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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 4 years ago

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Eccentricity [Chapter 9: Now I Love Your Shadow And I Love Your Curls]

Series Summary: Joe Mazzello is a nice guy with a weird family. A VERY weird family. They have a secret, and you have a choice to make. Potentially a better love story than Twilight.

Chapter Title Is A Lyric From: “Til I Die” by Parsonsfield.

Chapter Warnings: Language, references to sex, violence, and drug use.

Word Count: 7.6k.

Other Chapters (And All My Writing) Available: HERE

Taglist: @queen-turtle-boiii @bramblesforbreakfast @maggieroseevans @culturefiendtrashqueen @imnotvibingveryguccimrstark @escabell @im-an-adult-ish @queenlover05 @someforeigntragedy @imtheinvisiblequeen @seven-seas-of-ham-on-rhyee @deacyblues @tensecondvacation @brianssixpence @some-major-ishues @haileymorelikestupid @youngpastafanmug @simonedk

Field Trip

“You want to go to Chicago with me?”

I coughed, having almost inhaled a chunk of pineapple off my slice of GrubHubbed pizza. We were sitting on the grass outside Forks And Spoons under the shade of the maple trees, which were turning from jade to ruby to amber to fool’s gold, rejoining the earth they once rose from one fallen leaf at a time. It hadn’t rained in almost four days—was that some kind of record?!—and the leaves littering the ground crunched when I stepped on them, which I did purposefully and often. The breeze was soft and whispery and temperate. I could get used to this whole having actual seasons thing. “What, in like a hypothetical, at some point in my life kind of way?”

Joe smiled. His U Chicago hoodie of the day was black. “No, as in this weekend.”

“Really?”

“The Cubs have a game on Saturday, and it’s supposed to be rainy and overcast the whole time, and I just thought...” He shrugged, toying with a piece of pizza crust before tossing it to the squirrels. He’s nervous, I realized. How the hell do I have the ability to make the sexy undead Italian man nervous? “It might be nice for us to be able to get away for a few days. Away from my family. Away from Charlie. Not that I don’t appreciate the ambient noise of his snoring from the living room couch, it’s super endearing, I seriously consider dating him instead of you at least twice a week.”

“Go for it. Charlie could use a rich husband. His pension is pathetic.”

“You wouldn’t miss me?”

“I am not necessarily opposed to clandestinely seducing my sugar daddy stepdad should the occasion arise.”

Joe crossed himself like a nun passing tattooed, cursing, lip-pierced teenagers on the sidewalk. “Lord, protect me from this harlot.”

A weekend away. No Charlie, no constant and chaotic whirlwind of Lees, no Ben. I hadn’t spoken to Ben since our misadventure in the Lee kitchen; if he wasn’t avoiding me of his own volition, he was following orders to stay away. Joe claimed that they’d talked it out. I wasn’t sure if I believed him. “I accept your invitation. Although, truthfully, I’d rather get hit by a bus than watch an entire real-life, no-commercial-breaks baseball game.”

“I accept your acceptance. And I’ll throw in a visit to the Shedd Aquarium, just for you. They have baby sea otters.”

“Sweet.” I checked my iPhone. “I’m gonna be late for Chemistry.”

“Anything fun planned?”

“We’re doing a lab involving hydrochloric acid. I’m highly concerned that Ben will accidentally spill some on himself. The miraculous instantaneous healing thing might raise a few questions.”

“Hm,” Joe replied. But he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at my bandaged hand. And he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Joe, I’m fine.”

“Yeah.” He took a preoccupied swig of his Dr. Pepper. Solemnity never seemed right on him; it was like he was wearing somebody else’s skin. “You’ve mentioned that.”

“Hey. Mob guy.”

Now his eyes flicked to mine.

“No more sad spaghetti.”

“Okay.” He surrendered, took my face in his hands, gave me a kiss on each cheek and then one quick parting peck on the forehead. “You win. I’m not sad. I’m ecstatic, actually. I’m gonna be eating my weight in hotdogs and mustard-slathered pretzels on Saturday. What’s there not to be ecstatic about?”

“The fact that your license says you’re only twenty and consequently can’t get a beer?”

Joe blinked, remembering. “Fuck.”

I drained my Diet Coke, flung my pizza crust to the skittering grey squirrels—no eerie albino forest friends today—and pulled on my backpack. “See ya. Have an awesome time in Game Theory.”

“Thanks, I probably won’t!” he chimed, waving, grinning compliantly; and yet did I still sense some lingering menace of disquiet, of fear? I suspected I did. Chicago would cure everything.

Ben tensed when I walked into Professor Belvin’s classroom, ran his fingers through his unruly blond hair, peered fixedly down at his notebook and feigned obliviousness. There was already a metal tray of Erlenmeyer flasks, labeled bottles of solutions, burettes, goggles, gloves, and an unassembled ring stand crowding our small table by the open window. Autumn air poured in like seawater through cracks in the hull of a ship.

“Guess who’s gonna see the Cubs play up close and personal this Saturday?” I announced.

He pretended to have just noticed me. “...You...? But that doesn’t sound like you.”

“It was Joe’s idea. I’m acting like I’m not totally thrilled and freaking out about it, but I am. Don’t tell him.”

Now Ben was the one staring at my bandaged hand. His green eyes were large and unfocused.

“I’m fine,” I insisted.

“Sure,” Ben returned noncommittally.

I started skimming through the packet of lab instructions and setting up our titration experiment as Professor Belvin circulated through the classroom, observing, commenting, offering suggestions and critiques. My wounded hand—still sore in the lull between Advil doses and relatively useless—was quite the embarrassing hinderance; I fumbled with a large glass flask and almost dropped it.

Ben shook his head and reached out to stop me. “Here, oh my god, this is so pitiful, sit down. Please sit down. I’ll set it up. It’s the least I can do.”

“Thanks.” I peeked at his notebook. “Your handwriting is atrocious. Haven’t you had like a century to work on that?”

“Penmanship was never at the top of my to-do list, tragically.”

“What language is that, anyway?” The phrases scrawled in black ink in Ben’s notebook definitely weren’t English. Or Italian. “Elvish? Are you a lowkey Lord Of The Rings fan? Magic and self-sacrifice and nearly insurmountable evil, I could see that being your thing.”

He smirked, struggling with the ring stand. “It’s Welsh.”

“Welsh,” I repeated, perplexed. “Welsh...like how Gwil is Welsh?”

“Precisely.”

Professor Belvin checked in on us, nodded in approval, reminded me that I was always welcome to stop by at bowling league activities, and resumed his wandering.

“Gwil still speaks it,” Ben continued. “The rest of them speak it too. At least enough for basic communication.”

“I didn’t know,” I said, fascinated, examining the long, unfamiliar words riddled with Ls and Ws and Cs. “But that must be very useful.”

“It is. Welsh is nearly a dead language at this point. It’s like talking in code. I always refused to learn it on principle...or maybe I was just being difficult. I would study other languages, Arabic, Japanese...but not Welsh. That was always Gwil’s language. Their language. It was a Lee thing. But now...”

“Now you’re sort of a Lee too,” I finished for him, smiling.

“Whatever,” Ben said, hiding behind his bangs.

I watched him as he at last tamed the ring stand, secured the burette, placed the Erlenmeyer flask. Then he began reading the labels on the solution bottles. “Guess what else.”

“What, Baby Swan?”

I grinned, showing off my unremarkable, entirely benign human teeth. “I’ll bring you back your very own U Chicago hoodie.”

That night, after a pleasantly prosaic dinner with Charlie—burgers, one veggie and one of the conventional variety, and milkshakes at Danny’s Diner—I started packing a small, Arizona-sky-blue suitcase as sparse raindrops pattered against the roof and moonlight streamed in through the open window. Then I ticked off my mental inventory.

“Jeans, sweaters, pajamas, socks...”

I pawed through the top drawer of my old, scratched dresser—the same one that had once upon a time been Renee’s—and contemplated the bra and panty options. Would my theme be comfort and practicality, or feral impenitent seductress? Friday and Saturday in Chicago would be our first nights alone together. That had to be significant, right? After some deliberation, I gathered a handful of lacy, transparent, and/or exceptionally skimpy lingerie from Victoria’s Secret that Jessica had more or less forced upon me during a shopping trip in Port Angeles last month. As I dropped them into the open suitcase, I glanced up to see the albino owl outside my open bedroom window.

“You never know,” I told the owl, shrugging.

It leered judgmentally back at me with those gory red eyes.

“Oh shut up. How many eggs have you laid in your lifetime, Casper The Unfriendly Ghost? Probably like a bazillion. Freaking feathery trollop.”

The owl had nothing to offer in its own defense.

“Why don’t you ever come around when Joe’s here? I’m sure he’d love to meet you. He’s pale and weird too. Although I like his eyes a little better than yours. No offense, Snowflake.”

The owl blinked, tilted its gaze at me, ruffled its feathers and sent the raindrops that had gathered there flying in every direction.

I slid my iPhone out of my back pocket, spun around, and snapped a quick selfie with the owl in the background. “Say cheese, Marshmallow!”

The owl immediately unfurled its wings and flapped off into the trees, vanishing.

“Huh. I guess homegirl is camera shy.” I texted my selfie to Archer, typing out with my thumbs: I am the Steve Irwin of Forks. Behold, one of my many forest friends.

Archer replied a few minutes later: WOW! Pasty and mildly disturbing. Exactly your type. :)

“Yours too, apparently,” I murmured, smiling in my empty room.

I went to my full-length mirror with the plastic, teal-colored border, briefly appraised my reflection, felt a dull swell of approval for what I saw there. The version of myself that had once been so consumed by fears of inadequacy seemed impossibly far away, maybe even fictitious, a dream so vivid I could mistake it for truth. Three things were taped across the top of the mirror: Joe’s Official Citation!! No More Sad Spaghetti!! post-it, his Official Whatever You Want Pass, and a photo of us dressed up together and standing in front of the limo in the Lees’ driveway just before the Calawah University Homecoming dance. I peeled off the Official Whatever You Want Pass, carefully folded it into a neat little square, and tucked it into my wallet.

When the rain began to pour and thunder rolled in off the Pacific Ocean, I closed my bedroom window; but I remembered to leave it unlocked for Joe.

Departure

“Got your license?”

“Yes, Dad,” Joe sighed.

“Got your airport snacks?”

Joe held up the gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with pumpkin and white chocolate chip cookies. “We’re ready to rock.”

“Call me when you get there safe,” Mercy fretted, hugging me and then Joe. “And Joseph, sweetheart, you make sure you keep an eye on her. She’s never been to Chicago before, it’s a big city, and O’Hare is an absolute nightmare, it’s so easy to get lost...”

“I don’t think he needs any reminders, love.” Dr. Lee laid a hand on her shoulder, stroked his neatly-trimmed beard with the other, watched us with a vague and wistful smile.

Mercy went back to trimming the flowers she had spread out across the kitchen countertop, white calla lilies that she threaded one by one into a translucent sapphire blue vase. “Now don’t forget to say goodbye to your brother. He’s out back feeding the new ducks. And I expect these ones to stick around for a while, thank you very much.”

“Mom, I don’t need to say goodbye to Rami. I’ll just think it. Really loudly.” Joe rubbed his temples with his fingertips and squeezed his eyes shut. “Peace out, you nosy bastard.”

“Joseph,” Mercy pleaded.

“Okay, okay, I’ll go say goodbye. Don’t get all aggressive. Don’t take it out on the flowers.” Aggressive...what a joke. I doubted that Mercy Eleanor Lee, formerly Martin, had a single aggressive bone in her immortal body; not even the infinitesimal stapes of her inner ears or the sesamoids of her feet.

“They’re calla lilies,” she replied dreamily, tending them like children. “And they symbolize love, and beauty, and fidelity...”

My nostrils itched and burned faintly in dissent. “I think I’m allergic to them.”

“You’re allergic to fidelity?” Joe asked, raising his eyebrows. “That’s it, now you’re definitely not getting my reclaimed virginity. No ma’am. I am not hit-it-and-quit-it material.”

“Oh sweet baby Jesus,” Mercy murmured.

“I’m going,” Joe said, showing his palms in capitulation and disappearing out the back door. I dragged my suitcase to the front one, politely declining Mercy and Gwil’s offers to help.

Lucy—her bleached hair in a high half-ponytail and wearing polka-dotted black tights, combat boots, a plaid miniskirt, and an extremely Octoberish orange sweater—was sitting cross-legged on the roof of Gwil’s Volvo. God, he’s such a dad. “Have a nice time,” she chirped artfully.

I opened the hatch of Joe’s Subaru and threw my suitcase inside. “Why do you sound like you already know I will?”

“I might have some relevant clairvoyant insight.”

“No way.” I stared up at her, stunned, my hands on my waist. “But you can’t see me, right...?”

“True. But this vision wasn’t of you. It was of Joe. You just happened to be there.”

Interesting. Very interesting. “And what transpired in this vision?” A night full of hot, steamy, blissful vampire sex? A girl could dream.

Lucy closed her eyes, recalling it fondly, maybe even cherishing it. “You were sitting in the stands of a professional baseball game. I could hear the crowd roaring, the umpire’s trumpeting interruptions. Blue and white...everyone was wearing blue and white. And you were there together—Joe a vampire, you human, side by side, almost entwined—shouting to each other over the thunderous noise and laughing and pushing nuggets of soft pretzels into each other’s mouths. So happy. I’d never seen Joe so happy.” Her striking pale eyes came open. “And he’s someone who’s already rather prone to happiness, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“I have,” I agreed.

“He’s never been serious about anybody else. I hope you know that.”

“I know that’s what he tells me.”

“It’s the truth,” Lucy insisted. “I would know if it wasn’t. Rami would know, Ben would know. Joe...he’s kind of the opposite of you. He’s always been the easiest to read. He’s the one Rami hears most loudly, the one who shows up most often in my visions. He’s clear, you know? Uncomplicated. Authentic. And what you mean to him...it’s something everybody sees. It’s a contagious sort of lightness, of joy. So thank you for that.”

And if whatever mysterious genetic switch that renders me immune to your talents wasn’t flipped, I’m pretty sure I’d look the same way. “I should definitely be thanking you,” I said. “You guys have a pretty cool existence going on here. And I’m so grateful to be invited into it.” For however long this lasts, anyway.

“None of us really invited you,” Lucy demurred. “We just let it happen.”

“So everyone knew I was coming? Because you saw it?”

“Everyone but Joe.”

“You never told him?”

“No. Not even now.” Lucy turned sharply towards the trees, as if she heard something in the soaring western hemlocks that swayed drunkenly in the wind. After a moment, she continued. “I’m not sure if I can even explain why. It wasn’t that I feared changing the timeline or something...my visions always come true regardless. Always. But I guess...” She tugged on her short half-ponytail, pondering. “I guess I didn’t want to cloud any of his decision-making, any of his emotions with the specter of the inevitable. I wanted whatever he felt for you to be completely organic. And it is.”

I considered her. “You are extremely thoughtful for someone who spends as much time shopping as you do.”

Lucy laughed in a high-pitched, almost juvenile trill, netting her fingers beneath her chin, her elbows resting on her bent knees. “I do like to shop. I didn’t always though.” She peered off into the trees again, this time pensively. “Did Joe tell you anything about my life before Gwil saved me?”

“Aside from the copious hippie jokes, not really.”

She nodded, her eyes far-away and still lost in the forest. “Gwil and Mercy are inordinately wonderful people. My biological father and mother, unfortunately, were not. And maybe they couldn’t help it, because from what I understand their parents were monsters too. I don’t think of them very often now, not even to resent them. But when I was alive I burned with it, with all that hatred, with all that bitterness. Every bruise was another log on the fire. Every screaming match or hurled plate was a splash of gasoline. So I ran away and found what I fancied to be a new family, and I lived on basement couches and out of vans and in abandoned buildings, and I explored increasingly inventive ways of putting that fire out.”

The October breeze cascaded through the trees, carrying echoes of birdsong and disembodied distant voices and the scent of pine. It reminded me of Joe.

“Chemically speaking,” Lucy said, “that first hit of heroin, that first high...it’s the best you’ll ever feel in your entire life. Nothing else will ever compare. Not skydiving, not backpacking through Southeast Asia on some Pulitzer-prize-winning journey of self-discovery, not winning the lottery, not the births of your children, not falling in love. And once you accept that, what’s the point in stopping? Everything you ever experience will live in the shadow of that needle. You’re twenty-five and you’ve already seen the endgame. You’re born, you suffer, you catch a glimpse of paradise, you pay bills and push shopping carts down the aisles of grocery stores and insipidly smile your way through your husband’s work parties until you die. What’s the fucking point? So I didn’t stop shooting heroin. And the whole time, I knew it was killing me. That’s what they don’t tell kids when they force them to make those idiotic classroom promises to never do drugs. You know it’s killing you, but you don’t care. Because it feels so goddamn good. Because it becomes the only sliver of your existence that doesn’t cut like glass beneath your skin. Sometimes you love things so much you let them kill you, isn’t that ridiculous?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer her; still, I heard my own voice: “Yes, it is.”

“It took dying for me to see that life is worth living. That there’s magic in the mundane and the frivolous. And that there’s beauty everywhere if you bother to look for it.” Lucy uncrossed her trim legs, leapt gracefully off the Volvo, and—with definite but not unkind scrutiny—pulled at the collar of my thrift shop sweater. “Even in your very, very, very misguided fashion preferences.”

The front door of the Lee house swung open, and Joe jogged out, carrying his suitcase. Gwil, Mercy, Scarlett, Rami, and Ben appeared on the porch to wave us off.

“What’d you do?!” Joe demanded, pointing at Lucy.

“Nothing,” she quipped.

“You guys gotta stop doing this!” Joe exclaimed. “You know what you’re doing, you know exactly what you’re doing, you gotta stop cornering people and forcing them to listen to your creepy tragic backstories! Nobody freaking asked!”

Lucy chuckled patiently and stood on her tiptoes to hug him goodbye. “Have fun.”

“You know it.” Joe tossed his suitcase into the Subaru and opened the driver’s door. “Ready, Baby Swan?”

“Almost.”

I walked to the wrap-around porch, climbed the steps, held my hand out to Ben. My stitches had almost completely dissolved over the past week, and the clunky impediment of bandages was no more. Joe crossed his arms and watched from beside the Subaru with an uneasy frown, but he didn’t try to stop me. He nodded to Rami, so subtly I almost didn’t notice. Rami nodded back.

“I will miss your melodramatic brooding immensely,” I told Ben. “Please do some fun family stuff while we’re gone. I’ll see you soon. Dan eich bendith.”

“Dan eich bendith,” he replied, taken aback. And then, after a moment’s hesitation, he ignored my outstretched hand and embraced me, his grasp so strong and yet so careful. His scent like crisp leaves and salted caramel and autumn sieved into a bottle unfolded in my lungs like an opened book.

“I Googled that especially for you,” I whispered. “You’re welcome.”

“I’m in awe.” His words were characteristically sardonic, but I heard warmth in them as well. When Ben pulled away, I saw that everyone else was smiling. Mercy had tears in her eyes.

I retreated back down the porch steps and met Joe by the Subaru. “Okay, mob guy. I’m good.”

He slid on his sunglasses, shook his head, flashed a proud and toothy grin. “You definitely are.”

All the way down Route 101 to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, we listened to Joe’s classic rock mixtapes and my NOAA Ocean Podcast episodes, reviewed the weekend itinerary, ran through the bare essentials for me to understand an MLB game (“Which I am totally not excited about whatsoever,” I informed Joe, who knew enough not to believe me).

When the Boeing 747 ascended above the clouds and unimpeded sunlight poured in from the other passengers’ windows, Joe put on a black sleeping mask over his sunglasses and reclined his seat, tried to nap, passed the time until he would be safe beneath the curtains of the sky again.

Somewhere over the Dakotas, as I leafed through a book about the Great Barrier Reef for my Marine Botany class, Joe’s hand bumped mine. “Hey,” he said drowsily, seriously; and I braced myself for some emotional declaration, some dire warning, some grave realization of the futility of what we agreed—almost always wordlessly, and yet unfailingly—was love.

“Yeah?”

“It’s an emergency.”

“Uh oh,” I replied, smiling now.

“Flag down the flight attendant and get some more of those honey roasted peanut packets,” Joe said. “I’m starving myself back to death over here.”

The Windy City

The bat cracked deafeningly against the baseball pitched at nearly a hundred miles per hour. It was a home run. The crowd erupted into mindless, primal shrieks of conquest; and when Joe jumped to his feet, clapping and cheering and nearly spilling his blue-and-white bucket of popcorn, I found that I did as well. I screamed for the team of a city I’d never lived in, sank back into my seat beside Joe, nestled against his chest as his right arm closed around my waist and hauled me in closer, as his left hand teased me with a soft pretzel nugget hovering just out of reach. And in that moment, I felt like Lucy, snatching Polaroids out of the space-time continuum of the present and the future and the past. There was where Joe and I were right now, of course; the day we had met each other in the nonfiction section of the Calawah University library; the dance floor at Homecoming; the first night he snuck soundlessly into my bedroom window; all those years we still had left to spend together. Not forever, but perhaps long enough.

“I like this baseball thing,” I told him over the roar of the crowd, twirling my fingers around the curling locks of dark hair that stuck out from under his Cubs cap. Or maybe I just like you.

“Whew, thank god.” Joe wiped his forehead with the back of his hand in mock relief. “Now I don’t have to break up with you.”

After the game—a 5-3 Cubs victory, close enough to keep the spectators’ blood pumping throughout—we boarded the L, held onto the metal railings as the packed train car bumped and swerved along, and disembarked in Little Italy. Historic brownstones were interrupted by a freckling of pizzerias, Italian ice stands, and sports bars spilling out shouts of triumph and despair. We were staying in the Four Seasons with a view of Lake Michigan; but we had an hour of daylight—albeit chilled, dreary, and forever threatening rain—left in our Saturday. Tomorrow would be the aquarium, and then dinner before catching our flight back to Seattle, back to the greenery and fog and eternal dampness that I was beginning to think of as my home. Had I really only left Phoenix two months ago? Had I ever really lived there at all?

“So,” Joe said as we walked under shedding green ash and black cherry trees, his arm draped across my shoulders. “Guess what the University of Chicago has. In addition to a killer Economics PhD program, which yours truly will be graduating from in approximately 2027, astonishingly aged not a single day. Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.”

“Hideous sweatshirts?” I guessed.

“One of the best Marine Biology departments in the world. And the affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory up in Massachusetts, where they send their PhDs to do research.”

“Wait, seriously?” I stopped abruptly, the heels of my boots squealing against the sidewalk. “You mean...for me?”

He rolled his eyes. “No, for my other girlfriend who is also inexplicably super obsessed with the ocean. I clearly have a type.”

“You want me...to come to Chicago...with you...after graduation? For like...a five to seven year commitment?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, that just sounds...serious.”

“Huh. What do you know. I guess we’re serious after all.” He took my hand and pulled me gently forward, leading me down West Taylor Street. He seemed to have a destination in mind.

“How is this going to work for you, anyway?” I asked, beaming uncontrollably now, trotting along beside him. “Living in a place that isn’t Washington or Scotland or Alaska?” Chicago was cold and cloudy for a lot of the year, true, but few cities were Forks-level wet and sunless. Forks-level tyrannically depressing, I would have said two months ago.

He shrugged, unphased. “Night classes. Sunglasses. Faking a chronic illness so I don’t have to leave our house. I’m really good at that one. Plus I can get a doctor’s note any time I want one. I’ve got connections, you know.”

Our house. He said OUR house.

Joe came to halt in front of a stately yet plain brownstone which now operated as a trendy bookstore, the kind that sold six dollar lattes and hosted anarchist poetry slams on Friday nights.

“Is this where we’re going to crack hipsters’ kneecaps as a bonding activity?” I asked.

“This is where I grew up.”

I looked again, studying the earth-colored stone quarried over a century ago, the wrought iron railings that framed the front steps, the rectangular windows revealing the illumination and shadows of other families’ lives. “Joe,” I said softly, leaning into him, searching for my words.

“There were eight Mazzello kids: Joseph, Charles, Mimi, Salvador, Donna, Lucia, Bianca, and Giuliano.” He rattled them off like a jingle from a fast food commercial. “And I was the oldest. So when my dad dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of his shift at the Zenith Radio factory, it was my job to step up and figure out how to keep everyone fed. I was seventeen and completely hopeless at school back then; Sal was always the smart one, the disciplined one, he ended up as a math professor at Loyola University. I was just some directionless, grieving kid who never shut up. But there was a place for boys like me in Chicago in the 1920s. The mob could get you money. The mob could turn that same incessant chatter that got you bruised at school into something useful. And the mob could give you a family.”

Joe watched the brownstone solemnly, meditatively, his hands in his pockets.

“My mom sobbed for an hour the first time I brought home an envelope full of bills with Hamilton’s face on them. She knew how I got it. But how could she say no, how could she tell me to stop? We’d never seen money like that. All my siblings could finish school. My sisters could have new dresses on days that weren’t Christmas and Easter, my brothers new shoes, Sal the glasses he needed so badly. My mother always had something to put in the offering plate at church. And once you were in the mob, it wasn’t exactly easy to leave. But they took care of their own. After I died, they sent my mother money for years, until her own children were established enough to support her. That’s when I learned that money wasn’t just something that put food on the dinner table or kept the lights on. It’s a way of showing loyalty, of giving people peace and comfort and meaningful choices in their lives. It’s how I’ve been taught to give back to the world. So I guess I shouldn’t have disparaged my fellow vampires back in Forks, because there’s a slice of my tragic backstory, Baby Swan. Now you know. And you should know everything, since we’re in this thing together. Or maybe I just want you to.”

I laid my palm against his cool and flawless face, ran my thumb lightly across his cheek. “You really are serious about me.”

“I am alarmingly serious about you.”

“Even though this thing of ours has an expiration date?” Since I can never become a vampire. Since I will never have the distinction of being a permanent fixture of the Lee coven.

“That’s not a problem for today. That’s a problem for ten or fifteen years from now, whenever you decide you want to settle down and have kids and do the whole Great American Dream bit. You’ll be sick of me by then anyway. You’ll be dying to get away from us. Hahaha, get it? It’s a pun. Dying to get away from the vampires.”

I couldn’t imagine ever being sick of Joseph Francis Mazzello. Still, ten or fifteen years felt almost as good as forever to me. Fifteen autumns, fifteen Christmases, fifteen journeys around the sun that he avoided so deftly. “Why me, Joe?” I asked, incredulous. “You could have anyone. Any human, any vampire. Why me?”

“Because you’re you,” he said simply. And his mystified dark eyes added: What kind of a question is that? “You’re smart and you’re hilarious and you actually care about the world, about where it came from, about where it’s going, about people and places and animals that you’ll never meet. You’re indomitable. You’re fearless almost to the point of recklessness. And yet you’re so kind. You’re even nice to Ben, and humans are never nice to him...they’re either horrified or confused, or they’re too busy fantasizing about him to remember that he’s a real fucking person. But you’ve always tried to see the good in him. Even when he didn’t deserve it.” Joe shook his head, marveling. “And yeah, I’ve...I’ve screwed around, full disclosure. I’ve done the hookup thing. And it was great for what it was. But I never wanted more. I never felt some gnawing, sentimental, Hallmark-channel need for connection, to understand who they were as people. And then I met you, and...I want to know every single goddamn thing about you. I want to know your favorite color, what books you read, what the hell is so appealing about pineapple pizza, what you dream of. I feel like I could never get tired of trying to understand you.”

A refrain circled through my mind like a whirlpool, dragging every other thought down into oblivion: I love him, I love him, I love him. “Blue,” I said at last.

“What?”

“Turquoise blue, like the sky in Arizona. That’s my favorite color.”

The smile, slow and wonderous, rippled across his face. He took my hand again. “Come on.”

Joe led me onwards, down a few blocks and around a corner, as the muted sun receded from the sky and the first stars took its place, pinpricks of celestial light in a blanket of violet, azure, amber, rust. He stopped in front of the Church of Saint Lawrence, established in 1902 according to the sign mounted on the brick wall that faced the street, perhaps the same church that he had once visited with his family as an impatient child, snickering with his brothers and sisters and kicking the back of the pew in front of him with shoes that never fit quite right. There was a fountain bubbling with transparent water, a statue of the Virgin Mary at the center, coins made of copper and nickel and zinc glinting through the water under corridors of silvery luminance cast by the streetlights.

“I lied about not having my own superpower,” Joe informed me mischievously, not at all serious.

“Oh, did you now?”

“Absolutely.” He opened his wallet, rooted around, pulled out a penny and handed it to me. “I can make wishes come true. So go ahead.” He nodded towards the fountain. “Make your wish.”

The penny was worn and nearly indecipherable, but I was just barely able to read that it had been minted in 1928. The same year Joe was turned. “Joe...I can’t just throw this away!”

“You’re not throwing it away. You’re exchanging it for a wish. Now wish.”

I closed my eyes, chose my wish, tossed the penny into the fountain. The plink it made when it hit the water was bright and yet mournful somehow, like windchimes, like flickering candlelight.

“Outstanding job,” Joe complimented.

He was so visibly proud, so content, so faultless. The streetlights threw shadows across the sidewalk, the fountain, the whole world it seemed. I laced my fingers behind his neck, gazing up at him. “What are we doing tonight, mob guy?”

“I’m so glad you asked. You see, we have options.”

“Let’s hear them.”

“Door Number One,” Joe began. “It’s been a long day, and you’re exhausted from the illustrious honor of witnessing a Cubs victory firsthand. So we go back to the hotel, find some shark documentary on tv, order room service, shower, and drift off into a peaceful slumber. Just like last night.”

“Not bad. How about Door Number Two?”

“Door Number Two. You’re tired, but not that tired. We go back to the hotel, find that same aforementioned shark documentary, but totally ignore it and make out instead. Maybe we even round second base, in the spirit of the Cubs. Whatever you’re up for. Then we shower and drift off into a peaceful slumber.”

“Even better,” I said, and I meant it. “And what’s Door Number Three?”

Now Joe became jittery; his eyes darted to the fountain, the church, the cars that rolled lazily by. He was so desperate to conceal his hope, to not impose any undue influence upon me. I felt infinitesimal, almost weightless drops of rain against my cheeks, my collarbones, the downy undersides of my arms. “Well, uh, Door Number Three is...it’s...well...uh...it’s...”

Door Number Three is a home fucking run. “I want Door Number Three.”

“Really? Because you don’t have to say that, you can say no, that’s completely fine, it’s more than fine actually, it’s awesome, it’s totally cool, I’m seriously fine either way, and you can obviously change your mind whenever—”

“Wait.” I broke away from him, yanked my own wallet out of my purse, found the Official Whatever You Want Pass, hastily unfolded it, and presented it to Joe. “I want Door Number Three.”

He barked out a shocked laugh, accepted the pass, studied it in disbelief. “You are full of surprises, ma’am. It took me a hundred years to find a woman like you. And I don’t think I ever will again. Makes one wonder if this whole eternity thing is all it’s cracked up to be.” He tucked the pass into his pocket and kissed me beneath the streetlights, beneath the stars. “So there’s one tiny caveat to my wish-granting superpower.”

“Yeah?”

He smiled impishly, nudging the tip of my nose with his. “You have to tell me what you wished for.” He was joking, as he almost always was; I didn’t have to tell him anything. He wouldn’t press the issue. I doubted that he was really expecting me to answer at all. And yet I wanted to tell Joe; I yearned, for once, to be as clear as Lucy had said he was.

“For you and me,” I replied in little more than a whisper. “And for forever.”

Home

The only thing that startled me was how profoundly unstartling it all was, how wholly uncomplicated, how effortless.

I didn’t feel like a different person afterwards. I didn’t feel that some latent spark of lust, of carnality had been ignited, had singed through me, had left me forever marked like the heights of children ticked off on a doorframe over decades; I felt neither ruined nor awakened, no wiser, no older, no more enlightened as to the incalculable eccentricities of the vast and enigmatic universe. I felt only happiness, and exhausted satisfaction, and a deep, dreamless peace that engulfed me like frothy fingertips of waves dragging pebbles and shells back into the sea. I felt only a homecoming that was measured not in miles but in soul.

We slept in as the morning sun rose over Lake Michigan, bought Ben a hoodie (black, of course, per his usual aesthetic) from the University of Chicago gift shop, strolled unhurriedly through the dimly-lit, relentlessly blue pathways of the Shedd Aquarium. As I stood in the glass tunnel and watched sawfish and blacktip reef sharks soar by overhead, Joe linked his arms around my waist, tucked his chin into the dip of my collarbone, kissed the slope of my jaw.

“What do you think?” he asked, perhaps a touch apprehensively. “Could you get used to the Chicago life for a few years?”

“I would be tempted to kidnap some of these guys and bring them home to live in our bathtub. But yes.”

And Joe murmured, smiling, his lips to my temple: “That’s illegal, ma’am.”

Our flight back to the West Coast took off after dusk, and there was no blinding sunlight for Joe to avoid; only immense glooms of clouds and gleaming distant stars and the unfathomable void of space, cursed with crushing pressure and darkness like the cervices of the ocean floor.

Fifteen years might not be enough, I thought, resting my forehead against the cold airplane window as the city lights died behind us, as Joe’s hand weaved through mine on the armrest. But forever sounds just about right.

Larkin

There once was a boy born in a stone cottage with a dirt floor in a vanishingly inconsequential village just west of Clifden, Ireland. It was February 9th, 1672, bitterly cold, miserably wet, and the sea was murderous with storms. His mother was illiterate, as her mother had been, and as her mother had been as well, all the way back to people who painted mammoths on cave walls with their fingers; she was thirty-three and already exhausted with living, her seven children forever underfoot, her full and ruddy cheeks perpetually smudged with dirt from the field and ashes from the fire. Her husband was a failure and a drunk, but half a day’s worth of work once or twice a week was better than none at all; and as much as she never would have admitted it, he was a tether for her in a world that was often, as she had learned, both lonely and cruel.

She gave the baby boy a name—a strong Irish name, none of that audacious English rubbish—that meant rough or fierce, just like the sea that rose and ruptured against the rocky cliffs outside. He would need to be rough to survive in this world. He would need to be fierce.

He began like all the other children had been: sweet and yet anonymous, yielding, needful, worryingly small. She rocked him absently with one arm as she stirred the stew pot with the other. She sang to him, told him stories long before he could comprehend them, tales of the Lord and the saints and all their malevolent adversaries: serpents, pestilence, demons, dragons. She tossed stray sticks to him so he could carve pictures into the dirt floor and keep out of the way as she labored with the laundry or the sewing. And he grew, and he grew; and there was nothing remarkable about him at all, that boy speckled with mud and soot and the perpetual bruises of children mostly left to their own devices, that boy with pallid skin like his mother’s and black hair like his father’s and eyes so light and vibrant a brown they were nearly gold.

The boy was a baby, and then a child, and then a young man. And his mother realized one day—all at once, as a mother does when their attention is divided among so many other lives, when the children’s analogous faces bleed into each other and even their names sometimes escape her, even those names that she had chosen herself from the stories her own mother once passed to her through threadbare whispers—that people had a habit of following him, of listening to him. That there was an ether of allure that hovered around him like the mists that clung to the precarious, crumbling cliffs that touched the sea; that there was something like what the heathens called magic. And when the war came, that boy who was no longer a boy left his mother’s stone cottage and enlisted in Clifden, lied about his age, signed his name with an X because that was all he knew how to spell. But he was sure to tell the man who handled the ledger that he did have a real name, a good Irish name, a name apt for a soldier, a name that his mother had told him meant rough or fierce: Larkin.

There are men who join wars out of loyalty, principle, love for their homes; and then there are men who join to escape their homes, perhaps to forget them entirely. If you were to consult that ledger signed in a pub in Clifden, Ireland in 1688, you would read that I fought for Ireland, for the Catholics, for Christ the Lord and all his saints. But what I really fought for was my own resurrection: to take that boy stained with dirt and ignorance, drown him in the blood of other mothers’ trivial sons, and dredge up some greater version of myself that I had always known existed, that was hidden somewhere in the netlike darkness of the marrow of my bones.

People follow me, and they always have. I couldn’t tell you why. When I called them to enlist, when I thrusted swords and pikes into their calloused farmers’ fists, when I told them they could fight and live to see their wretched homes again, they believed me. I climbed the ranks like a ladder, like a mountain made of bones. And all those other mothers’ sons laid down for me so I could walk across the bridge of their spines to what I mistakenly assumed was invincibility.

