Archive of Our Own ^beta

turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG]

TG: were staying at roxys so ill be back tomorrow morning
TG: try not to miss me too much ok babe i know its hard
CG: HAH, YOU WISH. I’M GOING TO GO TO BED EARLY AND LUXURIATE IN BEING ABLE TO TAKE UP AS MUCH SPACE AND BLANKET AS I WANT WITHOUT HAVING YOU HERE TO STEAL IT FROM ME AND WAKE ME UP SEVENTEEN TIMES IN THE NIGHT ATTEMPTING TO KICK ME OFF THE HORIZONTAL SLEEP PLATFORM.
TG: yeah yeah send pics
TG: love you <3
CG: SEE YOU LATER. DON’T FORGET JOHN’S COMING OVER AT 3.
CG: I LOVE YOU TOO <3
TG: you got it babe

turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG]

***

“Davey!” Roxy is joyous as they vault over a couch to meet you in the entryway of their, Jane and Callie’s house, and immediately wrap you in a bone-squeezing hug. You stumble slightly, resorting to rising a few inches off the ground to keep your dubious balance, and return their embrace with a laugh.
“Sup, Rox,” you say into their shoulder. Their curls tickle your cheek, the fabric of their soft sweater warm and familiar. “I know I’m immortal and all, but you are crushing me right now.”
“Deal with it, baby,” Roxy responds, giving you one last squeeze before releasing you. You fix your shades that have been knocked askew and reach up to inspect your ruffled hair, glancing appreciatively around the house with its high ceilings and warm lighting. It’s new, as are all of your houses, but they’ve already managed to make it feel lived in, comfortable.

“Woah, loving this decor,” you say with a low whistle, and Roxy beams as he leads you through the front room towards the lounge area.
“It was mostly Callie and Jane,” they say, following your gaze over the tasteful lighting, the squashy couch with its brightly coloured cushions and blankets, and of course the monochrome motif of a cat walking echoed on each wall. Roxy’s eyes sparkle with affection and pride as they look around at the house that they and their datefriends built and decorated, and you feel warmth bloom in your chest. That’s your dad, looking so happy and complete. “Rose and Dirk are just through here.”

“Aw, man, I’m the last one?” It’s getting dark outside already, the weird mutant fireflies beginning to settle in the trees, glowing ten times brighter than any firefly you’ve ever seen before. You smell the campfire before you see it, exiting through the glass double doors out into the garden. “I thought for sure I’d beat Dirk.” The dude in question looks up as the two of you approach, raising an eyebrow from his position cross-legged on a stripy picnic blanket. You wave at him. “Sup, man.”
“‘Sup,” he returns, firelight reflecting warmly in his eyes, turning the colour from orange to honeyed. He’s not wearing his shades, hasn’t worn them in a couple decades. It’s hard to describe the feeling of warmth- of being cared for; who the fuck would have thought?- that settles in your chest, even now, years later. You remember the day you’d had that conversation with perfect clarity; will remember it for the rest of your impossibly long life.

***

It had been a calm day to be out on the lake. Clear, cloudless skies, the afternoon sun strong enough to make you thankful for your shades, birds chirping. The water had been cool and gentle, lapping at the side of your boat. Dirk was in one of his characteristic muscle tees and you were wearing a terrible slogan tee that you and Karkat had alchemised out of an old record shirt and an sbahj comic.
“I’ve never done this before,” you’d said, and Dirk had turned slightly, enough to let you know he was listening. You could see his eyes past the side of his shades, enough that you didn’t feel the prickles of unease that you felt too often in his presence. This was your brother, goddamnit. Your non-shitty brother. You were supposed to feel at ease around him.
“Fishing?” he asked, just enough emotion in his voice to keep it from the monotone that had plagued your childhood. You nodded. “That’s alright. It’s easy, really. I’ll teach you.”
He was handing you pieces of equipment, showing you how to put them together, what to do with the bait, the line- and there was white noise growing in your ears. You were nodding, mechanical, doing as you were told- and he stopped.
“Hey,” he’d said. “You okay?”
It was awkward, but there was genuine worry in his eyes behind the shades, and for a second you felt so twisted up inside that you didn't know if you were about to laugh, cry or throw the fuck up. Or some awful combination of all three.
“I- uh, yeah, I just-,”
“You’re breathing really fast.” Very gently, he’d taken the rod away from you and put it down. The sun was high in the sky, the birds were singing, your hands were shaking.
“Shit,” you said, pushing your shades on top of your head so you could dig the heels of your hands into your eyes. “Shit, shit,”
“I need you to breathe,” he said, and his voice- but no, it was okay; there was differentiation there; it wasn’t exactly the same. You focused on the differences in tone and pitch, shutting your eyes tight so you didn’t have to see him silhouetted against the sky, because like that it was so much harder to tell the difference-
“I’m okay,” you managed, garbled. Breathe. “I’m okay.”
“Can I- touch you? Or is that-?”
You shook your head violently, and immediately regretted it. Shit, fuck, now he was gonna think you hated him or something, why was your fucked up brain like this?
“Okay,” he says calmly. “I’m going to count to eight and I want you to breathe in with me. Then hold it.”
You followed him, breathing, holding, letting your breathe go slowly, and after repeating it several times you felt… better. Not great, but better.
“Did that help?” he asked, and you nodded.
“I can’t believe I’m having a fucking panic attack over some fucking shades,” you choked the sentence out through your breaths, knees pinned tight to your chest, head down. You made an aborted gesture with your hands, twisting them tightly together. “I mean- this is such bullshit! Right? You can see that this is bullshit?”
“Sure,” Dirk says carefully, and the tiny sound of plastic clicking against plastic makes your eyes fly open. He’d taken his shades off, folded them and placed them by his side.
“You- don’t have to-,”
“Dave,” he says, “you’re my brother. You’re pretty much the only family I have, except- I guess, Rose, but I still haven’t spoken to her that much. My point is, my alternate timeline self was an abusive piece of shit, and if there is anything I can possibly do to make it easier for you to, you know, exist, without being reminded of him, then I’ll do it gladly. I’m sorry I didn’t notice earlier.”
Slowly, you manage to unwind your fingers from each other, flexing your hands. The phantom sparks of blades clashing together flash before your eyes, but you blink hard and clear them.
“I… yeah.”
It’s silent, save for the gentle lapping of water at the side of the boat.
“Sorry.”
“God, please don’t apologise. If anything-,”
“Wh- no, dude,” you say, letting your legs down. “If you’re gonna finish that with, like, I should be the one apologising, then just- don’t. It’s not even close to being your fault. I just… have a fucked up brain that hates me. God, that was embarrassing. Thanks for, uh, talking me through it, I haven’t had one that bad in…” Like at least a week. Whoops. Delayed trauma responses are kicking your ass lately. Karkat and Rose have been on it with the reading mental health journals to give you advice, though.
“I used to get pretty bad panic attacks, too,” Dirk says, sounding offhanded- but you know him now, and you know that divulging any kind of personal information is a big fucking deal for him.
“You did?”
He nods. “Back on… future old earth, I guess, the drones would attack fairly frequently but without warning. I trained myself to go without sleep and food for days at a time because they would attack during the night, or they’d prevent me from going on supply runs a lot. When I was a kid, the power went out during a storm and the backup generator broke; I spend maybe two weeks in the dark, surviving off my rations, terrified that they were gonna come for me and I wouldn’t be able to hold them off. Eventually I fixed it, but. Ever since then, power cuts have always put me on edge. Thunderstorms used to fuck me up big time, emotionally speaking.”
“Fuck,” you’d said. His eyes were far away, remembering, but they snapped back to yours when you spoke. You could tell by the way he held himself that he was uncomfortable, but he was telling you this because he trusted you. “Dude, I always forget you grew up, like, totally alone.”
“I mean, I had Roxy and Jane and Jake,” he said. “And you, kind of. But.”
“But turns out online friends don’t count for that much when the real world is basically hell.” You nodded. “Yeah. I get you.”
He cracked the thinnest sliver of a smile, and you felt like you’d been given a piece of the sun. “I guess you do,” he said.
“Alright, show me how to thread this motherfucker again,” you said, stretching out your shoulders and picking up the fishing rod from the bottom of the boat. Dirk blinked at you.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Hell yeah, dude,” you said. “Dinner is on us tonight. We’re doing this, bro.”
“We’re making this happen,” he finished, and you sealed the deal with a solemn nod and a fist bump. Perfect.

After that, Dirk stopped wearing the shades. You’d turned up at dinner that night with a bucket of fish- mostly Dirk’s, but you’d done pretty well for your first try and Dirk had looked so fucking proud of you every time you caught one- and both of your shades tucked away. Your friends gathered around the modest campfire on alchemised chairs and beanbags blinked at your shadesless appearances, but no-one commented. Before you parted ways, Dirk to hand over the food to whoever was in charge of the fire, and you gravitating to Karkat’s beanbag, he’d given you a nod, like, I got you.
“We should do that again,” you’d said, and his whole face had fucking lit up as he smiled- a genuine Strider-smile, almost imperceptible, but so full of warmth it nearly bowled you the fuck over.
“Hell yeah,” he’d returned, and that was that. It wasn’t the end of the progress you both needed to make- that would take another few years to work through- but it was a pretty fuckin’ dope start.
“What was that about?” Karkat had asked as you’d sunk down next to him, and you’d shrugged, not really sure you were able to put to words the feelings that were crowding your chest. Something about that pride on Dirk’s face when he looked at you, pride that you’d never felt directed at you from Bro, not fucking ever; the careful, methodical way he’d taught you how to bait the line and throw and reel it in; the emotional vulnerability he’d put himself through talking to you...
“I had a good day,” you said and Karkat had nodded, face soft in the glow of the campfire.
“Good,” he’d said. And it was.

***

Back in the present you flop down on the picnic blanket next to Dirk, who lifts an arm to give you a side hug. You settle into it, squeezing him back tightly before disentangling. “Were you talking about me?” he asks.

“Yup,” says Roxy, throwing themself down on the blanket as well. Rose is lying on her front with a book on the side closest to the fire. As she sets down her reading material you can see it’s the latest draft of Karkat’s manuscript. Dude still hasn’t let you read it. “Bitching ‘bout you, actually.”

Dirk’s eyebrow raise becomes more pronounced: a question. You wave it away in favour of leaning over to hug Rose in greeting, pointing at the book. “Any good?” you ask and she smiles.

“Unfortunately, David, I have a policy of confidentiality to uphold with my clients,” she says loftily, in the same tone as the psychologist act she did when you were kids. “I really can’t tell you anything.”
“Aw, come on,” you say, and she pushes the book into her bag before you can grab it. “Karkat won’t even let me read it. Says it’s ‘not finished’ or whatever. I told him to include as much explicit xenophilia as humanly, or, I guess, Troll-anly, possible; I just wanna know if he followed my suggestions…”
“Absolutely not,” Rose says, folding her arms. “Even more so if he hasn’t actually let you read any of it yet.”
“He’s such a perfectionist,” you bemoan, and Rose looks you up and down pointedly.
“Obviously not,” she says, and you keel over clutching your chest as if shot.
“You’ve wounded me. Oh, fuck, you’re killing me, sis. I’m dying.”

