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The meteor is a china shop with glass walls, and you’ve got an uneasy herd of bulls and legion of stone-throwers ready to bring it down.
And yet, nobody has moved. You’re in a quiet kind of standoff with your co-inhabitants, ready to snap but not ready to take the blame for shattering your peace.
You brush Vriska in a hallway on the way to your room, and in a split second, she has her dice thrown onto the floor and a cutlass in her hands, her outfit suddenly bright orange like yours.
“Watch it, Seer,” breaks out from behind her tight lips, and for a second, you believe she’s imagining someone else in your position, someone who shares your title but with much more danger and sharp smiles.
You stare at her for a second, imagining that if your eyes were burned bright red instead of soft violet, you’d have stabbed her as soon as she turned around to leave. But you’d never done that, she’d never done that, Vriska was alive.
In your room, in your block, in the space you call your own; you wonder what had possessed you to think about stabbing Vriska. You’d never thought particularly unkindly of her, certainly no more than you’d thought of your own brother, but you’d never considered putting a knife through his back. No, this wasn’t a fantasy, but more of a possibility. A possibility that had never happened, or at least not in your universe. You hesitate to say timeline, because while there were presumably many doomed timelines where the other Seer had snapped and put a knife between Vriska’s spine and ribs (in fact, it was incredibly likely, given her abrasive personality), this one event felt more like a fixed action. It had happened, but not in this universe. Perhaps in another universe, where a coin had landed on the opposite side, or not at all.
You’ve caught glimpses of the other side of the coin flip before. When you’d wake up with a pounding headache indicative of a horrendous hangover (not to mention the empty bottles surrounding you), but them blink and it would be gone.
You’d pass a room in the meteor and smell a sickly sweetness coming from it, and a sticky residue on the floor that reminded you of some rather unfortunate sodas on Earth, but when you looked over your shoulder to make sure there wasn’t something else, the meteor floors would be as clean as ever and the air as stale as it had always been.
You’d hear Dave off-handedly reference a guy in the vents, who he described to look similar to a “blurry purple bigfoot with a huge boner” (lovely simile, Dave. Just lovely). When you’d ask him to elaborate, he’d laugh and deny saying that, because the only guy creepy enough to be a vent-dweller had been locked inside a fridge for the past year, and he couldn’t see Karkat awkwardly shimmying through the vents, and he’d launch into another drawn-out metaphor involving Karkat scooting through the vents like a salamander in a toilet paper tube, and you’d frown, because as you were prone to many unfortunate things, hearing voices hasn’t been one of them since you threw the Thorns of Olgogoth into a dream bubble.
And yet, you feel like you’re not the only one who knows about the other side of the coin. You’d see your Seer counterpart stumble and gasp from wounds that weren't there; or glance to look at something in a different way than usual, as if she’d forgotten that she was blind; or even scrunch up her nose when she smelled Vriska (she identified that scent as blueberries, but sometimes the look on her face said she smelled bright cobalt blood on a cold iron blade).
Eventually, after a bleary day of watching Dave desperately try to alchemize apple juice, a day of watching Kanaya sewing (a day of watching Kanaya push Vriska away from messing up her sewing project), a day of hearing Karkat yelling at Dave about ‘penis ouija’, and a day of reading what you are starting to think could be described as Troll Twilight, you head back into your room. Your block. The space that you call your own.
Terezi is sitting in the middle of your bed.
You groan inwardly, as despite the put-together façade you employ, your room is a disaster. You haven’t made your bed in upwards of a month (upwards of a perigee, upwards of one lunar cycle) and it shows. Your bed has begun to look more like the fabled troll piles than a human bed, mounds of alchemized blankets and your own mostly-clean laundry heaped on top of it (you haven’t seen your pillow in a week).
Terezi grins widely (too widely for someone who’s witnessed all the death she has), perched in your pile, holding a copy of Human Twilight upside down, a hand under her chin, and a look in her blinded eyes that indicates it’s going to be a while before she leaves.
As you suspect she’s going to sit on your bed, your pile, your sleeping receptacle for as long as she feels is appropriate to set the mood, which will undoubtedly be an absurdly and uncomfortably long time, you break the silence and throw the first stone.
“The other side of the coin flip. It happened, didn’t it?” Even though you’re certain that your last statement would be considered a question, your inflection conveys it as a certain fact.
She laughs her grating laugh, pulls her glasses up to her forehead so you’re staring into her sun-scorched eyes, and shatters the glass house with her answer. “Of course.” She pulls out her dragon-headed cane and unsheathes the blade you suspected had done in one too many lives, and for a split second you see blue bloodstains on the blade and you blink and they’re gone but the look of regret on Terezi’s face remains. “I nearly killed her, you know.” She ponders for a second. “I did kill her, you know, but it was on the other side of the coin flip.”
You start to approach her from the doorway, and she snaps her head up to look straight through you. “And on this side of the coin flip, she lived. But it wasn’t as simple as that, was it?”
The flow of your words and hers match up excellently, and you wonder for a second why neither of you had conceded your games of playing psychologist or lawyer before to discuss what had happened.
You almost know what she’s going to say before she does, but you’ve never thought this before.
“It wasn’t a timeline split. Or, it once was, but this,” she gestures around the room, pointing at various locations that wouldn’t have any significance unless you knew about the other side of the coin. First at where your empty bottles would have been, secondly to her eyes, and thirdly past you off into the doorway (you think she’s referring to Vriska with this point), “wasn’t a part of it. The first two timelines, the true sides of the coin, they were just Vriska’s death then and death for all of us significantly later, or Vriska living for a very short period before all of us died.”
You sit down on the bed next to her, you sit down on the pile next to her, you sit down on the sleeping receptacle next to her, and consider this fact. “But I’ve never seen this second timeline. It was a doomed timeline from the start, wasn’t it? And,” you pause, hesitant in this conclusion, “wouldn’t that make the other side of the coin flip, the one that ended in inevitable death for all of us, wouldn’t that make that the original alpha timeline? Where things went right, and yet, in the same breath, went terribly wrong?”
She nods, and for a second you see her stabbed through the heart with her own sword, old cobalt stains mixing with fresh teal blood, and for a second, you feel a sharp pain in your chest and look down to see a red bloodstain in the center of your god tier robes, which you hadn't been wearing a second ago. You shake your head and it’s all gone.
Bitterly, she laughs, none of the metallic and sharp undertone present in her usual laugh. “It’s rather inconvenient, isn’t it? Smelling death at every turn, knowing that you’re only innocent due to outside intervention.”
You hesitate again because, no, you don’t understand. You’ve see the other side of the coin, but you don’t truly experience it. You played no part in it; you were busy destroying a sun bigger than your universe and becoming a god (you’re almost certain those three events happened simultaneously, because of course they would). And yet, you still are a Seer, and you’ve seen more than you should have in your own ways. You both died in the other side of the coin flip, you had both just glimpsed that possibility.
“It’s scary,” you concede. “The possibility of death. Even though we know there’s dreambubbles, it’s not really any kind of life after death.” You don’t like admitting that you’re scared. You don’t like admitting anything that could be construed as a weakness of any type, and you know your teal-blooded companion doesn’t either, but she did. And so did you.
You suppose that might be a mark of a Seer. An inability to show weakness, an inability to be wrong, an inability to confide in anyone, and a frightening predisposition to accepting death over defeat. A tactician’s folly, if you will.
Terezi frowns slightly, her sharp teeth worrying at her lower lip. You want to comfort her, but you can’t bring yourself to.