[Fanfic] Momentum
Title: Momentum (Parts 7-8 + Epilogue)
Fandom: Homestuck
Characters/Pairings: Aradia, Sollux, Nepeta, Vriska, Equius, Terezi, Eridan, Kanaya, Tavros, Feferi; Sollux?Aradia, Equius♥/♠Aradia, implied Eridan♠Vriska, implied Sollux♥Feferi
Warnings: Spoilers for Hivebent (Act5-1) I guess?
Word count: (total) 27,563
7
centaursTesticle [CT] began trolling apocalypseArisen [AA]
CT: D --> Aradia
CT: D --> This is una%eptable
CT: D --> Completely ine%cusable
CT: D --> I won’t stand for it
AA: what are y0u talking ab0ut
CT: D --> I have just found out, through a convo100ted series of conversations, that the b100 team will be led by that scum-b100d Sollu% Captor
CT: D --> I am not having any of this
AA: s0llux will n0t lead the blue team
AA: it has already been decided
AA: he was never meant t0
CT: D --> …Oh
CT: D --> Aradia
CT: D --> This is an e%quisite power play
AA: what
CT: D --> No need to e%plain, I understand completely
CT: D --> You have allowed him to believe he is the leader in order to gain his irrevocable support
CT: D --> And you plan to use him as a member of the team, a mere pawn
CT: D --> I am e%tremely impressed that someone of your position could develop such an elegant plan
AA: thats n0t really h0w it happened
AA: but the result is the same s0 whatever
CT: D --> You are humble
CT: D --> As befitting someone of your rank
CT: D --> But you will need assistance for your plan to su%eed
CT: D --> We will co-lead the b100 team
CT: D --> With your natural grace and my cunning and influence we will be unstoppable
AA: thats fine
CT: D --> You are a%epting my proposal then
AA: this is the way it was meant t0 be
AA: s0 im 0k with it
CT: D --> Yes
CT: D --> Yes that is e%actly the response I was hoping for
CT: D --> This game will be entirely in our control
AA: are y0u sure y0ure 0k with that
AA: being c0leaders with a peasant girl
AA: 0_0
CT: D --> It is a fleeting problem
CT: D --> In time it will cease to matter
CT: D --> Until then, do not concern yourself about it
CT: D --> This co-leadership will be a secret for now
CT: D --> In the meantime carry on with your plan
centaursTesticle [CT] ceased trolling apocalypseArisen [AA]
------
Equius and Vriska later had a conversation we already read, which began like this:
AG: Equiiiiiiiiuuuuuuuus.
And ended like this:
AG: D8n't you d8re!!!!!!!!
And then Equius went to check on the robot.
------
It was all nonsense, anyway. He knew it, and she knew it, and he knew she knew it, and he knew she knew he knew it, and…
In any case, it was all nonsense, and everyone involved was aware of that fact. Equius would proceed with his plan to be in cahoots with Aradia long enough to take total control for himself. But he would not leave her out in the proverbial cold. No, with her, in her new position in society, by his side, together they would dominate this silly game, blue and red teams alike, and save their civilization.
For that to occur, he needed to get this robot finished and into her ghostly hands as soon as possible. He removed the tarp he had covering it, protecting it from prying eyes, and gazed on its shiny gray and blue form. His model had been nearly perfect, and so copying the robot directly from her would have made a nearly perfect creation. But that was not good enough. All her imperfections, every drop of red that had marred her inside and out, had been improved, upgraded. Perfected. Blue, his very lifeblood and that of his lusus, sat dormant within the robot body, waiting to flow through perfect mechanical veins into perfect mechanical limbs and a perfect mechanical head and back towards a perfect mechanical heart.
No, wait.
That was the final change. The heart, he finally decided--after hours, days, of wavering back and forth--the heart was not perfect. This could easily be fixed, though. The chip he had made for this purpose was already complete, still sitting on the counter where he had left it after the last time he had changed his mind and taken it out. The thought of installing it, finally installing it and leaving it there, was making him…sweat.
He swept the robotic form into his arms, admiring how the light of the moons reflected off her metal eyes and her hair. Yes. Yes, this was as it was meant to be, with her and her perfect blue blood wrapped tightly and safely in his strong grasp. Together they would--
You’ll what?
That voice… Equius turned sharply to stare at one of his other robots in the block. It stared back. His robots were not built to speak, but sometimes he liked to pretend they could. That delusion was better than talking to himself.
A filthy red-blood is still filthy, even if she is no longer a red-blood. You can’t change what she is.
Equius’s glowering shot through his shades at the robot, but it remained unperturbed, despite the silent reminder of the one who’d made it.
Freak. You’re a freakish brute, and a hypocrite. Have fun filling pails with your low-class matespr--
At the end of his fist, the robot crashed out of his block through the wall and exploded in the air outside, causing his entire hive to tremble.
“Any more objections?!” he demanded, staring down each of the other robots in turn. But the example had been made.
At least the rumbling outside of his hive had--
There was a loud explosion from down below, and as Equius watched with wide eyes, it tore his hive into two pieces, sending the inside wall of that very block and everything on the other side of it tumbling into the crevice between his hive and Vriska’s. That in itself would not have concerned him terribly, but as he peered over the edge, he could only watch in horror as a white figure plunged into the widened chasm below.
He cried out the name of his lusus, but it was too late. White became white and blue on the sharp rocks below. Equius turned away, feeling sick.
apocalypseArisen [AA] began trolling centaursTesticle [CT]
AA: equius
AA: hell0
AA: are y0u there
Eventually, the nearby sound of Trollian’s message notifications pierced through his clouded mind.
AA: y0u really sh0uld answer me
AA: its kind 0f imp0rtant
For a while, Equius toyed with the idea of ignoring the messages entirely, but the noise was bothering him. Might as well see who it was and what they wanted and get it over with.
centaursTesticle [CT] began trolling apocalypseArisen [AA]
CT: D --> What is it
CT: D --> I am attempting to have a private moment of mourning
CT: D --> This is une%pectedly horrible timing
AA: y0ur lusus just died didnt it
CT: D --> How did you know that
AA: it was meant t0 happen
AA: all 0f y0ur lusii will die
AA: but y0u can bring him back
CT: D --> How
CT: D --> Tell me
AA: i am g0ing t0 c0nnect t0 y0u
AA: t0 begin this game
AA: which will all0w him t0 c0me back t0 life
AA: is y0ur grub ready
CT: D --> It appears to be e%creting a strange f100id
CT: D --> And some sort of round apparatus
AA: g00d that means its hatching
AA: mine t00
AA: we have n0w established a c0nnecti0n
CT: D --> Now what
AA: n0w all y0u have t0 d0 is press enter
CT: D --> Very well
CT: D --> Do all games employ such e%crutiatingly esoteric loading screens
AA: n0
AA: n0w
AA: i am ab0ut t0 perf0rm s0me menial ch0res in supp0rt 0f y0ur her0ic escapades
AA: meanwhile maybe y0u sh0uld g0 check 0n y0ur lusus
CT: D --> I will do that
centaursTesticle [CT] ceased trolling apocalypseArisen [AA]
The many stairs his hive contained would take far too long to traverse. Instead, he jumped down from the edge of the torn block, landing on the surface of the part of his hive that had fallen and splintering it further. But the structure was made strong and sure, and it managed to hold up at least enough to keep the body of his dead lusus from falling deeper into the chasm. Difficult though it was to look at the broken body, Equius forced himself to kneel beside him. Fearful of breaking his lusus’s fragile form any further, he would not touch him.
“Aurthour,” he mumbled, his movements frozen with grief and fear. “Aurthour, you…have served me well over the sweeps.” His words were uncharacteristically poorly chosen, halting, confused. “After everything I’ve put you through, everything you’ve done for me…and especially your final sacrifice, your donation of your own perfect blood to me, I…”
Trailing off, he turned away to blink back pale blue tears. “I will never forget your--” He stopped, noticing some strange undulating light hanging above his head.
“What in the heck?”
Equius rose to his feet, stepping back in shock as the body of his lusus was lifted towards the blinking, shifting kernel and merged with it in a blinding flash of light so bright that even with his shades he had to throw his hands up over his face.
AURTHOURSPRITE: Equius, my boy!
EQUIUS: D --> A-Aurthour
EQUIUS: D --> What does this mean
EQUIUS: D --> You can talk now
AURTHOURSPRITE: It appears so! I have been waiting an awfully long time to speak with you!
EQUIUS: D --> This is e%tremely confusing
AURTHOURSPRITE: Yes, I rather suspect it is! And we will have plenty of time to speak later!
AURTHOURSPRITE: But for now I think you may find it practical to return to your respiteblock and continue speaking with your friend.
AURTHOURSPRITE: Otherwise there may not be plenty of time to speak at all!
EQUIUS: D --> I will do that, but
EQUIUS: D --> The idea that we are friends is
EQUIUS: D --> E%tremely disorienting
EQUIUS: D --> I don’t suppose you can acquire me a towel in that state
AURTHOURSPRITE: I’m afraid not, my boy!
