Work Text:
You’d told John to fix it. You’d given him all the motivation he needed to get his ass in gear, sent him off to seek audience with his denizen, and completed your role. The cascade of adrenaline that brought you this far is starting to fade, and as John flies off you finally start to let your body relax. Not much longer now, before the truly distressing amount of blood leaking out of your mesathorax reaches critical mass. Not much longer before you can leave this shitty land of pointy prisms and overwhelmingly bright crackly sky lights, before you can take a break from hiding from your problems in the real world, and start hiding from them in the dream bubbles instead—or rather, hiding from a certain person you simultaneously long to see and dread reuniting with. It’ll be a nice change of pace, you suppose. It pays to switch up which of your fuckups you’re focusing on every now and then.
You smooth out the edges of scarf with your fingers in a sort of nervous tic that you’re glad no one’s there to see, and you wait.
And--
Someone’s pestering you on Trollian.
Your friends are all dead, the last survivors of a massacre are sliding themselves into another universe to escape total devastation, and someone’s pestering you, a rapid series of pings followed by a chilling silence.
You pull up the window.
EB: hey terezi!
EB: you're probably wondering why i called you here today haha
EB: but yeah i think you had your heart set on dying alone in a sandy waste land like some kind of sad dweeb so this will probably be kinda shocking for you
EB: sorry, i guess?
EB: but i went to typheus like you told me to, and he didn't eat me this time
EB: and he offered me a deal
EB: okay i guess all denizens offer deals or choices or whatever so that's not too surprising
EB: man, i bet you guys didn't even listen to what your denizens had to say!
EB: so maybe this is pretty shocking for you to hear
EB: but typheus said that either i could go on to make some changes with my powers and stuff and other versions of me could pay the price
EB: or that i could give the powers to someone else, and die here
EB: crazy, right??
EB: and listen
EB: what you said about how i should use my weird powers to fix this made a lot of sense
EB: after all, i'm the leader, and i owe it to my friends to make sure they don't stay dead!
EB: but
EB: man
EB: i don't even know where to start fixing this mess
EB: i mean, i wasn't even there when everyone died!
EB: there was some kind of mess with a clown? and that spider troll who talks a lot? and maybe the batter witch????????
EB: how could i stop all that from happening if i don't even know what led to that point?
EB: and also
EB: well
EB: you're probably going to say i'm just being a weenie or a weak human about this or something, but
EB: i got to thinking about his price, and it really sounds like typheus was saying the version of me who made it to this point would die
EB: or wait that doesn't make sense
EB: but i think what he's saying is that there can only be one john
EB: that either i could die here, or i would have to kill my past self and take his place, or something
EB: and that's not fair at all
EB: my friends are going to need me!
EB: and i wouldn't even know what i'm doing or what to change
EB: i’m not some kind of fancy seer of mind or something
EB: and typheus did promise that whoever had the power wouldn't die until they've finished their work
EB: so uh
EB: terezi
EB: i guess what i'm trying to say is
EB: fix this
EctoBiologist's computer has exploded!
There’s a tingling in your fingertips, a sort of blue glow that smells like raspberry Troll Pop Rocks TM and feels like pins and needles. The blood has stopped spurting out of your chest wound, and when you probe it with your index finger you feel sticky wetness and torn flesh and a dull ache, but no stabbing pains or gushing teal.
You have the power now to do anything you want, to change anything you want. You could, you suppose, assassinate the Condesce as she sits on her throne on Derse, or throw yourself in front of a club to save Nepeta. You could return to the battle you just witnessed as an extra soldier, exhausted and injured as you are. You could pull Kanaya out of the way of a psionic blast and conk Gamzee in the head while he’s busy breaking your past self’s ribs. You could be the hero. The hero could be you. You could fix everyone’s mistakes, steal the limelight, and be the savior you and your friends had never known they needed.
Ha. Let’s be honest: that’s not going to happen.
What do you know about being the savior? What do you even know about the subtle little touches or grand actions that will nudge the timeline towards the best of all possible conclusions?
There was a time when you’d thought that you could see everything, the entire web of possibilities mapped out in coronas of brilliant minty green. It had all seemed so clear: which paths to choose, who was expendable and who wasn’t, who was right and who was wrong. You’d really thought you could make those choices for everyone.
You can think of at least two corpses that would provide compelling evidence to the contrary, and the memories of a Dave with blood staining his green suit, of Vriska still and unmoving on the rooftop of the meteor, don’t exactly make you want to dive into active manipulation again.
