Chapter Text
Folly is everything Rat is not.
While she shares his mischievousness, they differ in more ways than there are stars in the galaxy.
Folly could trace her fingers along the edge of the world, count each individual blade of grass, and still find more things that contrast them so greatly.
To Rat's paranoia, Folly is trusting. Some might say she has too much faith in mortals. Even then, what has a goddess to fear against a menagerie of misfits?
To Rat's violence, she is graceful and elegant.
She wouldn't dare to get her hands dirty herself- After all, that is what followers are for, is it not?
To Rat's adamance, she knows when to quit. She knows when something is hopeless, and knows how to twist it around in her favor.
Being truthful, Folly knows she is one of the lesser deities.
While she is powerful, much more powerful than Rat or Clown, she is not at the top of the food chain. This she knows to be true.
She's knowledgeable on many such things, being an encyclopedia of pranks and traps.
One thing she is certain of, though? Her and Rat are intertwined in some way. She does not know why, nor how to reverse it, but what she is certain of in relation to it is;
She hates Rat.
She hates Rat more than she hated Mouthpiece, more than she hates the other deities.
Every place she touches is doomed to fall into ruin because of his presence. No matter what universe, no matter what world.
So long as she has a form, Rat is certainly never far behind.
She had to commend him- for being the equivalent of a war criminal, he's done quite a good job at prolonging this world's life as long as he can.
With most of the End Portals gone, the only way this universe can doom itself is Charter.
Folly feels it in the air, this time around.
The time is approaching.
Even so, this does not stop her hatred of him. Every time she makes a presence, a ripple, a sound; there is always an echo.
Some soul that lingers half a heartbeat behind hers as she comes upon a new body, each and every time.
Always dark, always hungry. Always something in her image.
Whereas Folly is content with her status, Rat is not.
She does not know if it is something in his code- the universal strings of numbers that make up everything that is -she does not know if it can be unwritten, but she knows he hungers for power.
And, trust her, she's certainly tried deleting him. Tried deleting his code, trashing it, warping it, over and over and over again.
He always comes back. There's always more bitterness.
If Folly is a star, breathing life into planets anew, Rat is a black hole. He twists and distorts even his own desire until there is nothing left.
He is the silence that follows the canaries last song.
Perhaps he is a remnant of her, some long forgotten part of herself meant to balance whatever she is now.
The great equalizer, maybe. If she is mischief, he is war. Perhaps.
She tries to rationalize it. Every time, without fail.
Every time the world ends. Every time it devolves into chaos, she tries to rationalize. He doesn't know her, of her, who she is- she's checked! His memory is as blank as a fresh block of marble.
There's no stain of any other deity upon his code, there's no mark from another celestial entity.
The only energy she can sense radiating off of him is her own. Shattered, irreversibly changed, but it's her own.
Even now, bound to Charter.
Even bound to The Augur.
He's tainted, she can tell. She can taste it through whatever binds their code. Folly, bound to Rat, bound to whatever demon has taken his reins.
Still. Still, he reeks of her code, as if born of it himself.
She floats, endlessly- cannot sleep, can never dream. She always feels it, there.
A creeping in the back of her mind, like moss growing over stones on a riverbed. She worries that whatever corruption Rat has opened the door to will leak over to her.
She worries. Not that she'd ever admit that.
Folly feels it weighing down her divinity, like the weight of the Dusk's Epitaph in Rat's palm.
And, again, not that she'd ever admit it; she fears Rat's conviction is binding her further to this world. Day by day, her link to him strengthens and the pull to a physical body intensifies.
Part of her wonders if they really do look the same under twinning masks. If they share the same face shape, have the same eye color.
In each world, will it always be the same? Will he be a copy of her? Will he follow behind her, again and again, like her shadow?
Will he always be the representation of the end?
As the days pass, she finds more excuses to linger. She stitches the hole in the border she never bothered to fix, when Rat got rocketed out all those blocks.
She makes minor tweaks, updates some of the mods, dredges Lux's anchor out from wherever it was buried in the scattered remains of her code.
Again, yet again, Folly tries.
Tries to get rid of Rat. She rips open his file, over and over. She guts the lines of numbers, of commands, of zeros and ones.
Strewn across the map, hung in trees like tinsel. And yet, always. Always. It always manages to fix itself.
He always manages to fix himself.
She does not know what drives him. What pushes him forward, what keeps him here, bound to her. She does not know why she cannot exist without his presence.
Folly does not know why she must doom everything she touches.
She does not know why he destroys everything.
He's broken, now. She can feel it through the link. She recalls, faintly, a time she could not. Could not feel, could not share this with him.
She recalls a time where emotions did not travel between them.
Despite this, Folly feels phantom tears drip down her cheeks as the days pass. She feels her chest twist with grief in the maybe-mornings.
She feels things she knows do not belong to her.
She wishes she could not feel anything, even for just a moment. She wishes the desperation wasn't so bitter, seeping through her already fragile godhood.
Then, there. There is a brief pause in the thoughts.
In the endless stream of static noise, there is peace. Just for a moment.
In the void, here. This is where she spends most of her time. She floats, she codes, she wishes she were not what she is.
And here, in the void, there is a visitor. There is another divinity.
It only takes her a moment.
A moment to conjure a floor, a moment to take form, a moment to feel the tether once more- stronger, this time.
The world is dark around them. In front of her, a being steps. It is but a silhouette. There is no light to give it shape here.
There is scarcely enough energy to give her shape here.
For the first time in a very long time, Folly feels the edges of her dress brush against her fingertips. For the first time in a very long time, she takes a breath and feels it linger in her throat.
For the first time in a very long time, she sees.
She feels. She smells. She experiences more than just what her other half can offer her.
Pale eyes squint at her.
The presence of Charter seeps through the dark tile floor she's made. She opens her mouth to speak, and for a moment she can almost taste it in the air.
It is a sour, bitter thing. So powerful as to numb her for a moment.
Her fingers twitch.
There is a voice. Folly hears it, this time. Hears the words, turns them over again and again in her mind.
It sounds like charcoal scraping against metal, like birdsong in the morning, like the wind chimes on Rat's front porch, like the heat death of a universe.
It is dark, and deep; and it reminds her of space and being born and being alone. It reminds her of grieving.
She brushes her fingertips against the hem of her skirt.
"I wasn't expecting you to slink your way back here. It has been a very long time since I've had a visitor."
Rat is the silence after a canaries last song.
Folly is the one holding the birdcage.