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While the meteor is big, it is thankfully never quiet. He is sure they would all go fucking insane if it was, though it would help if his moirail hadn't already flipped out. There is machinery running to fill the blank spaces between the dreams bubbles filled with the voices of dead friends and the footsteps of the not yet dead walking above or below him. It's gog-awful that the keyboards only sometimes provide his refuge, as he goes over his past failures and argues with himself over his own usefulness in a circuitous path of shame and derision. Those chat boards are timeless, a quality he prizes in its impossibility and his self-derision only deepens for idolizing such shitty reminders of the past.
The meteor is large enough for others to continue the explorations cut short by the various betrayals, but not for him. For him it is much too small because everywhere he goes is somewhere another one of his dead friends has been; he can tell, because they all took to leaving shitty-ass trinkets and memories in the white chests scattered across the meteor. No one has bothered to clear out their friends' rooms yet because when they keep seeing them in fleeting dreams, it seems wrong to get rid of their possessions. But they are certainly, definitely dead and it turns the maze into a minefield.
He tells his friends, the ones who bother anyway, that he is busy with leaderly things but honestly he just doesn't know what to do. Three years is a long time to be stuck on a giant flying space-rock with his four remaining friends and a pair of aliens. He feels fucking useless, especially when all the other trolls are clearly busy with developing relationships with the meddling humans. He feels alone, left out, and it only makes him more spiteful when he's around them. Three years is going to be the longest time he has ever spent really alone. He was never good at waiting but even with all that time, he is not sure what he will do when they land.
Even now that everything has calmed down and even the threat of Jack has diminished like their meteor on the spatial horizon, she can't walk down the halls alone. No one else can understand why, but they can't smell the colors of the walls, how overpowering the grey gunmetal smell is or how traces of the lost colors of the rainbow still haven't washed out of the floors, despite everyone's best efforts at cleaning. Where it doesn't smell like iron, she can catch traces of chocolate, the spite of mustard, a rich scent of fushia.
She has a hard time being on the roof.
Dave is a good distraction, because he is relaxing. His orange popsicle smell is strong enough for her to follow anywhere but it isn't overpowering. It covers the room just enough to let her forget that outside in space, there are no smells and that off the meteor, she is well and truly blind, despite being a seer. She wonders if their new world will smell like Eridan and if she could stay on a world like that.
Because there are no recuperacoons on this rock, she lies in bed every morning after waking up and spends hours deciding if she can get out of bed. Sometimes it is the stress of dreaming, because all the gold has gone out of her dreams since Prospit was destroyed and the Outer Gods make it hard to sleep. Often it is because she is caught up in her own mind and those of others, chasing the endless possibilities down the twining branches of doomed timelines. More common are days when she can barely get dressed because she doesn't know which choice someone will make and their future depends on her. Then Karkat or Dave starts knocking on her door and she returns to the simple choices and she gets out of bed.
She has decided that God Tier must prevent insanity. After all, should anyone else begin relying on intuition to guide themselves and their comrades away from an omnicidal canid, it is likely that they would be institutionalized and replaced with someone more rational. However, given that the human race is currently down to four members, only two of which were on the ship at the moment, her plan was readily accepted because of her position as the Seer of Light. But her intuitions are frustratingly vague and it bothers her.
She spends her days learning. It's like setting up a puzzle from the inside out; she starts with no idea of the edges and no clue how the full picture will look. If it weren't for her ambiguous seer's powers, she would never know how to continue. But piece follows after piece, without her even really knowing how or where to look, and she is building a map. She is solving her universe like a puzzle, but she can see the inherent flaws in the analogy. Because her universe, as she used to think of it, is forever expanding and there will never be any edges for her to find. Because her universe, as it now is, borders the Furthest Ring and the Outer Gods, whom she no longer wishes to meet. Because her universe, as she plans to build it, will bring her into a new universe.
She carries her guilt privately and so well that no one on the meteor knows she feels guilty. They see her dedication to her job as guide and do not ask what drives it. She does not offer an explanation as to why she has thrown herself into her duties as a seer. She does not think any of them know what it is like to have their purpose corrupted. Her guilt is because she was made her friends' worst enemy through her own curiosity and her role was used to create their own destruction. She carries her guilt quietly because she isn't sure she wouldn't do it again for the same reasons.
She walks alone in darkness and listens to the sleeping meteor. It is only darkness because there is no night; were she to look outside, she would see the green sun that used to light her planet. But now there is no horizon for it to set behind and even inside the meteor, she is never without light. The other occupants of their shooting star have set up their own sleep schedules, but she can't. She has always been awake when others were asleep and it is the same now. There is no night for her friends to wake up to and no day for her to wander in. It is no surprise she often goes for a week without sleep, even though she knows she shouldn't.
He is still out there and she knows it. Though their leader kept her from chasing after him the first time, she does not intend to let him stop her ever again. The boys might be moirails, and she good friends with the Knight of Blood, but he overlooks the potential results of what he has done. Gamzee killed two of their comrades and stole the bodies of the rest. She does not trust the unstable troll either with the dead or with the lives of her friends. Karkat cares too much, for all his anger. Only she can put aside her not-pity for the Bard to protect the rest of her race with the edge of her chainsaw. It is another reason why she stays awake, to hunt when her friend won't have to see the purple blood of his moirail smattered down the halls.
She has lost a tremendous part of herself though. She misses her lusus, especially now that nothing remains of her. That she can no longer fulfill that promise she made pains her more than remembering the blast that followed its destruction. She is the last of a caste that was entrusted with the propagation of her race; she is one of the four, maybe five, remaining trolls in the entirety of the universe and she lost the one thing that would make her role and their continued survival possible. There is a slim chance, as slim as the hook of her horn, that the matriorb could be realchemitized but she has killed their hero of hope and even Rose admits that its recreation may not be part of the definition of success. The green sun gently mocks her by its color alone, reminding her of sculpted topiaries.
