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bladekindeyewear · 4 years ago

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HS^2 bloggin’ mainline 2020-08-23

More homestuuuuuck

I’m a little tired today so I don’t expect much intelligent analysis out of myself, but if anything classpecty happens I doubt I’ll be able to help myself regardless.

oh, always

(EDITS: added note on horn colors, link to ask on potential Blood powers reference)

> CHAPTER 12. Really Convoluted Metaphorical Horseshit

cuuute

In the bowels of a different ship, at a moment in time that is not pinpointable in either direction from the previous interaction, another Dave raps quietly to himself.

another dave raps quietly to himself. i am glad that phrase exists it brings me joy

(LATER EDIT: A friend on Discord pointed out that throughout this entire update, Karkat's horns are #FF0000 red. They were normal candy-corn colors in previous glimpses at the ship crew, though they used a dark single-color shortcut typical of old Homestuck at one point... but THIS time it stays STARK red even when we zoom in close later. Is this just artistic liberty? Did Karkat color his horns for fashion? Does this happen to red-bloods like the Sufferer after a certain age? Just how much time has actually passed, here? We might have to wait for the commentary for this one.)

KARKAT: I WAS SAYING I THOUGHT WE MIGHT GO, I DUNNO, ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE ENTIRE SHIP WHILE THE CLOTHES WERE WASHING. KARKAT: SEEING AS THIS DECREPIT MACHINE WE WERE SO BLESSEDLY PROVIDED WITH MAKES A WHIRRING SOUND SO PANCHAFINGLY ARHYTHMIC THAT IT THREATENS TO ERADICATE THE ENTIRE CONCEPT OF TEMPO FROM THE UNIVERSE.

Karkat really has chilled out hasnt he? like this is surprisingly level for him, and that fact is hilarious.

KARKAT: AND YET SOMEHOW BASICALLY ALL THAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE WE STARTED THE LOAD IS THAT YOU’VE BEEN USING IT AS A FUCKED UP BEAT TO WHISPER TO YOURSELF ABOUT FLOWERS TO.

oh gosh that’s why he’s rapping

> ==>

DAVE: kanaya was telling me this kids story the other day about this dude who didnt cherish a flower enough until it peaced out to do flower stuff idk its not pertinent to the story DAVE: except the flower was a person DAVE: because it was a metaphor

Oh right, coming back to the Little Prince stuff I was too lazy to metaphor-deep-dive into, and literally asking the same questions we were asking about who the Little Prince’s story applies to mapped here if anyone at all, like Dirk and such, or what biases were in the retelling of it and the way Kanaya phrased it. So now we’re practically mocking it by deep diving it here, hence the last page’s “DAVE: i was just thinking through some really convoluted metaphorical horseshit”, which means we’re both about to further explore AND shit all over the existence of this story metaphor until it doesn’t mean anything and most of the meaning we drew from it earlier is made a joke~

well, not “we”, cause I was too lazy, so... y’all

DAVE: anyway what goes down in the story is that once the flower lady is out of the picture DAVE: the main character goes around making all these connections between her and everything else in the universe until every damn thing feels like a symbol for how much he fucked up and how much he will never see her again KARKAT: THIS SEEMS PRETTY FUCKING INTENSE FOR A KID'S STORY DAVE: yea thats pretty much what i said

Oh holy shit. That’s yet another way to put it. Are we doing a whole moral takedown of the Light aspect today? cause it sounds like we’re taking a dump on the Light aspect and RoboRose getting too obsessed and immersed in it, which would be excellent

DAVE: but i guess its not so much what the story was technically textually about but more like the version of it kanaya internalized and then told me when we were talkin about how she misses rose

exactly

DAVE: so like now im taking the story she told me she was projecting her feelings onto and projecting my feelings on top of that

yes absolutely, you just rephrased it a different way with that exact same bias

DAVE: this is just one big game of emotional projection telephone so feel free to go paraphrase it to roxy later and make it about whatever fuckin thing youre currently missing

perfect. i need an emoji for that Italian thing for when you pinch your thumb and forefinger together and kiss it

ah this’ll do:

its like the expression “choice” but in nonverbal form

[...] whatever fuckin thing youre currently missing KARKAT: YOUR ABILITY TO GET TO THE POINT DAVE: gotem DAVE: anyway you’re not gonna have to miss that skill of mine for long DAVE: get ready for this shit because i am about to slap you with the point so hard youll fall ass first into the washer DAVE: just scrambling around in there getting all sudsy DAVE: but your brain is gonna be so blasted from the mindfreak of a point im about to make that there wont be anything left to clean

Anytime dave is told to get to the point he is contractually obligated to spend at least 20 seconds talking about how he’ll get to the point in a way that is not getting to the point

DAVE: so its genuinely cool that kanaya can go around creating meaning that may or may not be actually present in every little thing DAVE: connecting every feeling she has to the idea of her wife existing out there DAVE: so i told her she should keep that shit up DAVE: but im having the opposite issue where im struggling to find anything to be that kind of tether because every single thing i could possibly consider about what it is were doing just reminds me of yet another thing to be afraid about

Great examples of Light being good and bad! Attaching strands of connective meaning to everything. --though, in Dave’s case AND Kanaya’s case you could argue it’s both bad in terms of effects. That it’s great for Kanaya to care, but that she should be able to divest herself and live on her own terms without idealizing Rose literally everywhere she looks, personal growth which would be useful in helping bring Rose back to her in the first place. The struggle they’re looking forward to is largely philosophical, not just physical, and until Rosebot acknowledges that she was wrong it’s not over.

DAVE: everything fuckin sucks huge cosmic donkey sack and im terrified KARKAT: OK, SO I FEEL LIKE YOU SKIPPED A COUPLE NECESSARY STEPS IN YOUR POINT CLARIFICATION PROCESS.

Pretty sure Dave was on the same page as most Epilogue and start-of-HS2 readers. This situation is pretty bleak to dump our heroes into, no matter how much we believe will be resolved in the long run.

DAVE: ok but were you going with sweet or savory please give me that much at least KARKAT: YEAH IT WAS GOING TO BE SUNDAE-BASED. DAVE: nice KARKAT: YEAH. KARKAT: DO YOU WANNA WATCH MORE GBBO AFTER THIS? DAVE: absolutely

--ah, Great British Bake-Off, can’t say I’ve indulged

do they still have that?? did they save it from old Earth? or did they go where unflooded Britain used to be and say hey, new show reboot

KARKAT: GREAT. ANYWAY, LIKE I WAS SAYING, FOR THE LOVE OF SWEET HUMAN CHRIST, PLEASE BACK UP TO WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU’RE ACTUALLY SCARED OF. KARKAT: ALSO COME HERE, IDIOT.

That last line is like, exactly as fucking sweet and awesome as we imagined their relationship to be. :)

> ==>

OH MY GOD THAT’S ADORABLE

DAVE: ok yeah this is a better position to unleash all my inner fears n anxieties from

indisputably.

DAVE: those times its like my mouth was saying words about the situation wherein our friends are AWOL and maybe dead but my brain wasnt fully letting me experience the emotion that goes along with them DAVE: man its like i cant even start genuinely thinking about how afraid i actually am for rose and john without my brain flippin its wad and whiting out DAVE: like haha fuck i hope theyre ok DAVE: now i better make a fuckin joke before i succumb to the gaping mouth of despair waiting for me to fall in it as soon as i look down and acknowledge that its there ogling how juicy my ass looks as it trembles with terror

I really hope that the writers of HS2 know full well that this feeling? the one Dave is describing here? is what many of us who got way overinvested in the well-being of Homestuck’s surviving characters felt reading the Epilogues and Homestuck^2. So I really hope they’re working through it in a way that will result in a preponderance of GOOD THINGS happening and hope-filled situations. Cause that “can’t even think about X” feeling is too familiar, and if they understand it as well as it LOOKS like they’re getting to, I’d really like them to give us a helping hand healing.

I think that’s what they’re going for? Seems hopeful for me to think so, but they HAVE been doing better as HS2 has been going forward, from an emotional standpoint anyway; definitely better than the Epilogues. And I’ve worked through some of that stuff with the help of that, because it’s MUCH easier nowadays to think about Homestuck without my gut clenching.

DAVE: i guess im just fucked up about how to worry about dirk and be angry at him at the same time DAVE: because if i get as unholy pissed at him as i sometimes wanna be i also gotta admit to myself that maybe i coulda done something different there

Mhmm, Karkat’s potentially a pretty good person to speak with here since he’s done so much work trying not to feel responsible for everything that’s ever gone wrong.

DAVE: also like DAVE: and this by the way adds a whole other layer of guilt on there that i dont really know how to fuckin reckon with but DAVE: even with all the shit hes pulled and the fact that we are more or less heading toward having to take him down DAVE: whatever that is gonna mean and whether or not he planned it like that DAVE: i just DAVE: me and him had come so far with each other and it was really cool for a while to have him and i DAVE: ugh DAVE: i dont WANT to hate him

Yeah, Dirk and Jane’s heel-turns were really shitty for anyone who was a fan of them in the fanbase, as well.

KARKAT: WELL THEN QUIT FUCKING PICKING AT THE SEAM ON MY SHORTS AND SPIT IT OUT. THEY'RE BARELY HANGING ON TO THE DEFINITION OF "SHORTS" AS IT IS.

That is an adorably real boyfriend-laying-in-boyfriend’s-lap thing to do

DAVE: the part i mentioned before about how we really have no goddamn clue how long this trip is even gonna take DAVE: i cant help but feel like its barely getting revved up DAVE: and for me and roxy and jade and callie and kan thats normal shit at best and boring at worst but we all have our immortality to thank for that DAVE: we can just dick around in space for near-eternity waiting to catch up to our friends who may or may not be our enemies now and itll be fine DAVE: i mean no itll be categorically miserable DAVE: but well survive it KARKAT: HOLD THE FUCK ON. DAVE: but you KARKAT: DAVE. DAVE: no lemme say this

Oh god damnit. Karkat’s limited lifespan. As if we hadn’t ALREADY covered a nauseatingly extensive gamut of disheartening topics of conversation. We really have to confront every shred of misery in their past, present and future one after the other after the other in the Epilogues and HS2, don’t we? >:(

I guess it had to be discussed, though.

DAVE: we dont talk about it much and i got shit to say about it DAVE: its not like i never thought about how youre mortal before but i just thought wed be able to figure it out before it mattered DAVE: come up with some kind of plan DAVE: i was just distracted being happy with you i fucking guess and so i didnt think up a way to fix it DAVE: and now thanks to dirk we have to work it out right the fuck now DAVE: because i cant spend this trip just sitting around watching you get old and die

Jesus. I mean, WE know(?) that it’s not gonna be THAT many years, but THEY don’t know that.

Unless it really IS going to be that many years and HS2 is going to shamelessly take a fucking sledgehammer to our feelings for no goddamn good reason. Which it won’t! Right??? >:T

> ==>

Dishwasher ding

> Dave: Grapple with the clean, soggy consequences of the passage of time.

Hey, don’t make it a metaphor here. --though, fuck. I suppose we are dealing with everyones dirty laundry. God damnit. SURE, deal with it all story but then GET IT OUT OF THE WAY AND PUT SOME SERIOUS FUN AND LAUGHS IN HERE so we don’t feel like we’re wading through an entire garbage dump!!! *click*

Karkat’s eyebrows-only mouthless frown is really cute.

> ==>

okay Karkat explain the nope you’re lodging

> ==>

*put*

> ==>

*foot*

> ==>

DAVE: ok go on

I mean I at least appreciate the time investment in adorable boyfriends. That’s definitely something of SOME good value they’re giving us in exchange for this misery

> ==>

That Karkat image makes me wanna do that red-shaky-gif-thing with it

KARKAT: IT'S NOT LIKE I'M NEW TO THE PARTICULAR MOOBEAST WRANGLING EVENT OF SOMEONE I PREVIOUSLY LOVED BRUTALLY TURNING ON ME AND LEAVING ME TO TRY AND CRAM MY FEELINGS ABOUT THE SITUATION BACK TOGETHER ALL ON MY OWN.

True

KARKAT: HE DID THAT ON HIS OWN. AND WE MADE THE CHOICE TO GO AFTER HIM ON OUR OWN.

Yes, and you’ll possibly convince him more of that over time, though not in this short conversation

KARKAT: I WAS FOLLOWING YOUR LITTLE TRAIL OF COOKIE CRUMB FEARS UNTIL IT LEAD TO THE BIG SNACK FINALE OF WORRY ABOUT MY FRAGILE MORTAL MEATSACK. KARKAT: IF I HAVE SOMEHOW NOT BEEN CLEAR ABOUT THIS WITH YOU YET, LET ME GO AHEAD AND RECTIFY THE SITUATION RIGHT THE FUCK NOW. KARKAT: HANGING OUT WITH YOU ON THIS LONG TRIP TO WHO THE SHITTING FUCK KNOWS WHERE IS QUITE LITERALLY THE HAPPIEST I HAVE EVER BEEN IN MY ENTIRE MEAGER EXISTENCE. KARKAT: I'M SO ABSOLUTELY BLISSED THE FUCK OUT OF MY MIND TO BE ABLE TO LOOK AT YOUR STUPID IMMORTALLY SMOOTH HUMAN FACE SKIN EVERY DAY AND NOT HAVE A COMPLEX ABOUT IT.

D’AWWW

And with that darkly angry expression too, that’s PERFECT

I mean it’s true. What exactly would they be doing DIFFERENTLY on Earth C other than enjoying each other like this? It’s pretty fucking great.

...hm. Isn’t this journey-not-the-destination stuff pretty Breathy? Karkat’s proving more balanced by the moment.

KARKAT: AND I'LL BE STRAIGHT WITH YOU. IT'S NOT LIKE I HAVEN'T BEEN EXPERIENCING SOME COMPLICATED GUILT, MYSELF. KARKAT: THE FACT THAT I'M HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE JUST FUCKING CHILLAXING AND BEING IN LOVE IN SPACE IS A CLEARLY INCONGRUOUS WITH THE REASON I'M ACTUALLY HERE CHILLAXING TO BEGIN WITH, AND I'M NOT LETTING MYSELF FORGET THAT, EITHER.

Pff. He feels guilty for ENJOYING IT so much. <3

KARKAT: BUT I RESENT THE IMPLICATION THAT MY HAPPINESS IS REGISTERING FOR YOU AS YOU HAVING TO JUST "SIT AROUND AND WATCH ME GET OLD," BECAUSE I KNOW YOU KNOW IT'S MORE THAN THAT.

I’m glad Karkat knows that DAVE knows somewhere in him that it’s more than that, because yeah, if Karkat thought he DIDN’T know that at some level that’d be a reason to take MUCH MORE SERIOUS offense.

KARKAT: LIKE, JESUS, DAVE. YOU KNOW I'M AFRAID FOR YOU, TOO, RIGHT? KARKAT: OR DID YOU FORGET THE WHOLE HEROIC DEATH THING? KARKAT: I WORRY ABOUT LOSING YOU FAIRLY FUCKING REGULARLY.

Hah!!! Point taken. Karkat must view Dave as practically more fragile than HIM.

KARKAT: ONE: WE'VE BEEN THROUGH SO MUCH HELLACIOUS PANWARPING TRAUMA THAT I REFUSE TO NOT ENJOY THIS SHIT WHEN I FINALLY FUCKING GET IT, NO MATTER HOW LONG IT MAY OR MAY NOT LAST. KARKAT: TWO: IT'S NOT LIKE WE'RE DOING NOTHING. WE’RE MOVING. WE’RE WORKING. WE’RE HEADED SPECIFICALLY TO A PLACE WHERE WE WILL UNDOUBTLEDLY ENDURE YET MORE FUCKING HELLACIOUS PANWARPING TRAUMA. KARKAT: AND THREE: WE'RE DOING THAT BECAUSE WE HAVE FRIENDS WHO WE CARE ABOUT THAT NEED US. THAT IS OUR FOCUS, HERE. NOT OUR FEAR. IT'S ABOUT THE PEOPLE WE HAVE TO SAVE. KARKAT: SO DON'T FUCKING WORRY ABOUT ME, DAVE. I'M FINE.

Okay, this is great and wholesome. I am now retroactively GLAD that this topic got brought up. :)

> ==>

Dave is still afraid. There is a part of him that will always be, he thinks. He has accepted this about himself. There is another feeling coursing through him too, though. It’s something he's felt before, though never quite so intensely. He looks up at Karkat and understands, viscerally, the simple power his words have. They pump through Dave’s own body, alive and warm and true.

He wonders if Karkat realizes it, or if he’s just, as always, saying what he feels as he feels it. Dave doesn’t attempt to dissect it further. There will be time for that later.

Every really loving moment like this is sort of undercut by the fact that it’s also, in some senses, part of alt!Calliope’s narration and, by extension, her fanfiction.

EDIT 2: There's also either a hint to potential Blood powers or even an explicit Blood power use here that I didn't recognize. I'm leaning towards it's-laying-the-groundwork-for-future-use-of-Blood-powers-but-isnt-magical-in-this-case.

> ==>

Smooooch!

That was nice. Still gonna wait on doing any commentary til next time or a Bonus update or two, cause I’m beat. See y’all next time!

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #Homestuck^2 #spoiler #spoilers #Breath and Blood #Light and Void

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dukeofriven · 6 years ago

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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

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dafukdidiwatch · 5 years ago

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Part 335 End/Videos Analysis

So that was a lot of videos, but it explains so much.

First: FUCKING RIGHT ABOUT CAL! Like, 100%. Knew I was right not to trust the puppet. Like, in the beginning first Act stuff I was like “yeah puppets are creepy, got to hate the puppet ha ha pick the lesser evil here jokey joke” but the more he lived and survived in convoluted ways the more my hatred grew.

Let’s try to tackle this in order of that should have/could have happened to keep things in line.

So the whole point to Caliborn’s part, was to tell us exactly what SHOULD have happened.

John uses his new powers to zap all the humans together to fight Caliborn. Caliborn absorbed the Beta-Gang into the house to be found by John later. During the blast Dirk used his soul power to trap Equius, Hal, Gamzee, and Caliborn into Lil’ Cal. Which was punted into space to be found/collected later on.

Gamzee (having his soul inside Cal) cursed Dave to dream of the puppet, which moved the puppet into the real world by John’s baby making. The Beta Cal version went with Dave, did space shenanigans, got fused with a crystal ball to become Scratch and then hatched out like the freaky muscle bound turtle man he is. (having Scratch saying “human uncle” because he is part Hal makes technical sense but is still creepy)

While Alpha-Cal went to Dirk, eventually made it’s way to Caliborn, only for his soul to be trapped in there to start the process again eventually.

That’s the story of Cal what a ride. Do you think Hussie had this planned the entire time, or was figured it out along the way?

But let’s focus on the more important part: John and the Juju.

So the house Juju contains all the Beta-Kids. Which held John, which past!John touch to get those powers and started zapping around. But because of Terezi, he zapped to change the past to keep Vriska alive.

Vriska being alive is literally what changed everything, which is unbelievable how deep that change went to.

Because Vriska was alive, things had to be retconned further than John’s intentional power usage, so his other past self was killed off (along with Dave Sprite :( ). So the Jade and Jane that we way talking to Callie is the new canon Jade and Jane. And I don’t think that Vriska was ever supposed to be alive. Jade said she saw someone she didn’t expect to see. But she didn’t know which trolls were alive on the meteor, meaning it was like a space/time thing of knowing that she shouldn’t be there.

Instead of continuing the circle/cycle of Caliborn’s existence, Vriska made the path veer hard right to a different way.

And, wow this changes a LOT. More than I expected even.

Vriska rekindled her friendship with Terezi to be the Scourge Sisters yet again.

With Vriska around, Karkat started to hang out with Dave more to be better friends/maybe couple? (given how I missed the blatantly obvious of Meenah/Vriska until the last minute, I am going to tag that in just in case). I mean, Karkat was helping with Dave’s music instead of trying to pine after Vriska, and Dave cuddled against him while falling asleep to romance movies, so it’s possible.

While Vriska doesn’t have a romance with Kanaya, she still cares for her. So she makes sure that Rose doesn’t drink.

Vriska is able to control Gamzee to not do creepy shit, as well as be the balance Terezi needs to not be sucked into the abusive Spades spiral.

Confident Terezi didn’t go further into a depression spiral after meeting the ancestors. (I like the part where it looks like Gamzee is telling Kurloz that he couldn’t help create their dark leader because Vriska keeps him in check, and Kurloz just looks like he is so done)

And the OG Vriska still exists and still dates Meenah. That makes me happy to hear/see. Still have questions like does that Meenah remember talking to the meteor party without Vriska there or what, but it’s all good.

And instead of Gamzee being the one to make the sprites, Vriska does. And she revives Tavros for Jane! Without them blowing up, Tavros would probably help Jane out with her problems/confidence. And Dirk cringing at the thought of having Equius as his sprite, yeah that is so fair and hilarious to think about.

(does this mean that there is the OG Tavros who dated Vriska somewhere here too? Did she double stack the other sprites too, like Erisol and Fefeta?)

And finally, with Vriska alive, she put Jade to sleep (which yay she’s alive). She banded them together as a pirate captain to pull a rescue mission to save Roxy and fight Jane.

Meaning that when John and Roxy come back, it will probably be at that moment.

