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Your name is Terezi Pyrope, and there’s a cold, aching void in your soul where your moirail should be.
You remember her being alive. You remember her being dead. The confusion in the back of your brain is painful sometimes, whether you wake up each morning wondering why your pile is Vriska-less or you wake up with the guilt of killing her sitting heavily in your gut. In both timelines she occupied the majority of your thoughts in some way or another, and now it’s somehow even worse than when you knew her corpse was sitting in a clown’s creepy freezer. The sun smells like a delicious burst of lemon zest and the leaves in this place taste a lot better than on Alternia, but you can’t relax. The air is filled with the sounds of people enjoying themselves, all except the whining little weenie who has taken to trailing after you like a lost puppy.
“What are you doing now?” John asks, and you can practically hear him wrinkling his nose. “I swear I never understand a single thing you do. I think you do it on purpose.”
It’s a little bit true. Since you noticed that he’d follow you around whenever he was bored you’ve taken to doing inscrutable stuff just to see if he’d question it. Sometimes he even joins in. Sometimes, irritatingly enough, he’s better at it than you are. Currently, he’s holding a wriggling bag of millipedes, which you collected for no reason other than the fact he seemed to be grossed out by them. He seems to have forgotten all about that, though, because after his initial disgust he found most of them and is merrily swinging the bag without a hint of worry. You’ve never met anyone better at suppressing their negative emotions. Something deep inside you kind of wants to give him something he won’t be able to suppress.
Right now, you’re busy climbing to the highest branches of a tree that you’re only half sure will support your weight. John could have offered to help, to give you a lift, but he hasn’t. Instead, he’s just hovering awkwardly off to one side and watching you sweat and strain where he only has to will himself into the air. The branches do hold, in the end. It’s worth all of the effort to watch John roll his eyes with frustration when you tell him you just wanted to admire the view. On impulse, you grin and jump at him, knowing he’ll have no choice but to catch you. He’s annoying, but he’s too good, deep down, to actually let you fall. He does, however, plummet like a stone until the last three feet above the ground.
“Aaagh, you’re the worst, Pyrope!” He drops you unceremoniously, and you laugh like a drain.
“So why are you here, then? You’ve got plenty of idiots to hang out with,” you ask, watching his face carefully.
He tries to keep it blank. He’s terrible at it.
“Because…because I'm waiting to see if you trip and fall one of these days!”
A more laughable attempt at pitch-flirting you’ve never seen. You know he’s been talking to Karkat, and you don’t want to know what kind of high-level emotional advice has gone whistling over Egbert’s dorky little head. He’s barely out of the brooding caverns in maturity terms, and there’s no way he could every wrap his mind around what kismessitude actually involves. For some reason he won’t stop trying, though. It would be impressive if it wasn't so stupid.
“Hah! I’ll be dead before that happens. You can watch my corpse topple over slowly if you feel like waiting for a hundred sweeps,” you reply, noting the aftershock eyeroll it gets. “Shouldn’t you be off sucking face with Little Miss Candyfloss or being bestest ever friendpals with Dave?”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” he says, unusually snippily, before kicking angrily at some innocent leaf-litter. For a split second, you can smell the whiff of melancholy that comes from him before he can engage his emotional lockdown. There’s something wrong with him, and as much as you’re as far from pale as you could possibly be for John Egbert, it still makes something stir in your chest. He’s avoiding it again. Just like he always does.
“Yes, actually, if you want to hang around and bore me with your buffoonish antics then you do. I’m sick of you swerving from being upset to pretending everything’s fine like a drunken scuttlebuggy pilot. Spill it.”
Keeping your face neutral comes naturally after all of those hours of pretending you were fine. It’s not like anyone noticed when you stopped pretending, nobody besides Vriska. She was the one who forced you to confront the pain inside you, and as you hear John scuffing moodily along beside you wearing a frown he thinks you can’t ‘see’, it occurs to you that maybe John didn’t have anyone like that. Maybe nobody’s ever been stubborn enough to force Egbert to sit still long enough to actually deal with things.
“They’re all busy,” he mutters.
“Bullshit”, you counter, not unkindly.
“Eugh,” he says. It’s the usual disgusted noise he reserves for you, but somehow even whinier. You wait. You might be curious, but you’re not about to indulge his childish angst. A few minutes of silence should do the trick just fine. You amuse yourself by pulling pieces of bark from the trees you pass and eating them. Some of them actually taste quite good.
“I just…” he starts. It’s a false-start. A few seconds later, he tries again.
“It’s my Dad. Hanging out with him is really weird.”
“Your lusus?” you ask, confused. Rose told you John’s lusus died along with her own. Even for John, suppressing that fact seems extreme.
“If you want to be all weird an alien-y about it, yeah. My ‘lusus’. He looks the same and everything but I know he’s not my Dad. He…keeps calling me Dad by accident.”
“Well, duh. In his timeline you were his human ‘Dad’.”
He snorts loudly when you make emphasis curvatures with your claws.
“It’s not like that! Sure, he’s Jane’s Dad, not mine. I get that. But sometimes he does stuff my Dad used to do and he looks the same and…and he tells me some stupid joke my Dad used to tell only it’s weird because he learned it from some other version of me, but he looks so happy when I laugh…just like my Dad used to.”
John usually talks with his hands, waving them to emphasize every single point he makes. Right now, they’re shoved deep into the pockets of his shorts.
