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Terrible thing, to stare straight into the eye of Alternia's searing scarlet sun—yet somehow it's less terrible than having no control over your body!
At first, the rays of light are a warm kiss along Terezi’s arms, skimming down to her claws. Along her face, the curve of her cheek and jawline. It turns violent, and fast. Into an assault on her delicate skin, so inexperienced with it. Angry blisters burst through her skin, welts from the light’s lashing.
Then it kisses her eyes. Ravishes them, really! It’s a full-fledged sloppy makeout as the sun slurps and smacks away at the silken lens, at the iris and pupil, toothy at the cornea and oh it’s all-devouring now!
The agony is beyond anything real. The agony is painted in the color red! Crimson, scarlet, carmine, a lip-smacking cherry pie—how dare her pain be her favorite color! How very insulting to be taunted like this.
The reds grow brighter. Brighter and brighter and brighter, until all of the world is a white-hot pain. Blood streaks down from her sockets, blistering the tip of her snout.
The world’s ending, she thinks.
That must be the answer, what else could be the answer? There’s no meaning-making to be found in this, it’s impossible—it’s invasive and senseless and silly and stupid—!
All she wants to do is die!
Tears mingle with blood in odd ways, like oil and water. Or so she thinks, as the light lays her flat onto the earth, ready to flay her alive.
And as the sun gorges away, unable to get enough, never able to get enough, Terezi is stripped from the luxury of screaming. Terrible thing, for an invisible hand to be clamped over her mouth.
terezi.
This has to be the end. There’s no darkness, there’s no light, there’s nothing but utter nothingness. Terezi tries to look around, but nope, nada. She’d have just as much luck trying to see out of her elbow! Who knew the end of the world was just like being inside a black hole? Like being inside a void’s mouth?
Whoever’s she stuck with can’t be happy, because their crying stirs her awake.
terezi!
The voice is familiar enough, and the presence unraveling around it feels like family. Terezi reaches out with her mind, hoping her message lands the mark.
who are you?
Unbeknownst to her, the world’s most innocuous question is also the most heartbreaking!: the cries turn to sobs, full-bodied sobs.
i’m so, so sorry, terezi.
It’s her lusus speaking.
mom, where are we? i can’t see anything.
The sobs take a turn for the worse, so absurdly loud that what would—should—be the forest starts rumbling, only it’s not the forest, because it’s straight up nothingness instead. Apparently the apocalypse is a shitstorm of motherly sadness!
child, you’re right beside me.
Beside her? Why can’t she see jackshit then—
Even if Terezi wanted to look up at the sun (make smoochy eyes to a fiery death orb of blood and fury and other melodramatic shit? No fucking thank you!), she can’t. Like everything else from her point of view, it has faded into nonexistence—maybe, hopefully, ideally.
It’s better than the other option!
So why does it still press upon her, its heat thick and heavy atop her thighs? Wriggling around doesn’t get her anywhere, trying to stand sends her straight into a world of whirling hurt.
The last thing she saw was cherry red, a cherry red bursting into white hotness, what the hell actually happened—
Just as her sunburn deepens, so does her dread, tightening the gigantic knot in her guts. Hands still in-tact (as far as she can tell), she weakly waves one in front of where her eyes should be.
No five fingers, not even an outline of them! Not even the shadow of them! Only a monstrous amount of fucking nothingness!—
Oh god oh god oh god—
—And though her lusus crying makes her want to cry, she doesn’t. Digging her nails into the nothingness dirt, she stops herself. Wills herself. If she cries then she’ll break, and if she breaks then her lusus will wanna hatch and wrap her in leather-soft wings, and if she’s getting cradled like a pathetic little grub by her hatched lusus the world will end because those are the rules for her lot in life!
terezi i’m so so sorry just lemme hug you terezi i did this i hurt you i blinded you i’m so sorry i never wanted you to be like me—
Insurmountable pressure, heart-shattering sadness, and a smorgasbord of only the most bitter of sensitivities aside, the world can’t end for a second time, that wouldn’t do at all!
stop saying that, you did nothing!
Terezi’s never been good at just sitting in a space and feeling all the messy stuff out. She’d rather just clean the mess, fix whatever the problem is. Make whoever did this—and she has sneaky, sickening suspicion who the slitherbeast is—pay. Problems are gonna have to be solved anyway, right? They’re gonna have to be at some point, right? Why else have televised courtblock cases dedicated to trolls figuring their shit out and providing free entertainment in the process! Basic schoolfeeding much?
So… right! Right.
