#i was thinking it would be that dave never knew his actual mom but dirk and roxy raised him together and she took over full time once dirk -

[weirdmageddon]

i love these tags this person is so right

actually, can you imagine if dave was raised by B1 roxy?

i wanna get into this actually

(ok i had to spend a few hours rewriting this because IT DIDNT FUCKING SAVE AFTER FIVE HOURS OF WRITING WHEN MY COMPUTER UPDATED WHILE I WAS AFK so it would mean a lot to show this post some appreciation. i LOVEEE hearing what other people have to say)

even though these things mom does are presented in an extravagant, kitsch, jokey way, her intentions always came from a place of sincerity. she is simply Funnie

but rose reads too far into it and assumes things that aren't there, that her mother is passive-aggressively feigning interest in rose's interests simply because the things she does are so extra. "why do all of this if not to mock me"

im telling you right now if dave lived in this household he wouldn't assume antagonism, he'd go,

don’t forget who LITERALLY patented tangible jpeg artifacts as their post-scratch adult self and scattered shitty scummed up statue of liberties all over the planet. theres no way some of that overboard artful shit wasnt post-ironic / circling back around to genuine funny sincerity

dave's natural state is funny sincerity like roxy. he's had the natural capacity for this type of humor from the start and this is the direction he goes towards when he grows out of his brother's shadow by the end of the comic. dave and roxy share an earnest “so bad its good” type of humor

(lots more under the cut; the length of this meta analysis just got unwieldly with all the pictures and whatnot)

despite the alcoholism, roxy is a supportive mother. she's not the ideal guardian but hells of a lot more supportive of her kid than bro is. if she knew dave's interests she would totally indulge in them with some over the top silly goofy haha shit as a genuine gesture simply because she loves him

rose isn't too keen on it though. but she is more similar to dirk in her natural state of thinking of overthinking shit and assuming the worst, like the tags said

and yes dave got the sweet cuddly yet sometimes backhanded ouppy gene from roxy, probably even moreso lol

roxy's even said rose "sounds like girl dirk"

side tangent here, but this is something i wanna talk about.

i dont think bro should ever be in custody of children ever but if theres anyone who would be up to the task it's rose probably. i know she'd be able to keep up with him. not only does she have a defined personality (dave is more malleable and absorbs his environment like a sponge), if anyone can pick apart B1 dirk's batshit brain and probably be right on the money it's her. lil cal has been pumping patriarchal nonsense into bro's head and rose would be able to bring the fucking facts to the table without losing her own and being a living example of a badass little girl. i also don't think bro would try to force masculine roles onto rose like he did with dave, seeing as she is a girl, so she would actually have more of a leg up and get some passes that dave was never afforded. and rose wouldn't stand idly and accept any bullshit; she is no doormat. and i think this would earn bro's respect

but anyway, from this, couldn't we conclude roxy "sounds like girl dave"?

yeah okay. we havent even gotten into their penchant for funny typos or misspeaks, deliberate or otherwise

so, dave's environment

the sentiment "god you hope you can be as good as your bro at this some day" might have been genuine at the time when he idolized bro but of course he's not able to express that in any sort of sincere fashion because he's in dirk's fucking household. and this level 10 irony shit isnt doing dave any favors

his role models were the Internet and a vague idea of what Bro was like. So he built up his facade based on irony–not the literary definition of irony, as Rose might be quick to point out, but a popular concept of irony based on the idea that things that didn’t make sense actually made sense in some roundabout way. As a master of irony, Dave probably reasoned, he could see in a way other people couldn’t why a world that was scary and didn’t make sense really did make sense, and could therefore convince those people that he was superior to them. And he would wield his knowledge to maintain the appearance of superiority by calling everything ironic and pretending he didn’t care about things that didn’t make sense, and he would use walls of vaguely rhyming words to keep everyone at arm’s length so they wouldn’t discover his insecurities (source)

roxy's style is the embodiment of post-irony. being raised by mom lalonde would be like being raised by joel vinesauce ok

what can i say ….. (getting meta about this actually, hussie got these jpeg wizard wallpapers from a spyware website. link takes some time to load because internet archive)

rose is quick to read post-irony as actually being a joke/insincere, which in bro's case would be true. but i believe dave's natural instinct, outside of the influence of bro, is to read post-irony as genuine, which is exactly how mom serves it. we see this as early as act 3 from him; he understands her motives better than rose does herself:

and in act 6 intermission 2 i think it's pretty clear

but the thing is, it's always genuine from her. dave wouldn't have to second guess it because he's not one to naturally second guess someone's sincerity; that was learned due to his bro being virtually unassailable

there two types of ironies at play here:

seems like a joke, is actually genuine (roxy)

doesnt seem like a joke, is actually a joke (dirk)

you can make the argument that the second is is more psychologically destructive because it makes you question the reality of what is genuine sentiment and what isn't. dave never knew what was genuine and what was irony so he just sort of existed in this sincerity-ironic limbo and always did the opposite of what he genuinely felt on principle even if it always did originate from a genuine place.

"it just a joke bro i was just being ironic i dont actually x" is so much more trust-breaking and psychologically damaging than "wait are you being serious" / "i am being so fucking fr rn davy gravy" / "ok thats actually pretty fucking awesome. giant ass wizard statue" / "RIGHT"

how much about dave would change do you think? his character arc would be completely different for one thing, i think he'd have it good aside from mom's alcohol issues. he'd be left with the sweet and funny parts of him that we see at the end of the comic. the fake coolguy stuff is out, but this remains. this is dave in his element and we see it as early as act 1

he'd probably have no shades growing up in the lalonde residence* either cause those were given to him by bro straight out of the crater as an extension of his own cool image. and john gave dave ben stiller’s aviators for his 13th birthday to replace them so he could “spread his wings”

dave said he was wearing them for the ironies but i kind of doubt it. maybe post-irony but there was some reacharound to it being genuine because dave never put those pointy anime shades on his face again.

*though... it’s kind of hard to imagine him without his shades at all? B2 dave still got stiller’s shades from stiller himself so maybe getting them is a universal constant. i can imagine mom getting him them as a birthday gift cause shes pretty wealthy and probably could buy it out in an auction. but also itd be cool if john still gave him it as a gift

dave is actually a lot more genuine and easy to read than he lets on even when grappling with his upbringing with B1 dirk (again, see this post). this can be seen all throughout he comic but a good example is the evolution of thoughts about his interest in the preserved dead things in his room:

if B1 roxy was dave's guardian he probably WOULD have pursued paleontology because she wouldve indulged him in it and probably find it cool and worthwhile to pursue, instead of allowing dave to flounder under ironic detachment, being poisoned by irony to the point of gaslighting himself into believing he doesnt actually believe he thinks this shit is cool. even if it was indulged in this such a way; a superficially kitsch and ironic appearing presentation, it comes from a genuine place and inspires genuine interest. just read the comments.

basically, i think if B1 roxy raised dave, their relationship would have a surface level appearance of being bizarre or over-the-top but they’d have an unsaid mutual understanding that it’s completely in earnest and just build on each other's funny and absurd gestures of affection. rather than seeing it as one-upping each other, it'd more like collaboration of some silly bullshit that you take a step back and look at full and just say, "fucking incredible"

speaking of paleontology, mom had the proto-ectobiology lab. maybe they'd be able to use the equipment to appearify paradox ghost imprints of the dead shit to create paradox clones of things from the cambrian era??? sounds like a fun mother son bonding activity. and theyd actually put the sciencey shit in the household to use

oh god i know exactly the kinds of music shed listen too also growing up as a teen in the 80s. she on that (post)-punk/art rock/new wave/new romantic mtv stuff. XTC shit fr. this is a B-52S HOUSEHOLD. maybe the associates for the campy melodramatic flair. so he gets to keep the record on his shirt cause he is an enjoyer of the shit in her vinyl collection. dave would still gravitate towards musical expression and music itself but of more variety outside of just rap, with an 80s-90s, even 70s flavor due to mom’s influence. see this for perhaps a glimpse. ​she probably visited new york city a lot for business trips and because the music scene was cool as hell around that time, imports came straight from jfk airport, she probably got in on that a bit and have remnants in the form of vinyls and cassettes. in this way she could be distributing void to dave (influencing him with forgotten / presently irrelevant music). now he can REALLY rave about bands none of his friends have heard of. “hey davy grvay watcha listenin to” (he holds up vinyl cover) “omg snakefinger”

btw dave lalonde would look like this to me

[grape-icing]

hi!! could you write a short story thingy between cg! roxy and regressor! dave? platonic ofc!!! i think roxy would act as a mother figure to dave!!! maybe dave comes over to roxys for a playdate for the first time, and he’s a little nervous to be so vulnerable around someone for the first time!! idk, you can take whatever creative liberty you want with it!! :)) thank you!!

HAIIII IM SO SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG!!! IVE HAD TESTING ALL WEEK AND I HAD NO IDEAS!!! SORRY IN ADVANCE IF ITS BAD!!! I'll also post this on ao3 :33333

Actual story!!

Dave was pretty nervous about John's doctor's appointment because he knew John would call a babysitter. Which was fine he supposed due to the fact he already told everyone about his regression but he hadn't been watched by anyone else before. Bluh!!! Even the thought of it made him anxious. Dave curled up next to John, filled with worry.

“Something worry bud?” John questioned the sudden movement of the younger boy.

“Uh no” Dave replied which was a lie because he didn't want John to get worried and potentially miss his appointment. Although now that Dave thought about it….

Well never mind, the mystery babysitter was here. Dave really hoped it wasn't someone in his family.

“Oh! That must be her.” John got up and raced towards the door.

“Hiya Roxy!” Dave was doomed, why did it have to be his mom? Sister? thing of all people, well at least it's not Dirk.

“Ok, so he knows where everything is and stuff. Uh, am I missing anything? Oh, his favorite juice is in the fridge. Shoot I'm already late! Okay got to go, bye Dave I love ya!” John quickly left.

“Hai Davey!” Roxy announced. Dave turned away.

“Oh um okay. Do you want to watch a movie or play or….uhm…do something?” Roxy questioned, trying to get him to do anything.

“No,” Dave said quick and bluntly.

“You don't wanna do…anything like at all? Not even a movie?” Roxy walked over and sat right beside him.

“I- uhm sure, I guess,” Dave replied not trying to hurt his mother's feelings. Dave didn't actually know if Roxy considered herself his mother but she didn't mind being called “Mom” so maybe.

“Good!! So whatcha wanna watch honey?” Roxy reached over to grab the remote.

“Uhm I'm not sure, maybe Octonauts? You can pick if you want though.” Dave said in a softer voice than earlier.

“Nah, Octonauts work!” Roxy quickly put the show on and wrapped an arm around Dave, which he wiggled and squirmed his way out of.

After around 20 minutes Roxy suggested they go outside and get some fresh air which Dave very nervously said yes to.

“Need any help getting your shoes on, baby?” Roxy asked while bending down to him.

“no” Dave stated. Roxy saw right through the lie and helped him tie his shoes.

“Uh m-mom,” Dave muttered.

“Hm? What is it pumpkin?” Roxy questioned as she finished trying the younger one's shoes.

“Nothing much. I was just wondering if it was hot outside.” Dave asked while standing up.

“Oh yeah, it's going to be very hot, perfect for playing!” Roxy said cheerfully while grabbing her purse to leave.

“Oh” whined Dave.

“Is something wrong muffin?” Roxy asked due to the tone of his voice. “If you don't want to play that's okay, we can get ice cream if you want!”

“I want um ice cream, please” Dave followed Roxy onto the front steps.

“Alrighty! We can totes do that, I think there's an ice cream place right around here.”

Roxy carefully held his hand the entire walk home, which Dave thought was nice. After about five minutes of walking, they made it to the ice cream parlor.

“Look! We're here!” Roxy bumped Dave on the shoulder to draw his attention.

“Mhm,” Dave quietly followed his mother over to the counter to order their ice creams.

“Okay I'll have one strawberry ice cream and, what do you want Dave?”

“Uhh cookies and cream please.”

After the two got their ice cream they started to walk back home.

“Hey Rox, do ya know um when dad is going to be home?”

“Yeah, he has to run some errands so it might be another hour or two. Don't worry though! Me and you will have loads of fun.” Roxy reassured him that the time would fly by and she'd be out in no time.

“It's okay if you don't want me to stay. I'm not mad I promise.” Roxy gently stoked his hair.

“N-no I don't want you to leave I just don't want you to uhmm never mind.” Dave quickly cut himself off before starting to try and speed-walk home.

“Dave baby slow down. You can tell me anything! I wouldn't say a peep to anybody, not even John!” Dave hit a full stop when she said that.

“Uhm well that was kinda it, I don't want you to go and talk about me to like, I don't know, Rose or Dirk?” Roxy turned to Dave and pulled him into a hug.

“I would never do that, but I can understand why you would think that. Hehe, I talk a bunch so it's reasonable.”

Dave and Roxy stood, embraced in that hug for at least a minute straight before going back to walking again.

Once the two of them returned to the house Roxy decided it would be best just to stay home due to the heat instead of playing outside. Roxy put Dave’s show back on before realizing he was probably still hungry.

“Hey sweet pea, you hungry?” Dave silently nodded. While Roxy went to cook him something, Dave slowly moved over to where he kept all of his little items but started to hesitate, finally, he picked up his bottle.

“Whatcha messing with Dave?” Roxy asked, coming into the room to check on him.

“Uh n-nothing?” Dave squealed out as he quickly shoved what he was holding behind his back.

“Are you sure? Because that didn't seem like nothing?” Roxy questioned as she got closer. “What’s behind your back, Dave?”

“Nothing like I said!” Dave said in an elevated tone, leaning away from her, trying to conceal what was behind him.

“Dude, I need to see what's behind you so I can make sure it’s nothing dangerous.” Roxy pulled his arms away from his back, which was surprisingly easy.

“Pumpkin if you wanted a drink you could have just asked. I'll bring it when I bring your food. I'll be right back!” Roxy placed a small kiss on his forehead and went back to the kitchen.

While Roxy was in the kitchen she quickly filled up his bottle with the apple juice in the fridge, Grabbed his food, and made her way back into the living room. When she got there she handed him the plate.

“Um, thanks” Dave muttered while eating a big spoonful.

“Of course!” Roxy answered.

“Oh, wait! Here’s your bottle, sweetie.” Roxy handed him his cup and sat down beside him. Dave mumbled something inaudible and shoved it where it couldn’t be seen due to him being embarrassed by it. Which obviously confused Roxy.

“You okay little dude? I saw you hiding your drink, any reason for it? if it’s because of me, you don't gotta worry, I don't care whatcha do as long as you’re not getting hurt or making a mess.” Roxy moved closer so she was basically right against Dave’s back, She gave him a small hug from behind. Dave leaned into her warm embrace and cautiously reached for his bottle, looking over at Roxy to make sure she wouldn't judge him or anything like that. Roxy planted a small kiss on his head as he finally started to drink his juice. After around twenty minutes Roxy pulled a blanket over him as soon as she realized he was asleep.

“Hey! I'm back!” John announced, getting cut off by a loud “shhh!!” from Roxy.

[evildykeserket]

i Think that none of the guardians were that great Not because they are inherently bad people but because of the circumstances surrounding them. they took measures that They thought would protect their kids which backfired. but just because there were Good Intentions doesnt mean their actions were Good and forgiveness is a tricky thing bc its. well its Hard when you have a shitty guardian whos bad because Their circumstances were bad and you have to weigh. Can I Forgive You?

and ultimately thats hard to say because it really Does depend on the person. and its like. yea you fucked me up even if you didnt Mean to and i still love you but. you know.

and this goes for All guardians even if you think some of their actions were more morally reprehensible than others.

bro - well he severely fucked up with the fighting / physical abuse / general unsafe enviroment with porn, weapons, etc. he was also being mind corrupted by a fucked demon puppet. he just wanted dave to be strong enough to fill the knight role and made him Hate the concept of being a hero.

mom - negligence mainly. im Not counting the alcohol abuse as a Moral Failure but rather a consequence of knows the world is going to end, she cant do anything to stop it, they Are doomed. it still had bad consequences with rose growing up in that environment and falling into the same habits. she gave rose everything she wanted to an Extreme degree that just made it stifling to like anything.

grandpa - he was dead which. isnt necessarily his fault lmao? but the isolation to people, house full of dangerous weapons and such. the isolation was because the batterwitch, if she knew he had a child she Would have been all over jade [female heir type - she let jake go cause he was a guy etc etc] and he was also the Most involved with the game. he just Couldnt be there, wasnt supposed to survive.

dad - his problem is that, he supports his kid but they dont Talk. he recognizes the situation is Not Good and grieves for his mother but doesnt tell john Anything to protect him - even going go far as to lie about how nanna died. he Watches john and can recognize his surroundings [what movies he likes, the writings on his walls] but never actually Talked with him. inherent misunderstandings.

i think out of all of them, jade and june would forgive more easily just by. Not recognizing that anything was ever off. but they [jade probably] would eventually make peace even if theres a lot of anger and grief involved, just because shes used to that. june is. complicated because she has the 'best of it all' and would struggle the most with it. if they could have one honest conversation i think they would be fine but that obviously cant happen. not even with a Different version of her dad.

dave i dont think would ever forgive his brother and i dont think thats a bad thing. sometimes its better to just let go, its in the past and no amount of what ifs can ever change that. it would probably affect his relationship with dirk though and That would take a while to. not fix but come to terms with if that makes sense. rose is. Also. very complicated in the same reason as june since their home lives Very mirror each other. although she has the chance to talk with roxy and figure out Why she did what she did. i think she heavily goes back and forth on 'i understand and forgive her' and 'she never Talked with me, its her fault our relationship was messed up. i was a child' and they can co-exist.

thats my thoughts at the very least. trauma and trauma recovery is a very tricky subject and theres no black and white of it. and its even Harder to talk about all together cause its like. oh yea they had it Worse so why are you talking about this? when its not. about that. they were all stuck in the same shitty circumstances.

and i want to go into separate posts for each, especially june and rose but Also they Are parallels of eachother so you Do have to talk with. With each other. of course its Not Direct Parallels but general rule of thumb:

rose ~ june

dave ~ jade

either way thats it for now i hope this actually made sense lmao oh god i havent even gotten into the alpha kids and how they would play into this. well i did a little bit but thats Also an important step for them in dealing with their trauma [exception for june] and of course, the other way around with the alpha kids and Their guardians. havent gotten to them yet so ill hold off for now

[takendruid]

Is there RoseMary in the Bleach AU

(my first ever ask :00) yes!! Thank you so much for the ask, however I'm gonna elaborate a bit on other ships >:) there's also Dirkjake and Davekat! Kanaya is an arrancar like karkat (and Jake is a quincy, a quincy specifically in the wandenreich) so Dirk, Dave, and Rose are all FUCKED if their dad finds out they're all dating the enemy.