Which means that was the condition John and Roxy agreed too. They had to make everyone else feel sad about their deaths which had already happened.

The Prodigal Teens return.

(I’m still salty that Dave Sprite is now dead, I really liked him.)

#dafukblog #homestuck #act6.6 int4 #hs335 #hs335 end

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abundantchewtoys · 5 years ago

Text

Homestuck^2 re: Chapter 4 “The Contest”(p119-143)

Ah, "The Contest", huh? I don't think Harry Anderson was in the bleachers watching a sporting match during his last hour at school.

It sounds innoccent, but it probably isn't. I don't suppose we'll see Callie in a drawing contest with Calliope. :P

---

Page 119

... Ah. It's the new planet. Interesting tree growths.

Is it going to be a contest racing somewhere?

Or is Dirk going to hold a contest, and who wins gets to name the planet? Kind of weak since he can just rig the contest with his powers.

I wonder if the First Guardian is already here, too. ... Then again... This session is the first outside of the Green Sun's domain! So maybe no First Guardian.

---

Page 120

That's a bigass bare mound.

---

Page 122

Ace landing, Terezi. 10/10

It's like a cracked piñata. Dirk's room appears to have been near the backend of the ship.

The trio's survived, though, and now they've gone exploring. So... I suppose Dirk has captchalogued all equipment from the storage rooms.

---

Page 123

Rosebot appears to be en guard near the entrance, but what's inside the cave?

---

Page 124

... Wow. Why is she en pointe, has she studied ballet over the course of the three years? :P That black tiara is unsettling. Well, so is the rest of the black outfit, but perhaps it's inspired by that Alternian battle armour which Candy Rose was wearing.

... Pffffff, Dirk. Are they just using the cave for shelter, or is this were the frog temple can be found?

... Are they going to enter the Lotus machine?

---

Page 125

Woooooow. Okay, Terezi's looking SMASHING. A lot like Latula, actually, with the hair. Lots of the characters are in to using their accentuting lines in their outfits these days, I've noted.

And yeah, Dirk just set up shop in this cave. (The prince is in.)

---

Page 126

Pfffff, Terezi is just bored out of her mind. I guess she had the vague idea of serving as Dirk and Rose's consciousness, but that has turned out rather differently. Of course, she has little control over Dirk. Even her being able to have him stop calling Rose Rosebot, is just him humouring her to some extent.

Also, we get an insight what ascension is like for Rose. Still quite confusing, it appears. Then again, the process isn't finished yet for her.

I liked how the combination of the command and Dirk's first comment actually belong to be read together - in that he asked Terezi to render herself more symbolically, and she did!! Yes, her hear really looks like Latula's now.

I guess the reason she didn't succumb to drinking this time, is that Terezi isn't actually the one that caused John to die, unlike with Game Over Vriska. Though she's probably still guilt-ridden, since it was the exertion of getting her to Earth C that was the final straw.

---

Page 127

Yeah, Rose still thinks Terezi's on board with everything on some level. But Dirk's plans, even though they involve her, extend way beyond.

---

Page 128

Showoff. She isn't a fully realized Mind player, but she's still quite powerful. Ah yes, let the theories commence that the new session will contain Quest Beds for Karkat, Kanaya and Terezi. :P

Heh, the powers Dirk is showing there. They're what Brain Ghost Dirk used on Aranea, and Reload Dirk on Caliborn.

---

Page 129

Heheh, another equine didn't survive bearing down on a planet. And Dirk was involved.

I'm... Not entirely sure what just happened here.

I though Rose was alluding to Plato's Cave. And she seemed to notice the ship didn't need repairing and how odd that is. So she might be at least a little aware of his powers?

Well, at least we know now that Dirk has the same access as Dave.

And is Deltritus the name he has for the cave/planet? Though it sounds kind of like the name for a denizen.

----

Page 130

Wow. Okay.

So. Dirk wants to create something wholly new. He thinks they made a mistake in creating Earth C from "leftovers".

I notice that we have kind of an alphabetical thing going on. Alternia, Beforus, Earth C, now Deltritus.

Dirk makes a good explanation about how he can still be so flawed while being completely self-aware. Still doesn't excuse all his manipulations. He keeps her on the same page as him at all times.

So the contest is about species. This means we're going to get 2 entire new species and cultures introduced, my god. I thought we had reached a threshold somewhere, somewhen. But no. Apparently not. I guess that's the next step we're going to.

The Watchmaker analogy is actually quite fitting for Dirk... and Rose's meta-analysis for her.

Dirk's notes on Deltritus are interesting. Shows he's actually not that concerned with details after all.

Blaperile has a good point - Dirk knows a session will be spawned here, but not what race "wins" in the end. Or he makes a point of not telling for the sake of his game.

I also saw some more of Dirk's accent slipping in here, suddenly. Huh.

---

Page 131

Heh, the Sburb logo is actually in Jane's colour here, not Dirk. That will become relevant later on.

I wonder if this is how universes used to propogate in previous iterations. Gods create races, several per universe, on different planets at a time, and have all of them play Sburb.

...

Eeeuw, Dirk proposes to, like, experiment on DNA. So there isn't animal life to start from here.

In the end, what they start from is still ectobiological material, nothing from scratch.

---

Page 132

... Wow. So it's the mother of all Sburb machines. The Ultimate Alchemy/Ectobiology... Thingamabob. Still, I'm reeling from the idea that they'd combine their own DNA with items. That's some Frankenstein like shit right there.

Here's to hoping all their "iterations" only exist as holograms or simulations, not real beings. That'd be cruel, otherwise. Maybe this is a moment to give some of the fan species a cameo, make them canon that way!!

---

Page 133

Ah. Rose still has his number, at least. Hey there, 1025 cameo. *wave* Of course he picked one of the unseen shenanigans from when Terezi was controlling him.

---

Page 134

Ooooh, so it's what Jade was doing to create a frog that could perform the Vast Croak, but in reverse!

Alchemical biology genetic SBaHJification

Dear god. Really, they should just add JPEG artifacts and be done with it.

So yeah, it's back to combining items. The ultimate alchemy session.

---

Page 135

Awww, she remembers this, even misses these simpler times of combining items. And yes, seems like an appropriate circle of stupidy goes on inside the machine.

But maybe the machine just reads the captcha's on the back of the card! ... Wild efficiency, in my Sburb session? It's more common than you think. :O

---

Page 136

I fear for Dirk's first attempt. Not going to be a viable form of living at all, right? Poor thingy.

---

Page 137

Ah yes. Ecto-Alchemologize. The appropriately contrived term for what's appearing.

Dirk's manning those buttons like a DJ, like the protagonist of And It Don't Stop.

---

Page 139

Cool effect.

---

Page 140

... Yes, it's definitely a bonehead they just created.

It APPEARS to have a normal face, but yeah, it's probably a mutant, not unsimilar to the beasts that were fought on the Tower of Syndetic Ascension.

---

Page 141

... Well okay, that actually looks kind of cute.

A gusher tentacle cactus. But tiny.

So it would appear Dirk's DNA just gives it life, not anything more.

---

Page 142

Welp, that little guy's freaking out.

---

Page 143

When we next see them, the place is going to be littered with sentient abominations. ... Actually, come to think of it, Roxy experimented a lot with Jaspers DNA as well, creating all those Mewtini clones. But they weren't sentient.

Unless Dirk didn't have the sentience switch on yet.

---

Next chapter appears to be from Terezi's perspective! But who's she going to talk... to...

She's not going to get Vriska's message NOW, is she? ... Of course she is.

Well, this is where we’ll leave things. We’ll pick the story back up in a few weeks!

#homestuck #homestuck^2 #reaction #rose lalonde #dirk strider #terezi pyrope #ecto-alchemologize #deltritus

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theorynexus · 5 years ago

Text

Proceeding logically, we now go to 71.

As I lay sleeping in the night, a thought occurred to me: it seems much more likely that it will be our Calliope who reigns over the Candy timeline than Alt!Calliope. This is primarily because of the fact that Alt!Calliope had their fingerprints all over the mainstream of Homestuck, but also because of they suggest that the only reason they interfere with the Meat timeline is because of Dirk’s tyranny. If in fact the Candy timeline is, as a baseline, a Cherubic paradise, as was implied, then this would give Alt!Calliope no real specific reason to have inserted themselves into it in the first place (albeit the logic of that statement is a bit complicated and tenuous). Furthermore, this becomes likelier because Dirk suggests Calliope was acting particularly grim because she knew that John Egbert would be sacrificing himself in the Meat timeline; thus, (given the reasonable suggestion that Calliope’s will for John to survive could potentially either be responsible for the split in the timelines or possibly for her theoretical control of one of them) and particularly considering both the necessity of the defeat of Lord English and the suggestion on Dirk’s part that the fandom would be debating the legitimacy of the Candy Timeline (whether it “counts” as living, or something like that), it makes some sense that the supposedly more “fan fiction-y” and sweet/saccharine timeline might be one which our Calliope is responsible for. If this is the case, erm... well, I may not be able to post everything that comes up in the future, there. Given Roxy’s description of how Calliope freaked out and started drawing pictures, later on, well... I am reminded of the stated nudity that is involved in some of said pictures, and obviously Tumblr will not allow for the posting of pornography; thus, I will either have to be using cropped images or merely (obliquely) describing what is happening on those panels, should that eventuality come to pass. On a different note: Maybe Troll Obama Karkat will actually succeed in his election attempt, this time around! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This strongly (and most disturbingly) reminds me of the heavy “convincing” that Dirk performed as his second to last resort, when he wasn’t giving characters direct orders. I do very much hope that if this is indeed our Calliope’s work, they don’t subvert the free will of the inhabitants of her timeline very often. I would be very, very disappointed in them. >:

Well, well... this is certainly quite interesting. It could be either interpreted as him believing that his decision doesn’t matter, either way, or, given his contempt for the leaf and his toss of it away, his rejection of that sort of bounded, directional choice; thus his embrace of free will, despite the previously apparent pre-determined pathways Paradox Space would allow for in order to ensure the single direction it had in mind (away from the stem) was carried out. A most interesting metaphor, indeed. As for the sky: It is VERY interesting that John doesn’t react with disgust toward the sky, given his stated belief that it was over-saturated and painful in comparison to his former home’s own sky, when he returned with all of the Kids for their “first big meet-up,” from their perspective. Perhaps it was only the jostling of his memories that actually seeing that Earth’s sky again allowed in the first place that made him feel, in retrospect, that the one in the world they created felt “wrong.” Or maybe “that blue” is meant to suggest the same reaction and a desire to embrace it, rather than reject it as the other version of him had. It’s a bit of a shame that it’s not elaborated upon. Oh, by the way, there were certain things that the Meat Timeline didn’t address which will indeed be very important for Paradox Space’s great progression, and which this timeline could fulfill, so I guess that that could further ensure that this timeline has an important reason/justification for being. Chief among them is ensuring that the Calliope/Alt!Calliope split happens in the first place. Given the fact that the Retconned Alpha Kids’ session could not have produced a new universe, let alone one with trolls and earth in it, so the previously speculated split in the world’s timelines as a result of the shenanigans John ensured could not actually work out. Instead, it will have to be the Meat/Candy split that functions to ensure this split possibility (with Alt!Calliope actually coming from the Meat world, which will not have anyone to greet the Cherubs, but will still have the Meteor available to eventually have them start the Game, I think; whereas the Candy timeline will have normal Calliope’s emergence, and Gamzee). I actually thought about this in the 3 day period where I could not post because my account had been terminated by Tumblr, much to my chagrin, but... to even greater chagrin, I am reporting this to you now because I unfortunately saw a flash of “It’s time to release the bard from his prison,” or something like that, and now I have to admit it to you all because, despite the fact that it makes my actual development of the idea on my own more questionable and the revelation weaker in general, I cannot help but be honest with you and leave judgment in the matter up to your judicious hands, rather than trying to bury the matter. Darn self-spoiling nonsense... . >.<

Hmm. This is a very interesting moment. Particularly in light of the narrator’s way of describing things, including the surprise involved, here. It’s got me quite questioning whether Calliope is actually in charge of the narration as of the current moment. The way that things are being worded at the moment sounds like the person involved doesn’t know about the gender concerns of Calliope or Roxy, as of now. Furthermore, their halting, uncertain way of narrating it very much reminds me of Dave. I am in no way certain of this assessment, however, especially considering Dave has indeed been in contact with Roxy and Calliope and should have known about their identity concerns for some time. Hmmm. It’s possible, of course, that they haven’t really reached that point in their personal development, but I would guess this isn’t the case. The plot thickens.

I’m quite sure that this matter will be figured out momentarily. This may very well be the moment that actually starts the John/Roxy relationship in the first place: the moment of affection resulting from the fact that Roxy knew John was likely going to die on this mission could make her feel confident enough to suggest they enter into such a relationship, in fact. Or it could just be one step among many. Guess there’s no point in speculation.

At least for a while, yes. Yes, it shall be awesome. As for that... John, did you really think of them as anything less than family to begin with? I mean, you knew that they quite literally were, as far as the Kids are concerned, ever since you Ectobiologized them! And the trolls have quite seriously been grafted into that family at that point, don’t you think? But regardless of these silly little revelations that a depressed person might legitimately suddenly have, even if he should already know these things...

That is an interesting thing to say, Calliope. Well, two interesting things. The equivocation fading obviously refers to the fact that, for the most part, their depth of connection to the canon will be fading in the near future, despite the fact that the actions in this timeline will heavily influence and directly lead to certain necessary canonical outcomes (specifically, the rise of Caliborn, and through him, Lord English). The other interesting matter is those plans. That Calliope has interesting plans which she wishes to impose upon John is most interesting, indeed, and makes a great bundle of question marks (uncertainty noodles, were they called?) pop up over my head.

My guess is that this will specifically be the version of Gamzee seen in Collide? At the very least, that would make sense, given the way his fate was mysteriously glossed over in the flash. Maybe he didn’t get sucked into the black hole as so many were speculating.

I fricking love the way this is describing her. So cute. <3

This is also incredibly cute, and I adore the contrast between Calliope’s enthusiasm and semi-innocence and John’s skepticism and disdain. It makes for a very rich tapestry to devour.

Hah. Void is blocking his interpretation of Roxy’s thoughts, even now, I think. I think that’s what this means, at least. I am indeed quite curious about whether this impenetrability will persist in this timeline, generally, though.

Yes, levitas does generally make one feel more whimsical and act less grave. I wonder if this suggests John is more in-touch with Breath, in this timeline. (I wonder if his binding to the fate of Paradox Space [and perhaps his wonderful dice hammer in particular] was what made it impossible for him to flee out of Lord English’s mouth like the Breeze whistling through his teeth. LE does have ridiculous super speed, but Davepeta was able to interject their claws to [partially] protect John in time, at least. Hmmmm. ... I wonder if we’ll be able to see Jasprosespritesprite in this timeline, some time. )

Do:

#Homestuck Spoilers #Homestuck Epilogue #Homestuck Liveblog #Candy Epilogue #Cherubs

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journeysintowebcomics · 5 years ago

Text

Homestuck Liveblog #187

UPDATE 187: Love Confession

Last time Dirk took back the narrative, and Jade was knocked out for months. Also, Jane won the election, it’s a victory for the neoliberal austerity measures. Viva la Crocker! So what now? Let’s see.

We make a quick stop back at Rose’s apartment. She understandably wants to pack a few things before we leave this planet forever.

...okay, the update has barely started and there’s already some big news. So Dirk’s leaving the planet with Rose? Why? Is this an important part of his assimilation plan? Or is he doing this just to spite Kanaya, because he clearly has dedicated a lot of effort to making her run in circles? Dirk, explain!

She’ll have to leave her current body soon if she’s going to survive the absolute realization of her Ultimate Self. The new body I’ve made for her won’t have much use for her usual ensembles. That’s all I was saying.

The first thought I had was that she was going to ascend and turn into some kind of metaphysical existence, then I read the part about ‘the new body I’ve made for her’. Could it be a robot? I remember Dirk is superb with robotics. Pretty creepy of him to shove Rose’s consciousness into a robot, really. Kanaya isn’t going to be happy at all with this.

At least there’s still enough Rose in that head she wants to pick up stuff because of the memories. There’s still hope if she’s taken away from Dirk, perhaps? Hard to know. Rose hardly will be safe as long as Dirk has control over the narration, anyway.

Apparently Dirk knows nothing about jewelry, because he calls a necklace a ‘rock rope’. I know it’s unlikely the version of Earth he came from had any use for jewelry given...well...he was one of the two humans that remained alive and also everything was ruinous and gone, but seriously, Dirk, pay attention, haha! Rock rope, seriously...

I expect at least an aggravated retort, but nothing comes.

I glance back and see that her eyes have grown glassy and distant, like two round-cut amethysts. Her smile seems due less to fondness than stupefaction. The circles under her eyes are dark, and her head is cushioned on an arm bent beneath it. Keeping her eyes trained on me seems to be the only energy she’s able to expend anymore. The omniscience sickness is wreaking havoc on her. I should hurry up.

I’m glad I never had to feel whatever she’s going through. Not everyone can be built like me. It just means I carry a greater responsibility to take care of those more fragile. Especially the ones most important to me.

It sounds like Rose would have been going through a lot of trouble even if Dirk hadn’t been messing around with her head, but nothing of what he has done is good for her. Since she’s not in any condition to make sure Dirk picks up the right things, he just shoves everything in a bag or something and calls it a day.

ROSE: Are you sure Kanaya is going to be ok with this?

She’s so far gone she can’t even tell Kanaya of course wouldn’t be okay with this. Damn, Rose, this epilogue hasn’t been kind to you at all. First it makes you omniscient and have killer migraines, now it’s drying your brain like a raisin so maybe you can be shoved into a robot while you’re being taken out of the planet to who knows where. Then again, who has this epilogue been kind to?

Dirk states he’ll make Kanaya understand, by which I imagine he means he’ll make her go around the Earth as if she was playing Where in the World is Rose Lalonde. Given how Kanaya won’t accept anything that isn’t Rose being freed, talking to her won’t be an option.

Speaking of Kanaya, she’s currently rushing towards the apartment, possibly having noticed Rose is there, and stop to take out her phone and plan what she’ll say to Dirk.

Is she sure she’s not misunderstanding something? Could she have misread the signals, or falsely assigned nefarious intent to a perfectly innocent series of events?

Honestly at this point I doubt anything of what Dirk has said to her can be construed as a ‘perfectly innocent series of events’. I mean, almost all of it has been left up to imagination, but Dirk already admitted he’s okay with messing around with Kanaya, so I doubt he has even pretended to make it look like this isn’t a kidnapping.

By now it’s pretty clear where there’s orange text there’ll be gaslighting. He takes advantage of his narrative powers to fill Kanaya with doubts and make her think she’s misinterpreting so many things. He’s even making her doubt of maybe being with her is good for Rose. It gets to the point where she tries to call Rose again and, this time, Dirk lets her answer, most likely because he knows he has managed to get the reactions and feelings he wanted her to feel.

KANAYA: Rose Its Okay

KANAYA: I Know Everything

ROSE: You... you do?

KANAYA: Yes

KANAYA: I Understand Whats Going On Now

KANAYA: I Just Want You To Know

KANAYA: How Happy You Made Me

ROSE: Oh, Kanaya...

KANAYA: I Wont Be Long

KANAYA: I Just Need To Say A Couple Things

KANAYA: While I Can

KANAYA: Before I Get Too Emotional About This

KANAYA: I Finally Get It

KANAYA: I Know You And He Belong Together

KANAYA: I Really Hope You Will Both Be Happy

KANAYA: Wherever Youre Going And Whatever You Decide To Do

KANAYA: I Will Always Be Thinking Of You

KANAYA: And Be Grateful For The Life We Had Together

ROSE: I...

ROSE: I’ll always remember you, Kanaya.

ROSE: Thank you so much for understanding.

And with this the path is clear and Kanaya won’t interfere anymore. Dirk has once again gotten away with whatever he’s trying to do. Congratulations, Dirk. Now what? He takes the phone to speak to her. Now that Kanaya isn’t upset and raring to rescue Rose, they have a short conversation.

DIRK: You’ve probably heard by now that Jade is sick.

DIRK: In a coma or something? She’s in the hospital.

KANAYA: Yes

DIRK: I’ve got an antidote for that. Medicine of sorts.

DIRK: If you give it to her, it should wake her up almost immediately.

DIRK: I left it here on the counter in your apartment.

I sure as hell don’t trust anything Dirk can give them. I’m almost certain that supposed antidote or medicine is none of that, and will make her worse. What’s more, won’t this make them suspicious? This would certainly show Dirk knows more about what happened to Jade than what he has told them. Heck, as I mentioned last update, this isn’t the first time he has used tranquilizers. Someone should have been able to make the connection, no?

Dirk sedates Rose with his trademark horse tranquilizers and takes her away. Also...

It slips my mind to bring along her bag of stuff.

I find that impossible to believe. No way Dirk just forgot, he intentionally left that behind, Mr. Multitasking, the guy Jane said would be unlikely to forget even little details.

Back at Dave and Karkaroni’s home, they still were in denial about their defeat in the political world, and now are watching Jane’s inauguration. This is such a bad spectacle for them Dave immediately proposes to get drunk. He’s down with alcoholism now. Oh boy. He also has been wondering for a while if there was anything they could have done different that could have led to their victory. Hardly, as Jake’s endorsement was going to be the cornerstone of their victory, but he still wonders that.

