Over the course of a few short minutes, three things happen
at roughly the same time.
ad1ostoreador: iF TALKING TO THE DENIZENS IS POSSIBLE, tHAT IS WHAT i WOULD, uH, rECOMMEND,, tHEY ARE ACTUALLY ON THE SIDE OF YOU ALL LIVING AND LEARNING, eVEN IF THEY DON'T SEEM LIKE IT AT FIRST,
ad1ostoreador: jUST, uM,, tHE CHOICES THEY GIVE, aRE NEVER NOT HARD,,, tHEY HELP, bUT THEY WILL BE THE HARDEST CHOICE YOU'VE EVER HAD TO MAKE,
dignaeris: You're the only card that's alone. But you're a card of strength, craftsmanship, and excellence.
dignaeris: A card of community, as well.
dignaeris: That's about all I've got.
malleablepersonage: I will do whatever you think will help.
You can feel your planet’s melodies reverberating in your skull.
Sollux hasn’t returned yet.
It makes sense.
The first building block you knew of: Kris. The multiverse brought you to him, or him to you, or both, and you found he could manipulate other sessions. You found he could restore missing gates, the glaring evidence of a dead session, effectively reviving it, just like you had been. In your resurrection, so too could you serve a purpose, resurrecting your own game.
Gamzee instilled heavy skepticism in you, which pushed back your eagerness to confide in your own doom player or team leader regarding the development. You wanted more answers. You found them over the past few nights, speaking to other players whose sessions the Lord of Doom had interfered with, repaired, manipulated. It had been exhausting, involved long mornings of interrogating, but it was what you needed. It filled the time between the initial realization of the opportunity Kris provided, offered certainty, and let the role emerge that you needed to know you were supposed to play.
Tavros told you he had been given the choice to singlehandedly free his session, and you’ve felt that responsibility since you could feel a beating heart in your flesh chest again.
You’re pacing quietly as you think it through. Droog’s cards had been quite clear: everyone else torn, confused, chasing light, chasing legacies, running from darkness, running from guilt, and there you and your card stood. Solitary, alone, even if for the best of your own community.
And Kris had been just as clear.
That brings you to now. Tavros’ story, Droog’s cards, and Kris’ offer.
You realize you don’t need the Lord of Doom to restore all the gates in your game to keep the game alive. He can restore just the ones that will take you to your denizen, and given the circumstances, that could be enough.
Suddenly it feels like the sweeps trapped in your soulbot served a purpose, too. It estranged you for a reason, it drove a wedge between you and your friends, it forced every one of them to move on, however hard their hearts may have fought it, however hard their hearts may still fight it.
Whatever had found itself corrupted in the soul of the game paralleled what had been corrupted in you. You have to fix it. That’s why it was you, no one else, that found Kris, that’s why it was you alone in the cards, that’s why the hope for the session was reborn with the return of your motivation and agency. Your friends brought you back to life, so it’s your turn to advance this plot. This is your sacrifice to make.
...
You wonder, as you slide down the side of your crumbled hive to sit in the grass, if your choice would be so kind as Tavros’ was -- as it’s easy for you to see it as, since it was never designed for you. You would guess not, because if you were ever asked to save the session or stay with your friends, you wouldn’t need so much as the tick of a clock’s second hand to make the call.
You’re sure your offer’s alternative to whatever could save your friends will entail something much more enticing.
The opportunity to see your lusus again, maybe. A happy life with Sollux, far away from judging eyes, hidden in the dream bubbles, something you know he’d prefer to whatever it is you’re determined to do instead. The chance at a reset or do-over, the chance to stop your death from ever happening, even if it could mean the timeline is doomed as a result. Perhaps the chance to die, and to truly die, for it all to be over and to forfeit the weight of the responsibilities you’ve carried your whole life entirely.
It takes every ounce of your strength not to put the plan into motion immediately.
It’s tempting. You’re determined, or perpetually suicidal, or both, eager for martyrdom, eager for a climax to the knowledge you’ve shouldered for the entirety of your existence. But you promised Sollux you wouldn’t do anything without talking to him first, so all that’s left to do is wait, to steel yourself, and to prepare yourself not to be talked out of it. He won’t like it, and he’ll fight you on it, but it all seems so obvious to you, so you’ll remind yourself that until he comes back. It might offer you some sort of defense to whatever emotional appeal to your pusher he’ll try to make to dissuade you.
malleablepersonage: that is a very well-reasoned explanation
malleablepersonage: let me know when you'd like me to wiggle my nose and work the magic
Your eyes flicker back down to your palmhusk, and at seeing Kris’ confirmation that your plan might work, you just set it aside.
Maybe, just maybe, Sollux will understand, and at the end of all this, you could get the peace of knowing you perished into the void for your friends to have a second chance at lives outside of this hellish game.
The cursor blinks on an empty page in front of you.
Not literally. There’s no cursor. You don’t have your husktop in front of you. You’re outside, staring into the red atmosphere of the planet, away from the rolling hills of pink flesh, to the sky, where a gate should be. Where a gate once was. Your revival, you’re sure, will do nothing to advance the standing of the game, if solely for the sake of revival. It won’t bring those gates back. But you suppose alive is better than dead. For yourself, and for a lot of people.