I haven't really thought of any other ships to include since I don't yet know how they'd be included, but some I would like to set least hint to or show are June X Vriska, Meat Roxy crushing hard on John pre-transition, perhaps platonic cronkri, and erisolfef.

Some I've already mentioned are the fact that Jade likes Dave, Jane LIKED Jake, and BroMom. Jade doesn't know Dave is dating someone, and Dave's sexuality is in a really confusing position for him. He doesn't know if he's bi, pan, gay, or what. Like he would be up to dating Jade as well as Karkat, but the two biggest barriers are 1) his confusion with his sexuality and 2) the fact karkat is a hollow and Jade is a quincy. Jane liked Jake when she didn't know he was John's half-brother when they were 14/15. Jake never found out tho because he's a bit of an oblivious idiot. Finding out they were technically related isn't what put her off, it's the fact he was dating a SOUL REAPER as a QUINCY. Bro/Ult Dirk and Mom Lalonde used to date but like,, in this comic, it's pretty obvious Bro never actually liked her. Funnily enough, Mom actually already knew but was waiting for him to go to her about it. Roxy is fucking smart, and Mom could easily tell Bro never liked her in the first place. But yeah- they divorce when Rose and Dave are very young and Bro takes Dave and Dirk, and Mom takes the girls and "meat" Roxy.

Also vriska is an arrancar as well, but John/June, being a fullbringer, is actually in the most fortunate position because his powers are closely related to hollows so like,, he's technically not saying the enemy but also is...

So yeah! Rosemary is very canon, it's just not a ship I usually think of first since Rose and Kanaya aren't characters in my like- top beloved. I do love them, they're just both cursed as not being my favourites in both characters and ship so I tend to forget about them 😭 If I think of any other ships, I'll probably mention them in another post. But again!! Thank you for the ask :DD it was very fun to answer

[simmonsized]

hi tell me about transversal trickshot please and what your thoughts are on which dave you chose to have that conversation thank you very much

omg okay i'd love to!!!

this is probably long so i will kindly put it under a cut!

it's probably not related to what you are asking but the name is also a joke specifically relating to the fact that bro was stabbed with his own sword crossways, lmfao (thus, transversal)

anyway!

basically, i picked Dave (god) for two reasons to start, and then it spiraled from there:

ONE, the last Actual Conversation he had with Bro from his point of view was a kind of fraught, awkward conversation in chapter 12, which was written to reflect the last time Dave remembers Bro treating him like a little kid (which is to say, with kindness) (and then does, in this scene, treat him like a little kid). that's some deep deserts lore bullshit, but there's a, waves hand, scene in katabasis that is being directly referenced here. not terribly important.

BUT u know his last interactions with him were like -> watch him almost die -> go back into time using powers he said he never wanted to use again and talk to Bro in this strange gentle way that was completely alien to him because neither of them know what to do or how to talk to each other -> watch him almost die but from future dave's perspective -> watch jane bring him back to live -> see him again and the first thing out of his mouth is "i'm glad you're not dead again"

Basically, he didn't get to have a conversation on the roof like Dave(sprite) did, and so i needed something, i suppose, that would let him connect with Bro, and Dave already had that, so it was his turn.

TWO: Rose lmfao. I had mad crazy plans early on for Rose and Bro, but it also involved tackling something i consider to be a problem in canon; once Rose started drinking, Dave started to retreat away from her, and he certainly didn't do shit to help. Dave is a coward. That's pretty much canon. He doesn't like confrontation, he's not any good at working out his friends’ problems, and he's selfish. But because he doesn't understand Rose, it leads to conflict, and because he can't talk to anyone else about it, it became easier, in that way, to talk to Bro, who he knew at this point, had at least some kind of past with Mom, who he knew is a (recovering) alcoholic.

This then led to The Sword, and a moment in time where Bro gets to see a peek at Dave, and his shame, and the thing that, at that moment in time, is quite literally weighing on him. if that makes sense???

also got to make a funny joke about bro and dirk a la lancelot vs galahad (arthurian legend jokes, caledfwlch, etc)

I wish I could explain how i tend to write conversations between characters but i guess just like. most of the time i do dialogue first and fill everything in later. this usually lets me kind of make sure we stay on track, or at least meander naturally, and then i can fill in what's going on in between, especially if there is a big pause!

So while it starts about Rose, it ends up involving the sword, and thus, the Nasty Death Scar, as it is so lovingly called in my household.

Part of the reason i would not think Dave(sprite) suitable for this is that while he is Dave, and is morbid, his current preoccupation with playing a hand in Bro's death would probably do nothing more than make him feel worse. also he's got his own scar, bro ain't special.

And also Dave, at this point specifically, still has all his crazy unresolved feelings relating to the sword, the fact that Bro doesn't seem bothered too badly by his own death (though we find out later this is not true) and he just. Is gross. LOL i love him but Dave is gross.

I think by seeing Bro's scar, he can kind of like. confirm in a weird way that the event Actually Happened, and that it's over, and that Bro is here, and is alive. That there isn't just a huge fucking hole punched through his abdomen and that Dave isn't insane?? you know??

also references to signs at sundown, my beloved <3

and then of course at the end we see Bro offer a little piece of himself that Dave has never known, although rng is intentionally littered with these, one of my big things with the Strangeness between bro and the daves is that they don't Really Know him as a person. they know bro as BRO the guardian, BRO the person who "trained" (yikes) them, but they don't know anything else about him. This is common with kids as they grow up, as we learn that our parents used to be kids, too. So that one little nametag, handed over begrudgingly, maybe a little embarrassingly, is Bro giving Dave a little piece of himself at that age, something that at this point, this Dave needs desperately. He's already jealous of DS, though it'll take him time to realize it, and so it was important for him to have this conversation with Bro, and to see him as human.

I hope any of this was anything!!! and also sorry it's so long!

[fluorescencefuture]

Homestuck^2: How I’d write the Omega Kids (and the Candy timeline villains)

I haven't reread Homestuck nor the epilogues in a while so correct me if I'm wrong with anything here. This was all in one go, too, so I probably missed something here or there. I'm also not a native English speaker so pardon some grammar errors.

In General

I’d give them a five-letter name scheme. Names of a group being the same length was a big deal in original HS (human first names had four letters, troll names had six, Ancestors had eight-letter titles, Cherubs had eight letters too, etc.), so it’s odd seeing this new group have names of varying length

I’d also give them all shirt symbols. It’s odd that something so iconic to Homestuck isn’t present in the new kids, either.

I'll write for both the canon post-canon with evil Jane and for my own version with different villains. Evil Jane happens because a highblood troll who hears of the old ways of Alternia attempts to kill her and take her crown, as she's technically the heiress. Jane wins, but she starts to see trolls and Alternian culture in a different light from then on. At first she was only trying to prevent the worst parts of Alternian culture from coming back, but over time grew to despise trolls, and ended up trying to force human culture onto Alternians.

The other Candy villains are a dangerous terrorist rebel group that wants to overthrow the creators and destroy them. They say the creators made the people, abandoned the people for years, then suddenly came back and decided they control the people. The group is made of humans, trolls, carapacians, and even consorts. The mysterious shadowed leader claims to be doing this for the people, but really, all they want is to have control for themselves, and they don't care if any innocents get in the way.

Harry Anderson

Has nothing to fix, he’s perfect as is

Okay but seriously, the guy is the kid with the least questionable things around him. He has no baggage from sharing the same name as an established character (ICP Harry Anderson doesn’t count), and he didn’t come from infidelity.

He also has actual color to his personality. He likes musicals and sewing. He has a good relationship with his dad. Like many kids with divorced parents, he wishes his parents were together again. What do the others have? Vrissy is just a slightly less aggressive Vriska. Tavros is just OG Tavros and Jake combined. Yiffy’s thing is being a dog girl named Yiffany Longstocking. The others could be fleshed out eventually, but with the slow pace and meandering plot we have right now, I doubt it.

If Jane's the villain, things would mostly go the same way. If Jane isn't the villain, it goes two ways: he decides to join Vrissy's guerilla anti-anti-creator group and fight because he wants to protect his parents, or he's just very anti-conflict and avoids the fight because he doesn't think he's up to it. He's frequently threatened but doesn't tell his parents about the threats. Eventually, he gets convinced to join and fight.

Vrissy

So Vrissy’s in relationships with guys who are technically her cousins. At first I was like “well, they’re not biologically related nor were they raised as family so it’s not weird”. But then Tavros called Kanaya “Aunt Kanaya” and now I’m thinking “oh god, that’s really weird”.

Now she’s just a troll girl from school. She's just close to Kanaya and Rose, but isn’t their kid. She isn’t related to anyone. Anyone except Vriska, who she was named after. Vrissy’s new nickname is just Vriss.

Alternatively, her name is something completely different. Honestly, it just seemed like a way to shoehorn in a Vriska for the story. Only for actual Vriska to come back anyway.

Uhh, Eshtha (from Jyeshtha, a Hindu nakshatra Scorpius is associated with)? Oriona (from Orion, the myth where Scorpius is mostly attributed to)? Naiaka (from Manaiakalani, as Hawaiians saw Scorpius as the demigod Maui’s fishhook)? Oh wait, I’ll have to make nicknames for those names too. Uh, Eshty, Riona, and Naiah.

Maybe have her have a personality that’s rather opposite to Vriska’s than have her as Vriska 2. She's more a perky goth, more cheerful and sweet. More "I knew you could do it!" than "So you can do something after all." A beast in battle, of course. She doesn't like to use her mind control powers, because she finds them disturbing.

If Vriska had to come back, the conflict would come from their conflicting personalities. Vriska would pretty much act the same way she did to (Vriska), but this time, Vriss doesn't take any of it and stands her ground.

Whether the villain is Jane or not, she's the one who decides to fight back, and she gets her friends and others to join her. The creators have been nothing but good to her, and she cares about them a lot, especially Rose and Kanaya. Not to mention they're also her friends' parents.

Tavros

Yeah, we’re gonna have to rename that kid. It never made sense to me why Jake and Jane named their kid after some guy they don’t know that well. I don’t remember everything from the Epilogues, but I’ll assume the reason was Gamzee or something. Also weird that Jane, who’s supposed to be racist to trolls, would just...let her kid be named after one.

Something old-ish would work. Flynn? Silas? Avery? Clyde? Niles? Louie?

He's moirails with this Vriss instead of kismeses. The Vrissy/Tavros kismesis also felt like re-hashing the kismesis that Vriska and OG Tavros kinda had.

If we went post-canon villain Jane, he'd be reluctant to join the rebellion and is more of a pacifist who would rather try to talk his mom out of it.

Alternatively, Jane and Jake are separated (but not divorced) and he lives with Jake. Because Jane was never terrible to him and Jake doesn't tell him how bad she's gotten, he disagrees with her but still tries to justify and rationalize that Jane's really doing it from a place of good intentions.

If the villain isn't Jane, then Jane and Jake have been hiding him away, and his friends can only see him when they visit him at his swanky home. You might say he's...housetrapped. He joins because his friends are in it, and doesn't quite grasp how serious things are until the rebels try to kill Jane (the rebels try to kill Jane first because you always kill the healer first).

He's in contact with a mysterious guide who's kinda spacy and a little terrifying at times. His friends think the guide might just be some creepy predator. It's revealed to be Candy Gamzee, out of the fridge and legitimately harmless, but untraceable and doing mysterious things behind the black. Again.

Come to think of it, Dirk's missing too...

Yiffany Longstocking

Yiffy is now the ectokid of Dave and Jade. She looks more like a DaveJade kid than JadeRose, really. Dave and Jade are also either happily married or coming close to an amicable divorce. Yeah, the toxic shit Jade did and the erasure of Dave's bisexuality also don't exist here. Jade, Dave, Karkat, and Terezi are backing Vrissy's anti-anti-creator group.

Her new name is something unisex. Riley? Logan? Robin? Sloan? Salem?

She spends a lot of time outside doing sports and doesn't talk much. She's not very close to the other three kids, but she's surprisingly pretty close to her Aunt Rose.

While Jade and Dave are out on a mission for Karkat (this is the mission Candy Dave dies), she gets kidnapped by the opposing force (Jane/the terrorists). She gets a shock collar forced on her, then is hidden away in a Boarding School for Inconvenient Girls, enrolled under the name "Yiffany Longstocking". Jade comes home to find that her family's been taken from her. Again.

Yiffy almost escapes, but she gets knocked out and taken back to base, where they lock her in a cage and treat her like a dog. She's still defiant to the end.

If Jane's the villain, Jake is inspired by Yiffy's defiance, grows some balls, exposes Yiffy's treatment to the press, and sets her free. She beats up the guards trying to stop her. Jake gets surrounded by more guards. In response, he pulls out his pistols and a one-liner, and bam, cliffhanger.

If it's the terrorist group, Terezi picks up on Yiffy's scent when they're in a base, and she's saved by the other three kids, where she immediately turns around and beats the crap out of the guards. They become proper friends from there.

The reunion panel still happens and this time it's her reuniting with her loving mother and aunt instead of...y'know.

BONUS: Sadstuck

Harry gets his own “im not a hero” speech after trying and “failing” to be the hero that John was

Vriss is eventually forced to use her mind control powers. It’s either a “Katara using bloodbending" situation, or she forces her friends to leave her behind when they want to stick by her.

Tavros finally witnesses his mother’s true nature when Jake defeats all the guards, but is stabbed from behind by Jane and killed. In the other version, it seems Jane is finally safe and able to come home to her son. Then she’s killed right in front of him.

After the big hug with Jade and Rose, Yiffy pulls away. She smiles, looks around behind them, and asks “Where’s Dad?”

So, please tell me what you think!

[dahniwitchoflight]

Homesquared Chapter 14

lol gotta love John’s enthusiasm of being part of the movers and shakers getting shot down cuz he hasn’t actually flexed his Main Character Muscles in quite a long time

though he’s honestly taking his mid life crisis very well all things considered, its good he cares more about his kids than anything else and I like the bond he’s getting to make with Harry, it’s nice!

Now what’s a million times funnier though is the same thing happening to Vriska, she is decidedly NOT taking her midlife “but but I want to be important too!!” crisis not nearly as well as John is haha

VRISSY: I guess you Did go Viral, 8ut the news moves so fast these days. I don’t think Any8ody is like...

VRISSY: Glued to their phones Waiting for your New Hashtag Resistance content.

Yeah Vriska, you’re so 15 minutes ago :P people have moved on

what, did you think you were going to be important forever?

VRISKA: What’s the point of me even coming to this shitty fake reality if I’m not supposed to fix it?

to have a mid life crisis about not being important anymore obviously :P

VRISSY: Yeah, they told me about That stuff, but a Lot of the Shit that Happened in the Session if just not in the History Books.

VRISSY: You weren’t Really mentioned that Much.

VRISKA: Excuse me?

I Am Living For This Whole Conversation

VRISKA: I SINGLE H8ND8DLY!

VRISKA: CURED YOUR MOTHER’S FUCKING ALCH8LISM!!!!!!!!

JOHN: uh, vriska, everything okay over there?

VRISKA: EVERYTHING’S FINE, J8HN!

JOHN: okay.

JOHN: do you girls want a snack?

ASJHGFSHFHWE yeah calm down Vriska have a snack 

ahh, loving it

Turns out, History is written by the people who were left who decided to give a damn about writing it, and if those people Don’t Like you, they can just decide to not mention you, no matter who you are or what you did

All your “important” accomplishments are for naught and have become meaningless because you’re an asshole and other people didn’t like you enough to decide that you mattered in the long run

Congrats! Infamy doesn’t matter as much as Connection

Aww, cute with Annie getting hug bombed by her moms

Though, Rose definitely has a stronger bond with Annie than just being her surrogate it looks like

I understand this family situation just fine, if Annie really was just supposed to be a way for Jade to overcome her lonliness, and Rose was her only functional way and only person she could approach with this idea, and Rose responded out of care for her friend

Rose, shouldn’t really have a distinct mom attachment here, because then it implies a stronger than platonic relationship with Jade

but it could just be a great example of “this is why you don’t agree to create a child with your friend purely because said friend was crying out of lonliness out of failed relationship and wanted a child to fill that void of lonliness but who then shoves said child off the sidelines and doesn’t interact with her at all and leaves her in the hands and care of a supposed enemy and

yknow, I think I’m just gonna stop there before I remember Jake also knew about Yiffany existing so if the only ones who didn't know were John/Dave/Karkat and Kanaya then what was honestly the point of hiding her in the first place

Its not the fact that Yiffany exists that Im finding hard to believe, its just hows she treated narratively after she started existing thats stretching my rubber band into a dangerous area

“ROSE: Is it the libidinous power rush that comes from snapping your fingers at men with guns, or are you worried that you might accidentally do something heroic?

