#dave was a CHILD you idiot. he didnt have to be TRAINED for anything

[timaeuse]

@stridetm said: 👀 + is there a part of you that hates me?

“What?” the very idea comes off ridiculous. dirk’s questioning even before dave’s finished talking -- the word hate is barely fully formed when dirk’s waving it away, affronted by the suggestion. there are a lot of parts of him. he’s not proud of the majority of them, learning how to keep them quiet and make them softer as time goes by. he can’t imagine any one of them hating dave.

dirk knows what this is about. every so often he’ll catch sight of himself in a reflective surface and not recognise the man he sees. he’s taller, stronger, a mean downturn in his lip. he’ll ridicule himself, snap stand up straight and where’s your sword in his head until he’s jumping at the sound of his own breathing. even now, there’s the tiniest urge to tell dave to quit asking questions that he doesn’t want to know the answer to and the voice that wants to be heard is not his. dirk is so used to picking this particular splinter out of himself that pausing to hear it out feels wrong, somehow -- like he’s going to fall into it, lose some part of himself he can’t get back. he swallows thickly, glancing first at dave and then at his crossed ankles. anything to avoid his eyes.

“Listen, kid.” even that’s wrong -- it’s heavy on his tongue, thick like molasses and rotten like decay. there’s something unhinged inside this locked box he keeps, and if given an inch it would take a mile. pink lightning crackles between dirk’s teeth as he opens his mouth only to close it again. he has to think. he isn’t thinking, and that’s the only thing that he knows is his own. his splinters can touch his heart but his head belongs to him, and it has to stay that way or he’ll lose it completely. “I’m not makin’ excuses for the guy. He sucked. More than sucked. He was probably the worst dude to touch down in paradox space, and that’s the truth. But he didn’t hate you.” 

he says it with certainty because it’s true. dirk’s done the exploring -- inside his own shard, the largest and brightest of the bunch, there’s a warm orange glow, firelight on a winter’s night. it’s the hearth at home, safety, a sturdy place to land. it takes a while to find, but it’s there, and it’s peaceful, and knowing it exists is sometimes the only thing that gets dirk out of bed in the morning. hal’s shard is faint now that part of him has merged with another, but it beeps mechanically at him all the same. digging around in there makes him nauseous, feels like an invasion of privacy, but there’s a collection of wires even so, an oasis in the midst of lines of code. his dreamself’s shard is blank and dark. brain ghost dirk’s is tinted green and smells of fresh pine, feels too much like jake’s soul for dirk to touch without feeling unclean.

bro strider’s shard is barren, save for a small pocket of cold air.

it feels like a day at the height of an awful summer -- oppressive heat that suffocated and strangled, a kind of muggy humidity. dirk can’t stand being there longer than he ever needs to be. it’s his least favourite place inside himself. once, he’d woken in a cold sweat, both hands pressed over his heart, pink fire flickering over his fingers. a botched extraction that had almost killed him. if he’s to live, it has to stay. 

he doesn’t know if it’s worth it.

the air bubble, he’d found by accident. when poking through the blistering rubble of what he’d been, dirk had gotten overwhelmed, tried to flee but found himself lost in the twists and turns of his own self. the breeze had hit him full force -- it was still thick with age and smelled like a basement, but it was something different, a far cry from ash and soot. it wasn’t calm, or adoration, or empathy. it was simply there, a space in which something had once resided. dirk wonders even now if it had been chased out by the fire, much like he had. chased out by insanity and the promise of something powerful and cruel.

“I don’t think he was right, but I know what he meant. He knew what was going to happen, I think -- or had some notion. What he did never came from hate. He wanted you to be ready to fight. Ready to lose him.” 

he barks out a dry laugh, pulls his hands out of his soul and watches the black fade from the tips of his fingers. singed in reverse. “A whole lotta good that did, huh.” he doesn’t know what else to say. he doesn’t know how to explain that he understands bro strider without making it seem as though he pities him. his splinters so rarely deserve his sympathy, and bro even less so for being what he hoped he’d never be but always thought he’d become -- a monster too consumed by the big picture to see who he was hurting. a glory ardent idiot that died a meaningless death because the urge to be the hero was too strong to ignore. 

“He didn’t hate you. I don’t hate you. Couldn’t if I tried, little man.” he fights the edge away from his tongue, but it beats him effortlessly. there’s strength to bro that dirk won’t ever find the will to tap into.

there’s a cold, clean spot in his soul. nothing that justifies his abuse, nothing that makes everything okay, nothing that makes him less of a creature, but a spot all the same. it belongs to dave. always had, always will.