echidna | ❄ sixth reminder

❄ sixth reminder

[ morning ; 1338 benny road ]

[ Jade can't help but feel something is wrong this morning when she wakes up. She feels like she's missed something, almost like she's been asleep for a long time. She stumbles out of bed, feeling a little fuzzy, noticing the changes to her room. The window's been repaired, there's a backpack that she didn't have before with half finished homework on the desk. She doesn't really start to feel concerned until she looks at the calendar on her wall, which has been flipped over to October.

That can't be right.

She grabs it from the wall, bursts out into the hallway still in her nightgown and clutching it to her chest. ]

Karkat? Gamzee?

[ phone ]

Hi Mayfield! Long time no talk! Or maybe we did talk, but it wasn't me me, it was creepy drone me. I'm not really sure what happened, I can't remember anything since, hmmm, a couple weeks ago, I think, after the zombies. I don't remember going home, or being here, nothing! It's kind of scary, but I'm glad that I was a normal creepy drone and not a murderous creepy drone. I really hope that doesn't happen to me again. Have you ever had something like that happen to you? Not even just droning but, I don't know, something reeeeally creepy where you almost... don't exist. It's kind of scary.

Oh, and apparently I'm a girl scout now, hehe.

[ afternoon ; your front door ]

[ There is some pretty persistent knocking at your front door right now. If and when you get around to answering it, you will find Jade on your doorstep, wagon stacked high with boxes of cookies behind her. She is looking particularly adorable right now, all dressed up in a girl scout's uniform. ]

Hi!! Do you like cookies?

[ phone; fail filter to eridan ]

Eridan? Hi, um... how are you?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Not in the kitchen. Fucking nosy as always.

[It's not a no, but he'll let her finish her breakfast.]

[ At that, Jade proceeds to inhale the rest of her breakfast. Not that there was that much left. And admittedly it is pretty much at the same speed as she was eating before. She hops out of her chair when she's finished, fuck dishes that's what drone parents are for. ]

Your room?

Sure.

[With that, getting up with a hasty scrape of the chair on the floor and walking back there. He doesn't stop to make sure she's following, although he assumes she will and part of him hopes she doesn't. He doesn't know if he can really do this.]

[ Jade's following close behind, albeit silently, a little lost in thought. She's not really sure what he's going to tell her, so she's trying to relive old conversations and piece together some idea from that. ]

[Letting her into the room and closing the door behind him. And now that he's done that he looks very trapped. He's made a big deal out of this and now he can't back out even though she'll think he's pathetic or worse she'll think this was nothing to care about at all.

He really trusts her but his ease around her is partially explained by how little she really understands his world, and he's about to change that, and he doesn't know if he's ever felt so scared and vulnerable even if he's trying not to let it show.]

[ She settles herself down on his bed, patting the empty spot beside her and trying not to think too much about how cagey he suddenly looks. She doesn't say anything, just offers a small smile and waits for him to speak first. ]

[He sits.

He's still, and doesn't say anything for a minute, trying to arrange his thoughts and figure out where to start. If he's going to explain this, there's no way around one other issue, and ironically it feels almost easier to talk about.]

So.

What do you know about the hemospectrum? You've seen my blood, at least.

I know a little, but not that much.

[ Most of her knowledge comes from hearing Eridan talk about it, so yeah, not the best source of information. ]

Okay.

Well, it's a caste system based on the color of our blood. You know where we all stand, because it's the color we type with.

[Not in his case, but that's blatantly obvious right now.]

So, you know, the highest are the seadwellers. Feferi's blood makes her royalty. Out of the landdwellers, blue bloods are highbloods. Then you have Gamzee, who's the highest possible for a landdweller. On the other hand, once you start getting below green, you're a lowblood. If you remember Aradia's color, that's the lowest possible blood color on the hemospectrum.

It's sort of hard to explain if you don't have it what the point is. Highbloods have larger hives, more things. They'll probably grow up to be leaders. Lowbloods are more likely to be culled if there's something wrong with them or they can't defend themselves. That kind of thing.

That's how it works, more or less.

[ Jade nods politely, listening carefully. It makes enough sense-- well, not sense exactly, because it seems unfair to sort people like that, but she can certainly grasp the idea well enough. She tries to put the rest of it together herself. They type in their blood color, just like her and her friends had used their eye colors, but Karkat had always typed in grey. She's seen his blood, his troll blood, though there was no difference at all between it and hers. ]

So then your blood is, [ she pauses to consider her word choice. ] different? Sort of like Aradia's but... different.

[ It's the best she can come up with. He probably won't take well to something like 'special', and she definitely doesn't want to use something like 'weird'. ]

You were hiding it?

Yes. I was hiding it. I had to hide it.

My blood isn't really sort of like Aradia's. Call it what it is, it's bright red and that may not mean anything to you but to us, it's not a color blood is supposed to be. If I was Aradia's color then I would still be essentially scum, but at least I would have a value. Unless you want to say lower than zero is a value, maybe if we're counting negative numbers. I don't know.

The point is, my blood is a mutation, and mutants aren't supposed to be allowed to live. I should have been culled the moment I was born. The fact that I was allowed to pupate and was chosen by a lusus and wasn't completely erased from existence as soon as anyone noticed what color I was is just not something that happens in our society.