EQUIUS: D --> Fudgesicles
apocalypseArisen [AA] began trolling centaursTesticle [CT]
AA: equius
AA: y0u really sh0uld alchemize y0urself s0me s0rt of m0bile c0mmunicati0n device
AA: but we can d0 that later
AA: are y0u there yet
CT: D --> What have you done to my hive
AA: i have merely depl0yed the appliances that will all0w y0u t0 pr0ceed and succeed in the game
CT: D --> My recuperacoon is ruined
CT: D --> And where is my toilet
AA: they were in the way
AA: s0 i br0ke them
AA: 0_0
AA: s0rry
CT: D --> It
CT: D --> It is not a huge problem, but
CT: D --> What are all these contraptions
AA: i can explain everything later if y0u want
AA: f0r n0w there is 0ne thing i need y0u t0 d0
CT: D --> What
AA: i just made y0u a b0w 0ut 0f 0ne 0f y0ur cruxite d0wels
AA: f0r y0u t0 pr0ceed and enter the game itself y0u will need t0 break it
CT: D --> …
CT: D --> I can do that
CT: D --> Wait
CT: D --> What was that
CT: D --> What’s going on
AA: y0ur hive just c0llapsed
AA: y0u will n0w plummet t0 y0ur untimely death unless y0u d0 s0mething immediately
CT: D --> WHAT
AA: you really sh0uld just hurry up and g0 break that b0w
CT: D --> Very well
8
Twenty-one music boxes. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-four music boxes visible from her vantage point, atop the remains of her destroyed hive. It seemed that even though Aradia had abandoned it, the game had decided she had not. It was just as well. She could operate from here as well as from anywhere.
Nepeta was a skilled player and even better at taking direction, just two of the many reasons Aradia had chosen her as her server player, but her quick actions in getting the dead girl into the Medium meant that Aradia had been waiting here in the Land of Quartz and Melody for an excruciatingly boring twenty minutes before her client arrived with her robot body. Equius fell from the portal above her, the present tucked carefully and securely under one arm. As he straightened from his descent, she listlessly inspected the body from her lofty vantage point several feet off the ground.
It was well-made, that much was certain, and though she noticed all the blue additions…whatever, it didn’t matter. A robot body was a body after all, and she would have a difficult time getting through this game and towards their final destination without it.
Equius seemed agitated upon arrival, and only grew more so the longer he stared at her floating, froggy, dead form. She decided it would be best to spare the both of them another moment of awkward staring back and forth and headed towards the robot. The voices had made it clear enough that they would have plenty of time for awkwardness as they adventured together through the game.
Slowly, like viscous honey, she dripped into the robot, filling in the spaces within the metal frame. Strange sensations she had forgotten began seeping just as slowly back to her: the feeling of being real, physical; having hair and horns and a metal surrogate of flesh. Activated by her presence, the blood within the robot body began to pump and flow, fueling movement, allowing her to grasp things and alter things and experience, in a strange way, breathing again, being alive again.
“How does it feel?” he asked her, and Aradia took little time to consider her answer. “Different,” was her response, quick and easy. But it was more than that. The feelings took longer to come back than that sensation of being alive did, but slowly they too were returning. He prompted her, encouraged her to turn her gaze inward and recognize what she had gained back since her death. The more he spoke, the more she realized there was, perhaps, something stirring within her, something…something…
Suddenly it hit her, hard, the two patron feelings of the concupiscent quadrants at once, rattling her with their sudden strength and disparity. There was hate there, at the very center of her, a core of anger and fury and retaliation that she had forgotten existed. There was love there, coupled with it, or something like it, a shell of gratitude for reminding her of what she had misplaced all those weeks ago when she died. And then there was a strange sort of love stamped into the part of her chest where her blue heart pumped blue blood, pulling her in a direction she had never even considered. And then there was, around that, a strong casing of hate that lingered from the days when her red heart had pumped rusty red blood, shoving her along in yet another direction.
“Oh my god what did you do!” she cried, confused and torn in so many ways. With one hand and half her focus she took hold of him, kept him from running away; the other clenched by her chest, the source of all this insane, tormenting turmoil. He began babbling, half-choked by her power, explaining what he’d done, offering to remove it. By the time he was finished she couldn’t hear him anymore over the swirl of emotions tangling up inside her, old anger clashing with new; fake love at odds with true appreciation.
“Get it out!” she gasped, losing sight of reason. “Get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out!!”
Equius watched, helpless, as she plunged her strong robot hand into her apparently less-strong robot chest and tore from it, in a splash of blue blood, the heart he had so painstakingly and lovingly created, and ruined with one final poor decision.
“This…disgusting…piece of garbage! Trash! Worthless vile filth!”
Unable to intercept her, he could only look on as she pounded it to pieces on the platform of her alchemiter, ignoring his cries for her to stop.
She only did so when the heart was an unrecognizable pulp of blood and metal on the pure white surface, the chip completely decimated along with it. But then she turned her attention on him, grabbing him by the collar of his tank and shaking him, slapping him.
“And you, you’re even worse! You stupid hypocritical blue-blooded SNOB!!” Any other troll would have broken much like that heart beneath her hand, but Equius held on, managing to take her assault without fracturing. For once his freakish strength was coming in handy.
Her grip tightened further, physical threat turned verbal barrage, and she screamed into his face from point-blank range.
“You think you can just do whatever you please? You think you can mess with my emotions like they’re your toys?! I AM NOT YOUR PLAYTHING, EQUIUS ZAHHAK! I AM NOT YOUR PAWN TO MOVE AND CHANGE AT WILL! I AM AS MUCH A TROLL AS YOU ARE! SO FUCK YOUR STUPID CHIP, FUCK THE HEMOSPECTRUM, FUCK THE POWER YOU THINK YOU HAVE OVER ME, AND FUCK YOU!!”
And then she was kissing him, and Equius didn’t care why. He wrapped her tight in his arms, and her grip around him was just as strong, just as passionate. Barely daring to breathe for fear this was all a dream, he just let it happen, reveling in its existence, too afraid to question it.
When an eternity later she broke away, glassy red eyes revealing nothing, he could only watch her helplessly, afraid to make a move before she did.
“We have much to do,” was all she would say, however, turning her sights away from him and onto the music boxes riddling her land. “We should get started.”
“Y-yes,” he managed to answer, feeling very much as if he had just awoken to a dream that would not go away. “Let us do that.”
Equius would have agreed to anything at that point, the feeling of helplessness before her strange but inviting. Where she went, he would follow, and though he had little idea of where she was headed and why, he made up his mind to go with her, fight with her, protect her if necessary. And for once he didn’t stop to wonder over silly things like propriety or respectability.
Aradia knew he would follow her, without him needing to say a word. The voices told her as much. They also told her of an item, something that could help her deal with this nasty tangle of emotions that had suddenly taken over her core. While her eventual goal remained the same, she now had a secondary one, and Equius would help her until she reached it. Together they set out, into the Land of Quartz and Melody, with enemies looming on the horizon.
------
Aradia watched with a blank expression as Equius tore the final imp limb from limb from limb from limb from limb from limb. Six limbs: four horse, two frog. He had insisted upon dispatching this batch of them himself, and she found his stubbornness and vacillating take on whether he wanted to lead her or vice versa positively infuriating. Emotions were a double-edged sword, she was finding. On one hand, they were powerful, potent ingredients in any sort of relationship--black, red, or otherwise--but on the other, they could be crippling. Or confusing. She assumed this vacant face to try to quell them, while finding that the process was not so simple.
“It’s safe now,” he reported breathlessly, wiping his forehead with the singular, already soaked towel he had recovered from his hive before abandoning it. “Are you alright?”
“None of them even came close enough to touch me,” she reminded him, setting him with a glassy-eyed stare. “Do you think you can stop being so ridiculous? We’ll get farther in this game if you do.”
A wave of panic passed over his face. “I don’t know what you mean. What am I doing that’s ridiculous?”
“This idiotic and overwhelming desire to protect me is what’s ridiculous. Ribbit,” she added.
The towel passed once more over his brow. “I’m afraid I still don’t understand. This is what we agreed upon, you being the secret leader over me, and me--”
“Being a leader doesn’t mean you don’t get to do anything.” He took a step back, knowing what that flash in her red eyes meant. “We’ve been at this for three hours already and you’ve refused to let me touch so much as an imp. Isn’t this more like you bossing me around?”
“I-I--”
“I’ve had enough!”
“Very well!” he interrupted, holding up his hands in surrender. “If you want to be the one to defeat the imps--”
“NO!” she cried, robot hands clenching powerfully around nothing. He winced, remembering the feeling of that grip dangerously close to his throat. “You just don’t get it! Have you never heard of teamwork?”
“Well I--”
“Without stabbing each other in the back?”
“That’s not really how blue-bloods do things--”
“That’s what’s ridiculous!”
Equius watched as Aradia slowly schooled her expression back to a neutral form and let her speak.
“We will work together from now on, on everything. To defeat these enemies, and to progress in the game.”
“If those are your orders, then--”
“They’re not orders.” Reigning her emotions in formed a tight feeling inside her robot chest, where he’d furnished her with a new, chipless heart. “Just something that would be nice if you wanted to do.”
“Because…it’s something you want me to want to do?” Equius pondered slowly, growing more confused with each word he spoke.
“I…wait, no, it’s…”
They grew silent, staring at each other.
“Ribbit,” said Aradia.
“This is extremely perplexing,” said Equius.
“Yes.” She turned her attention to the closest music box, around which a gang of ogres was watching them with bloodthirsty eyes. “How about this, why don’t you try it and see how you feel about it?”
