I MEAN, YEAH. I WASN’T TALKING ABOUT YOU TAG TEAMING WITH ME.
I’D BE A FOOL NOT TO LET YOU FIGHT THEM ON YOUR OWN, HONESTLY, YOUR EXPERIENCE IS MOSTLY IN SINGLE BATTLE COMBAT.
…look for a miinute ii completely forgot the context and couldn’t make 2en2e of thii2 iin any way except that you apparently were iimplyiing that you would fiight two be the lord of the riing2.
> Its been perigees, since you dug yourself out of the burning remains of your hive. Those first weeks were spent hauling yourself (and what few remaining supplies you could gather in the ashes) towards the other end of the underground river system you'd shoved Karkat and Sollux into. That alone had taken days on a sprained ankle, nothing in your belly but a few sips of water, and all the ash and dust you'd inhaled. You'd been running on fear and anxious hope by then, and little else.
> The way you remember it now is both vivid and hazy. You remember every cold-sweat sleep and all the grainy, brown and grey dirt under your nails when you'd been terrified and entombed under your hive. You can recall the acrid sting of the water in the aftermath and the way the old-damp fire smell had sunk its sharp claws into your hair and your skin, even after you'd set off and the rubble was miles behind you. It was the time between leaving your home and finding the other entrance that had mashed itself together into a single solid block of grief, regret, and a landscape that treated you harsher than it ever had in all the sweeps you'd lived in it.
> You guess, by then, you didn’t really live in it anymore. Maybe it'd sensed that. You had no oasis, no protection, nothing to burrow under. No more spire and cloth, no place here. Nothing beautiful remained. Your only hope for yourself had been to leave something beautiful and useful behind you and it was neither, now. By the time you'd pitched a pitiful camp at the end of the tunnels, you were only from the desert, not of it.
> You know now that eventually they emerged, and that you'd cried. They’d cried. That you'd all gone on together afterwards and somewhere between your burial then and here, now, next to Sollux and his colorful and inexplicable dim season leaves, you'd come together.
> It felt longer than it was, that slippery time between. You'd mourned, you'd been angry, blamed yourself and the boys and the world for your lost place in it. Karkat had been trying to warn you that letting yourself be conscripted and locked away would put so much of you to death, and you don’t think he ever realized how much of yourself you'd already done that to. But you dont think any of you realized that this, too, was a kind of death.
> The kanaya you were before he'd reached out to you, before you'd sheltered them both, she might as well have burned too.
> You pick up one of the leaves, something bright yellow and bristling red at the ends, and twirl it between your fingers. It was the Equinox today, wasn’t it? it was also the only day of the season that you remember your lusus bringing you a small, spent paper lantern. Without fail, she would find the small light against the dawn and bring it to you dotted with rhythmic jade splotches. You'd never known what it'd meant before the caverns, Where it had come from. A sadness washes over you. You'd miss it this sweep. No lusus to bring you their small, caged offering and no home to keep it in. You’d miss it every sweep, if all of you didn’t succeed.
> You take the firebright leaf into your hand fully, and crush it between your palms ferociously, eyes pricking until both them and your hands are damp with your efforts, and bury the remains of it next to you into the cool dirt. Somehow, the motion is familiar, and it comforts your sore, nostalgic heart.
> This was another kind of death, to be sure. But the thing you hadn't seen, the thing that Karkat had been trying to open your eyes to, was that this was also the only way to live again. That at least this death would nourish the dirt instead of trapping you under it. You pull out the new palmhusk he'd managed to get for you in the last town and turn it on for the first time.
> It was what he'd been trying to tell you every step of the way. ‘Put down the sheers, Kanaya,’ he was saying. ‘Its time to grow.’
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
romaincrisis