He hasn't been your moirail for a very long time, yet you've been holding on to the fraying edges of some absurd hope that maybe, maybe there was...something left of the troll that you had gone so sickeningly pale for all those sweeps ago.
Yet as you look at him now, blood splattered and holding your equally as battered friend in a choke hold, all those hopes vanish just as quickly as your former moirall had done, leaving you alone and forgotten.
You look into his mad eyes, and you see nothing of the obnoxious, clumsy, weirdly caring troll that would spam your inbox with horrible raps, weird questions, or just annoying honks and clown faces. You don't see the troll that would make the most uncomfortable piles in all of Alternia, filled with horns and Faygo bottles and other bits of garbage that would in no way ever be considered comfortable, yet strangely was when he was there to offer a calming shush and a gangly armed embrace.
Now, all you see is a shell, empty and devoid of anything you had once pitied. All that is left is something to be hated, not in the way one troll hates another, but in the way one would hate a monster, a beast hellbent on destruction with no regard for what it tramples, only that it gets trampled.
You can't hate him, but you must, and it fills you with rage, deep and searing. It boils over the edge and you're running, faster than you've run before, sickle heavy in your hand. You see Kanaya on the edge of your vision, but all you can focus on is him, standing on the edge of the cliff, Terezi held firmly in his grasp, and you leap, expecting to land on your feet, sickle brandished high, only to come down low, sweeping through the juncture of his neck and shoulder, burying itself down into the middle of his chest.
Only this doesn't happen, there's a pressure on your throat, strong, but only noticed for a second, before the flaring pain in your chest distracts you from it. You can't see what has done it, your eyes locked over the shoulder of your former moirail. You can see Terezi, struggling to stand up, blood and tears dripping down her face, you wonder why she's crying, though not for long as another pang hits your chest, lower, but just as painful.
Then you're falling, or you must be, the wind rushing around you as it is.
Then everything is fire and heat and pain pain pain make it stop make it stop and you reach out your hand, hoping someone, anyone, would grab it, but no one does and the pain spreads to your lungs, and you're drowning, drowning, though it doesn't make sense – you're on fire – but you're drowning all the same: in broken diamonds, broken hearts, broken clubs, and broken spades.
Because even in its absence, love is pain.