Chapter Text
He wakes up on the balcony of the Houston apartment, but he almost doesn’t recognize it at first because the first thing he sees is a satellite dish on the roof of the building next door. For a long, long moment all he does is stare at it, uncomprehending, because a part of him isn’t sure what should be wrong and another part knows that something is definitely not right, here. He considers, for a moment, let’s his head roll back easily from his shoulders, and he stares up at the sky as he pursues the answers in his own mind.
He slowly manages to remember that the apartment is supposed to be at a much higher altitude than this and he’s going to sue whoever it is that made it shorter without his permission. Except maybe it’s not shorter at all, and everything else just got taller? This is probably an integral thing to know if he’s going to go through the trouble of making a lawsuit, so he stands from the shitty garden chair he’s woken up on, hates the fact that he’s old enough for his back to creak, and peers over the railing to check out how far away the ground is. Luckily for his sense of vertigo, it’s not bad. The apartment’s pretty far off the ground, sure, but he doesn’t have to play ball with The Jetson’s lifestyle just yet, it seems.
Things are starting to come back to him, anyway.
There’s no one else around, so he assumes he’s perfectly within his rights to slump against the railing, more than just a little overcome with exhaustion. He’s done nothing but fight and hide and fight and time travel, for the past handful of years, and he deserves a little bit of a break. He doubts he’s going to get one, considering that he still has no idea where he is, really, but it’s not like anyone’s going to complain about him taking a five-minute breather to his face.
The last thing he remembers is him and Rose getting their ass handed to them on a gilded platter by Baroness Batterbitch, which isn’t, as it turns out, a very pleasant memory at all. For an alien hag who seemed to think it was strategically sound to hire a douchebag chef and a couple of clown jokers to be her highest serving minions, she’d been vicious and unforgiving in battle; neither he or Rose had gone down easily or quickly, as far as he remembers, but the odds had been stacked against them from the start.
He’s never going to eat another cake again without thinking of her, though, and that’s what really pisses him off.
There’s still blood on his shirt from that battle, and he notices it when he stands up straight again; he cautiously gropes the area where the red is solid from pooled blood, but the skin underneath is unbroken and not even sore, so whatever’s happened, he’s apparently been healed - he’s okay with that, really, even if it just adds to the surreal quality of the situation. After he finishes checking himself over (and he really is healed, he doesn’t even have any bruises or minor scratches - he feels as good as new, almost literally), he peers back over the cityscape.
It’s...as calm as any old day in Houston, really. There’s the sound of far-off sirens but that hadn’t been unusual even in the pre-hell-on-Earth days. The sky is clear, the only panic in the streets looks like rush hour panic. No one seems to be cowering in fear of their lives, so he assumes that the human race isn’t currently being oppressed by any alien aggressors. He’s a little surprised when his phone still works, but he shakes it off and checks the news apps, and all of it’s just people bitching about the GOP and what scandalous thing which celebrity did this week.
Did they win? Dave struggles to call anything that actively destroys worlds and rips universes apart something as simple as a game, but from what little Rose was able to describe of it, that’s really what it was and how all these fucked up kids got tricked into participating in it. Nothing seems wrong or apocalyptic, though, so he assumes something must have gone right. More right than he’d originally assume it would, even, considering he’s no longer dead by an extremely foolish attempt to take down Sea Hitler. But this is more than just being alive - the whole world seems different, even just from the balcony there are things that are altered from what he remembers.
There’s a prickling at his skin, too, and it’s as he’s surveying the buildings around him that he begins to realize that the familiar beat of time in the back of his head is so very faint, now, that he can barely hear it. He runs a hand through his hair as he stands there, and he tries to concentrate on the familiar tug and pull of it, but - yeah, no, he doesn’t appear to be able to do much with it at all, anymore. He can still sense it, though barely, and there’s something about it that’s choppy and patchwork and harder to concentrate on then all the rest - so he stops concentrating on it. He’s got enough of a headache going on without trying to figure out something that he’s never actually completely understood in the first place.
For a moment, the mere scale of the amount of information he doesn’t have seems very overwhelming, but he pulls himself together because he’s Dave Strider and he hasn’t hidden under the blanket of willful ignorance for a long, long time.
The first thing he does when he pulls himself together is send a text to Rose, because the best case scenario is that she’s in the same situation he is, or else she’s dead, and Dave’s not good at dealing with death and he’s not going to start being good with it anytime soon. His fellow terrorist/freedom-fighter had better be alive, or else he’s going to have Words with her, ominous capitalization and all. When he’s sufficiently satisfied with the level of carefully planned irreverence in his message, he sends it and he stares at it until he has to blink. He’ll give her a day to respond before he lets himself worry about it too hard, but he can’t imagine a reason why he might be alive and she might not.
