/me treasures his gift of sight. Certainly his other senses are appreciated; he can savor the cold touch of stone under his feet, and the echoing sound a cavern produces with each exploratory step; smell the limestone dripping from the stalactites and taste the sour acidity in the air, but sight alone is his prized possession. Without it, how would he appreciate the treasures lying all around him? And not just the lost artifacts he hopes to find in the depths of this cave. In the shadowy illumination created by his flickering lantern, he can see Tavros clutching her arms to herself, shivering in the cold, eyes darting about evident of her usual cocktail of fear and excitement. Up ahead Nepeta is stalking close to the ground, hands occasionally brushing the ground in an approximation of quadrupedal motion, a flapping rodentbeast he had slain (much to Tavros' disapproval) twenty minutes prior still held proudly by its neck in his mouth. Aradia grins at both of them, taking in the view around him with unbridled enthusiasm. Even the limited field of vision created by the darkness around them is a treat; it makes him savor the little he /can/ see, and stokes a hunger to find what lies just beyond the darkness lapping at the flickering light.

Without warning Nepeta stops, rearing upright with notable alarm. Tavros and Aradia freeze in place. They haven't the slightest idea what their catloving friend has detected, but they're not about to question his judgment. Nepeta's uncanny awareness has gotten them out of more scraps than they cared to count. Slowly and silently, they withdraw their lance and whip respectively from their strife specibi. For a long time, the only sound to be heard is a low hiss Aradia assumes is coming from Leijon, but it gradually begins to be replaced by a building roar. At the very edge of sight, a typhoon of red and blue light is rushing towards them; Tavros is the first to catch wise and beat feet in the opposite direction, with Nepeta soon following her, but Aradia finds he can't move. He feels himself grow hot as the light creeps nearer, unbearably hot, until the hair on his scalp begins to singe and his maroon blood boils and his flesh begins to creep off his bones. Every sense screams at once, and are all at once silenced as the light overtakes him.

He's among his former friends, but he can't see them. He can view them just fine, is perfectly aware of their existence and their physical proximity to himself, but he can't see them. He no longer cares about them, about himself, about anything, and strange voices quickly sweep in to take his hand and lead him through his blindness. He carries out their orders unquestioningly, not really caring what the unseen specters want from him or why he's following their initiative. At one point he is entombed in cold, unfeeling metal, and paradoxically this restores some portion of his sight, peels away a layer of apathy. He perceives the world as vague, undefined blobs of color, moving about and occasionally touching one another. His previous unseen caretakers fade away without his ever having seen their true form, and new ones take their place. With his newfound sight he can tell who they are: they're him, separated by wide gaps of time, each of them leading each other along by a chain of leashes of which his own self lies at the end. He resents the collar locked around his neck, and when his masters all congregate together at once and are torn limb from limb, he relishes their destruction, and swears that he will never be enslaved, not by any force, ever again.

Sweeps pass, and his vision sharpens. It's a painfully slow process, focus increasing millimeter by millimeter. Over the course of his enslavement he had occasional flashes of clarity, 20/20 vision sparked by rage or passion or any other number of emotions he struggles to identify, but now that he is free he must carry his own weight, and there are no shortcuts. Victories are hard-won but cherished. He sees friends and partners in shapes that confuse him, illuminated by an incomplete understanding that he struggles to piece together. He finds love. He reaches for hate and burns himself in its flame, but in his disfigurement the light of love intensifies, and he sees the world in greater clarity than ever. For the first time in his intact memory, he feels contentment. Some level of confidence is returning to him, and he knows that nothing is left to stand in his way in the pursuit of understanding.

And then his freedom is stripped away as a tentacle, dark and moist and reeking of ill intent, wraps itself around his neck and draws him into the darkness. He tries to scream but no noise comes. No one seems to notice him being pulled into the abyss. Uncountable eyes trace his passing, then blink out as if they were never there. And they weren't, because as his vision undergoes a miraculous transformation to infallible sight, the same he had when he was alive, it becomes apparent that it's not a tentacle wrapped around him at all, but a whip. He traces it to its source and the shutters over his eyes spread wide when he sees himself, flesh and blood and grinning wide, clad in red with flapping wings, and he screams in earnest now, screeching that he doesn't want to know, that he doesn't want to see what lies beyond the darkness, pleading for the sweet embrace of ignorance. He plucks at his eyes, tearing the artificial viewports from his face, but he can still see the red-clad specter in front of him, laughing manically, growing smaller as it flings him howling into the bottomless chasm below.

He hits bottom and his eyes snap open. He's on the floor of Equius' respiteblock, entangled in the covers. It seems he rolled off the bed. He rights himself with shuddering, spasming movements; if he breathed, he would certainly be hyperventilating right now. His first thought is resentment that he needs to sleep at all; physically it's impossible for him to become tired, so why does his mind do so? And with no biological components with which to process sopor, nightmares were all that he had. He seems to recall his new moirail once saying that she doesn't sleep, and Nepeta doesn't either, although that was a special case. Maybe, if he trained himself, he wouldn't have to?

But he doesn't want to have to. He wants to be able to sleep by Equius' side. His resentment refocuses and targets the choice between nightmares and spending time with the love of his post-life, but he's missing the true source of his frustration, and deliberately so. He doesn't want to have to think about it. He swore he wouldn't be a slave to fate again, and the more apparent it became that he had no choice in the matter, the more he wanted to shut the creeping future out of his mind and damn the consequences. He wouldn't be able to do that forever. But he can do it now, crawling back into bed and pulling the covers back over him and his matesprit. Tenderly he embraces her, not intending to sleep again but to savor the touch of her skin and the sound of her breathing and the smell of her hair and the taste of sweat in the air around her, but above all the sight of the most amazing troll in the world, held right there within his arms.