(its the latter)

“She stopped thinking about how she would be received, and more about how she could play to the people she knew would receive her favorably.

Looking up she sees Tavvy with tears in his eyes. Rage and guilt surge inside her. This situation is not her fault.”

Gotta Justify It. Gotta Justify It.

Doesn’t matter if I’m Right or Wrong, if enough other people validate me than Everything is Fine and I’m a Good Person.

JANE: So before you accuse me, take a look at yourself!

JANE: I'm the only one who has taken any interest in her upbringing or education!

JANE: Or have you forgotten who has been paying for her schooling and taking charge of her introduction into society?

JADE: i never asked you to do that!

JADE: you offered!

Okay but Jade, you DID let Jane have Annie in the first place and then presumably washed your hands of her, when supposedly the only reason Annie exists is because you wanted a daughter with whom you could have a loving relationship with

You gotta, explain you’re thinking there Jade cuz I still don’t get this bit

Though in thinking about it, I think I know why this happened

Jade grew up isolated from any person, but still loved her grandfather, despite his absence

to her, family relationships didn’t involve any sort of personal work, they were just things she had because she had them

did she just believe the same would happen for Yiffanny? that she could paradoxically still have a relationship despite long absences? Annie doesn’t seem to have any resentment here for Jade or Rose so I mean ???

“ If they were to kill Tavros, the entire world would see them commit this war crime. And weighed in the balance, Lalonde and Harley would be off the playing board. Saving your daughter certainly counted as a heroic death, and with the damage they'd done to humanity, it would also probably be just. “

She hates them both so much she’d let Tavros die for it

But also, she really does calculate everything in terms of how the Masses would view their actions as Just or Heroic

so yeah, she was absolutely about to let Tavros die, damn Jane

literally the only thing that stopped you was that Jake viewed the threat as a real threat and was about to do something stupendously Heroic to save Tavros and you decided you didn’t want Jake to die a heroic death

On the flipside, oh damn, Yeah Vriska’s going full throttle right on the nose ahead with the obvious audience expectation, that there gonna make another sburb session and get the obvious group of important 4 kids to god tier

that’s clearly the path vriska wants and expects, but hey, just imagine if what Vriska wanted to happen didn’t happen this time, imagine if the kids were just like “nah im good?” when it comes to a god tier

The narrative is making it super clear that at least 3 out 4 kids are kinda not feeling all the outdoorsy action and excitement of a game of life and death

Annie though I could hella see her down to play sburb and get a god tier, shes got that whole “isolated childhood trauma and parental issues pressure cooking her a strong will to take her life into her own hands” energy

Vriska, go see Annie, her strong willed butt is more of the action girl you’re looking for I think

At least if they do end up playing the game and getting the tiger, Annie feels like the first one to do it or the action catalyst of their session, like how Vriska was for hers, or Dirk for the alphas, or

hmm. who was is that kinda, moved things along for the Beta’s again? I think it was Rose, but Dave did a ton to move things along as well, but also their trolls like Terezi and them gave everything big nudges, I think Rose counts as the equivalent Beta in session mover and shaker though

Side note: the panels with vrissy and vriska here very feel cartoonish and light hearted, interesting choice

but it does give off Major “Play Game: Level 1″ vibes if that makes sense

What the fuck is with the Dave Soldiers

I mean, they look more like Red Johns?Jakes? with the black hair

the glasses throw me off though-

UHH DID THEY JUST FUCKING KILL HARRY ANDERSON??

HOLD ON. HOLD UP

TAVROS AND ANNIE: WITH ROSE/JADE/JAKE/JANE

VRISSY: WITH VRISKA DOWN BELOW

HARRY: WITH JOHN. ON JOHN’S COUCH.

JOHN IS ALSO STILL HERE, MEANING HARRY SHOULD BE WITH HIM.

yeah he literally just went outside for a second to see where the V’s went and then the house gets bombed, and we get three whole panels dedicated to John slowly sitting down in the wreckage

Harry Anderson just got fucking killed holy shit.

oh my god, they were leading up to it too.

We just had three seperate death flags for the other 3 kids in a row

Brain Ghost Dirk warned Jake that Annie was gonna die via electrocution unless he stepped up

Jane was gonna let Tavros die vie neck snapping (even though Kanaya really wouldn’t have)

Vriska and Vrissy discuss god tiering, and what it would mean for Vrissy, death is a subtle implication there but still there

Now to see if Jane’s ever revived Harry Anderson before in the next update I suppose :o

*edit*

They did not kill Harry Anderson, I saw pumpkins in front of the house that got exploded and didn’t see it looks different than the other bland white suburban house that John actually left, so no one died, Harry just got his implied death threat turn

Harry is at Roxy’s House, John sits in the smoldering ashes of his childhood home, languishing in the idea that Jane, the girl who might have in another reality been his loving grandmother, actually wants him and his kids dead for realsies

he never really got to sit and think about the hole where his home was that the meteor struck when he entered sburb huh? (I know his house came with him, giving the allusion all was well in the Medium, but a real meteor still struck the place that he stopped existing on OG Earth, to an outside observer, it would look like a meteor destroyed his home)

with Vriska talking about sburb to Vrissy, it is nice imagery to imagine the implications of the Kids god tiering from Earth C

and the destruction left in their wake

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

oohohoho you just opened the deepest can of worms on the planet

-mod dave, who wrote a fucking ten mile essay

first off, addressing the second anon, no theyre all humans. h., half humans at least. cause yall know me i fucking love my humanstuck aus off my ASS

(that would be funny as hell though. a troll from space walking into a camp on earth going “I AM THE SON OF ONE OF YOUR EARTH GODS. BITCH” like... holy shit)

so first things first their parents. im gonna lay this out, the beta kids and trolls are all greek (EXCEPT sollux hes roman cause his parent has no greek equivalent), and all the alpha kids and trolls are those gods roman equivalents (,,EXCEPT dirk cause he kinda balances sollux being roman out). i havent figured out how thatd happen like 16+ times yet cause in the percy jackson books theres only ever been one instance of two siblings of the same godly descent being greek and roman respectively in HISTORY so like.. i guess th. i guess thats just not a problem in this au

anyway this gets really long so im gonna talk about the beta kids and trolls cause i havent elaborated on the alphas at all ((peep the tags if you wanna see their parents though))

johns the son of zeus, rose is the daughter of athena, dave is the son of apollo, and jade is the daughter of demeter. they were all raised in their respective states, all had to come to new york for various reasons. jades been there the longest, shes been there 9 years and shes been on a couple quests. her biggest accomplishment so far is how she protected the camp from this big vicious angry hellhound that got past the barrier. naturally the girls fluent in Dog Training, so she steps up and instead of trying to kill this thing, she reaches out and tames it as fast as she can. it ends up actually working, and ever since that day she, her cabin, and the camp have a whole bodyguard sleeping right outside the demeter cabin! hes her steed in battle and hes a Very Good Boy. and his name is becquerel

johns the newest kid at camp, he has no idea who he is or why the fuck his school got attacked or why in the hell those anemoi thuellai were so fixated on him or HOW in the hell he absorbed the lightning one threw at him and ended up fine,,, hes just a big mess right now. a big enough mess that when he got claimed by literally zeus, no one else was around, he shrugged it off as some basic magical happening, and he stayed in the hermes cabin far longer than he should have cause no one! fucking knew he got claimed! by zeus of all people! dumbass. he ends up figuring it out though. like an off-hand mention about how this “weird lightning thing appeared above my head a couple weeks ago, haha weird right?” once he figures it out he realizes “hey i might be able to fly” so he sneaks off into the woods to try it. he succeeds fairly quickly but god almighty everyones face the one day the dude just yote himself off a small cliff without warning,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

dave and rose are really tight, theyve been there roughly the same time length, and since their cabins are across from each other they just bother each other all the time. daves the resident Doctor even though he really doesnt look it cause hes got the apollo powers. apollo is the medicine god. so if you wound your stupid ass in battle daves in the ER room patching you up with his glowy hands. rose on the other hand is a very good strategist. shes one of the only athena kids ever recorded to actually have a power - telekinesis. she has no idea how she developed it, she thinks its from birth, but it freaks her out. shes training it though.

so the beta trolls, are also all human(ish). aradias hades kid. but i pulled a pjo trope on her based on one of my favorite characters (im not saying for spoilers, but if you recognize the situation, You Probably Know Who Its Based Off) and aradia died. her mom, the handmaid, had been pulling some Shady Ass Shit and ended up getting herself killed, but aradia tried saving her and ended up going down with her.

so handmaid gets sentenced to the fields of punishment in the underworld, and aradia gets sentenced to elysium, heroes paradise. shes like “no i want my mom to be okay” so they take that away from aradia and they put them both in the fields of asphodel, the neverending grey space for Not So Good But Not So Bad people. her mom becomes a shade (shadow spirit, no human resemblance), as all people do, but aradia. doesnt? and she gets dunked in the fucking river lethe and if you dont know what that does it erases your memory. so she just. comes out of the river like “hello? wgat tae fukc goin on??” but she still remembers one thing. there was an “a” in her name.

tavros is the son of hermes, hes just kinda taken on the role of backup counselor for when the actual cabin counselor is out. hes in a wheelchair, but he also has prosthetic legs for when he needs to actually stand up and fight. hes really good at it too. also catch him in winged converse cause he Owns Those and Uses Them To His Advantage. hes trying his best to keep focused on the camp, cause aradia was his childhood friend, he misses her a whole lot, she never got to camp in the first place. and to his knowledge, shes still dead.

sollux is a janus kid. thats a problem cause janus is roman, and this is a greek camp. he grew up with dave, he showed up with dave, hes been at camp as long as dave. but hes been unclaimed since he showed up so he thinks hes unwanted by whatever parent he has. he knows hes a demigod, he got through the camp barriers, so what the fuck is wrong with him? he also feels shitty cause hes shit at the greek lessons, he cant read a lick of it which literally every demigod without exception should be able to do, he cant name any gods- well, he can, but.. he gets their names mixed up. why does he keep calling poseidon “neptune”? and he has a much, much different way of natural fighting than other kids. they slice, he jabs. he wasnt taught to jab. 

karkat is an aphrodite kid with vitiligo, and to make matters worse, hes ace and on the aro spectrum. to make matters WORSE, the aphrodite kids are kinda notorious for being really shallow, really materialistic, and really mean. karkats been dubbed the “runt” of the cabin, he gets made fun of for his spots to the point where he uses make up and magic to conceal them. worst of all? hes the kid of the goddess of love, for fucks sake. being reminded that “loveless people shouldnt be able to stay in this cabin, mom must have made a mistake claiming you” is kind of.. a blow to the self esteem. long story short he hates aphrodite for claiming him, and would have rather stayed in the hermes cabin. but he eventually goes on this big quest thats vague as fuck right now but Its The Main Plot, he ends up proving to himself that hes worth something and that his siblings are wrong, and my FAVORITE LINE IN THE WHOLE THING i came up with is HIS when he deals a final blow to some big monster: “REMEMBER MY FACE THE NEXT TIME YOU REINCARNATE. MY NAME IS KARKAT VANTAS, I’M THE SON OF APHRODITE, AND LOOKS CAN KILL.”

nepeta isnt anywhere near developed as others are unfortunately, shes a daughter of ares and shes really really good at hand to hand combat. shes small but she leads groups of people in things ranging from camp volleyball games to actual literal wars. shes a tough little shit

kanaya isnt really developed either, i have yet to figure out most of her powers too actually, shes a daughter of iris, the rainbow goddess though. (blatant reference to both kanayas vampirism and. h. her. sh. es ga. gay) ONE THING SHE CAN DO THOUGH is iris message at will without water or drachmas so really shes just everyones go to cell phone and its fucking hilarious cause people just come into the cabin like “KANAYA I NEED TO TALK TO [X]” and shes like “You Better Fucking Pay Me I Am Not Your Personal Cell Phone”

terezi is the daughter of nemesis and she has this really peculiar power she hasnt really gotten the hang of yet. she has synesthesia, so while she cant see she can smell and taste the colors of her surroundings and its really helpful. sometimes though she gets messages from her mom. they dont even come as dreams half the time, they come as almost a different plane altogether. tez has the power to literally tip the scales, pretty much. and when she gets like that, she can see. shes not on earth though, shit on earth stops when shes like that. shes just kinda In Her Own Head, i guess? and in her head she holds the two scales in her hands. she is the arms of the scale. and depending on which one she lifts up, she can literally alter the fate of the battle or happening thats going on By Herself. once she chooses she just whooshes back to real life though and nothing has changed. the only downside? it takes a LOT of energy and cant be exploited for little things. her one thing on her bucket list is to tap into said powers while getting something from a vending machine so like three things will fall out but it hasnt happened yet and shes upset

vriskas a daughter of tyche, the luck goddess, come the fuck on you knew i was gonna, i havent really elaborated on her either and im upset about that. but hey now you get a break from all those fucking paragraphs

equius is a hephaestus kid, and he kinda stays in the background. hes a range fighter, he spends a lot of time in the forge, and even though its been a project looooong since forgotten, hes been excavating the tunnels under cabin nine for years. by himself. he has no idea where they lead, but dammit hes gonna find out where. he has no idea about a certain bunker in the woods though...

gamzees just there for a fucking laugh tbh hes a son of dionysus and i love that cause hes the god of wine and parties and insanity. usually gamzees just zoning out somewhere hes Not supposed to be, and hes not affected by the maenads FUCKED UP BULLSHIT that goes down the forest sometimes. also hes so fucking scared of tavroses wing shoes he tried them on once while he was high and JESUS CHRIST

eridan is the son of kymopoleia, a SUPER obscure goddess. lets just say dont fuck with eridan cause his mom is the goddess of violent sea storms,

and naturally, feferi is the daughter of poseidon. cause who the FUCK else would she be the daughter of. WHO. NAME ONE GOD

OH AND JUST CAUSE I FORGOT CALLIE AND CALIBORN ARE SATYRS IN THIS AU. CALLIE HAS PAN PIPES. and caliborn still has a gun

[ask-the-party-god]

Ask The Party God - Timeline

the pre-terezi-gang timeline post is here

height references over here

hi, im jade! everyones favorite party goddess and trans doggy girl~ but you already know that! if youre reading this, it means youre interested in learning more about my reality, because paradox space is fucking weird like that and you cant really be sure all the time

as far as im aware, everything up to the point where we beat the game happened without deviations from the alpha timeline? so this is what rose has talked about as a ‘terminal timeline’, or ‘post-canon’, or whatever the hell that is supposed to mean

we got to earth-c, and i settled in the troll kingdom because trolls are cool, dave and karkat were in the neighborhood, and the caverns are close by so i can visit rose and kanaya speedily as well! i still do have my old tower out on an island, with my workshop and garden, but i almost never sleep in it, too far away and isolated from everyone...

then one day i found this old active server in the furthest ring keeping tumblr active and i thought, hey, why not have some fun? ;D

as for the others...

my darling sis june egbert! she lives in the consort kingdom, but has been thinking about relocating elsewhere lately! she went through a rough patch right after the game, unsure of what to do and full of all sorts of doubts and questions, but shes doing a lot better nowadays! specially now that terezi is back, shes been a lot more peppy and hanging around with the lalondes particularly!

rose rose rose rose~ happily married to her wife kanaya, duh, but that doesnt make her any less of a flirty cutie! a while back she got really sick for a bit, and weve been keeping an eye on her just in case it happened again, but its been all good ever since! she helps kanaya at the caverns a bunch, which makes her schedule busy busy... and you didnt hear this from me, buuuut words out on the street that she and kanaya may be warming to the idea of having a kid! <3 well see how that goes!

one cool dude~ daves a little bit of a shut-in honestly! and honestly i dont blame him? he must be tired after all the timeline and time travel shenanigans, so he spends a good chunk of his time hanging out in his and karkats house! hes kind of awkward about opening up with feelings and stuff, and ive been trying to nudge him to be more open for a while! but with all the craziness thats been going down lately, and more people coming and going and getting together, hes starting to consider things he hadnt before~ hopefully, some specific someones? ;)

janey! my uh... ecto-mom, technically, although we see each other more like cousins than anything else! she still owns crockercorp, but ever since jasprose has been around, she has been spending a lot more time at home and just hanging out with her friends, which really, sounds a lot healthier than the big business thing she had going on a while back! she enjoys teaching me baking stuff, but doesnt have much patience for my decorating skills ;p

grandpa! and grandson technically, hehe, jakes kind of a weird case, hes a mixture of a shut-in, a celebrity and an adventurer! he can spend up to weeks at a time without leaving his manor, but then hell have full weeks of interviews and hiking, and thats not to say anything of when he and dirk put out another episode or two of their dumb comedy talkshow... hes often busy with stuff, but hes still a good pal and can clear his schedule in seconds if we need him for something!

one sweet nb dude! rox really is... something else, really! fun to tag along at a party, fun to chill at home playing games, fun to talk about more serious stuff and open up with him, he really is just solid as they come! hes been hanging out a lot more with june since she got out of her depressive slump, but sometimes i wonder if junebug finds weird to get flirty with roxy, considering im pretty sure we made out in front of her at some point or two... hehehe

dirk! if daves a bit of a shut-in, hes a shut-in times two, which is weird because youd think someone stuck in post-apocalyptic earth for so long would want to hang out more? not to say he DOESNT, though! hes around jake often enough, and keeps close to jane, roxy and dave specially! we dont see each other too often, but we HAVE been messing around with robots and planning out to upgrade our respective self-bots for funsies!

