Let's go get our horseboy back

Chapter 1

(Hey, thanks for clicking on my story! Enjoy your Erinep, dedicated to my lovely friend on Discord for a fanfiction trade. This will be ongoing, so make sure you save it to catch later updates! Alright. Have fun.)

Void, eh..?

Sure, that checked out. Eridan never was the superstitious type, after all. In fact, that he had any means of perception or thought was positively baffling to him (though at this point, he supposed, both concepts had been reduced to the downright abstract.) After all, there wasn't supposed to be anything "beyond" getting bisected through the middle by a chainsaw-wielding creature of the– okay, you know, what? He was done trying to logic any of this.

What it was, anyway, was complete and utter horseshit– and here he thought he couldn't possibly get any lonelier. Complete isolation. Complete awareness of his unawareness. Was he mad? He was pretty goddamned sure he was going up the wall, here, if there was even any mind at all left for him to lose. If there was one thing Eridan hated, it was an existential crisis. Unfortunately for him, he was 6, and so he found himself faced with them quite often.

At least the solitude was nice. It gave him space to (somehow) think and process what in the bloody, gaping, serrated hell just happened.

The duel. What even was it? A dick-measuring contest? What was he thinking? Defending the honor of, and a place next to a former heiress, who, frankly, didn't even really have any to speak of? He thought he was justified. He thought he was doing the right thing. That he had any sliver, even a glint of a shot. Had he the means, he'd probably laugh at himself. What a fucking loser he was. What did it even get him in the end? A couple of dead friends and split in two right down the middle by a fucking rainbow drinker, which, he wasn't even going to go into the levels of impossible THAT was on.

Not that he hadn't seen weirder, but he digressed... To... Himself? To nothing? It still wasn't entirely clear. He paused to retrieve his train of thought.

Eridan had killed plenty of trolls in his time. He had figured this would just be another one to chalk up to the total. (Even if it was one of the last 12 of their species left alive... It was a land dweller, anyway... All the better.) He guessed he should have known better than to have fucked with a Fuschia's boy toy. Even if said Fuschia was someone as... Emotionally ill-equipped as Fef. Her matesprit... He could just spit. The gangly bastard– this was all his fault! It had to be! Eridan... He'd acted rationally, hadn't he? He was going to win Fef back eventually, who did that wretched computer goblin think he was, trying to swoop in and...

And what? Treat her better than Eridan ever could have?

Okay. No. He was stopping that before it started. He was NOT hosting another pity party. If he had any more self-pity, he swore to God, he might just fall flushed for himself. He was willing to admit that he'd... exited the previous plane of existence with less grace than he had maybe planned. Maybe it was all a mess. Maybe they were all only 6, and they were trying to play grown-up under circumstances no 6-sweep-old should have to endure. Maybe... Just maybe he could admit that everyone was sort of in the wrong there. Maybe he had... Maybe... Kind of started all of this by being overdramatic again. That seemed to be what he did best, didn't it? His guts twisted. He really killed two of the only people who gave any scosche of a flying fuck about him and then completely doomed his species.

Still... He hoped... That if he met Feferi... In the afterlife, or whatever this was, he could apologize and there wouldn't be too many hard feelings. Maybe he'd even try to play nice with Sol if it turned out that those two crazy kids had found each other. Maybe. Maybe, maybe... God, he disgusted himself.

His thoughts looped in a similar manner, stirring the pot infrequently to make sure that the guilt and shame stew Eridan had been reduced to cooked evenly, and that his self-loathing formed a proper crust around the main morsel that was his self-image. He wasn't sure how much time passed, or even if time passed at all (it felt like an eternity,) before he thought to wave away his cloud of misery and analyze, say: How he even had his little shred of existence, what it was, what he was, where he was, and what his surroundings were. He looked around. Inky blackness, more inky blackness, a creeping sense of dread... And that was about it. Nothing, he surmised. What a great lot of help that had been.