He noticed them, too, and he swallowed his exhaustion from the last three hours once more, making fists. “Ok, we’ll try that.”
------
Equius Zahhak did not get tired. That was going to be his claim from now until the world ended, ignoring the fact that it was already about to, and no matter what he was not going to give up that assertion for all the boonbucks on this strange planet.
“You look exhausted, Equius.”
“I don’t…get…tired,” he panted, leaning against a golden structure amidst the quartz.
“Uh-huh. Why don’t you take a rest?”
He scowled at her. “Without a proper…recuperacoon filled with sopor slime? And with ogres, lichs, and…imps shuffling around everywhere? Jokes are…unbecoming of you, Aradia, and you’ll…stop.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Is that an order?”
“Was me taking a rest an order?”
“Ok, fine. It’s not an order, but you’re not going to get very far in that state. And I wasn’t joking.
“Sleep,” she repeated, a little kinder. “I can’t do much about the nightmares, but I can keep watch.”
“You…you fought just as hard as I these last few hours,” he stated, sounding confused by the very existence of the words.
“I’m a robot. I don’t need sleep.” She took him by the shoulders and pressed him firmly against one of the music boxes, grateful that any new sweat that action may have caused went indistinguishable from what was already there. In his state, he had little energy to protest, though he attempted to anyway.
“This is most…irregular, Aradia, you…shouldn’t be…”
“You should sleep,” she murmured, stepping away from him. Before he could finish his sentence, exhaustion had won out, and the vision of her before him blurred into the ice blue of the land as his eyes closed. He didn’t have to tell her he was only obeying. Some habits were simply necessary, but others were hard to break.
------
Sometimes they just wandered, side by side, when those nearby enemies had caught a glimpse of what the pair of them could do and chose wisely to leave them be. Sometimes they remained silent, only guessing at what the other was thinking. Other times they spoke.
“Where did Aurthour get to, anyway?” he asked once, long after he had had to abandon his one rag of a towel.
“He will be able to join you later,” she explained, counting music boxes again in her head.
He stopped to wipe his brow with the back of his hand, and to look at her carefully. “You seem to know an awful lot about this game.”
“When I prototyped myself into the kernelsprite, I gained an enormous amount of information about the game’s inner workings.”
“Then why have you remained silent about it?” Equius demanded incredulously.
“You didn’t ask.”
He paused. “So if I ask you a question, you will answer?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
Aradia stopped to inspect one of the smaller music boxes protruding out from the crystal of her world, noting its features dismissively. “That is also a construct of the game. Answers are not meant to come easily.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” The music box was partially encased in quartz, and she couldn’t captchalogue it easily.
Equius ground his teeth a little, ignoring the feeling of more little bits of them breaking off. “What is the point of this game?”
“It is an elaborate attempt to save our race.”
“You’ve already expressed the fact that we would fail. Why are we still playing?”
“Because some of us still believe we can succeed.”
“Then why are the rest of us still going?”
“Why do you keep living despite the fact that you will eventually die?” she countered.
“Your answers are unbearably ambiguous,” he told her, annoyed. “I demand that you stop.”
Her focus shifted briefly, sending a psychic pulse towards the music box. The quartz around it shattered violently, freeing the device.
Aradia calmly captchalogued the music box, and it disappeared into the ether amongst her other items, held in the sway of the spirits that spoke to her. “I can’t really control the ambiguity. And even if I could,” she added, turning towards him, “your demands are useless.”
Equius, however, seemed to have lost track of the conversation with her sudden display of destruction. Sweat shone again on his forehead and the side of his neck. “Why…why did you do that?”
She tilted her head at the crater in the quartz that the music box had left behind. “I felt like it,” was her only answer.
------
“You look exhausted,” he panted, leaning against a tall crystalline spire. Between them their sudden assailants, a pair of Quartz Giclops, had finally gone down in a shower of grist, but not without quite a bit of difficulty. Aradia had gone unscathed, and he was merely bleeding lightly from a scratch on his shoulder, but the fight had taken its toll nonetheless.
“I am a robot. I do not get exhausted. You, on the other hand--”
“I am…Equius Zahhak. I do not…get tired.”
“Your attempts are duplicity are both impotent and unimpressive.” Aradia settled on an outcropping of quartz and rested her metallic chin in a metallic hand. “Rest. I will keep watch as before.”
“Aradia--”
“Rest,” she insisted, and not for the first time Equius did not regret making a robot as strong as he was. He had little energy left to argue, and even less left to fight with her, and in some strange way it felt almost gratifying to comply, so he leaned obediently backwards until he was nearly horizontal on the quartz surface of the planet.
But sleep, even ignoring the lack of a proper recuperacoon and the soothing feel of the sopor slime around him, was difficult to come by. He remained awake, staring up at the starless, moonless, blank sky of her world. As he listened, she settled nearby to keep watch for underlings. She was so close, yet so far away. His eyes refused to close, still straying towards where she sat motionless, eternal, waiting. So close…
“Is…there anything nearby?” he asked, his breath returning slowly now that he was motionless.
“No. Perhaps they’ve taken the hint from our defeat of those two.” She pointed to where the bodies of the giclopses would be, if they had remained behind, even if he couldn’t see.
“Then maybe you could…”
“What?”
Grinding his teeth again, Equius passed the back of his hand over his brow, still soaked in blue-tinted sweat. “Perhaps you could…stop keeping watch…”
“I told you I’m not tired--”
“…and join me,” he finished, “maybe.”
She stared at him. “What.”
He shrugged to contain the way his body was trembling from exhaustion (or was that nerves?), keeping his gaze pointed at the sky. “Maybe you could join me. With your head,” he patted the upper part of his chest, by his collarbone, “right here.”
As he watched the sky, slowly her form came into view, looming over him. Her arms were crossed. “Is that an order?” she asked, sounding expectant, annoyed.
He closed his eyes, and for a while he didn’t know how to answer.
“It’s not an order,” he finally discovered. “Just something that would be nice if you wanted to do.”
“Ribbit,” was all she said, and Equius soon abandoned the line of thought that had led to the suggestion. It was probably too late. Maybe her feelings ran too black for him after all. She was too much a blue blood to take orders from him, and too much a red blood to happily comply with them anyway. Too much a red blood to issue any orders herself, and too much a blue blood to believe he’d go along with anything she ordered him. What had he done to himself, bringing this strange being into the world--one who was so much a member of both worlds so as to be a part of neither?
As if to further confound him, while sleep continued to elude him, he felt her settle onto his chest, warm metal a hard but strangely comforting weight upon him. He reached up between her curved metal horns and stroked her thin metallic strands of hair, and she didn’t retreat from him, didn’t slip away as subtly as she’d come. He didn’t ask her why, or what had caused her to grant his wish. She was too much a red blood to resist the intentions of the game, and too much a blue blood to give him a straight answer anyway. Feeling his eyes close heavily, he went to sleep dreaming of the mix of red and blue that she was, and woke up immediately in a land awash with purple.
------
When he came to, she was gone. Panic shot through Equius’s chest as he leapt up, ignoring the residual exhaustion as he cast around wildly for her. But she was merely a dozen or so yards away, dispatching a Gold Basilisk neatly with a wave of her hand, and collecting the cascade of grist that resulted. She stood still, moving her fingers carefully as if trying to calculate something.
“Aradia,” he began hesitantly, walking over to her. She stopped counting and turned slowly to look at him, take stock of him.
“It was attempting to sneak up on us,” she explained.
He shook his head, dismissing that line of conversation. “I dreamed,” he told her, “of a place entirely clad in purple. Is this another part of the game? What does it mean?”
“So you did wake up,” she acknowledged, in lieu of an answer.
“What does it mean?” Equius had little patience for the game’s ambiguity. In his dream he had glimpsed a world full of sleeping…sleeping friends, he supposed, all clad as equals, all dreaming what dreams he could not fathom. But she was not among them, her fellow blue-team members. Why?
She looked away from him, down at the spot where the basilisk had once stood, and eventually refused to answer. “I would like to discuss what you saw in your dream with you, Equius, but at the moment I’m short on time.”
“What do you mean? What’s--”
“I need to find a return node. There’s something I need to make.”
“Aradia, explain yourself!” She had begun to head towards a deep red portal just visible above a high cliff of quartz, but he took hold of her arm, stopping her. “You insisted that we work together in this game; are you going back on that now?”
Her robotic face was impassive as she turned her head a little to look back at him. The voices assuaged her that he would not hinder her until she had finished her task, and that he could not afterwards. “You may come with me,” she finally said, “but this has nothing to do with you.”
When he stared at her, unsure how to take this, she took it as consent and, with an arm around him, she lifted them both up into the air and towards the portal.
“So you’re not going to tell me what you need to make, or why it’s so important that you do it immediately?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it does not concern you.”
They floated with ease through the return node and blinked back into existence upon Aradia’s ruined hive. It looked as if Nepeta had been kind enough to make most of the available upgrades to her alchemiter in the time she had been gone.
“You’re wrong.” Equius stepped out of Aradia’s grip the moment his feet hit the ground, and she let him, already turning her attention to her task. Her first step was to get that music box’s code, so she activated her sylladex. “I am fairly concerned. Rather concerned. Your actions are very concerning.”
“Nevertheless, they are none of your business.” The spirits were being very cooperative. They spelled out the captchalogue code on her Ouija modus and the voices told her how to change it to fit her needs.
