wintersday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wintersday) wrote2022-08-07 10:07 pm
wintersday) wrote2022-08-07 10:07 pm
Fic: Desperate Measures
Title: Desperate Measures
Fandom: Homestuck
Major Characters/Pairings: Kanaya
Wordcount: 750
Rating: PG
POV: Second person
Summary: A Doomed Kanaya refuses to accept her fate.
The universe is unraveling like a poorly-stitched hem.
You can’t see it. Not yet. The damage is lightsweeps away, and despite the wings buzzing dragonfly-rapid at your back, your sight is no better than it was before you died. But the sense of something coming apart tickles your thinkpan like a loose thread – a hundred thousand loose threads, a million, as numerous as the stars and proliferating with every second. It seems unfair that your ascension should buy only your own doom and the ability to feel it as it happens, but that matters not at all to this game’s whims. It doesn’t even matter that Jack is gone and you have killed him. This wasn’t the way that things were supposed to go, and so it won’t be.
The roof of the meteor complex is bare and grey, a stark aesthetic disappointment hanging within a vast cold void. You sit at the edge and look up into the black, wondering how long it will be before you see the horizon collapsing inward, and what it will be like when you do. Mostly, you hope it will be fast. Part of you also hopes it will be beautiful.
In your lap, the matriorb rests heavily. You cradle its warm, tough shell between your fronds as you wait, careful of the sharper protrusions, and hum the tune your lusus used to sing to you. It might be only imagination that you can feel the unhatched mother stir at the sound, but she still lives, despite Eridan’s efforts, and will until doom catches up to you. It seems to you that you owe her something more than giving up.
You close your eyes to think, and in your mind, the emptiness around you takes on texture and substance. It isn’t empty after all. It doesn’t feel like it would take much effort to stand up, reach out, and pluck one of the few remaining worlds from the sky.
A thought occurs to you: spacetime is spoken of by physincisionists as fabric. It can be folded, not with the hands but with the mind. It stands to reason, then, that it could also be aligned, drawn taut. It might be cut. You have no scissors to cut it, but you have claws. As you are a god now of distances and lines, surfaces and infinitesimal points, those claws can be as sharp as you like.
Your measurements will have to be exact. You cannot discard pieces of existence willy-nilly, nor can you leave gaps through which anything might sneak. Still, your mouth is dry with fear as you set the matriorb aside and take the soft darkness in your hands, but you think it might be possible.
So: measure twice, they say, and cut once, but you don’t think you have time for that. The decay is accelerating. You measure once, over an arc far greater than you could have comprehended while alive, and then you slide the tip of your claw into a single point too small to be real, and with one swift motion slice existence open along the line you’ve chosen. The edges flutter. A high wind wails through. There’s no time for doubt either. You do it again: measure, cut. Little by little, your doom falls away like so much scrap fabric. Which greater floor it litters, you don’t know and don’t particularly care.
There is so little you have to work with. A universe, in your considered opinion, should be bound with veins and sinew in the way of old myths, but all you have is ordinary thread. Your modus disgorges a spool of it in pale lilac, alongside a needle, and you feel a twinge of regret for the girl whose incisive text and weaponry these things remind you of. You would have liked to meet her, but the place where your world intersected with hers is one of the fraying edges that has already been cut away. It will have to be enough to fight the game as she had, by stitching your universe back together in her color. You bring two once-distant segments of space together, pierce and pull the needle through, and know the worst of it is over. You’re not yet sure of everything you’ve excised from the cloth of this universe. You hope it’s nothing you’ll miss. Inevitably, it will be. But the work is nearly done now – the edges matched, the seams clean, the stitchwork strong. It’s holding. It will hold.
Fandom: Homestuck
Major Characters/Pairings: Kanaya
Wordcount: 750
Rating: PG
POV: Second person
Summary: A Doomed Kanaya refuses to accept her fate.
The universe is unraveling like a poorly-stitched hem.
You can’t see it. Not yet. The damage is lightsweeps away, and despite the wings buzzing dragonfly-rapid at your back, your sight is no better than it was before you died. But the sense of something coming apart tickles your thinkpan like a loose thread – a hundred thousand loose threads, a million, as numerous as the stars and proliferating with every second. It seems unfair that your ascension should buy only your own doom and the ability to feel it as it happens, but that matters not at all to this game’s whims. It doesn’t even matter that Jack is gone and you have killed him. This wasn’t the way that things were supposed to go, and so it won’t be.
The roof of the meteor complex is bare and grey, a stark aesthetic disappointment hanging within a vast cold void. You sit at the edge and look up into the black, wondering how long it will be before you see the horizon collapsing inward, and what it will be like when you do. Mostly, you hope it will be fast. Part of you also hopes it will be beautiful.
In your lap, the matriorb rests heavily. You cradle its warm, tough shell between your fronds as you wait, careful of the sharper protrusions, and hum the tune your lusus used to sing to you. It might be only imagination that you can feel the unhatched mother stir at the sound, but she still lives, despite Eridan’s efforts, and will until doom catches up to you. It seems to you that you owe her something more than giving up.
You close your eyes to think, and in your mind, the emptiness around you takes on texture and substance. It isn’t empty after all. It doesn’t feel like it would take much effort to stand up, reach out, and pluck one of the few remaining worlds from the sky.
A thought occurs to you: spacetime is spoken of by physincisionists as fabric. It can be folded, not with the hands but with the mind. It stands to reason, then, that it could also be aligned, drawn taut. It might be cut. You have no scissors to cut it, but you have claws. As you are a god now of distances and lines, surfaces and infinitesimal points, those claws can be as sharp as you like.
Your measurements will have to be exact. You cannot discard pieces of existence willy-nilly, nor can you leave gaps through which anything might sneak. Still, your mouth is dry with fear as you set the matriorb aside and take the soft darkness in your hands, but you think it might be possible.
So: measure twice, they say, and cut once, but you don’t think you have time for that. The decay is accelerating. You measure once, over an arc far greater than you could have comprehended while alive, and then you slide the tip of your claw into a single point too small to be real, and with one swift motion slice existence open along the line you’ve chosen. The edges flutter. A high wind wails through. There’s no time for doubt either. You do it again: measure, cut. Little by little, your doom falls away like so much scrap fabric. Which greater floor it litters, you don’t know and don’t particularly care.
There is so little you have to work with. A universe, in your considered opinion, should be bound with veins and sinew in the way of old myths, but all you have is ordinary thread. Your modus disgorges a spool of it in pale lilac, alongside a needle, and you feel a twinge of regret for the girl whose incisive text and weaponry these things remind you of. You would have liked to meet her, but the place where your world intersected with hers is one of the fraying edges that has already been cut away. It will have to be enough to fight the game as she had, by stitching your universe back together in her color. You bring two once-distant segments of space together, pierce and pull the needle through, and know the worst of it is over. You’re not yet sure of everything you’ve excised from the cloth of this universe. You hope it’s nothing you’ll miss. Inevitably, it will be. But the work is nearly done now – the edges matched, the seams clean, the stitchwork strong. It’s holding. It will hold.