At the very end, the daughter plays mother as she shooshes her lusus, but nothing’s new underneath Alternia’s all-devouring sun!
let me help you.
More words echoing from Dragon Mama, but when Terezi awakens again, it’s thankfully in the soft squishy bliss of her recuperacoon. The slime has worked its magic on her burns and blisters, cooling the worst of them, but the itching! God! A zillion ants crawling all over her couldn’t be this miserable—but maybe it would be, because she wouldn’t see them, because she’s still stuck with her elbow vision.
Squirming in a pitiful attempt to not scratch herself, she frowns. Elbow vision makes everything else feel insanely heightened: the squash of the slime, the sound of her breathing, it’s all at least seventy times louder. Off-putting and offensive indeed.
talk to me, terezi.
And whatever her lusus has to say is at least seven hundred times louder, too.
but you already did?
She did, truly. She wouldn’t have reached her hive without her help. What’s usually a minute walk turned into an hour-long excursion—something she’s not eager to replicate. The pulley sure put the pull in pulverizing!
no, i mean like how i do. seeing!
Now she’s confused. Frown deepening, she tries to remember the times Dragon Mama actually taught her stuff—kinda hard to do that when you spend your days on a scale that will set off a doomsday clock as if you so much as stretch! Not that Terezi can fully resent her, those are just the rules. Independence is her middle name, hatched and raised and baptized by the fires of living alone deep in a forest, Alternia’s fate a constant (but noxious) whisper in her ear: tick, tock, tick, tock.
How very heroic it all is! But it’s what she does best—an impressive feat from someone who serves that shit up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!
what do you know? you live inside an egg.
To her relief, sleep cocoons around her soon after.
GRRRRGGGHHH.
For the hundredth time that night, her digestion sack gives her a ring, always leaving the same message: feed me, feed me! Very annoying, basic bodily functions.
Groaning, Terezi rolls to the other side of the slime, eyes closed but not particularly caring if she falls asleep or not. Another night, another shit load of nothingness awaiting her, with only more dreamless dormancy to look forward to in the morning! Sorta. Sopor may dull the edges, as it's supposed to do, but there are still sparks of vision bleeding through into her unconscious, sparks of the world ending in that blinding cherry bomb, that mind melting pain of the gloopy ooze leaking out from her globes…
The rudeness is getting to the point of ridiculousness!
And it’s not that she’s depressed or traumatized or anything like that—no, don’t get it twisted! It’s just that she doesn’t wanna get out of the recupracoon.
And maybe if I just lay here long enough, she thinks, I can just move on from what happened. She’s told herself this… how many nights now? How many nights since the ruby red star seduced her so fiercely? It drives her crazy, not knowing for sure.
Because no matter how much her digestion sack bitches and moans, what she craves more than anything else is a sense of control—a whole feast of it, actually! Delectable spreads consisting of control over her behavior, control over her environment, and for the most scrumptiously delicious dessert of all, control over her feelings.
And there’s that itch too, that ever-present anxiety demanding action from her, anything. Something, anything, now now NOW! Who would have thought that going blind would make her so popular among the crowd of Varying Neuroses?
So instinct drives her out of the slime to look alive (alive enough, anyway, alive as much as she can with burns and scabs—not that she can see them!). Instinct, plus a fervent desire to not end up like a certain Mr. Gamzee Makara, who, according to Karkat, has in-fact snacked away at the slime clinging to his own skin when he gets hungry enough, ick, gross. How utterly pitiful; at least she knows better than that.
(She’ll let the Condesce personally cull her before she admits it, but for a whole six seconds, she considers trying it. Who knows, maybe he’s onto something!)
Speaking of friends—
A notification pings from her husktop. Unusual to be away for so long, she’s dimly aware that she’ll have to reply to them, that they must be worrying themselves into puking up a storm or something. But they’ll have to keep puking until after she has her date with Troll Kraft Grubaroni and Cheese.
As a wriggler she was adept at scrounging around; now at her grown up age of six sweeps she’s adept at the instant meal. Terezi is not, was not, and never will be a “homemade grubloaf served warm beside a glass of entomilk” kind of girl—again, kinda hard to have a lusus cook for you when she lives inside an egg! Instead, it’s just another point she prides herself on, learning to feed herself.
She can do it. Ornery as her appetite may be, she’s parched for a heaping glass of Proving a Point About Something, To Someone, To Anyone and Anything At All!
