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Blood wasn’t supposed to have a distinctive smell from person to person. It was all supposed to carry the same shitty scent of iron that never failed to make you feel like you were dying. It wasn’t supposed to be identifiable by the ‘sourness’ or ‘scent of despair’ that it carried – not unless you were a blind conniving alien catching the taste of metal on the breeze. So it was bullshit that whenever Dave shoved his head under his pillow, he knew the distinctive metallic bite that came with every inhale was reminiscent of Dirk’s blood. The very same blood that even after John’s grandma had arrived hadn’t disappeared from his god robes completely for several hours.
Dave didn’t like blood and he didn’t like the feeling of the sword he’d so thoroughly talked up carving a b line straight through three dude’s necks. Two of them might have been attempting to serve up some major cause for concern, but one of those dudes’ was also his road to recovery when it came to his bro; a fact that at the time he wouldn’t have been able to admit, but could now fess up to in the right company. Dirk wasn’t bro, and Dave felt no satisfaction when his sword met flesh. To this day it still bothered him, the look that Dirk shot him before Dave racked up enough points for a UAV. Now, years later it was still a subject everyone found themselves skittering around. Terezi especially, she could get that decision stuff, sometimes she was the only one who got it – acting on pure instinct and hoping that your choice isn’t the wrong one. It came with the aspect.
Sometimes he wondered if there was a timeline where he decided that road wasn’t the one to take. Sure, Dirk was back up a few minutes later, but there was still an uneasy feeling settling in Dave’s stomach when the topic was dug up from the depths of everyone’s memory. Of course, it had been a long time, nobody really thought about things from that long ago any more. Like most things, it had been lost to the void of time centuries ago.
Like with most things. Centuries.
God he was old. He was a god and he was old, which was pretty much a given when it came to gods, but was still weird.
It was weird because not everyone was a god, not all of them were going to live forever; most had already demonstrated that fact. Mourning happened, but as previously mentioned, a couple thousand years was a really, really long time. The scenarios they came up with to extend the life spans of the trolls were incredibly elaborate. Rose was convinced they would work without falter for the first six times, and then she sort of lost it… Kanaya, she was going to live for a long time, and sometimes there were moments where Dave envied her – but mostly all he could feel was pity for his ecto sister. She was given countless years to fret and worry and stress over the fact that eventually, Kanaya would die. Rainbow drinkers apparently weren’t immortal like the ones from earth legends. Yeah. It sucked.
What sucked even more was that trolls and humans shared similar brain chemistry.
The first time Karkat didn’t know who Dave was, was seventy years after the Firestarter’s had stopped starting fires. Kanaya was in the room with him, still looking spry and not a day over nineteen when Karkat had furrowed his eyebrows together and looked up at the human in confusion. The jade blood had tried to explain, but Dave cut her off, saying he already understood, and that humans had something similar. Karkat stopped acting familiar towards the humans, sometimes acting out in ways that could be described as outright hostile. Only Kanaya could truly placate him, she mentioned it was because of her status as a jade blood, but Dave had a feeling she was just being humble. Eventually she was the only one that Karkat recognized. She was the only one whose face he greeted with a small smile, even while he forgot his own; and fuck, did that hurt like a train collision.
He died in his sleep, nobody was with him and nobody could determine the time of death, but the body was cold when Dave went to check on him in the morning. Aradia had one hell of a time blocking off his access to other timelines while Roxy talked him down. He’d broken a chair, thrown it right against a wall and cussed out all the other trolls and fuck-
It just hurt. Everything hurt. His eyes were stinging and his knees hurt from their collision with the ground, but he couldn’t find himself caring because nothing could be more painful than the loss of his best friend.
Fiction liked to emphasise how losing someone you loved was comparable to losing your everything, but fictional stories that glossed over details were wrong. Karkat wasn’t his everything; he was just a large part of the circle that made it up, which might very well have been worse in some ways. Dave hadn’t wanted fill the gap that the troll’s death had left, he didn’t want to replace Karkat, didn’t want to ‘move on’ with his life because why should he have to keep pressing forwards if he had the option to go back.
He never did though.
He played with the idea, tossed it around in his head until the possibilities it would present started turning sour, until the thought didn’t plague him anymore like a sickness that he could never sweat out. Well, not ‘never’, because he did eventually.
As previously mentioned. He had been alive for a long time. Time that gave him the opportunity to let sleeping dogs stay that way, instead of poking them with a stick like he might have once previously done. There wasn’t anything left to fix on the timeline, they hadn’t done anything wrong – it was just the way things worked.