no light, no light
a revelation in the light of day: you can’t choose what stays and what fades away.
WARNING FOR EMETOPHOBIA!! big ole throwup in this one. also vaguely unsettling horrorterror stuff.
HEIR.
They come to you every night. You are not being overdramatic. Ever since you’ve left your home timeline, not a single night has passed that they weren’t bothering you. They always come in that very moment between sleeping and waking, an inhuman screeching somewhere between your temples, yet silent to everyone else. Sometimes, you sleep, and they talk to you in your dreams. Sometimes, you stay awake until the mornings and try to reason with them, mumbling to yourself on Karkat’s couch.
Those days are over now. You and Karkat are a mostly undefined thing now, and you get to sleep in his bed. You throw him a glance, sleeping peacefully next to you, and sigh. Mouthing silently at the ceiling, you say, What?
THIS IS THE LAST STRAW.
You make a face. What’s that even supposed to mean. They, too, have a penchant for the dramatic, of course, being old Eldritch gods that once granted you all of their power for a revenge mission. They still grant you some, because they think you are useful to them, and you think they are useful to you. Communication, however, is not always easy.
Huh? you mouth this time, which really just looks like you opening your mouth in incomprehension.
YOU WILL RETURN HOME. YOU WILL STOP THE PRINCE.
Your eyes burn when you roll them. You are fucking tired, and yet, this doesn’t sound like a conversation you’ll be able to skip. You throw Karkat another glance, then quietly roll out of bed and slip on a hoodie. Only once you’ve closed his bedroom door behind you and are padding through the living room do you answer, voice as low as possible, “Stop him from what? He went to one board meeting. I can forgive that.”
HEIR. YOU DON’T HONESTLY BELIEVE THAT.
Again, you grimace. Yeah, maybe you don’t. And maybe you don’t want to care. Maybe you want to stay here in a different timeline with a guy who wants to date you and fucked you silly on his kitchen counter. Maybe that’s been better than hanging around your home and trying to get the billionaires to stop exploiting the entire rest of the world. That doesn’t really sound unreasonable to you.
“I want to stay here,” you mutter, both of your hands buried in the front pocket of your hoodie. “He’s not… Dirk doesn’t seem completely off the shits yet, and if he was, I would not fucking care. Let me stay here.”
THIS IS THE LAST STRAW.
“Yes, you already said that. What does it mean?” You want to roll your eyes at them again, but before you can get that far, you’re blinded for a full second by white hot pain in your right temple. Instead, you squeeze your eyes shut, barely fighting back a shout so you don’t wake Karkat. Instinctively, you stumble toward the bathroom, one hand pressed to your head, the other one pawing around for the faucet. The pain fades as quickly as it came, but you still feel groggy in its wake, and reach down to drink water from your hands.
GO BACK TONIGHT AND DEAL WITH HIM SOON, OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES.
“What consequences,” you mutter, hoarsely, in between gulps.
THE PRINCE HAS BECOME TOO POWERFUL. NO HUMAN CHILD WILL DECIDE ALONE OVER LIFE AND DEATH. ONLY WHEN THE HEIR RETURNS TO THWART HIM CAN WE BEGIN TO RESTORE BALANCE.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” you say, water droplets flying as you wave your hand around dismissively. “We have been over that. What consequences?”
AN HEIR OF LIGHT WHO REFUSES TO DO HIS WORK
(They make a dramatic pause.)
IS NOT AN HEIR OF LIGHT AT ALL.
You say, “I don’t know what that means.” The very next second, your entire body seizes up violently. You choke out a noise, gasping for breath, your hands grabbing the edge of the sink as you feel your insides convulse, shoulders spasming as something seems to claw its way up your throat. Fruitlessly, you try to speak, to swear, to yell for Karkat, your mouth opening and closing but no sound coming out. Your hands slip and your legs give out and you drop to the cold bathroom tiles, and as you land on your back, for one terrible blink of an eye, you think you’re dying.
Whatever is crawling up your throat is blocking your windpipe, but it falls forward when your body throws itself to the side, clawing at the gaps between the tiles until you’ve worked yourself up on your knees. You retch, your elbows quivering, your eyes burning, breath stuck in your lungs as a thick glob of black sludge wrestles itself out of your mouth and lands on the floor with a wet splat. You suck in a breath, try to close your mouth, try to swallow down, but more is on its way, and you shiver from head to toe instead.