“Roxy’s great, I mean, so awesome, but we’re still like sixteen and we both got our childhoods ruined by the stupid fucking game, so we’re just doing whatever makes us happy right now. I still want to get to know her better, but it’s not like there’s any rush or anything. I don’t really know any of the new kids yet.”
You listen with amusement as John remembers he’s still carrying the millipedes, realizes that you made him collect them for no reason, and slings them away into a bush. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to have derailed his train of thought, because you’ll be damned if you’ve got the patience to direct him down this particular track again.
“And everyone else…they’re all so different from what I remember…Dave’s always off with Karkat and its nice seeing them so happy I guess but I miss when they used to talk to me all the time. Rose is happy too and that’s great, and Jade is kind of quiet now but she seems to like hanging out with the little alien girl and her Grandpa. I just…I feel like they’re all leaving me behind.”
John may be an airhead, but he’s not stupid, and suddenly you wonder if the reason he keeps following you around is because he actually empathizes with you. The part of you that remembers screaming at him to fix things with your dying breath is less surprised than the rest, but only by a fraction of an inch.
You sigh, and wonder just how angry helping him through all of this is going to make you. It’s going to be like coaxing a stuck wiggler out of a recuperacoon when they won’t admit that they got themselves wedged in the first place, but you know you’re going to do it anyway. John keeps pushing you out of your comfort zone of sulky loneliness every time he tags along, ruining your attempts to escape the air of bliss settling over the rest of the group like a well-earned sleep after a long day. It’s frustrating. You’re beginning to suspect that he knows that, and that might, just might, be why he does it.
You take a deep breath and damn yourself.
“That’s because they are leaving you behind, Egbert. They’re actually dealing with their issues rather than pretending they don’t exist. I’m blind, and even I can see that.”
John takes a little gasp of air, like you just kicked him in the stomach. It serves him right. He wouldn’t be following you if he didn’t need to feel the swift smack of the truth. That doesn’t mean he appreciates it, though.
“Fuck you Terezi! You were raised by a goddamned egg! As if you’d even begin to understand how confusing all of this is!”
You turn and actually smack him this time, hard across the shins with your cane.
“Oh no, Egbert? I wouldn’t know how it feels not to know whether someone I love is alive or dead?”
Your finger finds the dumb little lime ghost symbol on his chest and you poke with just the amount of force he deserves. How can he still be wearing the same t-shirt that he wore as a stupid thirteen year old? He must have actually alchemised a larger version so that he can kid himself he can physically live in the past. You want to rip it off him.
Wait. No, you don’t. You want to give him a piece of your mind instead.
“The game took half of the people I ever cared about, ruined my chances with both people I thought I was actually flushed for, destroyed the planet I grew up on, and made me kill my moirail.”
You’re getting worked up. You can feel your bloodpusher racing under your skin. You really hope Egbert can’t.
“And now, I have no idea where she is. She didn’t show up out of nowhere and give me a hug, John. I’ve lost her! This time she’s gone forever, and she’s never coming back!”
“Terezi…” John sounds confused again, his voice is too quiet. He’s supposed to be angry, something isn’t right. Warmth on your face…oh shit, those are tears. You turn away, but he’s got your arm in a grip that’s way too strong for dumb, soft John Egbert. Interesting.
“Look, we don’t know that, and if anyone is going to claw their way into a new universe it’s Vriska. But you don’t get to compare that to my Dad dying, Terezi! You made me go back and change things so you didn’t kill her, and then you got to spend three years all cuddled up together. I found…I saw…my Dad’s body…”
John seems to deflate. He sinks down slowly onto a nearby log like a puppet whose strings have been cut. What a fucking pair you make, having mental breakdowns in the middle of a forest.
“Yes, John. You did.”
Because you can’t help it, you want to get under his skin, you push him. Not literally, of course.
“And it only took you three years to realize that, apparently. Should we get Rose to make you a little medal to commemorate the breakthrough?”
You don’t anticipate the punch, but you sense he’s about to do something before he begins to move. Sidestepping turns it from an uppercut that would have laid you out to a painful thump on the shoulder. A branch catches under your feet as you reel backward, tipping you onto your ass. For now, you decide to stay there and let John think he’s got the upper hand.
“Why can’t you just be nice, for once, Terezi! I know you can do it, I’ve seen you be nice to other people so why are you so horrible to me all the time!”
“Because someone has to be!” you reply, possibly a little louder than you meant to. “Everyone treats you like you’re a precious little wiggler who can’t handle anything, but that’s bullshit. I won’t do that, Egbert. You need at least one person who won’t.”
John doesn’t reply, but he sounds like he’s listening.
“You look at Dave and Rose and Karkat and all you see are happy people, because you’re an idiot. You assume they just fell in love and that solved everything. I don’t know if you’ve just seen too many dumb movies, but that isn’t how life works. They had to actually admit that they weren’t happy and deal with their shit like adults before they got better. It didn’t happen by magic! You can’t just snap your fingers and fix yourself like a doomed timeline!”
You can hear him grinding his teeth, even as he steps toward you with a hand outstretched to help you up. For a second, you wonder if you pushed him too far.
When he helps you up, he pulls you bodily into the weakest attempt at a blackrom kiss you’ve ever encountered. That won't do. You grin as you show him how to do it properly.
By the time you're done with John Egbert, he'll have taken a long, hard look at his inner demons. Maybe, if he's lucky, you'll help him take them to pieces.