She could feel Equius’s agitation from where she worked, feeding the altered code into the alchemiter and funneling in the proper amounts and types of grist, but she had to ignore him for the time being. Just a little bit longer…
They appeared, finally, on the alchemiter’s platform, twin sets of music box parts mounted on stages of quartz. The last things she needed in order to exact revenge long overdue.
“Aradia--” He cut himself off before he said something he regretted, issued her an order that didn’t feel right anymore, somehow. But in his voice she sensed what he had intended to do, and his struggle with it, and took one last moment with him. After all, with these she had all the time in the world.
“Equius, thank you. What I am about to do I never could have done without your help. You…” She approached him, the music box time machines floating on either side as reminders of the work to be done. And though he waited for her to continue, for the first time she lacked the proper words. “You’ll understand eventually, what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it.”
The kiss she gave him this time was brief, but it lacked the harsh, messy fury of their last embrace. Their lips barely touched, his fingers barely skimmed over the smooth, cool surface of her arm, before she was gone in a flash of blue light.
The world she left behind felt empty, as empty as that from which he had left to find her. The Heir of Void could bring himself to remain here only briefly before he had to move on, the loneliness too encompassing. And besides, he figured, if he kept moving, eventually he would find her.
-Epilogue
Every time he watched those blue metallic lips move, to pronounce hollow words or to form small, half-smiles that were cheap imitations of their former selves, something inside Sollux died. And that was worrisome because Sollux had already died twice, literally, and many times more than that figuratively, so it was fairly likely that there was very little left in him that was capable of death, and he would rather not find out exactly how much.
It was bad enough their session had turned fruitless, that their reward had been snatched away from them the moment they thought they’d finally won. It was bad enough they were stuck here on this stupid asteroid, spinning out in space light years away from anything else resembling life, and it was bad enough that Karkat’s plan to do anything at all about it was to scream at the aliens they’d created like some newly-hatched grub hungry for more lusus milk. But to have to sit here cycle after cycle and watch her pantomime life, speaking almost exclusively to that freakish blue-blooded snob and having become that which she used to despise…
“Sollux? What’s wrong?”
He turned his head an inch and glanced up. Feferi’s usually excited features looked genuinely concerned as she watched him watch Aradia across their laboratory hide-out in the Veil. He had stepped away from his own console to clear his head, but he could only stare at her from over here, conversing quietly with Equius.
“It’th…I don’t know. It’th thtupid, I gueth.”
“Your face is what’s stupid!” she countered brightly, trying to cheer him up.
“Uh…thankth, Feferi.”
The princess’s smile fell as she reached over to Kanaya’s vacant console and borrowed her chair. “Okay, serious time. What’s going on?”
“Well…” Resting his hands on his knees, Sollux nodded over to where Aradia was seated. “You know, Aradia and I uthed to be really good friendth. And then a lot of thtuff happened and thhe died--”
“Yes, I remember Kanaya telling me a little about it when that happened.” Turning, Feferi glubbed in quiet disapproval at Vriska’s also empty chair.
“…Yeah. And thhe wath never the thame after that. At firtht I thought thhe wath mad at me but thhe’th jutht a completely different perthon now. And it thuckth becauthe even though thhe’th not really…dead anymore, thingth’ll never be the thame between uth.”
“Were you two flushed?” she asked, plastering innocence all over her face.
The mustardy color of Sollux’s blood seeped through to reveal itself on his cheeks. “Feferi…!”
“I’m being serious, glub! Because it certainly sounds like roemance is what was going on there. Or at least it was for you.”
Sollux gave her an uncertain look.
“Don’t worry, I won’t be shellfish and jealous like some people.”
“…Maybe. Yeth. I don’t know,” he sighed. “Maybe we were angling for that, but everything happened too fatht.”
A contemplative expression worked its way onto Feferi’s face. “Well, maybe you were, and maybe you weren’t. No use letting it eat at you, what would be the porpoise? People change and relationships change, and this is just another one of those times.”
“I gueth you’re right…”
She watched him carefully, her lips bent into a frown. “But it’s still krilling you that you can’t talk to her the way you used to.” He nodded. “That can be pretty roughy, but, sometimes you just have to reel in what you caught! You can’t always throw it back!”
“…Uh.”
“Oops, did I go overboard again?” Despite her sheepish grin, Feferi leaned over and took Sollux’s hand. “Sorry. Look, why don’t you just go talk to her? It’s got to be betta than ignoring each other, right?”
Together, the two of them glanced back over to the far side of the room, where Aradia and Equius were still quietly conversing.
“It’th not that eathy. Every time I go near her that athhole giveth me a fithhy look. I don’t need two high-clath bulge-thnifferth on my bad thide. No offenthe.”
“None taken,” she promised him, shaking her head. “But don’t you worry about Equius, I’ll take care of him!”
Before he could stop her, Feferi had stood and made her way over to the other side of the room, dodging the various items strewn about the floor.
“Equius! Can I talk to you for a second?”
Sollux would have been lying if he’d said the way Equius’s entire body froze up at the sound of their former empress-in-waiting calling him wasn’t absolutely hilarious, but he knew he’d have little time to spare laughing.
“Y-you wanted to speak to me, your highness?” he asked, already beginning to sweat as he made his way over.
“Yes, I was just thinking that despite being on the same team and all it’s a shame we’ve never really talked before!” she said brightly. “Don’t you think so?”
“I admit I was rather busy with the game, and I’m sure your majesty was as well, though had I known you had an interest in speaking to me, I’d--”
“Oh, hey, Equius, you should call me Feferi, right? I’m not reelly ruling over anyone anemonemore, am I?”
“I-if that’s what you wish, you--I mean, F--…Fefer--…”
“Oh wow, your face is really glubbing blue! Heehee! There’s really no need to get so worked up!”
While Feferi lured Equius away from his console, Sollux carefully made his way over to his own and sat down gingerly.
“Hey Aradia,” he managed to get out.
“Hello Sollux.”
He froze, watching her click around the humans’ timelines uninterestedly.
“Did you need something?” she prompted.
“I gueth…maybe…I don’t know.”
She turned her head to blink at him blankly. “Um.”
“It’th jutht that we don’t really talk anymore.”
“We have been speaking pretty regularly since the game started.”
“Yeah but that’th been jutht all kindth of thit about the game. I mean we haven’t talked like we uthed to.”
She blinked. For the first time, Sollux noticed her eyelids didn’t close at the same time when she did. He shuddered.
“I don’t really remember how we used to talk.”
Words died on his tongue, along with a good deal of whatever was left of him inside that was still alive.
“…Oh.”
Equius turned his face away from the former princess to hide his blush, but he started when his gaze locked onto Aradia’s new conversation partner. “What the heck--!” he muttered, taking a solitary stomp towards the side of the room from which he’d come.
Feferi grabbed his arm before he could get far and quelled his anger with a knowing smile. “Hey, let’s just let them talk, okay? Just for the halibut! Glub!”
He gave her a despairing look but consented, still watching the pair carefully. Aradia had her head tilted to the side as if in confusion.
“Maybe you could remind me. If that would make you happy.”
Uncomfortably, Sollux clenched the seat of his chair with both hands and looked down at the floor between them. “I don’t know, you alwayth uthed to pethter me about all kindth of thit that you were exthited about, and you’d athk me my opinion about them like it meant thomething to you.”
“I see.”
“But you don’t really get exthited about thingth anymore, do you?”
“It’s hard to get excited about anything when you know everything’s ending and when.”
“Thee, that’th what I’m talking about! You were never thith deprething before…before you died.”
“No, I don’t imagine I was.” Aradia blinked one eye, then the other, not quite in sync. “I believe I understand how to proceed. Actually Sollux, there’s been something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Yeah? What’th that?”
“Prospit,” she said quietly, her eyes falling half-lidded. “And Derse. You were on both of them… What were they like?”
Sollux blinked. “The voitheth never told you?”
“I never had a dreamself. There was never any reason to know.”
“Right…” Gathering himself, he sorted through his memories of the now-destroyed moons, trying to figure out how to describe them. “Well, Derthe bathically thucked. When I wath there no one elthe theemed to be awake, and the voitheth were louder than ever, tho I pretty much got out of there ath thoon ath I could. But Prothpit…” His mouth tilted into a half-smile at the memory despite himself. “Prothpit wath kinda nithe. It wath loud and KK wath thtupid, taking forever to wake up, but it wath almotht fun.”
Aradia listened with an intensity only she could employ, alive or dead, and if Sollux didn’t look at her directly he could trick himself into missing the dull shine of the lights off her metallic carapace. In fact, if he closed his left eye, she almost looked the way she had in life, red where she now was blue, healthy and flushed where cool metal now encased her body.
Feferi was right, he thought. People changed, and they could never really go back to the way things were. But as he spoke about Prospit, about sitting in Karkat’s tower with Terezi and Kanaya, watching him sleep, about his shock at seeing Vriska so genuinely happy for Tavros’s newfound flight, about the time Gamzee had nearly gotten away with riding his unireal air through the White Queen’s throne room, he began to think that perhaps he finally had the answer to his old question. Any Aradia, even a blue-blooded one who was often creepy and depressing to talk to, was better than none at all, and even if she could feel the remotest of emotions stirring in her mechanical robot heart, then at least that part of her was the same as the Aradia he once knew.
OMG. All that formatting. AUGH. AUUUUUGGHHHH.
