John stares
at his phone for a while, thumb pressed to the space just below the
“send message” button. He realizes he’s not dwelling so much on the
content he’s hesitating to send—which now that he’s looking at it,
seems no less vapid than anything he tends to bother Terezi with
online—as he is on the nature of this correspondence they have, and
his peculiar semiannual need to bother her in this way at all. What
is this relationship they have, he wonders? Does he even care that
much? Does she?
But if he doesn’t care that much, and there’s nothing to it,
then why does he do it? Why does he seem to put care into the
nonsense he badgers her with? He supposes he could ask the same of
many features of his life. Why does he care? Why does he put the
time in? When you can’t shake the feeling that nothing here has
much intrinsic meaning—or rings as “canon,” to drop a term he has
to admit has worn out some welcome in his vocabulary—how does one
justify even leaving the house?
He thought he was over this. That he got his moping out of his
system those first few years on Earth C and then started getting
his life on track. He got married, he had a kid. That fixes
everything, right? He wonders if his intermittent check-ins with
Terezi have less to do with her personally and more to do with
gravitating toward someone who’s still out there. Someone who can
still lay credible claim to functioning as an agent of relevance. A
person who hasn’t entirely forfeited their volitional integrity
just yet. Like a guy with a wife and a kid.
Heh, not a bad joke he just told himself, he has to admit. But
it’s not satisfying, because it’s probably not the answer. The
truth is, he thinks he just keeps texting Terezi because she’s the
only one he knows who isn’t here.
John drifts aimlessly through the atmosphere for hours,
thinking, but not thinking. The forest below grows thin, alien. He
floats past the border of the Troll Kingdom, where the grass starts
to get sparse and gray, and sets down in a quarry surrounded by
bare, thorny bushes. Instead of flowers they’re sprouting throbbing
yellow pustules. John touches a branch and one of the pustules
bursts, leaking mustard-colored slime everywhere. How could you be
homesick for a place like this, John wonders.
Then he remembers Terezi once told him about the place she grew
up in. A quiet forest of blueberry and cotton candy. A canopy so
dense she had to walk minutes from her house to be exposed to the
sun. Even Alternia had beauty in it. But John is sure that Earth C
probably replicates it the same way it replicates everything else:
thin and garish and fake, fake, fakity FAKE. A bad photocopy with
the ink settings turned to high contrast. A sunrise that casts no
shadows.
He’s been contemplating this melodramatically for maybe ten
minutes when the sky rips opens above him and flashes violent waves
of red and green across the landscape. Having dead trolls deposited
from the sky like this is far from unusual these days, but what
comes plummeting out of the rips in space above this time isn’t
troll-shaped at all. It looks more like a meteor—a flash of metal
and fire screaming toward the planet, trailing thick black smoke
behind it. It outpaces the flames for a moment, and John recognizes
it. It can’t be. There’s no way. And yet, there’s no mistaking
it.
It’s his father’s car. A whole ton of white metal oxidizing in
the heat, the windows all smashed open. If anyone’s in there, he
can’t make them out. John feels like he watches the car descend and
crash against the earth in slow motion. It hits the ground with an
impact that reverberates for miles.
He’s never moved so fast as he does to reach the crater. He
skids to a stop at the rim: below, the car is twisted and steaming,
curled into horrible, jagged edges, but the back half is mostly
intact. He sends a thrust of wind through the back of the carriage
to blow both doors off and crawls inside to examine the seats. Just
to make absolutely certain no one was in it when it crashed. The
metal of the frame is still so hot that the air around it is
sizzling, but John doesn’t care.
The back seat is a mess. It’s smeared with... shaving cream?
With little bits of... something, strewn about. He pinches some of
the dry, brown, flaky substance, and sniffs it. Is this...
tobacco?
Mingling with the shaving cream, there are red bloodstains. But
no flesh, or bones, or anything signifying the remains of a person.
John puts a hand to his chest and sighs with... relief?
Disappointment? He has no idea what he was hoping to find in here.
Not his father, right? That would be stupid. Who needs to put eyes
on their own father’s corpse twice in one lifetime. But then, he
sees it.
A streak of teal, smudged along the top ridge of the seat
cushion, at the center of a red, bloody handprint. With wide eyes,
John reaches out and runs his thumb over it. It chips under his
nail, the same consistency as human blood. The same color as
Terezi’s text.
He rubs the flaky crust between his fingers. He only stopped
talking to her a few hours ago. Time passes differently out there,
as he’s often reminded. She was so sure she was dying. Was this it?
Was this how she —
John reels back, nausea striking him in the pit of his stomach.
What kind of twisted coincidence is this? Why is he finding this
now? If Terezi was here, why? Who was she bleeding with in the back
of his father’s car?
It finally hits him. Not just that he hasn’t seen Terezi in
years, or that he’s never going to see her again. It’s that he
never was going to see her again. It was over before it
began.
John’s body is drenched in sweat. He staggers away from the
mangled car, his eyes stinging from the heat. He rips his glasses
off and looks up at the sky, an unfocused and unspecific field of
color and possibility. It looks like a flat canvas to him, yet
behind its flatness he knows it stretches back through an infinite
expanse of pointlessness, a limitless field of uncaring. It seems
to mock him.
He points his eyes at the sympathetic dirt instead. The soft
earth seems to beckon him, and he finds himself sinking to his
knees, fingers digging into the disrupted soil. It’s still warm,
humming with energy from the car’s meteoric fall. The sight of his
arms stretched out in front of him warps in his blurry field of
vision, bending and shimmering in the dying light.
John realizes he’s crying when the first wet droplets fall onto
the backs of his hands. They mingle with the dirt around him,
turning the comforting earth to sticky mud. He doesn’t get it, and
he never has.
A choked sob forces its way out of his chest. His fingers flex
into claws, gathering up dirt into his shaking fists. He bears down
until his knuckles turn white and his fingernails press sharply
into the flesh of his palms. The pain makes him feel real.
All he’s ever wanted is to be fucking real.
Then, as if not quite finished with the sky just yet, he turns
his gaze upward to give it one last angry look. He feels consumed
in that moment by the acuteness of his physicality and the
overwhelming scale of his cosmic irrelevance. His lungs fill with
air, and he releases all his years of pent-up frustration and anger
and guilt and doubt and weakness and pain and misery in a
blood-curdling shout that sounds more like it’s from the mouth of
an animal than a man. John screams at the merciless sky until his
throat is raw and he has no energy left even to cry.
No one hears him, and if they had, it wouldn’t matter.