You can hear her snort of laughter even though you can’t see her and you roll over onto your side to listen in on what Roxy and Dirk are saying. The grass- shorter and softer than that of OG Earth and Earth C, and a much darker green than you’re used to- is pleasantly spongy beneath you.
“That’s not fair,” Dirk is protesting. “Dave was later than me.”
“Probably for the same reasons, too, huh,” Roxy says with an exaggerated wink and you sit up, pulling off your shades and propping them on top of your head.
“Excuse me? Are you insulting my honour?”
“No one said anything about honour,” Rose cuts in. “You’re the one bringing it up. Got something to tell us?”
“Please,” you return. “Remember when you accidentally sent that lewd message meant for your beautiful wife to our family group chat? I do. I’m scarred for fucking life by it, actually. I have extra therapy sessions because of it. It’s costing me a fucking fortune, Rose, and I have a family to support. Me and Karkat are gonna lose the house. We’ll be out on the streets- not these streets, no, we’ll be back down there,” and at this you gesture wildly in the approximate direction of the planet you recently left behind, “Since rent prices are fucking skyrocketing up here-,” a lie. You don’t pay rent here; you fucking made the place. “And it’ll be just us wandering sadly, me looking attractively scruffy and rugged from lack of, like, insulation, and Karkat pacing up and down the road screaming charmingly at citizens who are all shocked to see their gods roughing it on the cold hard streets of reality. We’ll turn to petty crime, get caught because we all know that I have no fucking sense of inconspicuousness- that's a hard word to say fast- and Karkat’s basically a walking alarm bell, and then we’ll get thrown in jail for the rest of lives, and I’ll die heroically saving Karkat from getting beat up by some rowdy prison dude after he inevitably insults the guy’s mother, and it’ll be final. Heroic death, tick motherfucking tock, no more Dave Strider to grace your homes and lives. Is that what you want, Rose? Is that really what you fucking want?”
You stop, glaring expectantly at your sister. Also catching your breath. The fire crackles pleasantly, sparks leaping over the logs, and some weird new-planet creature makes a warbling noise in the trees.

Rose hums thoughtfully for a moment. “Six.”
“Six as well,” says Roxy.
Dirk shrugs. “Four.”
“Aw, dude, what?” you ask, flopping back onto your elbows. “I bare my soul to you in the first ramble of the evening and you give me a four?”
“It was the insulation thing,” Dirk explains. “Also the fact that you made me remember that fucking message, Jesus Long-Dead Christ, Rose.”
She waves a hand in that ‘I’m embarrassed but I refuse to show it’ way of hers. “Deflection has never been your strong suit, David,” she says, and you wrinkle your nose.
“Why is everyone calling me David,” you wonder aloud. The passing many-eyed fireflies make no response. Typical.
“Were you, or were you not late to our family reunion gathering extravaganza because you were engaged in a romantic tryst with the distracting force known colloquially as your husband Karkat Vantas?” Roxy asks commandingly.
You pause for a second, and then shrug. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Anticlimactic,” says Rose. “I was expecting another rant.”
“I got nothin’ to be ashamed of,” you counter. “I mean, have you seen him? Being late was worth it.”
Rose nods, tipping her head to the side, and you can tell immediately from the look in her eyes that she’s thinking about her own alien life partner. “You make a good point there.”
“Y’all are as bad as each other,” Roxy groans, and reaches for the picnic basket. “Who wants snacks?”

***

“Do you remember what it was like at the beginning?” Roxy sighs, wistful tinged with wryness as he leans his head of pink curls against Dirk’s shoulder.
“Sure,” you say from your sprawl on the picnic blanket. “Absolute fuckin’ mess. The crowns? No one should ever give sixteen year olds royal power. Mark that down in the lessons we have learned notebook.”
Roxy grins wryly. “And Janey and Jake’s capitalist empire,” they reminisce with a wince. Thinking about their girlfriend’s short-lived stint at becoming CEO of Everything was still a sore subject. Disaster had been averted- narrowly. You know Jane understands where she went wrong; you know it’s not entirely her fault given that she, like the rest of you, never had actual, proper schooling and was groomed from birth to become an evil businesswoman… but still. It’s hard to forget how fucking close you’d all been to falling the fuck apart back then, along with the rest of your brand new world.
“That was a real shitshow,” says Dirk, summing up your thoughts with typical aplomb. He’s carefully petting Roxy’s hair as they wriggle to lie with their head fully in his lap, the firelight crackling softly as it plays over their face. Whatever wood you're burning right now is giving the flames an almost imperceptible violet tinge. Dirk looks pensive, maybe more so than usual. “Thinking about it, I get the feeling that things could have turned out a lot worse for us.” For me, hangs at the end of his sentence, unsaid, but impossible to ignore. Yeah, that, too. The height of Dirk’s control issues had been after the game ended and immediate danger was, for the first time in his life, averted. It would be an understatement to say it had been… bad. But you were a team, and earth support groups had had nothin' on you all. Your resident seer nods slowly, the mood turning serious for a moment as she traces a finger absentmindedly through the grass.

“I’ve had similar feelings,” Rose admits, “but I think, truly, that the path we’re on currently is the best one. The right one. At risk of sounding a little gauche, it’s the path that we deserve, all of us. Happiness.”

Dirk nods, slowly. He’s being quieter than usual, and he looks tired- like Karkat, he basically always looks a second away from collapse; you don’t know if you’ve ever seen either of those dudes look well-rested in your life- but content, still petting Roxy’s hair gently. You tap his shoulder with your knuckles lightly in a gesture you’ve both adopted as unequivocally supportive. As always you can feel the ebb and flow of time around you, and with the gradual expansion of your powers, sensing the myriad other timelines branching off and running parallel to your is easy. All you have to do is think about it and there they are, shimmery threads stretching out and around the reaches of your consciousness. Which would be the reaches of, like, paradox space, you guess. Or reality. Whatever. As the resident time player, you’re uniquely qualified in that you can say ‘time ain’t real’ and know it’s the truth. But still, even with the whole concept of time being super arbitrary and confusing to actually think about, given that it’s basically just an instinctual experience for you that requires no actual brain power- the timelines. You can feel ‘em, all infinite batshit numbers of them. And, well:
“Man, I don’t know how much my powers and shit count for but I’ll say this. I can’t feel anything particularly fucked up about the timeline we’re in right now. It feels right to me. Like Rose said. Feels like we’re supposed to be here. That whole shitshow at the beginning, uh, notwithstanding I guess.”

“Speaking of shitshow,” Rose says, casting a sly smile towards you, “you and Karkat…”
You groan. “Jegus, Rose, we get it; you and Kanaya are the only ones with their shit together from the get-go on the ‘fall deeply in love with an alien’ front, alright, me and Karkat sorted our shit out eventually!”
“Only took you five years,” Dirk murmurs, and you throw a chocolate-covered strawberry at him, which he catches easily and eats, stem and all.
“Dude, shut up, you can not talk.”
With his shades off, the fire in front and decades behind them it’s so much easier to see the faint blush that hits Dirk’s freckle-dusted cheeks. Roxy swivels in his lap to laugh up at him.
“You and Jake-!”
Rose leans forwards. “You and John-,”
“Still can’t believe you macked on my best friend, man.”
“I- Hey! If anything it was him macking on me,” Dirk protests.
“That’s what you take issue with here?” you ask, shaking your head. “Terrible. Awful. Betrayed by my own brother-slash-weird-genetic-dad. Double-betrayed, because my best friend was in on it too. Insidious. It’s been, like, twenty years but I’m not over it.”
“That’s also why he was late today,” Roxy whispers behind her hand through a peal of giggles, and Dirk sits up straighter, making to protest- but you’re not finished. “‘Sides, you say it took us five years but actually, I’ll have you know, we got together like, two months after the game ended, so. Fuck you.”
“Wait, really?” Roxy is looking at you with wide, startled eyes. “But you didn’t move out to your own place for five years, did you?”
“Nah,” you says, smiling faintly at the memory. “It was cool, chilling with Jade and TZ in our massive castle for a while. Y’all saw the Jade Harley Botanical Gardens gardens, right?” Everyone nods. “Yeah, she actually started those like… way back then. Taught me and Karkat how to not kill plants. And then when the population got going she sort of handed it off to the gardening enthusiasts and they named it after her.”

“So you and Karkat were together-together that whole time?” says Rose, with trademark skepticism and suddenly you remember the real reason you and Karkat didn’t move out for so long. It hadn’t just been the gardening, or TZ’s legendary dorito smoothies.
“Oh, shit,” you start, leaping up, and Rose grimaces.
“Stop,” she says, but she knows it’s futile. You can see it in her eyes. Your sister hates losing bets.
“How much money do you owe Kanaya now?” you ask gleefully, and Roxy starts laughing.
“You bet on when they’d get together?” they ask. “Rosie! My only daughter! You never told me about this!”
“Because neither of us had won,” Rose says through gritted teeth. “I cannot believe this. The one time I actually want you to be a disorganised mess, you actually manage to claw back some semblance of competence? Despicable.”
“How much is it,” you ask, grinning wide enough that your cheeks are starting to hurt. “Come on. You can tell me.”
“It was a hundred Caegars,” says Dirk, and Rose whirls to face him, betrayed, as you burst out laughing.
“This is the best day of my life,” you sigh, rolling onto your back. “I’m gonna make a banner.” You raise a hand, palm turned to the sky, envisioning the masterpiece. “‘Rose Lalonde is a loser’. Incredible.” You can do it in comic sans and fry it in the sbahjifier and everything.
“I will burn everything you hold dear,” says Rose pleasantly.

Later, when you’ve managed to escape death-by-occult-majyyks, Dirk turns to you.
“Anyway, did you really call today the best day of your life? Better than your wedding day?” He’s raising his eyebrow again. He does it just to annoy you, because he knows you can’t do it. He has that shit down to a fine fucking art. Bastard. You will never be able to emulate it; Karkat knows you’ve tried.
“Eh,” you say, waving a hand. “Call it a tie.”
Roxy glances over their shoulder from where they’re putting more logs on the fire. “I’m telling Karkat you said that.”
“Aw, come on, dad.”

***

The day you married Karkat wasn’t the happiest day of your life, but it was a close second. At least, it was at the time; now, looking back at your epic love saga and with many many years unfolding ahead of you yet to come, you know that your threshold for superlative happiness has only increased and kept increasing since. But anyway, your wedding was fucking incredible for sure, but in order to reach that point, the two of you had to actually sort your shit out in the first place. And the day you finally kissed was an insta-winner for the hotly contended number one spot in your Happiest Days list.

There was a huge tree in the garden you shared with Terezi and Jade. And Karkat, obviously, but you and he were kind of a package deal at this point, your names spoken in the same way as ‘salt and pepper’, ‘Rose and Kanaya’, ‘fish and chips’. The tree was one of your favourite spots to sit and chill and mindlessly write lyrics or listen to music, and that day had been one of the warmest days so far. The shade under the wide canopy called to you, the calm .
Jade was out on a date with Davepeta, whose existence in general still kind of weirded you the fuck out, but you were coming to terms with it; Karkat was probably taking a nap, and Terezi was packing. All three of you had unanimously decided to give her space while she planned her journey into the furthest ring to search for her moirail or girlfriend or whatever they were. It was kind of… awkward, around her. Not bad-awkward, necessarily, but she was so single-minded about her mission that you felt like you were intruding just by being in the same room. So you passed by the door to her room with your notebook tucked under one arm, and headed out into the sun.

It was only once you were halfway across the garden that you realised you had been wrong: Karkat wasn’t napping- dozing in a patch of sunlight like a cat, draped languidly over the couch, curled in a tight ball with his hands in fists and his brow furrowed- after all.
He was reading one of his trashy romance books in a soft patch of grass in the shade at the foot of the tree, light dappled over his hair. As you drew closer you realised he was wearing one of your shirts, and even though your wardrobes had basically merged into one big pile of laundry at that point, your heart still kind of seized at the sight of him in it.
“Dude,” you said as you flopped down next to him, and his nose wrinkled as he carefully marked his place in the book and looked up at you with a little sigh.
“Yes, Dave?” he said with a long-suffering tone that was pretty much entirely undermined by the tiny smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Nice shirt there, Kitkat,” you said, and grinned. “Keep stealing from me like this and I’m gonna start charging fees.”
There was a brief moment where his cheeks looked like they’re deciding whether or not to blush, and then he rolled his eyes at you. “Fuck you,” he said without venom, “you’re wearing my socks, don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
You glanced down at your feet, shoeless because why waste time putting sneakers on when you can just float above the grass? Shit, you were totally wearing his socks, charcoal grey with pale pink polka dots. You hadn’t even realised.
“Busted,” you said, and leaned back against the tree. Fuck, the sun felt nice. “Guess we’re both thieves.”
“Knights, but close enough, dumbass,” Karkat muttered, and you laughed, chest strangely light, cracking your eyes open.
“Sarcasm! I love it. You’re way better than Kanaya at that.” You peered over at the book, trying to read the notes he’d scrawled in the margins. His trademark block capitals filled the edges of the pages with his commentary. God, it was fucking adorable.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Karkat said, closing the book with a muted snap. You made a face at him, and he made one right back, not pausing in his sentence. “What with how much time she’s spending with your hatchmate.”
“True…” you thought about Kanaya and Rose, living in beautiful gay bliss. You were pretty sure they were gonna get married soon. Neither of them had said anything about it, but after three years on the meteor with them, you liked to think you knew them both pretty well. At that point, it was just a question of who would propose first.
Also, you may or may not have made a bet with Karkat and John about it.
Speaking of Karkat, he was putting his book down and to one side. A light breeze ruffled his hair, and you thought about how it felt, how weirdly feathery and soft it was if you stroke it, but how if you patted it it was almost spiky. He turned his eyes, full of honey-coloured light in the afternoon sun, towards you.
“Oh, dude, you don’t gotta like… stop reading on my account. I’m just chilling.”
He frowns. Again, it’s adorable. Fuck, he’s adorable. “You sure?” he asked. “Because I know you get antsy if you don’t have my full, undivided attention for more than a minute.”
Temptation won easily and you reached over, threading your fingers through his hair and ruffling it affectionately. It was so soft, and like, weirdly thick. It looked like it would be bristly, but instead it was completely the opposite. “Hey,” you told him. “I can be quiet.”
“Uh huh,” he said, skeptical because he was a fucking hypocrite, and didn’t make any move to shake your hand off. He just picked his book back up, turning his attention back to the pages. You petted his hair a little more just because you could, and then you produced a notebook from your cluttered sylladex and got to work on your latest project. The sun drifted slowly through the afternoon sky, and the leaves moved faintly above, casting shadows on the ground at your feet.

