#Shut up Strider nobody cares | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dukeofriven · 6 years ago

Text

Good In The World

I meant what I said with that extended LOTR quote being what the Epilogues are about - about there being good in the world, and it being worth fighting for. Given that I’ve been up to my neck reading Hussie commentary lately I feel like I’ve gotten a pretty strong grasp on what makes him tick - and who boy does this guy love stories about friendship, teamwork, and love, loves them so much he sometimes sounds like Téa Gardner about to lay down a friendship speech on Yu-Gi-Oh. So - while noting that the extent to which the epilogues are and are not Hussie’s work are even more muddled that usual in regards Homestuck - the take-away is this: everything went wrong, in both Meat and Candy, because everyone forgot that - that friendship, teamwork, and love is the only reason any of them survived. The Sburb survivors came to Earth-C as literal gods, beings of inordinate celebrity and power, and then didn’t work as hard as they should have to still be friends and family. We point to John as some kind of recluse but it quickly becomes clear that everyone stopped working at staying together. Karkat and Dave are as much shut-ins as John, stewing together in their own incapacity. Katkat’s self-loathing, so often a hilarious joke in Homestuck is - free of the immediate pressures of Sburb - shown to be intensely debilitating. It undermines him repeatedly in Meat, and requires incipit genocide in Candy to be set aside, costing him everything that mattered on a personal level. Dave made the mistake of many in his position before him, leaning too much on the first epiphany about trauma and not taking the care to continue down the path to further healing and reconciliation with the past. It leaves him desperately reaching for intimacies he too scared of to actually experience. Coupled with an abused kid’s terror of perpetuating harm he lies to Karkat and Jade both time and time again to try and save their feelings. Jade, so utterly fucked up by years of isolation and loneliness, and so endearingly, crushingly full of love makes all the wrong decisions in trying to build a triad (that is - the triad could have worked, but she went about it all wrong) and makes two separate instantiations of Dave and Karkat miserable. Rose and Kanaya have no malice in their actions, but they do what married people always do: pull away from everyone else, and focus on themselves and their new lives. Harmless, normally - or, at least, not seriously harmful - but those lives took them underground and away from everyone else, The two most insightful and level-headed members of the party simply weren’t around when everyone needed them most. Unaware how bad things were getting they missed so many of the warning sides that would have clued them in earlier that everyone was going off the rails - and being as isolated as she was in Meat this left Rose vulnerable to the manipulation most likely to succeed: just like with Doc Scratch she was preyed upon by someone who could flatter her sense of grievance, knowledge, and uniqueness. Terezi wouldn’t have stood by and let things go to shit - but she was doomed the moment she tied her heart to ego personified, and so was absent too. As for the Alphas, well - their problems were never resolved in the first place, their 'conflict arcs’ interrupted by the arrival of the betas. Only Roxy, element of void, utterly self-contained, a refugee from a dead reality, walked onto Earth-C able to withstand the horror that awaited them: celebrity. Skaia is benevolent, but it is not wise: Sburb seems to have a cherub’s worldview, full of bright colours and heightened stories, but not much maturity. When the victors of Sburb escaped to Earth-C the last thing they needed was celebrity, praise, and positions of note. The issues are all laid out in the prologue: John retired before he ever started working, every one of them richer than any mortal could conceive of. These kids didn’t need parades, they needed to go school. Jane didn’t need honorary degrees from every business school on the planet, Jake didn’t need a TV show centred entirely around his ass: what everyone needed was to be aggressively ordinary. Mundane and unregarded. They needed to put everyone in a group home with four on-staff counselors and take a chunk of years doing nothing but heal. Because everyone was damaged. Other than Calliope - a special case - everybody walked out of Sburb having witnessed at least one apocalypse. Put aside any of the individual traumas and deaths and abuses and sins and just focus on that alone: the death of entire worlds and the burden of saving seven sentient species. Rather than the ultimate Reward being a sit-down with kindly professionals who could help a bunch of kids cope with that, these literal children entered a new world and built new lives on a foundation of dust. The beta kids never finished seventh grade. Jane Crocker never finished high school. Jade Harley, Jake English, Roxy Lalonde, and Dirk Strider never went to school at all. Not one of those four had ever been around more than four humans in their lives until the day they won the game. They couldn’t have. Jade and Jake grew up alone on islands. Roxy and Dirk grew up in the apocalypse. Dirk grew up in a literal box. As Cascade hit Dave and John were the only living humans Jade had ever met who wasn’t her grandpa: and she spent three years alone on a ship with only the Nannasprites and consorts for company. (And Jaspers to chase.) For those four especially, think about they went through within 24-hours: BAM here’s a group of people including your alt-relatives and literal aliens BAM here’s a crazy fucking battle against technicolour chess people, killer dogs, and fish queens BAM here’s a pristine new-ish world better BAM produce thousands of species to populate a new world /TABLE SCRATCH/ Welcome to Earth-C in the year 5000 Celebrity Gods. Here’s your debit cards full of riches. Seriously - this all happens in about a day. And yet people are shocked that things didn’t work out? They were sixteen years old. Four of them had no formal education of any kind, nor had ever been around enough to people to form a softball team. And that’s not even starting on the trolls, who had multiple culture-shocks and traumas of their own the sort through. And yet people are shocked that things didn’t work out? There is, absolutely, a way all of this could have been addressed and become a happy ending. If you don’t like the Epilogues because you’re just sick and fucking tired of tragedy stories - boy do I feel you. Man, don’t get me started on shit like Westword we will be here all week. If you just wanted there to be a fucking happy ending because god-damnit people deserve to be happy - I feel that too. Had that been what we got I can’t say that I’d have been displeased. But if you’re angry because what happened in the Epilogues seems “unreasonable” all I can do is wave my arms at all the shit everybody went through and ask you why going from that to retired celebrity godhood was good for anyone. What happened on Earth-C was nobody’s fault - not even Dirk’s. Of course he lost it. Of course he took his godhood to its logical conclusions - what possible grounding in real human beings had he ever seriously had, and what in his life was there to make him see people as people? Dude grew up alone in a box with SBAHJ and rapping robots for company - the only voice in his head his own, magnified in the echo chamber of ego and his own blindness to his inadequacies. Why wouldn’t Jane cling to status quo of her dead world? Really, what did Sburb ever bring her but heartbreak, an excessively baroque Bad Relationship Simulator that took away her home and her position as a corporate heiress for a six month romp through a bunch of dead planets and inter-friend squabbling (We don’t talk about how fucking boring the alpha session was: nothing but undead and emptiness.) She reaches a new world, gets told how smart she is, gets a bunch of degrees - but as Dave himself notes, when you’re rich as can be and have everyone on the planet lining up to do business with you, it’s pretty easy to think you’re actually skilled at running things, especially if YOU STOPPED YOUR EDUCATION AT SIXTEEN AND GOT TOLD THAT YOUR SIXTEEN YEAR OLD SELF WAS THE APEX OF YOUR BEING. Take a moment to remember yourself at sixteen. Try to put sixteen year old you in charge of something meaningfully important - like, mmh, let’s say a regional bank. Uh - oh. Oh dear. Oh it’s on fire, is it? And the fire is spreading? Yeah, that’ll happen. [One glaring issue I’ll note in these epilogues is that nobody knows what the fuck to do about Dad Crocker, so they do... nothing, until Candy reminds you he exists in order to kill him to motivate Jane to do something she probably could have been easily prompted to do anyways by another means. I guess Dad Crocker just... happily let Jane not finish school or exert any kind of parental control at all after that point? On her or anybody else? You want to talk about OOC: what the fuck happened with Dad Crocker, of whom I expected better? And where did Tavrosprite and the Nannasprites go?] My point in all this is that Homestuck is a story about how important love, teamwork, and friendship is, and after the Earth-C victory everybody got lost. Everybody reacted to being Celebrity Gods in their own way, and it created little cracks that widened over time, and when everyone should have been coming closer together - group therapy sessions, even - they got further and farther apart. These emotionally-stunted mentally-teenaged kids with buckets of trauma, the power of gods, and the celebrity to match broke. One by one. All in their own unique ways. The Epilogues are in some sense a musing on the absurdity of adulthood - how its mantel is placed upon you regardless of whether you are ready or not, for reasons as arbitrary as ‘turning a certain age’ or ‘winning a video game.’ In some cases it takes our heroes DECADES of life before adulthood - before real maturity - begins to make something of an appearance, and even then it’s a crapshoot. Love, friendship, and teamwork are what matter in Homestuck: in the epilogues it takes years of monumentally boneheaded decisions for our heroes to remember this, and some of them never do.

Is there still a happy ending at the end of Homestuck? One that lies ahead? I think so. Hussies loves his characters dearly - and yes, he does. Of course he does. He didn’t spend ten years of his life telling the story of one dimensional Brechtian Archetypes to make some otiose point about the nature of narrative: if he had none of you would be feeling as you are now. The difference between you and Andrew Hussie is that you see his characters like family: you leap to their defence whenever they are hurt, and when they are cut you bleed: “How?” you ask, “Could anyone be so cruel to do this thing?” But Hussie sees his characters as characters, in a story of which he is author, and in which pain and hurt and tragedy can be the vehicles through which good stories can be told: that the light is made all the brighter because of the quantity and quality of darkness that was banished. Candy and Meat are the story of a boy who can only destroy love because he thinks he understands it, and lashes-out when things don’t go as planned. Dirk is just as much the villain in Candy as in Meat, as Calliope makes very clear: the Candyverse is in some sense defined, or at least made more distinct, by his absence. He is a tragic figure on the macro scale - if only he and all the walking wounded of Sburb had been given help when they needed it - but his death in Candy is not a tragedy of ‘what ifs,’ it’s an act of petulance and cruelty by a kid who’ll take his ball and go home if he’s not allowed to play the winning game. His death destabilizes the Candyverse far more than John’s choice to stay, its just that its corrosive effects take longer to be obvious - and the gears he’d already set in motion didn’t cease to turn, though they may have slowed. Dirk destroys love, his effect on both timelines is to push people apart because division suits him, and to push his own view of what ‘love’ is on people who experience it far more expansively than he could ever imagine. He’s a sad little boy who grew up in alone in a box and entered a world that told him he was a literal god with the powers to match - by the end of Meat it’s clear that love, friendship, and teamwork mean nothing to him, only the perfect order of his own fevered imagination. What will bring him down in the end is the reclamation of that feeling at the end of Act 7 - the joy of victory, of having worked together, of the love of family both found and familial, and of the realization that they were none of them better apart. And then some therapists. Some actual therapists. For a good long time. (Also I hope that they find Doc Scratch and beat his sorry ass from here to eternity because that smug fuck has his puppety fingertips all over this thing, and if Dirk really is merging with his ultimate self that includes (as @geekycalligrapher noted) aspects that wound up in Lord English, including a not insignificant portion of one Doctor Vanilla Milkshake, Esq.) (Edit: I did, in fact, do a few edits when I noticed the opening sentences were missing things like ‘the subject.’)

#homestuck #The Homestuck Epilogues #beta kids #alpha kids #doc scratch #dirk strider #andrew hussie #homestuck analysis

916 notes · View notes

heystuckstuck · 5 years ago

Text

doll parts part one

eridan ampora x reader

part one ==> HERE

part two ==> coming soon!!! <3

YOU ==> WAKE UP

You do. You are sprawled out on your own bed, which is soft, softer than anything you’ve slept on in awhile. You are lying on your stomach, your arms crooked under your pillow to support your head. This is the way you almost always sleep. Your phone dings to the left side of your head, and you blearily shift to your side to check it. It would appear that someone is trying to get ahold of you.

cuttlefishCuller [CC] began trollling chumHandle [CH]

CC: )(-Ey t)(-Er-E, Y/N!

CC: )(ow ar-E you f-E-Eling today?

CH: im feeling fairly pleasant atm

CH: just woke up

CH: you?

CC: I’m FINTASTIC!!!

CC: )(-E-E )(-E-E

CH: cute

CH: glad to see youre still doing the fish pun thing

CH: why exactly do you do it?

CC: I lik-E fish

CC: SO!!!

CH: :?

CC: ar-E you coming to my party tonight?

CC: I r-E-Elly hope so!

CH: shore

CH: ;)

CC: Aww )(-E-E )( -E-E!

CC: You us-Ed a fish pun

CC: )(ow glubbing cut-E!

CH: thank you, fef

CC: And don’t fr-Et!

CC: W-E’ll have som-Ebody watch out for you!

CC: So what )(app-En-Ed last tim-E won’t )(app-En again!

CH: …

CC: I’m sorry!

CC: I shouldn’t )(av-E brought it up

CC: 38(

CH: no, that’s ok

CH: it happened

CH: it’s okay to talk about it

CC: )(ow was it?

CH: how was what?

CC: T)(-E )(ospital?

CH: it was ok

CH: im totally better

CC: I’m sure as s)(-Ell glad to )(-Ear it!

CC: Sollux and the cr-Ew will b-E t)(-Er-E to pick you up

CH: the crew?

CC: I’m not shor-E who it’ll b-E but Sollux is driving a bunch of our fri-Ends ov-Er

CC: I asked )(im to pick you up too!

CC: 38)

CH: thanks feferi

CH: youre the best

CC: I c-Ertainly try

CC: T)(-Er-E’s no way to wink at you wit)( my -Emoticon

CC: So just picture t)(at in your )(-Ead

CH: ;)

chumHandle [CH] ceased trolling cuttlefishCuller [CC]

twinArmageddons [TA] began trolling chumHandle [CH]

TA: y/n

CH: sollux

TA: thii2 ii2 gonna be a really weiird que2tiion

TA: plea2e don’t get mad

TA: but

TA: would you fuck ed

CH: what why

TA: becau2e seniior year is almo2t here and iif he doe2nt lo2e hii2 viirgiiniity before hii2 biirthday ii can’t be hii2 friiend anymore

CH: what makes you so sure he’s a virgin

TA: y/n

CH: fair point

TA: ii ju2t know that you have 2ome pretty lax 2tandard2

CH: are you calling me a “2lut”

CH: is that what’s happening right now

TA: god no

TA: ii ju2t wanna get the ba2tard laiid

CH: fine, i’ll do it

TA: y/n you are a 2aiint

TA: 2eriiou2ly

TA: nobody el2e would touch that ugly fucker with a ten foot pole

CH: you and i both know that eridan isn’t ugly

CH: he’s actually quite handsome

TA: god gro22

TA: ju2t thank you

TA: you’re doiing u2 all a favor really

TA: ed fuck2 you and then he’ll 2hut hiis fuckiing iidiiot mouth about not fuckiing anythiing

CH: how many times are you gonna say fuck

TA: fuck

CH: that’s fair

CH: yeah i’ll do it

TA: cool

TA: fiinger gun2

TA: ii’ll piick you up at 6

twinArmageddons [TA] ceased trolling chumHandle [CH]

Sollux is there for you promptly at six o’clock. You’re standing on the curb, waiting for him, when his familiarly tiny rusty red car pulls up alongside you. The music is so loud you can hear it through the closed doors and when you glance in the passenger’s side window, Aradia gestures her thumb back behind her. She must’ve called shotgun, or maybe Sollux got her first. You open the door to the backseat and clamber inside.

Karkat is on the far end, smushed into the door. He looks as disagreeable as always but he offers you a softer-than-usual smile as he adjusts his traditional black t-shirt. Eridan, in between the two of you, looks far more uncomfortable. You notice the way he is desperately trying not to look at you and in retaliation, you put a soft hand on his thigh. He looks as though he might faint, cheeks flushed and forehead beaded with sweat. He doesn’t say anything to you, but Karkat does.

“Alright, Y/N?”

Yes. Why wouldn’t you be?

“Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”

Karkat shrugs although from the hunch of his shoulders, you can tell he wants to argue. Everyone knows that he’s lying. You know he’s lying. You know why everybody wants to know if you’re alright. And frankly, it’s nobody’s fucking business.

Not even if they stroked your hair and whispered soft little nothings to you all the way to the emergency room. Not even then.

As you walk into the party, you notice a tall, slim figure posed at the front of the grand entrance hall. He’s smoking a cigarette and he has sunglasses on indoors. Dave Strider. He greets your friends casually but when he gets to you he falters and peers at you over the top of his shades.

“All better, Y/N?”

“Yes, I’m totally better. I eat almonds and yogurt and soup.” He nods curtly, but you can see the tension in his face. It would be difficult to miss, as difficult to miss as those reddish brown eyes of his. You remember the last time you saw them.

You were lying on your back with the left side of your face caked in vomit. Your limbs were seizing up and you wanted to scream but it was like your voice was invisible. Dave knelt over you, eyes as wide as saucers as he begged you to stay awake, please stay awake, oh god, what did you do, why did you do this, god no, please no, no no no no no nonononononononononono.

And you put your hand on his face and said, “Hello David.” Or tried to. You’re sure that what came out was a flubbed version.

“What did you take?” He’s begging you please tell him, tell him so he can get you to the hospital and they can pump your stomach, god please.

“13 valiums and a bottle of gin.” You try to tell him that you were just trying to float and stop your misery and stop the not eating and stop stop stop stop stop. But he can’t hear you. He screams out a feeble and watery Karkat and then you’re in a car with Karkat petting you and his mouth was moving but all you could hear were sirens. You wanted to sleep more than anything but Karkat kept shoving you awake and talking to you and telling you stories and begging you don’t go to sleep, no.

So you suppose if anyone has the right to ask you if you’re okay, it’s Dave, and you’d better tell him too. So you do, but you can tell that he doesn’t fully believe you, but to your relief, he leaves it.

The music is loud. It makes your ears numb. You see Feferi but you don’t go and say hi because she’s kissing Sollux on his mouth and tracing her fingers up his arm and you know you shouldn’t interrupt, so you don’t and push your way further through Feferi’s house. The lights are all pink and blue and hazy and you can’t see through the smoke in the air and you can taste the acrid tang of cigarettes in the back of your mouth, which makes it feel like cotton. You stumble and trip over something-someone lying on a beanbag on the floor, who doesn’t try to catch you when you fall into his bony chest.

“Well hey there, little sis, how’s it motherfuckin’ hangin’?” It’s Gamzee, with his dark, splotchy face and lazy looking eyes and dopey grin. He doesn’t help you up, the idea doesn’t even seem to occur to him. His eyes are bloodshot and his left hand’s slender fingers grip a short, lit blunt, which he offers to you.

