MSPA fan-fiction

[boper9]

(Exactly how long before the advent of SGRUB?)

Whatever more I write, that won't be too important. But it's at least longer than one troll's lifespan, so thus out of Vriska's giving-a-shit range.

"EVERYTHING RADICAL EVER"

... Boper that was really cool thanks for linking me to it! Sorry I'm all verbose and bluh!

Sorry you are being sorry for no good reason! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE ATTENTION FFFFFYES I AM BATHING IN ALL THIS EGO BOOST.

I am so behind on my reading augh, when did this thread start going by so quickly??? I'm not complaining but shit guys you are the most productive sons of bitches ever. I LOVE YOU, LET'S HUG

Blame reclusiveAmateur for this one; I got all inspired by her second-person Dave-centric fics that goddamnit I wanted to write one too, so here it is! (notes: indeterminate amount of time post-sburb, dave/jade, implied john/rose)

we drive by braille

show spoiler

hide spoiler

one.

It hits you out of nowhere in your junior year of high school, when you take some joke religious comparison class for a decent place to sleep after lunch. Eventually the teacher moves into mythology, though, and then Greek mythology, and that's when you sit up and pay attention: Ceto, Echidna, Typhon, Hephaestus; names you know attached to things you've seen with your own eyes. You remember Ceto's convoluted mindgames, and Echidna's hollow dead leaf laughter, and Typhon's glib, stolen grin, but most of all you remember Hephaestus because he was so much like you it hurt.

You wonder if any of the others ever decided to do the same thing, but it doesn't really matter, because, as you find out, it's kind of personal. You don't know why it took you so long--okay, well, maybe you do, and maybe you just didn't want to revisit it, or maybe you just didn't want to know how deep it really goes. But the time is long overdue, so one miserable winter evening, you hit the internet up for research on your denizen.

The basics are obvious because everyone knows them--smith-god, artisan, volcanoes, etcetera. A god of dual elements, fire and earth, the twin virtues of creativity and persistence (twin vices of molten anger and slavish devotion); born imperfect and thrown from the mountain, he found belonging in a craft (sound familiar, beatsmith?, you think and immediately unthink), honed it like no one else before him because being the best was all he had. And as you click through the pages, as it sounds more and more like you, you remember those years ago: the red furnace glow, the rhythm of time kept with a blacksmith's hammer, walls of moving copper, and a man who could've been you in another life hunched solemn and joyless for all the beautiful things he makes.

And still you keep going. You read about Hephaestus winning back his place on Olympus, all that power and all those gods laughing at him behind his back.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You read about the fall of Typhon, how Hephaestus built his workshop on top of him, how his forge was powered by the breath of a dying god.

(at your strongest when your best friend's at his weakest)

You feel a little sick to your stomach, so you x out of the browser and that's that. You start sleeping through your religion class again, and when it's time to pick a topic for your final, you go with Hinduism. Years later, when you're signing up for classes your sophomore year of college, you have the choice between religion and history. You choose history.

two.

You're a picky eater. It was fine growing up, with your brother bringing home an endless rotation of TV dinners for the nights he wasn't going to be around (which was most nights). Everything was neatly labeled, flash frozen, and compartmentalized, and it didn't matter how many times bro told you to man up and eat your vegetables because he was never there to bitch when you dumped them in the trash.

But then the real world came along and made you try to eat things that weren't pizza rolls and hot pockets, and that's when you got fussy. You hate the texture of pork, and you hate it when the food on your plate mixes; you hate sushi, Indian food, shellfish, anything with ketchup or bell peppers. You try to avoid situations where people might cook for you in case you have to push away your dinner and deal with the aftermath of being an offensive houseguest.

(“I was half expecting dog food,” you tell Jade in your usual deadpan, leaning awkwardly on the kitchen island; bad joke and you know it but you can't seem to tell any different kind with her. The way her shoulders hunch confirms it, but you soldier on anyway because that's just what you do, even as she scrapes a mangled chunk of salmon into the garbage and gives you a wounded, kicked-puppy look. You're kind of a jackass and a little insufferable sometimes, and you can't argue that, but no one would ever accuse you of being heartless--except for now, maybe, as she leaves the room with little more than a glance back and you stand there with parted lips, poised to say words that won't come out.)

Lalonde watches you over the weeks, notices how finicky and repetitive you get with your meals, and tells you with that unbearably smug little Harvard grin of hers that it's a control issue.

She adds: “Not the only one, I'm sure.”

You look down at your plate, organized by color and type--starch and green on one side, protein and yellow on the other, all separated like it's quarantine--and set your fork down. “Quit watching me eat,” you say, folding your arms. “Shit's weird.”

three.

There aren't many true things about yourself that you like to show to the world, but how much you like words is one of them, and anyone who isn't comatose can see it for themselves. Freestyling is a goddamn artform and you're good at it, because if there's anything in this world you can do, it's pull all the right things together at exactly the right time. You have the vocabulary for it, and--god help you, it's the dumbest shit and it sounds too much like Rose, but something like the soul of a poet, too. There are deep, winding nuances to language that you feel comfortable in, and you guess it's the most obvious similarity between you and your sister. You can laugh all you want at her reams of poetry and fanfiction, but it doesn't stop you from understanding why she does it.

The rap, the freestyling, the hip-hop: it's a strange manifestation of your interests, strange enough that nobody asks because they think they know, and you're fine with that. You don't have to explain it to anyone. Middle class white kid from Houston--total joke if you think you can relate, pretentious hipster douchebag, an insult to the culture. And they can keep thinking that, because fuck if you're going to waste your time justifying it; that it wasn't always this way, that cinder block and particle board furniture wasn't always just a statement, that it wasn't always a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood. Before his bro hit the right niche, things were a little tighter, and those were the nights you spent in bed with a hand-me-down CD player, finding something to relate to in the music you looped: Rakim, NWA, The Fugees, Public Enemy, over and over and over until you could mouth the tracks by memory. It made things seem a little more bearable, making order out of chaos.

But you didn't always have the CD player either, so before that, it was books. The library became a babysitter when your brother couldn't pick you up from school, at first just for the air conditioning, but then you decided somewhere along the way--why not? You started picking through the shelves and that was it, really. The start of a secret love affair that never really stopped, with an emphasis on secret. Dickens and Burgess didn't exactly gel with your pridefully--painfully, meticulously--constructed don't-give-a-fuck attitude.

(Seven years old, thumbing through cheap thrift store books, and you pick up a dog-eared, moth-eaten copy of East of Eden; “Isn't this a little much for you, man?” your brother asks and you shake your head, because it's not about the stories, or the characters. You don't have to understand those and you don't pretend to try. It's about all those words that sit in those pages just waiting for you to collect them.)

Years and years later, you still never let your collection grow larger than what you can hide under your bed, and it rotates out every couple of months: Tolstoy, Alighieri, Camus, Orwell for now until you wrap up War and Peace, find some time off to dump them off at a used bookstore, and pick out replacements. There's a kind of enjoyment in the ritual now; you can hunch in the aisles and pretend you've got better things to do all you want, but you aren't fooling anyone, least of all yourself.

(You slide into the booth across from Jade, ten minutes late--feeling every last aching second of it between the store and the restaurant, made worse knowing she doesn't have that long in town--and you give a quick apology, explaining about lines and traffic; she's just glad to see you. Then, because she's weird and there are parts of her that the mainland can't crush, she sniffs the air and says, “You smell like books.” When you give her a noncommittal shrug, and she adds: “I like books.”

You can't help yourself and maybe you'll regret it later, but then again, maybe it could be a good thing if you let it. With a secret little half-grin hidden behind your menu, you look at her over the top of your shades and say, “Me too.”)

four.

You find--or found, really, because it's been years since you've had it--something satisfying in your title. Not the time part, because it's hard not to be a little smugly satisfied at being placed in charge of so much power and it's so fucking undeniably cool, but the knight part--and you had trouble admitting it at first, when you were under siege by John's well-intentioned jabs and Rose's instant, unsolicited analysis. You denied, denied, denied until they finally gave it a rest and you could take a good, long look at it yourself.

You're not prim and proper, and you're not polite, and you're not really all that chivalrous, but there are still pieces of you that shine beneath the layers of stony indifference and practiced jerkass. If you can't ooze charisma and a winning personality--because even you can admit you'll never be the golden boy (respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted), not like John--then you can at least tell the god's honest truth whenever you can, even if it hurts--maybe especially if it hurts. If you're not going to open doors for women, then you can sure as hell throw a couple punches for one when it's 2 AM and some drunken frat fuck won't leave her alone. It happens a few times, and the night ends with bruised knuckles and the taste of blood in your mouth, but you always get your point across with blistering clarity.

You're not the guy with flocks of friends, never will be, and you don't want to be, not really. For however much it aches to know you'll never belong, it narrows down the list of people you'd feel obligated to take a bullet for.

And when it comes down to that--well. It has before, where you had to make that choice, except it wasn't really a choice, not for you, and you stepped in front of that sword, that gun, that blast of fire every. single. time. For all the kinds of men you aren't, that's the kind of man you are, and that's what's so satisfying. When the game ended and everyone got on with their lives and all that's left of Time is no need to ever wear a watch again, you can still say that yeah, you're a knight in your own way. That's something that'll never change.

five.

You're chronically, habitually, hopelessly bad at women.

It's not getting them that you're bad at; you're attractive and you know it, because you're fastidious about your appearance to the point of compulsion and you never leave your apartment without looking like you could buy the town. You're the skilled musician dripping with arrogance, indifferent to the existence of other people, and girls go fucking crazy for it. It helps, you think, that apparently there's something mysterious about you, something a little dark and intense, because, well--you've seen war and nobody comes out of that without a little bit of baggage, and they love that. You're the guy they want to take home and kiss better and stitch back together with force of personality. You're the guy they want to fix so you'll love them.

You don't, though, you don't even come close, and you suppose that's where the point of contention is. A week, two weeks, sometimes three, and it's smooth sailing--but then she'll want your apartment key, or she'll want to meet your friends, or she'll drop hints about moving in and you're fucking out of there. Sometimes you're out of there sooner, for stupid reasons: there was Jenna, the poli-sci major who couldn't shut up; there was Ashley, who accidentally ran into you everywhere and you're pretty sure she was stalking you; Madison had too many piercings, Olivia reeked of nicotine, Nicole kept asking about your parents. They're just the start of your list. It extends way, way beyond them. You tell John that they just weren't right; you know for yourself that you just weren't trying.

(Her name is Mira and she's a righteous bitch, you decide, and you wonder why you're even here, fumbling around her apartment in the dark looking for where you dropped your damn tie, when you got sick of her two weeks ago and got sick of nights like these a week after that. You know she's watching you from her bed, face contorted in that nasty little scowl of hers, but you can't see her and you don't really want to.

“I don't know what your damage is, Strider.” You hear the rustle of bedsheets and her soft footsteps on the hardwood and you don't dignify her nagging with any sort of response. “Do I look too much like her? Not enough?”

Mira--beautiful, horrible Mira, with her tan skin and her long black hair and her serpentine calculation--has a way with words that reminds you of Rose, if Rose were even more of a frigid cunt. You feel a sort of cold fury rising up in your gut, old and familiar because that's just always how it starts with you, ice first and fire later. “Finish that thought,” you say, and you know she will, because she doesn't back from a challenge. She's dating you, after all. “Go ahead.”

“Wait, I'm sorry. She has her hair cut short now, doesn't she? I think I saw her in Forbes last month. Cute. Like a pixie. Shame you won't let me meet her.” She follows you as you stalk down the dark hallway, into the living room, where you swipe your keys from the coffee table. “Or maybe she just hasn't come back into town yet. Is that it? I wouldn't know, you never talk about her.”

She's on your heels even as you grab your jacket, and you still don't have your tie but fuck it, better to buy a new one than put up with this bullshit. “Poor you, all lonely because your rich little heiress girlfriend left you behind. Do you miss her? Is that why you said her name?”

You'd never hit a woman, not in a thousand goddamn years no matter how much she might deserve it, but as she blocks the doorway, sheet pulled around her and that fucking scowl on her face as poisonous as the rest of her, you come so, so close. “Get the fuck out of my way,” you say, and it's all you have to say, because--

Well. She liked you because you were a little dark and intense and broken, but actually seeing you like that isn't something she can handle.)

“Dude,” John says and he doesn't even try to hide his amusement as he chews on his straw, the smug bastard; you regret calling him even though it's what you always do when you have a problem. “Your life's kind of gone to hell you're trying way too hard to compensate.”

“Bullshit. I'm not compensating for anything,” you say, but you aren't so good at lying anymore, because John only laughs at you, at your half-eaten plate of sorted, organized food.

six.

Okay, so you have some fucking control issues. You get it. People can just get off your dick about it already because you know, they don't need to keep reminding you. You're enough of a reminder to yourself. Yeah, so you had kind of a crappy childhood and a brother who was never home, and when he was, he was putting you through shit a kid shouldn't have to go through, all 'it's for your own good's and 'you'll thank me when you're older's and 'pay attention, you're gonna need to know this someday's. And yeah, maybe it affected you more than you'd like to admit, and yeah, maybe you didn't have any control at all and you reacted with trying to force everything around you to make sense.

And there's that other part of your title that still rides along with you, the one that was so fucking cool until you learned what happens when you have to become the get out of jail free card for your friends. (It's almost hilarious, you think, striving all your life to be the best and then finding out that only the best are ever offered up for sacrifice.) You were the one who made it through the game, but you can't help but think of other timelines, all the other pockets of failure that another you had to fix at his own expense. If you were another man, it might make you bitter, but you're not. You're more bitter at yourself and how you're dealing with the leftovers.

You still feel time a little too intimately than you'd prefer, but it's not under your control anymore, so you force it in other ways; you went after music with a kind of terrifying fervor as soon as you realized your personal timeline was static again, learning instruments, collecting vinyls and samples by the thousands. It's that rhythm, you know, and they call it keeping time but it means something entirely different to you; it's the way you can sit with your mixing equipment for hours, making tiny, exacting changes for perfectionism's sake, finding what's wrong and fixing it, making sense out of the chaos. And when you're on that stage with that guitar and that microphone, you've got a crowd's attention locked onto you, a show of force through skill and determination. You're not the golden boy and you never will be, not like John, but you can make people listen.

And you'd say it's fine but it's not, not really, when every night you get all dressed up with nowhere to go but around, around, around, the dance that went out of style years ago with partners who don't know what's going on until you're gone. You don't enjoy it, and maybe that's what scares you--that you faced an image of yourself when you were thirteen that you swore up and down you'd never become, only to become it anyway. Metronome for a hammer and here you are, hunched over joyless and solemn for all the beautiful things you make.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You're not a drinker--control issues, the voice of Rose echoes in your head, and you've been drinking just enough to laugh at that, just enough to flick through your phone's address book, looking for a name and a number and a reason. Around the middle of the list you realize you've only come up with two out of three, and that'll have to be enough.

As you listen to it ring, and ring, and ring, and ring, you become dimly aware that it's 3 AM and you're kind of an asshole when a groggy, girlish voice picks up.

“Dave?”

You lick your cracked lips, close your eyes, and your voice curls her name into a question: “Jade?”

“What's wrong?”

Your shoulders shake in a chuckle made out of pure fuck it, and from the silence on the other end of the phone, you can't help but wonder if she thinks you've gone crazy, and--well. Shit, maybe you have, and maybe that could be a good thing if you let it.

“Everything,” you say, and it's not the whole truth, but it's a start.

Also oh man this is good. The oddness of time in this, like how it seems to be all narated at once but each subsequent one has perspective form a later point in his life, is so very time-travley. This fic embodies dave on quite a few levels



Awww yis look at me rolling about in my compliments at the top of this page. LOOK AT MEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

[Solaris]

Fuck, sarasvati why do you have to do that?
Everyone stop making me feel emotions!
I COMMAND IT AS KING!
But seriously I love you all so much, you do not know
you do not know

[kmsumrall]

I am so behind on my reading augh, when did this thread start going by so quickly??? I'm not complaining but shit guys you are the most productive sons of bitches ever. I LOVE YOU, LET'S HUG

Blame reclusiveAmateur for this one; I got all inspired by her second-person Dave-centric fics that goddamnit I wanted to write one too, so here it is! (notes: indeterminate amount of time post-sburb, dave/jade, implied john/rose)

we drive by braille

show spoiler

hide spoiler

one.

It hits you out of nowhere in your junior year of high school, when you take some joke religious comparison class for a decent place to sleep after lunch. Eventually the teacher moves into mythology, though, and then Greek mythology, and that's when you sit up and pay attention: Ceto, Echidna, Typhon, Hephaestus; names you know attached to things you've seen with your own eyes. You remember Ceto's convoluted mindgames, and Echidna's hollow dead leaf laughter, and Typhon's glib, stolen grin, but most of all you remember Hephaestus because he was so much like you it hurt.

You wonder if any of the others ever decided to do the same thing, but it doesn't really matter, because, as you find out, it's kind of personal. You don't know why it took you so long--okay, well, maybe you do, and maybe you just didn't want to revisit it, or maybe you just didn't want to know how deep it really goes. But the time is long overdue, so one miserable winter evening, you hit the internet up for research on your denizen.

The basics are obvious because everyone knows them--smith-god, artisan, volcanoes, etcetera. A god of dual elements, fire and earth, the twin virtues of creativity and persistence (twin vices of molten anger and slavish devotion); born imperfect and thrown from the mountain, he found belonging in a craft (sound familiar, beatsmith?, you think and immediately unthink), honed it like no one else before him because being the best was all he had. And as you click through the pages, as it sounds more and more like you, you remember those years ago: the red furnace glow, the rhythm of time kept with a blacksmith's hammer, walls of moving copper, and a man who could've been you in another life hunched solemn and joyless for all the beautiful things he makes.

And still you keep going. You read about Hephaestus winning back his place on Olympus, all that power and all those gods laughing at him behind his back.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You read about the fall of Typhon, how Hephaestus built his workshop on top of him, how his forge was powered by the breath of a dying god.

(at your strongest when your best friend's at his weakest)

You feel a little sick to your stomach, so you x out of the browser and that's that. You start sleeping through your religion class again, and when it's time to pick a topic for your final, you go with Hinduism. Years later, when you're signing up for classes your sophomore year of college, you have the choice between religion and history. You choose history.

two.

You're a picky eater. It was fine growing up, with your brother bringing home an endless rotation of TV dinners for the nights he wasn't going to be around (which was most nights). Everything was neatly labeled, flash frozen, and compartmentalized, and it didn't matter how many times bro told you to man up and eat your vegetables because he was never there to bitch when you dumped them in the trash.

But then the real world came along and made you try to eat things that weren't pizza rolls and hot pockets, and that's when you got fussy. You hate the texture of pork, and you hate it when the food on your plate mixes; you hate sushi, Indian food, shellfish, anything with ketchup or bell peppers. You try to avoid situations where people might cook for you in case you have to push away your dinner and deal with the aftermath of being an offensive houseguest.

(“I was half expecting dog food,” you tell Jade in your usual deadpan, leaning awkwardly on the kitchen island; bad joke and you know it but you can't seem to tell any different kind with her. The way her shoulders hunch confirms it, but you soldier on anyway because that's just what you do, even as she scrapes a mangled chunk of salmon into the garbage and gives you a wounded, kicked-puppy look. You're kind of a jackass and a little insufferable sometimes, and you can't argue that, but no one would ever accuse you of being heartless--except for now, maybe, as she leaves the room with little more than a glance back and you stand there with parted lips, poised to say words that won't come out.)

Lalonde watches you over the weeks, notices how finicky and repetitive you get with your meals, and tells you with that unbearably smug little Harvard grin of hers that it's a control issue.

She adds: “Not the only one, I'm sure.”

You look down at your plate, organized by color and type--starch and green on one side, protein and yellow on the other, all separated like it's quarantine--and set your fork down. “Quit watching me eat,” you say, folding your arms. “Shit's weird.”

three.

There aren't many true things about yourself that you like to show to the world, but how much you like words is one of them, and anyone who isn't comatose can see it for themselves. Freestyling is a goddamn artform and you're good at it, because if there's anything in this world you can do, it's pull all the right things together at exactly the right time. You have the vocabulary for it, and--god help you, it's the dumbest shit and it sounds too much like Rose, but something like the soul of a poet, too. There are deep, winding nuances to language that you feel comfortable in, and you guess it's the most obvious similarity between you and your sister. You can laugh all you want at her reams of poetry and fanfiction, but it doesn't stop you from understanding why she does it.

The rap, the freestyling, the hip-hop: it's a strange manifestation of your interests, strange enough that nobody asks because they think they know, and you're fine with that. You don't have to explain it to anyone. Middle class white kid from Houston--total joke if you think you can relate, pretentious hipster douchebag, an insult to the culture. And they can keep thinking that, because fuck if you're going to waste your time justifying it; that it wasn't always this way, that cinder block and particle board furniture wasn't always just a statement, that it wasn't always a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood. Before his bro hit the right niche, things were a little tighter, and those were the nights you spent in bed with a hand-me-down CD player, finding something to relate to in the music you looped: Rakim, NWA, The Fugees, Public Enemy, over and over and over until you could mouth the tracks by memory. It made things seem a little more bearable, making order out of chaos.

But you didn't always have the CD player either, so before that, it was books. The library became a babysitter when your brother couldn't pick you up from school, at first just for the air conditioning, but then you decided somewhere along the way--why not? You started picking through the shelves and that was it, really. The start of a secret love affair that never really stopped, with an emphasis on secret. Dickens and Burgess didn't exactly gel with your pridefully--painfully, meticulously--constructed don't-give-a-fuck attitude.

(Seven years old, thumbing through cheap thrift store books, and you pick up a dog-eared, moth-eaten copy of East of Eden; “Isn't this a little much for you, man?” your brother asks and you shake your head, because it's not about the stories, or the characters. You don't have to understand those and you don't pretend to try. It's about all those words that sit in those pages just waiting for you to collect them.)

Years and years later, you still never let your collection grow larger than what you can hide under your bed, and it rotates out every couple of months: Tolstoy, Alighieri, Camus, Orwell for now until you wrap up War and Peace, find some time off to dump them off at a used bookstore, and pick out replacements. There's a kind of enjoyment in the ritual now; you can hunch in the aisles and pretend you've got better things to do all you want, but you aren't fooling anyone, least of all yourself.

(You slide into the booth across from Jade, ten minutes late--feeling every last aching second of it between the store and the restaurant, made worse knowing she doesn't have that long in town--and you give a quick apology, explaining about lines and traffic; she's just glad to see you. Then, because she's weird and there are parts of her that the mainland can't crush, she sniffs the air and says, “You smell like books.” When you give her a noncommittal shrug, and she adds: “I like books.”

You can't help yourself and maybe you'll regret it later, but then again, maybe it could be a good thing if you let it. With a secret little half-grin hidden behind your menu, you look at her over the top of your shades and say, “Me too.”)

four.

You find--or found, really, because it's been years since you've had it--something satisfying in your title. Not the time part, because it's hard not to be a little smugly satisfied at being placed in charge of so much power and it's so fucking undeniably cool, but the knight part--and you had trouble admitting it at first, when you were under siege by John's well-intentioned jabs and Rose's instant, unsolicited analysis. You denied, denied, denied until they finally gave it a rest and you could take a good, long look at it yourself.

You're not prim and proper, and you're not polite, and you're not really all that chivalrous, but there are still pieces of you that shine beneath the layers of stony indifference and practiced jerkass. If you can't ooze charisma and a winning personality--because even you can admit you'll never be the golden boy (respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted), not like John--then you can at least tell the god's honest truth whenever you can, even if it hurts--maybe especially if it hurts. If you're not going to open doors for women, then you can sure as hell throw a couple punches for one when it's 2 AM and some drunken frat fuck won't leave her alone. It happens a few times, and the night ends with bruised knuckles and the taste of blood in your mouth, but you always get your point across with blistering clarity.

You're not the guy with flocks of friends, never will be, and you don't want to be, not really. For however much it aches to know you'll never belong, it narrows down the list of people you'd feel obligated to take a bullet for.

And when it comes down to that--well. It has before, where you had to make that choice, except it wasn't really a choice, not for you, and you stepped in front of that sword, that gun, that blast of fire every. single. time. For all the kinds of men you aren't, that's the kind of man you are, and that's what's so satisfying. When the game ended and everyone got on with their lives and all that's left of Time is no need to ever wear a watch again, you can still say that yeah, you're a knight in your own way. That's something that'll never change.

five.

You're chronically, habitually, hopelessly bad at women.

It's not getting them that you're bad at; you're attractive and you know it, because you're fastidious about your appearance to the point of compulsion and you never leave your apartment without looking like you could buy the town. You're the skilled musician dripping with arrogance, indifferent to the existence of other people, and girls go fucking crazy for it. It helps, you think, that apparently there's something mysterious about you, something a little dark and intense, because, well--you've seen war and nobody comes out of that without a little bit of baggage, and they love that. You're the guy they want to take home and kiss better and stitch back together with force of personality. You're the guy they want to fix so you'll love them.

You don't, though, you don't even come close, and you suppose that's where the point of contention is. A week, two weeks, sometimes three, and it's smooth sailing--but then she'll want your apartment key, or she'll want to meet your friends, or she'll drop hints about moving in and you're fucking out of there. Sometimes you're out of there sooner, for stupid reasons: there was Jenna, the poli-sci major who couldn't shut up; there was Ashley, who accidentally ran into you everywhere and you're pretty sure she was stalking you; Madison had too many piercings, Olivia reeked of nicotine, Nicole kept asking about your parents. They're just the start of your list. It extends way, way beyond them. You tell John that they just weren't right; you know for yourself that you just weren't trying.

(Her name is Mira and she's a righteous bitch, you decide, and you wonder why you're even here, fumbling around her apartment in the dark looking for where you dropped your damn tie, when you got sick of her two weeks ago and got sick of nights like these a week after that. You know she's watching you from her bed, face contorted in that nasty little scowl of hers, but you can't see her and you don't really want to.

“I don't know what your damage is, Strider.” You hear the rustle of bedsheets and her soft footsteps on the hardwood and you don't dignify her nagging with any sort of response. “Do I look too much like her? Not enough?”

Mira--beautiful, horrible Mira, with her tan skin and her long black hair and her serpentine calculation--has a way with words that reminds you of Rose, if Rose were even more of a frigid cunt. You feel a sort of cold fury rising up in your gut, old and familiar because that's just always how it starts with you, ice first and fire later. “Finish that thought,” you say, and you know she will, because she doesn't back from a challenge. She's dating you, after all. “Go ahead.”

“Wait, I'm sorry. She has her hair cut short now, doesn't she? I think I saw her in Forbes last month. Cute. Like a pixie. Shame you won't let me meet her.” She follows you as you stalk down the dark hallway, into the living room, where you swipe your keys from the coffee table. “Or maybe she just hasn't come back into town yet. Is that it? I wouldn't know, you never talk about her.”

She's on your heels even as you grab your jacket, and you still don't have your tie but fuck it, better to buy a new one than put up with this bullshit. “Poor you, all lonely because your rich little heiress girlfriend left you behind. Do you miss her? Is that why you said her name?”