DAVE: i just keep imagining what wouldve happened if that absurd rube goldberg machine of life ruining humiliation had been stopped at any point

DAVE: maybe just being backstabbed by his endorsement alone was something we couldve recovered from with some rigorous counter campaigning

DAVE: but what if i had been fast enough to cut him off before hed even said anything

DAVE: what if i hadnt accidentally fallen on him on the stage when i was rushing over there to stop him

DAVE: what if he hadnt freaked out like i set off fireworks next to a nam vet and started trying to fucking scrum me

DAVE: what if id just backed away from his punch with my legs like a normal person instead of warping the flow of time to escape causing him to become so startled he shit his pants

DAVE: what if i hadnt gotten so visibly grossed out by the smell that even the people watching it on tv could tell what had happened

DAVE: what if he hadnt started sobbing when the audience in the front rows started throwing up

DAVE: what if wed had better security and stopped that lady from running onstage during the fracas and announcing that jake has been dodging paying child support for their 3 kids

Ah.

...

You know, I’m not really a fan of Jake. He’s okay as a character, but I don’t like him that much. Still, I keep having the impression his entire existence in Homestuck for quite a while is to be the author’s punching bag. The guy can’t have any dignity, can he? That aside, Dirk wasn’t in charge of the narrative back then because he was busy ogling over John and Terezi’s heartfelt conversations, so all that happened without his intervention. Poor Jake...

Also, so many people are very into getting Karkaroni and Dave together. While I like that thought, it feels rather invasive of everyone to be so invested in it. At this rate they’ll make the relationship fail before it has even started.

Karkaroni is a bit relieved he didn’t win, but...after the humiliation of losing to anyone in such a public manner I imagine he’s not going to be thrilled with the attention. Even if he’s loved by the public it still will get some comments and words of support, and he’s not the type to take those things quietly. Good thing he almost doesn’t leave the hive.

If Karkat had anything resembling a spine, he’d turn to Dave with those big, sparkling shoujo eyes and finally open his tsundere heart to consummating their painfully obvious and mutually reciprocated passion

How quaint, my eyes somehow went blind momentarily as soon as the words ‘sparkling shoujo eyes’ were said in reference to Karkaroni. What a curious phenomenon.

Somehow, trying to manipulate Dave into confessing his feelings towards Karkaroni is the line Dirk refuses to cross. Really? That’s your line in the sand? Okay then. So he’s going to let these two handle things their way, although with some prodding via narrative, I suppose. Oh, that’s what this page will be about! I see! Alright, continue.

Karkaroni begins by thanking Dave for everything.

KARKAT: EVEN IF WE DIDN’T WIN, I’M GLAD WE TRIED.

KARKAT: I’M GLAD WE WENT THROUGH THIS TOGETHER.

DAVE: me too

KARKAT: MORE THAN ANYTHING, I... YOU...

KARKAT: YOU BELIEVE IN ME IN A WAY NOBODY EVER HAS BEFORE.

KARKAT: MORE THAN I’VE EVER BEEN ABLE TO BELIEVE IN MYSELF.

Aw, that’s sweet! He really appreciates the support and it’s easy for him to believe Dave means everything he says. When anyone else tells him they like and support him it feels like condescending kindness, but it’s different with Dave. That’s what Karkaroni is saying.

KARKAT: YOU’RE ON MY LEVEL. AND I’M ON YOURS.

KARKAT: I BELIEVE THAT YOU SEE ME IN FRONT OF YOU THE WAY I ACTUALLY AM, FOR BETTER OR WORSE, AND STILL LIKE ME ANYWAY.

KARKAT: SO EVEN THOUGH IT’S STILL HARD FOR ME TO BELIEVE IN MYSELF A LOT OF THE TIME,

KARKAT: I BELIEVE IN YOU, SO I DON’T NEED TO.

DAVE: so what youre saying is you believe in me who believes in you

They’re kindred spirits, pretty much. Even if they don’t get together, they’re likely to be good friends for a very long time, if not forever. That’ll do them both some good, especially in these coming times of bad economy and neoliberal austerity measures. Besides, without Jade messing around with ridiculous threesome thirst, things are bound to be less tense around here. The future is...not looking bright, but at least they’ll have each other as support.

KARKAT: YEAH, KIND OF?

KARKAT: FUCK, MAN. THAT’S KIND OF DEEP.

DAVE: i know

KARKAT: SO, YEAH.

KARKAT: THAT’S WHAT I’VE NEVER REALLY FELT BEFORE.

KARKAT: AND I’M GLAD YOU’RE...

KARKAT: THAT WE’RE...

Come on. You’re so close.

KARKAT: I’M GLAD YOU’RE MY FRIEND, DAVE.

Aw, that’s fantastic! Look at that, Karkaroni said aloud he appreciates Dave this much, and he did it to his face! This kind of thing is real difficult for him, so the fact he felt the spontaneous need to tell this to Dave is pretty nice. They have come quite a long way since their first interactions in like Act 3 or so.

Dave pretty much says ‘oh. Same.’, which is as much emotional reciprocation as Dave can give, I suppose, so I can’t give him much of a hard time. Dirk, on the other hand, is pretty much dying. If Dave and Karkaroni’s conversation is what makes Dirk quit controlling the narrative I’ll be so amused. This is going so well Dirk decides to press things a little, making Dave have some weird mental images and similes, but it does get Dave to continue talking.

Kind of rude to forget what you were talking about Karkaroni’s feelings, pal. Top notch friendship/almost romantic effort. But yeah, it’s now Dave’s turn to talk about his feelings, saying ‘same’ in more words.

DAVE: like maybe we feel the same way about certain things

DAVE: but what were saying and what were feeling

DAVE: maybe those arent exactly the same thing

DAVE: and maybe... we should...

KARKAT: WE SHOULD WHAT?

DAVE: maybe its time to

DAVE: talk

DAVE: about... that

Well, I guess this is progress?

KARKAT: THAT???

DAVE: yeah, like

DAVE: how... when you say were friends

DAVE: what... does that mean

KARKAT: THAT WE’RE FRIENDS?

DAVE: yeah but

DAVE: is that it?

DAVE: just friends

Oho, he’s pushing for it! Maybe Dave really feels something romantic towards Karkaroni. I’m actually a bit surprised he’s acting on that. While I personally did believe he did, I wasn’t really going to take it for granted unless more indication was given in the text and here it is. Alright!

KARKAT: OF COURSE NOT.

KARKAT: YOU’RE MY...........

KARKAT: B......

KARKAT: ......EST FRIEND.

DAVE: oh

DAVE: i see

It’s so unlike Karkaroni to hesitate like that. Does he feel the same too? I feel like, if he had no doubts about it, he’d have outright said ‘best friend’ without any ellipsis. Something in your mind, Karkaroni? Dave accepts it anyway, and that’s that. At least until Dirk keeps pressing things forward again. Geez, give them a break.

Alright, Dirk, can you not. Being too descriptive is a thing, you know.

Dave’s actually leaning forward for a kiss, Dirk making sure every little action Karkaroni does seems like he’s receptive to romantic overtures, until Dave realizes he’s having thoughts he’d never have. Which is true, really. The narration is really invasive.

KARKAT: WHAT’S WRONG?

KARKAT: DID I DO SOMETH—

DAVE: no

DAVE: i just cant

DAVE: shit

DAVE: it just feels like

It feels like nothing, Dave. Don’t worry about it.

DAVE: what the fuck is going on

DAVE: this feels really off

KARKAT: ????

DAVE: idk

DAVE: i just keep having thoughts i know id never think

He’s right. This is precisely why I say forcing things to happen is not a good idea. Look at that, it’s interfering. Way to go, Dirk, now stop metaphorically holding their head together as if they’re dolls you’re making kiss. All you did is make Dave all confused.

I take a deep breath and get myself under control. My light psychological intrusions may have only made things worse. Invested as I am in the outcome of this encounter, I know forcing their hand would be a mistake.

NO KIDDING.

If Dave passes that threshold not of his own will, it’d be a hollow victory anyway. There’s nothing I can do but settle down, step it back, and trust my boy to bring it home.

I think if Dirk forced things to happen this wouldn’t last, unless Dirk keeps his attention on their romantic relationship 24/7, and he obviously wouldn’t want to do that. Things would fall apart irreparably, I’d say, because these two are so emotionally constipated they would refuse to even consider the possibility of trying again. Just let things happen, if they happen.

What follows is several paragraphs of prose so purple I’m surprised the font is orange. Despite that it’s pretty well written, it’s descriptive and paints the scene pretty vividly. This may be the one time I like Dirk’s narration. Also, all that is being funneled into Dave’s head, so it’s like he has a narrator describing everything, which he doesn’t like. Dirk once again ruins everything when Dave had already progressed, and let me tell you, your loved one shouting in your face to some unseen influence is not attractive.

Before Karkaroni can ponder if Dave is losing his mind right in front of him, Dave just goes ahead with the kiss. There they go! What they wanted has happened. Now the thing to wonder is if it’ll last. Good luck to them!

God damn. I’m sorry. I’m blowing the description here, and missing a lot of good shit. It just caught me so off guard.

Honestly it’s better this way. No need for more, that was all that was needed. Brevity is the soul of wit, Dirk. Not that you have ever known the meaning of the word ‘brevity’.

I’m not going to intercede with a single word further, and I won’t let you, either. I won’t cheapen this beautiful moment with my base editorialization just to satisfy your voyeuristic curiousity. Frankly, I’m offended you’d even expect me to.

I expected it because you have as much tact as a baseball bat to the teeth, pal.

What they’re getting up to here is nobody’s business but theirs.

Davekat is canon, and that’s really all there is to say on the matter. Let’s give these crazy lovebirds some privacy and move on.

Thank goodness, make this twice I’m okay with Dirk’s narration. I better check outside and see what color is the moon right now. Oh, look, it’s blue. No wonder he’s being discreet.

So after these parts where Dirk was acceptable as the narrator, naturally he has to go and ruin it by meeting Jake the next page, where he immediately showers himself with rose petals and preens by bragging about any virtues he thinks he has. I’m not looking forward to him talking to Jake, especially not after the way he was talking about Jake back at the stadium for the endorsement speech. At the first sign of ridiculous gaslighting I’m calling this a day.

My guy Squarewave is here too. I need his help today, because there’s a lot of cargo to wrangle. He’s wheeling something around on a hand truck. Something about the height of Rose, roughly Rose-shaped, and wrapped in a cloth. I know she’s gonna love it the first time she sees it. But the only way she’ll be able to do that is when she’s awake and looking in a mirror.

Okay, it definitely will be a robot for Rose. Golly, there’s something really creepy about transferring a friend’s consciousness to a robot, especially when she’s in no condition to do anything about it. Then again, I suppose a robot’s processing power would help to deal with the sensory overload of all the visions and stuff. That must be Dirk’s reasoning, no? I wonder for Rose will react once she’s inside the robot, able to think clearly – if Dirk doesn’t stop her from thinking, of course.

Dirk goes straight to the point, telling he needs a spaceship, although he doesn’t mention it’s to run away from the planet. All he wants is something fast, to run away as quickly as he can to where nobody can bother him while he keeps his iron grip on everything from a distance, I suppose.

Apparently Jake thought he was going to join Dirk, so Dirk sets that straight. Now that this matter is settled, Jake asks a sensible question:

JAKE: So um... how long will you be away? Does kanaya know about all of these shenanigans?

DIRK: Yes.

DIRK: We’ve discussed it. She’s ok with it.

JAKE: Whew good to see theres no trouble in paradise. Theyve always had the most lovely marriage.

Boy that’s going to be awkward to discuss, if they ever do. There’s plenty of trouble in paradise, and all of them are shaped like Dirk.

Jake hasn’t gotten over his failed relationship with Dirk, and he asks him when he’ll be back from this romp in space. The news Dirk is never coming back devastates him. Oh hey, I just realized: is Terezi coming? This is what Dirk meant about letting her come along, right? Is she going to join them, dragging John’s corpse in a wallet? Should I expect a Terezi robot in the future?

Jake can’t come, not only because Dirk doesn’t want him anywhere near him, but also because he’ll have to support Jane in a reign that’s likely to last millions of years. Jake argues he knows nothing about strategy or policy, so I suppose he’ll stay because of his political capital? Whatever political capital he has left after the...shameful spectacle of the endorsement speech.

DIRK: Uh, Jake. Nobody wants you to do any of that.

DIRK: Well, I know Jane sure doesn’t.

JAKE: Then... what...

DIRK: You’ll just be, you know.

DIRK: Her candy boy?

JAKE: CANDY BOY???

DIRK: Yeah. Being on call.

DIRK: Serving a multimillion-year term of giving her the right kind of “presidential action” she needs to keep going. To keep her morale up and such.

DIRK: To provide her with many heirs.

DIRK: Doesn’t that sound cool?

I’m losing my patience with this ass and also with Condesce Jane. Scrolling down. Jake basically confesses he can’t live without Dirk’s presence, and Dirk puts all the blame on Jake. Where’s the arrow for the next page...ah, there it is.

Kanaya is looking for Jade’s hospital room, antidote in hand. She finds it and shows Roxy the antidote, ready to apply it to Jade. She doesn’t even explain what it is, she just injects it right away, and it doesn’t take long at all for Jade to start moving. An effective antidote! And when Jade opens her eyes, they’re green instead of black. She’s not possessed. Ah, so that’s why Dirk was okay with letting Jade wake up, she’s not under Dead Calliope’s control anymore.

Looks like during her trance there was still some sort of consciousness in her. She knows a lot, possibly in the same way Dirk, Rose and Terezi know a lot – by seeing a lot of alternate Jades. She’s taking it all rather well, without headaches or anything debilitating like what Rose had before going to see Dirk. She does have something, though: wrath. And it’s all directed at one person.

JADE: DIRK STRIDER HAS TO BE STOPPED!!!!!!!!!!

Damn right! Buuuut he’s kind of getting on a spaceship, so you’re running out of time for that. Then again, this is Jade, the one with space powers. That has to be some sort of advantage.

The next page is Dirk’s justification for his actions. It’s nothing really worthwhile, mostly that he wanted to be a good person and thought of himself that way, but given what he had to do and what powers he had, it was impossible to come across as anything but the villain, and that he admitted he was the villain now. From all this page there’s only a couple things worth going deeper into, I’d say. Let’s see...

If my agenda was to try as hard as I could to make sure no one thought I sucked, what the fuck would ever get done? How would I go about taming this world, or shaping reality for the better? And if I didn’t bother pursuing those goals, and thereby tacitly accepting the untold suffering that resulted from my inaction, wouldn’t that make me a bad person? If I try and succeed, I’m a hero, right? And if I try and fail, at least I made things interesting on my way to the grave. There would be a tragic nobility in that. And the way I see it, settling for anything less from my arc would be, frankly, pathetic.

Right. Can’t say I understand what Dirk’s plan is, other than it seems like it’s to assimilate everyone under one big god or something – most likely in a metaphorical manner – but other than that there hasn’t really been any kind of information about it. That aside, there’s something else to touch in this part.

Be okay with everyone hating you because you know what you’re doing is for the better? It’s more than fine. Has a lot of potential and grounds for some good personal conflict. It’d indeed be tragically noble. Buuuut none of what I read in this epilogue says it’s a tragically noble. In terms of writing, Dirk seriously is going to succeed on making every character in Homestuck loathe him, judging by the way Jade already woke up and is ready to scream her head off about how Dirk has to be stopped, so he has that much right. All that is more than fine, and it certainly would be a hella interesting story if it wasn’t an epilogue.

The problem is that Dirk controlled the narrative and showed exactly what was going on in his head. The reader could see very clearly what he thought of everyone, the reader saw what kind of choice words he had to say about people like John or Jake or anyone else. The reader saw all the disdain towards pretty much everything and how Dirk kept patting himself on the back. After all that, this entire page of Dirk justifying how it’s okay if he’s the villain comes across as very delusional. It’s pretty hard to think of any of this as ‘tragic nobility’ when the narrative showed very well he’s pretty rotten to the core.

Which would have been excellent if this had been anything other than Homestuck, really. It’d have been such an interesting thing, and so enjoyable. Alas. Still going to talk about that once I’m done with the epilogue.

The other thing I think is worth seeing is this:

That’s why when someone finally comes knocking for the price I owe, I’ll fully welcome it. By then it’ll have been a long time coming, and I’ll probably have done more than my share to make sure, somewhere along the way, it all got put into motion. What good is a villain who doesn’t have a satisfying dramatic comeuppance in store for him? So yeah, the next time I die, let’s pencil it in as a Just Death. And let’s also have it on good authority that the next time Dave cuts off my head, it’ll be for good.

I’ll be looking forward to that day just as much as the next guy.

He already has decided how it’ll be. I don’t doubt he’ll let it happen because, well, he controls the narrative, and my guess is that he wouldn’t let anyone but Dave kill him. Who better than him? And in what other manner but making the meme happen once again? Even during death Dirk Strider has to stick to his memes. Wouldn’t be surprised if when the time comes he intentionally writes things so Dave decapitates him instead of, say, stab him through the gut with the sword.

Aaaalso, is this implying said ‘satisfying dramatic comeuppance’ isn’t coming in this epilogue? Kind of say that coming, really. I heard the Meat epilogue has forty-something pages and this is page 41. There’s not really a lot of space left to do a dramatic confrontation that’s not rushed, unless you forgo everything like setting it up and just teleport everybody to the moment of Dirk’s death. Then again, this is Homestuck. Clean, tidy conclusions aren’t really its thing, haha, so I didn’t really think there’d be any kind of confrontation with Dirk. If Lord English didn’t get one in the story itself, why would Dirk Strider of all people get it?

The next page starts with quite the long conversation. Let’s see...

So, Jade is immediately alarmed while Kanaya is appeasing her, saying everything is okay. Roxy is going to be so confused, being the only one here who hasn’t been involved in Dirk’s antics at all. Now that I think about it, Roxy is the only one who hasn’t been kicked to the curb by this epilogue, I suppose it’s because she’s been pretty much a nonentity during the epilogue except for a conversation or two that didn’t really have anything to do with the other plots. Then again, Calliope had even less and she ended traumatized.

KANAYA: Hes Going To Take Good Care Of Rose

KANAYA: Probably Much Better Than Id Ever Be Able To

KANAYA: Ill Miss Her But Im At Least Thankful For That

JADE: THANKFUL??

JADE: kanaya...

JADE: did

JADE: did dirk KIDNAP ROSE?!

Yes! He very much did! Make sure when you rescue her her mind is in her body instead of inside a robot. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to convince everyone to take an empty husk away, saying she’s in a coma or something.

Things are so bad Roxy sounds indignant. I feel bad for her, it’s going to be tough to hear such things about one of her oldest friends. Jade asks questions to find out if Kanaya being okay with these developments was an attitude she arrived to by her own volition or if Dirk influenced her in some manner. As soon as the answer is said she knows it’s Dirk’s influence.

It’s fine, Kanaya. Why don’t we just say I’m invoking the mercy rule here. Jade is onto me obviously. But I wouldn’t have even let her wake up if there was anything you all could do about it by now. As the cherub resurfaces in her mind, I’ll be fading out of here soon anyway. I don’t see any reason to keep my dear friends in limbo any longer than they need to be.

So he doesn’t mind if Dead Calliope takes over Jade again – and possibly the narrative. Sounds to me like Dirk got away with whatever he was doing, then. If he can let go of the narrative, then he doesn’t need it anymore. Oof, not good. He cares so little he even gives Kanaya her own sane judgment back. How smug of him.

KANAYA: Wait

KANAYA: I Dont...

KANAYA: Im Confused

ROXY: ???

KANAYA: Why Didnt I At Least

KANAYA: Demand To See My Wife Before They Departed While I Had Dirk On The Phone

ROXY: omg u didnt even SEE her before she left??

KANAYA: No

KANAYA: At The Time It Didnt Feel Right To Ask I Guess

KANAYA: I Was So Devastated I Thought

KANAYA: That I Should Just

KANAYA: I Dont Know What I Thought

KANAYA: What

KANAYA: What Was I THINKING?

JADE: :(

She must be furious. It’s not everyday she lets go of her quirk like that. From the position my scrolling bar is at right now, I see more full caps. Kanaya, do you still have chainsaws? I can imagine Kanaya revving up the chainsaw right now. Dirk should consider himself lucky he may be already in outer space.

Seriously, it’s pretty hard to think of Dirk’s actions as ‘tragically noble’ when he’s patting his own back so hard he’s going to sprain his shoulder.

Without even knowing the details Kanaya is already certain Dirk has corrupted her in some manner, because otherwise Rose wouldn’t have acted like she did. She’s not wrong! And then she vows to make him pay, and pay dearly he will. That part I’m afraid won’t happen, as I’m pretty sure Dave will be the one to give the final blow, and chainsaws kind of make deadly injuries so she can’t do anything.

Since Jade’s the one with the answers, Kanaya demands to hear them, impatiently ignoring Jade’s words about anything that doesn’t seem related to Dirk at first. True to dramatic yet cheesy writing, all Jade manages to say is...

JADE: im trying to get to that!