You sat in companionable silence for a while, Karkat hunched over his book with his brow all wrinkled, gnawing on his thumbnail -thumbclaw? Thumbtalon? Do trolls even call them thumbs? It was probably something like ‘opposable grab digits’ or something- and pausing every so often to scribble something in the margin. You were making some progress on your lyrics, but mostly you were just… relaxing. Your awareness of the space around you- the trees, the dips and hills, the houses in the distance, all the places someone could conceivably attack from- was a constant thrum in the back of your mind, like it always was, but it wasn’t overwhelming. For the first time in a while, you didn’t feel tense.
It was nice.
Being with Karkat was nice.
Alright. You’d been having thoughts like that with increasing frequency for basically the past year and then some. On the meteor the two of you had something, for sure. You were best bros, peas in a dubiously gay pod. It had been on the meteor, with Karkat’s help that you’d actually fucking got your head out of your admittedly fine ass about a lot of stuff. Namely, your myriad issues with masculinity. And your sexuality.
Allowing yourself to give and receive affection, even just in the context of friendship, was basically invaluable, and you had Karkat to thank for that. He was just so unashamedly him; he cried, like, all the fucking time; he loved rom-coms and wasn’t even embarrassed about it; he wore all his emotions on his sleeve and then went ahead and yelled about them for good measure. It was the opposite of everything you’d ever known. Being with him- being his friend, sharing his company, hanging out with him- for those three years had made you a better person; you had zero doubts about it. And the two of you had never… talked about it. About what you were to each other- beyond the best bros thing. You were pretty sure Karkat felt it too, that there was something more to your relationship, but you didn’t have any fucking clue how to even go about bringing that up in conversation, so you just… hadn’t. It was dumb, maybe, but more than anything you didn’t want to jeopardize your friendship. The thought of losing Karkat actually made you want to throw up, no kidding around.

But still. There was something. Something in the way that you’d become so comfortable around each other you did shit like hold hands, and cuddle, and put your limbs on each other even when there was no need for it. You threw your hand around him when you walked and he tucked his around your waist. You shared your clothes; you’d slept in the same bed more than once under pretext of: ‘nightmares’, ‘cold’, ‘we just watched a movie and I don’t wanna move’ and more. The excuses were bullshit. You just hadn’t been able to bring yourself to tell him to his face that you wanted to be close to him.
Recently, when he talked, you couldn’t stop yourself from staring at his lips. His teeth flashed when he spoke, even more so when he shouted, and you were so fascinated by them. You wanted to touch them, which was fucking weird. And gayest of all, you found yourself wondering what it would be like to kiss him.

He was your best friend. He’d pretty much saved your fucking life on that meteor, or at least rescued you from a lifetime of repression and unhealthy coping mechanisms. He- he was hot, anyone could see that. He was an alien. He was… he was Karkat. Your best friend.
You were sitting shoulder to shoulder with him in the grass under a great green tree, and the sun dipped below the leaves to dazzle you even through your shades, and he raised his head to shield his face with a hand and squint out at the view, and

And you loved him.
You loved him so much your chest ached.
Fuck.

“What?”
He was looking at you, now, half of his face aglow with sunlight. You’d spoken out loud. The look in his eyes was half fear, half precious, perfect hope.
All at once, something in your chest went click, and something in your terrible fucked-up brain shrugged and took a back seat.
“I love you,” you said, simply. The words were surprisingly easy to get out. You just said it, and then it was said, and the words hung there before you like clouds. You could taste them on your tongue from a moment before. The moment stretched out. Were you freezing time without realising?
Karkat’s eyes were perfectly round.
“You-,”
He made a weird choking noise, and you blinked. His throat worked. He opened his mouth. No sound came out. Uh.
“Karka- shit, are you okay?”
You confess your fucking love to a guy and he starts choking, holy shit- He held up a hand, like, please refrain from speech, I am trying to breathe, and you patted him on the back helpfully until he stopped suffocating on his own spit and wiped the pinkish tears out of the corner of his eyes.
For a second he opened and closed his mouth like a fish, and then:
“You just said it!” You nodded.
“Yeah, I know,” you said. “Crazy, right? I didn’t think it would be so- so easy. Man,”
He was gesticulating wildly now. “You-! Dave! I can’t believe- what the fuck!”
“Does this mean you don’t feel the same way,” you said uncertainly, “because like, I was pretty sure-,”
“No, you fucking- you-,” His volume rose wildly as he stared at you, deep pink blush high on his cheeks, “Of course I fucking do!”
“You do?”
“Yes!”
And then he reached for you, hooking a hand round the back of your neck, and pulling you in. It wasn’t a perfect kiss, but it was your first one, and that meant something. It was warm, and kind of messy, and you drew back to stare at one another. Your hand trembled, just a tiny bit, when you pulled off your shades. You licked your lips.
“Um,” said Karkat, eyes fixed on yours, voice wobbling like it was his turn to be all hesitant and blushy. Affection rose like water in your chest. Fuck. Fuck, you loved him. You cupped the side of his face, running the pad of your thumb over his cheekbone. His skin was so smooth and so warm. His eyelashes lowered, long, dark and thick, brushing against his skin. Carefully, you leaned in again, pressing your lips together again. It was gentle, and his lips were soft; the undertone of desperation was a background hum between the two of you as you shifted in place and Karkat kissed you back, his other hand fisted in the fabric at your shoulder.
You drew apart, couldn’t stop the breathless smile, and he was smiling back at you like dawn breaking over a city skyline.
“I really- Karkat, dude, I know we’re young and all, but-,”
“I love you,” he told you. “And I want to human-date you.”
Your helpless grin spilled across your face. You couldn’t stop running your thumb over his cheekbone, holding him so carefully. Your head was spinning. “You wanna be my boyfriend?” you asked, and his nod was so vigorous it dislodged your hand. “You’re my boyfriend. Holy fuck. Karkat Vantas is my boyfriend.”
“Shut the fuck up and kiss me again,” he commanded, but he was blushing so bright and your heart was like a beacon in your chest.
“Sir, yes, sir,” you replied, and leaned in once more.
The afternoon sun trickled lazily across the sky, trailing heat like banners. You were steeped in light, melting in it, the leaves rustling coolly above, calm shadows moving in patterns across both of your faces.
You were immortal gods, that was undeniable. But to you, on a much more fundamental level, you were just a traumatised kid. Karkat was your best friend. You loved him, and he loved you too.

***

“Dave? You good?” Roxy is waving their hand in front of your face. You laugh it off, and Rose shoots you a look of understanding. This whole evening is pretty much geared towards reminiscence, and the memories being brought up are mostly good- fucking incredible, even- but still...
“It’s kind of bittersweet, huh,” you say, looking out at the sky, dotted with pinpoints of light. One of them is the planet you created. Not too close, not too far. Just right. You can’t stop thinking about everything you’ve left behind. When you first got here you sat on the roof of your new hive with Karkat and squeezed his hand, and watched the whole golden web of your future spill out before you. You hadn’t looked too deeply. You’re no Seer, anyway- but the sheer depth and breadth of the timeline yet to come that unfolded (was still unfolding, had to yet to unfold, had been unfolded since the beginning of paradox space; time, flat circle, etcetera) before and around you was breathtaking in the scariest, most tantalisingly hopeful way. You blink. You have a sentence left to finish. “I mean, thinking about all the time we spent there.” you gesture vaguely. All eyes follow the weird arc of your hand and fix on the pinprick of light that was Earth C. “All the memories we made, the population we fuckin’ created, the shit we achieved... Not all of it was good- some of it was pretty fuckin’ bad, actually, but- man, I don’t know. It’s just weird.”

“There’s so much that I’m gonna miss,” says Roxy, nodding with a wistful look in their eyes.
Dirk hums pensively. “The lakes were pretty good,” he says, and the corner of his mouth quirks up in a sliver of a smirk. “Also, the internet.”
“The fuckin’ internet, man!” Roxy groans loudly. “We need to move like, a tiny bit closer. So we can still catch their wifi. Carapacian twitter was so good.”
“I’ll miss the brooding caverns,” Rose says, slow-crackling flames playing gently over her face. “I spent so much time there with Kanaya, it was almost my second home. Raising the mother grub and seeing her through to birth was a remarkably profound experience, one that I’m honoured to have played a part in. And of course I’ll miss the fanfiction servers, at least until we find a way to access the Earth C internet again.” She nods once, matching Dirk’s thoughtful visage. “There were some truly amazing works on there.”
You crack a grin, remembering yours and Karkat’s own voyage into the Earth C fanfiction archive. “Fuck, Rose, you did not have to remind me of that. I won’t miss the amount of people writing smutty fic about, like Karkat and Jake. That shit is just weird.”
“It’s creative freedom,” Rose says, a smile curving her lips, and you roll your eyes at her.
“Whatever. I’ll miss, fuck, so much. The fucking Mayor, for starters.” There is a round of assent. The day you said goodbye to the Mayor- who had elected to stay and live out the rest of his life (which seems to be marked by at least a little bit of longevity, considering he’s still kickin’ and the usual Carapacian lifespan would’ve… ended… by now. Fuck, no, you’re not gonna think about the Mayor dying. Fuck that to hell and back) caring for the citizens of his town in a beautiful feat of nobility, compassion, and a love for democracy- was in the top ten saddest days of your life. It’s still raw.
“Man, I’m gonna miss the Mayor so much…”
‘We’ll go back and visit,” Roxy says, determined. “It’ll do everyone good to see us once in a while, anyway, to remind them that, y’know, their gods are real and do exist, and that we’re still lookin’ out for them even if we’re taking a more hands off approach now.”
“I can’t wait to see the Mayor again,” you say, fervently. Everyone nods. Love for the Mayor is both innate and eternal, and also, like, the most powerful fucking force in paradox space, godtier powers be damned. “I can’t even think of anything else I’ll miss, I’m fucked up over the Mayor now,” you say, and Dirk pats your arm sympathetically. “Shit. I guess the chess guys, they were cool to hang out with. And I’ll miss playing ‘who can get recognised the most times by walking around on the streets in disguise’, that was fun.”
“Also, we put in so much work revolutionising the media industry,” Dirk says, and you gasp aloud.
“Dude, we did!”
“I know we agreed to kickstart those projects and let them germinate for a couple decades and see what they create, and it definitely will be interesting to see the fruits of our rad science, but…”
“But it would also be sweet to be down there gettin’ involved,” you finish Dirk’s sentence with a sigh. “Yeah, bro. For sure.” You’d spent years making music, making art, directing films, writing scripts, injecting your Strider-brand irony into the mainstream and watching the citizens of your new planet react to it. Entire new movements of art had risen and fallen, even in the brief twenty nine years you’d been there. You still have a massive collaborative grubggle doc dedicated to their meticulous documentation. Post-post-new-wave-dadaism was your favourite, visually speaking, and musically you know that glitchwave farmstep would retain a special, hallowed place in your heart for eternity. You and Dirk share a poignant moment of eye contact in solemn remembrance of the creative masterpieces you’d helped nurture.