You'd never hit a woman, not in a thousand goddamn years no matter how much she might deserve it, but as she blocks the doorway, sheet pulled around her and that fucking scowl on her face as poisonous as the rest of her, you come so, so close. “Get the fuck out of my way,” you say, and it's all you have to say, because--

Well. She liked you because you were a little dark and intense and broken, but actually seeing you like that isn't something she can handle.)

“Dude,” John says and he doesn't even try to hide his amusement as he chews on his straw, the smug bastard; you regret calling him even though it's what you always do when you have a problem. “Your life's kind of gone to hell you're trying way too hard to compensate.”

“Bullshit. I'm not compensating for anything,” you say, but you aren't so good at lying anymore, because John only laughs at you, at your half-eaten plate of sorted, organized food.

six.

Okay, so you have some fucking control issues. You get it. People can just get off your dick about it already because you know, they don't need to keep reminding you. You're enough of a reminder to yourself. Yeah, so you had kind of a crappy childhood and a brother who was never home, and when he was, he was putting you through shit a kid shouldn't have to go through, all 'it's for your own good's and 'you'll thank me when you're older's and 'pay attention, you're gonna need to know this someday's. And yeah, maybe it affected you more than you'd like to admit, and yeah, maybe you didn't have any control at all and you reacted with trying to force everything around you to make sense.

And there's that other part of your title that still rides along with you, the one that was so fucking cool until you learned what happens when you have to become the get out of jail free card for your friends. (It's almost hilarious, you think, striving all your life to be the best and then finding out that only the best are ever offered up for sacrifice.) You were the one who made it through the game, but you can't help but think of other timelines, all the other pockets of failure that another you had to fix at his own expense. If you were another man, it might make you bitter, but you're not. You're more bitter at yourself and how you're dealing with the leftovers.

You still feel time a little too intimately than you'd prefer, but it's not under your control anymore, so you force it in other ways; you went after music with a kind of terrifying fervor as soon as you realized your personal timeline was static again, learning instruments, collecting vinyls and samples by the thousands. It's that rhythm, you know, and they call it keeping time but it means something entirely different to you; it's the way you can sit with your mixing equipment for hours, making tiny, exacting changes for perfectionism's sake, finding what's wrong and fixing it, making sense out of the chaos. And when you're on that stage with that guitar and that microphone, you've got a crowd's attention locked onto you, a show of force through skill and determination. You're not the golden boy and you never will be, not like John, but you can make people listen.

And you'd say it's fine but it's not, not really, when every night you get all dressed up with nowhere to go but around, around, around, the dance that went out of style years ago with partners who don't know what's going on until you're gone. You don't enjoy it, and maybe that's what scares you--that you faced an image of yourself when you were thirteen that you swore up and down you'd never become, only to become it anyway. Metronome for a hammer and here you are, hunched over joyless and solemn for all the beautiful things you make.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You're not a drinker--control issues, the voice of Rose echoes in your head, and you've been drinking just enough to laugh at that, just enough to flick through your phone's address book, looking for a name and a number and a reason. Around the middle of the list you realize you've only come up with two out of three, and that'll have to be enough.

As you listen to it ring, and ring, and ring, and ring, you become dimly aware that it's 3 AM and you're kind of an asshole when a groggy, girlish voice picks up.

“Dave?”

You lick your cracked lips, close your eyes, and your voice curls her name into a question: “Jade?”

“What's wrong?”

Your shoulders shake in a chuckle made out of pure fuck it, and from the silence on the other end of the phone, you can't help but wonder if she thinks you've gone crazy, and--well. Shit, maybe you have, and maybe that could be a good thing if you let it.

“Everything,” you say, and it's not the whole truth, but it's a start.

That is really nice. Its like dave wrote a book called 'My life lessons. This shit is for me but go ahead and read it too"

[Isoraķatheð]

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=wylzva851m47b

So I guess this is Story 6a linked into the sig.

It's nowhere near the interesting part where the game is actually played but I have to show something!

[Sushi Database]

I am so behind on my reading augh, when did this thread start going by so quickly??? I'm not complaining but shit guys you are the most productive sons of bitches ever. I LOVE YOU, LET'S HUG

Blame reclusiveAmateur for this one; I got all inspired by her second-person Dave-centric fics that goddamnit I wanted to write one too, so here it is! (notes: indeterminate amount of time post-sburb, dave/jade, implied john/rose)

we drive by braille

show spoiler

hide spoiler

one.

It hits you out of nowhere in your junior year of high school, when you take some joke religious comparison class for a decent place to sleep after lunch. Eventually the teacher moves into mythology, though, and then Greek mythology, and that's when you sit up and pay attention: Ceto, Echidna, Typhon, Hephaestus; names you know attached to things you've seen with your own eyes. You remember Ceto's convoluted mindgames, and Echidna's hollow dead leaf laughter, and Typhon's glib, stolen grin, but most of all you remember Hephaestus because he was so much like you it hurt.

You wonder if any of the others ever decided to do the same thing, but it doesn't really matter, because, as you find out, it's kind of personal. You don't know why it took you so long--okay, well, maybe you do, and maybe you just didn't want to revisit it, or maybe you just didn't want to know how deep it really goes. But the time is long overdue, so one miserable winter evening, you hit the internet up for research on your denizen.

The basics are obvious because everyone knows them--smith-god, artisan, volcanoes, etcetera. A god of dual elements, fire and earth, the twin virtues of creativity and persistence (twin vices of molten anger and slavish devotion); born imperfect and thrown from the mountain, he found belonging in a craft (sound familiar, beatsmith?, you think and immediately unthink), honed it like no one else before him because being the best was all he had. And as you click through the pages, as it sounds more and more like you, you remember those years ago: the red furnace glow, the rhythm of time kept with a blacksmith's hammer, walls of moving copper, and a man who could've been you in another life hunched solemn and joyless for all the beautiful things he makes.

And still you keep going. You read about Hephaestus winning back his place on Olympus, all that power and all those gods laughing at him behind his back.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You read about the fall of Typhon, how Hephaestus built his workshop on top of him, how his forge was powered by the breath of a dying god.

(at your strongest when your best friend's at his weakest)

You feel a little sick to your stomach, so you x out of the browser and that's that. You start sleeping through your religion class again, and when it's time to pick a topic for your final, you go with Hinduism. Years later, when you're signing up for classes your sophomore year of college, you have the choice between religion and history. You choose history.

two.

You're a picky eater. It was fine growing up, with your brother bringing home an endless rotation of TV dinners for the nights he wasn't going to be around (which was most nights). Everything was neatly labeled, flash frozen, and compartmentalized, and it didn't matter how many times bro told you to man up and eat your vegetables because he was never there to bitch when you dumped them in the trash.

But then the real world came along and made you try to eat things that weren't pizza rolls and hot pockets, and that's when you got fussy. You hate the texture of pork, and you hate it when the food on your plate mixes; you hate sushi, Indian food, shellfish, anything with ketchup or bell peppers. You try to avoid situations where people might cook for you in case you have to push away your dinner and deal with the aftermath of being an offensive houseguest.

(“I was half expecting dog food,” you tell Jade in your usual deadpan, leaning awkwardly on the kitchen island; bad joke and you know it but you can't seem to tell any different kind with her. The way her shoulders hunch confirms it, but you soldier on anyway because that's just what you do, even as she scrapes a mangled chunk of salmon into the garbage and gives you a wounded, kicked-puppy look. You're kind of a jackass and a little insufferable sometimes, and you can't argue that, but no one would ever accuse you of being heartless--except for now, maybe, as she leaves the room with little more than a glance back and you stand there with parted lips, poised to say words that won't come out.)

Lalonde watches you over the weeks, notices how finicky and repetitive you get with your meals, and tells you with that unbearably smug little Harvard grin of hers that it's a control issue.

She adds: “Not the only one, I'm sure.”

You look down at your plate, organized by color and type--starch and green on one side, protein and yellow on the other, all separated like it's quarantine--and set your fork down. “Quit watching me eat,” you say, folding your arms. “Shit's weird.”

three.

There aren't many true things about yourself that you like to show to the world, but how much you like words is one of them, and anyone who isn't comatose can see it for themselves. Freestyling is a goddamn artform and you're good at it, because if there's anything in this world you can do, it's pull all the right things together at exactly the right time. You have the vocabulary for it, and--god help you, it's the dumbest shit and it sounds too much like Rose, but something like the soul of a poet, too. There are deep, winding nuances to language that you feel comfortable in, and you guess it's the most obvious similarity between you and your sister. You can laugh all you want at her reams of poetry and fanfiction, but it doesn't stop you from understanding why she does it.

The rap, the freestyling, the hip-hop: it's a strange manifestation of your interests, strange enough that nobody asks because they think they know, and you're fine with that. You don't have to explain it to anyone. Middle class white kid from Houston--total joke if you think you can relate, pretentious hipster douchebag, an insult to the culture. And they can keep thinking that, because fuck if you're going to waste your time justifying it; that it wasn't always this way, that cinder block and particle board furniture wasn't always just a statement, that it wasn't always a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood. Before his bro hit the right niche, things were a little tighter, and those were the nights you spent in bed with a hand-me-down CD player, finding something to relate to in the music you looped: Rakim, NWA, The Fugees, Public Enemy, over and over and over until you could mouth the tracks by memory. It made things seem a little more bearable, making order out of chaos.

But you didn't always have the CD player either, so before that, it was books. The library became a babysitter when your brother couldn't pick you up from school, at first just for the air conditioning, but then you decided somewhere along the way--why not? You started picking through the shelves and that was it, really. The start of a secret love affair that never really stopped, with an emphasis on secret. Dickens and Burgess didn't exactly gel with your pridefully--painfully, meticulously--constructed don't-give-a-fuck attitude.

(Seven years old, thumbing through cheap thrift store books, and you pick up a dog-eared, moth-eaten copy of East of Eden; “Isn't this a little much for you, man?” your brother asks and you shake your head, because it's not about the stories, or the characters. You don't have to understand those and you don't pretend to try. It's about all those words that sit in those pages just waiting for you to collect them.)

Years and years later, you still never let your collection grow larger than what you can hide under your bed, and it rotates out every couple of months: Tolstoy, Alighieri, Camus, Orwell for now until you wrap up War and Peace, find some time off to dump them off at a used bookstore, and pick out replacements. There's a kind of enjoyment in the ritual now; you can hunch in the aisles and pretend you've got better things to do all you want, but you aren't fooling anyone, least of all yourself.

(You slide into the booth across from Jade, ten minutes late--feeling every last aching second of it between the store and the restaurant, made worse knowing she doesn't have that long in town--and you give a quick apology, explaining about lines and traffic; she's just glad to see you. Then, because she's weird and there are parts of her that the mainland can't crush, she sniffs the air and says, “You smell like books.” When you give her a noncommittal shrug, and she adds: “I like books.”

You can't help yourself and maybe you'll regret it later, but then again, maybe it could be a good thing if you let it. With a secret little half-grin hidden behind your menu, you look at her over the top of your shades and say, “Me too.”)

four.

You find--or found, really, because it's been years since you've had it--something satisfying in your title. Not the time part, because it's hard not to be a little smugly satisfied at being placed in charge of so much power and it's so fucking undeniably cool, but the knight part--and you had trouble admitting it at first, when you were under siege by John's well-intentioned jabs and Rose's instant, unsolicited analysis. You denied, denied, denied until they finally gave it a rest and you could take a good, long look at it yourself.

You're not prim and proper, and you're not polite, and you're not really all that chivalrous, but there are still pieces of you that shine beneath the layers of stony indifference and practiced jerkass. If you can't ooze charisma and a winning personality--because even you can admit you'll never be the golden boy (respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted), not like John--then you can at least tell the god's honest truth whenever you can, even if it hurts--maybe especially if it hurts. If you're not going to open doors for women, then you can sure as hell throw a couple punches for one when it's 2 AM and some drunken frat fuck won't leave her alone. It happens a few times, and the night ends with bruised knuckles and the taste of blood in your mouth, but you always get your point across with blistering clarity.

You're not the guy with flocks of friends, never will be, and you don't want to be, not really. For however much it aches to know you'll never belong, it narrows down the list of people you'd feel obligated to take a bullet for.

And when it comes down to that--well. It has before, where you had to make that choice, except it wasn't really a choice, not for you, and you stepped in front of that sword, that gun, that blast of fire every. single. time. For all the kinds of men you aren't, that's the kind of man you are, and that's what's so satisfying. When the game ended and everyone got on with their lives and all that's left of Time is no need to ever wear a watch again, you can still say that yeah, you're a knight in your own way. That's something that'll never change.

five.

You're chronically, habitually, hopelessly bad at women.

It's not getting them that you're bad at; you're attractive and you know it, because you're fastidious about your appearance to the point of compulsion and you never leave your apartment without looking like you could buy the town. You're the skilled musician dripping with arrogance, indifferent to the existence of other people, and girls go fucking crazy for it. It helps, you think, that apparently there's something mysterious about you, something a little dark and intense, because, well--you've seen war and nobody comes out of that without a little bit of baggage, and they love that. You're the guy they want to take home and kiss better and stitch back together with force of personality. You're the guy they want to fix so you'll love them.

You don't, though, you don't even come close, and you suppose that's where the point of contention is. A week, two weeks, sometimes three, and it's smooth sailing--but then she'll want your apartment key, or she'll want to meet your friends, or she'll drop hints about moving in and you're fucking out of there. Sometimes you're out of there sooner, for stupid reasons: there was Jenna, the poli-sci major who couldn't shut up; there was Ashley, who accidentally ran into you everywhere and you're pretty sure she was stalking you; Madison had too many piercings, Olivia reeked of nicotine, Nicole kept asking about your parents. They're just the start of your list. It extends way, way beyond them. You tell John that they just weren't right; you know for yourself that you just weren't trying.

(Her name is Mira and she's a righteous bitch, you decide, and you wonder why you're even here, fumbling around her apartment in the dark looking for where you dropped your damn tie, when you got sick of her two weeks ago and got sick of nights like these a week after that. You know she's watching you from her bed, face contorted in that nasty little scowl of hers, but you can't see her and you don't really want to.

“I don't know what your damage is, Strider.” You hear the rustle of bedsheets and her soft footsteps on the hardwood and you don't dignify her nagging with any sort of response. “Do I look too much like her? Not enough?”

Mira--beautiful, horrible Mira, with her tan skin and her long black hair and her serpentine calculation--has a way with words that reminds you of Rose, if Rose were even more of a frigid cunt. You feel a sort of cold fury rising up in your gut, old and familiar because that's just always how it starts with you, ice first and fire later. “Finish that thought,” you say, and you know she will, because she doesn't back from a challenge. She's dating you, after all. “Go ahead.”

“Wait, I'm sorry. She has her hair cut short now, doesn't she? I think I saw her in Forbes last month. Cute. Like a pixie. Shame you won't let me meet her.” She follows you as you stalk down the dark hallway, into the living room, where you swipe your keys from the coffee table. “Or maybe she just hasn't come back into town yet. Is that it? I wouldn't know, you never talk about her.”

She's on your heels even as you grab your jacket, and you still don't have your tie but fuck it, better to buy a new one than put up with this bullshit. “Poor you, all lonely because your rich little heiress girlfriend left you behind. Do you miss her? Is that why you said her name?”

You'd never hit a woman, not in a thousand goddamn years no matter how much she might deserve it, but as she blocks the doorway, sheet pulled around her and that fucking scowl on her face as poisonous as the rest of her, you come so, so close. “Get the fuck out of my way,” you say, and it's all you have to say, because--

Well. She liked you because you were a little dark and intense and broken, but actually seeing you like that isn't something she can handle.)

“Dude,” John says and he doesn't even try to hide his amusement as he chews on his straw, the smug bastard; you regret calling him even though it's what you always do when you have a problem. “Your life's kind of gone to hell you're trying way too hard to compensate.”

“Bullshit. I'm not compensating for anything,” you say, but you aren't so good at lying anymore, because John only laughs at you, at your half-eaten plate of sorted, organized food.

six.

Okay, so you have some fucking control issues. You get it. People can just get off your dick about it already because you know, they don't need to keep reminding you. You're enough of a reminder to yourself. Yeah, so you had kind of a crappy childhood and a brother who was never home, and when he was, he was putting you through shit a kid shouldn't have to go through, all 'it's for your own good's and 'you'll thank me when you're older's and 'pay attention, you're gonna need to know this someday's. And yeah, maybe it affected you more than you'd like to admit, and yeah, maybe you didn't have any control at all and you reacted with trying to force everything around you to make sense.

And there's that other part of your title that still rides along with you, the one that was so fucking cool until you learned what happens when you have to become the get out of jail free card for your friends. (It's almost hilarious, you think, striving all your life to be the best and then finding out that only the best are ever offered up for sacrifice.) You were the one who made it through the game, but you can't help but think of other timelines, all the other pockets of failure that another you had to fix at his own expense. If you were another man, it might make you bitter, but you're not. You're more bitter at yourself and how you're dealing with the leftovers.

You still feel time a little too intimately than you'd prefer, but it's not under your control anymore, so you force it in other ways; you went after music with a kind of terrifying fervor as soon as you realized your personal timeline was static again, learning instruments, collecting vinyls and samples by the thousands. It's that rhythm, you know, and they call it keeping time but it means something entirely different to you; it's the way you can sit with your mixing equipment for hours, making tiny, exacting changes for perfectionism's sake, finding what's wrong and fixing it, making sense out of the chaos. And when you're on that stage with that guitar and that microphone, you've got a crowd's attention locked onto you, a show of force through skill and determination. You're not the golden boy and you never will be, not like John, but you can make people listen.

And you'd say it's fine but it's not, not really, when every night you get all dressed up with nowhere to go but around, around, around, the dance that went out of style years ago with partners who don't know what's going on until you're gone. You don't enjoy it, and maybe that's what scares you--that you faced an image of yourself when you were thirteen that you swore up and down you'd never become, only to become it anyway. Metronome for a hammer and here you are, hunched over joyless and solemn for all the beautiful things you make.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You're not a drinker--control issues, the voice of Rose echoes in your head, and you've been drinking just enough to laugh at that, just enough to flick through your phone's address book, looking for a name and a number and a reason. Around the middle of the list you realize you've only come up with two out of three, and that'll have to be enough.

As you listen to it ring, and ring, and ring, and ring, you become dimly aware that it's 3 AM and you're kind of an asshole when a groggy, girlish voice picks up.

“Dave?”

You lick your cracked lips, close your eyes, and your voice curls her name into a question: “Jade?”

“What's wrong?”

Your shoulders shake in a chuckle made out of pure fuck it, and from the silence on the other end of the phone, you can't help but wonder if she thinks you've gone crazy, and--well. Shit, maybe you have, and maybe that could be a good thing if you let it.

“Everything,” you say, and it's not the whole truth, but it's a start.

Dang, Dave aint alright. @_@

I kind of want to know more about the other three in this situation. Especially John, because Jade and Rose seem more central to Dave's issues.

[PaulPower]

PS; Paul, really dug the meeting bit, though I think Jade being sprite and girl is a bit of a cheat. Then again sburb's all about cheating in increasingly outlandish ways. Also in case my last post didn't make it clear, I dig what you are doing with Showtime.

Yeah, I know what you mean, when I first came up with the idea I did think "wow, way to reverse Jade's character development and potentially send her into Mary Sue territory there, Paul". I ended up going with it anyway because it seemed like a neat idea and... well, out of sympathy I guess. And like you say, it fits with the general theme of "cheating the hell out of SBurb. Thanks, though.

I think I must have missed your last comment, I'll go have a look for it now.

e: oh right, I didn't miss it, assuming it's the "Jade coming downstairs to find her grandpa dead and stuffed" one. Hehe, I know what you mean. I guess if I wanted to be twisted I could make that her ninth birthday present... :mspareader:

[tawawawa]

Well, I wrote a short fic and thought I might as well post it in here and run away.

It's Tavros and Vriska, taking place shortly after the failed kiss and inspired by a drawing by Alimus Prime. I haven't written fanfiction in yeaaaaars!

show spoiler

hide spoiler

THUD!

A sharp pain filled the back of Tavros’ head as he unceremoniously hit the floor with a grunt. Slowly, he propped himself on one arm to rub at his aching head. What just happened? His mind was fuzzy on top of the fading pain. His gaze slowly traveled down the ceiling where his cherry red rocket chair was tangled in a large web, posters and character sheets covered the dark wall, and finally a fairy hanging her head with drooped shoulders stood before him.

Wait a minute here- Tavros rubbed at his eyes removing some of the glitter powder off his face and stared in disbelief. A real fairy? Right here with him? She was a lot bigger than he expected. He gawked at the costume, cute little red slippers, thigh high black stockings, a simple sleeveless dress, cerulean wings behind long locks of wild black hair, an odd pair of glasses where one lens was completely black, and just as unusual- a robotic left arm. Within seconds, his gawking turned into a sharp gasp as reality struck the daydreaming troll down.

It was Vriska. Dressed up as a fairy but that didn’t make him any less comfortable. Probably more uncomfortable instead.

Tavros tried to quickly push himself back but slipped on a stray D4 in the middle of his palm falling onto his back once more with a pathetic groan of pain. He stuttered, his cheeks growing hot as his short term memory returned. Crashing into Vriska’s house, falling out of his rocket chair, the special stardust, being picked up and…. Tavros’ thundering heart became a lump in his throat at the sheer thought of it, his fingertips brushing against his lips and ending up with slightly tinged fingers to reveal it wasn’t all a hallucination nearly stopped him dead where he lay. The feeling of those cerulean lips pressed against his own was not the most horrifying memory, it was-

“Uhhh, duhhh, duh! Is that all you have to say!?”

Tavros winced as he was roughly yanked up by his collar, staring up in shock at Vriska’s face that trembled with raw fury and hate.

“After everything I did for you, bending over backwards whenever you complained it was too hard! It’s a fucking miracle that I’ve even put up with you for this long, ToreaSNORE.” His name was hissed out venomously while Vriska’s single remaining eye glared straight into Tavros’ own. His body shuddered in fear and he dared not attempt to advert his gaze.

Vriska dramatically thrust out her normal arm but Tavros was too paralyzed to turn his head. “I go out of my fucking way to design this quest for you with this stupid costume and what do I get?” She gave him a firm shake, getting out a few wobbly interjections. “What do I get!? Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”

“Bu-uh-uh-ut… Uh-uh-uhhh…” The constant shaking quickly made him dizzy as his head bobbled to and fro until Vriska stopped. Instead, she took a higher grip on his collar that dangerously came to choking.

“But what!? What is it, Pupa Pan!?” She sneered, hating that bright green costume with every fiber of her body that she trembled. Words could hardly describe the amount of hate she was feeling towards the blubbering grub in her grip.

“I uh…. Uhhhh, I don’t know…” Tavros whimpered and tried to sink down into his shirt in a desperate attempt to get away.

Vriska drew in a cold breath, glaring down at him before grabbing with both hands lifting him off the floor once more. “That’s right! You don’t know! You don’t know anything because you don’t DO anything but abscond! I can’t even manipulate you to NOT abscond!” The shaking came again, stronger than ever blurring Tavros’ vision. “I couldn’t do it! I hate you! I fucking hate you! Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate…! Hate….”

Tavros groaned when his world stopped spinning from all the shaking. It felt like his brains were beyond scrambled but his mind quickly switched from thinking about his own state of health when he felt only light trembling and near silence. Vriska held her head low, long bangs covering a portion of her face but revealed enough to show delicate fangs biting into shaking cerulean lips.

“… Why can’t you just love me too…?”

He could hardly believe his ears. The usually loud terrible shouting was reduced to a single nearly inaudible plea. So that earlier muddled feeling that came with foreboding nostalgia was Vriska’s mind control again. This time not being used to bring harm to him, but return her affection in his state of shock. Tavros frowned as the puzzle slowly came together. She wanted him to come here and be the fairy to his Pupa Pan, not hurt him. There was nothing to be scared of.

Tavros felt himself being lowered and caught a glance up at Vriska’s disheartened face that held her trembling eye shut behind her glasses. “… Vriska?”

Her body froze for what seemed forever until she let out a shaky sigh and glared down at Tavros, ignoring her watering eye. “Sh-shut up… just-”

“I… uhhh.” A lump was caught in his throat as he glanced about the room, finally returning to Vriska in her fairy costume with a dull brown blush on his cheeks. “Um, I think, maybe… I could fly if, uhhh… You gave me a uhhhhhh… another, you know… happy thought?”

[Kebs]

Mr. Sushi Database I have just now come to thread to tell you that you are amazing. Like seriously is there anything that's not writing down these amazing stories?

Shithead.

[Orange]

I am so behind on my reading augh, when did this thread start going by so quickly??? I'm not complaining but shit guys you are the most productive sons of bitches ever. I LOVE YOU, LET'S HUG

Blame reclusiveAmateur for this one; I got all inspired by her second-person Dave-centric fics that goddamnit I wanted to write one too, so here it is! (notes: indeterminate amount of time post-sburb, dave/jade, implied john/rose)

we drive by braille

show spoiler

hide spoiler

one.

It hits you out of nowhere in your junior year of high school, when you take some joke religious comparison class for a decent place to sleep after lunch. Eventually the teacher moves into mythology, though, and then Greek mythology, and that's when you sit up and pay attention: Ceto, Echidna, Typhon, Hephaestus; names you know attached to things you've seen with your own eyes. You remember Ceto's convoluted mindgames, and Echidna's hollow dead leaf laughter, and Typhon's glib, stolen grin, but most of all you remember Hephaestus because he was so much like you it hurt.

You wonder if any of the others ever decided to do the same thing, but it doesn't really matter, because, as you find out, it's kind of personal. You don't know why it took you so long--okay, well, maybe you do, and maybe you just didn't want to revisit it, or maybe you just didn't want to know how deep it really goes. But the time is long overdue, so one miserable winter evening, you hit the internet up for research on your denizen.

The basics are obvious because everyone knows them--smith-god, artisan, volcanoes, etcetera. A god of dual elements, fire and earth, the twin virtues of creativity and persistence (twin vices of molten anger and slavish devotion); born imperfect and thrown from the mountain, he found belonging in a craft (sound familiar, beatsmith?, you think and immediately unthink), honed it like no one else before him because being the best was all he had. And as you click through the pages, as it sounds more and more like you, you remember those years ago: the red furnace glow, the rhythm of time kept with a blacksmith's hammer, walls of moving copper, and a man who could've been you in another life hunched solemn and joyless for all the beautiful things he makes.

And still you keep going. You read about Hephaestus winning back his place on Olympus, all that power and all those gods laughing at him behind his back.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You read about the fall of Typhon, how Hephaestus built his workshop on top of him, how his forge was powered by the breath of a dying god.

(at your strongest when your best friend's at his weakest)

You feel a little sick to your stomach, so you x out of the browser and that's that. You start sleeping through your religion class again, and when it's time to pick a topic for your final, you go with Hinduism. Years later, when you're signing up for classes your sophomore year of college, you have the choice between religion and history. You choose history.

two.