JADE: the thing with dirk is...

JADE: is...

Whooops, here comes Dead Calliope. Hi! And this time Dirk is okay with it because his plans are already underway, so he doesn’t mind giving the dead cherub this advantage. Dead Calliope will give Jade back only when Dirk is so far away he’s not a danger to anyone, and given how he’s already far away and in control...well that’s going to be a long while.

they will know what to do, when they are ready.

Ha ha. Sure. They’ll all just hop in a spaceship and go on a wild goose chase trying to hunt me down. I know that already. It’s really not rocket science. Except for the fact that it literally is.

Can it really be called a wild goose chase when it’s a foregone conclusion they’ll succeed? You know they will, you’re even expecting that with some eagerness. It may take them a looooong time, but they’ll reach Dirk someday. A few of these people have an eternity to do so, after all. I imagine others will come along once they find out what happened, too. I’m pretty confident Jane would be the only one who wouldn’t, and that’s because she’ll be too busy implementing her reign of terror.

kanaya drops to the floor and begins weeping again. she feels the sorrow anew from her wife’s departure, with a sense of rage and pain unshrouded by the veil of the prince. neither she nor her friends will have to worry about him anymore, so long as they remain on this planet and under my protection.

Well! Sorry to disappoint, Dead Calliope, but the odds they’ll remain on this planet and do nothing after two of them stated pretty clearly Dirk has to be stopped and kidnapped someone are...pretty low. I just hope Dead Calliope isn’t going to get in their way when they finally get going.

KANAYA: He Has To Be Stopped...

huddled on the floor, she repeats this pledge to herself. theoretically, he could be stopped before he leaves, if they hurried. they would need to know what to do, where to go, and to have the motivation to do it, but time is short. i could push them to, with a certain degree of intervention, but i will not. my unwillingness to do so is what separates me from him. and what corporeal life needs now is someone presiding over them who is nothing like him at all.

So Dead Calliope would just be an observer narrating everything, I guess. She wouldn’t intervene or push anyone around unless they were insulting the mighty lollipop. That’d be the extent of her actions, hm...having free will sounds really nice, I must say. It wouldn’t be so bad for this to be the status quo.

This is the end of the page. This update is already quite long, so I’ll cut it here. In the next one I’ll finish the meat epilogue.

Next update: next time

#homestuck #homestuck liveblog #webcomics #liveblog #webcomic liveblog

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galaxyacerodoesart · 6 years ago

Photo

Me: Oh, I should go back at drawing some more “normal” stuff for the Sanders Sides fandom..i sure miss those guys just by themselves! No AUs, just them! c:

Also Me: I WILL throw my shitty cursed Sanderstuck AU at your guys faces and you all WILL ENJOY IT.

AKA. Homestuck Panel Edits are fun, and i won’t be letting go of my Sanderstuck AU too soon, so ya’ll better be ready for panel edits of this cursed AU in the future, because they certainly are fun to make asfsadjkasdklasj

All of my Sanderstuck sprites can be find HERE AND! Under Read more some background story for what is going on in this picture AND Virgil/Roman relationship in the AU in case anyone is interested in my train of thought during the making of this, BE WARNED THOUGH, it is long. I like to talk and give things details, don’t blame me >:’T

First, without getting too into the story itself of the AU, Virgil and Roman relationship in this AU is simple:

At the Start, they couldn’t stand each other, their opinions and views on things were pretty much opposites, with Roman always trying to see the bright side of things while Virgil would jump straight to the bad and pessimistic side of things, so basically no matter what Roman would bring up to the table, Virgil would point the bad side of every single one of his ideas, which would lead to their endless rants and fights. They would talk with each other to begin with,mainly because both were friends with Logan and Patton (so they basically were dragged into conversations together by them). When shit hit the fan and Sburb happens, and everyone is dragged to pretty much save the universe, Virgil is obviously TERRIFIED and ready to just die and be the reason the universe ceased to exist in the first place, while Roman is seeing it as all he ever dreamed of (Being the hero?! Saving not only the world, BUT THE UNIVERSE?! Count he in) so again, their views of things clashed against one another, Roman wanting to jump and fight to the “greater good” and Virgil not believing for one second they can pull this through, eventually going with Roman saying Virgil wouldn’t be needed to end the game at all, since everything he did was bring everyone’s spirits down anyway (Which is definitely a lie, as, ironically, both him AND Virgil are the most important players, being a Space and Time players respectively, but obviously Roman isn’t aware of that at the start) this leads to a pretty awful tension in the team, as after hearing that Virgil isn’t talking to anyone for what feels like ages, completely isolating himself until he finally seems to just dissapears. Plot related things happen, with Virgil ending up going Grimdark at some point, just in time for Roman to come to terms and realize (with a lot of explanation and help realizing some shit from Logan, Patton, Thomas and even Remy) HOW WRONG he was about Virgil’s part in their game, and about Virgil as a person in general. His negative view of things weren’t his way to try to bring Roman’s ideas down, but to actually improve them, since pretty much all the time, all the “criticism” he received from Virgil would have improved his ideas if he just stopped to listen. Virgil wasn’t hating on everything Roman did, he actually cared so much about it, that he would try to make sure they were perfect, so everything would go well and no one would get hurt. After realizing that, Roman sets off to try to find and apologize to Virgil, so they can start from zero and actually become friends.

Meanwhile, on Virgil’s side, he literally isolated himself in the void believing everyone would be better without him holding them back like that, that was part of the reason at least, what he would never tell a soul, is that the words Roman threw at him did hit him HARD, since as far as he could remember, Virgil always admired Roman’s way of seeing things, and honestly wished he could see things as positively and passionate as he did, and would be lying to himself if he said he may or may not had develop some sort of crush on the other, but being to scared to do any sort of move, he just kept that little detail to himself, so yeah, Roman words really did hurt him. When Roman and the others FINALLY find Virgil, they all try to reach for him but he was into the void and believing in Roman’s words for so long, that it seemed almost impossible to pull him back, ending with the last person they would think would help to actually solve the issue and bring Virgil out of the void and out of his Grimdark state: Dolian. Sure, he was a Void Player, but no one really imagined he would be willing to help out like that, but since everyone was too busy crying tears of happiness to have Virgil back, they let it slide. When he is able to finally talk with Virgil, Roman tells him all he realized while he was gone, and gives the most sincere apologize he can manage, to which Virgil accepts after understanding Roman’s side of things.

Time jump a few weeks, everyone is gathered around the same living-space at this point (Think the meteor in Homestuck where Kanaya, Rose, Karkat, Dave and Terezi stay, it’s pretty much the same thing) Roman does keep his word of trying to understand more Virgil way of thinking, and slow but surely, they get to the point where they can call each other “friends” which while is amazing (Patton is SO proud of his boys omg) things definitely aren’t easy on Virgil’s heart, as the silly crush he had on Roman before Sburb happened only gets stronger now that both are on actual good terms, Virgil only ever told Logan about said crush, as he know the others wouldn’t tell a soul about it, or make a big event of it, so at that point, Logan is Virgil’s “to go talk about this stupid crush” guy. At one point, already getting enough of all that, Logan just straight up suggests that Virgil just TELLS Roman how he feels, literally going on saying “Realistic, we literally don’t know if we will even survive the events of this game, so you really don’t have anything to lose by telling him how you feel” to which Virgil panics almost screaming how he “can’t just tell someone how much he loves them” which had Logan responding with “Then just write your feelings down. Not saying you will need to send him a letter saying how you feel, but it might make things easier for you to get all this pressure out of your shoulders” to which Virgil reluctantly agrees. Unknown to BOTH of them, Roman was hearing the whole conversation (Don’t blame him, the space they are isn’t exactly huge, and neither of them really were using indoor voices anyway) although he doesn’t really know WHO IS the person they are talking about as no name was dropped any time, all Roman knows, is that Virgil has a crush on someone and is struggling to tell them. Which, surprise surprise, low key hurts Roman, who was actually starting to develop a crush on Virgil as well, now that he knew who he really was. And no, of course at no point Roman stops to consider he might be the person Virgil is talking about, he hurt Virgil in the past right?! His words and stupid beliefs almost lead to Virgil being completely lost and left to die in the void, no way Virgil would have a crush on him after all that. Whoever, for the first time in what seems forever, Roman decides to push his own feelings and needs aside, and actually focus on Virgil’s instead. If Virgil needed help confessing to who he loved, he was going to help him! That’s what friends do, he owned him after all he did! He was a hopeless romantic anyway, if there was one thing he knew, was how to confess to someone, so even if it hurt, Roman would make Virgil and whoever he liked be together and happily ever after! It is what Virgil deserves, happiness, right?! Who cares about his own feelings, Roman would be fine. He probably didn’t deserve Virgil anyway, not after all he has done to him.

And unknown to both, Roman and Virgil, literally everyone in that place knows about their crushes on each other, they are obvious like that. But they all respect their own wishes and are willing to let them tell each other their feelings in their own time. Which sadly seems like it will take a while because, goddammit, those two are slow when they want to.

SOOO YEAH. That’s pretty much how Prinxiety works in this AU. Two idiots who clearly love each other, but one doesn’t know how to tell the other, and the other don’t believe he deserves to be with the other after all he did to him. The idea behind the panel I edited is pretty much a follow of the last details i explained, Virgil writing his feelings down on letters that (if depending on him) will never really be given to Roman, while Roman wants to help Virgil write his heart out, because “he owns him for everything he did in the past”, despite the fact he would want nothing more than be together in a relationship with Virgil at that point, and Virgil obviously trying to push him aside because “HELLO?! HOW CAN I WRITE DOWN ABOUT MY CRUSH FOR YOU IF YOU ARE LITERALLY NEXT TO ME?! NO, STOP! DON’T YOU DARE READ ANYTHING IN THAT PAPER!!!” but Roman isn’t giving up on helping him so he can finally be happy like he deserves to be.

#sanders sides #virgil sanders #roman sanders #sanderstuck #prinxiety #??? i guess...it's implied lmao #well it definitely happens in the future so...yeah. prinxiety.#my art #homestuck #hs #They are a mess. That's it that's their relationship.#Roman would eventually realize Virgil was crushing on him tho don't worry #he may or may not finally get the chance to read one of the letters Virgil make after a long time #and then they just become this awfully cute couple with Roman always showering Virgil with love because he wants to make him happy.#also not only double dates with Logicality happens #TRIPLE DATES with logicality + Dolian/Remy/Emile as well aw yis #Thomas does end up being the only single one until they end the game and remake the universe tho dajdkljaks #at least for now since I can't think of anyone to pair Thomas with PFFF :')#sorry Thomas :'v

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blatherkatt · 7 years ago

Text

Title: The Calm Is Terrifying When The Storm Is All You Know [Homestuck]

Chapter 33: Declarations

Summary: There were two kinds of trolls who went to Earth: rich shitheads with too much money and free time, and desperate assholes who couldn’t survive on Alternia, even with the best efforts of the young Condesce. Karkat hated the planet almost immediately, but with his home planet too dangerous for mutants, he really didn’t have any choice but to hide out on this weird little diurnal planet. At least he’d be safe. Or so he thought, right before blundering his way into an accidental friendship with the son of an anti-troll terrorist.

Rating: M

Chapter Warnings: Implied/Mentioned abuse, mentions of terrorism, death mention, injury mention, depiction of an emotional breakdown, trauma aftermath; Illustrated; Pesterlog

FIRST | PREVIOUS | NEXT

— carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling tipsyGnostalgic [TG] —

CG: WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?

— tipsyGnostalgic [TG] is an idle chum! —

CG: FUCK YOU, I CAN SEE THAT FOR MYSELF, YOU PIECE OF SHIT PROGRAM. I’M GONNA FUCKING YELL ANYWAY.

CG: I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO PICK ME UP AT NOON. IT’S LIKE, 1:30 AND YOU STILL AREN’T HERE, WHAT GIVES?

CG: IF YOU GOT KIDNAPPED, TOO, I SWEAR TO FUCK I’M PERSONALLY PUTTING THIS ENTIRE GODDAMN FAMILY UNDER PERMANENT WATCH.

CG: I’M NOT ABOVE SITTING ON YOU ASSHOLES IF THATS WHAT IT TAKES.

TG: okay first off i know youre like a literal alien but heres a protip for ya:

TG: general human earth etiquette is to not text people who you know are probably driving?

TG: its like a whole thing

CG: WHY

TG: idk probs because texting while driving’s a great way to fucking crash lol

TG: anyway!!

TG: yeah im real sorry about that mom fucking rang me up like

TG: hi im at the airport come get me!

TG: out of fucking nowhere because everything has to be a fucking hassle with this woman

TG: so i had to go get her

CG: WHY THE FUCK WAS SHE AT THE AIRPORT?

TG: because fuck me is why

TG: and THEN shes like

TG: ooooh i gotta do some mysterious whatthefuckever errand at some mall out in the middle of nowhere

TG: so now im sitting in the parking lot waiting for her to get back which might be a while because her bad leg’s been acting up lately

TG: and thats why im not there yet >:(

CG: WAIT. WAIT, HOLD ON, I’M CONFUSED.

CG: BY “MOM” ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT RACHEL? I DIDN’T EVEN THINK SHE HAD A BAD LEG.

TG: nonono

TG: ray is like. dirk and dave and rose’s mom

TG: i dont call her mom i just call her aunt ray cuz shes not my mom yknow

TG: my mom is aunt ray’s sister

TG: aunt ramona? they talk about her?

CG: OOOOOOH. YEAH.

CG: THE WOMAN WHO WRITES THOSE SHITTY SUPERNATURAL ROMANCE BOOKS KANAYA LOVES.

TG: hahaha yeah her trashy shit is great

CG: SHE’S HERE?

TG: apparently!!!!!!!!

CG: I’M SENSING SOME BITTERNESS.

TG: ugh its fine she just always does shit like this

TG: womans always gotta make a fuckin entrance even if that means not telling anyone shes coming

TG: and its goddamn annoying as shit!!

TG: but its fine i get it shes here to help out and we are kinda all hands on deck

TG: speaking of tho i heard something about kanaya not coming along after all?

CG: NOT YET, NO.

CG: SHE’S BEEN TALKING TO ROSE, AND APPARENTLY DAVE’S BEEN PRETTY UNEASY WITH THE NUMBER OF NEW FACES AT THE HIVE.

CG: HOUSE. WHATEVER.

CG: TEREZI’S PROTECTION DETAIL HAS HIM KIND OF ON EDGE, I GUESS?

CG: SHE’S GONNA COME AROUND LATER PROBABLY. AND MIGHT END UP STAYING WITH PORRIM AND KEEP IT TO VISITS, AT LEAST UNTIL THINGS SETTLE DOWN A BIT.

CG: SO IT’S JUST ME FOR NOW.

TG: ooooh yeah geez i bet

TG: poor dave :( :( :(

TG: i gotta tell you and mom some uh. serious shit about him when i pick you both up

TG: id pass it on here but its probs better if i just tell you face to face?

CG: OH, WONDERFUL!

CG: MORE NO DOUBT HORRIFIC NEWS REGARDING DAVE.

CG: I CAN’T WAIT. THIS PANIC ATTACK’S GONNA BE ONE FOR THE RECORD BOOKS, I CAN JUST FEEL IT!!!

TG: :(

TG: tl;dr hes not in great shape but hes getting better but theres some stuff we gotta go over

TG: jfc mom what the fuck are you doing its been ages

CG: SO WAIT. SHE JUST HAD YOU DRIVE HER OUT SOMEWHERE AND WALKED OFF ALONE?

TG: yeah

TG: woman can take care of herself just fine so like im not worried??

TG: but still, like. cmon woman!!! whatever it is hurry up a little

TG: it cant be that important we got places to be

In terms of location, it was almost an outlet mall; somewhat detached from the nearest city and surrounded by forest. It was mostly all one building, positioned in a dip in the ground next to a clear stream, and these features had helped make it a serviceable fortress during the invasion, although Derek had regularly complained that he’d have preferred a site that held the high ground. Still, they’d made do; the roof was high enough that one could see for quite some distance, the stream offered fresh water, the trees provided decent enough cover during skirmishes, and the walls were thick enough to turn away most weather and weapons. It hadn’t been much, but it had served well enough as home for six years for around threescore ragtag survivors-turned-fighters.

Out in the surrounding forest, those who hadn’t survived that conflict still lay buried in pitiful graves marked only with a stone or a chunk of wood. There hadn’t been time to properly put anyone to rest; it had been risky enough for two or three people to slip out during a stretch of quiet with a shovel and a body. They simply hadn’t been able to afford to have any sort of formal burial, not with the threat of an attack constantly looming.

Even so, even so…

Derek had picked a spot he would remember.

In life, the oak tree would have been the kind people would have thought of as a monarch, with branches spread wide and gnarled wood ancient and strong, holding children in its branches as easily as if they were made of nothing; but the tree had already been dead by the time the invasion started, a great, ancient, dried-out husk. Even so, decades later, it still stood, its branches reaching toward the sky, the other trees forming a circle around it as though too respectful to come too close. Mushrooms and trails of greenery crept about a quarter of the way up the ancient trunk.

At its roots, a rotting wooden spar stuck up out of the ground. This, too, had been reclaimed by flowers, grasses and mushrooms, decorating the splintered and decayed timber with dark summer greens and pale white-and-lavender blooms.

Derek Strider, down on one knee with his sheathed sword held in his right hand, sighed. Of course, the trouble with having to bury the dead so hastily meant that there’d been no one to look over the graves, so it was to be expected that it be in such disrepair, but even so, seeing this one choked out by the invading flora was…

It wasn’t right.

Overhead, the ancient branches rustled slightly, and the raucous calling of a bird broke the silence. Derek narrowed his eyes and ignored it, tried to write the disrespectful noise out of the scene.

The crow seemed to have other ideas. The bird lighted down on the wooden grave marker, red eyes fixed on Derek’s face. It flapped its wings a few times, cawing incessantly. Derek scowled, unsheathed his sword, and struck —

The blade passed through the bird with no resistance whatsoever. The creature’s body split in two, bloodlessly, as though Derek had cut through smoke — it even looked like smoke, like a cloud cut in two by a passing jet. As Derek looked on, uncomprehending and with a growing sense of dread, the bird’s body seemed to pull itself back together, a video played in reverse, and the bird’s accusatory squawks started up again as though nothing had happened.

Derek was on his feet in an instance, stepping away from the beast, and as he did, he happened to look up…

Perched on nearly every branch of the old tree were ravens. Unlike the crow, they were all silent, and aside from the occasional shifting of a foot or tilting of a head, motionless. Scores of staring animal eyes bored into him.

Derek had never been a superstitious man, but nor was he the sort of fool to ignore the truth his own eyes showed him. He’d spent six years fighting alongside a witch, and seen enough to learn that some things really couldn’t be explained away as coincidence.

Had it been anyone else, he would have responded to the sound of footsteps approaching this site with a furious attack; even Ben knew better than to disturb him here. But when he whirled to face the intruder, he froze.

She’d aged more since he’d last seen her than he would have expected. Hints of silver streaked her hair, and she leaned heavily on her gnarled black cane. A faint breeze stirred the black fabric of her dress, playing with the light shawl laying across her shoulders. The crow had fallen silent.

“Put that thing away before you take someone’s eye out,” said Ramona, nodding nonchalantly at Derek’s sword.

Derek narrowed his eyes, and did not respond aloud, instead choosing to slowly and deliberately slide the sword back into its sheathe. Only after his left hand had returned to his side did Ramona nod and continue.

“That’s better,” she said. “Now we can talk things over like reasonable adults. Mind you, I ought to do the world a favor and wipe you out right now,” and Derek took a slow, deep breath at that, as she continued, “But I’d prefer not to desecrate your brother’s grave by staining it with your blood. I respect him far too much for that. You, however, have somehow managed to exceed all of my worst expectations to a nearly unfathomable degree, as of late. I’ve held off on this confrontation out of respect for the past, but I can see now that this was a mistake.”

Derek shifted. “Everything I’ve done has been to protect our damn planet, Ramona,” he started, but was cut off.

“Really?” she said, “Well, then. I’m not about to attempt to ask you to cease killing trolls, as we both know that would be pointless, but I would very much like to know how exactly burning your own son alive plays into your grand battle strategy?”

“He…he turned on us,” Derek said, through gritted teeth, “He forced my hand, left me no choice!”

“He is a child!” Ramona snapped. “And you, of all people, should know better! If you really must follow this path of self-destruction to its end, fine, but he should never have been involved!”

“I—”

“And in any case, you had a perfectly good sword on hand, I’m sure. If young Dave really did need to die, you could have executed him with minimal pain, but no, you wanted him to hurt, to know he was dying and to fear you and suffer as he passed. How do you justify that, Derek? How does anyone, especially a child, deserve anything of the sort?”

The eyes of the ravens and that damned crow still drilled into him. He could feel the stares on his back, but kept his eyes locked on Ramona’s, refusing to back down.

He wasn’t going to take back what he’d done. There’d be no guilt, he’d done nothing wrong except overreact a bit. It was justified. That…that boy wasn’t Dave. Ramona was using the name like a blade, but she’d not win that way. He didn’t deserve the fucking name, didn’t deserve to have anything to do with Dave, he never would have let Rachel name the kid that if he’d known he was going to grow up to be such a pathetic, useless little coward.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” he said.