The stairs only take twenty minutes to stumble down. Point #1, proved!, she thinks. If her head was any bigger, she’d topple over from the weight. I’m proving a point!, sloshing half the pot of water onto her shirt. #2, secured, so safe and sound. Humming to herself, she turns on the stove and waits for Point #3 to come to a boil. She dumps in the grubaroni, and tries not to cringe when she hears the hard pasta clatter against the counter. Cooking with elbow vision was easy, up until now.
But maybe she can still have her dinner and her control-flavored cake and eat it all too!
She fumbles for this metaphorical cake as much as the spilled pasta—I’m proving a point I’m proving a point I’m proving a point.
I’m—
Stupid, foolish, idiot girl, not paying attention when she should, not thinking how she should! When thinking’s kept her alive alone in the woods without an actual lusus, when thinking’s kept the world from ending, until now.
—burning oh my god I’m fucking burning again why is it back the red the sun the hurt WHY DO I HAVE NO FUCKING CONTROL OVER MYSELF—
At the very least she should have heard the flickering from the stove burner; if her hearing’s so fantastically sharp, she should have heard the fucking flickering! But no, she just had to be so focused on finding the pasta that she can’t see that she had to stick her elbow in the burner she can’t see and burst open the blisters she can’t see because she’s fucking BLIND!
Goodbye hunger, hello nausea—her digestion sack changes its tune: throw me up, throw me up! Very annoying, basic bodily reactions.
Slapping the burner off (she’s not gonna puke while leaving the stove running, she’s not that much of an idiot), she falls to the ground, breath shallow. She wraps her arms around herself but that lasts all of a microsecond. Her wounds are too tender for hugs.
Physical pain is, among many trolls, a point of pride on Alternia. And if it means surviving, she can try adjusting to this attitude. To be a mighty mite and not just a mite. But what gets her is the goddamn memory of it all: how it felt for the light to tongue her body and brain, the sun rays to ravish her with blisters and burns, scalding her down to muscle and optic nerve.
For her autonomy to fail her, to keep her so fixed and frozen, the powerlessness so cold cold cold, only to melt her down like some sugary mess of a soured popsicle, as the red star had its way with her, licking and lavishing—
Lobotomizing the part responsible for her feelings would make life so much easier right about now! Sopor slime is the best next thing at least, and she’s gonna drown herself in it, drown herself until she forgets.
When Terezi runs back to her respiteblock, she sets world record after world record, in categories such as BEST IN FRANTIC WALL SCRAMBLING, or BEST IN FACE PLANTING, and of course GETTING LOST IN YOUR OWN HIVE FOR HUMILIATING AMOUNTS OF TIME! And because her old grubbish desire to be very best hasn’t finished betraying her yet, she goes for the gold in TRIPPING OVER SHIT!
Her toe catches on a doorstopper of a legal tome, and she goes flying—or less charitably, crashing—into more books. It explodes only the finest of her wounds, stinging so sky high with the leaking pus as a fun little bonus. At one time Terezi prided on being the most well-read troll her age. Now she could kill herself for leaving them scattered about in a scuttlebuggie wreck of a mess.
Unwilling to move, she decides that she just might.
Ding!
Someone’s messaging her—and a second and a third and fourth time, just for the fun of it—judging by the firing squad of notifications to her ears. Probably Karkat. Troll’s untouched by the shame of quadruple messaging, you gotta admire it! The thought of talking to him, teasing him until she can sniff out his glowing agony from behind the keyboard, cheers her considerably, to the point she feels blah rather than blah blah blah. Dare she say a flush is rising to her cheeks? The heat of a crush is much more manageable than the heat of the sun—and more amusing. And when she’s through bugging him she can go bug someone else. Nepeta’s always fun; maybe this time she’ll finally convince her to break up with that stinky sweaty sleazeball! After she succeeds there (which she will), Sollux will be awake for sure, fingers flying away as he sprints through whatever program he’s working on, sprinting away from the miseries of his own mind. He has to be depressed right now; and dealing with someone more depressing than herself will be like visiting one of those paradise planets the empire owns, god she can’t wait to get her head out of her ass—
Wait—
Wait.
If she thought she was an idiot for burning herself on the stove… no, apparently, she is! Just a straight up idiot. Prior to this disaster, it would have taken the universe fizzling out into a handful of sparkly stardust and dreams before she would dare call herself stupid, but life’s full of surprises! Surprises in the business of slurping her soul from her body, down to the bone marrow. Stupid, simple, fucking MORONIC IDIOT GIRL! Of COURSE she can’t answer—she’s never talking to anybody EVER AGAIN!