You're a picky eater. It was fine growing up, with your brother bringing home an endless rotation of TV dinners for the nights he wasn't going to be around (which was most nights). Everything was neatly labeled, flash frozen, and compartmentalized, and it didn't matter how many times bro told you to man up and eat your vegetables because he was never there to bitch when you dumped them in the trash.

But then the real world came along and made you try to eat things that weren't pizza rolls and hot pockets, and that's when you got fussy. You hate the texture of pork, and you hate it when the food on your plate mixes; you hate sushi, Indian food, shellfish, anything with ketchup or bell peppers. You try to avoid situations where people might cook for you in case you have to push away your dinner and deal with the aftermath of being an offensive houseguest.

(“I was half expecting dog food,” you tell Jade in your usual deadpan, leaning awkwardly on the kitchen island; bad joke and you know it but you can't seem to tell any different kind with her. The way her shoulders hunch confirms it, but you soldier on anyway because that's just what you do, even as she scrapes a mangled chunk of salmon into the garbage and gives you a wounded, kicked-puppy look. You're kind of a jackass and a little insufferable sometimes, and you can't argue that, but no one would ever accuse you of being heartless--except for now, maybe, as she leaves the room with little more than a glance back and you stand there with parted lips, poised to say words that won't come out.)

Lalonde watches you over the weeks, notices how finicky and repetitive you get with your meals, and tells you with that unbearably smug little Harvard grin of hers that it's a control issue.

She adds: “Not the only one, I'm sure.”

You look down at your plate, organized by color and type--starch and green on one side, protein and yellow on the other, all separated like it's quarantine--and set your fork down. “Quit watching me eat,” you say, folding your arms. “Shit's weird.”

three.

There aren't many true things about yourself that you like to show to the world, but how much you like words is one of them, and anyone who isn't comatose can see it for themselves. Freestyling is a goddamn artform and you're good at it, because if there's anything in this world you can do, it's pull all the right things together at exactly the right time. You have the vocabulary for it, and--god help you, it's the dumbest shit and it sounds too much like Rose, but something like the soul of a poet, too. There are deep, winding nuances to language that you feel comfortable in, and you guess it's the most obvious similarity between you and your sister. You can laugh all you want at her reams of poetry and fanfiction, but it doesn't stop you from understanding why she does it.

The rap, the freestyling, the hip-hop: it's a strange manifestation of your interests, strange enough that nobody asks because they think they know, and you're fine with that. You don't have to explain it to anyone. Middle class white kid from Houston--total joke if you think you can relate, pretentious hipster douchebag, an insult to the culture. And they can keep thinking that, because fuck if you're going to waste your time justifying it; that it wasn't always this way, that cinder block and particle board furniture wasn't always just a statement, that it wasn't always a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood. Before his bro hit the right niche, things were a little tighter, and those were the nights you spent in bed with a hand-me-down CD player, finding something to relate to in the music you looped: Rakim, NWA, The Fugees, Public Enemy, over and over and over until you could mouth the tracks by memory. It made things seem a little more bearable, making order out of chaos.

But you didn't always have the CD player either, so before that, it was books. The library became a babysitter when your brother couldn't pick you up from school, at first just for the air conditioning, but then you decided somewhere along the way--why not? You started picking through the shelves and that was it, really. The start of a secret love affair that never really stopped, with an emphasis on secret. Dickens and Burgess didn't exactly gel with your pridefully--painfully, meticulously--constructed don't-give-a-fuck attitude.

(Seven years old, thumbing through cheap thrift store books, and you pick up a dog-eared, moth-eaten copy of East of Eden; “Isn't this a little much for you, man?” your brother asks and you shake your head, because it's not about the stories, or the characters. You don't have to understand those and you don't pretend to try. It's about all those words that sit in those pages just waiting for you to collect them.)

Years and years later, you still never let your collection grow larger than what you can hide under your bed, and it rotates out every couple of months: Tolstoy, Alighieri, Camus, Orwell for now until you wrap up War and Peace, find some time off to dump them off at a used bookstore, and pick out replacements. There's a kind of enjoyment in the ritual now; you can hunch in the aisles and pretend you've got better things to do all you want, but you aren't fooling anyone, least of all yourself.

(You slide into the booth across from Jade, ten minutes late--feeling every last aching second of it between the store and the restaurant, made worse knowing she doesn't have that long in town--and you give a quick apology, explaining about lines and traffic; she's just glad to see you. Then, because she's weird and there are parts of her that the mainland can't crush, she sniffs the air and says, “You smell like books.” When you give her a noncommittal shrug, and she adds: “I like books.”

You can't help yourself and maybe you'll regret it later, but then again, maybe it could be a good thing if you let it. With a secret little half-grin hidden behind your menu, you look at her over the top of your shades and say, “Me too.”)

four.

You find--or found, really, because it's been years since you've had it--something satisfying in your title. Not the time part, because it's hard not to be a little smugly satisfied at being placed in charge of so much power and it's so fucking undeniably cool, but the knight part--and you had trouble admitting it at first, when you were under siege by John's well-intentioned jabs and Rose's instant, unsolicited analysis. You denied, denied, denied until they finally gave it a rest and you could take a good, long look at it yourself.

You're not prim and proper, and you're not polite, and you're not really all that chivalrous, but there are still pieces of you that shine beneath the layers of stony indifference and practiced jerkass. If you can't ooze charisma and a winning personality--because even you can admit you'll never be the golden boy (respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted), not like John--then you can at least tell the god's honest truth whenever you can, even if it hurts--maybe especially if it hurts. If you're not going to open doors for women, then you can sure as hell throw a couple punches for one when it's 2 AM and some drunken frat fuck won't leave her alone. It happens a few times, and the night ends with bruised knuckles and the taste of blood in your mouth, but you always get your point across with blistering clarity.

You're not the guy with flocks of friends, never will be, and you don't want to be, not really. For however much it aches to know you'll never belong, it narrows down the list of people you'd feel obligated to take a bullet for.

And when it comes down to that--well. It has before, where you had to make that choice, except it wasn't really a choice, not for you, and you stepped in front of that sword, that gun, that blast of fire every. single. time. For all the kinds of men you aren't, that's the kind of man you are, and that's what's so satisfying. When the game ended and everyone got on with their lives and all that's left of Time is no need to ever wear a watch again, you can still say that yeah, you're a knight in your own way. That's something that'll never change.

five.

You're chronically, habitually, hopelessly bad at women.

It's not getting them that you're bad at; you're attractive and you know it, because you're fastidious about your appearance to the point of compulsion and you never leave your apartment without looking like you could buy the town. You're the skilled musician dripping with arrogance, indifferent to the existence of other people, and girls go fucking crazy for it. It helps, you think, that apparently there's something mysterious about you, something a little dark and intense, because, well--you've seen war and nobody comes out of that without a little bit of baggage, and they love that. You're the guy they want to take home and kiss better and stitch back together with force of personality. You're the guy they want to fix so you'll love them.

You don't, though, you don't even come close, and you suppose that's where the point of contention is. A week, two weeks, sometimes three, and it's smooth sailing--but then she'll want your apartment key, or she'll want to meet your friends, or she'll drop hints about moving in and you're fucking out of there. Sometimes you're out of there sooner, for stupid reasons: there was Jenna, the poli-sci major who couldn't shut up; there was Ashley, who accidentally ran into you everywhere and you're pretty sure she was stalking you; Madison had too many piercings, Olivia reeked of nicotine, Nicole kept asking about your parents. They're just the start of your list. It extends way, way beyond them. You tell John that they just weren't right; you know for yourself that you just weren't trying.

(Her name is Mira and she's a righteous bitch, you decide, and you wonder why you're even here, fumbling around her apartment in the dark looking for where you dropped your damn tie, when you got sick of her two weeks ago and got sick of nights like these a week after that. You know she's watching you from her bed, face contorted in that nasty little scowl of hers, but you can't see her and you don't really want to.

“I don't know what your damage is, Strider.” You hear the rustle of bedsheets and her soft footsteps on the hardwood and you don't dignify her nagging with any sort of response. “Do I look too much like her? Not enough?”

Mira--beautiful, horrible Mira, with her tan skin and her long black hair and her serpentine calculation--has a way with words that reminds you of Rose, if Rose were even more of a frigid cunt. You feel a sort of cold fury rising up in your gut, old and familiar because that's just always how it starts with you, ice first and fire later. “Finish that thought,” you say, and you know she will, because she doesn't back from a challenge. She's dating you, after all. “Go ahead.”

“Wait, I'm sorry. She has her hair cut short now, doesn't she? I think I saw her in Forbes last month. Cute. Like a pixie. Shame you won't let me meet her.” She follows you as you stalk down the dark hallway, into the living room, where you swipe your keys from the coffee table. “Or maybe she just hasn't come back into town yet. Is that it? I wouldn't know, you never talk about her.”

She's on your heels even as you grab your jacket, and you still don't have your tie but fuck it, better to buy a new one than put up with this bullshit. “Poor you, all lonely because your rich little heiress girlfriend left you behind. Do you miss her? Is that why you said her name?”

You'd never hit a woman, not in a thousand goddamn years no matter how much she might deserve it, but as she blocks the doorway, sheet pulled around her and that fucking scowl on her face as poisonous as the rest of her, you come so, so close. “Get the fuck out of my way,” you say, and it's all you have to say, because--

Well. She liked you because you were a little dark and intense and broken, but actually seeing you like that isn't something she can handle.)

“Dude,” John says and he doesn't even try to hide his amusement as he chews on his straw, the smug bastard; you regret calling him even though it's what you always do when you have a problem. “Your life's kind of gone to hell you're trying way too hard to compensate.”

“Bullshit. I'm not compensating for anything,” you say, but you aren't so good at lying anymore, because John only laughs at you, at your half-eaten plate of sorted, organized food.

six.

Okay, so you have some fucking control issues. You get it. People can just get off your dick about it already because you know, they don't need to keep reminding you. You're enough of a reminder to yourself. Yeah, so you had kind of a crappy childhood and a brother who was never home, and when he was, he was putting you through shit a kid shouldn't have to go through, all 'it's for your own good's and 'you'll thank me when you're older's and 'pay attention, you're gonna need to know this someday's. And yeah, maybe it affected you more than you'd like to admit, and yeah, maybe you didn't have any control at all and you reacted with trying to force everything around you to make sense.

And there's that other part of your title that still rides along with you, the one that was so fucking cool until you learned what happens when you have to become the get out of jail free card for your friends. (It's almost hilarious, you think, striving all your life to be the best and then finding out that only the best are ever offered up for sacrifice.) You were the one who made it through the game, but you can't help but think of other timelines, all the other pockets of failure that another you had to fix at his own expense. If you were another man, it might make you bitter, but you're not. You're more bitter at yourself and how you're dealing with the leftovers.

You still feel time a little too intimately than you'd prefer, but it's not under your control anymore, so you force it in other ways; you went after music with a kind of terrifying fervor as soon as you realized your personal timeline was static again, learning instruments, collecting vinyls and samples by the thousands. It's that rhythm, you know, and they call it keeping time but it means something entirely different to you; it's the way you can sit with your mixing equipment for hours, making tiny, exacting changes for perfectionism's sake, finding what's wrong and fixing it, making sense out of the chaos. And when you're on that stage with that guitar and that microphone, you've got a crowd's attention locked onto you, a show of force through skill and determination. You're not the golden boy and you never will be, not like John, but you can make people listen.

And you'd say it's fine but it's not, not really, when every night you get all dressed up with nowhere to go but around, around, around, the dance that went out of style years ago with partners who don't know what's going on until you're gone. You don't enjoy it, and maybe that's what scares you--that you faced an image of yourself when you were thirteen that you swore up and down you'd never become, only to become it anyway. Metronome for a hammer and here you are, hunched over joyless and solemn for all the beautiful things you make.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You're not a drinker--control issues, the voice of Rose echoes in your head, and you've been drinking just enough to laugh at that, just enough to flick through your phone's address book, looking for a name and a number and a reason. Around the middle of the list you realize you've only come up with two out of three, and that'll have to be enough.

As you listen to it ring, and ring, and ring, and ring, you become dimly aware that it's 3 AM and you're kind of an asshole when a groggy, girlish voice picks up.

“Dave?”

You lick your cracked lips, close your eyes, and your voice curls her name into a question: “Jade?”

“What's wrong?”

Your shoulders shake in a chuckle made out of pure fuck it, and from the silence on the other end of the phone, you can't help but wonder if she thinks you've gone crazy, and--well. Shit, maybe you have, and maybe that could be a good thing if you let it.

“Everything,” you say, and it's not the whole truth, but it's a start.

Okay yeah gonna comment on this like hell as soon as I get these damn tears out of my system.

[OracleEngineer]

Well, I wrote a short fic and thought I might as well post it in here and run away.

It's Tavros and Vriska, taking place shortly after the failed kiss and inspired by a drawing by Alimus Prime. I haven't written fanfiction in yeaaaaars!

show spoiler

hide spoiler

THUD!

A sharp pain filled the back of Tavros’ head as he unceremoniously hit the floor with a grunt. Slowly, he propped himself on one arm to rub at his aching head. What just happened? His mind was fuzzy on top of the fading pain. His gaze slowly traveled down the ceiling where his cherry red rocket chair was tangled in a large web, posters and character sheets covered the dark wall, and finally a fairy hanging her head with drooped shoulders stood before him.

Wait a minute here- Tavros rubbed at his eyes removing some of the glitter powder off his face and stared in disbelief. A real fairy? Right here with him? She was a lot bigger than he expected. He gawked at the costume, cute little red slippers, thigh high black stockings, a simple sleeveless dress, cerulean wings behind long locks of wild black hair, an odd pair of glasses where one lens was completely black, and just as unusual- a robotic left arm. Within seconds, his gawking turned into a sharp gasp as reality struck the daydreaming troll down.

It was Vriska. Dressed up as a fairy but that didn’t make him any less comfortable. Probably more uncomfortable instead.

Tavros tried to quickly push himself back but slipped on a stray D4 in the middle of his palm falling onto his back once more with a pathetic groan of pain. He stuttered, his cheeks growing hot as his short term memory returned. Crashing into Vriska’s house, falling out of his rocket chair, the special stardust, being picked up and…. Tavros’ thundering heart became a lump in his throat at the sheer thought of it, his fingertips brushing against his lips and ending up with slightly tinged fingers to reveal it wasn’t all a hallucination nearly stopped him dead where he lay. The feeling of those cerulean lips pressed against his own was not the most horrifying memory, it was-

“Uhhh, duhhh, duh! Is that all you have to say!?”

Tavros winced as he was roughly yanked up by his collar, staring up in shock at Vriska’s face that trembled with raw fury and hate.

“After everything I did for you, bending over backwards whenever you complained it was too hard! It’s a fucking miracle that I’ve even put up with you for this long, ToreaSNORE.” His name was hissed out venomously while Vriska’s single remaining eye glared straight into Tavros’ own. His body shuddered in fear and he dared not attempt to advert his gaze.

Vriska dramatically thrust out her normal arm but Tavros was too paralyzed to turn his head. “I go out of my fucking way to design this quest for you with this stupid costume and what do I get?” She gave him a firm shake, getting out a few wobbly interjections. “What do I get!? Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”

“Bu-uh-uh-ut… Uh-uh-uhhh…” The constant shaking quickly made him dizzy as his head bobbled to and fro until Vriska stopped. Instead, she took a higher grip on his collar that dangerously came to choking.

“But what!? What is it, Pupa Pan!?” She sneered, hating that bright green costume with every fiber of her body that she trembled. Words could hardly describe the amount of hate she was feeling towards the blubbering grub in her grip.

“I uh…. Uhhhh, I don’t know…” Tavros whimpered and tried to sink down into his shirt in a desperate attempt to get away.

Vriska drew in a cold breath, glaring down at him before grabbing with both hands lifting him off the floor once more. “That’s right! You don’t know! You don’t know anything because you don’t DO anything but abscond! I can’t even manipulate you to NOT abscond!” The shaking came again, stronger than ever blurring Tavros’ vision. “I couldn’t do it! I hate you! I fucking hate you! Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate…! Hate….”

Tavros groaned when his world stopped spinning from all the shaking. It felt like his brains were beyond scrambled but his mind quickly switched from thinking about his own state of health when he felt only light trembling and near silence. Vriska held her head low, long bangs covering a portion of her face but revealed enough to show delicate fangs biting into shaking cerulean lips.

“… Why can’t you just love me too…?”

He could hardly believe his ears. The usually loud terrible shouting was reduced to a single nearly inaudible plea. So that earlier muddled feeling that came with foreboding nostalgia was Vriska’s mind control again. This time not being used to bring harm to him, but return her affection in his state of shock. Tavros frowned as the puzzle slowly came together. She wanted him to come here and be the fairy to his Pupa Pan, not hurt him. There was nothing to be scared of.

Tavros felt himself being lowered and caught a glance up at Vriska’s disheartened face that held her trembling eye shut behind her glasses. “… Vriska?”

Her body froze for what seemed forever until she let out a shaky sigh and glared down at Tavros, ignoring her watering eye. “Sh-shut up… just-”

“I… uhhh.” A lump was caught in his throat as he glanced about the room, finally returning to Vriska in her fairy costume with a dull brown blush on his cheeks. “Um, I think, maybe… I could fly if, uhhh… You gave me a uhhhhhh… another, you know… happy thought?”

Asdfghjkl.

Aww. More stuff like this and I wont be able to hate Vriska anymore.

[foxesforsale]

I am so behind on my reading augh, when did this thread start going by so quickly??? I'm not complaining but shit guys you are the most productive sons of bitches ever. I LOVE YOU, LET'S HUG

Blame reclusiveAmateur for this one; I got all inspired by her second-person Dave-centric fics that goddamnit I wanted to write one too, so here it is! (notes: indeterminate amount of time post-sburb, dave/jade, implied john/rose)

we drive by braille

show spoiler

hide spoiler

one.

It hits you out of nowhere in your junior year of high school, when you take some joke religious comparison class for a decent place to sleep after lunch. Eventually the teacher moves into mythology, though, and then Greek mythology, and that's when you sit up and pay attention: Ceto, Echidna, Typhon, Hephaestus; names you know attached to things you've seen with your own eyes. You remember Ceto's convoluted mindgames, and Echidna's hollow dead leaf laughter, and Typhon's glib, stolen grin, but most of all you remember Hephaestus because he was so much like you it hurt.

You wonder if any of the others ever decided to do the same thing, but it doesn't really matter, because, as you find out, it's kind of personal. You don't know why it took you so long--okay, well, maybe you do, and maybe you just didn't want to revisit it, or maybe you just didn't want to know how deep it really goes. But the time is long overdue, so one miserable winter evening, you hit the internet up for research on your denizen.

The basics are obvious because everyone knows them--smith-god, artisan, volcanoes, etcetera. A god of dual elements, fire and earth, the twin virtues of creativity and persistence (twin vices of molten anger and slavish devotion); born imperfect and thrown from the mountain, he found belonging in a craft (sound familiar, beatsmith?, you think and immediately unthink), honed it like no one else before him because being the best was all he had. And as you click through the pages, as it sounds more and more like you, you remember those years ago: the red furnace glow, the rhythm of time kept with a blacksmith's hammer, walls of moving copper, and a man who could've been you in another life hunched solemn and joyless for all the beautiful things he makes.

And still you keep going. You read about Hephaestus winning back his place on Olympus, all that power and all those gods laughing at him behind his back.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You read about the fall of Typhon, how Hephaestus built his workshop on top of him, how his forge was powered by the breath of a dying god.

(at your strongest when your best friend's at his weakest)

You feel a little sick to your stomach, so you x out of the browser and that's that. You start sleeping through your religion class again, and when it's time to pick a topic for your final, you go with Hinduism. Years later, when you're signing up for classes your sophomore year of college, you have the choice between religion and history. You choose history.

two.

You're a picky eater. It was fine growing up, with your brother bringing home an endless rotation of TV dinners for the nights he wasn't going to be around (which was most nights). Everything was neatly labeled, flash frozen, and compartmentalized, and it didn't matter how many times bro told you to man up and eat your vegetables because he was never there to bitch when you dumped them in the trash.

But then the real world came along and made you try to eat things that weren't pizza rolls and hot pockets, and that's when you got fussy. You hate the texture of pork, and you hate it when the food on your plate mixes; you hate sushi, Indian food, shellfish, anything with ketchup or bell peppers. You try to avoid situations where people might cook for you in case you have to push away your dinner and deal with the aftermath of being an offensive houseguest.

(“I was half expecting dog food,” you tell Jade in your usual deadpan, leaning awkwardly on the kitchen island; bad joke and you know it but you can't seem to tell any different kind with her. The way her shoulders hunch confirms it, but you soldier on anyway because that's just what you do, even as she scrapes a mangled chunk of salmon into the garbage and gives you a wounded, kicked-puppy look. You're kind of a jackass and a little insufferable sometimes, and you can't argue that, but no one would ever accuse you of being heartless--except for now, maybe, as she leaves the room with little more than a glance back and you stand there with parted lips, poised to say words that won't come out.)

Lalonde watches you over the weeks, notices how finicky and repetitive you get with your meals, and tells you with that unbearably smug little Harvard grin of hers that it's a control issue.

She adds: “Not the only one, I'm sure.”

You look down at your plate, organized by color and type--starch and green on one side, protein and yellow on the other, all separated like it's quarantine--and set your fork down. “Quit watching me eat,” you say, folding your arms. “Shit's weird.”

three.

There aren't many true things about yourself that you like to show to the world, but how much you like words is one of them, and anyone who isn't comatose can see it for themselves. Freestyling is a goddamn artform and you're good at it, because if there's anything in this world you can do, it's pull all the right things together at exactly the right time. You have the vocabulary for it, and--god help you, it's the dumbest shit and it sounds too much like Rose, but something like the soul of a poet, too. There are deep, winding nuances to language that you feel comfortable in, and you guess it's the most obvious similarity between you and your sister. You can laugh all you want at her reams of poetry and fanfiction, but it doesn't stop you from understanding why she does it.

The rap, the freestyling, the hip-hop: it's a strange manifestation of your interests, strange enough that nobody asks because they think they know, and you're fine with that. You don't have to explain it to anyone. Middle class white kid from Houston--total joke if you think you can relate, pretentious hipster douchebag, an insult to the culture. And they can keep thinking that, because fuck if you're going to waste your time justifying it; that it wasn't always this way, that cinder block and particle board furniture wasn't always just a statement, that it wasn't always a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood. Before his bro hit the right niche, things were a little tighter, and those were the nights you spent in bed with a hand-me-down CD player, finding something to relate to in the music you looped: Rakim, NWA, The Fugees, Public Enemy, over and over and over until you could mouth the tracks by memory. It made things seem a little more bearable, making order out of chaos.

But you didn't always have the CD player either, so before that, it was books. The library became a babysitter when your brother couldn't pick you up from school, at first just for the air conditioning, but then you decided somewhere along the way--why not? You started picking through the shelves and that was it, really. The start of a secret love affair that never really stopped, with an emphasis on secret. Dickens and Burgess didn't exactly gel with your pridefully--painfully, meticulously--constructed don't-give-a-fuck attitude.

(Seven years old, thumbing through cheap thrift store books, and you pick up a dog-eared, moth-eaten copy of East of Eden; “Isn't this a little much for you, man?” your brother asks and you shake your head, because it's not about the stories, or the characters. You don't have to understand those and you don't pretend to try. It's about all those words that sit in those pages just waiting for you to collect them.)

Years and years later, you still never let your collection grow larger than what you can hide under your bed, and it rotates out every couple of months: Tolstoy, Alighieri, Camus, Orwell for now until you wrap up War and Peace, find some time off to dump them off at a used bookstore, and pick out replacements. There's a kind of enjoyment in the ritual now; you can hunch in the aisles and pretend you've got better things to do all you want, but you aren't fooling anyone, least of all yourself.

(You slide into the booth across from Jade, ten minutes late--feeling every last aching second of it between the store and the restaurant, made worse knowing she doesn't have that long in town--and you give a quick apology, explaining about lines and traffic; she's just glad to see you. Then, because she's weird and there are parts of her that the mainland can't crush, she sniffs the air and says, “You smell like books.” When you give her a noncommittal shrug, and she adds: “I like books.”

You can't help yourself and maybe you'll regret it later, but then again, maybe it could be a good thing if you let it. With a secret little half-grin hidden behind your menu, you look at her over the top of your shades and say, “Me too.”)

four.

You find--or found, really, because it's been years since you've had it--something satisfying in your title. Not the time part, because it's hard not to be a little smugly satisfied at being placed in charge of so much power and it's so fucking undeniably cool, but the knight part--and you had trouble admitting it at first, when you were under siege by John's well-intentioned jabs and Rose's instant, unsolicited analysis. You denied, denied, denied until they finally gave it a rest and you could take a good, long look at it yourself.

You're not prim and proper, and you're not polite, and you're not really all that chivalrous, but there are still pieces of you that shine beneath the layers of stony indifference and practiced jerkass. If you can't ooze charisma and a winning personality--because even you can admit you'll never be the golden boy (respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted), not like John--then you can at least tell the god's honest truth whenever you can, even if it hurts--maybe especially if it hurts. If you're not going to open doors for women, then you can sure as hell throw a couple punches for one when it's 2 AM and some drunken frat fuck won't leave her alone. It happens a few times, and the night ends with bruised knuckles and the taste of blood in your mouth, but you always get your point across with blistering clarity.

You're not the guy with flocks of friends, never will be, and you don't want to be, not really. For however much it aches to know you'll never belong, it narrows down the list of people you'd feel obligated to take a bullet for.

And when it comes down to that--well. It has before, where you had to make that choice, except it wasn't really a choice, not for you, and you stepped in front of that sword, that gun, that blast of fire every. single. time. For all the kinds of men you aren't, that's the kind of man you are, and that's what's so satisfying. When the game ended and everyone got on with their lives and all that's left of Time is no need to ever wear a watch again, you can still say that yeah, you're a knight in your own way. That's something that'll never change.

five.

You're chronically, habitually, hopelessly bad at women.

It's not getting them that you're bad at; you're attractive and you know it, because you're fastidious about your appearance to the point of compulsion and you never leave your apartment without looking like you could buy the town. You're the skilled musician dripping with arrogance, indifferent to the existence of other people, and girls go fucking crazy for it. It helps, you think, that apparently there's something mysterious about you, something a little dark and intense, because, well--you've seen war and nobody comes out of that without a little bit of baggage, and they love that. You're the guy they want to take home and kiss better and stitch back together with force of personality. You're the guy they want to fix so you'll love them.

You don't, though, you don't even come close, and you suppose that's where the point of contention is. A week, two weeks, sometimes three, and it's smooth sailing--but then she'll want your apartment key, or she'll want to meet your friends, or she'll drop hints about moving in and you're fucking out of there. Sometimes you're out of there sooner, for stupid reasons: there was Jenna, the poli-sci major who couldn't shut up; there was Ashley, who accidentally ran into you everywhere and you're pretty sure she was stalking you; Madison had too many piercings, Olivia reeked of nicotine, Nicole kept asking about your parents. They're just the start of your list. It extends way, way beyond them. You tell John that they just weren't right; you know for yourself that you just weren't trying.