You’re not qualified to be a hero. You’re not qualified to be anyone’s judge, jury, or executioner. You’re not the kind of Seer of Mind who knows what everyone’s thinking and planning and deciding. There’s only one mind that you can truly See.
You clench your fists and let the flashes of blue surround you and set off to make a better Terezi Pyrope.
-
The first time, you stick with the basics. You leave yourself a few cryptic messages about not getting hung up over needing stupid boys—independence will be key to helping this new Terezi succeed. You help her knock out Gamzee early, so that she’ll know not to fear him in the future, and she won’t have anyone but you fucking with her head at the moment of decision. And, at the last possible moment, you knock Vriska out, inform Terezi brightly that this intervention is “4 G1FT FROM TH3 FUTUR3!” and flash away, satisfied that you’ve taken all the worst obstacles out of the path of your other self. Now she won’t struggle with the guilt and loneliness and shame that paralyzed you for three years. She’ll have that time to grow into herself, to become the strong arbiter and guide you were always meant to be.
You’re imperfect—you’re actually sort of a wreck right now—but this Terezi? A Terezi freed from guilt and doubt and fear and second-guessing and relationship drama? She’ll be strong and independent and secure. She’ll lead her team to victory, and you’ll be able to retire in peace.
and so, in the new future, you hover under the great stone disk where everyone has gathered, listening and sniffing to check up on your progress, letting the background noise of John and Dave and Karkat’s yelling wash over you. You, in true Seer fashion, observe. Your other self is withdrawn and quiet. She’s acerbic, overflowing with trademark Terezi Pyrope wit, but she’s not assertive.
It’s not the fact that she isn’t a leader that surprises you—you’ve always been the type to shape your leaders instead, to make figureheads amenable to your goals and guide them from the shadows. But this Terezi isn’t guiding Vriska at all, she’s following, following as Vriska lays out inane battle formations and torments some loser humans. She argues and snipes, but she doesn’t say anything of substance. You feel a slow burn of shame in your stomach. You’ve failed to set things up right, and now another Terezi is suffering and useless, a follower in thrall to someone who’ll only get her killed and toss her aside like garbage.
Take two.
You flash yourself back to the moment you’d added a note on the wall, wait until the version of you from moments ago is done scribbling “YOU DON’T N33D H1M” in red chalk, and add underneath it, “YOU DON’T N33D H3R 31TH3R. TRUST YOURS3LF.”
When you flash back to the lilypad, the new Terezi isn’t huddled in Vriska’s shadow, but she’s not exactly running the ship either. She’s sitting alone, legs dangling off the edge of the platform, as Vriska throws an arm around Rose’s shoulders and tells the rest of the assembled team that she knows they can do this. From your vantage point underneath the lilypad, you can see red shoes swaying back and forth, smell the exhaustion rolling off of your other self in little, defeated waves.
You get too close and she senses you, revs up her wings and drops down to speak with you out of view of the others. There’s no sign of tears beneath her glasses, but her voice has a bit of a hitch in it as she stares you down.
“What did I do wrong?” she asks, finally, bitter and clipped. “I stayed away. I trained. I made myself stronger. In an admirable show of obedience and trust, I followed all your instructions almost literally to the letter! So why do I feel so weak? Where exactly did I veer off your path?”
You don’t have an answer to that.
“I get why you didn’t want me around her,” your other self continues, unbidden. She’s losing that tight control over her voice that you’ve always prized so much, that trick of talking like you’re making a slightly insulting observation and are amused by what you’ve noticed. She’s talking rapidly now, a continuous vomit of words that you don’t know if you want to hear. “I get why she’s bad news! She makes me lose control and sway from my ideals. She sucks me in and makes me feel like I’ll do anything to stay in her little pool of light. I stayed away like I should, but—I’m not stronger without her. I’m always on the verge of tears. Sometimes I couldn’t get out of my pile in the evening, and no one helped me. I can’t stop thinking about what I nearly did, and I know she resents me for it, but I can’t help thinking that if she were here for me, it would be easier. But that’s weakness, isn’t it? I know what I’m supposed to do, so why—“
There are tears starting to stream from your other self’s eyes, and you can’t even begin to handle that, so you flash away instead. You can’t say anything to comfort her. All you can do is tinker again, fix your mistakes, and make it better for the next timeline. You lay a warning hand on the shoulder of the last version of yourself, stop her from adding the second line of chalk, and intercept Vriska instead, a few months into the journey. Clearly, Vriska is the problem here, not you, and altering Vriska’s behavior has always taken a finer touch than just ignoring her.
