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Aradia wasn't alive and it felt like she never would be.
She wasn't even Aradia anymore, the girl who's smile had faded so long ago that she wondered if it had ever existed, the girl who was able to love and feel. She tried to feel again, she really did, but she ended up destroying those monuments she once fawned over out of rage because they didn't work anymore, why didn't they work? Why didn't they didn't make her happy, and why did destroying them not even make her feel sad?
She tried doing what the whispers said, or what the carapacian man told her too but it was still all empty, all she felt was the dull remnants of anger that occasionally boiled over and gave her a hint of feeling.
Then she was trapped in a body, a body that wasn't her own - a crude facsimile of what a sick troll wanted from her under the guise of a gift. It was a metal cage that existed so many times, that in what timeline would she escape? The first time she had been able to feel in sweeps and the feelings weren't hers, those cloying emotions, terrible and demented and fighting to take control of a girl who barley had any control to begin with. Blood whirred around the metal clockwork inside of her, beat by a heart that was not her own, the heat of her own rust replaced by the sickly ice of Equius’ blue. Ripping that heart from her chest was all she could do.
Where organs once resided, living; or even rotting peacefully as all things should; there was foreign blood and meat and metal, nothing of hers. She couldn’t even tell who she was. Before at least she knew on some level who she was, or who she had been, but with the metal skin and counterfeit feelings there wasn’t even a scrap of who she was for her to hold onto.
Her skin was steel, her blood was blue and she would never feel warm.
Cold hands had pulled the leash of inevitability and it was her own cold hands that had beat Vriska to a bloody pulp.
She thought she was ok with everything, her death, the voices, Jack Noir, the death of the universes around her.
She thought she was ok.
Her skin was steel, her blood was blue and she would never feel warm.
All she could do was acquiesce to her commands and destinies, watching universes and mistakes replay over and over, fulfilling her idle duties as a destroyer of timelines just as instructed.
There were armies of her, a hive mind of obedient clones trapped in that same charectature of metal all connected via the same purpose, the same loops of destruction as timeline after timeline was left desolate
Her planet was calm and felt ancient, the music boxes ringing aharmonious like raindrops, with clicking chimes on combs of crystal like her own metal chassis. It was on that planet where Aradia found the end of her unlife, dreamself perishing. She was metal on her deathbed and sickly blue before her own blazing burgundy exploded through and translucent wings unfurled from a titanium chrysalis.
She was alive, at last.
Truly alive.
And free.
She was the only voice in her head, the only command being those at her fingertips. The time that had bound her like a puppet was bending and warping to her will, standing still and ticking to the beat of her drum.
Aradia had been lurking in the shadows for so so long and now she could finally see the burning light again, the green sun so deadly and powerful and utterly cosmic.
She was alive now, and she had every intention of staying that way.