(Her name is Mira and she's a righteous bitch, you decide, and you wonder why you're even here, fumbling around her apartment in the dark looking for where you dropped your damn tie, when you got sick of her two weeks ago and got sick of nights like these a week after that. You know she's watching you from her bed, face contorted in that nasty little scowl of hers, but you can't see her and you don't really want to.

“I don't know what your damage is, Strider.” You hear the rustle of bedsheets and her soft footsteps on the hardwood and you don't dignify her nagging with any sort of response. “Do I look too much like her? Not enough?”

Mira--beautiful, horrible Mira, with her tan skin and her long black hair and her serpentine calculation--has a way with words that reminds you of Rose, if Rose were even more of a frigid cunt. You feel a sort of cold fury rising up in your gut, old and familiar because that's just always how it starts with you, ice first and fire later. “Finish that thought,” you say, and you know she will, because she doesn't back from a challenge. She's dating you, after all. “Go ahead.”

“Wait, I'm sorry. She has her hair cut short now, doesn't she? I think I saw her in Forbes last month. Cute. Like a pixie. Shame you won't let me meet her.” She follows you as you stalk down the dark hallway, into the living room, where you swipe your keys from the coffee table. “Or maybe she just hasn't come back into town yet. Is that it? I wouldn't know, you never talk about her.”

She's on your heels even as you grab your jacket, and you still don't have your tie but fuck it, better to buy a new one than put up with this bullshit. “Poor you, all lonely because your rich little heiress girlfriend left you behind. Do you miss her? Is that why you said her name?”

You'd never hit a woman, not in a thousand goddamn years no matter how much she might deserve it, but as she blocks the doorway, sheet pulled around her and that fucking scowl on her face as poisonous as the rest of her, you come so, so close. “Get the fuck out of my way,” you say, and it's all you have to say, because--

Well. She liked you because you were a little dark and intense and broken, but actually seeing you like that isn't something she can handle.)

“Dude,” John says and he doesn't even try to hide his amusement as he chews on his straw, the smug bastard; you regret calling him even though it's what you always do when you have a problem. “Your life's kind of gone to hell you're trying way too hard to compensate.”

“Bullshit. I'm not compensating for anything,” you say, but you aren't so good at lying anymore, because John only laughs at you, at your half-eaten plate of sorted, organized food.

six.

Okay, so you have some fucking control issues. You get it. People can just get off your dick about it already because you know, they don't need to keep reminding you. You're enough of a reminder to yourself. Yeah, so you had kind of a crappy childhood and a brother who was never home, and when he was, he was putting you through shit a kid shouldn't have to go through, all 'it's for your own good's and 'you'll thank me when you're older's and 'pay attention, you're gonna need to know this someday's. And yeah, maybe it affected you more than you'd like to admit, and yeah, maybe you didn't have any control at all and you reacted with trying to force everything around you to make sense.

And there's that other part of your title that still rides along with you, the one that was so fucking cool until you learned what happens when you have to become the get out of jail free card for your friends. (It's almost hilarious, you think, striving all your life to be the best and then finding out that only the best are ever offered up for sacrifice.) You were the one who made it through the game, but you can't help but think of other timelines, all the other pockets of failure that another you had to fix at his own expense. If you were another man, it might make you bitter, but you're not. You're more bitter at yourself and how you're dealing with the leftovers.

You still feel time a little too intimately than you'd prefer, but it's not under your control anymore, so you force it in other ways; you went after music with a kind of terrifying fervor as soon as you realized your personal timeline was static again, learning instruments, collecting vinyls and samples by the thousands. It's that rhythm, you know, and they call it keeping time but it means something entirely different to you; it's the way you can sit with your mixing equipment for hours, making tiny, exacting changes for perfectionism's sake, finding what's wrong and fixing it, making sense out of the chaos. And when you're on that stage with that guitar and that microphone, you've got a crowd's attention locked onto you, a show of force through skill and determination. You're not the golden boy and you never will be, not like John, but you can make people listen.

And you'd say it's fine but it's not, not really, when every night you get all dressed up with nowhere to go but around, around, around, the dance that went out of style years ago with partners who don't know what's going on until you're gone. You don't enjoy it, and maybe that's what scares you--that you faced an image of yourself when you were thirteen that you swore up and down you'd never become, only to become it anyway. Metronome for a hammer and here you are, hunched over joyless and solemn for all the beautiful things you make.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You're not a drinker--control issues, the voice of Rose echoes in your head, and you've been drinking just enough to laugh at that, just enough to flick through your phone's address book, looking for a name and a number and a reason. Around the middle of the list you realize you've only come up with two out of three, and that'll have to be enough.

As you listen to it ring, and ring, and ring, and ring, you become dimly aware that it's 3 AM and you're kind of an asshole when a groggy, girlish voice picks up.

“Dave?”

You lick your cracked lips, close your eyes, and your voice curls her name into a question: “Jade?”

“What's wrong?”

Your shoulders shake in a chuckle made out of pure fuck it, and from the silence on the other end of the phone, you can't help but wonder if she thinks you've gone crazy, and--well. Shit, maybe you have, and maybe that could be a good thing if you let it.

“Everything,” you say, and it's not the whole truth, but it's a start.

So. Fucking. Good.


Sarasvati I love your writing soooo much, plz never stop ever :3 Second person is hard, but far out you write it so well and it reads fantastically!

[breccia]

Oh gosh I wrote something that’s not slash! This was meant to be a short little “What happened to them?” fic but ….. I have (length) problems.

Action/Adventure: Tavros struggles to protect Gamzee in the medium while hoping Vriska will save him.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Gamzee's first step into the medium was wrought with poetry so vivid and intense that to transcribe it to words would be such unjust treatment as to be a crime against all such prose that came before it. The world dripped with splendor so thick it condensed on his surroundings like sugary dew, glistening in the light as it filled the air with the scent of honey. This was how Gamzee saw most things, however, and if he had been in a clearer state of mind, he may have realized that it was why Tavros was not nearly as excited as he was by the new environment.

AT: uMM, OKAY
AT: i NEED YOU TO
AT: kIND OF FOCUS, FOR A SECOND
AT: iF THATS OKAY
TC: CaN yOu FuCkIn SeE tHis ShIt AlL uP iN hErE???
TC: iS tHiS sHit EvEn ReAl??
TC: LiKe HoW tHe fUcK dOeS tHiS mOtHeRfUcKiN bEaUtY eVeN hApPeN
TC: ItS fUcKiN uNnAtUrAl
TC: bUt nAtUrAl!
TC: hAhA
TC: WoW
TC: WhOA!!!!!!!
TC: HoLy ShIt TiTs
TC: dO YoU sEe ThAt MoThErFuCkEr RiGhT tHeRe?!
AT: gAMZEE,
AT: i, UHH
AT: sORT OF DON'T HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO,
AT: rEALLY GET INVOLVED IN YOUR GAME
TC: hAhAhA HoLy BoNe gRabBiN GrUb LoVeR tHaT mOtHeRfUcKiN pLaNt jUsT mOvEd!!
TC: hOw ThE fUcK dId iT dO tHaT
TC: hAhAhahA oH WoW
AT: aRE YOU STILL THERE
AT: yOU ARENT REALLY,
AT: rESPONDING TO ME
AT: gAMZEE,
AT: i AM STILL UHH,
AT: sTILL HERE
AT: oN ALTERNIA
AT: wITH ALL THE METEORS
AT: tHEY ARE STILL COMING
TC: sHiT I aM LiKe oNe mOrE fUcKiN aWeSoMe FuCkIn MiRaClE aWaY fRoM sTrAiGhT uP lOsInG AlL oF mY mOtHeRfUcKiN sHiT aLl OvEr ThE PlAcE
TC: hAhahAHh
AT: uHH,
AT: iT IS REALLY PRETTY THERE
AT: bUT,
AT: vRISKA IS MY SERVER PLAYER
AT: aND UHH,
AT: tO BE HONEST
AT: i AM NOT SURE SHE IS GOING TO HELP ME AVOID THESE METEORS
AT: eVEN THOUGH KARKAT SAID SHE WOULD
AT: i DONT KNOW
AT: sHE ALREADY KIND OF
AT: jUST THREW THE LOAD GAPER,
AT: oUT THROUGH MY WALL
AT: iTS OUTSIDE NOW,
AT: mY LOAD GAPER
AT: sHE KEEPS LAUGHING
TC: WhOAAAAaaaAA!!!
TC: mY FuCkIn LuSuS cAn TaLk!!!!!!
TC: hOw tHe FuCk dId It LeArN tO dO tHat
TC: tHiS iS tHe MoThErFuCkIn KiNg oF aLl mIrAcLeS rIgHt HeRe!!!!!!!!
TC: Oh ThErE gOeS mY ShIt jUsT gEtTiN aLl uP aNd lOsT! hAhaHa!

Tavros could feel the sweat on the back of his neck as he tapped his keys anxiously. Could Vriska see what he was typing? He hadn't thought of that. What if she could read it? Surely she would start berating him for even mentioning her. She would probably be mad that he called her by her name, or doubted her intentions. After all, she kept claiming that she was "only helping." Despite her words, Tavros couldn’t help but sit straight in his two-wheeled device, eyes peeled for any sudden movements, ears aching as they listened for any tell-tale signs of the next step in Vriska's systematic destruction of his respiteblock.

If only Gamzee were paying attention! He always knew just what to say to make Tavros feel better.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: uMM,
AT: cOULD YOU,
AT: mAYBE REPLACE THAT WALL
AT: tHAT JUST FELL DOWN
AT: mY FAVORITE POSTER WAS ON IT
AT: i KNOW THIS IS LIKE,
AT: a BUILDING GAME
AT: sO,
AG: Uuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggh
AG: Don't you ever stop complaining?
AG: You're so annoying!
AG: There are meteors about to flatten your sorry ass and all you can think about are your dum8 posters!!!!!!
AT: i AM THINKING ABOUT THE METEORS
AT: i AM THINKING ABOUT THEM A LOT
AG: Then shut up for once and let me do my 8uisiness!
AT: wELL,
AT: i AM STILL,
AT: yOU KNOW
AT: hERE,
AT: sO, UHH, I JUST FIGURED
AT: iF I DONT MAKE IT TO THE MEDIUM
AT: mAYBE YOU COULD JUST,
AT: lET ME HAVE MY POSTERS BACK FIRST
AT: iF THATS NOT,
AT: uHH,
AT: tOO MUCH WORK
AT: fOR YOU
AG: I'm going to get you to the medium!!!!!!!! jegus!
AG: Despite all the 8laring sirens in my head screaming JUST LEAVE HIM
AG: HE IS, UHHHHHHHHHHHH
AG: NOT GOING TO BE VERY USEFUL IN THE GAME
AG: I am still working on it so why don’t you just RELAX
AG: If you can get your pathetic fuck-ass clown friend in there without somehow fucking up too 8adly do you really think i am going to have a pro8lem???
AT: sORRY
AT: i DIDNT MEAN TO,
AT: fLY OFF THE HANDLE LIKE THAT
AG: Oh please Tavros! Can you apologize more to me?????? I love it so much when you whimper and crawl around on your 8elly like the tiny little gru8 that you are!
AT: sORRY
AG: UGH!!!!!!!! OK that's it I am taking down another wall, you have earned it!

-- arachnidsGrip [AG] ceased trolling adiosToreador [AT] -


Tavros clicked on the SGRUB window behind Vriska's chat. Gamzee was lying on the ground, staring up into the sky with wide, unblinking eyes. His lusus-sprite was nearby, watching over him. Over the crest of a nearby hill, out of Gamzee’s glazed line-of-sight, was an army of small, black imps. They were gathering together. Tavros swallowed hard.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: hEY, UHH
AT: tHERE ARE A LOT OF THOSE IMPS THAT TEREZI TOLD ME ABOUT
AT: tHE LICORICE GUYS
AT: tHAT WANT TO HURT US
AT: I THINK YOU SHOULD GET UP
AT: bEFORE THEY GET TO YOU


Tavros clicked madly through SGRUB’S interface, looking for a way to help Gamzee. The imps were going to reach him soon, and in his dreamy state he was in no condition to fight. Tavros nervously scrolled through endless options that made little sense. He was supposed to be building platforms for Gamzee to reach his second gate, too! At least, that's what he thought Karkat had said. Karkat yelled a lot and made up really long, strung-together words that Tavros liked to skim over sometimes, so it was hard to tell.

His heart hadn't slowed in the last few hours. He had to protect Gamzee somehow -- but there were also those meteors hovering just above him, and he was fairly certain that Vriska wasn't going to do much about them. At least she had thrown Tinkerbull into the kernelsprite for him, none too delicately, of course, but Tavros hadn't seen hide nor horn of him since. For all he knew, Vriska intentionally made it seem like she was prototyping his deceased guardian, when really she was just setting him up for disappointment. Maybe it would be a hostplush sprite. Or Pupa Pan! Tavros caught himself quickly. Vriska would never do that. Maybe she had actually thrown the load gaper into it?

There was an ominous rumbling from outside. Tavros looked through the large, gaping hole that Vriska had made for him earlier. The sky was bright orange, and heat was radiating in from the ground. A bead of sweat rolled down his back.

Suddenly there was a booming crash so loud that Tavros bounced up from the two-wheeled device. As he landed back down, he saw his bathtub fly through the air outside, crashing out of a wall from the other side of his hive. The meteorites seemed to be landing closer as well.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: uHH
AT: oKAY SO YOU GOT ME BACK
AT: fOR WHATEVER I DID
AT: cAN WE MAYBE,
AT: tALK ABOUT GETTING OUT OF HERE
AT: iTS GETTING HOT
AG: 8lah 8lah 8lah
AG: I'm sure I can find more things to 8ust out of your respite8lock if you'd like to keep complaining
AT: nO,
AT: tHATS OKAY
AG: Look I put your stupid flying dead steer8east thing into your stupid glowing kernelsprite to make you an even stupider flying 8ull piece of shit!
AG: I don't even know why I was so generous
AG: I guess that's just who I am
AG: So generous! All the time!
AG: Please, stop thanking me Tavros!
AG: You are em8arassing me!
AG: I am literally growing flush over all this gratitude you are pouring on me!
AG: I could 8athe in it, if I hadn't just thrown your 8athtub out into your yard
AG: Do you see what you make me do?!
AT: oKAY
AT: tHANKS
AT: tINKERBULL IS A PRETTY GOOD LUSUS
AT: tHANKS FOR USING HIM
AG: ughhhhhhhh
AG: You are so disgusting

Tavros clicked away once more as he saw Vriska's cursor move back above his respiteblock, hopefully to build more. The client server still showed Gamzee on the ground, smiling as he appeared to doze off, enveloped in the beauty he could no doubt barely comprehend around him.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: uMM
AT: i COULD REALLY USE
AT: sOME OF YOUR ENCOURAGEMENT
AT: cAUSE YOU'RE REALLY GOOD
AT: aT MAKING ME FEEL BETTER
AT: aND VRISKA IS SCARING ME
AT: aLSO,
AT: wAKE UP
AT: tHOSE IMPS ARE CLOSER
AT: gAMZEE,


-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Okay little 8oy skytard, I put all the game's equipment outside for you to use.
AG: All you have to do is put in this punchcard I put on your desk and it will create an item for you to use to get out of there!
AG: So simple!!!!
AG: Even you can do it!
AT: oH,
AT: oKAY
AT: bECAUSE I AM WORRIED ABOUT GAMZEE
AT: i DONT WANT TO DISCONNECT FROM HIM FOR TOO LONG
AT: tHANKS VRISKA
AG: Oh gog please dont thank me, its em8arassing how easy this shit is
AG: They have all these complex names for shit like they think will make it seem difficult but really it’s so straightforward I wonder why anyone would have any pro8lem with it at all!!!
AG: this game poses no challenge to someone with my skill.
AG: I am SO 8ORED already! D::::<

Tavros considered agreeing with the girl, potentially gaining her favor, but decided against it. There was never anything he could say that went over well with Vriska. A compliment would only earn him a punishment, perhaps on par with the punishment he would receive for a complaint. Instead, Tavros wheeled himself over to the ramp that led him down to the front of his lawnring.

The ground outside was pulsating with each impact of the meteorites that were now raining down around him. The sky had turned red, and the brush around him was browning under the heat. Tavros looked around. The load gaper sat nearby. Further off, the bathtub. There was no sign of any of the SGRUB machinery he had encountered when helping Gamzee connect. He pulled out his huskphone.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: vRISKA
AT: i UHH,
AT: dONT SEE ANYTHING OUT HERE
AG: Of course not!
AG: Why would I put it out there, where it could get hit by a stray meteorite???
AG: Don't you ever think about shit before you open your windhole?
AG: Or, I guess, your typehole?
AT: oH
AT: oKAY
AT: sO THEN, WHERE IS EVERYTHING
AG: I put it in a super safe place!
AG: It's all on your roof!

Tavros set the huskphone down in his lap and looked up at his respiteblock. It towered over him, blotting out a large portion of the burning sky. He could make out the silhouette of SGRUB'S complicated machinery on the flat of his roof.

AT: hOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET UP THERE
AG: oh come on tavvy
AG: fly!!!!!!
AG: hahahahahaha


Tavros reentered his home, desperately wheeling up to his husktop to check on Gamzee. He was no longer centered on the screen. Tavros' heart skipped a beat.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: gAMZEE
AT: whERE ARE YOU
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: i AM SUPER SERIOUS
AT: rIGHT NOW
AT: uMM,
AT: wHERE ARE YOU

The respiteblock suddenly shook violently and Tavros dug his fingers into the armrests of the two-wheeled device as he nearly toppled over. A bright flash and an intense wave of heat washed over him. Tavros gnashed his teeth together hard, cringing and crumpling his upper body together, trying feebly to protect himself. It was the biggest meteorite yet, and the closest. As the shockwave passed him, Tavros hesitantly opened an eye, glancing out the extra large window Vriska had made, toward a gigantic crater that now spotted the landscape nearby.

His time was growing short.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: oKAY
AT: mAYBE IF YOU BUILD A ROPE DOWN
AT: i CAN CLIMB UP
AT: aND MAKE MY ITEM
AG: A rope?!?! Seriously????
AG: How do you even 8UILD a rope anyway? Could you tap on your head for me, I want to see if your skull is actually bonemush and that's why you have no fucking common sense!
AT: wELL
AT: i DONT KNOW, UHH
AT: hOW ELSE TO GET UP THERE
AT: aND IF I STAY DOWN HERE
AT: i THINK I WILL PROBABLY
AT: dIE
AG: Goddddddddddddddddddddddd Tavros
AG: What do you take me for!
AG: I told you already
AG: I am too generous!
AG: I built you a stupid ramp
AG: So you can roll your stupid two-wheeled device up
AG: And make your stupid item
AG: And get into the stupid medium!!!!!!!!
AT: rEALLY?
AG: NO I AM LYING!
AG: yes really!!!!!!!!!!!
AT: wAIT
AT: wHICH IS IT
AG: >::::T

Tentatively, Tavros stuck his head around the corner of the hallway, gazing through the flickering lights that emanated through the few intact windows left in his respiteblock. He wasn't quite sure what he was expecting Vriska to have done, but he was fairly confident in his assessment that there was no way she had built him a ramp. The fiery light cast itself upon what was, undoubtedly, a solid ramp leading up around what had become an abandoned staircase. Tavros blinked. The ramp remained.

He looked down at the huskphone in his lap, wondering if he should thank the girl. He glanced back into his room at the empty client screen where Gamzee once was. There wasn't time to get into a confusing and overly complicated series of words with the girl that together would equal no real accepted gratitude. Gamzee was undoubtedly ill-prepared to face the army of imps that were laying in ambush for him. He would probably be infatuated with their very existence, right up until they cut through him with their impy weapons, laughing little impy laughs as Gamzee cried out in pain!

Tavros closed his eyes tightly and tried to shake the thought out of his head. He had to hurry! If he got crushed by a meteor, there was no way Gamzee would be safe! He had to rely on his friend to protect himself just for a few moments while Tavros entered the medium. Steeling his resolve as best he could, which admittedly was not a whole lot, Tavros gripped the wheels next to him tightly, and took off up the ramp, quietly hoping that it wouldn't end abruptly and he'd crash down to the ground as Vriska laughed from the safety of her computer's perch.



-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Oh my goodness!
AG: You made it up the ramp!!!!!!
AG: Tavros I made you this trophy, do you want it?
AG: It is for the 8ravest 8oy in the whole wide world who was able to move his two-wheeled device up an inclined plane all 8y himself!
AG: I am so proud of you.
AG: WHO'S MY 8IG, INCLINED PLANE CLIM8ING 8OY?
AG: WHO'S MY 8IG WHEELING 8OY??????
AG: YOU ARE!!! YES, YOU ARE!!
AT: oKAY
AT: i AM PRETTY SURE YOU ARE BEING SARCASTIC AGAIN
AT: bUT,
AT: tHANK YOU
AT: fOR BUILDING THE RAMP
AT: bECAUSE I SEE THE BIG METEOR NOW
AT: aND UHH,
AT: iT LOOKS REALLY CLOSE.
AG: Well then stop shitting around and make the item!
AG: I did not go to all this trou8le just so that you would be squashed into a 8oring pile of TavGROSS
AT: uMM
AT: oKAY
AT: tHANKS
AT: i HOPE GAMZEE IS OK
AG: 8luuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Tavros looked down into the glistening brown oognibomb that the alchemiter had created for him with Vriska’s punchcard. Despite the extreme size and proximity of the rock hovering above him that seemed even closer now that he was on top of his respiteblock, his mind couldn't help but race over the possibilities of what kind of fiduspawn might be inside. Maybe a new species! That would be so exciting!

AG: Tavvvvvvros.
AG: Stop 8eing an idiot.
AG: If that's possi8le!
AG: You have to 8reak it to get to the medium.
AT: bUT
AT: i DONT HAVE A HOSTPLUSH READY
AG: oHHH, UHHHHHHH, OK THEN
AG: Just w8 until you get squished under the meteor then I guess!
AG: It should 8e totally worth it!
AG: i MEAN,
AT: wHAT IF I HURT IT
AG: Oh my godddddddddddd
AG: It hurts to roll my eyes this much.
AG: OK so
AG: Think about your high-8looded friend, I guess!
AG: And like
AG: All that friendship!!!
AG: So much friendship!!
AG: It's overwhelming you right now!!
AG: Tavros he is in trou8le and only you can save him!
AG: You must use your 8oy-skylark powers to rescue the maiden
AG: The sopor slime princess awaits!
AT: yOU REALLY THINK HES IN TROUBLE
AT: bECAUSE I AM WORRIED TOO
AG: OPEN THE GOD DAMN EGG TOREASNORE BEFORE I LOOSE MY FUCKING HANDLE ALL OVER AND FLY OFF THIS SHIT LIKE SOME CRAZY FUCKING ACROBATIC FUCKING THING
AG: Ugh I just got so worked up I couldn’t even come up with a proper sentence!
AT: oKAY,
AT: i WILL
AT: iF THATS WHAT YOU WANT, VRISKA

Tavros took a final look up at the hovering meteor. It looked like it filled the entire burning sky. The sweat was pouring off him. The oognibomb felt slippery in his shaking palm. His huskphone buzzed as Vriska continued to harass him, no doubt screaming insults and commands for him to break the ball open.

What would happen when he entered? Would he be able to come home ever again? Was Tinkerbull already there? Would it really work? Where would he go? Was Vriska playing a joke on him? What about Gamzee?

At this thought, Tavros seemed to wake. He closed his eyes tight as a loud rumbling grew up from around him, the meteor no doubt bearing down upon him. Without looking, Tavros threw the oognibomb to the ground, covering his ears from the growing noise as his hands were freed. He ducked down into his chair, squeezing his eyes closed. The rumbling grew deafening, and the heat began to choke him.




Suddenly, there was silence. Tavros opened his eyes to see his feet, just where he had left them, and the top of his respiteblock’s roof. A soft wind ruffled his hair. Slowly, Tavros sat up in his two-wheeled device.

The sky was clear of meteors, replaced with an omnipresent wind that whirled around him ceaselessly. Around his home was a desert of lightly colored sand.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: vRISKA
AT: i MADE IT
AG: Oh, really? I guess I fell asleep there at the end, what with all the excitement and all.
AT: tHERE IS A DESERT
AT: aND WIND
AG: Please tell me more, this is real exciting stuff here
AT: tHANKS
AT: i THINK YOU SAVED MY LIFE
AG: yyyyyyaaaaaaaaaawwwwwnnnnnnnn

Tavros nearly smiled at the girl’s response, but his thoughts were broken in an instant as he recalled his primary mission. He had to reconnect to Gamzee!

The two wheeled device flew down the platform and back into the respiteblock, all the while his huskphone buzzed with messages. It could wait, he thought. There were much more important things than hearing Vriska’s newest complaint.

Tavros skidded to a halt in front of his husktop and began fumbling with the controls, nearly falling out of his seat as he searched through the landscape to find his friend. There were no imps in sight, no lusus, and no Gamzee.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: gAMZEE
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: iM REALLY SORRY I HAD TO GO
AT: i HOPE YOURE OK
AT: pLEASE SAY SOMETHING
AT: aNYTHING

There were no tracks on the ground, and no trail of what Karkat had described to him as grist. Gamzee’s respiteblock was empty. His Trollian window was dormant. Tavros felt his stomach knot up tightly. If only he had been faster… he could have reconnected and found him! If Gamzee was hurt it was all his fault and he could never forgive himself!

Tavros scrolled around the environment futilely, the buzzes from his phone and the blinking of Vriska’s Trollian window completely forgotten. His stomach tightened harder and Tavros placed a hand on it, squeezing tightly, trying to match the pain.

AT: gAMZEE I AM REALLY SORRY
AT: i DIDN’T MEAN TO LEAVE YOU
AT: bUT I WAS GOING TO GET SMASHED
AT: pLEASE TELL ME YOURE OK
AT: pLEASE
AT: tELL ME ANYTHING

Tavros’ hand fell from the keyboard as he stared off into the screen. Again, the huskphone buzzed. He wanted to throw it into the wall. His eyes slowly refocused on the world Gamzee had entered. He didn’t know what to do. Was this it? Was it over?

Tavros scrolled around once more, focusing on the land, trying to put the thoughts of his mind. He wanted to see the beauty that Gamzee had seen. Tavros followed the whimsical flourishes that painted the ground, his breath evening out for the first time in hours, despite the pain that lay just out of reach. The path he followed grew lusher until he spotted a small, dark imp. Another appeared. Tavros felt worse as yet another imp appeared. They seemed to be forming a circle, lazily wandering about some central figure, a central figure that had big, bushy hair and two long horns and—

Tavros’ eyes went wide as he spotted his friend. His eyes were closed and the imps walked around him in a daze, occasionally bumping into each other and falling over. Had they killed him?! Tavros had stopped breathing completely as he stared at the scene. He was too late! They had gotten to him! He failed!

