endgame
previously: no light, no light | martyr | resurrection
JIM WALTON WILL HAVE BEEN ARRESTED BY THE TIME YOU WAKE.
Well, that’s not a message you ever foresaw the horrorterrors beaming into your mind while you slept. But you never were great at foreseeing anything. You knew things that were going on in the present, sometimes in the past, but not in the future. You don’t have that kind of power.
WE WILL RESTORE YOUR POWERS TONIGHT.
“Already?” you say, in your dream. You know you don’t say it out loud. You’ve done tests, recorded yourself at night. This is all in your head. “All I had to do was frame the guy?”
THIS IS TENTATIVE. CEASE YOUR MISSION, DEFY US AGAIN, AND WE WILL TAKE THEM BACK AT ONCE.
“Great, I love being shoved around.” You can’t remember what you were dreaming before they showed up. Everything is a blinding white now, with vague shapes writhing in a far-off distance, like shadow puppets behind a veil. You don’t have a body, you’re not even feeling a floating sensation or anything. You just exist here, arguing with the outer gods. “No, it’s fine. I’ll keep going. I want to see that motherfucker jailed.”
THERE IS A NEW TASK FOR YOU.
In your dream, in the vast nothingness of incorporeality, you groan, loudly.
“What now?”
YOU WILL KILL THE PRINCE.
“Kill?” you echo. “Kill Dirk? You know he really helped tearing down Jim Walton, right? I don’t know that I could have done it without him. He got me to a hospital after that asshole chopped my finger off, so I’d probably at least have gotten a really nasty infect--”
HE HELPED FOR HIS OWN PROFIT. YOU KNOW THIS.
“Well, yeah,” you say. “Just seems kinda rude to immediately go kill him now that we’re done.”
YOU ARE RUDE.
“Fair point.”
ONCE YOUR POWERS ARE RESTORED, WE WILL SURGE INTO YOU. IT WILL BE OVERWHELMING, BUT YOU CAN TAKE IT, HEIR.
“Feel like I’ve heard that one before,” you say, but as per usual, they ignore your joke and keep talking.
YOU HAVE DONE IT BEFORE. YOU WILL BE OUR VESSEL AND CARRY US TO HIM. WE WILL TAKE CARE OF THE REST.
You don’t like the sound of that. Without your Light you might not be the brightest, but you are fairly sure you know what they mean. You’ve become their “vessel” once before, you’ve been “overwhelmed” by the powers they bestowed upon you once before, when you were thirteen, and a dog had just killed your mom. That didn’t end well. You didn’t manage to avenge her, and then you died.
“You haven’t really set a great precedent,” you tell them. “Are you even sure you can kill Dirk?”
YOU DARE DOUBT US. WE CAN KILL WHATEVER WE WANT TO KILL.
“Yeah, well. So can he. That’s your whole issue with him, isn’t it? He decides who lives and who dies. You don’t think he’s just going to decide that he lives?”
IT IS TIME HE LEARNED HIS PLACE IN THE HIERARCHY OF GODS.
“Ok, badass thing to say,” you say, but you can already feel yourself fading. That is no good. With what they announced, you don’t think you’re looking forward to waking up. Karkat is asleep next to you. Shit. “I don’t think it’s going to work, and if he kills me and it turns out to be a just death since, you know, I did kill six people in under half a year, aren’t we all kind of shit out of luck? You guys included? Hello?”
Your voice doesn’t echo. The writhing behind the veil has stopped. For a moment -- even if you tried, you couldn’t quantify the amount of time -- everything is still. Then, unceremoniously, your dream ends.
With a loud gasp, you sit up straight in your bed. Whether or not Karkat wakes up with you, you can’t tell. You can barely see. The light was off when you slept, of course, but it flickers on now, the bulb burns through, explodes. Shards of glass rain down on you as your body lifts up and off the bed, suspended in mid air as you, too, flicker with light. Your powers return to you all at once, and you become them, you turn into a figure of pure light, blinding, too bright to take, leaving behind a human-shaped scorch mark on the sheets below you. Knowledge flows through every part of your being and you scream, although your voice breaks almost immediately at the sheer amount of it filling up your head. Dave was bitten by one of his snakes recently. One of the flowers Karkat arranged in your bath for you the other day stands for love on first sight. Walton isn’t even officially arrested yet, but is already working on the means to make bail. Dirk hasn’t ascended back to his place as Crocker Corp CEO yet, but continues to indulge in consultations that are very much paving his way.
Before the insurmountable pain between your temples can make you pass back out, you exhale, and your light flicks off. In the darkness of your bedroom, your skin turns a dark grey, your hair a bright white, and your glowing eyes stare vacantly at the wall as you allow the horrorterrors to take over. Dimly, in the back of your mind, you still think that this is a stupid idea. But it sure as hell feels better than what you were going through a second ago.
All around you wafts the familiar black aura of grimdarkness, thorned tendrils curling and uncurling, as if stretching limbs that haven’t been properly used in almost a decade. You have to bring them to Dirk. It’s easy, you know where he lives. You’d wager he’s probably even awake. Somewhere outside of your blinds, the sun is already up over NYC. He’ll be home.
You want to say something to Karkat, you manage to think vaguely, you should, you really should. All that comes out, of course, are Eldritch tongues, and you can barely see him anyway, behind the thick forest of grimdarkness obscuring the real world from your vision. You like to think your voice sounds gentle, at least, as it always does. You don’t want him to worry. You know he will, oh, you know he will, and you know he will be devastated when Dirk inevitably kills you, and you inevitably stay dead, one too many monstrosities committed in your short life to be resurrected. Karkat will want to fight him, you think, and then Dirk will kill him, too.
You’d cry if you could. You can’t, though, and find yourself appreciating that. Once again, you are in the backseat of your life, letting someone else take over. And once again that someone else is a conglomerate of old gods you brought in from another universe, who seem so sure that they know what to do, now. You don’t think that they do. But there is no arguing with them. All you can do, now, watching from behind your eyes, is hope. That the return of your luck will be enough to get you through this fight.
And that your anger at the man who started all this, who could have stopped it all if he hadn’t gotten this drunk off his own power, will be enough to kill him.
You don’t know how you make it to Dirk’s house. You can barely focus on the world outside. All you think about is that you know where he is, and you know what he’s doing, and you know that he doesn’t know you’re coming. By the time you materialize a mere few feet away from him, you’ve channeled the last of your will into how much you hate him (and his stupid little bowlcut), and your snarl of Eldritch swears comes with an air of anticipation. If you put your mind to this, maybe, if you give it all you have, with any luck, you can bring the both of you down, and end this once and for all.
Fairly anticlimactically, you then proceed to have a deathmatch with Dirk in his house, which kills both Dirk and you and completely demolishes the place, but leaves neither of you perma-dead.
You have a Discord-exclusive awkward moment of recovery, agree to never tell Dave about this, and go your separate ways.
