You zap back to Earth C with the last of your energy. And I do mean last. You place your first foot on the ground, stumble forward three steps, and cough up blood. Terezi has to catch you under your arms, but you’re already going translucent around the edges. Your skin is cooling to the touch. The poison is coursing through your blood so furiously it’s making your veins feel like cords.

Terezi can tell you’re dying. She’s not in great shape herself, but she manages to tug you to your feet.

You try to remember if you’ve ever been revived by Jane before. You honestly can’t recall. So much shit has happened. Maybe?

It doesn’t matter. This isn’t a wound you can recover from. It’s Game Over this time: no healing, no afterlife, no cosmic clock proclaiming your sacrifice as Heroic. The poison needling through you is antithetical to narrative relevance. You’re not dying, John. You’re being erased. Cherubs don’t fuck around. We’ve both been learning that the hard way.

I guess it’s tragic, though maybe not in the conventional sense. My view is, the real tragedy with you, John, is that you never mattered all that much. To those on the level of the cherubs, and now my level as well, you were never all that special, despite the critical role you played. You were just a middling glob of human glue used to seal one glaring gap left in canon. A simple tool to be wielded by a mechanic whose consciousness has risen high enough to see the machine for what it is. Your complete lack of remarkability, specific motivation, drive, opinion on where to direct your own fate—these deficiencies are exactly what made you so useful, so susceptible to being endowed with the you-ness I’ve borrowed to satisfy my purposes.

You slip from Terezi’s grip and face-plant into the grass. You hitch an elbow beneath yourself so you can roll over onto your back. You want to see the sky.

What was it that you thought when you went home, John? Back to your real home? That the sky here is too bright? That it looks like someone nudged the contrast a couple degrees in the wrong direction? How does it look now?

You close your eyes against the light.

Well, that’s a little melodramatic. Not quite, John.

You died the moment you made the decision to go meet your destiny. You would have lived if you made the other decision, under a certain definition of the word “living.” You might have even lived until the end of your immortal life span, as shitty as that sounds. The objective reality of that life might be in dispute by some of the more pedantic canonistas out there. The outspoken sophists when it comes to what “counts” and what doesn’t. They know who they are. But whatever kind of life in a bubble you’d be living, at least you’d still be breathing in it.

That was the actual choice Calliope was giving you that day. That’s why she looked so sad when you decided to fight Lord English, even though you knew both then and now that it was the only choice you possibly could have made.

It was, John. This will be the best outcome for everyone. I promise.

Terezi kneels at your side. She doesn’t do anything sappy like take your hand, though. Mostly because she knows how this is going to go, and doesn’t want to experience the tactile sensation of feeling your pulse slow under her palm.

She wipes her eyes and nods.

She doesn’t confirm or deny the intent of her statement. She cries quietly, and waits for you to say whatever dumb shit is rattling around in your poison-addled mind. There’s a chilly breeze rolling in from the mountains. It rustles through the trees, breaking the perfect silence of an autumn afternoon.

You try to touch her face, but you can barely see now. You miss, and lovingly caress the air instead. Your hand lands back on your chest. You feel blood soaking through your shirt. You’re bleeding again.

Then John dies in the middle of a love confession.

Terezi leans closer, then holds perfectly still. She tilts her ear toward him and sniffs once. There, she can hear it. The slow seeping of blood, like a distant stream. The scent of his life leaving his body, strangely unmistakable, like the quality of the air before it rains. She listens to him bleed while she smells him die.

Terezi presses her ear to his chest and confirms that his heart has stopped. Her tears dry up at that. She’s so devastated she can’t even fucking cry. What is she supposed to do now, when John was the one who asked her to come back to this place? Would she ever have had any intention of returning if it weren’t for him? She doesn’t know anymore. She remembers his voice, so earnest and friable, asking her over and over again to come home. In multiple realities, all he wanted for her was this. To be home safe, with all their friends. And now that she’s here, she’s lost.

Legs shaking, she gets to her feet and takes a whiff of the horizon. Where the fuck am I, she thinks. How do I just get on with living here after everything that just happened?

That’s definitely a fair question. But I have one that’s much more important for her to answer.

Terezi, are you seriously just going to leave the body here?

Of course not. Terezi’s a practical girl, after all. She digs the wallet out of her blood-stained pants, and captchas the corpse. She holds it close to her heart, like a secret. Like John’s stupid last words: a confession whispered for her and no one else.

And then she starts walking home.