#graphyca

THIS IS THE LAST STRAW.

You make a face. What’s that even supposed to mean. They, too, have a penchant for the dramatic, of course, being old Eldritch gods that once granted you all of their power for a revenge mission. They still grant you some, because they think you are useful to them, and you think they are useful to you. Communication, however, is not always easy.

Huh? you mouth this time, which really just looks like you opening your mouth in incomprehension.

YOU WILL RETURN HOME. YOU WILL STOP THE PRINCE.

Your eyes burn when you roll them. You are fucking tired, and yet, this doesn’t sound like a conversation you’ll be able to skip. You throw Karkat another glance, then quietly roll out of bed and slip on a hoodie. Only once you’ve closed his bedroom door behind you and are padding through the living room do you answer, voice as low as possible, “Stop him from what? He went to one board meeting. I can forgive that.”

HEIR. YOU DON’T HONESTLY BELIEVE THAT.

Again, you grimace. Yeah, maybe you don’t. And maybe you don’t want to care. Maybe you want to stay here in a different timeline with a guy who wants to date you and fucked you silly on his kitchen counter. Maybe that’s been better than hanging around your home and trying to get the billionaires to stop exploiting the entire rest of the world. That doesn’t really sound unreasonable to you.

“I want to stay here,” you mutter, both of your hands buried in the front pocket of your hoodie. “He’s not… Dirk doesn’t seem completely off the shits yet, and if he was, I would not fucking care. Let me stay here.”

THIS IS THE LAST STRAW.

“Yes, you already said that. What does it mean?” You want to roll your eyes at them again, but before you can get that far, you’re blinded for a full second by white hot pain in your right temple. Instead, you squeeze your eyes shut, barely fighting back a shout so you don’t wake Karkat. Instinctively, you stumble toward the bathroom, one hand pressed to your head, the other one pawing around for the faucet. The pain fades as quickly as it came, but you still feel groggy in its wake, and reach down to drink water from your hands.

GO BACK TONIGHT AND DEAL WITH HIM SOON, OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES.

“What consequences,” you mutter, hoarsely, in between gulps.

THE PRINCE HAS BECOME TOO POWERFUL. NO HUMAN CHILD WILL DECIDE ALONE OVER LIFE AND DEATH. ONLY WHEN THE HEIR RETURNS TO THWART HIM CAN WE BEGIN TO RESTORE BALANCE.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” you say, water droplets flying as you wave your hand around dismissively. “We have been over that. What consequences?”

AN HEIR OF LIGHT WHO REFUSES TO DO HIS WORK

(They make a dramatic pause.)

IS NOT AN HEIR OF LIGHT AT ALL.

You say, “I don’t know what that means.” The very next second, your entire body seizes up violently. You choke out a noise, gasping for breath, your hands grabbing the edge of the sink as you feel your insides convulse, shoulders spasming as something seems to claw its way up your throat. Fruitlessly, you try to speak, to swear, to yell for Karkat, your mouth opening and closing but no sound coming out. Your hands slip and your legs give out and you drop to the cold bathroom tiles, and as you land on your back, for one terrible blink of an eye, you think you’re dying.

Whatever is crawling up your throat is blocking your windpipe, but it falls forward when your body throws itself to the side, clawing at the gaps between the tiles until you’ve worked yourself up on your knees. You retch, your elbows quivering, your eyes burning, breath stuck in your lungs as a thick glob of black sludge wrestles itself out of your mouth and lands on the floor with a wet splat. You suck in a breath, try to close your mouth, try to swallow down, but more is on its way, and you shiver from head to toe instead.

Sticky black mass keeps splattering from your mouth, pooling on the floor in front of you until the puddle is almost two feet across. You feel empty in a strange way -- you’ve thrown up plenty of times in your life, and you’re familiar with the empty stomach feeling it usually leaves. This one isn’t located there. It seems to be in your chest, in the hollows of your ribs, in your core. Whatever climbed out of you just now left a hole that feels cold, and desolate in you.

Quaking, you raise one hand to wipe at your mouth. Right as you move, the mass moves as well, rising off the floor in a writhing tangle of tendrils, and you watch the splot you wiped from your mouth detach itself from the back of your hand and join it. Still on your knees, as you sit back on your haunches, the inky blob hovers a few feet above you, tangling within itself, tentacles disappearing and reappearing at random, in constant motion. When it speaks, its voice has finally stopped resonating within your head -- it’s outside of you now. They’ve left you.

SO LONG AS YOU DON’T FOLLOW YOUR CALLING, HEIR. YOU DON’T DESERVE THESE POWERS. WE HAVE TAKEN THEM.