At the Battle Of The Boyne, my horse was shot out from under me. A Williamite caught me beneath the ribs with his dagger. And as I bled out, staring up at the sky and impatiently waiting for the pain to vanish as my consciousness withdrew like low tide, I became aware that someone was lifting me, holding me, spiriting me through the battlefield and then the wilderness; and that my pain, in a disconcerting turn of events, had swelled to a vicious and unrelenting inferno.

Three days later, I woke to find that I was resurrected again, this time as something more than human. The man who turned me was blond-haired, light-eyed, agile and yet gentle, ancient and yet ever-changing.

“I thought you’d survive,” Nikolai said in a thick Slavic accent, standing over me with a kind smile. Then he helped me to my feet. “You have greatness in you. It sweats out of your pores, it’s in every word you speak. What a shame it would be for all of that to go to waste.”

He taught me everything: how to read and write, how to hunt, how to dodge the sunlight, how to survive an existence that was both theoretically endless and yet forever on the precipice of being cut short. He introduced me to the Draghi, to vampires who were remarkable for their ferocity, or their creativity, or their curiosity, or their cleverness, or all those things at once: Victorien, Honora, Elizabeth, Kestrel, Zhang, Sergei, Ana, Gwilym. And most crucially, Nikolai showed me that my human talents were magnified several times over, that his own followers were not immune to them, that there was power in collecting exceptional individuals like pieces of china stacked in a locked cabinet; and that if I could learn to climb immortal bones, the ladder never needed to end.

You never quite get used to the power, to the invincibility, to the promise of eternity. You never take it for granted. It hits you, again and again, in ceaseless and victorious waves. Once I was a barefoot toddler who sketched dragons and Catholic saints from the stories my mother told me into the dirt floor of our drafty stone cottage. Now I live in palaces with marble floors, with spiral staircases and libraries and gold-dripping ballrooms, with unobstructed views of any sea I choose. Now I am the dragon.

My phone rang, and I checked the name on the screen. Then I answered. “Hello, beauty. How’s the other side of the Pacific treating you?”

And Liesl answered, in a soft and astonished voice: “I don’t think Lucy can read her. I don’t think any of them can.”

I could feel it again. Another wave, crashing through me like the ocean, like the unstoppable rolling of time: power and insatiability and exhilaration. I smiled in my twilight-lit study as long-dead stars rose outside and the wind howled like wolves over the East Sea. “You know what to do.”

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dreamofasupernaturalchamber · 3 years ago

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Dabb's Dream of a Red Chamber: Dean, Sam, Cas, Jack, and the roles they play

In my last post, I explored how Dean starts off as Qin Keqing in S14 but becomes Lin Daiyu later on in the season. The transition point is 14x13-- the 300th episode. I always found it funny that Dabb chooses the Ruyi Baozhu to start this episode. It's a Buddhist item, and of course, SPN becomes very Buddhist toward the end (which is why everyone hates the finale). What I want to talk about today is Baozhu as both a pearl and a name.

This name appears in Dream of a Red Chamber. Who is Baozhu? One of Qin Keqing's maids who volunteers to be adopted by her after her death so she can play the role of the daughter during the funeral. She then becomes a nun after the funeral-- fitting, no, considering her name? Let me tell you this: a monk (and this gets interesting, but I'll get to that later) arrives at Lin Daiyu's home when she's young and says the only way she'll live a long life is if she becomes a nun. Obviously she doesn't choose this route. But going back to SPN--Dabb twists the Baozhu into another Buddhist message-- so why not use some other artifact from Buddhist lore? Why Baozhu?

I think it's because Baozhu is the combination of the Bao from Baoyu's name, and Zhu, which means pearl. The emphasis is on the pearl, which makes sense-- Dabb isn't going to involve yu, or jade, when Cas (the character corresponding to Baoyu) is secondary in this episode. Dean is the one who makes the wish, and so the treasure is going to represent him.

So who is associated with pearls in Red Chamber? Qin Keqing, for one-- she has maids who carry "pearl" in their names. And Lin Daiyu, who is the reincarnation of the Jiangzhu (Crimson Pearl) Fairy. She's also associated with the Jiling Pearls, which foreshadow the Jia family getting dragged into the royal family's power struggle.

But Dean is nothing like Lin Daiyu, readers might say! He's not sickly. We'll get to the sickly part later-- let's first talk about Lin Daiyu and what she represents.

First and foremost-- Lin Daiyu represents rebellion. Not literal rebellion (although if I'm not wrong, the Jia family gets into huge trouble for aligning themselves with the wrong princes), but rebellion against societal conventions and patriarchal feudalism. The last thing Baoyu wants to do is take the imperial exams and become an imperial bureaucrat-- but this is exactly what his family wants him to do. This is what Baochai, Shi Xiangyun, Xi Ren, and all the girls want him to do-- except for Daiyu. Daiyu tells him, "You should do what you want." And so they think of each other as zhiji, which I suppose can be translated as soulmate, but really means "a friend who knows me." A zhiji is a friend who knows your soul.

And this fits Dean and Cas-- Dean is the one who encourages Cas to rebel against Heaven. Dean is the one who asks Cas what he wants. Dean is the one who bucks convention; he's the subversive one, the one who represents free will.

(And as a side note, Qin Zhong, the younger brother of Qin Keqing, is another one of Baoyu's more subversive loves-- he dies just as Baoyu's oldest sister is made the highest ranking imperial concubine, which indicates that Baoyu's attempts to buck against feudalism are destined to fail and foreshadows Lin Daiyu's death. Qin Zhong, Qing Zhong-- his name tells us that Baoyu is a lover.)

Dean doesn't die from what looks suspiciously like TB, which is how Lin Daiyu dies in the last forty chapters of Red Chamber-- however, we know that those chapters are ghostwritten and doesn't fit her panci, or the poem that foretells her fate, the hints that she's married off for political purposes, or Zhiyanzhai's footnotes which indicate that she dies of a broken heart. Zhiyanzhai is very likely the coauthor of Red Chamber, and their notes indicate they were there for most of the events of the story (Red Chamber is thought to be a retelling of how the author's family fell upon hard times-- of course, there are other interpretations too, which I will talk about in a separate post). Dean dies from a broken heart two times. The second time takes.

Now let's talk about Cas and Baoyu. Baoyu is usually considered the reincarnation of Shen Ying Shi Zhe, who is a heavenly monk in another dimension. He waters the Crimson Pearl Grass every day, and she becomes a fairy as a result; it's hinted that he falls in love with her, which threatens his cultivation/enlightenment, so he runs off to the human world to gain more enlightenment, and she follows him and decides to repay her debt by crying all of her tears for him (the lyric "don't you cry no more" comes to mind). Yes, Lin Daiyu is the fairy this blade of grass becomes. Yes, Shen Ying Shi Zhe is responsible for giving her life, much as Cas is responsible for lifting Dean from perdition.

Cas also falls from Heaven to experience love, but up until Dabb took over, this was usually framed as a positive thing. I'm-- not quite sure Dabb actually frames it as a positive thing. Cas's ending calls to mind the endings of the gods/fairies who fall from grace because they fall in love in Chinese folklore-- they either become human, or they become enlightened and regain their standing in the heavens. Baoyu's real ending is unknown, but it's not hard to guess that he becomes enlightened and goes back to being Shen Ying Shi Zhe-- which would match nicely with Cas's ending.

There's another version of Red Chamber (there are multiple versions-- again, remember, this is a work of metafiction, and this will come into play later) where he's considered to be one of the rocks Nuwa was going to use to patch a hole in the sky, but was discarded. We usually interpret this rock as the piece of jade Baoyu was born with, but I do want to point out this version, because Cas, given his performance in the later seasons, also fits this description.

Then there's Sam-- he contains shades of Baoyu (he marries someone after Dean dies, but he's never happy, which is what happens to Baoyu; this is foretold in a song Baoyu hears in Bo Ming Si), but I'm going to argue that he is Baochai. Who is Baochai? The other girl in the love triangle-- Baoyu loves Daiyu, but marries Baochai instead (this plays out differently here). What does she represent? She represents money (there's the gold radical in chai, and it's often said that her union with Baoyu is a marriage of gold and jade, and her family is exceedingly wealthy). She represents adherence to tradition. She and Daiyu are like "sisters" at one point, but that falls apart because Lady Wang hates Daiyu and wants Baochai as her daughter-in-law instead. And even though Baochai and Daiyu top the first volume of the beauties, they share a poem that foretells their fate; all the other women get their own poems. And what's Baochai's fate?

It's a one liner-- a gold hairpin (chai) buried in snow. I've seen all sorts of theories flying around that she's supposed to die in the snow, but honestly, I think the ending in the ghostwritten chapters is probably close to what was planned for her. She marries Baoyu, but he leaves to become a monk and she lives alone in the Jia family. In the ghostwritten ending, she also has a son. Her room at the Jia's mansion (she lives with them)? It's compared to a Snow Hole; she's a minimalist when it comes to interior decoration.

And let's look at Sam's ending. He basically lives in a shrine to the dead with his one son, and it's clear his marriage was short-lived (no pictures of the wife). His ending is a perfect match for Baochai's.

And then there's Jack. I compared Jack to Baoyu in the previous post, and again, if you look at the stories of Shen Ying Shi Zhe and the rock (especially when you consider that Jack was born to stop the apocalypse/make the world a better place), you can see the similarities. But he also represents other characters-- Daiyu and most likely Prince Beijing, who's the head of the four princes, or the old guard; those two characters are connected through Baoyu, which makes for a nice trio of characters.

How does Jack represent Daiyu? There's the way he's not entirely welcome in his own home (Lin Daiyu lives with the Jia family, and Lady Wang dislikes her immensely.) There's the way he dies in 14x08-- from what looks suspiciously like TB, just as Daiyu dies in all the TV adaptations and in the ghostwritten chapters. He changes identities after this death -- he becomes the prince.

Let's finally talk about Prince Beijing. He's young-- under twenty. The Jia family is close to him. He clearly plays a role in the power struggle-- if we're going off the real prince he's based on, then he should be in the faction against the dowager emperor, which means he's loyal to the emperor, but most analyses claim that he's not loyal to the emperor. One piece of evidence for the latter viewpoint: he attends Qin Keqing's funeral in full regalia, which is considered disrespectful, and hands Baoyu a bracelet of Jiling pearls that the king gave him to symbolize their brotherhood. That's-- not what you do with what the emperor gives you. It's just not done. (That being said, I can see the real prince getting away with that, because he was the real emperor's favorite brother.) Baoyu then hands Daiyu those pearls, and she throws them away. Later on, Baoyu will hand Daiyu the prince's straw coat and she tosses it away again. She doesn't accept anything from Beijing until she's forced to. We can interpret this as Daiyu disapproving of Baoyu's alliance with Beijing (and there are other interpretations that assert Beijing is responsible for marrying off to distant lands, but since the last forty chapters were never written...).

This fits Jack. He's TFW's only hope against Chuck, who is both the emperor and the dowager emperor in this story. Cas has faith in him, just like Baoyu likes Prince Beijing. Dean doesn't have faith in him, just as it's implied that Daiyu doesn't have much faith in the prince either. This is where the meta gets very interesting, because who is Chuck? The writers? The network? What does it mean if he's both the emperor and the dowager emperor? I'm going to talk about this next in a post on the meta structure of SPN and Red Chamber.

What I want to point out before I end this post is that it's very likely Dabb planned these very controversial endings for Dean, Cas, and Sam-- I doubt censorship had anything to do with it. SPN may have been a story about a fight between the writers and the network, or it may have been a Buddhist story, but either way, I'm pretty sure SPN ended exactly as Dabb meant it to end.

#spn meta #dean winchester #castiel #jack kline

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cloudbattrolls · 4 years ago

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The Woods, Interrupted

Running from Rhyssa hadn’t lasted long.

Rather, it had apparently lasted a week or so after fleeing from her the first time, during which they’d apparently they’d suppressed the memory of the encounter. Unhelpful in practice, though at least for once their brain had tried to do them a favor.

Sadly it had all come rushing back in a jolt of pure adrenaline as they had attempted to book it from her swarms of wasps, tearing through branches and becoming riddled with splinters for their trouble.

They looked up at her now from a pile of leaves they’d collapsed on, too weary to run more. God, they could drain a whole person dry right now and have room for several pints of another. Their head rested on their knees as they huddled over.

“What do you want.” the worm drinker groaned.

She looked at them (or did she look? She still wore that bandanna over her eyes, and a hat on her head that would’ve shaded her view, yet clearly she could see somehow) and knelt down next to them.

Every part of them ached, worms protesting from hunger and disappointment that the woman next to them was anything but prey. Their clothes were damp and dirty from nights in the forest and they wanted to go home.

Home. There was no home, not anymore.

Their cavern would never be theirs again, and they wandered for a reason: after leaving OLSC, staying in one place too long was just asking for the empire to snatch them up a third time.

“I just wanna talk, honey. Ain’t you even a little curious about what we got in common?”

Tuuya looked away from her, ears down and twitching in irritation.

“No. Bugger off. Just because we’re both made of bloodsucking parasites doesn’t mean we’re going to be friends.”

Or siblings.

The freshly remembered word cut through their head like a rusty knife, slow pain mixed with disbelief. It couldn’t be true; they’d never seen Rhyssa before in their life. Their worm was artificial anyway, a product of their ancestor’s science; if her wasps were (god forbid) natural, there was no way they could be related.

She clicked her tongue in disapproval.

“Well dang, you treat everyone who wants to get to know you this way? Doesn’t seem like much of a way to make pals.”

“I don’t associate with other undead.” They snapped, plucking off a leaf stuck one of their horn tines and crunching it up in their hands with rather more malice than it deserved. “You make for terrible company.”

They thought of Tiijah and brushed the thought aside. They hadn’t spoken with her in ages, nor Shiver, or Matcha. They’d probably never see that ridiculous mediculler boy again either. None of them counted.

Besides, did the fool think they’d somehow forgotten about her town? Perhaps she’d been doing it so long she’d forgotten it was messed up to make people your willing blood bags, but Tuuya was all too aware. Their dozen cavern trolls had been bad enough, let alone a couple hundred people who were clearly only the latest of what had probably been thousands over the sweeps.

Rhyssa laughed, and if they’d had any more energy than it took to keep their face out of the dirt, they’d have hurled another smoke bomb at her out of spite.

“Well, who in tarnation do you shoot the shit with? Living trolls are fine for a wheeze and all, but you turn around and they’re dead or ascended or too old to have fun with anymore.”

The worm monster scowled as they looked back at her, hoping they were staring directly into her eyes. Arrogant prick.

“Here’s a thought: why don’t you leave me alone, and I leave you alone, and we both forget this ever happened.”

Hardly. But figuring out how to kill her and deal with her brainwashed horde would take time.

She sat properly and bit her lip as if considering it, then shook her head.

“Back in my town, did you think you were protecting my folks? You thought I was gonna drain them dry?”

They snorted.

“I didn’t know what you were going to do, I just knew I didn’t like it. We have nothing more to discuss, because if you haven’t noticed, I hate you. Have a terrible night.”

“Why?” She said, blunt and frustrated, hands spread out in what was probably meant to be a placating gesture. “Look - sorry for ripping at ya before, I didn’t realize you were my kind. Thought you were one of the little wriggler drinkers, trying to swipe blood. I woulda never done that if I’d known.”

They closed their eyes, giving a hard sigh in irritation.

“Thanks. That changes nothing. Goodbye.”

It was difficult to tell what she was thinking, but the woman shifted, hands crunching leaves in her fists as the weak moonlight filtering through the treetops.

“You don’t even care about who you are?”

“I find my life much improved by behaving like I’m a person instead of a disgusting hell swarm. Weird take, I know, but that’s why you and I have zero common ground and never will.”

She parted her lips and wasps flew out. The worm monster flinched back, and Rhyssa smiled and put a finger to her mouth.

The insects flew around before settling on Tuuya’s arms, faceted eyes gleaming as their antennae twitched. The younger drinker went rigid, expecting pain.

“Well? If you’re going to attack me, get it over with.” They half-snapped, a quaver to their voice as their bright jade pupils flitted back and forth between the white creatures and Rhyssa’s face.

“Hush up a moment and listen.”

They felt the buzz more than heard it. It spread through them like a wave of electricity, not painful, instead oddly invigorating. Every part of their body vibrated from the wasps’ noise, their worms yearning to come out, to...communicate, somehow.

Instinctually, they cut the back of their hand and released the pale invertebrates. The creatures wriggled up their arms, their shoulders - and the wasps didn’t hurt them.

They fluttered around the worms delicately, lightly brushing them with their wings...almost as if with affection. The worms docilely waved in the air as if to track the insects’ progress, even though they had no eyes.

Tuuya looked up to see Rhyssa grinning even wider.

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

Her voice was all innocence.

“Smiling. It’s annoying.”

“Nah, you ain’t gonna ruin this. I knew it. I knew you were the real worm. I always hoped you’d survived somehow...I was right.”

The jade rolled their eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about and care less. Their reactions don’t speak for me. I have a troll thinkpan, even if the rest of me is them.”

Yet despite their dry words, the drinker felt a sense of recognition. It was nothing they could explain. Alternian Standard didn’t have the language for it, for a sensation that went beyond the five senses, a flickering of belonging that was alien and yet terrifyingly familiar.

Why? Why did they feel that way?

“That doesn’t make a lick of sense, sweetie. They are you. Can’t you feel it? Even if you don’t remember - ”

They snapped to attention, eyes narrowed.

“Don’t remember what?”

Rhyssa waved a hand in a gesture that tried to be casually dismissive but failed as her wrist trembled a little.

“Nothin’, sugar cube, don’t fret about that right now.”

They retracted their worms back into their body and folded their arms.

“Does this have anything to do with whatever you called me when you first saw me? That was a name, wasn’t it?”

Hlayos, or so it had sounded like. It had been kind of hard to hear precisely when they’d been trying to put themself back together from those godawful stingers.

The woman sighed and blew air out of her dead lungs, running her fingers through the grass.

“Look, I don’t wanna go into all that just yet, okay? I still need to figure out what I’m gonna do. This is great, but...”

The wavy-haired undead leaned back as Rhyssa trailed off wistfully, apparently staring into space. Their mouth pulled into displeased slash and their ears angled likewise.

“Can I go, then? Without you sending your horrid beasts after me?”

She sniffed in a way that indicated Tuuya had been rude, which honestly was the funniest thing they’d heard all night.

“Whatcha in such a hurry for anyway?”

“Oh, I’ve got a meeting with the empress and her personal tea server.” They remarked, snide. “If I’m late I have to dance the macarena and wear mittens on my horns.”

Claire’s forest wasn’t too far from this one, now that they remembered where they were. Selfish as it was, all they wanted right now was a hot cup of her own hivemade tea and to hear Irisma and Moelle play, or Talula shriek in delight as she stacked blocks. Maybe they could listen to Elziah and Aduya practice their music, ask Wueyah to show them her art, or - not that they’d ever admit it - toss Herbie some snacks.

Then they realize what they want even more: to sit with Uunive lying in their lap like she did when she was small and her horns hadn’t reached their full growth, when she still wanted to play Sailor Moon and they ran dungeons and dragons every week.

God, they missed her. How was she doing with her cavern duties? Did she have a matesprit now, that girl she talked about before? Had she made more bread? Above all, was she still safe?

Useless thoughts, every one of them, highly ridiculous and inappropriate. They hadn’t been made to be sentimental.

They had been meant to be like Rhyssa.

“Now why don’t you wanna tell me?” The wasp monster mused.

They barked a laugh, managing to push themself up after a long enough rest.

“Could it be because I don’t trust you? I don’t know how many barbs I have to throw before one sinks in, but here’s a flat fact: I would rather be literally anywhere else right now.”

Bizarrely, her mouth turned down in an injured pout.

“What’s so great about where you’re goin’ anyway? You don’t seem the party type, so it ain’t that. Pfft, no, wait - you got a living quad, I bet. Shoot, you would, you seem so young and goofy.”

They got up, ignoring her, ignoring their hunger, and pointedly walked away silently (well, more like with periodic sullen leaf crunches, but they did their best).

“Is it that little cluster in the woods over yonder?”

Tuuya kept walking despite the pit of dread that had opened up inside them. If they didn’t react, she had nothing to go on. She could just be taking shots in the dark.

“Is it that maroon who walks round with that dragon-lookin’ thing?”

Keep walking. Keep walking. Don’t show her anything.

“Gosh, guess I could pay them a visit myself. See what makes their company so preferable. Course, question is, should I let them live at the end? Maroons die in a blink anyway. I’d be doin’ you a favor.”

The buzzing sounded again and they couldn’t help it, they whirled around to see Rhyssa’s swarm buzzing around her.

The wasps weren’t fluttering gently now.

Their throat went dry, drier even than it was, and their eyes widened in fear they can’t conceal.

“No.” They whispered. Even with Claire’s powers to reckon with, the wasps were fast and deadly enough to seriously injure or kill the others before she could help them.

“Please, no. Don’t do it.”

“Why?” She said again, this time almost indifferent in her tone, her relaxed shoulders, hands on her hips. She was annoyed at most; there was no hate in her voice, not even any arrogance. These trolls were just an obstacle to her. The receiving end of her petty spite.

Spite they were helpless to stop.

“Because...they don’t deserve to die. They’re decent people, decent as anyone can be on Alternia. They don’t deserve to die just for knowing me.” Tuuya croaked, hands shaking.

“Aaaaaah.” Rhyssa breathed, satisfaction and ire in her voice. “Thought I smelled you in those trees. That’s what took me so long, thinking you were there instead of here...now I get it. But that’s an awful weak argument, sugar. Put some fire into it! Same stuff you showed me when you were defending my folk, and you barely knew them. What makes these little snacks so important that they’re worth keeping alive, hm?”

The tailor’s mouth opened and closed, then they found their voice.

“They - they are very talented, artistically, and I assist them with clothing and such, and - ”

The situation would’ve been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so terrifying. Firebird had been a menace, dangerously delusional, nothing but a misguided fool in the end, but she had never threatened their...their circle.

The wasps rose higher in the air, primed to attack.

No. They all had so much to live for. They deserved so much better -

They began to fly.

The worm monster flung an arm out as they yelled, voice weak and cracking as they trembled in fear, ears flat against their head.

“Don’t hurt them, because I...I love them.”

Tuuya slapped a hand to their mouth. Idiot. What a stupid thing to say. As if they had the right.

If Claire ever found out...never mind, absolutely no energy to worry about that right now, save it for later.

The wasps spiraled down and back into Rhyssa, who chuckled gently as the other drinker went weak in relief.

“Aw, that’s cute. Dumb, but cute. Well...if ya really do like ‘em so much, I guess I wanna meet ‘em!”

They stared at her blankly.

“What.”

“I mean I could drink ‘em instead, but your call - ”

“Fine! Fine, I’ll take you.”

Not as if they had a choice.

But damned if they’d ever let her touch them. Damned if Claire and her family would ever suffer because of Tuuya and the trouble they’d accidentally brought with them.

As Rhyssa walked ahead, their bright yellow and jade eyes narrowed.

They’d kill her somehow. For the sake of their circle. For the sake of her captive town.

And most of all, because she was bloody irritating.

END

#cloud writes #the children of ozyrel #rhyssa #etuuya vannyn

1 note · View note

astronomyparkers · 7 years ago

Text

The Princes and The Pauper

Warnings: Drug mention (very brief)

Pairing: Tom Holland x reader x Harrison Osterfield

Word Count: 4.7k

A/N: Here it is guys! The au everyone has been asking for since last summer! I roughly outlined the plot of this in a long post of text screenshots, but here is the full, finished first part! This series will become very NSFW as time goes on, and because of that, I think I may do a bit of a different posting schedule? The way i see it in my mind right now (which could very easily change because I am a deeply indecisive person) is that after the first few chapters, this au will mostly just become smut, without much driving plot. I know not all of you want just smut, and would like to see some actual developing plot and characters, so what I may do is have two stories going at once, and swap on updating them? That way, those who want smut will get smut, and those who want plot will get plot. The only problem with this is that we all know I’m not the most reliable for updating? So I’m not quite sure how that’ll work out. But!! That’s further down the road! For now, here is the first part! I really hope you like it, and let me know what you think!

{masterlist}

You weren’t exactly sure what the proper thing to be running through your mind as you raced down the steps of The Metropolitan Museum of Art should be. It’s not like there was ever a time where you thought that the situation would come up. And even if there was, you certainly didn’t expect to be in a long gown like some kind of modern Cinderella, chest heaving as you raced to escape the three security guards following behind you.

Maybe you should’ve been thinking about what exactly had led you to crash the gala, attended by New York’s wealthiest. Maybe you should’ve been thinking about how you knew better than to listen to Jade’s crazy plan. At the very least, you should’ve been thinking about your phone number, hastily scribbled on the hand of one of the very men standing on the steps above you, watching as security chased you down the famous stone steps.

Instead, as you dove head first into the waiting taxi cab, barely inside before Jade and Penelope yelled at the driver to step on it, the door not yet shut behind you, all you could think was,

Next time I have to run away from security, I should wear block heels instead of stilettos.

It had been Jade’s idea in the first place, which should have been your first clue that it was nothing but trouble. Yes, your friend was brilliant, ambitious, and cunning, but whenever you got involved in a plan of hers, it usually ended with something unpleasant. Like when she had convinced you and Penelope to go to a “group study session” at a frat house the night before your psychology final. Or when she had said “Really, Y/N, drinking raw egg, Worcestershire sauce, and hot sauce together will totally cure your hangover!” the morning of your psychology final. You loved Jade dearly, but most of her plans brought you way out of your comfort zone.

Like this one was about to. Even before she had explained it, you could sense that it wasn’t going to be completely enjoyable. The mischievous shine in her eyes was never a good sign, especially when you noticed it in the middle of Central Park.

“So I know we had planned to go to the Empire State Building tonight,” Jade began, pausing to sip her ridiculously expensive coffee as she spoke. “But I have a different idea.”

“What? But it’s supposed to be really clear tonight! We could see so many stars and—”

“We can still see stars.” Jade interrupted your response. “Just…not the kind you’re probably imagining.”

“What do you have in mind?” Penelope asked in a curious voice.

“Well…” Jade dragged out the word, a smirk coming over her features. “When you two were standing in line for coffee, I overheard an interesting conversation about a gala being held tonight, at the MET.”

You felt your stomach drop. “Jade. Please tell me this isn’t going where I think it’s going.”

“Aw, come on, Y/N! It would be fun!”

“How is getting arrested in New York fun?” You asked incredulously. “Look at me! I wouldn’t survive in jail!”

Jade rolled her eyes. “Okay, first, you’d just need to find the scariest inmate and become their prison bitch. Second—”

“That sounds terrifying!”

“We wouldn’t get caught! And even if we did, they wouldn’t throw us in jail. Don’t be so dramatic.”

“Jade, you’re like, the queen of dramatics.” Penelope said, amusement in her voice. “Have you met you?”

“Nevertheless,” Jade shrugged and paused her walking, leaning against a metal fence. “I still think we should try to go. We brought formal wear, right? We might as well use it!”

“You know this could end horribly, right?” You fiddled with the coffee cup in your hands. “Like, really horribly?”

“Look, it’ll be a fun night! And, worst case scenario, we end up in a McDonald’s at midnight, slightly overdressed, with a really fun story to tell.”

“Jade—”

“Y/N.” She mimicked your voice as she pouted out her bottom lip and gave you puppy dog eyes. “Please? It’ll be so much fun! And, if it does end badly—which it won’t—I give you full permission to say ‘I told you so’ as much as you like.”

Biting your lip, you glanced between your friends. “Penelope?”

“I don’t know…” Penelope shrugged, a small grin coming over her face. “It does seem like it could be fun…”

“See? Even Penelope wants to go!” Jade finished her drink with a satisfied smile. “That’s a majority vote. We’re going.”

“Fine!” You exclaimed, rubbing a tired hand over your cheek. “Fine. We’ll go. But you’re the one who has to call my mother and tell her what happened when we need bail money.”

Jade tossed her coffee cup in the garbage and linked her arms with yours and Penelope’s as the three of you resumed walking.

“Tonight is going to be life-changing. Just you wait.”

The rest of the afternoon passed by in a blur of hairspray, walk-in waxing appointments, and last minute trips to the closest drug store to pick up lipstick after Penelope accidentally dropped her favourite shade of pink in the hotel toilet. Despite your reluctance at trespassing at a gala at the MET, attended by New York’s wealthiest, you had to admit: it was fun to have somewhere to go that allowed you to wear sparkly, strappy heels and a beautifully beaded crimson dress. It was something you had purchased for a cousin’s black tie wedding the previous fall, only for the wedding to be called off. While the wedding was cancelled before a refund on the venue was too late, the same couldn’t be said for the formal gown you were left with. You had thought you would never have anywhere to wear it again, and you would almost be thankful for this night if it didn’t make your palms sweat with anxiety.

In the back of the taxi on the way to the MET, your friends could tell you were nervous. You kept adjusting your choker, fiddling with your hair, and tugging at the sleeves of your dress like you usually did with sweaters in the winter. Jade took your hand and gave you a calm smile.

“Y/N. Breathe. Remember, nothing bad will happen. We’ll get in, hang around for a few hours, and then get out. It’s just a museum visit.”

“Right. Just a museum visit.” You said, taking a deep breath as you twisted the silver ring on your finger. “Just a museum visit to one of the most famous museums in the country, filled with priceless works of art, surrounded by rich socialites and tons of security. Just a museum visit.”

Penelope rolled her eyes as she smoothed her flowered skirt. “Just keep your mouth shut and smile, okay? You’re a horrible liar. Let Jade and I do the talking.”

You swallowed hard and nodded as the cab pulled up down the street from the MET. Penelope climbed out first, grabbing your hand and tugging you out as Jade pushed you from behind. You stumbled onto the sidewalk with less grace than you would have liked.

Jade laughed a bit and shook her head as she paid the cabbie while Penelope held your shoulders to help you balance.

“Remember. Mouth shut, Y/N.” She said, fixing a strand of your hair.

You nodded again and followed her and Jade up the famous stone steps.

There was a long line of people waiting to go in, people with old money, new money, and everything in between. You took a deep breath and gripped your small beaded clutch tight to try and calm your shaking hands.

The line moved quickly, and the closer to the door you got, the more afraid you were. There was a security guard there taking tickets and checking bags of the partygoers, and you just knew that you were going to get caught.

“Jade—”

“Calm down.” Jade squeezed your arm reassuringly. “There’s a huge group of socialites in front of us. We’ll sneak in with them.”

However, it seemed the group of socialites had other plans. When their bags were searched by the guard, you could see he had found something unsatisfactory.

“Mr. Prescott, you know substances like this aren’t allowed in—”

“Aw, come on.” The young man he addressed flashed an artificially whitened smile and pulled out his wallet. “What will it take to make it allowed, sir? My father would be happy to make a donation to any…cause of your choosing.”

You looked at Penelope and Jade with wide eyes, trying to signal that it was time to go. Your friends, on the other hand, seemed to pick up a different sign.

With their heads held high, they subtly grabbed both of your arms and marched you behind the security guard, who had become distracted by the bribe he was receiving. Before you knew it, you were inside the MET.

You kept walking as fast as you could without seeming suspicious, the click of your high heels abnormally loud in the vast hall. The three of you didn’t stop walking until you were camouflaged among the crowds of society’s finest, hidden in plain sight.

“Oh my God.” A smile spread over Jade’s face. “We actually did it.”

“Why do you look so shocked? Didn’t you believe we could?” You asked as you eyed the crowd around you.

“Yeah, of course! Like, I believed we had a solid eighty-three percent chance to—”

“Eighty-three?” You raised your eyebrows incredulously. “You banked our freedom on eighty-three percent?”

“Hey, that’s an A- grade.” Penelope laughed as she grabbed three flutes of champagne from a passing waiter. “Thank you.”

You accepted the glass from your friend, sipping it to try to calm your nerves. You had never been one for champagne, but seeing as how one glass of the liquid being served probably cost more than your university tuition, you thought it couldn’t hurt to enjoy.

“So, Jade…” You rubbed the corner of your mouth to make sure no lipstick smeared. “What now?”

“Now?” Jade glanced around the room. “We walk around. Make some small talk. Enjoy the art. Let’s say we meet back here in around two hours?”

Your brow furrowed. “Actually, I think sticking together would be—”

“Come on, Y/N, live a little.” Penelope rolled her eyes and delicately lifted her skirt. “I’m going to head to the west wing. Jade, you were saying you wanted to go to—”

“The east wing. For the Renaissance exhibit.”

You exhaled heavily. “Okay. Fine. I’ll look around here a bit. But in two hours, we meet back here. And don’t be late!”

Jade grinned. “Oh, never. Cross my heart.”

“Hope to die.” Penelope’s smile matched Jade’s as the two of them said their goodbyes and went off in different directions, disappearing into the crowd.

“Alright then.” You muttered to yourself, sipping your champagne liberally. “Guess it’s just me.”

You wandered among the people, keeping to yourself as you looked at the exhibits. As nervous as you were, you soon became entranced by the art around you. Paintings you had only read about in books were displayed on the walls, and statues you had seen in countless films were close enough to touch. Of course, no matter how much the marble beckoned you, you didn’t dare reach out a hand. The last thing you needed was a reprimand from security, especially since you weren’t rich enough to pay them off.

Of course, being alone didn’t help you blend in. Nearly everyone else attending was in a group of four or more, whispering among themselves as they milled about the museum halls. Only one group of two stood out from the crowd as they conferred quietly in the corner, drinking champagne and glancing at the crowd with bored eyes.

They were two young men who looked close to your age, but that was where the similarities between you three stopped. It was obvious from the way they carried themselves to the quality of their suits that was noticeable from across the room that they had been born into this life of privilege. There was an air around them that even the other socialites in the room seemed drawn to; you could see multiple people making eyes at them. And you had to admit, you could see why. Maybe it was the champagne you had drank, or the aura of wealth in the room, but they had to be two of the most attractive men you had ever seen in your life.

As soon as the thought crossed your mind, the one with longer hair looked directly at you, making eye contact that froze you in your spot. Knowing you had been caught staring, you felt heat rush to your cheeks. It seemed the man could feel it as well; a smirk began playing on his lips as he winked at you.

Flushing more, you quickly turned away and tried to busy yourself with staring at the art. Your hands nervously clutched at your empty champagne glass as you focused on admiring the marble statue that was in front of you. You did your best to block out everyone else in the room as you took deep breaths to calm yourself, but heat continued to crawl up your neck. Your heart was pounding so loud that you could hear it in your ears. And it was pounding loud enough to drown out the footsteps approaching you, so the smooth, accented voice took you by surprise when it appeared in your ear.

“It’s called Venus Italica, by Antonio Canova.” The man said, his breath hot on your neck.

You cleared your throat and tried to steady your voice. “E-excuse me?”

“The statue. Venus Italica.” The man moved to stand more directly beside you, and you turned more towards him without thinking about it.

Now that he was closer, you could really take him in. His hair seemed to have a soft curl to it, but it was styled slightly up and back, so you couldn’t be sure. His skin looked porcelain smooth, his teeth blindingly white, his lips a flushed red. His eyes were brown, and when you met them it was hard to look away; they were like a hearth, warm and inviting.

Your own eyes blinked as you tried to focus your words. “I—yeah. Yeah, it’s beautiful.”

The man nodded. “Is this your first time seeing it in person?”

You nodded, turning your gaze back to the statue.

“It was commissioned by King Ludovico in 1804, after the French had taken a statue of Venus from Florence to the Musée Napoleon.” His voice was soft as he spoke in a British lilt. “It was completed in the 1820s.”

You nodded again, unsure of what else to say. “That’s…interesting.”

The man mimicked your head movement, his gaze focusing back on you. “I haven’t seen you at one of these before. I’m Tom Holland.”

The way he said his name made it seem like he expected you to recognize it.

“Right, right.” You faked a smile and clutched your empty glass tighter.

“…From Holland Enterprises. My father Dominic owns the company?” Tom continued, confusion tinting his eyes. “And you are?”

“Oh, um…Y/N. Y/L/N.” You said cautiously. “Nice to…meet you.”

