by their titles, as opposed to their morality play names. Invoking animals made them feel more like they belonged in Aesop’s Fables than on stained glass windows. Yet, as staunchly irreligious as Sollux was, even he knew that the doomsayer’s prognostication was a gross overestimation of The Ram’s desire to interfere with the universe. Through cultural osmosis, he knew that the Two Goddesses were opposing yet complementary forces. Darkness and light, maker and taker, observation and interference.
Everyone knew that the universe was made by the Two Goddesses: The Ram and The Spider. For the universe was inevitable, and all it needed was to be lucky enough over a long enough period of time.
Sollux knew this, but he didn’t have to believe it.
He kept walking until the doomsayer was out of earshot, but his mood had been sufficiently soured. Only a few more blocks left to go, and the bookstore would be nestled in the corner between a lot awaiting sale and an ice cream shop. Not the most glamorous of locations, but Sollux wasn’t looking for glamor.
The chime of a bell sounded off in the otherwise quiet store, followed by the door closing. Sollux looked around. He had the mental image of the building being some musty tomb that just so happened to be filled with books, but the room he was in was immaculately kept, if a bit cozy in terms of space. There was a counter to his left, and the actual books to his right, kept in organized and dusted shelves.
“One second!” A voice called from the backroom. Sollux glanced at the space past the counter, then, not knowing where to rest his eyes, began to look over the crumpled sticky note in his hand again. He was really going to do this, wasn’t he?
Before he could turn on his heels and leave as quickly as he entered, the door behind the counter opened to reveal the sole worker at the store. Made of beaming eyes and wild hair, she looked larger than life, which somehow both eased and increased Sollux’s anxiety. Her skin was a sun-kissed tan, and her eyes were brown like the earth. In a lot of ways, she looked like the type to be into anything but metaphysics, but she also looked like just the sort.
“Sorry about the wait,” the woman chimed as she smoothed out the fabric of her outfit. In lieu of a uniform, she wore a business casual dress; a black v neck that was lined by a lanyard dotted with pins. One of the pins had a maroon Aries symbol on a black background. “Welcome to Ram’s Skull! My name is Aradia! How can I help you?”
Sollux flinched. He felt vulnerable enough just standing in the room, all too aware of the weight of his body, but this took the cake. He couldn’t ask about what he had come for. Not right away. “Which of your parents decided that naming you after The Ram was a good idea?” He resisted the urge to enunciate The Ram, if only to avoid digging himself into an even deeper hole with this complete stranger.
Aradia laughed, but it was the kind of laugh that felt like she was laughing with you, not at you. “I named myself. My last name is the same, too. I don’t suppose you believe, if you’re using The Ram as your preferred moniker?”
Sollux was beginning to sweat. “Do you bring up religion to every customer you get?”
Aradia smiled. He noticed that she had dimples. “Only to the ones who bring it up first.”
“Fuck,” he cursed under his breath. He was mentally begging himself to shut the fuck up, but he couldn’t. “Yeah, I don’t think they did shit. Even if they did make the universe, and that’s a pretty big fucking ‘if’, it isn’t like they’ve ever shown their faces. We could easily be in a watchmaker situation, where they just fucked off right after.”
Aradia hummed thoughtfully, eating up the seconds with the gesture before responding. “What is your name?”
“Wh--” Sollux sputtered, his face contorting into a mixture of offense and self-disgust, “what does that have to do with this?”
“Absolutely nothing,” she smoothly answered, shrugging her shoulders a little. “I just like knowing the names of my customers.”
If he had been named anything else, perhaps this line of questioning would have gotten them off the path that invariably led to conversations that haunted him at two in the morning. “It’s Sollux.”
Aradia’s eyes widened. “Last name?”
“...It’s the same.”
“Which of your parents decided that naming you after one of the Minor Gods was a good idea?”
“My dad.”
Aradia quirked up an eyebrow. She was leaning against the wall; settled in for an answer a little longer than that.
“Fuck, alright, I guess this ties into what I’m looking for, so sure, tragic backstory: Unlocked.” Sollux threw his hands up in the air, but his body still felt like it was being weighed down. He really should have waited for a less shitty day to do this, but if he hadn’t gone that morning, he might not have wracked up the nerve again for a while.
Besides, there was something about this god-named girl that made her strangely easy to talk to. Maybe it was the smile, the genuine one that didn’t feel like it was just for customer service. Maybe it was the fact that they would never talk again once he was freed of his nightmares. Whatever the case, he found himself filling up the dead air once again.
