#Horned lizards shoot it from their eyes because why the fuck not I guess

[fear-the-hippo]

*bleeds on you to discourage predation*

[puppiclown]

Indiana Strider - rap god and archeologist extraordinaire

After incredible airport delays, I’m finally home and can post this Secret Santa gift! @starspawnedwarlock I hope you enjoy and I’m so so sorry about the delay! 

This ficlet is 1.2k wrds and rated T for cursing lol. Enjoy! @homestuckss

Your name is DAVE STRIDER but it might as well be Indiana fuckin' Jones, for how good your getting at cleaning up cool ass old relics. Dream bubbles aren't really your thing, but you guess they have to be, now that you are a) dead and b) most definitely not alpha Dave. This one in specific you found pretty boring — its mostly just rocks and weird lizards with almost no dead versions of your friends to talk to. You managed to find a Rose a month(?) ago and you think maybe you spotted a John wandering through the more wooded parts of this place last week, but besides that, the only person you've discovered is, well- 

SLAM!! 

The door crashes closed hard enough to knock a framed photo of Snoop Dogg you salvaged from this apocalyptic wasteland off of the wall. You grit your teeth and hold the lizard spine you were dusting in place before it can shatter against the counter.

Her. She is the only other person in this whole fucking bubble you've managed to make definitive contact with. According to her, there are other ghosts lingering around the place, more so than you've found, but you're skeptical. Well, you're not actually skeptical, because you're not stupid and you know that Medigo can talk to the dead and has an eerie ability to know where they are. But. You want to be skeptical. "DAVE!" She shouted, flying over to you. Her arms are stretched as wide as they could be around a bulging tarp that you can see blackened bits of bone sticking out of. "I discovered some interesting remains while tunneling for our friends. I'm pretty sure one of them is a cat!" 

"That's cool." You mumbled back, repositioning vertebrae with your tweezers. "But, dude, could you maybe not slam the door. You broke Snoop." She didn't quite stop smiling, but it faltered a bit. "Oh no, your Dogg memorabilia! I'm sorry! I was just..." She delicately placed her pile of dirt packed bones onto the floor. "You were excited.", you finished for her. She perked up immediately. "Yes! I was very excited." She rummaged through her new findings until she finally withdrew what she had been speaking of. She hands it to you with a dramatic flourish. You take it and immediately begin gently pushing and pulling at the looser dirt clumps. The skull looked feline enough, but the forehead was strangely tall and broad for one. You discover why not too long later — with some gentle prying from your tools, you find an eye socket in the center of it. "Ooo three eyes!" She squealed. "How fun!" 

"Yeah." you replied maybe; you're not paying attention to her as much as you are the weird little mutant in your hands. He's a funky little dude.

  She must take your silence as intrigue or something similar because she pulls up a chair and takes a seat. From there she tells you about the other things she's found, the salamander tail and the dog tooth and the crow talon. You mechanically work with your cat skull and listen but don't hear her — you could recite it back if she asked, but she never would; she just keeps going and if you miss something, it's your loss. Your nails are black from the dirt under them and your neck aching from craning over your work when she finally pulls you from the yawning nothing static space between your ears. 

"So, are you going to tell me why you're upset?" 

You pause in your work and stare at her out of the corner of your eye. You can't keep it up for long. She's too intense and too strange to look at directly — her wide, red grin and gigantic eyes, the bright red robes, the horns. Her silence is like the anticipation in a joke and your response is the punchline. "I. Uh. I'm fine." There's no pause when it's time for her to speak. It's like she already knew what you were going to say. Maybe she did. "I know you're bored!" 

"Do you." you respond robotically. Your hands roam over the rough surface of Mr. Three Eyes and you can smell alcohol and peroxide and Dawn cherry blossom dish soap even though you haven't opened any of those yet. Your body is always a step ahead of you. 

"Is that what's wrong? You're just bored?" She never gets annoyed when she talks to you. However long your responses take, she always answers back immediately and with the same even level of enthusiasm. It's like she doesn't mind your halting way of talking or like she's a computer simulation waiting on user input. Both are pretty comforting ideas. "That's not...exactly it." you finally respond and you hardly finish before she shoots back, "Then what is it?" She's still smiling. "I'm upset...because I'm bored. I'm always going to be bored forever. I'm...dead. It's over. I'm not alpha Dave anymore, my timeline is fucked back and forth. And I'm gonna spend forever in this little cage, these little dream cages, digging up other dead things. I'm gonna be bored forever and it's not even gonna end when I die, because I'm already dead." You can't really feel your lips moving as all of this spews out of your mouth from some dark pit deep in your chest. It just comes out like a well; she always knows how to dig deep inside you and find these little pockets of frustration and sadness. It's what she does best, you guess. 

"David." she laughs a little, and you look over, weirded out. That's a weird thing for her to call you and that little chuckle was weird, and she's always slightly off, isn't she? "David, I understand what you mean. I really do. I felt like that too, the first time I died. But you have to understand that death isn't the end. That's just how the living think of it. Think of this existence, these bubbles, as less of a damnation and more of a journey. An immigration! Yes, you miss your friends, your specific friends, and you had goals you wished to accomplish, and, well, a life ahead of you. But just as refugees of war had all of those things before they are forced to abandon them for safety, so are you, so have you. You have been forced here, to the dreaded land of white eyes and lost aspirations. And like them, you must re-create your goals and find something else to venture towards, be it traveling to as many bubbles as possible or never leaving this one, or maybe," she tapped a claw on top of your new cat head, "seeing how many cat skulls you can dig up before a Lalonde strolls in." "What?" you groaned, lost. "Anyways, to sum all this up, you need a new hobby, turntechGodhead. Maybe several!" She flew up out of her chair and floated her way toward the door as you slid forward and put your head on the counter. "Did you just call me by username?" you mumble into the cold marble. "I'm glad that one of your new interests is archaeology, Mr. Strider!" she yelled over her shoulder as the door swung open. "It suits you!" 

Maybe it does, you think to yourself. She slams the door, too hard, and you lizard spine falls to pieces. You kind of grin to yourself regardless. Dave Strider - internet sensation, expert meme maker, rap God, and...archaeologist. Sounds pretty dope to you.