The next step in his self-appointed reconnaissance mission is a lot more vague, because he’s beginning to get the sense of Grand Cosmic Events and if he were to put himself on a scale of how important he is next to them, something tells him that the meter would read a shameful, ‘Absolutely Fuck All’. So, yeah, he’s got no plan because everything around him is insisting on being ambiguous, his usual font of information is currently MIA, and he’s still got no idea how the Houston apartment got so much shorter.
The best place to gather information is from the inside, though, and Dave taps his phone against the railing for a moment before he turns, decisively, on his heel and advances inwards into the heart of the mystery. The apartment is kind of a wreck - the first room in off the balcony is the kitchen, and he’s not sure anything in it actually looks like a kitchen should except for the stack of empty pizza and take-out boxes on the counter next to the trash. There’s fireworks in the sink and a pile of... interesting little colored stuffed animal doll things on the floor that look like something he might buy off the internet if he were poor and desperate, and something red and green in the blender that he’s pretty certain isn’t edible or even an attempt at food. He opens the fridge out of pure curiosity and almost gets impaled by swords again, but he spies actual food behind the glint of steel, too. It’s not how he would decorate now, but it seems like exactly the sort of place he’d have if he’d had time to actually be home, between Hollywood and Rebellion.
Alas, though, the kitchen can only hold his attention for so long before he remembers what he’s trying to accomplish, here. He wipes his hands on his pants and steps out into the living room; there’s honest to god cinderblock furniture in here, and he knows for sure that this is definitely the apartment, but it’s also not - because he draws the line at cinderblock furniture. He might allow it in his own home, but he’s guilty and angry enough about Dirk that he knows for a fact that he ordered top of the line furniture for the kid - it probably wouldn’t have been top of the line by the time the kid was there to enjoy it, but it’d at least be well built enough not to crumble into dust and gravel before that.
He manages not to turn his nose up at it in a grimace, but only barely, and he’s about to turn around to investigate the rest of this shitty Houston apartment when he notices that the second-rate futon appears to actually be occupied. The first thing he sees is blonde hair, following by the same stain of red that had been on his own clothes, but before he can even start to get his hopes up that he and Rose ended up in the same place, he realizes that it’s a man.
A man who’s...oddly familiar, though Dave knows for a fact he’s never seen him in his life.
He’s probably about Dave’s age, maybe a little younger or maybe a little older (who can really tell and who really cares, no Strider really looks much like the age they’re supposed to anyway), but the way he stretches out on the couch makes him look like he’s definitely taller. He’s wearing a baseball cap and a pair of shades that Dave’s pretty sure he must use as a deadly weapon, and there’s definitely blood on his shirt in a pattern that’s disturbingly similar to the pattern of blood on his own. Dave would worry about stains on the upholstery, but the futon continues to be shitty no matter how long he looks at it, so he doesn’t actually give a shit.
He’s also breathing still, which tells Dave that he’s not the only person to be inexplicably without injury and gives him more hope for Rose.
What he wants is to be able to assume that this new douchebag is Dirk, but something about the label feels wrong even as part of it feels right; he tries to apply logic to this incredibly illogical situation, though, and this man’s not the right age to be his kid-brother and not even really in the right time period. Whoever he is, though, Dave decides that he’s definitely, somehow, a Strider who’s been far too involved with events that he doesn’t really understand.
Somehow he’s still sleeping, despite the fact that Dave hasn’t exactly thought to be quiet while he’s exploring this apartment that’s both his and very much not his. He considers waking him up for all of two seconds before he finally shakes his head and disengages from his staring. There’s more left to explore in this apartment, and Dave needs a little more time to himself to adjust. There’s really not a lot else to look at, though - he spends some time dicking around in a room he probably would have approved of as a pre-teen, going through records and photographs and a choice collection of dead things. He stops because it starts feeling skeezy and awkward, though, because apparently this room did belong to a teenaged version of him. The shitty pictures say enough, really, and the shittier drawings - there’s even some SB&HJ comics on the computer.