Tom’s eyes drifted to your hands and the glass flute. “Oh, you’re empty! Allow me to refill you, I’ll just—”

“I’ve got it.” Another accented voice appeared from behind you, and when you turned around, you were greeted with the sight of the other man who had been standing next to Tom. In his hands he clutched two full champagne glasses, one of which he extended to you. “Here you are, love. Let me take that.”

You accepted the new champagne flute as the new man swiftly took the empty glass from you and placed it on the tray of a passing waiter.

“Um, thank you.”

“Not a problem.” He smiled at you, blue eyes shining with mirth. “Harrison Osterfield, of Osterfield Inc.”

“Which your dad owns, right?” You guessed, running a finger around the rim of your glass.

Harrison nodded as he sipped his champagne. “And your name, love?”

“Y/N Y/L/N.” Tom answered for you, stepping around so he could stand next to Harrison in your line of vision.

Harrison repeated your last name to himself. “Huh. I’ve never heard that name before. What does your family do?”

“Well, my dad works in…real estate.” You answered slowly. “And my mom is, um, a lawyer.”

What you said wasn’t a lie. In fact, it was the truth. Your dad was a real estate agent, and your mother was a lawyer. Of course, your father wasn’t making multimillion dollar deals for houses, and your mother worked at a small legal firm and did a lot of pro bono work. Neither one of those jobs made enough money to even be in the same category as Tom and Harrison. But you didn’t feel the need to correct the assumptions they were clearly making as they eyed you up and down.

“You’re new money, then?” Harrison asked, slipping his hand into his suit pocket. The gesture made the perfectly tailored sleeve bunch up slightly, and you could see the platinum Rolex adorning his wrist.

You blinked quickly. “Uh—”

“And here by yourself?” Tom questioned, stepping the slightest bit closer to you. “Or are your parents with you? I’d love to meet them, maybe introduce myself?”

“I would, as well.” Harrison echoed the sentiment. “My father works with a lot of real estate companies; I’m sure he’d be interested in meeting with your father. And we could see a bit more of each other if—”

“They’re not here.” You said quickly as your palms started to sweat again. “They had, um, an emergency with our…summer house. A pipe burst, and they had to…go take care of it.”

Okay, now you were lying. Plainly, blatantly lying. And you were certain you weren’t doing it well. Nevertheless, Harrison and Tom seemed to believe it. Perhaps it was because you looked the part, or because they didn’t think anyone with your social status would be able to make it into the gala, or because they just wanted what you were saying to be true. Either way, each boy continued to show interest in your conversation.

Tom and Harrison each placed a hand on the small of your back and began leading you through the exhibit, pointing out different statues and works of art and giving you a brief history.

“How do you know so much about all of this?” You asked as you sipped your champagne.

“Art History at the Mountbatten Academy for Boys.” Tom said, a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “That’s where Harrison and I met. We were roommates from Year Nine to Year Thirteen.”

“The Mountbatten—what?”

“It’s a private school in England.” Harrison explained, his thumb just barely rubbing your back. “The finest in the country.”

“And so it should be, considering what our fathers paid for it.” Tom laughed a bit, finishing of his champagne and grabbing a fresh glass before he had finished swallowing.

“Where did you go to school?” Harrison asked curiously. “Did you stay in the country? Or go abroad?”

“I—in the country.” You finished your champagne as well, quickly grabbing a new glass. “An, um, all-girls school in…New Hampshire.”

Harrison frowned. “I didn’t know there was an all-girls school in—”

“So what brings you two to New York? If you’re from England?” You asked quickly, eager to change the subject.

“New York brought us to New York.” Tom smiled easily, half charming and half cocky. “Why wouldn’t we want to come here? We have a penthouse here for a reason.”

“You’ll have to see it sometime.” Harrison nodded in affirmation of Tom’s statement. “We have houses in London, Milan, Greece…but our New York penthouse is my favourite.”

“And, tragically, the one we spend the least amount of time in.” Tom sighed, shrugging his shoulders. “But, c’est la vie. Whenever business brings us to New York, it’s never for more than a few days.”

“Tragic.” You echoed quietly, fixing your gaze on a Monet painting as you passed by.

It occurred to you that Tom and Harrison were the very definition of arrogant. Whenever they finished a glass of champagne, they snapped their fingers and a new one appeared. They walked through the crowds like the expected them to part because they wanted them to. And they did. Their suits were designer, their shoes were designer, and you suspected their entire lives were just that. Designer.

They talked about how they went to Cambridge University and how they both worked for their fathers now. But, from the stories they told you about the work they did, it was clear that not much actual work was done. Harrison and Tom’s fathers were business partners, but it seemed what Harrison and Tom mostly did was—

“Networking.” Tom said in response to your question about their work.

“Which is a fancy word for partying.” Harrison grabbed two new glasses of champagne from a passing waiter and tossed a fifty dollar bill on his tray. “Cheers, mate.”

“So what does networking entail?” You asked as Harrison passed you your fourth drink of the night.

“Well,” Tom ran a hand through his slicked back hair. “All sorts of things. Attending galas, luncheons, parties, and connecting with current clients and future clients. The social side of business.”

“It’s all politics.” Harrison rolled his eyes before pulling you in close. “Tell me, love. Look around the room. What do you see?”

You did as he said. “I see…priceless works of art?”

“Exactly. And is anyone here actually looking at the art?”

“Well…no.” You frowned as you glanced at the crowd. “They’re not. They’re all talking.”

Harrison nodded in satisfaction. “They’re all playing the game. A well run business needs all its different parts to run smoothly. Having a working business model is only part of it; you need connections to make it into an empire. A game always needs players, you see. And players always need allies.”

Those words got to you. Even if Tom and Harrison were the very definition of arrogant, they weren’t dumb. It was clear that they were very, very smart. And very, very attractive. And smelled very, very good. And their hands felt very, very nice on your back.

And it seemed that you were very, very tipsy.

“Is that why you started talking to me?” You asked curiously, swirling the golden liquid in your glass as you avoided the two pairs of eyes staring at you. “Networking?”

“Partially.” Tom shrugged. “But the low cut neckline on your dress didn’t hurt either.”

You felt heat flash up your neck and into your cheeks again, and you cleared your throat.

“Tell—tell me about this statue. Here. It’s Degas, isn’t it?”

Harrison smirked at your subject change, but answered you accordingly. “Yes. La petite danseuse de quatorze ans. Edgar Degas. Sculpted in…1920?”

“1922.” Tom corrected, stepping closer to the statue. “It was the only sculpture Degas ever titled and exhibited.”

You nodded, fighting the urge to reach out and touch the bronze girl’s tutu. “It’s beautiful. I love—”

The beeping of your phone in your clutch interrupted your sentence. You frowned and opened your small bag, pulling out your phone to a text from Jade.

At first, you were confused. It wasn’t time for the three of you to meet up again; what did she need? But when you read the text, you instantly sobered up.

“Security is here looking for party crashers and we need to go!! Meet us outside!!”

“What’s wrong?” Tom’s voice sounded concerned as he rubbed the small of your back. “Is everything okay?”

“I—no.” You said shortly, shoving your phone back in your clutch. “No, I-I have to go. Right now.”

“What?” Harrison asked in a bemused voice, brow furrowed. “Why on earth do you have to go? It’s not even midnight yet!”

“Yeah, well,” You shot gunned the last bit of champagne in your glass and handed the empty flute to Harrison. “It’s time for my carriage to turn back into a pumpkin. Or time for my taxi to turn back into a pumpkin…I’m kind of unclear on that analogy, to be honest. I’m not quite sober. But I think the pumpkin thing is the important reference here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Listen, it’s a long story, and—” Over Harrison’s shoulder, you could see two large men in suits and earpieces enter the room. “And I really, really, don’t have time to tell it.”

“Y/N.” Tom grasped your wrist, not tight enough to hurt, but not loose enough to allow you to slip away. “What is going on?”

“Okay, the short version is, basically,” You pushed your hair out of your face. “I kind of have to go before I get arrested for trespassing? But I, surprisingly, had a really good time with you two!”

“Surprisingly?”

“Trespassing?”

“Tom, could I borrow a pen?” You asked, holding out the hand that wasn’t caught in his grasp.

Tom complied wordlessly, reaching into his suit jacket and passing you what looked like the most expensive pen you’ve ever seen in your life.

“Seriously? You can’t just go to Staples to buy pens like everyone else?” You examined the pen closer. “Is this monogrammed?”

“Why are you mocking my pen?”

You grabbed Tom’s arm in way of response and quickly scribbled your number on his hand before handing the pen back. “I really do have to go, but, um, call me if you two ever feel like slumming it.”

“Slumming it?” Harrison frowned as Tom examined the ink on his skin. “Seriously, Y/N, what’s going on?”

“I—” Your sentence was interrupted as you saw the two security guards spot you. They began to make their way to you, the bouncer from earlier not far behind them. “Got to go!”

Before Harrison or Tom could stop you, you hiked your dress up to your thighs and started running towards the door on the other side of the room.

“Hey! MET Security! Stop!”

You could hear the heavy footsteps of the three security guards following behind you, and you ran faster, your heart pounding in time with the clicking of your heels on the floor.

Stiletto heels had really been a bad choice.

Chest heaving, you bounded down the hallways of the MET, through the front atrium, and down the concrete steps. You felt the cool New York air on your legs and thighs, and the thought of random passersby seeing a lot more than you had planned occurred to you, but you couldn’t afford to pause to think about it. The guards’ steps were getting closer, you were growing tired, and you could see a taxi waiting below.

“Y/N! Hurry!” Penelope and Jade were hanging out of the open door, reaching out their hands as if they could pull you closer as you bounded down the steps.

With the shouts of security in your ears, you barely made it to the taxi. You stumbled inside, half falling and half being pulled by Penelope before you slammed the door behind you, locking it for good measure.

“She’s in! Step on it!” Jade yelled at the taxi driver, who peeled away from the curb so fast you could smell burning rubber.

You fought to catch your breath as Penelope and Jade began to giggle, and, in spite of yourself you did too.

“Jade,” You gasped, pressing a hand to the stitch in your side. “I told you so.”

“Hey, we made it out!” She laughed, running a hand through her hair. “Look! Security isn’t even following us!”

The three of you turned around to stare out the back window. The three security guards were standing be the curb, watching as you drove away. And standing at the top of the steps above were Harrison and Tom, staring after the cab with confusion and bewilderment.

“Who are Prince Charming One and Two?” Penelope asked you with curiosity.

You turned back around and pressed a hand to your forehead. “It’s a long story.”

{part ii}

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redwriter-redroses-blog · 6 years ago

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One More Chance chap. 2

It's the same old story. Salem's defeated and teammates go their separate ways. Oscar gets caught in a cycle of repetitive days. As he gets comfortable with his new life, a certain silver-eyed warrior crashes back into his life. Finally, he gains a another chance at a new life. And perhaps even a chance with romance.

"Remember to stay with your assigned group," Marigold announced. "Don't stray too far from the group. While the Jade Forest is impressive, it is still crawling with grimm. Remember that today's hike is only to get you acquainted with basic wilderness survival skills. Do not attempt to fight any grimm you may encounter. Instead inform either Mr. Pine or I and we will take care of it."

Oscar sat near the front of the bus. Marigold stood on her knees as she addressed the entire bus. When she was finished, she slid back down into her seat and faced forward. The whole bus immediately erupted into students' conversations. Marigold groaned and rubbed her temples.

"Hangover?" Oscar asked her.

"Just a small headache from the noise," she replied. A wad of paper went soaring through the air above their heads. Marigold shot up. "Don't throw things!" Another wad of paper came flying, forcing her to dodge. "Jett! Throw one more paper and you have to sit up here with us!"

Oscar fiddled with his collapsed cane. He didn't want to get involved yet. Marigold slid back down with a long groan.

"This is going to be a long trip," she complained.

"Tell me about it," Oscar sighed. Marigold started on a long rant about her students before transitioning into stories about her school days and her friends. Oscar ended up zoning out and watching the scenery that passed by the bus.

The trees started being replaced by toppled trees. Oscar perked up at seeing an increase in destruction. Then the bus passed by a destroyed house. The students excitedly murmured amongst themselves. More houses destroyed and crushed started popping up. Then the bus stopped. Oscar stood up to see why the driver stopped. There was a blockade. Oscar got out of his seat and reassured the driver before leaving. Two guards stood by the blockade. They greeted Oscar as he approached them.

"What happened here?" Oscar asked.

"Same as usual. Grimm," the first guard answered.

"A large horde of them," the other added. While grimm were steadily disappearing from the world, they were still around in abundance. "We have a huntress working to exterminate them right now. We don't want any ordinary civilians entering the area in the meantime. Too dangerous."

"My name is Oscar Pine. I am a teacher at Signal and a skilled huntsman. This is a field trip of students from Signal. I have paperwork to say we're allowed into the Jade Forest today, if you would like to see it." Oscar fished around in his bag for the paperwork. He presented them to the guards. The two exchanged looks before quietly consulting with each other.

"Alright. Please be careful," the first guard said. Oscar returned to the bus as the guards moved to open the blockade for the bus.

"I am going to remind you of what Ms. Pearson said when we left. There will be a lot of grimm today so remember to be safe and don't stray from the group under any circumstances." Oscar sat back down in his seat. The bus started moving again and Marigold tapped him on his shoulder.

"Is it really that bad?"

"They said it was a horde, but a huntress is taking care of it."

"That's good. We'll be able to step in if anything happens!" Marigold stated determinedly. Oscar smiled kindly at her. He absentmindedly traced the swirls on his cane. It had been a long time since he heard about any large hordes of grimm in Patch. It worried him.

The bus pulled into the entrance of the Jade Forest. The students filed out of the bus, each with varying levels of excitement for the hike. Oscar began his lecture on the wildlife in the area and how to survive in an area such as this. The group came across a large clearing and Oscar gave the students their first task. He sat on a rock on the far side of the clearing as he watched his students build small tents from leaves and branches.

###

"I don't understand this!" Nora complained. She held two large branches in her hand. "If it rains you could just camp out in a cave or something!"

"You're not always going to find a cave, kid," Qrow leaned against a tree as he watched them work.

"I'm sorry that I pulled you into this…" Oscar piped up. He held some sticks together as Jaune and Yang worked on tying them together.

"Don't worry about it." Sun replied. He was high in a tree, tossing down branches and leaves for them to use. "We needed to set up camp anyways."

Half of the group was working on setting up a camp. Ren had even started preparing dinner with the help of Ilya and Weiss as Blake worked on starting the campfire. The other half had opted out of camp preparation to help Oscar with learning to build a small shelter. They called it "training reasons," but really Nora and Ruby had just wanted to build a fort.

"There, that should do it." Yang stepped away from the shelter. Oscar and Ruby, who were tasked with holding up the branches, let go with sighs of relief. Ruby squealed.

"It's so cool!" She began crawling into the little shelter.

"Don't forget the leaves!" Nora started piling leaves on top of the sticks of the shelter. Ruby excitedly bounced as she watched the sky start to be shaded by the piles of leaves.

"Oscar! Come in here! This is so cool!" Oscar slowly crawled into the little shelter. There was barely enough room for the both of them. They sat shoulder to shoulder on the damp ground. He wasn't as excited over the shelter as the others were. "Isn't this cool?!"

Ruby turned to him with excitement sparkled in her silver eyes. Her face radiated joy. Oscar couldn't help but smile too. He felt awkward but sitting next to her in the little twig shelter made his chest feel warm. He turned his gaze to stare at his feet. He felt that if he looked at her too long, he would go blind.

"Yeah… it's pretty cool," he smiled. Ruby's grin became wider and Oscar could feel his heart pounding in his chest.

"My turn!" Nora announced. There wasn't enough room for all three of them. Oscar decided to leave to make room.

###

"Hey Oscar!" Marigold came to sit next to him. She stretched her arms. "I know that I'm supposed to help everybody as revenge for not taking the troublemakers, but you're a jerk for making me run around like this."

"I am?" he replied with a joking tone.

"You looked pretty lost in though over here. What were you thinking about?"

"Just thinking about the past. I remember when I learned how to make a stick shelter."

"Ah. Fun times."

"Yeah… it was…" Oscar sighed in reminiscence.

He looked over the students as they worked. Some were working on overly-ambitious shelters that looked more like forts. Some had made their forts already with the help of their semblances and their group was hanging out around their little shelter. Luckily everyone was working. It was peaceful… too peaceful…

"Hey Marigold? Where are the troublemakers?" Oscar asked.

"Last I saw them they were right over there…." Her sentence trailed off as she pointed to an abandoned pile of sticks. Oscar groaned and stood up.

"They are so dead when I find them. Stay here and look after the other students. Let them eat lunch when they're finished or something."

"Got it." Marigold saluted. Oscar stomped into the woods.

Oscar opened his scroll. He had all of his students' contacts. He opened Cole's contact and called him. There was no reply. Oscar's eyebrows scrunched up. He tried Hector. Same result. Finally, he tried Jett. Still nothing. Now he was frustrated.

He heard a beowolf's howl. Oscar froze. That was never a good sign. He took off running towards the noise. His heart pounding in his ears. He feared the worst. What if his students were being attacked by beowolves?! He ran closer and saw something in the distance. It was people running towards him. They had terrified looks on their face. Oscar recognized them to be Cole and Hector. There were tears streaming down their cheeks when he approached. Oscar was panting, but managed to get some words out.

"What happened?!"

"Beowolves! A-A lot of them!" Cole blurted out. Oscar put a hand on both of their shoulders.

"We will discuss this matter later. For now, get back to the group and stay with Ms. Pearson."

"But Jett is still over there!" Hector cried out.

"Just do as I say! I will get Jett!" He pushed both of their backs as he continued to run. The beowolves' growls were getting louder. Their dark heads peered over the tall bushes and undergrowth.

A beowolf could sense his anger. It came charging at him. Oscar extended his cane and stabbed the grimm. He slid underneath its feet and repeatedly hit its back before jumping onto its shoulders. He pierced its head. It collapsed and started disappearing.

Oscar jumped off and continued his advance. He burst through the brush and landed in a small clearing. He spotted Jett on the other side, cowering by a tree. Oscar immediately jumped up, landing on the head of the nearest beowolf. He leaped onto the next one, using their heads and shoulders as stepping stones. He saw a beowolf readying to attack Jett. Oscar quickened his pace. He leapt at the beowolf and stabbed it in the back, through to its front. The grimm fell.

Oscar looked down at the grimm as it disappeared. He took the moment to catch his breath.

"Jett!" Oscar roared. He was beyond furious now.

"M-M-Mr. Pine! Look out!" Jett called.

Oscar whipped around. He held out his cane to block any attack that may come at him. He saw a beowolf with its claws out, arms lifted to attack. Oscar waited for it to slash at him so he could counter it.

Except it didn't. There was a flash of red before his eyes and the beowolf was down. A figure stood before him, clad in a red cape that flowed with the wind.

"Are you his teacher? Please get him out of here right now," a soft voice came from the huntsman. Oscar's blood turned to ice. He knew that voice. It was sounded a little different, but it was hers. She turned around. His eyes met with those beautiful silver eyes.

"Ruby?!" The name escaped Oscar's lips before he could do anything about it. She took off her hood. Long, flowing black hair spilled from the hood.

"Oscar?!" Ruby gaped. Before either of them could say anything else, a grimm growled, reminding them of their current situation. They immediately fell into a natural battle position. Their backs pushed together and their weapons readied.

"Jett get out of here now." Oscar demanded. He couldn't tell if Jett obeyed him. He focused on counting the grimm surrounding him.

"There should be about a dozen grimm left," Ruby reported. Oscar heard the distinct chink as Ruby released her cartridge and loaded another one.

"I'm guessing you have a plan. What do you need?"

"Not much. You have two minutes then get out of the way. Corral them into one spot, please."

"You got it."

Ruby and Oscar leaped into action. He hit the nearest beowolf, knocking it back. He rushed at a straggler, pushing it back into the center of the clearing. He knocked a beowolf approaching from behind Ruby. She shot at them, refusing to let them past some imaginary line.

Two minutes were up. Oscar jumped out of the way. He landed where Jet hadn't moved from his tree. Then Ruby started running. Oscar knew what she was doing. He grabbed Jett and pushed him into the nearest bush as the wind started to pick up. The clearing transformed into a storm of red rose petals. The beowolves trapped in the middle. Then Ruby broke away. She skidded to a stop and held Crescent Rose behind her as she readied for the final cut.

Crescent Rose extended. A red light blasted from it, creating a larger version of Crescent Rose. Ruby dashed forward. In an instant all the grimm were slashed at once. They disappeared into black smoke.

Ruby sighed in relief and put Crescent Rose away.

"That was awesome!" Ruby cheered. She waved to the two in the bushes. Oscar came out with a smile on his face. Ruby dashed over and pulled him into a hug that nearly toppled him to the ground.

"It's sooo good to see you again!" Ruby grinned.

"It's been a really long time," Oscar laughed. Ruby let go of him.

"Look at you! You're so much taller than me now!" She stood on her toes to measure the height difference between them.

"And… you've grown your hair out." Admittedly Oscar didn't know what else to say. Nevertheless, Ruby took a long lock of hair in her fingers and played with it.

"Yeah… well I though it would be a cool change."

"It looks good."

"Thanks!" Ruby beamed. There was a moment of awkward silence between them. "Sooo… you're a teacher now?"

Oscar remembered Jett was standing right there. He also remembered his rage from the boy running off.

"Will you excuse me for a minute?" Oscar parted from Ruby. His entire attitude changed. "Jett!"

Jett flinched at his teacher's enraged expression. It was rare that Oscar got mad. His students had never seen it before. Even Ruby looked a little surprised by his outburst.

"You blatantly broke the rules and ran off on your own. To top it off you almost got yourself and your friends in danger! When we return to school, you are to report to the headmaster. You will be suspended for a week, minimum. Am I clear?!" Jett meekly nodded.

"Wow Oscar, you're taking this teacher thing really seriously," Ruby commented.

"Not now, Ruby. I'm trying to do my job."

"Well we weren't exactly the 'rule-abiding' type either." Ruby shrugged. She walked up to Jett. "I think you'll be a great huntsman one day. But first you need to learn to put others before yourself. Being a huntsman isn't about killing the most grimm or rushing straight into battle. It also requires a lot of looking around and evaluating the situation. If you run head first into a fight, you could get yourself hurt of worse, your friends and teammates."

Ruby looked at Oscar for encouragement. Oscar only sighed, hearing Ruby's words dissipated all the anger from his body. He was relieved to know that that part of her still hadn't changed.

"So? What are you doing out here?" Oscar asked Ruby.

"Hm? Oh before that… Hey Oscar… does the world seem to be spinning to you?"

#rwby #fanfiction #rwby fanfiction #fanfic #rwby fanfic #rosegarden #rwby rosegarden #ruby rose #rwby ruby #rwby rub rose #oscar pine #rwby oscar #rwby oscar pine #rosepine #rwby rosepine #One More Chance #omc c2 #omc

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homestuckexamination · 7 years ago

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Homestuck: Execution of a Masterpiece - Part 3 - Birth, Death, Rebirth, Redeath

Homestuck’s beginning is slow, but it helps to set the mood and the setting for what’s going to come next- Which is very important. One of the many reasons Homestuck seems confusing to outsiders, is because they see or hear about stuff happening in the middle or towards the ending of the story. Homestuck is dense, and it makes sense if you follow it through, but without the start that are the first Acts, without a solid base to support the rest of the comic’s craziness, it just wouldn’t work.

With Acts 1, 2 and 3 out of the way, we move onto Acts 4 and 5 in this part, after the first reveal of the trolls, after the Intermission, after Rose’s entry into the game. Now that the comic has a solid base to work upon, it’s time to delve in deep into the story Hussie wants to tell with this world he’s created.

So without further ado?

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5

And what better way to begin the new Act after an Intermission some people don’t quite seem to care about, than with a beautiful Flash Game?

Breaking the tedium and confusion many felt during the Intermission, but having showcased all of the relevant things Hussie wanted to showcase within it thus far, we follow John’s descent into his Land. We get to see the world beneath the Clouds, we get a name for this Land, and we get some impressive amount of World Building! Some Imps now have tendrils, suits, dresses and cat faces, showing us that Rose’s prototypings affect everything as well, and John encounters Frog Monuments and Consorts that talk to him about the World, about the Fireflies, trapped in the clouds by a spell put there by the Slumbering One. About the Slumbering One creating the Underlings, commissioned by the Agents, and clogging up the Pipes that serve to request and send items in the Land. This puts John’s Quest in the Land into light, how he must unclog the pipes and let the Breeze flow once more.

It’s not only informative, but also fun to go through, as you get the chance to freely go around bonking Imps, and also picking up stuff and tossing the stuff in your Sylladex to attack

But once that little appetizer is done, we move to the plot threads that weren’t closed in Act 3 immediately. Namely, we see the Aimless Renegade recognize the symbol of Bec’s Head and rush down to meet the Mayor, while PM assaults him because he’s been trying to shoot them all this time. Similarly, we finally move on to Jade and whatever the hell her deal is with Dave’s Beta Copy.

Jade messes around with her Sylladex, and ends up having to leave her Bass behind, which explains why it was in the future jamming the elevator pad. Bec finds her messing around in the Temple, and promptly warps her back home, where she starts installing Dave’s Beta. And to all of this, the trolls are trying to contact her! She doesn’t want to talk them though, but it begins to showcase them getting more involved in the story, letting the reader know they’re in for a few new interactions soon enough.

She also contacts John about the game, and tells him her statement about not knowing what the Game was was just because she was asleep! She starts connecting with Dave to save him from the Meteors, while John is contacted by CG.

For those who missed the “CG” at the end of the Intermission, this panel confirms that the trolls really aren’t human. And knowing CG had a sprite and a captcha card, making it obvious he is playing the game, it puts their claim of being able to contact them at any point in their lives in a new light. They’re messing with them, but they’re not lying when they make such claims. The question this raises is, of course... Why are they fucking with them? CG also states he’s been talking backwards with John- This sets up the utterly confusing yet plot-relevant conversations with CG. The further into the Timeline John goes, the more he knows CG, and the less CG knows him. And since stuff he said in the past would be redundant to say in the future as well, he has a reason to not simply tell John everything that’s going to happen, always leaving us with the lingering mystery of what’s going on. This can be highly frustrating, but since CG does spill the beans little by little, and his conversations are always hilarious, they only build up anticipation for the next conversation.

We continue setting up what comes next, all the post-apocalyptic characters chill out and start to get along, Jade starts to deploy everything in Dave’s house, and finally we get a glimpse at Rose’s Land. We see a diagram of the Kids’ Session for the first time, with a sphere already there, and a new one appearing before zooming in- This puts things more into perspective. Just like John has the Land of Wind and Shade, Rose has gone to an entirely separate planet, the Land of Light and Rain. Rather than ‘levels’ in a videogame, or something similar, they’re basically creating a Solar System in their Session, with Skaia as the ‘Sun’ so to say.

Immediately afterwards, WV wants to get PM to the terminal to meet John, and she pauses on the Planets. Now that we’ve seen LOWAS and LOLAR, it becomes obvious these are all the 4 Kids’ Planets! For those who’d forgotten about the mural, it brings the realization home without seeming forced, and we learn that PM was the voice talking to John through the entirety of the Act 4 Walkaround.

And then we see a voice talk to Rose. A new voice. Speaking in fancy text, and calling her ‘Seer’.

This clearly indicates a fourth, yet unnamed, unseen character in the Future, and marks her as the Seer of Light according to Nanna’s notes on the Sassacre Book, to go with John’s Heir of Breath title.

John continues his exploration and finds tough monsters. Jade falls asleep and in her sleepy stupor, prototypes the impaled crow Dave killed in Act 2. She recovers the Betas too- An important detail since she obtains them somehow, and does just as expected with the crow. After all we already saw an image of Dave’s future in which he was on the roof with the Crow Sprite, just as we saw a flash of Zazzerpan’s broken, half-buried statue in Rose’s Land. Temporal Foreshadowing begins to come true.

With Temporal Mechanics already in play, Hussie then throws us yet another curve ball! We are seeing WV and company having a meal, when suddenly...

We see, in the Session, the Authority Regulator, and the Parcel Mistress. Not only do they have the same personalities as AR and PM- They share their initials. This is an immensely clever detail. We already knew they were from the Kingdoms of Light and Darkness, but to make it more obvious and less confusing, their Past and Future counterparts always share the same Initials. This is true of every single Carapacian’s title- Although the fact the Archagent’s name is Jack Noir, implies that, aside from their title, Carapacians also have a normal name we don’t learn about.

AR finds John’s Dad’s car that has fallen from the cliff above, and takes the Beta and Jade’s Present which was in there. PM, as the intense Mailswoman she is, chases after him to get the package and deliver it to John. This marks the beginning of an intense chain of events that spans the entirety of Act 4′s story, all, simply, to deliver a package.

In his Land, John is quickly overwhelmed by higher level Underlings, but is saved by a mysterious blunderbuss-wielding man carrying his Sassacre book. It’s Jade’s Grandpa. He’s Dead, which reminds us that the Medium is a weird timeless expanse outside of the normal flow of time on Earth, but we are left to wonder HOW he got there, and WHY he is there.

After the Consort Village is saved, John uses the pipes, as he’s learned from the Consorts, to request the envelope with his missing Server copy so that he may connect to Jade as soon as possible. PM complies this request eventually, but instead of just delivering it normally like a god damn rational person, she sends it through the pipes which makes it get to John eventually, in the future. This leaves John to pretty much mess around in his Land while the rest of the Kids’ stories develop, and while we follow the Carapaces in the Future, and now, the Present as well- Carpaces which are implied to be Exiles from their Kingdoms now.

A third, Egg-shaped station appears next to the Frog Temple in the future- And we see Dave’s Entry Item be an egg laid by a bird. Yet another symbol of a beginning. However, since his Sprite is a bird, it takes the Egg away from him to make a nest- Of course his entry just couldn’t be easy and straight forward with no time constraints. Where would the suspense be in that?

This marks a trend as well, a lot of the time in Homestuck, while there would be a more logical, straight-forward way to do things, the silliest and most hilarious way tends to be preferred. This is, after all, a comedy at its heart, even if by this point the story has grown to be something quite a lot more intense.

Through the following pages, we begin to learn more about SBURB mechanics, and get in contact with more of the trolls. gallowsCalibrator specifically reveals a lot, like the Titles of a few of her partners, and the fact the carapaces in the future are, in fact, Exiles. They reach the dead planet long after the ‘Reckoning’, and aid the players in non-obvious ways. carcinoGeneticist talks to Jade in the past- Seeming kinder than in the future, and talking how she needs to get in contact with him when her robot explodes, which she dismisses as him being a jerk. We also begin to see the trolls more clearly, their designs solidifying.

Anyone observant enough about their symbols would also already know at this point, the 12 trolls are based on the Zodiac. We see Jade in the past working on John’s present, too- Meaning she has been working on it for quite a while. The same present PM is still tracking down into the very Kingdom of Darkness. We get a brief glimpse of the Black Queen...

And beyond the fact she has been prototyped twice, it also becomes evident Snowman from the Felt is, in fact, the Black Queen as well. Furthermore, from the Egg Capsule in the future, the Fourth Exile appears...

As a white version of Snowman, named the Windswept Questant. The White Queen, of course. While time hopping can be confusing the picture starts to be painted rather clearly at this point. The Stations of the Exiles are shaped like the Kids’ entry items. The Exiles are members of the Kingdoms in the Session. The Trolls have their own session where Jack was their Exile, and the Black Queen too, arguably. We also see Jack task PM with taking the crown of the White Queen and King if she wants to get the package- While being teased about knowing what IS in the package. This back and forth of PM’s Quest and Jack not letting us see what’s in the package spans the entirety of Act 4 as one of the core plot threads that keep us engaged in the story. Why are they Exiled? PM did obviously not kill the Queen. What’s in the box? Why does John need it? Jade can see into the future and sent it specifically to go in this roundabout way, so it could literally be anything, from the most relevant thing yet, to the stupidest thing.

And while Rose proves herself to be a badass, we start to alternate between mild progress in the Kids’ stories, with involvement of more Troll stuff. GC tells John to skip to the last Gate of his Land using a Jetpack- To ambush his Denizen while he’s asleep and have an easy Final Boss victory. Rose gets pestered by adiosToreador to find ways to own Dave, while on the other hand, grimAuxiliatrix contacts Dave to find ways to understand Rose and get on her level. The two are revealed, and things seem to start to build a semi-friendship. The Trolls that until now were nothing but a bother, start to become more fleshed out characters.

Enacting the final scene from Con Air, John adopts a young Salamander and calls her Casey, who becomes a bit of a recurring comic relief.

The Package Quest continues, and we learn about the White Queen, and how she abdicated once PM requested her crown- After all, White is always supposed to lose, and she feels giving up on the throne may be an important tactical step to save as many people as possible. And given she gave her Crown and Ring to PM upon abdication, now, in the future, it’s PM who gets the honor of being named the new Queen.

We also see Jaspersprite for the first time since the [S] Enter flash, who talks to Rose about being her cat, as well as the Quest of her Land, about Playing the Rain and bringing back all the fish her Denizen devoured. This gives the process of Land Quests a bit more of a solid ground- In each Land, the Hero has a Quest, something about something the Denizen did, and how they must prove themselves a Hero to fix it, and then face the awful slumbering beast at the core of their planet. A generic base upon which to build more specific Quests based on the specific person and their Land and Title. At this point in the story, the Fans are already quite encouraged to make their own characters and involve themselves in the story! Making Lands, making Quests, making their Hero Titles, making Alchemized Items. This extreme flexibility of the setting and how the game is shaped to each person individually makes for a lot of fun Self-insertion. And while the story and the characters are compelling, this is a big draw for a lot of people. A good way to keep fans engaged while the comic was coming out.

And at the same time, while things seem to be advancing the story smoothly, we get our first taste of loss in the comic. So far, there’s been the looming threat of dying quite a few times, but things have never quite gotten far enough to grant it to be anything other than mild concern. However, as Dave enters the game and pesters John, he finally blasts off into the 7th Gate to meet his Denizen...

And we fast-forward, to learn that John died to his Denizen, Jade never got into the game, the Trolls stopped talking to them immediately afterwards, and Dave and Rose have been living for months in an offshot, doomed reality. Dave can’t take the fact he prototyped Cal anymore, and he decides to go back. He’ll change the past, reroute the Timeline so they don’t fuck up, but in turn, since they’re in a Doomed Timeline, Rose, left behind, will cease to exist. A first taste about the existential drama revolving around Time Travelling and being able to see into the future, as well as a first taste of loss. Dave suggests Rose goes to sleep, since their Dream versions, their Dream Selves, seem to operate weirdly outside of the flow of Time. And as Dave goes back in time, everything fades, leaving Dream Rose to vanish- An act which forces Rose, in the present, to collapse.

Dave manages to convince John to not get tricked by gallowsCalibrator into getting killed, and promptly drops all of his equipment before Prototyping himself instead of Cal.

The timeline is changed, and gallows is warned to not mess with John because he’s a gullible idiot that will literally do anything you tell him to do. John still blasts off in his jetpack, but doesn’t go to the gate- And CG informs us of a few more things about the game. They are a group of Players that already finished the game. At one point in the game, the Reckoning happens, a time when the Darkness wins against the Light, and meteors are drawn from an asteroid belt, the Veil, towards Skaia. It’s an endgame event, and CG implies the Kids weren’t able to win the game, and did something that somehow affected their own Session, forcing his group to hide in the remnants of the Veil. There’s still many questions raised by this statement, but at this point, the Trolls’ antagonism and claims of them ‘fucking up’ somehow take on a whole new meaning. They’re bitter because they lost their Session because of the Kids, and now we’re left to wonder what they’re going to do next. Specifically, the assurance that the Trolls can see them into the Future, and there’s no way to change the fact that they’re going to fuck up, then fuck the Trolls up. Inevitability, Existentialism. Introduced immediately after Davesprite’s Timeline and Future Dream Rose ceasing to exist and merging with Present Rose, it’s a clever way to put the stakes into perspective, and leave the reader nervous, nervous that there may not be hope left. To all of this, of course, we still do not KNOW the purpose of the game! We know that they need to defeat the Denizens, and the Black King and Queen but... We still do not know why.

