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doom is not quite time and time is not quite doom. time is the throughline, the canvas, the grid, the sprawl and unfurl of events into dizzying vectors and architectures and archaeologies.
Damara showed you it once, or maybe more than once: you never can be sure how many times something has happened, is happening adjacently, with time.
doom is not the low hum of the universe running down, though it is made by that thing. every timeline is a doomed timeline, if you wait long enough.
doom is tether. doom is the meant, doom is what holds. endings and stains and burned-in pixels.
* *
your descendant's hands arc in flight over the chalkboard. the whirling figure of the jump emerges in its flawed helical beauty.
"I don't need to tell you how obviously impossible that is," you laugh, playing into his performance. his eyes spark with something you recognize as propulsion, steering a grounded flight through code and geometry. your hands twitch around the tea you're using mostly as a radiant heat source; your circulation still hasn't quite gotten used to perfusing out past your elbows yet.
"I don't have a flight path that works in this universe," Sollux presses on. "this figure assumes that space-time is a holographic projection of a two-dimensional... elsewhere. obviously that assumption is useful for modeling, but it fucks gravity right up, among other things. but I feel something at the end of this…"
"yes, yes, assume a one-dimensional universe where pi equals 3. go on..."
Sollux makes a face at you, too much fang to be entirely a reaction to you being an ass as usual. you wince, not sure what you've done. your mind and tongue are no more used to being part of a whole, free troll than your bloodpusher. you keep making mistakes and being forgiven, keep finding yourself helplessly uncomprehending at this new set of fields and forces that govern your new soft, small, safe life. "no, hold on, I know what I'm feeling – these equations solve for a roaring migraine at the absolute best. at worst... I'm not sure. you're right, let's forget about it." the fixated brilliance of his eyes dims, worried pools of hazy color. "let's get dinner, love, and go see KK or walk in the forest together, whatever you want..."
* *
doom is double vision, the ache of migraine, the disquieting overlap of realities equally real but too incompatible to coexist.
keeping the line between them is important, keeping the wall there. because if you didn't -
* *
"I can't say no to one of your fucked-up brilliant ideas, you know that." you set down your tea and stretch a pale scarred hand toward the board, threads of light extending from your fingers to flow around the chalked figure, sketching and refining its intertwined arcs. "dinner can wait. please?"
"it's that – I just remembered where this idea came from. I'm drawing a jump that you almost succeeded at, in a time that didn't... that didn't..." Sollux's eyes sparkle with crystalline red-blue reflections, the sheen of incipient tears, the flaring up again of flow in his work. wrapped around your brainstem, a voice whispers, not yours or his or any one troll's, a slippery bass note of a doomed voice that you aren't even sure is a voice, when you try to listen – "but I think I know what you saw, where you were going. it looks like this..."
* *
the scream of something much larger than you is one with your scream,
dissolution, annihilation, endlessness, perfect, wrong -
* *
("we're forked."
it's a duality pun, but also an accurate description of your state with respect to the timeline. you're staring into your own helmet-shielded eyes. whorls of power spin furiously from your - his - horns, a scream expressed in light, power looping through the air. this moment isn't every moment, but this you is every you, an indelible stain fixed and spidercracked from the place where it slices through time -
"we blue it," you start to say, but the words s t r e t c h -)
* *
keeping the line between them is important, keeping the wall there.
you can't have everything you want. you can't - you -
* *
you're walking with Kankri - with -
- the Signless, lost in a forest. you've fought off a pack of wild snortbeasts, at least 30 to 50 of them, and you're spattered with weird mammalian blood, the red of it drying to rust on your clothing. Meulin is scouting the boundaries as you talk -
"I wish we'd won," he says, "I wish we'd made a bigger impact - but you were right, after Porrim was gone anything we did was going to be a mostly useless, self-aggrandizing last stand, and I'd rather - stay around to do something, to inspire someone, even if we almost never speak to anyone. I - I am glad we're alive. but I don't know that I like being the version of myself that survives when others don't."
moonlight dapples through leaves. you cast two overlapping shadows. the nights are growing shorter. the merciless solar heat hunting your family is a constant, even if the empire has mostly forgotten about you. but you live, and move, and mourn.