aradia! we only met briefly in dreams for the longest time, but i knew already that she was a riot! she came with terezis group after she finally found vriska, and seems pretty happy just... kind of... being around and watching shenanigans ensue! i actually dont know where she lives, but she drops by occasionally, because im apparently pretty ‘fun’... cant say i disagree ;)

sollux is blind, and not dead, and WILL kick you in the shins if you keep prying about how exactly he ended up like that, which is fair enough! he spends a good chunk of his time with aradia, and im not sure if theyre dating or not...? but hes been around the other trolls a bunch! specially kanaya, apparently theyre good friends that go way back! i guess they both DO style their hair similarly, with the side spike thingies...

the other half of the dave-kat duo! swooooon~ really though, i cant remember the last time i said “dave” or “karkat” without talking about the other shortly after... buuut theyre just roomies, and hell get awkward and grumpy if you even so slightly IMPLY otherwise, despite the fact everyone knows they fall asleep leaning against each other during friday movie night! roooolling my eyes~ with the rest of the living trolls having arrived, hes been a lot more willing to go outside, which im glad for! its healthy to get some fresh air from time to time, and specially hang out with friends!

oh-la-la, miss maryam-lalonde herself! kanayas the matriarch of the caverns, and quite the busy gal, having taken it upon herself to supervise her entire species reproduction and well-being... in my opinion, she needs a good vacation from time to time, and to be less of a workaholic! >:o ive been helping her occasionally in the caverns, and as of late weve begun trying to mess around with ectobiology for some troll-human crossing experiments with... not good results so far... but hey, rome wasnt built in a day!

terezis back, yes! after spending YEARS out there looking for vriska, she managed to find her and come back, the madwoman! personally im not sure why anyone would go to such lengths for... her... but also, its not my bond, not my place to speak, she obviously really loves her a bunch! with vriska no longer lost in the middle of the furthest ring, shes started to catch up with everything going on with earth-c, and i think shes really going to like being around! specially with how much june and the rest have missed her ;)

troublemaker extraordinaire herself! shes... well, shes vriska, im pretty sure she stole that eyepatch from sollux? so you just know she up to no good already >:/ speaking of her eyepatch, im not sure WHY shes wearing it? whatever kinda wound she got, she doesnt like mentioning it, despite bragging about defeating english at every chance she gets! terezi says they found her popping in and out of consciousness in the furthest ring with some messy wounds, and that shed probably been hovering out there after the fight for years... doesnt seem to have humbled her in the slightest <.<

callieeeee! theyre super sweet and wonderful but also really shy and awkward! they live with roxy but manage to outdo dirk in terms of shut-in-ness... they also totally like roxy but is unsure about approaching those feelings considering the whole species thing and whatever, ive been trying to get them to open up for a while now! weve written fanfic together and drawn grids, so i can definitely tell theres some attraction there, even if theyre afraid of acting upon it just yet <3

jaspie is roses bane, and the one cat that made me get used to their smell enough that i dont bark at them instantly anymore! im pretty sure she crashes at janes often, and is just as outgoing and flirty as i am around earth-c parties and bars, which is saying something honestly! i wont let her dethrone me as the party god, though >:)

and finally davepeta! theyre staying with june for the time being until they can get settled around and see what they want to do here! theyve also dropped by dave and karkats a bunch, which i most certainly dont mind! i definitely appreciate some help in bringing a romantic vibe into those twos lives~ ;o

and thats about it! theres also the nannasprites and tavrosprite and arquius, but they pop by so sporadically and rarely that i dont know what theyre doing a majority of the time... we lost track of gamzee after the session so hopefully hes totally gone, and we havent heard any message from caliborn in years... and with the furthest ring broken and the black hole sealed, leaving a weird white empty space right in the middle of reality, im not sure what our chances of bringing back the other trolls are :( but still, we keep living on happily over here and having our fun slice of life ending together!

id say after everything weve gone through, we deserve a big break, dont we? hehehe <3

also, particularly important events that happen and are recorded in this blog will be tagged as timeline shenanigans!

[earthseaborealis]

New Traditions and Worlds

My @homestuckss gift for @dykeiatrist ! I used “Davekat,” “Jane,” and “Hurt/Comfort” (with a bit of DirkJake) to create a cute little holiday fic! Hope you enjoy it :D Have a wonderful holiday season!!

Also on ao3 (@detective_in_space if the link doesn’t work!)

“Twas the week before Christmas,” Dave started before pausing, “Yo Rox, what’s somethin’ that rhymes with Christmas?”

“Ass? Wait, no, no that doesn’t work… Christmas…” Roxy muttered, “Okay so, like, the only thing I’ve got is Christmas, but you absolutely cannot rhyme ‘Christmas’ with ‘Christmas,’ right?”

“You’re definitely right,” Dave sighed as he scratched out the words in his notebook, “Dude, like absolutely nothin’ rhymes with Christmas words.”

Roxy moved over and rested their hand on his shoulder, “Karkat will appreciate the thought at least. Hey, there are other things than Christmas raps, like festive interpretive dances! Or Festive slam poetry?”

“Well, duh, it’s Karkat we’re talkin’ bout,” Dave laughed, but in his defense, it was true. Karkat would yell and insist that he hated Dave’s most ‘ironic’ gifts, but there was a certain fondness in his tone. Like it was just a whole elaborate game. The edges of Karkat’s eyes would wrinkle as his lips curled into a small grin. A small chuckle would escape, which Dave would obviously point out, and in response, Karkat would punch him (before wrapping him in a hug). Oh god, that was the best… 

“Hey sleeping beauty,” Roxy interrupted, as they lightly hit the side of Dave’s head, “Did ya invite me over here just to fall asleep?”

“Nah dawg, I was just thinkin’ about the usual,” Dave brushed their hand aside. 

“So,” Roxy drawled, “Karkat?” Roxy wiggled their eyebrows at Dave. 

“No,” Dave exclaimed, “Fuck, I mean, no. Hey, do ya know any, like, traditions that people do for Christmas and all that jazz.” Now that was a smooth change of topics. 

“Smooth like a baby’s bottom,” Roxy laughed, “But, nah. I didn’t even know Christmas was like a real thing… thought it was an urban myth or something.” Oh, right. Roxy lived in some highly-futuristic society that was enslaved by a fish bitch, but there was none of that oppressive dictatorship on Earth C. Trolls, Carpacians, Humans, and well, any other species were free to chill by the fire and enjoy whatever holiday they wanted. Now that, was what sweet, sweet democracy was about (preach Obama). 

“Lit, lovin’ that we’re both oblivious of any cultural traditions… hey, you think one of the Crocker-Harley-English… berts... would know more about this? I’m feelin’ like they’d be all up in that shit,” Dave said, “Oh fuck, I’m so smart. That’s like totally their thing.”

After quickly picking up all his stuff and saying goodbye to Roxy, Dave picked up his phone and dialed Jane Crocker, the holiday expert, on his way home. Wait, oh fuck, what if she was busy? It’s not like he usually talked to her, so was it out of the question? Oh no, maybe he should’ve just texted John...

The phone picked up, “Hello, Jane Crocker speaking?”

“Oh… oh! Hey Jane, it’s Dave… ya know… Dirk’s cooler bro,” Dave started. He shoved his hands into his hoodie pocket and kicked a stray pebble on the sidewalk. Yes, he could be floating around, but exercise was important. 

“Well, howdy there Dave. It’s been a while since we’ve talked, hasn’t it,” she chuckled, “Anyways, did you need anything?”

“So, like, Rox and I were talkin’ about Christmas and stuff… and well, we’re both dumb and have no idea what people actually do for it, so I thought you might be the expert on the subject? Because it totally seems like it’d be up your ally,” Dave rambled on. 

“Well golly, I’m flattered. It’s been a while since I’ve actually celebrated the holiday, but of course, I’ll help you! Before the game, my father and I had so much fun celebrating… let’s see… Well, I’m sure you already know this, but we’d go out to a farm together and pick out a tree. I’d always search for the fattest tree, and my father would help me cut it down. And then we’d go get Hot Cocoa and pick out ornaments together, and well, oh sorry, I’ve gotten a bit off-topic, haven’t I,” Jane apologized.

“No, no! You’re literally the best… lemme just get a piece of paper to write this on,” Dave fumbled around his captchalogue, and pulled out an old notebook (of course, with Obama on the cover). “Okay cool, I got one, hit me with all that sweet, sweet info.”

“Alright… let’s see, what else… oh, well after we decorated the tree, we’d make and frost sugar cookies and cakes together. Oh! Karkat and you are welcome to come over together sometime and make cookies with me if you’d like,” Jane offered. Hell yeah, she was a literal legend. Roxy and Dirk had the best friends. 

“Yeah, dog, we’d love to! I’ll hit you up with a date once Karkat checks the calendar. You know him and… schedulin’,” Dave said as he continued to write down Jane’s suggestions. 

Jane chuckled, “Sounds good… and one more thing… My father and I would always put cheesy Christmas music on. That was the best… we’d make absolute fools out of ourselves, but it was so much fun. Literally, we’d just dance around and belt the lyrics… those we’re the days,” Jane’s voice started to crack… fuck… had Dave made her cry? “Sorry…” she continued, “I don’t mean to be so emotional. Oh lord, I’m sorry. I… I hope I helped you a bit, and just, feel free to come over whenever for cookies…” 

“Fuck, no,” Dave searched his brain… what would Karkat say… “Sorry for bringin’ up those memories. I know it sucks and all. I’ll give you some time and just hit you up later.” 

“Yes, that’d be great… see you later then,” Jane said as she hung up. 

Well, shit, Dave had already made one person cry and it was only 11 a.m. Maybe Christmas was just an emotional time and stuff. Jane was cool, though, so he hoped that she was okay. Plus, she gave him some kickass advice, and he was so ready to get his holiday spirit on. 

The rest of the walk to his place was boring. Dave tried to come up with some more sick raps for his Christmas album, featuring the new and improved version of “Jingle Bells.” The air was crisp and way too cold for Dave’s Texan roots (he blamed John for the freezing wind), so he was thankful when he finally reached the door. 

“Yo, Karkat, I’m home, and I come with words of wisdom from the one and only Jane Crocker herself,” Dave announced as he closed the door behind him. He attempted to throw his coat and hang it up, but it fell clumsily to the floor. He shrugged it off and continued through the cozy lil’ condo, finding his way into the kitchen, where he found Karkat doing a load of laundry. Yes, the washing machine and dryer were in the kitchen… it was only the most ironic, British mom location for them. Dave, being the coolest man to ever exist, ran up to Karkat and hugged him from behind. 

“Jesus fucking shit Dave! Are you trying to give me a blood pusher attack?” Karkat screeched as he jumped like fifty feet in the air (okay maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but it basically happened). 

“Nah dude, you wouldn’t dare be all anime protagonist on me and faint. Like, imagine me runnin’ to cradle you in my arms while you murmur ‘I’m goin’ to have to kawaii the shit out of your desu.’ Literally, imagine that” Dave rambled. 

Karkat groaned at this, “Stop spending time with Dirk. You’re turning into a shitty weeb Karkat said as he pushed Dave away. 

“I can’t help it… it’s who I am,” Dave clutched yo his chest and fell to the ground, pulling the other boy down with him. Karkat’s words. The worst weapon of all. 

“I’m going to go live with Kanaya and Rose,” Karkat grumbled, falling to the ground as dramatically as possible (making sure to land on Dave with as much force as possible). 

“Like you’d do that,” Dave scoffed, “She’s worse than me. Plus, is you did, we couldn’t be all romantic and celebrate human holidays together. C’mon dude, we gotta act like a high school couple. Get all up in each other’s space and kiss under the mistletoe. Oh, speakin’ of that! I talked to Jane, who is literally the best, and she was like ‘oh Dave! Check out this super lit tradition I did back on the o.g. Earth. Like, you get to cut down a tree and decorate with the most ironic ornaments.’” 

“Sound detrimental to the environment and a waste of time. What’s the point of celebrating a fucking tree,” Karkat asked.

“Dude, it’s a pine tree, which is superior to all other trees. Besides,  it’s about family and friends. I mean, I never celebrated Christmas with Bro, but you can’t just diss Karen like that,” Dave said, using his best white mom voice. 

“Fine whatever. I’ll celebrate your dumb human holiday, but I call picking out the decorations,” Karkat bargained as he stood up and dusted off his pants (getting rid of Dave’s germs).

“Hell yeah, deal! Get your coat on, we’re gonna get a tree and bring it in our house,” Dave exclaimed, quickly getting off the ground. 

The boys quickly got ready and we’re out the door, hopping into their car. Dave has gotten it because well, basically of all Karkat and his friends could fly. He has listened to Karkat’s complaining enough and invested in an older, used minivan. And man, did he love the thing. Hey, maybe he’d become a car person after the holidays were over. 

Dave was about to drive to the nearest park with a saw, but Karkat demanded that he call and ask Jane first. Jane recommended a small farm in the middle of nowhere, and with the use of a GPS, they eventually found their way there (after a few hours of trial and error).

“Jane said that fat trees were better, but honestly, I’m lovin’ this tall ass one right here. I mean look at it. It’s taller than the Empire State Buildin’… wait, is that still a thing? Like an Earth C Empire State Buildin’?” In Dave’s defense, it was a totally valid question. Like, did Earth C have the same seven wonders of the world? Who knew. 

“Shut the fuck up. We’re here for a tree, not imperialism,” Karkat groaned, “And besides, our house isn’t big enough for that.”

“But Karkat, the economy,” Dave whined, “But like, what about this tiny one… it reminds me of you, short stacks.”

Karkat shoved him, “And the other reminds me of your flat ass.” 

“I’ll take that as a compliment… since you're lookin’ at my ass and all,” Dave pulled down his Stiller shades and winked.

“Shut up, you fucking twink. Let’s just celebrate your weird human holidays and get the tree,” Karkat grumbled as he attempted to pick up the tree. 

Dave doubled over laughing as he watched the 5’3 troll struggle, but once Karkat shot him an angry glare, he rushed over to aid him (with his huge muscles, of course). “Nice, I can feel it pokin’ me through my mittens. Ten out of ten would recommend.”

After endless trial and error, the pair managed to carry the tree to the register and on top of their car, a red minivan that Dave had picked out.

“So,” Karkat started, “We just put a tree in our block and decorate it? And then some creepy old man flies around the world and gives presents to children by putting them under the tree?” His eyebrows furrowed as he attempted to understand human traditions.

“Dude, I can’t even explain it. Humans can come up with some weird shit when they put their minds to it,” Dave laughed. The rest of the car ride consisted of Karkat rambling about trollian traditions. Their hands managed to find one another and rest comfortably on the center console (Dave, of course, kept one hand on the steering wheel at all times… hey, safety is important). 

Their next stop was the local hardware store. It was owned by a sweet, older Carpacian. In all honesty, she reminded Dave of the Mayor… a kindred spirit whose goal in life was to just lead and help make others happy. She made the place seem like the opposite of a place to buy tools. The place was decorated with festive garlands and cheery music rang through the air. Dave waved at her as the pair walked towards the Christmas section.

“So,” Dave drawled, “What kind of ornaments are we lookin’ for? Personally, I wanna find a dick shaped one… for the memories of cockscotch. Bless that game.”

“This is a family store, dick-muncher! And we’re getting triple-f ornaments! Family fucking friendly!” Karkat screeched, marching ahead (but not before grabbing Dave’s hand and pulling him along). 

“Fine, fine, I get it… gotta make our house grub friendly, for when John comes over,” Dave snickered as they walked the ornaments aisle. Who knew there were so many different variations in fucking decorations? You had some for your Karens, poor college students, newlyweds, too many to count. Karkat busied himself with the… glass ball? Well, whatever that kind of ornament was called. 

“These are nice,” Karkat noted, showing Dave a set of jade glass baubles (haha, like Kanaya).

“But like, dude, they’re so borin’,” Dave whined, “We gotta spruce this tree up… get it? Spruce is a kind of tree.” Dave chuckled at his own dad joke. Shit, he was hilarious. 

“Hey, I’m just trying to make this actually look nice. We’ll get other colors too, and “spruce” it up, as you say,” Karkat said as he went back to check out the boring ornaments. Dave, on the other hand, went to look at the children’s ornaments on the other side of the aisle. Most of them were new pop culture things that Dave didn’t recognize (God was he growing old). However, there were a few that grabbed his attention, and obviously, he was gonna have to show these to Karkat. 

“Yo, dawg. Check out these cool little fuckers. They’ll make our tree look mads cool,” Dave opened his hands to reveal a bunch of little crab ornaments. They were cute and not boring glass balls. Plus, crabs were like Karkat’s thing… he’d definitely appreciate them.

“Crustaceans? Don’t you just know the way to my blood pusher,” Karkat rolled his eyes, “Just put them in the basket before I change my mind.”

Dave threw his fist in the air and gave Karkat a side hug, “Hell yeah, you won’t regret this. We gonna get so festive up in this joint. All the moms will be beggin’ to check out the coolest tree in the neighborhood, which if ya didn’t catch on, will be ours.”

“You got me. I’m only doing this to make Carol jealous. She fucking deserves it,” Karkat chuckled. Yes, Dave knew he was doing swell when he made Karkat laugh. If only he could give himself a, well earned, golden star. 

“Dude yes, I fuckin’ hate Carol. C’mon, let’s get more lights. We gotta make this flashy and blow a fuse, speakin’ of which… do you know how to fix a broken fuse? Because I do not wanna call Dirk over to fix it for us. He’ll be like ‘Dave, I’m just tryin’ to celebrate the holidays with my darlin’ boyfriend… have I mentioned Jake’s ass? Damn, lemme just rant about that and never actually fix your broken utilities.’ Can you imagine the pain, Karkat,” Dave lamented? He loved his brother, don’t get him wrong, but he did not want to mess with Dirk this close to the holiday season. 

“I can, actually. Remember what happened the week before Jake’s birthday? Dirk is batshit crazy, but he gets it from you,” Karkat smirked as Dave feigned an offended expression, “Now, can we stop talking about his love life and actually pick out some decorations?”

