A/N: So I was thinking about Homestuck (big surprise), and it's really fuckin' depressing. I was just imagining Sollux wandering around aimlessly in some post-Scratch AU scratching at his h0ll0w eye sockets and being an angsty fuckass cause that's what Captors do. And since I was bored, I whipped up a character study for blind!Sollux (pre- 'it lo0ks 2d O_0' updates).

Also, random, but Gamzee/Sollux is my all time OTP. My friends gave me soooo much crap about it 'cause they thought it was total crack (which is is), but guess what? Yeah, that's right, it's fucking canon now. I am the shipping master. It's me.

A lot of the time, it was impossible to sleep. Sollux would lie on his back in the bed he shared with Gamzee, just staring at the ceiling. Least, that's what he would've done if he had eyes. He spent a lot of this quiet time, something he had in abundance, just thinking about the exact moment his life had been turned on its ass.

That fuckass's wand had lit his powers on fire.

How the fuck do you even set psionic energy of fire? he asked himself a lot. It didn't matter. Nothing did now. The blaze had travelled like quicksilver, pooled in his eyes, burned them right out along with the Voices, and that was all there was to it. Nothing prophetic or glorious or even enlightening, just silence and the crawling mental pain of knowing where his eyes should be and finding nothing.

The hacker hadn't slept in weeks. It was so draining he could barely muster a conversation some days, but he couldn't do it. He'd figured something while watching his companion snore contentedly, those lanky limbs all knotted up at weird angles that could only be considered comfortable if you were as flexible as Gamzee. He'd figured that the only reason sleep is so restful for most people is because it's an escape. An escape from insanity, and the guilt of two friends murdered for Gamzee. It used to be an escape for Sollux from the headaches and the voices and the depression. But there was none of that left to run away from now. After the Scratch, they'd all ended up on Earth, somewhere in the middle of a forest. They were out. Home free. They'd re-grouped on the Jade human's island, burned all the evidence, and tried to just live as if nothing had happened. It was hard, especially for the trolls who could barely go out for fear of being hunted and eviscerated, picked apart in a lab somewhere for their lack of humanity. But no matter their current situations, they'd all realized, some sooner than others, that you can't repress or hide what never existed in the first place. You can't close your eyes if there's nothing left to see but ashes and flashbacks.

Back when he'd still needed to wear glasses, Sollux used to pick at the seam where the wire met the warped lenses, trying to find the pressure point that would snap them. Not because he didn't like them, they'd made him look like such a coolkid, when he actually cared about that stuff. He was constantly breaking them because he hated what they hid. He spent so long trying to snap that glaring red and blue with too many fucking dimensions to fit inside one troll's skull part out of his life like a cracked lenses, as if he believed he actually had control over his fate.

Being blind was worse. Much fucking worse. The euphoria of death rattle-less silence wore off pretty damn quick, and now he felt like praying to whatever God the humans kept mentioning for a single whisper of hope, anything to cling to. Mostly Sollux just stuck with his own species; they felt more real, easier to sense in the darkness. That, and it was just easier to turn his back on the fucked up world he and his friends had created.

Terezi had tried teaching him to exist how her lusus had her, but they both knew it was useless. He wasn't a Seer. He'd known he'd become blind, because the whole knowing-things-you-aren't-supposed-to-know gig had nearly split him in two, but he was a mage. A conjurer of cheap prophetic knock-offs. The Mage of Doom, to be precise. As if that made it any better. It was useless to still cling to the useless title he knew, but it fit, so he kept it. Sometimes Gamzee still laughed out binary puns at him when he was particularly stoned, and Sollux wanted to punch him instead of just sitting there seeing nothing, feeling no connection to whoever the clown still thought existed. twinArmageddons is dead! he would have screamed if he thought it would do any good. Armageddon had already come and gone for him. Big fucking deal. No confu2iing 2hiit left two fiill the awkward 2pace2 between hii2 lii2p. Just

h0ll0w

fucking

d00m.

Two blank zeroes with nothing to do but stare desperately from between an extra 'd' and 'm'. M for mage, and D for dead to the world: shambling through a dark inner city apartment somewhere with a tri-polar clown, cutting his feet on the rims of those stupid fucking horns lying everywhere he walked because he couldn't see shit what leaped out of the darkness to hurt him. Limping, staring, sitting and staring. Fuck if he could just remember what it was like to see, to do anything. He'd sell his soul if just one image would burn its way into his eye sockets forever. Anything but charred bone and burnt memories and way too much shit that was just suddenly, without explanation

g0ne.