“You know what else I’ll miss?” Rose asks softly, eyes levelled on the star that was your planet, winking in the distance. “The park where Kanaya and I were married.”
“Oh, hon,” says Roxy comfortingly, taking hold of Rose’s hand. “It was so beautiful! When we go to visit that’s stop number one.”
“It was beautiful, wasn’t it?” Rose shakes her head slightly. “I must confess, all this reminiscing is making me… uncharacteristically emotional.”
“Emotions are good for you, nerd,” you say to her. She flips you off with elegantly painted nails.
“Dave, you’re the most emotionally repressed person I’ve ever met,” she says.
“Was,” you correct her. “Was the most emotionally repressed person you’ve ever met. Then I went through character development, remember?”
Rose just sighs.

***

(She’d had a plan of how it was going to go. Of course she had. She’d picked out the ring after weeks of searching and fretting and second, third, fourth-guessing herself, of driving Karkat- who, she would admit reluctantly, was without a doubt the resident romance expert- insane with her planning. She’d booked them a dinner at Kanaya’s favourite Alternian fusion place for their anniversary; she’d ordered flowers; she’d written and memorised a speech-
But of course, for all her planning, all her Seer powers, life just didn’t work that way.)

Rose was of the opinion that no artist could possibly hope to capture the beauty that was Kanaya Maryam in repose. Curled catlike in her favourite armchair, bathed in a pool of sunlight, she stirred softly in her sleep. Light shifted over the soft planes of her face and glinting off the pearly corner of fang poking out from her lips. The faintest jade blush under her skin glowed with warmth. Everything about her was exquisite: her elegant hand, resting on the open pages of her well-read copy of Complacency of the Learned; the soft tufts of her hair feathered against her cheekbones; her long, dark lashes shadowed against her faintly luminous skin. Even the cramped cursive of her handwriting in the margins of the book was beautiful. Kanaya. Her soulmate, however gauche the concept may be. It made her chest ache hot and fierce, made her breath stutter in her throat until she had to take a moment to remind herself that oxygen was an essential part of staying alive. She was verklempt; she was in love. Would death by overwhelming emotion be just or heroic? Would it be final? Rose found that if she had to choose a way to go, that would surely be it.

She drew closer, reaching down reverently to brush a strand of hair away from Kanaya’s face. The honeyed sunlight was warm on her skin. Kanaya was warmer- hotter, one might say, with a smug leer in the audience’s direction- like this, with her smooth skin sun-warmed and glowing from within. At Rose’s gentle touch she stirred again, eyelashes fluttering lightly before she raised her head, blinking sleepily up. Her eyes, half-lidded and drowsy, sun-soaked irises a bright, mellow green, caught Rose’ gaze, and she smiled a wonderful slow smile of undiluted love as happiness bloomed over her features. The way her face transformed with that smile reminded Rose, suddenly, of their first morning on Earth C, the sight of their first sunrise breaking over the horizon in a glorious wash of peace, the first time they all truly felt like it was finally over: that they could finally live.

Oh, she’d had a plan.

At that sleepy smile, afternoon sun washing over them both in heady, soporific waves, Rose didn’t even think. Couldn’t think. Faced with Kanaya gazing at her with dozy delight, her mental faculties gave up the ghost and dissolved on the spot.

“Marry me,” she said. Blurted out, really. It was rather embarrassing- but she shoved away the immediate mortification in favour of allowing her overwhelming fountain of emotion to spill over into her eyes. She was breathless, lips parted, tension humming through her like a shivering wire. Kanaya blinked.
“Yes,” she said immediately, then sat up a little in her chair, one hand coming up to her chest, lips parting as wakefulness descended. She shook herself slightly, in that catlike way that she had, dark hair mussed and gorgeous. Her eyes shone. The moment stretched between them like a long-loved violin string, perfectly tuned. And then Rose burst into tears.

Later, when she’d calmed down, she’d run to their bedroom, fumbled the box from the shoebox she’d hidden it in- a designer shoebox with velvet padding, because she was Rose Lalonde, gods damn it- and stumbled back downstairs to the sunlit room to fall to one knee in front of Kanaya, flipping it open with trembling fingers. She’d been so focused, so swept up in the emotion and that damned speech she’d prepared, that it had taken her a second to realise than Kanaya had knelt down as well, pulling a box of her own from the depths of her skirt pocket.
Oh. Oh.
Really, how could she ever have expected anything less?
“Rose Lalonde,” said Kanaya, voice choked with emotion-
“Kanaya Maryam,” said Rose in return, and they were both smiling helplessly, both barely holding back another flood of tears, kneeling in front of each other in the house and life they’d built together.
Kanaya said, “You are the love of my life.”
Speech forgotten (for now; even in the midst of all this there was a part of her brain that whispered there’d be time for gratuitous speech-making later, most probably in their bedroom), Rose said, “Will you do me the honour of being my wife?”
Kanaya, sharp fangs peeking out gorgeously from her joyous smile, said, “Yes, a thousand times over, I- Rose- I’m certain that it doesn’t need to be said and yet I hope you’ll allow me the desire to say it regardless- I love you,”
Rose swayed forwards, verbosity felled, and whispered, “Kanaya, I love you so much,”
And Kanaya with pale green tears sliding down her cheeks caught her by her shoulders and said, “Wait, I still need to ask-,”
“Yes,” said Rose, falling into her arms, laughing and laughing through her tears, “Yes, yes, I love you, yes,”

They found the rings later, the boxes side by side on the carpet. Slid them onto each others’ fingers, intertwined their hands. Rose leaned up and kissed her fiancee.
“Mrs and Mrs Lalonde-Maryam,” she whispered. Kanaya kissed her back sweetly. “Maryam-Lalonde, surely,” she replied.

It was a fairytale; it was a myth come to life. Any sordid vampiric romance Rose had ever read fell pathetically short of the wonder that was Kanaya Maryam. Being able to- to have and to hold, til death do them part (and of course, what with the immortality perks, their years together stretched far into the future)- was the greatest honour of her life. With the ring on her finger and her soon-to-be wife in her arms, Rose couldn't help but think that despite everything, despite the death and the destruction and the nightmares and the panic attacks that plagued all of them... for this, it had all been worth it. To meet the love of her life, and live happily every after with her, hand in hand together, facing a golden future.

***

Rose blinks as she comes back to herself. Everyone is drowsy, absorbed in humming along to the music, getting snacks, staring at the fire. A fond smile curves her lips as she brushes her hair against the rings on her finger, the stunningly-wrought black and silver engagement band set with amethyst and jade, gothic and elegant all at once, and the simple black-and-gold wedding ring, the colours of which perfectly matched their respective aspects.

Blowing steam from the top of their mug, Roxy squints at the horizon. It’s a burning line of candyfloss pink and creamsicle orange. “Hey, li’l man, are you using your powers or does the sun just set, like, really slowly here?”
“I don’t think I’m doing anything,” you say, turning your attention to the thrumming in your blood. “Nah, I’m not. Time here is like… slightly off from Earth C, I think. It’s kind of hard to tell. I’m like an iPhone, I just switch over to the new time zones automatically; I don’t really notice it anymore.”
Roxy makes a huh face, and shrugs. “Well, it’s a nice sunset,” they muse. “Matches my hair.” It’s true; it does. Roxy’s bleached hair cycles through like, a different colour every day, but they always tend to go back to their favourite soft pink, which is what they have now. It looks almost peachy, and you pull your camera out of your sylladex without even thinking about it. Roxy grins wide and strikes a pose as you snap a pic. Your camera whirrs, spitting out the printout which you hand over. It’s a good picture, the colours are amazing. You raise the camera again, snapping more pictures of the trees, the weird bugs, one of Dirk's face in frame with Roxy just behind.
Rose speaks up from where she’s pouring herself a new mug of hot chocolate. “Speaking of your time powers, I find it endearing how you thought I didn’t notice that you stopped time to take a nap in the middle of our coffee meetup last week.” She takes a long sip. You pause in taking another picture, this time of the fireflies circling the trees behind Dirk. Shit.
Dirk turns to face you fully, eyes slightly wider than usual, which is basically an loud exclamation of astonishment in Strider-talk. You take a picture of him and his nose wrinkles slightly, but he’s undeterred. “You can control time in your sleep now?” he asks and when you nod, whistles softly. “That’s amazing.”

Every time. Every goddamn time Dirk compliments him, you feel like you’ve been hit by a fuckin’ truck filled with, like, happiness and sparkles and joy and shock and affection and, and bewilderment. It’s ridiculous. You’ve known Dirk for fucking decades- exactly twenty nine years, seven months, two weeks, four days, thirteen minutes and forty-five seconds, your brain supplies helpfully- and it still gets you every fucking time. On reflex, you stop time then and there to bury your face in your hands, wobbly smile pressed into your palms.
“God fucking damn it,” you breathe to yourself. The air is utterly still, fireflies frozen mid flight, weird iridescent purple bugs stopped in their tracks. The look on your brother-slash-ecobiological-dad’s face is impressed, awed, even. It’s pure uncomplicated pride. Dirk’s proud of you, and it’s nowhere near the first- or last- time you’ve seen that expression on his face, because he always makes sure you know when he’s proud of you, because he just cares like that, just goes out of his way to make you feel loved, and appreciated, and wanted in a way that you never, ever experienced in the first thirteen years of your life- and still it never fails to shock you. Never fails to make you feel like throwing your arms around him and messing up his shirt with tears ‘cus you’re just that overwhelmed with emotion. God fucking damn it. Your heart is so full. It’s just been so long since you’ve all properly hung out, and you knew you missed your family but you didn’t realise you missed them this much. You really might cry. Fuck.

Once you’ve got yourself under control again, you unfreeze time, letting the fireflies continue on their lazy looping paths. Your cheeks are still red, though. You can feel it. You clear your throat.

“It’s kinda bad, actually,” you say, changing the subject. “Karkat always gets mad at me ‘cus I do it to get a lie in in the mornings.”
“While your powers are developing at an extremely impressive rate, you should practice exercising control over them at the same time,” Rose says. Her eyes are glowing, Light symbol emblazoned over her pupils in that eerily beautiful way that happens when she uses her powers, and she's using the slightly lower voice, the one she has when she imparts advice that’s not just good ol’ common sense, it’s verified Seer Facts, baby. You wonder what she saw just then, what brief flashes of possibility flickered behind her eyes in the milliseconds before she spoke. “Being able to not use them is a good skill to have as well.”
Her eyes flash, light blazing stronger for a split second before it simmers down and her irises fade back to their usual purple.
“I… will do that,” you say. “Thanks. Also, your eyes really complete your witchy goth aesthetic, have I ever told you that before?”
“Thank you. I suppose yours are fairly cool, too.”
You frown. “My… eyes? Uh, thanks, they’re the same ones I’ve had since birth.”
Rose raises an eyebrow. Roxy and Dirk are also looking at you with twin expressions of doubtful confusion on their faces.
“What?”
“You didn’t know?” Roxy asks.
“Dude. Know what?” Seriously, what?
“When you use your powers, the time symbol appears over your irises,” Rose says. The corner of her mouth quirks up in a smile. “It’s bright red, a lighter shade than your eyes, and it stays there for a few seconds afterwards before fading. We’ll acknowledge the fact that you’ve never looked at yourself in a reflective surface while using your powers and move on, shall we?”
“Wh- and you have?”
Her eyebrow raise becomes more pronounced. “Of course. I wanted to see what physical changes it brought.”
“I don’t- okay. Whatever.” You are determined to not let this be a thing. And you need to change the subject immediately before someone brings up the fact that you just stopped time for a hot second there. “Let’s move on. What ‘bout you, Rox? Any new and whacky void shit?”
Roxy shrugs. “Ah, you know,” he says, a wicked grin burgeoning at the corner of his mouth. “Just the usual. Snatchin’ any old thing outta the depths of the void before you can say “alchemiter”. And also, this.”

