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She dreams of falling. They aren't good dreams.
The Void is a very contradictory thing; It wraps around T. D. like a blanket, like a comforting arm. It is made up of empty space and static, and it echoes. And if you fall in, if you stumble off the edge of an island and aren't quick enough with a pearl, it'll crush you with it's dense nothingness until it compacts you into nothing yourself.
Ask her how she knows.
Each time she wakes in her own bed is the same feeling, whether after a period of sleep or after a respawn - the crushing nothing, the falling, and then she's gasping for air, tumbling from the platform onto the floor.
Its awful. She misses who she was before the nightmares.
---
She hems and haws about knocking on Dii's door before realizing that Dii isn't even in what T. D. considers to be the house proper: she's off to the side, down the hill a little bit, constructing... something. Renovating the warrens of her home. Every time she visits, even just the top layers, the layout changes. Her home is like a living being, breathing and shifting by days.
Its spooky as hell.
T. D. knocks on the lower door, closer to the sounds of life happening.
Dii is renovating, expanding a massive chamber so much that it's starting to take over the surface of the hill it's built into, the netherrack spreading and covering like some strange plant matter. It makes a strange sound under her feet, not quite the grinding sound of gravel but something closer to the squelch of meat.
"Hey, Violet!" Dii dusts her hands off on her pants, standing up from where she'd been kneeling in the soul soil. "Come in! What brings you by?"
Tyrian Diver was the name given to her by the Queen Mother, bestowed upon her, a gift as surely as the horns and the claws that belied her ancestry. It was the name the Mother Dragon used to call her into existence, and it was the name her Pod called her by. It was the name she had shortened when she had gotten to the Overworld, because it was a long mouthful - clumsy and awkward, just like herself - and that was in the common tongue. Queen Mother forbid an overworlder try to Voidspeak.
It was starting to feel less like a name that applied to her, and therein lay the issue. Who is she? None of the things she was made to be. None of the things she was brought up to be. The Queen Mother wouldn't recognize her, even if she presented herself before the Fountain and begged to come home.
T. D. ducks under the doorframe and steps inside the warrens. "I, uh. Had a couple of questions. Do you remember the other week, when we were talking about names?"
---
"You're the Protector, Diver's the Caretaker, and I'm the scout!" Flicker declares, chest puffing proudly like one of the many chickens running around outside. Dii giggles, and even T. D. cracks a smile. For just a moment, she almost fits into this picture.
"Now hold on," Dii interrupts, "What are all those words? They sound like jobs."
"Well, duh! You're the protector that keeps us safe! I go out to get what we need, and Diver makes sure the pod is okay." T. D. could swear she felt light. Pride, maybe, or relief. "Although," and Flicker glances at T. D. with a frown, and she stage-whispers to Dii, "I wonder if she's a very good caretaker or not. Sometimes it seems like she needs her own help, you know what I mean?"
And the tiny welling of warmth and light froze over and fell into the pit of her stomach.
"We're not talking about me," She snapped, smile disappearing, morphing into a scowl that felt ugly on her face, even as she tried to brush the comment off. She didn't mean it like that. Stop taking everything personally."We're talking about your sleeping habits. Get more."
"Oh yeah? How much sleep do you get?"
"I get enough!"
---
The room was soft all over, covered in wool and fabric and color in a way that seemed wholly divorced from the netherrack and crimsonwood that made up the top floors of the warrens of Dii's house. Central to the room is a massive pit, as wide as T. D. is tall and twice as deep, halfway set into the floor and halfway raised above.
"Come take a look, Violet," Dii invites, and despite a growing pit of anxiety that she pointedly ignores she finds herself walking over to the edge and looking down.
It's a pit. She doesn't know what else to call it. It's padded and soft on her bare feet and there's pillows and blankets tucked into the corners, waiting for someone to jump down into the conspicuously ladder-less and doorless pit. She's a little afraid her toe-claws will rip something.
It's... a lot. She doesn't know what it means but it clearly Means Something to Dii.
Dii and Flicker both gather at the edge with her, eager to show her the room, and maybe that should have been her first clue that something was up.
She feels Flicker's claw on her shoulder, a friendly gesture. At first. "We need to have a chat," Flicker says behind her, and the hand leaves her shoulder.
"What are you-" She doesn't get the question out, but she turns just in time for Flicker to push her into the pit with both claws. She lands in a heap on the floor of the tall woolen pit, the walls and floor substantial but padded enough that she doesn't hurt herself.
Flicker jumps down after her, and then it's dark- Dii has sealed the pit off so she can't blink away. Her own p- her friends are conspiring against her. Cheaters.
She picks herself up off the floor, unsteady on her feet and in her gut. The floor is too soft, her ankles unused to having to compensate for the roll of the padding beneath her.