Without thinking, he brought the cursor over the other Troll and began clicking on his side, mentally crying out his friend’s name as he refused to believe what the scene depicted. An imp nearby toppled over, landing on Gamzee’s lap. It rolled down his legs, coming to a stop on its back. Gamzee’s eyes opened, and Tavros felt as though he could crash through the screen to get to his friend. Gamzee seemed to wake as he looked around dreamily for a moment, before reaching to his side and grabbing his computer, smiling.

-- terminallyCapricious [CT] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

TC: oH hEy My BrOtHeR
TC: wHeRe HaVe YoU BeEn AlL uP aT?
AT: aRE YOU ALIVE
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: gAMZEE THERE ARE IMPS
AT: eVERYWHERE
AT: aRE YOU HURT
AT: wHAT IS GOING ON
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: I HAVE BEEN MESSAGING YOU
AT: fOR AWHILE
AT: i THOUGHT YOU WERE IN TROUBLE
AT: iT LOOKED LIKE YOU WERE HURT
AT: i WAS WORRIED
AT: wELL,
AT: nO, I WAS REALLY SCARED
AT: rEALLY REALLY SCARED
TC: aW hElL nAw tHeRe aInT nO rEaSoN tO bE sCaReD!
TC: iVE jUsT bEeN cHiLlIn wItH mY nEw iMp bUds
TC: ThEy ReAlLy aRe dIgGiN oN mY sOpOr SlImE pIeS
TC: I GaVe tHeM sOmE aNd NoW wErE jUsT hAnGiN
TC: I oUgHtA oPeN a rEsTaUrAuNt oR sOmE sHit
TC: mAkE sOmE MaD cAsH
TC: tHeSe LiTtLe BrOs cAnT fUcKiN gEt EnOuGh!
AT: i WAS,
AT: rEALLY SCARED
TC: aW sHiT mY fUcKiN TaVs
TC: I dIdNt mEaN tO mAkE yOu AlL nOt ChIlL aNd ShIt
TC: wHeN wE mEeT uP iN hErE I WiLl gIvE yOu a BiG fUcKin pIe tO mAkE Up FoR iT
TC: tHe BiGgEsT!
TC: nO cHaRgE fOr TaVrOs aT tHiS FuCkIn pIe ShOp!
AT: i DONT, REALLY, WANT A PIE, ACTUALLY
AT: bUT THANKS
AT: i AM JUST GLAD YOURE OK
AT: tHAT IS MUCH BETTER THAN A PIE
AT: tO ME
TC: aWw sHiT aRe YoU SuRe cAuSe ThEsE sHiTs ArE fUcKiN gOldEn
AT: yES,
AT: i AM PRETTY SURE
AT: tHAT IT IS BETTER
AT: pLEASE STAY IN TOUCH WITH ME
AT: i DONT WANT TO LOSE YOU
AT: aGAIN
TC: tHaT iS a SuRe mOtHeRfUcKiN tHiNg!
TC: :o)
AT: hONK,
TC: hAhaHA ShIt YeAh mY bRoThEr!!
AT: }:D

Tavros was grinning for the first time all day. From behind him came a soft, fluttering, familiar sound, and as Tavros turned to face Tinkerbull’s sprite, he thought he may never stop.

“You’re late!” he jokingly scolded to the tiny bull. “Where have you been?” The bull cocked his head and seemed to smile. The computer buzzed once more, but Tavros barely heard it.


-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Tavrosssssssssssssssssssss
AG: Why are you smiling like that?
AG: It’s creeping me out. You’re such a weirdo.
AG: Your world looks so 8oring holy fuck!!
AG: Why are you so happy all of the sudden?? Ugh.
AG: Tavros?
AG: What are you doing you idiot?
AG: Hey, moron!
AG: Why are you ignoring me????
AG: You know that I can see you right?
AG: Don’t be such an idiot!
AG: TTTTTTTT
AG: AAAAAAAAAAAAA
AG: VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
AG: RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
AG: OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
AG: SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

-- adiosToreador [AT] blocked arachnidsGrip [AG] –

AG: What.

[foxesforsale]

Oh gosh I wrote something that’s not slash! This was meant to be a short little “What happened to them?” fic but ….. I have (length) problems.

Action/Adventure: Tavros struggles to protect Gamzee in the medium while hoping Vriska will save him.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Gamzee's first step into the medium was wrought with poetry so vivid and intense that to transcribe it to words would be such unjust treatment as to be a crime against all such prose that came before it. The world dripped with splendor so thick it condensed on his surroundings like sugary dew, glistening in the light as it filled the air with the scent of honey. This was how Gamzee saw most things, however, and if he had been in a clearer state of mind, he may have realized that it was why Tavros was not nearly as excited as he was by the new environment.

AT: uMM, OKAY
AT: i NEED YOU TO
AT: kIND OF FOCUS, FOR A SECOND
AT: iF THATS OKAY
TC: CaN yOu FuCkIn SeE tHis ShIt AlL uP iN hErE???
TC: iS tHiS sHit EvEn ReAl??
TC: LiKe HoW tHe fUcK dOeS tHiS mOtHeRfUcKiN bEaUtY eVeN hApPeN
TC: ItS fUcKiN uNnAtUrAl
TC: bUt nAtUrAl!
TC: hAhA
TC: WoW
TC: WhOA!!!!!!!
TC: HoLy ShIt TiTs
TC: dO YoU sEe ThAt MoThErFuCkEr RiGhT tHeRe?!
AT: gAMZEE,
AT: i, UHH
AT: sORT OF DON'T HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO,
AT: rEALLY GET INVOLVED IN YOUR GAME
TC: hAhAhA HoLy BoNe gRabBiN GrUb LoVeR tHaT mOtHeRfUcKiN pLaNt jUsT mOvEd!!
TC: hOw ThE fUcK dId iT dO tHaT
TC: hAhAhahA oH WoW
AT: aRE YOU STILL THERE
AT: yOU ARENT REALLY,
AT: rESPONDING TO ME
AT: gAMZEE,
AT: i AM STILL UHH,
AT: sTILL HERE
AT: oN ALTERNIA
AT: wITH ALL THE METEORS
AT: tHEY ARE STILL COMING
TC: sHiT I aM LiKe oNe mOrE fUcKiN aWeSoMe FuCkIn MiRaClE aWaY fRoM sTrAiGhT uP lOsInG AlL oF mY mOtHeRfUcKiN sHiT aLl OvEr ThE PlAcE
TC: hAhahAHh
AT: uHH,
AT: iT IS REALLY PRETTY THERE
AT: bUT,
AT: vRISKA IS MY SERVER PLAYER
AT: aND UHH,
AT: tO BE HONEST
AT: i AM NOT SURE SHE IS GOING TO HELP ME AVOID THESE METEORS
AT: eVEN THOUGH KARKAT SAID SHE WOULD
AT: i DONT KNOW
AT: sHE ALREADY KIND OF
AT: jUST THREW THE LOAD GAPER,
AT: oUT THROUGH MY WALL
AT: iTS OUTSIDE NOW,
AT: mY LOAD GAPER
AT: sHE KEEPS LAUGHING
TC: WhOAAAAaaaAA!!!
TC: mY FuCkIn LuSuS cAn TaLk!!!!!!
TC: hOw tHe FuCk dId It LeArN tO dO tHat
TC: tHiS iS tHe MoThErFuCkIn KiNg oF aLl mIrAcLeS rIgHt HeRe!!!!!!!!
TC: Oh ThErE gOeS mY ShIt jUsT gEtTiN aLl uP aNd lOsT! hAhaHa!

Tavros could feel the sweat on the back of his neck as he tapped his keys anxiously. Could Vriska see what he was typing? He hadn't thought of that. What if she could read it? Surely she would start berating him for even mentioning her. She would probably be mad that he called her by her name, or doubted her intentions. After all, she kept claiming that she was "only helping." Despite her words, Tavros couldn’t help but sit straight in his two-wheeled device, eyes peeled for any sudden movements, ears aching as they listened for any tell-tale signs of the next step in Vriska's systematic destruction of his respiteblock.

If only Gamzee were paying attention! He always knew just what to say to make Tavros feel better.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: uMM,
AT: cOULD YOU,
AT: mAYBE REPLACE THAT WALL
AT: tHAT JUST FELL DOWN
AT: mY FAVORITE POSTER WAS ON IT
AT: i KNOW THIS IS LIKE,
AT: a BUILDING GAME
AT: sO,
AG: Uuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggh
AG: Don't you ever stop complaining?
AG: You're so annoying!
AG: There are meteors about to flatten your sorry ass and all you can think about are your dum8 posters!!!!!!
AT: i AM THINKING ABOUT THE METEORS
AT: i AM THINKING ABOUT THEM A LOT
AG: Then shut up for once and let me do my 8uisiness!
AT: wELL,
AT: i AM STILL,
AT: yOU KNOW
AT: hERE,
AT: sO, UHH, I JUST FIGURED
AT: iF I DONT MAKE IT TO THE MEDIUM
AT: mAYBE YOU COULD JUST,
AT: lET ME HAVE MY POSTERS BACK FIRST
AT: iF THATS NOT,
AT: uHH,
AT: tOO MUCH WORK
AT: fOR YOU
AG: I'm going to get you to the medium!!!!!!!! jegus!
AG: Despite all the 8laring sirens in my head screaming JUST LEAVE HIM
AG: HE IS, UHHHHHHHHHHHH
AG: NOT GOING TO BE VERY USEFUL IN THE GAME
AG: I am still working on it so why don’t you just RELAX
AG: If you can get your pathetic fuck-ass clown friend in there without somehow fucking up too 8adly do you really think i am going to have a pro8lem???
AT: sORRY
AT: i DIDNT MEAN TO,
AT: fLY OFF THE HANDLE LIKE THAT
AG: Oh please Tavros! Can you apologize more to me?????? I love it so much when you whimper and crawl around on your 8elly like the tiny little gru8 that you are!
AT: sORRY
AG: UGH!!!!!!!! OK that's it I am taking down another wall, you have earned it!

-- arachnidsGrip [AG] ceased trolling adiosToreador [AT] -


Tavros clicked on the SGRUB window behind Vriska's chat. Gamzee was lying on the ground, staring up into the sky with wide, unblinking eyes. His lusus-sprite was nearby, watching over him. Over the crest of a nearby hill, out of Gamzee’s glazed line-of-sight, was an army of small, black imps. They were gathering together. Tavros swallowed hard.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: hEY, UHH
AT: tHERE ARE A LOT OF THOSE IMPS THAT TEREZI TOLD ME ABOUT
AT: tHE LICORICE GUYS
AT: tHAT WANT TO HURT US
AT: I THINK YOU SHOULD GET UP
AT: bEFORE THEY GET TO YOU


Tavros clicked madly through SGRUB’S interface, looking for a way to help Gamzee. The imps were going to reach him soon, and in his dreamy state he was in no condition to fight. Tavros nervously scrolled through endless options that made little sense. He was supposed to be building platforms for Gamzee to reach his second gate, too! At least, that's what he thought Karkat had said. Karkat yelled a lot and made up really long, strung-together words that Tavros liked to skim over sometimes, so it was hard to tell.

His heart hadn't slowed in the last few hours. He had to protect Gamzee somehow -- but there were also those meteors hovering just above him, and he was fairly certain that Vriska wasn't going to do much about them. At least she had thrown Tinkerbull into the kernelsprite for him, none too delicately, of course, but Tavros hadn't seen hide nor horn of him since. For all he knew, Vriska intentionally made it seem like she was prototyping his deceased guardian, when really she was just setting him up for disappointment. Maybe it would be a hostplush sprite. Or Pupa Pan! Tavros caught himself quickly. Vriska would never do that. Maybe she had actually thrown the load gaper into it?

There was an ominous rumbling from outside. Tavros looked through the large, gaping hole that Vriska had made for him earlier. The sky was bright orange, and heat was radiating in from the ground. A bead of sweat rolled down his back.

Suddenly there was a booming crash so loud that Tavros bounced up from the two-wheeled device. As he landed back down, he saw his bathtub fly through the air outside, crashing out of a wall from the other side of his hive. The meteorites seemed to be landing closer as well.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: uHH
AT: oKAY SO YOU GOT ME BACK
AT: fOR WHATEVER I DID
AT: cAN WE MAYBE,
AT: tALK ABOUT GETTING OUT OF HERE
AT: iTS GETTING HOT
AG: 8lah 8lah 8lah
AG: I'm sure I can find more things to 8ust out of your respite8lock if you'd like to keep complaining
AT: nO,
AT: tHATS OKAY
AG: Look I put your stupid flying dead steer8east thing into your stupid glowing kernelsprite to make you an even stupider flying 8ull piece of shit!
AG: I don't even know why I was so generous
AG: I guess that's just who I am
AG: So generous! All the time!
AG: Please, stop thanking me Tavros!
AG: You are em8arassing me!
AG: I am literally growing flush over all this gratitude you are pouring on me!
AG: I could 8athe in it, if I hadn't just thrown your 8athtub out into your yard
AG: Do you see what you make me do?!
AT: oKAY
AT: tHANKS
AT: tINKERBULL IS A PRETTY GOOD LUSUS
AT: tHANKS FOR USING HIM
AG: ughhhhhhhh
AG: You are so disgusting

Tavros clicked away once more as he saw Vriska's cursor move back above his respiteblock, hopefully to build more. The client server still showed Gamzee on the ground, smiling as he appeared to doze off, enveloped in the beauty he could no doubt barely comprehend around him.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: uMM
AT: i COULD REALLY USE
AT: sOME OF YOUR ENCOURAGEMENT
AT: cAUSE YOU'RE REALLY GOOD
AT: aT MAKING ME FEEL BETTER
AT: aND VRISKA IS SCARING ME
AT: aLSO,
AT: wAKE UP
AT: tHOSE IMPS ARE CLOSER
AT: gAMZEE,


-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Okay little 8oy skytard, I put all the game's equipment outside for you to use.
AG: All you have to do is put in this punchcard I put on your desk and it will create an item for you to use to get out of there!
AG: So simple!!!!
AG: Even you can do it!
AT: oH,
AT: oKAY
AT: bECAUSE I AM WORRIED ABOUT GAMZEE
AT: i DONT WANT TO DISCONNECT FROM HIM FOR TOO LONG
AT: tHANKS VRISKA
AG: Oh gog please dont thank me, its em8arassing how easy this shit is
AG: They have all these complex names for shit like they think will make it seem difficult but really it’s so straightforward I wonder why anyone would have any pro8lem with it at all!!!
AG: this game poses no challenge to someone with my skill.
AG: I am SO 8ORED already! :::<

Tavros considered agreeing with the girl, potentially gaining her favor, but decided against it. There was never anything he could say that went over well with Vriska. A compliment would only earn him a punishment, perhaps on par with the punishment he would receive for a complaint. Instead, Tavros wheeled himself over to the ramp that led him down to the front of his lawnring.

The ground outside was pulsating with each impact of the meteorites that were now raining down around him. The sky had turned red, and the brush around him was browning under the heat. Tavros looked around. The load gaper sat nearby. Further off, the bathtub. There was no sign of any of the SGRUB machinery he had encountered when helping Gamzee connect. He pulled out his huskphone.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: vRISKA
AT: i UHH,
AT: dONT SEE ANYTHING OUT HERE
AG: Of course not!
AG: Why would I put it out there, where it could get hit by a stray meteorite???
AG: Don't you ever think about shit before you open your windhole?
AG: Or, I guess, your typehole?
AT: oH
AT: oKAY
AT: sO THEN, WHERE IS EVERYTHING
AG: I put it in a super safe place!
AG: It's all on your roof!

Tavros set the huskphone down in his lap and looked up at his respiteblock. It towered over him, blotting out a large portion of the burning sky. He could make out the silhouette of SGRUB'S complicated machinery on the flat of his roof.

AT: hOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET UP THERE
AG: oh come on tavvy
AG: fly!!!!!!
AG: hahahahahaha


Tavros reentered his home, desperately wheeling up to his husktop to check on Gamzee. He was no longer centered on the screen. Tavros' heart skipped a beat.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: gAMZEE
AT: whERE ARE YOU
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: i AM SUPER SERIOUS
AT: rIGHT NOW
AT: uMM,
AT: wHERE ARE YOU

The respiteblock suddenly shook violently and Tavros dug his fingers into the armrests of the two-wheeled device as he nearly toppled over. A bright flash and an intense wave of heat washed over him. Tavros gnashed his teeth together hard, cringing and crumpling his upper body together, trying feebly to protect himself. It was the biggest meteorite yet, and the closest. As the shockwave passed him, Tavros hesitantly opened an eye, glancing out the extra large window Vriska had made, toward a gigantic crater that now spotted the landscape nearby.

His time was growing short.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: oKAY
AT: mAYBE IF YOU BUILD A ROPE DOWN
AT: i CAN CLIMB UP
AT: aND MAKE MY ITEM
AG: A rope?!?! Seriously????
AG: How do you even 8UILD a rope anyway? Could you tap on your head for me, I want to see if your skull is actually bonemush and that's why you have no fucking common sense!
AT: wELL
AT: i DONT KNOW, UHH
AT: hOW ELSE TO GET UP THERE
AT: aND IF I STAY DOWN HERE
AT: i THINK I WILL PROBABLY
AT: dIE
AG: Goddddddddddddddddddddddd Tavros
AG: What do you take me for!
AG: I told you already
AG: I am too generous!
AG: I built you a stupid ramp
AG: So you can roll your stupid two-wheeled device up
AG: And make your stupid item
AG: And get into the stupid medium!!!!!!!!
AT: rEALLY?
AG: NO I AM LYING!
AG: yes really!!!!!!!!!!!
AT: wAIT
AT: wHICH IS IT
AG: >::::T

Tentatively, Tavros stuck his head around the corner of the hallway, gazing through the flickering lights that emanated through the few intact windows left in his respiteblock. He wasn't quite sure what he was expecting Vriska to have done, but he was fairly confident in his assessment that there was no way she had built him a ramp. The fiery light cast itself upon what was, undoubtedly, a solid ramp leading up around what had become an abandoned staircase. Tavros blinked. The ramp remained.

He looked down at the huskphone in his lap, wondering if he should thank the girl. He glanced back into his room at the empty client screen where Gamzee once was. There wasn't time to get into a confusing and overly complicated series of words with the girl that together would equal no real accepted gratitude. Gamzee was undoubtedly ill-prepared to face the army of imps that were laying in ambush for him. He would probably be infatuated with their very existence, right up until they cut through him with their impy weapons, laughing little impy laughs as Gamzee cried out in pain!

Tavros closed his eyes tightly and tried to shake the thought out of his head. He had to hurry! If he got crushed by a meteor, there was no way Gamzee would be safe! He had to rely on his friend to protect himself just for a few moments while Tavros entered the medium. Steeling his resolve as best he could, which admittedly was not a whole lot, Tavros gripped the wheels next to him tightly, and took off up the ramp, quietly hoping that it wouldn't end abruptly and he'd crash down to the ground as Vriska laughed from the safety of her computer's perch.



-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Oh my goodness!
AG: You made it up the ramp!!!!!!
AG: Tavros I made you this trophy, do you want it?
AG: It is for the 8ravest 8oy in the whole wide world who was able to move his two-wheeled device up an inclined plane all 8y himself!
AG: I am so proud of you.
AG: WHO'S MY 8IG, INCLINED PLANE CLIM8ING 8OY?
AG: WHO'S MY 8IG WHEELING 8OY??????
AG: YOU ARE!!! YES, YOU ARE!!
AT: oKAY
AT: i AM PRETTY SURE YOU ARE BEING SARCASTIC AGAIN
AT: bUT,
AT: tHANK YOU
AT: fOR BUILDING THE RAMP
AT: bECAUSE I SEE THE BIG METEOR NOW
AT: aND UHH,
AT: iT LOOKS REALLY CLOSE.
AG: Well then stop shitting around and make the item!
AG: I did not go to all this trou8le just so that you would be squashed into a 8oring pile of TavGROSS
AT: uMM
AT: oKAY
AT: tHANKS
AT: i HOPE GAMZEE IS OK
AG: 8luuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Tavros looked down into the glistening brown oognibomb that the alchemiter had created for him with Vriska’s punchcard. Despite the extreme size and proximity of the rock hovering above him that seemed even closer now that he was on top of his respiteblock, his mind couldn't help but race over the possibilities of what kind of fiduspawn might be inside. Maybe a new species! That would be so exciting!

AG: Tavvvvvvros.
AG: Stop 8eing an idiot.
AG: If that's possi8le!
AG: You have to 8reak it to get to the medium.
AT: bUT
AT: i DONT HAVE A HOSTPLUSH READY
AG: oHHH, UHHHHHHH, OK THEN
AG: Just w8 until you get squished under the meteor then I guess!
AG: It should 8e totally worth it!
AG: i MEAN,
AT: wHAT IF I HURT IT
AG: Oh my godddddddddddd
AG: It hurts to roll my eyes this much.
AG: OK so
AG: Think about your high-8looded friend, I guess!
AG: And like
AG: All that friendship!!!
AG: So much friendship!!
AG: It's overwhelming you right now!!
AG: Tavros he is in trou8le and only you can save him!
AG: You must use your 8oy-skylark powers to rescue the maiden
AG: The sopor slime princess awaits!
AT: yOU REALLY THINK HES IN TROUBLE
AT: bECAUSE I AM WORRIED TOO
AG: OPEN THE GOD DAMN EGG TOREASNORE BEFORE I LOOSE MY FUCKING HANDLE ALL OVER AND FLY OFF THIS SHIT LIKE SOME CRAZY FUCKING ACROBATIC FUCKING THING
AG: Ugh I just got so worked up I couldn’t even come up with a proper sentence!
AT: oKAY,
AT: i WILL
AT: iF THATS WHAT YOU WANT, VRISKA

Tavros took a final look up at the hovering meteor. It looked like it filled the entire burning sky. The sweat was pouring off him. The oognibomb felt slippery in his shaking palm. His huskphone buzzed as Vriska continued to harass him, no doubt screaming insults and commands for him to break the ball open.

What would happen when he entered? Would he be able to come home ever again? Was Tinkerbull already there? Would it really work? Where would he go? Was Vriska playing a joke on him? What about Gamzee?

At this thought, Tavros seemed to wake. He closed his eyes tight as a loud rumbling grew up from around him, the meteor no doubt bearing down upon him. Without looking, Tavros threw the oognibomb to the ground, covering his ears from the growing noise as his hands were freed. He ducked down into his chair, squeezing his eyes closed. The rumbling grew deafening, and the heat began to choke him.




Suddenly, there was silence. Tavros opened his eyes to see his feet, just where he had left them, and the top of his respiteblock’s roof. A soft wind ruffled his hair. Slowly, Tavros sat up in his two-wheeled device.

The sky was clear of meteors, replaced with an omnipresent wind that whirled around him ceaselessly. Around his home was a desert of lightly colored sand.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: vRISKA
AT: i MADE IT
AG: Oh, really? I guess I fell asleep there at the end, what with all the excitement and all.
AT: tHERE IS A DESERT
AT: aND WIND
AG: Please tell me more, this is real exciting stuff here
AT: tHANKS
AT: i THINK YOU SAVED MY LIFE
AG: yyyyyyaaaaaaaaaawwwwwnnnnnnnn

Tavros nearly smiled at the girl’s response, but his thoughts were broken in an instant as he recalled his primary mission. He had to reconnect to Gamzee!

The two wheeled device flew down the platform and back into the respiteblock, all the while his huskphone buzzed with messages. It could wait, he thought. There were much more important things than hearing Vriska’s newest complaint.

Tavros skidded to a halt in front of his husktop and began fumbling with the controls, nearly falling out of his seat as he searched through the landscape to find his friend. There were no imps in sight, no lusus, and no Gamzee.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: gAMZEE
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: iM REALLY SORRY I HAD TO GO
AT: i HOPE YOURE OK
AT: pLEASE SAY SOMETHING
AT: aNYTHING

There were no tracks on the ground, and no trail of what Karkat had described to him as grist. Gamzee’s respiteblock was empty. His Trollian window was dormant. Tavros felt his stomach knot up tightly. If only he had been faster… he could have reconnected and found him! If Gamzee was hurt it was all his fault and he could never forgive himself!

Tavros scrolled around the environment futilely, the buzzes from his phone and the blinking of Vriska’s Trollian window completely forgotten. His stomach tightened harder and Tavros placed a hand on it, squeezing tightly, trying to match the pain.

AT: gAMZEE I AM REALLY SORRY
AT: i DIDN’T MEAN TO LEAVE YOU
AT: bUT I WAS GOING TO GET SMASHED
AT: pLEASE TELL ME YOURE OK
AT: pLEASE
AT: tELL ME ANYTHING

Tavros’ hand fell from the keyboard as he stared off into the screen. Again, the huskphone buzzed. He wanted to throw it into the wall. His eyes slowly refocused on the world Gamzee had entered. He didn’t know what to do. Was this it? Was it over?

Tavros scrolled around once more, focusing on the land, trying to put the thoughts of his mind. He wanted to see the beauty that Gamzee had seen. Tavros followed the whimsical flourishes that painted the ground, his breath evening out for the first time in hours, despite the pain that lay just out of reach. The path he followed grew lusher until he spotted a small, dark imp. Another appeared. Tavros felt worse as yet another imp appeared. They seemed to be forming a circle, lazily wandering about some central figure, a central figure that had big, bushy hair and two long horns and—

Tavros’ eyes went wide as he spotted his friend. His eyes were closed and the imps walked around him in a daze, occasionally bumping into each other and falling over. Had they killed him?! Tavros had stopped breathing completely as he stared at the scene. He was too late! They had gotten to him! He failed!

Without thinking, he brought the cursor over the other Troll and began clicking on his side, mentally crying out his friend’s name as he refused to believe what the scene depicted. An imp nearby toppled over, landing on Gamzee’s lap. It rolled down his legs, coming to a stop on its back. Gamzee’s eyes opened, and Tavros felt as though he could crash through the screen to get to his friend. Gamzee seemed to wake as he looked around dreamily for a moment, before reaching to his side and grabbing his computer, smiling.