The pair still had one more destination before they could go home and relax, maybe even decorate the tree… but knowing themselves, they’d probably wait until Christmas Eve to put the new lights and ornaments up. 

“Oh my goodness, I’m so glad you two could make it,” Jane said as she opened the door, “I’ve already got everything out, so all we have to do is bake and decorate cookies… and perhaps eat a bit of dough.” She ushered the two inside. 

“Hell yeah, you’re the best Janey,” Dave said as the pair put away their coats and walked to the kitchen with Jane. Everything was so clean, especially when compared to their house. Karkat would always fuss about his habits, but Dave felt a sort of comfort in the messiness. So what if there were shirts thrown on the floor and an unorganized stack of papers on the kitchen table. It built… character. 

“I’ve never had what you humans call ‘cookies,’ but thank you for having us,” Karkat added. 

“Oh please, it’s no problem. I love baking, and I especially love helping people get into the holiday spirit,” Jane said. The trio fell into a simple routine once Jane showed them the recipe, helping the two boys when need be. Dave filled the silence by rambling under his breath about whatever he deemed important, while Karkat concentrated on making his cookies perfect. 

“Hey look,” Dave exclaimed while holding up one of his doughy creations, “It’s a Karkat angel! A Kar-Angel… a Karkat Van-Angel!” His cookies were shaped into gingerbread men with nubby horns and an uncharacteristic smile. 

“And I made a Dave-Cookie… oh wait, it’s just a blob of dough, my fucking bad,” Karkat retorted, going back to rolling out his dough. 

It was a long process, but after a few hours, the boys had successfully made their first batch of Christmas sugar cookies. A few of the cookies weren’t burnt on the edges, but they were delicious nonetheless. Jane demanded that the pair take home their creations, as she didn’t have enough room in her cabinets for more holiday desserts. 

“Goodness, thank you so much for coming over and making sugar cookies! I haven’t had this much fun since… well, it’s been a while. Feel free to come by and help me whenever you all would like,” Jane chirped. 

“Of course, Janey,” Dave replied, “You best bet we’ll be back for some more goodies! Gotta get my housewife on. I can’t be accidentally poisoning Karkat with some undercooked cake.” 

“You’ve poisoned me with every meal of your’s, except the Kraft Mac and Cheese, but only because Roxy helped you,” Karkat spat. 

“Oh well, we certainly can’t have that. I’ll be seeing you both again soon then. Have a Merry Christmas and a wonderful new year!”

It was dark by the time they were home. Karkat and Dave both felt the sleepiness enter the body, as they kept yawning. It was too late to decorate the tree, so it was leaned against a corner. The pair immediately plopped down onto the couch and put on a holiday classic, Tim Allen’s “The Santa Clause,” which Dave argued was the best Christmas movie known to mankind, trollkind, and carpaciankind alike. 

“Y’know, I never imagined that I would celebrate Christmas. Like, dude, that shit was mads uncool,” Dave said out of the blue, interrupting the beautiful sound of Tim Allen interacting with CGI reindeers and kidnapped children.

Karkat groaned, “Well, me either, yet here I am, celebrating a dumb holiday for dumb human grubs.” He was just trying to enjoy this wonderful holiday film, but with Dave, silence didn’t last long. In a way, it provided comfort to the pair. He knew that Dave absolutely hated the silence, as it reminded him of his Bro. For Karkat, Dave’s endless rambling allowed him to take his mind off of his worries. It was an odd relationship, one that had taken years to achieve, but here they were… they had made it, yet Karkat knew there were still shaky moments for the two of them. Like now, for example. The pair both would jump around certain barriers, trying desperately to aid one another, while still attempting to not dig too deep. 

Dave rested his head upon Karkat’s thighs and snuggled into the pile of blankets, reminding him of their time on the meteor, “Y’know, I wouldn’t have this whole thing any other way. ‘M glad my first Christmas is with you, instead of Bro.” His words are slurred together and slightly muffled, and Karkat can’t help the stupid ass blush that creeps onto his face at the sound of them. 

“Fuck that guy,” Karkat spits. After a moment, he starts again, this time with a gentler tone, “And it’s nice to have you here too, no matter how fucking dumb your endless rants may be.”

Dave could almost hear Dirk whispering “Tsundere” in his ear as he chuckled, “Awe, love you too, KitKat.” He sits back up, nearly smacking the top of his head into Karkat’s jaw. He looks away for a second, briefly hesitating, then leans in, closing the distance between the pair. It’s just a brief peck, but it leaves the two of them speechless. Dave looks at Karkat through his shades. A light brush coated his cheeks and his lips curled into a small grin. 

Karkat pulls Dave into his side and looks towards the corner of the living room, where their small, fat tree is leaning against the wall. It was empty and in desperate need of attention (aka Crustacean ornaments). Filled with a sudden burst of energy, he paused the movie and stood up, pulling Dave with him, “Get off your lazy ass and get fucking festive. We have a tree to decorate.”

[dukeofriven]

I feel you on criticisms on John. Dude certainly has his flaws and his relationship with other people, particularly Roxy, have clearly been unhealthy. But the guy have apparently been depressed for years, and he haven't actually ever had much experience with real life on person relationships. He got issues he needs to work on, but he is not a bad person.

It’s the rampant hypocrisy that’s eating at me. “Let they who are without sin cast the first stone” y’know? Roxy and John are the only survivors of Game Over - even given the trauma that everyone went through those two went through more. Even Rose, with her vague sense of her alt-self in a doomed timeline, experienced what it was like to fail on such a profound scale: and to know that your failure is the one which the alpha timeline was aiming for all along. Your utter failure was not only pre-ordained, it was requirement for existence to go as planned.Both Roxy and John experienced this, but Roxy got to move to a universe where her friends were still alive, and their formative experiences were identical: Roxy lived through, what, 24 hours that Dirk and Jake and John’s Hot Mom didn’t? Less? Dirk is still hurtling through space when John and Roxy arrive in Post-Retcon world, just as he was before Game Over broke bad. Roxy has to live with the horror of seeing her friends die - but her ‘replacement’ friends are functionally indistinguishable from the old ones. Which I’m not saying to be callous, but to contrast her with John. John moves to a universe where his sister shares almost none of his memories of years spent together on a golden ship, growing up together, bonding as closer friends, as siblings.We don’t talk about that enough, I think. Jade gets shafted in several ways in the final hours of Homestuck: she gets no chance to speak to John and say “you were dead” - to come to some kind of understanding, some beginning of healing. What must that be like, to meet someone - your own brother - who mostly knows a you you never were? John has all these memories of Jade and Jade has only a fraction of the memories of John.And for John there are those issues that he would have encountered anyway in the OG timeline had things gone well. His other close friends (heck, I’d argue he was closer to Dave and Rose pre-Sburb than he was to Jade; he calls Dave, at least, his best friend) had all spent years forming closer bonds with one-another and new people. In the OG timeline, had Game Over not happened and they’d won, John would still have had to bridge that gap of space and time: but he would have had his sister there for support, and companionship, and close bonds. The Jade he instead ends-up with is practically a stranger who spent three years mourning him (AND HER BOYFRIEND BIRDFRIEND WHO IS PART BOY (thanks @technicallynotanon for the reminder that retcon Jade didn’t date)) alone save for a bunch of none-too-bright animals and her ghost clown grandmother.It’s tragic - and to make it so much worse things seem to have been easy for everyone other than John. They all fell in to new things. Relationships, mostly: Dave and Karkat made room for Jade, Rose got married. Relationships tend to tax friendships: the singular I struggles to compete with the plural we. Only Terezi - with her endless capacity to understand the paths of mind - might have understood him: but she left, taking the blackrom crush with her as she did so.John was isolated. John was more isolated, more alone than any other person: even Callie, who had an intermission of eternity being dead, returned to a world full of friends who remembered her well, and she snagged a don’t-yet-have-the-label-for-it-partner in the process. She too had someone to turn to, and that someone was the only other person John shared his trauma with.Sometimes its hard to talk to people. Sometimes it is harder still when the shadow of a life-partner looms over everything.So John didn’t talk to Roxy. Why does that shock us? Why are we the least surprised? Why are we acting like his actions are so unconscionable? For all that they were so darn cute together that cuteness comprised a relation of several hours over which one of the top two greatest traumas of John Egbert’s life occurred.The other was the death of his father, who was murdered, and whose brutalized corpse John had to witness. A murder - as far as we know - that never had any closure. A murder - as he may have come to realize with some reflection - that occurred largely through the manipulations of the same troll girl his only other crush fucked-off to go find and be with.We keep minimizing John’s trauma. We keep not putting it into perspective. We do him such a disservice.We say, instead, that his not talking to Roxy - that brief surge of anger and shame that threatened to break through his crushing anhedonia, his envy of one person who found another when he did not - we say it is some appalling moral failure. I’m a depression sufferer with a life of regrets and an embarrassing number of long years full of singledom and opportunities that were missed accidentally, but just as often avoided on purpose because self-sabotage is a way of life for people like me.Self harm can be as simple a matter as seeing something you want and letting it slip away, watch it slip away, watch yourself watch it slip away knowing you could do something and then… just… not. And afterwards struggling to explain your actions to other people, and even to yourself: if only I’d… if I had just…why didn’t…?You let it happen because, deep-down, you know you don’t deserve it. The paths not taken, the paths heavy with bitterness, shame, self castigation - paths such as these I have in spades, and hearts, and clubs, and even diamonds.But I, of course, could NEVER see myself acting like John does, and I am sure that no one on Tumblr calling John a creeper has ever done something like it either. I am sure their reaction is born of pure and moral rectitude, and not fear and revulsion at seeing themselves reflected so completely in so unflattering a manner.Surely not they. Surely not I.John Egbert doesn’t need a reason to be depressed. Nobody does. But his depression is not solely an accident of brain chemistry: it is rooted in his sense of self, and his sense of self is a failure. He couldn’t save his dad. he couldn’t save his friends. He couldn’t win Sburb and he couldn’t build the universe he was allegedly destined to build. All of that happened only because Terezi knew how to use him: left to his own devices, nothing would ever have gone right. John couldn’t save anyone.Or so it must seem in the haunting privacy of his thoughts.John has lived with that failure circling around and around in his head since… oh, I’d say about thirty minutes after everything settled down on Earth-C, about an hour after the party ended and his friends went to their new homes and their new lives and he was alone for the first time with the things he had done and the things he failed to do. It probably started the moment he first noticed the silence of his house, the house that was essentially an exact replica of the house he had lived in on the very day his father was murdered and his litany of failures began. It probably began when he sat on the couch in that big empty house and stared at the door that his father was never, ever going to walk through and listened to deafening roar of being the only person there.That was when it started: with a hollow emptiness in the stomach. With a skull that every-so-slightly seemed to be pressing in on his brain, a feeling he’d never felt before. The sudden, sharp, jarring flashes of memory: his father’s body ripped eight ways to Sunday, Rose breathing her last in the dust of LOPAN, that awesome expanse of Skaia local alight with burning worlds and desecration. It began when the Heir of Breath found himself short of his own element for no reason at all, save that he simply found it hard to breathe, hard to make his body continue to breathe.He didn’t say anything at first.He made excuses.He didn’t want to bother people - told himself he was actually enjoying the alone time, enjoying having nothing to do after what felt like a lifetime of doing: although, really, the events of his life comprised little more than two sets of 24 hours spaced three years apart. And that bothered him too - “all things considered it’s not like you went off to war, John, and spent years away” he told himself. Retirement after two days of solid work? Most would kill for that. These and other good reasons not to say anything came and went: there was always a good reason not to say anything, and even those times when some semblance of human feeling  burned hot enough to produce genuine emotion he quickly suppressed it. It’s amazing how quickly depression is something you normalize, how quickly you find reason not to disturb it, to upset the status quo.By the time he realized even dimly that he should have said something to someone, anyone - about Roxy, or about that hollow feeling that now comprised his insides, about how nothing caused him joy or distress, that he could feel his youth rushing away from him in a torrent of time that he could do nothing to stop - it was too late. Perhaps it was always too late. This too, perhaps, was something that always had to happen.Perhaps.There is a moment at the end of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead where Guildenstern, standing on the gallows, faced with his impending doom and the absurdity of his existence muses “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said ‘no.’ But somehow we missed it.”Then he dies.That line echos with me. I suspect it echos with many people like me. That’s the worst part of depression: the sense that no matter how much your condition explains your past you are never free of the feeling that there was a moment you could have done something about it all - but you missed it. The moment was lost, and everything since has been one long, unending chain of payment for that mistake.John Egbert doesn’t need our pity, and nor do I mean to say that he is free of criticism. Our depression contextualizes our actions, but it does not excuse our frailties. John Egbert, however, deserves better than the disapprobation of sinners throwing stones.

[knifekris]

hey hewwo i need to know... more abt ur zizi strider au. have u thought about like. the first meeting with them and their friends in person?

not explicitly until this moment ! 

like ive said before a big insecurity zizi has is the fact that theyre not human and they worry about what it means about them as a person. theyre afraid of being inherently bad because theyre a troll and because the condesce is the only other example of a troll that they know and its not like dave left them any physiology books. (edit: he didnt fuckin . theres no way he couldve known thered be an alien claiming his legacy. this is so funny. tyzias looked at this badass dude who fought alongside roxys mom and just went “this is my rolemodel now” thats so funny to me. oh god once they have the thought “wait this guy hated the condesce wouldnt he hate me” aaa the crisis that would entail. eee. )not to mention the weird attitude condy would have towards them like? her whole Thing is wanting to give humans the caste system so that she can use that against them but it never worked out. but here tyzias is like. a troll? a tealblood no less. like, how differently would he be treated from roxy because of that? i can still imagine a lot of fighting off drones that are basically )(IC trying to get at them. maybe shes waiting until his ‘ordeal’ age to do anything drastic and shes just trying to emulate alternian culture? condy voice let me raise you like a REAL troll. oh thats something to think about.

back to the actual question,

cue me looking over the wiki and being forced to remember how canon ACTUALLY happened. 

“ According to this page, he landed in the middle of the ocean with Lil Cal, and used the puppet as a flotation device to somehow get to a house to live in. He grew up alone in the single remaining penthouse apartment of a high-rise building in the now-flooded Houston, Texas. “

still not relevant to your question. ill get there in a second. so much bullshit happens thats technically related to dirks prince of heart powers? theres just so fucking much going on with dirk. this is gonna be a matter of figuring out what needs to happen and getting it to happen WITHOUT it being dirk. oh my god.

FRIENDS IN PERSON.

in canon, ‘in person’ for the alphas didnt happen until a whole bunch of dreamself shenanigans came about. remember that sick flash with dirk fucking around on his jet-powered skateboard thing? yeah. that fucked. im pretty sure the fast pace and “lets get this shit DONE” attitude would be something zizi goes with too, figuring if he focuses on the stuff that needs to happen to keep his friends safe he wont have time to consider their feelings towards him being a troll and all that jazz. id imagine he might say something to at least jake abt bein an alien? and while roxy would have their moment of surprise i dont see why they wouldnt just Fuckin Go With It. unless they already knew? theyd bond w zizi a lot over condy, itd make sense for zizi to bring it up as a relevant part of the conversation. maybe they dont, out of fear? out of not wanting it to be seen as a Big Deal? or just procrastinating it. hrm. i think hed avoid telling them until the last possible fkin second (aka in person) because of just like. dummy fear.

jane might have a hangup about it. maybe? but in the end im sure itd just be something jane Ignores For The Moment To Consider And Bring Up Later In An Awkward Conversation

as for jake and zizi. theyd hug so fucking good bro theyd hug SO good zizi is shorter than jake and would tug him down to give him the worlds worst noogie dont even fucking LOOK at me their broship means the world to me.

[journeysintowebcomics]

Homestuck Liveblog #183

UPDATE 183: Narrative Takeover

Last time everything went wrong for so many characters. John’s fight with Caliborn went awry, Jane’s plan to seduce Jake didn’t work because he kept thinking of Dirk, and Dave and Karkaroni’s political strategy meeting got derailed by Jade deciding it was a good time for romantic overtures. So now let’s continue.

So, now that they have been dumped in middle of the chaos that’s destroying all the known existence and reality, John checks the situation. Lord English is up there, in front of the black hole, seemingly impervious to its strong absorbing effect.

Unlike his younger form, his eyes aren’t flickering wildly. They’re locked in place, an eight ball in each socket.

If I remember correctly from the booklet about pool I read like six years ago when I started playing pool for fun, the eighth ball is the last one you must sink, so I’d say it indicates it’s endgame. I think it also had happened in Arc 7. Symbolism!

Tavros is over there, leading an army, Vriska is nowhere to be seen and presumably is very dead, and Meenah was supposed to be going away, I think? Anyway, it’s fight time! Everyone already has their weapons at the ready – all the weapons that are supposed to hit Lord English pretty hard – and Rose tries to remind them what exactly their plan is. She barely gets a single word out before she’s dead.

But Rose doesn’t get to finish what she was trying to say. Lord English’s mouth roars open and a wave of energy blasts through your group. Rose is the only one caught in it. She dissolves in slow motion. You can see the outline of her body in shadow. One arm thrown up over her eyes, shoulders pulled up defensively, cape billowing out behind her. She leaves an afterimage of shimmering light in her wake and then dissipates, drifting apart like a handful of salt tossed out to sea. You can almost hear the cosmic clock counting down, tick tock, and a chime to accompany her fate: Heroic.

This fight lasted like three seconds before it all looked grim as heck for John and friends. This is going to wreck everyone’s morale and ruin whatever effective plan they had, as I really doubt Rose was supposed to stand aside and let everybody else act. They’re so doomed.