Sticky black mass keeps splattering from your mouth, pooling on the floor in front of you until the puddle is almost two feet across. You feel empty in a strange way -- you’ve thrown up plenty of times in your life, and you’re familiar with the empty stomach feeling it usually leaves. This one isn’t located there. It seems to be in your chest, in the hollows of your ribs, in your core. Whatever climbed out of you just now left a hole that feels cold, and desolate in you.
Quaking, you raise one hand to wipe at your mouth. Right as you move, the mass moves as well, rising off the floor in a writhing tangle of tendrils, and you watch the splot you wiped from your mouth detach itself from the back of your hand and join it. Still on your knees, as you sit back on your haunches, the inky blob hovers a few feet above you, tangling within itself, tentacles disappearing and reappearing at random, in constant motion. When it speaks, its voice has finally stopped resonating within your head -- it’s outside of you now. They’ve left you.
SO LONG AS YOU DON’T FOLLOW YOUR CALLING, HEIR. YOU DON’T DESERVE THESE POWERS. WE HAVE TAKEN THEM.
You say, “What the fuck?” Your voice is scratchy and hurts in your throat, but coughing now only sounds like an invitation for more vomit, actual one from your stomach this time. “I didn’t get my powers from you. I got them from the game. You can’t take them.”
Convinced of this much, figuring that the horrorterrors might leave your body but you’ll always have your godtier powers, you feel yet another cold shiver of dread rush down your back as a faint light seems to blink on inside the black mass above you. That’s just for show, you think, they’re conning you, so you try to use what the game gave you, you try to turn into light, you try to procure even the faintest of glows, and it doesn’t work. You have the same powers any other guy outside on the streets has.
THIS IS THE POWER WE WIELD. WE, AND ONLY WE, SHALL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT HAPPENS TO THE PEOPLE OF YOUR UNIVERSE.
“What happened to establishing balance?” you mutter, running a shaky hand through your hair. “Look, did you seriously just take away my godhood? To make me start shit with Dirk? The guy who could kill everyone except for me, because I was protected by Light? How is this going to motivate me to ever set foot in that dumpster fire of a timeline again?”
YOU WILL SOON REALIZE YOUR NEED. WE WILL NOT ALLOW OUR HEIR TO FIGHT THE PRINCE IN THIS STATE. HOWEVER YOU MUST RE-PROVE YOUR WORTHINESS. GO HOME, JOHN LALONDE. PICK UP THE WORK YOU SO FOOLISHLY LEFT BEHIND. AND ONCE WE SEE THE RICH FALL, YOU WILL SEE THE LIGHT AGAIN.
The air makes a weirdly wet pop when it closes around the space the mass leaves when it disappears. You’re on your knees in Karkat’s bathroom, staring into nothingness. You don’t… You don’t need your powers. They can keep them, then. This is idiotic.
Slowly, you reach up for the sink and pull yourself up, standing on two uneasy legs so you can look at yourself in the mirror. The white streak in your hair is still there, but so is the awful emptiness in your chest. You don’t need your powers, you think. Your hand travels up to the side of your neck, bitten and bruised by Karkat’s vampire fangs. You’ve been letting him feed on your blood for the past weeks, knowing that you’re protected both by conditional immortality and by inhuman luck, so even if he wasn’t as cautious as he is, he couldn’t kill you.
He could, now.
He’d never forgive himself.
You wrinkle your nose. Karkat lets you live here for free, but you get your own food, your own clothes. If you stay for longer, you’re going to want to start chipping in for rent, or at least water and electricity. You have no source of income, because you’ve been living off of gambling winnings, which, again, you got due to your luck, and your convenient knowledge.
Okay, so you’ll have to start living a slightly less risky life. You’ll manage. You’ll adapt. Living a risk-free life was exactly what pushed you into immortality ennui before, but… Well, you won’t be immortal anymore.
You turn to stare at the door, toward the rest of the apartment, where Karkat is hopefully still asleep, somewhere. He’s immortal. You’ve been living with the comfort of that. Immortality was going to be something you could be tackling together.
Your head feels light, in a way you don’t enjoy. Whenever the Light would pump you full of knowledge, it would hurt, it would knock you out for days and you would hate it, but you’re already missing the place it inhabited up there. Knowing that you will not know things whenever it’s convenient for you in the future is disconcerting, to say the least. You are not a smart man. You make people believe you are, but you know that you’re not. Not without Light.
When you sit down on the edge of Karkat’s bed, you feel sick again, but this time you know it’s just your stomach. You watch him stir awake, watch the worry creep into his features when he sees you, and you give him a defeated smile.
“It’s time,” you say. “We need to go home.”
