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161 lines
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<title>The Homestuck Epilogues: Candy - Chapter 26</title>
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<div id='s26'></div>
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<div>
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<h1>Chapter 26</h1>
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<div class="o-story_text o_epilogue type-rg type-sm line-caption line-copy pad-x-0 pad-x-lg pad-b-lg">
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<p class="no-indent"><span class="opener type-hs-opener-rg type-hs-opener-sm">J</span>ohn stares
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at his phone for a while, thumb pressed to the space just below the
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“send message” button. He realizes he’s not dwelling so much on the
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content he’s hesitating to send—which now that he’s looking at it,
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seems no less vapid than anything he tends to bother Terezi with
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online—as he is on the nature of this correspondence they have, and
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his peculiar semiannual need to bother her in this way at all. What
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is this relationship they have, he wonders? Does he even care that
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much? Does she?</p>
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<p>But if he doesn’t care that much, and there’s nothing to it,
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then why does he do it? Why does he seem to put care into the
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nonsense he badgers her with? He supposes he could ask the same of
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many features of his life. Why does he care? Why does he put the
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time in? When you can’t shake the feeling that nothing here has
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much intrinsic meaning—or rings as “canon,” to drop a term he has
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to admit has worn out some welcome in his vocabulary—how does one
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justify even leaving the house?</p>
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<p>He thought he was over this. That he got his moping out of his
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system those first few years on Earth C and then started getting
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his life on track. He got married, he had a kid. That fixes
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everything, right? He wonders if his intermittent check-ins with
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Terezi have less to do with her personally and more to do with
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gravitating toward someone who’s still out there. Someone who can
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still lay credible claim to functioning as an agent of relevance. A
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person who hasn’t entirely forfeited their volitional integrity
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just yet. Like a guy with a wife and a kid.</p>
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<p>Heh, not a bad joke he just told himself, he has to admit. But
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it’s not satisfying, because it’s probably not the answer. The
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truth is, he thinks he just keeps texting Terezi because she’s the
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only one he knows who isn’t here.</p>
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<p>John drifts aimlessly through the atmosphere for hours,
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thinking, but not thinking. The forest below grows thin, alien. He
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floats past the border of the Troll Kingdom, where the grass starts
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to get sparse and gray, and sets down in a quarry surrounded by
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bare, thorny bushes. Instead of flowers they’re sprouting throbbing
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yellow pustules. John touches a branch and one of the pustules
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bursts, leaking mustard-colored slime everywhere. How could you be
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homesick for a place like this, John wonders.</p>
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<p>Then he remembers Terezi once told him about the place she grew
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up in. A quiet forest of blueberry and cotton candy. A canopy so
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dense she had to walk minutes from her house to be exposed to the
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sun. Even Alternia had beauty in it. But John is sure that Earth C
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probably replicates it the same way it replicates everything else:
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thin and garish and fake, fake, fakity FAKE. A bad photocopy with
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the ink settings turned to high contrast. A sunrise that casts no
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shadows.</p>
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<p>He’s been contemplating this melodramatically for maybe ten
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minutes when the sky rips opens above him and flashes violent waves
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of red and green across the landscape. Having dead trolls deposited
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from the sky like this is far from unusual these days, but what
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comes plummeting out of the rips in space above this time isn’t
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troll-shaped at all. It looks more like a meteor—a flash of metal
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and fire screaming toward the planet, trailing thick black smoke
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behind it. It outpaces the flames for a moment, and John recognizes
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it. It can’t be. There’s no way. And yet, there’s no mistaking
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it.</p>
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<p>It’s his father’s car. A whole ton of white metal oxidizing in
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the heat, the windows all smashed open. If anyone’s in there, he
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can’t make them out. John feels like he watches the car descend and
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crash against the earth in slow motion. It hits the ground with an
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impact that reverberates for miles.</p>
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<p>He’s never moved so fast as he does to reach the crater. He
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skids to a stop at the rim: below, the car is twisted and steaming,
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curled into horrible, jagged edges, but the back half is mostly
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intact. He sends a thrust of wind through the back of the carriage
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to blow both doors off and crawls inside to examine the seats. Just
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to make absolutely certain no one was in it when it crashed. The
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metal of the frame is still so hot that the air around it is
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sizzling, but John doesn’t care.</p>
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<p>The back seat is a mess. It’s smeared with... shaving cream?
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With little bits of... something, strewn about. He pinches some of
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the dry, brown, flaky substance, and sniffs it. Is this...
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tobacco?</p>
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<p>Mingling with the shaving cream, there are red bloodstains. But
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no flesh, or bones, or anything signifying the remains of a person.
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John puts a hand to his chest and sighs with... relief?
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Disappointment? He has no idea what he was hoping to find in here.
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Not his father, right? That would be stupid. Who needs to put eyes
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on their own father’s corpse twice in one lifetime. But then, he
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sees it.</p>
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<p>A streak of teal, smudged along the top ridge of the seat
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cushion, at the center of a red, bloody handprint. With wide eyes,
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John reaches out and runs his thumb over it. It chips under his
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nail, the same consistency as human blood. The same color as
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Terezi’s text.</p>
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<p>He rubs the flaky crust between his fingers. He only stopped
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talking to her a few hours ago. Time passes differently out there,
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as he’s often reminded. She was so sure she was dying. Was this it?
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Was this how she —</p>
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<p>John reels back, nausea striking him in the pit of his stomach.
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What kind of twisted coincidence is this? Why is he finding this
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now? If Terezi was here, why? Who was she bleeding with in the back
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of his father’s car?</p>
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<p>It finally hits him. Not just that he hasn’t seen Terezi in
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years, or that he’s never going to see her again. It’s that he
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never <em>was</em> going to see her again. It was over before it
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began.</p>
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<p>John’s body is drenched in sweat. He staggers away from the
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mangled car, his eyes stinging from the heat. He rips his glasses
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off and looks up at the sky, an unfocused and unspecific field of
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color and possibility. It looks like a flat canvas to him, yet
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behind its flatness he knows it stretches back through an infinite
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expanse of pointlessness, a limitless field of uncaring. It seems
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to mock him.</p>
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<p>He points his eyes at the sympathetic dirt instead. The soft
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earth seems to beckon him, and he finds himself sinking to his
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knees, fingers digging into the disrupted soil. It’s still warm,
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humming with energy from the car’s meteoric fall. The sight of his
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arms stretched out in front of him warps in his blurry field of
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vision, bending and shimmering in the dying light.</p>
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<p>John realizes he’s crying when the first wet droplets fall onto
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the backs of his hands. They mingle with the dirt around him,
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turning the comforting earth to sticky mud. He doesn’t get it, and
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he never has.</p>
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<p>A choked sob forces its way out of his chest. His fingers flex
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into claws, gathering up dirt into his shaking fists. He bears down
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until his knuckles turn white and his fingernails press sharply
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into the flesh of his palms. The pain makes him feel real.</p>
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<p>All he’s ever wanted is to be fucking real.</p>
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<p>Then, as if not quite finished with the sky just yet, he turns
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his gaze upward to give it one last angry look. He feels consumed
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in that moment by the acuteness of his physicality and the
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overwhelming scale of his cosmic irrelevance. His lungs fill with
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air, and he releases all his years of pent-up frustration and anger
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and guilt and doubt and weakness and pain and misery in a
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blood-curdling shout that sounds more like it’s from the mouth of
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an animal than a man. John screams at the merciless sky until his
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throat is raw and he has no energy left even to cry.</p>
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<p>No one hears him, and if they had, it wouldn’t matter.</p>
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