“It was after my mom died. She… had been in labor with me at the time. Neither of them were particularly devout back then, but the experience ‘woke him up’, he’d tell me. Said he named me after the Mage of Doom to try and get him off my fucking back.”
“And did it work?” Aradia asked, genuinely curious to know.
Sollux laughed once, a singular, sharp “hah” that sounded like it was being choked out more than anything else. “I wouldn’t be here if it had. No, the whole experience just stuck me with shitty nightmares. Nothing else has worked, either. So, now I’m here, like the start to the world’s worst joke: A nonbeliever walks into the religious owner of a bookstore and says ‘ow’, because he is the fucking worst when it comes to both existing in a physical space and interacting with other humans. Fuck,” he cursed at himself, having run out of steam to say anything else.
“Well, barring the identity crisis you seem to be having, I think I can help!”
Aradia clapped her hands together before Sollux could get a word in edgewise. “But! The counter really isn’t the place for a talk like this. We can chat in the breakroom, if it helps put you at ease.”
Sollux sighed. She didn’t have to be empathetic to have eyes; to see the way that he was struggling to carve out space for himself in the air of the room. “Yeah, sure.” He had no idea how long this would take, but sitting down sounded like a godsend.
“Okay, come on back!” Aradia stepped back over to the room she had come from, opened the door, and held it open for Sollux, who stepped around the counter to reach it. The room itself was well-furnished and just as cozy as the store proper. Even more books filled the shelves that lined the walls, and there was an area meant for breaks off to the side, with two chairs positioned near a table. They were both made of wood, but one had a dark red cushion, while the other was dark blue.
Sollux adjusted his glasses.
“Why do you have two chairs here if it’s just you? I can’t imagine you get people rambling about their nightmares often enough to justify it,” he mentioned as he took a seat in the blue chair, which was closest to the door.
“Oh, I have a coworker who drops by from time to time,” Aradia answered while sitting in her own seat. “She isn’t exactly scheduled, and when she does arrive, it’s often as if dictated by the roll of a die, but I welcome the company.”
“I would say that that’s fucking weird, but weird is a little lost on me at the moment. Can we just start?”
“Of course!” Clapping her hands together once more, Aradia beamed to Sollux before settling herself down for the discussion.
“The realm of dreams can seem utterly nonsensical, but many ancient cultures believed that they were how the Two Goddesses communicated with their creation. What do you dream about, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“The same thing, over and over again.” Sollux paused, trying to get his thoughts in order. “This is going to sound absolutely fucking delusional, but I dream that I’m on Alternia.”
“What do you do on Alternia?” Aradia asked, not missing a beat.
Sollux paused. He didn’t expect such… acceptance, he guessed? He needed to stop tempting fate like this, but maybe there was a chance that he could walk out of the store feeling slightly better about himself. “Not much. At least, not to start? I’m just kind of sitting around, coding, because work can’t leave me alone even when I’m on an alien fucking planet.”
Aradia nodded. “Are you a human when you dream, or are you a troll?”
“A troll,” Sollux sighed, embarrassed. The fresh memory of thinking that he had horns was still ripping through any remaining sense of pride he had. He still had to fight the urge to actively check the top of his own head.
“I see. What else do you do?”
“I don’t know.” A beat. “I don’t mean as in ‘I know but I don’t want to talk about it’, I mean ‘I don’t know’.” He could no longer resist the urge, and in an anxious move, he ran a hand along the top of his head. It only touched hair. “I would start feeling like something is pulling me, and I’m trying to make it stop, to wake up, to do anything but see how the nightmare ends. I start flying to who knows where, and all I know is that I would rather do anything but be there. Not like that.”
If Sollux didn’t know any better, he might have thought that he saw Aradia pale ever so slightly. “Have you ever seen how it ends?” She asked.
Sollux shook his head.
“Try to. Your mind is probably fixating on it because it needs to reach closure with what it symbolizes.” Aradia chose her words carefully, doing her best to skirt around what was clear as night to her.
A vague feeling of discomfort was starting to reach Sollux again. He tried to pick at the hem of the cushion he sat on to distract himself from it. There was a single loose thread that he could make into a little ball between his thumb and pointer finger. “And what, exactly, does it symbolize?”
Aradia looked off to the side for a moment, pursing her lips. “It could be a lot of things. An expression of dislike for your work, or your relationship with religion, for instance. You have to figure out what it means to you, once you have all of the pieces of the puzzle.”
“No straight answers, all vague advice,” Sollux huffed. “I shouldn’t have expected anything less from someone with The Ram’s name.”
