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Spicy flecks of chocolate get into your nose in the Land of Sand and Zephyr, temporarily blinding you. Tavros watches you from a dune and dribbles out in his careful voice, "Yeah, the sand will do that, if you aren’t careful. Sorry." His gaze skims your nose and mouth, never directly intersecting with your eyes. This means you are looking directly as his! You wonder if anyone will ever remember that you are blind.
"Don't worry, Tavros! I can take care of myself" You grin at him, and wink. “How is ghosthood treating you?” Your voice doesn’t wobble at all.
Now he looks you in the eyes for the first time, not that means anything. His eyes are as blank as yours, only paler. "Being dead is, largely okay, overall. There is a lot more time to sit, and think, and not worry about dying for any one of the arbitrary reasons that I could have died, previously. And, uhhh," he says, "one of those things, and it is possible, that I am being presumptuous, but I want to say that there was nothing that you could have done, probably. Uh, that is to say, in the case of my violent and unfortunate stabbing, in case, that wasn't clear." This all strikes you as inherently unfair! First Rose understands strategy better than you, now even mister caramel creme is worming his way into the inner crevices of your head.
When you were a Scourge Sister what you always realized and Vriska never, never had was that a half-truth was better than a whole lie. You used to play with the truth like it was your sparring partner. It was yours to command. This is how manipulation works!
You are a sweep older now, and very tired. "No," you say. "It was all my fault. Vriska was my responsibility." You pause. "You were all my responsibility" Telling the truth (and nothing but the truth, hehehe) is a hard thing! It unsettles you. It makes you feel like you are not something made, but is.
He shakes his head. “No…we weren’t. I mean, the seer class was the strategist class so, in a way, you were in charge of us, but I think the meaning of our quest is to take individual responsibility for our own actions.” He crosses his arms over his unpunctured torso. “It may be possible, I guess, that I am projecting. But. For me, at least.”
Death has been kind to Tavros Nitram. He still speaks in long pauses and sudden bursts, like he is scooping up the words in his tongue before ejecting them, but the vortices of his speech patterns are smoothed out. It occurs to you that might just be the absence of Vriska. It occurs to you that you do not know how long he has been alone in the dream bubbles. Tavros is and always will be six sweeps. He will never grow up, this lost boy.
"I could see him!" you say, dizzy with regret.
"Uh, what."
"I could see Rufio!”
He looks at you as if you are someone to be pitied. "Okay, that was, definitely a bizarre and unusual change of subject, but I will ignore that. And, I have been thinking, as I stated, previously, and, Rufio definitely wasn't real. He was just someone that I made up, in order to provide a false front of confidence, and, also, if we are being completely honest, to divert my personal failings onto.”
“He wasn’t real but I could see him. He used to ruffle your hair and give you one of his bro massages.” You grimace.
Uncertainty is written in his slump-shouldered posture. “Yeah, okay, I admire your devotion to role playing scenarios, but I think, that in this case, the charade is unnecessary.”
“It is not a charade!” Words gloop out of you thick as syrup. “As the Seer of Mind my dominion included other people’s fantasies. You believed! You believed so much that you made him real. He was real.”
“Terezi,” he says— very, very gently! And it might be the first time in a long time that he has addressed you by name. “I don’t think that it actually matters.” He makes a little movement in the air with his hands, like he wanted to pap you but couldn’t, quite. You wrap your arms around his neck, digging your heels in to counterbalance him. After a long moment, he puts a hand in your hair. He strokes it. You relax in inches.