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Your mind is an easy place to get lost.
There's a pain
There's no doubt
I've been through hell
But on my way out
It’s early morning when you wake from the nightmare, the room quiet and smelling dark, Vriska groggily pulling her silk sleep mask (blue and embroidered with a sleeping pair of eyes) off her eyes as your shout rouses her.
“Ughhhhhhhh,” she groans. “Wh8t issssssss it????????”
You barely can hear her, as if you’re as deaf as you are blind. All you can taste is overripe blueberries, rotten and sickly sweet on your tongue, like her blood on your swordcane all those sweeps ago. Your bloodpusher is pounding teal through your veins, racing behind pointed ears as you suddenly cling to her.
“1 K1LL3D YOU, 1 K1LL3D YOU--1’M SO SORRY, WHY DON’T YOU H4T3 M3??”
“Really, Rezi, this 8gain?” she scoffs. “That never h8ppened 8etween us! Seriously, you 8lew up my arm and most of my sight 8ack when we were kids and we got through that 8ut you think I h8 you for some shit that went down in another timeline?”
“BUT TH3 F4CT 1 COULD DO 1T 4T 4LL? 1 ST1LL LOST YOU TH3R3 4ND 1T W4S MY F4ULT 4ND 1 D1D 1T 4LL MYS3LF. 4ND 1 W4NT3D TO DO 1T BUT 1 N3V3R H4T3D FOR 4NYTH1NG MYS3LF MOR3.” You feel your claws dig into her back, but she doesn’t so much as flinch. Gently, her hands shift to your wrists, guiding you away while grounding you.
“And you 8rought me back, didn’t you?”
“TH4T W4S 4LL JOHN--”
“8ut it was for me.”
“4FT3R 1 D13D TH3R3--1 S4W YOU. MY GHOST, B3FOR3 TH3 DR34M BUBBL3S 4LL BURST. 1 FOUND TH3 GHOST OF YOU FROM WH3N 1--WH3N 1 K1LL3D YOU. W3 W3R3 TOG3TH3R 4T TH3 3ND, 3V3N 4FT3R 3V3RYTH1NG.”
“Ha, really? I think I met her once, she was suuuuuuuuch a loser!”
“WH4T? NO, SH3 W4S--SH3 W4S P3RF3CT, L1K3--”
“Like meeeeeeee?” she teases.
“Y3S! Y3S, 3X4CTLY! SH3 M1SS3D H3R--YOU, 1 M34N--SO SO MUCH. SH3 BROUGHT YOU B4CK SO YOU 4ND M3 COULD H4V3 TH1S L1F3.”
“Perfect? Please, I was joking! We killed thousands of kids together 8ack in the day, come on.”
“1’M JUST SO GL4D 1 H4V3 YOU B4CK.” You stiffen. “PROM1S3 M3 1 WON’T 3V3R LOS3 YOU 4G41N. PROM1S3 M3.”
“I promise.” You feel her smile beam onto you like the sun, warm and sky-bright. “Hey, it’s pr8ctically morning. I can make 8reakfast,” she says.
And all the ways I've been torn
Stripped my heart to the core
All of my fears combined
Walking the thinnest of lines
You’re still getting used to the diurnal sleep schedule that you’ve adopted to mesh with the humans more easily, the softer sunlight of the new world nothing like the burning glare that burnt down on Alternia in the daylight hours. She leaves the recuperacoon and you can hear her getting dressed across the respiteblock. After a moment you make your way to the ablution block and try to shower off the heavy feelings of the past. You imagine that timeline--that world where everything went wrong, where you couldn’t stop yourself from bringing her to justice that you convinced yourself she needed, where she dared you to deal it to her in the language that only you and her could speak, certain you would never follow through but brought to her knees when you did--slipping down the drain of the ablution trap with the sopor slime clumped in your hair. Gog, you really did sleep badly, to be this much of a mess. Isn’t the sopor supposed to help?
Then again, there’s a difference between the nightmares your species naturally bears and the echoes of such turbulent vacillation and vast cosmic stakes. You don’t envy whatever species the game next falls into the hands of, whatever wrigglers or children are next pried from their lusii or guardians or whatever they have and cast into a game of genesis or oblivion.
