Archive of Our Own

The water back home's much as it always has been, deep and murky and blackened in some places. You skip across its oily surface in your skimmer, racing to stay just out of Ampora's reach. That dirt-kisser's the only one who mackerels on you like this, and you'll be glubbed if you end up as his catch of the day. You never have before. Why start now?

Your braided hair snappers in the wind behind you, threatening to smack your pursuer like a pair of well-rolled rat tails. Whoops, suckafish just took one in the face and went down with a splash, his skimmer careering out of control. Couldn't have planned it better. Your own skin is tough, but you love bruises, when you can get 'em. In fact, you like to play much rougher than he can fish it out... or take it, so it appears.

Hey, this deep spot is practically black on the surface, like a bruise. Like someone just punched the whole damn planet. That's... that's kind of awesome. Somefin you can aspire to. Ampora doesn't bruise right, which is almost as much of a turn-off as his certainty that you should be into him, even that way. If you could be bothered to toy with him, he'd probably just burst by the time you'd dragged his swollen body home.

You see Earth's oceans long before you hear about them, swimming in the depths of the void, in the turbulent swirls of desires and dreams colliding.

Yeah, you know about salt. That's totally a thing on Beforus. But as soon as you breach the mnembrane you realize something's wrong. Your home planet's oceans never had this much. Shit's stinging your sensitive eyes, gumming up your gills, making it hard to breathe right. Like the whole ocean's burning down or somefin. The water's also weirdly transparent, buoyant, refractive. You can't swim straight, and the yellow sunlight filtering near the surface is like pouring puckerfruit juice into your eyes along with the excess salt. All you need now is a paper cut. On your eyeball.

Through your bleary gaze, you can just make out a couple of skinny legs kicking. Small fish in a big pond, huh? Nah, that's an abuse of a surprise noodle. You can't resist the opportunity for target practice, but the hostile sea robs you even of this pleasure: your 2x3dent spirals lazily through the viscous medium and goes wide of the mark, klicks wide. Your prey turns in shock as it passes, and with a few deft scissor strokes pulls herself back up onto the pier.

You splutter with rage, getting it all down the wrong pipes, down into your stomach, and promptly soaked up by your aggravation sponge. It weighs heavy on your tongue, tasting like wrong wrong wrong this is all wrong. Water is your element, your strength; it hides you in its depths, it yields you its bounty. It's your enabler, your accomplice, your weapon. It doesn't fuck with your game like this. Your world spins as you fight for oxygen. The gibbering of the local deities, having a chuckle at your expense, floods your ears. You wouldn't normally care, but you get even more angry when you think about how you normally don't care because obviously you do this time what a geoducking gaperload

You've never been more relieved to wake up from a dream of hunting, and that thought alone makes you sick.

Once, you gave it up. For an heiress to kill, you might have read in one of your books, was supposed to be honorable. It was supposed to be your calling, your destiny, killing another with your hands, an empress's hands. Only you had better ideas. You were fit to rule, but not over mere star systems: you wouldn't settle for less than a universe of your own creation, with other beings nothing but specks of dust in your endless despotic reign. No one would even bother to bet against you.

So when the seeds of dissension you sowed in your session sprout, and what fails to make your teammates stronger turns out to kill them, you don't try to take it back. Days later, as your own supposedly precious blood stains the water, you're still convinced you have a chance. It isn't until you have an audience with the Noble Circle that you wonder what you've been doing so close to these guppies. And so, just before the bomb rips you open, a doubt nestles in your ribcage.

Because this time, you must give it all up.

Almost all, anemoneway. You still got your grudges.

It's a while of searching. You're not sure how long, everything here is just "a while". But by now, your feud has become personal. You're prepared to go to... lengths... to fork that juicy alien grub, if only to prove to this stupid half-remembered ocean that you aren't as weak as it thinks you are. To have had another clean shot at last, after so long, only to hit the blue nerd instead, really amps your drive. You will hunt her through every winding rivulet of the Furthest Ring until you find her. And then you'll --

Shell yeah! This bubble's contents seem to have the right feel to them, and you brace yourself for the burst of acrid salinity as you charge across the threshold of memory. It still tastes terrible, but you can lump it as long as it takes; you were raised by the strongest forces of nature. The sun is setting, and as thunderheads gather on the horizon, your troll's eyes welcome the gathering darkness.

Is that her? Or... a facsimile of her. Someone from the human session.

She's not dressed for swimming, but in a black, full, floating mess. Her appearance spooks you, vis-a-vis other humans you've seen in the dream bubbles, and you grapple with that feeling a while before you realize: her short hair, waving in an even halo around her head, is white as bone, and her skin is the dusky charcoal of an ebonpyre.

A question that's been hovering in the back of your mind finally slips free -- are you dead or dreaming? In mute answer, she slowly opens her eyes, blank white like your own. You take a moment to stare her down until, blink, her sclera glow yellow. Blink and they're red like those candy shades Pyrope wears, blink and they're empty and black as the void that surrounds you. Neat trick, you think. Her lips split into a wicked grin, revealing teeth sharper than human teeth you've seen.