"Okay, ha ha, very funny," T. D. says, but her jaw is set. In the dim, she can still see Flicker and Flicker can see her because they're both made for a lightless environment, but it's still unsettling. The wool doesn't reflect the dim light the way endstone does. "Let me out now, please."
"No. We need to talk." Flicker is insistent.
"About what?"
"You!" The young Enderian who is barely, tenuously an adult by End standards and spends as much passion on lightening the mood and goofing off as she does on Scouting, suddenly looks so adult and serious. "You haven't been taking care of yourself."
Why did that matter? "We aren't talking about me," T. D. forces herself to stop grinding her teeth. Bad habit. She needed to stop. "I can take care of myself just fine. It's not your job to worry about me. "
"It's the job of the whole clowder to worry about each other," Dii chimes in from above. Whatever material she'd used to block off the pit carries sound better than the wool does. "If one person is sick-"
"I'm not sick!"
"You haven't been sleeping. You're getting thin. What's the last thing you ate?"
T. D. has to think about that one a little too long. "...I had a baked potato."
"When?" Dii demands. T. D. falls silent, looking up as if to stare through the lid, mouth drying up. Dii wouldn't like the honest answer to that, but she can't bring herself to lie about it. "I don't like this silence I'm hearing, Violet. You need to tell us what's going on with you."
"Why can't you just accept the pod?" Flicker's voice softens, quiets. Hurt?
T. D. thinks her head might be spinning. "I've accepted it just fine," she says, but even as she says it she's not sure it's true. She should feel joy, satisfaction at the implication that someone would want her in their pod - or clowder, in Dii's case, she supposes - but it sticks in her gut like so much slime, the idea of Pod contaminated with shame and loss.
"I feel like you're struggling, though, and it hurts me to see you struggle." A claw lands on her arm again - gentle touch, one she wants to lean into, one she can't lean into or she really will crack open, and what kind of Caregiver would she be if she did that? She pins her own claws under her arms, crossed in front of her chest like some sort of brace.
"You can tell us if you're going through something," Dii says above, voice perfectly concerned and worried and - caretaker-y.
T. D. really isn't doing her job for this pod, is she, if the protector is doing the temperament checks? Sure, the dark circles under her eyes had deepened, and maybe her clothes had gotten a little looser. And maybe she had gotten a little clumsier, and maybe she had some bruises from a few more teleports gone wrong. None of it was an excuse.
"I don't know what you're talking about," She lies. It lies heavy on her tongue, like the very air rejects it.
"I think we all know what I'm talking about," Flicker is uncharacteristically serious. T. D. hates hearing it. "We are not leaving this room until you tell us one thing you are proud of yourself for-"
"Alright, hold on-"
Flicker raises her voice, "-AND, one thing we can do to better support you!"
"Then I guess we're just going to sit here forever!" T. D. shouts back.
"Fine! Then we sit here!"
They're silent. T. D. regrets shouting almost immediately. Flicker's claws are on her hips, elbows out at angles, taking up the rest of the room in the pit.
She squints at Flicker in the dim of their little cocoon. "Why are you so insistent on this?"
"Because this is our pod! When one member of the pod isn't working properly, isn't functioning properly, something's wrong-"
"I am functioning just fine, thanks-"
"We need to fix that- You're not, though. You're not-"
"I don't know what you're talking about. I am functioning just fine," She insists, "I am functioning so fine, I am doing my job." She paces the woolen prison - the walls are just two steps in each direction, so it's not as calming as she had hoped, but she fears that if she stays still while pinned under Flicker's direct gaze and Dii's indirect overwatch, she might combust. That'd probably be bad for the wool.
"Violet," Dii's voice is slightly muffled, but still comes through mostly clear from above them. She sounds downright worried. How strange. "You know you have more value to the clowder than just your job, right?"
The question... doesn't really compute, because of course her value comes from her work. Her work is her life. And it's no wonder Flicker thinks she's a bad caretaker - clearly she is one, if her p- if her people think she's unstable. What was the last thing she built for them? The tunnel to her base, she renovated that, made it safer for Dii and Flicker to use, even installed ladders - but Flicker had built the tunnels first. Dii had carved twisting, curling warrens into the mountain they shared before T. D. had ever stepped foot in their house. Maybe when she and Dii had expanded the trading hall, but even then, it's not like it was very much, or very much work. Flicker didn't really want her advice, and Dii never seemed to need any. Hell, not long ago, she'd spent a week away building alone, a build she had no intention of showing anyone.
She'd be a terrible podmate to them. They deserved better.
"Dive-" Someone calls to her, but she's spiraling, sinking.
She's too selfish, to Individual. There is a reason she can't go back to the Queen Mother, to her spawn pod. How selfish she was to think she might be able to find a facsimile of that community in the Overworld. Now there's nowhere to go, so she presses herself into the wool as far as she can, as if she can mimic the soothing pressure of the Void manually. Her claws are sharp, and the wool is soft and breakable, but despite how high her hackles are raised she still doesn't want to break anything in Dii's home.