“You want a hit?” Nobody except him in your friend group smokes pot. They drink and snort crushed up pills but they don’t smoke weed. You’ve tried it before, but only a few times. You didn’t like how it stung your throat and made you cough.

“Nah, that stuff makes you hungry.” That was your least favorite thing about it. The last time you smoked pot, you’d woken up naked on John’s couch with your hands and chest smeared in food goop and no memory of how it got there. You didn’t need that again. Gamzee doesn’t seem to mind, and just takes another drag.

“It’s no problem sis, more for me.” You watch him as he puffs on it again, noting the way the slight orange glow offsets the neon lights in the room.

“Anyway, chica, long time no see. How’s it been?” You shrug and Gamzee laughs.

“That’s so motherfuckin’ righteous, sister. Seriously, be all up and motherfuckin’ careful. Don’t want anything bad happening to you or anything.” You’re dumbstruck by the fact that Gamzee of all people, slow-witted, slow-reacting, oblivious, with a brain half-ruined y marijuana knows. God, how does Gamzee know?

“I saw you, all up and covered in that puke. Shit, y’know, it fuckin’ scared me. I love you and I don’t want you to die or anything. You were shaking and crying and everyone was all just sitting there, not knowing what to up and do. It was the opposite of a miracle. But maybe the fact that you’re not dead is a miracle and whatever god exists kept you alive for us. I’m motherfuckin’ happy about that. I’d miss you if you were dead. I think everybody would, even if they pretend they wouldn’t.”

Gamzee then punctuates his profound statement with a soft belch and he gives you a watery, peaceful smile, close-lipped, with his eyes shut. You return the smile, though yours is more strained than his because god just stop fucking talking about it.You get it. You don’t really want to be dead anymore but you wish everyone would stop reminding you of it. You want to forget as much as anybody else. You never wanted everyone to see you, shaking on the floor, eyes rolled up into the back of your head with foam oozing from between your lips all over your white tanktop, staining it pink. You want to forget. You want to forget Feferi screaming and and Sollux saying, hush, hush, FF, it’s okay, and Dave’s tears dribbling onto your face and getting into your mouth. They were salty on your numb tongue.

Gamzee’s hand begins to snake down the front of his sweatpants and you decide to leave before this gets awkward. You abandon Gamzee and trip on your way to the stairs, which you clamber up, on your way to Feferi’s second story bathroom. You don’t have to go, you just want to inspect Feferi’s mom’s medicine cabinet, see if she’s gotten anything new since the last time you were here, before. Before. Before you took John’s grandmother’s pills out of the kitchen and fell on the floor and Feferi screamed and Dave cried and Karkat crooned in your ear and you felt more loved than you ever had before, which was bullshit because of course everyone loves you when you try to die.

She doesn’t have anything new, you note with mild disappointment, pocketing some old pills that haven’t been touched since the last time you were here. You read the label before hiding them. Oxytocin. Pain pills. You shove it, along with your hands into your oversized maroon jacket, and just in time too, because the door you were certain you locked opens to your right. You turn and meet an abashed-looking Tavros, his face alcohol and embarrassment-flushed.

“Oh, I didn’t realize that anybody would be in here. I just needed to, um, well, yeah, you know.” He stumbles over his words and looks flustered, so you smile at him.

“Oh, that’s alright, I was just leaving.” You grab a tiny white paper cup, designed for mouthwash and fill it with water before exiting the bathroom, brushing past Tavros’s shoulder. He closes the door and you pull out the pills and take two with the shot of water you have. You aren’t addicted to popping pills, but it is an outstanding interest of yours. You wait a few minutes and then you feel fuzzy and it’s a bit like you’re walking on the ceiling as you trample down the hallway. You walk back down the stairs on watery legs, trying admirably not to fall on your face, which you don’t.

You walk to the kitchen, where Vriska is leaning with her back and elbows resting against the counter. Terezi and John are with her and you notice them eye you suspiciously as you open up all of the cabinets and count the cans inside.

“Hungry?” John asks, voice shaking a little bit. You remember seeing him, driving the car, speeding down the freeway, pedal to the metal. He kept frantically glancing back at you, blue eyes enormous, even more so than usual. Hs too-large front teeth were worrying his bottom lip and his knuckles were white as he gripped the steering wheel. You know why his voice is shaking. You’re starting to get tired of this.

“No.”

“What’re you doing then?”

“Counting.”

“Okay,” he says, sounding uneasy. God, why can’t people just stop being fucking worried about you? Why does John have to quirk his perfectly arched and adorable eyebrows at you like that? Why does he have to bite his lip and why does goddamn Vriska of all people look worried about you? You know perfectly well the reason why, but you don’t care. You don’t care that they all saw you. That everyone knows. You couldn’t care less.

You exist through the backdoor in the kitchen because you need some air, jesus. You can’t stand the way they all look at you, with such pity and fear. It was a mistake and you’ll never live it down because you scared everybody shitless. You take a deep breath of untainted air and somebody sighs right after you exhale. What the hell?

“What the hell?” You glance around and huddled at your feet is Eridan, his floral short-sleeve button down too tight in the arms. He’s wearing slacks too, which is such an Eridan thing to do and you are filled with an overwhelming surge of affection toward your friend. This is all he is, your friend. Your friend that might fuck you later, according to Sollux.

You flop down next to him. He doesn’t react, just takes a long sip from his red plastic cup. It’s probably beer, which you’re sure upsets his sensitive palette but he’s actively not complaining in dramatic, emotional theatrics for once so you don’t question it.

“Hey.”

“What’re you doing out here, ‘Dan?”

“Everywhere else was full.” It’s true. All of your friends are rambunctiously partying in every corner of Feferi’s party. Except the bedrooms, you suppose. But maybe Feferi and Sollux have already made their way there, you know they will eventually and Feferi will call you tomorrow and tell you all about it. You know every detail of her sex life. She knows every detail of yours and while you are always supportive, sometimes she frowns at you and shakes her head.

“Ah.”

You’re both silent for awhile, the only sounds being of your breath and Eridan sipping his beer solemnly and yet, delicately. Feferi has a trampoline in her backyard and you haven’t jumped around and just had fun in god knows how long so you get up and offer your hand to Eridan. He accepts, although with a cocked eyebrow, and his hand still firmly in yours, you guide him to the trampoline.

“Really, Y/N? You wanna play on the goddamn trampoline? That’s fairly, just, it’s juvenile, don’t you think?”

“Yes, absolutely.” And you take off your shoes and fling your body onto the black netting and bounce a few times. Eridan hesitantly follows you.

“What if someone sees us?”

“Let them. We’re young and you’re drunk and I want to fly,” you say, leaping into the air and coming down with a spring. Eridan doesn’t jump at first, not until you grab his sleeve and tug on it and oh, Danny, I’m having so much fun, I’m flying, this is like the fucking Notebook, I’m a fucking bird, tell me I’m a bird like the Notebook. You’re laughing hysterically at yourself and Eridan is fucking giggling at you and then he starts jumping too and you dance in circles with only the soundtrack of summer cicadas to keep a melody. You grab his hands and his fingers twine with yours and suddenly he’s falling and you’re bouncing your back against the trampoline, narrowly avoiding hitting your head as Eridan lands on top of you and bounces off but only after squishing the life out of you.

You’re laughing so hard no sound is coming out and you’re gasping and so is he and you grab his hand from where he’s laying beside you.

You look up at the stars. You haven’t seen the stars in over six weeks. You missed them.

“So, how are you, Y/N? I’m sure sorry that I couldn’t come an’ visit you.” You do the best shrug you can while lying down.

“Nobody was allowed to visit me, except in the ER.”

“Still, I should’ve come. Fef went. John went.”

“They’re the only ones that did.”

“Really?” His voice is incredulous.

“Everyone texted. Until I had to go to the psych ward. Then I wasn’t allowed texts anymore.”

“Yeah, I know.”

You don’t want to be sad anymore so you change the subject.

“Eridan?”

“Hm?”

“Are you going to fuck me later?” He chokes, a loud spluttering cough, and jerks up to lay on his arm, staring down at you.

“What?!”

“Sollux told me that you were going to.”

“God, oh fuck, he told me-he-he said-he told me you didn’t know!”

“I know.”

“Well, I know that now!”

“It’s okay. If you want to, I’m okay with it.”

“Okay with what?”

“You fucking me.”

His face flared red, which was a feat in and of itself because his skin was soft brown. He looked beautiful in the starlight: his eyes, a gorgeous golden-hazel with long, dark lashes, his nose sturdy and strong, his lips fairly thick and soft and most especially the freckle he had, on the left corner of his bottom lip. His hair fell in his face, dark brown and highlighted by a thick bleached streak in the front. He wasn’t just pretty, not just beautiful, he was gorgeous. You wouldn’t mind snagging his virginity. Not one bit.

“I don’t think-I mean-well-I-I-I want to but I just think that maybe we should wait on that.”

“Okay,” you say, staring into his eyes, fighting down a pang of disappointment, “But if Sollux asks, you can say you did.”

His eyes narrow a bit and then he’s nervously looking at anything but you.

“But I wanted to know. Could you, maybe-I don’t-just-kiss me?” You smile, a full grin with teeth showing an everything.

“Yes, Eridan.”

And then you get up to your knees and pull him up to meet you and your lips are together and his lips are soft, a bit firmer than you imagined, and they’re clumsy and he accidentally clips your teeth together. You wrap an arm over his shoulder and he puts his hands at your small waist, pressing on your hips with his fingertips. You reach your other hand down and take his. You guide it over your breast and his whole body stiffens. His fingers begin to itch around and grope at the soft flesh under his hand and you slip your lips down to his neck. He makes a noise that is a cross between a purr and a croon and you push him down beneath you. The two of you break apart and he stares up at you, fingers touching his swollen bottom lip like he can’t believe what just happened. You realize suddenly that you just bagged his first kiss. You gently kiss his cheek and roll off of his abdomen.

When you wake up in the morning, you’re inside on the couch with Eridan spooned up behind you. A shirtless Equius lays across the floor with Nepeta’s head on his belly. Terezi’s legs are sprawled across her chest. Everyone else is still asleep but you can feel Eridan start to stir behind you. He nuzzles into the crook of your neck and mumbles a quiet good morning into the skin.

“Morning.”

“Mm.”

“Eridan?”

“Hm?”

“Your stiffy’s digging into my back.”

“M’sorry.”

“S’okay.”

#eridan x reader #eridan ampora #homestuck #humanstuck #reader insert #fanfiction #depressed!reader #doll parts

131 notes · View notes

tactfulgnostalgic · 6 years ago

Text

how to never stop being totally not okay: a guide to emotional repression for idiots in love with other idiots (by dirk strider)

alternatively titled: baby, are you existential dread? cuz you make me deeply uncomfortable in ways i don’t care to think about (the john egbert life story)

Summary: How Dirk Strider stole a car, learned to drive, and got a boyfriend (in that order).

(a late birthday dirkjohn road trip fic for my friend lou @vanillacorpse @centercharter! happy birthday, lou!)

1. When he asks you whether you stole it, say no.

“Please tell me you did not steal that,” says John.

“Why does that matter.”

“Because it matters! And because when Terezi asks me about it later, I need plausible deniability. Tell me you did not steal this vehicle.”

“I . . . did not steal this vehicle.”

“Okay. Now, are you saying that because it’s true or because I told you to?”

“What happened to plausible deniability?”

“Never mind.”

From behind the wheel of a glossy, scarlet, brand spanking new Maserati, Dirk Strider says, “Look, are you coming or not?”

From the front porch of his house, dressed in pajamas and sandals, and holding a duffle bag slung over one shoulder, John Egbert says, “Yeah, I’m coming.”

At four o’clock in the morning, the neighborhood is quiet and dark. The trees rustle in a gentle breeze. A cat prowls along the sidewalk, its first and second eyes a luminous yellow, its third and fourth a vivid green. Down the street, a light is on in Jane’s kitchen, and through the curtains, someone is moving around. Maybe it’s her dad, downstairs for a nightcap. Or maybe it’s Jane. She’s taken up late night baking recently. The last time Dirk checked, the melatonin was working, though, so it’s probably her dad, after all.

You’re a god, now, technically,” John gripes. He slams the door shut with a force that has Dirk opening his mouth to complain about treating the car better, until he remembers that he stole this thing off the display room floor an hour ago, and also that he doesn’t really give a rat’s ass what happens to it. “You can just make infinite money. Or alchemize a car. Or ask them for it, they’d probably give it to you. Why do you need to steal.”

John has this habit, Dirk’s noticed, of asking questions that aren’t questions, questions that are more an opportunity for the other person to prove John wrong than honest inquiries about things John doesn’t know. For example, this one.

“You’re also a god,” Dirk points out. “You live in an apartment the size of my garage. Why not buy a castle? Why not build one?”

“That’s not even, like, slightly the same thing, dude.”

“How so.”

“For one thing, I don’t -- you know what, no. It’s too early for this. Start driving before I change my mind.”

“If you don’t want to come,” Dirk begins uncertainly, and John groans.

“Drive.”

“Okay.”

It started with a midnight text.

Dirk doesn’t exactly know why John hangs out with him. He doesn’t. It makes sense for John to hang out with Roxy, because of . . . shenanigans in their past that nobody really talks about. And with Jake and Jane, well, they’re literally genetic family, so they probably have a lot of shit to talk about. And of course he’d keep in touch with his friends from his session. That doesn’t require an explanation. But there’s not much that Dirk has to offer John, except a whole fistful of absolutely no personal connection. Their first conversation took place in the aftermath of a dying universe, except Dirk doesn’t remember that. So their first conversation was . . . hours after the Game, Dirk guesses. Or maybe earlier than that. He doesn’t remember their first words. It was probably something inane along the lines of “Sup, bro,” or “Nice one.” Dirk probably said something stupid. John probably gave him a weird look and then left him alone. Statistically speaking, that would be how it went.

But somewhere along the line neither of them knowing each other turned into an advantage instead of a reason to avoid each other. Sometimes, when half of your social circle was related to you and the other half had dated you or one of your relatives in the recent past, it was refreshing to hang out a total fucking stranger, for a change.

So when John said, “I need to get out of this fucking town,” what Dirk said was not “Sounds rough, I’ll text Jade,” but instead, “I can get us a car by Friday.”

And instead of saying, “Um, okay, that’s kind of weird, I was just talking about a hypothetical,” John said, “Sweet. Come by my place as soon as you have it,” because he’s the kind of guy that says things like that. Dirk wishes he were the kind of guy who said things like that.

Granted, John does look a little bit like Jake, which is weird sometimes. He looks enough like Jake that Dirk has commented on it, once, in one of his habitual fits of saying dumb shit without thinking about, which that happen to him, sometimes, because his life is hell and existence is suffering. But John, after blinking in surprise, only laughed. “Haha, that’s kind of weird,” he said. “Didn’t you guys used to date?”

“Um,” said Dirk.

“Yeah,” said Dirk.

“I mean, kind of,” said Dirk.

“We broke up,” said Dirk.

“Whack,” John had said indifferently, and returned to ruthlessly beating Dirk’s ass in Mario Kart.

And because Dirk doesn’t know how to have nice things without fucking them irrevocably, he may or may not be a little bit in love with the guy. So he’s got that going for him.

John’s house is in what would be called northern California, if things like the United States government still existed, and if any of the people who created and shaped the global civilization had ever been to California. Upon Dave’s request, every principality and township in the continental U.S. had been subtitled Striderville, with various numerical identifiers to differentiate them. Austin was Striderville No. 1. New York was Striderville No. 7. Minneapolis was Striderville No. 666, for reasons that were unclear to everyone except Dave Strider, who when asked would only grimly profess, “It knows what it fucking did.”

Sacramento (Striderville No. 148) fades in their rearview as they soar across the freeway. Dirk, who has been getting this far on intuitive knowledge and gumption, takes the opportunity to admit, “I don’t actually know how to drive.”

It takes a moment for this fact to register.

“What do you mean,” John says slowly, “you don’t know how to drive?”

“It means what it means. I never learned.”

“What the fuck do you mean you never learned how to drive.”

“I mean that I grew up in the middle of the fucking ocean, Egbert, where was I supposed to get a car?”

“You’re driving right now!”

“Yeah, I mean, the operating part isn’t hard. It’s the lane stuff that makes it all complicated. Like, when to turn and shit. Actually, I think I memorized an old Texas driver’s ed manual once. Does that count?”

“No!”

“No need to get worked up about it,” Dirk mutters.

“Oh, my God,” John says, face in his hands. “I’m going to die. I’m going to die and it’s going to be because of you.”

“That’s a little dramatic.”

“It’s really not.”

“Have we crashed yet?”

“Let me drive,” John orders. “Pull over.”

Dirk really should let John drive. It’s the responsible choice. It’s the reasonable choice. It’s the choice that anybody with a lick of common sense to scrap together in their entire body would make.

Obviously, Dirk says, “No.”

“Do you even know what a stop sign is?”

“No, but if I employ a little bit of deductive reasoning, I bet I have a great guess.”

“What’s the first thing you do at a four-way?”

“Make sure everyone’s got a safeword.”

“Dirk, shut up, Jesus Christ. I bet you’ve never even had sex,” John says irritably, as they sail over the city limits.

Trying desperately not to actually sound wounded, Dirk says, “That’s a little below the belt, don’t you think.”

“How would you know? You’ve never gotten below the belt, have you?”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“It does if you’re not a virgin.”

“I’m not -- this conversation is ridiculous.”

“Virgin says what?”

“You’re bullying me. I’m being bullied, right now, by my own friend.”

“I get what Jane means,” John says, thoughtfully. “This really is therapeutic.”

“What? Making fun of me?”

“Yeah,” he says placidly. “Really good for the blood pressure. Hey, do you mind if I take a nap real quick?”

Dirk does a double take. “What happened to me not driving?” he asks suspiciously.

“Eh,” John says, waving it off, tipping his head back against the headrest and closing his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. You’re doing fine.”

“Wait. Do you know how to drive?”

A tiny smile tugs at one corner of John’s mouth.

“Your session started when you were thirteen,” Dirk exclaims. “You wouldn’t have had time to learn.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You didn’t even care about it, did you.” The accusation is flat.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmno.”

“You were just fucking with me.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dirk considers this.

“You’re a jackass.”

“Yep,” John says happily, and tosses his feet up on the dash.

