#the bone ring

[ascendedprotege]

>Terezi: Attempt to obtain information

She doesn't seem to be too interested in speaking to you, so you don't say too much. You instead just watch the masked woman as she moves around, glancing nervously as the robot leaves you, the only connection you have back home. It is not entirely comfortable to be here, with the only way back home gone.

But you didn't come here for comfort.

You start as you see Bridhe's body on the table, and you bite your lip, fingers running nervously through your hair as you watch him unfold, like a flower. 

You want to run to him and touch him and grab him and shake him, make him wake up, and get up out of there. You want to grab him and go and leave this place. But you don't move, you remain calm. You watch the woman as she moves around, observing the body. You take the time to do so as well, as you had not had the chance to see what had become of him.

It was hard, and in the end, you jump at the opportunity to converse and remove your attention from that cold corpse.

"Who did this? How can we find them?" You ask, your mind already on the judgement, on the call to revenge, finding who had wronged your best friend in such an utter way. And making them pay.

"And is there anything you can do to...fix him?" You're not sure what's the right word for that. You leave the question about the ring unanswered, as you have no idea, and Sollux would probably be able to give a better answer than you. You give a glance at him, making sure that he was handling confronting his boyfriend's corpse.

[ascendedprotege]

>Past Past Terezi: Meet the weird old lady.

You stop preparing yourself for your flight across the Gulf of Mexico. You be yourself a week or two ago, when you were significantly more stable and less inclined to take off to lord knew where.

You're no longer in that bathroom, now you're in some less grody but far less familiar room. You instinctively clutch onto Sollux in an attempt to not bowl right over, you did not want to risk touching anything in this strange room. It might may some curse on you or something.

You stick close to the robot as she moves, head whirling around every which way, trying to make heads or tails out of your current position. The sight of Bridhe's wings do not escape you, and you feel a cold chill going up your spine. But hey, how common were fae wings? Maybe they were someone else's. 

You glance nervously at Sollux, hand patting the pocket where your deck, and more weapons then one woman should need, rested. Was any of that shit steel? Whatever the case, you should be able to put up some fight in case this all went horribly wrong. You'll have to protect Sollux, but you're sure you can manage that. He's a twig, you can sling him over your shoulder and fly off if things went south, right?

Your attention turns to whom you assume is your hostess, and you nod politely to her. "Um, hello. We're sorry about this. We just--Well my name's Terezi, and our friend Bridhe..." You glance at Sollux again, inviting him to explain further. 

[ascendedprotege]

>Terezi: Road the show. Or something.

You have no idea what you're doing, only a vague notion of where you're going, and no fucking clue who's this robochick that is leading you there. But Bridhe's at the end of this weird ass rabbit hole, so you nod and stare into the mirror like a good little girl.

You feel...kind of awkward, honestly, on this whole trip. Sollux and you had barely talked, but at least there was Mer. You couldn't really touch him like you usually did to people when you were worried and fretting, but you could manage that, you were a big girl. Instead, you stared into the mirror, running your fingers through your hair, attempting to comfort yourself.

There's a sense of vertigo, but you are, as previously stated, a big girl, and you manage fairly well, before starting in surprise at the new surroundings. It was unlike any way you had gotten into Fae land previously, and you definitely hadn't seen any gross ass bathrooms like this.

"So, we're in Fae land...?" You ask quietly, trying to shuffle away from all of the iffy looking surfaces, glancing around for a door.

[whiten01z]

> N01-Z: Mourn your friend.

You don’t know how to do that, mostly because you’ve never known anyone that’s died. Besides, you think you’re supposed to be sad to do that kind of thing, and you’re not sad. In fact, for as much as you’re prone to stressing about everything under the sun, you’ve been weirdly calm since you found out about Bridhe and you’re not sure why. Maybe… maybe you’re just doing it wrong.

You’re probably just doing it wrong.

So you don’t mourn. Instead, you clean.

You clean their apartment, because Sollux asked you to take care of it while they’re gone.

You clean their apartment because unlike you, Dirk hasn’t been weirdly calm since he found out about Bridhe, and you know it’ll just escalate if he can't do something to Fix It.

You clean up the pieces of wings that crumble like burnt paper when you try to pick them up from the bathroom floor.

You clean up the black ink pools on the tile and the splatters on the wall and the desperate-looking smears along the counter.

You clean up the smell of damp wood and rot that makes your skin prick and Dirk’s eye ache with bad memories, replacing it with the smell of 409 and bleach and cigarette smoke.

You clean and clean and clean until there’s no trace left that anything was ever wrong. Until you’re just a guy apartment-sitting with his boyfriend for some other friends who went somewhere, and now you’re waiting for them to get back.

Because Sollux said he was going to bring Bridhe back.

Bring him back as what though? It took giving up so much to save your dumb ass and you weren’t even dead yet. How much would they take away this time?

For the next few hours, you sit with Dirk on the now spotless bathroom floor, knees to your chest and your sixth seventh eighth cigarette of the night between your lips.

Sollux said he’d bring him home, but would there even be anything left of them to come home?

[whiten01z]

3:04 To Sendai

The human mind has a strange, inefficient way of processing information. You think at one point you must’ve understood how plants grow, back when your brain was the summation of Tokyo University’s archives and the entire internet. Maybe you still do, but sometimes it’s hard to know what’s what when your head is cluttered with the memories of the dead. Memories of things that haven’t happened yet.

There’s a white door in the middle of the station that you’re sure you’ve never seen before. No one goes in or comes out; they’re all waiting for the train that’s pulling into the station, on time to the second because Japanese trains are never early and never late. As you reach for the handle, a woman’s voice sounds over the intercom:

“Now arriving, 3:04 to Sendai. Have a nice day.”

The door swings open. It leads to a closet. You know this because of the seeds – row after row of tiny green sprouts, suspended in the shallow water of a hydroponics system that seems go on for miles.

Whoever put this here built an efficient set up. The plants grow visibly even as you look on, lanky stalks pushing up and up and up until they’re almost chest-high, outer layers peeling away to become orange and black leaves that rustle like paper in the wind. Shh shh shh shh. You watch in fascination as they sway, faster and faster, until all at once they leaves take off in a startled flurry, stalks snapping back as the dark cloud of wings disappears into the void.

“Bri—”

You wake up in a quiet fit, sheets crumpled and twisted around your ankles. You feel dry, somehow simultaneously exhausted and jittery with leftover caffeine. There taste of alcohol lingers in your throat and your teeth are numb with rotted sugar. You wonder vaguely if you woke Dirk with your sleep-rapping again.

It takes several minutes and a lot of muttered cursing before you manage to drag yourself over to the bathroom. You lean heavily against the counter as your brush your teeth, elbow locked and neck craned painfully low over the sink. Shh shh shh shh -- the brush moves slowly in the same corner of your mouth over and over. Water swirls lazily before vanishing down the drain. The world blurs in and out of existence as you squint hard against the florescent light, contemplating a dark spot on the tile that you’re sure you’ve never seen before.

What even is that? You spit minty foam and lean down for a closer look.

Oh. It’s a tiny, black moth. You stare at it for a long time, sleep fogged brain meandering over its significance and coming up with nothing. You poke at it carefully with the back end of your toothbrush, but it doesn’t move. You think it might be dead. Oh well.

You rinse your mouth, gulp down two full glasses of water, and flop back into bed.

You stand in front of the crowd at the edge of the platform. In a few seconds, the 4:44 to Shinjuku will be passing through, traveling at exactly 283 km/hour.

On the other side of the white black door, you think you hear someone crying.