Chapter Text
You swam for a long time.
You swam until you forgot where you came from, or where you were going. You swam until fatigue settled so deep in your bones that you stopped feeling it anymore. Sometimes you ate, and sometimes you rested, but you couldn't do either for long without panic seizing you. You were compelled to keep moving towards your goal, even though you didn't know what that goal was. Every momentary delay sent pangs of alarm through your body, until you started moving again.
That sense of urgency was all you had to guide you, and perhaps if it hadn't been so strong, you would have noticed that you were swimming in circles for days and nights on end.
But you kept swimming, on and on and on, until you could swim no longer.
And after you no longer had the strength to swim, or move, or fight the current, you sank into the dreamless sleep of exhaustion, near enough to death that your compulsion no longer had a hold.
When you woke up, your face was pressed against sand.
You dragged yourself up, even though it felt like someone had poured fire through your limbs. You looked around, and then you listened.
For the first time, something like a destination formed in your mind, and a goal seemed within reach. You sobbed with relief as you limped your way across the beach, closer to a sound that called out to the deepest parts of your soul.
You could hear it clearly; the curses that rang above the sound of the ocean until the voice that formed them broke, over and over.
You were going to fix everything. This was what you were there for.
Shh, everything's fine now, you kept thinking. In your mind you weren't sure who you were talking to, but you seized onto that thought. Everything's fine now, everything's fine now.
*
It starts on a bad night, when the sopor is too thin and your lusus too long gone.
The smothering warmth of chemically-induced serenity recedes too far, and like the tides revealing a shipwreck, it leaves all the jagged, broken bits inside you exposed. You feel raw and empty and you spend the night crying, shaking and screaming at the ocean.
You scare yourself when you're like this, and you eat your next pie while it's still hot, burning your fingers and tongue. You don't feel it. Everything has been inverted; the acuity of your senses has been transferred to your usually numb emotions, and you're overstimulated.
You pace the beach, gripping a juggling club like a lifeline. You squeeze it to your chest like a beloved grubhood toy one minute, and the next, you look at it without comprehending what it is. When the sopor softness settles in your thinkpan and rolls down your body through every nerve ending, you stumble your way back to your hive.
You don't remember reaching it, but you wake up in your recuperacoon. The sopor is low, almost too low to sleep in, but you still sleep.
When you wake up the next night and climb out of the recuperacoon, you're struck by a sudden feeling of estrangement, like you are in some new and unfamiliar place. You're fairly sure you're still in your respiteblock, because there are images of clowns grinning down at you from the walls, and the glow of your husktop's screen giving everything a familiar blueish sheen, but it takes you a few moments for your thinkpan to catch up with your eyes on account of all those fuzzy sleepy miracles rattling around inside your spongecase slowing everything inside.
The empty pie tins on the table are stacked neatly, and clean of any crumbs. You sort of have a blurry memory of licking a tin round and round, though you don't recall more than a few seconds before or after. But it looks like someone up and cleaned your respiteblock up, stacking all the horns in a corner. You don't think you've ever seen this much of your floor at a time, but even this novelty isn't enough to overtake the feeling of confusion.
You can't sort the mess inside your 'pan well enough to find any moment in time when you might have decided to clean up your respiteblock. Admittedly, your sense of time isn't the best if you had to choose between yours and a broken time management device, and sometimes when you recall things, you don't remember what order they happened in, like each memory is a little bead that snapped off a necklace and fell to the ground, bouncing in every which direction.
But you're staring at all these beads now, and you're counting 'em, and you're putting them back on the string in whatever order you think might make sense so's they make a pretty pattern, but now you've got this one extra bead, and it's also the wrong size and the wrong color and doesn't fit anywhere, and well...
It's a pretty bead, but doesn't feel like it's yours. Feels like it's from someone else's necklace, except there's not anybody around who would have lost a bead, so it has to be yours, you think. And anyway, it's a pretty bead, you don't get beads like these often and...
What were you thinking about?
You can't think on an empty stomach. Or on a clear head, either.
You bake a pie for breakfast and eat it slowly. You check the slime level in your 'coon, and you eat slower, and you only take a teensy bit out for lunch. You need to remember not to eat a lot until your next ration comes in.
You distract yourself by talking to your friends. You have a rap battle with Tavros, you talk with Karkat... It feels alright, it feels like you can make it to the next supply drop. You forgot last time, ended up staring at a wall for too long and missed it, but you told Karkat to remind you this time, and if you hang out online with him, you know he'll remember for you. You know he'll tell you to go and collect your supplies. He'll scream and swear and rant, but he'll go and pick them up himself if he thinks he has to.
And if he also starts thinking that you warrant keeping a closer eye on you, well... Karkat needs to take care of people, and you don't all mind if 'people' mainly means you. The brother needs a calming influence in his life, before his horns start sizzling like overheated candy in a radiation-based heating apparatus.