He’s starting to get that this isn’t really his world, though, even if it leaves him more confused as to what he’s doing here. This is a world where he grew up in - well, not a normal home, but with actual family...and actually, if he was still just a kid here, then the man in the living room? He might actually be Dirk, because Dave doesn’t really get alternate realities, but that seems like the sort of backwards bullshit that would happen in one. Dirk raised him here, and the man in the living room is Dirk (or at least a version of him), and Dave’s got twenty different varieties of migraines going on right now.
All in all, his first waking hours after his presumed death are incredibly surreal, and he finally gives in because he’s sick of being in the dark about it all - and either alter-Dirk is going to have some modicum of a clue, or else they’re both going to be confused, but either is good enough for him. He grabs one of the plush abominations from the nearest surface and launches it directly at the man on the couch - and he’s not at all vindictively amused when it hits target, of course, because that’s childish and not at all cool.
In any case, it does it’s job - the man sits up and looks like he reaches for a sword that’s not there, but he pauses as he sees Dave and his entire body twitches. His mouth twists into a frown, and Dave is definitely not the only person who’s So-Done-With-This. In fact, Dave thinks he’s probably doing a better job of keeping a straight face, because after a moment of mutual Strider-watching, alter-Dirk sighs and knocks his cap off, and then pulls his sunglasses away so that he can drop them and massage his temples.
“You’re not Dave,” Dave is accused, and he crosses his arms and can’t decide if he’s actually offended or not.
“Look, I know you must be used to shopping for hand-me-down Daves at the salvation army, but I’ve got a certificate of authentication in my pants, so I’m not exactly looking for your approval, here.”
“Oh, is that what they’re calling micro-dick these days?”
“I don’t know, man, you’re the one with the fetish and the problem, you tell me what the slang is.”
There’s a pause, then, before they’re both smirking at one another and a silent mutual agreement that they both forgive the other for not being the right Strider. He deigns to sit on what is literally the shittiest futon he’s ever been subjected to (he will probably never stop bitching about it), and the two of them stare at the blank television screen in silence for a long, long moment before alter-Dirk sighs, again.
“I guess they managed to start the Scratch, then?”
“I literally have not even the slightest fucking clue what that’s supposed to mean.”
“You’re from the new universe the scratch created, right?” Dirk stares at Dave who stares at him so blankly that he has to look over the top of his glasses to really convey his lack of comprehension. “Didn’t you play the game?”
He fucking knew it. He almost wishes he’d paid more attention to Rose’s explanation of it, except that he’d been dealing with enough, at the time.
“You mean...Sburb, right? The alpha version of Sburb, or some shit. Nah, I mean, that wasn’t my part. Lalonde mentioned something about a couple of do-gooder kids who started playing the day the Batterbitch invaded, and later on our genetic progeny was supposed to join them, but that’s literally all I know about it.”
“The Batterbitch?” The silence permeates again as they both consider the situation, before alter-Dirk swears under his breath and stands up. “You shower first, I’ll get the coffee started, and we’ll deal with everything else afterwards?”
“Sweet, I’ll enjoy the break from looking at your face.”
When he finds that one of the closets actually has his entire wardrobe from L.A. in it he decides that he can’t even begin to quantify how done he is with this day.
They manage to hash it all out, though, or at least piece it together enough from what each of them know to have some faint grasp on the situation. Whatever’s happened, the fact that they’re here at all must means that the kids either won, or that they’re winning. Either’s a good sign, and it goes unspoken that the both of them are anxious for their respective brothers to show up.
Even if there might end up being more than two Daves, though alter-Dirk says that he’s not sure how the game works or how fair it’s going to be. Dave just sort of accepts this as another oddity of his life. They manage to normalize life between them in a minimum amount of days, though, and Dave starts the job hunt because apparently his fame hasn’t carried over to this universe (he thinks he’s okay with that, though, because there’s a chance he’ll get to meet Dirk and he wants to have the time to get to know him).
A week after they wake up, they both get a call at the same time - Dave’s heart leaps to his throat because the only person who has his number in this place has to be Rose, and Dirk’s frowning at his own phone with a mix of recognition, hope, and confusion. They each break for different parts of the house; Dave for the balcony, and Dirk leaves entirely, probably headed up to the roof. Dave’s managed to realize in the past week that it’s the other blond’s favorite place to retreat to.
“Hello?” He answers, and he has no idea how he’s managed to keep his voice so even, but he practically collapses in the balcony chair when the familiar chuckle of a certain woman meets his ears.
“Dave. I apologize for taking so long to reach you, but it seems that my phone wasn’t as lucky to survive the confrontation as I was, and it’s taken a ludicrous amount of time to have it fixed.”
