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Tavros stiffened as he heard the key rattle in the lock, but it was only Gamzee, come to pay him a visit. Tavros relaxed and smiled. Gamzee had been coming less often recently for reasons he refused to talk about, so now his visits came to feel like a treat, mini holidays breaking up the cycle of monotony and horror that had become Tavros’s life.
“What’s up, invertebrother?” Gamzee asked, strolling over to sit next to him on the heavily padded raised platform that served as his bed. Tavros scooted over to give him more room. “How’s it been since I last seen you?”
“Uh, I guess about the same, since all I do is sit here,” Tavros replied, “so I don’t really have anything new to talk about. But what have you been doing? Are you still shadowing the Grand Highblood?”
“No, my bro, I all graduated from that position and now I be out on my own getting my Subjugglator on unrestricted.”
“How do you like it?”
Gamzee didn’t answer immediately. “To be honest with you, brother, I don’t motherfuckin’ know,” he finally said.
Tavros glanced at him. There was an odd expression on Gamzee’s face. His smile had faded, and there was a dark, unsettling look in his eyes. Gamzee had been falling into these moods more and more often since the Highblood had begun to 'educate' him, and Tavros wasn’t sure how to react. Perhaps it was because Gamzee had been undergoing the lengthy process of weaning himself from supor slime. It felt as though he was an entirely different person from the friend Tavros had been slamming with on Alternia. “What’s wrong? You, uh, said this was who you were meant to be, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what I was all thinking, but I been having some reconsiderations about that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, brother. I think I got some wicked damage up in my motherfuckin’ think pan from all that slime I been getting my chill on with for so long. Shit was motherfuckin’ poison, brother. All them colors and mysteries and the motherfuckin’ chill was all lies made by motherfuckin’ poison leading me down the path of motherfuckin’ ignorance of what all my motherfuckin’ ancestral birthright was about. But now I been reaching deep down and finding up where my harshwhimsies were at all along and discovering the usage of my chucklevoodoos all like what Kurloz tells me I should, but it’s all motherfuckin’ wrong. It feels like some other motherfucker is all up in my think pan, fuckin' with me from the inside out. Something ain't right about the way things are. It's like everything I been thinking was sacred and true ain't never gonna be the truth I was thinkin' it was, bro. And I don’t know how to motherfuckin’ think on about that.”
He sighed and the darkness of his expression deepened. “Um, it...uh,” Tavros said, feeling like there was something he needed to say but having no idea where to start, “it sounds like you’re having an, um, religious crisis, which is bad, and I wish I could do something to help reassure you, but I definitely don’t know enough about that sort of thing to do much helping...but, uh, maybe it’s good you’re tapping into your ancestral knowledge and growing that way?”
Gamzee stayed quiet for a moment, gazing ahead of himself with a distant look in his eyes. “I got this motherfuckin’ anger, bro,” he said. “All this motherfuckin’ anger. Every day I sleep and I wake up with more of it, rattlin' around in my skull, like my dreams are all breeding in me this whole other person what's tryin' to take over. And the wicked pictures be whispering all the motherfuckin’ truths of this motherfuckin’ bloodcircus all up into my hear ducts and they say some crazy motherfuckin’ things. The chill is dead in me, brother. I'm a messenger of the motherfuckin’ murdermirth now.”
“Uh...” Tavros said, feeling a chill shiver down his spine until it lost itself in his paralyzed lower body. Gamzee was staring at the wall ahead of them, lost in his mind, his purple pupils mindlessly tracing the pictures the Highblood had drawn there with Tavros’s blood during his last visit. “Are you talking about...those pictures in particular, or...?”
“These motherfuckin’ pictures...” Gamzee said, beginning to realize what he was looking at. He stood and walked to them, his eyes widening as he understood. He turned and looked back at Tavros. “What the motherfuck is this?” he asked, coming back to him and yanking his head to the side by his chin. Tavros, shocked, sat very still as Gamzee ripped the bandage off his cheek and stared down at the angry wound the Highblood had carved there the day before. It was Gamzee’s sign, the Capricorn insignia he and the Highblood shared.
Tension made the air grow heavy, and Tavros bit his lip. Gamzee stood in front of him, and, as though his limbs were almost too stiff to move, he brought his hand up to trace the cut gently with his thumb. Tavros winced. He was afraid, suddenly, of the troll standing over him. For the first time, he realized how much Gamzee was beginning to resemble the Highblood, now that he was filling out and his body and face were finishing the transition into adulthood. But it wasn’t the build of his body or the shape of his face that made Tavros’s heart skip beats. It was his expression that completed the resemblance, that unsettling look of contained rage and power hidden beneath a mask of paint, the darkness glinting in his purple irises, the recently awakened aura of insanity.
“What the mother fuck...” Gamzee breathed, and the air seemed to crystallize around him. “Where else?”
“M-my wrists,” Tavros said, stammering, “and, uh, my back and chest, and maybe my thighs, but I can’t really feel...”
