Things Left Over
A/N: ...I'm sorry. These updates. They just. They've been tearing me up. I just.
I'm just going to leave this here.
/abscond
"I don't get you."
A frown tugged at Tavros' lips. "What's to get?"
"You're all into fairies and Pupa Pan and shit, right? Adventures." Vriska had taken and kept the lead, leaning into every long stride she took as they traversed the wasteland. "Stupid adventures, but still adventures."
"Well, yeah."
"You waste your life waiting for some big epic story, and then as soon as the opportunity to really do some crazy shit presents itself, I have to drag you kicking and screaming."
"Well I don't think that's fair, exactly," Tavros grumbled, riding the slide of a sand dune carefully to the bottom.
"You like being dead. What's that about?"
Tavros shrugged. It had been so long since he'd seen her – the real her, not the Vriska of his memory, always skulking around his dream bubble like a cartoon villain. It was disorienting, being around the real thing. Or as real as dead ever gets, he supposed.
"I guess it was just such a relief," he finally admitted. "Not being trapped in the Veil anymore. Not sitting around and waiting for the worst. Walking again. Like, with real legs. Legs that can go up stairs and stuff. It was safe, and I didn't have to be afraid like-"
"Like when your real gutless self was walking around," Vriska supplied.
"Yeah, I guess so." The corners of his mouth tilted in something approaching a smile. "It was nice. Peaceful."
Vriska made a dismissive noise, a grunt laced faintly with disgust. "Figures."
"It was nice being alive again, though. Even just for a minute."
"Not like that," she spat. "Jeeeeeeeez Pupa, isn't there anything you really miss from being alive? Your sad little existence was really that empty?"
Tavros stopped. The wastes rolled out endlessly in front of them, a scorching sky above a sea of sand. Yes, there was something he missed. There were a lot of things. He missed rapping and Tinkerbull, the way a good gaming session felt, Aradia's hand on his shoulder. His life hadn't been empty at all. Terrifying, maybe, and hard, so hard, but not empty.
For a moment, he let his eyes slide shut. Those few moments of sudden, screaming life, they had hurt. It was already getting hard to recall, so abrupt and overwhelming, so loud. He had barely registered what he – they – had been seeing. Bright pops of color in a landscape of endless bleakness, a girl they didn't know. She had been screaming, Tavros thought. Maybe. He couldn't be sure. And behind her. Heavy, half-lidded eyes. A face so familiar, one he knew, twisted and wrong. Different. Changed. A lazy smile. Swoops of gray and white fading in and out of a pattern he knew so well. And a voice, a graveled rasp, almost lost under the hysterics of the thing they had become. A word. A single word.
Honk.
"Yeah," Tavros murmured. "Yeah, there's something I miss."
"Well, come on, then, don't just stand there with your head up your nook. Let's go fuck some shit up."
Tavros followed her. He followed her because he was Tavros and that was what he had always done. He followed her because he didn't really have a choice in the matter, if he was honest. Their footsteps twisted out behind them for miles, and he pressed on; he followed her because that word echoed in his head, aching in every fiber of his being, distant and formless, almost stripped from his memory but still there. Still seared into him.
Tavros followed her. He would hear that voice again.