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You used to say it wasn’t abuse. You said it was tough love when you wanted to cast Bro as some kind of stoic badass; after The Game turned out to be A Thing, you said Bro only did what he had to in order to ensure you inherited enough badassery to keep everyone alive. When you wanted to get Rose off your back, you said it was just what happened when kids got raised by young, single bro-dads ignorant in the ways of squishy babies. What kind of fucked up government let some nineteen-year-old possibly-autistic paranoid nutcase with zero people skills raise a baby by himself, anyway? Bro did the best he could under the circumstances. You were fed, you were clothed, you had an allowance that you spent mostly on buying dead things in jars from eBay. Once you got too big to sleep cuddled next to him, Bro even gave up the only bedroom in your shitheap of an apartment. He loved you, he did. He was just all kinds of shit at showing it. It wasn’t abuse.
Kids who were really abused, you saw them at school sometimes. They cowered and hid their bruises. You showed yours off like battle scars, which they were. You told yourself that abuse was meant to beat someone down. Bro built you up, made you strong. It wasn’t abuse.
You spent all of elementary school feeding yourself these lies. You used up three whole years on a meteor thinking about it to finally come to the conclusion that, yeah, it was abuse. Masculine ideals are bullshit - irrelevant bullshit now that the society that made them up is blown to smithereens. (And even if that society comes back remade, it’s still bullshit.) Dave Strider is some form of queer, and that’s okay. Yes homo. Dave Strider was abused by his guardian, and that’s not okay. But it doesn’t make you weak. It doesn’t emasculate you to admit it because you chucked your stereotyped Hollywood masculinity out the window a long time ago.
It was abuse, and Bro, once he comes back after you step through that door to paradise, is gonna have a lot of explaining to do.
Most of your friends have already gone through. Karkat holds out his hand to you, but you’re waiting on Dirk. You look at him; he looks at you. What if he meets Bro and starts hating on himself for the douche he could have been? What if you meet his Bro and hate yourself for the-- Nah, other you was rad as fuck.
In the end, you’re not given a chance to stall anymore because Roxy shoves you through.
I want Earth to come back.
I want to stay together with everyone.
I want the trolls to be welcome.
…I want Bro to come back.
You hope The Game – Paradox Space’s Universe-Birthing Algorithm – listens to you. What’s the point of being a god if you can’t influence the world of your own creation?
There are flashes of light, of darkness, and of dangerous nuclear green. You come to in a large house, lying on the carpeted floor before an unlit fireplace. The first things you see when your vision clears are two urns sitting on the mantle, and above them two portraits – Nanna Egbert and Poppop Crocker.
Dads Crockerbert are the first guardians to make an appearance. They look at each other in confusion, and then at the thirty-some teenagers and assorted chess guys littering their combined super-house. Their best guess is that they’re twins in this world, and they share a townhouse. They shrug and deal with the intrusion in a stern, fatherly manner. House rules are set. Cakes are baked and consumed.
Things go by in a disjointed flash, as if your mind isn’t really here with your body, not really processing the implications of your surroundings. RoxyMom saunters in. She’s dating one of the Dads. You wonder if RoseMom will date the other Dad once she revives (but no that’s gross because Rose is your sister, ugh). You wonder if RoseMom will revive at all. RoxyMom talks about splitting up the group, taking some to set up camp at her place in New York. A double RoLalMansion would be sweet, if RoseMom revives…
The super-house is big, but not nearly big enough. The place is fucking swamped with trolls and their monster custodians. You can’t even cuddle with your trollboyfriend without being screeched at by five hundred pounds of crustacean. “Skraaaaakkt!” Knight Strider, you must prove yourself strife-worthy of my son’s grasping appendage in trollmarriage!
Or that’s what you imagine he’s saying, anyway. “Sorry, dude. No can do,” you tell him.
Karkat agrees. “No, dad. Just no.” (Then he opens up a can of tuna for the thing. Pushover.)