A stream of unanswered questions, while answering questions already posed before, this is the forward motion of Homestuck, and what drives its narrative. Hussie is really good at building up expectations, and making you wonder why something happened the way it did. He gives you answers, but doesn’t give you ALL of them. He spaces them out, slowly feeds them to you, lets you figure things out and make sense of what was happened, and then lets you try to figure out what’s going to happen next based off of these new revelations. As he implied back in the day, Homestuck is like a Puzzle. You can have fun merely going through it at surface level, but the real fun begins when you start to piece the more obscure pieces together, and learn to see the full picture.

Right after CG tells John that they will all fuck up, we actually switch to... Jack of all people. In the Flash that marks the End of the First Year of Homestuck, [S] Jack: Ascend. We learn that the Kingdom of Darkness’ name is Derse, we see an image of the three planets of the Kids of afar, Dave’s inclusive, the Land of Heat and Clockwork, before focusing on these Dark Kingdom shenanigans. And we see, much like Spades Slick and Snowman, Jack and the Black Queen have a rather turbulent relationship. Jack hates her, she teases him, and forces him to wear the ridiculous clown dress until he refuses to and tears it apart. She angrily suspends him in the air and threatens to kill him- But in the last moment, Jack reaches for the box with Jade’s present to John, which he’s keeping... And uses SOMETHING in it to tear the Black Queen’s finger and kill her. As we see the White Queen abdicate, we see that taking off the ring she wears makes her lose her Prototyped appearance, and the same happens with the Black Queen. Except rather than giving it to PM to keep it safe, Jack takes this ring for himself, wearing it, and gaining the powers of the Kids’ prototypings.

To all of this, Rose wakes up in her room in Derse. Just like John had scrawled subconsciously on the wall, so has she- Except her drawings are the letters of the word MEOW written repeatedly and randomly. This is the secret Jaspers whispered into her ear... And for a split of a second, she can see the letters shift, from MEOW, to GCAT. Most people miss this fact, and some don’t even know what it means, but this is not just MEOW written over and over. It’s a genetic sequence of some sort. It should be mentioned that all of the Kids’ and Trolls’ Usernames use every possible combination of the GCAT letters, except John, ectoBiologist- But he changed his Username, and it used to be ghostyTrickster, GT. This is just a little interesting detail by Hussie- Between Ectobiology introduced with Rose in Act 3 and this Genetic Code, as well as the names of the Kids, it’s obvious something is going on.

We also see what’s going on with the rest of the cast, and with their Guardians, with Dad, Mom and Bro facing off against a series of powerful monsters, and beating the crap out of them.

And in the end, we shift to the first of Hussie’s silly self-insertions into the story, through the Fourth Wall. The Fourth Wall is, initially, presented as the fourth wall of Jack’s vigilance cubicle, but he says it was stolen a long time ago, a little tease about how Hussie likes to break the Fourth Wall.

Hussie and the Reader mess a little bit with each other, he then Recaps the first year of Homestuck, and then we get back to the story. Nothing too spectacular, but a fun little tease.

Afterwards we follow John, and GC guides him to reach his Second Gate this time, which leads him to Rose’s Land. There he finds her asleep, and Dave, too curious for his own good, tricks John to get him the code for Rose’s journals- And then promptly falls asleep because Rose is visiting him on his Dream Room in Derse, making him notice he’s been awake there all along, but didn’t know it. John further checks around her room and finds the delayed Birthday Present she was making for him...

Which looks suspiciously like a modified version of the Bunny he got from Dave? It’s even dirty with Oil Stains, which it got in his Land. This makes one wonder if they are the same bunny, but how would that even make sense? Either way, John blasts off before Rose can wake up and greet him in person, to explore her Land. Meanwhile, Rose and Dave spend some time together messing around in his Dream Room- And a Dream Version of Dave’s Bro’s main doll, Lil Cal, creep her out enough to toss it out of the window. Strangely enough, the doll is caught just in time by Bro’s rocket skateboard?

Following this, we see the Guardians and some other things gathering somewhere. John’s Dad finds Jade’s Grandpa and follows him to a Transportalizer. Rose’s Mom and her Horse go on another Transportalizer. And John, following the steps of Rose’s mother, lands himself going through the same Transportalizer.

Much like the Ends of Act 2 and 3, it seems like all of the plot points through the Act are slowly coming together in some way. John has landed himself in the Veil, and found a genetic laboratory of some sort, where it’s obvious all of the Guardians have been to a few moments ago, and left a series of items around.

We see AR leaving the Veil with Bro’s Rocket Skateboard, enjoying the ride around the meteors. Meanwhile, PM is preparing to head into Skaia, to meet the White King- But on the way there, the Courtyard Droll, one of Jack’s subordinates, manages to steal the White Queen’s Ring from her!

Which is promptly recovered by Jade’s Dream Self, who’s taking her sleeping time to build Dave’s house up to his First Gate, just like Rose did with John, and just like Dave has already done with Rose’s house.

It’s now, as we look into Skaia, that we see the past of the Mayor, much like we’ve already seen with PM and AR. While originally a Chess Board, the more people entered the game, the more the Battlefield for the Battle between Light and Darkness shifted, until it made an entire chessboard-like planet of strife and death. WV was but a peasant taking care of his crops, when the war destroyed his life. And so he rose as a revolutionary leader, turning both armies against the Black King.

Before he could launch an attack, however, Jack, now with the Queen’s Ring, attacked the King, destroyed the Sceptre that gave him powers, and decapitated him- Ascending to something higher than a King or a Queen. Meanwhile, PM gets the White King’s Sceptre and Crown, getting him to abdicate as well- But is ambushed by one of Jack’s minions again, causing her to lose the Sceptre.

We shift from this montage about the Battlefield, to Rose and Dave finally getting equipped with some new weapons and clothes, preparing to ascend to the First Gate.

And it’s at this point that some Time Loops we’ve already seen started begin to close. Dave clones Rose’s Journals through the code he got from John, finding out one of them had the MEOW code on it, and the other just some Wizard Fanfiction. He uses his juice-stained Betas to bookmark the page, and then sees Rose...

Destroying the original books. She’s being told by the Dark Gods that the MEOW code is a dangerous genetic sequence that needs to be destroyed at all costs. Rose’s always been interested in Eldritch Creatures, but now that she’s starting to use Dark Magic, and claims to have heard their whispers, in her Dreams, as her Dream Self, things start to take a creepy, concerning turn for Rose. Dave goes to get rid of his own MEOW book copy, but finds it has already been stolen.

The Draconian Dignitary, the third of Jack’s minions, has stolen it- And apparently Dave tried to go back in time to stop him, only to end up dead. This puts into perspective the dangers of Time Travelling to solve problems, and forces Dave to get rid of his own corpse in an incredibly morbid display.

It’s in this Act 4 that Death begins to become a prominent thing- The looming threat of people dying has begun to actually come true, even if some of the Deaths are Time Clones or going back in Time, the characters still remember them, and are obviously traumatized by these events. Hussie describes his idea regarding this sort of Death, as how in games, you simply start at your last checkpoint, and no one mourns the thousands of dead Marios left behind. He takes the mechanic of how you mess up a lot in games until you get it right, and turns it into a morbid, deadly display.

To break the tension of what’s going on with Dave and Rose, we move onto what John is doing in the Veil- And we get yet another immense Plot Bomb. The 4 screens are locked at different points in time over his Nanna, Jade’s Grandpa, Dave’s Bro, and Rose’s Mom. He can also see a series of events- Dad seeing a meteor blow up a Crockercorp Factory, Grandpa arriving to the Island with Jade- Who’s holding the sewn bunny Rose gifted him...? Dave’s Bro standing next to a crater with a pair of tiny shades, and Rose’s Mom watching as a meteor crashes into Nanna’s prank shop, killing her on the spot. He tries Appearifying each of the adults, and as expected, the machine Paradoxifies them, which takes their genetic material...

And clones them. Furthermore, the slime then mixes in pairs of two, and...

Creates clones of the Kids. CG messages John to put what just happened into words, and once more, the existential nature of SBURB and Homestuck itself comes into play. Those aren’t just clones of the adults and the Kids- They are the adults and the Kids. To ensure the game is played in the first place, SBURB sends a set of players back to Earth, that will be fated to play the game, to ensure they are born in the first place. The Kids and Guardians were created in a laboratory, and Jade and John are the genetic children of Nanna and Grandpa, just like Rose and Dave are the genetic children of Bro and Mom. CG implies that the Kids’ Reckoning starts extremely early because they fucked up and let Jack get the Ring- Whereas in the Troll Session, Jack was apparently an ally. He went on a Rampage and began the Reckoning early, and Skaia, to prevent being destroyed too fast, creates portals that send the meteors of the Veil to different points in time on Earth. This causes the both the Apocalypse, and also ensures that the Babies are sent to the point in time when they were born.

SBURB is recursive, and ensures its own existence, as well as that of its main players. As such, their birth, and the destruction of Earth, were pretty much fated from the beginning. Clones of themselves, fated to play, timelines where people fade from existence, dark gods influencing others, some of the heavier themes of Homestuck are already in play, set up and ready for Act 5.

After having been investigating the mysterious meteors and the woman he saw that day, Dad and Mom are finally reunited atop a flying ship Grandpa is piloting through the Veil, towards Skaia.

We also see something we already came from a Meteor in the Veil, discovered by AR, who decides to investigate...

Inside, he sees the past of Nanna and Grandpa, how young Grandpa accidentally shot Sassacre, who would’ve otherwise been their adoptive father... And yet the device isn’t locked on any of the adults like the ones in the laboratory John was just in. It’s set over something else.

Halley, the beloved dog Grandpa called ‘Harley’ because of a speech impediment. At 13 years, he left with the dog, and left Grandma to be raised by Betty Crocker herself. Things start to become clearer, too, when DD shows up with the MEOW and Wizard Fanfic books...

And discards the latter, along with Dave’s juice-stained copies which were being used as a bookmark. These fall on the open Time Capsule, and set it up for Jade to recover once the temple is sent back to Earth, finally closing that loop that had been left lingering since the very end of Act 3! And with John enacting Con Air’s last scene and gifting his bunnies to young Rose and Jade, explaining how Rose was able to have a bunny to gift him, and how Jade had it on Grandpa’s past, the Act’s curtains close...

Hussie teases us a little bit, making us think the End of Act 4 is going to be silly, before we get back to Dave, Rose and Jade. Dave is talking with GC about what to do next, as well as the little momentary trauma of seeing his dead corpse and having his own blood on his hands. Rose is pestered by GA, who’s worried about her communing with the Dark Gods, but Rose is busy killing things. Finally, Dream Jade chats with AT, who tells her he loved sleeping in Prospit, until their Dreamselves died, a fact Jade didn’t even know was possible.

And with those last bits and pieces of information set up, we reach the actual End of Act 4- [S] Descend.

We see Dave’s entry, and how his Brother split the meteor heading to his house in half, buying him some extra time to enter. The ship with Mom and Dad prepares to reach Skaia, and we see Jack going on a rampage- Exterminating both armies of Light and Darkness, tearing the Battlefield itself asunder, and finally, being given the lost White King’s sceptre, which allows him to begin the Reckoning. Once started, the babies are warped on top of meteors, and the meteors are sent towards the Skaian Defense Portals, that will sent them back to Earth. On the Frog Temple meteor, we see DD use the MEOW code and Halley’s genetic code, to create Bec- Who as we know, would then emerge from the crater the Frog Temple Meteor left on Earth. Another Time Loop close.

Meanwhile, Jack continues his rampage on Prospit, as the White Queen and an entourage of Prospitians leave the planet. Everything is destroyed, and Jack tears the chain connecting the Moon of Prospit- Where John and Jade dream- to fall towards the Battlefield. He then goes to Dave’s Land, and faces off against Dave’s Bro, on a giant, record-shaped device. After a short strife, Bro stabs his Katana on this record, making some kind of energy to start emitting out of it... Before leaving mysteriously. A hint? A signal? We don’t quite know.

Finally, we move back to Prospit, to the falling Moon, and see John’s Dream Self cast out of his room, as Jade’s Dream Self tries to wake him up in time. To no avail, she decides to sacrifice himself- Pushes him out of the way, and bears the brunt of Prospit’s Moon crashing on top of her on the Battlefield. The explosion tears a good chunk of the Battlefield right out of the planet, and manages to wake John’s Dream Self up, but at the obvious cost of Jade’s Dream Death. With her Dream Self dead, her Dream Bot explodes, along with the rest of her room, leaving her asleep and on free-fall plummeting towards the ground of her island. Becquerel watches this as the biggest Meteor heading to Earth looms above Jade’s place.

Dave ascends to his First Gate- But Rose, instead, casts a spell upwards and destroys her own, instead deciding to fly through the Land with her powers.

We’re left with a lot of questions from this flash, while many others were answered- However, while the Act is over, a short Epilogue puts things into perspective. Rose writes a last entry in her walkthrough, talking about how she’s been informed time and time again of how they’re all doomed and fated to fail. And she’s not having it. She’s going to tear the game apart if she needs to to find answers and save everyone. She also mentions she has ripped the Walkthrough out of Earth’s Internet, and set up a Server out with the Eldritch Gods so anyone would be able to access it.

John is awake on the Battlefield now, and finds Jade’s dead body, taking the ring she had on her. Mom and Dad land on the Battlefield, and Grandpa finds Jade’s body, which he taxidermizes and brings back home- As we learn out, Halley’s body, Jade’s Dream Self, and Jack’s 4th Wall has been hidden in his attic laboratory all along, explaining why Grandpa had a photo of Dream Jade over the Foyer.

We see the Exiles, one by one. AR finds John asleep in the Veil, and uses the Rocket Skateboard to send him to safety, leaving him to be Exiled to Future Earth through the portals. WV laments the loss of everyone, and dons John’s Dream Blanket as the rags that cover him in the future. PM assassinates the mook that ambushed her, meets with Jack to get the Package, and gives it to John, before being exiled herself through a portal. The White Queen rides a ship to Earth, finds the halved Egg terminal- Halved just like the meteor Bro halved, repairs it, and then crowns PM as the new Queen. WV reaches into his trusty pocket knife and shows us he’s had the White Queen Ring all along. John sees this in the Clouds of Skaia, and knows he has to give the Ring to someone at some point.

He opens the package, and reads a birthday wish by Jade, explaining exactly how she knows all she knows from the future, and what Prospit is. Of course, now that it’s destroyed, it only makes John sad. He also reads a letter from... Someone else. Someone who knows Jade, and has helped her make the present, but little is known about him. Jack finds John, and wants the Ring- But just in time, his present jumps out of the box. The same Bunny Jade had, the one Rose had sewn, but now with robotic implementations and four powerful Weapons. The Quills of Echidna, Ahab’s Crosshairs, the Warhammer of Zillyhoo, and the Royal Deringer. Jack is forced to flee from combat for the time being.

Hussie recaps the vents leading up to the End of Act 4, and we finally reach Act 5. There’s so many things that have happened, a lot of plot threads that were open still close at last, and while there’s still a few things left up in the air, the story seems perfectly set up to continue advancing, and seeing, not explaining things that have happened before, but what comes next, what the Trolls have been implying is going to happen, and how everyone fucks up so tremendously.

This marks the End of Part 1 of Homestuck, and in a way, while I feel Act 1 and 2, and at most Act 3, should be considered the ‘introduction’ of Homestuck, when it comes to the whole of the story, it really is only, at this point, that we finally move beyond the Introduction, and start getting into the thick of it.

And yet, with everything set up to continue the story, we cut, not to any point in the story of the Kids...

But to the Homeplanet of the Trolls, Alternia. The beginning of Act 5 revolves, entirely, about the story of the Trolls, their culture, and their relationships with each other. But of course, now that we’ve been presented with the Sylladex and SBURB, with the Sprites, now that we’ve already talked to a bunch of them before, Hussie kicks up the pace of the story. We’re told what the Trolls do, yes- However, since we already know what the Game does, we’re explicitly told about some things that would, otherwise, have been quite the stunning revelation, and at times we straight up jump to the future to see how things said in the past as foreshadowing later turned out to be true, as a sort of Instant Karma kind of deal.

We learn about their Culture, Trolls are a violent race of space-faring insectoid creatures that have violent nightmares if they don’t sleep in special soporific slimes. They’re all born from Mother Grubs, huge insects to which the genetic material of all the combined population is given so that she may lay eggs for their species- Which are born as insectoid grubs with heads, and pupate into a more human-like form. They have no familiar structure, Adults don’t live on the planet and they are raised exclusively by monstrous creatures known as Lusus Naturae, that act half as beasts they have to feed and take care of, and half as guardians that protect them. And they have a complex Romantic system with 4 different kinds of Romance. A lot regarding Troll Anatomy and Culture is left ambiguous, or seems completely made up on the spot- And it really likely is. Specially the Quadrants, are needlessly complex, and yet describe four kinds of relationships the Fandom has learned to embrace, love, and use on other different Fandoms. This silly little bit of worldbuilding, and how Trolls all have different horns and symbols, inspired many to create their own Fantrolls- As if SBURB already didn’t offer infinite customization possibilities for self-insertion and OC-Making, now they had a WHOLE other species with weird alien romance. This is what makes a lot of people consider the Trolls their favorite characters.

The Trolls also have different blood colors. Lowest bloods are lower on the class hierarchy- They have much shorter lifespans, and at the bottom of the Hemospectrum, they’re basically treated like slaves. It goes all the way from Rust to Fuchsia, with them being the respectively lowest and highest possible colors, divided in 12 castes, and having the Highest two, Violets and Fuchsias, be a sub-species of Trolls that live underwater and have fins and gills. On top of this, every Troll talks with a different typing quirk, and along their color, makes their text immediately recognizable, if likely harder to read.

The first part of Act 5 is, as such, a fresh start with fresh new characters, but boosted to not drag on infinitely. For this reason, we quickly hop back and forth through the Timeline, to relevant and interesting moments to keep people’s attention regarding the Troll Adventure.

Sollux Captor, goldblood and Hacker of the group, has found two sets of ruins thanks to Aradia Megido, rustblood, and thanks to Kanaya Maryam (GA), jadeblood. Much like the Frog Temple for the Kids, these two Frog Temples carry the code from which the Game of SBURB is developed, to open the gateway into the Session. Sollux has prophetic visions of the imminent extinction of their race, and has been convinced that the game is their only salvation.

As such, they make two Teams, only for each of the Sessions, for each of the Frog Temples. The Red Team with Karkat Vantas (CG), Terezi Pyrope (GC), Kanaya Maryam (GA), Gamzee Makara (TC), Tavros Nitram (AT) and Vriska Serket (AG), and the Blue Team with Sollux Captor (TA), Aradia Megido (AA), Nepeta Leijon (AC), Equius Zahhak (CT), Eridan Ampora (CA) and Feferi Peixes (CC). These weren’t originally the pairings however, there was treachery and betrayal to set them up like this- And yet this was also, always, the groups they were fated to create.

As it turns out, the Ruins weren’t two different sets of Ruins, but rather a same set split in two. And when the time came to close the circle of their Sessions, they were forced to actually connect the two different chains together, joining the same Session. The Red Team were Prospit Dreamers, the Blue Team, Derse Dreamers. With the exception of Sollux, whose whole schtick is doubles and bifurcation, so he has two Dream Selves, on on each moon, and Aradia has no Dream Selves.

There’s a lot that happens in this Act, but it’s mostly presenting the story of the Trolls, rather than bringing up any special Plot Point. Aradia starts the story Dead, after an accident doing Fatal Live Action Role Playing, but has a robot built for her soul to inhabit after prototyping her ghost. Tavros has been left paralyzed from the waist down, but gets sweet robot legs after they all get trapped in the Veil. Sollux dies trying to save one of his friends before entry, but a kiss awakens one of his Dream Selves and makes him able to continue the adventure. Karkat fancies himself the leader of the group, but he’s shouty and annoying. He’s also incredibly insecure, specially because he has mutant Candy Red blood, an oddity in his species. It’s thanks to this that Jack bonds with Karkat and aids the group take down the Black Queen. Nepeta is a wild Huntress who’s kept in check by a blood-racist-and-creepy blueblood. Kanaya is a jadeblood- The caste who takes care of the Mother Grub, and her lusus was a Virgin Mother Grub. She took the Matriorb from her Lusus, an egg which she now keeps and protects as the only hopes of repopulation for her species.

Terezi is a law-loving blind girl, blinded after a FLARP incident. Her lusus never hatched, and died shortly after hatching before entering the game, sadly, but she taught her telepathically how to smell and taste colors rather than seeing them- Letting her see the world through synesthesia even while blind. Equius is the creepy robot-building blueblood that keeps Nepeta in check, and is in turn pacified by her. He’s creepy and loves horses, muscles and being degraded, but in the end he actually ends up being quite well meaning. Gamzee is a Juggalo stoner part of a creepy highblood cult, but that’s always eating soporific pies that leave him just kind of stoned. Eridan is an overdramatic violet noble with a genocide complex that wants to kill all Land Dwellers. He keeps Feferi’s lusus fed by orphaning other Trolls’ lusii. Feferi is the Heiress to the Alternian Throne, and wants to redefine the Trolls’ violent society to be more kind. Her lusus is an Eldritch Abomination that must be kept well fed or she will create a psychic shockwave that will destroy Troll Civilization. Eventually, her lusus dies and releases this Vast Glub, killing everything but herself and the Empress of Alternia, before being prototyped, which proves to be a big problem in their Session.

And finally there’s Vriska, a manipulative cerulean blood that’s pretty much the source of all the conflict from the Trolls. She’s a bully that abuses Tavros on the pretense that she’s trying to strengthen him, because she likes him but thinks he’s a weenie. She mind-controls him to jump off a cliff, which paralizes him. She FLARPs to get villainous Trolls and feed them to her hungry spider lusus, who torments her, and so, as a retaliation for hurting Tavros, Aradia communes with the spirits of the Trolls she’s killed to haunt her. In turn, Vriska is manipulated by someone else, and enticed to control Sollux to visit Aradia and murder her. As a retaliation, Terezi causes Vriska to lose her arm and an eye, which in turn angers Vriska enough to manipulate Terezi to blind herself. The cycle of revenge goes deep with them.

We also get a few 4th-wall-break cameos with Hussie being silly, teasing the audience about the story dragging on before skipping right to the juicy bits, or straight up posting the whole exposition about Troll Romance again before laughing. From the first self-insertion in which he says how it was a ‘bad idea’, to now where he rejoices in teasing the audience, the author has become more recognizable, more of a character. An interesting fact, too, is that by this point Hussie had the story more or less on rails, rather than letting the readers choose where to go next- But the interaction didn’t stop there, as every one of the Trolls’ names were chosen by the fans! It’s little things like those that keep people engaged, and what made Homestuck a fun Fandom, while still retaining a lot of fun meta and wall-breaking references now that it’s done.

However, and while the Session in itself is important, and showcases how some other SBURB mechanics work and how their Session went, there’s some very important things scattered through the Troll Introductions.

Doc Scratch is an entity first introduced as simply a mysterious man who writes in white text, and that has been manipulating Vriska. We learn, however, that he’s the First Guardian of Alternia, an entity supposed to protect the world. A God, pretty much, nigh Omniscient and Omnipotent. A smug asshole really. He is in service of an Unstoppable Time Travelling Demon named Lord English. If that name sounds familiar, it should! It’s the name of the boss of the Felt, and a quick look at Doc’s room shows that we are, in fact, in a green sort of Manor just like the Felt Manor. Furthermore, those green crackly powers of his are awfully similar to Bec’s, which implies Becquerel himself being a First Guardian as well.

Doc Scratch is the cueball to the Felt’s Pool Balls, the one that puts everything in motion. His name is, in fact, both a reference to Pool, and also to Satan Himself. He plays the role of the Devil, manipulating and messing with the Trolls to lead things the way they need to be. He doesn’t lie, but he’s good at omitting truths.

We’re not told much about Lord English, but a program Sollux finds implies he will be summoned into the Universe when the Universe itself dies. However as he can travel through time, when he appears should not be an issue. After all, He Is Already Here.

Doc Scratch’s only purpose is to bring forth Lord English into the Universe, and will do anything to accomplish this goal. He’s an excellent Host.

As such, the Troll Session not only works to give us some context about SBURB and what they’re doing and who they are, it also gives more relevance to the Intermission. The Black Queen is banished from the Session- And Doc Scratch gives her a new role in the Felt. The boss of the Felt is Lord English- And we’re told that when the Universe dies he will appear. We also know, if you remember, that if Snowman dies, the Universe dies- She’s the 8 ball, the one that must be sunk last. Things are starting to get eerie and ominous, this sub-plot about the Trolls suddenly takes a lot more relevancy. But we continue to watch their Session develop.

At last, Aradia, now Aradiabot, gets her revenge on Vriska beating her nearly to death, and then warps to the very end of their Session.

We learn Aradia gathered Doomed Copies of herself through 1000 different Timelines to face off against the Black King. With their best equipment, with 1000 Aradiabots holding back the psychic powers Feferi’s Lusus gave to the Black King, and with an impossibly lucky roll of Vriska’s magic dice weapon in the last second, they managed to beat the Black King, miraculously.

And so the Trolls were about to claim their Ultimate Reward for beating the game. But right before they could do it, something happened.

The Kids’ Session, at some point, caused a Rift in Time and Space. Something called a Scratch, and left ambiguous to what it’s effects are or what it does. A Scratch by itself shouldn’t have done anything, however, it seems, somehow, the Kids’ Scratch sprung a demonic entity of some sort on the Trolls just as they were to win. Forcing them to hide in the Veil, while it rampaged through the Session and murdered all the other 999 Aradias.

And finally, we learn, the purpose of the Game. Why it’s something much more important than saving Earth. The Players are thrust as Hero into a battle between Light and Darkness. They’re tested, they’re proved. And ultimately, if they are able to defeat the Darkness...

They will create a whole new Universe to rule as Gods. The Humans’ entire Universe was created by the Trolls playing the game. And in playing their Session, they somehow managed to ruin their reward right as they were about to claim it. And now, trapped, waiting for the Demon to get to them, they bitterly bother and hassle the Kids through different points in time.

Act 5 Act 1 ends up- We see the Blue Curtains representing the Trolls’ Blue Universe, as opposed to the Kids’ Red Universe, close. Two Sessions, Two Universes, Two Curtains, Two sub-Acts for Act 5.

The ending of this Act comes with major implications, about the role of the Game and whatever it is the Kids do that fucks everything up. We’re also left wondering about Lord English, and also, about the Demon that sprung up on the Trolls. The first assumption is that this Demon is the same as Lord English, but that then raises questions about the Universe dying! Does it have to do with the Scratch perhaps? Where Act 4 left a lot of things nicely tied up and ready to open up new doors, Act 5 Act 1 opens the floodgates to a whole bunch of new speculation, and now that we’re following two different groups of Players, both Humans and Trolls, there’s so much that could happen next!

Hussie is good at building expectations and then surprising you. Even in the quickly-told tale of the Trolls, there are still impressive twists and turns, they’re downplayed by the narrative as a nudge to how the author is rushing through it to get back to the Humans, but they’re still surprising enough to leave you wondering for a moment. And this last bit towards the end, about Creating the Universe, truly puts everything in perspective. SBURB, the Game with the Highest Stakes. Your entire civilization dies, you’re thrust into mortal peril, but if you overcome it, you will become a God. Here enters the ‘Creation Myth’ portion of the story Hussie described as well. The characters are faced with their own mortality, with revival and Dream Selves, with moral choices and the dubious nature of Free Will when the Trolls can see exactly what they’re going to do, when Failure seems all but avoidable. Kids, trapped by Fate. Humans, rising to Godhood. Creation, Dreams, Hope. And such, Act 5 Act 2 opens its curtains.

And Act 5 Act 2 begins with Karkat watching John’s entire timeline, and getting a hate-romantic crush on him. With what we learn about Troll Romance, suddenly his antagonism towards pretty much everyone in the previous Acts, but specially John, takes on a whole new Troll-romantic light. And straight off the bat, we begin with a plot bomb the size of Planet Motherfucking Jupiter.

Karkat has been trolling John backwards, from the end of this Timeline to the beginning of their adventure, so the very first conversation he has with him is right at the end, right before the ‘Scratch’ that causes everything to go wrong. So we get a glimpse of the far future, and when Karkat tries to throw it in his face, John not only comments that he knows about the Scratch and is in fact about to start it- He tells us Future Karkat has pretty much helped them come up with the Scratch plan, and mentions it is their only hope now. Coming off from the perception that the Scratch was what made everything go wrong from the prior Acts, suddenly the reader is left not knowing what to think, or knowing what the Scratch really IS. What better way to kick off a new act?

We then begin to switch, from seeing how the Trolls interact with the Kids and find about them the first time, and how the Kids are following the story that we left off on Act 4. This intertwines the new action the readers have been waiting for regarding the Kids’ Session, with some more context about why the Trolls have been acting how they have. Karkat is apathetic at first towards the Humans, but as soon as he finds out they’re the source of their problems, he orders everyone to bother them. And of course, very few, if no one, actually take him seriously, but given the way Trolls just are in general, their morbid interest end up coming hostile a few times.

Vriska takes an interest in John, and tries to use her powers to Mind Control him- But as it happens, her powers don’t work on Humans. Instead, she finds out she can only use them to put Humans to sleep or Wake them up. She finds this out just as John was about to meet his Dad in the Battlefield, ending up leaving him without his reunion, and making him lose the White Queen’s Ring.

And then, much like how Terezi had been guiding him around, she starts to tell him what to do. John luckily also recovers the SBURB Beta copy he’s been trying to recover since Act 1, finally the Breeze delivers PM’s parcel to its destination, and John is ready to return home and connect to Jade.

So now he needs to go back to his house, install the Beta, and finally begin the process of getting Jade into the game, to complete the chain and save her before the enormous meteor we saw at the End of Act 4, and that has been a looming threat since we saw it in Rose’s laboratory in Act 3, impacts.

With Rose, meanwhile, we see how Kanaya has slowly gained more interest about Rose, because as she’s found out, she’s the writer of the GameFAQs guide she found prior to their adventure and that helped her group start the game more smoothly. Rose locked it away in a server outside the boundaries of Sessions and Universes, in the Furthest Ring, so even though technically Earth didn’t exist yet at that point, Kanaya was still able to get it. However, a few misshaps with John pretending to be Rose and a few not so friendly conversations, keep her lukewarm towards Rose until they finally start to get more in tune with each other. This all culminates with Kanaya seeing Rose blow up her First Gate.

Concern mounts about what Rose is doing anymore, specially as Kanaya starts to examine her Timeline more closely. The girl has gone rogue, and is tearing her Land apart trying to get the answers she seeks. In fact, Kanaya is extra-concerned because she has noticed, at one point in Rose’s Timeline, she simply. Blacks out. Her screen goes dark, and she cannot see her anymore. Now that we know Jack, that we know the Trolls, and that are more or less advancing through the story at a steady pace, having Rose go rogue like this, listen to the Dark Gods and tear everything apart adds an element of suspense and uncertainty, coming from one of the Kids no less.

Rose also talks with Dave, telling him the Dark Gods aren’t as bad as they seems, that she has other sources as well and is doing this out of her own volition and judgement. And of course, she asks of him to remove his shades and look into the Furthest Ring from Derse, as the Gods would like an audience with the prince of the Moon. We also learn that Rose is trying to track something very specific down- Something called the Green Sun.

After watching Prospit get destroyed, Terezi is crestfallen, and returns to tell everyone, before receiving a donation that gets the Trolls in contact with the Kids.

This Donation is, in fact, something she later on instructs Dave to do, once more creating a recursive situation in which they only met in the first place because of events that only happened because they met.

Terezi takes a liking to Dave, and begins to instruct him on what to do next, where to go, how to advance in his Quest and become more powerful. In a way, it seems like Vriska and Terezi are trying to push their rivalry through Dave and John, but they’re too good friends to actually argue or do anything like that, and in fact it’s more Vriska than Terezi who suggests such a rivalry exists.

In this way, while also showcasing the other Trolls talking to the Humans and among themselves on occasion, the story builds up a few specific Trolls as the ‘main’ Troll paired with each Kid, making it less of a headache to go through 12 different Trolls bothering the 4 Kids, and at the same time, builds expectations and suspense. You have Terezi and Vriska messing with John and Dave, with romantic undertones and rather funny shenanigans, while Rose and Kanaya keep most of the intensity, still with their humorous moments of course, but tilting more towards a concern for Rose and a wonder of what’s going to come next. You’ve just returned from meeting all of these Trolls an Act ago, but you’re already thrust deep into the thick of the story, and wondering just what comes now. What’s going to happen? That is one of the best things about Homestuck. Wondering just what comes next.

John installs the Beta, and Nannasprite tells him about a necklace he can use to summon her while he’s away now that he’s ascended to a sufficient level. This starts to present a trend of allowing the Sprites to roam anywhere, setting up for them to be elsewhere however they may require, rather than being bound to the house. She makes him eat dinner on a floating bed while he works away on Jade’s place.

Rose and Dave are, meanwhile, assaulted with inquiries and questions coming from other Trolls. Rose shuts down a romantic solicitation from Eridan, and gets into an intriguing conversation with Aradia. She doesn’t like the way Rose has been doing things, and doesn’t like hearing that she’s been tracking down the Green Sun- Which she calls, the ‘Power Source of all First Guardians’, and which pin-points it as the thing that gives Doc Scratch and Bec their powers. This makes sense, too, since the Green Sun occasionally flashes in the background of Becquerel’s warping. Then Nepeta asks for Rose to let her talk to Jaspers- And complies happily, bidding him farewell and letting him have her laptop. This is a really reassuring moment too, with the risk of Rose becoming evil or something, having a genuinely nice moment with her cat puts the reader at ease for the time being, while still knowing she will ‘black out’ eventually.

Dave meanwhile, has to deal with Equius, as he’s trying to get a sword out of a pedestal Excalibur-style, before deciding to break it in half. This is something Dave has done before too, having his swords broken is part of a bigger theme regarding Dave that goes back to his Strife with his brother. He deals with Gamzee as well, and given Gamzee is a juggalo, he sends him an ICP music video, which Gamzee actually finds to be Blasphemous and gets visibly angry for the first time, rather than letting it slip as the stoned Clown he is. Finally, Terezi tells him he’s going to fall asleep soon, and given the sword he took is important loot that’s going to attract monsters, he lets Davesprite handle them himself. Vriska puts him to sleep, and Davesprite defeats the monsters, before flying away. Asleep as he is now, Dave heads out to visit Rose’s Dream Self.

It’s then that we start to flip back and forth between two main scenarios. On one hand, you have Jack Noir, still in Dave’s Land, examining the sword Bro left behind...

And taking it, tracking him down to John’s Land for a rematch after what happened in [S] Descend. Jack has been pretty much tearing everything apart with no direct opposition except from the bunny, and Bro proved to be a really interesting adversary. He wants more.

And he gets more than he bargained for when Davesprite joins into the battle.

In a fit of rage, Jack frees himself from Lil Cal and sets fire to the Oil surrounding their arena, and given the nature of John’s land, the entirety of his world begins to ignite slowly, creating a most dreadful scenario.

Meanwhile, Jade, whose room exploded, was caught just in time by Bec before she hit the ground.

Before falling asleep in another narcoleptic fit of hers. But, now, her Dream Self is Dead. There’s no Prospit to Dream on, and so she starts to have a psychodelic dream about her favorite series. Things take a strange turn when her dream zooms out and pans to Dave on Derse- Removing his shades, and looking up into the skies of the Furthest Ring, and gazing, apparently, into Jade’s dream. Feferi appears in her Dream, and everything goes wrong, Eldritch Creatures begin to whisper at her and appear around her until she’s forced to wake up from such nightmarish visions.

Feferi explains, the Elder Gods of the Furthest Ring have glubbed Bubbles for them to Dream on now that they don’t have Dream Selves. They allow them to dream collectively, but in exchange, they’re pretty much in Eldritch Space. Feferi, whose Lusus was an Eldritch Abomination, seems even happy about this, but Jade is absolutely freaked out. Nevertheless, she’s awake now, and she ses John messing around with her house! They start to install the Beta, things seem to be finally reaching the point where someone isn’t under the imminent threat of being killed by a meteor! But there’s one problem.