You turn the stone gifted to you once over in your hands. You think you might hear Sollux calling for you, but you aren’t sure; you don’t spend the time standing there to find out. A second later, you’re gone. A second later, you’re standing on the Land of Dew and Glass, where Feferi was waiting for you.
That’s the blinking cursor.
She tries to talk to you. About Sollux, you think, or about Eridan, or-- you shouldn’t even pretend like you’re paying attention, because you aren’t. With her at your side, for the first time since trapped, the two of you leave the timeline.
You travel back further than just the Vast Glub, you travel back before the game. You go as far back as possible, for as in tact a body as possible for Feferi to merge with your soul. She is, after all, a witch, and organic life is hers to manipulate, but that requires more than the pile of rotten flesh and bones that will be sitting there by the time the game begins. In the timeline the two of you go back to, you have only been in the ground a night.
Your ghost is there. She speaks to you with more success than Feferi, because she anticipates no answer. She says she knew you’d come. You ignore her.
Though Feferi looks prepared to dig, helpless as her expression is in anticipating the undertaking (ha), you decide not to torture the poor girl in testing her. You stand in front of her, and with the guidance of your hands, the dirt vacates the grave, each grain rolling out and onto the turf beside it. Then your attention is on your corpse, and you once again are using psychic powers to lift it, battered and bloodied and broken with limp arms and ankles and head hanging, out of its grave, into the air.
Feferi is speaking again. You still aren’t listening. Your ghost isn’t, either. She’s watching. You’re reminded that you could leave your dead body here, and Feferi could revive that ghost instead, spare the entire timeline the pain that comes with your death. But you’re not going to do that, and neither is Feferi. And, for all you know, this could change your past self’s path, this could trigger a timeline where the glitch with the planets and the gates didn’t happen. Where you all still had a chance, because of this body’s disappearance.
(You doubt it.)
And then, you’re standing in your hive, once more.
What’s left of it. Leveled, crumbling. Frankly something close to tragic. You’re standing in the ruins of what was once your hive on the Land of Quartz and Melody, is a more accurate description. Feferi is still glubbing on, body still floating in the air, and you can’t help wondering as you lay your corpse’s body down if she ever makes a habit of shutting up. You don’t remember her being this talkative. Maybe she’s nervous.
“You’re shore you want to go through with this? It’s oh-cray to change your mind.”
For the first time, you actually look at her.
Over, and up. Up at her, because she’s an adult, and you’re still trapped in the body of a child.
“I’m not changing my mind,” your voice answers, hollow and empty as ever. She wants you to change your mind, you think, because...
...does it really have to be said out loud?
Eridan still pines for her, and she still pines for him, and he still pines for you, and she knows all of that.
You look back at your corpse, and the first few moments, you watch. You can see those few moments. You see it lift into the air once more, and for a split second, you see the green light wrapping itself around the cadaver, seeping into the cuts and changing it into something else. For those few moments, you’re an observer.
Then everything is black.
You don’t see your soulbot shatter into pieces where you were standing a few yards from Feferi, and you don’t see how she tugs at the right strands of DNA to send your body along its natural progression, along those extra sweeps that had passed in this timeline. You don’t see how your body falls gently to rest against the ground once more. When you open your eyes again, you hardly even think of any of that. You wake up with your mind blank, staring at a purple sky.
You can feel more than just the ground.
You can feel the grass. You can feel the soil against your skin, and a few pockets of rock, the fabric of your shirt and the pressure of a size or two too small, you can feel your hair against your cheeks. You push yourself slowly to sit up, and you feel a chill with the breeze, and you swear you can even feel the vibrations against your skin when Feferi speaks again. She’s asked you something. You don’t know what. You don’t care.
Except, you must care, because next thing you know, you’ve lunged straight at her. She’s underneath you now, and you have her cold arms pinned over her head, and speaking of things you can feel, you can feel the anguish in your expression. You can feel how your lips pull back to bear your teeth, completely built on instinct, since there’s not much threatening there; you can feel your brows, knit in frustration, in anger, in suspicion and so-far-unspoken accusation; you can feel your nostrils flared. She’s trying frantically to get you to calm down. She could hurt you, she knows that, but she doesn’t want to, or she would have already. She’s trying to talk you down from whatever’s just possessed you, and she tells you as much.
You spit in her face, and she outright gasps in surprise at the insult. She clearly anticipated a much more grateful reception.
“Don’t use that word like you understand it!” you shout in her face, voice notably less hollow, less robotic than it once was, even if still off as it always has been. “Don’t change the subject!”
“From what??”
“You used him!” finally finds its way out from between gritted teeth. “No, you used me! You used me to get to him!”
“Aradia--”
“You cashed in on my death to try to swim your way into a quadrant with him that he never even wanted!”
“Aradia!”
“Who does that, Feferi?? Aren’t you ashamed? Aren’t you sorry?”
“Get your fins OFF of me!”
You blink.
You slowly release her arms and get to your feet, taking a few paces away from her. You hear the ground shuffling behind you, likely the sound of her getting back up.
