Chapter Text
"This world order, the same for all, no god made or any man, but it always was and is and will be an ever-living fire, kindling by measure and going out by measure." - Heraclitus of Ephesus
Alternia is not a nice place. This is something you realize immediately upon reaching the entrance, almost as soon as you cross a specific threshold sometime during your long descent. The heat of the air spikes up dramatically, prickling at the back of your neck while your ears start to pop in an odd rhythm from the sudden change in pressure. If not for the fact that you’re already sweating profusely, you would no doubt start perspiring from the suffocating humidity alone. You let a brief, sharp flare of panic well up inside you for a moment, the fear that maybe you took a wrong turn and are about to end up head first in Derse, before you quell the feeling altogether. You don’t have time to panic right now.
The entrance is significantly less grandiose than you expect, and there’s a noticeable lack of dead people around. There are two doors ahead of you, large but not gaudily so, leading to what you can only assume are Prospit and Derse, respectively. There’s an uncomfortable looking throne sitting between them, though it’s empty, and you find yourself looking around for wherever the entrance to Skaia would be, eyes flitting about for some kind of well-lit hallway with a chorus of angels singing nearby. You can’t seem to find it, though - there are just the two doors, one yellow and one purple, sitting abnormally firm in the deep red rocks of Alternia’s inner structure.
You take about half a step forward, intending to push your way into Prospit, only for someone to pop into existence on the throne in front of you with a near-deafening crack, like a bolt of lightning. The momentum of your half step quickly reverses into an ungraceful stumble backwards, and you find yourself face to face with… some guy?
He’s wearing an open shirt and loose pants, shoeless feet draped over the arm of the throne and lanky body perched against the stone like it’s the most comfortable thing in the world. He’s got some ridiculous multi-colored glasses on, and the hand he’s resting his chin on gives way to an increasingly blasé attitude that does nothing but irritate you. Despite having the body language of a bored child, he has all the physical features of most deities - grey skin, golden horns, a little bit of a glow emanating from within him that you only notice in your peripheral vision.
“Congratulations,” he drawls with a lazy wave of his hand. His voice pitches up like he’s reading off a prewritten speech. “You’re dead. If you were not aware already, this is the afterlife and your soul will be weighed by a god - me - and then you will be sorted into either-”
“I’m not here for that,” you interrupt.
This gets him to sit up a little straighter, feet coming down to touch the floor. “You’re not dead,” he says, as if just realizing.
“Great observation.” You approach him, adjust the sword strapped to your back. “Where’s the God of Alternia? I need to talk to him.”
“You’re looking at him,” the guy says. “Though I go by Sollux these days.”
You squint at the skinny, smug kid in front of you and try to conflate his image with the descriptions you remember hearing about the God of Alternia; he’s supposed to be tall, intimidating, crackling with energy and wearing the world’s most uncomfortable outfit. This certainly doesn’t seem right.
“Where’s the real God of Alternia?” you correct.
“He’s dead,” Sollux explains, quickly followed by a grin and, “So you humans are still calling it Alternia, huh?”
“What the hell else are we supposed to call it?”
“Maybe its given name?” he suggests. “Something a little less lazy than Alternia ?”
You quirk an eyebrow at this and Sollux inhales a deep breath in preparation for what you can only assume is a typically long-winded godly epithet.
“It’s the Supplementary Subterranean And Abyssal Corpse Capital,” he says. “Simple, to-the-point, explanatory-”
“Sack,” you interrupt.
“What?”
“The acronym, SSAACC. ” You wave your hand around with a sneer. “You guys literally named the Underworld ‘sack’ and you’re shitting on humans for coming up with Alternia?”
Sollux pauses for a beat before asking, “What do you want?”
“I need to get my sister back,” you say. “She’s in Prospit, or I think - I hope she is - I just need to bring her back, I-”
“Look, kid, I just weigh the souls,” he explains. “If you’re trying to bring someone back to life you’re gonna have to talk to Death.”
“Are you kidding me?” you gripe, an angry hand coming back to grip at the hilt of your sword. “I came all the way here from the Northern border and you’re gonna make me jump through hoops to see my fucking sister?”
A gray, placating hand goes up to silence you and you start to feel the sting of electricity in the air, the legendary powers of the Psiionic prickling up your spine as Sollux’s attitude takes a sharp turn into less personable territory.
“I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them,” he says, tone deeper than before. “I let them in, but they don’t come out without Death’s permission. There’s a process.”
You take in a long breath, hold it in your lungs for a while as you ruminate on whether attacking a god would send you directly to Derse at the end of your life. For three of the seven seconds that you’re holding your breath it seems extremely tempting, but you’ve let go of the thought by the time you exhale. Your hand releases the hilt of your sword.
