snowfield | [FIC] ==> Equius: Rewind.

Because even prompts like 'yellow!Equius, frog breeding' are not sacred in the face of sadstuck.

Your name is Equius Zahhak, and even though it baffles you completely, you’re pretty okay right now.

By all definitions you shouldn’t be happy at all. You’re presently sitting in the Land of Amphibians and Muddy Water and Pollen That Stains Your Clothes, and all three of these things are all over you. A detached part of your brain is still shivering and twitching, trying to get it all off because it’s disgusting and gross and you hate it. But then the other half notes that there’s someone picking gunk out of your hair, disentangling the seaweed from your horns, and that’s enough to get you to shut up for the moment. Yes, you’re sitting on a giant lilypad that’s tilting dangerously close to the water. Yes, you can see the little amoebas or whatever crawling just beneath the water. Yes, there’s a frog who has just made itself comfortable in your lap, but you don’t feel like expending the energy to get it off. Or maybe you don’t care enough, a definite first. Whichever way it happened… the sun is drying your skin — another first, the presence of a sun scared the living daylights out of you the first time around — and you’re being doted on by the most wonderful creature in every planet your shitty game has ever made.

“Equius. Equius,” she says quietly, stirring you with a shake of the leg. You practically rocket into a sitting position, having woken from what was creeping dangerously close to a dream. Once it registers in your head that there’s no highblood trying to kill you (and you could feel them coming, too), you turn your head around to look at the girl whose lap you were practically sleeping in a few seconds before. She looks crestfallen, and upon noticing that, so do you. You don’t get past wondering what unspoken social law you broke this time when she starts to speak. “…Oh. There was a croakbeast on your lap, but he’s gone now.”

“Was there? I’m sorry…”

“Oh, no!” Nepeta shakes her head, energetically. “No need to apawlogise. I just saw him and thought, hmm, what if that was one we caught before?”

“Um. Where did it go off to? I can—” You’re stopped mid-sentence by her hand on your arm, and you immediately cease trying to get up.

“No, krilly! Sit down. It’s just one frog.” She smiles at you and, yep, you’re not going anywhere. “Besides, I’m purretty shore that we didn’t need him anyway. And if we did then we’ll hunt him down again!” Of course, her ‘hunting’ of frogs — which mostly involved slamming into whichever one she saw — was what tipped the lilypad and sent you both into the water, which was why you had all the dirt and gunk on you in the first place. But, you know, you can’t really fault her for trying to help, especially when you can hardly stand touching them enough to get them into the right positions. You much prefer working the various terminals and machines, leaving Nepeta to interact with the things as your… sort-of… assistant.

…But of course she’s not your assistant, she’s your superior. Of course. She’s just lending her valuable time to help you, time which she could be spending on her own world, yes. You really don’t deserve her help, or even her subordinates’ help. Many were the times she tried to send you better food, more expensive parts, all of these extravagant gifts that no gutterblood even had any reason to be getting — none in the world, not just you. Most of the time you’ve derailed her more ludicrous offers by insisting all of the uproar that would come from the anonymous addressee sending such things to you; it would just attract more attention than either of you wanted, and back then, the threat of attention had been enough to make her step down.

You didn’t have that excuse to hide behind anymore, of course. She was helping you whether you liked it or not.

And, you figure, maybe… maybe now that the situation is a little bit different — because of the Empress, thank you very much— then maybe all that good will wasn’t such a hindrance after all.

…Okay. It’s over. It’s over.

You just… sit there for a while, quietly, alone in the neverblackspace while the interior pieces shift around. They don’t move in any recognizable pattern to the untrained eye, but then, by this point you could probably be considered trained. The one blotch of purple there, that’s going to become a frog; it’s blended with the several colors of the ocean, and a darker bit underneath, probably another frog whose green tint was changed by the water. The blueish-greenish thing is then going to blend in with one of the pink lotuses — the lesser drugs, you remember after a moment — and then is going to situate itself right between those two stars right there. You really know this dream bubble far too well.

Nope, wait, it’s starting.

Your name is Equius Zahhak, and even though it baffles you completely, you’re pretty okay right now.

Ha-ha, yep, it did make a lot of shitty worlds.

It was really just a big guessing game on your part, working out the nonsense that had been contained in that curious little box. It had fallen into your hands when you were walking down… um, you couldn’t remember the numerical designation of the street (you hadn’t been able to for a long time), but it was a market. Not a very bright or clean market, no, but a lot of your… more unusual materials had to be found somewhere. Anyone respectable wouldn’t have been caught dead there, which was why you often quietly bemoaned why you even went there in the first place, but the fact of the matter was that there was always one little thing that you really needed, and it was almost always to be found there — or to be ordered, and gotten there on some other day. You’d been swindled into it by one of the people you — well, you dealt with on a regular basis, you weren’t really sure if you trusted her, but she had this wooden thing that she said had been passed hands many times. It had fallen into hers, and according to her, she couldn’t make heads or tails of it; she was too stupid. But you, no, you, you bought things that most adult trolls didn’t even know what to destroy with, and you were a smart kid and you would take a lot better care of it than she had. Of course, you had kind of gotten the feeling that she was just trying to get it out of her hair and into yours, but you eventually found yourself walking back to your hiveleaf with that damn box and no cold-catalysmic radiation generators. The worst decision of your life, undoubtedly.

…Maybe you could have, once, used another dream bubble to watch that instead. But it obviously wasn’t happening, so you just reminded yourself of it anyway. It’s always good to remind yourself of other things in these kinds of situations, you think. Otherwise you just… well, Bad Things happened, okay? Loss of sense of self and all that.