“No, I suppose you don’t,” said Ramona, folding her hands over the top of her cane. “I’ve a fairly good idea, in any case.” She sighed. “The war is over, Derek. The time to put aside this violence and misery is long since behind us. Our children do not deserve to grow up as we did.”

“The trolls are still here,” Derek spat.

There was a long silence. Ramona sighed again.

“Fine, then,” she said, “So be it. Do as you will. Chase violence as long as you like. But if you come near my family again, I will consider it an act of war.”

She turned, and he was tempted to take the bait, to try attacking her while her back was turned, but he held still. It was infuriating, knowing what a pointed insult turning her back on him was, knowing that she knew he would not risk attacking her—but she was right. She was much too dangerous.

“Come along, little one,” she said, abruptly. The crow rose off the grave and flew to land on top of Ramona’s cane. If Derek had cared to pay any attention, he might have noticed the crow look back at him with something like regret in its eyes, but Derek was already far too lost in his own thoughts.

As one bird, the ravens took wing, dispersing in all directions, leaving him alone again.

The trouble with trying to go from Alternian to English was a multifaceted one, to be sure, but so far the most obnoxious piece of it that Karkat could see was the tendency of guides on how to speak English to simply use the closest Alternian equivalent as an English word’s translation. More and more, the two languages were notably extremely different, and while he could speak English well enough that he’d never had any serious problems, there were any number of words that he kept tripping over as a result of a translation being extremely unclear and culturally misleading.

Witches, for instance, were clearly something very different on Earth. The Alternian word that was translated to English as “witch” was, like most Alternian words, a series of noises in the ‘click and growl’ family that most humans lacked the anatomy to create, and generally refered to certain lowblood prophets and healers in Alternian folklore. They were those who lived away from society and who, through some lucky genetics and convenient psychic powers, were able to fend of drones and effectively disappear from the world at large’s knowledge. They kept to themselves, sought to harm no one who didn’t attack them first, offered shelter to the weak and the hunted, and as such were always portrayed as utterly despicable beings in fiction, as no writer with any sense of self-preservation had dared to portray such reckless treachery under the rule of the last Condesce. There might have been some changes to the lore under the new one’s rule, but things like that changed slow.

In any case, they certainly weren’t anything like the old woman in a shawl who was sitting next to Roxy in the front of her car.

She was dressed all in black, for one thing. Alternian witches didn’t tend to wear much black. Some Alternian witches didn’t tend to wear all that much clothing at all, really. Most seemed to belong to ancient religions that weren’t particularly fond of shirts.

Ramona was definitely magic as shit, though, Rachel’d been right about that much. Was that all a witch was on Earth, just someone with magic? Fuck, if that were the case, then probably like at least a third of all trolls were witches by Earth’s standards. Then again, maybe magic was another poorly translated word? English didn’t seem to have a word to separate “things that we (read: trolls) know exist, like psychic powers and psiionics and ghosts and chucklevoodoos,” and “things that are super fake and don’t actually happen ever and make no sense.”

Whatever. In any case, Ramona didn’t look at all like Karkat had expected, and when he climbed into the back of the car, she didn’t react to his presence with anything stronger than an amiable nod. She seemed to have her mind on other things, and was largely silent at first.

Roxy wasn’t; she immediately piped up happily as Karkat swung open the door with a “Hey, man! Sorry about taking so long! Can you, uh, do me a favor and check on Jaspers? He’s in the carrier behind Mom, Rose asked me to pick him up while she and Aunt Ray were gone. He’s been missing them a lot, all staring out the window and kneading his blanket and shit, and he’s not a huge fan of car rides.”

“He’s asleep,” Karkat said after glancing into the little crate.

“Awesome. Alright, buckle up and we’ll get this damn show on the road.”

“On the road again, just can’t wait to get on—”

Karkat tilted his head as the car’s radio abruptly changed from quietly playing some human pop song over to something much louder and completely different. Ramona stifled a snort as Roxy stabbed a button, switching the radio back to the previous channel.

“No, thank you,” she said, glaring. “Christ, the fuck is with this thing today, I swear to god.”

“I suppose it may simply be getting into the spirit of things,” said Ramona with a smile. As the car pulled away from the curb, she turned back a bit to face Karkat. “It’s Karkat, isn’t it? Rachel’s been sending me any number of emails with updates, and from the sound of things, you’ve been rather instrumental in bringing young Dave back into the fold, so to speak.”

“…Into the what?”

“It’s a figure of speech, meaning in this case that you’ve helped us return him home as well as helping him to adjust to being there,” she said. “For which you have all of our heartfelt thanks. Ours is perhaps not the most functional of families, but it is ours, and as I’m sure you’ve seen firsthand, ripping away a piece of it the way Derek did has had some very painful consequences for all involved. We owe you a great deal.”

“Yeah, man!” Roxy said. “And from what Rose has been telling me, you were kind of a big part of why he finally spilled what he knows. Which, he did bee-tee-dubs, which means he’s off house arrest finally, so that’s good—”

“—And a partridge in a pear tree,” the radio crackled.

“What the fuck? It’s August,” Roxy scowled. She turned the radio off altogether as Ramona glanced hurriedly out the window.

“Speaking of Dave,” Karkat said, hopefully before anyone got distracted again, “Roxy, you mentioned that there was something that you needed to say face to face?”

“Right, shoot, yeah,” said Roxy. The car turned onto the long road that led eventually to the Lalonde hive. “Okay, so, like. There’s definitely some shit you should know before we get there, but I wanna preface it all real clearly by saying that Dave’s okay, y’know? He’s got a lot of healing to do, but the doctors said that as long as he’s looked after and we change bandages and shit and he gets plenty of rest, he’s definitely not in any danger anymore. He’s…weak, but he’s not like gonna keel over at any moment, okay?”

“Not actually making me feel any better, Roxy!” said Karkat. Oh, boy, with a preface like that…

“Well, fuck, I tried, I guess. Uh. So, Dave did get hurt…pretty bad, and there were some other complications—oh, for fuck’s sake!!”

“Watch me, watch me, hey, watch me, watch me!” The radio was louder than ever. Ramona’s hand flew up, poorly hiding a grin.

Karkat leaned around Roxy’s seat to glare at her.

“What the fuck, Roxy,” said Karkat.

“I’m not doing this!” Roxy said, waving her hand wildly. “I swear to fuck, I wouldn’t! I really do need to pass on some shit about poor Dave, and the radio’s never done this before? It’s been acting up since a little before we picked you up, keeps changing on its own and shit, augh!”

She fought with the controls, but the song stopped only for a moment before getting even louder.

“Why the fuck do you humans even have this obnoxious song?! Who listens to this?? It’s literally just some squawking wiggler screeching for its lusus’s attention!”

“I mean, I kinda love it for that honestly, it’s terrible and stupid and wonderful, but like, come the fuck on??? What’s with this thing?! Now is not the time!”

“Ass ass ass ass ass ass ass ass ass ass—“

“GOD, that’s even worse!!” Roxy yelled, slamming her fist down on the dashboard. “Fucking stop!!”

“That’s enough for now,” Ramona said, almost murmuring it.

The radio turned off. Karkat and Roxy both turned a suspicious eye on Ramona, and with equal simultaneity, decided to drop it for now.

“Anyway,” Roxy said slowly, “What I was trying to say is, um…Karkat, do you know what it means for someone to ‘flatline?’ Because, um. Dave kinda did, for like, a minute and a half.”

Karkat shook his head, realized Roxy probably couldn’t see him with her eyes on the road, and said, “Uh, I have no idea what that word means, no.”

“Well, um…”

“It refers to a heart monitor indicating that the heart has ceased beating,” Ramona said. “The machine indicates activity with a line which shows peaks and valleys, and it goes flat when that activity has stopped, thus, ‘flatline’. The organ we call a heart serves an equivalent function to what trolls call a ‘blood pusher’ or a ‘pump biscuit.’”

Karkat felt for a moment like his own pump biscuit had stopped.

“Shit, Mom, when did you get so good at translating to trolls?” Roxy murmured.

Ramona shrugged. “I’ve made efforts to reach out,” she said. “The war ended, after all, and since we’re allies now, it doesn’t hurt to learn about each others’ cultures.”

“His fucking—What?!” Karkat screeched, unable to keep the harsh buzzing whine out of his voice. God, that was such a moirail noise, and any other time he’d have yelled at himself for not keeping it under control, but not now, not when… “His fucking blood pusher stopped and I’m supposed to be calm!?!”

“They got it moving again!” Roxy said. “He’s okay now, the doctors said it was going strong! It was, um, mostly just exhaustion, they think? Like, the burn wounds could’ve killed him on their own, sure, but they got on those quick enough that if he’d been healthy to begin with he probably wouldn’t have been so bad off? But between ten years of, you know…and just, apparently he hasn’t been eating enough even while he’s been back with us? And Ray’s gonna get on his ass about that, but, just—look, the thing is, Dirk doesn’t know about this yet, and Aunt Ray’s asked that we try to keep it that way, and I don’t really get why but I think she has her reasons?”

Karkat was definitely hyperventilating, oh fuck, oh fuck—Ramona’s hand reached back to touch his own, snapping him out of it.

“It’s fine to be worried,” she said, gentle. “I promise you, though, it is as Roxy says: he’ll be fine given time to recover and the safety with which to do so. He’ll be alive when we get there.” She sat back in her chair, turning towards the road again. “As for Dirk, I suspect Rachel is waiting for things to settle down before breaking it to him gently. He is, for better or worse, very like his father, and Derek handled his brother’s death poorly, in large part because at the time we could not afford to mourn. Rachel probably wants to make sure that Dirk does not feel he has to force himself to be strong when she tells him.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Roxy muttered. “Anyway, the main thing about that is that he’s not got a lot of energy right now, so don’t…take it personally if he just falls asleep on you sometimes? Especially with the painkillers he’s on, apparently that’s a side effect, too. He can walk short distances, but he gets wobbly quick and needs help sometimes, so there’s that too.”

“Fuck,” said Karkat, softly.

The next ten minutes of the ride were carried out in tense silence. This was broken by the radio once again bursting back on and blasting the ass song again, at which point Roxy threatened to pull over and smash the fucking thing to smithereens.

By the time they actually got to the fucking house, Karkat felt like his soul was going to vibrate right out of his fucking body with impatience. They had yet another delay in the form of Terezi’s protection detail—Terezi herself wasn’t there, but some officers were, and they insisted on knowing about any weapons the three of them had as well as names, and went in to check with the family while making them all wait outside by the car. Karkat already had his fucking bag in hand, he was ready to go, but no, they had to go through this tedious procedure! Sure, it was probably a smart move, and when he was feeling a little more sensible he’d be more okay with it as it was the sort of thing that probably would make them all feel a bit safer (especially poor fucking Dave), but right now the were a pain in the ass and he was going to fucking explode!!! If they didn’t!!! Let him get in the fucking hive!!!!!

Rose stepped out as they were still talking to the police, and for the first time in his life Karkat was unspeakably happy to see her. She quickly confirmed to the police that all three of them were in fact expected and trusted by this household, and then gently let Jaspers out of his carrier. The cat immediately yowled and threw himself into her arms, kneading at her shoulders and rubbing his face against hers, and it all would have been super cute if Karkat didn’t have his mind on other fucking things.

“Come on in,” Rose said, nodding towards the door. “Dirk’s on the couch and Dave’s in Mom’s room, as neither of them can handle stairs right now and Dave needs his bandages changed at least twice a day. Karkat, do you—”

She was talking to air. He was already in the fucking door.

And then had to face the fact that he’d never actually been to Rachel’s room. Fuck. Rachel was coming up the hall, though, and a slightly bewildered young human (wait, fuck, that was Dirk, what happened to his hair? It looked so weird hanging down like that instead of spiked up) was sitting on the couch with an Earth husktop on his lap. Roxy pushed in the door with Ramona right behind her, dropped a heavy wheeled bag right next to the door, and immediately launched herself at Dirk, who gave a startled yelp as she did so.

Rachel rested a hand on Karkat’s shoulder as she passed him, rushing up toward Ramona throwing her arms around her shoulders. The two shared a long hug, and Rachel kissed Ramona’s cheek.

“God, I’m so glad you’re here,” Karkat heard Rachel murmur, before Rose tapped his shoulder.

“I was asking if you knew where Mom’s room is,” Rose said.

“Uh.”

“It’s down the hall to the observatory, but you take a left before you get to it. Make sure to make plenty of noise on the way over, Dave gets really jumpy when he’s the only person in that room. He can’t block the door since we need to be able to come in and out, and it’s got him a bit on edge.”

Karkat nodded, unable to get any words out past the lump in his throat. He more or less just dropped his bag on the ground and pushed past, zooming around toward the room indicated. Dave looked half-asleep when Karkat pushed the door open, and waved as he sat up with some effort.

God, the photo Rose had taken didn’t do justice to how fucking bad he looked. There were bruises across his face and neck turned a weird greenish-gray but still dark against his skin, and bandages everywhere, his hair was a mess (although that might have just been from sleeping). He was in some oversized shirt with an Earth hoofbeast on the front that was probably Dirk’s judging by the size, and Karkat had no idea why Dave had it on but right now he didn’t care.

“Hey, man, uh. Shit’s been crazy, huh?” Dave said with an awkward grin. He didn’t have his shades on either, which made sense if he’d been sleeping, except they weren’t on the bedside table (which did instead contain a nearly empty glass of water, several bottles of pills and salves, and a first aid kit from which clean cloth bandages overflowed).

Two weeks of emotion boiled over all at once. Wordless, Karkat stomped across the room and grabbed Dave’s stupid fucking shirt in both hands and tugged him close.

“It was three days, Dave,” Karkat hissed.

“Wha—?”

“Three days! And you got yourself fucking kidnapped by a terrorist on day goddamn two!! What the fuck, Dave?!” His voice was threatening to abandon him, but Karkat forced it right back into place by sheer willpower. This tangent would not be fucking stopped, hell no. “I take my eyes off of you for two days, and you get yourself into shit again! What the fuck!!! Do you have any idea how-how fucking agonizing it’s been waiting for news?! And you’re just sitting there like ‘Oh, hey! What’s up?’ What’s up is my foot up your waste chute, you hopeless fucking—!” Okay, nope, his voice was leaving after all, actually. He felt tears roll down his face, and he should’ve been more worried about that, but Dave already knew about his blood color and he was the only troll in the house right now, so, fuck it, fuck it all! Helpless, he tugged Dave closer again, letting his face press against that stupid shirt, claws still twisted into the fabric as he sobbed.

“Holy shit,” Dave muttered.

“I was so fucking scared,” Karkat gasped. This was pathetic, they weren’t remotely a couple, Karkat had no right to be this worked up and he knew it, but…Dave wasn’t exactly pushing him away, either, was he?

“I’m sorry, man, I didn’t even…It wasn’t planned this time, it just sorta happened, and Dirk got hurt, and I…”

“I’m not actually angry at you, despite having so much right to be that legislacerators everywhere have preemptively declared me innocent. I’m just fucking screaming for the sake of it, dumbass.”

“Oh.”

The awkward pause that followed was filled with only the sound of Karkat’s weeping, which, fuck, he was probably too fucking embarrassed to tell him off. Except…Dave’s hand lifted up to rest gently against Karkat’s back, so, maybe he didn’t mind that much? Was that wishful thinking?

“Sorry for this,” he said, just in case, as he pulled away a bit. “It’s really fucking embarrassing, I know, I just…”

“It’s cool, man,” said Dave. Then, with a wink, he said, “I know you got your massive Strider homocrush, it’s only natural—”

“Dave, I swear to fuck, injured or not, I will pummel you into dust with a fucking pillow, don’t test me!” Karkat snapped.

Dave snorted. “Hey, man, it’s fine, everyone’s allowed to be a lil gay sometimes with their friends, it’s only natural.”

“I’ll ‘natural’ you!! Motherfucker, I spent the two weeks worrying about your wellbeing and you come at me with more of this bullshit!!”

Dave cackled with laughter. Karkat rolled his eyes and sniffled. He feigned annoyance as best he could, but, God, it was such a relief to hear Dave laugh. Rubbing a sweater sleeve furiously across his eyes, Karkat pulled back, sitting awkwardly on the edge of the bed. “Okay, but seriously, what’s with the shirt?” he asked, gesturing at the floating head of the hoofbeast. It wasn’t even a joke or a drawing. It was just…a straight photo of a hoofbeast’s face, with no text or explanation of any sort. What the fuck??

Dave glanced down, and snickered. “Oh, shit. Uh, yeah, we needed something that’s easy to get me in and out of, since the bandages on this fuckin’ burn need to be changed like, a lot, not to mention the gross-ass cream they have us slathering all over it on the regular. We tried a button down, but the buttons were kinda chafing, and like…who the fuck wants to ruin a fancy shirt with gross burn juices, right? And Dirk’s shit is more comfortable, and this one’s big enough that it’s real easy to take off even if I’m high on the damn painkillers.”

Karkat winced slightly, but decided not to comment. The scream from the video echoed somewhere in his think pan. “Where’re your shades?”

“Bro fuckin’ stepped on them or something, man, I dunno. They fell off at some point, and they were already cracked before all that, and Terezi just found pieces. Which fucking sucks, I mean God dammit, those were a gift from John. Shit sucks.”

“John?” Karkat tipped his head.

“Yeah, he’s like, an old friend of mine. Have I not mentioned him to you? Whatever, he, uh.” Dave scratched at the side of his head. “He was an online friend from before Bro started doing the, uh, raid shit, and I kept talking to him and another friend, Jade, for a while afterwards even though I wasn’t supposed to?”

“Jade’s name I remember,” Karkat said.

“Haha, yeah, yeah cuz I told you about…anyway.” He cleared his throat. “I guess since Dirk’s college is starting up again soon, not that he’s going for the first couple weeks with his leg and a fucking concussion, but, it’s starting up, and John’s sister goes there too, and he’s gonna come with so we’ll be able to hang out for a bit? Which is fuckin’ rad, I haven’t even talked to the guy in three years and we’re finally meeting in person.”

“You want him to be here? While you’re this badly injured?” Karkat yelped.

Dave blinked at him like he’d just grown a secondary head.

“I mean, yeah?” Dave said. “Like, yeah, I’m not in great shape and I guess it’ll be a lil weird for him to see me like this, but I’ve missed him.” Before Karkat could press the question further, though, Dave yawned. “Ugh, fuck, I wanna keep talking, but I’m…halfway to falling asleep, shit.”

“Oh,” said Karkat. He got up, ready to leave. He wanted to stay, wanted to curl himself around Dave’s obnoxiously lanky frame as best he could and protect this fragile idiot human from the entire universe, but…it wasn’t his place, was it? No.

“You leaving?” said Dave, rubbing at his unbruised eye.

“You said you wanna sleep,” Karkat said.

“Right. Uh. Could you, like…fill this back up for me, then, I guess?” Dave said.

“…Sure,” said Karkat.

He was…still confused, but Dave was tired, so he didn’t press. But he couldn’t wrap his head around wanting a friend around while he was so injured—well, he’d wanted Karkat around, hadn’t he? He’d seemed happy to see him, aside from the, uh, yelling. Still, it didn’t make sense! Every troll knew as a small child that the only people you could trust when you were injured were your lusus, your moirail, and maybe your matesprit! Anyone else might take advantage of the weakness and kill you, that was just basic logic! But Dave didn’t even seem to be thinking about it.

And…and yet, come to think of it, Roxy’d been awfully forthright about how bad Dave’s condition was. Hell, she’d heard it from Rose, who seemed like the one most likely to know not to spread that weakness, but the humans were all sharing it and passing it around. It wasn’t just that they didn’t seem to care who knew that Dave and Dirk were injured, it was like they wanted people to know.

And as he filled up the glass of water in the kitchen, he watched as Roxy and Dirk talked on the couch, as Dirk told her that he’d passed on the news of their condition to Jane already, that Rose had told her and Dave’s friends, and it just kept going. Everyone had to be up to date on the fact that both brothers were injured and vulnerable, and yet…

“I hope the flight wasn’t too long,” Rachel was saying to Ramona.

“Nothing would be too long right now,” she said in turn, blowing gently on a cup of tea that Rachel had just poured her. “Times like these, we all need to do our part. I know I might not be able to do much, mind you. My leg’s been acting up something fierce, as of late, but I’ll do whatever I can.”

Something clicked. All at once, the curtains pulled back and Karkat saw the whole picture—saw maybe not what it always was, and certainly not what the Lalondes achieved on any sort of regular basis, but what it was supposed to be, how it was meant to work.

On Alternia, everyone lived in constant competition. Trolls had to be strong as close to all the time as they possibly could, or at the very least find a moirail who could, because otherwise their society wouldn’t particularly care much if they died. That just meant they didn’t deserve to be a part of the gene pool or to contribute to society. If they were injured badly and left vulnerable, it was seen as normal for others to take advantage of that weakness and exert power or outright kill a rival. It was how they survived so long, or so the cultural narrative had so long stated: by this competition, the strongest survive. Nevermind that this survival was built on the corpses of uncountable trolls who didn’t make the cut, it Worked.