"I'm older than I've ever thought I'd be," he muses. "I don't know what to do with that."
you made choices that led him to this. you're selfishly content with that.
or you want to be selfishly content with it, but you also -
* *
you grasp at a rare moment of post-orgasmic coherence. "the dead fuck better." Latula just did a thing with her claws and the back of your knee that made you come until your ghosty seedflap twinged and seared with pushing out remnant nothing. as erogenous zones go the back of your knee is like, third tier at best, but that's still definitely a thing that just happened. "got millions of sweeps to practice. do sicker boardside switch kickflips, too. totally worth splodin' your ghost into a boring dream bubble for."
"...shit, Tuna, but being alive was sick." she doesn't say a damn thing about what either of you sacrificed or lost to get here, to this state of stasis and constraint where you've refined hedonism into a fine-spun art between the echoes of your bodies and the wreck of your mind. you pity her spectacularly, inconsolably.
she looks up at you from the crux of your hip with her dazzling icy blanks of eyes, listening. fangs stopped on the patient verge of a bite that she has all infinity to close around the ridge of your hipbone where you're as sensitized and exposed as a bulge, now and after and before...
"worth it." the conviction emerges from the snowblind static-roaring black box of half your mind as if there's anything at its origins you could ever again number or analyze –
she bites your hip and lets you explain by screaming. pity ravages you like the fanged emptiness between one fantastic island of suspended being and the next, enfolding, inevitable, true beyond all truths.
* *
the scream of something much larger than you is one with your scream,
dissolution, annihilation, endlessness, perfect, wrong -
* *
- you come adrift from yourself, two
no, more discrete versions than that. there's a world where Latula Pyrope holds your heart, and one where you're wandering the planet with Meulin and the Signless, growing old together.
there's a world where you self-conscripted, chose the terms of your fate.
there's one where you've become something so far from a troll that there are no words, only numbers and transmissions through the dark.
and one where some ancient ageless wreck you barely recognize as yourself walks in a world you barely recognize as your world, and the sky is free of drones, and you hold the hand of a troll who looks like you and levitate through the air, free, free -
this must be like what the Signless sees in his dreams.
not the same world, but the same feeling. the absolute knowledge that there can be something better than this - not only guessed-at, but known,
time sprawls like a thicket of brambles, occludes the paths between your dooms. you don't know how to get there from here, or from any other of the points that enter onto this placeless place.
* *
"Only one thread emerges, always," Damara says, unlight streaming from her lips like smoke, obliquely answering the question you hadn't figured out how to ask. "Each instance, born from the consumed ashes of what could have been."
every one of you loses.
every one of you wins something.
* *
the truth is, you never assumed you were going to live long at all; you always thought you'd go out in a blaze of glory.
so many moments, so many blazing endpoints stamped in the circuit of your doom, and still, from each, the threads of your persistence, thinned like trees standing after a forest fire.
doom is not time, and it is also not Life, which you are thoroughly sick of. but it marks survival, just as it marks dissolution.
every timeline is a doomed timeline, if you wait long enough.
* *
she showed you time so you could understand doom, so you could see the black thread running through. not so much a loop as a roundabout. defined, indelible points of entry and exit.
these are your own, but you're conscious that your voices mark places in other people's dooms; that where they switch tracks, you can perceive an echo.
* *
Your scream is the roar of your engines,
and for a moment, the pain becomes one with
the expression of the pain,
incandescent, mindless, viciously perfect,
burning off haloes of light.
* *
"How is this a gift?" you ask, scalded, raw, numb.
"It's not a gift. It's your inheritance."
