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When the game ends, the feeling you expect to wash over all of you, does. With a vengeance. Nothing feels like it fits quite right anymore, as if you’ve all lived out entire lifetimes only to be thrust back into being your eighteen-year-old selves. (It reminds you of Inception, how DiCaprio has never quite pulled on your heart that strongly, but now that you’re living it you want to gumming throttle him for making you realize this was even an emotion you could feel.)
But in addition to the feeling lost or out of place, carrying around heads too heavy for your young bodies, there’s another feeling that you can’t tell if anyone is experiencing but you - ironically enough, it’s loneliness.
For all that you grew up wickedly alone - just young enough when you lost your only family to have very vivid, minute memories of unimportant events before you had the sense to start deliberately committing things to memory - it never felt exactly like this does.
You’d looked your friends over, back then, fresh out of the backwards world of a fantasy, feeling like your heart had been pulled from your chest. (The pun in that statement had leaned against an alley wall, waiting for everyone else to come to, and avoided your gaze. His crown was gone but his shades were firmly in place.)
John, Rose and Jade had been firmly counted among your friends then - of course, how could they not be - but the three of them were practically attached at the hip. You think you could understand. The loss of Dave (or rather, not the loss, that sounded so - passive, it didn’t suit him or what he did, the way he did it be damned) had affected all of you, but those three had grown up with him. They’d known him outside of battle as well as inside and you can’t imagine - you can’t. You consider yourself lucky you don’t have to.
There’d been individual despair and grief in all of their features and it had looked fresh, like they’d expected to get him back. It was an awful day, and for all that you love them you wish you could forget their faces.
What really kills you about them though, you think, is how they’d bonded over it. You doubt they’ll ever be without one another and sometimes it makes you seethe with jealousy and guilt like you never grew up, and maybe you haven’t.
But the truth is that you, Jane, Roxy and Dirk had decided to go your separate ways and you’ve never regretted anything so much. All the time you’d wasted thinking of no one but yourself had come back to bite you in the ass and now it seems like they’re all you can think about. You remember them, deliberately and aggressively, as if you’re trying to burn the way they look into your memory forever. You barely understand the compulsion as “missing them” until a thought hits you at 3:00 AM one morning and makes you feel as though your wings have been clipped:
You miss Dirk. You miss him. God, now that you have a word for it you don’t want to ever stop thinking it. You miss him like you miss breaths sometimes running, you miss him in a way that chokes you from a place you’ve never been choked and you think this is where that word comes from, this is why people use it.
He’d always been there. You have vivid memories of the way he’d typed and talked, of the curve of his jaw (sharp, no slack) back to his ear (weirdly graceful) and around the back of his head, into the thick, styled curls of his hair. You remember his cheekbones and his aquiline nose and the plane of his forehead and his awkward smile, too many crooked, unfiled teeth and you just - you remember him. You remember him from so many angles and none of them are the angle of the first thing you see waking up in the morning, and that lack makes you want to tear your hair out all of a sudden.
You’d never noticed that he was always the first person you looked to, your gaze so automatic and cursory that you took it for granted.
The city is enormous around you, labyrinthine and impossible and fascinating and it reminds you of Dirk. You can’t take a step without thinking about him and how - even if he’d stayed here the way you did you could live out the rest of your life without ever seeing his face again. It makes every step that much heavier, the sidewalk feels like it’s mocking you, like you’re only a street corner behind him all the time.
You wonder if this is how he felt. (Hurt stings through you when you realize itcouldn’t have been how he felt - Dirk never took you for granted, ever. That was the whole problem. He always felt just a step away from losing you, whereas you feel a step away from finding him. Hope stirs in your chest and you want to wring it out of you until you can’t feel it anymore, just on the chance it might help you understand him.)
You’re lonely in a way you hadn’t realized you could be, but the city yawns in front of you and you have to believe in it. Dirk had come to mean too much to you too late and you’re through with playing make-believe; you no longer believe that your life is the kind of story where one day, through serendipity alone, you’ll bump into him in a coffee shop or a deli or the park and something will fall back into place. That’s a love story for movies and you reject it with a bitterness that makes you feel like a little boy trying to wear an adult’s suit.
That’s why you barely even register what’s happened when you actually do.