“Fine,” you spit. “What do I have to-”
“Where did you say you were from again?” Said with a grin, a coy finger on his jawline, a pull of something behind your naval.
“The Northern border?” It was a long journey down to the southern coast to get to Alternia; full of turmoil and near-death experiences, and trying not to go mad from being alone for so many months.
“Ah.” The grin splits into a leering smile, and then the tug in your stomach gets stronger. “Karkat’s gonna love this.”
You open your mouth to ask him what he’s talking about, why he seems so delighted to hear where you’re from, when you’re suddenly yanked backwards by whatever force had been curling around in your gut. You almost fall, but whatever is controlling you keeps you upright as you’re pulled deeper into Alternia to a nearby, poorly lit hallway. As you disappear into the darkness, you see Sollux, eyes glowing behind his glasses, give you a satisfied wave goodbye.
You only realize you can’t breathe when you arrive at your destination a moment later. You fall to your knees with a gasp and have to take a few seconds to get your bearings, a little unraveled at having your body thrown around like a ragdoll by a petulant, telekinetic child. When you finally manage to ground yourself and take note of your surroundings, you surprisingly find yourself in the middle of what looks like an office.
It’s a mess, with paperwork strewn over a dozen or so desks, cabinets overflowing with documents. A pen has started to leak black ink, unusually thick and oozing down the side of someone’s desk, ruining several papers. You see an overturned chair in one corner and an extremely dead fern in another. It would be funny, if not for how confusing and terrifying it is.
There’s no one around. You were dropped unceremoniously into an empty office room which is, presumably, the domain of the God of Death, and no one can even be bothered to show up and scoop you off the floor.
You remain on the floor for what might be a bit too long, your confusion and exhaustion mixing into a complete lack of mental faculties for a few minutes. It’s long enough that you start to hear someone approach, and you’ve only just managed to stand when you see a young woman, with curled horns and curlier hair, arrive in the room.
“Oh, hi!” she says happily, smile a little manic. “Can I help you with something?”
“Uh, yeah.” You shy away from her extremely cheery demeanor and readjust your sword, which had gone askew in your fall. “I’m trying to find Death?”
She laughs, “Aren’t we all?” and then smacks you on the shoulder on her way past you. She disappears down a separate corridor and you hear another voice start to chastise her, sharp and scratchy.
“Aradia, for fuck’s sake,” the voice echoes from the hallway, fast approaching. “You can’t just fuck with humans like that, you know they’re fragile.”
The voice appears to come from the body of a young man as he exits the hallway and into the clusterfuck of an office space. He’s a little more well-dressed than Sollux, back a little straighter, hair somehow messier, though with the same gray skin and golden horns as everyone else down here. He’s got a sweater on despite it being somewhere around fourteen million degrees however far underground you are, which contrasts deeply with the ring in his eyebrow, the hoop in his nose, and the several other piercings in his pointed ears. He pauses when he sees you and regards you with the same expression you might have upon discovering a cockroach rifling through the food in your kitchen.
Something about him is painfully familiar.
“What do you want?” he asks.
You snap out of whatever mental fog had gathered around your brain and state, clearly, “I’m trying to talk to my sister.”
He sighs and starts attempting to straighten up a nearby pile of papers. “If you want to speak to a departed loved one you have to summon their spirit from the overworld in the traditional-”
“No,” you interrupt. “I want to get her out of here.”
His eyes narrow. “You want to revive her?”
When you answer in the affirmative the guy, who you can only assume is Karkat, tips his head back and lets out a dramatic groan. It’s followed by an annoyed, “Why the fuck did Sollux send you to me ?”
“You’re not the God of Death?” you ask, figuring that if some kid could be the new God of Alternia, then Death would be no different.
This brings Karkat some pause, like you hit a nerve. “I’m Death’s apprentice ,” he explains through gritted teeth. “She’s busy on the West coast with a plague, we’ve been overworked for weeks -”
“She?” you repeat. That’s not right. “I thought Death-”
“That doesn’t matter,” Karkat insists frantically. “I can’t help you, okay? This isn’t in my paygrade and I’m not even being paid.”
He starts to turn away like he’s done with you but you dart around to intercept him. “You can’t even just… open the door?” you ask desperately. “Just let me in so I can-”
“ Let you in? ” he repeats incredulously. “Do you know what kind of monumental shitstorm Death would unleash if she found out I was letting random mortals with swords walk into the fucking Corpse Capital like they own the damn place? If you wanna go in so bad then go ahead and try, she’ll kill you as soon as she finds out and then you can stay for real! Is that what you want? Do you have some kind of fucking death wish? Because I can ask her for a favor if you’re so fucking desperate to get inside the doors!”