You say, “What the fuck?” Your voice is scratchy and hurts in your throat, but coughing now only sounds like an invitation for more vomit, actual one from your stomach this time. “I didn’t get my powers from you. I got them from the game. You can’t take them.”

Convinced of this much, figuring that the horrorterrors might leave your body but you’ll always have your godtier powers, you feel yet another cold shiver of dread rush down your back as a faint light seems to blink on inside the black mass above you. That’s just for show, you think, they’re conning you, so you try to use what the game gave you, you try to turn into light, you try to procure even the faintest of glows, and it doesn’t work. You have the same powers any other guy outside on the streets has.

THIS IS THE POWER WE WIELD. WE, AND ONLY WE, SHALL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT HAPPENS TO THE PEOPLE OF YOUR UNIVERSE.

“What happened to establishing balance?” you mutter, running a shaky hand through your hair. “Look, did you seriously just take away my godhood? To make me start shit with Dirk? The guy who could kill everyone except for me, because I was protected by Light? How is this going to motivate me to ever set foot in that dumpster fire of a timeline again?”

YOU WILL SOON REALIZE YOUR NEED. WE WILL NOT ALLOW OUR HEIR TO FIGHT THE PRINCE IN THIS STATE. HOWEVER YOU MUST RE-PROVE YOUR WORTHINESS. GO HOME, JOHN LALONDE. PICK UP THE WORK YOU SO FOOLISHLY LEFT BEHIND. AND ONCE WE SEE THE RICH FALL, YOU WILL SEE THE LIGHT AGAIN.

The air makes a weirdly wet pop when it closes around the space the mass leaves when it disappears. You’re on your knees in Karkat’s bathroom, staring into nothingness. You don’t… You don’t need your powers. They can keep them, then. This is idiotic.

Slowly, you reach up for the sink and pull yourself up, standing on two uneasy legs so you can look at yourself in the mirror. The white streak in your hair is still there, but so is the awful emptiness in your chest. You don’t need your powers, you think. Your hand travels up to the side of your neck, bitten and bruised by Karkat’s vampire fangs. You’ve been letting him feed on your blood for the past weeks, knowing that you’re protected both by conditional immortality and by inhuman luck, so even if he wasn’t as cautious as he is, he couldn’t kill you.

He could, now.

He’d never forgive himself.

You wrinkle your nose. Karkat lets you live here for free, but you get your own food, your own clothes. If you stay for longer, you’re going to want to start chipping in for rent, or at least water and electricity. You have no source of income, because you’ve been living off of gambling winnings, which, again, you got due to your luck, and your convenient knowledge. 

Okay, so you’ll have to start living a slightly less risky life. You’ll manage. You’ll adapt. Living a risk-free life was exactly what pushed you into immortality ennui before, but… Well, you won’t be immortal anymore.

You turn to stare at the door, toward the rest of the apartment, where Karkat is hopefully still asleep, somewhere. He’s immortal. You’ve been living with the comfort of that. Immortality was going to be something you could be tackling together.

Your head feels light, in a way you don’t enjoy. Whenever the Light would pump you full of knowledge, it would hurt, it would knock you out for days and you would hate it, but you’re already missing the place it inhabited up there. Knowing that you will not know things whenever it’s convenient for you in the future is disconcerting, to say the least. You are not a smart man. You make people believe you are, but you know that you’re not. Not without Light.

When you sit down on the edge of Karkat’s bed, you feel sick again, but this time you know it’s just your stomach. You watch him stir awake, watch the worry creep into his features when he sees you, and you give him a defeated smile.

WE WILL RESTORE YOUR POWERS TONIGHT.

“Already?” you say, in your dream. You know you don’t say it out loud. You’ve done tests, recorded yourself at night. This is all in your head. “All I had to do was frame the guy?”

THIS IS TENTATIVE. CEASE YOUR MISSION, DEFY US AGAIN, AND WE WILL TAKE THEM BACK AT ONCE.

“Great, I love being shoved around.” You can’t remember what you were dreaming before they showed up. Everything is a blinding white now, with vague shapes writhing in a far-off distance, like shadow puppets behind a veil. You don’t have a body, you’re not even feeling a floating sensation or anything. You just exist here, arguing with the outer gods. “No, it’s fine. I’ll keep going. I want to see that motherfucker jailed.”

THERE IS A NEW TASK FOR YOU.

In your dream, in the vast nothingness of incorporeality, you groan, loudly.

“What now?”

YOU WILL KILL THE PRINCE.