“That mother fucker. That mother fucker. I’m going to mother fucking kill him.” The rage erupted to the surface, and the yellows of his eyes grew dark with murderous intent. He spun towards the door, but, without thinking, Tavros reached out and grabbed his wrist.
“Uh, wait,” he said, flinching as Gamzee looked back, the pressure of his anger boring down on him. Gamzee was already focusing his chucklevoodoos, preparing to fuck someone’s shit up, but Tavros held his grip. “I know you’re, um, mad, but if you try to challenge him about it, you’ll definitely just make things harder for both of us, so, um...please, stay here. I’m just...lonely.”
Gamzee didn’t move for a moment, examining Tavros’s fearful expression, and then, slowly, he turned and plopped himself back down next to him. Then, to Tavros’s surprise, he leaned over and dropped his head onto his shoulder, his horns and height making the movement awkward. “I’m motherfuckin’ sorry, my brother,” he murmured, his eyes closed. “I sorta lost track of my motherfuckin’ self for a bit there.”
“That’s okay,” Tavros responded. When Gamzee didn’t say anything else, Tavros brought his arm up around Gamzee’s shoulders, shifting to offset their height difference so that Gamzee could lean against him more comfortably. “It sounds like you’re having a, uh, tough time right now, so it’s probably understandable that you sort of flip out sometimes.”
“I don’t know, brother,” Gamzee said with a heavy sigh. The anger had left him, but into the void came a deep exhaustion. “I don’t motherfuckin’ know about anything how this motherfucker is supposed to be working anymore. Kurloz’s been saying I got something in my motherfuckin’ harshwhimsies what’s only been mentioned in the righteous prophesies, but his prophesies aren’t those what I always believed to be true. He’s stealing up all the chill in me, ruining all the good things I love up in my motherfuckin’ heart to pull me down into his faith fetishes. But I’m not the motherfuckin’ faithchump I used to be, not like him and the rest of the motherfuckers what are ignorant about what’s real. I know now what all is true. There is no miracles, no mirthful messiahs, no magic, no nothing sacred. The Vast Honk is a motherfuckin’ lie, brother, there is no motherfuckin’ paradise. It was all just false fakey fraudy con jobs from an unfunny bullshit artist that exists outside of this motherfuckin’ ficlet. Kurloz stole up all my spiritual fantasies and wants me to be buying up his, and now he got you all wrapped up in his motherfuckin’ sick games, cutting you up like you was a motherfuckin’ doll for his wicked pleasure.”
“But...I’m not dead,” Tavros offered. When Gamzee didn’t respond, he continued, “Maybe it’s not that bad. I mean, all those things you mentioned are surely bad things, but maybe you just need to think about them differently.”
“How else should a brother motherfuckin’ think on such a motherfuckin’ sickawful fallout?”
Tavros thought for a moment, his fingers catching the end of Gamzee’s long hair. It struck him how odd the situation was. Before, if you had asked him, he would have insisted that Gamzee was the stronger of the two of them, that Gamzee was the one who would keep them afloat in a time of crisis, but now it was him struggling to come up with something inspirational to keep them both from spiraling into emotional and spiritual desolation. He thought back on life before Conscription Day, when he was still living in his hive on Alternia, Tinkerbull sleeping on the floor, the walls covered with posters of Pupa Pan, back before his existence had been reduced to another troll’s pleasure and before Gamzee had begun to go insane. His heart constricted in his chest, but he tried not to let it show on his face.
“Fairies aren’t real,” he finally said, “and, uh, Pupa Pan was never really real either, and neither was Rufio. I guess when we were kids, there were a lot of things we believed in that weren’t real, and now that we’re adults, we have to accept that a lot of the best things are really just fake. But sometimes I still like to pretend that even though I’m stuck in this cell, and there are no windows, and I can’t really move around at all without my four wheeled device, maybe Pupa Pan will come and sprinkle special stardust on me, and together we can fly away to an imaginary paradise planet where fairies are really real and there are all sorts of magical things. I guess what I’m saying is that, uh, you don’t have to believe what Kur—what the Highblood is telling you if you loved what you had before, and you don’t have to give it all away just because it’s fake and will probably never stop being that way. So maybe a lot of things are false fakey fraudy con jobs, and that’s really sad, but...sometimes, I think that it’s definitely better to keep believing in them anyways, because somehow maybe that makes them a little less imaginary...and if they make you believe in something that’s better than what there is here, then maybe that’s almost as good as if they were really real. Because that’s, um, probably the only thing we can do for ourselves right now.”
Gamzee stayed silent for a few minutes, and then he slowly wrapped his arms around Tavros and buried his face into his shoulder, smearing his face paint onto Tavros’s thin shirt. “We’re gonna get you the fuck up out of this motherfuckin’ box, brother,” he said, his voice muffled. “We’re gonna run the motherfuck away to someplace at where we can keep our motherfuckin’ beliefs alive and get our chill on and feel right all up in our motherfuckin’ pump biscuits. We’re gonna find our motherfuckin’ paradises, my brother. I promise you we will fuckin’ find our motherfuckin’ paradises.”