Copyright Notes: Aradia Meggido, Sollux Captor, Vriska Serket, Homestuck, et cetera (c) Andrew Hussie, including a small excerpt from page 004147 of Homestuck. Lyrics in title (c) Stars.
You would normally be inclined to sit and glare at the blue text on your computer screen with a hint of cynicism marring your otherwise unaffected, cheerful, and somewhat easily excitable (for certain manners of things, such as archaeology, artefacts, history, and whatnot) demeanour, brushing off the she-witch's words as nothing more than some sort of childish ruse to get the best of your hard-to-find irritability, but the sad thing is – no, the sad things, plural, are – she really doesn't lie so much as evade the truth, spin a web of manipulation around it, and didn't have much of a reason to make you get up, walk to the door, look outside, shake your fist at the absence of another soul, and end it there, and you honestly cannot think of any reason why the truth would be, well, bad – and, well, he's one of those things that piques your somewhat easily excitable demeanour. You stand up and shake your head a little, feeding yourself doubts despite the conclusion you had come to only moments before. It was, after all, a really strange thing out of nowhere. He normally contacted you, made sure you weren't "too busy" with archaeology or reading some ancient tomb, finding old hats crusted over in dirt or ancient laptops bearing the façade of some hornless, discoloured troll on the front. Well, you are busy, often, but you want to include him in your busy . . . ness. No, he would have contacted you first.
It must be a trick! He surely would have told you if he was making the trip all the way out here from his hive stem.
As it turns out, your original instinct was right: there he is, the silhouette of his form coming into clarity as he moves closer to your own hive, and instantly your look becomes one of sheer glee. He could be spontaneous! (Half the time.) He came to surprise you!
"Sollux?" You call out to him, still unable to make out anything but an outline, your voice ringing of happiness nonetheless.
You can't remember the last time the two of you spent any real time together that wasn't through red and yellow words on a brightly lit screen. Sollux just . . . he had days. Long stretches of days where he didn't want to see the outside world, leave his room, and sometimes, he didn't even want to get up to do any coding or hacking. You would try to tell him you wanted him to be happy, but he'd say the two of you were in two different worlds. It was like one of you was Derse, and the other Prospit (he always said you were Prospit, of course, beautiful and shining and bright), you and your antiquity and him and his modernness, ruins and computers, artefacts and command scripts, completely different worlds. 0pposites can bec0me parallel beauties, you would tell him, parallel being one of his favourite words, one that you used when you wanted to nudge him just slightly into agreeing with you, into cracking a smile. no, he would say, no, aradiia, iit'2 hard, and no one understand2, seconds before signing off.
He's been like that lately – you can't remember how long it's been since he was active and lively last, excited to tell you about some new programme he'd conjured by the magic of coding, excited to hear about your newest findings, excited to come over and have lunch so he could show you and you could show him. You've gotten used to this over the years, though it still upset you to think about these manic episodes, only happy half the time, in some cruelly ironic way that played off his love of duality – a love that made him suffer in the end. The dismal episode must have come to an end and a new, cheerful one begun, for him to be here to surprise you in a manner completely unlike him, and you feel your chest heaving slightly as you breathe excitedly, anticipating seeing him, talking to him – but then the shadows dissipate as he reaches the light flooding out from the hive windows, and so does your smile, your excitement, your thoughts, the heavy breathing now a result of something completely different as you see the glow encasing his body, glasses in one hand and a jar of some dreadful golden substance in the other, dripping down his chin like a rainbow drinker after a meal of some poor low-middle-class but not lowest-class troll, and before you have the chance to utter his name again, this time in fear, whispered just barely, the red and blue escalates from his eyes and for a moment, you can see it, you can see the flashes of overwhelming dazing electric light before your eyes are blinded by the sheer blaze of it only seconds not even seconds half seconds before you feel it you can feel it and it feels like stabbing and burning like each light beam has shot through your body multiple times and left fire in its wake upon exiting and you think you let out a scream but you're not sure you can't hear over the electricity the static the sudden hush the sudden lull the sudden nothing the sudden
end.