Chapter Text

"LEFT HANGING," she reads. Shrug. "Could have been worse." She's always had a morbid fascination with nooses, but imagining herself swinging from one... perhaps that's too morbid, even for her.

"BIFURCATED. Seriously?" Sollux stares at the paper as if it just shot an insult in his face. "It's like fate is obsessed with entwining my destiny with the number fucking two. Couldn't I be trifurcated instead? Would that be so difficult? Or maybe I would like to stay in one piece! Wow, universe! You would never have thought that was a possibility otherwise! I'm trying this again, give me a decent death this time--"

Terezi grabs his hand. Weird how, even as a blind girl, she can always sense where he is. "You'll probably get the same thing! You know how the machine is. It never does what you want it to."

He still doesn't hesitate to stick his finger back in the machine. Flinches a second time as the needle jabs him again. And another slip of paper prints itself out. With his non-bloody hand, he snatches the paper and holds it up to his glasses, hoping his eyes are deceiving him.

"BIFURCATED."

Terezi rocks back and forth on her heels oh-so-innocently, smiling as sweetly as someone with that many teeth can. "I don't want to say I told you so, but..."

"Oh, fuck off." He rips the slip in half. The other one too, for good measure. Two pairs of torn paper pieces drift to the ground.

"Bifurcation is interesting!" Terezi gushes, sweet smile having now gone The Full Morbid. "That'll be an exciting death. No boring person dies by being cut in half!"

He shrugs. "I'll probably just die of a headache while bifurcating code--"

Terezi's grabbed his shoulders. She brings her face right up to his: "Listen up, you sulky honey-flavoured mess."

God, I hate it when she calls me those stupid names, he thinks, still loving it.

"You can't spend your life doing nothing! If you get bifurcation, you should get a life thrilling enough to get cut in half at the end." The smile becomes a smirk: "And I know how to get you one."

He knows from experience that Terezi's ideas often go very, very wrong. He also knows that she's right. He can't let life get him down, not if he's only got so much of it to live.

"Fine."