“Kill?” you echo. “Kill Dirk? You know he really helped tearing down Jim Walton, right? I don’t know that I could have done it without him. He got me to a hospital after that asshole chopped my finger off, so I’d probably at least have gotten a really nasty infect--”

HE HELPED FOR HIS OWN PROFIT. YOU KNOW THIS.

“Well, yeah,” you say. “Just seems kinda rude to immediately go kill him now that we’re done.”

YOU ARE RUDE.

“Fair point.”

ONCE YOUR POWERS ARE RESTORED, WE WILL SURGE INTO YOU. IT WILL BE OVERWHELMING, BUT YOU CAN TAKE IT, HEIR.

“Feel like I’ve heard that one before,” you say, but as per usual, they ignore your joke and keep talking.

YOU HAVE DONE IT BEFORE. YOU WILL BE OUR VESSEL AND CARRY US TO HIM. WE WILL TAKE CARE OF THE REST.

You don’t like the sound of that. Without your Light you might not be the brightest, but you are fairly sure you know what they mean. You’ve become their “vessel” once before, you’ve been “overwhelmed” by the powers they bestowed upon you once before, when you were thirteen, and a dog had just killed your mom. That didn’t end well. You didn’t manage to avenge her, and then you died.

“You haven’t really set a great precedent,” you tell them. “Are you even sure you can kill Dirk?”

YOU DARE DOUBT US. WE CAN KILL WHATEVER WE WANT TO KILL.

“Yeah, well. So can he. That’s your whole issue with him, isn’t it? He decides who lives and who dies. You don’t think he’s just going to decide that he lives?”

IT IS TIME HE LEARNED HIS PLACE IN THE HIERARCHY OF GODS.

“Ok, badass thing to say,” you say, but you can already feel yourself fading. That is no good. With what they announced, you don’t think you’re looking forward to waking up. Karkat is asleep next to you. Shit. “I don’t think it’s going to work, and if he kills me and it turns out to be a just death since, you know, I did kill six people in under half a year, aren’t we all kind of shit out of luck? You guys included? Hello?”

Your voice doesn’t echo. The writhing behind the veil has stopped. For a moment -- even if you tried, you couldn’t quantify the amount of time -- everything is still. Then, unceremoniously, your dream ends.

With a loud gasp, you sit up straight in your bed. Whether or not Karkat wakes up with you, you can’t tell. You can barely see. The light was off when you slept, of course, but it flickers on now, the bulb burns through, explodes. Shards of glass rain down on you as your body lifts up and off the bed, suspended in mid air as you, too, flicker with light. Your powers return to you all at once, and you become them, you turn into a figure of pure light, blinding, too bright to take, leaving behind a human-shaped scorch mark on the sheets below you. Knowledge flows through every part of your being and you scream, although your voice breaks almost immediately at the sheer amount of it filling up your head. Dave was bitten by one of his snakes recently. One of the flowers Karkat arranged in your bath for you the other day stands for love on first sight. Walton isn’t even officially arrested yet, but is already working on the means to make bail. Dirk hasn’t ascended back to his place as Crocker Corp CEO yet, but continues to indulge in consultations that are very much paving his way.

Before the insurmountable pain between your temples can make you pass back out, you exhale, and your light flicks off. In the darkness of your bedroom, your skin turns a dark grey, your hair a bright white, and your glowing eyes stare vacantly at the wall as you allow the horrorterrors to take over. Dimly, in the back of your mind, you still think that this is a stupid idea. But it sure as hell feels better than what you were going through a second ago.

All around you wafts the familiar black aura of grimdarkness, thorned tendrils curling and uncurling, as if stretching limbs that haven’t been properly used in almost a decade. You have to bring them to Dirk. It’s easy, you know where he lives. You’d wager he’s probably even awake. Somewhere outside of your blinds, the sun is already up over NYC. He’ll be home.

You want to say something to Karkat, you manage to think vaguely, you should, you really should. All that comes out, of course, are Eldritch tongues, and you can barely see him anyway, behind the thick forest of grimdarkness obscuring the real world from your vision. You like to think your voice sounds gentle, at least, as it always does. You don’t want him to worry. You know he will, oh, you know he will, and you know he will be devastated when Dirk inevitably kills you, and you inevitably stay dead, one too many monstrosities committed in your short life to be resurrected. Karkat will want to fight him, you think, and then Dirk will kill him, too.

You’d cry if you could. You can’t, though, and find yourself appreciating that. Once again, you are in the backseat of your life, letting someone else take over. And once again that someone else is a conglomerate of old gods you brought in from another universe, who seem so sure that they know what to do, now. You don’t think that they do. But there is no arguing with them. All you can do, now, watching from behind your eyes, is hope. That the return of your luck will be enough to get you through this fight.

