Paint, Sweat, and Tears - A Homestuck Fanfiction

The glow of your recuperacoon illuminates your whole respiteblock, casting a green shadow on everything the light touches. The hum of your husktop has ceased since it ran out of battery last night, and it sits cold in front of you. The only sound in your room is the hush of the air vents and your changing breath as you stir.

You wake slowly, groggy from eating too much sopor yesterday. Yesterday was a bad day. A terrible day. One of the computers exploded (again), Karkat and Sollux got into another fight that you had to mediate, and the food replicator made everything taste bland. You couldn’t choke down the dry tasting food, so you spent the entire day downing Faygo and sopor while lying on the floor, trolling the humans. Eventually you passed out, still on the hard ground.

You drag yourself off the floor and out of the sticky mess of sopor and Faygo you made last night. Undressing yourself, you walk into the bathroom and step into the sprinkling apparatus. You wash off yesterday’s paint, soda, and slime and let the water run down your body, relaxing your muscles. Rolling your neck into the water, you think about what lies ahead for you today. Perhaps Equius will fix the replicator, unless he’s busy fixing Tavros’s legs since they still can’t manage stairs. As much as you love your best friend, though, you can’t live on Faygo and hope Equius fixes the replicator first.

Stepping out of the sprinkling apparatus, you dry your hair off and push it out of your face then wrap a towel around your waist and approach the bathroom mirror. Wiping the steam off it, you stare at yourself making sure you had washed all the paint off your face. You missed a spot under your jaw line and you scrub away at it until you’re satisfied.

You open up the bottle of paint that you had been using for quite some time and a foul oder of rotten eggs hits your sniffnodes and you gag in protest. You quickly cap the old paint jar and toss it into your litter cylinder, then proceed to get another one from underneath the sink.

You dip your fingers into the bottle of fresh paint and begin to smear it around your face with expert skill. When you started doing this when you were just a wiggler you had to use a paint brush or a small sponge at first, but by the time you were four sweeps old, you had mastered it and could do it with just your fingers.

You drag one long finger across your forehead and make the circles on your temples and move on to your eyes when you begin to feel a dull pain in the back of your think pan. You ignore it and associate it to last night and continue your work until it begins to worsen. This is too much pain for just last night. You didn’t over do it that much, did you?

You squeeze your eyes shut and pinch the bridge of your nose, hoping that will alleviate the pain. It does not, and in fact it makes the pain worse. You open your eyes to see stars and parts of your vision begin blacking out. You fight for consciousness as you begin to feel lightheaded, head still throbbing in pain. Your vision turns black and you fight to stay standing, grabbing at the counter and panting heavily but you collapse on to the floor with objects of your counter clattering around you. 

Bright lights flash in your vision and you return to darkness. The only thing you hear are your short and quick gasps along with small moans of pain from the ever increasing throbbing in your skull. 

The lights return, bringing blurry shapes that you can not make out. You try to focus on what they are, but reject what you see once they have reached clarity. You see your friend’s bodies, limp and lifeless on the floor. A rainbow made of blood flowing from one troll to the next. Gashes cover them, limbs are broken and sawn off, skulls are beaten in, and you watch as all the blood comes together in a disgusting pool at your feet. You bring your hands up from your sides to find yourself holding your juggling clubs which are covered in the blood that the floor is so violently painted with.  Everything goes black again.