They snap their fingers, and Dirk disappears.
Totally disappears. You fall forward with a yelp where you’d been leaning against your brother’s side.

Roxy lets you all exclaim wildly for a second before snapping his fingers again, and- boom. Dirk is back, eyebrows travelling slowly up his forehead. There’s no fanfare, but the part of you that’s not busy flipping the fuck out notices that the shadows around Roxy become slightly more pronounced when he does the voidy thing.
“That… sure was something, Rox’,” Dirk says. His voice is as calm and measured as usual, but there’s something else. Roxy gives him a double thumbs up.
“I know! It’s not just invisibility now, it’s like- wow. Everything.”
“Where did you go?” you ask, and Dirk shakes his head.
“I wasn’t anywhere,” he says, and smiles slightly at the look on your face. “No, I mean- literally, I wasn’t anywhere. Roxy’s aspect is void, so I suppose that’s “where” I went, but honestly I think it’s probably a little more complex than that.” He darts a glance at Roxy, who nods. “I could still hear and feel you all, though. You just couldn’t… interact. For all intents and purposes, I didn’t exist anymore. At least, not to you.”
“...Huh.” you say. Roxy is looking vaguely uncomfortable. “You can erase someone’s existence?”
He shifts in place. You notice that their eyes change, too; where Rose’s fill with light that erases her pupils entirely, it’s as if Roxy's pupils grow to fill even the sclera of their eyes with deep, inky black. It’s strange, but also- strangely inviting, instead of scary.
“I mean… yeah,” he says. “Yeah. I think I could probably… do it permanently, too, if I- I wouldn’t want to! But- yeah.” He looks down at his hands, flexing them. You think about what this means. Could Roxy erase someone’s existence so thoroughly that even their memory disappeared? Could he stop someone from believing in their own existence?
“Void is… kind of a difficult aspect,” he says. “I can do stuff like summon basically anything I want, which is cool, and I can turn invisible and make other people invisible, but- when I really think about it I can feel that there’s so much more. And not all of it’s, like… fun. I don’t know. It’s mysterious, right? And I like it, obviously, it’s my aspect. But I get the feeling that if I’m not careful, I could… I could cause some damage. Sorry, Dirk.”
He waves their apology away. “It was cool,” he says. “Kind of nice, if a little unexpected. Peaceful. I wouldn’t want to stay there for a long time, though.”

“Dirk and I have actually been thinking a lot about our powers,” Rose says, silhouetted in firelight. “His abilities as a heart player mean that he is very good at understanding and extrapolating the potential of each of us. And mine as a Seer of Light are obviously extremely valuable in planning, strategising, etcetera.”
“Planning what?” you ask, still kind of reeling. You know Dirk has definitely noticed how you’ve kind of shuffled much closer to him after his sudden disappearance, but he’s also a really good brother, so he doesn’t say anything.
Rose tucks her hair behind her ear. “Our powers are only going to grow and develop from here on on out,” she says. Her tone of voice makes her sound like she’s giving a speech. She’s looking at her hands, and you can see the tips of her fingers are sparking, flecks of light dancing there in a shimmering array that flickers and glimmers in the darkness. “I don’t have any bad feelings about them, or the way that they change our bodies, but again: control is key. Practice with them. Learn them. They’re all part of us, after all,” she says. “We’re supposed to love them.”

Dirk shifts uncomfortably beside you and you sit up properly to rest a hand on his arm. Out of all of you, he has the most… tense relationship with his powers. And, like, himself in general. It’s something that he has in common with John, actually, now that you think about it, which maybe explains why their whole… thing… works so well. God, you can’t believe you’re thinking about your brother macking on your best friend again. Or vice versa. However the fuck it went down.

***

The way it went down was something Dirk didn’t fully understand himself, and he tended to pride himself on logical thinking most of the time.
John had blown through his door like a gale- or rather, in a gale, which had dissipated to reveal the bundle of blue cloth standing in the middle of Dirk’s living room, dismay dawning on his face as he realised where he was.
Dirk had been sitting on the counter working on his latest project- which mainly involved a lot of stripping wires and alchemising gyroscopes- and though the sudden presence of a near-stranger in his space set off about fifty different alarm bells, he forced himself to raise an eyebrow coolly, settling into a nonchalant slouch.
“So,” he said, when John’s bewildered silence had stretched on far too long, “you come here often?”
John snapped out of it. “Wh- uh. Fuck. Sorry, I was aiming… for…”
“For…?”
He frowned. “I could’ve sworn there didn’t used to be a house here,” he said, almost sheepishly. It might have been endearing if Dirk didn’t recognise the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands wound tightly around each other. “Sorry. I’ll just… go...”
“You’re right,” Dirk said, setting aside his tools and pushing down off the counter to continue his nonchalant slouch against the side rather than atop it. “I built this place a couple weeks ago. Needed to get away from the others for a bit.”
The expression on John’s face changed, clearing slightly. Without his shades, it was hard for Dirk to assess him without him realising, and he wasn’t that good with people in general. This whole situation felt a little bit like a minefield, and, sure, Dirk probably should’ve just let John go when he mentioned it a second ago, but…
Well. Dirk’s always enjoyed sabotaging himself. And blowing himself up navigating an interpersonal minefield with a guy who looked just a little too much like his recent ex for comfort seemed about right for his track record.
“You want anything?” he asks instead, crossing to the fridge and grabbing himself a can of orange soda. John hesitated, crossing and uncrossing his arms a couple times, then nods. “Sweet.”
Dirk threw him one, just to see what his reflexes were like. He snatched it out of the air with his wind powers without looking, too busy glancing around your place. It’s impressive, Dirk won’t lie. He refused to feel self conscious about the state of his abode, not because he didn’t fully recognise that it was a godawful fucking tip in here, wires and metal plates and spare parts and alchemiter experiments strewn and heaped all over the floor and every conceivable surface, but just on principle. He had a reputation to uphold, after all. What the reputation was, he couldn’t really say, but nonetheless. It was there.
John whistled.
“You admirin’ my decor?” Dirk asked, taking a long sip of soda. Ah, sweet, refreshingly tooth-rotting sugar. Beautiful.
“Oh, yeah,” said John, grinning slightly. “I think Kanaya would love it.”
“Rose’s fashionista vampire girlfriend? Probably. You can see how all the ladies are flockin’ to this veritable mansion de la mode.”
Dirk’s French accent was disgustingly mangled by the Texan drawl you’d picked up from watching your Bro’s tapes, and he knew it. But his shit-eating grin was wasted on John, who didn’t really seem to give too much of a fuck.
Instead, John was shaking his head, air swirling at his feet and ruffling his hems. He was still wearing the godtier hoodie, albeit with jeans and sneakers instead of the rest of the getup. Dirk gave up on his own ages ago- although he’ll admit he had something of a soft spot for the cape. “Wow, you sound like Rose.”
“Hm.” It’d been a while since he’d spoken to Rose. She was cool, though; she had a very piercing stare, and the last time they’d hung out Dirk had watched her verbally destroy Dave in an affectionate, merciless, take-no-prisoners style that he couldn’t help but respect instantly. “I’m deciding to be flattered.”
John snorted. It’s kind of cute. Wait. No. Shit. Repress that. What?
“Yeah, she’d say that too, probably,” he was saying. Dirk grappled for something to reply with. This was kind of awkward, wasn’t it? Why was John even here, anyway? The whole reason he hadn’t just seen him off as soon as he’d arrived was that there was evidently something wrong, but now Dirk was questioning why in the fuck he ever thought he could do anything to fix it. Machines, he can fix. People? If there’s one thing he’d learned, it was that it’s much better not to even try. Machines are simple. Humans are much more complicated.

“So what brings you here, anyway, Egbert?” he said, ripping off the proverbial bandaid, and the breeze playing with John’s rolled-up hems kicked itself into a gust. Ah.
He rolled the soda can between his palms. “Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
John switched from rolling the can to rolling his eyes, and the gust picked up a little harder. He didn’t seem to notice. “I just came from a fight with Jade, actually. I guess… I used to come here sometimes, when we first arrived. To be alone.”
“It is a nice spot for self isolation,” Dirk said, nodding. The trees had been thick when he’d first arrived, and it had been a good day of hard work lopping them down to clear enough space for his cabin. John looked at him, vaguely incredulous, though there was still something glazed in his eyes.
“Is that why you moved here, too?”
Dirk shrugged one shoulder, lazy. “I’m working on something big right now. It needs to be perfect, so I need to be somewhere with no distractions while I finish it. Sorry for highjackin’ your hangout spot, man.”
John waved this away, eyes clearing slightly, and leaned over to look more curiously at the heaps of parts littering the floor. “What are you making?” he asked, picking up a piece of sanded plating, flat on one side and curved on the other. Is that…?
“Oh, hey, I was looking for that,” Dirk says, flashstepping over and taking it from John’s hands. Single-minded concentration is beginning to slide over him like a mist. “I need to fit this. You can come if you want, just don’t touch anything.”
He’d thought he’d lost this piece, thought he’d have to make another one and sand it down again. It wasn’t a lot of work, but it was annoying, and any setback made him antsy. He liked things to flow easily from step to another, liked to be five steps ahead at any point. John followed him down the hall as he went through the archway- no doors, they slowed things down- leading to the back half of the house, which he’d completely gutted, ceilings and all, so that it opened up into a big, warehouse-style space that stretched from roof to artisanal wood floor.
His latest projects were stored here, some suspended from the ceiling on sturdy wires, others lined up along the walls, and the most recent lying half-finished on the workbench in the centre of the room, wires trailing from it in every direction, hooked up to various machines filled with liquid and gas.
“Woah,” said John from behind him, but he was already at the bench, leaning over to slot the shoulder plate perfectly in place, protecting the bundle of synthetic muscle fibres and nerves. He fixed it there with a few screws, tight so it wouldn’t budge. He’d weld it later, when everything else was finished.
“This is the final model,” he said, catching John’s eye and stepping back. “The other prototypes are pretty good, but this one… this is it.”
“This is what you’ve been doing? Making robots?” John’s eyes were wide and bright; it was easy to envision him as a leader, even like this, with dark shadows under his eyes nearly matching Dirk’s own. Something about his gaze reminded Dirk of the crisp freshness of a sharp wind, jolting the senses into action.
John was showing more emotion than he’d seen from him in their whole encounter today, which was weird- usually Dirk lays claim to the title of apathetic bastard. He realised that that was what had been throwing him off this whole time: being faced with someone else sporting a similar expressionless face as his own.
“Making bodies,” he corrected. John’s mouth turned down in a comical C shape, and Dirk smiled slightly. “I realise that sounds incredibly serial-killer esque, but here we are. It’s for Hal.”

The body was incredible. Dirk would never sincerely claim to be humble, but this time he wasn’t being arrogant for once. It was a work of art. Sleek, human-sized, a little taller than Dirk because he had to add extra couple inches to fit all the balance mechanisms, which pissed him off and he was sure Hal would mock him incessantly for it- it’s perfect. The red stripes would glow when it’s all fired up, and the face is human enough to have expressive capabilities but not so much that it falls into uncanny valley territory. Hal isn’t human, and he doesn’t want to pretend to be, or act like he’s ashamed of his ‘superior artificial functions’. He’s made that pretty damn clear.
“Hal…” John is frowning. “Isn’t he a sprite? With, uh, the strong troll… I forget his name.”
“Arquiusprite, yes. He messaged me the other day, collecting on the debt that I’ve basically owed him since I was thirteen and thought it would be a good idea to clone my brain and make an enslaved AI debate partner out of it.”
John’s lips quirked up slightly. “...Wow.”
“Yup.”

The rest of that day had descended into Dirk showing his impromptu visitor around the workshop, feeling oddly flustered by the genuine praise- not that he would show it, of course. As the shadows had lengthened, John had checked his phone. Dirk had caught a glimpse of a screen filled with notifications- probably missed calls and texts from Jade or Dave- before he’d turned it off, dropping it back into his sylladex.
“Yo,” Dirk had said, and the strange almost-angry, almost-sad look on John’s face had disappeared as he’d looked up. “You wanna order pizza?”