Jade’s house is absolutely full of shit. John had the Harlequins, they were an obvious choice. Rose prototyped her cat and something eldritch. Dave had the Crown. But Jade, just in the very same room the Kernelsprite’s hovering in, she has everything from her Grandfather and a Suit of Armor, to wall-mounted monster heads and globes. We have no idea what John is going to prototype, and in fact he’s so confused about what to do himself that he asks Rose for advice! She doesn’t want to spoil his adventure, as she’s already learned what he is going to do- And so just tells him that, if he doesn’t prototype anything, they will be Doomed. With every prototyping, Skaia’s Battlefield changed, and it will only acquire its final form if John prototypes something. She also mentions that, once prototyped one last time, a Treasure will appear at the core of it, a Treasure John will have to retrieve. Its name is The Tumor.

And just like that... With no explanation about what’s going on, John wakes up after his bed has fallen into the Oil Ocean, with his Land still blazing because of Jack’s powers, and no idea of what happened to Jade, as well as no way to check a computer to see if she entered the Medium or not. Rose is being cryptic with him and doesn’t give him a straight answer, but for once, Karkat proves to be a huge help in explaining what’s happened. He insults him, saying that they JUST fucked up majorly, that they just did the thing that fucked everything up, and then proceeds to explain.

[S] Jade: Enter proves to be one of the pivotal moments in the story. Vriska forces John to collapse asleep, unable to prototype anything- And Bec is forced to Prototype himself in order to help Jade out and destroy the meteor about to hit her house. The blast razes the surface of the Earth, but earns Jade a few extra seconds to complete the entry process. In doing so, however? Jade’s effectively prototyped her monstrously powerful First Guardian dog- And Jack Noir, wearing the Ring, acquires First Guardian powers.

They have created an essentially unbeatable boss, and somehow, whatever it is they manage to do afterwards, it is Jack Noir with these powers, that manages to enter the Trolls’ Session and begins to destroy everything. Karkat wakes up for the first time on Prospit, just in time to watch Jack devastate everything around him. We also see, Jack, right after entering the Trolls’ Session, has a blood stain on his hand- But we don’t see it yet in the present. It’s not from Bro, and it creates the concern that he’s going to be killing someone else. It also works as an effective way to distinguish Jack in the Kids’ Session, and Jack in the Trolls’ Session.

Suddenly the looming threat of whatever it is they did becomes a much more tangible and dangerous thing, when it is apparent that both Bro and Davesprite have just died. Bro isn’t a player either, and thus has no Dreamself ‘spare lives’ of any sort, so unless Jade prototyped Bro into her Becsprite, there’s no way he can come back. He’s, effectively, the first major character in Homestuck who dies for good.

While John converses with Karkat, the flames in his land take on a green hue, and we also see, in the future, the White Queen repairing the last Station- Just as she did with the Egg, bringing forth the last of the Terminals. We still don’t quite know why they’re all gathering on the Frog Temple, but now they’re all there, for whatever purpose they may have.

And seeing the station appear, reminds the Mayor of something he’s forgotten, gazing at the Ring in his hand, reminiscing about something. As it turns out, the Ring John lost floated over to WV, and the two briefly met on the Battlefield in that short nap Vriska forced him to take.

Things slowly start to come together like this, the threat looming over everyone’s head is made evident, one of the biggest mysteries in the series thus far is revealed, and now, John is trapped in the middle of a blazing Land.

And then Vriska tells us something even more concerning- She intentionally put John to sleep knowing Jack was going to get First Guardian powers. After all, Jack is already in their Session. He is Already There. Even if she’d prevented it from happening, John would have ended up in a Doomed Timeline. Another show of inevitability, of futility. We’ve basically already been told what happens- The Kids lose, Bec Noir arrives to the Troll Session. But seeing things deteriorate in action, and seeing what happens to everyone, is an intense ordeal. Vriska wants to involve herself, just like how she’s trying to make John into a Hero, she also intentionally created the biggest threat they are facing. Because she intends on taking him down herself.

John thinks she’s crazy, but he doesn’t have time to complain. He’s on the verge of death now, about to burn to a crisp, but the Mayor starts to contact him again. He accidentally gets locked up in his terminal, and begins to rant at John about how he is the Windy Boy, and how he should do the Windy Thing, and how he’s being stupid. John doesn’t know what’s going on, but under pressure, ordered to ‘do the Windy Thing’, he, subsconsciously, activates his powers as the Heir of Breath for the very first time.

This is the first time the titles have become something relevant other than merely a title- This is a manifestation of actual power, strong enough to extinguish the flames destroying John’s Land. And while it takes him a while to activate it, as it happens, the Breeze just flows effortlessly to save his Land. Whereas the creation of Bec Noir came with a sudden realization of despair and the grim future ahead of the Session, suddenly seeing John demonstrate these insane powers flips it back with a show of hope, of excitement. A quick whiplash, stabilizing the mood so that the reader becomes interested in what’s going to happen next, once again. Homestuck is a Comedy after all, but it has shown us, at this point, that it doesn’t mind becoming a darker tale at times, to drive home the point of how serious something is. But after something heavy, the audience needs something lighter.

Something lighter we don’t quite get, however. Jade’s Land is the Land of Frost and Frogs, a snowy landscape with frozen amphibians scattered through it. She’s fallen asleep again after the entry, and in her Dream, she has a flashback to the first time Feferi talked to her. She tried to bond with Jade over prototyping something awfully powerful, and how it wasn’t her fault, and explained how she would shortly contact the Horrorterrors of the Furthest Ring to allow everyone to Dream there with them. It soon becomes obvious Jade and Feferi are sharing a dream again, just like that time before... Except Feferi states she’s not asleep.

She’s Dead.

The terrifying, blank-eyed expression, paired with the sudden shocking possibility of Feferi dying is a disquieting mixture. Aradiabot is implied to explode at some point in the future for some reason, but that was more of a confusing statement at one point during a walkaround flash. This, is a whole panel dedicated to the revelation of Feferi being dead, and Jade waking up creeped out from this nightmare. This raises other questions too, then- Specifically, how she died, and how can she, being Dead, contact Jade through a dream.

Things are starting to get serious, so Hussie interjects some more silliness. Jade confronts a Bec-prototyped Imp, and has a hard time shooting it as she’s warped through the entirety of the Session unable to shoot him, paralleling when she played fetch with him in her island. Ultimately, though, Becsprite helps her take the Imp down.

Following this, Dave contacts her and, given John is busy doing his own thing, manages to clone his own Beta Copy of SBURB so that he becomes both Rose and Jade’s Server Player, deploying everything she needs to begin the game. However that’s a Future version of Dave, and we go back to see our Present Dave who just woke up from a nap. He contacts Rose, now that he’s seen the Horrorterrors, and tells her he’s heard a plea for help.

The Horrorterrors are being Exterminated by something, and they need help, which is why they are reaching out to Rose. On the other hand, Rose has been making plans with none other than Doc Scratch himself. Rose mentions that Doc Scratch wants to die, and being a First Guardian, he’s virtually indestructible. But, he shares a power source with their newly-created archnemesis, Bec Noir. The Tumor she wants to recover from the Battlefield is actually a Bomb. Rose needs Dave, a Hero of Time, to map out the blank, non-euclidean, eldritch space that is the Furthest Ring. Rose then will carry the Tumor to the Green Sun in a suicidal mission, and help take Bec Noir down.

Of course Dave refuses, knowing this will be a suicide mission, but Rose assures him she’ll only be sending her Dreamself. He calms down after this, but Kanaya is still extremely concerned. Specially knowing she blacks out at one point, she mentions that she has ‘trained a powerful wizard’, and humors Rose with a bit of a roleplaying scenario about taking her back from the clutches of Eldritch Corruption.

In reality, she’s just messing around. She make a wand for Eridan because he was being pushy and wouldn’t shut up about Rose’s own magic, but has not been training anyone. Still, the concern stands, as she’s worried Rose is doing something very rash.

We move back to Jade, and a talk between her and Tavros- Who’s talked to her a lot while asleep, and is now trying to push his self-confidence to new limits by asking Jade out. She obviously turns him down, however he also has a plan she wants her to allow him to do. Communing with her Sprite and facing him against Bec Noir, using First Guardian Powers against a First Guardian, however Jade simply doesn’t trust him, specially because he reveals he did this in the past, and accidentally killed Jade’s Grandpa in the process. He’s turned down on this idea as well, and then Vriska immediately teases him about this.

As it turns out, however, Vriska maybe spills a bit too much to Tavros. She starts teasing him about how useless both him and Jade are- But then she starts to imply Jade’s narcolepsy has actually been Vriska practising her power on hers through the entirety of her childhood. She was the one to point DD to get the Books with the genetic code to Create Bec. She was the one who made John fall asleep to create Bec Noir. She’s the unseen hand that’s been manipulating their Session and made it as fucked up as it is, and Tavros can’t just stand by and let that happen. He sets off to face against her.

This section of Act 5 is an emotional rollercoaster. Things are being revealed, plans and plots are happening, possible deaths and foreshadowing, everything is starting to come together in really interesting ways, and finally, we reach what I believe is one of the best parts in the entirety of Homestuck. And it begins, with John finally landing after doing his Windy Thing, close to a Consort Village.

After doing the Windy Thing, John has reached the highest level he can possibly get to, but Vriska tells him he’s not done. There’s a special Quest Bed he can go to sleep on, and once he does so, he can begin climbing the God Tiers. Consorts in his village also talk about such a thing- The flash is a nice mixture of a walkaround with one single fighting section against an Uranium Imp, showcasing how hard to kill those things are. We get to hear how excited the Consorts are to see the Breeze clear up the flames, knowing the legendary Heir is around. They speak of the Bed in which the Hero will take a Legendary Nap. And ultimately, we get to the Quest Bed...

As it turns out, it’s a hard stone slab in the shape of a bed, with the same symbol we saw in John’s shirt at the beginning of the Act. The name of the God Tiers, the implication of an extra boost of power, and also, seeing John in new clothes! Things are looking like they’re going to get interesting, and John requests Vriska to put him to sleep! But then...

Vriska merely posts a smiley face once John is asleep. And the next thing we know?

The Heir is Dead.

This is a sudden, and unexpected development, followed by an incredibly beautiful flash with music that has brought some readers to tears. WV watches in horror as the Windy Boy stops moving atop the slab, but even while dead, we see fireflies clinging to John, the quest bed’s posts glowing, and then, a shift of perspective to the Battlefield- Where WV in the past is watching the same event from another perspective. John’s Dreamself is transported atop a Quest Bed equivalent in the Battlefield, and while the wounds begin to transfer from his Real Self to his Quest Bed, they soon clear up and heal. He rises, above the Quest Bed, in a spectacle of lights even the other 3 can see from their respective Planets, and then...

The Heir rises. But it’s not all triumphant victory. Nay, immediately after his ascent, we see John see his corpse on one of Skaia’s Clouds, and watch as WV in the future looks at John’s lifeless body, and the screen communicating with him blacks out.

John has ascended to his God Tier, as the Heir of Breath, but ultimately, he has still been killed upon his Quest Bed. This is John’s Dreamself, and while he may be a consciousness-merger, the morbid fact is that there’s a Dead John in his Land, and that WV thinks John is dead now. We know he has Ascended, but we also don’t know why just yet. Is dying a requirement? Or did the God Tier Ascension activate in time? The details are ambiguous, and knowing Vriska has been plotting behind everyone’s backs, it creates distrust and concern. Homestuck has lots of themes, and it touches a lot upon existentialism and mortality- But seeing the main character die on screen and then resurrect in such a spectacular manner makes for one of the most beautiful moments in the entire comic.

And yet the moment is not over yet. Before we can ask too many questions, we switch to someone else...

Here, we get confirmation. To become a God, you need to first Die. The Quest Bed is a Sacrificial Slab of sorts, and Vriska has tricked John without telling him what he had to do- Merely putting him to sleep, letting him Ascend unaware of what was going on. The morbid realization is immediate, we’re seeing characters face their own mortality now. Jade’s Dreamself has been dead for a while, Dave is seeing Time Clones die and is about to kill himself on the bed. Rose is going on a suicide mission, and John was tricked into dying to Ascend. It’s a heavy, unpleasant topic. It is also extra nerve-wracking for Rose- Kanaya says she blacks out on the screen, and we just saw WV’s screen black out after John died... So does that foreshadow Rose’s fate as well? Only time will tell.

We get even deeper into existential territory here with Dave and Terezi, however. Dave knows something is off- That version of him on the Quest Bed is not part of the loop. He’s a doomed offshot. Insisting in wanting to reach the God Tier, Terezi didn’t think he was ready to confront his own mortality, and tricked him. She’s the Seer of Mind- She mentions, Reality is made with every thought, with every moment. And she can see the consequences of where those thoughts would lead if they would turn into actions. She asked Dave to choose heads or tails in a coin flip, to find out about the God Tier at that moment, or later. And in doing so, there was a split in the Timeline- A version of Dave who chose heads, and one who chose tails.

Dave is freaked out. Not only does he have to face his own mortality, but also the fact the one right beneath him is a Doomed version of himself. Terezi also teases him, what if he became the Alpha Dave if Dave killed him? But what would happen to himself after that, would he be the Doomed Dave? Ultimately, Dave can’t bring himself to do it, and Terezi mentions he never reaches God Tier in his Session. They talk about how only one of the Trolls ever reached the God Tier, she teases about how Luck doesn’t actually matter when it comes to such choices...

And we move back to the Trolls’ Session, a flashback to when Aradia beat the shit out of Vriska. Hussie rides this extremely heavy train of emotions, sacrifice and death for a while, an uncharacteristically intense sequence of events for the comic. Tavros, having watched this happen, is encouraged by one of their Exiles to kiss her, which would revive her as her Dream Self, as we saw with Sollux-

But she doesn’t want him to revive her. She knows about the Quest Bed, she knows about the God Tiers, and this is too good of a chance to pass up on.

Vriska’s Dream Self starts to suffer the same wounds as her Real Self, a hint that she’s slowly dying, while Mind Controlling Tavros from Prospit to get her exactly where she needs to be.

However, she’s not controlling him completely. Unlike other times where she overwrote other people’s will entirely, Vriska, much to Snowman’s distaste, wants him to do it of his own volition. She tells him to do it, to kill her, to not let her bleed to death slowly, forcing him to write her words in blood, but never forcing him to stab her on the spot.

Fresh off of seeing John die, and having Dave nearly off himself on the Quest Bed, this scene is extremely bloody and fucked up. Snowman urges Vriska to force him to kill her, and Vriska starts to freak out herself- Screaming at Tavros, wanting him to kill her, but he just cannot do it, he cannot bring himself to kill her.

He scrapes his fingers raw on the rock writing in her blood, to the point of bleeding himself, and ultimately, traumatized and in tears, he simply escapes Vriska’s Quest Bed, leaving her to bleed out slowly.

Of course, the Trolls’ Quest Bed is a Cocoon because they are bugs. This is representative of metamorphosis, in the way it cracks and blasts right open, unlike the Kids who simply lie in a bad surrounded by flashy lights.

Seeing Vriska in her God Tier garbs as the Thief of Light is how this uncanny, morbid section of death and existentialism. We close a few loops, about why Vriska considers herself to be so strong, and how she has her arm and eye back even though they were blown off earlier in the Troll story. We see how John gets his new outfit, and learn more about the process to power up further in the story and make use of cool powers like John’s Windy Thing. But ultimately, while presenting the interesting concept of God Tiers, this section serves to remind the audience how fickle the lives of everyone in the Session actually is, how easy everything can go wrong, how fucked up the game is, forcing Kids to Die if they want to reach a higher level. It’s simply, an unsettling time.

Finally, things seem to take on a lighter note when Jade begins to alchemize stuff to start her adventure properly. Clothes, weapons, the Alchemizing montages are always fun to go through, and they serve as a good break from all the Death that’s been happening. She also manages to combine some of ther more divination-oriented items to create glasses through which she can see the others in the Session, just like how Rose has been using crystal balls to see everything around the Session.

This is quickly followed by an unpleasant conversation with Eridan, who still seems hellbent on having a rivalry with Rose, and tries to aid Jade one-up her... Except she refuses and thinks the rifle he’s sending her is completely stupid, and just stops dealing with him.

At this point, it should be interesting to note, through the past few sections of this Act, there has been a Countdown. Leading up to some critical event. Given the build-up, one’d assume it’s the Scratch itself, but then again, for the Trolls, the Scratch already happened and it’s what made Jack appear in their Session, so it’s left ambiguous. And so, we cut to a series of little flashbacks, with the countdown appearing on top of various points in the Timeline of the Trolls after they were forced in the Session, we see them split up slowly, the team falling apart, and it culminates with two specific heartbreaking moments.

One is the unsatisfying fulfilment of when we saw Aradiabot having exploded in one of the previous flashes. She bids farewell to Sollux, sadly, before randomly blowing up, for no apparent reason, that reminds the readers this was a thing that had already been shown, and yet frustratingly giving no more answers than we already had!

The other is Terezi’s grief. She almost seemed unaffected by how she had made Dave split his Timeline to show him about mortality, and yet, as she watches the Doomed Dave on the Quest Bed wake up and get immediately murdered, it’s obvious she cared. She cared a lot.

There’s still comedy, there’s still humor, but Hussie makes it clear that, at this point in the story, he’s not afraid of showcasing the horrors of the situation the Kids and Trolls have been thrust into, and death starts to become more frequent, and more graphic. Much like how the Time Mechanics were built up, so was Death, slowly built up from the looming threat of meteors, to having a teleporting murdered able to appear anywhere and kill anyone at any point in time, with two completely different sets of characters, period. This builds fear and suspense, and added onto how the Troll group is falling apart, and how the countdown is ticking down, creates an uneasy atmosphere. Before, the plot hooks were all about seeing what the Kids would do next. Now? Now it’s about hoping they will all survive.

And so we move to Jade again, who’s using her goggles to examing the Session. She sees Rose in Dave’s Land, speaking to Doc Scratch. She examines how her friends are doing, and ultimately finds Bro’s corpse, and the body of the Doomed Dave. Dave tries to reassure her things are fine, but much like how these last panels have shown the reality of the threat these Kids are facing, this makes Jade begin considering options, about what to do next. Tavros is indisposed and unable to commune with Bec as he suggested, so, instead, what Jade does is... Prototype her Dead Dream Self.

Who is immediately distraught by these events and blows the laboratory at the top of Jade’s tower right off of it. What seemed like a great idea, having Jade take over Bec’s powers and deal with Bec Noir herself, suddenly this little bit of hope is put into question as this happens- And yet we’re teased and not allowed to see why she’s so distraught! No, we briefly see something else...

“The most important character in Homestuck”, watching the miracle of a new beginning, as the Countdown reaches 0. The facepaint, the face, the purple blood, all seems to hint Gamzee, but Gamzee is just the comic relief stoner, so he CAN’T be the most important character, right? There’s something fishy going on, and we’re thrown yet another curve ball, to another of Hussie’s self insertions.

Wearing Lord English’ Coat, teasing us about the fact we still don’t know who Lord English is, but mentioning how it’s so big he can barely even make use of it. He toys with the Audience’s lack of idea to where the story is headed, and recaps the story once again to refresh our memories, because things are about to start getting more and more interesting.

Finally, we’re back to Jade and Jadesprite... And what she says is concerning. Jadesprite mentions having been dead for Years, that she was with her Friends and had forgotten everything bad that Happened, to her, to John, to Prospit. This makes sense since Grandpa took Jade’s body back into the past, and she was in the Laboratory for years, but this makes us wonder who her friends were exactly, and WHERE she was. An Afterlife of sorts it sounds like.

Jade attempts to calm her down, to tell her there’s still things to fight for, that John is alive, but that they need her help, her help to defeat Bec Noir. But Jadesprite is too defeatist. Where Jade’s trying to be optimistic, Jadesprite has lost all her Optimism, she wants to give up, she wants to let go. And this infuriates Jade. It infuriates her because she doesn’t believe she would act like that, because she wants to believe they can still do something. Inevitablity and Pessimism, against Hope and Optimism.

Her sprite’s circular arguments, her talk about how they’re ultimately doomed and nothing matters, goes against Jade’s personality entirely, and it angers her, it angers her absolutely, until Karkat contacts her- After years of ignoring him and not wanting to be in contact with him, this is the one occasion she’s GLAD something distracts her. Jadesprite flies away, and Karkat, for once, is nice to her. He exposes how her arguing like that with another version of herself is akin to Karkat arguing with himself and all the different times he talked to her from different points in time, painting an unpleasant picture of her. He also apologizes, to her, for being such a shithead, and Jade starts to finally take a liking to him. He also mentions that he’s been talking to her from the future, and he has a single request of her right now- To captchalogue the Fourth Wall.

Another Blackout, teasing us about Rose once again, about Death, as we move on to the Exiles again. PM doesn’t want to be the Queen, the previous Queen insists she needs to. We learn about their plan, to destroy the 4 Stations for some unknown reason, and AR already starts to rig them up with explosives. But within the cylinder capsule, still trapped inside, we have the Wayward Vagabond... Who has a nightmare.

A surreal nightmare about the tragedy he saw on the Battlefield, about the monster that killed everyone he was leading during the revolution.

About him blaming himself for the disaster, coming to embody Bec Noir in his nightmare, as the one who led everyone to their death. It should also be noted, the nugget of uranium he ate back in Act 2 has been shown quite a few times already, as if Hussie wanted to refresh people’s minds about this fact.

WV relives in his nightmare, how everyone died in the Battlefield, and is absolutely horrified, but his dream is cut short by- Vriska. Invading his Dream. Just like how Feferi invaded Jade’s, does this imply the Mayor also dreams in Feferi’s Dream Bubbles? Whichever the case, Vriska just states her intention of wanting to take Bec Noir down once again... And then, [S] Wake.

In the past, Bec Noir destroys Derse, as expected, however we zoom into Derse and find something inside we didn’t know about, something highly intriguing. Deep within the catacombs of Derse’s Moon, there’s something, lying dormant...

Aradia’s Dreamself, which we thought didn’t exist, atop a slab of a Quest Bed that shouldn’t be there. This is a mysterious development that raises a lot of questions about the Quest Beds and Aradia- However, the result is immediate. Derse is destroyed, and Aradiabot’s explosion is caused because Aradia’s Dreamself Ascends to God Tier.

And with her powers as the Maid of Time, she quickly freezes Bec Noir in Time, not letting him continue his rampage any further, at least for the time being. Before we can sit too much on this revelation however, we fast-forward, to the Present, and see Vriska waking up from her nap to face Tavros. After finding out she’s been manipulating everyone, she deserves to have Tavros be after her- But as much as Tavros is trying to be a Hero, Vriska still proves to be too much for him to handle.

Tavros dies, murdered by Vriska, with his own lance. And where Bro’s death was the first death of a major character, he was, still, one of the Adults, not one of the characters we’ve been following more closely. Aradiabot died- But we just saw her revive as a God Tier. Tavros however? This is the end of Tavros’ Line, and marks the very first character of the main cast we see dying for good.

Terezi finds his corpse soon after, and we’re shown that yes, he’s 100% dead. And teasing us yet AGAIN with the end of Rose, we have Kanaya once again concerned about her well being. Given she has no answers, she tries to contact Jade from the future, to tell her what’s going on- But in the future, Jade has set up a series of passwords so people from other time frames won’t mess with her, tired of dealing with Time Shenanigans, she manages to keep things linear. Sadly, this means Kanaya still knows nothing about Rose’s fate, but it hints her that she has to start talking to Jade in the past to eventually get to talk to her in the future.

And thanks to this conversation, we learn about one of the biggest details we needed to know regarding SBURB. Jade, as a Space Player, has breeding duties to attend to.

Kanaya has found the key to the captchalogue card for the Matriorb- Which implies she’s supposed to hatch the new Mother Grub in the Meteor, right now. This brings up a talk about how they’re supposed to eventually repopulate their species, however, the Breeding Duties are something else. Kanaya mentions that once the Forge- Jade’s Volcano- is stoked, the Land will change climatically, and she will require to follow a series of steps to clone Frogs. Using Ectobiology equipment, she’s supposed to paradoxify the Frogs in her Land, and mutate them. Of course, given the Frogs are frozen and doing nothing, any attempt to Appearify them will just warp them- So she has to pretty much make plans to track down each Frog at some point, so that she can get their Slime instead of warping them. And through the genetic recombination of the Frogs, they will eventually create the Genesis Frog- The embodiment of the new Universe they will create with SBURB.

With this, we know almost everything we need to know about the Game. How it changes with each Prototyping, how the Black Royalty needs to be defeated before the Reckoning, that the Denizens in each Land are guarding a Hoard of Grist used for something, and finally, that they need to create the Universe by breeding Frogs. It seems arbitrary, but there’s very specific symbology about Tadpoles looking like sperm cells and Amphibians tying to Gnostic currents of thought, but that’s a talk for another day.

A clearer picture of how the Universe is created, and what the Universe is in the world of Homestuck, paired with more concern with Kanaya about Rose, and exacerbated by the way she’s been talking to Doc Scratch- Which she recognizes, as she had a brief encounter with him during her childhood before waking up on Prospit, before everyone else, just like Jade.

Finally, we arrive at [S] Kanaya: Return to the Core. And while everything leading up to this point has been quite heavy, this moment marks a turning point in the entire narrative of the story. Now that Hussie has dangled the threats and danger in front of our faces, it’s time to kick things up a notch.

Kanaya readies to bring the Matriorb to the Core of the Meteor and hatch it. She tells Karkat, and we see that the only ones left around are Karkat, Kanaya, and Sollux and Feferi- Who seem to have been spending an awful lot of time together and are chilling nicely together. However, as Kanaya tries to leave, Eridan interrupts her- As the Prince of Hope, he considers himself the go-to guy about anything regarding Hope. And he considers? Their situation is absolutely Hopeless. He’s going to joing Bec Noir’s side, and wants to offer Feferi, as the Royal of the group, to join him. Of course both her and Sollux are astonished he would even suggest something like that, it’s an obviously awful plan and it’s turning him against everyone else! As such, Eridan and Sollux have a duel...

A duel which, surprisingly, ends up with Sollux being defeated. Up until now Sollux always won, but it would seem that this situation, and the Wand Kanaya made for him, has given him enough confidence to actually overpower Sollux.

Eridan snaps absolutely. There’s nothing left to fight for in his mind, there’s only waiting for their eventual death, or joining the villain. And as Feferi tries to stop him...

She becomes a victim of Eridan’s rampage as well. Kanaya hesitates to go after him, but ultimately, after a staredown between the two, Eridan notices Kanaya’s reason for hesitating to attack him. The Matriorb.

And just like that, Eridan leaves Karkat alone with two corpses, a destroyed Matriorb, and a knocked-out goldblood. In an incredibly short amount of time, two major characters have been taken out, and another has become a noticeable villain. Even with the God Tier stuff, even with Jack around, this is an absolutely crazy twist of events, everyone is dying, things are awful- And yet things are about to get more awful. Karkat is contacted by none other than Doc Scratch, who warns him with these eerie words.

And on top of this? Gamzee contacts Karkat- But his Quirk is completely different. His attitude is dismissive and angry, and we learn, he’s run out of soporific. And now that he’s not stoned? He’s ‘found his calling’, as a descendant of the violent, high blooded Subjugglators. Eridan has snapped, but his snapping comes from the fear, from the fact that he thinks everything is lost and is looking for a way out. Gamzee, here, completely flips his personality, and just for his own enjoyment, and heritage, threatens to track down and kill every single one of the Trolls still left alive.

Karkat is absolutely terrified, and tries to drag Sollux away, to save themselves. Meanwhile, Terezi becomes obsessed with the fact Vriska has murdered Tavros- And becomes blind to the fact there’s another 2, potentially even more dangerous killers on the loose roaming the Meteor.

Before, there was the implication and possibility of the Trolls and the Humans meeting together through some crazy plan, that they may manage to evade or kill Bec Noir. But now everyone is dying. Now everyone is turning against everyone. At this point it suddenly becomes a worry if anyone is even going to survive long enough to see the End of the Act, and the section of the comic the Fans have unofficially dubbed Murderstuck begins. A hopeless and powerful start to the following Arc of the comic, dealing with Terezi’s investigation of the murders, the fear of dying at any point, and the culmination of the Kids’ plans regarding their own Session.

Worse yet? Hussie likes teasing the audience, and Homestuck is a comedy, as dark as things may get. A Black Comedy perhaps at this point, but a Comedy nontheless. And now that the author has shown he’s not afraid to kill off characters, we also return to what John has been doing in the Battlefield since he Ascended- Making it hard to tell when he’s going to flip the script on us again, keeping the reader tense and fearful that their favorite characters will be next.

John finds his Dad’s wallet, and uses his powers to ride his Car through the Battlefield while he catches up to what has been going on with his friends. He contacts Jade for the first time since she entered the Session. Karkat also contacts John in a panic, about how he’s freaking out and how he may die- But when he attempts to contact him back, Temporal Shenanigans make things difficult and instead John contacts Past Karkat, who’s still angry at him. The conversation goes nowhere, and John is left confused about Karkat’s state.

And so we keep moving with Karkat’s absolute terror regarding the situation, and Terezi’s obliviousness to what’s going on. Beaten up by Eridan, and dropped down the stairs, Sollux starts losing teeth, and Karkat tries to contact everyone about the situation, warning Equius and Nepeta, but unable to contact Terezi. Her shades have been left behind and stolen by Gamzee, which makes Karkat assume the worst and thing he’s already gotten her. Meanwhile, Terezi finds Feferi’s corpse- But finds Kanaya’s body has disappeared. A trail of jade blood leads around, and Feferi’s body also has a pair of suspicious bite marks she simply regards as Vriska’s doing again. Unable to see beyond her own feud with Vriska, much to the reader’s concern for her.

And yet, the bite mark and Kanaya’s disappearance, specially considering her early-stablished love for vampire-esque romance novels, and that some goth style Rose has, makes one wonder if there may still be hope for at least one of them. It doesn’t matter however, as Murderstuck continues in full force with the unsettling [S] Equius: Seek the Higb100d.

Equius and Nepeta are spending some quality time together, but Equius expresses his concern about Gamzee. He bids her farewell just in case, and tells her to hide in her room. Of course she can’t just stay put, however, and ends up sneaking through the vent ducts. She starts seeing, messages written in blood, specially in Tavros’ bronze blood- As well as a trail of jade blood leading to a chopped-in-half transportalizer. More mystery about the state of everyone, culminating in Nepeta staring, wide-eyed, outside of a grate...

Before moving back to Equius, and his search for Gamzee. Finally he finds him, having stolen Terezi’s shades, and one of Equius’ bows. He doesn’t recognize him at first with the shades, but soon realizes his mistake when he’s told to Kneel before him. His subservient attitude towards a Highblood, however, proves to be Equius’ biggest flaw.

Strangled to death, and Nepeta, who’s been watching this happen, quickly jumps to try and avenge him- Only for Gamzee to show his most absolutely terrifying side. Not only catching her mid-pounce, but revelling in the scratching of his face and drawing of his blood.

He’s absolutely crazy, and it’s left ambiguous whether he kills Nepeta as well, and as one of the Fandom’s favorite Trolls, this is an absolutely perfect dick move to keep the suspense going. Specially since we switch entirely away from Murderstuck, and back to John, who’s searching around for his parents, while Vriska contacts him.

Vriska’s beginning to feel bad about killing Tavros, and is wondering about her worth as a Troll. She starts to bond with him about the fucked-up nature of Troll Culture, which, while obvious to the reader, has never quite been addressed directly too much. And Vriska seemed like the least likely person to have this realization! The death, the drama, it builds up this section to be incredibly emotional. Sollux finally wakes up, blinded by Eridan, and without his lisp now that his teeth are gone. He’s also stopped hearing the screams of the imminently deceased, which puts him at ease. Him and Karkat confirm Terezi to still be alive, but don’t manage to mention Gamzee is out on a rampage before something happens to her.

And just like that we go back in time to what seems like a random spot in the comic, Dave’s past, speaking with Aradia. Soon enough though, we learn that this is a Dream Bubble, and God Tier Aradia appears before Dave.

He tries to remember when he fell asleep, and ultimately comes to the realization- He’s not asleep. He’s Dead. He’s the Doomed Dave Jack Noir killed. The Dream Bubbles act as a Hub for both the Dreamers and the Dead. He also sees Memories of the Alpha Dave, about him finding out about Bro’s Death, and Aradia pretty much guides him around to adapt to the idea of being Dead. She, however, is not Dead. She’s Alive, for the first time in the Comic, and very much looking forward to staying that way. Curious, how while everyone else is dying, Aradia, the one who started Dead, actually manages to be brought back, more cheerful than ever.

Vriska keeps talking to John. About life on Alternia, and eventually mentions about her Ancestor- Her genetic Ancestor. Trolls never get to meet them, but she found her Journal a long time ago, with her same symbol. Reminiscing about her past, who she looks up to, her dreams, her regrets, it helps make someone like Vriska, who’s been incredibly dubious thus far, into a more sympathetic character. And she encourages John to use his Windy powers creatively to recover the Tumor- And so he does, Drilling a hole straight to the core of the Battlefield.

And immediately after we’re met with Dad and Mom enjoying a nice romantic dinner together, while Bec Noir watches. Much like with Gamzee and Nepeta, this is cut before anything happens, but the implication is highly worrying, specially given John is worried about him still.

To break the tension of what’s going on with all this death, we also begin to learn more about Vriska’s Ancestor, and Ancestors in general. Interjecting excerpts from her Diary, with the slow but inevitable confrontation of the three Murderers in the Meteor.

Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, a powerful Pirate Captain notorious through Alternia, terror of the seas.

Orphaner Dualscar, rival to Mindfang, a powerful feud mirroring Eridan and Vriska’s FLARP campaigns.

The Grand Higblood, High Subjugglator and ruler of the Landwellers, interested in taking Mindfang down, and to whom Dualscar offers some vital pieces of information regarding her fleet and her situation.

Karmic Retribution seems imminent, and just like their Ancestors had a feud, Vriska, Eridan and Gamzee prepare to face off against each other. Mindfang, however, also speaks of someone else. The Neophyte Legislacerator, Redglare.

Tasked to track Mindfang down and bring her to justice, whom Mindfang downplays quite intensely because of being a novice. However, Terezi doesn’t find herself involved in this feud, no...

As she appears, collapsed asleep, and bitten just like Feferi was. No, she cannot participate in this Feud, but there’s someone else who can, and does intervene.

Brought back from the brink of the Dead, like the Undead Rainbowdrinkers she so loves. Feeding on the blood of those around her, and rising up to put a stop to this nonsense.

Finally, a beacon of Hope in the middle of this bleak section of the comic, Eridan is Dead, avenging both Kanaya herself and Feferi, and Gamzee has been kicked off a ciff for the time being. She’s back and more badass than ever, showing us that not all is lost, even among all of this death!

The celebrations are, however, cut immediately as we jump back to Bec Noir.

Kanaya is alive... But Mom and Dad are not. It’d be hilarious seeing Jack accessorize any other time, but seeing him toy with the others’ belongings while two of the Kids’ Parents lie down dead on the ground is absolutely awful. Furthermore, he’s not done with his rampage. He wants to go after John- But the windy thing is messing with his canine sense of smell. He also wanted to take Jade out, but Bec’s instincts make him unable to harm her- And so he commissions one of his minions to take her down, who in turn, tells the Courtyard Droll to kill her. We can simply not be THAT glad that Kanaya is back, everyone else is still in grave danger.

This insecurity makes the entirety of this section very nerve-wracking- And now that people are starting to die more and more, we’re also starting to see more of an use for the Dream Bubbles Feferi created.

We also see how Aradia managed to get to the Bubbles- Keeping Jack frozen in time, angering him, she made his First Guardian powers begin to act up. And just like that, as he lunged to try and get her? She used his flickering body as a portal to the Green Sun itself, right in the middle of the Furthest Ring.

We learn more about one of the Aradiabots as well. One who faced Jack, and got tangled up by Lil Cal, one Jack took from Bro as a trophy- And tangled, she was struck by a meteor and landed on Alternia. As such, a genetic code made by Tavros (t1ck), Aradia (t0ck), Vriska (8r8k), Terezi (H34DS), and a doomed timeline version of Gamzee that went on a rampage in the Session (honk HONK), were mixed by the Black Queen in the Frog Temple to create Doc Scratch.