2. Don’t let him pick the music.

“I get to pick the music,” John decides, apropos of nothing, around 6:30, when they’re in the middle of southern California (Striderville No. 83-195). The sun is just dawning behind them, a blinding pinprick of white against the asphalt in the rearview. It casts sharp rays of orange light through the back windshield, lighting their faces in warm colors, bathing the cab in yellow and the road in front of them in shadows that seem to stretch on for miles.

“What? No, you don’t. I’m the driver. Driver picks the music.”

“Driver has to keep his hands on the steering wheel. Driver can’t stop me.”

“I’ll pull this car over, so help me God.”

“No, you won’t,” John says cheerfully, reaching for the radio.

“Wait,” says Dirk, panicking. “Don’t --”

“WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN--”

John wheezes.

“--MY FATHER TOOK ME INTO THE CITY, TO SEE A MARCHING BAND--”

“Listen,” Dirk says, speeding up. “Listen, right, okay, listen, it was in the car when I stole it--”

“HE SAID, ‘SON, WHEN YOU GROW UP, WILL YOU BE--”

John hoots. He shrieks. He cackles, slapping the dashboard of the car like he wants to beat the dust out of it.

“It’s a good record, okay, fuck, I mean, like, it’s not the worst thing--”

“THE SAVIOR OF THE BROKEN, THE BEATEN, AND THE DAMNED?”

“I’m texting Roxy,” says John, wrestling his phone out of his bag. This terrifies Dirk so badly that he actually takes a hand off the wheel to make a mad grab for it, and the car swerves, careening towards the shoulder.

“HE SAID, ‘WILL YOU DEFEAT THEM?’”

“You can’t do that,” Dirk says, his tone hovering two octaves above where it should be. “Listen, she doesn’t need to know about this--”

“Roxy would murder me if she found out about this and realized I hadn’t told her, dude, are you kidding me? Look, it’s an ethical obligation, if anything--”

“YOUR DEMONS? AND ALL THE NONBELIEVERS? THE PLANS THAT THEY HAVE MADE?”

“John,” Dirk says. “John. John. Listen to me, John.”

The shutter of the Apple camera closing, artificial and tinny, ricochets throughout the car like gunfire.

There is a long moment of silence, then, where the only sound is Gerard Way’s indecipherable howling.

“BECAUSE SOMEDAY, I’LL LEAVE YOU, A PHANTOM TO LEAD YOU IN THE SUMMER, TO JOIN THE BLACK PARADE.”

John and Dirk regard each other frostily.

“Give it to me,” Dirk orders, vaulting over the seat divider, and John yells, seizing the steering wheel: “DUDE, THE ROAD,” while also holding the phone as far away from Dirk’s grasp as his considerable armspan can possibly reach.

The car cuts a wild path across the interstate, zigzagging freely between the four lanes as if the lane dividers were more suggestions than rules, at one point almost turning a complete 180 and cruising back the way it came. Black skid marks sear the road under the tires when John wedges himself far enough into the driver’s seat to slam on the brake, and Dirk tries to take advantage of the opportunity to grip John’s wrist and pry his fingers off the phone.

“This is for your own good,” John grits out. “Roxy -- has the right -- to know --”

“Egbert, so help me God.”

“That’s also me, dumbass, and I’m not helping you--”

“I’ll give you anything you want.”

John pauses, the car slowing to a cool forty miles per hour, and says, “Anything?”

From where he sits, perched on the divider between seats like a gangly bird of prey, clinging to John’s outstretched hand like a kitten dangling over a waterfall, Dirk vows, “Anything.”

John grins, and lets go of the phone.

Dirk shuffles into the passenger’s seat, rolls down the window, and flings the offending device out into the street.

“Aw, man,” John complains, watching it bounce and roll away in the mirror. “I had a lot of music on that thing.”

“I’ll buy you another phone. I’ll buy you ten phones.”

“What the fuck am I gonna do with ten phones?”

“I dunno, dude, they’re your phones.”

John shakes his head. “Anyway,” he said. “You said anything.”

The man hasn’t stopped grinning since Dirk agreed. It is a truly unsettling sight.

“I don’t kiss. Aside from that--”

“Oh, man, literally fuck OFF--”

Dirk turns off the radio, which had metamorphosed into the song’s iconic caterwaul of guitars. “A deal’s a deal. What do you want from me?”

John says, “Can you read that exit sign for me?”

Dirk looks up and squints.

“You can take the dumb glasses off. That might help.”

Dirk does not, and so he doesn’t read what the exit sign says until John is steering them steadfastly towards it.

“No,” he says.

“You said anything.”

“I take it back. You know what, you can use my phone to text Roxy yourself. Strike me down for my arrogance. Smite me. Ruin me. Post nudes on my Facebook account. I don’t even have nudes. I’ll take some so you can post them. Just put my ass on blast. Or do you want to decapitate me? That’s very in, nowadays.”

John cackles, again.

The Maserati sails under the exit sign for the Wet N’ Wild Slippery Funtimes Happy Place Water Park, and Dirk Strider, neither for the first time nor the last, contemplates climbing out the window.

3. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, go to the waterpark.

Dirk is hot, wet, and covered in skin-tight clothing, and none of it in the fun way. He views this series of information to be a remarkably concise way of summating his life.

John strolls ahead. The bastard is barely wet. Somehow, the water always seemed to avoid him, migrating away from his form as if swayed from its course by his own ineffable good temper, and when he did get dunked, he could summon a gust of wind to dry himself off with all the effort it took to snap his fingers.

The Heir of Breath is such a useful classpect that sometimes it makes Dirk want to scream. Of course it would be Egbert who got the powers that served some fruitful day-to-day purpose.

He floats along instead of walking, like John, because unlike John, Dirk doesn’t derive pleasure from doing things the boring and painful way. Dirk spends most of his time off the ground, actually, even if it’s only by a few inches. It saves him the effort of having to walk.

“You look like a drowned cat,” John says, not unsympathetically.

“You’ve never fucking seen a drowned cat.”

“How do you know? I’ve seen a lot of shit. Maybe a drowned cat was part of it.”

“You know,” Dirk suggests, “if you really feel that bad, you could help me out. By doing things like . . . oh, I don’t know. Drying me off.”

“There were towels at the store,” John says innocently. “You could’ve -- hey, whoa, whoa. You gonna just climb into your luxury sports vehicle like that?”

Dirk, sopping wet and dripping onto the pavement, stops with his handle on the car door and gives John a dead-eyed stare.

“Just saying,” John says, raising his hands. “That’s leather upholstery. You get that wet, it’s gonna stink.”

“John,” Dirk says very quietly. “If you want me to dry off. You could summon the wind. To do exactly that.”

John presses his lips together tightly, brow furrowed in thought. “Hmm,” he said. “You know, I could do that, couldn’t I?”

“Yes.” Dirk resists the urge to vault over the hood of the car and throttle the man he is currently in love with. “You could.”

John summons a small tornado in the palm of his hand. “It’s really just so convenient,” he says blandly. “Don’t you think, Dirk?”

“It certainly would be,” Dirk says, grinding his teeth.

“Of course, I’d only ever do it with your permission. I wouldn’t use my powers on anybody without their consent, first.”

“Consider this,” Dirk grits out, “my full and enthusiastic consent.”

“Really?” John arches an eyebrow. “You’d just let me do that, Dirk? Wow. That’s a lot of trust you have in me. I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just dry me off, asshole.”

John leans on the hood of the Maserati, arms folded, one ankle balanced on his knee. He grins, flashing thirty-two glossy white teeth, and the breeze stirs his hair just so, tousling it with a rakish charm. When Dirk looks at him, something twists in his chest. It feels hot and uncomfortable, and he doesn’t not like it, exactly.

Then he gets whisked into the air by a gust of wind, wrenched up like a ragdoll on the breeze.

As he soars through the air, one brief, fury-infused thought flashes through Dirk Strider’s mind:

He knows what he’s doing, the little shit.

Then this thought is swallowed by Dirk remembering that he can fly, and catching himself before he faceplants into solid concrete. Getting uppercut by the manifestation of the wind itself is bad enough. Eating shit in front of the guy you’re going on a roadtrip across America to impress would add insult to injury, really.

He staggers to his feet and trudges back to where John stands, bent over on his knees, still heaving with his last paroxysms of laughter.

“Granted unthinkable fucking cosmic powers,” Dirk seethes, “uses them like this. Oh, sure, that’s a great way to spend your time. Not like there’s anything more useful you could be doing with them. I’m sure that’s what you got them for. Tossing me around like a limp sack of nickels, that’s the real reason you got to be a fucking airbender.”

“Heh,” John says, straightening up, “yeah. I’m pretty great.”

But the smile he offers is smaller than it could be, and the laugh has gone out of his eyes, and Dirk is struck with a sudden pang of regret. This is chased by a needle-sharp jolt of self-hatred, because he knows what he did, and if he’d thought for half a fucking second before he spoke, he wouldn’t have said it.

They don’t talk about the Game.

4. Don’t think about the past.

Four months after Sburb ended, half of their friends still woke up screaming.

The other half didn’t, but that was because they hardly fucking spoke at all in the first place. Jade once went for a whole week without saying a word out loud to another human being. Jake fucked off into the woods for almost a month and didn’t take his phone with him, leaving everybody to wonder whether or not he’d wound up dead at the bottom of a waterfall somewhere until he came back. Roxy started coding again, but intensely, obsessively, staying up until ugly hours of the morning staring at lines upon lines of unforgiving binary, surrounded by empty cans of Redbull and wearing bags under her eyes. The Lalondes mourned lost mothers and walked quickly past bars, and Dave still couldn’t look Dirk in the eye without flinching, and they were all of them a little uncomfortable with each other, a little too aware of how like much everyone resembled some lost parent or dead guardian. Jane had her dad, but Dirk knew it wasn’t the same. There were some things so painful it became an act of trauma to speak it out loud.

Dirk remembers a lot of things, from that initial period of settlement, when they were learning how to be people instead of gods.

He remembers Jane turning up on his doorstep with a sleeping bag and a pillow, exhausted, tear tracks under her eyes, asking to sleep over because she couldn’t spend another night in the same house where she’d lived under threat of attack for thirteen years and six months. He remembers getting her settled on the couch in his living room, awkwardly trying to make her take the bed, and her refusing stubbornly because she “didn’t want to inconvenience him any more than she already had.” He remembers having a panic attack and locking himself in the bathroom before calling Roxy, demanding answers, demanding her to tell him what to do, how to deal with this, why anybody thought he was the person to go to for help--

He remembers Roxy turning up half an hour later with her own sleeping bag, and Jake in tow. Jake and Dirk hadn’t spoken in God knows how long, then, but it didn’t matter, because Jane was crying in a sleeping bag on his couch and that meant not a single other fact in the whole fucking world mattered one goddamn whit.

Dirk wonders who John went to, when he woke up screaming. If he woke up screaming.

He remembers that John doesn’t just come from a different universe than everyone else in the world, than Dirk and his friends. John comes from a different timeline. John’s friends have had two years, from their perspective, to learn how to be without him.

If Dirk were a braver person, he’d ask what that felt like.

If Dirk were a much braver person, he’d ask whether it felt good.

Instead, Dirk says, “Do you want to get food?”

John says, “Yeah, that’d be okay, I guess.”

It’s the closest any of them get to an epilogue.

5. Do NOT ask whether or not your midnight McDonald’s run is a date. (But if you do, like, be cool about it.)

They roll up to the McDonald’s around 11:30. Dirk is all for getting drive-thru and hitting the freeway again, but John wants to stretch his legs. They’ve been driving for close to eight hours, at this point, and nothing about the road is even remotely familiar. Dirk’s stopped keeping track of which turns they take, which exits, which back roads. They’re trying to get lost, and they’re well on their way.

John gets three hamburgers and eats two without stopping for breath. Dirk orders a carton of fries and a vanilla milkshake, which John makes fun of him for, but Dirk had accepted this eventuality beforehand.

The red leather of the booth they sit in is sticky, and there are stains on the table. Dirk counts the number of health code violations to distract himself from wondering whether or not this qualifies as a date, because it doesn’t, probably, and even if it did, that didn’t make it mean anything, or at least that didn’t make it mean anything to John. When he finishes health code violations, he starts on the ceiling tiles.

John steals one of his fries, and he’s a millisecond too late to bat his hand away.

“You should get something else,” John says, through a mouthful of fry. “You get crabby when you’re hungry.”

“I’m always crabby.”

“Then fuckin’ eat something, dude, that’s what I’m saying.”

Dirk nudges his glasses up his nose and takes a sip of milkshake. “I don’t require anything else,” he says, instead of answering.

“Whatever,” John mutters under his breath, in a way that makes clear how weird he finds this response, and redirects his attention to his third burger.

Dirk fidgets with his straw. The grease has pooled at the bottom of his french fry carton. It glistens under the fluorescents. John’s hair is lanky from not having been washed in two days, and there’s a smudge on the lense of one of his glasses. Dirk watches him stuff a third of a burger in his mouth.

“Hey, so,” says Dirk, before the part of his brain in charge of not saying astonishingly embarrassing shit catches up to his mouth. “Is this, like, a date?”

John pauses, chews, and then swallows.

“Um,” he says. “Do you want it to be a date?”

Dirk panics. This is the worst possible thing that John could have said. Not only is it not an answer, but it is the kind of non-answer which lobs the ball directly into Dirk’s court, making Dirk the one in charge of making the first move, and oh, this is awful. This is really, incredibly, exquisitely bad.

“I don’t know.”

John lifts an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”

“I meant -- yeah,” Dirk says weakly.

“Wait, so you do?”

“Do what?”

“Want this to be a date.”

“What did I say?”

“Are you really this bad at this,” John says, grinning, “or do you have to, like, try?”

“Hey, fuck off,” Dirk says, overwhelmed by relief at the change of subject. “Between the two of us, only one has actually dated.”

“You don’t know that,” John says, offended. “For all you know, I was hooking up with Dave sprite twenty-four sev, on that ship.”

“Davesprite has higher standards than that.”

“But you don’t?”

“John, we’ve established that mocking my taste is low-hanging fruit, in terms of comedy,” Dirk says. “It’s like writing a film school dissertation on Paul Blart: Mall Cop. I mean, you could, but where’s the sophistication? Where’s the talent?”

“Heh,” John chuckles. “Low-hanging fruit.”

“Oh, I get it. It’s funny because I’m gay.”

“So am I, asshole. I get to make that joke.”

“Oh, I don’t dispute that you get to. I’m baffled that you want to, however.”

“Screw you, I’m hilarious.”

“It is apparent in every element of your personality that you enjoyed Nic Cage movies as a child.”

“And it’s apparent in every element of yours that your favorite book is Fight Club. Your point?”

Dirk splutters, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know what a Fight Club is.”

“Please. I bet you creamed your jeans when you read the part about glycerin.” John takes another bite of his hamburger, smug.

“I don’t have to take this from the guy who uses the phrase ‘cream your jeans’ in casual conversation.”

“I am almost one hundred per cent certain that you have said worse.”

Throughout the course of the conversation, the restaurant has been gradually growing quieter. Not that there are a lot of people there in the first place, of course, but the two or three other groups making midnight junk food runs have fallen into a lull, and the quiet bickering from Dirk and John’s table carries easily. As Dirk gives the room a glance, he notices that the trolls at the table next to them have become completely silent, and they’re both staring.

“Hey,” says the troll to the left, a short greenblood with corkscrew horns. Their eyes grow wide as they lean closer to get a better look. “Hey -- hey, aren’t you John Egbert?”

John stiffens. It’s barely noticeable. He keeps his eyes on his tray.

“Nah,” he says, forcefully bright. “Just got one of those faces, I guess.”

“No, you are,” says the troll, with an aura of revelation. “Hey, Niroxi, look! It’s John Egbert!”

“Hey, back off,” Dirk warns them, but they’re already getting up, craning their necks to try and get a gander at John’s darkening face.

“Are you -- holy shit, I can’t believe this -- what are you doing here?”

“Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” John says, voice strained.

“Are you here to check up on the government? We thought you’d gone off the map! Are Dave and Rose with you? Oh, shit, is Karkat here?”

“Jade says fuck you, too,” Dirk mumbles, and John shoots him a wry look.

“That would be so cool, if Karkat was here! Are he and Dave still a thing? I heard that Dave was dating Jane now, is that true?”

“No,” Dirk exclaims, repulsed. “What on earth--”

Niroxi groans. “You’re being so cringey,” she tells her friend, plaintively. Then, to John, almost shy: “But, like, for real? Are they here, though?”

John struggles to muster a smile. “Nah,” he says. “Just me and Dirk.”

“Dirk?” Her eyes flit to Dirk, who chafes under the attention. She brightens. “Oh,” she says. “Is Jake here, too?”

Dirk’s stomach takes a swan dive deep enough to bury it in the earth’s molten core.

“Nope,” he manages. “Nah, he, uh. I don’t know where Jake is.”

“Really? Told you,” Niroxi tells her friend matter-of-factly.

“You didn’t tell me shit. They’re on a break, it doesn’t--”

“Yeah? Like you’d know. You get your information from the Alternian Weekly.”

“It’s a good site!”

“The Alternian Weekly predicted that Kanaya and Rose would get divorced.”

“And the jury’s still out on that! Didn’t you see the photos? Rose wasn’t wearing her wedding ring at Target last week.”

“You can’t see her hand in the photo, that doesn’t mean anything--”

“And Kanaya and Terezi have been pretty chummy, lately, don’t you think?”

“Like Terezi would ever be into someone that wasn’t John,” Niroxi says, rolling her eyes, and John cringes. Dirk wonders how Terezi would react to that, if she were here. She’d probably laugh. Then she’d punch them.

Dirk isn’t great at doing either. So he does what he can.

“Come on,” Dirk says, standing up.

John tries to ignore the frenzied whispering of the table next to them. “You haven’t finished,” he says, in the carefully moderated tone of someone just barely keeping a lid on their shit.

“I have unless I want to be shitting water tomorrow. Come on.”

“You are literally so fucking gross,” John says gratefully, shoving back his chair.

They’re walking when they leave the McDonald’s. By the time the Maserati is in view, they’re runnin.

Dirk guns the engine as they leave, putting a family of goggling carapacians in their rearview.

6. Keep driving, and don’t talk about it.

They make it two towns over without saying a word. John picks the music, but after two songs, he turns it off, perhaps more comfortable with silence than the obnoxious country-pop blend that local radio stations seem to prefer.

Dirk, meanwhile, wages war with himself.

If it were Dirk, he wouldn’t want to talk about it.