And that your anger at the man who started all this, who could have stopped it all if he hadn’t gotten this drunk off his own power, will be enough to kill him.

You don’t know how you make it to Dirk’s house. You can barely focus on the world outside. All you think about is that you know where he is, and you know what he’s doing, and you know that he doesn’t know you’re coming. By the time you materialize a mere few feet away from him, you’ve channeled the last of your will into how much you hate him (and his stupid little bowlcut), and your snarl of Eldritch swears comes with an air of anticipation. If you put your mind to this, maybe, if you give it all you have, with any luck, you can bring the both of you down, and end this once and for all.

Fairly anticlimactically, you then proceed to have a deathmatch with Dirk in his house, which kills both Dirk and you and completely demolishes the place, but leaves neither of you perma-dead.

It must have been two or three days by now, you would estimate. You’re not sure, though. You don’t know what time it is. You don’t know where you are. You only ever see the one guy, and you still don’t know who he is. Yeah, you know who he works for, you know this is because you fucked over Jim Walton, but you know nothing about him. You can’t manipulate your way out of this because you can barely get a read on him, and you’re starting to feel tired and spent from sitting on this goddamn chair for who knows how long.

You’ve gotten water and gross liquid food you’re pretty sure was initially meant for hospital patients and counts as some sort of torture. He goes out of his way to keep your hands tied up, and all you can do to keep them from going completely numb is occasionally roll your shoulders and wiggle your fingers. You just wish you had a plan. You wish you knew how to make plans on your own.

“The man I sent to your place never came back,” he says, after closing the door behind him. He’s not here all day. Most of the time, you just sit around on your own, feeling your own pulse in the bruises on your face. There’s nothing here to help you escape. Just you and a table. You really need to start keeping knives in your sylladex.

“Mm,” you hum, and tilt your head back toward him from where you were staring at the ceiling. “I’d wager he met the vampire I’m dating who currently lives there, then.”

You only get an irritated look for that. You do know that much about him: he is tired of you. That’s probably not good.

What’s also probably not good is the butcher knife he’s holding in one hand when he approaches your chair. “I want names,” he says. “Obviously you’re not doing this alone, so give me names.”

“What for?” you say, shifting just enough to roll your shoulders. It’s pride alone that makes you focus on his face instead of the knife, even though you feel hyper aware of its presence. “So you can tie them to chairs, too? We both know you don’t plan to let me out of this room unless it’s chopped into little pieces, so what motivation do I have to tell you anything?”

You catch him smiling before he walks behind you. Yeah, this is all not great. He says, “That depends on whether you wanna be dead or still alive for the chopping part.”

Your scoff gets lost in the noise of the chair scraping against the floor when he drags you over toward the table, your right side facing it. All you’ve gotten so far is a split lip and eyebrow and a bruise on your cheekbone -- not even a black eye, not one cracked rib. He’s not one for battery, you think, he was just trying to be imposing, and he’s learned that it didn’t work by now. Part of you wants to find it hard to believe that he’s suddenly going to be mangling you with a knife when he wouldn’t even punch you in the stomach a little, but he seems practiced in how fast he unties your hands and then re-ties your left to the chair. Like he’s done this one before.

Hammer, you think, my hand is free, I can deploy my hammer from my specibus and kill this guy. It wasn’t an option before, with how your hands were bound there would have been no point to it. He presses your right down on the table now, with only his human strength pushing it down, and you’re sure you could make it, but all you feel from your shoulder to your fingertips is the numb buzz of a limb that’s fallen asleep. You can’t focus enough to procure your hammer, as much as you try with your useless mind.

“You know,” you tell him, “whatever you’re doing won’t even hurt me with how numb my hands are from being tied back there all the time. We should really update our bondage contract, you and I.”

“Oh, it’ll hurt,” he says with an unaffected satisfaction in his voice that disturbs you. With the broad side of the blade, he pushes your pinky finger away from the others, like he’s separating it from the herd before hovering his knife above it and throwing you a glance. You’re watching your hand, thinking that you can definitely still move your fingers, but before you get to do that he uses his other hand to push them firmly down against the table. “Names, John.”

Whatever. It’s a pinky finger. You’ll survive without it, you won’t even bleed out from the wound. Right? You’re pretty sure you won’t. You’re not selling out Karkat or Sollux -- you barely think anyone could even do anything to them, with both flying under the radar pretty well, this is just a matter of principle. You’re not giving this asshole shit.

You look up at him, and say, pleasantly, “Fuck you.”

“Okay,” he says, and cuts off your finger.