/brb passing out
Fandom: Homestuck
Characters/Pairings: Aradia, Sollux, Nepeta, Vriska, Equius, Terezi, Eridan, Kanaya, Tavros, Feferi; Sollux?Aradia, Equius♥/♠Aradia, implied Eridan♠Vriska, implied Sollux♥Feferi
Warnings: Spoilers for Hivebent (Act5-1) I guess?
Word count: (total) 27,563
7
centaursTesticle [CT] began trolling apocalypseArisen [AA]
CT: D --> Aradia
CT: D --> This is una%eptable
CT: D --> Completely ine%cusable
CT: D --> I won’t stand for it
AA: what are y0u talking ab0ut
CT: D --> I have just found out, through a convo100ted series of conversations, that the b100 team will be led by that scum-b100d Sollu% Captor
CT: D --> I am not having any of this
AA: s0llux will n0t lead the blue team
AA: it has already been decided
AA: he was never meant t0
CT: D --> …Oh
CT: D --> Aradia
CT: D --> This is an e%quisite power play
AA: what
CT: D --> No need to e%plain, I understand completely
CT: D --> You have allowed him to believe he is the leader in order to gain his irrevocable support
CT: D --> And you plan to use him as a member of the team, a mere pawn
CT: D --> I am e%tremely impressed that someone of your position could develop such an elegant plan
AA: thats n0t really h0w it happened
AA: but the result is the same s0 whatever
CT: D --> You are humble
CT: D --> As befitting someone of your rank
CT: D --> But you will need assistance for your plan to su%eed
CT: D --> We will co-lead the b100 team
CT: D --> With your natural grace and my cunning and influence we will be unstoppable
AA: thats fine
CT: D --> You are a%epting my proposal then
AA: this is the way it was meant t0 be
AA: s0 im 0k with it
CT: D --> Yes
CT: D --> Yes that is e%actly the response I was hoping for
CT: D --> This game will be entirely in our control
AA: are y0u sure y0ure 0k with that
AA: being c0leaders with a peasant girl
AA: 0_0
CT: D --> It is a fleeting problem
CT: D --> In time it will cease to matter
CT: D --> Until then, do not concern yourself about it
CT: D --> This co-leadership will be a secret for now
CT: D --> In the meantime carry on with your plan
centaursTesticle [CT] ceased trolling apocalypseArisen [AA]
------
Equius and Vriska later had a conversation we already read, which began like this:
AG: Equiiiiiiiiuuuuuuuus.
And ended like this:
AG: D8n't you d8re!!!!!!!!
And then Equius went to check on the robot.
------
It was all nonsense, anyway. He knew it, and she knew it, and he knew she knew it, and he knew she knew he knew it, and…
In any case, it was all nonsense, and everyone involved was aware of that fact. Equius would proceed with his plan to be in cahoots with Aradia long enough to take total control for himself. But he would not leave her out in the proverbial cold. No, with her, in her new position in society, by his side, together they would dominate this silly game, blue and red teams alike, and save their civilization.
For that to occur, he needed to get this robot finished and into her ghostly hands as soon as possible. He removed the tarp he had covering it, protecting it from prying eyes, and gazed on its shiny gray and blue form. His model had been nearly perfect, and so copying the robot directly from her would have made a nearly perfect creation. But that was not good enough. All her imperfections, every drop of red that had marred her inside and out, had been improved, upgraded. Perfected. Blue, his very lifeblood and that of his lusus, sat dormant within the robot body, waiting to flow through perfect mechanical veins into perfect mechanical limbs and a perfect mechanical head and back towards a perfect mechanical heart.
No, wait.
That was the final change. The heart, he finally decided--after hours, days, of wavering back and forth--the heart was not perfect. This could easily be fixed, though. The chip he had made for this purpose was already complete, still sitting on the counter where he had left it after the last time he had changed his mind and taken it out. The thought of installing it, finally installing it and leaving it there, was making him…sweat.
He swept the robotic form into his arms, admiring how the light of the moons reflected off her metal eyes and her hair. Yes. Yes, this was as it was meant to be, with her and her perfect blue blood wrapped tightly and safely in his strong grasp. Together they would--
You’ll what?
That voice… Equius turned sharply to stare at one of his other robots in the block. It stared back. His robots were not built to speak, but sometimes he liked to pretend they could. That delusion was better than talking to himself.
A filthy red-blood is still filthy, even if she is no longer a red-blood. You can’t change what she is.
Equius’s glowering shot through his shades at the robot, but it remained unperturbed, despite the silent reminder of the one who’d made it.
Freak. You’re a freakish brute, and a hypocrite. Have fun filling pails with your low-class matespr--
At the end of his fist, the robot crashed out of his block through the wall and exploded in the air outside, causing his entire hive to tremble.
“Any more objections?!” he demanded, staring down each of the other robots in turn. But the example had been made.
At least the rumbling outside of his hive had--
There was a loud explosion from down below, and as Equius watched with wide eyes, it tore his hive into two pieces, sending the inside wall of that very block and everything on the other side of it tumbling into the crevice between his hive and Vriska’s. That in itself would not have concerned him terribly, but as he peered over the edge, he could only watch in horror as a white figure plunged into the widened chasm below.
He cried out the name of his lusus, but it was too late. White became white and blue on the sharp rocks below. Equius turned away, feeling sick.
apocalypseArisen [AA] began trolling centaursTesticle [CT]
AA: equius
AA: hell0
AA: are y0u there
Eventually, the nearby sound of Trollian’s message notifications pierced through his clouded mind.
AA: y0u really sh0uld answer me
AA: its kind 0f imp0rtant
For a while, Equius toyed with the idea of ignoring the messages entirely, but the noise was bothering him. Might as well see who it was and what they wanted and get it over with.
centaursTesticle [CT] began trolling apocalypseArisen [AA]
CT: D --> What is it
CT: D --> I am attempting to have a private moment of mourning
CT: D --> This is une%pectedly horrible timing
AA: y0ur lusus just died didnt it
CT: D --> How did you know that
AA: it was meant t0 happen
AA: all 0f y0ur lusii will die
AA: but y0u can bring him back
CT: D --> How
CT: D --> Tell me
AA: i am g0ing t0 c0nnect t0 y0u
AA: t0 begin this game
AA: which will all0w him t0 c0me back t0 life
AA: is y0ur grub ready
CT: D --> It appears to be e%creting a strange f100id
CT: D --> And some sort of round apparatus
AA: g00d that means its hatching
AA: mine t00
AA: we have n0w established a c0nnecti0n
CT: D --> Now what
AA: n0w all y0u have t0 d0 is press enter
CT: D --> Very well
CT: D --> Do all games employ such e%crutiatingly esoteric loading screens
AA: n0
AA: n0w
AA: i am ab0ut t0 perf0rm s0me menial ch0res in supp0rt 0f y0ur her0ic escapades
AA: meanwhile maybe y0u sh0uld g0 check 0n y0ur lusus
CT: D --> I will do that
centaursTesticle [CT] ceased trolling apocalypseArisen [AA]
The many stairs his hive contained would take far too long to traverse. Instead, he jumped down from the edge of the torn block, landing on the surface of the part of his hive that had fallen and splintering it further. But the structure was made strong and sure, and it managed to hold up at least enough to keep the body of his dead lusus from falling deeper into the chasm. Difficult though it was to look at the broken body, Equius forced himself to kneel beside him. Fearful of breaking his lusus’s fragile form any further, he would not touch him.
“Aurthour,” he mumbled, his movements frozen with grief and fear. “Aurthour, you…have served me well over the sweeps.” His words were uncharacteristically poorly chosen, halting, confused. “After everything I’ve put you through, everything you’ve done for me…and especially your final sacrifice, your donation of your own perfect blood to me, I…”
Trailing off, he turned away to blink back pale blue tears. “I will never forget your--” He stopped, noticing some strange undulating light hanging above his head.
“What in the heck?”
Equius rose to his feet, stepping back in shock as the body of his lusus was lifted towards the blinking, shifting kernel and merged with it in a blinding flash of light so bright that even with his shades he had to throw his hands up over his face.
AURTHOURSPRITE: Equius, my boy!
EQUIUS: D --> A-Aurthour
EQUIUS: D --> What does this mean
EQUIUS: D --> You can talk now
AURTHOURSPRITE: It appears so! I have been waiting an awfully long time to speak with you!
EQUIUS: D --> This is e%tremely confusing
AURTHOURSPRITE: Yes, I rather suspect it is! And we will have plenty of time to speak later!
AURTHOURSPRITE: But for now I think you may find it practical to return to your respiteblock and continue speaking with your friend.
AURTHOURSPRITE: Otherwise there may not be plenty of time to speak at all!
EQUIUS: D --> I will do that, but
EQUIUS: D --> The idea that we are friends is
EQUIUS: D --> E%tremely disorienting
EQUIUS: D --> I don’t suppose you can acquire me a towel in that state
AURTHOURSPRITE: I’m afraid not, my boy!