“It’s not your business,” Vriska says, leaning against the wall, faux-casual and aggravating in the most intentional way possible. “Thanks for the meddling that saved my life or whatever, but you’ve fucked with Terezi enough. Can’t you just leave her alone?”
“I think I would know better than you what’s right for her!” you say, because that’s a challenge and you’re not going to just roll over and take something like that from a girl who has never, in three timelines, managed to save Terezi Pyrope.
“Right, like telling her to ditch all her friends? Brilliant call there, Pyrope, it definitely didn’t make her feel like a lonely inadequate piece of shit—“
“If she feels lonely and inadequate, it’s because of you!” It just bursts out, and you regret it immediately, both because of the generally shameful loss of control and because of the look of horrible, condescending pity on Vriska’s face.
She steps forward, tall and menacing—when did she get so tall? You were always almost the same height growing up—and you will yourself not to take a step back. She’s not going to hurt you, obviously, you’re just—just off balance.
“I’m doing my best to help my moirail through the bullshit you put her through,” she says, low and quiet. “You’ve got a lot of nerve sticking your fronds in our business and blaming me for what you’ve caused!”
She jabs a finger towards your face, and before you have a chance to think about it you’ve flashed away, back home to your treehouse on a night you’d been away from home, and you bury your face in the scalemate pile and try to keep yourself from crying.
Vriska is the problem, you know it. You know it. You have eight sweeps of your own memories, plus three different timelines to draw on. You know how things started to fall apart after the two of you stopped speaking, how you started building your walls higher and keeping your relationships light and casual and ironic. You know yourself. You know that killing her was the worst and hardest thing you’ve ever done, that you need her and want her and literally couldn’t live with yourself if you hurt her. But you also have seen what she does to you, how she stupefied you into following her in your childhood, how she brainwashed you into her minion in every timeline you let her.
You need to be stronger than her.
You dry your tears and straighten the scarf tied around your face and flash back to your message, nod to your pair of other selves, and add another note instead. “SH3 C4N H3LP YOU, BUT ONLY YOU C4N GU1D3 YOURS3LF.” Then you flash yourself back to just a few hours after the trip began, and corner Vriska in her respiteblock.
“Let me make one thing clear,” you say, before she has a chance to even call for help. “You have been given a new lease on life, a fresh start, even. I’m sure you will be motivated to make the best of it. But don’t forget: I saved your life, and I can take it away just as easily. In another timeline, I did kill you, and it was easy. So tread carefully, Serket. If I were you, I’d listen to what Terezi tells you, and do whatever you need to do to help her, and not make any more trouble.”
You jam the head of your cane into her gut, and flash away as she doubles over in pain. You want to feel satisfied. You feel cold instead.
When you appear back on the lilypad platform, ready to see what you’ve wrought, Rose and Roxy aren’t there. Karkat has a deep cut on his side, and he’s hissing in pain as Vriska tries to staunch the bleeding. Dave is awkwardly patting Kanaya on the back. Terezi is sifting through a pile of papers, growing more frantic by the moment. There’s something wrong here, something so wrong that you know immediately that this can’t be the timeline you settle on, and in your surprise you drop your guard, let her see you.
“What did we do wrong?” she asks you, and there’s an ugly edge of hysteria in her voice. “I planned the raid perfectly. Rose and Karkat and I were supposed to be able to rescue her dancestor, but there were more guards than we planned—how did I miss that? I’m the leader, I should have known—“
Rose is dead, you realize, and maybe Roxy too, and Terezi’s jaw is clenched with a familiar mixture of anger and agitation and deep self-loathing. Vriska looks up from attempting to save Karkat, and you can’t parse the look on her face, but you don’t like it.
“Vriska wanted to come along, but I thought me, Rose, and Karkat were a better team, I needed people I could trust to watch my back, and now—“
“It’s not your fault,” you say, and you mean it. It hasn’t been any of their faults. “I just miscalculated. I messed up, or something, and--I’ll do better next time.”
It’s not the kind of message you would want to hear, but you need to say it to someone, and they’ll be doomed soon anyway, or whatever happens to the timelines that you don’t follow to their conclusions. Terezi nods, stiffly, and you can hear a muffled sob from Kanaya, and you flash away to a few hours earlier in this timeline, because you can’t bear it anymore.
“Take Vriska along with you,” you say without preamble, and Terezi and Rose look up from their planning.