-- terminallyCapricious [CT] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

TC: oH hEy My BrOtHeR
TC: wHeRe HaVe YoU BeEn AlL uP aT?
AT: aRE YOU ALIVE
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: gAMZEE THERE ARE IMPS
AT: eVERYWHERE
AT: aRE YOU HURT
AT: wHAT IS GOING ON
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: I HAVE BEEN MESSAGING YOU
AT: fOR AWHILE
AT: i THOUGHT YOU WERE IN TROUBLE
AT: iT LOOKED LIKE YOU WERE HURT
AT: i WAS WORRIED
AT: wELL,
AT: nO, I WAS REALLY SCARED
AT: rEALLY REALLY SCARED
TC: aW hElL nAw tHeRe aInT nO rEaSoN tO bE sCaReD!
TC: iVE jUsT bEeN cHiLlIn wItH mY nEw iMp bUds
TC: ThEy ReAlLy aRe dIgGiN oN mY sOpOr SlImE pIeS
TC: I GaVe tHeM sOmE aNd NoW wErE jUsT hAnGiN
TC: I oUgHtA oPeN a rEsTaUrAuNt oR sOmE sHit
TC: mAkE sOmE MaD cAsH
TC: tHeSe LiTtLe BrOs cAnT fUcKiN gEt EnOuGh!
AT: i WAS,
AT: rEALLY SCARED
TC: aW sHiT mY fUcKiN TaVs
TC: I dIdNt mEaN tO mAkE yOu AlL nOt ChIlL aNd ShIt
TC: wHeN wE mEeT uP iN hErE I WiLl gIvE yOu a BiG fUcKin pIe tO mAkE Up FoR iT
TC: tHe BiGgEsT!
TC: nO cHaRgE fOr TaVrOs aT tHiS FuCkIn pIe ShOp!
AT: i DONT, REALLY, WANT A PIE, ACTUALLY
AT: bUT THANKS
AT: i AM JUST GLAD YOURE OK
AT: tHAT IS MUCH BETTER THAN A PIE
AT: tO ME
TC: aWw sHiT aRe YoU SuRe cAuSe ThEsE sHiTs ArE fUcKiN gOldEn
AT: yES,
AT: i AM PRETTY SURE
AT: tHAT IT IS BETTER
AT: pLEASE STAY IN TOUCH WITH ME
AT: i DONT WANT TO LOSE YOU
AT: aGAIN
TC: tHaT iS a SuRe mOtHeRfUcKiN tHiNg!
TC: )
AT: hONK,
TC: hAhaHA ShIt YeAh mY bRoThEr!!
AT: }

Tavros was grinning for the first time all day. From behind him came a soft, fluttering, familiar sound, and as Tavros turned to face Tinkerbull’s sprite, he thought he may never stop.

“You’re late!” he jokingly scolded to the tiny bull. “Where have you been?” The bull cocked his head and seemed to smile. The computer buzzed once more, but Tavros barely heard it.


-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Tavrosssssssssssssssssssss
AG: Why are you smiling like that?
AG: It’s creeping me out. You’re such a weirdo.
AG: Your world looks so 8oring holy fuck!!
AG: Why are you so happy all of the sudden?? Ugh.
AG: Tavros?
AG: What are you doing you idiot?
AG: Hey, moron!
AG: Why are you ignoring me????
AG: You know that I can see you right?
AG: Don’t be such an idiot!
AG: TTTTTTTT
AG: AAAAAAAAAAAAA
AG: VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
AG: RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
AG: OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
AG: SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

-- adiosToreador [AT] blocked arachnidsGrip [AG] –

AG: What.

Wow, you got all the characters down so perfectly! I laughed at Vriska's 'what.' at the end there, it was fantastic

[Sushi Database]

Oh gosh I wrote something that’s not slash! This was meant to be a short little “What happened to them?” fic but ….. I have (length) problems.

Action/Adventure: Tavros struggles to protect Gamzee in the medium while hoping Vriska will save him.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Gamzee's first step into the medium was wrought with poetry so vivid and intense that to transcribe it to words would be such unjust treatment as to be a crime against all such prose that came before it. The world dripped with splendor so thick it condensed on his surroundings like sugary dew, glistening in the light as it filled the air with the scent of honey. This was how Gamzee saw most things, however, and if he had been in a clearer state of mind, he may have realized that it was why Tavros was not nearly as excited as he was by the new environment.

AT: uMM, OKAY
AT: i NEED YOU TO
AT: kIND OF FOCUS, FOR A SECOND
AT: iF THATS OKAY
TC: CaN yOu FuCkIn SeE tHis ShIt AlL uP iN hErE???
TC: iS tHiS sHit EvEn ReAl??
TC: LiKe HoW tHe fUcK dOeS tHiS mOtHeRfUcKiN bEaUtY eVeN hApPeN
TC: ItS fUcKiN uNnAtUrAl
TC: bUt nAtUrAl!
TC: hAhA
TC: WoW
TC: WhOA!!!!!!!
TC: HoLy ShIt TiTs
TC: dO YoU sEe ThAt MoThErFuCkEr RiGhT tHeRe?!
AT: gAMZEE,
AT: i, UHH
AT: sORT OF DON'T HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO,
AT: rEALLY GET INVOLVED IN YOUR GAME
TC: hAhAhA HoLy BoNe gRabBiN GrUb LoVeR tHaT mOtHeRfUcKiN pLaNt jUsT mOvEd!!
TC: hOw ThE fUcK dId iT dO tHaT
TC: hAhAhahA oH WoW
AT: aRE YOU STILL THERE
AT: yOU ARENT REALLY,
AT: rESPONDING TO ME
AT: gAMZEE,
AT: i AM STILL UHH,
AT: sTILL HERE
AT: oN ALTERNIA
AT: wITH ALL THE METEORS
AT: tHEY ARE STILL COMING
TC: sHiT I aM LiKe oNe mOrE fUcKiN aWeSoMe FuCkIn MiRaClE aWaY fRoM sTrAiGhT uP lOsInG AlL oF mY mOtHeRfUcKiN sHiT aLl OvEr ThE PlAcE
TC: hAhahAHh
AT: uHH,
AT: iT IS REALLY PRETTY THERE
AT: bUT,
AT: vRISKA IS MY SERVER PLAYER
AT: aND UHH,
AT: tO BE HONEST
AT: i AM NOT SURE SHE IS GOING TO HELP ME AVOID THESE METEORS
AT: eVEN THOUGH KARKAT SAID SHE WOULD
AT: i DONT KNOW
AT: sHE ALREADY KIND OF
AT: jUST THREW THE LOAD GAPER,
AT: oUT THROUGH MY WALL
AT: iTS OUTSIDE NOW,
AT: mY LOAD GAPER
AT: sHE KEEPS LAUGHING
TC: WhOAAAAaaaAA!!!
TC: mY FuCkIn LuSuS cAn TaLk!!!!!!
TC: hOw tHe FuCk dId It LeArN tO dO tHat
TC: tHiS iS tHe MoThErFuCkIn KiNg oF aLl mIrAcLeS rIgHt HeRe!!!!!!!!
TC: Oh ThErE gOeS mY ShIt jUsT gEtTiN aLl uP aNd lOsT! hAhaHa!

Tavros could feel the sweat on the back of his neck as he tapped his keys anxiously. Could Vriska see what he was typing? He hadn't thought of that. What if she could read it? Surely she would start berating him for even mentioning her. She would probably be mad that he called her by her name, or doubted her intentions. After all, she kept claiming that she was "only helping." Despite her words, Tavros couldn’t help but sit straight in his two-wheeled device, eyes peeled for any sudden movements, ears aching as they listened for any tell-tale signs of the next step in Vriska's systematic destruction of his respiteblock.

If only Gamzee were paying attention! He always knew just what to say to make Tavros feel better.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: uMM,
AT: cOULD YOU,
AT: mAYBE REPLACE THAT WALL
AT: tHAT JUST FELL DOWN
AT: mY FAVORITE POSTER WAS ON IT
AT: i KNOW THIS IS LIKE,
AT: a BUILDING GAME
AT: sO,
AG: Uuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggh
AG: Don't you ever stop complaining?
AG: You're so annoying!
AG: There are meteors about to flatten your sorry ass and all you can think about are your dum8 posters!!!!!!
AT: i AM THINKING ABOUT THE METEORS
AT: i AM THINKING ABOUT THEM A LOT
AG: Then shut up for once and let me do my 8uisiness!
AT: wELL,
AT: i AM STILL,
AT: yOU KNOW
AT: hERE,
AT: sO, UHH, I JUST FIGURED
AT: iF I DONT MAKE IT TO THE MEDIUM
AT: mAYBE YOU COULD JUST,
AT: lET ME HAVE MY POSTERS BACK FIRST
AT: iF THATS NOT,
AT: uHH,
AT: tOO MUCH WORK
AT: fOR YOU
AG: I'm going to get you to the medium!!!!!!!! jegus!
AG: Despite all the 8laring sirens in my head screaming JUST LEAVE HIM
AG: HE IS, UHHHHHHHHHHHH
AG: NOT GOING TO BE VERY USEFUL IN THE GAME
AG: I am still working on it so why don’t you just RELAX
AG: If you can get your pathetic fuck-ass clown friend in there without somehow fucking up too 8adly do you really think i am going to have a pro8lem???
AT: sORRY
AT: i DIDNT MEAN TO,
AT: fLY OFF THE HANDLE LIKE THAT
AG: Oh please Tavros! Can you apologize more to me?????? I love it so much when you whimper and crawl around on your 8elly like the tiny little gru8 that you are!
AT: sORRY
AG: UGH!!!!!!!! OK that's it I am taking down another wall, you have earned it!

-- arachnidsGrip [AG] ceased trolling adiosToreador [AT] -


Tavros clicked on the SGRUB window behind Vriska's chat. Gamzee was lying on the ground, staring up into the sky with wide, unblinking eyes. His lusus-sprite was nearby, watching over him. Over the crest of a nearby hill, out of Gamzee’s glazed line-of-sight, was an army of small, black imps. They were gathering together. Tavros swallowed hard.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: hEY, UHH
AT: tHERE ARE A LOT OF THOSE IMPS THAT TEREZI TOLD ME ABOUT
AT: tHE LICORICE GUYS
AT: tHAT WANT TO HURT US
AT: I THINK YOU SHOULD GET UP
AT: bEFORE THEY GET TO YOU


Tavros clicked madly through SGRUB’S interface, looking for a way to help Gamzee. The imps were going to reach him soon, and in his dreamy state he was in no condition to fight. Tavros nervously scrolled through endless options that made little sense. He was supposed to be building platforms for Gamzee to reach his second gate, too! At least, that's what he thought Karkat had said. Karkat yelled a lot and made up really long, strung-together words that Tavros liked to skim over sometimes, so it was hard to tell.

His heart hadn't slowed in the last few hours. He had to protect Gamzee somehow -- but there were also those meteors hovering just above him, and he was fairly certain that Vriska wasn't going to do much about them. At least she had thrown Tinkerbull into the kernelsprite for him, none too delicately, of course, but Tavros hadn't seen hide nor horn of him since. For all he knew, Vriska intentionally made it seem like she was prototyping his deceased guardian, when really she was just setting him up for disappointment. Maybe it would be a hostplush sprite. Or Pupa Pan! Tavros caught himself quickly. Vriska would never do that. Maybe she had actually thrown the load gaper into it?

There was an ominous rumbling from outside. Tavros looked through the large, gaping hole that Vriska had made for him earlier. The sky was bright orange, and heat was radiating in from the ground. A bead of sweat rolled down his back.

Suddenly there was a booming crash so loud that Tavros bounced up from the two-wheeled device. As he landed back down, he saw his bathtub fly through the air outside, crashing out of a wall from the other side of his hive. The meteorites seemed to be landing closer as well.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: uHH
AT: oKAY SO YOU GOT ME BACK
AT: fOR WHATEVER I DID
AT: cAN WE MAYBE,
AT: tALK ABOUT GETTING OUT OF HERE
AT: iTS GETTING HOT
AG: 8lah 8lah 8lah
AG: I'm sure I can find more things to 8ust out of your respite8lock if you'd like to keep complaining
AT: nO,
AT: tHATS OKAY
AG: Look I put your stupid flying dead steer8east thing into your stupid glowing kernelsprite to make you an even stupider flying 8ull piece of shit!
AG: I don't even know why I was so generous
AG: I guess that's just who I am
AG: So generous! All the time!
AG: Please, stop thanking me Tavros!
AG: You are em8arassing me!
AG: I am literally growing flush over all this gratitude you are pouring on me!
AG: I could 8athe in it, if I hadn't just thrown your 8athtub out into your yard
AG: Do you see what you make me do?!
AT: oKAY
AT: tHANKS
AT: tINKERBULL IS A PRETTY GOOD LUSUS
AT: tHANKS FOR USING HIM
AG: ughhhhhhhh
AG: You are so disgusting

Tavros clicked away once more as he saw Vriska's cursor move back above his respiteblock, hopefully to build more. The client server still showed Gamzee on the ground, smiling as he appeared to doze off, enveloped in the beauty he could no doubt barely comprehend around him.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: uMM
AT: i COULD REALLY USE
AT: sOME OF YOUR ENCOURAGEMENT
AT: cAUSE YOU'RE REALLY GOOD
AT: aT MAKING ME FEEL BETTER
AT: aND VRISKA IS SCARING ME
AT: aLSO,
AT: wAKE UP
AT: tHOSE IMPS ARE CLOSER
AT: gAMZEE,


-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Okay little 8oy skytard, I put all the game's equipment outside for you to use.
AG: All you have to do is put in this punchcard I put on your desk and it will create an item for you to use to get out of there!
AG: So simple!!!!
AG: Even you can do it!
AT: oH,
AT: oKAY
AT: bECAUSE I AM WORRIED ABOUT GAMZEE
AT: i DONT WANT TO DISCONNECT FROM HIM FOR TOO LONG
AT: tHANKS VRISKA
AG: Oh gog please dont thank me, its em8arassing how easy this shit is
AG: They have all these complex names for shit like they think will make it seem difficult but really it’s so straightforward I wonder why anyone would have any pro8lem with it at all!!!
AG: this game poses no challenge to someone with my skill.
AG: I am SO 8ORED already! :::<

Tavros considered agreeing with the girl, potentially gaining her favor, but decided against it. There was never anything he could say that went over well with Vriska. A compliment would only earn him a punishment, perhaps on par with the punishment he would receive for a complaint. Instead, Tavros wheeled himself over to the ramp that led him down to the front of his lawnring.

The ground outside was pulsating with each impact of the meteorites that were now raining down around him. The sky had turned red, and the brush around him was browning under the heat. Tavros looked around. The load gaper sat nearby. Further off, the bathtub. There was no sign of any of the SGRUB machinery he had encountered when helping Gamzee connect. He pulled out his huskphone.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: vRISKA
AT: i UHH,
AT: dONT SEE ANYTHING OUT HERE
AG: Of course not!
AG: Why would I put it out there, where it could get hit by a stray meteorite???
AG: Don't you ever think about shit before you open your windhole?
AG: Or, I guess, your typehole?
AT: oH
AT: oKAY
AT: sO THEN, WHERE IS EVERYTHING
AG: I put it in a super safe place!
AG: It's all on your roof!

Tavros set the huskphone down in his lap and looked up at his respiteblock. It towered over him, blotting out a large portion of the burning sky. He could make out the silhouette of SGRUB'S complicated machinery on the flat of his roof.

AT: hOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET UP THERE
AG: oh come on tavvy
AG: fly!!!!!!
AG: hahahahahaha


Tavros reentered his home, desperately wheeling up to his husktop to check on Gamzee. He was no longer centered on the screen. Tavros' heart skipped a beat.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: gAMZEE
AT: whERE ARE YOU
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: i AM SUPER SERIOUS
AT: rIGHT NOW
AT: uMM,
AT: wHERE ARE YOU

The respiteblock suddenly shook violently and Tavros dug his fingers into the armrests of the two-wheeled device as he nearly toppled over. A bright flash and an intense wave of heat washed over him. Tavros gnashed his teeth together hard, cringing and crumpling his upper body together, trying feebly to protect himself. It was the biggest meteorite yet, and the closest. As the shockwave passed him, Tavros hesitantly opened an eye, glancing out the extra large window Vriska had made, toward a gigantic crater that now spotted the landscape nearby.

His time was growing short.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: oKAY
AT: mAYBE IF YOU BUILD A ROPE DOWN
AT: i CAN CLIMB UP
AT: aND MAKE MY ITEM
AG: A rope?!?! Seriously????
AG: How do you even 8UILD a rope anyway? Could you tap on your head for me, I want to see if your skull is actually bonemush and that's why you have no fucking common sense!
AT: wELL
AT: i DONT KNOW, UHH
AT: hOW ELSE TO GET UP THERE
AT: aND IF I STAY DOWN HERE
AT: i THINK I WILL PROBABLY
AT: dIE
AG: Goddddddddddddddddddddddd Tavros
AG: What do you take me for!
AG: I told you already
AG: I am too generous!
AG: I built you a stupid ramp
AG: So you can roll your stupid two-wheeled device up
AG: And make your stupid item
AG: And get into the stupid medium!!!!!!!!
AT: rEALLY?
AG: NO I AM LYING!
AG: yes really!!!!!!!!!!!
AT: wAIT
AT: wHICH IS IT
AG: >::::T

Tentatively, Tavros stuck his head around the corner of the hallway, gazing through the flickering lights that emanated through the few intact windows left in his respiteblock. He wasn't quite sure what he was expecting Vriska to have done, but he was fairly confident in his assessment that there was no way she had built him a ramp. The fiery light cast itself upon what was, undoubtedly, a solid ramp leading up around what had become an abandoned staircase. Tavros blinked. The ramp remained.

He looked down at the huskphone in his lap, wondering if he should thank the girl. He glanced back into his room at the empty client screen where Gamzee once was. There wasn't time to get into a confusing and overly complicated series of words with the girl that together would equal no real accepted gratitude. Gamzee was undoubtedly ill-prepared to face the army of imps that were laying in ambush for him. He would probably be infatuated with their very existence, right up until they cut through him with their impy weapons, laughing little impy laughs as Gamzee cried out in pain!

Tavros closed his eyes tightly and tried to shake the thought out of his head. He had to hurry! If he got crushed by a meteor, there was no way Gamzee would be safe! He had to rely on his friend to protect himself just for a few moments while Tavros entered the medium. Steeling his resolve as best he could, which admittedly was not a whole lot, Tavros gripped the wheels next to him tightly, and took off up the ramp, quietly hoping that it wouldn't end abruptly and he'd crash down to the ground as Vriska laughed from the safety of her computer's perch.



-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Oh my goodness!
AG: You made it up the ramp!!!!!!
AG: Tavros I made you this trophy, do you want it?
AG: It is for the 8ravest 8oy in the whole wide world who was able to move his two-wheeled device up an inclined plane all 8y himself!
AG: I am so proud of you.
AG: WHO'S MY 8IG, INCLINED PLANE CLIM8ING 8OY?
AG: WHO'S MY 8IG WHEELING 8OY??????
AG: YOU ARE!!! YES, YOU ARE!!
AT: oKAY
AT: i AM PRETTY SURE YOU ARE BEING SARCASTIC AGAIN
AT: bUT,
AT: tHANK YOU
AT: fOR BUILDING THE RAMP
AT: bECAUSE I SEE THE BIG METEOR NOW
AT: aND UHH,
AT: iT LOOKS REALLY CLOSE.
AG: Well then stop shitting around and make the item!
AG: I did not go to all this trou8le just so that you would be squashed into a 8oring pile of TavGROSS
AT: uMM
AT: oKAY
AT: tHANKS
AT: i HOPE GAMZEE IS OK
AG: 8luuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Tavros looked down into the glistening brown oognibomb that the alchemiter had created for him with Vriska’s punchcard. Despite the extreme size and proximity of the rock hovering above him that seemed even closer now that he was on top of his respiteblock, his mind couldn't help but race over the possibilities of what kind of fiduspawn might be inside. Maybe a new species! That would be so exciting!

AG: Tavvvvvvros.
AG: Stop 8eing an idiot.
AG: If that's possi8le!
AG: You have to 8reak it to get to the medium.
AT: bUT
AT: i DONT HAVE A HOSTPLUSH READY
AG: oHHH, UHHHHHHH, OK THEN
AG: Just w8 until you get squished under the meteor then I guess!
AG: It should 8e totally worth it!
AG: i MEAN,
AT: wHAT IF I HURT IT
AG: Oh my godddddddddddd
AG: It hurts to roll my eyes this much.
AG: OK so
AG: Think about your high-8looded friend, I guess!
AG: And like
AG: All that friendship!!!
AG: So much friendship!!
AG: It's overwhelming you right now!!
AG: Tavros he is in trou8le and only you can save him!
AG: You must use your 8oy-skylark powers to rescue the maiden
AG: The sopor slime princess awaits!
AT: yOU REALLY THINK HES IN TROUBLE
AT: bECAUSE I AM WORRIED TOO
AG: OPEN THE GOD DAMN EGG TOREASNORE BEFORE I LOOSE MY FUCKING HANDLE ALL OVER AND FLY OFF THIS SHIT LIKE SOME CRAZY FUCKING ACROBATIC FUCKING THING
AG: Ugh I just got so worked up I couldn’t even come up with a proper sentence!
AT: oKAY,
AT: i WILL
AT: iF THATS WHAT YOU WANT, VRISKA

Tavros took a final look up at the hovering meteor. It looked like it filled the entire burning sky. The sweat was pouring off him. The oognibomb felt slippery in his shaking palm. His huskphone buzzed as Vriska continued to harass him, no doubt screaming insults and commands for him to break the ball open.

What would happen when he entered? Would he be able to come home ever again? Was Tinkerbull already there? Would it really work? Where would he go? Was Vriska playing a joke on him? What about Gamzee?

At this thought, Tavros seemed to wake. He closed his eyes tight as a loud rumbling grew up from around him, the meteor no doubt bearing down upon him. Without looking, Tavros threw the oognibomb to the ground, covering his ears from the growing noise as his hands were freed. He ducked down into his chair, squeezing his eyes closed. The rumbling grew deafening, and the heat began to choke him.




Suddenly, there was silence. Tavros opened his eyes to see his feet, just where he had left them, and the top of his respiteblock’s roof. A soft wind ruffled his hair. Slowly, Tavros sat up in his two-wheeled device.

The sky was clear of meteors, replaced with an omnipresent wind that whirled around him ceaselessly. Around his home was a desert of lightly colored sand.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: vRISKA
AT: i MADE IT
AG: Oh, really? I guess I fell asleep there at the end, what with all the excitement and all.
AT: tHERE IS A DESERT
AT: aND WIND
AG: Please tell me more, this is real exciting stuff here
AT: tHANKS
AT: i THINK YOU SAVED MY LIFE
AG: yyyyyyaaaaaaaaaawwwwwnnnnnnnn

Tavros nearly smiled at the girl’s response, but his thoughts were broken in an instant as he recalled his primary mission. He had to reconnect to Gamzee!

The two wheeled device flew down the platform and back into the respiteblock, all the while his huskphone buzzed with messages. It could wait, he thought. There were much more important things than hearing Vriska’s newest complaint.

Tavros skidded to a halt in front of his husktop and began fumbling with the controls, nearly falling out of his seat as he searched through the landscape to find his friend. There were no imps in sight, no lusus, and no Gamzee.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: gAMZEE
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: iM REALLY SORRY I HAD TO GO
AT: i HOPE YOURE OK
AT: pLEASE SAY SOMETHING
AT: aNYTHING

There were no tracks on the ground, and no trail of what Karkat had described to him as grist. Gamzee’s respiteblock was empty. His Trollian window was dormant. Tavros felt his stomach knot up tightly. If only he had been faster… he could have reconnected and found him! If Gamzee was hurt it was all his fault and he could never forgive himself!

Tavros scrolled around the environment futilely, the buzzes from his phone and the blinking of Vriska’s Trollian window completely forgotten. His stomach tightened harder and Tavros placed a hand on it, squeezing tightly, trying to match the pain.

AT: gAMZEE I AM REALLY SORRY
AT: i DIDN’T MEAN TO LEAVE YOU
AT: bUT I WAS GOING TO GET SMASHED
AT: pLEASE TELL ME YOURE OK
AT: pLEASE
AT: tELL ME ANYTHING

Tavros’ hand fell from the keyboard as he stared off into the screen. Again, the huskphone buzzed. He wanted to throw it into the wall. His eyes slowly refocused on the world Gamzee had entered. He didn’t know what to do. Was this it? Was it over?

Tavros scrolled around once more, focusing on the land, trying to put the thoughts of his mind. He wanted to see the beauty that Gamzee had seen. Tavros followed the whimsical flourishes that painted the ground, his breath evening out for the first time in hours, despite the pain that lay just out of reach. The path he followed grew lusher until he spotted a small, dark imp. Another appeared. Tavros felt worse as yet another imp appeared. They seemed to be forming a circle, lazily wandering about some central figure, a central figure that had big, bushy hair and two long horns and—

Tavros’ eyes went wide as he spotted his friend. His eyes were closed and the imps walked around him in a daze, occasionally bumping into each other and falling over. Had they killed him?! Tavros had stopped breathing completely as he stared at the scene. He was too late! They had gotten to him! He failed!

Without thinking, he brought the cursor over the other Troll and began clicking on his side, mentally crying out his friend’s name as he refused to believe what the scene depicted. An imp nearby toppled over, landing on Gamzee’s lap. It rolled down his legs, coming to a stop on its back. Gamzee’s eyes opened, and Tavros felt as though he could crash through the screen to get to his friend. Gamzee seemed to wake as he looked around dreamily for a moment, before reaching to his side and grabbing his computer, smiling.

-- terminallyCapricious [CT] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

TC: oH hEy My BrOtHeR
TC: wHeRe HaVe YoU BeEn AlL uP aT?
AT: aRE YOU ALIVE
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: gAMZEE THERE ARE IMPS
AT: eVERYWHERE
AT: aRE YOU HURT
AT: wHAT IS GOING ON
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: I HAVE BEEN MESSAGING YOU
AT: fOR AWHILE
AT: i THOUGHT YOU WERE IN TROUBLE
AT: iT LOOKED LIKE YOU WERE HURT
AT: i WAS WORRIED
AT: wELL,
AT: nO, I WAS REALLY SCARED
AT: rEALLY REALLY SCARED
TC: aW hElL nAw tHeRe aInT nO rEaSoN tO bE sCaReD!
TC: iVE jUsT bEeN cHiLlIn wItH mY nEw iMp bUds
TC: ThEy ReAlLy aRe dIgGiN oN mY sOpOr SlImE pIeS
TC: I GaVe tHeM sOmE aNd NoW wErE jUsT hAnGiN
TC: I oUgHtA oPeN a rEsTaUrAuNt oR sOmE sHit
TC: mAkE sOmE MaD cAsH
TC: tHeSe LiTtLe BrOs cAnT fUcKiN gEt EnOuGh!
AT: i WAS,
AT: rEALLY SCARED
TC: aW sHiT mY fUcKiN TaVs
TC: I dIdNt mEaN tO mAkE yOu AlL nOt ChIlL aNd ShIt
TC: wHeN wE mEeT uP iN hErE I WiLl gIvE yOu a BiG fUcKin pIe tO mAkE Up FoR iT
TC: tHe BiGgEsT!
TC: nO cHaRgE fOr TaVrOs aT tHiS FuCkIn pIe ShOp!
AT: i DONT, REALLY, WANT A PIE, ACTUALLY
AT: bUT THANKS
AT: i AM JUST GLAD YOURE OK
AT: tHAT IS MUCH BETTER THAN A PIE
AT: tO ME
TC: aWw sHiT aRe YoU SuRe cAuSe ThEsE sHiTs ArE fUcKiN gOldEn
AT: yES,
AT: i AM PRETTY SURE
AT: tHAT IT IS BETTER
AT: pLEASE STAY IN TOUCH WITH ME
AT: i DONT WANT TO LOSE YOU
AT: aGAIN
TC: tHaT iS a SuRe mOtHeRfUcKiN tHiNg!
TC: )
AT: hONK,
TC: hAhaHA ShIt YeAh mY bRoThEr!!
AT: }

Tavros was grinning for the first time all day. From behind him came a soft, fluttering, familiar sound, and as Tavros turned to face Tinkerbull’s sprite, he thought he may never stop.