“I didn’t minnow you were going to be so fra-gill,” she huffs.
“I’m not fragile,” you shoot back.
She opens her mouth to protest, but you’ve grabbed her arm before she can get the words out. The stone is in your hands again, swiped up from the ground beneath, and then you’re back on her planet instead of yours.
“Aradia, let’s talk about this--”
That’s all you hear before you’re gone again. Just as quickly as you’d arrived, to drop her off, to leave her there, to return to being alone. Nothing more. You can guess that she’s messaging Sollux -- Sollux, gods, your heart hurts to even stumble across the name, you can’t unpack that yet -- right now, to tell him you’re acting insane and hysterical and erratic, or maybe Equius -- you can’t unpack that yet either -- hoping he could distract you, perhaps even Karkat to calm you down. It doesn’t matter. Your palmhusk is still on LOBAF.
You’re overwhelmed. You feel so much, so much you were so scared -- was that fear? -- you would, and now here you are, feeling all of it. Feeling everything that touches you, feeling heartbreak, feeling rejection, feeling so much resentment you don’t know what to do with it. You have things to do, you have things to collect, including your thoughts at some point, but you feel like you can’t even move. You’d cry, you’d sob, if you had the space in your thinkpan to decide to do it.
Your name is Aradia Megido, and you just spent three sweeps longer dead than you were supposed to. Alive as you may be, you are not okay with everything.
She couldn’t stop staring at him. She’s gotten more subtle about it over the course of the night. As far as she can tell, he hasn’t noticed, not this time or any one prior. But his movements are so real, so organic, she can watch the skin shift over the bones of his limbs every time his arm reaches for something it needs. And, oh yeah, he needs things, like food, and water, and all sorts of things she’s long since outgrown, and that’s kind of beautiful, too.
She has found herself reminiscing on her own to keep her head from being so constantly turned his direction, in the memories of her wrigglerhood self, more lately than usual. In her robot form, she can still care for people, but the sort of love she felt while she was alive is absent, without it being specifically programmed in -- and we all know how that went.
She has found herself reminiscing in the memories of what it was like to love.
She can still remember it, even if she can’t feel it anymore the way she once did. She can remember how she felt for Tavros, protective and friendly, the genuine heartbreak that came when he lost the ability to walk, and the time she spent trying to help him, though it was quickly forgotten for dependence on Vriska. (She remembers the heartbreak in discovering that, too.) She remembers the admiration she had for Terezi, once upon a time, the sort of mutual respect that perhaps could have even been something in another timeline.
Another timeline, without him, because so long as he was there, he would eclipse everybody else.
She can remember the warmth in her chest when she touched his cheek or combed his hair out of his face, and she can remember the butterflies in her stomach at the feeling of his lips against her shoulder. They were young, they were children, it was all oh so innocent, but it was still so real. The kind of real that can only exist between old souls, as they both were when they hatched.
Empathy has never been her strong suit, and it’s even less so now, but knowing what she pieced together at the previous daybreak, she can’t imagine how hard this must be for him. She thinks of the stories that Kanaya had told her about, once upon a time, cautionary tales of letting ghosts come back, how they’re never quite the same, how it’s so much more painful to see your loved one there, trapped, haunting, never quite right, perpetually off. She had certainly known as much to be true when she was alive, because she could hear them. And he has lived that, for three sweeps now, just to know he did all that he could for her. How could their love not have been real, for him to love her enough to do that after all this time?
He had to still love her, didn’t he?
The question had never much mattered to her before, but it’s different now. Now, there’s a chance of her coming back. Now, there’s the risk that she’ll be as horns-over-heels for him as she was at six, and he’ll have let those feelings die, buried in the ground alongside her corpse, so she’s trying to talk her out of every potential daymare scenario.
Her red eyes blink as his message pops up across the screen.
ye2?
She sits still another moment, then gets to her feet, doing as he asked some time ago now. She almost wants to press it further. She wants proof. She wants something tangible, she wants insurance for her future self’s fragile heart, she walks right up to him with half a mind to kiss him right here. She’s interrupted his line of sight by how she leans against his computer desk, and doesn’t move nor elaborate even at his confused expression and flat question for explanation, while she contemplates it.
Staring at him in that moment, though, watching his face, his features, mature and evolved and perfect, Aradiabot is reminded that it’s been a long time since he was hers, anyway.
She pushes off from his desk without a word, steps with far less purpose as she takes a few steps away. At the end of it all, did it really matter if he still loved her? She would want to be alive again, no matter what. There were so many things she wanted to do-- no, things she wanted to want to do again, that required a fiery soul and beating pusher once more. So there was no use in getting the answer to a question that wouldn’t change anything.
She felt the first spark of an irrational anger, with Equius, for not building a bot that more correctly mirrored her real personality, if he even knew what it was in the first place. But just as easily as it had come, it faded. A preview of what would be waiting for her, if she came back.
When she came back.
She was going to come back, either way, and if her Sollux was long gone, she would just have to find a way to come to terms with that.
In the meantime, Aradiabot has taken back to sitting on the floor.