It’s an interesting detail we’re shown this, how he was made from Lil Cal and a Cue Ball, how an apparently random version of Gamzee completed the gentic code. But whatever significance this has, it merely serves as a segue to visit Doc Scratch briefly- Who talks about Spades Slick about to come over pay him a visit, greeting him, and quickly returning to the chat he was having with Rose, the chat we saw Jade briefly glimpse before, the same situation leading up to Rose’s black out.

Finally, the intensity of this last section, is broken by some long-awaited answers. Doc Scratch is cryptic, but Rose gets some intriguing information. The Scratch finally becomes a more specific event- It’s a literal Scratch in a Construct in the game, which will release enough energy to cause a Hard Reset of the Timeline. A new beginning, with slightly different values. A new chance to Win the game, but at the price of total Oblivion, unless Rose found a way to keep existing afterwards. Doc Scratch insists that the Tumor has enough power to blow the Green Sun, and comments to Rose that she has a 50% chance of Ascending to God Tier- To which Rose deduces there are two Quest Beds, and only one of them will let her Ascend. We’ve actually already seen it too- Aradia’s Quest Bed, bringing new possibilities to the table.

We also learn more about God Tier itself- And the fact it provides Conditional Immortality. A God Tier will only be able to die if they are killed, and even then, only if their death would count as Heroic or Just. Rose is hesitant about the plan in aiding Doc Scratch- However, he ensures she shouldn’t be. He’s been reborn to pave the way for Lord English in countless universes, and has never failed. Rose helping him or not is irrelevant- He is already there. It’s inevitable. But in the same way, Bec Noir is a more unpredictable Wildcard than his Master, so taking him down is a priority. This confirms us that even though he’s been referred to as a Demon, Bec Noir is not Lord English, and keeps the speculation going about who he may be, if we have seen him yet.

Finally, Scratch implies Rose’s Magic may not be as Magic as it may appear. Rather, he implies it to be an innate power, not something granted by her wands. Rose is the Seer, she seeks answers, and she has to learn she other ways to get them. For example, Jade’s Cueball, which she manages to see through with her Seer vision. It tells her to contact Jade- And so she does, which leads her to becoming aware of her mother’s death. Regretful. Resentful. She would’ve liked to make amends, to find her before something like this happened, but was so busy with all the planning and magic that she simply did not.

Jade is concerned, as Doc Scratch joins their conversation, and as she sees Rose’s regret. She doesn’t know how to react, and eventually, the question about the Horrorterrors being benevolent or not comes up once more. Doc Scratch encourages Rose to ask her Cue Ball... And as she gazes, the answer comes in Eldritch Tongues. Rose blacks out of Kanaya’s screen, and she goes completely off the deep end.

Rose gives in to the Dark Gods in her thirst for revenge, and goes Grimdark. And just like that, she blasts off towards Skaia to go kill Bec Noir herself- A worrying prospect given we know Jack reaches the Troll Session. Finally, the worries are justified, Rose has been corrupted by her own Dark Magic, and is going to do something reckless. And of course, Hussie takes this suspenseful moment to tease the Fanbase, and tells us how he’s going to directly interfere with the story, for just a moment, but enough to change everything, in some reduced space of just one yard in length. Of course we have no idea what he’s even talking about or if he’s serious, but it does help defuse a bit of the tension.

We go back to John. After drilling through the Battlefield, he’s found the Tumor- A giant Yin-yang colored growth with a countdown within. He captchalogues it quickly before returning to the surface.

Back in the surface, John encounters WV once more, as well as the Robot Bunny, who hands him its Hammer, as well as the Courtyard Droll, who’s apparently just tagging along. He reads a second note by Jade’s mysterious pen pal, who speaks about their Grandma, and signs the letter as ‘J’. The story is teasing yet another character again, but at this point it is hard to imagine how they’d even fit into this story!

Tumor in hand, John decides to lift one of the fallen Dersite Battleships on the Battlefield, and send WV, the Bunny and CD on a quest to deliver the Tumor to Rose- Leaving himself without any computing device in the process, as he hands Dad’s entire wallet. And just like that, a deep darkness falls upon the Battlefield, which John goes to investigate, while Vriska bids him farewell for the time being, given he’s being blacked out from the monitor as he goes into the darkness.

Rose descends upon the spot where Mom an Dad were murdered, surrounded by the Inky Blackness, and tracks Jack down, There are many murdered Carapacians, as well as hidden survivors. And through the halls of the castle, we find a few interesting pieces of foreshadowing. Four red curtains, then a blue and red curtain hiding a replica of the Beat Mesa that needs to be Scratched. And beyond, 6 Green Curtains leading to a white platform. There’s also four Tapestries, symbolic of the 4 Kids, talking about They who Wait for the Heroes to arrive. Interesting tid-bits, but overshadowed by the fact Rose soon bumps into John- And unable to speak with him as she can only speak in tongues, leads him back up to where their parents lie, dead.

And in front of them also, there’s Bec Noir, waiting for the two. John realizes the gravity of the situation, and both Rose and John prepare to fight- Just as Jack teleports behind John and stabs him through the chest. He collapses immediately, and Rose goes on a furious rampage to try and take him down.

The sudden cut of the music, the immediate defeat even with his God Tier Powers, the fact John just drops right there and then unceremoniously, is yet another blunt reality check of how powerful of a foe they are facing up against. But there’s no time to grieve for John- As Dave finds his dead Bro in John’s Land. He tells Terezi, however, that he’s not sad, but there’s obviously something eating away at him. On top of that, AR is bidding him farewell, making him mix sentences and lose track of what he’s doing. AR prepares to blow up the Stations, and Terezi begins to vent to Dave about Vriska.

This is starting to feel, once again, like wrapping up the Act, but there’s also still a lot of other plot threads left. Terezi is expressing self doubt, about facing Vriska, about their rivalry. We also find confirmation that Nepeta is dead, adding her to the tally. But just as Terezi heads to face her? Year 2 of Homestuck is officially over, and in yet another little Meta tease from the author, Hussie chooses this spot to have ‘Disc 1′ of Homestuck to be officially over.

With the aesthetic of a Game, it only makes sense there’d be discs- But without the Disc, we can not control the characters in flashes anymore, merely watch them walk around. Terezi falls down a trapdoor and starts to get teased by Gamzee from the shadows- Given her old FLARPing outfit and Plush Dragon, teased with notes, manipulating and building her up for the final confrontation with Vriska.

She also manages to find Disc 2- But it gets Scratched. A nod, a hint, to the incoming Scratch, a tease to how close we’re getting to this climatic moment.

Still, Terezi prepares to Ascend to meet with Vriska, while we try to make use of the Scratched Disc- Which begins to glitch the comic itself and the flashes. To build up the rivalry between Terezi and Vriska, we learn more about their Ancestors- And how Mindfang, underestimating Redglare, lost her fleet, an eye, and an arm to her freakish fire-glaring Dragon Lusus, Pyralspite. We also learn how, during her trial, she Mind-Controlled the audience of the Trial and forced them to hang Redglare. Mentioning it to be curious how there’d be so many Lowbloods, as if it was all just some sort of highblood spectacle, making it easy for her to break free, and facing the judge-monstrosity known as His Honorable Tyranny.

Later, she’d meet the Expatri8, Equius’ Ancestor, to fix her arm, and learned through a prophetic vision from the Cue Ball about the Summoner- A Bronzeblood that’d be born in the future, and take control of Pyralpsite, trying to lead a rebellion to free the Lowbloods. One who’d become her Lover, and one who’d end up taking her life eventually. We see, in these stories, the Karmic undertones flowing through the stories of the Trolls and their rivalries, how they’re paralleled, and inverted. Like a never ending cycle.

Everything is ready. Terezi faces off against Vriska, and tells her that she’s seen with her powers- If she faces off against Bec Noir, she’ll lead him to the Meteor, and everyone will die. Vriska dismisses her, but Terezi is serious. She challenges her to a coin flip. If she stays, or goes, decided by Heads or Scratch. Vriska laughs, she’s the Thief of Light! She has ALL of the Luck. But as Terezi mentioned before- Luck doesn’t matter. Does it? She flips, a tense moment about the outcome and Vriska manipulating Luck...

Just as the Flash glitches to the point of being unable to continue. As a little addendum, I have seen many people try the ‘Glitched Game’ aesthetic to varying results, but Hussie is on POINT on how these sections look.

With the Disc Scratched, we’re told we’ll need someone able to heal a disc Scratch- A Scratch Doctor, if you will.

And thus begins the [o] Section of Act 5 Act 2. In which Doc Scratch, while he’s reparing the disc, takes over the narrative and begins to explain things, rather than following the story normally. It should be noted, the sudden narrative shift was forced by a Time Constraint regarding the End of Act 5 Act 2, but while it’s a strange and jarring shift, it becomes one of the most iconic moments of Act 5, as this smug asshole replaces Hussie and begins to show us shit. Additionally, now on the new Homestuck.com website, the banner is added on top- But back in the old MSPA website, the banner with the title of the Website was replaced by a banner with extra stuff that happens off-panel.

It is a shift in narrative perspective, but because it is Doc Scratch who narrates it, how unbearably smug and verbose he can get is played for a joke, which helps lighten up the pace. And this section of the story works to bring Plot Threads to a closure leading to the very End of the Act. So much like Doc Scratch, I will rush slightly through this section, shall we?

Left with such a monumental cliffhanger, Scratch begins by telling us how he thinks the events would go. And obviously, manipulating Light? Vriska cannot lose the Flip. She would always win, and as such, she’d leave to find Jack. To all of this, on the top panel, Slick is messing with Scratch’s house and fucking shit up, too.

And to talk about Vriska’s Duel with Jack, we first begin with Rose’s Duel. And while she held up well against Jack, ultimately, she died, and John came back to life. Obviously, we’ve seen John initiating the Scratch at the beginning of Act 5, he couldn’t die like that- But for it worked a charm as a short-term point of suspense and grief.

Just as Terezi predicted, Jack follows the trail Vriska left from the Meteor, and destroys everything and everyone, presenting Terezi and Karkat’s corpses to Vriska, to tease her. And so Round two against Jack begins, with Vriska rolling her impossibly lucky roll as she did with the Black King, and powering up with an Ancestral Awakening.

Like this, Jack would meet his match, and end up defeated by the Thief of Light. And meanwhile, Spades Slick, burning down Scratch’s apartment and fucking everything up, meets his demise at the hands of the Felt as well-

But, this is not a favorable outcome. With everyone else in the Meteor Dead? Such an outcome is not one the Alpha Timeline would deem as adequate. And Terezi knew this.

This Transition showcases beautifully, exactly how Terezi’s powers work. She cannot alter the result of the coin flip. She knows Vriska will win regardless. But as she knows.

Luck simply doesn’t matter.

And just like with this Timeline, we also see Slick’s death be an unfavorable Timeline- And we go back to the Alpha, where Snowman arrives and saves Slick from his fate.

Vriska collapses, and Karkat, Kanaya and Sollux arrive- Trailed after by Gamzee.

We see, one last message Vriska sent to John. She feels that defeating Jack will be something that will redeem her. She sent John the code for her dice set, encouraged him to revive soon thanks to his God Tier, and told him to kiss Rose to revive her Dream Self before it’s too late. She also mentions about going on a date... But as we know, she has just been stabbed through the back. John’s Judgement Clock doesn’t tip towards Heroic or Just, and he rises, ready to kiss Rose.

Now that Snowman and Slick are in the same room, things get heated and soon they start to make out- To which Scratch shoos Snowman away and changes the view of the top banner to something less scandalous, to Jade’s Land, after she’s stoked the Forge and talked with Echidna, tagging along with Dave to find the Frogs, before being attacked by Jack.

Vriska’s Judgement Clock ticks- And just at the last second, Jack smashes it. It tips towards Just, ensuring Vriska’s death sticks- Albeit whether her Death would count as Just by normal standards, or if Slick influenced her Death, is left intentionally ambiguous. Scratch, tired of Slick’s bullshit, beats him up, making a mess of the rest of the panels of the story, and tells him that he has to go Kill Snowman.

At the same time, on the top banner, the fight with Jack ends up with Jack warping Jade’s bullets through him, killing Dave, and thus Rose and Dave’s Dream Selves are saved and awakened on Derse at the same time.

Karkat makes sure to contact John about the final plans regarding the end of the Session- He’ll need Rose’s Needlekind Specibus, and the Quills of Echidna, something Jade would get from her Denizen, strong enough to Scratch the Beat Mesa. The problem is that now Dave and Rose have lost a Spare Life- And as such, if they detonate the Tumor to blow the Green Sun up, they will also die for good. Whichever of the two does it, is doomed for good. Jade has plans to save herself and John from the Scratch, but they’re vague. And Karkat has been told the explosion from the Tumor will be big enough to act as a Beacon to meet up with someone- Still vague, given Jade nows things in the future, having Dreamed in the Bubbles and hatched a plan to ensure as many people as possible’s safety.

And with these last facts set up, Doc Scratch allows us to parse through a series of ‘Choose your Own Path’ panels while he deals with another interruption. Between all that Karkat has just said, and the implication that Karkat just did something to Gamzee, the audience is left wanting to know how it will all come together- And allowed to choose whatever panels they’re the most interested in.

As such, there’s a series of paths to follow.

We see the mission John sent WV, CD and the Bunny to complete. CD tries to steal John’s Wallet with The Tumor, but the Bunny recovers the Tumor in time. WV is left trapped in the ship and ends up Exiled from the Session at last, the Bunny reaches Derse to deliver the Tumor, and CD gets scolded because he forgot his task was to Kill Jade.

We follow Vriska’s Ghost meeting with John- Except it happens to be a John Ghost. The Ghost of the Timeline Terezi fucked up, killed by his Denizen. Vriska tries to get along with him and go on a date, but that far back, he didn’t even know her. We also learn John chose to die to the Denizen- He was given a Choice, about how he was in a Doomed Timeline and everything was going to go wrong, so he could live and continue as such, or die and ensure things would be corrected.

Jadesprite is in the Battlefield, alone and sad, when we see a wounded Davesprite appear- He was not dead after all. He’s also carrying the whole Royal Deringer, not just a broken version. He went to see Hephaestus, his Denizen, and fixed the sword. He tries to encourage Jade, and she warps the sword away to Derse.

We see a few minor stories- Gamzee flirting with Tavros, Nepeta and Jaspersprite talking, some character buildinng, ironically, for already dead characters. We see Nannasprite talking to John’s Neighbour, about her Childhood, how she was raised by a wicked pastry baroness, how she vanished one day... And how the pastry baroness was, in fact, not a Human.

We follow Dave and Rose, a little flashback about Dave having nightmares, before realizing he’s asleep. Rose seems to not want to tell him exactly what’s going on, and Dave eventually figures it out- They were talking about who was going to go die setting up the Tumor. Dave refused to let Rose go until Rose acceded. The sword Jadesprite warped was taken and used to cut Derse’s Chain, sending the moon through the Furthest Ring- But just then, Rose knocked Dave out and rode the Moon herself. Dave resigns himself, he’s Asleep, but Rose isn’t, she’s on Derse’s Moon travelling through his Dream Bubble. She’s going to go and he can’t just wake up- Until the Draconian Dignitary appears, physically on the moon, to try and kill Rose. He stabs Dave, which wakes his Dream self wake up- And still seeing the Moon in the sky, rushes towards it to help her.

We see Jade finishing up the Frog Breeding, talking to Kanaya and Karkat. She’s gone see Echidna one last time- She helped her remember the location of the Last Frog they needed, a special Frog Karkat and Kanaya never found and thought wouldn’t matter. Echidna refreshed Jade’s mind, showcasing it as an event that happened long into the past, a Frog that appeared momentarily when she was young, and is implied to have been the trigger of her waking up on Prospit. In exchange for remembering though, Echidna requested her to bring every other Denizen, Consort, their Lands everything, with her, beyond the Scratch.

And from this, Karkat starts to get nervous. He realizes he made a mistake, when breeding the Frog, they rushed it, and didn’t make a healthy Frog. All of their problems, were caused by a faulty Genetic Code. Karkat gave the Genesis Frog Cancer.

And furthermore, Karkat realizes... It manifested as something specific. Dersites hate Frogs, but Jack has been murdering Jade’s frogs a lot. He knows what’s going to happen. He realized what everything is leading up to. Jack is the Cancer. And when the Countdown reaches 0, he will kill the Genesis Frog himself, destroying their Universe.

But while Karkat blames himself, we also see Gamzee, sober, murderous, talking to Dave in the past- Dave who teases him about the ICP video. For a split second we also see the ICP video that Gamzee found blasphemous was sent by Betty Crocker’s Media Account to Dave... And because of it, Gamzee claims to have used his powers to make their Universe Terminal. Focusing his Nightmare Chucklevoodoos to summon the Harlequin Doll that caused John to have nightmares about clowns, and that ultimately led to the ridiculous outfit that made Jack kill the Queen. The most important character in Homestuck indeed.

These few pages have an astonishing amount of information, and shocking revelations about what’s going to happen. But they’re ultimately interrupted by what Doc Scratch has gone to check- And what he finds is a young, Aradia-looking rustblood, slamming a Fifth Wall showing Hussie on the other side. As if things couldn’t get even more confusing.

Doc Scratch turns off the screen, and scolds her, before starting a Lecture about the Troll Race. It mentions that originally, the Ancestors of the Trolls were a group of SBURB Players, who Scratched the game. Trolls were a peaceful race. But after Scratching, in the new reality they made, Doc Scratch became the First Guardian, and manipulated their entire species to be more violent, prepare them for the game. We learn about the story of the Sufferer- Karkat’s Ancestor, a preacher that had visions of the peaceful potential of Trolls, who was ultimately killed for his preaching. Of the Dolorosa, Kanaya’s Ancestor, and a Jadeblood who abandoned her position in the Brooding Caverns to raise the mutant-blooded, lusus-less Sufferer, and was ultimately captured and sold to slavery, to Mindfang no less- The same slave Dualscar would later murder to ignite their rivalry.

We learn of the Disciple, Nepeta’s Ancestor, in a relationship with the Sufferer, and who kept his teachings alive after his death. The E%ecutor Darkleer, who was supposed to kill her, took pity on her, and was thus exiled as the Expatri8. We learn of the Psiioniic, Sollux’s Ancestor, a follower of the Sufferer who was captured and used as a living battery for the Empress’ Battleship- And of Her Imperious Condescension, the Empress, Feferi’s Ancestor, who saw her whole empire collapse after the Vast Glub.

And then we learn of the Handmaid- The young Troll he’s scolding. Who arrived to Alternia after everyone was already dead. Scratch would raise this Troll to become a weapon to instigate fear and violence, to serve him and Lord English, cursed with immortality until a new subject was found- And eventually it was. Her Imperious Condescension would, ultimately, return to her Dead World after the Vast Glub, and confront the Handmaid. Highest and Lowest bloods. And the Handmaid would be granted death at last, while the Condesce was forced into servitude of Lord English.

But while these explanations are happening? The young Handmaid turns the screen with Hussie back on- And he breaks through into Scratch’s Apartment.

He speaks of how the verbose asshole is being creepy and long-winded again, and pretty much goes there just to beat the shit out of him. Hussie has done Meta things before- But this is the most Meta he’s gotten yet, to the point of actually tearing a leg off of Doc Scratch and watching him collapse on the ground! He seems to just be an empty Puppet while he’s around- Which is an interesting fact, as if Hussie’s the puppeteer that Scratch tried to break free from, and now without strings, merely collapses on the ground. Hussie recovers the already repaired Disc 2 of Homestuck, and the Handmaid escapes... But she’s beckoned by a voice. Who shouts at her how she expects to escape.

When he is already there. The first glimpse we get at Lord English’s, his two eyes. Finally we’re back on track, and we get to see a showdown with the last surviving Trolls- Karkat pushing everyone else away, and taking care of Gamzee himself... By pacifying him. Subverting expectations and calming the murderous clown in a completely unexpected way.

Finally, everything is set up for the Ending of the Act. All but one thing. Karkat pesters Jade one last time, about to confess he maybe likes her- When she interrupts him. The Scratch has begun and the sky is weird, but there’s something else in the sky. “Shaving Cream?” she wonders, before her connection and Karkat’s cuts completely. The Courtyard Droll descends, with a bomb made with explosives and all of John’s Dad’s Shaving Cream- And detonates it in front of Jade. The tadpole of the Genesis Frog is cast down into Jade’s Volcano, and she dies on the spot.

Jack becomes enraged by this, even though CD did exactly what Jack wanted him to do. And so, we finally reach the End of Act 5...

[S] Cascade. The culmination of every plan and plot thread woven through Act 5. The animation that broke the Internet. This 13-minute behemoth actually crashed several websites when it first dropped, and for a good reason.

Cascade marks the climax of Act 5, and it’s a wonderfully constructed, fast paced sequence of events. John initiates the Scratch and fights monsters trying to stop him. Jack kills CD for killing Jade- And yet we STILL do not see blood in his hand. This fact is driven home by a quick shift to Jack at the Critcal Moment of the countdown, using his Red Miles to start tearing through the Genesis Frog. This happens as the Flash window expands to become bigger, to a lot of people’s amazement. We see this manifest in the Future with the Exiles, as the Red Miles start to fill the sky... And the White King finally appears, reuniting with the White Queen- As a final, wilted lily appears, set to open in 10 seconds.

Jack carries Jade’s body to her Quest Bed- Just like Bec carried Jade to her Bec when she fell asleep, and then rushes into the Frog Temple. We follow its timeline, and then... Jack Noir comes out of the Frog Temple. Murders both the White King and Queen, and then threatens PM with the same fate. However, AR starts to blow the Stations up, one by one, and Jack’s attention shifts to him! AR hesitates in the last second, unable to blow the Mayor’s Station while he’s still trapped inside, and he’s promptly decapitated. At long last, the foreshadowing is closed. Jack enters the station with his powers, and rips the Uranium the Mayor ate earlier in Act 2 right out of his stomach. This stains his hand with blood, and with the Station Powered, he uses the machinery within to transport himself to the Trolls’ Session.

And then, the music mellows down, and we move onto Derse, Dave and Rose. Dave caught up with the Moon, and helped Rose kill DD before he could do anything to her. This means, however, that both Rose and Dave are going to go through the Suicide Mission together. They descend to the core of the moon to set the bomb up- And find slabs with the Time and Light Symbols on them. Just like Aradia’s Quest Bed in her Moon. The Tumor is set up- And it opens up to show machinery inside, two tubes. One Red, representing the Human Universe, dying because of Jack’s actions. One Blue, representing the Troll Universe, zooming into Alternia, and then, into Alternia’s Green Moon.

Just as ordered by Scratch, and wielding his white gun, Snowman tells Slick to do it, and Slick shoots at her. A Cue Ball Bullet, right through the Heart of the 8 Ball. And once sunk, the Universe begins to collapse, as was once mentioned in the Intermission. Both Red and Blue Universes start to die, powering up the Tumor- It makes sense after all. To take out a Sun twice the Mass of the Universe, you need a Bomb powered by Two Universes. Right?

We move away once more, with a brief glimpse of PM seeing Jade die and finding WV with a gaping hole through his stomach, before zooming in on Jade once more. Hummingbirds gather, just like John’s fireflies during his Ascension- But before anything happens, we move to the Battlefield. There’s not enough defense portals, Meteors are raining, and Davesprite and Jadesprite gaze upon a huge meteor headed their way. It’s the End, and they know it... But just then, Jade Ascends. And as her Dream Self was alive, in Jadesprite, Jade merges with her, and Ascends as the Witch of Space- Along with a pair of stylish fuzzy Dog Ears, and paired with badass First Guardian Powers.

Jade immediately uses her new powers to shrink the incoming meteor and save Davesprite- And promptly rides a Prospitian Battleship, before shrinking the Battlefield, taking it with her. PM drags WV away, despairing as the only one left, staring at the Red Miles in the sky- Before spotting WV’s White Queen Ring. Jade warps John to her side, after he’s done Scratching the Beat Mesa. Dave and Rose contemplate their last moments. And then, the action kicks up a notch.

One by one, Jade shrinks the planets, as she promised Echidna, to take everything with her, and everything starts to flip quickly. Dave and Rose, the Tumor, and the two Universes dying, the Beat Mesa ascending, PM slowly putting on the ring, a crescendo of events while the Countdown remains in plain sight- And then Jade pulls out the Fourth Wall she took from the laboratory earlier in the Act. With the Scratch happening, everything is slowly being erased, and the entire adventure flashes backwards on the screen, freezing on that one moment when Gamzee was said to be the Most Imporrtant Character. He’s holding Cal in his lap, and talking to Doc Scratch.

And all he has to say is a single word.

S u c k e r s .

The Tumor detonates, but the Green Sun is nowhere to be seen. No, they are in an empty void, and suddenly... The Green Sun bursts outwards. Twice the Mass of the Universe, the Tumor wasn’t powered by two Universes to blow the Green Sun up- It created it instead. Scratch said it had the power to do so... He never said it would destroy the Green Sun. They also, indeed, travelled to its location- Moments before it was created. Manipulated, tricked, fooled. And the explosion the Trolls were told they’d see? The creation of the Green Sun, not its Death.

The Trolls gaze upwards at the Sun and Sollux overexerts himself bringing the Meteor closer, half-killing himself- Although also half-unblinding himself in the process. Bec Noir stares at something appearing from the Frog Pad he once came from, a white shade of himself, ready to throw down. PM, wearing the White Queen’s Ring, and carrying WV’s body.

And meanwhile, just as Aradia once did, emerging from the ruins of her moon, both Rose and Dave emerge triumphantly from the depths of the Green Sun, Ascended to God Tier, rising to meet Aradia and Sollux already waiting for them there.

Finally, the closing shots of the flash. Jade enlarges the Fourth Wall as everything about their story continues to be erased, and finally, she shatters right through it, escaping the Session before the Scratch is completed.

And so, the curtains close. Cascade is amazing, visually, musically, and the way it’s constructed is simply beautiful. The story it conveys, the converging of so many different things at the same time, the way it wraps up the Kids’ and Trolls’ Sessions flawlessly, but leaves other plot threads open to continue afterwards. One of the crowning achievements of the story, with an incredibly satisfying delivery, a grand Finale to the Session. The Universes are Dead, the Scratch has reset everything, but all 4 Kids are alive and God Tier, PM has been powered up like Jack, the Angel to his Demon.

And yet, so many questions remain. About who J was in John’s birthday present. About what’s going to happen next, with the Meteor on the Green Sun, and Jade’s Ship through the Forth Wall.

But most importantly, a detail many may dismiss in this triumphant instant.

The Troll Universe has been Destroyed.

As the Code foretold. The Universe has Died. And now, the Demon shall come.

Before Act 6 begins, and after the culmination of everyone’s plan to Scratch and Survive, we see the culmination of someone else’s plan coming to fruition.

The clock Ticks and Tocks, before stopping, and soon, green flesh begins to expand from inside Doc Scratch. He’s described himself, smugly, as an Excellent Host before, but this takes on the literal meaning of that statement. Lord English is summoned through Him, and that’s why he needs to Die.

Hands into claws, muscles bulging out, and his missing leg replaced by a peg leg, ending in the tip of a Pool Cue. It only makes sense, Scratch is the Cue Ball, the Felt is the rest of the balls, and now, Lord English, appears as the pool Cue, the hand behind everyone else, deciding where and what to strike. And meanwhile, we see a glimpse of Jade’s ship breaking through the 4th Wall, and headed right to another 4th Wall in front of it!

English dons his coat, and Doc Scratch’s head slowly shatters, to reveal his true form.

A monstrous, skull-like head, which unsettlingly resembles Lil Cal, which Honks terrifyingly- The Vast Honk Gamzee’s religion prophesized. He then uses his Cairo Overcoat to encase himself in a Time-travelling sarcophagus, and goes back in time to toy with the Universe as he pleases.

This Flash is the first look we get regarding Lord English and his fearful visage, and while he’s already been the indirect hand behind a lot of the events the characters go through, we finally can give an appearance to the Name. We finally see what we’re up against

The genius of his reveal, however, comes in the foreshadowing of the genetic code used for Scratch. t1ck, t0ck, as the clock ticks away in Scratch’s office. 8r8k H34DS, as Scratch’s head is torn open. And honk HONK, as English releases his war cry. A moment of hope and ecstasy such as Cascade, followed by a moment of fear and despair.

Where Acts 1, 2 and 3 set up the Sessions, Acts 4 and 5 narrate an epic adventure spanning two Universes, paradoxes a-plenty, death and existentialism, hope and optimism. The Heroes become literal Gods, the story goes unexpected places. And yet this crazy narrative still manages to keep a coherent storyline, through all those time hoops and uncertainty, a gripping tale that makes you want more. They have overcome their first major challenge- Surviving the problems caused by their Sessions, and resetting everything. So the only question left now is.

With the expectations the story has set thus far... And the Scratch having been successful... What comes next? Where could this tale possible go?

Well, we’ll see about that in Part 4!

#Homestuck #HSE #Hiveswap #Hussie #Upd8 #Fanon #Canon #long post #LONGPOST #Block this on mobile pls

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fanfics-andstuff · 4 years ago

Text

Let Lyria Drink Her Cocoa and Sleep

72 hours.

They had been awake for:

Seventy.

Two.

Hours.

Lyria Eclair Graham de Vanily, Echo Olympia Butterfly, Octavian Marcus Tabullo, and Flint Donovan Vance had been flooded with paperwork. Lyria with the paperwork from the Underworld, Seas, Olympus, needs for the Chaos Army, helping with the war against the Titans, training Godly descendants from Camp Half-Blood and Jupiter, Head Counselor duties, dealing with the Graham de Vanily, Sunset, Celestia, and Evergreen businesses in the Wizarding Mortal World, classes and homework for Hogwarts. Echo with the paperwork from training the Chaos Army, helping with the war against the Titans, training Godly descendants from Camp Half-Blood and Jupiter, Head Counselor duties, dealing with the Butterfly, Du Pont, Luna, and Cargill businesses in the Wizarding Mortal World, classes and homework for Hogwarts. Flint handled both of the Praetor duties and paperwork and trained the Godly descendants at Camp Jupiter. While Octavian handled both of the Centurion duties and paperwork.

Lyria and Echo were on their last legs now as they struggled to get to the Great Hall of Hogwarts. Quickly chugging on her tenth Diet Coca-Cola, Lyria disposed of the can using her powers and flopped down onto the end of the Hufflepuff table. Echo ate her 50th brownie and sat down onto the end of the Ravenclaw table. Even though both of them were sorted in Gryffindor, they felt more at home with the other houses.

A few more minutes passed by but they felt like seconds to the demiwitch and deminymphwitch in disguise, they ate chips (Hot Cheetos for Lyria and Takis for Echo) and drank hot cocoa. It was silent in the usually loud Great Hall, since all of the occupants were staring at the two girls.

Lyria and Echo smiled for the first time in seventy-two hours and continued eating.

"Hey you two! Wow!" Reyna's energetic voice was like a slap against their faces, almost causing the poor girls to drop her life saving foods. Even through the Realistic Scene, both girls looked absolutely terrible. She sent her sisters in all but blood a pitiful pout, ignorant to the rush of her cohort mates heading to the Realistic Scene. The mass majority of them gave their leaders a surprised look, wondering if pigs will start flying next at the sight of their terrible state. There wasn’t some tension by the others, no thanks to the recent incident between Octavian’s recent ex-girlfriend, May Sophia and Lyria and Echo's 'supposed' stealing and bullying. Though, no one at Camp Jupiter nor New Rome bought Sophia’s claims and went to Lyria and Echo’s side. Madeline ‘May’ Sophia damaged her reputation when she published the Cordelia Pamphlet that she admitted to having an affair with a married man 10 years her senior for a year.

"Mmhm..." Lyria warmed her cheek with the mug, hoping that the brunette could take a hint and let her indulge in the diabetic level of sugar. She almost didn't feel Reyna's fingers smoothing against her unusually pale forehead, brushing away the dark face framing pieces with a frown on her face. The brunette then placed a hand on Echo's flushed cheek, shaking her head like a worried mother hen.

"Lyria, Echo, you two don't look very well. You guys haven't been well for the last three days. I think you should stay here at camp and sleep..." Reyna was prepared for Lyria's spiteful snort and Echo’s eye roll, countering the blue eyed girls glare with her cold dark brown ones.

"I need to sign more paperwork." The noir haired pursed her lips childishly and was followed by, “Me too.” from the red head and ignored Reyna's gaping face before going in for the hot cocoas.

With a speed that could rival a blue hedgehog, Reyna swiped the mugs out of Lyria and Echo's hands. The girls reacted quite late, blinking a few times with confusion before realising what happened.

"Reyna-aaaaaa..." Lyria flopped tiredly on the table, Echo’s chibi tears running down her eyes whilst she pathetically reached out for her saving grace. "Ple-eeeeeease..."

"No, I can tell that both of you have had enough of this." Reyna's frown deepened at Echo's cries.

"Let GDV and BB have their hot cocoas, Reyna." Octavian whooped coming out of his office looking the same as Lyria and Echo, joined by a few agreements by Emilie Jade, Bernice Gonzalez, and Nala Bank. "They look no better than, I." His usual honey blonde hair was reduced to a lighter shade of blonde, his bright teal eyes was a much darker hue, his tan face was pale, and he had dark bags under his eyes.

Reyna simply observed with her lips pursed. Wheels geering through her head as she evaluated everything that took place right now.

Lyria, Echo, and Octavian were too tired to give a damn.

"I’m pretty sure that you three haven’t been sleeping because of your paperworks. Now, I’m going to make sure that the three of you get proper sleep." Reyna chuckled and ate up the sight of three Godly descendants’ torn faces.

Protests were heard all around the First Cohort and Great Hall.

The three of them were so tired, they were sure that they were delusional.

"Well~!" Flint’s voice suddenly piped up from the doorway, walking in like a dead looking model. "Guess that I’m not setting a good example like the three of you." he snickered when Echo flipped out her middle finger at him, refusing to lift her head up from the table, while Lyria made a slicing motion with her thumb across her throat, and Octavian throwing a pillow at his best friend. The rest of his former cohort mates looked at Flint and understood why he had said that: his sandy light brown hair was dead looking and messy, his amber eyes was more of a dark yellow, and his normally medium brown skin tone was deathly pale.

A few others giggled as well whilst Flint dramatically fell to his knees, yelling how he was so 'wounded' and couldn't believe that they in the world had the balls to do that to him!

He made way to Lyria, encasing his hand over hers, beckoning her to lower her finger with a playful tut. Lyria shivered at the feel of his gold ring pressed against her warm skin.

"Now, now, it's rude to pull a gesture like that.” Reyna added, “No matter how much Flint deserves it," Reyna ignored her best friend's betrayed 'Hey!' and laughed warmly. Seeing Lyria woke him up more than the pathetic cup of coffee in his hand. He felt his heart skip a beat when she slowly lifted her head up to meet his gaze.

Bluebell eyes met sparkling amber.

"Can I toss you out of the windows instead?" Her tone was so innocent, it was like she was asking if she could borrow a pencil. Flint giggled out a 'No', his smile never leaving and squeezed her hand. Marinette dropped her head back down to the table with a groan that sounded like 'Cocoa...'.

"Reyna?"

"No, Flint."

"She looks like she really needs it,"

"What she needs is a warm, toasty bed with fluffy pillows and her teddy, Philly. The same thing with Echo but with her stuffed puppy, Amara and Octavian, with his body pillow, and you, with your stuffed giraffe, Forje."

"Octavian-nnnn, please help me persuade your girlfriend. I'm too tired for this..." Said boy and the Puerto-Rican demigoddess flushed a bright red and protested against the claim of being in a relationship (even though they have a crush to the other).

Flint collapsed an empty space, right next to Lyria, playfully flopping against her. He sipped his cup, eyes still closed. On any other day, Lyria would have loved when the duo made eye and let alone skin contact.

Now?

She's way too tired to think let alone move or speak. Reyna and Octavian bickered back and forth and Echo being brought in the argument because she said the statement of them being in a relationship, whilst the rest of the cohort cooed internally at Lyria and Flint.

"I'd let you have my coffee but this is as bitter and black as Lupa's soul," He earned a cute snicker from his Filipino descended friend (read, crush). She unconsciously moved closer to the blonde, clutching his purple shirt, half asleep. Flint relished every touch, beaming. Though he could have sworn that Rose piped out a 'So cute!' at the back. The thought left as soon as it came.

He focused on Lyria's sweet scent and her addicting warmth, tempted to sleep against her again.