You like her style. Weird, sarcastic, and unquestionably dangerous. She seems more than six sweeps -- how much more, you can't say, you know the dead don't age. A timeless hauteur crackles along the length of her body as she rises out of the water, smoldering with black flames, hissing with steam. Eldritch majyyks arc between the needles she clutches gray-knuckled, filling the sea breeze with the metallic tang of ozone.

She's spoiling for a fight. And that's just what you need right now.

You're taking a dip in the open sea. The ship you've been sailing on is a mere dot on the horizon. You called scouting duty to swim out here, and nobody need be the wiser. Least of all your captain, with her pretensions to grandeur.

The deep waters, where you meet your kismesis, swirl with the ink of petty gods and demigods striving to remain unseen. She channels their strength sometimes during your trysts, raising welts along your neck and arms with tendrils of force that caress even as they strangle. It's so deliciously other, so alien even for an alien, so sacrilegious even for someone as jaded as yourself, and she is very, very good at it. It leaves you subdued while your senses try to process what's happening: an act of sublime, almost tender aggression, raising wordless, existential questions that mere punches never could.

She never speaks, now. She tried once, and what came out was a pidgin form of the secret language of the saints, so mangled you barely recognized it. Shell, it's rubbing off on you, making you talk weird even in your internal monologue. But you understand everything you need to from the set of her stance, the ripples on the waters, the way she somehow manages to roll her blank cueball eyes at you. She knows, instinctively, when to push and match strike for strike, and when to yield to your advances, if only to exploit the holes you leave in your guard. At the last, battered, breathless, aching for more and yet unable to move, you both float face down and stare into the murk, as far as you can make anything out. It's never that far.

And afterwards, the currents take hold of your secrets and bear them far away.

You wonder sometimes about how unlikely it was that you would become involved with a human ghost. In retrospect, under these circumstances it would have been harder not to; it was the natural arc of your obsession. The hunter becomes the hunted, and the predator, prey. You don't need to make it much more complex than that.

You've swum farther out than Vriska can comfortably follow you, which is just as well for the time being. She's the memory of an ocean away now. Her endless pursuit of idle diversion was cute at first, helped to while away the tedious aeons after the fire with all the irons in it cooled down. But it's starting to gr8 on you. You've never been one to keep your thoughts to yourself, so at some point, you'll have to 8r8k it to her.

Anyway, the diversion you're looking for now is not one she can provide.

When the pale shade of your affections first ripened and flushed, you admitted, as casually as you could, that you were filling a different quadrant on these outings. You both know it's not natural to fill every quadrant with the same being, which makes the constancy of your ongoing company all the more stifling. She'd never have left you alone this long otherwise, and luckily she seems uninterested in the details as long as you come back. Yet your chest creaks under the pressure of secrets kept, like a sunken treasure trove filled with counterfeit pieces of eight.

The sea is as restless as you are, and its choppy surface tells. Streaks of rainbow lightning criss-cross the sky in an approaching storm, their after-images leaving dull cracks stamped on the backs of your eyeballs. High clouds smother the stars, but their undersides flicker with the light of the fireworks flying between two figures hovering above the water's surface: your damnedest cephalopod, and a new interloper you haven't seen before. Maybe this is one of her memories that she never acted out for you.

The pair seems evenly matched -- raw animal fury against undulating despair. It would feel indecent to watch, and might make you jealous, if it wasn't obvious that they're actually trying to double-kill each other. You can't get a clear shot to intervene: one seems to be everywhere at once, its blade flashing as it severs the mystical whips of thorns groping blindly outwards from the position of the other. No sooner is one dark pseudopod cut off than two more sprout from the stump, their hatred multiplying.

It happens fast. Too fast for you to understand at first.

The thunderclap almost splits your eardrums. A crack in the fabric of the void lances through the bubble, ripping a hole in the ocean floor. The stunned combatants drop like stones from the sky and fall into the ocean, which begins turning in a whirlpool. The sea is literally taking them down the drain.

You struggle with all your might against the maelstrom. It's almost too strong even for you. This is clearly no ordinary memory of a storm, but the work of the Lord of Time, whose presence -- always immanent -- is now manifest in the destruction all around you. You cast about wildly for your hater, but she is as good as gone by now, pulled down into the heart of the nothing and forgotten by the multiverse. You already have no idea what happened to the other one.

You beach yourself on the strand, every ghostly muscle remembering the battle for survival, and against loss. Your matesprit opens her mouth to ask, then sees the cracks on the horizon and the stoic set of your face. She shuts it again.

If you've grown to know one thing, it's the ocean. There is no end to its vastness, between the shores, between the stars. All things living and dead, whether after mere sweeps or innumerable eons, return to it, to be lost at last in the deep.