As if to underscore how screwed they are, Jade tries to use her powers and finds out the black hole up there is where the green sun used to be. It made Lord English vulnerable, but she’s powerless now too. Whooops. Kind of a big oversight. How didn’t John or Future Rose foresee that detail? It’s kind of important!

With that, two of the four are now dead and they haven’t gotten started for real. Dave is trying to cut Lord English with the cueball sword, John is...standing around, I suppose, until he snaps out of it and surrounds Lord English with wind, capturing him until he tries to smash his skull with the hammer. Lord English eats the hammer. I’m...okay, I didn’t see that coming. I appreciate the move a lot. John can’t do much else because his glasses are broken, so he can’t see well at all. Good thing Meenah is around now! What a lifesaver!

Time to assess the situation and check how badly things have turned in...like a minute or so. As I always say: a minute is quite a long time in a fight!

Ghostly Tavros and another one of John’s hammers join the list of casualties, Meenah deciding to go in for the kill. Not unless you turn into Dave, gal! Not that Dave is faring much better, he’s trying to harm Lord English but he’s way too fast, even for Dave, who is no slouch in the agility department. That’s incredibly quick, and he’s not fueled by the green sun right now. Everything is awful for the heroes here!

Meenah is launched away and I can only guess she’s dead, because in this scenario being thrown away is kind of fatal due to the huge black hole up there. Dave is under Lord English’s foot, John barely saves him by throwing more hammer at Lord English for him to eat, and tries to set up a hammer barrier to prepare that silly thing he made with the legendary Zillyhoo and Vriska’s dice. If they need a lucky hit they sure need it now!

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < waaaaaaaaaaaait

...oooooooh no. I had completely forgotten this existed. Hey, what’s new? Will you be able to defeat Lord English? At least Dave is reacting with horror, which is the right reaction when you see a copy of yourself that was merged with a cat. Davepetasprite is being inspirational, trying to psyche up Dave, and it works!

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < i know it looks pawful right now but we can do it

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < in fact were literally the only ones who can do it

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < after all

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < it is our destiny B33

You also are the last three people left here, so I don’t think it’s much about destiny at this point.

Somehow, between the three of them they manage to do real damage on this monster. John’s hitting him with hammers even if Lord English keeps eating them, Dave slashes and actually gets blood, and Davepeta scratches with the claws. The cycle continues, Lord English almost eats John’s favorite hammer, just that this time he almost gets John himself. Well then. This story is truly something.

Apparently John got injured with Lord English’s teeth or something, because he’s bleeding heavily. I swear, if John dies because he got bitten by Lord English I’m going to be astonished, because that was never a cause of death I imagine would ever happen.

You lift your chin and see it: Lord English’s gold tooth cracked off at the base and embedded in your chest. It must be stuck between two of your ribs, you think, because it hurts like a bitch when you try to breathe.

Oof, you’re in big trouble! When you have something embedded into you you really shouldn’t take it out unless you’re in a professional’s hands, so it’s pretty likely John will have that tooth embedded into him for quite a while. Dave isn’t doing too badly, managing to stab Lord English with the cueball sword up the hilt, unfortunately leaving him vulnerable to Lord English’s maw. Oh god, he has tasted human blood, everyone run! Too late for Dave, though, he gets his head bitten off.

Won’t lie, that’s pretty brutal as far as deaths go. Damn!

Obviously this enrages Davepeta, who grabs Lord English and flies up to the black hole, dragging him along. That was an option? Maybe it’d have been great to have done that much earlier, before Dave died. Really would have been nice.

The black hole—the gaping, implacable, cosmic embodiment of the dead cherub, his long-departed sister—finally welcomes Lord English home.

English and Davepeta are sucked in with a subatomic whimper. The reunion sends shock waves across the pitiful remains of Paradox Space. And then everything is wholly, utterly, and categorically silent. It’s over. Lord English is dead.

Ding dong, the witch is dead. Somehow it’s done! Excellent! Now, here comes opinions about this whole sequence.

To be perfectly honest, this left a lot to be desired. The least of my complaints is the length – for a climactic fight it’s a little bit short. Which isn’t really a problem here, given this isn’t Homestuck anymore, it’s the epilogue. The fight not getting focus is fine and dandy, honestly. I’m actually surprised we got a fight at all.

What I will complain about, though, is that for something that pretty much only Davepeta got to do something worthwhile. It feels like pretty much everyone else who intervened, both alive and dead, were there just to die. It’s pretty disappointing, really. I think I’d have been okay with that if they at least had managed to do something before dying.

Curiously enough, if this had been incorporated into the story, characters dying so fast would have been less bad. I’d say this being part of epilogues is what makes this be treated differently to how it’d be otherwise. But yeah, Lord English is dead, and there’s plenty of epilogue left. I suppose that means the political stuff is what’ll fill the rest of the epilogue in this route, no?

You collapse against whatever is passing for the floor at this moment of utterly null corporeal conditions surrounding you. It doesn’t feel possible. You’re not sure you can even trust your perception well enough to believe it. But it seems to be over. You’ve convinced yourself of this truth well enough to allow yourself to exhale. Enough to allow yourself to suddenly acknowledge the agony coursing through your body, emanating from the gold tooth lodged in your chest. Enough to allow yourself to succumb to the overwhelming urge to sleep.

He’s so dead. And so, all the Wonderkids are dead, total party kill. They tried and they succeeded, mostly thanks to a timely intervention by what turned out to be the best sprite just for killing Lord English, and now they’re all dead. I’m pretty sure by now this makes Homestuck qualify as a Greek tragedy.

Ah, there’s the conversation Rose and Dirk are going to have. She starts by talking about that novel she wrote in her diaries, the ones about wizards. She feels the story as written by the adult Rose Dirk knew from his original world didn’t have as much passion as she did when she wrote the original draft in her journals. Maybe! When you write something for a widespread public, you have to kill a liiiiittle of your own passion to tailor it for a wider audience. It’s a cynical thought, I admit, but I believe I’m right.

ROSE: Anyway, my point is that I’ve long suspected my story was a pre-manifestation of my Seer of Light powers. I was seeing beyond my universe into another.

Doesn’t sound farfetched to me, I must say. It’s possible that, from her early ages, she was unconsciously starting to tap onto the many powers and abilities that come with her title and role. I mean, Mom Lalonde was there, and I believe in her own way she’d help pave the way for the kids to achieve what was needed to triumph. She may have done something, inadvertently or not, that led to Rose writing her novel in a fit of inspiration. Who knows. Certainly not me, and it’s such a minuscule point in the vast net of Homestuck I doubt it’ll be ever touched.

I hadn’t noticed until now that in the end a total of twelve players had crossed the door into the new universe. Fun number for that. Also, Terezi’s name is among them, so she did get to the new universe after all. What happened to her?

All these numbers may or may not have significance. Hah! Well it depends on what kind of author writes the story. Given it’s Hussie, well, I’m inclined towards thinking there’s some significance. Whether the reader will find out about it is an entirely different manner, of course.

Of course Dirk has given his current situation a lot of thought, he even has theories about what’s it. I’m listening, pal, enlighten me about this new plotline.  

DIRK: I mean, some of us have stopped using our powers completely. Not a whole lot of need for emergency resurrections or complex timeline manipulation on a planet that’s never had a conflict more serious than a sportsball riot or a rumpled hat shortage.

DIRK: But even aside from how often they’re used...

DIRK: Some powers don’t lend themselves to the infinite expansion of one’s mind, the way ours do.

ROSE: I see.

ROSE: So what you’re saying is, it’s more a matter of one’s aspect than it is whether one’s powers are practiced further, or allowed to atrophy.

DIRK: Yep.

So it all depends on the power. It’s not like everyone’s going to start suffering this too, it seems to be limited to what aspect it is. Perhaps Jade and Dave would go through this too? Other than them, I’m not sure anyone else would.

ROSE: In that case, perhaps Terezi had the right idea.

ROSE: Getting away from this place, I mean.

ROSE: Maybe I was a fool for imagining I could settle down here.

Ah, so that’s what happened to Terezi. She left. Maybe she had a feeling things wouldn’t go well, it does make sense she’d be feeling the awfulness Dirk and Rose feel right now. With her Mind aspect, it does make sense she would. Where’d she go, though? Is she a nomad around the world or something?

Dirk’s taking this easier than most would because he’s used to multitasking. Ah, right, he did have his dreamself and his realself, dealing with both must have given him some practice. Still, two is nowhere close to the infinity of everything, so I’m skeptic it’s as good of a training as he says it was.

ROSE: I’m caught in the liminal space between reality and reverie, where people once believed demons dwelled. But the only reason the demon is still sitting on my chest is because I refuse to banish it. All it would take is looking directly at it.

ROSE: I’m forcing myself to stumble through my life as a sleepwalker. All this pain and sorrow could go away if I would just allow myself to wake up.

DIRK: Then why don’t you?

ROSE: Because I’m not sure that the person opening her eyes will be me.

Brings to mind that about us being someone’s dream and, when that someone wakes up, it’s all over. It’s the kind of thing that brings existential crisis when you think about it too hard, isn’t it? So, if Rose here’s experiencing something similar, she’s not going to have a good time because she’s the kind of person who thinks a lot. Nobody should be jealous of these two, that’s awful.

Dirk, in what’s unusually close to sympathy, crouches and takes off his sunglasses, looking straight at Rose’s eyes. He admits he’s a very flawed person and shouldn’t be always right, and that he knows all about his own flaws.

Rose’s eyes have grown distant, almost mirrorlike. Dirk can see himself reflected in her vacant stare.

ROSE: All the pieces in their place.

ROSE: The mechanisms all running smoothly.

She says this in a hollow tone. It’s the disarming voice a puppeteer ventriloquizes for a marionette.

...okaaaay, something happened. If I’m understanding this and the next few sentences correctly, Dirk pretty much took over Rose. I don’t know why, he just did. Althoooough...hm. It’s still early. Maybe the reasons will be revealed later. But hey, you can’t say this was predicted! Also, if I had to guess, the moment Rose was taken over was when he took off his sunglasses. It just makes sense, really.

Whyyyy is the text turning orange. Dirk, are you taking over the narration?

Yup, he did, and he’s addressing the reader. He sounds pretty bitter there are readers, and brags about he can make the reader’s perspective change and turn into a character’s perspective. No complaints from me for you doing that, really, be my guest.

But I haven’t revealed myself to you just to boast about the abilities arising from the gradual obliteration of the constraints on my consciousness. I’ve only taken a moment to answer a few questions. Not ones I heard you ask—because again, you are nonspecific and therefore do not matter—but ones I imagined you asking. And by imagining these questions, they became less fake, and as such, demanded similarly non-fake answers. No, in truth, the time has come to make my presence known in order to start bringing my plans to fruition. It’s time to get down to fucking business.

Eh. Sounds to me like Dirk wants to ramble and wants an excuse to do so, even if he has to make that excuse himself. Golly, pal, you have free control of the narrative. Ramble all you want, go ahead.

To continue the narrative, John has to wake up and does so. I suppose he being sleepy and exhausted after the fight was just he being sleepy and exhausted instead of being borderline dead because of blood loss. Dirk forces the narrative to make John apologize to no one for everything that happened in the battle, and it’s all so heavy-handed even John notices something’s going on with his head. Dirk, you’re not doing a very good job at being subtle.

Suddenly you remember: Lord English’s tooth is still embedded in your chest. You panic, wrap your hands around the base, and give it a little tug. It’s excruciating. The tooth makes an awful grating sound as it grinds along one of your ribs. You gasp and lose your grip, biting the inside of your mouth so hard that you taste blood.

Can’t blame you for trying, but I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Without someone to administer proper medical care, you’ll bleed to death pretty much instantly.

Yeah, exactly! Not that there’s anyone to administer proper medical care in the middle of literal nowhere, so he’ll have to transport himself somewhere else before he touches that tooth any further. Where’s John, anyway? Is he still lying around underneath the black hole? Did he zap himself somewhere else?

On the other hand, the tooth is poisoned. So you’re pretty much fucked either way, and that’s really all there is to say on the matter.

Oh. That’s a thing now? Well then, guess you’re screwed, John. Thanks for everything, have a nice death. I suppose it would count as a heroic death because he received that fatal wound fighting someone who was obliterating reality, so being revived isn’t an option, I suppose.

John wanders around for a very long time, depressed and feeling pretty awful, until he sees Dad Egbert’s wallet. It’s a coincidence to find it anywhere in the infinite expanse of reality! John opens the wallet, aaaaand...end page! Quick, make a distraction and go check some other place. It’s the usual Homestuck style, so that’s what happens.

Jade’s explaining Dave and Karkaroni’s political ambitions to Roxy and Calliope, once again using the terms ‘neoliberal austerity measures’. I’m still unsure what that’s supposed to mean, but whatever it is makes Roxy groan, no doubt because she has heard about said measures too much already. They’re bad, and Karkaroni’s underdog populism is the counter to those, she argues. Give him a chance! Unfortunately for Elect-a-Troll 20xx, it doesn’t seem like Calliope and Roxy are very interested in getting involved in this at all.

ROXY: i just dont rly

ROXY: care about politics that much i guess

I suppose this means she’s not going to support Jane either. Hey, better for her to not be interested than for her to be on the opposite side. This is a victory of some sort.

She’s reticent to supporting anyone not only because she’s not interested in politics, but also because it’s a fight between her friends and she sure isn’t eager to going against a friend. She also knows this is something Jane has been planning for a long time, so she’s not into ruining Jane’s plans – even though she won’t really go out and say she supports Jane. I really disagree Jane is fragile, though. She’s anything but fragile.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Roxy’s the only one left I haven’t been able to crack. Her mind remains a total enigma to me, just like it always has. If I had to guess, it’s her Void powers that make her invisible, even to increasingly omniscient parties such as myself. For all intents and purposes, it’s like her thoughts don’t exist. She’s the same person, as far as I can tell. She still wears her heart on her sleeve. But the bottom line remains: Roxy Lalonde is still utterly fucking inscrutable.

Which is a very good thing for her. I wonder if this means Dirk would be unable to do anything with the narration involving Roxy, if she’s invisible for even the increasingly omniscient parties. In that case, she’s the luckiest person in this entire canon. Good thing, too, given how Dirk is a fervent supporter of Jane, so he can’t manipulate her into doing anything.

Roxy’s staying out, but what about Calliope? She doesn’t want any of this either, because it’d be stressful as all hell and that’s a very valid reason to not want to get involved in politics, especially if it’s between competing friends. At least Jade understands well enough and doesn’t insist.

Apparently Roxy asking Jade to call both Calliope and her by ‘them’ throws Dirk off to the point he has to hastily say aloud he doesn’t care and that he’s very okay with this, you guys, it’s totally okay. I don’t know, when this kind of thing is written or said like he did I can only think that person is indeed not okay with it. Dirk really should stop his rambling for once before he shoves his feet deeper into his mouth.

For a person that’s starting to be omniscient and spent an entire page mocking the reader and being vainglorious he sure is pretty concerned with keeping up the appearances.

ROXY: i mean what am i gonna do

ROXY: get married and pop out 100 bbs?

I mean, with ectobiology that’s far easier and simpler than you make it sound. You don’t even have to get married for that.

I choose to believe Dirk has gotten so flustered by the conversation about Roxy and Calliope being non-binary he chose to make Jade be unconscious. He had to stop the conversation somehow, so he made her do astral plane stuff. Smooth, Dirk, smooth as a brick.

I may as well stop here for the time being.

Next update: next time

[thelifetimechannel]

In this week’s bonus content, Dave places prank orders on the local carapacian message boards.