“You’re late!” he jokingly scolded to the tiny bull. “Where have you been?” The bull cocked his head and seemed to smile. The computer buzzed once more, but Tavros barely heard it.


-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Tavrosssssssssssssssssssss
AG: Why are you smiling like that?
AG: It’s creeping me out. You’re such a weirdo.
AG: Your world looks so 8oring holy fuck!!
AG: Why are you so happy all of the sudden?? Ugh.
AG: Tavros?
AG: What are you doing you idiot?
AG: Hey, moron!
AG: Why are you ignoring me????
AG: You know that I can see you right?
AG: Don’t be such an idiot!
AG: TTTTTTTT
AG: AAAAAAAAAAAAA
AG: VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
AG: RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
AG: OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
AG: SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

-- adiosToreador [AT] blocked arachnidsGrip [AG] –

AG: What.

Awww, Tavros Gamzee :3

[yellowwedge]

I wrote a little more of Schoolstuck, if you guys are interested. :3

Spoiler'd for silliness and length:

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Henry Tudor (for that was his name) was roused from his drowsy state by the chiming of his laptop. Upon further inspection, Pesterchum was open and he was being pestered by one of his friends from the dorm across the way. With a yawn and catlike stretch, he responded to the question he had been offered with a short and fitting reply:

confinementTruth began pestering cubicCuriosity at 23:17
CT: oh man
CT: do you have any idea what’s going on?
CC: not a bloody clue.
CC: please feel free to enlighten me.
CT: you havnt heard of Sburb?
CT: It’s like, some conspiracy shit
CT: personally I blame the government
CC: I never really understood that bro
CC: like, you hate the government
CC: and you’re all anarchical and whatnot
CC: yet here you are at Turntech college
CC: …?
CT: yeah well.
CT: im like a Trojan horse or some shit.
CT: anyway man
CT: Sburb
CT: im so pumped for this
CC: So wait
CC: were going to play a game?
CC: *we’re
CT: hell yeah.
CT: iv been researching this shit for months
CT: its got some kind of connection with all these meteor strikes.
CT: well personally I doubt they’re meteors but whatever.
CC: so let me get this straight; this thing is a game, and it’s installing on your computer.
CT: correct.
CT: except for one detail
CT: I’ve spoken to a few friends.
CT: I think its installing on every computer in the school.
CC: wat.

I'm just trying to balance how many characters to introduce at this stage with realism (everyone being involved with this game).

[orngjce223]

Hey guys I've stopped trying to keep up with this thread because it's too much fantastic in not enough time but here's some notes I put together on Troll Twilight if anyone's interested in writing what Kanaya might read?

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Trolls have exoskeletons; thus, it can be noted that a rainbow-drinker must have skin as yielding and soft as fabric, as much as that implies. On all fronts, not just the skin part; they stay in the sunlight because the dark dims their powers of color beyond recognition and they end up as white as a lusus. In the original stories, in fact, they are nothing /but/ woven sunlight and they disappear when or where the light ends. Not that this'll stop Troll Twilight from expressing the star-crossed love between Lucila and Marcat.

Similarly, the Shadow-droppers, in the original stories, are ordinary trolls who turn into terrifying monsters - giant tarantula-like beings who will happily eat trolls - upon the solar apogee, which means the best course of protection from them is to stay in the dark. In Troll Twilight, this transformation is voluntary, maintains one's mind so that one can minimize bloodlust, and can be done anywhere, although it's still easier when the sun's out. Ryanor is a shadow-dropper who also lusts after Lucila.

Lucila has a giant inferiority complex and yet, somehow, is being chased by the immortal boys in the neighborhood. Please don't ask me why. Her lusus is completely ignorant of these happenings, anyway: trolls have unique smells, but the immortals have no smells at all, so the lusus doesn't detect them.

Troll Twilight is actually critically-acclaimed as a fantastic piece of literature that puts a new twist on the old stories.

[DocBeard]

Dang, Dave aint alright. @_@

Dave's fine. It's just.

Its hard. Being a young adult. and. and no one understands.

But yeah, all four kids have Issues. Sarasvati has a good handle on them, from what I've seen.

e: oh right, I didn't miss it, assuming it's the "Jade coming downstairs to find her grandpa dead and stuffed" one. Hehe, I know what you mean. I guess if I wanted to be twisted I could make that her ninth birthday present... :mspareader:

Really, with your having John know Jade's a relative from the beginning, I'm kind of fascinated by the implications as far as how John would react to, 'One of my best friends has been alone on an island with her dog for YEARS and me, one of her two living relatives, had no idea.' once he got a chance to really process that.

[Bardic Feline]

Oh gosh I wrote something that’s not slash! This was meant to be a short little “What happened to them?” fic but ….. I have (length) problems.

Action/Adventure: Tavros struggles to protect Gamzee in the medium while hoping Vriska will save him.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Gamzee's first step into the medium was wrought with poetry so vivid and intense that to transcribe it to words would be such unjust treatment as to be a crime against all such prose that came before it. The world dripped with splendor so thick it condensed on his surroundings like sugary dew, glistening in the light as it filled the air with the scent of honey. This was how Gamzee saw most things, however, and if he had been in a clearer state of mind, he may have realized that it was why Tavros was not nearly as excited as he was by the new environment.

AT: uMM, OKAY
AT: i NEED YOU TO
AT: kIND OF FOCUS, FOR A SECOND
AT: iF THATS OKAY
TC: CaN yOu FuCkIn SeE tHis ShIt AlL uP iN hErE???
TC: iS tHiS sHit EvEn ReAl??
TC: LiKe HoW tHe fUcK dOeS tHiS mOtHeRfUcKiN bEaUtY eVeN hApPeN
TC: ItS fUcKiN uNnAtUrAl
TC: bUt nAtUrAl!
TC: hAhA
TC: WoW
TC: WhOA!!!!!!!
TC: HoLy ShIt TiTs
TC: dO YoU sEe ThAt MoThErFuCkEr RiGhT tHeRe?!
AT: gAMZEE,
AT: i, UHH
AT: sORT OF DON'T HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO,
AT: rEALLY GET INVOLVED IN YOUR GAME
TC: hAhAhA HoLy BoNe gRabBiN GrUb LoVeR tHaT mOtHeRfUcKiN pLaNt jUsT mOvEd!!
TC: hOw ThE fUcK dId iT dO tHaT
TC: hAhAhahA oH WoW
AT: aRE YOU STILL THERE
AT: yOU ARENT REALLY,
AT: rESPONDING TO ME
AT: gAMZEE,
AT: i AM STILL UHH,
AT: sTILL HERE
AT: oN ALTERNIA
AT: wITH ALL THE METEORS
AT: tHEY ARE STILL COMING
TC: sHiT I aM LiKe oNe mOrE fUcKiN aWeSoMe FuCkIn MiRaClE aWaY fRoM sTrAiGhT uP lOsInG AlL oF mY mOtHeRfUcKiN sHiT aLl OvEr ThE PlAcE
TC: hAhahAHh
AT: uHH,
AT: iT IS REALLY PRETTY THERE
AT: bUT,
AT: vRISKA IS MY SERVER PLAYER
AT: aND UHH,
AT: tO BE HONEST
AT: i AM NOT SURE SHE IS GOING TO HELP ME AVOID THESE METEORS
AT: eVEN THOUGH KARKAT SAID SHE WOULD
AT: i DONT KNOW
AT: sHE ALREADY KIND OF
AT: jUST THREW THE LOAD GAPER,
AT: oUT THROUGH MY WALL
AT: iTS OUTSIDE NOW,
AT: mY LOAD GAPER
AT: sHE KEEPS LAUGHING
TC: WhOAAAAaaaAA!!!
TC: mY FuCkIn LuSuS cAn TaLk!!!!!!
TC: hOw tHe FuCk dId It LeArN tO dO tHat
TC: tHiS iS tHe MoThErFuCkIn KiNg oF aLl mIrAcLeS rIgHt HeRe!!!!!!!!
TC: Oh ThErE gOeS mY ShIt jUsT gEtTiN aLl uP aNd lOsT! hAhaHa!

Tavros could feel the sweat on the back of his neck as he tapped his keys anxiously. Could Vriska see what he was typing? He hadn't thought of that. What if she could read it? Surely she would start berating him for even mentioning her. She would probably be mad that he called her by her name, or doubted her intentions. After all, she kept claiming that she was "only helping." Despite her words, Tavros couldn’t help but sit straight in his two-wheeled device, eyes peeled for any sudden movements, ears aching as they listened for any tell-tale signs of the next step in Vriska's systematic destruction of his respiteblock.

If only Gamzee were paying attention! He always knew just what to say to make Tavros feel better.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: uMM,
AT: cOULD YOU,
AT: mAYBE REPLACE THAT WALL
AT: tHAT JUST FELL DOWN
AT: mY FAVORITE POSTER WAS ON IT
AT: i KNOW THIS IS LIKE,
AT: a BUILDING GAME
AT: sO,
AG: Uuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggh
AG: Don't you ever stop complaining?
AG: You're so annoying!
AG: There are meteors about to flatten your sorry ass and all you can think about are your dum8 posters!!!!!!
AT: i AM THINKING ABOUT THE METEORS
AT: i AM THINKING ABOUT THEM A LOT
AG: Then shut up for once and let me do my 8uisiness!
AT: wELL,
AT: i AM STILL,
AT: yOU KNOW
AT: hERE,
AT: sO, UHH, I JUST FIGURED
AT: iF I DONT MAKE IT TO THE MEDIUM
AT: mAYBE YOU COULD JUST,
AT: lET ME HAVE MY POSTERS BACK FIRST
AT: iF THATS NOT,
AT: uHH,
AT: tOO MUCH WORK
AT: fOR YOU
AG: I'm going to get you to the medium!!!!!!!! jegus!
AG: Despite all the 8laring sirens in my head screaming JUST LEAVE HIM
AG: HE IS, UHHHHHHHHHHHH
AG: NOT GOING TO BE VERY USEFUL IN THE GAME
AG: I am still working on it so why don’t you just RELAX
AG: If you can get your pathetic fuck-ass clown friend in there without somehow fucking up too 8adly do you really think i am going to have a pro8lem???
AT: sORRY
AT: i DIDNT MEAN TO,
AT: fLY OFF THE HANDLE LIKE THAT
AG: Oh please Tavros! Can you apologize more to me?????? I love it so much when you whimper and crawl around on your 8elly like the tiny little gru8 that you are!
AT: sORRY
AG: UGH!!!!!!!! OK that's it I am taking down another wall, you have earned it!

-- arachnidsGrip [AG] ceased trolling adiosToreador [AT] -


Tavros clicked on the SGRUB window behind Vriska's chat. Gamzee was lying on the ground, staring up into the sky with wide, unblinking eyes. His lusus-sprite was nearby, watching over him. Over the crest of a nearby hill, out of Gamzee’s glazed line-of-sight, was an army of small, black imps. They were gathering together. Tavros swallowed hard.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: hEY, UHH
AT: tHERE ARE A LOT OF THOSE IMPS THAT TEREZI TOLD ME ABOUT
AT: tHE LICORICE GUYS
AT: tHAT WANT TO HURT US
AT: I THINK YOU SHOULD GET UP
AT: bEFORE THEY GET TO YOU


Tavros clicked madly through SGRUB’S interface, looking for a way to help Gamzee. The imps were going to reach him soon, and in his dreamy state he was in no condition to fight. Tavros nervously scrolled through endless options that made little sense. He was supposed to be building platforms for Gamzee to reach his second gate, too! At least, that's what he thought Karkat had said. Karkat yelled a lot and made up really long, strung-together words that Tavros liked to skim over sometimes, so it was hard to tell.

His heart hadn't slowed in the last few hours. He had to protect Gamzee somehow -- but there were also those meteors hovering just above him, and he was fairly certain that Vriska wasn't going to do much about them. At least she had thrown Tinkerbull into the kernelsprite for him, none too delicately, of course, but Tavros hadn't seen hide nor horn of him since. For all he knew, Vriska intentionally made it seem like she was prototyping his deceased guardian, when really she was just setting him up for disappointment. Maybe it would be a hostplush sprite. Or Pupa Pan! Tavros caught himself quickly. Vriska would never do that. Maybe she had actually thrown the load gaper into it?

There was an ominous rumbling from outside. Tavros looked through the large, gaping hole that Vriska had made for him earlier. The sky was bright orange, and heat was radiating in from the ground. A bead of sweat rolled down his back.

Suddenly there was a booming crash so loud that Tavros bounced up from the two-wheeled device. As he landed back down, he saw his bathtub fly through the air outside, crashing out of a wall from the other side of his hive. The meteorites seemed to be landing closer as well.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: uHH
AT: oKAY SO YOU GOT ME BACK
AT: fOR WHATEVER I DID
AT: cAN WE MAYBE,
AT: tALK ABOUT GETTING OUT OF HERE
AT: iTS GETTING HOT
AG: 8lah 8lah 8lah
AG: I'm sure I can find more things to 8ust out of your respite8lock if you'd like to keep complaining
AT: nO,
AT: tHATS OKAY
AG: Look I put your stupid flying dead steer8east thing into your stupid glowing kernelsprite to make you an even stupider flying 8ull piece of shit!
AG: I don't even know why I was so generous
AG: I guess that's just who I am
AG: So generous! All the time!
AG: Please, stop thanking me Tavros!
AG: You are em8arassing me!
AG: I am literally growing flush over all this gratitude you are pouring on me!
AG: I could 8athe in it, if I hadn't just thrown your 8athtub out into your yard
AG: Do you see what you make me do?!
AT: oKAY
AT: tHANKS
AT: tINKERBULL IS A PRETTY GOOD LUSUS
AT: tHANKS FOR USING HIM
AG: ughhhhhhhh
AG: You are so disgusting

Tavros clicked away once more as he saw Vriska's cursor move back above his respiteblock, hopefully to build more. The client server still showed Gamzee on the ground, smiling as he appeared to doze off, enveloped in the beauty he could no doubt barely comprehend around him.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: uMM
AT: i COULD REALLY USE
AT: sOME OF YOUR ENCOURAGEMENT
AT: cAUSE YOU'RE REALLY GOOD
AT: aT MAKING ME FEEL BETTER
AT: aND VRISKA IS SCARING ME
AT: aLSO,
AT: wAKE UP
AT: tHOSE IMPS ARE CLOSER
AT: gAMZEE,


-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Okay little 8oy skytard, I put all the game's equipment outside for you to use.
AG: All you have to do is put in this punchcard I put on your desk and it will create an item for you to use to get out of there!
AG: So simple!!!!
AG: Even you can do it!
AT: oH,
AT: oKAY
AT: bECAUSE I AM WORRIED ABOUT GAMZEE
AT: i DONT WANT TO DISCONNECT FROM HIM FOR TOO LONG
AT: tHANKS VRISKA
AG: Oh gog please dont thank me, its em8arassing how easy this shit is
AG: They have all these complex names for shit like they think will make it seem difficult but really it’s so straightforward I wonder why anyone would have any pro8lem with it at all!!!
AG: this game poses no challenge to someone with my skill.
AG: I am SO 8ORED already! :::<

Tavros considered agreeing with the girl, potentially gaining her favor, but decided against it. There was never anything he could say that went over well with Vriska. A compliment would only earn him a punishment, perhaps on par with the punishment he would receive for a complaint. Instead, Tavros wheeled himself over to the ramp that led him down to the front of his lawnring.

The ground outside was pulsating with each impact of the meteorites that were now raining down around him. The sky had turned red, and the brush around him was browning under the heat. Tavros looked around. The load gaper sat nearby. Further off, the bathtub. There was no sign of any of the SGRUB machinery he had encountered when helping Gamzee connect. He pulled out his huskphone.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: vRISKA
AT: i UHH,
AT: dONT SEE ANYTHING OUT HERE
AG: Of course not!
AG: Why would I put it out there, where it could get hit by a stray meteorite???
AG: Don't you ever think about shit before you open your windhole?
AG: Or, I guess, your typehole?
AT: oH
AT: oKAY
AT: sO THEN, WHERE IS EVERYTHING
AG: I put it in a super safe place!
AG: It's all on your roof!

Tavros set the huskphone down in his lap and looked up at his respiteblock. It towered over him, blotting out a large portion of the burning sky. He could make out the silhouette of SGRUB'S complicated machinery on the flat of his roof.

AT: hOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET UP THERE
AG: oh come on tavvy
AG: fly!!!!!!
AG: hahahahahaha


Tavros reentered his home, desperately wheeling up to his husktop to check on Gamzee. He was no longer centered on the screen. Tavros' heart skipped a beat.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: gAMZEE
AT: whERE ARE YOU
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: i AM SUPER SERIOUS
AT: rIGHT NOW
AT: uMM,
AT: wHERE ARE YOU

The respiteblock suddenly shook violently and Tavros dug his fingers into the armrests of the two-wheeled device as he nearly toppled over. A bright flash and an intense wave of heat washed over him. Tavros gnashed his teeth together hard, cringing and crumpling his upper body together, trying feebly to protect himself. It was the biggest meteorite yet, and the closest. As the shockwave passed him, Tavros hesitantly opened an eye, glancing out the extra large window Vriska had made, toward a gigantic crater that now spotted the landscape nearby.

His time was growing short.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: oKAY
AT: mAYBE IF YOU BUILD A ROPE DOWN
AT: i CAN CLIMB UP
AT: aND MAKE MY ITEM
AG: A rope?!?! Seriously????
AG: How do you even 8UILD a rope anyway? Could you tap on your head for me, I want to see if your skull is actually bonemush and that's why you have no fucking common sense!
AT: wELL
AT: i DONT KNOW, UHH
AT: hOW ELSE TO GET UP THERE
AT: aND IF I STAY DOWN HERE
AT: i THINK I WILL PROBABLY
AT: dIE
AG: Goddddddddddddddddddddddd Tavros
AG: What do you take me for!
AG: I told you already
AG: I am too generous!
AG: I built you a stupid ramp
AG: So you can roll your stupid two-wheeled device up
AG: And make your stupid item
AG: And get into the stupid medium!!!!!!!!
AT: rEALLY?
AG: NO I AM LYING!
AG: yes really!!!!!!!!!!!
AT: wAIT
AT: wHICH IS IT
AG: >::::T

Tentatively, Tavros stuck his head around the corner of the hallway, gazing through the flickering lights that emanated through the few intact windows left in his respiteblock. He wasn't quite sure what he was expecting Vriska to have done, but he was fairly confident in his assessment that there was no way she had built him a ramp. The fiery light cast itself upon what was, undoubtedly, a solid ramp leading up around what had become an abandoned staircase. Tavros blinked. The ramp remained.

He looked down at the huskphone in his lap, wondering if he should thank the girl. He glanced back into his room at the empty client screen where Gamzee once was. There wasn't time to get into a confusing and overly complicated series of words with the girl that together would equal no real accepted gratitude. Gamzee was undoubtedly ill-prepared to face the army of imps that were laying in ambush for him. He would probably be infatuated with their very existence, right up until they cut through him with their impy weapons, laughing little impy laughs as Gamzee cried out in pain!

Tavros closed his eyes tightly and tried to shake the thought out of his head. He had to hurry! If he got crushed by a meteor, there was no way Gamzee would be safe! He had to rely on his friend to protect himself just for a few moments while Tavros entered the medium. Steeling his resolve as best he could, which admittedly was not a whole lot, Tavros gripped the wheels next to him tightly, and took off up the ramp, quietly hoping that it wouldn't end abruptly and he'd crash down to the ground as Vriska laughed from the safety of her computer's perch.



-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Oh my goodness!
AG: You made it up the ramp!!!!!!
AG: Tavros I made you this trophy, do you want it?
AG: It is for the 8ravest 8oy in the whole wide world who was able to move his two-wheeled device up an inclined plane all 8y himself!
AG: I am so proud of you.
AG: WHO'S MY 8IG, INCLINED PLANE CLIM8ING 8OY?
AG: WHO'S MY 8IG WHEELING 8OY??????
AG: YOU ARE!!! YES, YOU ARE!!
AT: oKAY
AT: i AM PRETTY SURE YOU ARE BEING SARCASTIC AGAIN
AT: bUT,
AT: tHANK YOU
AT: fOR BUILDING THE RAMP
AT: bECAUSE I SEE THE BIG METEOR NOW
AT: aND UHH,
AT: iT LOOKS REALLY CLOSE.
AG: Well then stop shitting around and make the item!
AG: I did not go to all this trou8le just so that you would be squashed into a 8oring pile of TavGROSS
AT: uMM
AT: oKAY
AT: tHANKS
AT: i HOPE GAMZEE IS OK
AG: 8luuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Tavros looked down into the glistening brown oognibomb that the alchemiter had created for him with Vriska’s punchcard. Despite the extreme size and proximity of the rock hovering above him that seemed even closer now that he was on top of his respiteblock, his mind couldn't help but race over the possibilities of what kind of fiduspawn might be inside. Maybe a new species! That would be so exciting!

AG: Tavvvvvvros.
AG: Stop 8eing an idiot.
AG: If that's possi8le!
AG: You have to 8reak it to get to the medium.
AT: bUT
AT: i DONT HAVE A HOSTPLUSH READY
AG: oHHH, UHHHHHHH, OK THEN
AG: Just w8 until you get squished under the meteor then I guess!
AG: It should 8e totally worth it!
AG: i MEAN,
AT: wHAT IF I HURT IT
AG: Oh my godddddddddddd
AG: It hurts to roll my eyes this much.
AG: OK so
AG: Think about your high-8looded friend, I guess!
AG: And like
AG: All that friendship!!!
AG: So much friendship!!
AG: It's overwhelming you right now!!
AG: Tavros he is in trou8le and only you can save him!
AG: You must use your 8oy-skylark powers to rescue the maiden
AG: The sopor slime princess awaits!
AT: yOU REALLY THINK HES IN TROUBLE
AT: bECAUSE I AM WORRIED TOO
AG: OPEN THE GOD DAMN EGG TOREASNORE BEFORE I LOOSE MY FUCKING HANDLE ALL OVER AND FLY OFF THIS SHIT LIKE SOME CRAZY FUCKING ACROBATIC FUCKING THING
AG: Ugh I just got so worked up I couldn’t even come up with a proper sentence!
AT: oKAY,
AT: i WILL
AT: iF THATS WHAT YOU WANT, VRISKA

Tavros took a final look up at the hovering meteor. It looked like it filled the entire burning sky. The sweat was pouring off him. The oognibomb felt slippery in his shaking palm. His huskphone buzzed as Vriska continued to harass him, no doubt screaming insults and commands for him to break the ball open.

What would happen when he entered? Would he be able to come home ever again? Was Tinkerbull already there? Would it really work? Where would he go? Was Vriska playing a joke on him? What about Gamzee?

At this thought, Tavros seemed to wake. He closed his eyes tight as a loud rumbling grew up from around him, the meteor no doubt bearing down upon him. Without looking, Tavros threw the oognibomb to the ground, covering his ears from the growing noise as his hands were freed. He ducked down into his chair, squeezing his eyes closed. The rumbling grew deafening, and the heat began to choke him.




Suddenly, there was silence. Tavros opened his eyes to see his feet, just where he had left them, and the top of his respiteblock’s roof. A soft wind ruffled his hair. Slowly, Tavros sat up in his two-wheeled device.

The sky was clear of meteors, replaced with an omnipresent wind that whirled around him ceaselessly. Around his home was a desert of lightly colored sand.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] -

AT: vRISKA
AT: i MADE IT
AG: Oh, really? I guess I fell asleep there at the end, what with all the excitement and all.
AT: tHERE IS A DESERT
AT: aND WIND
AG: Please tell me more, this is real exciting stuff here
AT: tHANKS
AT: i THINK YOU SAVED MY LIFE
AG: yyyyyyaaaaaaaaaawwwwwnnnnnnnn

Tavros nearly smiled at the girl’s response, but his thoughts were broken in an instant as he recalled his primary mission. He had to reconnect to Gamzee!

The two wheeled device flew down the platform and back into the respiteblock, all the while his huskphone buzzed with messages. It could wait, he thought. There were much more important things than hearing Vriska’s newest complaint.

Tavros skidded to a halt in front of his husktop and began fumbling with the controls, nearly falling out of his seat as he searched through the landscape to find his friend. There were no imps in sight, no lusus, and no Gamzee.


-- adiosToreador [AT] began trolling terminallyCapricious [TC] -

AT: gAMZEE
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: iM REALLY SORRY I HAD TO GO
AT: i HOPE YOURE OK
AT: pLEASE SAY SOMETHING
AT: aNYTHING

There were no tracks on the ground, and no trail of what Karkat had described to him as grist. Gamzee’s respiteblock was empty. His Trollian window was dormant. Tavros felt his stomach knot up tightly. If only he had been faster… he could have reconnected and found him! If Gamzee was hurt it was all his fault and he could never forgive himself!

Tavros scrolled around the environment futilely, the buzzes from his phone and the blinking of Vriska’s Trollian window completely forgotten. His stomach tightened harder and Tavros placed a hand on it, squeezing tightly, trying to match the pain.

AT: gAMZEE I AM REALLY SORRY
AT: i DIDN’T MEAN TO LEAVE YOU
AT: bUT I WAS GOING TO GET SMASHED
AT: pLEASE TELL ME YOURE OK
AT: pLEASE
AT: tELL ME ANYTHING

Tavros’ hand fell from the keyboard as he stared off into the screen. Again, the huskphone buzzed. He wanted to throw it into the wall. His eyes slowly refocused on the world Gamzee had entered. He didn’t know what to do. Was this it? Was it over?

Tavros scrolled around once more, focusing on the land, trying to put the thoughts of his mind. He wanted to see the beauty that Gamzee had seen. Tavros followed the whimsical flourishes that painted the ground, his breath evening out for the first time in hours, despite the pain that lay just out of reach. The path he followed grew lusher until he spotted a small, dark imp. Another appeared. Tavros felt worse as yet another imp appeared. They seemed to be forming a circle, lazily wandering about some central figure, a central figure that had big, bushy hair and two long horns and—

Tavros’ eyes went wide as he spotted his friend. His eyes were closed and the imps walked around him in a daze, occasionally bumping into each other and falling over. Had they killed him?! Tavros had stopped breathing completely as he stared at the scene. He was too late! They had gotten to him! He failed!

Without thinking, he brought the cursor over the other Troll and began clicking on his side, mentally crying out his friend’s name as he refused to believe what the scene depicted. An imp nearby toppled over, landing on Gamzee’s lap. It rolled down his legs, coming to a stop on its back. Gamzee’s eyes opened, and Tavros felt as though he could crash through the screen to get to his friend. Gamzee seemed to wake as he looked around dreamily for a moment, before reaching to his side and grabbing his computer, smiling.