“A message from the orc—orchestrator herself? That’s a strong indicator that something catastrophic will happen if we don’t,” says Rose, a little fuzzily, and you realize she’s on her human soporifics again. Had she been that way in any of the other timelines apart from your own? You don’t remember. You hadn’t checked. There’s a churning feeling in your stomach, the realization that there’s too many threads here to keep track of and you haven’t been doing a good enough job numbering and sorting them. What other details are you missing?
Terezi glances at Rose, a little concerned, and then focuses on you. “I don’t trust her,” she says simply. “She’s barely talked to any of us since we started this journey. She spends all her time in the bowels of the lab, or in the dream bubbles. She’s plotting something, or putting more fucking ‘irons in the fire.’” You can almost taste the scorn in her voice. “I’m not trusting her with my life.”
You can tell there’s more that she wants to say, but she glares at you to make it clear that she’s done talking, and then pokes Rose in the shoulder instead.
“You’re dropping off. We need to go over the guard placements again.”
You don’t bother telling her that they’ve changed, that if the last timeline you saw is any indication they’re working on old info that will get them killed. What’s the point? The real problem is that Rose is utterly useless, and Terezi hasn’t done anything to fix it, and even the psychological benefits of not having killed Vriska and not tormenting herself with guilt won’t change the fact that this Terezi is down an important team member.
“K33P ROS3 SOB3R!” you write on the wall of Terezi’s respiteblock the night the meteor sets out, and flash back to the future to see how well it worked. It’s not that hard an instruction. A skilled manipulator like Terezi shouldn’t have any problem carrying it out. You should be able to fix the little Lalonde problem pretty easily.
No change, which is both tragic for Rose and more than a little upsetting to you.
“1 M34N 1T, TH3 SOPOR1F1CS 4R3 B4D N3WS,” you add, a few feet down the hall, on your next attempt. “1F K4N4Y4 WONT DO SOM3TH1NG, 1T H4S TO B3 UP TO YOU.”
No change, as far as you can tell. Still the conspicuous lack of Lalondes, still the straight backed Terezi with her jaw locked up and her fingers tapping like she’s about to vibrate out of her skin. You don’t know what’s not getting through. You don’t know why they all don’t just act as they should and follow the simple paths you’ve laid out for them. You don’t fucking know what you’re doing wrong.
“SH3LL D13 1F YOU DON’T STOP H3R.”
This time, Terezi brought back Rose’s body. She and Kanaya and Rose are sitting by it, Kanaya straightening her robes and Terezi combing the dried blood out of her soft, white hair with her fingers.
You think you see her trace a diamond against Rose’s temple, and you flash away before any of them see you, because this is far too much tenderness for you to look at without wanting to cry, or maybe scream.
It’s time to talk to Terezi.
“What is your problem?” you ask her, a sweep into the journey, leaving off the introductions because you no longer know how to talk to her except through a list of utilitarian commands. “All you have to do is get her to stop drinking.”
“Easy for you to say!” says Terezi bitterly, continuing to do the dishes in the tiny meteor kitchen. She doesn’t turn to face you, just keeps drying off plates, slowly and methodically. “She alchemizes the stuff nightly and has far more stashes than I can flush out. The most I’ve been able to do is get her to pester me when she’s wasted, instead of trying to make her way back to her room herself.”
You’re burning. “And what is that good for?”
“She has yet to choke on her own vomit, or die of what Dave calls ‘blood alcohol poisoning.’ It’s better than nothing!”
It isn’t better than nothing, not when you’ve seen how this ends, and you barely stop yourself from getting into an argument about semantics and whether a god tier can even die of substance overdose. It’s not the point anyway—the point is that all the tender care and harm reduction in the world won’t stop Rose Lalonde from taking a brilliant red pitchfork to the human midsection. All the pale solicitations in the world won’t stop the yellow sun on her robes from turning brown and crusty with blood.
“In the last few timelines I visited,” you say, carefully and deliberately, “She has been drunk during the final battle, and has died. Do you have a plan to prevent that from happening? Do you have a way to keep your team together so that you can win this game? Do you know how you’re going to save them all?”
You flash away before she can answer. It’s up to her to make this work, and you always did like to have the last word..
It turns out, she did have a plan. When you arrive on the lilypad this time, Rose’s hands are stained with teal as she cradles Terezi’s broken body. Vriska looks stricken.
“What the hell did you tell her?” she asks you the moment you appear. “Did you threaten her like you threatened me? Did you tell her she just haaaaaaaad to sacrifice herself for the good of the timeline?”