As a result, trolls had been bewildered just as Karkat had by how humans as a species managed to be so frail and yet so reckless and to still survive, especially when they didn’t exactly have the kind of numbers that trolls did. Humans lacked the numbers to be expendable, lacked the strength and toughness that kept Trolls alive, and yet they looked Death in the eye and pointed and laughed, and pushed themselves to extremes for no purpose other than to have some warped idea of fun. It was a question that had lingered around his consciousness for ages; how the fuck do humans even work as a species? How had such a seemingly doomed race not died off yet?

The answer that hit him now, as he watched Roxy help Dirk stand up and balance himself on a pair of crutches, was that humans didn’t have to be strong all the time, and that was the magic of their little social units, their families—they took care of each other. No one person had to be good at everything, or so good at one thing that it could keep them safe in any situation. It didn’t matter that their skin was thin or that they weren’t particularly strong or fast, they always, always had others around who would pick up the slack, others who would come even across oceans to offer what aid they could in times of strife; they weaved together all their strengths and weaknesses into a fabric able to withstand just about anything. Fuck, no wonder they’d wanted Dave back so badly. The Lalondes may have been less a tapestry and more a patchwork quilt, but it was still their quilt, and Dave was a part of it….

He felt a near-agonizing pang of envy that he didn’t have a quilt of his own. Humans might have been stupid about a lot of things, but this…this they’d gotten right.

“Fucking water? Is that really the best you could think of? Fucking dumbass,” Dave muttered to himself. God. This was stupid. This was all really fucking stupid. He couldn’t even deal with being alone while he was asleep, for Chrissakes! Too scared of nightmares of a big mean dog, like some fuckin’ little kid.

Yeah, he was tired, but he really, really didn’t wanna be alone right now, was the thing. Not with that fucking troll-drug-induced nightmare lingering around the edges, waiting to chase him down again at its first chance. But. Like. Karkat was kind of right? Bros don’t watch each other sleep, that’s fuckin’ creepy. Like. Okay, so maybe they’d done a bit of that way back when Karkat had been kidnapped, but they didn’t have a choice back then, and anyways they mostly slept at the same time during that experience, which was super different from just asking his best alien friend to fuckin’ hold his hand so the bad dreams wouldn’t get him. Fuck.

So he’d asked Karkat to refill his glass, even though he wasn’t thirsty right now, because it was an excuse to make Karkat come back, at least for a few more minutes, and they could talk for a bit, and maybe Dave’d stop being tired, wouldn’t that be rad.

Karkat came back in looking really thoughtful. He handed the glass over, and Dave took a sip to try and look like he hadn’t been 100% bullshitting there, and mumbled a thanks as he set it down. Then, just as a thought, he jerked his head toward the rest of the bed—it was a big king-sized one, probably left over from before the divorce and Mom had just never downsized or whatever, so there was a lot of space to Dave’s right—and told Karkat he could sit down if he wanted, Dave wasn’t gonna, like, pass out right this minute or anything, haha.

Karkat stayed quiet, which was fuckin’ weird, but he did sit down. He stared at the sheets for a minute, and then spoke up suddenly, saying, “I think I get it.”

“Get what?” said Dave.

“Why they wanted you back so bad,” said Karkat. “I mean, way back when you were first arrested. I kind of fought with Dirk over it at one point, because my only experience with the word Dirk used for why you should be with him was fucking Strider. And also I think I get why this shit all works, for humans in general. I mean, I’m probably just saying obvious shit, but it’s not how trolls work, we don’t take care of each other, not like this.”

Dave tipped his head.

“I mean with the whole fucking family thing,” Karkat said, rolling his eyes. “I’ve been trying to get it this whole time, but this shit’s used to justify so much bullshit with you humans, and I think I get it now, and why it’s so fucking important to you as a species.”

Dave snorted. “Dude, it’s not that big a thing—”

“It is, though! It just seems normal to humans because it’s how you always work, but, Dave, I’m serious, back on Alternia it’s every troll for themself. Maybe you have one person who has your back if you’ve got a moirail, maybe some are lucky like me and have friends who are actually consistently on your side and won’t take the first chance they get to kill you or fuck you up some other way, but we definitely don’t have a whole cluster of others we can just fall back on any time we’re met with something we can’t handle alone.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Dave started, but Karkat just kept going. Apparently he’d had some sort of fuckin’ epiphany in the past two minutes.

“It took me so fucking long to get this, but I get it now! You know what I don’t get, though, is why the fuck you ever tried to convince me that Strider is part of your fucking family.”

Something in Dave dropped like a stone.

He’d…had a similar thought, really. Repeatedly. Multiple times, over the past week or so. He’d been kind of trying to avoid it, because every time it popped up, he got really stressed out.

“And don’t give me any of the bullshit about being ‘related’ or what the fuck ever, I don’t wanna hear it,” Karkat kept right on going. “I still don’t get why you humans care so much about that. The whole point of this family thing is that you all take care of each other, not that you’re related or whatever! Your aunt’s here, did you know that? She flew across an entire fucking ocean just to make sure she could help out you and Dirk! What the fuck did Strider ever do for you?”

It was a good question. And the answer, of course, was: aside from trying to kill him, do you mean? Hahaha.

Karkat was still talking, but Dave wasn’t really hearing him. Fuck, this had been a mistake, he should’ve taken his chances with the fucking nightmare dog. That was better than this old song and dance with his own thoughts.

The facts were pretty simple. He’d operated under pretty clear logic when he went up against Bro: We’re family, so he loves me, so therefore if I ask him to let me leave and explain that I really can’t deal with this, he’ll let me go. Except, Bro had tried to kill him, which meant that…

That was as far as Dave ever got. He couldn’t think any farther than that.

He felt like…like the next thought should be obvious, but he couldn’t make himself think it. It was too big—not so much a square peg in a round hole as it was trying to cram a grain silo into a pinhole, and the thought threatened to overwhelm and destroy him, so instead of thinking it, his brain kept rejecting it, the effect being like a broken record skip-skip-skipping, over and over, repeating the last thought he could get to before the Big One, because he couldn’t not think the Big One, either…

It was so fucking stupid, it was just a thought, why couldn’t he…

“Hah, yeah, now that you mention it, I guess I was always kinda wrong about this shit, wasn’t I?” Dave said, unable to stop the sardonic laughter bubbling up in his throat. “I mean, fuck, no wonder it took you so long to get, I probably gave you the wrong idea. My dumb ass was convinced he’d never try to kill me, cuz we’re family, and, well, here we fuckin’ are!”

Skip, skip, skip—

Karkat was still talking in stuttered phrases in the gaps of Dave’s own flood of words, looking almost scared, but Dave didn’t comprehned any of them, and anyway, the ranting had started, there was no stopping this shit now. “Like, what the fuck was I even thinking, right? I really thought that was gonna work, that somehow he’d just let me go if I asked, like a fucking idiot! Haha, what a fuckin’ dipshit, right?! And here I was thinking he—” Frantic laughter bubbled up, overtaking the words, not that more would’ve come, that next thought was just too big. Was he crying? Fuck, Karkat didn’t need to see any of this shit, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t think

Skip, skip, skip, skip, skipskipskipskipskipskip—

It wasn’t Karkat’s fault. It really wasn’t. He might’ve set it off, but the storm had been building up for days, now, and it broke hard, sweeping Dave up in a torrent of just wordless mental screaming. He couldn’t think the next thought. He couldn’t. But the thing was damming him up, and he couldn’t ignore it anymore, and he was stuck in the middle and left to just completely melt down and dissipate into the flood.

A sound like a cicada crossed with the creakiest horror movie door ever to creak ripped through the tides, and suddenly Dave found himself tugged into a full body hug, wrapped up in four limbs with his face pressed into a thick sweater. The touch dragged him out of the flood and onto dry land, brought him back into now before he even knew what was happening. Karkat’s whole chest was vibrating with some intense cricket-cat hybrid purr, and this should’ve been so embarrassing but he was so tired and so lost and it was fucking comforting, so who the fuck cared. Who cared anymore. It was all bullshit. He could be embarrassed later.

Too soon, Karkat seemed to have the same thought, and tried to pull away. “Shit, sorry, I shouldn’t—fuck, I’m so sorry, this is really presumptive and I know you aren’t even into boys,” he babbled.

Dave groaned, wrapping his arms around Karkat’s chest and pulling him close. “Dude, if you try to make this about alien romance right now, I swear to fuck,” he gasped out between harsh sobs. Christ, he was going harder than Karkat did like twenty minutes earlier, what the fuck.

Karkat paused. Good. It meant his warm arms were still there. “Dave, I…I mean, this is troll romance, this is textbook moiraillegience, and I shouldn’t just be throwing myself at you because you had a moment of weakness, no matter how bad I, uh.”

Dave sniffled, wracked his brain for a moment…Karkat had explained this stuff about a million times, which one was…”That’s like…the bros quadrant, right?”

“The what.”

“The one that’s, like, platonic and shit.”

“…Yeah?” The cricket-purr started up again, cautiously.

“We fuckin’ kinda do most of that shit already, don’t we?” Like. Yeah. He wasn’t gay. That was still a thing. But Karkat was warm and solid and real and Dave was fucking exhausted and didn’t want to be alone, especially not when he felt right now like he was wrapped in safety. “Please, Karkat,” he added, because why not beg. He was already at maximum pathetic, there was no digging this hole lower, fuck it. “I really don’t wanna be alone right now, just, please don’t go.”

Karkat was quiet for a long moment, but finally, the cricket-purr went back to full volume and Karkat’s arms tightened around him.

“Okay,” Karkat said quietly. Dave let out a breath he’d barely known he’d been holding and went back to crying.

“We’re going to have to talk about this later,” Karkat murmured, which put him at about normal volume for anyone else.

“Later, then,” said Dave, and let himself finally fall the fuck asleep.

#dave strider #karkat vantas #davekat #roxy lalonde #longpost//#u BET UR BUTT THIS OENS GOIN IN THE DAVEKAT TAG #ITS ABOUT TIME #fanfic #fanfiction #calmvsstormfic #calmvsstormchapter #katt does a writing #jkdfsgfjhsfjshf not the best start to a relationship but like its something #lord this got long.#why tf did i think 32 and 33 would ever fit into one chapter.

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themockingcrows · 7 years ago

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TWO FATES, TWO KINGDOMS CH. 14: Preparedness

This chapter is SFW ao3 mirror: [X]

So many things need done when planning an escape, and yet so much hinges on timing and preparation and keeping the rest of the world in the dark that it's easy to lose sight of the real goals. Or even to doubt that the goals exist at all. With the clock counting down already and the window for fleeing into the ice of Winter slowly beginning to close ahead of them, the stress is on to ensure their very survival.

A week was not long enough to plan for an entire world changing. It was not long enough, and yet it was far, far too long to hide such an obvious secret when three people were at play gathering information and necessities in the shadows. The week was barely begun, and yet John already found himself questioning if the enthusiasm would be a detriment or an advantage as they sought out the talents of the seamstress once more.

“Dave, stop wiggling,” Kanaya urged. “If you're having trouble balancing just let me grab a stool. Don't push yourself.”

When the prince turned up at her doorstep, Dersite literally in hand, Kanaya had been excited. It meant he was well enough to get around and was beginning to heal, and that they could spend some time together at last with the safe knowledge that aside from her work space being warm and comfortable and secure with her guarding it shears in hand, that John was there on hand as an extra deterrent against any trouble that lay between her door and his own chambers.

Now, though? Now after learning that even while healing another countdown was hanging over her moirail's head, threatening him in a way she was powerless to shield him from? Oh, it was a matter of honor now.

“Standing still is not pushing myself,” scoffed Dave as he continued to wiggle and waver, working to keep his balance. He didn't want the damned stool, they were surely almost done anyway, why ask for anything special and make a fuss? His balance may be shot, but if he was careful he'd manage just fine. Just... needed to focus elsewhere in the room and make himself adjust that way, fake it till he made it or till Kanaya hurried up and finished.

“It is right now, and I'm getting the stool, you're making my measurements skew,” she huffed as she dropped the measure around her neck in a gentle loop and set aside the parchment she'd been making notes on. “Believe me, you want to be able to have this be just the right size. Too tight and you can't layer properly, too loose and cold air will sneak in all around.”

“How do you know so much about winter clothing in Prospit of all places?” Dave asked, reaching a hand out as Kanaya came near with the wooden stool and tapping at the seat as it flattened out, needing to aim himself before sitting. John shuffled where he sat nearby, fighting the instinct to stand up and help Dave with these simple things. He did enough as it was.

Kanaya smirked and ruffled Dave's hair up before she lifted the measure and leaned over him to get the number he needed while he was finally blessedly still on command. “You act as if Derse is the only place with a harsh winter. Have you so much as looked outside?”

“Yes, it's frigid and delightful.”

“Dave.”

“...Okay, okay, I know it wouldn't be comfortable long term and exposed, and it'll be worse the further into home we go. I still wonder how you know so much about clothes for traveling in cold weather.”

“Military guidance,” Kanaya said. “Custom making things for the princess Jade as well, as per her very specific requests following her safe return home. I helped to adjust designs for the soldiers who would be out in the terrible weather and along the front lines, as well as the general wintery outfits John's family requests and requires. The only difference with these is that one will be a good deal smaller, I'm going to have to keep them and the construction secret, and I'll be making bedding to match for three. Not to mention how quickly this has to happen!”

“I'm so sorry,” Dave started, only to be shooshed.

“If you apologize again I'll stick you with a pin. This is important, it's not as if you're asking for party gowns then changing your mind the second they're made and asking for a few full suits instead. You can make it up to me by getting safely home again and keeping the princes safe.” Kanaya grinned over Dave's head at John, eyes narrowing in amusement at the pout he gave. She hugged him around the shoulders and stroked at his hair slowly a few times, soothing herself and him at the same time with a sigh. To think she wouldn't get to do this anymore soon...

Losing a moirail wasn't the end of the world, especially if it was such a necessity, but it didn't make it hurt any less or make her feel any less preemptively alone. Karkat would still be around, and he would understand. ...But it wouldn't be quite the same.

“I'd write, but I don't suspect that would work out or even be wise,” Dave said after a time, realizing he wasn't just getting a few paps but a full petting instead. Kanaya seemed to rouse herself and halted the affection, going back to work. There wasn't much time, and she could talk and relax while she kept her hands busy instead of making it harder on herself later. “Is there anything I can do to reach you once I'm home safe?”

“If you do the workaround with Skaia, it might be possible. You'd do best to use a false name, though, and have it re-sent from within Skaia. Would rouse less suspicion than something coming directly from Derse, even if it makes it take longer.”

Humming, Dave lifted his arms when prompted, holding them at different angles as requested while Kanaya made her notes and added memos and reminders to herself for how to align the fit she was wanting and what material seams on the insides would need to do to avoid discomfort but still be warm enough. “A false name. I've not had a pen name before.”

“Well, you're hardly writing books, just try not to pick something that sounds purely Dersian and you should be fine. Pick something Skaian, or Prospitian, or Alternian, o-”

“Akwete Purrmusk.”

“...Pardon?”

“You sai-”

“A believable name Dave, be serious! Do you wish to correspond with me or not!”

“I don't know names from other places save for historical figures, pardon me for living beneath a mountain my entire life!” he scoffed as he turned his head. John giggled helplessly from the side as he opened his hands and spread his arms wide in a shrug.

“I mean. He has a point, Kanaya. Perhaps Akwete is just outlandish enough to work.”

“As an obvious fake, yes. John, help him think of a not terrible pen name.”

“My pen name is divine and even if the envelope doesn't wind up bearing it, you will know that from the bottom of my soul Akwete Purrmusk will be the one writing you those letters. You'll know it, I'll know it, John knows it, there is no escape. Akwete will flourish.”

“Ugh. Why not stick with a historical figure, then. At least those crop up occasionally as names even now, everyone scrambling to find something with significant meaning for their infants when they survive birth.”

“..Kanaya have I ever told you you have an unspeakably sunny disposition about these things?” Dave smirked. The grin morphed to a sudden laugh as the seamstress fed her measure around his neck and zipped it taut threateningly, only to kiss the apple of his cheek.

“You're an outspoken pest. I'll pick the name, then. ...Hmm.”

“Will you need one as well?” John asked. “For all this secret correspondence and all. Shall I wear a fake mustache while tending the post? Should the scroll wear a mustache,” he asked seriously, withstanding the withering look aimed his direction. “Kanaya, that look does nothing. You know my sisters. You know my sisters habits. You know my habits. The frigid gaze of the unimpressed is rich ambrosia to someone such as me, it simply means I have to try more and louder, it's an addiction and you're feeding it.”

“Maybe the two of you taking your leave is a good idea after all, a vacation seems necessary all at once. ..There. Dave that should be good, lower your arms and take a breather. I'm not entirely certain what to do about boots though, other than to snag a pair a bit too large from the supply for the guards and stuff them with the same material as the coats will be lined with. They'd be a bit clunky,” she worried, “but you'd be able to move and not lose any toes to frostbite.”

“I'm going to be suffering either way, from the sound of it. Either frigid or clunky.”

“...Suffering,” Kanaya said, brows lifting.

“Yes, suffering. Discomfort. This is a word I know in both languages, I'm learning to write it even. What of it.”

“Suffering,” she said again, tapping the side of her fist downward onto her splayed palm as if deciding something with a sense of finality. “Oh, that's it!”

John stood up finally and came to Dave's side now that he was done, wanting to close the gap and settle him in his arms once more, clingy and unashamed to show it. “Should I be concerned that you seem so enthralled at the word 'suffering', or...?”

“Oh! Oh, no, no. Just. That might be it. The name to use,” she explained excitedly, setting aside her measure and scrap of notes as she went to get a piece of parchment instead, ripping off a chunk before setting the rest flat on the ground in front of Dave's chair. “Stand up, while I have you here and you can brace him. I'm no cobbler, if I can't adjust the boots proper I'll figure something out to at least keep you warm. How hard can it be, I'm a damned professional.”

“The name, Kanaya,” Dave asked as he leaned on John's arm like a brace. “Mind telling me the name, while you're being a damned professional?”

“OH! Yes, right. Of course. Dolorosa.”

“...Uhm.” John cocked his head to the side, watching Kanaya bend and trace close around Dave's feet, then further out by a few inches in a steady, fluid gesture that could only be attained with far too much practice with a dressmaker's chalk over the years. “That's... quite the name, but what does it mean? What does that have to do with suffering?”

“It is a name from Alternia,” she explained. “A historical figure, no less, and one my line descends from supposedly. She was a figure of great love and great suffering, but it's a name that was widespread and well traveled as well. I believe it would fit the bill nicely for our correspondence. Nobody will care if Kanaya The Alternian Seamstress Of Castle Prospit gets letters from someone with an Alternian name from Skaia, I'm a nonentity as far as anyone is concerned and I'm glad to keep it that way.”

“Think you'd ever visit, were the option to come..?” Dave asked. “Even if just to Skaia. Halfway someday?”

Kanaya smiled uncertainly at him and sighed. Derse was said to be lovely in its own way, though it had its darkness and it's frigid chill right alongside it. Less sun that she preferred.

“...How about this. Should you two ever try to wed in some shape or another, know I'll do my damnedest to appear for you. I want to be there when you take your vows.”

“The official ones, or just the pledge,” John asked with a quirk of his lips as he leaned gently against Dave's back, arms folding around his abdomen and holding him close. “Because the pledge is already done, we exchanged that particular set of vows fairly recently. They don't count, I know, but stil-”

“They do so count!” insisted Kanaya. “They count a lot! Who cares if your countries recognize it, you're just able to see what they're blind to right now. Hold on to that, never lose it. You need everything you can get right now.”

“Considering I can't ask his brother for his hand, and I've transgressed by not seeking your approval in this endeavor as well, may I seek belated good tidings and well wishes while I sweep him off his feet and over a treacherous mountain path?” John asked.

“I'll be keeping an eye on your, but yes, well wishes and good tidings and all of those collective happy noises,” she said as she picked up the traced outlines and sighed again, looking lost. So much up and down, so much negative and positive. It felt like she was getting whiplash, the tendrils of fate entering a tug of war that normally she would be fearful of. Lovebirds rarely fared well in times of war. Especially high profile lovebirds, considering the record of the lost royals of the past that began this entire mess. Kanaya didn't even want to think of what would escalate for certain when it happened all over again, two lovers lost to the world.

“Ah, that reminds me,” John said. “Jake will likely be by asking for exactly what we're asking for. But if it somehow slips his mind, what is the latest that you feel I should have him drop by for odds and ends like socks and getting warmer gloves?”

“Yesterday,” Kanaya said with such seriousness that John didn't dare ask for clarification. “I think I know the dimensions for his bedding, though. A bit larger than yours and wider at the top, narrower at the foot with more warm materials there same as the others, and a wrap over hood piece to trap warmth. You'll look like the dead, but you should be warm.”

Dave shook till he got John off of him and closed the small gap between himself and Kanaya now that she wasn't writing or armed, squeezing her tightly.

“I expect nothing less out of you than the best, but can we just stop talking about the things you're making for just a few minutes? Just a few. That's fine right? Just a few minutes to sit down together before everything is busy and rushing like it's been already,” he all but begged against her shoulder.

Who was she to say no, when it was all she was craving as well? At least once more. One more pile of fabric to recline in and pass the minutes by before the cherished time left them both behind, bittersweet.