You don’t physically bump into him. You’re sitting in a booth by yourself in one of your regular haunts - a sandwich shop not very close to your home but worth the exercise to get there - and you have your laptop open in front of you. A friend of yours (an artist - she reminds you of Calliope sometimes and your heart hurts) is talking about the comic book you’re both trying so hard to put together. She’s trying to encourage you to write but you don’t know how to tell her that you feel like your greatest adventure is over, that it had left a bad taste in your mouth and now all you want to do is warn every protagonist you’ve ever seen that the adrenaline doesn’t last forever, that sometimes you make mistakes you can’t take back. God, you’re maudlin but you can’t help it.
You’re considering again, for perhaps the hundredth time, telling her what really happened to you. Where your inspiration comes from. The story you really want to tell, instead of some cheap imitation - you’ve never been good at obfuscating the truth and every word you put on the page for this storyboard feels wrong, like an injustice to the men and women you’ll never forget.
That thought spins away from you, as they tend to, and, unbidden, you imagine a life with her. Can’t help yourself. You think about falling in love with her and the scene plays out on a tired loop like a glitched file. The idea barely breaks its way into your heart enough to make it pound more than once. Instead of lingering on that, the fear that comes with not getting excited about love, you sigh and stare at your laptop until your order is called.
You get up to pick up your sandwich methodically, nudging through the crowd - it’s a hot meatball sub, same as always, the you nod at the man behind the counter when he gives you a smile. You turn away so you don’t have to carry on a conversation with him, and you come very close to stepping on another person’s foot.
"Oh, s’cuse me," up by your head and the foot you’d been looking at shifts out of the way, but - you look up, surely you’re mistaken -
You aren’t. No one can pull off those dumbass shades like Dirk Strider.
His mouth drops open - it seems polite, almost, like an evolution of one of the more nervous facial expressions he made when he was younger - and you can tell he recognizes you. Something in your gut burns like wildfire with the immediate understanding that he hasn’t forgotten you. It makes you brave. You don’t look away from him.
"…It’s all right," you finally reply, your mouth betraying you and quirking up into a disbelieving smile.
The look on Dirk’s face is a surprise: he smiles back at you. God, it looks good on him. You think, it’s been three years since I saw him do that, but even then it was never like this - it doesn’t look forced or frightened, just looks so very him.
Dirk’s time out of your life has been good to him. (You can’t bring yourself to read too much into that, not when he’s right here and your hopes are riding so high.) He’s still taller than you, made up of the same angular shapes and that soft updo you love, but he’s filled out some around his shoulders and arms, the black polo he’s wearing clinging to them in a way that’s foreign to you. Dirk had never struck you as a brawler, more lean and smooth everywhere, but apparently there are muscles he’d been hiding from you. They make his hips look even smaller than they used to by comparison, a belt tight around his waist and - you realize when your eyes get to about knee height that you’ve just been staring at him. Checking him out, even.
You look back up at his face, a touch guilty, overly worried that you may have overstepped some boundary already and that he’ll just kind of waltz out of your life as backlash for your disrespect, but Dirk doesn’t seem displeased at all. In fact, the smile is still there on his face, eyebrows drawn curiously above his shades.
"A - are - do you live around here?" you ask, because it seems important to get that out of the way first.
Dirk slowly shakes his head. “Not in the least. I’m… here on business.” God, his accent is hot.
You swallow convulsively, you think your back might be sweating. “Oh.”
Dirk nods quietly, but not in a way that signals to you any kind of end to the interaction. You can’t help yourself. You imagine him picking up his food, heading out the door, and disappearing again and it solidifies something in your brain, maybe.
"Would you, ah. Would you join me for lunch?"
Dirk raises his eyebrows, and you gesture toward your booth, laptop humming away. Please. Just lunch. Lunch is all you need, just an opening -
He turns and the light hits his shades in a way that lets you see right through them. His small eyes are squinched up a little in a subtle expression of wonder and happiness that you recognize from the fleeting looks you’d had of it back then - on another planet, even. It was the face he’d made whenever you did something truly, stumblingly romantic - like he was shocked every time that you’d remembered he was there, as if you could forget.
"Absolutely," he says, and something like affection sweeps up through you like fresh, clean air. "I’d love to."
You can’t help but smile at him. “Great. Top. I’ll be - ” You gesture helplessly, still holding your wrapped sandwich in one hand, and your heart is set at ease when Dirk laughs, waves you off.
"I’ll meet you there in a sec. We’ll catch up."
God, you don’t think you could’ve dreamed this going any better. That sounds - it’s - “Perfect.” That earns you another smile, and you think that your heart has maybe never felt so light.