Last time you’d seen her, she’d been cowed, subdued. Your other self’s death seems to have invigorated her, though, and you remember a vision you’d had once, of a Vriska who’d destroyed Jack Noir by sheer force of will after he dumped your bloody body at her feet.
“I tried to warn her,” you say, and your tongue feels thick and heavy in your mouth.
“Was this your plan all along?” Vriska demands. “Kill her off, and take her place? Manipulate her into dying for duty or Lalonde or whatever and then take everything she’d worked for?”
It hadn’t even occurred to as an option. You don’t want that. You want to be done with this, to die peacefully and let some other Terezi handle the glorious, terrible, exhausting business of living.
Kanaya lays a warning hand on Vriska’s, shoulder, but Rose is just watching you, eyes a little bloodshot but extremely alert.
“I want her to be happy,” you choke out. You’re getting worse and worse at this silent protector nonsense, you think. Soon you’ll have spilled your guts to every doomed party of players in paradox space, leaving them to choke on your excessive angst while you fly off to fuck something else up. “I want her and everyone she knows to live, and I want her to be proud of herself, and independent, and sharp, and brilliant, and passionate, and—“
There’s so much you want for her, for yourself, and the enormity of it is starting to dwarf you. You haven’t been happy and sharp and passionate since you were three sweeps old, fording streams with Vriska and playing at being dragons.
“Far be it from me to interfere or meddle with your self-improvement project,” says Kanaya, “But you have set a very high horizontal pole for yourself and it appears to be taking its toll on you and also on us as your helpless playthings.” Her voice is even, polite, but you can hear the biting edge to it. You can tell what she thinks of you and your failed tinkering.
She’s just an almost-ghost, just a doomed Kanaya. It doesn’t matter what she thinks of you. It just matters how she can help you on the next stage of your quest.
It’s like dying in a video game, or like that feathery orange version of Dave. When you’ve fucked up irrevocably, you might as well get as much information as you can before going back to fix everything.
“Which of those goals would you jettison, then, Ms. Peppermint Swirl?” you ask, settling yourself onto the floor beside your own corpse. A bit of her blood soaks into your pants, but who can really tell the difference? “Should I perhaps be content with her being powerful and competent, but losing the people she loves? Or maybe give her a stifling support system and let her ability to think for herself or change the world atrophy away? Maybe cut her off from the toxic presences in her life and watch her wither and die alone?”
“You would know better than I would,” says Kanaya carefully. “Terezi is… was… a very private person. I got the impression she didn’t believe she needed us, and was loathe to reach out for help.” She glances at Rose, who casts her eyes downward.
“You have a lot of nerve, asking Kanaya to fix your mess for you,” Vriska sneers, actually sneers. God, she must hate you for this, which is both completely unfair and painfully understandable. “Why don’t you clean it up yourself, if you’re so compassionate and worried about her?”
“I have been trying!” you say, and you can feel the prickling in your nose now. You’ll be crying in perhaps minutes. Humiliating. “I have been trying for timeline after timeline to clean up the mess I created when I stabbed you, but it’s like a rather large and snarled ball of yarn, and I’m running out of ideas that have any logical coherence to them.”
“Yeah, that would explain the bit where you fucking threatened to kill me--”
“If you’d seen the timelines I saw—“
“I should have been there for her!” she bursts out, in one long, breathless rush. “I should have stopped her from doing shit like this, but instead she cut herself off and suffered alone and hatched some fucking suicide plan, because you told her to, and I didn’t even do anything until it was too late, because I assumed she hated me and I didn’t want to mess with your plans, but you don’t even know what the hell you’re doing!”
She’s on her feet now, shaking off Kanaya’s hand, and you flash away before she can reach you, ashamed and a little panicked. The last thing you see is the resignation and disdain and sorrow in Rose’s eyes.
You head back to the first timeline you sent spiraling into failure, just a few weeks before everyone meets up and Terezi unquestioningly listens to Vriska about the kernelsprites, and you sit in the hallway of the meteor and wait for someone to find you, for something to happen. You don’t know what you’re doing anymore, you don’t have any clue who you’re angry at or who you need to fix. You don’t even know if this Rose business you fixated on is relevant, but you can’t stop trying, not when there’s a Terezi sitting alone and unloved on a platform and a Terezi holding back tears at the sight of her broken team or a Terezi who took a pitchfork to the thorax and coughed up blood from her punctured lungs until she died. You cry a little, although it’s not as satisfying as it used to be when you were small. The scarf on your face feels itchy and stiff, and you pull it down to your neck and close your eyes to keep the light out and just bury your face in your knees. Your broken ribs are grinding against each other a little. You hurt so, so much, and the physical parts of it are just the beginning.