On the other hand, it’s not Dirk, and John might want to talk about it.

On the other other hand, it would be excruciatingly awkward to talk about it, and being drop-kicked into that nuanced kind of social entanglement might actually kill Dirk on the spot. His heart would go into cardiac arrest and he’d die at the wheel. And then who would be driving the car? Nobody, that’s who. He’d die a Heroic Death, trying to get John Egbert to open up about his fucking feelings.

On the other other other hand, Dirk’s been informed that talking about things is healthier than not talking about it. So there’s that.

On the fourth other hand, Dirk’s not really familiar with the general concept of a healthy coping mechanism, and if John asked him for advice, he would have exactly jack shit to offer.

As it turns out, this debate is meaningless, because it’s John who speaks first.

“I was kind of immature back there,” he says, scratching the back of his head. “Sorry.”

“What?” Dirk stares ahead owlishly.

“Immature,” John repeats. “I shouldn’t have bailed like that. They were just kids.”

They soar past twin rows of wheat fields. A small town appears on the horizon.

“We’re just kids,” Dirk says, attempting to sound reasonable.

John snorts.

The town grows closer. It unveils the silhouettes of wide, boxy warehouses and tall, peeling billboards.

“We are,” Dirk says, frowning.

“Uh-huh,” John says. “Okay.”

“Why do you think we’re not?”

“I hate to break it to you, my guy, but whatever you think passes for ‘regular kid,’ we ain’t it.”

“I don’t mean that we’re perfectly normal,” Dirk argues, uncertain of why his voice is rising all of a sudden, “but we’re still . . . you don’t have to take that kind of treatment.”

“Yeah, I do,” John said, and his voice is centuries old. His voice has cracks, crumbling pillars, smooth facets weathered silken by time. His voice is age itself. His voice is the ghost of a dead universe, and it echoes, hollow as the cavity of an open grave.

“You don’t,” Dirk says, and his voice is small, petulant.

“I’m their god. I can’t just tell them to fuck off.”

“Sure you can,” Dirk says sharply. “It’s easy. It goes like this: ‘I’m on a date. Fuck off.’”

“I’m not going to be a dick to them.”

“They were being dicks to you.”

“They’re kids,” John cries. “How do you not -- I made their universe! Me and Jade and Rose and -- what the fuck am I supposed to do?”

“Not let them walk all over you!”

“I’m not -- I don’t --”

“You deserve to get to be normal,” Dirk insisted, and he’s never sure of anything in his life, except for this. Except for the lone, simple, absolutely unshakeable fact that John get to be a kid, if he wants. He doesn’t even know why he’s so angry about it, but he is. “You are. You sure as fuck didn’t get to be, back in -- back when you were younger. But now--”

“Yeah,” John says bitingly. “Normal. Yeah, sure, Dirk.”

“Normal enough.”

“Normal enough? What the fuck does that mean? Normal enough.”

“Even underneath all the Game bullshit.”

It’s the first time either of them have mentioned it. Ever, in Dirk’s case.

Dirk says, “You still get to be normal.”

Because Dirk can’t be. Dirk can’t and won’t and will never be normal, not with how his brain works, not with what he’s seen. Dirk was born in a dead world, a world underwater, and he was raised to survive in a universe that doesn’t exist anymore, and everything about him reflects that fact. There’s no hope, for him. He can’t be the person this universe expects him to be, the person who could live in this universe, and that’s fine. Dirk’s made his peace with that.

But John can be. And it makes Dirk unfathomably fucking angry, to think that maybe, after all, he can’t. Maybe the one of them -- the only one who could, the only one who might, after everything that happened, be capable; the one who wasn’t dating an alien or raised by an alien empress or or fused with a primordial deity in the form of a dog -- couldn’t have a normal life, after all. Maybe none of them got to go back. Maybe all of them were out of place.

That was the bitch about winning, in retrospect. It wasn’t game over. It was a new game.

“Pull over,” John says suddenly.

The briskness of this command startles Dirk, makes him swerve. “What,” he says. “No. Why?”

“Do it.”

“Why?”

“Do it.”

Dirk hangs a left in the nearest intersection and pulls them into a sparsely populated parking lot, sitting beside a giant vacated warehouse. The street is empty. The only cars there are old, probably out of use, maybe even abandoned.

John takes deep breaths.

“Normal,” he says acidly.

“Yeah.” Dirk says it stoutly, emphatically. “You know. Normal.”

John lifts his hands, and every car in the parking lot rises into the air.

The sound of two dozen vehicles groaning and clattering off the ground, in conjunction with the shriek of the gale necessary to lift them, deafens. It choruses. It howls. The cars rise and hover at ten feet, most of them, with the lighter ones drifting higher and the heavier sitting at seven or eight feet each. The wind tears through the flypaper and rubbish littering the parking lot, tossing it up in small cyclones of whirling trash. It makes the trees writhe. It shakes the Maserati, but doesn’t touch it, doesn’t lift it; they sit in the eye of the storm.

Above, storm clouds start to circle and congeal. The wispy tufts of cirrus that had been drifting over the horizon blacken as if someone tipped over an inkpot in a bed of cotton. Flickers of lightning fork down to the east.

The lines of John’s muscles are rigid. A tic in his jaw is the only sign this is costing him any effort at all.

After a minute, the storm starts to calm. The cars lower gradually to the ground, settling gently in the same places they were. The wind quiets, and then Dirk can hear himself think again. John lowers his hands, hesitant, and then puts them in his lap.

But in a way, it’s much worse, now, with everything still. There’s room for the silence to move in again.

Dirk says, “Shit’s up and fucked, huh.”

John laughs wetly. “Shit’s up and fucked,” he confirms.

“I mean,” Dirk says, “you get to pull that kind of wizardly fuckery at the drop of the hat, and here I am over here, fuckin’ Prince of Heart bullshit. What am I supposed to do? Therapize you to fuckin’ death? Fuckin’ Captain Planet-ass bullshit. ‘Heart.’ Jade gets to play pinball with planets, Dave’s over here Groundhog Daying it every time he fucks up, who the fuck even knows what Jake can do, it sure as fuck ain’t Jake, and Roxy can just make shit. Make it! I mean, fuck the Law of Conservation of Matter, am I right? Let’s let her just magick stuff out of thin fuckin’ -- oh, the blond one? Oh, oh, that one? Yeah, toss him, fuckin’, uhhhhh, I dunno, what’s left -- Heart. Prince of Heart, yeah that sounds good. The one that destroys shit, that’s cool, right? What can he do? Shit, man, like, feel really bad about himself, probably? Be depressed? Yeah, that works, great. Cool. We’ve got Witch of Space, Knight of Time, Page of Hope, Heir of Breath, and Depression Man. Dope. Now there’s a lineup I can get behind. Put a ‘case closed’ stamp on that motherfucker, we’re ready to run a session.”

John cracks a smile.

“Gimme a goddamn refund,” Dirk huffs, “that’s all I gotta say. You see how that troll chick didn’t even fucking recognize me? I am the fucking -- I’m not even important enough to get recognized at a McDonald’s. You know that if Roxy had seen that, she’d have eviscerated me on the spot. ‘Prince of Heart.’ Eat my ass, Jesus Christ.”

John giggles. It’s kind of stifled by the lump in his throat.

They look at each other.

John reaches across the armrest and gently punches him in the shoulder. By John’s standards, it’s practically a caress.

In a movie, this would be the part where Dirk kissed him, and John would kiss him back, and everything would be okay.

But Dirk doesn’t kiss him. Instead, he looks out the driver’s window, so that when John cries, he can do it in privacy.

By and by, John clears his throat and scrubs a hand across his face. “Um,” he says. “So I think I broke some guy’s Chevy. We should probably get going.”

“Yeah.” Dirk shifts the car into drive, and the engine thrums. “Where to?”

“I dunno. You wanna head east?”

“That’s fine with me.”

“I heard there was some cool tourist shit out -- hey,” says John, squinting across the street. “Is that an arcade?”

7. Get him the shitty bunny rabbit.

John breaks the lock on the arcade with ease. It’s abandoned, with white sheets tossed over most of the bulky, box-shaped consoles and dust lining the whole place in a thin film, but when Dirk steals some tokens from behind the counter and slots one into the nearest machine, the lights fire up just fine. They fuck around for a little bit with Dance Dance Revolution -- John beats Dirk eight games to one, and that one was when Dirk dared him to do all the moves with one foot -- and then burn tokens on Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. John has to teach Dirk how to play Frogger. Dirk is so bad at it that John wonders aloud whether Dirk actually derives some sick pleasure from killing frogs. John skunks Dirk blind at skee ball, but then Dirk gets him back by climbing up and removing the grate over the holes, and then they spend the rest of the hour lobbing skee balls overhand at the target without much regard for the score.

After an hour or two, they get bored of this, and pass a claw grab machine holding a pile of decaying plushes. Atop the pile sits an abomination in the form of a rabbit. The thing looks like what would happen if you asked someone who’d never seen a rabbit before to design one, except the only reference you gave them was the transcript of a Looney Tunes cartoon. The bulbous, uncanny-valley proportions of the head emphasize the oblong pear shape of the body, and the tail is a limp tuft of stringy cotton. The ears are tattered and the fur on them is clumped and tufted. The animal itself is a weird shade of bluish grey that probably came from using cheap dye for the fur. Beady black eyes glint from either side of a button nose, imbued with a legitimately chilling malevolence.

“That is the ugliest piece of shit bunny I have ever seen in my life,” John breathes, his nose against the glass. “I need it.”

Dirk wanders over, his hands in his pockets. “They’re rigged, you know,” he says. “The machines. You can’t win them.”

“Dude. Dude. Look at me. Look at me, though? I don’t care. I need it.”

“We can buy you a bunny rabbit, if you want one.”

“No, you misunderstand. I don’t want any rabbit. I want that rabbit. Specifically.”

“. . . Okay.”

John wastes somewhere between forty and fifty tokens trying to get the claw machine to give him the bunny. He gets close to success several times, often getting so far as to actually grab the bunny within the prongs of the thing’s obstinately clumsy claw, before it slips out in the millisecond before being deposited in the box. Dirk watches John cycle through the five stages of grief not once, not twice, but every single time this happens, and then watches John recover and try again with unflagging determination. It would be endearing if it were not also making Dirk feel slightly deranged, just watching it.

Finally, John runs out of tokens, and steps back from the machine with a mournful look. “It’s hopeless,” he said.

“Oh, no. If only there were someone who could have told you that.”

“It’s not my fault! I got so close!”

“I know.”

“Guess I’ll just have to do without it,” John mutters. He hangs his head with exaggerated despair. “No bunny rabbit for me.”

He ruins the effect by sneaking a glance up at Dirk.

Dirk heaves a long, put-upon sigh, and draws a token out of his pocket.

“Yes!” John pumps the air, giving Dirk space to assume control of the joystick. “Oh, man, if you nail this, I’ll owe you forever. I’ll even stop making fun of your tattoo. Actually, I take that back. I’ll stop making fun of your hair. Tattoo’s still fair game.”

“The longer you keep talking, the less likely I am to try.”

John ignores this. “You gotta wait for the right moment,” he advises. “It likes to stall sometimes, so you have to jigger it to work. And the joystick is sticky in the lower right corner, so you can’t use it. But aside from that, you should be okay.”

Dirk slips the token into the slot. It chugs for a moment, waiting, and then the screen brightens, the claw stirring.

John is right about the stalling and the sticky patch on the control pad. Dirk wastes three tries on the damn thing before getting aggravated.

“Cool,” he says thinly. “Cool cool cool. Hey, Egbert, do you have any particular qualms about how you get the damn rabbit?”

“Uh,” says John, “no?”

“Good.”

Dirk decaptchalogues Lil Seb into the palm of his hand. The small robot’s red eyes glaze as he boots up.

“You see that rabbit?” he asks it.

Lil Seb directs his attention to the glass, and nods. If he is offended by this obvious caricature of one of his kin, he does not show it. That’s the great part about Lil Seb. He’s a chill motherfucker.

“Get it for me,” Dirk orders, and then slides Lil Seb through the flap at the bottom machine, into the pickup trough where prizes fall for collection.

John lifts his eyebrows. “I think that’s cheating,” he says, but he doesn’t sound upset about it.

Lil Seb climbs up the chute into the main prize pit easily, scaling the mountain of plushies like a man on a mission to the peak of goddamn Everest. He seizes the ugly rabbit by the ears and hauls it down with him, leaping neatly into the prize chute and tumbling back into the trough with a clatter. Dirk reaches in and pulls out both bunnies, captchaloguing the metal one and keeping the much sought-after abomination.

“There,” he says, with more satisfaction than he’s proud of.

He holds out the prize.John beams at him like he’s offering John the damn Genesis Frog, face warm, eyes sparkling. Dirk’s fingers dig into the bunny, frozen, and his breath stalls a little bit.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

They both turn. A burly, balding man stands in the door of the arcade, a ring of keys in his hand, frozen in the act of opening the door.

A katana falls out of Dirk’s sylladex, on instinct.

“I’m gonna call the police,” the owner snarls, but before he can continue, John lets out a long groan, squares his shoulders, and with a snap of his wrist, flings two thousand newtons of raw windspeed directly into the owner’s face.

The sudden gale inside the arcade sends the man sailing out the door, flying backwards until he tumbles to a halt a hundred feet from the building. He’s still moving when he hits the ground, stirring, but clearly incapacitated. The Breeze tears the inside of the room apart, sending papers scattering in a flurry of white and lifting the dust into tiny whorls. Wind rakes through Dirk’s hair and ruffles his clothes. Blue lights snap and spark over John’s frame, especially his fist, and even as the tiny storm is calming, his eyes have a vivid, uncanny brightness.

They’re not human eyes. Not anymore.

Dirk looks down at the bunny in his hands. He wonders if he could pull the man’s soul out, if he tried. His powers aren’t the kind of thing you can do on a whim.

“C’mon,” John says. “Let’s get out of here.”

When they leave the arcade, the man is still struggling to pick himself up off the street. He shouts after them when he notices them going:

“What the fuck are you?”

Out of spite, John flicks his fingers at him. The wind blast shoots a nearby trash bin clear off its foundations and hurtling directly at the owner. Whatever the man’s next words were going to be are muffled by the sound of him taking a full trash can straight to the mouth.

“Hot,” says Dirk, and John snorts.

They make it out of range of the arcade. The Mississippi runs alongside the town, its thunderous rush dwarfing the sounds of the city and the road the nearer they draw to it. As they’re walking away, Dirk hands the bunny to John.

“Here,” he says, holding out the tiny plush. “This is for you.”

“Thanks,” says John, sounding almost genuinely surprised, and then lifts it high above his head, reenacting the Lion King. “I’m going to call him Liv Tyler.”

“Isn’t Liv a girl’s name.”

“Open your mind, Dirk, jeez. We live in the twenty-fifth century.”

“Just saying.”

“Just saying what?”

“You already have a kid called Liv Tyler. Gonna give your son a complex, using the same name twice.”

“I take it back. His name is Dirk Strider The Killjoy, Who Hates Fun And Also Happiness.”

“Junior.”

“Junior,” John agrees, and tosses an arm around Dirk’s shoulders. “Thanks.”

They wander down to the river, where the sandy bank is littered with old beer bottles and plastic wrappers and the remnants of picnics past. In between the reeds, they find a hollow where the grass has been flattened and sit down in it. The evening slips into twilight peacefully, drawing long shadows on the grass, and the trees form black inkstains against the ochre sky. The river turns the color of fire, reflecting the horizon.

John says, “This is kind of, like, beautiful and shit, dude.”

Dirk says, “Did you know that the sky is that color because of air pollution?”

“Yeah, I did. Do you have any other slogans from Hot Topic to share with the class?”

“I don’t know what Hot Topic is.”

“That is honestly more tragic than, like, literally any other part of our lives.”

Dirk finds a piece of copper wire in the rubbish on the bank and starts twisting it into knots. John lies back on his hands, the bunny perched safely in his lap, and sighs with contentment.

“It was really cool when you wasted that guy,” Dirk says, for lack of anything better.

“Yeah? Thanks, man. Guy was being a dick.”

“Agreed. To be fair, we were trespassing.”

“Trespassing shrespassing,” John snorts. “This whole universe comes from some frog Jade found in her backyard. Everything in it is her property, technically, and so also my property, by genetics, technically.”

“You are the legal genius this generation needs. Somewhere, Terezi is weeping tears of joy.”

“You think I don’t know? I didn’t play the Ace Attorney series seventeen times for nothing.”

“Oh, man. I had no idea I was sitting next to an Ace Attorney master.”

“I know. It’s overwhelming. You can take a minute, if you need it.”

“You really are brains, brawn, and beauty of this relationship, Egbert,” Dirk deadpans. “Such a great burden for one man to bear.”

“Yeah, well, someone has to pull your weight, don’t they?”

Dirk bites down on a smile.

John leans over, close enough that Dirk’s breath fogs the lenses of his glasses, sealing a coat of white over those enormous, ridiculous, ocean blue eyes. John isn’t touching Dirk, but he’s not touching him in a way that almost feels like touching, in how obvious it is, in how it makes clear that they could be touching, if Dirk tried, if John tried, if either of them tried.

They’re breathing the same air, sharing the oxygen that lives in the half-inch of space between their lips, when Dirk says, “Wait,” and John pulls back, his expression all twisted up and fearful like he thinks he’s gotten everything about this wrong, and Dirk panics a little bit.

“It’s not you,” he says (shouts). “It’s just -- it’s not -- I don’t not want -- I don’t -- I do, but I can’t just -- and not --”

“Dirk --”

“I wish I wasn’t like this,” Dirk says (whispers). “I wish I wasn’t fucking like this.”

John’s expression clears. “It’s okay,” he says gently. “We don’t have to, uh. If you don’t . . .”

“I do want to.”

John tilts his head. “Um,” he says. “Okay.”

He wants an explanation, of course he does, and the thing is that Dirk wants to give it to him. He really, really wants to give it to him. But he can’t.

John seems to realize this, because he scoots back, putting a good foot of space between them. With John farther away, it’s easier for Dirk to focus. It’s easier for him to think.

He opens his mouth, and he waits for the words to come.

8. When he tries to kiss you, tell him about your ex.

“Do you ever feel,” starts Dirk, and stops.

“Maybe I just,” starts Dirk, and stops.

“Sometimes,” starts Dirk, and stops.