"I'm fine," she insists again. "I'm doing my job." Maybe if she stonewalls like this they'll let her out. Maybe they'll even believe her.
They don't. Certianly Flicker doesn't. Flicker gets right up into her face, squinting, eye contact so direct and raw T. D. can feel the earthquake still in the back of her skull just as soon as it starts.
"Baloney," She declares with so much conviction, maybe accusation. "Mother Dragon knows when you lie. You don't want to disappoint Mother Dragon, do you?"
and she
just
stops.
She doesn't choke, but she pauses with her breath half-inhaled. The question - surely Flicker didn't mean it like that. Surely-
Suddenly, she is small, her juvenile tail still curled around her primary Caretaker's leg, watching as some strange Individual throws themselves upon the edge of the fountain, begging for the Queen Mother to take them back. The event ends in dragonbreath, and Young Tyrian Diver learns a lesson that day. She learns why her pod are so strict, why its such a big deal when an Individual comes back, and exactly how it ends every single time.
Therein lies the truth. Mother would be disappointed in her.
No wonder. Flicker must be angry. Disappointed. This was the other shoe dropping. She presses herself into the padding of the wool, wishing desperately that she could become one with the fibers and disappear into the colors, and closes her eyes. As if the void behind her eyelids can be a substitute for the Void she misses so much.
After a moment, she hears the muffled thump of another set of feet, quiet and catlike. Dii. "Alright, I'm going to cut in here," She says softly, "And I'm not looking at you directly, since Flicker said that you didn't like that."
Hardly her biggest problem, but it does make her relax a hair. But no more than. "...Thanks," She said, evenly as she could. She meant it.
"I think you're getting a little stressed out. Maybe we need to take a break?"
"We don't need to-!"
"Flicker," Dii's voice hasn't changed, but there's something that nevertheless makes Flicker's objection quiet.
"I just need to go build something," The words tumble from her mouth like rain, like a fountain. She opens her eyes and looks just to the left of Dii's face. "I'll be fine. I just need to go build something."
Dii nods once, slowly, calculating. "You have to promise that you're going to eat something, and get some sleep when you're tired." Dii demands. Declares? More forceful than an ask, gentler than an order.
T. D. nods in return, more to herself than anyone else in this room, not quite looking at either of them. She's so uncomfortably aware of herself, the way she's hunched over to Flicker's height, how her claws are digging into her sides, and she's never been so conscious about how long her claws are. "Uh. Yeah, I can do that."
She thinks that should be sufficient , but Dii leans closer. "Violet. Do you promise?"
"I can do that," She repeats herself. She's not quite sure who she is reassuring. Dii uncovers the pit, and the second she has a good angle she throws a teleport out and runs, to the loud protests of Flicker that echo up the warrens.
She just manages to keep her breathing even until she manages to get to her own dwelling. She thinks about the void in the basement, and for the first time it is not nearly as enticing or as comforting as the urge to Go, to Run, to blink away before the incapacity she can feel rising in her chest.
You don't want to disappoint Mother Dragon, do you?
Her chest feels hollow and crumbly. Why had Flicker said that? Tyrian Diver had thought she was doing okay. Sure, she was awkward, and quiet, but she was helpful! She had been good to her community, contributed food and shelter to her p-
Well. maybe Flicker was right. Maybe the Queen Mother would be disappointed in her. She wanted to throw up at the thought. She needed to leave, to get some space. Some distance. Enough to take a breath of fresh air, and a long view, from a point of stability again.
From a chest in her house, she retrieves her best tools. They are named for the gifts and burdens the Queen Mother gave her; A skilled hand. A delicate touch. A keen eye. A heavy responsibility. She gathers these, and a stack of food, and she runs. She said she wanted to build. She promised she'd get food and sleep. She never said where.
---
She sits on the edge of the cliff, legs dangling in the wind, claws combing through the grasses and watches the sunrise. She's far enough away that it'd be unlikely anyone would stumble across her by accident.
Queen Mother, she feels so stupid, now that she's had the distance to calm down and think, and overdramatic. Half of her heart demands to go back, to throw herself at their feet and beg forgiveness, promise them whatever they want of her, promise never to leave them again if they don't want her to. Surely she can make all of this up to them, prove that she can still be a good podmate.
The other half is spiteful, clutching on to a fistful of words that sting like arrows pulled from a wound, still half covered in her own blood. The spiteful half of her keeps her rooted in place, choking on the thorns and vines. It's poisonous. She hates it. Yet, she can't seem to release herself from it. It's exhausting. She's exhausted.
Well, she did sort of promise Dii she would sleep when she was tired. Maybe she can just lay down for a bit.