JAKE: Ms roxys mom!! JAKE: Is it true your girlfriends a vampire? ROSE: Last time I checked. ROSE: To be technical, the Alternian term is "rainbow drinker". ROSE: There are some differences, but if you're going for "attractive young woman who drinks blood", you're on the money. ROSE: Similar to the way "Ms Roxys mom" is on the money, but the term I'm used to is "Rose". JAKE: Its polite for one to wait until such a time as one had been introduced. JAKE: As such im jake. Dont believe weve yet spoken! ROSE: No, not directly, unless we've exchanged witticisms in a memo somewhere. ROSE: I've lost track of those. ROSE: I think they've become independent sentient creatures. ROSE: As such, they must be allowed to flourish on their own, making their own decisions. ROSE: They're grown up now. They can make their own choices. JAKE: Just walkin off all on their lonesome huh? JAKE: Godspeed to you memos. What happens in you stays in you. ROSE: With a tear in my eye, I waved them off to memo university, where they'll learn hard truths about themselves while obtaining an education. JAKE: I hear theyre going into the communications field. Good for them! ROSE: I expect great things of them. ROSE: And plenty of tawdry hijinks. ROSE: But if you've been reading them, you'll notice we already have those. ROSE: Dave tried to order a pizza from a carapace agent. JAKE: He what. JAKE: Can you do that? ROSE: Dersites have their own message boards. Mostly focused on fashion, apparently, but you can post whatever you like. ROSE: I doubt he received his delivery. JAKE: Do carapaces have pizzerias and if so what the heck have i been doing with reheated alchemized food for the past five months? JAKE: I am alas a deprived man. I never knew what i was missing until jane started bussing us the captchas for her home cooking. ROSE: Honestly? I have no idea. ROSE: I did roam Derse for a few months in another timeline, but I didn't have culinary experiences on the mind. ROSE: I can relate, though. ROSE: Most of my background was in microwave dinners. ROSE: Which I look back on with fondness now, after what we've been subsisting on for the last few years. ROSE: Which brings us back to the original topic, more or less. ROSE: Yes, this outfit has vampires now. That's a thing that we have. JAKE: Man. You guys were off having all the fun on the magical hijinks. JAKE: Not that tomb raiding wasnt a blast but you know there were no vampires. ROSE: As many of the more romantic novels would suggest, it's a bit of a burden. ROSE: But an asset if you want to keep your plans after being shot through the abdomen, or so she tells me. JAKE: So does it come with the unholy cravings and aversion to the daylight or is this weird alien vampiracy? ROSE: Actually, she's one of the few of her kind that enjoys the sun. ROSE: As for unholy cravings... ROSE: That depends on your definition. ROSE: *eyebrow waggle* JAKE: Er. JAKE: The blood drinking i meant the blood drinking!! JAKE: Gosh what you two do together is your own private matter. *tugs collar of god tier cape.* ROSE: She's working on that. ROSE: She won't go for your jugular without permission, if that's what you're worried about. JAKE: Good to know. Im not presently in a state of mind where id be interested. ROSE: Not that many people enjoy the subtle pleasures of being lunch. JAKE: I am an open-minded man. JAKE: But i dont think im into vore. ROSE: Based on what I've heard of the clutter in Jade's home, you may have been into just about everything else. ROSE: But then, fetishes don't always cross universes. JAKE: ! JAKE: Hey now no fair going through a mans dirty laundry! JAKE: What if i dragged out your alt-selves smut rags? ROSE: Relax. I've never seen any of it first hand. ROSE: The three who traveled with access to the house, on the other hand... ROSE: Also, I have smut rags? ROSE: Where are they? ROSE: I must see these immediately. ROSE: I wonder if I had the same usernames. JAKE: Funnily enough i hear you were specialized in vampire penny dreadfuls with real gals of the shadows. JAKE: Roxy did some digging and uncovered one of your many many psuedonyms. ROSE: I'll give you a king's ransom to get me copies and make sure my brother never finds out about this. ROSE: It's bad enough he uncovered my fanfiction.net account. JAKE: I will exchange it for your silence on whatever youve heard on alt-mes personal life. JAKE: Especially to dirk! JAKE: Well dirk... dirks one matter but definitely not hal. JAKE: Ill find some way to bribe jade and the rest. ROSE: I'll keep what I know hush hush. ROSE: Jade was evasive, though. ROSE: Mostly because she didn't want anyone to know you were dead. ROSE: I do know you had a passion for washed out blue pictures of women, though. I'll keep mum on that. ROSE: And the potential of illegitimate children scattered around the tri-state area. ROSE: You should always be careful about giving your full name to people over the Internet. Sometimes they do some digging. JAKE: Wait what. JAKE: What?? JAKE: Never mind i dont want to know! JAKE: Dirk wasnt exactly pleased about his alt self but as both men are apparently very very dead their checkered pasts shall lie with them. ROSE: As befits them. ROSE: Jade did use your past behavior to shame me, I'm afraid to say. ROSE: But it was yours, not his, and it was mostly to dissuade me from my familial path of jumping out the relationship plane without a parachute. ROSE: Apparently my genes don't have the monopoly on that kind of extreme evasive technique. JAKE: Oh... JAKE: Oh great. JAKE: Im an example. JAKE: A "cautionary tale" even!! JAKE: Madam let me just briefly say that by our deep emotional conversations that it does in fact take two to tango! JAKE: I wasnt the one who burned that particular bridge anyway. ROSE: Don't worry, we're all cautionary tales at this point. ROSE: That's what mythology is all about. ROSE: Respect your elders. Stay away from taboos. Don't have sex with cows. ROSE: The lessons from Greek mythology alone are practically endless. JAKE: The ol boys sound like they knew how to party. ROSE: That and not much else. JAKE: Did they do anything but go on adventures and cheese off the gods? JAKE: And hoe down like there was no tomorrow? ROSE: There were a lot of curses. ROSE: Our family tree may be just as convoluted, but hopefully we can avoid some of the drama. JAKE: I hope we got that out of our system now without having to see a man about a horse. ROSE: I think we've done a decent job of it. ROSE: I heard all of you had a blowout. ROSE: Two blowouts actually. ROSE: An emotional one and then a physical one. ROSE: We felt the aftershocks of the latter. JAKE: Yeah... JAKE: But we worked it out. JAKE: The physical blowout was the result of teamwork and friendship! JAKE: The emotional one not so much but its ok now! ROSE: That's been the story of our lives so far. JAKE: Just give dirk a hug if you get the chance ok? JAKE: He needs it. ROSE: Would he appreciate it? ROSE: I know my brother is worse than a bad kudzu infestation, but my ectofather seems standoffish. JAKE: No no trust me on this one hes on you he doesnt want to let go. JAKE: He just has a hard time initiating is all. JAKE: But hes down for some awesome platonic embraces almost all the time. ROSE: I see... ROSE: I'm spotting the problem. ROSE: We may be too alike. Someone else may have to lift our arms and gently wrap us around each other. ROSE: Then, once the hug is properly secured, it can become self-sustaining. ROSE: Maybe. JAKE: I will have to be the middle man then. ROSE: You'll broker our accord. ROSE: Anyway, unlike our illustrious Greek forebears, we're not myths written down. We can break our patterns. ROSE: I think we've already begun. ROSE: If I have to learn to initiate physical contact while not three sheets to the wind, maybe that's another step in the right direction. JAKE: I will be the one delicately managing the lamprey tendrils of strider-lalonde limbs. ROSE: Will you now? JAKE: I mean. Why not? ROSE: Far be it from me to impede on awkward sibling hugs. ROSE: I'll look forward to it.

[lateniteslacker]

A Twist of Fate

Note: Several people requested a longer version of the fic I wrote a while ago featuring incubus!Jake/Demon-Hunter!Dirk. Everyone wanted to know what happened between John and Dave. Right now, this story is about them, but Dirk/Jake will be coming soon!

The original story featuring Dirk/Jake can be found here!

Your grandma always warned you about the Striders.

From a young age, you were cautioned.  She instilled in you fear of them.  Fear of the prestigious family of demon hunters.  The Strider family lineage has brought death and ruin to so many of your kind. It doesn’t matter if the demons are benevolent or malicious. The Striders strike without difference or hesitance.

In Derse, there isn’t a single demon who doesn’t know the family and fear them.

At least, that’s what your grandma thinks.

You are John Egbert, and you know that there is nothing to fear.  Your grandmother is Jade Harley, the queen of Derse.  You aren’t nearly as old or as powerful as her, but you can hold your own in a fight.  

You know the Striders are only human, just like any other.

You blend in perfectly with the humans.  You have long since learned to hide your demonic characteristics.  Your ears soften and round with a simple spell, hidden behind your wild black hair even if you forget your enchantment. With the help of glasses, your demonically blue eyes pale a few shades to a vibrant (but human) blue.  

Even without your tricks, your grandmother’s magical charm protects you from the human’s eyes.  As long as you wear it, no human, not even the infamous Striders, will sense that you are a demon.

Once you reached the tender but capable age of 13, you stopped worrying about her rules.  You visited the human realm whenever you pleased, day or night.  You’ve never been anything but carefree as you walk through the marketplace of the town closest to the Derse portal near your home.  

You spoke with the humans and easily befriended them.  You took residence in a friendly elderly man’s home.  You helped care for him until he passed away naturally from old age a few months later.  You almost cried when they read his will.  Though he bestowed all his money to his family, he gave his home to you.

With the help of the villagers, you fixed up the simple house.  You lived with them and worked beside them.

And now, at the very capable age of 16, you think you may have fallen in love with one of them.

Human and demon unions are extremely uncommon, but they aren’t unheard of.  You’ve heard stories of several demons that chose to mate with humans and lived very happy lives.  The final outcomes were sometimes wonderful and sometimes deadly.  

You aren’t really concerned with which outcome you happen to face.  Either way, you will live your life happily with your boyfriend, knowing that you chose to live by your own rules.  

You love him, and you know he loves you.

There’s only one small problem.

Your boyfriend is Dave Strider.

“Egbert, when are you gonna introduce me to your family?  You know it’s not serious until you meet the fam,” Dave says, lounging on the couch in your front room, his gangly limbs spread all over.  One arm is curled behind his head, and the other is clutching his chest in a very overdramatic way.  

“My family’s a bunch of weirdos.  You’re better off not knowing them,” you respond cheekily.  

“I knew you weren’t serious about me.  Don’t even care enough to introduce me to your mom and dad.  I’m gonna expire over here, forever a lonely bachelor.  Never meeting his boyfriend’s family, never getting married.  Alone forever.  You want me to die a miserable death alone?”

You laugh and press your palm firmly against Dave’s mouth. “Shut up, Dave! You know that’s not true!”

He makes an “oof” sound as you jump on top of him, smiling and eyeing him playfully.  “Even if my family doesn’t agree to give me away in marriage, I’ll never leave you.  Ok?”

Dave makes an exaggerated gesture of rolling his eyes, but eventually he nods.  Slowly, you uncover his mouth and quickly replace your lips over his.  You do it to shut him up, but you also do it because you just want to kiss him.

Kissing Dave, you’ve found, is one of your favorite things.  Your lips glide along each other’s gently, and when you feel his tongue slide along your lower lip, begging silent permission, you part your lips, allowing him deeper into your mouth.  

Your teeth are short and blunt, human sized because you’ve willed them to be.  You know you taste like apple cinnamon and yeast, from the bread and jam you ate this morning.  You don’t really have to eat, but you don’t want Dave to know that.

After all, he thinks you’re a human.

Dave Strider, the infamous demon hunter, has no idea he’s dating a demon.

You’re still not perfect at reading thoughts, but you catch glimpses every now and then.  All you see in Dave’s mind is how much he loves you. He thinks you’re just a dorky guy who makes sweet jams and jellies.  He thinks it’s coincidence that you happen to live in this town, closest to the demonic realm.  He thinks he’s lucky he found you here, so he can continue to work and date you at the same time.

Dave thinks you don’t know about his job.  About the demons he kills at night.

You do.  And if your family knew you were dating him—in love with him—they would be appalled.

There’s a reason your family can never meet your boyfriend.  Your parents passed on long ago in a tragic accident, leaving you in the care of your grandmother when you were only five.  You don’t remember much about it, or about them, actually.  You know your dad could bake a mean cake. And your mom could never refuse a piece.

You remember that they loved you.  Though you don’t remember much about them, you miss them.

You wish that they could meet Dave.  Surely, they would understand that what you have with Dave is true love.  That it transcends humans and demons.   Or, in this case, demon hunters and demons.

Your grandma will not understand.  Jade Harley is fearsome in her might, and stubborn in her ways.  If she knew you were dating a Strider, you’re certain she would keep you on a magical leash for at least several decades.  Long enough for Dave to die before you could see him again.

Your grandma can never know.

“What’re you thinking about, Egbert?” Dave says, tapping your forehead.  “Your head’s all scrunched up like there’s too many thoughts going on at the same time in there.”

You can’t exactly tell him all that about your family, so instead you think of something else. “You really want to stay with me forever?” You ask him quietly, smiling shyly at him in a way that you know always gets to him.

It works like a charm. You see the responding light flush on Dave’s cheeks.  “Yeah, I guess that’d be cool.  We’ve been dating a while already, and you seem all right.  We could get married, you could move into my place, we could have a couple kids, and live the dream. It’d be pretty sweet.”

“Eww, move in with your brother?  No thanks,” you scrunch your nose, ignoring the fact that you could never have kids. Not that you would want them.  

Dave lives with his older brother.  “Bro,” is apparently what Dave calls him.  You’ve only seen him a few times, when you went to Dave’s house for one reason or another.  You’ve never even shared more than a passing ‘hello,’ but for some reason he sets you on edge.

Something about Bro being the most infamous demon hunter in the land.  It makes your stomach uneasy, to the point where you can’t eat your sweet jellies.

“Hey, I’ve got a sister too. She’s pretty cool,” Dave points out.

You laugh and kiss him again.  “You know I don’t swing that way, Dave.”

Dave grins at you and says, “thought I’d offer.”

Dave’s sister, Rose, is also a formidable hunter.  Luckily, she doesn’t live anywhere nearby.  She’s long moved out with her girlfriend.  The two fell off the face of the map some time ago, and you never have to deal with them.

Dave himself is nothing to sneeze at.  He’s skilled with a sword, and you know he’s taken down more than a few demons already. You wish there was a way to make him stop, but you honestly can’t think of a way to ask him.  Not without jeopardizing your relationship.  

If Dave were to find out you’re a demon, you have no idea what would happen.  

Would Dave kill you? Would he tell his scary older brother and make him kill you?  

A bright and vivid image suddenly comes to your mind.  It’s loud and sharp in its clarity.

You see Dave, with his katana plunged through your chest.  

It feels so real, so plausible.  It terrifies you.  The thought sends shivers up your spine.  

Reflexively, you touch the charm your grandma gave you.  It’s kept you safe and hidden for years already.  You know it will keep you safe many more.  Her magic is the kind that lasts for centuries.

Dave notices and murmurs, “how come you always wear that one?  I got you a pretty cool one too.”

“I like yours!  I wear it sometimes!” You quickly stammer in response.

“I never see you wear it,” Dave says, and though you don’t see the pout on his lips, you hear it in his voice.

“I do! I just like this one too!” you insist.  Then, your expression softens.  You pull your lower lip between your teeth, eyeing Dave in that adorably vulnerable way that you know he always falls for.  Quietly, you tell him, “It was my grandmother’s.”

Dave falls for it. You sense him feeling sorry for you. Dave feels sorry for the grandma that he doesn’t know is very much still alive and the powerful queen of the demon kingdom.  

In his thoughts, you see Dave reaching for you, taking you in his arms. You see him cradling you, and comforting you.  You see him shushing you, and rubbing your back gently, comfortingly.  

You almost reach for him, wanting to feel his arms around you, comforting you even though you don’t need it.

In real life, Dave doesn’t move from the couch. Instead, he says, “I’ll let you off the hook this time. But if I get you any other jewelry, you’d better wear it,” he says.

Other jewelry?  

Before you can ask, he sits up, pulling you up with him.  He glances out the window, and you see that it’s almost dark.  “I’d better go.  You know how Bro gets if I’m not home before dark,” he says, using his age old excuse.

You want him to stay. You really do.  But, just like Dave has responsibilities, you do too. While his involve killing demons, yours involve feeding yourself.

You are a growing incubus, after all.  

When Dave leaves, you kiss him sweetly and shut the door behind him.  You listen to his footsteps pick up as he hurries away.

The image comes to your mind again, of Dave with his katana.  You feel the cold hard metal plunged in your chest. You see your blood cascading down your body and down his blade, covering you both as you die by his hands.

It’s so real.  It’s almost like a terrible memory.

You shake your head.  You don’t know what this is, but it won’t happen. What you and Dave have together is special.  He’ll never hurt you like that.  He won’t.

As you head back into your house, you convince yourself of that fact.

And yet, some small part of you can’t help wondering if this is all already woven in your fate.  Is this something that happened already?  Is this a vision of what is to come?

You have no answers, and the one person you could possibly ask, you can’t.  Your grandma would never understand.

You try to ignore it, but all night the troubling thoughts linger in your mind.

[blatherkatt]

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

Chapter 23: A Temporary Parting Of Ways

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: Mentioned/implied abuse, internalized homophobia, more possible disordered eating/its closer to just bad eating habits learned from the abuse but i feel i should still warn for it

FIRST | PREVIOUS | NEXT

Things had been…relatively quiet, the past few weeks.

Ever since Dave and Dirk had finally worked things out on the roof, it seemed that with nothing in particular to wind themselves up over, the house had finally managed to actually become as peaceful as ‘a big house out in the middle of the woods’ implied. Not that things were perfect between her brothers, mind, but there was good mixed in with the bad, and even the tense moments were far less terrible.

A few days after that talk, for instance, Rose had been helping Dirk unload groceries as always.  Dave had come down, looking like he’d been caught stealing, but Dirk had simply tossed him a bag.

“Didn’t know which kind you like, so I just grabbed a few,” he’d said.

Dave had opened the bag, let a small smile spread across his face, said “Sweet,” and scurried back upstairs with a grateful nod at Dirk.

And since then it had seemed like whatever blockage was keeping them from progressing had been fully cleared away. They still moved in a series of frustrating baby steps, an infuriatingly endless process of trial and error, but even that was better than the vicious cycle of stagnation before, and Rose could see, day by day, Dave was well and truly starting to settle in.

(He was unfortunately a lot more nervous around Roxy, now, and he wouldn’t let her wrap an arm around his shoulders in the way she often did while speaking to people. He did, at the very least, seem to forgive her, however, especially after Roxy promised about fifty times over that she was never going to do that to him again.)

But things were never truly quiet in this house — there was always something. Even as Dave got better during the day, he was growing worse at night. Ever more frequent were the occurrences of his paranoia growing fierce enough that he would wake Rose up — Dirk’s room was still apparently akin to the lion’s den, and he couldn’t yet bring himself to fetch their elder sibling himself. The lost sleep was starting to grate on her, but she was careful not to direct her frustration at him. She’d learned that lesson well enough, being angry at him would only frighten him more; and besides, it was hardly his fault. That blame rested solely on the man who’d taught him to fear small noises so much.

Still, something would have to be done about that in the near future — with school starting up again in just three weeks, she really couldn’t afford to be losing this much sleep long-term. Dirk may have long since adapted himself to being a creature of the night, but Rose had no such skill.

More pressing than even that, however, was the trend that had come up in just the past few days: The trolls seemed to be fighting.

They wouldn’t say about what, and whenever Rose or Dave happened upon them mid-argument, Karkat would cut the conversation off and storm out of the room. Kanaya would only promise vaguely that she’d explain soon enough, and that Karkat was making it much more of a problem than it actually was.

“This isn’t about that, ahem, ‘pale-crush’ you’ve told me about, is it?” Rose grinned, after one such occurrence in early August.

Kanaya bit her lip. “Well, not directly,” she said, “but I fear it’s what may be clouding his vision. It’s…this is a good thing, in the long run, I promise, but it has some, um, short-term impacts that Karkat is not very happy about.”