You finish your two pies and bake another before you remember you should be rationing, but by that point there's no use wasting this nice extra pie, and you eat it before the hum of anxiety in your horns starts moving any lower.
You pretend that you have enough sopor left in your recuperacoon, but maybe you're kinda shit at pretending, because you're surprised as hell when you wake up the next night as well-rested as you do.
*
You wake up with the sharp smell of fresh sopor.
Slowly, you climb out of your recuperacoon and take a long, hard look at its contents. These are not the watery dregs from the night before. This is fresh sopor, so fresh that it stings your ganderbulbs, and it's more than you usually have.
Your frail grasp on the natural progression of events is broken as you scramble to find days and nights you know must be missing. When you come up only with an unbroken thread between going to sleep in the paltry remains of your sopor supply and waking up surrounded by such a cornucopia, you sit down on the floor and quietly attempt a panic attack.
You're still addled by sopor, or maybe just a bit too relieved, because you can barely scrounge a few stray flecks of concern.
You bake yourself a pie, and by the time you're a quarter way through it, your concern has melted away into comforting puddles of complacency. You sit down at your husktop, and your night continues to go well, because your best friend is online. You troll him with nothing more to your intentions than wanting to talk, but you still have this niggling curiosity—no longer tinged with worry—about how much time you're missing.
TC: bRo, If YoU dOn'T mInD a MoThErFuCkEr GeTtInG hIs QuErYmAkInG aLl Up In YoUr DiReCtIoN
TC: hOw LoNg SiNcE yOu AnD mE dOnE mAdE aNy SoRtA tAlKiNg NoIsEs Up At EaCh AnOtHeR?
CG: YOU'RE ASKING HOW LONG SINCE WE TALKED? I ASSUME YOU MEAN IN PERSON, BECAUSE I DOUBT EVEN YOU COULD FORGET WE TALKED JUST LAST NIGHT OVER TROLLIAN.
CG: UNLESS YOU ACTUALLY DID FORGET THAT. WHICH, WHILE COMING FROM SOMEONE WHO ISN'T A PANFRIED CROTCHGOBLIN WITH THE MEMORY RETENSION CAPABILITY OF A GRUB DROPPED ON ITS HEAD ONE TOO MANY TIMES WOULD BE SURPRIZING, WOULD NOT EVEN REGISTER AS A BLIP ON THE CLOWNFACE ASSHOLE BIZARRITY GAUGE.
TC: yOu KnOw Me DaMn BeSt, BrO. :o)
CG: YES, WELL, IT'S KNOWLEDGE GAINED THROUGH SUFFERING THE INANE WORDVOMIT OF AN IRRESPONSIBLE DOUCHEFUCK WITH STUPID HAIR. I'VE COME TOO FAR TO GO BACK.
TC: hOnK
TC: sO wHaT dId We GeT oUr TaLkFlApS aLl AbOuT lAsT nIgHt?
CG: OH DEAR GOD YOU ACTUALLY DID FORGET
CG: LOOK, I PROMISED TO REMIND YOU THAT YOU NEED TO GO AND GET SUPPLIES AT THE NEXT DROP.
CG: AND THIS IS ME REMINDING YOU.
CG: NOT THAT YOU NEED TO GO, BUT THAT I PROMISED TO REMIND YOU, WHICH I WILL ALSO DO WHEN THE TIME COMES, BECAUSE I'M COMMITTED TO THIS EMBARRASSING FUCKING CIRCUS ACT SO I GUESS I HAVE TO SEE THINGS THROUGH NOW.
He goes on to lecture you on the importance of stocking up, on how to take care of yourself, and a long tangent on why you need to brush your hair because it “FREAKS ME OUT, SERIOUSLY”. You sit there, contributing only the occasional honk to the conversation, but you don't really pay attention all that much. You just watch every line of text as it appears, walls and walls of gray concrete letters surrounding you like a fortress, and making you feel just as safe.
Later, you make a few more pies, eat two, and go for a walk on the beach.
You can feel all the miracles around you tonight, and you don't even feel a twinge of anything when you don't see your lusus.
When you return, you're guided back to your hive by the long stretch of light extending from your door and across the beach. It doesn't even occur to you that you turned the light off before you left until you're already inside and see the nice, clean stack of pie tins on the counter.
There's that distant feeling of reality not matching the world inside your thinkpan again, and you're still reeling when you feel arms going around you and something cold and clammy touching your cheek.
The juggling club is in your hand in moment, and you throw your head back, trying to stab with your horns, but the moment you move, everything tightens. You are in a headlock, and a hand clamps down around your wrist, tight enough to make the club drop from your inert fingers.
The hand is stark blinding white, and the voice in your ear whispers soothingly.
The hand is white. The hand is white.
The calming haze of sopor parts like a curtain, and terror hits you like a railbound transit device to the face.