It’s not the worst pain you’ve ever experienced. You think that might just say more about the sort of life you’ve led than about the pain of losing a finger. What you immediately suspect will haunt you much more is the sound of the knife going through your skin, and the bone cracking. You yourself also make a noise, the suppressed version of a scream, the clatter of your teeth when you attempt to grit them. Your arm flinches under his grasp, the rest of your extremities pull at their restraints, put you keep your lips pressed firmly together, breathing loudly through your nose. When he lifts the knife, the limp finger lying on the table, half an inch away from your hand, doesn’t look real.

“Was that worth it?” he says. 

And you realize that it was. The pain surging from your hand all the way up to your shoulder is sharp and clear, exquisite and focused, the polar opposite to the grainy static you felt in it before. You barely even think about it when you will your five foot tentacled stakehammer from your strife specibus, and close your remaining fingers around it.

The impact of it appearing in your hand bounces his grip off of you, and he flinches back like he’s already been hit. “What the f--” he starts saying, but before he can even finish swearing, you’ve already hurled your arm back and struck forward, the metal front of the hammer colliding square with his face and caving his skull in. Blood gurgles in his throat when he crumbles to the floor with a loud thud.

Well, that’s dealt with. You put your hammer down on the table and look for the knife he must have had. By now, your hand exists only in a cloud of burning pain, blood spurting from the stump of your finger, but your mind is clear and focused on the task before you. He let go of the knife when he fell, but it didn’t land on the table where you could reach it, it’s on the ground about a foot away from him. You take a breath, and throw your weight forward.

Your chair clatters to the floor, you land heavily on your bound left side, your hurt right hand only able to do so much to break your fall. This time, now that nobody else is here, you let out a strained noise, stuttering in your chest. You reach out, your palm slippery with blood, your four-fingered hand looking strange to your own eyes, and grab the knife.

Cutting the ziptie that’s holding your other hand while effectively lying on it is another task that takes you some wiggling, some undignified grunting, and spills blood all over your shirt and pants leg. As soon as both of your hands are free, though, you make quick work of the rest. You cut your legs free and plop off the chair, landing on your knees and your good hand, still holding the knife in your right. For a few seconds, you just kneel and stare at the man with the caved in face lying on the floor. He doesn’t look alive, but your luck has been shit lately. You raise his knife and bury it in his chest, just for good measure.

It comes back out with a squelch because you decide to cut off part of the jacket he’s wearing so you can roll it up and press it to your hand. Then you drop it, and wrangle yourself to your feet, stumbling almost all the way to the other end to the room in your attempt to balance yourself after being tied to a chair for days and also just having your finger cut off and killing someone. You make it back to the table and grab your wallet and phone from the far end of it, then shove your severed finger into your pants pocket without so much as looking at it. You’re getting the fuck out of here.

With your left pressing the fabric to your right, and your right clutching your hammer, you shoulder open the door, and find yourself in a deserted, basement looking corridor. There are few other doors, all closed, and an obvious exit at the end of an elevated hallway that seems to lead directly outside. You jog there, every impact of your feet on the ground reverberating through your injured hand, and when you shoulder open that door as well, you half expect an alarm to sound.

But your recent bad luck doesn’t seem to want to extend that far. When you enter a concrete backyard, there are no noises other than the door falling shut behind you, and faint street sounds. You turn around to stare up at the building you just emerged from, and find it to be a regular looking office building, high-rise, in what you immediately know to still be New York City.

“Jesus Christ,” you mutter. Using your thumb to continue pressing your makeshift bandage to your hand, you grab your phone with your other and power it back up. You need to… well. You want to be texting Karkat, but you need to be texting Dirk.

Immediately after entering your PIN, your phone vibrates in your hand so insistently that you almost drop it, flooding you with text messages and several calls you have missed in your absence. It pulls a wonky smile from you -- that’s nice to know, at least.

Karkat was very clearly worried about you, Dave wants to meet up for his birthday, and -- you check the date, and nearly yell out loud. It’s April 13. Holy fuck, it’s your best friend’s birthday, and instead of celebrating with him you just killed a guy who cut off your finger.

“Shit,” you breathe, and then you frown, because Dirk has also texted you. A single line, about the NYPD having found bodily remains.

Looks like your bad luck still extends well and far enough.

You text Karkat back first, trying to be reassuring but ultimately waving him off, then wish Dave a happy birthday, and then open your conversation with Dirk again to tell him that you need a paid off doctor that won’t ask you what the fuck just happened. Then you take several deep breaths, close your eyes, and swallow down the scream that has been stuck in your throat ever since that knife came down on you.