—Not that you weren’t already resigned to that anyway—

SHUT UP.

“Was there? I’m sorry…”

What was that nightmare going to be about? You can’t remember now. Though there was always the possibility of an educated guess, you suppose, considering you are very well acquainted with Alternian subconscious warfare by now. Most probably, that nightmare would have to offer dark things, giant massive writhing chasm-dwellers that were underneath the sea and the earth, and all of a sudden the ground just split open under your feet and you were looking down far, far, so far that it couldn’t be measured in Alternian standard metric sanity, and down at the bottom you just knew that there was some ancient ruler clawing his way right out. Or maybe, you know, maybe it’s you but it’s not you, it’s some twisted amalgamation of you and God knows what, and you can almost pinpoint the moment (see it’s there, right there) when it’s not even you anymore, you’ve just been completely taken over by the Ancient Thing and it's there, there in your eyes, and also because holy mother of christ trolls do NOT bend that way—

NO. Christ. Stop, Zahhak — Zahhak? Zahhak — just STOP. You are not a wiggler anymore, you are NOT going back there, thank you very much.

—Though you might as well be a wiggler for all the use you are—

SHUT UP!

“Um. Where did it go off to? I can—” You’re stopped mid-sentence by her hand on your arm, and you immediately cease trying to get up.

The amount of time you allotted to giving a shit about the dream bubble passed a long, long time ago. It’s just a scene now, a scene with very few words — Equius Equius oh there was a croakbeast on your lap but it’s gone now was there I’m sorry oh no no need to apawlogise — and you can repeat them all at a moment’s notice, and for a while you did, you spoke along with yourself and Nepeta, but then you basically ran yourself into the ground with that strategy and so you stopped. The bubble was thirty seconds long, at the maximum (Time is a funny Thing when you’re only concerned about Space), but your life has been measured in thirty-second-at-the-maximum increments for, again, God knows how long. You’ve built your hell, and now you guess you’re just going to sit in it, because there’s No Way Out. At least, no way out at your current capability, or the capability you’ve ever had.

—Maybe you could help yourself if you weren’t so—

DIDN’T I TELL YOU TO SHUT UP?!

You didn’t mean to do it. You didn’t mean to lock yourself in here. Um, yeah, just like you didn’t mean to just sit there and scream while Feferi tried to go and kill everyone, and just like you didn’t mean to go off because you felt some special snowflake Space player bullshit talking to you. You overestimated your ability, you fucked up, and now you’re here. Or really, ‘and then’ you came here would be better, because the act of entering into this goddamn bubble was so far off it was nowhere near the present tense. You don’t need to eat or drink, your body seems to have virtually shut down its need for anything, and you only started sleeping because even that had to be better than watching the same thing over and over again. (Not that it got you out of it once you woke up screaming.) Hell, your body wasn’t changing at all; it didn’t grow, period, because Time is a finicky thing, even though you only understand that by association, and it doesn’t really seem to Work Right anymore. Or, it doesn’t for you.

You didn’t have that excuse to hide behind anymore, of course. She was helping you whether you liked it or not.

Space. God damn you, Space and Time and You whoever you were, because You had taken what Feferi had promised — she said it would be better, right? — yeah, well, you took that and even if she was right then, you had to go and trust yourself to make it all go pear-shaped. You had to go take this damn dream bubble and you thought, wow, that is really neat, you wanted to see more of that. But you meant more of the events that happened afterwards, alright? So you worked your Fantastical Spacey Magic on it, and all it did was TRAP YOU IN THE GODFORSAKEN THING. Yeah, you really understood the calling of the elements there. Too bad you made your life go wrong in the process.

That’s all you were ever supposed to be, wrong. The wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong decision to turn left when you should have turned right, and the wrong prediction of how long it was going to take their fist to impact your face or whatever. The stars aligned sometime when you were produced as an egg from the incestuous slurry of the breeding caverns, and all of them sat down and had a drink and said, “This is going to be funny, someone grab the popcorn.” Interestingly (?), you’ve never really understood that until now. You knew that you were worthless to some extent, sure. Not entirely, because as you very well knew, the Empire loved to do away with entirely worthless things. But juuuust enough so that when push came to shove and you were throttled into the eternal neverblackspace that was supposed to be your element, you were just close enough to the far side of the competence spectrum that you could screw it up for yourself anyway. You’re pretty sure that’s what the neverblackspace has been trying to tell you all along, for that matter. Maybe you just didn’t see it when you were ‘younger’ because you could never see the sky from wherever you were at any given point. Oh yeah, you never could, could you? It was always covered by smog, or the tops of buildings, or those obnoxious glasses you crunched sweeps ago because you finally figured out how much of a douchebag you looked like with them on. Well, they’re off now, and whenever the scene stops you can see a few pinpricks of stars on the thinner sides of the bubble. And you can just see, written in their positions that shine bright against the neverblackspace, that you were the weakest link all along. In LOLAF, the one who could never even keep his eyes open when the sea monster Leviathan created waves underfoot; in Sburb, the one who wrote the damn thing in the first place, locking all of you in equally shitty situations that were probably all like this; and, sure, why not, let’s extend it to the rest of your life on Alternia too, because you were never more than a worthless lowblood in the first place. One out of two, or out of twelve, or out of millions; you were just the one star weak enough to let gravity pull you under, and become a black hole.

—yeah well maybe you—

You don’t want to listen to yourself anymore.

You’re going to sleep.

Your name is Equius Zahhak, and even though it baffles you completely, you’re pretty okay right now.