There's a place
With no hate
Touched by grace
Quiet as faith
Being six sweeps old, running through the night at Vriska’s side with blood painting t-shirts and small hands and ripped pants just slightly too big for you in ochre and auburn, felt like a childish adventure, the games you were meant for. But the multiverse was far bigger than your treehouse or her castle, your candy-flavored forest and her dramatic cliffs. You don’t know why Skaia chooses children to tap into its cloudy well of creation time and time again, but it feels so cruel of it to do so. You’ve come far enough to realize that your home was no happy place for wrigglers, but the countless dooms you’ve seen yourself and everyone you once knew fall to are a worse fate still.
You notice the hot water once again, steaming on your back uncomfortably, and hiss as you shut off the shower. You are lost in thought so often, dreaming of lives that once happened or might’ve occurred far away in space and time. You dry off, brush your hair until it shines like licorice and curls at the ends where you like it--it’s grown out a few inches since you’ve been living here, reaching your shoulder blades now--and get dressed. Wearing a black t-shirt over striped sleeves, ripped jeans, and an orange hoodie you stole from Vriska, you sniff at the foggy mirror as you slip on your red glasses. You’re doing okay. You’re going to be okay. Vriska is alive, you won the game, and you’ll never hurt her again.
Emptied my heart
Laid down my cards
Played my best part
Wanting a new start
All of my fears combined
Taught me to run and hide
You talk while you eat in the mealblock of the carapacian hivestem that you share with her. As usual, she’s up to date on all the gossip between everyone--talk of Rose planning on “proposing” to Kanaya, which sounds like some human formalization of matespritship, Jane seeming to be interested in joining Roxy and Callie’s relationship, plans for expanding settlements on Earth C--and you joke around about it with her. It feels good, being like this. Everything your relationship survived somehow brought you closer than ever, however much it hurts. You lost her in another life, and sometimes you feel something like that longing for the girl across from you just as badly, even as she sits so close to you smelling like blueberries and home, like you want to lean across and hold her so tightly that you’ll never be apart again.
And something washes over you the way it did when another version of yourself looked down at hands stained with your own blood and knew you were dead, when you remembered everything you’d felt through her memories and seen through her eyes, soaring through the starless sky before the final showdown.
There's a dissonance in all that I do
Yeah, nothing feels right or true
Black out on the floor just once more
“TH1S 1SN’T R34L.”
“No,” Vriska agrees sadly, “It isn’t.”
You reach for her a moment too late, and she’s gone like she was never there, a void where her light should’ve been.
The place I call my home
Yeah, I could die here and nobody would know
Die here and nobody would know
You gasp for air to search for any taste or scent to ground you, scrambling for anything to hold onto in the dark, dig untrimmed claws into whatever you can find. Your mind is still too full of thoughts for your thinkpan to handle, synapses formed across timelines and universes sparking and then drowning your hope in endless waves.
You finally come to on the floor of your own respiteblock next to your recuperacoon, covered in sopor and still feeling distant and foggy. You aren’t even sure if you fell asleep at all, lost in the depths of visions spanning paradox space.
Does this mean you have a happy ending with her, somewhere?
Or was it just a vivid dream, wish fulfillment powered by the distant flowing thoughts of faraway lives?
Does it even matter which is true?
In another life, your dying actions were to ensure Vriska would be brought back in the next life. Another version of yourself died so that you could be happy.
And it was all for nothing.
Not really, not in the end--she was alive long enough to let you win the game, she went down fighting Lord English in the glory she always wanted--but for you, it might as well be.
You had missed her so much, you had wanted to die. It’s true. When Aranea had reached her claws into your mind to pull on your thoughts, maybe she hadn’t had to push you very hard to plunge your own sword into your chest. If you’d lost the game but gotten a lifetime with her, that just might’ve been enough.
If somewhere, far away in time and space and lifetimes, there is a place where you sleep in her arms and are still at her side, you can live with that. If you died to give yourself another chance with Vriska, you can be just as happy for another Terezi to be with her.
You don’t feel like sleeping tonight.
You pull yourself back into the comfort of your recuperacoon, curl up on your side, and close your eyes. You focus your mind, reaching out with your thoughts once again.
When the sunlight hits the dust
And I can't get up
When the noise is just too much
I close the void and burn it off
But there's a crack in every wall
Is there a way out after all?
If I lose my grip and fall
Will I die?