That's what friends (crushes) do, right?

"I wouldn't be...able to take a sip of that without...gagging," Lyria shook her head quickly to stop nodding off. "Mine has fifteen teaspoons of sugar, lots and lots of cream, caramel, chocolate sauce, whipped cream and sprinkles..." She admitted quietly, blind to Flint and everyone’s shocked faces.

Maybe it's a good thing Reyna took that away from her!

"Are you trying to give yourself a heart attack? Diabetes? A food coma?" His shock was quickly washed away from one glance at her puppy eyes. "D-Don't cry please-"

"I just wanted to stay awake..." She peered at her cocoa in Reyna's hand so longingly, bottom lip jutted out. The stupidly familiar urge to kiss those soft looking lips blared in Flint's mind like a siren but he immediately pushed that thought back with great mental strength to ensure that he didn't freak Lyria out. "I also really like...sweet things..."

Is it possible to melt from such cuteness? Flint couldn't help but flutter internally and coo.

"You're sweet enough already, Princessa," The demigod spoke clearly, though it fell short on Reyna’s and Octavian’s ears, everyone else’s ears widened. Echo and the First Cohort never heard of that nickname before and the witches and wizards never seen Lyria with a soft side before, well, other than Echo.

"Then, since Reyna and Octavian act like a married couple all the time," Flint eyes flickered to the still squabbling pair, fussing over Lyria and Echo, before back at the petite girl. "They could be your parents, the King and Queen,"

Lyria hummed with amusement, her lips turning into a familiar smirk. For some reason, he knew she was going to banter back. While Echo in the background is explaining to the rest of the cohort about her wedding plans for Flyria (Flint and Lyria) and Reytavain (Reyna and Octavian).

He couldn't explain why.

"Then you could be my Knight, considering how he's always used the 'I'm your Knight in shining leather' comment," Flint felt his cheeks involuntarily redden. "And you could be..."

The older teen leaned closer to her face, heart racing like a hummingbird.

"I could be...?"

"...my..."

"Your?"

"...aking prinsipe-"

"LYRIA! ECHO!"

Brunette boy and Noir girl snapped out of their bubble, along with the rest of the cohort and school. They all simultaneously gasped as the Spanish-Austrailian girl leaned against the door timidly, like a deer in the headlights.

Her left cheek had a huge, painful looking purple bruise and her arms were covered in blood stained bandages.

Everyone looked at her with concern and mutters whilst Flint cocked an eyebrow in suspicion and frowned.

Lyria and Echo merely blinked.

"You...two are angry now...right?" Lila clutched her arms, hugging herself as if she was cowering before angry Gods themselves. Almost the kids and adults flinched and took a double take before gawking at the mentioned girls.

Reyna narrowed her eyes in solid confusion, Octavian cocked his head and scrunched up his nose but Flint...

He was fucking livid.

A solid ten minutes before breakfast, six days after her last stunt, this brat dares to antagonise Lyria and Echo again!?

However, the girls let out a dumb "Eh?", blinking repeatedly.

"I-I know you were mad about how I caught you both cheating a while ago...but I didn't expect you two to be extremely and attack me yesterday night!" May burst out crying, covering her face with her tattered looking hands as her sobs wrenched through her body. "Why didn't any of the medications work...why am I still hurt!" She clutched her cheek, enacting how much pain she's in.

For a descendant that was placed in the First Cohort, May Sophia was rather dumb. She should have known for a fact that no matter how convincing she could act, no one would ever take her side.

Especially when it involves Lyria and Echo.

"I got...extremely angry?" Lyria rubbed her eyes and blinked at May again. Any other day, Echo would have started a yelling match.

Right now, she was way out of it.

Sweet, innocent Rose furrowed her eyebrows too and she clenched her fists till her knuckles whitened.

"Hold on- hold up! I've been helping Octavian with some of Echo’s duties, none of them involving you, Echo, nor Lyria." Reyna slammed the cocoas down on a nearby nightstand, oblivious to the girls' twinkling eyes and soft "cocoa~". Octavian backed up Reyna’s claims and pulled Echo in his lap. Flint kept a protective grip on Lyria's upper arms, venturing closer, trying to keep her behind him, as if shielding her.

His eyes turned acidic and rage boiled over.

"That's because they lured me out to the outskirts of camp! They used their powers and they looked so scary-" May let out a loud whimper. Eyes darting back and forth on every descendant in the room. "It took hours after finally they left me alone!"

"Oho? I want to use my powers...then I can stab each and everyone one of my paperwork with it and then I can finally sleep at night~" Echo was painfully oblivious to her schoolmates' incredulous stares as she made googly eyes with the hot cocoa, the rest of her cohort mates just sighed knowing that Echo was always the more easily angered one. Emilie shook her head and took away the mug, placing it on the farthest nightstand and then glared at May suspiciously.

No one paid mind to the girls’ suffering.

"Certainly we can't catch every single fight, however, we've only catched sixteen fights. Thus, either you were hallucinating-"

"I wasn't! Where'd you think I got these injuries from!?"

"-Or! It was something else that attacked you. Though, that can’t be true because the newly enforced magical borders." Reyna then marched to the middle of the two girls, meeting from May's gaze. "These girls have a terrible sense of direction when they’re sleep deprived, always getting lost at the metro so it's impossible for her to have dragged you to the outskirts and make it back here. From what I can tell, Lyria, Echo, Octavian, and Flint have stayed awake for 3 days straight."

Flint rubbed the back of neck and Octavian smiled sheepishly when met with incredulous stares.

Lyria and Echo simply sighed, paying zero attention to them.

They tried using their mind to get the coffee closer to them but turns out, they're not telekinetic.

If May was smart, she would have agreed with Reyna and made up a story of the supposed criminal that attacked her from inside the camp even though there were borders. It would have bought her the coddling she wanted at the very least and kept her on everyone's good side.

However, it seems that May Sophia has, and always will be stupid. Perhaps a quarter as delirious as Lyria and Echo right now? Not that May seemed sane enough from the start...

"I swear on my sweet, dead grandmother's life, Reyna! It was Lyria and Echo! I know it was! Would I ever lie to you?" She clutched her chest and pleaded.

Silence.

Not a single sound was heard.

Everyone held their breaths.

Internally, May panicked. Why wasn't everyone jumping to her side? Why was everyone so quiet? 'Dammit- why isn't everyone berating those damn blue eyed bitches and catering towards me!?' She hissed in her mind.

"Now that I think about it," Micheal broke the silence. Flint, Reyna, and Octavian immediately whipped their heads towards him, eyes wide with multiple emotions. Each of them were coming up with ways to make his death look like an accident along with May's if he bought the lie.

"I think I saw that boy running from the Fifth around too...what was his name again? Dodo...Bobs..." Micheal could have fooled strangers with his confused, calculating expression but his close friends knew way better.

Game on.

"Yes! Bobby! He was there too!" May exclaimed and then whimpered loudly, bringing her arms together, as if she was in agony. "He saved me! Otherwise...I'd have...lost my head...Lyria and Echo were so close to..."

"Is that so?" Flint's voice was like thunder.

It wasn't that he was loud, no; he was very startling instead. A tone which no one but May had heard before when he threatened her not too long ago. An icy chill was sent down everyone's spine and his amber eyes gleamed with bloodlust. "Please do tell us more, what did our two sweethearts do in her as they beat you up?" He wrapped an arm around Lyria possessively.

Reyna and Octavian stood closer to them, with Octavian jumping off the Ravenclaw table and carrying a delusional Echo with him.

May's face almost darkened with indignation but she quickly fixed it with the kicked puppy expression. She took a step back, clutching a fist to her chest.

"W-Why are you guys acting like this...Micheal? Emilie? Rose? Are you seeing this? I think those five are against me now too-"

"But at least that weird monkey one was around to help you, right? If Lyria and Echo were THAT strong, which they are, then I bet Lupa and Terminus had to step in." Emilie rested her chin on her clasped hands, glaring at the five people down. Only Lila missed the playful bump Rose and Micheal gave on her back.

"Y-Yes! Also the sun and moonlights, the ocean, and the erm...skeletons? Lyria and Echo almost won...she could have devastated camp- no...the world! I think that's why my wounds weren't able to heal with the medications- Lupa was beaten black and blue..." Everyone else started to mutter, causing May to almost smirk victoriously.

'Yes...that's right, keep this up,' She cackled in her mind.

"Excuse me!" Lyria finally shouted, standing up with her hands on her hips. Lila's heart almost burst in excitement. Finally some fuel for her fodder! More ways to isolate Graham de Vanily as the female Praetor! Echo then followed, "The only devastation here is how no one's letting us drink our hot cocas! Octavian just give it to us!" “Yeah!” Lyria agreed.

Lyria and Echo didn't expect the smack upside behind her head from Reyna, making them yelp in surprise.

The Puerto-Rican girl grabbed the girls by the shoulders and yelled.

"YOU IDIOT GIRLS! YOU'RE BEING ACCUSED OF TRYING TO MURDER SOPHIA WHEN YOU BOTH WERE EXTREMELY ANGRY WHILST PULVERISING LUPA AND TURMINUS IN PROCESS YET ALL YOU TWO CAN THINK ABOUT IS A PUDDLE OF HOT COCOA FOR A DUMB MOCK TEST THAT WON'T AFFECT YOUR GRADES!?"

She shook their shoulders harder, muddling Lyria and Echo’s mind up even further. Flint stammered, trying to break them up whilst Octavain and their cohort watched the show with delight.

They didn't miss the appalled expression May threw.

The way everyone brushed her off...the poor, injured...pitiful girl!

"R-E-Y-NA-A-A-A-A!" Reyna finally stopped her torture and let Lyria and Echo flop into her arms unconscious. The secretly Greek demigoddess let out a groan, swirls in their eyes and the cohort burst out laughing while the school watched in horror.

"You did it Reyna! You beated them! You're a true hero!" Rose squealed out as Nala chimed with a "Way past cool". Playing along, Reyna straightened out the purple SPQR shirt, mock pride on her face with a smug smile plastered on. She handed Lyria and Echo back to Flint and Octavian's waiting arms and stalked towards the back of the cohort.

"W-What-" May didn't get a chance to finish her sentence.

"Miraculous Reyna Bug!" The brunette hollered, tossing a pen in the air with a cheesy grin. Emilie and Bernace made whooshing noises, as if to mimic the sounds of rushing magic ladybugs and everyone else cheered. "Your injuries should all be healed up now May! Good on ya~ now, Octavian, it's time to bring Lupa and Terminus and get them to make a temple of me in the camp-"

"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?"

May was now huffing and puffing.

Raw animosity shone in her eyes, hands clenched into fists by her sides, knuckles whitening and teeth gritted. Flint didn't try to hide his devilish smirk and the oddly quiet Octavian folded his arms, awaiting for the girl to show her true colours.

Alas, lack of attention made a slower, more frustrated and crazed May.

"I'm here, injured, traumatised! Lupa and Terminus were almost killed! These...THESE WENCHES-" She pointed venomously at the knocked out Lyria and Echo in Flint and Octavian's arms despite the male Praetor's warning glare. "-tried to kill ME! And you all don't care!? You're all worse than those at the Fifth Cohort!" More crocodile tears ran down her cheeks...

Though they ran down as purple drips, somehow cleaning away... the bruise?

My, what magical tears indeed.

"You see May, everyone knows that's not true," Octavian purred out, sitting down against the chair like a spoiled royalty with a beautiful girl in his arms- who would kick everyone's asses in one go anyways. He summoned a bit more of his inner arrogance so that his confidence didn't waver.

"How would you know!? You weren't there, Octavian!" Lila hissed, banging a fist against the door. Weren't her arms in agony again?

"I suppose, but," He tucked a hair behind Echo's ear with a Cheshire grin.

"I was with her, Lyria, and Octavian, all night,"

Everyone let out a dramatic, yet fake gasp, clutching their cheeks as Emilie let out a little cry "Flint how could you~!", one arm over her head whilst Bernice fanned her with a book. Rose covered her ears and Nala covered them just in case. Too much swearing for Rose’s entire life.

May paled and sweat dripped down her face. She shook her head slightly, taking a step back.

"W-W-What do you mean? What were you doing?"

"Well, what else would four, unsupervised kids be doing all night? Why do you think we're so tired?" Flint played with Lyria's hair, smile widening. Octavian’s peripheral vision caught Reyna with her pen recorder whipped out, probably not too long ago.

"T-That's a lie...you two are just saying that to protect Lyria and Echo...we’re never allowed out for curfew, let alone with no named sluts like them!"

"Do I need to show Lyria’s hickeys as proof?" Flint uncovered a big bruise on her collarbone from falling onto a moving staircase when walking to the Great Hall, lack of sleep messing with her coordination. It was dark enough to be mistaken as a love bite and the boy was never more grateful for it than he was now as he shamelessly advertised it, perfect teeth biting on his perfect lip. Octavian pulled down Echo’s collar to show a bruise she got when she collided with a pillar that morning.

"Whoa du-uuuudes- keep it child friendly here!" Micheal winked. The rest of the cohort kept up with the melodramatics and cackles till the male Praetor spoke up.

"Enough of our love lives now," Flint's smile was wiped off and the dangerous frown was back on.

May gulped as everyone else followed suit.

Some were close to exploding on the spot whilst others wore a look of pure disappointment and sadness. An army of negative emotions directed at her.

"Can't you see? The gig's up May. You've lost. We all know you've been bullshitting from the start. Take a seat over there," He beckoned to the lone chair that Emilie kicked out at the front, quickly adjusting Lyria to rest her head on his lap so that she was comfortable.

It took May everything to not fidget on the spot as the tension and intense rage that radiated from the object of her obsession grew bigger and colder.

"What if I don't want to." The Spanish-Austrailian sneered, itching to run down the Terminus and come up with a way to save her sorry ass. If there's one thing she refuses to do, it's to accept defeat. No matter how high the odds are against her. "I didn't do anything wrong after all-"

"I believe you don't have a choice, Sophia." Octavian admonished, hands clasped against his mouth similarly to Emilie not too long ago. A sleep deprived Octavian was a dangerous one. "Don't make me pull a Chloe Bourgeois from the tv show Miraculus Ladybug here and make your fucking life miserable by getting my father involved. I'm tired as hell and no one has got the time to humour you anymore. Take. A. Seat."

Keeping her steely gaze on his frame, May made way to the chair, plopping down and crossing her legs, trying her best to look powerful and threatening without paying mind to her 'wounds'. She was too tired to keep up with the pathetic act anymore and frankly, it was a breath of fresh air.

"Now, you're going to sit there, keep your mouth shut till I've finished talking, you got that-"

"You think that's going to work on me, Flint? Hah! My mother is an ambassador so you can't really do anything to me. You can google that for all I care, not like the rest of you googled whatever else I've said," Her smile was like a snake slithering, making everyone else feel uncomfortable and gross. A few seconds of the real May's colours and they all already wanted to pummel her to the ground.

"Did I say you could talk? Did my earlier threats fall on deaf ears? Do you love the sound of your voice so much that you're unable to comprehend simple french words from anyone else?"

"I-"

"I said keep your mouth shut."

Octavian’s tone felt like Neptune to her heart. Immediately she snapped her mouth shut and dug her fingers into her knees. The looming presence of everyone else didn't help either. The weight of the situation finally crept up on her and the girl realised...

She's not going to get out of this one.

"Alright, so where was I...? Oh that's it!" Flint leaned back. "I'm going to cut the chase. We're not mad because you lied, we're fucking pissed because you hurt Lyria and Echo and dared to do so again. I want you to fess up every single thing you've done in order to hurt someone so that we can record it and send it to the higher authorities. We want you out of our lives asap and I specifically will do anything to ensure that." His eyes were like ice now.

For the first time, you would recognise Flint as Victoria's son because of the near identical coolness and a spine stiffer than the strongest of steel. Not because of his victories.

"..."

"Sophia."

"..."

"Sophia." Flint repeated, eyes practically glowing in distaste.

"I..."

"..."

"I didn't do anything. Anything you can prove anyways." May pressed, trying her best to regain control of the situation but the boy in front of her is not the wielder of the mantle of destruction for no reason.

"Either you speak now or else I'll fish out the evidence myself and you will be utterly finished." He promised.

"..."

"SPEAK."

"From the moment I arrived, I kept touching you and clinging onto you...thought you'd make a great toy for me to control. Guess I should have dug my fingers in deeper to kill that disgusting spine of yours."

"Ah yes, some good old sexual harassment. Keep talking." The rest of the cohort paled in the background, horrified that they let something like this happen right under their noses.

"I stole your useless book! And threw it away like the garbage it is!"

"...you utter bitch... father almost took me out of camp if it wasn’t for Lyria, because of you."

"That's not even the best part! I also threatened Lyria and Echo in the bathrooms to take away all her friends, especially you two. That I'd make them all turn their backs on them and they'll be alone forever." She smirked at the rest of the teens, eating up the look on their faces.

Emilie was seething on the spot, desperate to break May's nose. The grip that Reyna had on her recording pen almost snapped the device in half, distraught with the suffering Lyria and Echo had been through.

"Should have realised how much of a psycho you were back then." His instincts screamed to kill May right this second and judging by the way Octavian was growling next to him, the legacy would encourage him. "Regardless, your threat didn't really work, hm? They kept fighting and ignored you,"

"And that's why I faked my injury, hid the cheat sheet in their bag and put my necklace and ring in their nightstands." May was about to stand back up but a hand clasped her shoulder from behind. She didn't need to look up to know that the perfect manicured nails belonged to Cupid’s daughter (Emilie). The Spanish-Austrailiandidn't even bother hiding the disgusted grimace that her lips twisted into.

"I didn't dismiss you yet, and also," Octavian leaned forward. "You're hiding some things, you know why I know? Because I have connections. You're better off spilling it yourself than me getting my hands dirty, Sophia."

"...you have got to be fucking kidding me."

"Sophia."

"That day when I cheated on you with Phoenix Cordelia..."

"The day the five of us went to the Caribbean? Yes, carry on,"

"I teamed up with Daisy Cordelia..."

"How and Why."

"..."

"Tell us."

Everyone took a bated breath, cold sweat dripping down their heads, anger grinding in the pit of their stomachs whilst Lyria and Echo remained blissfully asleep on Flint and Octavian’s lap.

"I worked with her to take down Lyria and Echo and give myself the title of Pontifex Maximus and her, as the female Praetor because I hate HATE Lyria and Echo! I don't regret anything I've done! Never have, never do and never will! I will rise to the top and take you all down one by one! You watch! You will all be begging at my feet, wishing that you kept your mouths shut and kept me as a lifeline! I'll start off with getting rid of those Graham de Vanily and Butterfly bitches to make you all suffer!"

The whole cohort erupted in an uproar.

Obscenities were hollered out.

Threats were exclaimed.

Descendants were restrained.

The Gods’ domains began to be more crazier.

Flint watched May with hate that could rival the eldest 6 Gods for Saturn.

Emilie struck her hand out, poised to give the brat a good smack-

"QUIET!"

A hand grasped Emilie's wrist while another tipped the cool cup of hot cocoa down her throat.

Echo slammed the travel mug down, Lyria gently put Emilie's wrist back to the girl and then turned towards the cohort. Their wise, tired eyes flickered to May's bewildered form for a split second and then back at everyone else.

"First off, thank you Flint and Octavian, for bringing the truth to light. I suppose waiting and planning for the right moment was a better idea than going out yelling and screaming." Lyria gave him a smile full of saccharine, making his heart skip a beat or two.

"You shouldn't be thanking me. I'm the one who let it get this bad in the first place...besides, you'd have concocted up something similar had it been anyone else getting harassed by her." Echo continued.

"You're not perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. Besides," Lyria glanced back at the fuming girl behind her. "You've acknowledged it and sought a solution to fix it, rather than covering it up and lying," May's teeth were basically scraping each other.

"Lyria..."

“Echo...”

"Second! As much as I'd love to beat her up for real like you guys, we are much, much better than this. Control your emotions or else your emotions will control you," Murmurs filled the room and everyone began to try calming down. "If we really were extremely angry, Lila," Lyria began.

"We would have finished the job. So I think it's wise to not try and anger us again,"

Echo’s eyes were like daggers, piercing May's weak frame, making the liar freeze on the spot.

"What do you mean again?" Octavian felt a rock hit the bottom of his stomach as Flint clasped the girl's wrist. The way Lyria flinched caused their paranoia to stir. "Lyria...?"

SLAM!

The force of Flint and Octavian's hands against the table as he shot up shocked the class once more. Reyna moved in quickly to grab Lyria and Echo and keep them out of the way.

"Get out and never come back! If we ever see your face anywhere nearby, you're dead!"

May immediately tripped out of the chair, feeling like she's been shot a thousand times by everyone's blood lusting looks, more frightened by the model and the designer. She scurried towards the door, only to crash into Lupa.

No words needed to be exchanged by the looks of her infuriated eyes. Everyone else in Camp Jupiter was crowding behind Lupa. They all wore the same blistering look, beckoning May to follow her outside.

They heard everything.

"It’s safe to say that training is cancelled," Terminus spoke. His voice was cold as ice.

With that said and done, the First Cohort door was closed.

May was gone.

Lyria and Echo have received justice.

Whoa...

A dizzy spell suddenly hit Lyria, Echo, Octavian, and Flint, causing the four of them to stagger on the spot, quickly supported by their friends as the event of what just happened came crashing down on them. Octavian was quick to recover, having managed to catch naps in between duties and paperwork to have some level of awareness whilst Lyria, Echo, and Flint took a few minutes to regain their bearings.

"Yo what the fuck just happened now..." Micheal broke the silence. "The day started off good with GDV and BB getting all loopy and Splinter and Octy getting chummy with them and boom! The boys turn into a kickass, scarryass, motherfuckin'ass interrogator and GDV and BB pretty much admitted that they can easily kill someone!? I THOUGHT YOU TWO WERE THE CINNAMON ROLLS OF THE CAMP?!"

"Micheal, you know why we have high positions in this camp," Lyria squinted slightly, almost swearing that she could see stars. The three other kids just nodded their heads.

Flint turned around to face his friend, eyebrows furrowed and sleep clouding his vision. He really was dead on his feet and at this rate, he would happily drape himself on the dirty floor for a good twenty minute nap.

However, one thing didn't leave his mind.

"Lyria, why didn't you tell me?"

"Hm? What?" She yawned quietly.

"That she threatened you?" Lyria picked up some cool anger in his words, recoiling back and then put her hands on her hips. Her eyes narrowed.

"I don't know and I don't care. I don't need to tell you everything, hmmph!" Truth be told, Lyria's confidence didn't allow her to be seen as a scaredy-cat or a coward, so she kept quiet. She also knew that anyone would be crazy as to threatening her, so she thought it was just a fluke.

"What. Kind. Of. An. Answer. Is. That?"

"I don't appreciate your tone, Romeo,"

"And I don't appreciate yours either, Juliet,"

"Well tough."

A beat went past as the duo stubbornly glared at one another.

Rolling his eyes, Flint sauntered towards her, hands in pockets and one eyebrow cocked.

"It's okay to not be okay you know," He spoke softly and then gestured out to the rest of the cohort and school who observed. Everyone wore a weak smile. "In order to progress, we need to communicate. You're always looking after us, catering to our feelings. Let us do the same. We really want to make it up to you," He let a hand rest on her shoulder, giving it a squeeze. "We don't want to let down our leader again."

With a sudden determination, he leaned forward and quickly brushed his lips against her cheek. Lyria’s face softened and her mouth opened in a cute gape as Flint stared back with a flustered expression.

"...Please?"

Tears flooded Lyria’s eyes, causing everyone to rush forward, hoping to calm her down. The tears never stopped streaming, no matter how many times the girls dabbed her eyes with napkins and held her hands.

"I...I..." Lyria began. Everyone leaned in eagerly.

"I..."

"I just realised how I never got to savour my hot cocoa..."

Everyone literally dropped on the floor with a groan. Of course, she wasn't lucid. She probably was never lucid from the start!

“Hey, can you blame me?! E, over there got her’s!”

Before anyone else could say anything, Reyna pushed Lyria on Flint’s back, commanding him to take her to her dorm.

"Yeah sure...I think I need a day off too..." He held the snoring girl on his back, piggy style before letting out a yawn.

"Don't try anything funny with my girl~" Reyna teased. On a normal day, Flint would have denied this and claimed that Lyria was just his friend (crush).

This isn't a normal day.

And Flint is tired and grumpy and sarcastic.

"Then perhaps I shouldn't mention about how yesterday was such a wild ride~"

"Flint!"

"Bye!"

"I'm being serious!"

"...Okay, for real though...Did GDV, BB, Splinter, and Octy bang for three nights straight or nah?"

"Micheal. Shut up."

“No.”

“Although, I’m waiting for the day when they finally get together. On a side note, Octavian, carry me to my dorm.”

“...Fine, but only if you let me sleep and not worry about our paperwork and our duties.”

“Sure, whatever.”

#lyriagrahamdevanily #echobutterfly #octaviantabullo #flintvance #lyriaandthedemiwitchseries

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floreamore · 4 years ago

Text

War + Raindrops

Like raindrops across a windowpane, the light filtered from diamond encrusted curtains that shadowed kisses across my chest. She spoke from behind while avox fingers threaded across my body, lacing a Venus flytrap around my waist. With every tug and word that came off her tongue, I shrank into the jaws of the flytrap. “Are you even listening to me, Flore?” Truthfully, I wasn’t. I spent most of my life not doing so, since the only person I truly listened to had died along with his tales. “Of course,” the lie rolled with ease, a habit I had grown acquainted with.

But I hadn’t grown acquainted to this yet, and I don’t think I ever will. Since once the balls and events start, she always had to report on them. The great Aeliana Diamson wasn’t one to pass up reporting on the victor’s tour and the outfits adorned at the parties held; of course she had to use her little doll to get the inside scoop. My heart had waned in moments like these, feeling more like a doll that sat abandoned on a shelf until too must dust settled than desirable to the eye rather than a prized collector’s piece. This treatment came with the nature of my job, hence her excitement I had moved on from a reporter on the games to something closer, the camera to follow as I trotted inward were her hopes. Yet rather than staying safe where she desired, I fled into uncharted waters.

Perhaps I had been silent for too long, since her voice perked up from behind. “Flore, dear,” it stepped closer, yet my gaze didn’t seek hers. Instead, it stared outside the lavish curtains onward, to the place I had felt was home. The towers lurked outside, calling to me, feeling guilty for being late. I had to be there to support Drake and Lilliana, since I couldn’t for Ben or Wisteria any longer. I may not have been there from the start, but what mattered wasn’t my time of arrival, but what I contributed. I wanted them to know that just because I was from a place where curtains had diamonds didn’t mean my investment waned. We were a team.

Catching where my gaze had laid, she placed her hand on my shoulder as I stood, towering over her from my pedestal in heels that scrunched the tips of my toes in a way that made me uncomfortable. While mom preferred to trot around in them all day, I was alright with being closer to the ground. But that would be one of the fewer problems that would arise that night. “Look at me, will you Flore?” Closing my lavender lashed eyes, the corner’s butterfly wings had batted upon opening, as if taking flight. It was a nervous tick of mine, one Addy would joke had been me rebooting, but I wish I could hit that button and for it to actually work. “Mom, I know you’re upset at me. You don’t need to pretend like you aren’t.”

“I’m not pretending Florencia. You know I am.”

Now that the avoxes had been shooed away, her true candor had showed. A side of her she reserved behind doors, one I reserved behind doors as well. Grabbing the bottom of my hushed blush train, my gaze flitted her way for the first time tonight. For a winter’s afternoon, it had felt sweltering. Sweat laid across my stomach underneath the constricting flytrap, an outfit I had hated. Everything seemed wrong. The heels were a hideous shade of jade that clashed with the fly trap corset; the corset was its own topic, and then there was the hijab, or lack of. She always hoped by styling my hair today would be the day that I would dawn my milk chocolate locks, which hadn't seen daylight since childhood. This all wasn’t me.

This wasn’t Florencia Diamson. No, this was- but where was Amirah?

I forgot where she was. But maybe we’re fated to pretend as if we knew where she had been to begin.

“And I am too, mom.” Stepping off the platform, my heels sunk onto the plush rug underneath, which I forcibly flung off across the room. They thunk loudly against the French alabaster doors, creating a black streak where they landed to an audience of a gasp. “Florencia! Do you know how much those cost?”

“No, I don’t. But money means nothing to us, and you know that. So what does it matter? Lets destroy twenty pairs? But first, how about this corset?” Fingers fumbling frantically at my back, mom wrestled my hands away, causing me to shout in frustration. “Just stop! Just stop for five seconds!”

“What has gotten into you Flore?”

Jaw tightening, her light palm rubbed the corner of my jaw. Dad was nowhere as usual, and she now in front of me. “Mom, this isn’t me. You know this isn’t.”

“Appearances are everything, as an escort you know that.”

“Then what happened to me controlling my own? Our stylists tastes are different, and I’ll have you know not even Satchel would ever dare to put me in something like this.”

Throwing her hands up, she shook her head, walking past me to look out the window where I had previously stood. “I’m sorry for taking care of you then. I’m sorry for trying.” Sighing had been our mode of communication, it had been for years. Licking my lips, I felt her straying. Why couldn’t she just listen? “Don’t do that-“

“Don’t do what?” She challenged, turning around.

“That feeling sorry for yourself. This isn’t about you. This is-“

“Our night! And it never is with you. It is always someone else, someone you haven’t met like those kids who always die, and what your delusion grandpa had rambled about.”

Raising my voice, my index finger jutted at her chest. “Don’t you dare speak about Jad. You didn’t know him like I did. He wasn’t delusional.”

Laughing, she teased, leaning forward, her face inches from my own. “And what are you going to do? Hit me? I’m telling you, you’ve been hanging with your “team” for far too long. Since anyone who would think that man wasn’t delusional for romanticizing, a starving district certainly is themselves. Let me talk the games committee, this placement isn’t just for a Diamson.”

“You don’t know what it means to be a Diamson. Or maybe you do because that's the name you married into.”

With a swivel of her heels, they clicked away from me, retreating to the opposite side of the room where she had once stood, sighing once more. In the lighting our differences, her hair past her bust as it always had been while mine typically pinned and hidden away, her arched nose to my swooped, her light skin to my dark, and now the black dress which I wanted to wear from the start and I in whatever this was exactly. With a low tone, her voice shocked me from how vastly different it was from the falsetto I had known. “I gave birth to you. You have always been a Diamson, despite what delusions your grandfather had perpetuated.”

With a click of my tongue, my hands went back to trying to unfasten my waist so I can breathe. “I overheard dad and jad once, and he said my name was Amirah. I know where we’re from. And I don’t care how much you force me to belong here, I don’t care that I was born here. I need to find out who I truly am.”

“Darling, just face it. You’re rock solid, glistening diamond.” Closing the distance, she curled a strand of my hair that had spilt across my face behind my small ears, murmuring tenderly. “You’re a Diamson, no matter how much you smear yourself with coal and shroud your beauty under all those layers of fabrics, you can’t confuse anyone. So go party with your new “team.” But just know you’ll never be one of them. You’re rock solid diamond, dear. So go play with your district dolls, and when they toss you away and tire of your charade, I’ll be here. Your real “team” will be here.”

I swallowed, hands falling from my corset, letting her pull me into her arms. Her body heat caused knots to form in my chest, feeling oh so parched as the sun waned against the towers behind. The avoxes were called in, having clearly awaited outside the doors and heard every word. As they rushed in, for once I pushed them aside and departed at the chance, stripping my body of all articles of clothing I could. Having ran to my room, the slam of my shrimp pink doors greeted me to the same diamond curtains across. Quickly wrapping my hair and stripping my lashes, I searched my closet for black. So I adorned floral black that night, reverting to what had originally belonged to me. Diamond curtains laid waste on the floor, torn up, to be repurposed for another night as a dazzling headscarf.

#r&k florencia #self para: vb 123

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homeiswherethestuckis · 7 years ago

Text

A Long Overdue Sleepover

@imperialpoet thank you so much for the request!! I’m sorry it took so long, but I hope everything in it makes up for it (we’ve got a big beta kid sleepover, full of pillow fights, movies, and other fun sleepover shenanigans). I had so much fun writing this, I really hope you like it! (Fair warning, it’s really long).

You’ve been planning this for a little over a week, and it would be a total lie to say you haven’t been near bursting with excitement about it. Honestly, even if you did try to be aloof and lie about it it wouldn’t be very convincing. Your tail starts wagging and you can’t control your own big, goofy grin whenever you so much as think about it. The day is finally here, all your preparations are done, and you’re so excited you can’t sit still.

After everything was settled on Earth C (getting all the kingdoms in order, living arrangements, figuring out just what the fuck you’re expected to do as a god) you’d decided it was about time you did something you’ve wanted to do ever since you were a little island girl with nothing but your dog and a computer for company.

You invited your friends to spend the night.

You’re keeping yourself busy rearranging the living room and making sure you have enough snacks when John arrives. You know he’s there before he even knocks (heightened senses are one of the very few perks of being fused with a dog) and it takes all your self control to keep from breaking your own front door down and tackling him to the porch before he has the chance to. Luckily it’s not a long wait, and it’s exactly .5 seconds after he lays knuckle to door that you have him knocked to the ground in a big bear hug.

“Wow,” John laughs, “that’s not the welcome I was expecting.”

“I’m happy to see you, what other kind of welcome were you expecting?” You ask as you stand up and help him to his feet. “You’re the first one here, by the way.”

“I am?” He follows you inside and plops down on the couch. “Cool, I win!”

“Congratulations!” You toss a pillow at him. “What’s your prize?”

“More quality time with my sister.” He throws it right back at you. “Duh.”

“Well, if that’s what you really want." You sit down next to him on the couch and shove the pillow in his face. “Take that!”

“Oh no!” His sputtering is muffled by the pillow you’re pressing into his face. He starts flailing his arms and legs, but you dodge anything that might hit you.

“I’m gonna smother you with sibling affection, John!”

Your door creaks open, and you tilt your head up to see Dave poke his head in. Dave looks at you, and then at John, who’s failed to notice him due to the pillow still obscuring his vision.

“Looks like I’m interrupting something important.” He finally says. “I’ll come back later. Pester me when you’re done murdering John, okay?”

He starts to close the door.

“Dave, get back here!” You take the pillow off of John and throw it at the door. It bounces harmlessly off the frame, but it’s enough to make Dave open the door again.

“Okay, fine, you convinced me.” He walks in and picks the pillow up off the floor. “I’ll help.”

Before either you or John can say anything more, Dave’s standing over the couch with the pillow outstretched in front of him. He drops it on John’s head, and the pillow tumbles right back onto the floor.

“Mission accomplished?”

“Mission accomplished.” You bump fists.

“Sweet. Now could one of y’all move? I’d like to sit my ass down. Cush the tush, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, Dave I know what you mean.” You laugh, scooting over to make room for him between you and John.

He jumps over the back of the couch and lands with a bounce between you.

“Don’t do that.” You scold. “You might break the couch.”

“Well, fuck, Jade, if your couch can’t handle that I can’t imagine how the hell it’s gonna hold up when we’re all jumping on it later.”

John furrows his eyebrows. “Are we all jumping on it later?”

“Yes.” Dave nods emphatically. “I am, anyway. Probably during the completely cliche and obligatory pillow fight I assume we’re having.”

“Are you saying what happened just now wasn’t a pillow fight?” John counters. “There was a fight. There were pillows. It all fits.”

“Dude, that was your definition of a pillow fight? You didn’t do shit that whole time, you literally sat here like a lumpy sack and let Jade and me hit you with a pillow. What kind of lame ass sissy pillow fighting have you been doing up til now?”

“Wow, Dave, I didn’t realize you were the pillow fight expert.” John bends over and picks the pillow up off the floor as subtly as possible. Considering the fact that the three of you are sitting together, it’s not very subtle at all. “You may be an expert at pillow fights, Dave, but are you an expert at surprise attacks?”

John throws the pillow, but Dave ducks out of the way before it can hit him. Instead, it gets you right in the face and skews your glasses. “You know, John, it’s funny you mention it because I actually am a fucking expert at surprise attacks. Especially at attacks made with a cheap and flimsy as shit goose filled pillow. You can’t pull a fast one on me, John. Can’t pull the wool or the feathers or whatever the fuck you stuff your sack with over my eyes. No one can.”