Poor crabmonsterthing looks so sad at that, and it’s like, yeah, you’d totally strife him to make him feel better… If you weren’t in close quarters with a bajillionfagmillion other people, many of whom are noncombatants. Also, Dads Crockerbert kind of freak you out with their dad twin powers activate. It would suck to be dadlectured for breaking a couple of those fancy Santas during your aggrievance.
You and Karkat sort of look at each other, and then purposely look anywhere except at each other. Because have you mentioned that there are a bajillionfagmillion other people around? They are not invited to a free show.
You clear your throat and jerk your thumb over to Dirk, as in “imma hang out with teen bro for a sec”. Karkat does this eyeroll-throat-slitting thing, as in “yeah, you do that while I avoid Kankri like the plague”.
Dirk isn’t much like Bro at all, except the most-likely-autistic part. Dirk is awkward and unsure of himself in a way Bro never was, and it doesn’t seem like that’s a part of him that would change with age. He’s… just like you. Just some dork pretending to be cool. The more you learn about Dirk, about how deeply he cares for his friends (even if his innate weirdness and ridiculous amounts of control issues lead to bizarre alien gestures of friendship that nobody understands), the more you think that someone who shared the same… soul as Dirk could never become the strife-bot that Bro was, especially in his later years.
None of your speculations mean a thing when Bro isn’t here.
So you chill with Dirk. You shoot the shit. You ask him things that there wasn’t time for during the “fight for your lives” bit. Favorite shows? Favorite games, ironic or otherwise? He shows you a couple of his drawings, which look disturbingly like yours when you’re not trying to be crap on purpose.
You’re in the middle of an apple juice vs. orange soda debate when in saunters RoseMom and OtherYou dressed to the fucking nines like they’re about to go to a Hollywood premier. All sparkly gowns and custom tailored tuxes up in here. The front door bangs open and they’re walking down the paisley welcome mat pretending it’s a red carpet. She’s hanging coyly off his arm, and it’s like, really? Even after that epic journey through death and rebirth, they’ve gotta pretend paparazzi are around to play the “will they or won’t they” game?
Besides, it’s obvious the answer is a big fat obvious NO because Rose inherited all of Dirk’s gay. That is a lot of gay. (And you got half the gay? Some of the gay? The gay mutated into xeno-pan-omni somewhere along the way?) That’s not even considering the incest bit.
OtherYou steps right in with a smirk on his douchetastic face, and he says, “Apple juice.” Dude, fuck that. You don’t need him to win your battles for you.
Dirk just stands there with awe written all over his face. You immediately think, “I hate that guy.” It’s not clear if “that guy” is Dirk because he got his Bro but you didn’t, or if it’s OtherYou for stealing Dirk’s attention and making you feel like a replacement that’s no longer needed.
Reunions are happening everyfuckingwhere. Each one just serves to make you feel that much shittier. First you were shit, then you were shit that got stepped on, and now you’re shit that got stepped on and left out to bake on hot asphalt in the Texan summer. Everyone else has their guardians now, except those who died of old age. Even the Grandpamas Harlish are back (and oh, there goes Tavros, apologizing for having offed Grandpa Harley through psychic shenanigans).
What else is there to do but step out like a classy motherfucker? Leave them to their reunioning and all that. You step outside the house for the first time and just, for a quiet moment, take in the blueness of the sky and watch the clouds drift overhead. Earth. How you’ve missed it.
You wander the perimeter of the yard just staring at shit like a total dork. Tree bark, wow, why did you never notice how awesome tree bark was before you got punted off to the far reaches of the multiverse and spent a bunch of years floating on barren space rocks?
It’s as you’re contemplating the wonders of dirt and pill bugs that you see a flash of Sburb nuclear green from the corner of your eye. There’s a thump, the sound of a body landing in the Dads’ immaculate rose bushes.
There’s only one person missing still. You’re shaking as you turn around. And it’s…
Him.
But.
There’s a figure lying in the rose bushes, yeah. There are scratches all along his exposed arms, but he doesn’t seem to notice them. He doesn’t seem to notice anything at all. He just flops there, breathing but lifeless, like a doll. Like a puppet with its strings cut.