* *
"all right," you say, "I trust you," and Sollux wraps his hands around the backs of yours, softer than rain, warmer even than your tea, and kisses you as all the fanged tension goes out of his lovely slender mouth.
you walk away from the board, wander out with your descendant in the night air. you're older than you've ever wanted to be, older than you still ever want to be, but something keeps your heart beating.
you build a future together, you forget.
* *
there's a place outside of time where you stood with Damara, once and an infinity of times.
this isn't Damara. this is the younger Megido, and it's not so much the visual silhouette of her body that tells you so - everything here is dream-hazy, hyperreal outlines in photographic negative, the brilliant unlight of a between-space without c - but the knowledge of what she was to Sollux.
(what she is, in timelines where she survives; you can only guess at those; they might not intersect any of yours at all -)
you feel that recognition as an overlay of memory written to your soul, a thing you know beyond knowing.
but the you who speaks to her is much younger, too, because you feel as you speak that your referent for holes in your skin is ones you've torn yourself, fighting with enemies less visible or external than the empire.
"How do I live, with all this anger in me? We've lost so much already, and everything that disintegrates around me leaves a mark like a hole torn in my skin. Do I ever find peace?"
"It isn't peace."
you think of the Signless and his peace, and you understand - a little more. not everything.
but the taste of a hunger comes on you, and hunger is sometimes better than satiety, in a way you've never been able to articulate.
* *
you tear at Sollux with your claws, growling, weeping; you mark the edges of the holes in his skin with your fangs. he dragged you through the void, and you gave up death for him so he could choose freely, and he chose this fate freely, and you pity him and you hate him, a searing anger that tastes of the hunger you've never quenched
(except in moments, except in the searing scream of light and motion, dissolving into -)
* *
the terror of facing the Handmaid, the psychopomp, is not that she takes you into death. death is easy. dissolution is easy.
the terror and the agony is that she smiles and takes your hand and ushers you into living, clinging tight to what remains.
* *
you reach into doom itself. it's a mottled iridescence, the color of an abalone shell, and it aches like a migraine.
the ache of it is exhausting to push past, but somehow, at the same time, the act of reaching becomes inevitable; the effort of forcing yourself through makes itself inevitable.
the feeling of double images resolving to one, of the paths untaken shredding, falling away. the feeling of data loss.
you wonder, if you couldn't see the other paths, weren't aware of the lives ripping away from you, would this hurt less? would it be less like the tearing of wires into your flesh, the sear of cautery?
or would the pain and the grief be the same but nameless, an untethered intrusion of horror, an empty place with no torn remnant to signify what once was?
* *
"I want what you're becoming," you murmur, reverent and mournful with pity, appalled and exulting in the words coming out your mouth.
after this, after all this, more than anything you're embarrassed at stating the obvious. Sollux strokes the back of your neck, his thigh shifting between your legs. it's your third time tonight, or would be by some quantized measure of pailing that you've long since transcended together. in a matter of breaths you'll roll both of your bodies over and put your bulge in him, as close as you can be in the here and now.
in a matter of the set and rise of the two moons you'll let go of hands and mouths, of the exquisite slender grasp of his seedflap, the accidental caress of his foot against your calf in the recuperacoon – to join together in a dance that does not cease or sleep -
...your wake-lines gleaming across the cosmos, want you waking into your new senses tender and raw and confused, want to watch you hatch anew, want to hold you the first time you know your glory for what I have always –
also for what definitely isn't the first time tonight, you burst into tears. Sollux's small wry smile says he knows just as well as you do that it won't really be like that. every perforated place on his body, pierced anew or in the last sweeps, flaring hot with emotion and the harsh brilliance of arc-potential says he knows it will be more.
"I don't think I have anything more to teach you about duality," your trembling salt-damp mouth says, and that's about how much you want this, now, and
here, near the vaulted roof of possibility, here in a dim liminal corner of your fate where your doom is to be perfectly known and seen -
this, too, he understands and takes you in.