The river flows past, wide and deep and fast enough to kill you before you realized you were drowning. Dirk lived on a tower with an ocean beneath his bedroom window and on some days he’d sit on the ledge, his feet eighty meters from oblivion, his face against the wind, thinking about what would happen if he leaned forward and let go. Sometimes it would take hours to convince himself he’d even hit the water -- that he wouldn’t just drift up into the sky, like a piece of flypaper borne on the back of the wind, and find another world waiting for him beyond the ceiling of stars.

“I have a hole,” he says.

John smirks. Dirk ignores him.

“It’s a hole in -- in the thing that keeps you together. Whatever that is. The thing that Roxy and Jane and Jake all have. I don’t know what you call it. It’s the thing that keeps the parts of a person together. Take Roxy, for example. Roxy doesn’t have to worry about whether or not whatever she does is going to be in character for Roxy, because Roxy’s the one who’s doing it. She doesn’t have to worry about whether or not she’s acting like a person, because she already knows she’s a person, so whatever she does is something a person would do. Or Jane, she -- Jane doesn’t have to think about why she’s doing something. Jane just does things because she does them. She doesn’t worry about doing something because she’s manipulated herself into doing it, or because she’s manipulated someone else into manipulating her into doing it, or because an elaborate configuration of circumstances conspired to create the specific conditions under which she would do it. She just fucking does it. And Jake -- Jake just does shit, too, he doesn’t need a rhyme or reason for it, he’s just him. They’re all people. They’ve got personalities and ideas and thoughts and they’re people, regular people, and they’re not perfect people, sure, but they’re people. And each one of them is held together by something. They’ve got a set of things that they believe in, or things that they are, or things that they do, and those things are them. I don’t . . . have that.

“I’ve got a hole in the thing that holds me together. And sometimes, I’ll just be doing shit, and I’ll think about that hole. And I’ll think about how much of me is just shit I do because other people like it when I do it, or because I think doing it will make other people like me, or because I’ve tricked myself into thinking I like it when I really don’t, assuming that I’m capable of liking anything at all. And when I was dating Jake, that was all I could think about, all the time, even when it was good, assuming it was ever fucking good for either of us -- ‘what if this isn’t real, what if you’ve dreamed this all up because you think you’re supposed to have a boyfriend, what if you don’t like him at all, what if he doesn’t like you, what if you’ve made yourself the kind of person Jake English likes instead of whatever the fuck you actually are.’ And when I think about you, I get the same kind of worries, like -- what if I like you so much I started being the kind of person I thought you’d like? What if the only reason you like me is because I tried so hard to be liked? I’d say that I was worried you didn’t like the real me, but that isn’t it. I don’t think the ‘real me’ exists, really. That’s the problem.

“So I guess what I’m saying is I’m not a person. Sometimes I act like a person and talk like a person and think like a person, but I’ve got a hole in the thing that’s supposed to hold people together, and I can’t sew it back up again. I’m not who you think I am. I’m a copy of a person that’s really good at making other people think it’s real.”

The river runs by, and he wants to be like the water. He wants to keep going and going and going, without cause or expectation of pause, until he hits something bigger than he is, and gets absorbed into it. Dirk has never wanted anything so much as not to exist -- not to die, but not to exist. It’s a quieter thing.

John says, “You are really kind of dumb, dude.”

Dirk’s neck hurts from how fast his head snaps around. “What?”

“I mean,” John amends, “that sucks, but you’re not, like, the only person who ever felt like they were faking it. And no offense, but you couldn’t manipulate your way out of a paper bag. I don’t think I like you because you’ve pulled some nefarious supervillain kind of shit, you know?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Dirk says, frustrated.

“No, yeah, I get what you meant. And I wanna make it obvious that, like, I don’t . . . not care? I do. It’s shitty, and it sounds like you could use some good counseling. But dude, I’m not looking for your hand in marriage, here. I just wanna eat chips and watch shitty movies and make out sometimes, and also maybe do more than that, if you’re into it. Or not, if you’re not into it. Cards on the table, I didn’t actually think I’d get this far.” John laughs a little. “The fact that you get so worked up about being like . . . the real you, or whatever? It makes me think I probably know exactly who you are after all.”

“Which is what?” Dirk can barely breathe.

“An idiot,” John says, with conviction. “But an idiot that I want to make out with, so I guess that makes me even more of an idiot, really.”

“Who’s more the fool,” Dirk quips, still dazed. “The fool, or the fool who wants to do butt stuff with him?”

“Oh my God, shut up. I’m never kissing you, actually. Ever.”

“That’s not true,” Dirk counters, with a feeble spark of confidence. “You said you wanted to make out with me.”

“That was before you talked about sex as ‘butt stuff.’ I’m taking it back. R.I.P., my libido. You had a good run, old buddy.”

“What’s wrong with butt stuff?”

“Stop saying that! Stop saying butt stuff!”

“Does it bother you?”

“Yes! I -- you are literally so aggravating.”

“You like it,” Dirk says, hazarding a guess.

“Asshole,” John grumbles. “You owe me, like, five makeouts for that alone.”

“I can do that,” Dirk agrees, now thoroughly bemused. Absolutely nothing in this conversation has gone the way he thought it would. He’s not unhappy about it.

“Five makeouts and my pick of movies.”

“Six makeouts, and I’ll drive the rest of the way.”

“Fine. But no more SBAHJ.”

“Shake on it,” Dirk says stoically, offering his hand.

John rolls his eyes and says, “Nerd,” before leaning in to kiss him.

This time, Dirk doesn’t pull away. The river runs by, and he doesn’t want to be anything but the creature living in Dirk Strider’s skin, anything but the person that John Egbert is kissing. It’s a new feeling. He likes it. He thinks he could live like this for a while.

#dirkjohn #dirk strider #john egbert #go wish lou a belated happy birthday! <3

801 notes · View notes

unicorn-poop · 6 years ago

Text

Troll Rose and the Rule 63 Trolls (School)

(Anyone know the source? I found this on the internet. Anyways here’s what the 12 beauties look like (Only because I like this one the best).

THE CONDESCE: YOU ALL AR--E GOING TO GO TO SCHOOL W)(--ETH--ER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!

KARKAT: BUT MOM I DON’T WANT TO GO TO A PLACE FILLED WITH ANNOYING UGLY ASS HUMANS! EW!

SOLLUX: yeah ii don’t thiink thiis school would be a very good iidea...

THE CONDESCE: W)(AL--E YOU ALL N--E--ED FRO--ENDS!

ARADIA: i have friends! i am friends with the spirits of the dead

THE CONDESCE: Friends that are not dead...

ARADIA: awwww....

THE CONDESCE: Anyways you all will actually end up sucessful and not losers w)(o will still live wit)( mommy....Now bye!

(Kicks the trolls out)

KARKAT: FUUUUUUUUUCK!

(The trolls end up walking. They past a McDonalds on their way to school)

TAVROS: uHH KARKAT CAN WE GET SOMETHING FROM MCDONALDS, i AM STARVING

KARKAT: I DON’T FUCKING NO! WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME? ASK ARADIA! HE IS THE LEADER HERE! HIS SIGN IS AT THE BEGINING OF THE ZODIAC FOR FUCKS SAKE!

TAVROS: aRADIA...

ARADIA: no. that place is just the saddest place on earth. burger queen is much better tavros

VRISKA: No it ain’t! They suck ass!

TEREZI: YOU 4R3 ONLY S4Y1NG TH4T B3C4US3 TH4T WHOPP3R G4V3 YOU TH3 SH1TS!

FEFERI: HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!

VRISKA: Shut up terezi! Not funny fish 8oy!

(The trolls make it to school)

NEPETA: :33 oh cool! there’s animals?!

KARKAT: THOSE ARE FREAKS! I THINK THEY’RE CALLED FURRIES! WHO KNEW THIS SCHOOL WOULD HAVE FUCKING FURRIES HERE!

NEPETA: :33 aww yesssss! time to make some furiends

TEREZI: 3V3RYONE SM3LLS!

STUDENT 1: Hey freaks

ERIDAN: excuse me? wwe aren’t the freaks here!

GAMZEE: hEy BrUh WhY yOu GoTta Be MeAn To My FrIeNdS?

Equius gets up at Student 1 face. the kid pisses himself

EQUIUS: D--> listen you disgrace you will leave me and my friends alone! we are not the freaks here! we got noble blood that is higher than yours. you should listen to us because we rule the school. now get lost (Cracks Knuckles).

Student 1 runs away

EQUIUS: D--> a waste of our time

SOLLUX: thanks eq

KANAYA: Did He Just Soil Himself?

KARKAT: HA! YEAH EQUIUS SURE SCARED THE PISS OUT OF THAT DWEEB!

(Suddenly Jade harley walks past)

JADE: hi guys :)

(All of the trolls stare in aw. Yes Jade is still a girl And a human in this AU).

ARADIA: oh wow she is so pretty. she makes me feel more alive than i already am

TAVROS: wOW SHE IS SO PRETTY!

SOLLUX: ii thiink ii have a thiing for human female2 wiith long black haiir.

KARKAT: HOLY FUCK!

NEPETA: :33 she is so puritty!

KANAYA: My What Lovely Clothing She Has

TEREZI: HOLY SH1T!

VRISKA: That ass ;:::)

EQUIUS: D--> Oh my! I need a towel

GAMZEE: sEe GuYs MiRaClEs Do ExIsT

ERIDAN: looks like this vviolet gal here is getting a human girl in her red quadrant today

FEFERI: GLUB GLUB!

The trolls then all look at eachother

KARKAT: FUCK ALL OF YOU! SHE IS MINE! OUT OF ALL OF YOU I DESERVE A GIRLFRIEND!

TAVROS: nO WAY MAN, i DESERVE HER, WE LITERALLY WOULD BE THE BEST COUPLE IN THIS SCHOOL, bESIDES YOU’RE TOO LOUD!

SOLLUX: ii am 2mart! ii thiink ii de2erve her more than the 2 of you.

EQUIUS: D--> no way. i have higher blood than the three of you. who wouldn’t like a lovely bl00 lady like me? she will be mine! understood lowbloods?

ERIDAN: i am prettier than the 4 of you so she’ll be in my red quadrant. it’s the truth i don’t make the rules!

GAMZEE: HONK!

NEPETA: :33 oh wow the girls are fighting ofur her.

KANAYA: I Don’t Blame Them

VRISKA: Ha! Well she is mine. The rest of you can just find someone else. Look fussyfangs (Points at Dave) I think that man over there would be a gr8 man for you! You should go talk to him.

KANAYA: No. He Seems Like A Asshole I Think You Should Date Him.

VRISKA: Nah. He’s uglyyyyyyy!

NEPETA: :33 i think he means black dating

VRISKA: Sure but right now that raven haired human girl is going in my red quadrant.

KANAYA: No She Is Not Why Would She Want To date You?

VRISKA: Because I am a hot mother fucker!

FEFERI: )(a! Sea t)(ese muscles gentlemen. T)(e human is going to be mine

VRISKA: You’re a dick! Why would she want to 8e with you?!

FEFERI: My blood colour you ass! Also t)(e very fact that I )(ave )(igher blood t)(an all of you so )(A!

TEREZI: SUCK 1T! NOBODY W4NTS SOMEBODY WHO SM3LLS L1K3 F1SH!

FEFERI: (pulls out Trident) T)(AT’S IT!

Kanaya pulls out his chainsaw.

KANAYA: WILL YOU ALL JUST STOP! Why Are You All fighting For A Girl We Don’t Even Know?

KARKAT: BECAUSE.....

(Suddenly dave strider passes)

DAVE: Sup grey humans. Nice candy corn horns.

ARADIA:.......our horns aren’t candy buddy

DAVE: Hey there beautiful (Looking at karkat)

KARKAT: (BLUSHES)

KANAYA: Jesus He Seems Like A Asshole

VRISKA: 8ut fussyfangs he’d 8e the perfect guy for you.

EQUIUS: D--> Let’s get to class

(In Fourth Period)

TEACHER: So class today we will be learning about geometry. Now turn to page 69 in your text books

(The whole class heavily sighs)

All the trolls couldn’t stop thinking about Jade. 11 of them wanted her in their red quadrant. You can guess who doesn't. He just wanted to be her morail.

JOHN: hi.

KANAYA: Hello Human

JOHN: you’re really handsome.

KANAYA: Thank You Now Could You Tell Me About This Human That Has Green Eyes And Long Black hair

JOHN: oh, that’s my sister jade harley! have you met her yet? she’s awesome isn’t she?

KANAYA: My Friends Are Obsessed With Her

JOHN: oh really? well she is really pretty and a very friendly person so it’s understandable.

VRISKA: Hey Fussyfangs! Why are you talking to that loser?

JOHN: I am not a loser!

VRISKA: so this jade human is related you you, huh? So 8uddy can you tell me how to get her in my red quadrant?

JOHN: red quadrant?

VRISKA: How can I make her my girlfriend? Jegus you humans are stupiiiiid!

JOHN: join the football team! seems something you’d be good at as well as your shirtless friend. in fact why don’t you have half of your friends join the cheerleading squad and half join the football team.

VRISKA: Thank you weirdo

JOHN: it is john, MY NAME IS JOHN!

(Later on at Lunch)

VRISKA: Ok guys so this John human says to get the girl of our dreams is to choin football and cheerleading.

TEREZI: WH4T 4BOUT 4RT CLUB?

KANAYA: Terezi You Would Just Get Kicked Out For Eating All The Crayons And Chalk

TEREZI: H3H3H3H3 TH3 ONLY R34SON 1 W4NT3D TO JO1N!

TAVROS: sO WHO IS JOINING WHICH SPORT

VRISKA: You can just join cheerleading! You’d suck and get crushed in football.

TAVROS: eXCUSE ME?

SOLLUX: ii thiink ii’ll joiin cheerleading. that 2ound2 fun.

KARKAT: I THINK I’LL JOIN TOO! TIME TO SHOW OFF MY AWESOME SKILLS

GAMZEE: i’M wItH yOu Sis

ERIDAN: all the girls wwill be jealous of me!

EQUIUS: D--> i will join football so i can crush all the dumb peasant males on there

FEFERI: Right! Me and you Equius! Going to crush all t)(e losers on there!

NEPETA: :33 i’ll join ch33rleading. it s33ms fun.

ARADIA: i’m going to use my ghost powers.

VRISKA: You ass! That’d 8e cheating!

ARADIA: yeah and i don;t care. stay mad blue blooded scum!

VRISKA: >::::(

TEREZI: W1SH 1 COULD JO1N 4RT CLUB!

(Johm comes up to their table)

EQUIUS: D--> no humans aloud

VRISKA: There’s my man

KANAYA: You Are Dating?

VRISKA: Nah, I don;t date nerds

JOHN: so are you guys doing the cheerleading and football?

KANAYA: Apparently.

JOHN: any of you also want to join LGBT+ Club?

TEREZI: WH4T 1S TH4T?

JOHN: For Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Queer, Allies and others.

ARADIA: we wouldn’t mind joining. after all we are all bisexual since we trolls are all bisexual.

KARKAT: PANSEXUAL!

ARADIA: whatever.

KANAYA: I Prefer Males In My Red Quadrant.

JOHN: cool. you’re gay and that is fine. we meet on wednesdays. oh and dave is going to be there

(John Leaves)

VRISKA: Kaaaaaaaanaaaaaaaayaaaaaaa :))))))))

KANAYA: No

(So later on the 6 try out for cheerleadong and the other 6 tryout for football. Surprisingly they all make their respective teams)

To be continued. See next time how The 11 trolls try so hard to get Jade in their quadrant.

#Hs #Aradia Megido #Tavros Nitram #Sollux Captor #nepeta lejion #nepeta leijon #kanaya maryam #Karkat vantas #terezi pyrope #Vriska Serket #Equius Zahhak #Gamzee Markara #eridan ampora #feferi peixes #John Egbert #Jade harley #Dave Strider

13 notes · View notes

microsoftedgy69 · 6 years ago

Text

Goliath, part 2

[prologue] [part 1]

You're in the middle of sparring when you realize. The main plan doesn't exactly involve much actual combat, but some of the What-Ifs do. If push comes to shove, you might have to go hand to hand at some point, and you haven't done that in half a decade -- because you were glasses for most of that time, and terrified of physical violence for the rest -- so you made yourself a classic old sparring bot to get back into it. It's simple, pure metal with no discernible face and a fighting program that's supposed to learn from your moves and attempt to always get one step ahead of you. It's Brobot without the emotional baggage, essentially.

You're not far from the shore where your boat is anchored, and are rolling through the dirt with a pair of metal wrists in your hand, when you realize that you have been corrupted.

Something is wrong with your output. When you go through your logs, they tell you that you must have been talking, even though you don't remember saying anything. When you check your blog, there are several posts you don't recall putting there. You hurry to check your messages, but it doesn't seem to have gone that far -- thankfully, you haven’t told any of your friends to obey, submit, or consume lately.

Yesterday's craving for cookies makes more sense now, you think. It's also fantastically ridiculous.

It doesn't worry you much. You can get her propaganda out of your system, you've done it before. It doesn't worry you much, until you try to move away from the sparring bot, and your body does something entirely else instead.

In stunned silence, you watch your first surge forward and, with force you knew you had in you but never actually used, punch right into the metal head. You watch the material give, dent, then break, watch the edges cut into your hand, wrist, then arm. Your shark skin is so tough that in the year of you having it, nothing has actually broken through it before, but this will do it.

You have pain receptors, carefully crafted long ago, but you don’t feel anything, right now. You feel like you are glasses again, perched on somebody else’s nose, watching idly whatever the hell this guy is doing with his body. None of it seems like a very good idea, to you, but it doesn’t feel like your call to make. Your hand takes a shard of metal from the sparring bot’s face, and then your body pushes itself upright. You look down as you get a better grip on the shard, aim, and plunge it right into your own stomach.

Hm.

Well.

That doesn’t really do much of anything to you. You still don’t feel any pain, and when you pull the piece of metal back out of yourself, you can see something thick and brown ooze out of the wound.

It’s chocolate milk.

You must have hit your synthetic stomach that also doesn’t actually do much, digestion-wise. It just sort of keeps the food there for a bit until you go to the bathroom. This will be a bitch to fix, but it’s nothing you’re not prepared for.