And then they’d spent a couple hours sitting on the futon in the living room devouring pizza with regular sort of-teen boy-god voracity. It had been… easy. Good. Most of the time, interacting with people was fucking draining- Dirk still hadn’t been used to being around so many people with so many emotions for such long periods of time, and he usually had to take, like, a full week to recover after one of the infamous group barbecues, and he knew Roxy was in the same boat. But this was… okay. Completely manageable, actually, which was surprising since he hadn’t been expecting anyone today and hadn’t psyched himself up for social interaction at all. John was just kind of easy to get along with. Quiet at times, loud at others, and he had a mean, hard streak that didn’t come out very often but that Dirk found absolutely intriguing.

Inevitably, as is the rule of teen slumber parties after midnight, the conversation turned capital-D Deep. At least, Dirk was pretty sure that was the rule. He’d slept over at Roxy’s, and Jane’s, and he supposed that playing video games and eating Doritos with Dave until either one of both of them passed out technically counted as a sleepover— but he wasn’t exactly well-versed in deeply personal emotional vulnerability. Or communication, in general.

Huh.

“Rose says I’m lonely,” said John, floating a slice of pizza in front of him. He was staring at it as if the pepperoni slices contained a great mystery that only he could solve, light from the TV reflecting bluish off his glasses.
“Maybe you are,” Dirk said, head pillowed comfortably on the now-empty pizza box. “I’m no therapist, but I know the look when I see it.”
Now John frowned at him, tilting his head in a birdlike way that kind of reminded Dirk of the seagulls that used to hang around his apartment before the game. “What look?”
“I grew up alone on post-apocalyptic earth on a tower block in the middle of the ocean,” you point out. Seagulls and robots notwithstanding, physical contact was… sparse to say the least. “Loneliness is... Pretty much my base state at this point. It’s ingrained. Roxy, too, and probably Jade, although mostly we just talk about furry shit, not our deep childhood trauma. Where was I?”

Maybe one of the consequences of his childhood isolation is that he tended to pick up behaviours from people he spent a lot of time with really easily, since he was constantly studying and emulating things like, oh, this is how normal people smile, and this is how normal people react to sudden physical affection from their friends. Usually he was fairly adept at hiding it, but apparently Dave Strider’s legendary rambles have infected him, too. It was spreading. Save yourself, John, before you too start heading down tangents with wild abandon.

“Right, the look. Yeah, it takes one to know one, man. And I am one. And I know one. And that one is you.”
John stared at him for a full three seconds, and then he laughed. It was bitter, and sort of desperate, but it stopped quickly. “Man, you sound so much like Dave,” he said. “It’s sort of amazing.” God damn it. You waited. John cracked. “Okay, so maybe I am lonely. So what? It’s not like I can do much about it. Even when I’m in the middle of a crowd of my friends, it-,”

He stopped abruptly, blinking behind his glasses. Every time he moved, light flashed across the lenses. “Oh, we’re doing emotional vulnerability,” Dirk said, raising an eyebrow coolly because he was panicking a little bit. “I thought you’d at least buy me dinner first, Egbert.”
“Fuck you. I got the pizza.”
“Shit. Fair enough. Listen, I get it. It’s in you- and I’m going to respectfully restrain myself from making the follow-up dick joke- and it gets deep inside you. Again, dick joke respectfully not made. The thing about being lonely is that if you live with it long enough you start thinking that’s just how things are.” he shrugged. “And maybe they are. Maybe that’s how it is for the rest of your life. Maybe that’s just the lot you got in life.”

John stared at him in disbelief, pizza revolving slowly before him, floating on a wisp of air. A loop of cheese drooped, threatening to fall. John didn’t seem to care. Probably he would just catch it with his powers. “Was that seriously your inspirational speech? ‘Life sucks, deal with it’?”
“Now, I never said you had to deal with it,” said Dirk, picking up his soda can and pointing it at John, who looked like he was about to say something but then decided against it. Every member of the group was well aware that Dirk’s track record of Healthy Coping Mechanisms was a glorious wellspring of absolutely nothing. “But now that you mention it- yes. You should deal with it. Even if it never goes away, you can manage it. You can tame that motherfucker like a-,”
“If you say ‘wild horse’ I’m going to leave.”
“- wild horse, correct. Don’t run from the truth, for the truth is omnipresent.”
John closed his eyes, tilting backwards until he was flat on his back, pizza forgotten. He was smiling, just barely, in a helpless, fuck all of this kind of way that Dirk knew very well. “I hate you.”
Reaching forward and snagging the pizza out of the air, Dirk shrugged. John made a muffled sound of protest at the blatant display of thievery, but he didn’t move to stop him so Dirk just went ahead and crammed the slice into his mouth. “I get that a lot,” he said through his mouthful, flopping onto his back as well. “Mainly from myself.” And when John laughed, it had been like a small kernel of warmth settled in the pit of his stomach, and stayed there, smouldering.

John had stayed the whole night, snoring quietly on the futon while Dirk pulled his knees up to his chest on the couch and wondered what the fuck he was doing.

After a long moment of silent breathing in which Dirk knew full well John had woken up but didn’t call him out for it, John rolled onto his back and squinted up at the ceiling. It was dark, but Dirk could see that without his glasses John’s eyelashes were long and dark, the cool blue of his eyes so dark they looked black.
“You know about philosophy, right,” John said, without looking at Dirk. His tone was flat. Slowly, Dirk let his knees down from his chest.
“...Sure,” he said, instead of one of the eight different prepared responses he had ready for such a question, ranging from arrogant and self assured to obnoxious and pretentious. Now didn’t seem like the best time to bring out Well, can anyone deign to know about anything? just to fuck with him.
John nodded. “You ever think about, like… free will?”
The words, the way he threw them out there in the cadence of every teenaged stoner contemplating their own existence, should have been laughable. But there was something about the room and the way tension cast a frisson through the almost-still air between them that made it so entirely Not Funny it was difficult to breathe.
“Heavy subject,” Dirk said quietly, instead. The clock on the bottom of the TV read 3:12 am, and he was wide awake. “Of course I do.”
“Me, too.” John’s voice is rough, maybe with sleep, maybe with something else. “All the time. Sometimes it’s all I can think about.”
“What about free will exactly?”
The silence feels fragile in a way that Dirk isn’t used to navigating, but anticipation bubbles in his chest. It almost feels as if he’s dreaming, except, of course, his dreams are rarely so pleasant.
“Paradox space,” John said finally. “Timelines. In the game, the future was always… already written. Like how Lord English was already here or whatever his stupid catchphrase was. Rose’s powers, Dave’s power’s… God, I mean probably all of our group’s powers when it comes down to it; they all hinged on there being, like, a path. Already laid out. That we would have to follow. And even- okay.” He stopped, paused, started again. “We had to play, right?”

Dirk nodded silently. He knew where John was going with this, had grappled endlessly with it himself. They all had. He had thought that maybe his own contemplation of the events was slightly more dramatic and tortuous and self-flagellatory than the rest of his friends, thanks to his fraught teen psyche and penchant for melodrama, but it looked like John had been battling a bit of a roiling tidal wave of emotion over it himself. And it was all coming to a head now; it was all written in the tight line of his jaw and the careless muss of his hair and the way he pressed the side of his face into the pillow, just briefly, eyes squeezing shut for a heartbeat.

“We had to play. Earth had to get destroyed. All those people had to die, all of…” he shakes his head, frowning. “But I never saw any of them. You know? I stayed at home. I didn’t have friends, except Dave and Jade and Rose, and I didn’t know them in real life.” The side of his mouth quirked into a bitter smile, odd to see on his face. “I don’t even know if the rest of the population was even real or if- if it was all part of the fucking paradox space simulation, like it’s just us, the players, and everyone else is just NPCs, and- man. Not that it even matters.”
He was breathing hard, eyes fixed on the ceiling, searching for the thread of thought to bring him back around to the subject.
“I always wonder, like, how much of what we did was inevitable. How much of it is still inevitable. Is the game gonna start again? Here? I mean, Karkat made our universe, and we played, so… I don’t know. But beyond that, beyond- having to play and having to destroy earth and having to fight and go godtier and, and everything else we did to finally win…”
Now his voice was even rougher than before. He swallowed hard, bringing one hand up and summoning a small wind that spun around his fingertips until it was a tiny hurricane, utterly localised and precise.
“Beyond this whole grand plan that dictated our lives for so long.”
Dirk waited. Cloth shifted as John shifted, turning to face Dirk, and although his voice was small, his eyes burned bright blue with intensity.
“Where do I fit into all that?” he asked.

Now Dirk was sitting at his workbench again, tinkering with a tiny model horse. He wanted to find some way to put rocket launchers in the legs, but everything he had was too bulky, so he was going to have to take the plates off and downsize them. And if that didn’t work, he’d start again. Anything for a rocket-launching model horse, damn it.

Half of his mind wandering while the other focused on the detail work, he let himself think. Inevitably, as always happened when faced with the tooth-grinding prospect of introspection, he settled on his mistakes. His flaws, his shortcomings, everything he really, really fucking hated about himself. Which was a lot, but maybe not as much as it used to be. Ah, recovery. A long and slippery road, but maybe not quite as Sisyphean as he would have once condemned it.

So. He was thinking about Jake.

The thing with Jake was that they’d gotten together when they were sixteen, and stupid, and both of them dealing- or, more accurately, failing to deal- with pretty serious mental health issues on account of all the trauma and deep-seeded loneliness and psyche held together by duct tape and varying-degrees-of-sincere prayer. And it hadn’t worked. At all. Oh, it was good when it was good- when it was good it was fuckin’ stellar, actually- but Dirk knew now, in wisdom gained through a small degree of hard-won maturity, that he’d been a shitty boyfriend. And Jake, while Dirk wouldn’t label him with the same degree of shittiness that he reserved for himself, hadn’t been perfect, either. They’d been so busy being obsessed with each other and using each other for their own fucked up escapist fantasies of love will fix this that they’d forgotten to, you know, check that their fabled love was actually healthy at all.

And they’d broken up. For good, this time. Broken up but not quite broken down, because Dirk was fairly confident in saying that Jake is his friend, and he’s Jake’s. One of his best friends, even, which he’s so fucking glad of, because- well. It had all been a huge fucking bummer to figure out, and sometimes, even now, one or both of them still managed to step in some of the broken shards of it and get an awful jagged chunk that they thought they’d carefully picked up and wrapped in newspaper and recycled but had actually forgotten about, and it had just been laying there on the floor waiting for someone to tread on it and dredge up a bunch of shitty memories that everyone had hoped were gone. But it was better now, despite all the broken glass. Feeling, Dirk was beginning to realise, was something that he was pretty much just going to have to get over and go through with.

Jake was much happier now. That was the main thing- although, alright, yes, Dirk was happy too and that was also important- that Jake was moved on and flourishing. They still hung out, playing video games and sparring and working on progressing each other’s powers. And sometimes it was awkward, and sometimes the broken glass was layered thick underfoot- but they could navigate it. They could pull shards out of their shoes and bandage up the wounds, no matter how tiny they were or how much it bled.

This metaphor was getting away from him.

The point was, it was okay. And it was okay that it was okay. He wasn’t used to feeling like that, wasn’t used to- letting go. There was an ever-present ache in his chest that said to him: what are you doing? He’s yours. He belongs to you. And when it got too loud, he went fishing. Or swimming. Or running. Or he strifed with Squarewave and Sawtooth 2.0, or he took himself to the Davekat-Jaderezi house and crashed on the couch letting the sounds of Dave and Karkat’s adorable domestic flirt-bickering wash over him. Sometimes he even talked to Rose, lying on the sofa in her office room for maximum irony, and she would smirk at him over the rims of her equally ironic reading glasses, and they would both talk in elaborate circles that hid tiny, infinitesimal grains of honest emotion.
And... sometimes he’d talk to John.