“Wow, what the fuck?” says Vriska, when she finally stumbles across you. “Have you seriously been hiding on this meteor ever since the green sun?”
You shake your head, not trusting your voice, and she plops herself down on the ground beside you, all elbows and knees and awkwardness.
“Jesus,” she’s saying as she looks you over. “You’re a mess. Terezi would flip if she knew.”
Terezi absolutely would flip, maybe, probably—you don’t know what Terezi would do anymore, because she constantly defies your expectations and all your attempts to herd her in the correct direction have ended in some degree of tragedy and misery. You’re so tired.
“How is she?” you ask, and dread the answer. However she is, it’s not good enough, and it hurts you in all sorts of surprising ways to think that Vriska knows this too, that she’s just as aware of your faults as you are. You remember how she admired you when you were four, how painfully obvious it was that she was looking to you to be her moral compass and source of stability, and you still can’t believe that in this universe, Vriska Serket holds Terezi Pyrope until she falls asleep and reassures her that it’s alright, she’s doing the right thing, she’s okay.
You can believe it. After all, it’s becoming increasingly clear to you that Vriska might know you better than you know yourself—not that that’s particularly hard.
“Well, she’s not bleeding out in a hallway floor,” Vriska says, all businesslike outrage. “What the fuck happened to your chest?”
You don’t bother looking down at the gaping hole Aranea had you carve into your own chest. “I’m fine.”
“Like hell you are—“
“It’s part of the deal,” you explain, haphazardly, though she won’t get it at all. “I can’t die until the board is set up right. It wouldn’t be—it wouldn’t be just. I’m trading my life and happiness for hers, and I can’t unbalance the scales by dropping dead. That’s not how it works.”
And then, because she’s still pausing to formulate a response to that load of bullshit, you take the plunge and ask, “How would you help her?”
You voice comes out shakier than intended, more pathetic. There are more tears starting to bead in your eyes, smearing your too-clear vision.
“Well, maybe we can’t,” Vriska says, unsure, defensive, and there’s a little hitch in her throat as she weighs what to say next. You’ve never known Vriska to hesitate when it comes to speaking her mind, but now you can tell she’s carefully deciding whether the words on the tip of her tongue should be said at all. And then-- “Maybe that’s who she is, okay? So, she’s not what you expected, or she has flaws, or whatever, and she’s not going to change. Can you hurry up and get over it?”
A few hours ago, you would have burned at the implication that you’re flawed. You would have said that it was your circumstances and mistakes that are fucking you up, that you make terrible decisions that bite you in the ass, but if those decisions could be reversed you’d be better.
It’s been a long, long few hours.
“So what am I supposed to do?” you ask, and it’s pathetic and humiliating because Vriska doesn’t have the answer to this, you know that. You know she’s made it this far by pushing the people around her to become who she wants them to be, making everyone strong or making them die trying. You know that when she hits a wall and runs out of tactics to change someone, she either leaves them or kills them.
She just shrugs and sinks further down the wall, until she’s more reclining than sitting. Her fingers tap against her knee. She’s not looking at you.
She doesn’t know what to do. She’s always been able to make herself into the person that she wants to, hero or villain, enthusiastic wriggler or adventurous FLARP champion or drawling mastermind or supportive moirail. If this were a journey to fix Vriska, you think bitterly, it would have been over in one jump. You’d just send her a list of traits and an explanation of how advantageous it would be for her to embody them, and she’d do it. She’s always been easy to manipulate.
That’s not quite true. She’s also been full of surprises too, the biggest wrench in your haphazardly made retcon plans.
But the challenge of getting into the heads of Vriska, or Rose, or anyone, is nothing compared to getting into your own head and preventing your inevitable self-destruction. You know that a good Seer of Mind would be able to do this easily, and that must have been what John thought when he gave you these powers, when he and Roxy chose to die in one universe trusting that you’d make things work for them in some other continuity. But you haven’t been a good Seer of Mind in a long, long time.
“Will you still take care of her,” you ask, after a while, “if she doesn’t get any stronger?”
Vriska groans. “She’s not just some human kid I’m messing with for kicks, asshole. Or, I don’t know, an injured hopbeast or something. She’s—you’re—she’s Terezi. I can’t guarantee what will happen in the end, but I’m not just going to cut her off because she’s not turning out how I wanted. I’m not that big of a douchebag.”
