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You run a finger along the scar that circles your neck. It’s thinner than you would have expected for a fatal wound, looking at it in the bathroom mirror.
Weeks ago, it had been tender to the touch, angry red, and you couldn’t have anything touching it. It was hard to sleep.
Still, you don’t regret it. You hope Dave doesn’t either. Your decapitation had taken down two Noirs in one swing of a blade, and it didn’t matter if you could still remember the moments of awareness afterwards when you had rolled off your own shoulders and a dizzying sight of your own torso.
Turns out it’s pretty hard to kill a god, and even if it’s heroic, it can take a while to truly be over.
The scary thing was, you were fully ready to accept it. You’d even been the one to tell him to make the swing. If Jane hadn’t gotten there fast enough, or if she was tied up somewhere else, or if something else had gone horrifically wrong… well. It had been heroic in the first place, and you want to convince yourself that it was enough to die a heroic death.
You knock your sunglasses off the edge of the sink with one hand by accident. They clatter to the floor, breaking the silence instantly. Bending down to pick them up, you run a finger along what was a sharp corner just a few seconds ago. There’s a tiny bit of the lens snapped off against the tile, and you pick that up too, leaving it on the edge of the counter.
You’ve got backup glasses, of course, because you’ve spent years never being seen without them. You’ve had them as long as you can remember. You’ve also got superglue, though, and something about replacing the glasses with a fresh unbroken copy makes something squirm deep in your throat.
(There’s something strange, too, about not looking outside your small apartment and seeing an ocean, about not being stuck in the end of an apocalypse with your only human contact being over Pesterchum, about being able to go outside and see the sun and get a hug from your closest friends. God, the first time you got a hug it was from Jake, and it was the first time you met in person and all you could think was about how nice it felt.)
There comes a knock at the door, and you really should have expected it, because you haven’t lived alone since the world was reset and your apartment only has the one bathroom. Outside the door likely stands one Dave Strider, your brother-not-brother from another universe who regularly gets mistaken for your twin but seems so much older.
You’re still not sure you’ve gotten over the hero worship of the first sixteen years of your life. If anything, you thought meeting the guy you based your entire sense of self around would change things, but it feels like there’s such a disconnect between the movie star who beheaded two juggalo Presidents with a sword on top of the White House and the sixteen year old he’s getting to know.
(Although, to be fair, you’ve seen Dave in battle, and he can be absolutely terrifying if he wants to be. Even then, from the stories you’ve heard from the others, that wasn’t the full scope of his abilities, and there was a time when he’d time travel as easily as breathing. The Dave that lives with you now, though, doesn’t touch any of that, and hasn’t for longer than you’ve known him.)
“Dirk?” comes Dave’s voice through the door. “You good in there?”
He’s concerned, and you can hear it in his voice, because as much as he tries to keep up the cool guy façade Dave cares about his friends deeply. At first, you’d been surprised that his aspect was Time, because he had seemed like the kind of guy to be described primarily by his impact on others. Before you met, it felt like all you had of him was other people’s opinions. You’d hear about how cool he seemed, or how he got on someone else’s nerves, or about how strange it was that he always wore sunglasses, or… well, when you suddenly met a whole group of people who’d known him for years, it felt like the list was endless.
Then you’d met in person for the first time, five months after your already-strange life had spiraled into something entirely new and out of your control, and you’d realized there was so much more to him, and you’d realized Time fit him perfectly.
“Yeah,” you call back, and your voice sounds hoarse. You clear your throat before you continue, and you think it’s way too loud, but it snaps the way you sound back to normal immediately. “All good in here. Just dropped my shades.”
You run your finger over the broken edge of the lens again. This would be way easier if you actually had frames on the damn things, but you’d always thought they ruined the aesthetic. The break is rough to the touch, and you think if you pressed down hard enough you could draw blood.
You don’t, though. You’re tired of pain, and you’re definitely sure Dave is too.
“Did they break?” comes Dave’s voice again.
“Yeah,” you say. “I’ll fix them, though.”