Rose raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?” she said. “Dear me, I’ll have to work overtime to quash my burning curiosity. I eagerly await learning what this is all about.”

“Then you’ll be waiting on Karkat,” Kanaya said, “because honestly I’m mostly just waiting for him to stop being so argumentative about this. We’d only be gone for three days, anyway, he doesn’t need to be so fussy.”

“Wait, you’re leaving?” Rose said, snapping to attention.

“What?” came Dave’s voice. He was standing on the stairs — Rose hadn’t even noticed him come down.

“Shoot,” said Kanaya.

What followed was a small bout of chaos — Mom and Dirk both needed to be part of this conversation, after all. Dirk was just in the basement, but Mom took a few rounds of phone tag to contact, and then Dirk had to go fetch her from work, and in the end it took nearly two hours to get everyone gathered downstairs to hear exactly what was going on. During that time, Dave scarcely left Karkat’s side (who only begrudgingly agreed to participate in the conversation after being asked several times. Rose privately suspected he had acquiesced purely due to the look of near-desperation on Dave’s face). Rose couldn’t blame him; she’d grown so used to the trolls being here that the thought of them leaving, even temporarily, felt…wrong, somehow. Karkat’s stomping around truly had become one of the features of home, almost as natural a sound as the chirping of birds outside, and Kanaya was, well. She was Kanaya.

Speaking of whom, once everyone was gathered around in the living room and seated, Kanaya’s hands skimmed along the fabric of her skirt, a nervous habit Rose had learned to recognize as a sign that she was trying to sort together her thoughts into words. “Well, you see, Porrim, who is, um, the rainbow drinker who’s been helping me, by the way —”

“Oh, great,” Karkat grumbled.

“Quite fortunately so,” Kanaya said, tossing a glare his way before continuing, “As I don’t know what I would have done if that hadn’t proved to be the case, she’s been endlessly helpful filling me in on things, but, um. Right, we’re talking about why Karkat and I would need to leave. Well, it seems that Porrim has actually been planning in a somewhat long term sense on eventually moving her shop up to this sort of general area, maybe not here exactly but…she called the area in mind ‘New England,’ I believe?”

“That’s a name that’s used as shorthand for a few states, of which New York is one,” Rose said. “It makes sense to me that she’d want to move up here, we’re a bit more…trendy, shall we say, than your average Texan.”

“What, spurs and horses aren’t trendy enough for you?” Dave drawled. Rose shoved him gently.

“Right, well,” said Kanaya, twisting her fingers together in nervous patterns, “Apparently, as a result of my new condition, she’s taken it as…a sign of sorts, to speed up this process. She’s moving her shop up to a town not too far from here, which is wonderful, because it means that even when this whole mess is sorted out and Karkat doesn’t need to live here anymore for his own safety, we can all still be close enough to, you know, see each other regularly.”

Rose bit back her first response. Somehow, the trolls living here had shifted from feeling deeply temporary in those first few weeks to now feeling like a permanent change, and instinctively, she found that she really did dislike the idea that they were just going to leave. There was no reason to. Lord knew the house had plenty of room.

Then again, perhaps it was a bit forward of her to assume that they would continue living together indefinitely when they hadn’t, technically, officially, agreed to be anything more than friends? Not that Rose didn’t want to be something more, nor did she have any reason to think that Kanaya felt any different, but somehow they just…hadn’t really talked about that yet.

She was getting there. Slowly. Eventually. These things had to be handled with tact, especially with someone as wonderful as Kanaya.

“In any case,” Kanaya said, smiling faintly, “the good news is that she’s already on the road and should be here in a couple of days, at which point she’ll need some help to unpack and set up the shop. Which, of course, we’re going to do,” another glare at Karkat, “Because she has been nothing but kind and helpful to the both of us and the least we can do is take a few days to help her settle in, can’t we, Karkat?”

Karkat groaned one of his most theatrical groans, complete with a rolling of his eyes so pronounced and exaggerated that his whole head seemed about to drop off his shoulders.

“Karkat, come on, you know how much this job means to me, and it’s only three days!” Kanaya hissed.

“She’s not gonna fire you over us being busy!” he barked back.

“At least let me go to help, then,” she said.

“You can’t just leave me alone here in chaos central!”

“Does Terezi know about this?” Dirk interrupted. “I mean, I’m happy as shit for you guys, it’s good to know that even whenever things are hopefully settled enough for everyone to move on with our fucking lives, we won’t be breaking up the, uh,” he flicked a gaze between Rose and Kanaya, and then between Dave and Karkat. “…Friendships,” he said, carefully. “But Terezi’s the one who really ought to be aware of this, since Karkat’s still potentially in danger.”

“She’s aware,” said Kanaya, “Don’t worry, I’ve talked to her about this as well. She’s prepared to have a couple local officers on standby in case anything pops up, but so far as she can tell, she doesn’t think that Karkat’s being actively, um, hunted, at this time.”

“There’s a fucking first,” Karkat grumbled. Rose raised an eyebrow at Dave, who shook his head faintly. Whatever that was about, now was evidently not the time to talk about it.

Kanaya paused for a moment, thinking. “She actually mentioned that she rather preferred you being away from this house, in truth,” she said.

Karkat snapped up to attention, a low, alien growl echoing in his voice as he spat, “What?!”

“She said that she’s worried about whatever Strider’s next move will be,” Kanaya said, “That he will probably take a more direct action, and that we were lucky that he wasn’t here in person last time to recognize you, and that while as best she can tell his men have stayed active in Texas, she’d feel better if you’re far enough away from this hive to be out of immediate danger.”

“I can fucking protect myself!” Karkat was bristling, more worked up than ever. “God fucking dammit, I don’t wanna fucking face Strider in the flesh, but I’m not so fragile I need to be in a fucking mail-order protective sheet cocoon at all times!”

“You won’t be!” Kanaya insisted. “Just for three days! Why are you so opposed to this? You were complaining just a couple weeks ago about never getting to leave this hive!”

Rose caught the way Karkat’s eyes darted towards Dave for the briefest of moments, and did her best to stifle a small smile.

“I just —“ Karkat spluttered, “I don’t — Fuck, fine! I’ll help unload a bunch of shitty boxes for a few days, whatever! Be so glad to get out and stretch my fucking legs.”

“Thank you,” Kanaya said, tension slipping out of her. “We won’t be leaving for another couple of days, anyway, so it’s not like we’re leaving right this second.”

“Whatever,” Karkat grumbled, stomping away upstairs. Dave stood for a moment, torn between saying something and following after, before evidently deciding on the latter.

“I think he took that rather well,” said Rose.

Fuck leaving. But also fuck telling Kanaya why, he was not interested in another round of nosy friends criticizing his futile pale crush on a clueless human.

Karkat stormed toward his room, stifling a growl. Yeah, sure, whatever, it was only three days, but he didn’t fucking…The thought of leaving Dave alone for that long, for any amount of time, made him nervous, which was stupid considering Dave was probably better at defending himself than Karkat was between knowing how to use a sword and that flashstep bullshit, but fuck it, he couldn’t help it! Not that he should feel like this — there was literally no one in the hive anymore that was in any way a threat to Dave! Even Dirk had turned out to really genuinely care about the guy’s well being once he’d pushed through the massive heap of whatever the fuck it was blocking that, and with that disgusting sewer clog out of the way, he could tell Dave was feeling more at ease!

Shoving his door closed behind him, he flopped down on the human sleeping contraption,  pulling the blankets into a makeshift nest, fussing and rearranging it just so. Some layer of his subconscious trying to yell that this was his place, or something, maybe. He wasn’t really paying attention to what he was doing, letting his hands do whatever while he chased down his own thoughts.

But what if something happened when he was gone? What if he wasn’t here, and —

He shook the thought out of his mind. No matter how badly he wanted to be, they weren’t moirails, they weren’t anything. Dave wasn’t gay, as he’d so clearly stated so many times. There was no way they’d be anything, and he should just accept that and stop trying to be the big bad protector for a guy who didn’t need it and wasn’t interested —

“Dude, you’re gonna shred those sheets if you keep that up.”

He whirled his head around to see Dave, having crept in as quietly as he always moved, standing just inside the doorway. “You okay, man?” he said. “You seemed ornerier than usual, which is a fuckin’ feat and a half.”

“I’m fine, Dave,” Karkat said, forcing himself to relax his hands, “Just…Pissed off.”

Dave shifted his weight. “Yeah, I get that, man. This shit did kinda come outta nowhere, and all, and I know you ain’t as used to getting uprooted at a moments notice as I am, like. It sounds from what you’ve told me like you lived in one place pretty much your whole life? And now you’ve been, like, yanked off your entire planet, and then once you got used to one place dragged off to another, and now they’re pullin’ you away again, and. I, uh. I’m sorry, is I guess what I’m trying to say? Not because it’s my fault or anything. You know, this time. But sorta just a general sorry that shit sucks, you know?”

Karkat just let him ramble on. God, something about the aimlessness of his rambling could be bizarrely fucking soothing at times, just a gentle monotone voice saying nothing hugely important, its constant presence a reminder that Dave was still there. He was completely on the wrong track as to why Karkat was angry, of course, but it was hard not to appreciate the effort.

(And moments like this were the worst part of the whole mess. Moments where Dave would send these fucking…mixed signals, leaving Karkat scrambling to piece together what Dave actually thought out of the barriers and facades and the ever-present pure nonsense. The guy kept going on about how he super wasn’t into guys at all, so Karkat would mentally chide himself on any fantasies of a relationship, but then he’d turn around and do shit like this, coming after him exactly like one half of the serendipitous pair of any novel or movie Karkat had ever devoured, checking that he was okay — sure, humans were a lot more prone to doing that sort of thing in general, but. It couldn’t…it had to mean something, right? And then Dave would harp on the ‘gay’ thing again, and Karkat would force his hopes right back down into the shame pit where they belonged.)

“And, I mean, like, no homo, but.”

(Exactly like that, yep. That was exactly it. Boy, the shame pit sure was cozy this time of sweep. Year. Whatever.)

Dave shuffled his feet awkwardly before continuing. “It’s gonna be weird as fuck without you here, even if it’s not for long. God, I’m gonna be bored as hell without you to argue about bullshit with. It’s gonna be like a fuckin’ high school parking lot in July around here, all quiet and shit, and I’m the one loser hanging around cuz I got nowhere else to go.”

“Have you considered maybe getting a fucking hobby, Dave?”

He snorted. “Oh, yeah man, with all this fuckin’ freedom to do shit I got, no problem. I’ll just get on the fuckin’ computer and do shit, maybe start taking walks outside.”

“There’s things you can do without leaving the hive or having internet, dumbass. Read a fucking book, I don’t know.”

Dave was quiet for one rare, painfully short moment. That all too brief moment passed, he said, “Dude, seriously, are you alright? I know bein’ surly is your thing, an’ all, but you’re sorta…you seem more pissed off than usual.”

No, Karkat thought. No, he wasn’t okay, he was hopelessly pale-smitten with an alien who couldn’t possibly understand the nuances of that sort of romance and consistently strung his feelings out on an endless up and down cycle of maybe-whoops-guess-not, and it fucking hurt, but he was too fucking invested to give up on him, to the point that being gone for even a few days made his naive, smitten bloodpusher twist in agony.

“Yeah,” Karkat said instead, “I’m just…fucking pissed that this got sprung on me outta nowhere, like you said.”

Dave thought for a moment, and then shrugged. “If you say so, man,” he said, and flopped down next to Karkat on the sleeping platform.

Much as he disliked eating in front of other people (it always made him feel like someone was going to chastise him for it or take it away, even though he knew by now that they weren’t, but he couldn’t help it any more than he could help the need to hide food in his closet), since the trolls were gonna be gone for a while, he joined the rest of the family-plus-two downstairs for dinner on the evening before they took off.

Mom had tried to make…something. It tasted fine, albeit kinda burnt, but Dave really had no idea what the fuck it was or what was in it. She seemed so proud of herself for cooking, though, that he really didn’t have the heart to ask.

That aside, though, if there was one thing Dave’s limited experience with family meals had taught him so far, it was that, fuck, they tended to turn awkward and uncomfortable. Like this one, for instance: somehow, the conversation had inevitably turned to Bro again. Mom wasn’t waxing poetic about fuckin’ Uncle Dave again, but still, shit was uncomfortable. Bro was a jackass sometimes, but he was…well, he…Dave didn’t like hearing how harsh they got, he guessed. It made something in his gut twist in knots to make pretzels jealous, but he was too nervous about accidentally getting into an argument to really speak up.

He settled for pushing his food around his plate awkwardly (he’d eaten about half, and was still hungry, but…well, if this’d been back in Texas, this woulda been the point where he’d done his best to save the rest for later, maybe steal some ice from the fridge so that the rest of the meal could be breakfast tomorrow, and he did know that wasn’t necessary here, but…) and listening with half an ear.

“Maybe we can call Aunt Ramona to hex him,” Dirk said, sarcasm dripping so thick you could spread it on pancakes. Dave perked up, keeping his face toward his plate still but spending a bit more of his thought process on paying attention.

“Oh ye of little faith,” Rose said, weaving her fork through the air for emphasis, “Who’s to say she couldn’t?”

“Rose, our aunt isn’t a fucking witch, she’s just a woman who simultaneously enjoys her privacy and has a flair for the dramatic.”

“What, Ramona?” Mom said, nearly but not quite spilling her wine with how fast her glass got pulled away from her lips.

“Mom, come on, back me up here,” Dirk said. “This farce has gone on for long enough, but Rose keeps playing up the rumors about her. You grew up with her, you’d know better than anyone that she can’t actually curse people or whatever.”

“Well, I dunno about cursing them,” said Mom, sitting back thoughtfully. Dirk flashed Rose a victorious smirk, which very quickly faded when Mom continued, “’s far as I know, she never went for that sorta thing. She’d more likely just fuck ‘em up directly, sick some murder shadows on them or just call down lightning if she’s pissed enough. Then again, Iunno, maybe her powers’ve changed over the years, I ain’t kept track.”

“Powers?!” Dirk sputtered. Rose had set her fork down, her face a picture of delight, hands clasped together.

“Oh, yeah, your aunt’s magic as fuck,” Mom said, grinning woozily. Dirk sounded like he was about to choke on air.

“What, like…seriously?” Dave said. “Like, are you just fucking around? Are we talkin’ fuckin’ backyard magician shit or straight up necromancy?”

“Like black lightning and visions of the future n shit,” Mom said. “It runs in the family or somethin’. Like, I dunno the specifics, that shit skipped me entirely, but like…she started hearin’ ghosts and talkin’ to birds around the time she turned…13, I think? And from there shit just got reeeaaal crazy.”

“This — Mom,” Dirk said, desperately. “Mom, you can’t be serious.”

“I’m dead fuckin’, hic, fuckin’ serious, Dirk,” she said, clearly very much enjoying herself. “How d’you think we survived in a fuckin’ mall for six years? That shit wasn’t bomb proof, it was a mall. But we never had to worry ‘bout it, cuz every time one of their lil’ ships got too close, she’d just….BOOM. Right out the sky. Couldn’t really do big ships, but those didn’t come after us too often, since we weren’t that big a group of humans, but the little ones, fuck. No goddamn match.”

Rose was staring at Rachel, clearly ecstatic at this revelation but also a bit incredulous. “Why did you not think to mention this until now, Mom?” she asked.

“Iunno, you kids never asked,” she shrugged. “I always kinda figured it was obvious? Like, how the fuck do you not look at Ramona and go, holy shit, that’s a fuckin’ real life majycks user if I ever fuckin’ saw one.”

“So, she really is a real life witch, then?!” Kanaya was fuckin’ bouncing off the couch, holy shit.

“Hells yes,” said Mom. “Derek was always so fuckin’ nervous around her, too, it was the funniest goddamn thing. She always kept such a tight lid on what exactly she could do, he had no idea what to expect from her, which, for a guy as fucking anal about planning everything out to the tiniest detail as he is, was always just the worst.”

Mom kept rambling on, but Dave got distracted by the expression of disbelief on Dirk’s face. Holy shit. Dude had met a literal police dragon, lived with a vampire, and yet his aunt being a witch was too much?

Apparently so, as Dirk stood, plate in hand, and walked off downstairs, chased out by the sounds of laughter from the rest of the household.

The next morning, both the trolls had packed enough clothes and such for three days, and Karkat was, at this point, fucking eager to get going. Might as well rip off the medical adhesive quickly. The sooner they got out, the sooner they could start helping with the move, and, shit, maybe they’d be able to finish early and come back sooner.

Rose and Kanaya of course turned the whole thing into their weird, cagey, flirty-who-me-I-would-never nonsense, of fucking course. He noticed that they did also trade phone numbers, though, which he was privately relieved about. Good. They’d be able to check in, then.

Not that Dave needed checking in on, of course. He’d be just goddamn fine, he didn’t need some short, shouty asshole mutant holding him back and wasting his time. Whatever.

He was so caught up in his usual self loathing bullshit, he almost didn’t notice Dave coming up and lightly tapping him on the shoulder.

“Hey, uh. No…” Dave rubbed the back of his head, his other hand shoved into one of his pockets. Karkat braced himself for the inevitable. “No bullshit, real talk,” Dave said, sighing, “I know it’s just a few days, but I’m seriously gonna miss you.”

Karkat pricked his ears and tried hard to stamp down the spark of hope. Outwardly, he snorted, and said “Yeah, well, same to you, I guess. It’ll be fucking weird not having this obnoxious thorn in my side, burrowing its way into my flesh at all hours.” He couldn’t keep a hint of affection out of his voice, damn it, maybe Dave wouldn’t notice.

Dave huffed a quiet laugh. “Seriously, though, take care of yourself, alright?” he said.

“…Yeah,” said Karkat, “You, too.”