You can’t tell anymore if that was supposed to be a jab at you, or what she would be referencing. Is she criticizing you for ending your sisterhood after she killed Aradia? For abandoning a whole string of alternate Terezis when they came out of the metaphorical oven half-baked? Is she trying to say she’s changed since the days she sent Tavros tumbling off a cliff? You nod anyway, and gather your thoughts for the next jump.
“And hey,” Vriska says, catching your arm. “Take care of yourself too, okay? I mean, Terezi looks up to you, and I’d hate to have to calm her down after she stumbles across your bloody corpse. Have a little sympathy, you know?”
Yeah, that’s the same old Vriska, still transparent as ever.
You flash forward a few weeks, back to the preparation for the final battle, and hover underneath the lilypad as you listen again to this Terezi arguing with John, listen to the animated chatter as Rose and Roxy reunite. You hear a soft zap as your previous self leaves, off to play the savior and heroically free Terezi from Vriska’s influence.
Terezi puts on her rocket wings and flies away. You hear John’s indignant goodbye, her faux-cheerful rejoinder. You stay there, and watch as the “sent” folder in your glasses fills up with the Trollian messages she’s trying to send and will never manage to.
You flash forward again, just a little, and yes, she made it through the final battle. Probably some of the other Terezis you created made it too, even if their state of mind wasn’t quite what you would hope for. But there she is, your first creation, high-fiving Dave, accepting a hug from Roxy, teasing Rose and Dirk for a nerdy conversation happening just a little too far away for you to hear. Punching John in the shoulder. Ruffling Kanaya’s hair. Wandering away from everyone to sit on the edge as the glittering light of a new universe fills the sky. You know what she’s waiting for, but you ask her anyway.
“Are you going to go with them?”
She raises her eyebrows when she smells you, blood-spattered and blindfolded and glowing with retcon powers.
“I’m not sure,” she says, faux-casual and chipper. “I think Roxy would like me to, or at least she says so. John and Dave and Rose, too. But that’s not the right world for me, is it?”
“Terezi,” you say fervently. “I have no fucking idea.”
She leans forward, straightens her glasses. “What do you think I should do?” she asks, slow and serious, and you are either going to laugh or cry. If you knew, you wouldn’t be in this situation.
“What do you want?” you ask, trying to sound wise instead of plaintive, because if she doesn’t know either then you might as well be trapped in this loop forever.
She gives you an incredulous look and begins tapping her claw against her leg. “Given time, the humans might be a good influence on me,” she fires off, pro-con list style. Terezi Pyrope, master of brilliant decisions and organized thoughts and objective truths. “They may never like me as much as they like each other, but they’ll make an admirable effort to hide it, and in the centuries I have remaining before my death, I might even learn to act as nonviolent and open as they do. I could get some new roommates and start some new friendships and live a long, peaceful life in the universe I earned!”
God, she’s good.
“Objectively, the answer is clear,” she continues gravely, “but I wouldn’t have come over here if I were fully ready to accept that answer, and you wouldn’t have asked me unless there was another option.”
“You give me far too much credit, Ms. Pyrope!” you say, and you’re enjoying this more than you realized. She’s volatile and codependent and overthinking everything, but she’s also you, everything you wanted to be, and you can’t believe it took you this long to realize.
“I give you exactly as much credit as you deserve, Ms. Pyrope. And I think you know what I’m about to ask of you.”
You do. “It’s dangerous,” you say anyway, like that will make any difference
“Yes.”
“She’s not a very good person,” you add.
“Oh, I know.”
“The other path is probably better for you as a person,” you inform her, one last test to see if she’ll change your mind. But then again, if you’ve learned one thing from this it’s that happiness and the better path intersect far less often than they should when you’re involved.
Terezi takes your hand, and you ready your mind for one last jump.
It’s hot. Around you, you can hear the cries of the ghost army as they mill about in confusion, feel the gusts of heat as Lord English incinerates them with his flashing breath.
“On your feet!” Terezi calls into your ear, and you stumble after her as she makes her way towards the front lines, towards the figure in gray and blue and black just starting to crack open a box.
Your ribs are scraping painfully again. There’s a rushing in your ears—no, not just your ears. Whatever was in that treasure chest is exploding outward in a rush of noise and sound and light, and you tear off your blindfold to watch as Terezi tackles Vriska away from it, as the massive glowing house takes shape and then sweeps towards Lord English, vaporizing everything in its path.