You lick your suddenly dry lips and call out, voice cracking, “Bro?”
No response.
“Bro!”
No response.
“Bro, stop fucking with me, you bastard. Do you have any idea the kind of bullshit I’ve gone through to revive your sorry ass? I don’t need you jerking me around to be the first thing you do post undeath.”
For a moment you want to punch him, because this is the kind of shit you’ve come to expect from him. Always mind games, endless mind games, with any ounce of sincerity so far buried that you can’t even tell if he ever loved you or if that was a game, too. “See how much I can fuck with Dave’s teeny weeny baby heart”. The hell kind of sicko would play that?
You call him out on it, finally. After years of abuse, you snap. “I’m not taking any of your shit anymore.”
There’s no acknowledgement at all, neither of you nor his wounds. Blood trickles down his arm. Drip, drip onto the roses.
You drag him back inside.
Honestly, you don’t pay much attention to who goes with who, aside from your close friends and those obnoxious drama queens who shout it out so you can’t ignore it.
The Lalondes plus troll entourage move out in a line of RVs headed east. The Harlishes plus troll entourage embark on the epic quest of finding out what in tarnation happened to their island home, and what kinds of combined technology will have sprung up there.
Dirk fucks off to Hollywood with OtherYou. He mentions something about robotics and Silicon Valley, but you don’t pay much attention due to mulling over how to decline OtherYou’s invitation to join them.
“I think all us Striders have had enough of alt versions of ourselves. No offense, but I can’t look at you without thinking one of us is doomed. I’m used to thinking there’s only room in this timeline for one Dave.”
“Suit yourself,” he says. You don’t miss the slightly relieved set of his shoulders as his gaze (and Dirk’s) flick over to Bro sitting docilely on the couch. They promise to visit. The drive up the coast isn’t so long, they say.
So they’re gone now, and the population of Casa de Crockerbert is down to the dads, you, John, Jane, Karkat, and a couple other trolls still lurking about. That’s fine. Your priorities now are to take care of Bro and figure out your own shit.
Bro is doing better. He responds to voices now, especially yours; he turns to you when you call him. He’s grown fond of hugs, too. The Dads were kind enough to spare a room for the two of you, and you take your meals there so you can feed Bro without the other members of the household looking on you in pity. You help Bro take baths and slowly relearn how to tend to his bodily needs.
He’s still empty, though. Wiped clean. The Game didn’t know what to do with him after removing the taint. There was so much of Cal in him it sickens you to think of it. Bro was just a meatsuit. Just a puppet for the puppet.
No wonder he had such an affinity for puppets, yeah? It was ironic.
You think Bro was Dirk, once. Once upon a time. Long, long ago. Way back when. In his childhood, perhaps. In the flickers and flashes of humanity that you used to see when he would smile at you (very rarely) or buy you the apple juice that came in the little apple bottles because he knew you loved that stuff.
You used to see him reaching out for you, then aborting the motion. And you used to think, because you didn’t know anything was fundamentally wrong with Bro all the way down to his soul, that you were just imagining things. There was no way a dude as cool as Bro would want a hug, right?
Now you’re not so sure. Now you think… After seeing the way Dirk practically melts into hugs, touch-starved as he has been, that the part of Bro that was still Dirk, smothered and suppressed by the juju… He was calling out to you.
And you didn’t hear him.
You didn’t think to look for him when he was gone. You didn’t hear him when he came back just to die for you. You didn’t hear him when the bits of his soul that were still his own sputtered out.
Well, you promise yourself that you’ll be here for him now. You’ll take care of him and keep hoping that the tattered bits of his soul will mend, will grow to cover the holes left by Cal’s departure. And in thinking all of this, you come to realize that you’ve always had two Bros. The one who abused you is gone. The one who loved you, who loves you still, is here reborn, but not like anything you thought he would be.
The next time you find yourself alone with Dirk when he comes to visit, you bring it up with him.
“You told me once that Cal raised you,” you say.
“Yeah, what of it?”
“He raised me too.”