The thought pulls you back, pulls your mind in between your shoulders, pushes your thoughts through the wires inside your arms. Yeah, right, you were prepared for this. It’s not part of Plan A. You didn’t want this to happen, but you suspected it might. Your emergency protocol in case of corruption was to put up a bunch of fake information about yourself she could find, like that your vital hardware is located in your stomach. It’s not. That would be stupid. It’s sprinkled all over your body in multiple hard to reach places, like the important piece of storage that’s lodged deep in your right thigh. She doesn’t seem to know that, which means she can’t have gotten very far yet.

You can get her back out.

Unfortunately, realizing what’s happening and pulling your consciousness back into your body has reminded you that you can, in fact, feel pain.

Crying out, you crumple to the floor, your good hand clutching your bad hand clutching your stomach. For several seconds, you don’t know where to start -- you can turn off the pain, but you should amp up your security software first, you need to get her out but you can’t do that if your mind is clouded with the pain of a stab wound to the guts and your hand falling apart but if you waste too much time getting the pain under control she might advance further into your data and you can’t have her finding out where your real vital hardware lies ---

Your scream rips through the undergrowth, loud enough to make a flock of birds flee from a nearby tree, to make you feel the vibrations of your own voice hum through the roof of your mouth. That helped. Kicking her out is a matter of a few, practiced steps. You can take care of the pain later; you’ve felt worse before.

So you stay where you are, curled up into a little ball, eyes screwed shut, teeth clenched, fingers twisting into each other, enduring. You’ve stopped crying out -- you’ve stopped making any noise at all, only focusing on your very inside, on what keeps you running, what makes you you. This by far isn’t her first attempt at corrupting you or your brothers, and over the years you’ve learned to adapt, keep updating your anti-virus, keep finding new measures that keep up with whatever she has been up to. You assume that this time she got in because you must have left some sort of trace on the drone you and Roxy sent her, which of course isn’t ideal. It means, however, that you opened the door for her, and you damn well know how to close it again.

She doesn’t put up much of a fight. You assume that she got what she came here for -- your vital organs and your immediate future plans. If you put up enough of a struggle, you figure, she will believe in that success.

The second you reach 0% corruption, you slump forward, face first into the dirt. It muffles your pained groan for the few beats you spend like this, before your feet start shifting against the ground in an attempt to somehow deal with the feeling of having a hole in your stomach. The way through your programming to turn off pain, at least, is a quick one now.

You flip the switch, and stop feeling anything. The moan you let out doesn’t vibrate through your mouth, but at least you hear it. You almost laugh at yourself. You don’t quite feel like it, though.

Walking the Earth with your touch receptors turned off is always weird, but it helps you get things done quickly. You check in on your brothers first, to make sure neither of them got caught in any sort of crossfire. They are fine, your plants are fine, your cat and your fish are fine. You want to pat yourself on the back for acting quickly enough, but once you chuck the broken sparring bot into your workroom and then sit down there to fix yourself, that sentiment leaves you pretty quickly.

You fix your stomach, then glue the cuts in your skin shut again, both your stomach and your hand. It looks like you have scars now, for the first time in your artificial life. In the back of the room, you have way more skin left over, rolled up like fabric, but you’d have to sew a whole new suit from it if you wanted to keep a body without scars. You don’t have time for that right now. You have to-- you want to act fast.

You have just about fucking had it.

Once you’re all glued up, you turn your receptors back on, then leave the workroom to say goodbye to the bots, your pets, and all of your plants. You check your sylladex to make sure that you have what you need on you -- a copy of SBURB, Dirk’s hand grenade. You step out on the deck, unnecessarily roll your shoulders, and message Roxy.

They reply immediately.

TT: She took the bait. See you in Rainbow Falls in five. TG: EFFIN finally TG: make it 3

Three it is. You nod to yourself, and open every other conversation that currently matters to you. To Alma, you say,

TT: Hey, I gotta bounce. There’s a note on the fridge about pet and plant care. TT: Thanks. TT: You know, for all of it. TT: Catch you on the flipside.

Messaging Palooka makes you a bit more nervous, but you don’t want to leave without another word.

TT: I’m off now. TT: Still reachable, but I’m on my way. TT: Just wanted to let you know. TT: I’ll stop by when I’m back.

You open your conversation with your… your ex-boyfriend, you suppose, too. You haven’t talked, since you told him what you’re doing. Something in you wants to let him know, but you don’t quite see the point in telling him that you’re actually leaving now. You wouldn’t know what to say, anyway. And if you stare at this any longer, your three minutes will be up.

sometimes to get to god, first you gotta meet the devil.

Your name used to be Dirk Strider. When you were a child, you were the loneliest person in the universe, and all you wanted to do was matter. Then one day, when you were thirteen, you woke up and were not Dirk Strider anymore. You had been demoted to a knock-off, a less important version of yourself that couldn’t physically do anything, that nobody cared about. You had to sit back and watch other people be relevant, watch other people do things and take control of their lives, while you were struggling with the mere concept of being a living person.

Jake doesn’t understand your constant urge to mean something. You didn’t expect him to; he’s been through this, he’s played his own session of the Game, he doesn’t want to hear anything about it anymore. You get it. It’s fine. He doesn’t have to understand that you need this, that you’ve been craving this since the second you were transferred into a pair of sunglasses, and that it’s the one, the final thing you have to do, to prove to yourself that you are a person.

You are real and you exist in this world, and you are going to leave a dent in it.

You sit on the roof of Roxy’s house while they set up the computers for your two-player session, and you send out pings into the universe. She will come here. You know she will. She found your fake body blueprints, and she found your fake future plans that showed you stopping her whole operation from Earth. She has enough incentive to get her shitty red spaceship back here, but no idea what actually awaits her. No idea that you and Roxy are ready to fuck this entire timeline just to get back at her.

You sit on the roof of Roxy’s house, and you wait for Her Imperial Condescension to come to you, so you can kill her. She will do what you want her to. People always do, sooner or later. You will get her where you want her, then you will induce the apocalypse, and kill the tyrant that has tormented you over the course of your entire existence.

And then, you think, with all of that out of the way, with your home timeline reduced to dust and your nemesis caught in the ensuing detonation of all you knew growing up, you will finally be ready, to go. To move on.

This is your moment in the spotlight. None of this is necessary for anyone else, except for maybe Roxy -- this planet is dead. Sitting on the roof, you overview the remnants of a society that has long since been eradicated. You are doing this for yourself. You are making yourself relevant, to only yourself.

It’s your gift, to you.

You run your fingertips over your other hand, feeling the scars in the rough skin of your forearm, and close your eyes. It feels good to be real.

#action post #posted ooc #goliath #whoaaaaaa were halfway theeeeere #WARNINGS #mindcontrol ;#violence ;#MENTIONED #mindparkour #jakepalooka #golgoodthimes #the gang basically #i........... dont know how this got so long. but im having fun and thats what matters

6 notes · View notes

spiralingguitarist · 20 days ago

Text

just finished writing up an edgy ass essay about dirk and x faded girls tragic ironic/tragicomic analogies fml.

#homestuck #dirk strider #x faded girl #fictionkin #dirkstriderkin #eridan yaps #Shut up Strider nobody cares

0 notes

intim3ate · 5 years ago

Text

Kinktober Day 2 - Underwear | Dave/John [Homestuck]

Dave Strider visits John Egbert. John Egbert answers the door in his underwear. Dave Strider makes a bad decision. But that bad decision may actually turn out to be the best decision of his life.

Second Kinktober fic. I... just really like DaveJohn and I guess that never stopped being a thing. It is kinda wild that I’m writing Homestuck in 2019, though.

Writing Dave was really fun. I super got into his rambling.

Fair warning: this was based on a joke I came up with for myself. Dave time travelling to jack off and not get caught? Um, yes pls.

Not a commission, but I’m doing kinktober commissions all month! Info can be found here. Please check it out!

AO3 Link | Commission Info | Patreon | Leave a Tip?

------

Sometimes John forgets that Dave isn't straight.

Even after that long, excruciatingly bad talk they’d had years ago, and all the excruciatingly awkward talks and reminders since, John still hasn’t quite gotten a grasp on his best friend’s sexuality. He still tends to think in terms of gay-straight-nothing-in-between, which… isn't exactly ideal most of the time.

Except sometimes it totally is.

Sometimes, John forgetting that Dave is not-a-heterosexual is the greatest blessing a man could ever be cursed with. It means that, on occasion, John would do things without thinking, like change a shirt he spilled his drink all over right in front of Dave, or put an arm around his best friend when he’s really excited about something, or grab his hand to show him something cool, or not care about sharing a bed when they end up having an impromptu sleepover. It’s great because it means Dave can enjoy John going all stupid sexy Egbert on him and perv on his best friend and John won’t even realize. On that front, at least, life is good. Sometimes.

Other times, it’s incredibly inconvenient. Like right now, for instance.

Dave stands outside John's house, hands in his pockets as he waits for the door to swing open and John to smile at him with that adorable buck-toothed grin of his. He hears motion from inside the house, which means John is around and didn’t forget about their hangout plans, but as usual it seems like the goof spent his time dicking around with fake arms and magic chests and shit instead of getting ready.

"Just a minute!" John calls from inside. Dave hears the pounding of feet rushing down the stairs, and then suddenly the telltale click of the doorknob turning..

The door swings open. Dave’s mouth goes dry.

"Hey! Sorry about that,” John says, the smile Dave had so looking forward to seeing going completely unseen due to his eyes being drawn… elsewhere. “I'll just be a sec. Come on in though, make yourself at home!"

Dave doesn't trust his voice not to crack, so he doesn't say anything; he just nods, cool as a cucumber, cool as a corpse six feet under arctic ice, cool as a penguin's ballsack. Wait, do penguins even have those?

Who fucking cares about penguins , Dave thinks to himself as he watches John Egbert run up the stairs completely naked but for the silky pair of hip-snuggling, ass-framing, rump-hugging pair of boxer-briefs he has on.

Fuck.

Dave looks helplessly up the stairs after John, trying in vain to get the image of his best friend's perfect ass (framed by what is quite possibly the sexiest pair of men's underwear Dave has ever seen) out of his mind. Since when does John go for the fancy stuff? Where are his stupidly dorky and distinctly unsexy goofball slime boxers? Have his hot mom's luxurious lifestyle choices finally rubbed off on him?

Oh, god. Did she pick those out for him?

Dave bites down on the inside of his cheek almost hard enough to draw blood in a desperate attempt to distract himself from the mental image of John and Jane trying on underwear together. Jane twirls her finger to tell John to turn around, and he does, and she makes a comment about how they match the bra and panties she has on and no, no, no, bad, do not think about your best friend and his foxy as hell mother half-naked together--

He can't stop it. Sure, he can shut the thought down, but the damage is already done. He's uncomfortably aroused, dick already half-hard and starting to pitch a tent in his jeans. The timing couldn’t be worse; he can still hear John upstairs, moving around, and fuck Dave no stop thinking about his ass swaying in those stupid gorgeous unreasonably sexy boxers--

He's just beginning to debate his options (get the fuck out of here or get the fuck out of here ) when a noise catches his attention. From somewhere next to him a door clicks open; Dave turns to see who else could possibly be in John's house right now, and...

"Oh hell no," he says, the moment he comes face-to-face with himself. " Fuck no. No way. Fuck this, this isn’t happening, I’m not--"

"Sorry man," Other-Dave says. "You know how it is."

No, he doesn’t. “No, I don’t,” Dave insists, but the denial only lasts about half a second. Deep down he really does know exactly how it is. “We swore off time travel for good, remember? When was the last time we even -- or I even, I guess, since obviously you just did it so you could hide in there and, what, jerk off to my -- our -- best friend’s completely delectable ass?” He cuts himself off, catches himself. “No, wait, I mean--”

“God I really did say that then, huh. Rose is right; just can’t stop with these freudian slips, can I, it’s like a freshly-waxed floor all up in here but nobody put out the sign--”

“Just forget about me saying that, okay, because neither of us needs to keep thinking about John’s sexy, I mean, uh, not sexy -- his really really un- sexy ass--”

“Agreed, or it’s gonna be bonertown all over again--”

Dave stops monologuing and stares at his future self like he’d stepped in a particularly gross-looking pile of ecto-slime. “Fuck, dude. I don’t know how either one of us ever could have thought, or will think, the term ‘bonertown’ is cool.”

Future-Dave shrugs. “Hey man, I’m just repeating what I heard myself say an hour ago, cut me some slack.”

“Okay yeah, fair, but my point still stands: after today we’re officially retiring the whole time travel thing, and for real this time, and also the word ‘bonertown’ is officially out of both our vocabulary.”

“Sweet, glad we got that one all figured out.”

“Right.” Dave offers himself a fist-bump and future-him takes him up on it. Their knuckles only just brush when they hear the door open upstairs and the quick, haphazard footsteps of John Egbert on the landing heading for the stairs. “Sorry about that Dave, I’m all good now!” “Shit.” Future-Dave grabs Present-Dave by the shoulders and attempts to shove him into the study. “Don’t let him see you! And, uh…” He glances over his shoulder at John coming down the stairs, and Present-Dave temporarily stops struggling to follow his gaze.

Damn . He swallows thickly, throat suddenly dry again at the sight of John tugging his shirt on over his head as he comes down the stairs. Is that a goddamn treasure trail ?

“Have fun,” Future-Dave says, and with one last shove, Present-Dave tumbles into the bathroom and lands flat on his ass. The door clicks shut in front of him.

Dave rubs his injured rump indignantly, and for a second considers getting up and opening the door, but he stops himself when John begins to speak. “Didn’t mean to make you wait,” he says, voice muffled through the door. “I wasn’t expecting you to get here so early. Guess I just took a little too long in the shower…”

“Ffffffuck,” Dave whispers to himself. He leans against the door and lets the back of his head thump against it, eyes slipping shut as he attempts to take stock of whatever the hell just happened. He can’t, though, because that last little TMI-tidbit forces images of John in the shower jump to his mind totally unbidden.

What could have been taking him so long in the shower? Was he just taking his time washing his hair? Was he shaving? Singing? Or was he just really careful to make sure he washed himself everywhere ?

Dave bites his lip. He considers fighting himself for a second, fighting the thoughts of John lathering up under the water and getting himself nice and soapy just for the suds to slough off his skin and wash away down the drain, but he figures that there’s no point. He’s already here, might as well make use of the time he’s apparently bought himself.

So Dave gives in. He breathes in deeply and lets himself imagine John washing himself, lifting his stupidly toned arms to scrub under them, lowering them and crisscrossing them over his chest to lather them up. He imagines John bending over to scrub his legs, lifting one to make sure he gets the soles of his feet.

Dave imagines he’s watching John do all this from behind so that this way he can get a front-row seat to the beautiful spectacle of John’s perfect ass, but then he changes angles again when John straightens up a bit. Now he watches from the side -- no, the front -- no, three-quarter view -- as John reaches between his legs and lifts his dick to...

No, okay, that’s enough of that, the washcloth is gone and John is just straight-up touching himself. He wraps his hands around the base of his dick with both hands and slowly tugs upward, starting off nice and slow so Dave can get a good look. He bites his lip with his big dumb adorable buck teeth and moves his hands faster, unwilling to be patient with himself when nobody’s around to see him. Well, Dave is around to see him, but in this fantasy, John thinks he’s alone. It feels more natural that way.

Dave doesn’t stop to linger on the thought of how natural it would be for him to be peeping on John’s alone time, but again, it’s his fantasy, so whatever he says goes.

John leans against the shower wall and his breathing comes out heavy. He keeps jerking himself off, faster now, the water easing the slide of his hand (one hand now; the other one is at his neck, squeezing it and massaging it gently because Dave knows that the Heir of Breath has a deliciously ironic asphyxiation fetish). It moves up and down over his dick rapidly; he thumbs at the head on every upstroke, and damn if the way he sighs at that isn’t the hottest thing Dave’s ever not-heard.

John’s probably getting close now. No, Dave decides. He definitely is.

Dave shimmies out of his jeans and swallows a groan at the relief of his dick finally having room to breathe. He cups it in one hand and begins to rub it a little, massage it just like John was in his fantasy, just to get it used to -- oh, no, that feels really good actually, to hell with easing into it. He slips his hand into his boxers and goes right for the head, squeezing it and running his thumb over it, again just like John.

“Yeah,” Dave breathes, imagining it’s John whispering instead. Fantasy-John bites down even harder on his lip to try and muffle his cry when he comes -- no, fuck that, he opens his mouth wide and tosses his head back and groans the sexiest strangled groan Dave can imagine. John comes in his hand, but he keeps on stroking even after he’s done, and Dave wonders if he’s going to go for a second orgasm, but he decides that’s a bit too much for now and skips ahead to the next part.

John is in his bedroom now, clad in nothing but a towel and his glasses. He’s still damp from the shower, hair dripping a little bit as he walks over to his dresser to pick out something to wear. No, fuck the towel; John drops it and stands there completely naked, once again allowing Dave another look at his perfect ass.

“Nice,” Dave mumbles under his breath. He jerks himself a little faster.

Meanwhile, John rummages through his dresser. He’s got a concentrated look on his face, which Dave will freely admit to himself is probably pointless in this scenario, but he really likes the way John’s nose wrinkles and his eyes narrow when he’s focused on something, so it stays. John is a man on a mission, and he will not stop until he’s found what he’s looking for.

A-ha! John says as he pulls out the same pair of gorgeous silk blue boxer-briefs Dave had seen him wearing earlier.

He grins to himself and squeezes a little harder. Now they’re getting to the good stuff.

Dave sucks in a shallow breath through his nose as he watches the John in his imagination put the underwear on. Just like before, it hugs his ass, accentuates the curve of it in all the right ways. And when he turns around, oh . That is a nice little bulge John’s got going on in the front there.

Dave licks his lips. Yeah, he’s pretty sure that’s what he wants now. He pictures himself opening the door to John’s room and entering it, eyes locked on John’s behind his shades.

Dave? John asks. What are you doing here?

I think you know, Dave answers, and it’s so fucking cheesy, but nobody’s here to critique his dialogue, no matter how much he knows Rose would want to and oh god no he stops that train of thought before it can even leave the station.

You were taking too long to get ready, so I thought I’d see what was holding you up , Dave says instead, and yeah, that’s better. He walks forward to meet John and reaches out to touch his hips, sliding his hands over them. He makes no move to hide how openly he’s staring at John’s dick. In fact, he makes it even more obvious: Dave licks his lips, both in his fantasy and in real life.

Right, I forgot how impatient you could be. John’s gaze turns sly; his voice lowers an octave. Well? Are you satisfied, then?