“Pretty neatly done!” says a voice next to you, accompanied by a cloud of cinnamon and cherry, and you turn to see Aradia touching down near you.
“Thanks,” you say numbly, and lose a few moments trying to figure out which universe she must be from, before catching yourself. “I’m sure you would have done better, though. I’m starting to think I’m not cut out to fill the role of a time player.”
“No one really is,” Aradia says prosaically, helping you brush the sand off your clothes. “Really, the trick to time travel and timeline management is just to have fun and be yourself! But that’s pretty hard to manage at times like this.”
In the distance, Terezi is helping Vriska to your feet. You can just see the shock and admiration on her fact as Terezi pulls her into a bone-crushing hug.
“So I guess this is it, then,” you say, and you’re surprised at the little twinge of regret. “I’m done here, and all I have to do now to keep my bargain is die.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” says Aradia, grinning conspiratorially. “Actually, if you’re not busy, there’s something else I’d like to try.”
She whispers her plan in your ear, and you raise an eyebrow.
“That sounds like some pretty flagrant contract-breaking,” you say, but you’re unable to fully keep the smile from spreading across your face.
“Haven’t you heard?” says Aradia. “The game is finished. Denizens and titles and Alpha timelines don’t have any hold over you. You’ve been unstuck from canon since you got this power, and you really think a little green worm can stop you now?”
“Well,” you say, and there’s a sort of lightness in your chest. Your heart is actually beating again, for the first time in hours. “You make a compelling point.”
Around you, paradox space is crumbling. Sandy desert is giving way to inky blackness as the cracks spread further and further. You close your eyes, take Aradia’s hand, and let yourself feel it all wash over you, let yourself feel the outlines of each and every ghost, from the two girls still locked in an embrace a few meters away from you, to the cherub in black starting to let space collapse in around her, to a lonely girl with braids and piercings wandering in a memory at the furthest edges of your reach.
“Ready?” says Aradia, already suffused with blue light.
You open your eyes. You take a deep breath. You push, with one wrenching effort, following a single tiny strand of green light to its logical conclusion, and then—
When you come to again, there’s green grass prickling at your arms and blood rushing in your veins. There’s a hubbub of voices around you, of ghosts clamoring to know what happened, exulting in their newfound solidity and their bright yellow eyes. Aradia is leaning over you, giving you a massive thumbs up.
“I did it?” you ask, a little blearily, and Aradia nods, smile wide before disappearing into a crowd of newly alive ghosts that are already beeginning their usual chaotic hubbub as they try to figure out what the fuck is going on. Most of them probably never expected another chance at life, but here they are, fresh and shining in the light of the world that the Alpha timeline players created. The world you brought them to.
And—
You lock eyes with a ghost in the middle of the throng, a ghost with piercings and a tattoo and strange new clothes, a ghost you shouldn’t recognize at all but you can identify almost immediately. Vriska Serket is watching you, mouth open in surprise and delight and confusion, and you lever yourself to your feet, unsure of what’s coming next.
For all you know, she hates you. For all you know, every self-hating thought that crossed your mind in the past three years is true, and she really does see you as an irredeemable backstabber, someone she wants nothing to do with. She’d have every right, and just because one Vriska in one timeline said she wasn’t ever going to abandon you doesn’t mean this Vriska will be so forgiving. Just because you’ve done your penance and saved the world and helped one pair of Scourge Sisters reunite doesn’t mean you’ve earned her trust, let alone her love.
And just because she keeps popping up in the center of your struggles, just because you’ve never yet found a Terezi who doesn’t on some level care more about Vriska than herself, doesn’t mean that you should keep fixating on her. She’s a murderer too, and a frequently unrepentant one! For all you know she hasn’t changed a bit.
But.
But somewhere in this crowd, there’s a pair of Alpha timeline Scourge Sisters who have finally gotten their shot at happiness, who are peppering little kisses on each other’s faces and laughing at the sheer relief of being alive and together and in love. Somewhere in this crowd, there’s probably a Vriska embracing a Terezi she got killed in her foolishness and then killed a demon to avenge. Somewhere in this crowd, there are Terezis and Vriskas seeking each other out, no longer pitted against each other by the twists and turns of paradox space.
The game’s over. Your quest is over. You have a new heart beating in your chest, and your clothes are clean of blood, and when Vriska runs towards you and practically bowls you over with her hug, you hug her back and hold her tight as a world of new life and possibility envelops you.