“No, it’s...it’s cool. It’s not like I was worried about your sarcastic ass, anyway, Lalonde, I have no doubt you’d be able to psychoanalyze your way out of the clutches of the grim reaper if you wanted to.”
“Hahaha, I imagine so. How are you?”
“Honestly? Confused. Alive, but mostly confused. Dirk and I think we know what’s going on, but a lot of it’s just conjecture.” There’s a pause, and Dave assumes she’s processing this information, and then he wonders if she’s met Roxy’s alternate self.
“Before I answer, let me ask you: can you still take your little day-trips to the past?” There’s no accusation in her voice, just a general desire to know; and he feels okay with telling the truth, because she doesn’t make it sound like it’s a skill she needs him to have, right now.
“No. It’s...really slippery, right now. I can still sense it, though. Whatever brought us here, though, left a lot of...of gaps, I guess, it’s hard to explain. But they’re pulling together. Really, really slowly, but they are.” There’s a sound from over the phone, like she’s deflated but in a good way, and when she speaks again there’s a note of tension gone from her voice that he’s never even noticed before.
“We’re going to have visitors soon. As far as I can tell, they’ve won, but...well, you know better than anyone how nonlinear time can be. I think yours will arrive before anyone else’s though - and you might want to see about expanding, seeing as how you’ll have quite the little brood by the time it’s all over.” Dave frowns, a little, staring out across the city as the sun catches on the buildings, his feet propped up on the railing.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Of course, all she does is chuckle again and change the subject, because that’s all she ever does. He doesn’t even know why he wanted her to be safe, anymore.
“You’ll see. In any case, I have to be off, now - dearest Ms. Lalonde and I are about to go shopping, and we have the most interesting conversations on the subject of wizards. One last bit of advice, though? Don’t put it off any longer than necessary.” She’s hanging up the phone before he can ask her what the hell she’s even talking about, and she’s just as infuriating as ever.
He contemplates throwing his phone off the balcony out of spite, but there’s a knock on the door before he can, and he turns his head to see Dirk holding his phone out to him. Dave’s brows furrow, but Dirk just shrugs - and what the hell, why the fuck not. Dave takes the phone from him and puts it to his ear.
“Sup?”
“I hope you’re having a good afternoon, David?” What the shit? Dave furrows his brows, because the voice sounds too familiar, but at the same time, he’s not sure he can place it. “I was quite relieved to finally be able to get through to you two; everyone else has been here for a handful of months, now.”
“...Thanks? And it’s just Dave.” Who is he talking to? He glances at Dirk again, but the jackass is just leaning against the door and watching him, offering no help whatsoever. Whoever it is, though, at least they sound nice?
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I don’t think you were ever able to get Joe’s information before you left again, and I think he’d quite enjoy hearing from you now that you’re more likely to stay in one place.”
Of all the things he’s expecting, to hear about Joe again is...well, it hasn’t really crossed his mind before now and he immediately feels bad about it. Joe and Jade had been some of the easier, better constants in the last few years of his life, and he really is attached to them - but things have been messed up, and the idea that they might make it into this new world...it hadn’t really seemed plausible.
He’s also pretty sure that he’s talking to one Mr. Egbert, now, too, and though he never spoke directly to the man, he seems a lot more...present, than he had in Dave’s world’s past. Hopefully he likes this one better than that one. He considers that for a moment, but you know - out of everything fucked up going on right now, Mr. Egbert could literally be on the bottom of his list of concerns, so he relaxes back into his chair and props his feet up on the railing with a long, low sigh.
“You think so? I dunno, I bet the two of them have moved on by now - they probably barely even remember me.” There’s a pause over the phone, then, as if Egbert’s trying to parse out what he’s saying, and he can’t help but wonder how much the dude knows about all of this - he hadn’t had a lot to do with the man from his own world, after all, but he realizes, suddenly, that this man sounds a lot more in the know than he would have expected. He’s about to ask when there’s a chuckle.
“I doubt that either of them would forget you so soon.” He ends up talking with Egbert for longer than he’d expected to, and he finds it kind of weird how they’ve created this support group of ‘parents of children who are off stopping the destruction of reality’ but it’s good. The phone call ends with him getting Joe’s number and probably the most encouraging words he’s ever heard an adult man tell him, before. At some point, Dirk must have retreated inside, and Dave considers, maybe, trying to call Joe now, but...it’s getting late and he’s interrupted those kids lives enough as it is - he’ll call tomorrow, or the day after, but for now, he goes back inside and tosses the phone at Dirk’s head.