Your name is Kanaya Maryam, and everything is going wrong.
Most importantly, you've just died and reawakened as a rainbow drinker. You've also killed your former comrade Eridan. His purple blood is still smeared on your mouth and clothes, and his cape is wrapped around the fatal blow he'd inflicted.
But you think the worst of all is that your morail is dying next to you.
She has cobalt blue blood staining the orange of her shirt, flowers of dark against a plain of bright. Terezi's bloodied cane is lying a few feet away. The blind troll is nowhere to be found, though she may have left to help Karkat calm Gamzee. But it doesn't matter now. Terezi's mission is accomplished, or about to be.
Another trail of blood streaks from your morail's lips. She's barely conscious, but you still talk softly, your usually enunciated words slurring with emotion. You have never considered your morail's death. She has a talent for evading her own mortality, except for this instance, because there's no amount of luck that can save her. You've ripped most of your long skirt off and dressed the wound, but it's close to her bloodpusher and deadly.
Her eyes flare open suddenly and find yours. The color is fading from her pupils, a symptom of severe bloodloss. You try to smile comfortingly. With the rainbow of blood caking you, it's probably just frightening.
"Hey, there, McFussyfangs." Her voice carries none of it's underlying sneer, only lingering pain and the sweet tranquility of fast-approaching death.
"Hello," you reply, forever polite.
She doesn't speak for a moment, eyebrows furrowed. In pain, you think. But she doesn't show it. She's never one to show weakness, even now, dying and alone with you. "Bye."
The word startles you. Her eyes are slipping closed, and you shake her shoulder. The greying pupils surface again.
"Please don't," you whisper. Please don't what? Go? Die? Leave me? You settle on leaving the sentence open, cut off and unfinished, like a name half-chiseled into a headstone.
She makes the effort, even though it hurts her, and bares her fangs at something - maybe everything. You hate yourself. You're so selfish, waiting for her to die. You should be a true morail and finish her. Why let her suffer? But you can't, because you just can't.
Sometime during your internal struggle, she stops breathing.
You don't understand at first. You say her name, more than once, louder each time. You jostle her. You wait for one more ragged breath to force its way into and out of her. Nothing happens, and it takes several beats of silence for you to realize your morail's dead.
You sit back, drawing your bare legs up to your chin. You hope no one comes up and finds you like this, fighting jade green tears, breathing too deeply, staring too blankly.
But someone does come up. You hear the footsteps, but don't acknowledge their presence.
"Kanaya?"
It's Karkat. You only lift your shoulders in response.
"I'm . . . really sorry. That this happened. I won't tell you it was for the best, because you don't want to hear that, but I'm here if you ever want to . . . talk."
You can tell how much it pains him to say the words, and you spare him. "Just go, Karkat. I'll be with you shortly."
This reassures him, and he heads back inside. Your eyes find the corpse again. It's hard not to.
The cerulean blue blood pooling under her is attractive. You catch a drop on your finger and try it, too emotionally strained to care. You're hungry, and she has beautiful blood. Sweet. Not as rich as the blood of the royal sea dwellers, but special in its own way.
You can't put it off any longer. You can't leave your morail's body here, for fear that Makara would make off with it, and you can't take it into the lab. It's too upsetting. The abyss beckons.
Drop the body in the abyss and move on. That's what you need to do.
What you should do.
What you don't do.
Instead, you bend down and do exactly what you've wanted to do for you don't know how many sweeps, and kiss her.
You know it won't revive her. She's at the God Tier and her death is just, and the rules of the game demand her life.
As always, the game wins.
It wins, and it leaves you with blood on your lips and another dead friend, maybe even the most dear of your friends.
You carry the body to the edge of the roof and look down on the swirling darkness below. This is as close to a burial as she'll get, unfortunately. You know the others would laugh at you. Caring for corpses is a human quirk, but you think it's appropriate.
Her orange ensemble shrinks and darkens with distance and soon you're alone on a meteor, flying through space, covered in blood and wondering if your aching bloodpusher will ever hurt less, or if it's always been this way.