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“So tell me, how did you guys meet anyway?”

I was drilling Terezi for more information in the dining commons the next day when we were going to get dinner. We were sitting by ourselves while we waited for Karkat and Tavros to get here. Nepeta and Equius actually decided to come eat with us today as well, so they would be here soon themselves.

Terezi just shrugged. It was disappointing that she wasn’t teasing or up to her usual antics like she had the first day and a half I had known her and had gotten accustomed to. She was visibly upset about the whole thing and was acting more sullen and sad instead of crazy and clever.

It was disappointing, and not nearly as fun.

“We were friends in middle school. He went off to be friends with Karkat for awhile, and then he came back and talked me into dating him,” she munched on a bite of her apple, her head still turned downward. “Not a very interesting story.”

I had learned by now that if I nod, she’ll hear it. The curse of having long hair I guess, so I nodded and she scoffed, “If I had known he was such an asshole I would have had my mom move us across town sooner. She had already wanted to move, but I could have pushed her sooner.”

“So your entire family moved because of one guy?” I took a bite of the pizza I was eating. It was better than the food yesterday, but it wasn’t much of an improvement.

She turned her head up to make it look like she was staring daggers into my face, “He started harassing my sister to get ahold of me. My mom doesn’t know exactly what happened, and she never will, but I basically asked if we could move to get away from people in the neighborhood that were harassing me. I graduated, and then we moved.”

She lowered her head again and started biting at her apple again. She licked the juice up from it like a cat or something, which was really weird.

“Who is your mom again?” I asked. She had mentioned at one point there her mom was a famous prosecutor, I think.

“She’s known as Neophyte Redglare, or Prosecutor Redglare, because she’s never lost a case and she’s known by her red glasses and piercing stare. You don’t wanna be at the end of her stare, it’s scary as hell,” she said plainly, taking the last bite out of her apple and setting it down.

“And you would know how her stare is how…?”

“I didn’t go blind until I was eight you ignorant fuck,” she practically growled.

I groaned, “Like hell if I knew that Pyrope, you never told me.”

She sighed, pushing her pasta around with a fork. Thankfully it was in a bowl, otherwise it probably would have ended up all over the table. She didn’t say anything for awhile, and the silence was laden with her sadness. There was story behind her blindness, and I wanted to know what it was.

However, before I could ask, she spoke up again, “Why do you care about this anyway?”

“Why do you keep telling me about it?” I retorted.

“I haven’t had anyone even close to resembling a friend since I was in high school. I had a friend named Sollux at one point freshman year, but he ended up too messed up over the death of his girlfriend, Aradia, to be friends with anyone for the next four years and counting.”

My blood turned to ice and seemed to have stopped flowing through my veins. She knew Aradia?

She couldn’t find out what happened with her. She thought I was guilty for shoving Tavros in front of a car? She would flip her shit over what happened with Aradia. She could never know.

“You stopped talking, did you know her?” Fucking shit, she’s sharp even when she’s upset. Nothing get’s past her.

“Yeah, I did. We didn’t like each other much,” I managed to keep my voice steady, which was really great because I really didn’t need to be showing weakness right now.

“Why?” she asked, putting down her fork and lifting her head to face me.

“She thought I was a bitch, and I thought she was full of it.”

She rolled her eyes, “I didn’t know her very well, I was closer to Sollux.”

I didn’t say anything, only nodding to give a reply. I really, really didn’t want to talk about Aradia anymore. While I felt less bad about what happened to her than I do Tavros, what happened with her was far worse.

“How did you know Aradia if you are from here?”

“She’s from here initially, we grew up together,” my voice was cracking up. Shit, abort mission.

“Why are you so choked up about her if you guys didn’t even like each other?” Terezi had that sadistic smile back on her face, oh God.

I shook my head, “I didn’t like her no, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel bad that she died.”

“Enough to be choked up about it?” she asked, leaning forward.

I groaned, “Mutual exchange of information. I tell you why, and you tell me how you went blind.”
“Deal,” she grinned, leaning back in her chair.

I sighed, “I was driving, without my seat belt like a dumbass, in Prospit to visit Tavros’ family at the beginning of my sophomore year. It was almost my birthday, November 8th, and his family wanted to get together for it for some god awful reason. He had moved from Prospit to Skaia when we had been younger.

“Anyway, I was driving, alone, and a car came out of fucking nowhere and I tried to hit the brakes, but my car sucked and she slammed into my right side. I went through the left window. It was deemed she was at fault for not looking before crossing, but her parents still charged me with vehicular homicide because she died at the scene. I was found not guilty. The girl who died was Aradia Megido.”

Terezi watched, with her jaw dropped open. She closed it, opened it like she was going to speak, and then closed it again. She honestly looked so shocked like it was news to her that it was my fault that she died. She should have been able to deduce that by my reactions alone.

I felt guilt and regret churn in my stomach, “I lost my arm and my left eye went blind, I was lucky to survive. Her chest was crushed by the steering wheel.”

She opened her mouth to speak again, closed it, and then finally spoke, “So that’s how she died. Sollux wouldn’t tell me. And so that’s how you lost your arm. I didn’t know you were blind in your left eye though, that’s news to me.”

I rolled my eyes, which she was never going to see, “Yeah, well, I don’t make a habit of making that fact obvious. Just for your information, the lense on the left side of my glasses is the same lense they use in sunglasses to keep my eye from hurting from the sun.”

She nodded. Both of us were ignoring our food at this point, my appetite was gone and I could probably say the same for the blind girl.

Shrugging, she spoke up again, “My turn. I was in a bus accident when I was eight. I got a hell of a lot of glass caught in my eyes because I had had my face pressed up against the window when the truck slammed into the bus. Almost all the windows shattered, and I got a lot of glass in my eyes.”

She lifted her red glasses to show me the dashes and dents of scars from around her eyes, and even in her eyes. She lowered the glasses back down, “A girl named Feferi died. Her best friend, Eridan, kept screaming and screaming. He had a huge chunk of shrapnel in his side I’m told, almost cut him in half. I couldn’t really hear him very well because I was screaming pretty bad too. You would know, getting your eyes damaged to blindness hurts pretty bad.”

I nodded, “Yeah it does. Also, I think I heard about that from Eridan. He moved over to Skaia and I had a small thing with him, I think he said something about it once.”

“So that’s where he went, I hadn’t heard from him since middle school,” she shrugged.

“He’s still rich and as pompous as ever.”

“Hasn’t changed at all has he?”

“Nope.”

With that, Karkat walked over and slammed his backpack onto the chair next to me with a loud thump, “Hello you miserable excuses for humanity, Tavros has to do some research for Animal Behavior in the library before he can eat so he won’t be here.”

“Okay, where’s Nepeta and Equius?”

“Stuck in line.”

I looked over at Terezi with my good eye as Karkat went to go get himself some food. She looked a lot more relaxed than she had before we had talked, despite everything we talked about.

I sure as hell didn’t feel much better.