Two Things Learned

Jan 31, 2014 20:34

Two Things Learned From My Carrying on with the 12 Days of Christmas thing!

Title: Fissures

Fandom: Homestuck

Characters/Pairings: Gamzee <> Karkat

Rating: G

Warnings: Self harm

Summary: For once, you're not ahead of him.

Gamzee lifts up his hand and carefully flexes his fingers. His long, spidery digits curl towards him and then up, again. He’s not so much staring at the way that his fingers flex, you know, but checking that he can still do it. Once, you were in the habit of checking the tiny veins on the backs of your knuckles where the skin is thinner - just to make sure, though they came up a dull pink-blue, anyway.

“Just seeing if I can all be moving my own motherfucking gristlehinges,” he mutters. For once, you’re not ahead of him. Your pan really is just sharp, bloody edges and nobody seemed to want to get in there - not a Serket, not an ugly puppet, not Gamzee’s silent creep of a dancestor. He flexes his arm up and down and, with his other hand, traces the line of his bone as it presses through the skin. “My shuffle corpse ain’t all what’s dancing of its own life without my blessing.”

Gamzee continues to poke at his own limbs and stretch them out and back again. He doesn’t expect a response from you. You’d never thought to even picture his gangly, growing frame being pulled around by somebody else. There’s a low, fundamental crack in your own pan about it.

Gamzee grabs at one of his horns and scratches around the base and it seems like it’s a regular habit that he’s picked up, anyway. You’re not sure, yet, how deep the hopbeast hole goes. Skaia might have imposed a system of karma, but that broke alongside determinism and so did you all, even the dead.

“It’s like I’m all to be looking at the front of my pan, again,” the tone of his voice still rises and falls, though less dramatically than you’re used to. Some part of you thinks he’s got no right to be anything but an extreme. He continues to push at his own scalp and there’s a kind of sickly awkwardness about seeing a troll your age doing that. Gamzee had a growth spurt around seven sweeps or maybe closer to seven and a half sweeps but it’s hard to be sure about that after he disappeared and you started thinking in human time. “No other motherfuckers in there.”

“Yeah.” You’re not pale right now. The feeling is something rancid. Gamzee wraps the long fingers of one hand around a horn and tugs, his thumbnail skirting along small fissures. Trolls with bigger horns often have those, especially if they spent a wigglerhood falling off things. He closes his eyes and tugs enough that you know that it pulls at his scalp.

It was a mess even before every single thing more dangerous than Gamzee made itself known (including her). You didn’t have time to pick apart that warm, confusing mass of guilt before it all got broken open completely and everything turned itself inside out and Terezi disappeared to fight another battle that was in no way yours.
Gamzee frowns and you notice the new minutia of his face. His teeth fit, now, unlike when he was six and they took over. It’s harder to see a shadow or a monster if you can split him into detail. He huddles in on himself and circles one wrist with the fingers of the other hand. You watch those fingers twitch, half-idly. It was a mess, a thorough mess and, in the end, you couldn’t determine the points where things switched, again.

“It’s not for any kind of motherfucker.” You do give him a vague nod, but you could still probably really be anyone. He takes a breath like he’s sobbing, even though he isn’t, and his nails score across the skin of his arms. Purple draws up a little where he scratches. He looks down at his new, shallow wounds, startled, and pushes at them a little, smearing the blood. “But I used to all think that maybe this was all being to be someone else’s. Not to even be motherfucking questioned.”

You move towards him, and not because the sight of him like that curdles into the serendipitous somewhere in your bloodpusher (and it really doesn’t, you don’t think). There’s just no point in waiting to find out exactly what he was responsible for, and, when you get down to it, you’re not all that enthusiastic about anyone’s damnation, not even his.

Title: What To Write

Fandom: Homestuck

Characters/Pairings: Rose Lalonde, Roxy Lalonde

Rating: G

Warnings: None

Summary: It took a while for you to realise everything was dead. Roxy grew up on a ghost planet. Some things sound derivative until they’re real.

Roxy has pink tipped fingernails, the remnant of some private indulgent moment on an empty planet. She nibbles on one of them, not at all like the woman you knew but more like the girl you are.