EQUIUS: D --> Fudgesicles
apocalypseArisen [AA] began trolling centaursTesticle [CT]
AA: equius
AA: y0u really sh0uld alchemize y0urself s0me s0rt of m0bile c0mmunicati0n device
AA: but we can d0 that later
AA: are y0u there yet
CT: D --> What have you done to my hive
AA: i have merely depl0yed the appliances that will all0w y0u t0 pr0ceed and succeed in the game
CT: D --> My recuperacoon is ruined
CT: D --> And where is my toilet
AA: they were in the way
AA: s0 i br0ke them
AA: 0_0
AA: s0rry
CT: D --> It
CT: D --> It is not a huge problem, but
CT: D --> What are all these contraptions
AA: i can explain everything later if y0u want
AA: f0r n0w there is 0ne thing i need y0u t0 d0
CT: D --> What
AA: i just made y0u a b0w 0ut 0f 0ne 0f y0ur cruxite d0wels
AA: f0r y0u t0 pr0ceed and enter the game itself y0u will need t0 break it
CT: D --> …
CT: D --> I can do that
CT: D --> Wait
CT: D --> What was that
CT: D --> What’s going on
AA: y0ur hive just c0llapsed
AA: y0u will n0w plummet t0 y0ur untimely death unless y0u d0 s0mething immediately
CT: D --> WHAT
AA: you really sh0uld just hurry up and g0 break that b0w
CT: D --> Very well
8
Twenty-one music boxes. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-four music boxes visible from her vantage point, atop the remains of her destroyed hive. It seemed that even though Aradia had abandoned it, the game had decided she had not. It was just as well. She could operate from here as well as from anywhere.
Nepeta was a skilled player and even better at taking direction, just two of the many reasons Aradia had chosen her as her server player, but her quick actions in getting the dead girl into the Medium meant that Aradia had been waiting here in the Land of Quartz and Melody for an excruciatingly boring twenty minutes before her client arrived with her robot body. Equius fell from the portal above her, the present tucked carefully and securely under one arm. As he straightened from his descent, she listlessly inspected the body from her lofty vantage point several feet off the ground.
It was well-made, that much was certain, and though she noticed all the blue additions…whatever, it didn’t matter. A robot body was a body after all, and she would have a difficult time getting through this game and towards their final destination without it.
Equius seemed agitated upon arrival, and only grew more so the longer he stared at her floating, froggy, dead form. She decided it would be best to spare the both of them another moment of awkward staring back and forth and headed towards the robot. The voices had made it clear enough that they would have plenty of time for awkwardness as they adventured together through the game.
Slowly, like viscous honey, she dripped into the robot, filling in the spaces within the metal frame. Strange sensations she had forgotten began seeping just as slowly back to her: the feeling of being real, physical; having hair and horns and a metal surrogate of flesh. Activated by her presence, the blood within the robot body began to pump and flow, fueling movement, allowing her to grasp things and alter things and experience, in a strange way, breathing again, being alive again.
“How does it feel?” he asked her, and Aradia took little time to consider her answer. “Different,” was her response, quick and easy. But it was more than that. The feelings took longer to come back than that sensation of being alive did, but slowly they too were returning. He prompted her, encouraged her to turn her gaze inward and recognize what she had gained back since her death. The more he spoke, the more she realized there was, perhaps, something stirring within her, something…something…
Suddenly it hit her, hard, the two patron feelings of the concupiscent quadrants at once, rattling her with their sudden strength and disparity. There was hate there, at the very center of her, a core of anger and fury and retaliation that she had forgotten existed. There was love there, coupled with it, or something like it, a shell of gratitude for reminding her of what she had misplaced all those weeks ago when she died. And then there was a strange sort of love stamped into the part of her chest where her blue heart pumped blue blood, pulling her in a direction she had never even considered. And then there was, around that, a strong casing of hate that lingered from the days when her red heart had pumped rusty red blood, shoving her along in yet another direction.
“Oh my god what did you do!” she cried, confused and torn in so many ways. With one hand and half her focus she took hold of him, kept him from running away; the other clenched by her chest, the source of all this insane, tormenting turmoil. He began babbling, half-choked by her power, explaining what he’d done, offering to remove it. By the time he was finished she couldn’t hear him anymore over the swirl of emotions tangling up inside her, old anger clashing with new; fake love at odds with true appreciation.
“Get it out!” she gasped, losing sight of reason. “Get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out get it out!!”
Equius watched, helpless, as she plunged her strong robot hand into her apparently less-strong robot chest and tore from it, in a splash of blue blood, the heart he had so painstakingly and lovingly created, and ruined with one final poor decision.
“This…disgusting…piece of garbage! Trash! Worthless vile filth!”
Unable to intercept her, he could only look on as she pounded it to pieces on the platform of her alchemiter, ignoring his cries for her to stop.
She only did so when the heart was an unrecognizable pulp of blood and metal on the pure white surface, the chip completely decimated along with it. But then she turned her attention on him, grabbing him by the collar of his tank and shaking him, slapping him.
“And you, you’re even worse! You stupid hypocritical blue-blooded SNOB!!” Any other troll would have broken much like that heart beneath her hand, but Equius held on, managing to take her assault without fracturing. For once his freakish strength was coming in handy.
Her grip tightened further, physical threat turned verbal barrage, and she screamed into his face from point-blank range.
“You think you can just do whatever you please? You think you can mess with my emotions like they’re your toys?! I AM NOT YOUR PLAYTHING, EQUIUS ZAHHAK! I AM NOT YOUR PAWN TO MOVE AND CHANGE AT WILL! I AM AS MUCH A TROLL AS YOU ARE! SO FUCK YOUR STUPID CHIP, FUCK THE HEMOSPECTRUM, FUCK THE POWER YOU THINK YOU HAVE OVER ME, AND FUCK YOU!!”
And then she was kissing him, and Equius didn’t care why. He wrapped her tight in his arms, and her grip around him was just as strong, just as passionate. Barely daring to breathe for fear this was all a dream, he just let it happen, reveling in its existence, too afraid to question it.
When an eternity later she broke away, glassy red eyes revealing nothing, he could only watch her helplessly, afraid to make a move before she did.
“We have much to do,” was all she would say, however, turning her sights away from him and onto the music boxes riddling her land. “We should get started.”
“Y-yes,” he managed to answer, feeling very much as if he had just awoken to a dream that would not go away. “Let us do that.”
Equius would have agreed to anything at that point, the feeling of helplessness before her strange but inviting. Where she went, he would follow, and though he had little idea of where she was headed and why, he made up his mind to go with her, fight with her, protect her if necessary. And for once he didn’t stop to wonder over silly things like propriety or respectability.
Aradia knew he would follow her, without him needing to say a word. The voices told her as much. They also told her of an item, something that could help her deal with this nasty tangle of emotions that had suddenly taken over her core. While her eventual goal remained the same, she now had a secondary one, and Equius would help her until she reached it. Together they set out, into the Land of Quartz and Melody, with enemies looming on the horizon.
------
Aradia watched with a blank expression as Equius tore the final imp limb from limb from limb from limb from limb from limb. Six limbs: four horse, two frog. He had insisted upon dispatching this batch of them himself, and she found his stubbornness and vacillating take on whether he wanted to lead her or vice versa positively infuriating. Emotions were a double-edged sword, she was finding. On one hand, they were powerful, potent ingredients in any sort of relationship--black, red, or otherwise--but on the other, they could be crippling. Or confusing. She assumed this vacant face to try to quell them, while finding that the process was not so simple.
“It’s safe now,” he reported breathlessly, wiping his forehead with the singular, already soaked towel he had recovered from his hive before abandoning it. “Are you alright?”
“None of them even came close enough to touch me,” she reminded him, setting him with a glassy-eyed stare. “Do you think you can stop being so ridiculous? We’ll get farther in this game if you do.”
A wave of panic passed over his face. “I don’t know what you mean. What am I doing that’s ridiculous?”
“This idiotic and overwhelming desire to protect me is what’s ridiculous. Ribbit,” she added.
The towel passed once more over his brow. “I’m afraid I still don’t understand. This is what we agreed upon, you being the secret leader over me, and me--”
“Being a leader doesn’t mean you don’t get to do anything.” He took a step back, knowing what that flash in her red eyes meant. “We’ve been at this for three hours already and you’ve refused to let me touch so much as an imp. Isn’t this more like you bossing me around?”
“I-I--”
“I’ve had enough!”
“Very well!” he interrupted, holding up his hands in surrender. “If you want to be the one to defeat the imps--”
“NO!” she cried, robot hands clenching powerfully around nothing. He winced, remembering the feeling of that grip dangerously close to his throat. “You just don’t get it! Have you never heard of teamwork?”
“Well I--”
“Without stabbing each other in the back?”
“That’s not really how blue-bloods do things--”
“That’s what’s ridiculous!”
Equius watched as Aradia slowly schooled her expression back to a neutral form and let her speak.
“We will work together from now on, on everything. To defeat these enemies, and to progress in the game.”
“If those are your orders, then--”
“They’re not orders.” Reigning her emotions in formed a tight feeling inside her robot chest, where he’d furnished her with a new, chipless heart. “Just something that would be nice if you wanted to do.”
“Because…it’s something you want me to want to do?” Equius pondered slowly, growing more confused with each word he spoke.
“I…wait, no, it’s…”
They grew silent, staring at each other.
“Ribbit,” said Aradia.
“This is extremely perplexing,” said Equius.
“Yes.” She turned her attention to the closest music box, around which a gang of ogres was watching them with bloodthirsty eyes. “How about this, why don’t you try it and see how you feel about it?”
He noticed them, too, and he swallowed his exhaustion from the last three hours once more, making fists. “Ok, we’ll try that.”