“Of course,” she said before looking up to John. “...May I request a bit of privacy, though? John you know I'll keep him safe, nobody is laying a nefarious hand on him in this shop unless it's over my dead body.”

Shaking his head, John lifted his hands up to show the bare palms. “By all means, please. I don't get it, but I know it's important. I'll.. hm. I'll go get a snack or something. Bring back something for you two, don't lock the door too solidly while I'm gone?”

“I'll have the bar down,” Kanaya said cheerfully, already crossing the t's and dotting the i's in her mind to allow for the maximum relaxation. The prince could only laugh and reach a hand out to stroke Dave's upper back, hesitant about being apart but trusting the seamstress as much as he trusted his own family.

“As you were, then. I'll take my sweet time and try not to grow icicles in the halls before returning. Make the most of it, we have to get back to work when we leave, same as you,” John said. He gave a brief brow, courtesy and habit, before turning on his heel to leave. The satisfying clunk of wood settling into an iron bracing beyond the door nearly the second after he has closed it was enough to remove more weight from his chest. He decided to take the long way around, complete with backtracking his initial path there with his cloak pulled snug around himself like a heavy blanket of a shroud to ward off the chill enough to enjoy the view of the dreary looking remnants of their gardens and dusted shrubbery and topiary.

It was in the hall that he met Jake, his brother bearing two books beneath his arm with a third open with his thumb propping open the pages, green eyes dancing over the letters intently enough I he dimmer light that he initially walked right past John. His footsteps were soft and alternating, no hesitating, certain of his surroundings and where everything should be. Well. Everything that didn't have a sense of will on its own to start moving that is, as his younger brother suddenly clearing his throat to catch his attention made him falter his steps and seize his own body straight, clutching his books tighter to avoid dropping them.

“Oh!” Jake gasped. “Oh. Oh, John, you startled me so. What are y-” he started, then looked more serious. “Where's the Dersite?”

“With the seamstress being fitted for something to guard against the season more properly, it's bad enough even he's gotten chilled. Don't want him sick, he'd spread it to me of all people,” John said, brows giving a meaningful lift.

Jake stared for a moment, mind apparently still stuck in what he was learning as he contorted his face in puzzlement, releasing when it clicked. “Yes, of course, can't have the little rapscallion getting you ill, eh? I believe Jade was right, you should have gotten a dog. At least dogs with fur can't get their owners ill. Well, without biting them of course, but with a Dersite it's quite hard to tell if they will or not!”

“He won't, if he knows what's good for him. I'm already making sure he mends properly,” John sighed, crossing his arms. Jake had come nearer to speak, so he leaned back against the wall beside the window, ignoring the chill that raced down his spine at the first press of colder air. He'd need to toughen up in damned short order against the winter's foul graces if they were going to be going into the thick of it to return Dave home. John's face betrayed him, though, as Jake smirked at him and gestured with his head that he didn't mind walking with him. John, however, refused. “I was about to go to the kitchens actually. Was wasting a bit of time as I didn't want to sit and watch the Dersite get measured once I was certain he was behaving. Don't want to go too far away, though. Can't let your guard down around those things, one wrong move and it's all over for Kanaya.”

“But of course,” Jake said. He glanced around subtly as he tried to think of how to word his sentence for the most information possible without seeming out of place. “Remind me to loan you this book later, John? It's quite fascinating. Might give you some ideas on how to manage your little wild animal successfully, it details a lot of the wild beasts of Derse and the rugged terrain our soldiers have gone through during their battles and maneuvers against the opposition.”

“Mmmm.. You'll have to come and tell me more about it later, I don't know if I've the stomach to read the entire thing. Does it have pictures?” John joked.

“No, this one doesn't. This one however,” he said as he untucked a book from beneath his arm, “this one does! Should still be useful to you, since you look so frigid by the window there. Survival for winter storms and how they used to manage the sour weather in the past. Did you know you can pile up snow in just such a way that it will actually keep you warm? You can build a fire in it as well, if you do it right! There were even things on how to deal with caverns, and how to avoid falling into crevices in the ice, and how to deal with all the awful wounds you could get, it's so thorough!” Jake said excitedly, green eyes flashing. Research or not, this type of adventurous collection of facts was precisely what tended to get his blood pumping and for a moment John was hit with memories of childhood.

The boy with the wild hair and scraped knees and the too loud laugh had never grown up. Not really. He'd taken his lessons and accepted the heavy fate on his shoulders, had learned to walk and talk and act as he was told to do with his shoulders back and his voice quieter and his expression always tired. None of it had actually removed that young wild boy who would hunt down rabbits in the gardens to pick them up bare handed and pet them all till they were tame, the boy who'd climb tall things just to see what was up there and how far he could see, the boy who would hoot and holler and plan out elaborate adventures that usually involved everyone getting coated in mud and leaving footprints on the tile when they tried to sneak back indoors and avoid the nanny. Jake was right there and looking so alive it made John's heart ache.

There was his brother with the weight off of him. What a sight for sore eyes, and made John feel just a bit more secure in their escape plans. Enthusiasm led to more knowledge, and more knowledge would carry them quite far.

“You'll have to tell me about that as well, actually, I'm not certain I'd understand all of it and you sure seem to get it already,” John snorted, trying to look a bit uninterested after flashing a grin so broad his cheeks ached. “Were there any interesting offerings at the library? I've been meaning to stop by again and pick up something fresh. This weather and the Dersite being injured have led to a lot of bored reading, I keep going right through everything I pick up.”

“Oh, yes, there were some. I seem to have gone through a good deal of the newer offerings already, but I'll let you know my recommendations if you've not come across some of them. Perhaps Karkat won't mind my simply depositing them with you instead of returning them to him first.”

“You'll be ruining his ordering system,” John said with a concerned look. Then, just as seriously he said, “I love it, what a good idea.”

“You're a beast,” Jake chuckled, adjusting his grip on his books and fully closing the one he'd been reading before. “Would it be okay for me to visit you later tonight then, to speak? Or should I wait for another day? I can't imagine you're doing too much.”

“Later would be fine,” John said. “Give a knock first if you could. Dersite panics a bit if doors open too suddenly, since his sight is still awry.”

“Hm. Can't have that, what a fuss. I'll be sure to knock so you know it's me,” hummed Jake as he shifted his weight uncertainly. If they were meeting later, he'd need to get back to his room and hurry through some of these other books, collect the information he'd gathered already and be ready to present it. There were a few specifics he needed to sort out separately still, but input was needed from John before he could proceed. The sooner this could happen the better.

Jake wasn't certain if the chilled ring of a ghostly noose around his neck was anxiety or a premonition of bad news to come, and he didn't exactly want to wait and see if it would tighten either way.

With a brief brotherly hug being exchanged, the brothers parted ways so that John could head to the kitchen at his same lazy pace as before. The startled kitchen help was a welcome sight, the eyes glancing around looking for his blonde shadow coming up empty and confused before they bowed in welcome to him.

“Sire! Is there anything you're needing this evening? Supper isn't quite prepared yet, but we can always find something for you if you hunger,” said a man with an apron stained from too many wipes of his messy hands over time. No amount of washing would make those whites pristine again, it was just a fact of life.

The heir hummed and passed by several pots to give serious sniffs to their contents, wondering what the meal would be later before shaking his head and wandering by the bread baskets instead.

“Could you get some meat for me, please? Thinly sliced. I'm thinking finger sandwiches to tide me over. I'd like enough for myself and the seamstress. ...Ah, and the Dersite as well, be sure there's enough for there to be leftovers for him at least, he's useless if he doesn't eat enough,” he said after a moment or two of thought.

With some thin breads, meats, soft cheese, some berry based chutney and a container of milk to mix with whatever tea Kanaya might have on hand already, John soon swept away on his own back out to the hall with a flurry of his cloak and a newfound appreciation for being up beside a fire. After the steam heat of the kitchen, cooks and servants in short sleeves and breaking out in a fine sweat in some positions, the halls were frigid on the way to the seamstress' out of the way chambers, knocking with his foot. When nobody came to the door, John shifted the tray and knocked with the back of his hand instead, a pattern he tended to use that bordered on a song with two heavy thuds to signal its end.

He heard shuffling inside before the door cracked open, green eyes peering out to ensure it was really John before sweeping it open wider. His smile spread when he entered the room to find Dave half bundled in soft fabric on the floor like a shaggy caterpillar, heavier fabric already being patterned elsewhere on the floor with a sturdy marking pencil, and the fire stoked up.

“Seems you two wasted no time. Kanaya, are you intending to outfit him, or dress him with everything in your room,” asked John as he set the tray down and took up one of the dull knives to scoop up cheese and the spread for the sandwich. He didn't bite it when he was done, instead going to deliver it to the floor for Dave, the second going to Kanaya. John half expected her to be dainty with it, but apparently this was not an evening for that. She crammed half of it in her mouth, chewed two or three times so she could swallow without choking, and then stuffed the remaining half between her teeth to munch on between her far leans to mark and measure out the unmistakable pattern of a long looking coat.

“I have a dress that would look lovely on him, but he's balking for some reason. Were you not leaving so soon I'd win him over into it, I've better taste than your sister. At least the offerings I have wouldn't clash with his complexion,” she sniffed. “He looked chilled, so I coated him. …And perhaps we did get carried away with the pile, yes, but you know how it is. Why go half way when the pile is right there singing a siren song of softness and emotional balance?”

When John had made a third sandwich, he sat down beside the half buried Dave to eat, watching the silvery flash of scissors rise and fall as she began to fill the air with the crisp sounds of fabric come apart in clean edged chunks.

“I take it I at least didn't interrupt your weird cuddle session, from the look of this. Kanaya are you certain you're mortal? Sometimes I wonder if some deity is working through you when you get determined enough, it already looks like a coat and it's not even together yet.”

Kanaya lifted her shears and gestured airily at John's chest and head before going back to trimming out the pieces with quick movements, no hesitation. “If you second guess anything after sewing as long as I have been, you might as well give up your position and take up another craft entirely. I don't understand why you're so amazed at someone doing their job, though I enjoy the compliments. Maybe it's a royal thing. Pick up a craft instead of just a hobby, John, it will do you good in life. ...You might need it, as well.”

John lifted his brow as he licked a bit of the chutney from his fingertip, trying not to drop anything on her floor lest it be tracked around the room later. “Need it? Why, the trip isn't going to take forever.”

“...Do you really expect you'll be able to come home? To be welcomed with open arms in Derse forever?” asked the seamstress seriously, planting her hands on the ground. “What if you're just left to your own devices, unwelcome anywhere? What are your backup plans?”

“..Uh. Well. I mean, I'm handy with a hammer and I'm pretty sure I could use that skill for coin. I bet there's lots of things I can do that someone would hire me to do. Jake as well, with that bow of his he'd be able to handle wild game and pelts and claw aplenty.”

“Learn a trade,” Kanaya urged. “Or at least think of things to try when you get the chance. I'm serious, John, being useful as more than a powerful family who can swing a hammer will do you worlds of good. If things go badly, you are prepared. If they go well, then you have a hobby to fall back on and wildly impress the rich spoiled people around you with when you're bored.”

Dave snickered as he licked his fingers clean and slowly began to untangle himself from the pile of clothing, then push off the ground to stand up. Two sets of eyes watched him like hawks as he walked to the empty tray to fetch the bottle of milk, knowing well where Kanaya kept her little tea stash and mugs already. He could hear the release of pent breath from behind him as he reached out slowly, carefully, and picked up the bottle without knocking it over.

“I can hear you, you know. Try to be a little less astounded at me failing to mess up basic tasks? I'm supposed to be doing this anyway, you can't keep gasping forever.”

“Sorry, that was foolish of me,” John said, lifting his hands up with a shrug of his wide shoulders. “I'd like less milk and sugar in mine, please.”

“Tea with vague understanding on the concepts of sugar and milk and actual pleasant flavors. Excellent choice, my liege, excellent choice,” Dave said as he turned to the fire to begin the process, thriving in the relaxed, warm environment. He clutched the milk container tightly enough that a part of him worried he'd break it, wanting to ensure that it was only going where he wanted it to go instead of dropping it the second he'd regained some face.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Jake arrived in the evening to speak, expression tired but eyes full of promise. He carried a single book under his arm, with several scraps of parchment tucked into the pages, half full of writing. The knock was distinct enough that John called him in without opening the door himself, asking instead that Jake close and lock it behind himself upon entry after he poked his head inside. The soft tinkle of metal on metal was similar to bells as Jake watched John and Dave move slowly in dancing motions. One of John's broad hands was low on Dave's back, holding him close and steady by the press higher up below his arm, prepared to keep him upright if his legs went or he stumbled. His right hand was out to the side clasping the Dersite's pale fingers loosely, steps formal for the most part, repeating simplified motions to a tempo that was being gently hummed. The elder prince wasn't able to place the melody immediately, but he could take in the soothing nature of it all the same, half lullaby and half love song.

Fitting for them. They made a lovely picture against the finery of the room's décor and the flickers of dancing flame from the fireplace mingling with the glow of the other light sources, John dressed in his layers and Dave dressed simply to the cool air, the silvery metal at his throat flashing like fish scale every other turn, bright as his hair.

“Dancing so soon? Is there something to celebrate?” he asked when he'd waited long enough and felt like interrupting the magic wouldn't be some crime against nature.

“Well,” John said, dropping the song and letting Dave take over leading the tune, humming with softer notes to avoid becoming overly tired right off the bat. “We've secured a coat for him, it will be done within a few days. Kanaya's also making proper bedding for us all, and making sure the other odds and ends we'd likely need are secured. She'd making him boots too, I believe, or customizing some to fit him like a glove. We'll be plenty warm. ...And dancing like this is as good of a way as any to help him build himself back up and get used to balancing and moving around again. Not too spirited, but not slow enough to be boring.”

“Good, I've been looking into what we'd need for the horses too. It's a long distance, too long to carry all they'd need for certain along with our own supplies. Were it spring or summer it wouldn't be such a damned issue, but as it is,” Jake sighed, watching the pair continue to weave their slow but steady patterned footwork across the floor before he made his way to the bed to take a seat and look over some of the scraps of parchment he'd brought.”...We may need to bring a decent purse along and see if we can bribe people for places to stay.”

“No staying at inns?” John asked. “We'll not be flying our flags or bearing anything that screams royalty with us.”

“No, we'd just be two fellows dressed plainly and toting a half blind Dersite with us towards the border. I think we can get away with an inn after the first night, but I'd still prefer to aim for homes when we can. People may be more willing to share supplies if we've money for them to replace what we've used and turn a profit at the same time. It's also often easier to get a single family quiet than an entire building, and barns would let us stay with the horses themselves instead of being separated in case we had to run. Less being cornered.”

Dave's legs were starting to shake and his steps were growing more unsteady, but he didn't call a halt to the movements, face stubborn and focused as he continued to make his melody and follow the steps. John didn't slow down, following his directions to a tee, though his hand tensed a bit at Dave's back in preparation for the worst. His love was a stubborn mule, to the point of self destruction, and no force would alter that no matter how much John wished it could be so sometimes.

“That sounds like a plan. Will you be able to manage that?”

“Yes. I may also be able to get hold of a pair that are shoed for that kind of ride already as well, make it an easier fleeing. We'd need to leave at dawn, whichever day we do, and I know a general route to follow. We'd be able to cut across woodlands for part of it, and if we keep a good clip, still wind up near people by the time we'd have to stop for the night. We'll be needing to stop and rest periodically for the horses anyway,” Jake added as he looked down his list.

“This is a lot more complex than I'd thought it'd be,” John sighed. “If we weren't planning things ahead of time, we'd probably be losing the horses fairly quick in this snow.”

“We'd be losing ourselves in this snow as well. I'm still trying to sort out any kind of a route once we get over to Derse, but it seems a bit less simple to find anything. ...Dave, would you know any paths through the mountains?” he asked hopefully.

“No. I know my mountain's area and the woodland around it, and I think I still know the area I was captured. But I do not recall the specifics of how I got there anymore, or.. how I got here from there,” Dave admitted, his breathing coming heavier. “It's kind of.. of...”

His steps slowed and grew more shaky, struggling to keep up with his own pace before they suddenly buckled, sending him downward. John was able to snag him easily enough, having been waiting, but it was still a quick action he easily could have missed or messed up. Dave's hands scrabbled at John's front as if he were going to fall to the stone, clinging painfully tight against the skin that slipped beneath the shirt's fabric.

“Easy, easy, I've got you,” the prince mumbled, scooping Dave up once he got a better grip and depositing him beside Jake. He lay still for a moment, gray in the face and exhausted before he slowly rolled to his stomach and rested his head on his arms, shaking as he inhaled and exhaled slowly.

“You okay there, chap?” asked Jake, watching him like a hawk. “Think you'll be able to handle the travel? If we need a sledge we can try to plan around that. It'd just take some more wo-”

“No,” insisted Dave. “I'll be able to handle it, just stick with the current plans. There's enough up in the air and enough problems with the horses and supplies, I'm not adding to that even more than I already am!”

Jake stared at him before glancing to John with a grimace. From Dave's tone it was obvious what the problem was, though it was not something so easily fixed with a hug and a 'there there'. His heart sank, but he nodded and went back to his list.

“I'd recommend checking with Karkat, perhaps. He's already helped me pick the relevant sections quite clean, but if I pressure too much further I worry I'll leave a glaring line of torches from my inquiries to our escape route.”

“As if it'll be much easier if we look into it. We're all going!”

“Well. Yes,” Jake admitted. He fiddled with the softer edge of the parchment in his hand and bit his lip, weighing his next words carefully as precious metals. “There.. is a chance that Jane and Jade may be catching on to something being not right if I'm not careful.”

John's brows lifted and he rushed forward, planting his hands onto Jake's shoulders. “Wait, what? Jade might know?? Jane I could deal with, perhaps, but if Jade knows-!”

“Might be catching on! Might be!” Jake insisted, reaching a hand up to shove at John's face till he backed off. He wiggled the parchment till it crinkled, huffed, and straightened himself. “I said might because nothing is set in stone, nothing has crossed my path yet and nobody has confronted me! But Jane typically keeps up with what I read and we like to discuss chapters sometimes. The books I'd been reading lately are all fairly in line with our plans now, and I've not had the focus to juggle some form of novel at the same time to put on a face for Jane or Jade when I visit her. I fear it's only a matter of time before either of them notice. They've that spooky womanly air about them, the one that let's them know when you're fucking about needlessly so they can hit you upside the head.”

“Can't you just make something up if it comes to that? Or admit to one or two of the books and tell her what they were about, see if they'd not be interested? Jade hears enough about Derse and has memories aplenty of her freeze, and Jane tends to like mysteries far more than things that sound like field manuals.”

“That's the problem, John. She'll know, I've no idea how better to explain it, but she'll know! If not Jade, then Jane! There's not as much distracting her right now, all of her focus could be put towards sniffing out inconsistencies. The air I mentioned, John!”

“Jake.”

“Spooky womanly airs, John,” intoned Jake, face deadly serious.

John rolled his eyes, but Dave snickered softly. “I'm all too familiar with spooky womanly airs, Jake. You'll be meeting my family once we arrive, Rose will be more than enough to keep you busy with spookiness. It's one of her many charming points.”

“I still say you could just lie to them, Jake, we're going to be needing to lie easily moving out from here. It's a good skill to hone for our escape,” John insisted.

“I can lie to strangers quite well, and I'm able to lie to Father too. You know that,” Jake said. “It's different, though. Jane actively seeks out things and Jade...” He sighed and shook his head. “You're right. You're right, I'll see what I can do. Perhaps I can convince her about the current book I'm really reading being interesting, and then insist I'm re-reading one of my favorite jungle tales. John, you'd know it, it's the one with the charming cerulean vixen wh-”

John grimaced at him hard enough that Jake sulked.

“Oh, you're no fun at all. No taste at all, either, you've no idea what you're missing out on.”

“Jake, I've absorbed so much of that book from your enthralled crooning I feel as if I've read it against my will. Let's just try to focus on business while you're here safely: is there anything else we need to cover? Tack for the horses, our own food supplies. ...Medicine? Bandages..?” John asked, realizing more and more as he spoke aloud just how much razor would be to their necks for this journey.

There was a real chance of death to the elements, realer than he ever thought he'd be facing, and somehow it was that risk that struck terror into his heart far deeper than fear of his father's wrath. The chance of failure wouldn't just sting him, terrified and far from the warm fires or even funeral rites of home, but it would be stinging his brother and lover as well. Maybe this was a fool's errand. Maybe it wasn't too late to back out and dig his heels in, guard Dave against his father, against his entire kingdom if needs be. Running was the cowards way, or at least that's what he'd always been told growing up, reserved only for cowards and the rare times when strategy required it.

Dave rolled to his side and tucked his legs up to give himself more room, turning so he could face everyone easier while he rested with half closed eyes. Color was back in his face, and the cold sweat that seemed to come along with the swoons had dried, the part in his hair looking a little stiff for it. He took notice of John watching him, speech lulled and expression too worried for his own good, and smiled at him till the prince mirrored him. The tension seemed to melt from his shoulders.

No. That was enough proof that running was worth it. Dave would never be able to thrive here, not as things stood now. Escape was a requirement: he needed to go home if there was any hope of him finding lasting happiness.