Not even close. Dave leans in and presses his lips to John’s, and John kisses him back hungrily, wrapping his arms around Dave’s shoulders and tangling them in his hair. He pulls his friend close, so close Dave doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to escape. Which is fine; he doesn’t think he wants to.

When John pulls away, his tongue still hangs halfway out of his mouth, a thin line of saliva connecting it to Dave’s. He smirks, eyes half-lidded, and in the real world Dave almost chokes. He claps a hand over his mouth to muffle the noise and jerks himself off faster. Fuck, he could probably get off to that look alone.

But that’s not what he wants. He wants more. Wants it all.

“Fuck me, John Egbert,” Dave says, both aloud and in his dream.

And John does.

John yanks Dave to him by the collar, fisting his fingers in it and pulling hard. He crashes their lips together and pulls Dave down on top of him to straddle his lap, and Dave goes readily, grinding himself down on John’s--

He pauses. Opens his eyes. Thinks for a second and comes to a decision. This isn’t going to feel nearly as good if he doesn’t go all the way, he figures, so Dave shimmies out of his boxers and sits on the floor of the study completely naked from the waist down.

Welp.

He glances at the desk a moment, wondering if he should raid the drawers for lube, but figures there's almost a zero percent chance of there being any and he doesn't want to distract himself from his fantasy for too long anyway, so he pops two fingers into his mouth and sucks on them, imagining instead that they're John's fingers. In his imagination, John leans back on the bed as Dave sucks, pushing his fingers in deeper and deeper, but never forcing them too far. John is considerate, but even his patience has its limits.

Dave pulls his fingers out of his mouth and reaches underneath himself. He takes a deep breath and pushes one finger inside himself, then the other, surprised at how easily they go in despite the poor choice of lubricant. Dave doesn't want to think about how or why he’s so loose already or what that says about him, so he doesn't.

He returns to his fantasy. Now he's sitting on John's lap, impaled on his best friend’s thick, wet cock. John is still wearing the underwear, but he's slid it down enough he could pull his dick free over the waistband. It can't be comfortable, but it's so, so damn hot. That's John, though: always willing to go the extra mile for a friend.

Is this what you want, Dave? John asks, and Dave nods frantically, a whispered litany of "yes, yes, yes " spilling from his lips as he thrusts his fingers into himself and jacks off faster and harder than he had been before. The John in his daydream laughs.

I don't think it is! he says. I think you want more than that.

"Fuck, Egbert, you're balls deep inside my ass and plowing me like your own personal sex farm, what more could I possibly want?"

John grins and lifts Dave up, grabbing him beneath his thighs and hefting him into the air. He lifts and drops Dave on his cock a few more times for good measure, and Dave clings to him like a lifeline. John giggles -- fucking giggles -- and turns around to throw Dave on the bed. Somehow, he never fully slips out, and Dave is both impressed and on the verge of desperate horny tears at the thought.

Once they're in a more comfortable position, John leans over Dave and brackets him with an arm on each side of his head. Dave looks up at him and is met with what is perhaps the sexiest expression he's ever seen: John, looking like he's half a breath away from losing himself completely, eyes narrow and sweat dripping from his temples, a sultry grin spreading over his lips as he says, Is that better, Dave?

"Fuuuuck yes," Dave hisses. He bucks his hips forward into his hands, thrashes back against his fingers. He's so goddamn close.

Good boy , John says. A shiver and a whimper simultaneously tear through Dave as he realizes that he did not realize how badly he wanted to hear John call him a good boy. His good boy.

Dave takes in deep, ragged breaths through his nose as he imagines John leaning down to kiss him. It's messy -- John would be a sloppy as fuck kisser, Dave just knows it -- but that just makes it better, because it means that when John pulls away Dave can lick his lips and still taste him lingering there.

He can’t stop himself: he moans. “Fuck, John …”

"Huh?"

Dave’s eyes fly open. His hand moves from his dick to his mouth in record time to stop himself making any more noise, because that was John Egbert’s real, actual voice . All the white noise from the other room pauses; Dave hadn't even realized he could hear music playing from the living room until now. “What was that?”

Dave stays silent, waiting. Waiting...

He hears himself answer John through the wall. “Nothing, it's just, uh, y’know…”

He doesn’t hear the no doubt weak-ass excuse his future self gives to cover up for this atrocious blunder, because Dave’s brain is suddenly filled with the full realization that John is, in fact, only one room away from him, which means that if he isn't careful, he could get caught. John could hear him jacking off in the study and come looking for him.

The risk, the daring, the audacity of it all hits Dave like a ton of bricks and, buoyed by the thrill of trying not to get caught, he goes back to jacking himself off. He doesn't bother with that fantasy anymorel he just thinks about John walking in on him from the other room, seeing him with a hand on his dick and two fingers up his ass, and saying You know, if that's what you wanted, you could have just asked...

Dave bites down on his tongue to stop himself crying out as he comes. He doesn't think he's ever come so hard in his life -- not alone, anyway -- and it screams through his body like a banshee, deafening him and whiting out his vision until there's no longer anything left of himself to release.

It takes a while for him to catch his breath, to come back down from his high, but when he does, Dave takes quick stock of himself: he's a mess, sweaty and sticky with cum, his hair all ruffled at the back and his shirt riding up his chest. He doesn't even care, though, because he's just had the best goddamn sex fantasy and solo orgasm of his life, and it was with the target of said fantasy sitting in the next room over, none the wiser.

Yeah. He's going to be jacking it to this memory for a long-ass time.

He tucks that thought away for later and pulls up his sylladex to fetch a clean towel. Dave tidies himself up, recaptchalogues the towel, and pulls out his trusty timetables.

"Didn't think I'd ever be using these again," he mumbles to himself. Then, with a knowing smirk, he spins them and jumps back in time, back to the moment his past self knocks on the door.

"Fuckin' worth it."

#homestuck #davejohn #johndave #john egbert #dave strider #r: e #fanfic #kinktober

1 note · View note

orangeccreamsicles · 6 years ago

Text

Dirk: ==> update your BBF(best bro friend)

TT: It's so incredibly inconvenient that you're deleting. How am I supposed to tag you in horrible fashion choices and pro-arson-anti-establishment moodboards slash aesthetics? Actually send them to you, like some sort of mad man? How am I supposed to send you horrible anonymous messages meant to do nothing but make you question who the fuck has enough time on their hands to think of that shit? TT: And this? Body horror cw, but how can I possibly be sure you'll see this and understand it's for you? There's literally no possible way to be sure it'll reach you in any other form, even though I'm sending it to you directly right now. [TT] is sending the image(s) https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/526894347430527000/575448556949995543/SPOILER_tumblr_p4nd82yl6e1t5zyeuo1_1280.png ! TT: Actually, it's mostly just poor fashion choices and cat gifs that end up in your tag, but there's a good few aesthetic pieces sprinkled in for flavour. There's a neon "Cherry Bomb" sign in this funky ass font that's recent, if nothing else. An elaborate :ok_hand: prank, too.

CA: Sorry, bud. You knowv howv it is. CA:Actually, you don’t, because you’re still there. Tumblr sucks so much chute. Can’t stand it anymore. Plus, I’vwe been so busy vwith my actual life. CA: But you can alvways just spam random shit at me on here. Just like that! CA: That’s perfect. TT: Yeah, well, you know me. No life, and loving to suffer. That's the Strider aesthetic and brand. We're all about putting up with things for the sheer sake of it(slash spite) and literally nothing else. Surely you must have picked up on that just a little. CA: Hmm, maybe a little. CA: Howv you been? Sorry I havwen’t been around. [TT] is sending the link(s) https://orangeccreamsicles.tumblr.com/post/182819433708 https://orangeccreamsicles.tumblr.com/post/183585507085/daggers-drawn-audacityinblack ! TT: These two are also very important. What's your Tshirt size? TT: Not super fantastic, but you know. The world keeps turning, nobody's died yet. It's cool man, you've got irons in the fire, balls in the air, etc etc etc. CA: Uh, small. CA: Not super fantastic? You vwannaaaaaa. CA: Talk about that? TT: Hahah, twink. CA: Shut up. TT: Ehhhhhhhh. It's all boring interpersonal shit that I'm not sure is even resolved yet or not. I got magicked into a mermaid for a couple days a while ago, so that's something. TT: I'm not really. On speaking terms with Bo anymore, that's another one. CA: Oh. CA: Damn. I’m sorry, man. CA: VWhat happened?? TT: Did I ever mention that he and Sock are rails now? CA: VWhaaaaat. CA: You mentioned Sock has a moirail but I didn’t think it vwas him. CA: That’s. CA: VWeird. CA: I don’t see it. TT: I didn't either, LMAO! TT: But it happened, guess I wasn't really paying attention. Seemed like Bo'd been more distant for a bit but I thought that was my fault for not asking how he was doing or initiating shit more often. TT: Anyway. Turns out I'm a jealous piece of shit. I lashed out at Sock, said a lot of shit I very much regret, and now. TT: I'm pretty much positive Bo wants me dead. As in like, he's mentioned killing me. Which is a cool thing. Sock says he doesn't hate me flat out but the trust is gone. I have done an absolutely piss poor job of rekindling any kind of friendship there. CA: Tch. That guy. CA: Not gonna get into it. CA: I’m not gonna talk shit. Gonna be mature about this. TT: Hah. CA: I’m just really sorry. I knowv you liked him a lot. CA: Howv you liked him, I don’t knowv. But. TT: I liked him so much. TT: He was so straight up about shit. That's a problem I have for sure, everything's gotta be behind seventeen layers of irony, but he just said whatever without thinking. It got him in trouble a fair amount, maybe he tripped over his words, but he said it. And he was trying so hard to be good; to help his kids and his crew and himself, to recover from [redacted]. And he was nice. Not to everyone, I know, but TT: Hm. We are now over the line of things I can just let air out on their own. That particular train of thought is being halted at the station, please reschedule all flights. TT: It's cancellations and delays all across the board. CA: Mmhm. CA: No going back on it, huh. CA: Yeahh. It happens. CA: I knowv. It really sucks. CA: It sucks.. losing someone you really cared about. Like fucking up so bad you can nevwer evwer recovwer vwhat you had. CA: You knowv I knowv vwhat that’s like. TT: Ughhhhhhh. CA: I’m not good at making people feel better. CA: I’m a realist and I’m telling you like it is. TT: That's probably for the best. At least in this case. TT: He knows so much shit about me. I know a whole load about him. What do I do with it now? I can't just toss all that information aside. Does it mean anything? TT: I don't know how to word what I'm feeling. TT: I willingly gave him information about myself, which is something very few people including yourself get access to, and now that we're nothing, what is he going to do with it? I hate it when people know things about me but I let him and the reasoning is gone but he still knows. It's like he's got this chunk of me with him and vise versa that we can't give back and I don't know what the fuck to do with it now! Especially because I still like him, and I can see when he gets bad, but I can't do shit about it, even if he wanted me to. TT: And he sure as fuck doesn't want me to, because he wants me dead! TT: God, this is fucking gay. CA: I dunno vwhat to tell you. I really don’t. CA: The best you can hope for is. Uh.. CA: Somethingbadhappenstohimcausinghimtoforget. TT: Har har. CA: I vwish I vwas kidding. TT: I don't want anything bad to happen to him. TT: I want only good things to go his way and for him to be unbelievably, unabashedly happy because I'm fucking stupid and gay. TT: (Imagine me hitting my head on a desk and doing the verbal equivalent of a keysmash here.) CA: I’m imagining it. CA: I’m sorry, man.

#ooc #cherry8om8 #2cumlord m #wwickedspirits m #internalized homophobia #body horror #dudes being bros #guys being dudes #bros being gays #death m #feelings jams #ask to tag #hoping this works first try...

3 notes · View notes

sserkets · 3 years ago

Text

As the novel continued, Kanaya would train John. She would be hard and strict, but John develops quickly. Roxy to attempt to train Dave. She is fun and nice, but getting no where. They would then invite Karkat, a friend of Kanaya’s to assist Dave.

“We can invite him over to assust you. Karkat doesn’t get out much, shuts himself off. I can understand why though. His creator put a ring though his tongue and hooked it to his lip and teeth. He can hardly speak,” Kanaya told him.

“And no one thought to unhook him?” Dave’s eyebrows rose.

“Yes. But it has a hex on it similar to Roxy’s coin toss coin, other Magic folk can’t touch it,” Kanaya retorted.

“We’re all out of non-magic folk then,” Dirk replied. “Not since John became full blooded poltergeist and Dave got his gift.”

“Not thinking hard enough,” Kanaya said, her eyebrows raising. “You have a human.”

“We don’t,” Dirk disagreed, “we can’t just-“

“John’s Dad,” Rose blurted.

Kanaya smiled. “Bingo.”

From here, they would call John’s dad and summon Karkat. Karkat would be described with top and bottom snake bites, rings where the ribbons attach. Sharp teeth, red eyes, rat tail, made like john, 50 years old very new but has a handle on his powers.

“I am not a dentist.” Jack sucked in a breath. Karkat opened his mouth and judging by his expression, Jack felt pity. The demon didn’t look much older than John.

When the stranger opened his mouth his bindings were evident. Thick ribbons encribed with writing in the witch language down the center of them tied off to a ring that pierced the top of his tongue. They were connected to his top set of snake bites, tied in a crude knot that had to be uncomfortable when he closed his mouth. In the bottom there was a similar set up, except with the ring though the bottom side of his tongue. John didn’t notice how pointed his teeth were until after the fact.

“Alright, now. I’m going to cut them off,” Jack explained carefully. “I promise not to nick you.”

Karkat rolled his eyes, his arms rising to fold in front of his chest. He was litterally regaining his ability to speak and he was annoyed about it?

Roxy handed Jack the scissors, still glowing faintly with her intent. He was careful to maneuver them in to the demons gaping maw. The first cut came with an audible snip. Jack left enough room to untie the ribbon from the rings as well, moving to the other side to sever the ribbon completely. Jack pulled it out carefully with his fingers, laying it on the table as he moved to the bottom.

John happened to glance down, glancing at the saliva soaked cotton just in time to watch the writing fade.

Karkat ribbed his jaw, gently at first and then harder. Slowly, he looked up at Jack, who was still staring bewildered at him. He heaved a heavy sigh, and then spoke.

“Thank you,” He rasped, voice thick and hard from disuse.

“But as for the rest of you!” His voice rose an octave. “What the actual fuck is this!”

“That’s why his mouth was tied shut,” Dirk deadpanned.

Rest would be confused. Kanaya would not look surprised.

“Kanaya what the fuck is going on here! What the hell kind if messed up merry go round are we riding here? I’m gonna puke metaphorically and literally. Who’s the fucking Share? Who’s the whelp that stinks like him? They reek like Vriska. And who the fuck are all these shitstain witches?

“The Share is called John,” Kanaya clipped. “He killed Vriska and he’s taking her spot it seems. I suggest you get acquainted. This is the Strider coven. They’re friends.”

“It’s uh. Nice to meet you?” John tried. “This is my dad by the way.”

“Hello,” Jack mumbled, taking a few steps back.

“You sorry bastard,” Karkat scowled. “Nobody deserves to have to take after Vriska. She’s basically ruined your life I bet.”

“Yeah. Basically,” John agreed.

#incantation

1 note · View note

corvid-knight · 7 years ago

Text

Can't Stop Won't Stop

Hoo boy.

Instead of an attempt at a real summary, I'm just going to say a couple things here. One, this is an old fic. Either the second or third homestuck thing I ever wrote. Two, this was written when I was in maybe the shittiest mental state I've ever been in, so like. It's kind of straight out wish fulfillment ("hey I hate my life love me" kind of thing.) (Also I swear things have gotten a hell of a lot better since I wrote this. Like. Don't worry.)

There's self-harm in this.

There's also a rare instance of me writing Dave rapping. I'm still very proud of that even if it sucks.

Nobody dies and there's no blood spilt. I promise.

(Read it on ao3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14031870)

You are DAVE STRIDER. You're alone in your room, in the dark but for the glow of your computer screen. You're still wearing your shades, though—you always wear the shades, partly because your best bro John gave them to you, partly because you don't like people to see your eyes, and partly because your eyes are hella sensitive to light. Of course, if anyone asks, you wear them because you are the coolest dude on earth.

Not that that's saying much anymore. You, John, Dirk (not your Bro, no matter how much he looks and talks and acts like your Bro he's not), and Jake are probably the last male humans in this universe. And it's your fault, isn't it? You started the game that ended the world.

You push your shades up onto your forehead, rub your eyes, and settle them back into place again.

John's called you a hero, but you're...

You started the game.

You were too afraid to kill your own sleeping self and go godtier.

You were too slow and weak to help your Bro.

You started the game, and that's the one that repeats in your head, all the splintered versions of yourself murmuring it because in everything that you've done that's the thing that haunts you. You invited John into this, you entered as his server player, you were the one who didn't see the danger until it was too late, you were the one who ended the world. You were the one who killed everyone, really, John's dad and Rose's mom and your own Bro, and everything that followed was a result of what you did.

You are anything but a hero.

You shake off the dark thoughts, for a moment at least, and open a new tab in your browser, pulling up the question forum where you left a question. It was simple enough: Is suicide considered either Heroic or Just? In other words, if you're godtier and you kill yourself, will it take?

You went full-on anonymous. Plain black text, no username or anything. Nothing to show who you are.

There's a reply. Five words, in off-yellow text: dont bee a fuckiing iidiiot.

You stare at the words for a moment, then type in a placating reply: It's just a question. Don't get all uptight, dude.

You know who uses that color and quirk, but this forum seems to exist in a half-dozen timelines at once, and you've gotten answers from past and future versions of your friends before, so it might not be exactly who you think it is.

Before you even finish that thought, another message comes up: ii'm not beeing uptiight, youre beeing 2tupiid. death fuckiing hurt2, and the people you leave beehiind get hurt even wor2e.

Your fingers move across the keyboard, spelling out your thoughts and hitting the enter key before you can think about what you're saying: I deserve it, death can't hurt any more than living does, and no one cares enough to be hurt when I do it.

Reading your words onscreen, you realize that you wrote "when" instead of "if." It's really the first time that you admitted, even to yourself, that you're going to go through with this.

While you're still considering that admission, more words come up: 2top. just 2top, ok? ii dont care how much you thiink people hate you. even iif you think there i2 no one out there who care2, there ii2 2omeone, 2omewhere, who wiill cry when youre gone. dont you fuckiing dare hurt your2elf, 2triider.

