A.N: As apology for making you guys wait so long for the Lenses update, here's a little Sollux/Aradia oneshot that was supposed to be sadstuck and turned into fluff-ish? I don't know. Just enjoy~! And thanks for reading, as always!
He often made the journey out here now. It was funny, really, when he looked back on it. When there was actually a sane reason for him to come here, he hardly did. Now, he'd find any old excuse to free himself from the stuffy confines of his hive to traipse through the plains.
You could swear, as he got closer, that the air got heavier with the scent of smoke, although any wisps of grey were now long gone, or in the form of the clouds high above. There wasn't any greenery, the ground especially barren even for Alternian standards.
His fault.
There wasn't any life. Not a single screech of a squawk-beast circling overhead as though it were picking it's next meal. No flowers poking their timid heads through the dirt that littered the earth.
His fault.
Rubble was strewn about, scratching the soles of his feet through his shoes and patching the would-be clean landscape with debri.
His fault.
There wasn't a home here anymore. But, he could dream, right? Wishing to go back and change his mistakes, erase them like the sweep of a hand over a whiteboard, would make a difference, right?
Each time, he'd kneel in the freshly overturned earth, the smell of death - at least, to his imagination - surrounding him, choking up his nose and trapping him.
He'd written at least fifty messages by now. One for each day that she'd been gone.
Some of them were silly, inane lines of bullshit about odd things that had happened during the day. Things like, "toniight my lu2u2 fell off the roof agaiin. he made a huge crater iin the ground, two.". Little updates on himself, as though she knew or cared.
Others were heavier, written when he was feeling particularly melancholy, a regular occurrence these days.
But one thing held each of them in common.
He always signed off with a heart, the one thing he'd never had the chance to say before fate had stolen the words from his mouth. Before his hopes for the future had been blasted into oblivion, thanks to the raw power barely locked behind his own two eyes.
The night was fresh and clear, each breath in and out stinging his throat a little with the cold. He berate himself mentally for not thinking to bring some warmer clothes, although now it didn't really matter. He'd be back soon.
As with each time, he knelt in the sand, drawing out with his finger another message. But this one was different. This one was a goodbye.
"goodbye aa. you diidnt de2erve all thiis bull2hiit, especiially not from 2omeone liike me. ii wii2h ii'd had the chance two 2ay thiis two your face. iim 2orry. iim 2orry a thou2and tiime2 more than ii can tell you."
He finished with a heart, and stood up, brushing off the dirt from his knees. Turned away from the ruins of his dreams for one last time.
Only now, he heard a scratching in the sand behind him. He whipped around faster than he could think, and the breath he was taking caught in his throat.
New words; scratchy, faint and barely even readable, but they were there, right in front of his eyes, etched into the ground.
"im s0rry t00."
His eyes widened and he took a step back, then another, until he was finally running. The frantic pace he was keeping didn't stop until he was back at his hive, and the first thing he leapt for was his husktop. He pulled up Trollian, and sat to wait, fingers interlinked and twisting in and out from sheer nervousness.
- apocalypseArisen [AA] came online -