For the grave felonies of being useless at cooking, useless at reading, useless at walking in a straight fucking line, useless at being a half-decent troll who keeps her friends safe (evidence: look at Tavros! Look at Aradia!), Terezi Pyrope, acting as His Honorable Tyranny, the jury, and legislacerator in one, is found guilty of at least sixty-seven instances of useless incompetency!
And for these grave felonies? She’s sentenced to a one-way ticket to the gallows.
She staggers to the ablutionblock, away from any windows that look onto her lusus. Egg shell or not, Terezi refuses for her to see her like this. On the way she bumps into her desk, trips over another stupid book—all par the course for this shiny new reality that’s gonna get her culled!
If I can’t walk straight, she thinks, back against the ablution trap and knees drawn to her chest, then I’m not even living to another half-sweep. Pain from the sun’s scarring stomps on her eyes at the thought. And if she somehow evades the drones before conscription? Bye bye to her, no way they’ll ever stick her on a starship, not even to be cannon fodder on some putrid colony planet. There’s simply no way.
She may be fucking stupid, but she’s not that fucking stupid.
And her friends—
Fresh grief washes over her, then freezes down into ice. Sure, the thought of her friends finding out she’s blind leaves her sorta sick, sick enough that gagging herself with a spoon sounds just as good, but… they’re her friends! Who else will take on the tough responsibility of pissing them off, of keeping everyone safe and steady and sound?
Of keeping everything under control, as is expected from her?
If she breaks, the world will end. What’s alarming to realize is that it already has. Not by the click of a doomsday clock, not by the inferno of a dragon’s roar, but by the shitstorm of sitting in a darkness beyond the beyond, to the very ends of nothingness.
Once she’s sure that Dragon Mama’s off in dreamland, Terezi breaks. When’s the last time this happened, if ever?
Tears are an embarrassing and inflamed affair corroding away at her sensitive sores and swellings, but she doesn’t care, she doesn’t give even a smidgen of a single smelly shit: on and on, she cries and cries.
Daybreak should be cresting over the horizon now, the sky a sweet bubblegum pink dipped in periwinkle. She can’t see it, but the growing warmth against her skin tells her so.
It unsettles her.
Terezi doesn’t know how she made it outside, nor why she’s even here at all. Hours of crying has left her wrung out like a rag—her poor, poor eyes. Ridiculously swollen, she'd feel sorry for them if she wasn’t so pissed at them for refusing to do their job! She’s beyond a brain, beyond a body, beyond much of anything besides the breeze catching her tree’s gigantic boroughs.
The drop-off from her balcony to the forest floor is at least fifty feet. High enough for a body to hit the ground with a satisfying splat!,low enough for the fall to not take forever and give someone time to regret jumping.
It’s tempting to slip off the edge. Because really, isn’t she just gonna die at some point? Better to do it sooner rather than later. Better to call it an accident than face the shame of dying in a mass culling.
But is that actually what she wants? Any of this?
She stares into the void underneath her feet. It’s an actual void, not a hole of darkness or anything. An emptiness ready to be hatched into something.
The void surrounds her like a shroud. Standing in this liminal space of beginnings and ends, a presence joins her in the nothingness. Or so she imagines. It’s Sollux, she thinks—she doesn’t have to see him to know. Then there’s Nepeta, then there’s sweaty smelly sleazeball Equius. Then Aradia and Tavros, standing by side. Gamzee joins them next. Eridan and Feferi. Kanaya. Even Vriska.
When Karkat joins her, he takes her hand in his. Hand-in-hand, just like how she wants, both blushing to the tips of their horns, both slipping off the precipice together.
Somewhere below is her lusus.
She feels her way to the pulley. Look at her, she’s trying, how novel! I’m trying, she thinks, humbled by the threads of terror tugging at her when she almost slides out of the basket. Guess she doesn’t wanna die after all, here’s the proof in the pudding! I’m trying through the rope rubbing her hands raw, I’m trying taking an uncertain step, I’m trying praying that she’s in the direction of the pedestal. She tries because how else can she stand herself—literally and figuratively!
One step, two step, ten steps, twenty points tried.
When the grass is patchy, she knows she’s at the scales. She could kiss her past self for wearing down a spot, for visiting her lusus so many times, despite never expecting the same courtesy in return. Exhausted, she collapses to her knees.
And she reaches out.
Beneath her palm is the smooth surface of the eggshell, cool to the touch. In her mind’s eye, she can imagine its shimmering color, like a marble. It’s a balm to her burns.
She closes her eyes.
—Oinkbeasts must be flying, because she’s asking for help! Certainly the world is at its end!—
teach me.