“Are you sure about that, Dave?” Dave turns to look at you, and just as he’s turning his head you smack him with the pillow.

“Okay, fuck fine,” he rubs his cheek where you hit him and fixes his shades, “maybe I’m not an expert in terms of Harley attacks, you got me there.”

“You’re damn right, I got you there!” You laugh and hit him lightly in the chest this time. “And I got you there, too.”

“Okay,” Dave swats at the pillow in your hands, “I think that’s enough fucking around with the pillows for now. We can’t have a real bona fide pillow fight until Rose gets here, anyway.”

“I don’t see why we can’t just start right now.” John replies, dropping a pillow out from his sylladex. “We can have one now, and then we can go for round two when Rose comes.”

“Yeah, I agree! I’m sure Rose won’t mind.”

“No, we have to wait for Rose because otherwise y’all are gonna gang up on me and take me down real easy. If Rose is here then at least the teams will be even.”

“I always thought pillow fights were a one man’s battle type deal.” John admits, looking to you for confirmation.

You shrug. “Don’t look at me, I’ve never been in a pillow fight before. Dave?”

“We had a few on the meteor, but those got pretty heated and ended after some dunderfuck decided that head shots were a good idea. Horns can rip through a pillow case like a knife through melted butter. Feathers and shit everywhere, every god damn time no matter what. If a troll challenges you to a pillow fight don’t even try anything, just run because you’re leaving that thing with shreds of pillow and no dignity to speak of.”

“So what you’re saying is, you don’t know shit about pillow fights, either.”

“Yup. I know so little shit about pillow fights I’ve been diagnosed with mental constipation. Sorry to disappoint.”

You hit Dave one last time with the pillow. “If none of us know what we’re doing, then I guess we could wait for Rose. It’ll be more fun if we’re all here, anyway.”

“Do you know when she’s getting here?” John asks, dropping his pillow onto the floor.

“I talked with her earlier,” Dave replies, “she said she might be here in an hour or so. She’s doing something with Kanaya that couldn’t wait.”

“An hour or so.” You repeat, slumping into the couch. “Okay. So what do you want to do until then?”

“An hour, you say?” John strokes his chin thoughtfully, and you can see a wry grin cross his face. You have a sinking feeling in your stomach, and from Dave’s face you suspect he feels the same. “I think that’s just about enough time to watch a movie.”

“John, we are not watching Con Air again.” Dave says, shutting him down immediately. “I can’t go through that bullshit movie again, John. I can’t.”

“Con Air?” John snorts. “What, do I look thirteen to you?”

“Yes.”

John punches Dave in the arm before continuing. “My Con Air days are over, I have matured far past any interest in that movie.”

“Jade, I can’t believe this.” Dave fake sniffles. “Our boy is growing up so fast, he’s practically a man now.”

“I know, it’s almost too much to bear!” You and Dave hug and pretend to sob on each other’s shoulders.

“Wow,” John says sarcastically, “you guys are assholes.”

“Okay. So what, your obsession with Nic Cage is over with now? I don’t know about you, Jade, but I think that sounds fucking fake. I smell bullshit in the air right now, John, and it’s coming straight out of your mouth anus.”

“That’s really gross, Dave.” John wrinkles his nose at him. “But no, that bullshit you’re smelling must be coming from somewhere else, because I am shit free.”

“Just like that? Your weird man crush has come and gone?”

“Wow, John, I can’t believe you would abandon poor Nic Cage like that.” You shake your head disapprovingly. “After everything he’s done for you.”

“Now hang on a minute, I never said anything about Nic Cage! He is still one hundred percent my dude. I said I was over Con Air.”

“Okay.” Dave detaches himself from you. “Now that we’ve made the distinction that you are still a fucking dork for that piece of ham Cage, what are you suggesting we watch?”

“I was thinking National Treasure.” “National Treasure?” Dave snorts. “Holy shit, I can’t believe your taste in movies got worse.”

“What the fuck’s wrong with National Treasure?” John asks defensively. “It’s an action packed thrill ride all across early American history! It’s a good movie!”

“One, no it’s not, and two, do you really think Jade wants to watch that? The girl’s probably only seen like, five movies in her whole fucking life, she’s the only member of the Crockerbertengarleys or whatever weird mash up of your last names works for y’all that has the potential to develop actual good taste in movies. She’s not even American, dude. At least I don’t think she is. Hey Jade, are you an American citizen? Was your island affiliated with a bigger country or were you just your own thing?”

“I...think it was our own thing? I don’t know, Dave, I was thirteen and I lived with a dog, I have no idea if I was part of some other country or not. Probably not. That island seemed pretty secluded. It doesn’t really matter now, though, does it? America doesn’t exist anymore, so technically I’m just as American as either of you guys.”

“Fuck. Yeah, you’re right.” Dave nods. “All the more reason not to watch the movie! All of the facts in it are entirely useless in this new universe!”

“But Dave,” John counters, “it’s Nic Cage. He steals the Declaration of Independence.”

“Fuck the Declaration of Independence.”

“It’s a piece of paper, dude. I think the most you could do is masturbate at it.”

“Gross.”

“Gross is what you get for hanging out with boys, Jade.”

“Okay, so I really want to watch this movie, and obviously Dave really doesn’t want to watch this movie. Jade, what do you want to do?” John asks.

Both boys stare at you, waiting for you to break the tie between them. You think your options over carefully.

“I wanna see Cage steal the Declaration of Independence.”

“Fuck yes!” John whoops. “Best sister ever!”

He bumps your fist and scrambles over to your dvd player. “Jade, you’re gonna love this, I swear to god.”

“Man, you realize you technically are god, right? One of several? You’re just swearing on yourself.”

“Whatever, what I swear on doesn’t change the fact that this is an excellent piece of cinema and Jade’s going to love it.”

“I can’t wait to watch it!”

The movie isn’t as bad as Dave tried to claim it was, but it’s definitely not as good as John tried made it out to be, either.

“Hey, Dave?” You ask after awhile of watching John’s idol run around the screen and spout fact after fact about American history, much to the awe of his partners in crime.

“Yeah?”

“If I gave a shit about American history, would I find this movie more interesting?”

“Nope.” He shakes his head. “Not at all.”

“Thought so.” You get up off the couch and stretch before heading towards the kitchen.

John pulls himself away from the movie long enough to look at you. “Jade, where are you going? You can’t tell me you hate the movie that much!”

“I don’t, the movie’s fine!” It’s okay. “I just thought I’d go make some popcorn before Rose gets here.”

“Oh. That’s okay, then.” John shrugs and turns back around. “I’ll tell you if you miss anything.”

“Thanks.” You shuffle into the kitchen and start making the popcorn on the stove top. Sure, microwaving it would be faster, but there’s a lot less of it in a bag and you don’t like how it tastes all that much. John shouts comments about what you’re missing, mostly along the lines of “Holy shit, Jade, you have to see this!” and “hell yeah, you get them, Nic Cage!”

When you have the popcorn all done and in a big bowl, you take it back into the living room with you. You make Dave scoot over so you can sit between him and John so the bowl is easily accessible to everybody.

“Hey, Jade, you got any aj?”

“Geez, Dave, you still drink apple juice?” John laughs. “Aren’t you like, twenty?”

“Shut the fuck up, you’re never too old for juice!”

“Yeah,” you interrupt, “it’s in the kitchen.”

“Cool.” He nods, reaching over and taking a handful of popcorn. “Get it for me?” “What? No!”

“Come on, Jade.” He whines, leaning heavily against your shoulder. “Please.”

“No.” You push him off you. “I’m watching a movie.”

“Do you even know what’s going on right now?”

“Nic Cage is doing stuff and it’s cool.”

“Damn, she’s got you there, dude.” John adds as he pops some popcorn into his mouth.

“See, I’m paying attention!”

“What’s Cage’s character’s name?”

“It’s...” you search your brain for any reference of a name given, but find nothing, “it’s not Nic Cage?”

“Bam. Point proven. You have no idea what’s going on, you’re not watching this movie, and you are completely capable of getting me some aj. Game goal touchdown.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Dave?”

“Sports winning references. Don’t test me, Jade, I know what’s up.”

“And you also know where the kitchen is.” You reply, nudging him with your knee. “Go on, get your juice so I can sit here and enjoy whatever weird history based antics are happening in this movie.”

“They’re looking for Ben Franklin’s 3D glasses.”

You turn to John. “Wait, really?”

“Yeah.” John nods firmly. “He invented them, I think.”

“Wow, I didn’t know that.” You reply. “This movie really is educational.”

“I’d reconsider your definition of educational if I were you, Jade.” You look above you, and there’s Rose! She’s leaning against the back of the couch and smirking down at you. “I’ll admit, though I don’t know much about the subject of 3D glasses myself, I don’t think what John just said is accurate.”

“Are you denying the legitimacy of National Treasure’s facts, Rose?” John demands.

She leans forward and snags some popcorn out of the bowl in your lap. “Yes.”

“Okay,” John nods, “I have no idea how valid these facts are, either, but that’s not going to keep me from enjoying this movie.”

“Shit,” Dave chimes in, “should we have had a fact checker on this?”

“And how do you suppose we do that, Dave? Google?” She snorts. “I don’t think we’re going to find any information regarding if the facts in this by now ancient movie from a long dead universe are accurate or not. But if you can then yeah, you should definitely do that.”

“Oh, I’m going to.” He pulls out his phone and starts typing. “I’ll let you know if I find anything worth getting your snark on for.”

“Dave, my snark is on twenty-four seven, you should know that by now.” She replies. “But thanks, anyway.”

You watch her disappear into the kitchen. You wonder what she’s getting?

“Hey, Rose?” Dave yells without looking up from his phone.

“Yes?” She shouts back.

“I don’t know why you’re both shouting,” you butt in, “you’re only ten or so feet away from each other, you can hear each other just fine if you talk at a normal volume.”

Dave ignores you. “Could you get me some juice?”

“Why can’t you get it yourself?” You can hear Rose walking back to the living room, and you turn your head to see her standing there with a can of grape soda in her hand. She makes eye contact with you and holds up the soda and raises one eyebrow questioningly. You nod, she can definitely have it, you got it specifically for her, just like you got the apple juice specifically for Dave. You also got ecto-coolers for John, but since he’s graduated from Con Air you’re starting to wonder if he’s lost interest in Ghostbusters, too.

“Because,” Dave replies, “I don’t want to.”

“Oh no, I’m sorry, Dave.” Rose sighs. “I would love to, but I can’t. My hands are full.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? You have an entire free hand. Right there.” He gestures at her right hand for emphasis.

“Oh, this hand? You must be mistaken, Dave. I’m clearly using this hand.” Without breaking eye contact with him, she pulls a bendy straw out of her sleeve and holds it up in her right hand. “See?”

“Fine,” Dave slides off the couch with an exaggerated groan and drags himself over to the kitchen, “you guys suck, I’ll get it myself.”

He purposefully bumps into Rose on his way there, and she’s quick to retaliate by bumping him with her hip. Once he’s out of sight, Rose walks over to the couch and takes his seat.

“Have you had a straw up your sleeve this whole time, Rose?” John asks.

Rose cracks open the can and slides the straw in. “Yes, I did. I left home with it up my sleeve.”

“Why on earth would you do that?” You can’t help but laugh at her.

“I don’t know,” she shrugs, “I was leaving the house, but then I had to go back inside to get a straw because I felt like there would be a moment where I wouldn’t necessarily require a straw, but I would greatly appreciate the presence of one.”

“Oh,” John nods, “so you’re it was all your weird mystical seer powers.”

“Yeah,” she grins, “my 'mystical seer powers’.”

She waves her arms around and starts “oohing” ominously for emphasis. John is quick to join her, and you’re left a giggling mess between the both of them.

“Fuck,” Dave says when he finally returns with a big cup of apple juice, “I leave for one damn minute and I come back to silly. What the hell.”

He walks across the room and looks for a place to sit. He settles on the arm of the couch next to Rose. “You know, sometimes I forget how much of a huge fucking dweeb you are, Rose.”

“That’s rich, coming from Dave “dorkasaurus” Strider,” she laughs, flicking Dave in the shoulder, “you’re the biggest nerd I’ve ever had the pleasure of associating with.”

“Wow, Rose, I can’t believe you would say that.” Dave replies, faking offense. “Especially with these dumb chucklefucks in the running.”

“What are you trying to say, Dave?” You ask, raising your eyebrow.

“I’m saying you and John are giant geeks.”

“I take offense to that.” John says, not taking his eyes off the screen. He reaches into your lap and grabs a handful of popcorn. He tosses a piece at Dave, and it bounces harmlessly off his shades. “I am wounded, Dave! How dare you do this to me? I don’t think our friendship will ever recover from this shit you just spit at me, you damn asshole.”

“Bro, you’re making us watch National Treasure unironically because you have a hard on for Nic Cage.” Dave points out. “You’re a dork, end of story.”

John shrugs. “Fair enough.”

“Okay, but John’s your best friend,” Rose chimes in, “so that at least makes you a dork by proxy.”

“Never said I wasn’t a dork,” Dave says, taking a sip of his apple juice, “I just said I wasn’t the biggest dork you know.”

“I think it’s safe to say that we’re all dorks in our own special way,” you add, “and that’s why we’re all such great friends.”

“Gotta agree with Jade on this,” John elbows you lightly in the shoulder, “we’re all just one big goofy pile of geek.”

Dave thinks about it while taking another long drink of his juice. You’re pretty sure he’s blowing bubbles in it.

“Dave, if you’re even going to attempt to claim you’re not a complete nerdlord while you’re sitting there blowing bubbles in your juice like a giant toddler, I won’t hesitate to push you off this couch.” Rose threatens.

“Jade, Rose is threatening me.”

“If she doesn’t push you, I will.”

“Fine, I’ll admit, being part of your dork conglomerate doesn’t sound half bad, and y’all could probably use some of the dweeb yet cool patented Strider personality to spice up your dull ball of dweebitutde you currently have.”

“Gee, thanks, Dave.” Rose rolls her eyes. “Whatever would we do without you?”

“Watch this movie in peace, for starters.” John throws another piece of popcorn at him.

“Okay, okay, I get it! I’ll shut up!” Dave waves away John’s flurry of popcorn kernels. “Shit, it’s not like I’m the one that started this.”

“Yes, you are!” You throw a couple pieces of popcorn at him yourself. “But let’s save all the discussions about who’s a bigger dork or who started it for when the movie’s over, because I do actually want to see how this movie ends. What’s going on in it right now, John?”

“Something about Paul Revere, I think?” He replies.

“Who the hell’s Paul Revere?”

“British are coming.” Rose explains.

“Oh.” You don’t really get it, but whatever. “Okay.”

You sit back and watch the rest of the movie. There’s not a lot left, and you honestly have no idea what’s really going on, but you assume it would have made sense and you would currently be on the edge of your seat if you’d been paying attention up to this point.

“Oh, wow.” You say when the credits begin to roll. “Cage did it. He found the National Treasure! Just like the title said!”

“Yep!” John nods, grinning. “And now he’s rich and happy and stuff.”

“I can’t believe the “I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence.” part is the only one that ever got turned into a meme.” There’s a hint of genuine disappointment in Dave’s voice. “That whole thing was riddled with memetic gold. Past Earth was a fucking dunce for letting us down like that. No wonder it got destroyed.”

“Yes, that’s why Earth was destroyed. Lack of National Treasure memes.”

“So what are we gonna do now that the movie’s over?” John inquires as he gets up and walks over to the dvd player.

“Well, we could always pick up where we left off.” You suggest, your gaze slides over to Dave, who’s already subtly reaching for a pillow.

“Left off with what?” Rose asks right before Dave smacks her in the back of the head with a pillow.

You hold the popcorn bowl over your head so her face doesn’t hit the bowl or its contents as she falls forward onto your lap and then rolls onto the floor.

“Wow, that was a pretty good sneak attack, Dave.” You comment. “But didn’t you want Rose on your team?”

Rose gets to her feet and stares Dave down. There’s a dark smile on her face. “Pillow fights don’t have teams.” A pillow drops out of her sylladex and into her waiting hands. “It’s every man for himself!”

She strikes at Dave, but he’s already up and crouching behind the couch before the pillow gets anywhere near him. You can feel how the air was split from the force of Rose’s missed hit. You have a feeling that would have hurt if she’d made contact.

Rose climbs onto the arm of the couch and stands on it, her pillow at the ready. Dave stands up and tries to hit her quickly, but Rose is just as fast, and their pillows end up meeting in the middle. There’s an explosion of feathers, and Dave staggers back. Rose falls off the couch’s arm, but lands on her feet.

“I thought you knew better than to use goose down against me, Dave.” Rose laughs.

“I like goose down, fuck you!” Dave yells back. “It’s really soft. The real question is, why the hell do you sleep with your head supported by a goddamn brick?”

“I’m entitled to like extra firm pillows just as much as you’re entitled to feathered ones, Dave.” She hits him again with her pillow.

“Hey!” John interrupts, rushing between the two of them and swinging a pillow wildly back and forth. “Jade and I are in on this, too!”

“That’s right, we are!” You decide to mimic Rose by climbing onto the back of the couch so you’re standing over the three of them. You replaced the bowl of popcorn in your hands with a big pillow. “But John, I gotta remind you, like Rose said, this is an every man for himself situation. Pillow Battle Royale!”

You jump off the back of the couch and body slam all three of them. From there everything is just a mess of pillows and limbs, feathers and insults flying everywhere. You have no idea who’s hitting you or who you’re hitting, but it doesn’t matter because you’re having a lot of fun and so is everybody else. At some point you stop trying to say anything cool or clever and just start laughing. You had no idea pillow fights could be this fun!

You have a feeling the pillow fight lasted a lot longer than they usually tend to, but honestly you wish it had gone on longer. There are a lot of past pillow fights to make up for still.

“So,” John asks, panting, “who do you think won that?”

“Considering the fact that I’m laying on top of all three of you,” you reply, “I think me?”

Rose holds up her hand. “I concur.”

“You definitely got me beat.” Dave says. “I can’t even reach my pillow from here.”

You laugh and roll off of them. “That was fun! So what do you guys want to do now?”

They all start to get up, and you can see them thinking it over.

“Well,” Rose says slowly, “we’re definitely not playing truth or dare.”

“Or spin the bottle.” Dave adds.

“Obviously not, that goes without saying.” Rose agrees. “So barring those two sleepover classics...”

“We could watch another movie?” John suggests.

“I’m not watching National Treasure 2.” Dave is quick to reply.

“Okay, fine. Never mind, then.” “There’s a sequel?” You ask. You’re kind of curious about that. It seemed to end so well and without need of a sequel at all.

“Yeah, but we’re not watching it.”

“Okay, then.” You shrug. You’ll just get John to lend it to you later. “So what are we doing?”

Rose chews on her bottom lip, thinking whatever options were available carefully. “We could paint our nails and gossip while we wait for a pizza to get here.” She suggests. “That seems sleepover-ish enough, doesn’t it?”

“Yup.” Dave nods. “That has very sleepover vibes to me. Though usually I save all my gossip and nail painting for when I hang out with Kanaya. I don’t know what we’re going to do if mine are already done.”

“I feel your pain, Dave.” Rose pats his leg sympathetically. “I do the same with Karkat, but we usually get together and gossip under the guise of book club.”

“I knew your book club was fake.”

“Sure you did.” She rolls her eyes. “If you’re really worried about your gossip time with Kanaya being ruined, we’ll paint your toes, Dave.”

“So we’re painting our nails?” You ask for confirmation. “John, are you cool with getting your nails painted?”

“If everyone else is doing it, sure.” He shrugs. “I’ve never done it before, but I’ve also never been to a real sleepover before, so why not.”

You’re suddenly grateful to Kanaya and Roxy for introducing you to nail polish and giving you several bottles of various colors just because they thought you might like it. “Okay, I’ll go get my nail polish. Be right back!”

You bound up the stairs and over to the hall closet where your bathroom essentials and, as of recently, your nail polish. You gather all the bottles up into your arms and run back down the stairs with them. “Okay, I’m back!”

Rose, John, and Dave are all sitting in a circle around the coffee table. Their shoes and socks are all off.

“We all decided it would be far more fun to have everybody paint each other’s nails than to paint our own ourselves.” Rose announces. “Also Dave gave in and wants his finger nails painted, too.”

“Only if Jade agrees to do my hand.” Dave adds, holding up his right hand.

“Okay, I can do that!” You agree, taking a seat next to him. “This sounds way more fun!”

You dump your nail polish onto the table. “I think I have enough for everyone to choose two colors, so pick out what you want while I go order a pizza.”

“No anchovies!” Dave shouts after you.

“Yes anchovies!” John counters.

“Anchovies on half and we make John eat that half!” Rose chimes in.

“Never mind about the anchovies!”

You find the number for a pizza place you like that delivers to your neighborhood (you’d think being a god and all you’d be able to get delivery no matter what, but no) just in time to hear Dave replay, “Yeah, that’s what I fucking thought. Fuck those tiny salt fish.”

“Personally, I’m just glad he didn’t say pineapple.” Rose says. You’re typing the number into your phone while you walk back into the room.

“What do you think a pineapple anchovy pizza would taste like?” John asks wistfully while he shakes a bottle of sparkly blue nail polish.

“Death.”

“Shit and then death and then some more shit.”

“That sounds more accurate, can I change my answer?”

You order a sausage and a veggie pizza. You debate long and hard with yourself about ordering a pineapple anchovy pizza just because, but decide against it.

“Pizza should be here in an hour.” You announce. “Honestly it’ll probably be longer because of how far out we are, so I think we should have plenty of time to do this. Dave, give me your hand.”

Dave gives you his hand and a bottle of bright red polish, and you start painting. You haven’t been doing this for very long, so it’s not exactly great, but you don’t think Dave minds. From the corner of your eye, you see John struggling to paint Rose’s toenails. It’s a comfort to know you’re not the only one struggling with something so basic.

There’s honestly not as much to gossip about as you thought. You mostly just talk about normal stuff, like cool games you’ve found or how none of you are really sure how the fuck to rule a kingdom as a ruler or a god or whatever.

“So, Rose, how’s the wife and multitude of troll larvae?” You ask.

“Fuck, it’s so weird to me that you’re married.” John says. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m so happy for you and now that I know Kanaya I think she’s awesome, but I always feel like we’re so young and shit and then I remember that we’re like, in our twenties and we created this whole universe and you’re married to an awesome alien who you’re helping mother countless generations with. Do you know what I mean or is that just me?”

“I get what you mean.” You nod. “Honestly, it’s really easy to forget that we’re actual adults now, especially when we’re doing stuff like this. This makes me feel more like I’m thirteen than I think I did when I actually was thirteen.”

“Why the fuck are you guys trying to make me feel old?” Dave sighs. “I’m a coolkid, not a coolman. That’s not even a thing.”

“Kool-aid man was a thing.” John adds helpfully.

“Oh yeah.”

“Kanaya is good, and so are the grubs.” Rose interrupts, answering your original question. “That’s actually why I took so long. We were hatching a new brood today, and I wanted to make sure I was there to meet them. I have a few pictures of them if you want to see later.”

“Grubs are adorable, I definitely want to see them!” You reply excitedly.

Dave takes his hand away from you and starts blowing on his nails to dry them. “Jade, hand.”

You give him your left hand and nudge your bottle of green nail polish over to him. Across the table, Rose has also taken over painting one of John’s hands.

“You know, John,” Rose says as she paints, “one of the reasons you might not personally feel like an adult is because of your recent move. I can’t imagine you would feel you’ve reached the peak of maturity when you live with Jane and Mr. Crocker.”

“How is that, by the way?” You ask. “I feel like it would be fun but kind of weird.”

“Yeah, it is.” He nods. “Living with Jane is like living with a sister. I mean, a different sister, obviously. An older one who spends most of her time at work or Roxy and Calliope’s place, you know what I mean. And living with Mr. Crocker is nice, but sort of weird, too. He looks like my dad, and he kind of acts like him, but he’s also my son technically. It’s really, really weird, but I definitely prefer it over living alone.”

“That’s good.” Dave nods. He turns your hand slightly so he has a better angle on your pinkie. “Glad you’re not living alone anymore, dude.”

“Me, too.” John agrees. Rose finishes up his hand, and he holds it up above his head to get a good look at it. “Wow, this makes my paint job look like shit.”

Rose raises an eyebrow. “Why do you think I had you do my toes?”

John gives an audible gasp. “Everything makes sense now.”

“Jade, you have me next.” Rose says to you across the table.

“Give her a second, I’m almost done.” Dave is hunched over your hand, trying his hardest to get an even coat on all of your nails. “Okay, she’s all yours. John, get to work on my foot.”

“You people have no faith in my ability to grow as a nail artist.” John sighs, shaking his head.

You trade places with John and Rose gives you her hand. “Before you start, I have one thing to add.” She leans over the table and grabs a dark green bottle of nail polish. “I want you to paint my middle finger green.”

“Okay,” you laugh, “I can do that.”

You do her middle finger first.

Dave looks over at what you’re doing. “Shit, that’s such a good idea! I wish I’d done that.”

“Well, you can’t now, because I already did.” Rose says smugly.

“Do you really think I’m above stealing your ideas, Rose?” Dave raises his eyebrows, they’re barely visible over his shades. “It’s not like I could do it right now, anyway, I don’t think Jade has a gray one.”

“That’s true, I don’t.” You put down the green nail polish and shake up the purple one Rose had been using previously. “I’ll think about getting one if we ever do this again.”

“Oh, we’re doing this again.”

“So Jade, what have you been up to recently?” Rose asks.

“You know,” you shrug, “the usual. Kanaya and I found out that Calliope’s never actually seen plant life before coming here, and the only plants Roxy’s well versed in are pumpkins, so we decided to build them a huge garden around their place. They both seem like they’d like having plants a lot.”

“You’re right, they do strike me as plant people.” Rose agrees. “Calliope especially, given her aspect and such.”

“And she literally has green thumbs,” John adds, “so it’s not like she could mess plants up at all.”

“John makes a fair point, she does have green thumbs.” Rose takes her hand back and surveys your work. “Nice.”

“Thanks, this is the third time I’ve ever painted nails.” You admit. “Second time they weren’t my own.”

“Well, you’re a natural.” Rose says as she shakes her hand in an attempt to dry it. “You’re picking it up faster than John, at the very least.”

“I’m working on it!” He says defensively.

“My entire little toe is red.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Yours, I’m pretty sure. You’re the one holding the brush.”

“So Jade,” Rose picks up your bottle of nail polish and pulls your attention away from the boys, “do you want me to paint your hand or your foot?”

“Foot. I think I’m gonna let John paint my fingernails.”

“That’s a bold move.”

“I’m a bold person.”

Rose laughs. “You know, you really are.”

Rose paints your toenails with smooth, easy brush strokes. You can tell she’s done this plenty of times before. Probably mostly on herself and then with Kanaya when she got to the meteor. She’s done a lot faster than Dave was with your hand.

There’s one more switch around. You give John your hand to paint, and Rose offers Dave her hand. She tells him she wants the middle finger on this one purple and all the other fingers in the same dark green as before.

“Do you want anything special on yours?” John asks.

You shake your head. “Nope. Just the regular polish should be good.”

He starts painting your fingernails, and it’s a lot sloppier in contrast to what Rose was able to do with your toes. There’s about as much polish on your hands as there is on the actual nail, and it’s forming uneven globs in places.

“I didn’t think painting nails would be this hard.” He admits, looking at your hand with a furrowed brow. “Maybe I should start over.”

“No, it’s fine.” You wave away his concerns with your other hand. “The extra stuff should just peel off when it dries, I think. Do you want me to do your hand or your foot?”

He shrugs. “Whichever you want.”

You go for his hand and start painting. You just finish his thumb when there’s a knock at the door.

“That’s the pizza guy!” Has it really been an hour? “My nails are still wet, can someone else get it? Rose?”

“On it.” She stands up and walks over to the door. She has a brief discussion with the pizza delivery guy and comes back carrying two large boxes. “Where do you want these?”

“There’s enough room on the table, I think.” You push a couple stray bottles of polish out of the way.

Rose sets the pizzas down.

“Fuck, those smell good.” Dave sighs. “When do we eat them?”

“Soon.” You say. “When we’re done with this part, we’ll take a break and eat.”

“Awesome. Rose, hurry up.”

“I’m going as fast as I can, Dave.”

“No one’s eating until we’re all done!”

“Never mind, then. Take your time.”

You and Rose both finish painting Dave and John’s nails around the same time. Then it’s pizza time.

“It’s total bullshit that we created this universe but we still have to pay for pizza.” Dave says with his mouth full.

“I know!” John agrees. “I’d like a discount, at least.”

“Guys, paying for pizza’s not that big a deal.” You reply. “What else are we going to do with all the money we apparently have as gods?”

“Not spend it on pizza.”

Rose chuckles. “How much pizza are you buying that this is a legitimate concern, Dave?”

“Enough.” He says before changing the subject. “Hey, Jade, I couldn’t help but notice how we all each still have one set of nails left unpainted. Are we supposed to paint that one ourselves or what’s the deal here?”

“I thought about that,” you say, “and we could definitely paint it ourselves, or we could all paint the last set together in a nail polish free for all.”

“So you mean we’d all be trying to swipe our brushes across the same digit canvas simultaneously?” Dave asks. “Like, with whatever color we wanted and everything?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Sounds cool, I’m in.”

The other two agree. The four of you eat almost all of the pizza, there’s only a few slices of veggie left over. You take both boxes and toss the empty one in your recycling pile. The other goes in the fridge. Maybe you’ll eat it tomorrow morning if you’re too lazy to make breakfast.

You return to the other room only to find your friends already armed with nail polish and wry smiles. Oh shit.

They rush you and you’re pushed onto the couch. One of them has ahold of your foot, you think Rose. You can feel the nail polish hitting parts of your foot that aren’t your nails. It’s pretty cold. You can also feel all of their hands on your feet, which really tickles. You have to fight the urge not to start kicking to get them off. You’re laughing so hard your ribs hurt.

Just like that, it’s over. You sit up, your leg is over the arm of the couch to give everyone easy access to your previously unpainted nails. You wiggle your now technicolor toes at them. There’s so much nail polish on you that it’s practically dripping.

“Wow,” you giggle, “thanks, guys. This looks like shit.”

“I’d like to see you try better.”

“Oh believe me,” you reach over and grab a bottle of nail polish off the table, “I will.”

Rose is closer to you, so you get to her first. It doesn’t take you very long to learn that painting the same foot with two other people is a lot harder than you thought. You do manage to get the most polish on her foot, though.

You learn quickly when you get to the boys that fingers are a lot harder to paint than toes. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take very long to get the whole thing covered. When you’re all done, the four of you are laying on the ground, laughing and just as out of breath as you were at the end of the pillow fight.

“I liked that.” You say after awhile. “What about you guys?”

“It was certainly the most interesting experience I’ve ever had painting nails.” Rose comments. “No, wait, second.”

“What was the first?”

“I’m not telling.”

“You would have to if we played truth or dare.” John points out.

“We’re not playing truth or dare.” Dave denies firmly.

“Then what are we doing next?” John wonders, stroking his chin.

“I don’t know.” You shrug. “I guess we could watch another movie.”

“But what movie? Dave already said no to National Treasure 2, for some reason.”

“That reason being that it’s trash.” He says. “Now that you mention it, I borrowed a movie from Dirk the other day and I’ve been meaning to watch it.”

“What is it?”

“Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff the Movovie.” The movie falls out of Dave’s sylladex, and he holds it up to show the three of you. “Y’all wanna watch the shit alpha me got famous for?”

“Hell yes.”

“Hell.”

“Fucking.”

“Yes.”

You all gather on the couch again while Dave puts the movie in. “I gotta warn you guys, this shit’s like two and a half hours long, and knowing me I probably lied about the running time and it’s actually longer. Better break for snacks while you can.”

“In that case, I think I’m going to secure myself another soda.” Rose stands up. “Anybody else want anything?”

“I’ll take an apple juice.”

“Of course you will.” Rose rolls her eyes. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Rose leaves, and Dave runs over and steals the spot she was sitting in.

“Dave, what are you doing?”

“Taking my revenge.” He replies, sinking deeper into the cushions.

Rose returns, carrying a soda and a cup of apple juice, but she stops dead in her tracks when she sees where Dave is sitting.

“Take that.” He flips her off, a look of triumph on his face.

Without taking her glare off Dave, Rose brings the cup of apple juice up to her lips and starts chugging. She drains the entire cup, wipes her mouth, and sets it down on the coffee table. “Fuck you, Dave.”

The movie starts, and Rose takes a seat on the floor by your feet.

You don’t have much to say about the movie, except that it’s definitely interesting. You could imagine Dave doing something like this with his life.

“Wow,” John mutters ten minutes into the film, “it’s like you took your shitty webcomic, randomized it, put it through a shredder, and then pasted it together to make a single script that you made the actors recite from memory on the spot in an abandoned warehouse.”

“Knowing me, that’s probably exactly what I did.” Dave admits. “Spot on observation, John.”

“This makes me wish my eyes could throw up, congratulations, Dave.”

“Rose, your approval is literally all I ever wanted.” He responds. “That, and your spot on this couch.”

She punches him in the leg. You all continue to watch the movie. It doesn’t really seem to have a plot, but you can’t tear your eyes away from the screen. The colors are so obnoxious that it’s impossible to do so. You also have no idea which parts are the jokes. That’s okay, though, because you’ve been laughing at the whole thing.

You’re about an hour in when Dave starts yawning.

“Oh my god, are you bored by your own movie?” You ask, incredulous.

“No, I’m just kinda tired, you know?” He mumbles. “Staying up late is hard.”

He leans against you, and you all continue to watch the movie. About a half hour later, Geromy makes an appearance.

“Holy fuck,” Dave laughs, “I got Will Smith to play Geromy? That’s awesome, go alpha me! I gotta remember to tell Karkat about that later, he’s totally going to shit himself when he hears about that.”

“Karkat has a thing for Will Smith?” John inquires.

“Yeah, his thing for him’s almost as big as yours for Cage.” Dave nods. “Man, if they ever did a movie together, I bet you’d both keel over from excitement. Kill two nerds with one stone.”

“You’d revive us, though, obviously.” John says. “You love both of us too much to let us stay dead like that for more than a couple minutes.”

“Yeah, you got me there. No worries, you’d both be fine except for all the ridicule I’d reign down on you for it.”

“Guys, if you wouldn’t mind, I’m still trying to watch this movie.”

“Right. Yeah. Sorry, Jade.”

The movie does turn out to be longer than the running time said, and by the time you hit two hours and forty-five minutes, Dave’s out.

“Should we wake him up?” John asks, reaching over to poke Dave tentatively in the shoulder. You wave his hand away.

“It’s fine. It’s getting late, and he’ll probably watch this movie again soon, anyway.”

Three and a half hours in, the movie comes to a sudden, nonsensically midsentence end. You have no idea what happened. You feel like you sat here and hallucinated at the tv for several hours instead of watched an actual movie made by actual people.

“Well, that’s over.” Rose rubs one of her eyes. “Now what?”

“How opposed are you to National Treasure 2?”

“I’m not.” She replies. “Even if I was opposed to it, it wouldn’t matter at this point. I’m probably going to go to bed.”

“I could try to make room for you on the couch, or there’s a bed upstairs if you want it.” You offer.

“No, no.” She waves a hand at you. “Your floor is pretty comfortable, I’ll just sleep here. Try not to step on me, okay?”

“Okay.”

John steps carefully over Rose and puts in the movie. It starts, and within a few minutes Rose is fast asleep and snoring on the floor. John turns off the lights and you turn down the volume to make sure you don’t accidentally wake any of the sleeping people. If you’re being honest with yourself, you’re getting a little tired too. You glance over at John, just barely visible from the glow of the screen. He’s leaning heavily against the arm of the couch.

“Hey, Jade.” He yawns.

“Yes?”

“I had a lot of fun tonight.” He takes off his glasses and lays them on the coffee table. “We should do this again sometime. Soon.”

“Yeah,” you’re unable to fight the sleepy smile overtaking your face. Today’s been an amazing day, and you’d love nothing more than to do this again, “we should.”

#the beta kids #jade harley #rose lalonde #john egbert #dave strider #fic request #really long post #sorry #imperialpoet #sorry this took so long #also I just found out it's your birthday so happy birthday!!! I hope you like this #earth c #sleepover #yo it's a fic and I wrote it

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