“I don't think there's much else to worry on,” Jake admitted. “When I get the tack prepared and set aside, I plan to be pilfering some rations as well. If anyone questions me I can just go on about being besotted by an adventure in some way or another and wanting to pay homage to the experience by recreating it, or some such fib.”

“Worked when we were kids. Did you have a way to sweet talk extra bread and jerky from the kitchens by claiming the hero in the story subsisted off it so much that you wanted to do the same?”

“Yes,” said Jake. “Though that was quite a long time ago and not the dead of Winter. I'll have to brush up on that story.”

“Brush up on the same story to tell Jane and Jade, then, get more practice in,” John insisted. He walked around to the far side of his bed and crawled atop the mattress, coming up behind where Dave was laying prone and draping himself over his hip and waist like a heavy blanket suddenly enough that the Dersite groaned before accepting his fate as a cushion. “We're aiming for a week, right? It doesn't need to hold too long. ...If we wait longer, then perhaps...”

“Then the risk raises, the longer we wait. We can't risk it, John. A week is as much time as we should allow, we're playing with fire!”

“What if Kanaya can't work that fast?” Dave said. “I know she's astounding, but even with help she's only one seamstress.”

“She has her ways, Dave. Don't worry. If it was too much she would have said so,” John insisted, patting at his upper back a few times. “She's told me no plenty of times in the past, and for far less important things.”

“The one time I wish I knew proper sewing, and I don't know it,” he muttered sourly. Another thing he couldn't do or help with. Great. “What am I to do then? I can't remember much more about the travel aside from what to expect closer to my home, I've no money, no desire to risk going places alone here and no guarantee of how long I can be up and moving at any time. What CAN I do?”

“Keep exercising and resting and rebuilding your strength,” Jake said seriously. He turned where he sat to pick up Dave's hands, kissing the knuckles in a move so natural, so soothing, that it didn't even really register what he'd done till he saw John's eyebrows lift in surprise. “You'll be riding with us, and not needing to worry about steering. Just be strong. ...And perhaps try your best to keep us focused and on topic,”he added with a chuckle.

“...That's not helping,” Dave said flatly. “But fine. I see your point.”

Releasing Dave's hands, Jake slowly pushed himself up off the mattress and dusted his clothing down, tugging his shirt and cloak into place to smooth the wrinkles he may have placed in them during his time down. “It's helping a good deal, and it's good of you to remember it. If you're wanting a more specific request then.. how about this. Karkat said you still have those translations back and forth, and that older book?”

“Yes, it's a pain in the neck.”

“Write out common phrases for us. Dave, you know Dersian better than anyone else in this room, and you've managed to learn Prospitian terribly well too. I know there's overlap for Skaian, but if we give it our best attempts it'd be better than being mute and deaf in an entire country during our travels.”

“...Things like food, water, shelter?” asked Dave curiously. Okay. That was definitely useful, and with what he'd been absorbing lately he was fairly sure he could manage that. Perhaps he'd write up a list and bring it to Karkat for looking over and correcting before they left, since he was the authority on languages as far as Dave was concerned now.

“Please and thank you would be good too,” John added. “Courtesies. ...Maybe other things more specific to our needs too. Things for the horses, medicine. Cold, heat. Blanket. Perhaps the directions as well, if they have other words than North, South, East and West. It'd be a problem to seek direction and go the entirely wrong direction because we misinterpreted what we'd been told.”

“Are there any formalities with Skaia's commoner class?” Jake wondered aloud, suddenly glancing down at his books. “I've been looking into a lot of Derse's borders and the lands surrounding, but I've not thought to look into actually blending in that well. ...Will we be sticking out like sore thumbs?”

“Well. Yes, obviously,” Dave said with a lifted brow. “You're going to stick out terribly if you don't change some things. Clothing only goes so far: you're tall, well fed Prospitians with well tacked horses and noticeable accents who use fairly formal speech.”

Jake and John blinked at him, then at each other with a frown.

“Please, write up some phrases for certain then. In Prospitian too, if you would. I'll see about being more conscious of my speech for now. You can teach us more on the road, give us some lessons.”

“Of course,” promised Dave, feeling his spirits lift. Okay, that was way more important than just trying to handle being physically active and on his feet for longer periods of time. It'd give him something he could do when he needed to rest, too! Maybe if he did a lot of that he could convince John to let him practice swo- “Jake, that reminds me. Ensure I have a weapon too when we leave.”

“I'm... not entirely sure you'll need one. I mean, John and I will both be armed, and you're-”

“A prince of Derse who knows my country and who knows that not giving me a blade of my own is careless at best and an insult at worst,” he snapped, voice so full of authority that Jake found himself briefly lowering his chin the same as he did when his Father grew displeased. The elder prince laughed softly when he caught himself and nodded, smiling broad in delight. There was that spark of fire they'd need.

“A sword it will be then,” Jake said. He gave a brief bow before looking over the items he'd brought and stacking them more tidily in his arms, not wanting to risk dropping anything or giving too much information away to those he might pass. “I wish you two a pleasant evening then. I'll try to visit in.. say three days time. Should you need me sooner, send word.”

“I'll have a lot of things set up before then,” Dave insisted, trying to lurch upright to his feet but being held in place by John's firm grasp. “I'll try to keep him focused as well.”

“And I'll ensure he keeps building himself back up while not working into the dirt, on top of keeping up with other needs. Three days should be fine. Last minute prep at that point, right?”

“So long as nothing goes wrong? Yes,” laughed Jake again. “We'll need all the luck we can get for every step of this endeavor.”

“May the sun and moon bless us hard as the stupid stars shine bright,” John sighed.

#Homestuck #JohnDave #my fic #John Egbert #Dave Strider #Jake English #Kanaya Maryam

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dahniwitchoflight · 7 years ago

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Who inverted in the comic and who overembraced? This is really interesting.

oh man a list of everyone? oh boy lol

I dont think I can list everything AND explain why in detail all in one post, but I can at least make a basic list of my thoughts roughly in order

so in the first four acts of the comic roughly, there was Alpha Jade who wandered near the path of inverting to a Seer of Time, but snapped out of that when she saw a dead dave in her googles

there was Jadesprite who had become comfortable with nonexistence/death being suddenly brought back to life and Inverting because of her situation

then later incomic Grimbark Jade I would say with our new knowledge of what things are Time and what things are Space is probably that Grimbark Jade was overembracing (Space as bigger picture thinking/not worried about details/patience focused ie “playing the long con” = GrimBark Jade as wanting to go through with the plan of Dave killing LE with the cueball and not explaining anything just wanting it done, her being patient but threatening with Roxy getting her to make the matriorb etc things like that)

Rose obviously spent a lot of time falling in the beginning, and then made a big splash inverting when she went grimdark. later in the comic she become more balanced, more okay with not having all the answers or the answers that she “wants”, still dipping now and again but nothing too bad

Dave overall at the beginning was alright, Davesprite however was I believe heavily inverted throughout most of his existence (and then later finding some happiness as an existence in Davepeta, but I also consider that partly him “giving up” at being “Dave” in general so ymmv)

Dave himself foundered here and there in parts, but I wouldn’t say he ever got as bad as even John in the ship, his path was mostly “maaaan why do *I* have to be the guy who does things all the time, like yes like I’m good at Time, but can’t somebody else be good at Time too? Give me a break” like his situation was trying to set him up to overembrace and do everything himself but he was actively trying to avoid that, so it sort of ended up evening itself out in a comfortable balance kind of way

John has, obviously, the Prospit ship, but other than that one bad situation he found himself in was otherwise actually pretty alright in his role

as for Alpha kids, Jane was somewhat similar to Rose in that she had a lot of buildup for going down a dark inverty path at the beginning, it kind of came to a semi head under Caliborn’s mockery of her, then she stuffed it down until Crocker!Jane happened and let it all out

Dirk and ARr have an interesting situation where one was an overembracer while one was an inverter, and they kinda push eachother away from themselves as they both attempt to distance themselves from eachother, in some ways both versions of Dirk are trying simultaneously to be “less like “Dirk” ” and “more like themselves (who is Dirk)” in varying ways throughout the comic, so they both show signs here and there of flip flopping between those two states, overall though I think Dirk was more likely to overembrace at the start and invert near the end, while AR was more like to invert near the beginning and overembrace near the end

Roxy of all the kids was actually the most straightforward in her path, even moreso than John, she never really wandered from the straight and narrow, even when her vices came to a head or when she stumbled a bit she didnt let it overwhelm her, but shook herself off and straightened herself out and kept on trucking

and then Jake was fairly alright, but I do think a lot of his bravado at the beginning was maybe him trying to cover up that he didn’t really feel like a valuable contributor/part of the rest of the team, which is probably why he seemed to fall easily into place whenever Dirk stepped up tor try and take the reigns of any situation they were a part of in the beginning. Jake always did seem more comfortable leaving difficult situations in the hands of other people rather than deal with things honestly and thats probably because of his own perspective that he wasnt able to handle those things

and then when Aranea did her thing with him, technically during his giant hopey ball thing you could consider that “environmental factors forcing him to act overembracey” but I dont think it really counts cuz it wasnt of his own free will at all

and then for the trolls, most notable examples of either inversion or overembracing were:

Aradia as inverting while still a ghost/dead aka before god tier

Vriska as HEAVILY overembracing to the point of being poster child, while (Vriska) or punk Vriska/Ghost Vriska going the extreme other direction of inverting for a bit

Terezi at the super beginning you could say was more likely to overembrace (mostly because of Vriska influence probably), then mellowed out a bit, but then far later her relationship with Gamzee caused her to somewhat invert

Gamzee, did make drastic personality flips over the course of the comic, but he’s an ambiguous character and thats overshadowed by things like his personal Loyalty to LE and Lil Cal, I’ll give him that. But, overall, he did decide that what he wanted was the same thing as what LE wanted, he decided he was going to become his own god/s, and he sort of suceeded at that, and everytime, when it came to a head between what he wanted and what other people wanted, Gamzee did what he wanted every time (because he wanted what LE wanted which he understood as things that he himself wanted, because he knew he was going to become LE) so I would consider that a tendency for overembracing overall, with the slight exception of the beginning of the comic where he was a complete sopored up pushover

Eridan you could consider was a straightforward example of of overembracer in the same vein of Aranea later on, where he decided on a plan of action/his own beliefs, didn’t let anything or anyone else come into his consideration, and ended up having that plan blow up in his face

Tavros has a notable mention of as a ghost with Vriska dipping slightly into inversion but it never really came to a head/amounted to much

then the other trolls are more like, Equius was submissive, but he *wanted* to be that way, but he didnt do anything at anyone elses expense really, so he didnt invert or overembrace

Kanaya like Roxy was fairly steady in her role overall, and more rose to occasion whenever she was needed

Nepeta didnt really get much either way and neither Sollux

and while I definitely agree Karkat had some up and downs with his own self worth, neither were really that extreme, I think he did end up coming out on top with a better understanding of his role at the end of the day

and of the older trolls, the only notable example out of any of them inverting or overembracing wise was Aranea for overembracing, for already spoken about reasons

Meenah was a notable character, but again, was one of those that stayed fairly steady in their path without really trampling others’ wills

then finally cherubs

of course Caliborn/LE is THE poster child for overembracing as a universal concept far greater than even Vriska

Calliope, especially when dead, fell more into a situation where if she had been left in it, she would have bent towards one of the extremes overtime, probably inversion, but overall in the comic was a great example of someone who found more of a balance in her role overall

and then Alt!Calliope was, again, now knowing a better understanding of Space as patience and broad thinking versus Time as impatience and details focused (unlike before where I had those parts actually switched) I now understand her as someone who’s situation forced them to overembrace their talents, to become like Caliborn and his overembracing ideals in order to survive, to think only of themselves and nothing else in order to continue existing at all and find a way to claw themselves out/be able to do something

thats about that roughly

#Homestuck #Inversion

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isroselalondebisexual · 7 years ago

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this one's a bit of a loaded question, but what do you think the kids swapped with their patron troll would be like? like rose in kanaya's place, jade in karkat's place, dave in terezi's place, and john in she-who-must-not-be-named's place. they're all trolls ofc

Rose Maryam, a troll of moderate wealth and status, whose lusus is a Virgin Mothergrub. Well, we know from how Kanaya spoke of her and the brief times we saw her that Mamagrub was a very loving lusus. She comforted Kanaya when she was crying over getting her heart broken and Kanaya told a story of how she and Mamagrub just stayed in for troll-christmas and read stories. Mamagrub is, then, likely to be a more authoritative parent, as much as a weird alien bugmom can be. Rose would probably act somewhat less recklessly than she does in canon, more used to there being consequences to her actions and used to the potential for deadly consequences thanks to her culture. She’s very strong, with quick reflexes, used to having to fend off zombies from her desert home, but I doubt the experiences would be particularly traumatizing because her lusus is right there to make sure she’s okay and zombies are just oogie boogie scary monsters. Probably still has very similar interests, mirroring Kanaya’s own interest in Rainbow Drinker Trash Fiction and whatever passes as troll-goth, which I have firm reason to believe is actually light-centered but that’s a different post. Her role as a Seer of Space- okay, so, full stop, I imagine Space to be the ULTIMATE in Seer aspects, so I’m a little biased- but her role would be p much The Storyteller. Much like Calliope in canon, she is the one who sees not the timeline, but the STORY. The WHOLE. Space, by my understanding of it, is very interested in the WHOLE, and less interested in the PARTS. So Rose can’t really say “do x thing for y result” but she can say “This is our current goal for the moment, we need to work towards that.” Breeding the frog would be… fun… She’d honestly probably need help with that task, if I’m being wholly honest. Rose would, of course, be ENAMORED with the aliens they end up running into, and Kanaya, who I’m assuming would take the role of Light player in this scenario, would fit perfectly with Rose’s Alternian-goth aesthetic and the two of them would generally just continue being soulmates like they are in canon.

Jade Vantas, a mutant troll with incredibly low funding and pretty much no status, whose lusus is an anthropomorphic crab. She’s already pretty punchy in canon, but raised by Crabmom, she’s likely gonna end up with her particular apple not falling far from that tree. Not to mention the constant injustice of her society being shoved in her face, the stress of having to keep herself hidden, she’s gonna wind up pretty snippish! Would absolutely lie about her blood color, though, not hide it. She’d pass herself off as a rust, do absolutely everything she could to make sure the people around her saw her as a rust blood and not suspect her as a mutant. Stays away from games that could make her bruised or bleeding, but if she DOES accidentally get bruised, well, it’s CLOSE ENOUGH, right, no one should stare too long because it’s a reddish hue. She’s gonna make social connections first because she likes having friends, but second because she knows her chances of surviving go up exponentially if there are people who are like, actually important, who care about her. Angrily feels that there should be more worth placed on her own life, but feels deeply insecure due to her own place in society. Her lusus, while cantankerous, does love her though, and while they do have a mutual back and forth of caretaking, Crabmom is somewhat more intelligent than Bec the magic dog so Jade has better met emotional needs. Still ridiculously smart, but with less access to resources Jade’s intelligence is going to be more of a “known in theory not in practice” variety. Being able to alchemize a lot of shit during the Game is gonna be SO FUN for her. Her role as a Witch of Blood would be focused on her ability to use her bonds with her teammates to accomplish their goals. Jade’s gonna end up a little master-mind-y, and she’s the one who’ll take Rose’s “This is our goal now” and go “Okay, here are the people who need to work on that and here’s how” so she ends up sort of the leader? More like team manager, maybe. She knows her friends well, knows their strengths, and can accurately direct them. The fact that her friends will actually listen to her, even after learning her true blood color, and still love and respect her, will be very affirming for her and help her with her insecurities! Being really irritated all the time will need some work, but once removed from the society that makes her frustrated that’ll slowly simmer down.

Dave Pyrope, middle class, raised by a dragon egg. Probably ends up doing something cocky because he puts forth a “hot shit” persona and gets himself injured lmao. He’s chilly, but not cold blooded, and he can get away with some shit but he’s not invincible. Probably for the best that he lives in a goddamned tree tbh. He’s still a sweet boy though, he just craves that validation a little too hard and does stupid shit for attention. His Dragondad isn’t really around to give him all the attention he needs, especially in his more formative years, and even after Something Dumb makes him wake up on his moon when he can talk to Dragondad, Dave still wants ATTENTION dammit. Also I just realized that all the patron trolls were on Prospit, I just realized that. Anyway, Dave does indeed put forth a coolkid persona because it’s something he thinks is going to make people like him, and he’s kinda lonely out in the middle of a forest by himself with only a giant egg for company. That, and it’s Alternia, and signs of weakness can get you killed, so he wants to seem impenetrable and aloft and put out “don’t fuck with me” vibes even though Dave is, admittedly, pretty easy to fuck with. His role as Knight of Mind would start out as him closely guarding his own mentality, shielding it from others’ eyes so they do not know what he’s truly like. He would think, based on his classpect, that this is the right and true way for him to act, that makes sense, and become briefly even more entrenched in his own coolkid persona. But then going past that, he would need to understand that guarding one’s mind can be good, yes, but he’s not actually doing himself any favors by locking his true thoughts and feelings up. Rather, he needs to protect his mind, and the minds of his friends, by encouraging openness and honesty between them. He needs to come to terms with the fact that nothing is going to be clear cut and logical, that everything is messy and the smartest, most pragmatic thing to do when dealing with brains- these things that house all our messy thoughts and emotions and spur our behaviors- is to cultivate them. Dave has to learn how to productively manage psychology, his own and those around him, and accept his own personality. This is something Latula never did. Something Latula ended up failing to do, which is why, even millions and millions of sweeps after her death, she still puts forth her coolkid persona and uses her fake persona as a shield. Karkat remarked on it in canon, and a Doomed Dave in this verse would be a Dave that follows in canon Latula’s footsteps. They have to be honest.

John Serket, upper middle class, with a nasty nasty lusus. He’d get the demand to kill other trolls and feed them to Spiderdad, and honestly? I don’t think he could. I think he’d refuse and he would die, Spiderdad would die, or Spiderdad would have to go get his own damn food, possibly abandoning John. Or maybe Spiderdad would scream in John’s brain until he DID kill somebody. But John, he’s not the kind of person who would take it well. He’d be numb for the start of it, yeah, he wouldn’t feel anything about the warm corpse still bleeding body heat, even as he chucked it into Spiderdad’s web, and I don’t think he’d feel anything in the shower or as he went to sleep that day, even though he wouldn’t be able to stop THINKING about it I don’t think there’d be an emotional connect. Until the daymares. He wouldn’t stop thinking about it, and the guilt and disgust and horror would sink in slowly, slowly, slowly, building and building inside him until he’s sobbing on his kitchen floor and choking on his own breathing because what the FUCK did he do?! Oh god he killed somebody. I could imagine John making the decision that, since he has proven he can kill a troll, he can defend himself, and he can’t do that again, he cannot kill another troll to feed Spiderdad ever again. John would likely use his mind control powers to prompt Equius (or, whoever he’s living next to, idk how trollswaps really work either) into using his STRENGTH into causing a minor avalanche, effectively killing Spiderdad, because how dare he force John to kill, he didn’t want to do that, yeah he’s Cerulean but he never wanted to hurt anybody! And then, of course, comes the guilt of killing his own lusus, of forcing his neighbor to do the dirtywork, of using his powers against a FRIEND and John hadn’t wanted to ever do that either. He’s a list of broken promises to himself. So anyway very traumatized. John’s also likely to end up a very ANXIOUS person, in this kind of swap. A lusus who didn’t really love him, when a lusus is SUPPOSED to be the one creature in a troll’s life that they can KNOW values them, would leave its mark on his psyche, and the mantra that the people who you love/who love you will make demands, demands that come at deep personal detriment, is gonna fuck him up too, regardless of whether John kills his lusus or his lusus just starves or his lusus sticks around but keeps SCREAMING at John to do things for him. Literally all of those options are gonna leave John jittery and utterly anxious as a person. He’s gonna be the type of person who gives into demands very, very easily, and see requests from his friends as things he really can’t back out of, or else it’ll make him the bad guy, a terrible friend, a selfish greedy lazy person who doesn’t pull his weight, no matter how often he says “yes” it’ll never feel like enough to justify a “no.” He and Jade would end up working very closely, because Jade is the one issuing out orders and John responds quickly and without much argument. Like as not, John is gonna be the one helping Rose breed the frogs. As Heir of Luck, which I sorta discussed in my John Lalonde post, he’s a very lucky dude, and breeding frogs would probably go REALLY well for him! But given his different life situation, John Lalonde and John Serket are pretty different people with pretty different goals. John Serket’s personal quest would be more about becoming bright, as a person. John’s natural disposition is to be friendly, cheerful, playful and even somewhat childish. He was stripped of that, by his lusus and his society as a whole, but now he has a chance to play a Game with his friends free of his lusus, free of his old planet and it’s culture, and to truly bloom as a person he has to shuck all the things that were unlucky about his past life and embrace the things that WERE lucky. He’s got good friends, a solid inborn set of morals, and a laugh as brilliant as the dawn. He’s a cheery sunny boy with a lot of love in his heart, so his quest is to really, truly shine.

#Rose Lalonde #John Egbert #Dave Strider #Jade Harley #Rose Maryam #Jade Vantas #Dave Pyrope #John Serket #trollstuck #trollswap #answers #John #Dave #Jade #Homestuck

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