After that first real conversation in the middle of the night on Dirk’s futon, untangling and laying bare huge swathes of fuck this and fuck that and I can’t fucking believe we went through this, what did we do to deserve this, communicating with John had suddenly seemed so much simpler. Dirk could talk to Roxy, of course, or Jane or Dave or whoever; it wasn’t as if he didn’t think anyone understood… but the thing that made talking with John so brutally refreshing was that, at the end of the day, he was selfish. John, that is. Well- Dirk too, but- anyway. John was self-centred and hurt and bitter and angry. He wasn't happy, wasn't content, wasn't endlessly generous with the patience of a saint; and Dirk felt it, felt that anger ricochet around the room, understood it and reflected it himself. John had been gifted powers of the utmost OP proportions by paradox space, and he resented it. He hated it. It was confusing, and abstract, and way too destructive for one person to deal with, and yet there he was, supposed to be dealing with it. It was the most profoundly relatable thing Dirk had heard from someone not made from a copy of his own brain in a long, long time.

So.
Talking with John was good.

This thing they were doing, this thing where one or both of them would message the other, or turn up on their other’s doorstep, and there was a fifty percent chance they’d end up watching a shitty movie- Dirk half ironically, half sincerely analysing every possible nuance; John groaning and laughing at him for it- and a fifty percent chance they’d end up making out…
It was weird. Good-weird. Really good-weird. At first it was just weird-weird, because John looked so much like Jake, and Dirk didn’t know how to feel about that, but then he realised that John was kind of… not at all like Jake, really, that much, and also that he got it: the loneliness, the depression, the apathy, the powerlessness and the meaninglessness. Which wasn’t to say that no one else got it, but everyone else who got it was either not a gender that Dirk was attracted to, or they were already dating someone. Or married.

The thought of marriage kind of makes his skin crawl.

Last weekend, John came over and they’d watched Cars 3. While Dirk was fifteen minutes into an in-depth analysis of the homoerotic themes of the movie, which he deemed oscar-worthy in terms of subtlety, John had let out a loud sigh and draped himself over Dirk’s lap so his head rested on his thigh, closing his eyes. When Dirk had paused, John had just waved a hand and said, “Go on, I’m listening.” And Dirk wasn’t one to let himself be wrong-footed, so he’d just.... Continued. And John had yawned, apologised for yawning, because he wasn’t bored, he was just tired, sorry, keep going, and he’d just… stayed there. As Dirk reeled off a thesis about homoeroticism and themes of toxic masculinity in Cars 3. And when he’d finished, he was absentmindedly stroking John’s hair, and John’s chest was rising and falling softly, and John was asleep. That feeling- of looking down and thinking, oh, you feel safe enough with me, you trust me enough, to just fall asleep and let yourself be largely unprotected, godtier and op retcon powers notwithstanding, and you’re just… doing that. Here. with me- It was a feeling that he’d felt before a couple times, with Jake, yeah, but also with Dave. With Roxy. With Jane. Those feelings he could quantify, in some way; he could at least tell, you know, this is because you’re my brother or this is because you’re my best friends. But with John.... it wasn't romantic, but it wasn’t strictly platonic either. It was, to be perfectly candid, fairly fucking baffling.

“Affection,” Rose had said, adjusting her spectacles. “The word you’re looking for is ‘affection’.”
“Pretty sure it’s not just ‘affection’,” he’d returned, looking up from the Rorschach test booklet he was editing with a sharpie to make everything look like avant-garde erotica, and she’d raised an eyebrow at him.
“Pretty sure I’m the professional here, Dirk.”
“Neither of us are professionals, and you know it.”
“Don’t I just. Would you like a bon-bon?”
“Thanks.”

...Which was how most of their sessions tended to go if they weren’t embroiled in a three hour long argument about bullshit philosophical conventions that neither of them knew anything about beyond a cursory glance at the wikipedia page when they were thirteen and were both frantically googling on their respective shades or headtopband.
The point was, maybe Rose had a point.

Carding his fingers through John’s hair- thick, kind of tough, he needed to brush it- as Cars 3 played in the background had been intimate in this really bizarre mostly-platonic-possibly-something-deeper-than-that way, and by that point they’d already made out, like, twenty times.
“Are we in a relationship?” he’d asked, later, upside down on the sofa thoroughly kicking ass at Fifa 47.
“Uh, I’m pretty sure you have to ask someone out to be in a relationship with them. Can you stop scoring?”
“Can you stop sucking ass at this game?”
“Apparently not. Bluh.”

So that was how that had gone.
And then a few weeks later, they’d been making out, as usual, on the couch, and John had pulled back, frowning as he tugged experimentally at the collar of Dirk’s Proud Parent Of An Honour Student shirt.
“We’re not dating, are we,” he’d said, “because Roxy keeps asking me and I don’t know what to tell him.”
“They keep asking me the same thing,” Dirk had said. John was straddling him, worrying thoughtfully at his lip. His own, not Dirk’s. It was cute. His glasses were kinda steamed up. Dirk made a mental note to open a window or something next time. “I don’t think we are.”
John had nodded. “Cool.”
And then they’d just… gone back to kissing. Easy.

And the thing was, it was easy. Simple. With no concrete relationship, everything was sort of nebulous- and the Dirk Strider of a few years ago probably would’ve hated that, would’ve wanted everything pinned down, understood, analysed and calculated and tallied up to perfection. But the Dirk Strider of a few years ago had control issues coming out of his ass, and a superiority complex the size of planet Jupiter preventing him from actually fucking doing anything about it, so fuck that guy and his bullshit opinions to hell, basically. Not having the pressures of commitment and validation and constant interaction was… freeing, in a way that, again, sixteen year old him would have balked at. He used to pester Jake every fucking day, multiple times; needy and clingy and begging for attention. He’d guilt trip and manipulate and gaslight. He’d been a fucking terrible boyfriend. But... he was a pretty alright mostly-platonic-sometimes-not-at-all-platonic… Friend. Partner. Thing. Jesus, this was why he didn’t let other people see into his inner monologue. He couldn’t imagine how Dave did it, spilling his innermost thoughts and feelings via unfortunate Freudian rambling twenty four seven. Probably he’d just gotten used to the humiliation by now. Huh.

Out of the corner of his eye, Dirk saw his phone light up. It was nearing dusk, light fading from the room. He’d been lost in his work again. Putting down the tiny spanner, he picked up the phone, flicking it open to view the message.

EB: hey, do you want to come over and marathon stargate?
He’s not smiling; you’re smiling.

TT: …
EB: i have a fuck ton of cake. again.
TT: Be there in five.

***

You think maybe Dirk was thinking a similar thing to you, because he has that look in his eyes that means he’s thinking really hard about something in a not-negative-but-not-quite-uproariously-positive way. You pat him again. Double sympathy. Blinking, he shoots you a nod, and you settle in for some fresh brain hurting, free with every interaction with your sister. Thinking about godtier abilities makes your head spin like a top at the fuckin’ circus.

“We’ve been theorising about the possible directions these powers could take us, potential abilities we might develop, and how best to manage them. It will be stressful, I’m sure, but we can help each other through the developmental period. I think paradox space- the game, whatever entity is responsible- has purposefully waited until we’re more or less settled down and our prodigal planet is flourishing before confronting us with this next stepping stone. Dave, you already have experience of this with Karkat.”

Rose nods to you, and you nod back, slowly. During the game, Karkat never got the chance to properly develop his powers, although he was doing it subconsciously, on the meteor, during his session- his leadership and understanding of the bonds between people kept his team together. And he certainly kept you from falling the fuck apart.

“Right. So, uh, Karkat’s like, an empath now,” you say. Rose and Dirk exchange a smug look, which you assume means they called it. Roxy just looks excited.
“That’s so cool!” they say, leaning in. “How powerful is it?”
“Pretty goddamn powerful,” you say. “Uh, like Rose said, there was kind of some issues in the beginning because whenever someone close to him was feeling really strongly about something, it was like he felt the exact same thing but magnified.”
“So if someone felt sad around him…”
You nod. It was hard to think about. “Yeah, it pretty much sucked. But we kind of have it under control right now. And I mean, the Knight thing is fairly sick.”
“What Knight thing?” asks Dirk with interest. Rose is already taking notes.
“One time he cut his hand by accident while we were cooking, and he like… made the blood go back into his body. It was pretty lit. We’re pretty sure that’s to do with the, like, ‘exploiting your aspect’ part of Knighthood, or whatever.”
You also know that Karkat can probably straight up make weapons and shit out of his blood. But as cool as it is, the both of you decided years ago that you were done with fighting. And also, blood weapons are kind of gross, awful memories being dredged up notwithstanding. The trauma? Definitely not worth it.

“But like, beyond that it’s his usual leaderly powers, just, more. I mean, he’s really helped John over the years,” you say, and everyone nods understandingly. John is managing his depression really well at the moment, and you’re so goddamn proud of him, but a few years ago there was a long stretch of… some pretty bad stuff. He was isolating himself to the point where he’d be gone for weeks at a time, spending all day in his room, barely eating, alternating between not sleeping for a week straight or sleeping way too much. It got rough. At that time, it had been Karkat that managed to get through to him and help pull him out of the hole. You’ve had firsthand experience of Karkat dragging you bodily out of depressive episodes, and for all his loudmouthed tactics, it’s pretty fucking incredible. Yeah, your husband is the sweetest, more attentive, most emotionally supportive person around, and everyone else can suck it.

You continue, “I guess at first we didn’t realise it was his powers coming into play, since he never really got the chance to develop them during the game bullshit. But now we figure it’s all part of like… the way he brings everyone together and keeps us together.” Dirk is nodding.

“We definitely noticed that,” he says. “I think part of my… heart powers, too, means I’m tuned in to people’s emotions, especially strong ones, and although interpersonal bonds aren’t entirely my ballpark, I can sort of sense it when Karkat’s been influencing someone. I felt it around John. It’s impressive.”
“He should’ve been a Sylph, that’s the healing one, right?” Roxy smiles. “He’s constantly helping people. Even back on Earth C I used to see him sorting out people’s romantic troubles. Actually, I’m almost certain that he had something to do with Jane finally coming around.”
You hold up your hands. “I am super not at liberty to say, Rox,” you say, ‘cause Karkat still gets so adorably embarrassed about the whole deal and you’re not gonna throw the love of your life under the bus like that. Roxy laughs understandingly, like you knew they would, and turns to Dirk. “So, wait, your powers. How’s it going?
Dirk does that tiny sigh out of the corner of his mouth that’s Strider body language for a long groan.
“Fine,” he says.
“Helping and supporting each other.” Rose’s voice drifts loftily over from where she’s reclining, scrolling on her phone. “I just told you.”
“You need some allotted Karkat time, man?” you ask, patting your brother on the shoulder. He shrugs minutely.
“I’m handling it,” he says.
“Alright, so that was supremely unconvincing,” you say, and he flicks a minute glance at you that’s like can you stop calling me out for like, a second? So you send him one right back, all, never.
“Are you really?” asks Rose, still scrolling. “Or are your control issues just telling you that you have to?”
Dirk scowls at her, but his shoulders move in that way that means he’s inwardly conceding the point.
“Your powers as a Prince make your aspect difficult to deal with,” Rose elaborates, folding her legs beneath her. She lowers the phone so as to better look Dirk in the eyes. You wince sympathetically. Full on Rose eye contact is like being held in place by a couple of very focused lasers. “But your class doesn’t have to be a burden. Destruction has more meanings than the obvious, rather violent, ones. Furthermore, the heart aspect is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting and broad aspects that there is. At risk of inflating your ego, you are incredibly powerful, Dirk. You need to remind yourself that your power has many more uses- aggressive, defensive, active, passive, supportive, intellectual- than it may appear.”

She finishes speaking, pale eyes levelled with Dirk’s, holding his gaze. There’s a brief lull. You know, of course, that Dirk tends to view his aspect as, at the most basic level, pure self destruction. But you also know that heart is way more nuanced than that, even if your brother’s self-loathing issues get in the way of him being able to see it.
“Dude, you should talk to Davepeta,” you say. Dirk, eyes dark with conflict, looks away from Rose to meet your gaze in relative surprise.
“Jade’s datefriend?” he asks, frowning. “I literally don’t think I’ve ever held a conversation with them in my life.”
“Yeah, I’ve been seeing them kind of a lot since them and Jade became an item. I avoided them at the beginning ‘cus, you know-,” you don’t need to elaborate on that. Dirk knows better than anyone about weird contentiously uncomfortable relationships with splinters. “But listen, Nepeta was a heart player. And Davepeta is definitely still keyed the fuck into the heart player biz. Even more so, considering, like, Sprite knowledge and general emotional intelligence. Also, they’re literally made of splinters themself.”