“I guess it’s weird to think, for you,” she muses. “That nobody is alive anymore.”

It had taken a while for that to kick in, for the realisation to bring itself to a head. It’d been six months into the journey on the meteor and some memory of old school corridors had flipped over in your mind and then you realised that everything was less than atoms. Roxy had grown up on a watery ghost planet. Some things sound derivative until they’re real.

“Before I started talking to Jane and Jake, maybe even before I started talking to Dirk, there was this internet full of stuff. Dead stuff. Like, words and words full of things millions of dead people wrote, when their lives were just full of everything that kind of just was, back then, you know?” There’s no laborious melancholy to her voice - this isn’t an unveiling of the angst beneath the cheer. “It was weird, because they were dead, but I felt jealous of them, because they got to know all this stuff.”

“It was irrational,” you say. There’s something about speaking to Roxy that almost segues into incidental, until you become aware of something that sits like a shadow on the edge of your conscience. It’s waiting for something.

“Yeah.” Roxy tucks her hair behind her ear. The ends of her hair curls loosely just below her chin. Your mother wore rollers only sometimes, and you always thought it was some sarcastic grab at retro maternal glamour. Watching Roxy pick at her glittering fingernails turns some things over in your head like tables at a family excursion gone wrong. You thought you’d had all the time you needed on the meteor to pick over your childhood.

“It was weird, I guess. They were interested in so many things and I was, too, but there was nobody for me to talk to,” she says. “I posted stuff I wrote. I felt stupid because nobody was going to see it, then I realised that, yeah, nobody was going to see it.”

“What did you write about?” You wrote, too, and you used words like burst and miasma in your efforts to describe the meeting between man and monster. The yield of a mortal against the infinite of the void. Well, you wrote that sentence down early on.

“Lots. I wrote a novel, eventually, but, early on, I just wrote a bunch of short stories. There was a lot that nobody really understood. I ended up writing about things I never really even thought about happening, even though it was when I was alive and before me, too. After she came, though, the stories other people wrote starting being different, too. Slowly, in all these different ways.”

You were wrong, in the end. You don’t really feel embarrassed about that, though. How were you to know that they have a full, burgeoning squirm and press against the inside even in ways that were intangible? And that they have a bright kind of cold that runs along the inside of the epidermis and an oily, nauseous kind of heaviness, afterwards? It could only really have been purged in fire.

“But I had already written all of the villains as her. Well, I guess I hadn’t done that first, but it felt like I had.”

“Yes.” You wonder if you would rewrite anything to reflect what you now know. You haven’t written in a long time, so if you did, maybe it would be a purely beige account, mundanely prosaic. “Did it help?”

Roxy pauses and stares at a point on the ground. Distantly, something happens and you think it can wait. “It helped, I think. It didn’t hurt, I know that. I wrote about things I knew she had done but I didn’t like thinking about.”

“Fiction can be a good way to explore things, perhaps.” You could say how it felt but only a superficial rendering, somehow, even though it concerned every physical molecule of you. “And a way to express things without stating them, outright.”

Roxy nods and breathes, giving you a small smile. It’s sometimes a different face, you think, dimly. Then, she frowns. “Actually, it seemed like a lot of people started doing that. Writing down what they didn’t say. At least, they did for a while. And then I felt bad all over again, because I lived with things, but I didn’t live with it, you know? Not really. I got the end result.”

“It was still yours to write about.” Though, it isn’t like that’s your blessing to give, either.

“Mmmm,” she says, absently.

“Some things hurt like that,” you say. You still don’t have that blessing, except for she has, all of a sudden, a kind of dogged hopefulness out of nowhere, and you slide over that feeling in jagged bumps.

“I wrote about her, I mean, uh…” she pauses and looks at you, and it clicks. It wasn’t as if you really forgot, but it’s far stranger to think of another you than it even is to meet another one of your mother. “I wrote about Rose more often. Because she was there and I did want her back.”

There’s a silence like…it’s not just heavy. It’s sweet and sharp, and it seems like something has shifted enough for you to know what you maybe could about, now.

homestuck, fan fiction

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