[ Jade is quiet for several minutes, thinking over what she’s been told. Her perspective is slanted, to say the least, given that she is a human and not a troll, and can’t help but reason out troll culture from a human perspective. For now, she refrains on commenting on what he’s told her, opting to investigate further. ]

So your friends don’t know?

Some of them do. Terezi. Gamzee apparently, although I'm not sure he knows he knows. He never brought it up until he decided he actually cared about blood color and was going to kill all of us. Kanaya knows. I don't know, some of the others might have figured it out.

I was planning to tell them all. I just didn't want them to look down on me.

I don't think they would. You are lucky to have a lot of really great friends, and they are lucky to have you too.

Maybe. Even probably. Whatever.

That's not the whole story. There's a reason why I was allowed to live.

What happened?

Well, so...it turns out I'm not the only troll to ever have such a low blood color, because there was one other a long time ago who had the same color I do.

He somehow escaped culling, too, and he grew up and went around saying a lot of things and making a whole lot of promises and ultimately succeeding at nothing except for dying a gruesome tortuous death and being such a failure that his name and existence were wiped from all the records and just about no one gave much of a fuck. Except he was also good at one other thing, and that was getting some suckers to buy what he said who believed he was really going to fulfill all the impossible promises he made.

The entire reason I am alive is because of those gullible shitheads who think I'm here to do what he said he would do instead of just being a second sickening mistake on the part of the mother grub. So I have a life and I have a lusus and I have a shitty grey martyr sign to remind me that every day I'm a waste of sweeps of effort and hope because I was supposed to grow up and fucking save all of us and fix every problem in the entire universe while I'm at it and I don't know how to do that and I'm not even particularly good at anything and I don't even have the common decency to at least have an excuse for failure like getting roasted to death on some irons.

You know, he sounds like a shitbag to me but at the same time I'm nothing compared to him besides a spectacular disappointment. Whoops, you spent generations waiting for your leader, well here he is, that's right, this jackass. We know you're disappointed so we're throwing in some free instructions for ritual suicide along with his appearance, hope that helps.

That's how I feel, at least, which you're free to rightly judge as selfish and pathetic when I know everyone needs me and I should be dead anyway so maybe I should man the fuck up if I never exactly had anything that was mine to lose, huh?

[ Wow, now that's really a lot to take in. Jade 'hmm's and 'ah's thoughtfully where appropriate, nodding her head now and then. ]

It doesn't sound selfish or pathetic to me. That sounds like a lot of responsibility to give someone, especially when that someone is young and still figuring things out. [ She scoots closer to him, places a hand on his back and smiles gently. She doesn't know if she really gets all of it, but she feels like she understands a lot more. ] It's not very fair, when you think about it. I think that you sound really brave, and strong, for even trying in the first place. A lot of people probably wouldn't even do that! And it isn't even just trying, because you have succeeded a lot too.

[He leans automatically into her touch, feeling a little surprised and a little shaken that he actually said all of that out loud. Her words are nice, and on some level he knows it's true. It was never fair to ask this much of him. But it's also not so easy to forget a lifetime of self-doubt.]

I just wish they had someone who really could save them all. But they're stuck with me. And the worst part of it is...

[He looks away, feeling a little ashamed of himself, but in this deep enough that he can't bring himself to care whether he seems pathetic. It will be hard to face Jade after this, but part of him has really needed to talk to someone for such a long time and he doesn't want to stop.]

I mean, for a long time, I would've given anything to just...fuck, I don't need to be Feferi. Give me a blood color like Aradia's, give me a shitty lowblood symbol and let me type in a shitty lowblood color and get shoved around all the time and grow up to fail at becoming a threshecutioner and generally lead a shitty lowblood life...I don't know. For a long time, I hated whoever decided to make me like this. There's a great punchline to that joke if you know anything about the ectobiology component of the game, by the way. I sent my own wiggler self back to be born and for a minute I didn't want to.

But you know, for all of that? I think I wanted to believe that I really was special and I really should be their leader and I really did deserve their respect. So no, I don't think I was brave and strong. I think I was arrogant and I think I wanted them to need me, and now they're stuck with me because there is no one else.

[ As he goes on she slowly winds her arms around him, hugging tightly and resting her chin on his shoulder. ]

Maybe that's true, I don't know. Even if it is, that's not all of it, right? If it had just been from arrogance, or pride, you would have ditched your friends when things got tough!

[He really appreciates that embrace right now, although he doesn't do much to show it besides not shifting away from it.]

I couldn't do that. But it's not like it did them a lot of good.

God. I'm just a tightly wrapped bundle of issues upon issues just waiting to burst and I recognize how pathetic I sound dwelling on them like this. The pity me crap is getting almost as tired as the self-hate.

I'm sorry. I haven't always been this bad.

You don't have to apologize! Everyone has issues, and I think talking about them is a very good thing. [ She sort of wishes she could be more like Rose, at least as far as the interest in therapy was concerned. Maybe then she would know just what to say, but she hopes that what she has said has made some impact, even if it was just a small one. ] Do you feel a little better?

It doesn't mean everyone hears about it from everyone.

[He sighs a little testily, but honestly, having her just listen is probably more helpful than anything Rose would do. He doesn't want to be dissected or feel like something is wrong with him. He's just tired of having to feel this way all alone.]

Yes, I guess. Better, if slightly humiliated.

A little humiliation is good for you, it builds character.

I've had a lot of character built for me recently.

❄ sixth reminder

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