“That’s a very good point,” says Rose, eyes slightly narrowed. Light blooms over her irises, turning them bright white; in the dark it gives off the same effect as a mewobeast faced with a flashlight. She blinks, and the light snaps off. She nods in a brisk way that you’re pretty sure she picked up from Kanaya. “Yes. You should do that.”
“You’re railroading me,” Dirk accuses, levelling a finger at Rose. “With your seer powers. Does free will mean nothing to you?”

The laugh that Rose gives is half wry, half darkly humorous. The look she exchanges with Dirk afterwards is a whole conversation in a split second. With a start, you realise that the light hasn’t totally faded from her eyes, after all. Flecks of silver shimmer in her irises. “Free will,” she says, smiling slightly, and shakes her head. “Anyway. Follow Dave’s advice. It’s important.”

Roxy raises an eyebrow at you across the circle. There’s a peculiar tension that only breaks when Dirk sighs, a little louder this time, and waves a hand as if physically waving away the tension. “Alright,” he says. “I’ll talk to them.”

Rose gives him a small smile that you recognise as her acknowledging she was maybe a little harsh with the commandeering thing, and she’s checking to see if they’re still cool. Dirk inclines his head in a little nod, and you relax. Crisis averted; everyone’s chill. Rose and Dirk clash, like, a lot, because they’re such similar people, but over the decades- shockingly- they sat down and actually had some proper conversations about it. You’re kind of glad you weren’t privy to those talks: just thinking about the amount of multilayered semi-ironic semi-sarcastic semi-sincere bullshit that would have been encoded in their interactions makes your head spin. But they enjoy it, for whatever crazy pseudo-intellectual reason.

“Nice,” Roxy says with a happy smile, tugging Rose close and petting her hair gently- to which Rose complies, only displaying the minimum required nose-wrinkling and vaguely exasperated sighing. “Team sorting out our shit. I like it!” And he’s right; it is pretty great, all things considered.

Night falls completely, the pinkish dregs of sunset drained away over the new horizon. It’s still so strange and unfamiliar. You’ve been through a lot of horizons in your lifetime, but it doesn’t get any easier; your acclimatisation period doesn’t get any shorter. You take a deep breath of crisp new air, still retaining the day’s heat, tinged with smoke from your campfire, carrying the fresh smell of new grass, new flowers. Rose is showing Roxy something on her phone, their heads bent together as Roxy laughs a bright pealing sound filled with warmth and delight. Beside you, Dirk has pulled pieces of metal out of his pockets and is tinkering with them; you sit back and watch as familiar angles take shape, catching a glimpse of what could be a tiny hand, a leg. Like yours, his hands are always so restless, but where you direct your unconscious energy to tapping out new beats, muttering lyrics under your breath as you drum against any available surface, Dirk takes tiny pieces of metal, or wood, or plastic, or grass- and creates. You watch the tiny robot form in his hands, so meticulously careful, effortlessly competent. Your hands have almost lost the calluses of your childhood. You know they’ll probably never fade completely, know your skin will always be slightly tougher in the places where a hilt would rest, but compared with Dirk’s they’re paper-smooth. It’s kinda funny, you remember being sixteen- give or take a few loops- and watching him fight for the first time, and the cold sick feeling of recognising every move he made. Memory shadows would flicker over his image until you thought you were seeing Bro in his place, taller but transposed so that his movements mirrored Dirk’s exactly. Or Dirk mirrored him. Phantom pains would run up your arms, the reverberation from the clash of blade against blade sending tremors through your fingers even when they weren’t clenched tight around the hilt of your sword.
It had been awful, for years. Even after the game, you’d see him sometimes, practicing outside or sparring, with Jake or one of his robots, and you’d have to turn away and lock yourself in your room for a couple days before your head cleared.
Now, you look at Dirk’s hands assembling a tiny metal man and standing him upright on the spongy grass, and you smile, ‘cus sword calluses or no, the brother that’s in front of you is the only that matters. Unless Roxy decides he’s cool with being called your brother too, in which case you’ll have two brothers who love you.
Under the new sky, by the light of the stars, and the flames, and the fireflies, and your Rose’s phone screen and faintly glowing eyes, you think about how fucking lucky you are. Because you made it. You fucking made it! You went from being this kid, this fucked up kid with scars and a messed up brain, hypervigilant and anxious and unable to express affection for his closest friends without stuttering through eight different variations of “no homo”, to this. You’re an immortal god, yeah, but more importantly you’re surrounded by people you love and who love you in return. You have a brilliant husband who you fall deeper in love with every day, you have two parents who make sure you know that they’re proud of you; you have a sister who drives you crazy, yeah, but she’s also one of the best friends you’ve ever known and you trust her implicitly. You have John to watch stupid movies with and talk about gay shit and when you or he is feeling shitty and you’re losing your way, you hang out and play video games and chat shit. He was your best friend when you were kids and he- along with Jade and Rose- really did keep you alive through so much shit, and you’re so, so fucking grateful that he’s still your best friend to this day. And Jade, Jade who understands you, who taught you to garden and listens to your music and cooks ridiculously lavish meals with you and tells you about physics, Jade who you had this huge embarrassing crush on as a kid and who crushed on you in turn, who has grown up with you and turned into one of your closest fucking friends…

Dirk is looking at you now, firelight casting the side of his face in warm orange to match his eyes. He nudges his shoulder against yours: you okay? You nod at him.
“Just thinking,” you say quietly, and he nods, accepting it, and turns back to his little robot man.

You think about how Terezi messaged the group chat last week with nothing but a blurry selfie of her and a Vriska-shaped blob in the background- finally! After years of searching!- and how she’s on her way back even now. It’s gonna be so fucking good to see her. It’s been a while. More than a while. You miss her a lot; she’s another person who you went through some rough fuckin’ patches with but somehow still came out the other side. Honestly, even with Vriska in tow, you can’t wait, and you know everyone else is barely keeping a lid on their own excitement, too.
You think about how far you’ve come. You think about Earth C, that beautiful shining dot in the distance- you made that. A whole fucking universe and you helped create it. The game fucking sucked and you’re not gonna get into it- but really, after all of that, every one of you deserves to be happy, and over the last, say, ten or so years, you really think you made it. This new planet, this new beginning, is another step, but it’s one you’re glad to be taking. And you’re glad you have the people you love with you as you do.

“Dave, you look like you’re having an aneurysm.”
Rose’s voice is dry. Anyone else wouldn’t detect the undercurrent of concern running through it, but luckily for you you have years of experience being related to her, and you know her game to a fuckin’ T.
“He’s thinking,” Dirk tells her, and she makes an exaggerated noise like ohhh.
“Well, that explains that, then,” she says. “Don’t strain yourself, “bro”.”
You’re literally never gonna get over the half-sarcastic half-sincere way she does that. It’s gets you every fuckin’ time, and you can’t even explain it- it’s just one of those weird things that cracks you up, like Karkat sneezing or the new SBAHJ doorbell you installed. Rose is so fucking funny sometimes and you don’t even know if she means to be, but you’ll never tell her that. Well, not out loud anyway.
Instead you show her your middle finger like you’re uncovering a gift and she smiles, flipping you off in turn. Utterly heartwarming. Both of your weddings bands glint warmly in the firelight, and a thought pops into your head.

“You think you’ll ever get married?” you ask Roxy, who blinks, surprised at the subject change. Then he hums thoughtfully, poking at the fire with a stick, stirring the embers.
“Man, I dunno. Is polygamy even legal?”
“We’re literally gods, and this planet doesn’t have any laws as of yet. Also, we’re the only ones who live here.” Dirk points out. “Pretty sure it doesn’t matter.”
“Point.” Roxy sighs. “Even so, I don’t really… think it’s something we, like, need? Maybe someday, if we feel like it. But it’s not somethin’ that’s really on our minds right now, you know? We don’t need to, like, prove that we’re in love or that we’re gonna stay together forever- I mean, not that y’all needed to do that, either, aw, man, that’s not what I mean at all-,”

“Nah, I get you,” you say, nodding thoughtfully. “Me and Karkat already, like, considered ourselves married before we actually did the ceremony. Honestly, we just wanted to make Terezi dress up in her official outfit and do a speech. Also wedding presents. That was a bonus.”
“And you get a kick out of introducing yourself to people as Dave Vantas-Strider,” Rose adds, a smile curving her painted lips.
“That too, Rose Maryam-Lalonde,” you say. “That too.”

Roxy grins fondly at both of you, reaching over to ruffle your hair simultaneously. “Aw, you guys are so cute,” they say. “My favourite kids.”
“Your only kids,” Rose points out, but you both lean into it anyway. It’s Roxy. There are not many things that Rose is willing to mess up her hair for, but Roxy-brand affection is definitely one of them. And you’re right there in the same boat with her, in the middle of Touch Starved Ocean, rowin’ straight for Found Family Bay.
“But yeah,” Roxy is continuing, wrapping their hands around their mug. “Marriage ain’t off the table, but it’s not, like, our number one priority. We’re just chillin’. Bein’ madly in love with each other. Sorry, Dirk.”
On the other side of the blanket Dirk raises both hands. “Woah, no need to apologise. I’m good.”
“Well, good!” Roxy says. “I don’t want you to be lonely. Or feel left out or some such thing.” As always, Roxy is fiercely earnest, leaning forwards and tucking an unruly piece of hair behind their ear and they give Dirk the patented Lalonde Look of Aggressive Sincerity.
Dirk rolls his eyes, but he also shoots Roxy a small smile. Jegus, is this wistfulness you see in his eyes? Karkat would have passed the fuck out over how feelings-jam-y this whole night has been, probably after a long twenty minutes of ranting about humans and your pale promiscuity, I swear… Ah, you love him so much.
“Maybe a decade ago I would’ve done,” Dirk is admitting. “But I’m actually… pretty content now? Relationships are messy, and complicated, and I still have, y’know.” He glances to the side.
“Issues?” Rose supplies helpfully.
“Exactly.”
“Word.” You raise your fist for a bump, which Dirk duly obliges, bumping his knuckles gently against yours. The fire has died low, embers almost completely burned out, but you’re still warm from the residual heat in the air. This planet is hot, but not quite Texas-hot. Not LOHAC-hot. Not sweltering, just… nice. Comfortable. You like it a lot here. You think you’re gonna be okay here.

“Shit, I love you guys so much,” Roxy bursts out, hooking one hand around Rose’s shoulder and the other around Dirk, beckoning with one hand for you to scoot closer so they can enfold you in the hug as well. It’s warm and safe, and you’re surrounded by family on all sides. “You know that? I love you guys.”
“Love you too, Rox,” says Dirk.
“Ditto,” you say.
“You know I love you,” says Rose. She and Dirk, a little awkwardly because Roxy’s pulling them in so far their heads are almost knocking into each other, exchange a glance that reads ‘I am slightly uncomfortable with all the open displays of emotional vulnerability, but it’s true and I want you to hear my sentiment irregardless’. It’s sort of a relief to know that you all can still communicate more or less telepathically, even though you haven’t all hung out like this in way too fucking long.
Roxy throws their arms out suddenly, grinning widely. “Ah, I’ve missed this so much!” he says. “These past, like, two years have been so fuckin’ stressful what with all of us decidin’ to leave and then having to figure it all out and not seeing each other for fuckin’ ages and… I just missed you guys. I really missed you!”
The stars wheel slowly above, and Earth C is a bright dot in the velvet expanse above and around you. Dirk gently ruffles Roxy’s hair.
“Rox, you don’t have to worry,” he says solemnly. “Even if we take some time apart, we always come back together. You know why?”
You and Rose don’t need to glance at each other to chorus “No, why?” in perfect unison, nor to slap each other’s hands in a crisp high five directly afterwards, either. Dirk’s face is perfectly composed.
“Because ohana means family,” he says. “And family means nobody gets left behind.”
Roxy keels over laughing. You raise your mug to the night, toasting the myriad fireflies trailing ribbons of light through the sweet night air.
“Cheers, I’ll fuckin’ drink to that, bro.”