She chuckled. It was a sound that reminded him of wind chimes, in the mystical, light and airy kind of way. “And you’re distracting yourself from feeling the begrudging acceptance of fate. I understand that fate has not been kind to you in the past. It hasn’t been kind to any of us.” Her smile became a little more saddened, her eyelids just a little lower, and it gave her the look of having the weight of the world on her shoulders. “Even if it doesn’t feel like it, I assure you that something better will happen if you let this run its course.”
Sollux shifted in his seat, feeling as though he had been misled and was going to therapy as opposed to getting a solution to his nightmare. She was right about one thing: He wanted to focus on anything other than the fact that he was just going along with this. “Got anything that might help with keeping me asleep, then? Half the time, I wake up before I get to the end anyway.” He didn’t need to mention that it was because of the mortal terror.
“I would just recommend sleeping pills for that,” Aradia admitted. “If you don’t have any of your own, there are natural equivalents that I can give to you.”
“Oh. No, that’s fine, I have some I’ve been working through back home anyway.” He scratched the back of his head, wondering if they were even good anymore. Even if there was that bit of doubt, he didn’t want to inconvenience this woman more than he already had.
“Great! Just try to experience the dream as much as you can, and come back when you have more of an idea of what it means. Would tomorrow be okay for you? I’m open on Sundays, and I don’t get too many customers, so feel free to drop by whenever works for you!”
“Uh, yeah,” Sollux responded, the feeling of discomfort bringing him to stand from his seat. He felt like he would be crushed by the air itself if he stayed still any longer. “I’ll try tonight. No promises,” he added quickly, unsure of his own mettle. He wanted the nightmares to stop, not to have to experience them fully, but if he just had to go through this once…
“Thanks for the help, Aradia, but I should go. See you tomorrow, if all goes well. Or horribly. Fuck, both, I guess.” Awkwardly shrugging, he turned and started heading for the door.
“Of course!” She beamed a smile that he wouldn’t see. “Everyone needs a little help sometimes. See you, Sollux!”
Aradia watched as the door closed, then listened for the bell’s chime to signal that he had left. She then let out a long sigh, made up of every last bit of air in her lungs, before tanned skin gave way to grey. The shell of her disguise, the creation of which being an ability inherent to God Tiers that had claimed The Ultimate Reward, faded to reveal her truest form. Curling horns and maroon ram’s eyes, wings that flickered against the back of the chair, and the symbol of Time on the chest of her godhood.
“Spirits,” she spoke to herself, “that was so weird. He didn’t even recognize me. I thought he might have, even when I seemed human, but…” The game really was toying with them. “It probably won’t get any easier,” she concluded to the now empty blue chair. “You’re due for checking in on me in three, two, one.”
The notification ping for Trollian sounded off right on cue. Rolling her shoulders, Aradia stood up and went over to the computer, trading one place to sit for another.
arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling apocalypseArisen [AA]
AG: Hey, Aradia!
AG: Aren’t you going to thank me for 8ringing you your 8oyfriend?
AG: It wasn’t easy lining up all those daymares for him, 8ut you know I have all the luck.
AG: All of it!
AG: And luck can 8e easily manipul8ed.
AA: ok im going to stop you there before you go into another monologue about how luck can mean anything
AA: i appreciate the assistance though!
AA: whenever you are done with getting terezi to remember i will be happy to bring you both back to the point that we arbitrarily call the present :)
AG: Gee, thanks. I’d h8 to leave you w8ing, Miss I Experience All Points Of Time Simultaneously.
AG: You know, this is still 8ullshit.
AA: what is?
AG: You know what I mean! The whole “8luh 8luh the game isn’t done with us yet, how a8out you now run through your entire team, who are a 8unch of humans now, and get them to remem8er something they’re waaaaaaaay 8etter off forgetting” thing!
AG: Alternia fucking sucked!
AG: The game sucked even more, somehow!
AG: You would have to 8e ridiculously cruel to think that this is somehow doing anyone any favors.
AA: vriska we have been over this
AA: everyone deserves to have their own memories and bodies back
AA: from there they can decide what to do with them
AA: it isnt about cruelty or kindness
AA: its about giving them the choice
AA: if you are so against this then why are you trying so hard for terezi?
AG: What, are you trying to play fussyfangs without the fangs now? Don’t stick your nu8 where it doesn’t 8elong.
AA: whatever you say
AA: look someone just came in i need to go for now
AA: keep me updated?
AG: Yeah, whatever.
AG: I’d wish you good luck, 8ut, you know! :::;)
arachnidsGrip [AG] ceased trolling apocalypseArisen [AA]
AA: i know
apocalypseArisen [AA] ceased trolling arachnidsGrip [AG]