------
Equius Zahhak did not get tired. That was going to be his claim from now until the world ended, ignoring the fact that it was already about to, and no matter what he was not going to give up that assertion for all the boonbucks on this strange planet.
“You look exhausted, Equius.”
“I don’t…get…tired,” he panted, leaning against a golden structure amidst the quartz.
“Uh-huh. Why don’t you take a rest?”
He scowled at her. “Without a proper…recuperacoon filled with sopor slime? And with ogres, lichs, and…imps shuffling around everywhere? Jokes are…unbecoming of you, Aradia, and you’ll…stop.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Is that an order?”
“Was me taking a rest an order?”
“Ok, fine. It’s not an order, but you’re not going to get very far in that state. And I wasn’t joking.
“Sleep,” she repeated, a little kinder. “I can’t do much about the nightmares, but I can keep watch.”
“You…you fought just as hard as I these last few hours,” he stated, sounding confused by the very existence of the words.
“I’m a robot. I don’t need sleep.” She took him by the shoulders and pressed him firmly against one of the music boxes, grateful that any new sweat that action may have caused went indistinguishable from what was already there. In his state, he had little energy to protest, though he attempted to anyway.
“This is most…irregular, Aradia, you…shouldn’t be…”
“You should sleep,” she murmured, stepping away from him. Before he could finish his sentence, exhaustion had won out, and the vision of her before him blurred into the ice blue of the land as his eyes closed. He didn’t have to tell her he was only obeying. Some habits were simply necessary, but others were hard to break.
------
Sometimes they just wandered, side by side, when those nearby enemies had caught a glimpse of what the pair of them could do and chose wisely to leave them be. Sometimes they remained silent, only guessing at what the other was thinking. Other times they spoke.
“Where did Aurthour get to, anyway?” he asked once, long after he had had to abandon his one rag of a towel.
“He will be able to join you later,” she explained, counting music boxes again in her head.
He stopped to wipe his brow with the back of his hand, and to look at her carefully. “You seem to know an awful lot about this game.”
“When I prototyped myself into the kernelsprite, I gained an enormous amount of information about the game’s inner workings.”
“Then why have you remained silent about it?” Equius demanded incredulously.
“You didn’t ask.”
He paused. “So if I ask you a question, you will answer?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
Aradia stopped to inspect one of the smaller music boxes protruding out from the crystal of her world, noting its features dismissively. “That is also a construct of the game. Answers are not meant to come easily.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” The music box was partially encased in quartz, and she couldn’t captchalogue it easily.
Equius ground his teeth a little, ignoring the feeling of more little bits of them breaking off. “What is the point of this game?”
“It is an elaborate attempt to save our race.”
“You’ve already expressed the fact that we would fail. Why are we still playing?”
“Because some of us still believe we can succeed.”
“Then why are the rest of us still going?”
“Why do you keep living despite the fact that you will eventually die?” she countered.
“Your answers are unbearably ambiguous,” he told her, annoyed. “I demand that you stop.”
Her focus shifted briefly, sending a psychic pulse towards the music box. The quartz around it shattered violently, freeing the device.
Aradia calmly captchalogued the music box, and it disappeared into the ether amongst her other items, held in the sway of the spirits that spoke to her. “I can’t really control the ambiguity. And even if I could,” she added, turning towards him, “your demands are useless.”
Equius, however, seemed to have lost track of the conversation with her sudden display of destruction. Sweat shone again on his forehead and the side of his neck. “Why…why did you do that?”
She tilted her head at the crater in the quartz that the music box had left behind. “I felt like it,” was her only answer.
------
“You look exhausted,” he panted, leaning against a tall crystalline spire. Between them their sudden assailants, a pair of Quartz Giclops, had finally gone down in a shower of grist, but not without quite a bit of difficulty. Aradia had gone unscathed, and he was merely bleeding lightly from a scratch on his shoulder, but the fight had taken its toll nonetheless.
“I am a robot. I do not get exhausted. You, on the other hand--”
“I am…Equius Zahhak. I do not…get tired.”
“Your attempts are duplicity are both impotent and unimpressive.” Aradia settled on an outcropping of quartz and rested her metallic chin in a metallic hand. “Rest. I will keep watch as before.”
“Aradia--”
“Rest,” she insisted, and not for the first time Equius did not regret making a robot as strong as he was. He had little energy left to argue, and even less left to fight with her, and in some strange way it felt almost gratifying to comply, so he leaned obediently backwards until he was nearly horizontal on the quartz surface of the planet.
But sleep, even ignoring the lack of a proper recuperacoon and the soothing feel of the sopor slime around him, was difficult to come by. He remained awake, staring up at the starless, moonless, blank sky of her world. As he listened, she settled nearby to keep watch for underlings. She was so close, yet so far away. His eyes refused to close, still straying towards where she sat motionless, eternal, waiting. So close…
“Is…there anything nearby?” he asked, his breath returning slowly now that he was motionless.
“No. Perhaps they’ve taken the hint from our defeat of those two.” She pointed to where the bodies of the giclopses would be, if they had remained behind, even if he couldn’t see.
“Then maybe you could…”
“What?”
Grinding his teeth again, Equius passed the back of his hand over his brow, still soaked in blue-tinted sweat. “Perhaps you could…stop keeping watch…”
“I told you I’m not tired--”
“…and join me,” he finished, “maybe.”
She stared at him. “What.”
He shrugged to contain the way his body was trembling from exhaustion (or was that nerves?), keeping his gaze pointed at the sky. “Maybe you could join me. With your head,” he patted the upper part of his chest, by his collarbone, “right here.”
As he watched the sky, slowly her form came into view, looming over him. Her arms were crossed. “Is that an order?” she asked, sounding expectant, annoyed.
He closed his eyes, and for a while he didn’t know how to answer.
“It’s not an order,” he finally discovered. “Just something that would be nice if you wanted to do.”
“Ribbit,” was all she said, and Equius soon abandoned the line of thought that had led to the suggestion. It was probably too late. Maybe her feelings ran too black for him after all. She was too much a blue blood to take orders from him, and too much a red blood to happily comply with them anyway. Too much a red blood to issue any orders herself, and too much a blue blood to believe he’d go along with anything she ordered him. What had he done to himself, bringing this strange being into the world--one who was so much a member of both worlds so as to be a part of neither?
As if to further confound him, while sleep continued to elude him, he felt her settle onto his chest, warm metal a hard but strangely comforting weight upon him. He reached up between her curved metal horns and stroked her thin metallic strands of hair, and she didn’t retreat from him, didn’t slip away as subtly as she’d come. He didn’t ask her why, or what had caused her to grant his wish. She was too much a red blood to resist the intentions of the game, and too much a blue blood to give him a straight answer anyway. Feeling his eyes close heavily, he went to sleep dreaming of the mix of red and blue that she was, and woke up immediately in a land awash with purple.
------
When he came to, she was gone. Panic shot through Equius’s chest as he leapt up, ignoring the residual exhaustion as he cast around wildly for her. But she was merely a dozen or so yards away, dispatching a Gold Basilisk neatly with a wave of her hand, and collecting the cascade of grist that resulted. She stood still, moving her fingers carefully as if trying to calculate something.
“Aradia,” he began hesitantly, walking over to her. She stopped counting and turned slowly to look at him, take stock of him.
“It was attempting to sneak up on us,” she explained.
He shook his head, dismissing that line of conversation. “I dreamed,” he told her, “of a place entirely clad in purple. Is this another part of the game? What does it mean?”
“So you did wake up,” she acknowledged, in lieu of an answer.
“What does it mean?” Equius had little patience for the game’s ambiguity. In his dream he had glimpsed a world full of sleeping…sleeping friends, he supposed, all clad as equals, all dreaming what dreams he could not fathom. But she was not among them, her fellow blue-team members. Why?
She looked away from him, down at the spot where the basilisk had once stood, and eventually refused to answer. “I would like to discuss what you saw in your dream with you, Equius, but at the moment I’m short on time.”
“What do you mean? What’s--”
“I need to find a return node. There’s something I need to make.”
“Aradia, explain yourself!” She had begun to head towards a deep red portal just visible above a high cliff of quartz, but he took hold of her arm, stopping her. “You insisted that we work together in this game; are you going back on that now?”
Her robotic face was impassive as she turned her head a little to look back at him. The voices assuaged her that he would not hinder her until she had finished her task, and that he could not afterwards. “You may come with me,” she finally said, “but this has nothing to do with you.”
When he stared at her, unsure how to take this, she took it as consent and, with an arm around him, she lifted them both up into the air and towards the portal.
“So you’re not going to tell me what you need to make, or why it’s so important that you do it immediately?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it does not concern you.”
They floated with ease through the return node and blinked back into existence upon Aradia’s ruined hive. It looked as if Nepeta had been kind enough to make most of the available upgrades to her alchemiter in the time she had been gone.
“You’re wrong.” Equius stepped out of Aradia’s grip the moment his feet hit the ground, and she let him, already turning her attention to her task. Her first step was to get that music box’s code, so she activated her sylladex. “I am fairly concerned. Rather concerned. Your actions are very concerning.”
“Nevertheless, they are none of your business.” The spirits were being very cooperative. They spelled out the captchalogue code on her Ouija modus and the voices told her how to change it to fit her needs.