“So, what, you’re Death’s apprentice and that just means fuck all? You have absolutely no fucking authority to help me so I’m just shit out of luck?” you shout back. “What does that make you then? The God of Naps? The God of Orgasms? Every time someone has a wet dream do you show up with a damp towel and a fresh change of sheets like the sad excuse for a deity you are? Are you so low on the divine totem pole that you have to take it out on mortals who just want to find their families? Is that it?”
You watch in fuming silence as Karkat’s jaw clenches around the litany of things he probably wants to say to you, though you see him check his temper after a moment or two.
“This is not my jurisdiction,” he says slowly, with a hand raised to calm you. “If you want to bring someone back from the dead, it’s kind of fucking necessary to get Death’s permission first. I can send the paperwork but it might take weeks to even get a response.”
“Do it,” you tell him, barely allowing a breath to pass between you. He gives you a look and you add, desperately, “Please.”
Karkat considers you for a second before letting out a resigned sigh and approaching one of the overflowing cabinets. It takes him a bit to find the paper he needs, and then even longer to find a pen, during which he accidentally dunks his hand into the puddle of ink collecting on one of the desks. He curses several different gods before wiping his hand on a random piece of paper and producing a different pen from elsewhere in the room. The chair he plops into creaks loudly and he smacks the paper onto a desk with a dramatic flair, pen poised over a small inkwell.
“What’s your name?” he asks flatly.
“Dave,” you say, watching him scribble the corresponding letters onto the document. When he looks at you with a raised eyebrow you add, “Uh, Strider.”
“Fantastic,” he grumbles. “Date of birth?”
You give it to him, and several other morsels of personal information until he’s satisfied, all while standing awkwardly a little too far from him and having to raise your voice slightly for him to hear you. Your heart starts pounding out of control somewhere between your current address (Copper District, Northernmost Province) and the name of your closest living relative (Not Applicable), in anticipation of being so close to Rose after almost a year of trying to track down the entrance to Alternia, after countless setbacks and trials, after years of blaming yourself you can finally-
“Name of the deceased?” Karkat asks.
You blink at him. “What?”
“Name of the deceased,” he repeats, slower. “The person you’re trying to see?”
“Rose,” you clear your throat, “Rose Lalonde.”
Karkat acts as your scribe as you give him similar details about Rose, some of her information easier to recall than your own. Your pulse has hardly slowed by the time he reaches the end of the form, and then he flips it over.
“Reason for seeking revival of the deceased?”
The staccato your heart had been attempting to drum ceases with a cold chill down your back. Karkat looks at you blankly while you try to swallow around whatever is clogging your throat, try to formulate a word through the breath catching in your chest. When you don’t answer, he rolls his eyes and waves a hand around.
“You know, like…” He looks up, trying to pull examples from memory. “Did she have any kids? Was she… exceptional in some way?”
“I-”
“Was she unfairly murdered?”
You clench your jaw at this, accidentally biting your tongue and feeling pain well up in your mouth. You let a muffled groan escape you and Karkat gives you an odd look at the discomfort twisting your expression, eyes dropping back down to the form on his desk.
“I… have to put a reason,” he says, a little apologetic. “Or it won’t get approved.”
“We…” You manage to push down the bile in your throat after a few more attempts. “We had unfinished business.”
Karkat meets your eyes for just a second before muttering, “Right,” and scrawling your answer onto the sheet of paper. He looks over it a couple times before standing with a sigh and rolling the paper up, only to then deposit it into the middle of what looks like an old brick oven that was hidden behind a chair piled high with boxes of paper. He places the form inside and the worn stone lights seemingly without a spark, leaving behind little more than a small bit of ash when it dissipates a moment later.
“I can’t guarantee this will work,” he says. “The West Coast is a fucking nightmare, and I have no idea when she’ll have the time to even go through requests when she’s so busy with-”
He’s interrupted by the sound of the stone igniting again, depositing a new, entirely unblemished piece of paper in place of the previous one. Surprise prevents him from reading it immediately, until you clear your throat and he moves to retrieve the message. You wait with baited breath as he reads over the letter, noting the incredulous expression that unfurls over his face in the meantime. The letter ends up cast to the side after just a moment, drifting onto the corner of his desk and giving you a glimpse of a short paragraph, signed with a sparkly, pink pair of lips. The handwriting is just large enough that you can catch what’s written on it from where you’re standing, and the content of the letter makes your stomach drop out from under you.
“I’m busy, y’all take care of it. Do the usual shit and don’t bother me about it again, I have bigger fish to fry.”
“Well,” Karkat says in a strained voice. “Guess we’re going on a road trip.”