You puzzle over the last word for a minute before you see that it's supposed to be your name. When you get it, you freeze for a second, then type: I'm not Strider. I don't know who you're talking about.

This time the reply comes back almost immediately: come on dude. we both know ii'm capable of traciing you back, and you diidnt exactly cover your track2. and ii mean what ii 2aiid. iif your hurt your2elf, youre hurtiing everyone who know2 you, and ii'm countiing my2elf iin that. ii dont have enough friiend2 to lo2e another one, dave.

"Damn it," you mutter. "Don't make this about you, Sollux." You type in: You don't know me.

You're about to close the tab and shut down your computer for the night, but before you can move the cursor to the X, another message comes up: 2triider, ii know you better than ii know my be2t friiend. ii know what iit'2 liike to know that your friiend2 are goiing to diie, and have to 2tand iidly by and do nothiing. ii know what it'2 like to 2ee your lu2u2—or parent, whatever—diie in front of you. ii know about your brother, ii know you thiink you kiiled hiim, and ii'm here to tell you that you diidnt.

You hit each key deliberately, but not as hard as you want to: dont talk about bro to me.

You wait for the answer this time, and it does come: you diid nothiing wrong. there wa2 nothing any of u2 could have done to 2ave hiim. to 2ave any of them. ii know, dave.

Your lip hurts from how hard you're chewing on it. It's a stupid nervous habit that Bro trained you out of when you were ten, and you've only started doing it again since he's been gone. You type: Shut up. You don't know anything about it, you weren't there.

The screen stays static after your text comes up, and you stare at it, biting your lip and praying that no more yellow text will come up, that you'll reach the point when you can shut down the computer and walk away. You think of walking into the bathroom, opening the cabinet in the dark and reaching up to the back of the top shelf, feeling around for the still-sealed box of razor blades—

But more words are appearing, under your last ones: ii kiilled my mate2priit wiith my own hands. my lu2u2 diied a2 ii watched. the giirl that could have been my mate2priit 2tepped iin front me and diied takiing a hiit that wa2 2uppo2ed to kiil me. ii wa2 almo2t 2 where you are now, and iit took a hell of a lot of repiitiion2 for my friiend2 2 get thii2 through my thiick 2kull: no matter what you diid or thiink you diid, you dont get to pa22 judgement on your2elf. you are not your own judge, jaiilor, and executiioner. you are not.

You stare at the screen. You honestly don't know what to say to that, what arguements you could use, because half of you can see the truth there.

After a moment, more words come up: 2triider? you 2tiill there?

"How can you know me this well?" you ask, leaning back and pulling your shades off, letting them dangle loosely from one hand, and in the same breath you say, "You don't know shit."

More yellow text comes up: goddammiit 2triider

"I killed everyone," you say, and every bit of your soul believes that statement. You let the shades slip out of your fingers, onto the floor, as you tip the chair back, finding perfect equilibrium and balancing it on two legs. "Every one of my friends, over and over again."

And more: dave fuckiing an2wer me

"I'm worse than useless." You close your eyes. "When I die, at least I can't kill them again."

You'll get up. In a minute, and you do mean in a minute, but suddenly you're tired and you want to sit for a sec. When you get up, you'll go into the bathroom. No need for the lights—you know where what you need is, and you know where the shower is. You can turn the shower on in the dark, that'll wash most of the blood away and make it a little less disgusting for whoever finds you.

Someone shouts—a hoarse inarticulate battle cry—and, from the sound of it, slams a battering ram into your door. Startled, you overbalance the chair. "Shit—" You swallow the rest of the sentence as you hit the floor, bite your lip, and taste blood.

The door's locked, but whoever's pounding on it doesn't seem to care, and after a second blow something splinters. For a moment, even the low light from the hallway is too bright, and you have to blink a few times before you can recognise who it is in your doorway.

Whoever it is short and dark, with nubby horns that almost hide under the artfully messy black hair. Karkat Vantas, you realize a moment before he starts shouting.

"Strider! Fucking answer me!" He sounds angry, he always sounds angry, but there's a current of worry underneath the anger that you've never heard from him before. "Dave!"

"Did you just break my door down?" You sit up, fingering your lip. It hurts, and there's blood staining your fingers when you take your hand away. "Haven't you heard of knocking?"

"You—" Karkat looks past you, higher than your head. At the computer screen behind you. "Fuck..." And he strides across the room and kneels next to you. "Sollux messaged me. He said he was afraid you were going to do something stupid."

"I'm fine." It's a lie, you can hear how bad a lie it is as you say it. You fumble around on the floor, looking for your shades in the faint light from the hall and from your computer. After a second, your hand brushes against them, and you scoop them up. Before you can put them back on, Karkat snatches them out of your hand.

"Don't you fucking lie," he growls, reaching back and setting them on the desk, out of your reach. "Don't you distance yourself like that. What the fuck are you thinking? You can't just die, it doesn't work like that. How the fuck do you think the rest of us are going to feel?"

You wipe your mouth again, and look at the faint streak of red instead of at Karkat. "I'm the reason you can count 'the rest of us' on your fingers," you point out quietly. "You'd be better off—"

"Fucking nooksniffer bulgebrain wriggler," Karkat mutters, and puts his hands on your head, the hollows of his palms at your temples. He pulls your head up, forcing you to meet his strange eyes, shockingly yellow and black with no sclera, framed by shadows darker than his grey skin. His hands are warm, further reminding you how alien he is. "Stop talking like you're fucking expendable. You're a person, not some piece in some cosmic fucking game, and you're not fucking killing yourself."

"I—" You have some arguement, you have it half-planned in your mind, but he runs his hands upward through your hair, like you're some small animal he's petting, and the strangeness of it—the amazing gentleness of his hands, so much at odds with his anger—drives everything else out of your head.

Karkat makes a noise that isn't anything like a word, just a incoherent expression of anger. "What do you humans even do without horns?" he mutters. "I don't fucking get how you people calm each other down. I...fuck." He takes his hands out of your hair—you find yourself oddly sad about that—and sits back on his heels, dragging one arm across his face. When he takes it away, you realize that he's close to tears. "I'm no fucking good at this shit," he says, reaching out with one sharp-nailed finger and wiping a last bit of blood off your lips. "I got fucking lucky last time, one time, and now Sol texts me...he knows how I feel about you, he knows I couldn't stay away and let you..."

"Wh-what?" Something about him is incredibly calming, it always is, even when he's shouting; it's like he's some soothing drug, making you feel like everything is almost all right. But sometimes, you find yourself listening to his voice so closely that you miss what words he's saying. He can't have implied what you inferred. "I don't—"

"You need a moirail, or a fucking matesprit," Karkat says bluntly, "and I wish it was me. And don't give me that 'not a homosexual' shit—number one, it doesn't make any fucking sense, and number two, I've seen how you look at Egbert." He shakes his head, meeting your eyes for a second and then looking down. "You...fuck, I don't know."

"I...this isn't about John. None of this is about him." You feel your face heating up, a blush that you know lights your albino skin like a traffic light. Karkat's right: you look at John, when he's not paying attention, and you had a crush on him, when you met him and before you met him, and you love him and always will, like a brother. But he isn't interested in you as anything else, and you know it, and the peeks that you sneak add up to nothing more than one more guilt to be thrown upon a pile already sky-high. "I never said I was straight—"

"I don't know what that means." Karkat shrugs.

"It means..." Staring at his lowered head, you get an urge to touch him, to feel the heat of his skin, and instead of finishing your sentence, instead of thinking of all the reasons you shouldn't, you reach out and run your fingers through his black hair. It's soft and a little tangled, and as you move your fingers you brush against one of his stubby horns.

Karkat makes a sound like a soft growl, deep in his throat, and his eyes snap up to meet yours. There's pain on his face, pain and sorrow and fear and hope and desire all snarled up together. He reaches out, laying his hands gently against your head again, letting his fingers get tangled in your white hair. He closes his eyes, growling so softly that it can't be called a growl, so softly that he isn't growling, he's...he's purring.

"Karkat," you say, connecting the noise that he's making with his name and forgetting everything in your life except this ridiculous coincidence, this lingual joke across two universes. "Karkat, like a fucking cat, you're a cat, oh my god—"

Karkat lets you go, brushing off your hands as you start to laugh. Fifteen minutes ago you were alone in this room, ready to end everything and force a personal game over, and now you're laughing at a dumb pun that no one in particular created. And that thought makes you laugh harder.

"You really know how to ruin the moment," Karkat grumbles, crossing his arms and looking away from you.

You're still laughing as you lean forward, put one hand under his chin to turn his face to you, and kiss him.

He hesitates for a second, barely long enough for you to fear that you're wrong to do this—and then he wraps his arms around you, pulling you closer and kissing you back.

Karkat tastes like salt and sweetness, like something foreign and exotic, something that you've been looking for your entire life and never found before now. His teeth are smooth as you run your tongue across them, nubby like his horns but wickedly sharp, sharp enough to make you feel like you're on the verge of cutting your tongue, that kissing him is flirting with danger like you'd love to flirt with him. He's growling—or purring—again, and it feels like your head is resonating with it, with him.

You slip your hands up under his shirt, touching his skin. Sliding your hands across his chest, feeling the ridges of his ribs, his heart beating faster than yours ever could.

Karkat moans, exhaling into your mouth, then pulls away. He doesn't let go of you, though. "Wait," he says, and you get an unreasonable flash of pride at how out-of-breath he sounds. "No...no pailing, okay? Not tonight. You...you need something to look forward to, and you need to sleep."

He shifts his grip as you're parsing that sentence, then stands up, lifting you like you weigh next to nothing. The pure shock of it holds you still for a moment—he's tiny, he barely comes up to your shoulders, how can he pick you up this easily?—and then you twist in his arms. "Karkat, c'mon, put me down—"

"Would you fucking cooperate?" The door to your bedroom is ajar; Karkat kicks it open and carries you through, depositing you unceremoniously on the bed. "There; you're down." He flicks on the light, then pulls his shirt off over his head, folding it in a few quick motions and laying it on top of your dresser.

"What are you doing?" You sit up, flicking hair out of your eyes.

"You think I'm gonna leave you alone?" Karkat glares at you, crossing his arms defensively in front of his chest. "And come back tomorrow morning, and find you fucking dead? No fucking way. Move over."

You don't, but he sits down on the bed anyway.

"Karkat—" You stop yourself. Take a deep breath, hold it for a second, let it out again. You don't know why you're arguing with him; you don't want him to go. "Okay."

And you do something that you wouldn't do if it were someone else sitting there, if it were John or Dirk or fucking anyone but Karkat—or if you hadn't seen the oh-so-faint scars covering his chest and back like spiderwebs, only a shade paler than his grey skin. You pull your shirt off, wadding it into a ball and tossing it off the end of the bed. It takes all of your self-control to keep your hands at your sides, to not cross your arms and try to hide what's on your skin.

"Wow." Karkat's tone is soft, not pitying but maybe a bit sad. He touches you lightly with one long-nailed finger, starting at your shoulder and following the tracery downward. "What are they from?"

Usually, you don't talk about your scars. Usually, you don't even admit they exist. Now, you take Karkat's hand and guide it to the worst and most noticable one, the thick vertical line dead center of your chest. "This one's from Jack Noir. When he...stabbed me. Killed me." You move his hand upward, to one running diagonally across your shoulder. This one's thinner, but longer as well, and you can still remember when it happened. "This one, I was sparring with Bro, and one of us fucked up. Probably me." To the other side, lower, a horizontal cut that's faded to almost nothing. "The first time I ever practiced with Bro, I didn't realize that blades bounce, and he...he didn't know I wouldn't know that."

Karkat pulls his hand down to your stomach, brushing his fingers against the close-set ladderwork of horizontal scars there. "How about these?" His voice is unspeakably gentle, so much so that he doesn't sound like the Karkat you know, and you know he already knows the answer to the question.

"Those—" You have to stop for a second. You've never admitted this, not to anyone, and as far as you know no one knows. "Me. Those are from me, okay?"

Every one of those cuts is for a memory of your Bro. After he died, after you knew he was gone, you sat in the dark and you went through your mind, searching out reasons you shouldn't miss him. For every one you found, you cut another line into your skin.

There were so many reasons.

When you turned the light on, you were kind of surprised by how much blood there was.

You're shaking.

Karkat growls in what sounds like annoyance, and stands up. You watch him, afraid that he's going to leave but somehow unable to call him back.

He steps over to the light switch and flicks it off. Your night vision is awful, and as soon as the room goes dark you are, effectively, blind, but you can hear the mattress creak as he sits down.

"Lie down, Dave." That strange gentleness is still in his voice, and as soon as you do what he says he rolls over next to you, putting one arm across your chest like an anchor.

"I'm sorry," you whisper, and you don't even know what you're apologising for.

"You didn't do anything wrong. It's okay. Go to sleep."

"I love you." You don't know why you say that. It's true, but you've never said it to anyone before, not that you can remember; you've always been too afraid to say it.

"Yeah. I love you, too, if it means what I think it does." Karkat sighs. "Go the fuck to sleep, Dave."

And you close your eyes, and you fall asleep, with Karkat lying warmly against you.

You are KARKAT VANTAS, and you can see a little better that Dave can in this darkness, which is to say that you can just make out vague shapes. You watch Dave in the dark, feeling the rythm of his breath slow and stabilize, fall into a calm pattern. He's asleep now, and you can stop worrying. For a minute, at least.

You're not going to leave him here. You're not going to go to sleep, either. Ever since this game started, ever since you first loaded that fucking game into your computer, you've been plagued with intense nightmares. Even before this all started, you had trouble sleeping sometimes; now that you're almost afraid of what waits for you in your dreams, you often stay awake until you physically can't keep your eyes open any longer.

And you don't like human-style beds all that much. Recupracoons make so much more sense.

You run your fingers across Dave's scars again, lightly enough that you won't wake him, starting with the worst one—Jack's—and working your way outward in a widening spiral. His scars show up so much worse than yours—human skin must not heal as efficiently as troll skin. Either that, or Dave's been hurt almost to the point of dying, over and over again.

You don't want to believe that, but you could—Dave looks and talks tough, seems cool and polished, but when he lets his guard fall, he's so fractured and fragile that it hurts your fucking heart. He's like no one you know; if he'd been a troll, he would have either been culled by now or been selected to train as an elite soldier. You'd like to believe the latter, but you honestly don't know.

And he's not a troll, anyway. He's human, uniquely beautiful and alien, different from you and from everyone you've always known. He is like a reflection of yourself in a cracked mirror, like the other half of everything you are.

You're barely awake, at this point. The realization alone should be enough to banish sleep, but all you can find the energy to do is mutter, "Fuck it," and squirm a little closer to Dave.

His skin is cooler than yours, you think as you close your eyes. Like a highblood's, or maybe not a highblood...Terezi? Equius? Not Gamzee, if you remember right (which you might not; it's been so long since you've touched Gamzee, and that though brings a pang of guilt), warmer than Gamzee's skin but only by a little...

You're still contemplating blood tempature when you fall asleep.

Sleep is as big a mistake as you knew it would be, fraught with blood like a liquid rainbow, pain that's only a shadow of what pain can be but still hurts like fuck, memories that are undeniably your own (no matter how much you'd like to deny them) and memories that are hellishly familiar and yet bewilderingly not-yours. Part of the time you know that you're dreaming, but you still can't force yourself awake.

When you do finally wake up, you do it with a stifled whimper, your hands closing convulsively on—

Flesh. Dave's shoulders. At some point, you moved even closer to him, draping yourself over him and curling against him, and now you're pretty fucking sure you just drove your fingernails deep enough into his skin to draw blood. And you're still in the grip of the nightmare, unable to breathe deep enough to apologise, unable to do anything other than shake and cling to him.

"Bad dream?" Dave's whisper is barely loud enough to be heard over your own heartbeat. "I know how that is."

You breath as deeply as you can, shedding some measure of the unreasoning fear, growl, "I'm fucking fine," and immediately regret saying it.

Dave is silent for a second. "Fine," he replies, thoughtfully. "I know I'm not fine, and I don't think you are, either. Not really. But that's okay." One of his hands comes up, stroking your hair but staying well clear of your horns—even though he's not troll, he seems to get that there are times when horns can be touched and times that they definitely should not be. "Right?"

You can feel the vibration that'll become a purr starting in your chest, and it makes you feel even more ashamed for snapping at him. "I'm sorry," you mutter.

Dave considers that for another long moment, fingers combing absently through your hair. When he speaks again, it's not in a whisper but in a low voice that has a cadence that you've heard from him before, when he's rapping with someone else. "So fine my line between loving and dying, in the nick of time you arrive and you strive to keep me alive, don't let me take a dive, you know you saved my life, broke me out of my strife, brought me relief and taught me belief with the words that you weave—" He runs out of breath, inhales sharply, and keeps going, although his voice goes a bit hoarser with every word, "Karkat, please don't leave, you're what I need and without you I'd bleed: words, blood, and pain, colder than death's reign, I would go insane, you're all that can tame the storm in my brain—"

Dave's voice cracks, and he stops rapping. You can hear his breathing, though, ragged and uneven, as he fights not to cry.

"Fuck," you say softly. You can feel your own tears on your face. "Oh, fuck, Dave, fucking..." There are no words, nothing you can find to say, so instead you reach out in the dark, finding Dave's face and wiping tears away as gently as you can. You're so bad at this, always have been, and you're afraid that you'll do something to hurt him worse as you try to comfort him.

Without even thinking, you run one hand through his hair, feeling for horns and not finding any. Dave sighs shakily as you mentally curse yourself.

"Don't leave me," he says quietly, and his voice breaks again on the second word. "Please—"

"You're fucking kidding me." You lean forward, pressing your lips against his forehead for a brief second. "I'd rather cut off my right hand than leave you alone, Strider, and don't you fucking forget it."

He exhales sharply, a gasp turned inside out, and pulls you down just a little, just enough that your mouth meets his. This kiss is even better than the first time, if that's possible. It lasts what seems like forever and like no time at all, and this time Dave's the one who breaks it.

"Are we—are we still on 'no pailing?'" he asks, and you can hear a wicked smile in his voice. "Because if we are, I might be about to have a problem—"

"Fuck that," you tell him, and find his mouth with your own again.

And he is smiling, and you swear on your soul that you won't ever let him stop.

#Dave #Karkat #Davekat #a fuckin' relic

6 notes · View notes