She could feel Equius’s agitation from where she worked, feeding the altered code into the alchemiter and funneling in the proper amounts and types of grist, but she had to ignore him for the time being. Just a little bit longer…
They appeared, finally, on the alchemiter’s platform, twin sets of music box parts mounted on stages of quartz. The last things she needed in order to exact revenge long overdue.
“Aradia--” He cut himself off before he said something he regretted, issued her an order that didn’t feel right anymore, somehow. But in his voice she sensed what he had intended to do, and his struggle with it, and took one last moment with him. After all, with these she had all the time in the world.
“Equius, thank you. What I am about to do I never could have done without your help. You…” She approached him, the music box time machines floating on either side as reminders of the work to be done. And though he waited for her to continue, for the first time she lacked the proper words. “You’ll understand eventually, what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it.”
The kiss she gave him this time was brief, but it lacked the harsh, messy fury of their last embrace. Their lips barely touched, his fingers barely skimmed over the smooth, cool surface of her arm, before she was gone in a flash of blue light.
The world she left behind felt empty, as empty as that from which he had left to find her. The Heir of Void could bring himself to remain here only briefly before he had to move on, the loneliness too encompassing. And besides, he figured, if he kept moving, eventually he would find her.
-Epilogue
Every time he watched those blue metallic lips move, to pronounce hollow words or to form small, half-smiles that were cheap imitations of their former selves, something inside Sollux died. And that was worrisome because Sollux had already died twice, literally, and many times more than that figuratively, so it was fairly likely that there was very little left in him that was capable of death, and he would rather not find out exactly how much.
It was bad enough their session had turned fruitless, that their reward had been snatched away from them the moment they thought they’d finally won. It was bad enough they were stuck here on this stupid asteroid, spinning out in space light years away from anything else resembling life, and it was bad enough that Karkat’s plan to do anything at all about it was to scream at the aliens they’d created like some newly-hatched grub hungry for more lusus milk. But to have to sit here cycle after cycle and watch her pantomime life, speaking almost exclusively to that freakish blue-blooded snob and having become that which she used to despise…
“Sollux? What’s wrong?”
He turned his head an inch and glanced up. Feferi’s usually excited features looked genuinely concerned as she watched him watch Aradia across their laboratory hide-out in the Veil. He had stepped away from his own console to clear his head, but he could only stare at her from over here, conversing quietly with Equius.
“It’th…I don’t know. It’th thtupid, I gueth.”
“Your face is what’s stupid!” she countered brightly, trying to cheer him up.
“Uh…thankth, Feferi.”
The princess’s smile fell as she reached over to Kanaya’s vacant console and borrowed her chair. “Okay, serious time. What’s going on?”
“Well…” Resting his hands on his knees, Sollux nodded over to where Aradia was seated. “You know, Aradia and I uthed to be really good friendth. And then a lot of thtuff happened and thhe died--”
“Yes, I remember Kanaya telling me a little about it when that happened.” Turning, Feferi glubbed in quiet disapproval at Vriska’s also empty chair.
“…Yeah. And thhe wath never the thame after that. At firtht I thought thhe wath mad at me but thhe’th jutht a completely different perthon now. And it thuckth becauthe even though thhe’th not really…dead anymore, thingth’ll never be the thame between uth.”
“Were you two flushed?” she asked, plastering innocence all over her face.
The mustardy color of Sollux’s blood seeped through to reveal itself on his cheeks. “Feferi…!”
“I’m being serious, glub! Because it certainly sounds like roemance is what was going on there. Or at least it was for you.”
Sollux gave her an uncertain look.
“Don’t worry, I won’t be shellfish and jealous like some people.”
“…Maybe. Yeth. I don’t know,” he sighed. “Maybe we were angling for that, but everything happened too fatht.”
A contemplative expression worked its way onto Feferi’s face. “Well, maybe you were, and maybe you weren’t. No use letting it eat at you, what would be the porpoise? People change and relationships change, and this is just another one of those times.”
“I gueth you’re right…”
She watched him carefully, her lips bent into a frown. “But it’s still krilling you that you can’t talk to her the way you used to.” He nodded. “That can be pretty roughy, but, sometimes you just have to reel in what you caught! You can’t always throw it back!”
“…Uh.”
“Oops, did I go overboard again?” Despite her sheepish grin, Feferi leaned over and took Sollux’s hand. “Sorry. Look, why don’t you just go talk to her? It’s got to be betta than ignoring each other, right?”
Together, the two of them glanced back over to the far side of the room, where Aradia and Equius were still quietly conversing.
“It’th not that eathy. Every time I go near her that athhole giveth me a fithhy look. I don’t need two high-clath bulge-thnifferth on my bad thide. No offenthe.”
“None taken,” she promised him, shaking her head. “But don’t you worry about Equius, I’ll take care of him!”
Before he could stop her, Feferi had stood and made her way over to the other side of the room, dodging the various items strewn about the floor.
“Equius! Can I talk to you for a second?”
Sollux would have been lying if he’d said the way Equius’s entire body froze up at the sound of their former empress-in-waiting calling him wasn’t absolutely hilarious, but he knew he’d have little time to spare laughing.
“Y-you wanted to speak to me, your highness?” he asked, already beginning to sweat as he made his way over.
“Yes, I was just thinking that despite being on the same team and all it’s a shame we’ve never really talked before!” she said brightly. “Don’t you think so?”
“I admit I was rather busy with the game, and I’m sure your majesty was as well, though had I known you had an interest in speaking to me, I’d--”
“Oh, hey, Equius, you should call me Feferi, right? I’m not reelly ruling over anyone anemonemore, am I?”
“I-if that’s what you wish, you--I mean, F--…Fefer--…”
“Oh wow, your face is really glubbing blue! Heehee! There’s really no need to get so worked up!”
While Feferi lured Equius away from his console, Sollux carefully made his way over to his own and sat down gingerly.
“Hey Aradia,” he managed to get out.
“Hello Sollux.”
He froze, watching her click around the humans’ timelines uninterestedly.
“Did you need something?” she prompted.
“I gueth…maybe…I don’t know.”
She turned her head to blink at him blankly. “Um.”
“It’th jutht that we don’t really talk anymore.”
“We have been speaking pretty regularly since the game started.”
“Yeah but that’th been jutht all kindth of thit about the game. I mean we haven’t talked like we uthed to.”
She blinked. For the first time, Sollux noticed her eyelids didn’t close at the same time when she did. He shuddered.
“I don’t really remember how we used to talk.”
Words died on his tongue, along with a good deal of whatever was left of him inside that was still alive.
“…Oh.”
Equius turned his face away from the former princess to hide his blush, but he started when his gaze locked onto Aradia’s new conversation partner. “What the heck--!” he muttered, taking a solitary stomp towards the side of the room from which he’d come.
Feferi grabbed his arm before he could get far and quelled his anger with a knowing smile. “Hey, let’s just let them talk, okay? Just for the halibut! Glub!”
He gave her a despairing look but consented, still watching the pair carefully. Aradia had her head tilted to the side as if in confusion.
“Maybe you could remind me. If that would make you happy.”
Uncomfortably, Sollux clenched the seat of his chair with both hands and looked down at the floor between them. “I don’t know, you alwayth uthed to pethter me about all kindth of thit that you were exthited about, and you’d athk me my opinion about them like it meant thomething to you.”
“I see.”
“But you don’t really get exthited about thingth anymore, do you?”
“It’s hard to get excited about anything when you know everything’s ending and when.”
“Thee, that’th what I’m talking about! You were never thith deprething before…before you died.”
“No, I don’t imagine I was.” Aradia blinked one eye, then the other, not quite in sync. “I believe I understand how to proceed. Actually Sollux, there’s been something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Yeah? What’th that?”
“Prospit,” she said quietly, her eyes falling half-lidded. “And Derse. You were on both of them… What were they like?”
Sollux blinked. “The voitheth never told you?”
“I never had a dreamself. There was never any reason to know.”
“Right…” Gathering himself, he sorted through his memories of the now-destroyed moons, trying to figure out how to describe them. “Well, Derthe bathically thucked. When I wath there no one elthe theemed to be awake, and the voitheth were louder than ever, tho I pretty much got out of there ath thoon ath I could. But Prothpit…” His mouth tilted into a half-smile at the memory despite himself. “Prothpit wath kinda nithe. It wath loud and KK wath thtupid, taking forever to wake up, but it wath almotht fun.”
Aradia listened with an intensity only she could employ, alive or dead, and if Sollux didn’t look at her directly he could trick himself into missing the dull shine of the lights off her metallic carapace. In fact, if he closed his left eye, she almost looked the way she had in life, red where she now was blue, healthy and flushed where cool metal now encased her body.
Feferi was right, he thought. People changed, and they could never really go back to the way things were. But as he spoke about Prospit, about sitting in Karkat’s tower with Terezi and Kanaya, watching him sleep, about his shock at seeing Vriska so genuinely happy for Tavros’s newfound flight, about the time Gamzee had nearly gotten away with riding his unireal air through the White Queen’s throne room, he began to think that perhaps he finally had the answer to his old question. Any Aradia, even a blue-blooded one who was often creepy and depressing to talk to, was better than none at all, and even if she could feel the remotest of emotions stirring in her mechanical robot heart, then at least that part of her was the same as the Aradia he once knew.
OMG. All that formatting. AUGH. AUUUUUGGHHHH.
/brb passing out