-- terminallyCapricious [CT] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

TC: oH hEy My BrOtHeR
TC: wHeRe HaVe YoU BeEn AlL uP aT?
AT: aRE YOU ALIVE
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: gAMZEE THERE ARE IMPS
AT: eVERYWHERE
AT: aRE YOU HURT
AT: wHAT IS GOING ON
AT: aRE YOU OK
AT: I HAVE BEEN MESSAGING YOU
AT: fOR AWHILE
AT: i THOUGHT YOU WERE IN TROUBLE
AT: iT LOOKED LIKE YOU WERE HURT
AT: i WAS WORRIED
AT: wELL,
AT: nO, I WAS REALLY SCARED
AT: rEALLY REALLY SCARED
TC: aW hElL nAw tHeRe aInT nO rEaSoN tO bE sCaReD!
TC: iVE jUsT bEeN cHiLlIn wItH mY nEw iMp bUds
TC: ThEy ReAlLy aRe dIgGiN oN mY sOpOr SlImE pIeS
TC: I GaVe tHeM sOmE aNd NoW wErE jUsT hAnGiN
TC: I oUgHtA oPeN a rEsTaUrAuNt oR sOmE sHit
TC: mAkE sOmE MaD cAsH
TC: tHeSe LiTtLe BrOs cAnT fUcKiN gEt EnOuGh!
AT: i WAS,
AT: rEALLY SCARED
TC: aW sHiT mY fUcKiN TaVs
TC: I dIdNt mEaN tO mAkE yOu AlL nOt ChIlL aNd ShIt
TC: wHeN wE mEeT uP iN hErE I WiLl gIvE yOu a BiG fUcKin pIe tO mAkE Up FoR iT
TC: tHe BiGgEsT!
TC: nO cHaRgE fOr TaVrOs aT tHiS FuCkIn pIe ShOp!
AT: i DONT, REALLY, WANT A PIE, ACTUALLY
AT: bUT THANKS
AT: i AM JUST GLAD YOURE OK
AT: tHAT IS MUCH BETTER THAN A PIE
AT: tO ME
TC: aWw sHiT aRe YoU SuRe cAuSe ThEsE sHiTs ArE fUcKiN gOldEn
AT: yES,
AT: i AM PRETTY SURE
AT: tHAT IT IS BETTER
AT: pLEASE STAY IN TOUCH WITH ME
AT: i DONT WANT TO LOSE YOU
AT: aGAIN
TC: tHaT iS a SuRe mOtHeRfUcKiN tHiNg!
TC: )
AT: hONK,
TC: hAhaHA ShIt YeAh mY bRoThEr!!
AT: }

Tavros was grinning for the first time all day. From behind him came a soft, fluttering, familiar sound, and as Tavros turned to face Tinkerbull’s sprite, he thought he may never stop.

“You’re late!” he jokingly scolded to the tiny bull. “Where have you been?” The bull cocked his head and seemed to smile. The computer buzzed once more, but Tavros barely heard it.


-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began trolling adiosToreador [AT] -

AG: Tavrosssssssssssssssssssss
AG: Why are you smiling like that?
AG: It’s creeping me out. You’re such a weirdo.
AG: Your world looks so 8oring holy fuck!!
AG: Why are you so happy all of the sudden?? Ugh.
AG: Tavros?
AG: What are you doing you idiot?
AG: Hey, moron!
AG: Why are you ignoring me????
AG: You know that I can see you right?
AG: Don’t be such an idiot!
AG: TTTTTTTT
AG: AAAAAAAAAAAAA
AG: VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
AG: RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
AG: OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
AG: SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

-- adiosToreador [AT] blocked arachnidsGrip [AG] –

AG: What.

Ok, so that was pretty much perfect. I still can't get over that that is ACTUALLY how Gamzee took care of his imps. So nerve-wracking for poor Tavvers. XD

[northernVehemence]

Sarasvati. My god. I love reading stories about the kids being slightly older and returning to (somewhat) normal. You completely nailed Dave's personality -- I can totally picture him separating everything he eats into neat little quadrants on his plate. I'd love to read one about John! Or Jade! Or Rose! Just please write more!

And breccia, awesome as always. It's amazing how well you're able to mimic their speech habits in your pesterlogs. Like, you got the perfect amount of hesitation and worry out of Tavros. Amazing.

Oh and I guess I did some fanart for Windows and Flavors here and here? Tenebrais, I also draw another thing with Aurthour fighting Spidermom, but Imageshack is being a butt and not letting me upload it.

[Tenebrais]

Well I can't wait to see it!

Here's the next Windows chapter. It's Terezi, as specifically requested by NV, because she is awesome and you should all love her. Not quite as emotional as the last couple because, well, she doesn't have a very dark past. Except in the literal sense that she's blind.

Windows: Part 6

show spoiler

hide spoiler

-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG] --
CG: HEY VRISKA.
CG: WHAT’S YOUR SPRITE LIKE?
AG: She’s kind of a huge 8itch!
AG: Alw8ys wanting me to t8ke the time out to kill everything!
AG: Kill 8ll the imps, Vriska!
AG: Kiiiiiiiill theeeeeeeem!!!!!!!
AG: XXXX(
CG: LIKE LUSUS, LIKE WARD.
AG: H8y!
AG: Th8t was uncalled f8r!
AG: You’re 8lways l8ke that!
AG: 8LUH 8LUH LET’S H8 ON THE SPIDER GIRL
AG: SHE IS SUCH A 8ACKSTA88ING 8ITCH
CG: SHUT UP ALREADY!
CG: I JUST WANTED TO KNOW WHAT I SHOULD BE PREPARED FOR WHEN I GET TO YOUR LAND.
CG: I GUESS IF THAT SPIDERSPRITE IS FOLLOWING ME AROUND I’D BETTER WATCH MY BACK.
CG: HOW FAR HAVE YOU GOT NOW ANYWAY?
AG: Land of C8ves and Silence.
AG: Appar8ntly.
AG: Th8t’s what Aurothuersprite calls it.
CG: OH WOW.
CG: THAT MUST HAVE BEEN AN AWKWARD CONVERSATION.
AG: G8d, tell me a8out it!
AG: Actually he’s not th8t bad.
AG: Really pol8 and everything.
AG: I h8 it.
AG: He even forgave me for the wh8le thing with my lusus!
AG: Stupid l8usy godd8mn forgiving 8rute!
-- arachnidsGrip [AG] ceased trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] --

After all that girl had been through, it really wasn’t surprising she was so screwed up. Karkat couldn’t help but wonder how Terezi managed to deal with her in their Team Scourge days. She’d ranted to him at length about her after their partnership fell through. It was a wonder that they’d ever got along.

Maybe he could find out how they did it.

======> SWITCH 2


T34MM4T3 W4NT3D

L3V3L 8 BL1ND S33R LOOK1NG FOR P4RTN3R TO PL4Y DU4L G4M3S
1M HOP1NG TO B3COM3 A V1G1L4NT3 OF JUST1C3 B3C4US3 TH3 G4M1N1ST4TORS 4R3 US3L3SS!
1F YOUR3 1NT3R3ST3D PL34S3 CONT4CT G4LLOWSC4L1BR4TOR ON TROLLSLUM

Terezi was a devotee of the official Flarp forums. She loved to read discussions about the game and its lore, and the complaints. So many complaints! But what she was really interested in was the complaints about other players. Dual teams that played unfairly, bending or breaking the rules to defeat other teams and claim the loot. This was a serious issue when lives were on the line, but the gaministrators that were supposed to enforce rules and punish the offenders were notoriously lax. The injustice was tangible.
She had advertised on the Recruitment board for a teammate, so she could join their games and mete out justice personally. Solo play had all kinds of built-in restrictions and failsafes to ensure clouders played fair, but these were dropped for dual play - your only impetus to play fair was that if you were overly harsh, the other team’s clouder could make things equally difficult for you.
This was exploited far too much for her tastes. Justice had to be upheld.

She had already received a few replies to her ad. Some were predictably mocking her goals and telling her she’d die painfully. But a few looked like sincere attempts to join her cause. She picked the one she most liked the name of.

GC: H3LLO 4R4CHN1DSGR1P
GC: WH4T DO YOU PL4Y 4S?
AG: I’m a petticoat seagrift!
AG: Only level 3 though.
AG: Is that alr8? I’ve only been pl8ying for a week!
GC: 1 R3CKON YOULL B3 4LR1GHT 1F W3 C4N L3V3L YOU UP A B1T
GC: M4YB3 PL4Y SOM3 ON3-ON-ON3 G4M3S W1TH LOW R1SK
GC: 1 DONT R34LLY C4R3 4BOUT YOUR L3V3L OR YOUR LOOT
GC: 1 W4NT TO KNOW 1F YOUR3 S3R1OUS 4BOUT H3LP1NG M3 T4K3 DOWN T34MS TH4T DONT PL4Y BY THE RUL3S
AG: I can defin8ly help with th8!
AG: I neeeeeeeed it!
AG: Okay just to expl8in
AG: My lusus needs to 8 troll meat.
AG: And she c8n’t hunt for herself any more!
AG: It’s kind of a long story.
AG: 8ut anyway I figure this g8me can help me hunt for her!
AG: And if I’m hunting 8nyone it m8ght as well 8e 8ad guys!
AG: :::;)
GC: YOUR STORY CH3CKS OUT
GC: 1 GUESS
AG: What’s your lusus like?
AG: I alw8ys wanted to know what a normal lusus is meant to 8e like.
GC: 1 DONT H4V3 4 LUSUS
GC: 1TS K1ND OF 4 LONG STORY
AG: Hahahahahahahaha ok8y!
AG: So do I pass?
AG: Am I on your team?
AG: Pleeeeeeeease s8y yes!
GC: OH 4LR1GHT
GC: BUT ONLY B3C4US3 YOU 4SK3D SO N1C3LY
GC: >:]
AG: Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh!
AG: I h8ve the perfect name!
AG: Team Scourge!!!!!!!!
AG: 8ecause we’re scourging 8ad players from the game!
GC: 4LR1GHT TH4T SOUNDS GOOD

The next few days were a strict training regimen. Terezi clouded several campaigns for her new teammate until she reached level 7. She’d have gone further, but AG insisted that her lusus was starting to look very weak and would probably starve soon. They would have to play their first real game.
Terezi browsed the forums for a suitably villainous team to take down. A lot of the more brutal ones were very high level, but these guys were about level 9. She could probably take them. They were Team Ragnarok, consisting of fateImitated and enmityHarbinger. Reportedly, they’d used the invincible Guardian creatures intended to block off inaccessible passages to trap a player, resulting in their death. She would enjoy bringing them down.

GC: H3Y
GC: T34M R4GN4ROK VS T34M SCOURG3
GC: L3TS DO TH1S R1GHT NOW
FI: H4H4H4H4H4
FI: OK4Y 1 GU3SS
GC: 4R3 YOU COPY1NG TH3 W4Y 1 TYP3?
FI: Y3S
FI: 1TS K1ND OF WH4T 1 DO
GC: F1N3 WH4T3V3R YOULL B3 D34D SOON
FI: 1LL B3 CLOUD1NG SO NO
FI: 3H C4N PL4Y
FI: 4ND D1SM4NTL3 WH4T3V3R STUP1D CH4LL3NG3S YOU THROW 4T H3R
FI: WH1L3 1 CRUSH YOUR T34MM4T3 L1K3 A BUG
GC: GOOD LUCK TH3N
GC: YOUR3 GO1NG TO N33D 1T >:]

The grubs were plugged in, and soon the game was underfoot.
EH: GC! Hey
EH: partner! I hope you’ve said your last goodbyes to your
GC: YOUR3 PR3TTY OBNOX1OUS
GC: BUT YOU DONT N33D TO WORRY
GC: W3 4LW4YS PL4Y BY THE RUL3S
EH: sucker. You’re such a

EH, by the looks of it, lived in a cave somewhere. She’d most likely be used to the layout, so some disorienting traps should be useful. She laid out some simple warmup enemies around the hanging hive.
GC: OK4Y SOUNDS L1K3 4 D34L TO M3
GC: OOPS WRONG W1NDOW
EH: Huh?
EH: with? Who are you making a deal
GC: NON3 OF YOUR BUS1N3SS >:]

Once the player, a Harpstriker, had cleared the immediate vicinity she got out some sort of phone. Probably talking to her partner. Terezi put the pressure on by spawning one of the more powerful foes around a corner. EH had to stop to battle it.

FI: teammate? What have you been telling my
GC: WH4T
GC: SH3 W4SNT SUPPOS3D TO T4LK TO YOU JUST Y3T
GC: 1 GU3SS 1M GO1NG TO H4V3 TO L34RN TO D34L W1TH H3R W31RD W4YS!
FI: DONT TRY 4ND L13 TO M3
FI: 3H WOULDNT B3TR4Y M3
GC: YOUR3 3X4CTLY R1GHT
GC: 1 TR13D TO T4LK H3R OV3R TO MY S1D3 BUT SH3 W4SNT H4V1NG 1T!
FI: TH1S 1S NOT HOW YOU PL4Y TH1S G4M3!
GC: LOOK WHOS T4LK1NG
FI: 444444RGH!
FI: S4Y GOODBY3 TO YOUR T34MM4T3
GC: VR1SK4?
GC: 1 DONT N33D H3R 4NY MOR3
FI: Why are you breaking up our teeeeeeeeam?
GC: NO MOR3 TH4N YOU D3S3RV3

AG: Why is FI 8sking to form a new team?
AG: Am I missing something?
GC: 1M TURN1NG TH3M 4G41NST 34CH OTH3R!
GC: PL4Y 4LONG W1TH H1M FOR NOW
GC: 1LL F1N1SH OFF MY S1D3 OF THE C4MP41GN
EH stumbled through numerous dizzying traps and ended up in a cave route that lead to a dead end. Terezi spawned the most powerful monster at her disposal.

GC: H3Y 3H
GC: 1 JUST L34RN3D TH1S 4W3SOM3 TR1CK
EH: bitch! Oh, you

Some time later, both players enjoyed the spoils of a successful campaign.
AG: That was gr8, Terezi!
AG: The w8y you tore their team to shrrrrrrrreads!
AG: I wish I could do th8t.
AG: Teach me!
AG: Teeeeeeeeach meeeeeeee!
GC: 1TS NOT TH4T H4RD R34LLY
GC: YOU JUST N33D TO PL4Y ON TH31R W34KN3SS3S
GC: TH3Y W3R3 ONLY 1N 1T FOR TH3 LOOT
GC: SO TH3Y PROB4BLY D1DNT TRUST 34CH OTH3R TO B3G1N W1TH
GC: TH3YR3 BOTH D34D NOW SO WH4T3V3R
AG: Yeah!!!!!!!!
AG: My lusus is f8nally eating well!
GC: YOU PROB4BLY SHOULDNT H4V3 DON3 TH4T TO YOUR CLOUD3R
GC: G3TT1NG H1M TO OFF H1MS3LF L1K3 TH4T
AG: I’m sorrrrrrrry!
AG: But I really needed his 8ody to feed her!
AG: 8esides he was a 8ad guy.
GC: Y34H 1 GU3SS
GC: JUST 4S LONG 4S YOU DONT JUST GO K1LL1NG 3V3RYON3 W3 PL4Y 4G41NST 1 GU3SS 1TS F1N3
AG: I pr8mise I’ll only kill the 8ad ones!
AG: Solemnly sw8rn
AG: Cr8ss my heart 8nd hope t8 die.


Karkat pressed the button once again. It was becoming a reflex.
The screen hadn’t shown him anything new, really. GC was a great negotiator. He had been glad they were on the same team from the start. He’d never seen her eyes before, though.
They were really quite pretty.

[reclusiveAmateur]

Saras, ohmigodohmigodohmigod--!

(okay i know there have been other fics posted since then and i will read them I swear but holy crap I have to say this first)

Just-- holy-- :O I am kind of squeaking incoherently over here. I wish I could put together more coherent compliments but will holy crap if I can play any part in causing this even indirectly then I must keep writing just about forever suffice? Just-- it's-- ohmigod ;_;

[Bardic Feline]

Excellent as always, Tenebrais! It's kind of fun watching Terezi work, in spite of the fact that it involves, y'know...killing people. She's always been quite the manipulative little so and so. And I like how you can see Vriska going a few steps further towards becoming the compulsive killer she is now. Hmmm...I'm kinda thinking Tavros should be up next, since it sort of seems like a nice follow up from the start of Team Scourge to go to the start of Team Charge...or something. And we already have Aradia's love of archeology and exploration established, so she's primed for adventuring. Or something.

Ahhh, but I'm sure whoever you go with, it will be interesting.

nV: I continue to be in complete awe at your drawing skills.

[PaulPower]

I am so behind on my reading augh, when did this thread start going by so quickly??? I'm not complaining but shit guys you are the most productive sons of bitches ever. I LOVE YOU, LET'S HUG

Blame reclusiveAmateur for this one; I got all inspired by her second-person Dave-centric fics that goddamnit I wanted to write one too, so here it is! (notes: indeterminate amount of time post-sburb, dave/jade, implied john/rose)

we drive by braille

show spoiler

hide spoiler

one.

It hits you out of nowhere in your junior year of high school, when you take some joke religious comparison class for a decent place to sleep after lunch. Eventually the teacher moves into mythology, though, and then Greek mythology, and that's when you sit up and pay attention: Ceto, Echidna, Typhon, Hephaestus; names you know attached to things you've seen with your own eyes. You remember Ceto's convoluted mindgames, and Echidna's hollow dead leaf laughter, and Typhon's glib, stolen grin, but most of all you remember Hephaestus because he was so much like you it hurt.

You wonder if any of the others ever decided to do the same thing, but it doesn't really matter, because, as you find out, it's kind of personal. You don't know why it took you so long--okay, well, maybe you do, and maybe you just didn't want to revisit it, or maybe you just didn't want to know how deep it really goes. But the time is long overdue, so one miserable winter evening, you hit the internet up for research on your denizen.

The basics are obvious because everyone knows them--smith-god, artisan, volcanoes, etcetera. A god of dual elements, fire and earth, the twin virtues of creativity and persistence (twin vices of molten anger and slavish devotion); born imperfect and thrown from the mountain, he found belonging in a craft (sound familiar, beatsmith?, you think and immediately unthink), honed it like no one else before him because being the best was all he had. And as you click through the pages, as it sounds more and more like you, you remember those years ago: the red furnace glow, the rhythm of time kept with a blacksmith's hammer, walls of moving copper, and a man who could've been you in another life hunched solemn and joyless for all the beautiful things he makes.

And still you keep going. You read about Hephaestus winning back his place on Olympus, all that power and all those gods laughing at him behind his back.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You read about the fall of Typhon, how Hephaestus built his workshop on top of him, how his forge was powered by the breath of a dying god.

(at your strongest when your best friend's at his weakest)

You feel a little sick to your stomach, so you x out of the browser and that's that. You start sleeping through your religion class again, and when it's time to pick a topic for your final, you go with Hinduism. Years later, when you're signing up for classes your sophomore year of college, you have the choice between religion and history. You choose history.

two.

You're a picky eater. It was fine growing up, with your brother bringing home an endless rotation of TV dinners for the nights he wasn't going to be around (which was most nights). Everything was neatly labeled, flash frozen, and compartmentalized, and it didn't matter how many times bro told you to man up and eat your vegetables because he was never there to bitch when you dumped them in the trash.

But then the real world came along and made you try to eat things that weren't pizza rolls and hot pockets, and that's when you got fussy. You hate the texture of pork, and you hate it when the food on your plate mixes; you hate sushi, Indian food, shellfish, anything with ketchup or bell peppers. You try to avoid situations where people might cook for you in case you have to push away your dinner and deal with the aftermath of being an offensive houseguest.

(“I was half expecting dog food,” you tell Jade in your usual deadpan, leaning awkwardly on the kitchen island; bad joke and you know it but you can't seem to tell any different kind with her. The way her shoulders hunch confirms it, but you soldier on anyway because that's just what you do, even as she scrapes a mangled chunk of salmon into the garbage and gives you a wounded, kicked-puppy look. You're kind of a jackass and a little insufferable sometimes, and you can't argue that, but no one would ever accuse you of being heartless--except for now, maybe, as she leaves the room with little more than a glance back and you stand there with parted lips, poised to say words that won't come out.)

Lalonde watches you over the weeks, notices how finicky and repetitive you get with your meals, and tells you with that unbearably smug little Harvard grin of hers that it's a control issue.

She adds: “Not the only one, I'm sure.”

You look down at your plate, organized by color and type--starch and green on one side, protein and yellow on the other, all separated like it's quarantine--and set your fork down. “Quit watching me eat,” you say, folding your arms. “Shit's weird.”

three.

There aren't many true things about yourself that you like to show to the world, but how much you like words is one of them, and anyone who isn't comatose can see it for themselves. Freestyling is a goddamn artform and you're good at it, because if there's anything in this world you can do, it's pull all the right things together at exactly the right time. You have the vocabulary for it, and--god help you, it's the dumbest shit and it sounds too much like Rose, but something like the soul of a poet, too. There are deep, winding nuances to language that you feel comfortable in, and you guess it's the most obvious similarity between you and your sister. You can laugh all you want at her reams of poetry and fanfiction, but it doesn't stop you from understanding why she does it.

The rap, the freestyling, the hip-hop: it's a strange manifestation of your interests, strange enough that nobody asks because they think they know, and you're fine with that. You don't have to explain it to anyone. Middle class white kid from Houston--total joke if you think you can relate, pretentious hipster douchebag, an insult to the culture. And they can keep thinking that, because fuck if you're going to waste your time justifying it; that it wasn't always this way, that cinder block and particle board furniture wasn't always just a statement, that it wasn't always a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood. Before his bro hit the right niche, things were a little tighter, and those were the nights you spent in bed with a hand-me-down CD player, finding something to relate to in the music you looped: Rakim, NWA, The Fugees, Public Enemy, over and over and over until you could mouth the tracks by memory. It made things seem a little more bearable, making order out of chaos.

But you didn't always have the CD player either, so before that, it was books. The library became a babysitter when your brother couldn't pick you up from school, at first just for the air conditioning, but then you decided somewhere along the way--why not? You started picking through the shelves and that was it, really. The start of a secret love affair that never really stopped, with an emphasis on secret. Dickens and Burgess didn't exactly gel with your pridefully--painfully, meticulously--constructed don't-give-a-fuck attitude.

(Seven years old, thumbing through cheap thrift store books, and you pick up a dog-eared, moth-eaten copy of East of Eden; “Isn't this a little much for you, man?” your brother asks and you shake your head, because it's not about the stories, or the characters. You don't have to understand those and you don't pretend to try. It's about all those words that sit in those pages just waiting for you to collect them.)

Years and years later, you still never let your collection grow larger than what you can hide under your bed, and it rotates out every couple of months: Tolstoy, Alighieri, Camus, Orwell for now until you wrap up War and Peace, find some time off to dump them off at a used bookstore, and pick out replacements. There's a kind of enjoyment in the ritual now; you can hunch in the aisles and pretend you've got better things to do all you want, but you aren't fooling anyone, least of all yourself.

(You slide into the booth across from Jade, ten minutes late--feeling every last aching second of it between the store and the restaurant, made worse knowing she doesn't have that long in town--and you give a quick apology, explaining about lines and traffic; she's just glad to see you. Then, because she's weird and there are parts of her that the mainland can't crush, she sniffs the air and says, “You smell like books.” When you give her a noncommittal shrug, and she adds: “I like books.”

You can't help yourself and maybe you'll regret it later, but then again, maybe it could be a good thing if you let it. With a secret little half-grin hidden behind your menu, you look at her over the top of your shades and say, “Me too.”)

four.

You find--or found, really, because it's been years since you've had it--something satisfying in your title. Not the time part, because it's hard not to be a little smugly satisfied at being placed in charge of so much power and it's so fucking undeniably cool, but the knight part--and you had trouble admitting it at first, when you were under siege by John's well-intentioned jabs and Rose's instant, unsolicited analysis. You denied, denied, denied until they finally gave it a rest and you could take a good, long look at it yourself.

You're not prim and proper, and you're not polite, and you're not really all that chivalrous, but there are still pieces of you that shine beneath the layers of stony indifference and practiced jerkass. If you can't ooze charisma and a winning personality--because even you can admit you'll never be the golden boy (respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted), not like John--then you can at least tell the god's honest truth whenever you can, even if it hurts--maybe especially if it hurts. If you're not going to open doors for women, then you can sure as hell throw a couple punches for one when it's 2 AM and some drunken frat fuck won't leave her alone. It happens a few times, and the night ends with bruised knuckles and the taste of blood in your mouth, but you always get your point across with blistering clarity.

You're not the guy with flocks of friends, never will be, and you don't want to be, not really. For however much it aches to know you'll never belong, it narrows down the list of people you'd feel obligated to take a bullet for.

And when it comes down to that--well. It has before, where you had to make that choice, except it wasn't really a choice, not for you, and you stepped in front of that sword, that gun, that blast of fire every. single. time. For all the kinds of men you aren't, that's the kind of man you are, and that's what's so satisfying. When the game ended and everyone got on with their lives and all that's left of Time is no need to ever wear a watch again, you can still say that yeah, you're a knight in your own way. That's something that'll never change.

five.

You're chronically, habitually, hopelessly bad at women.

It's not getting them that you're bad at; you're attractive and you know it, because you're fastidious about your appearance to the point of compulsion and you never leave your apartment without looking like you could buy the town. You're the skilled musician dripping with arrogance, indifferent to the existence of other people, and girls go fucking crazy for it. It helps, you think, that apparently there's something mysterious about you, something a little dark and intense, because, well--you've seen war and nobody comes out of that without a little bit of baggage, and they love that. You're the guy they want to take home and kiss better and stitch back together with force of personality. You're the guy they want to fix so you'll love them.

You don't, though, you don't even come close, and you suppose that's where the point of contention is. A week, two weeks, sometimes three, and it's smooth sailing--but then she'll want your apartment key, or she'll want to meet your friends, or she'll drop hints about moving in and you're fucking out of there. Sometimes you're out of there sooner, for stupid reasons: there was Jenna, the poli-sci major who couldn't shut up; there was Ashley, who accidentally ran into you everywhere and you're pretty sure she was stalking you; Madison had too many piercings, Olivia reeked of nicotine, Nicole kept asking about your parents. They're just the start of your list. It extends way, way beyond them. You tell John that they just weren't right; you know for yourself that you just weren't trying.

(Her name is Mira and she's a righteous bitch, you decide, and you wonder why you're even here, fumbling around her apartment in the dark looking for where you dropped your damn tie, when you got sick of her two weeks ago and got sick of nights like these a week after that. You know she's watching you from her bed, face contorted in that nasty little scowl of hers, but you can't see her and you don't really want to.

“I don't know what your damage is, Strider.” You hear the rustle of bedsheets and her soft footsteps on the hardwood and you don't dignify her nagging with any sort of response. “Do I look too much like her? Not enough?”

Mira--beautiful, horrible Mira, with her tan skin and her long black hair and her serpentine calculation--has a way with words that reminds you of Rose, if Rose were even more of a frigid cunt. You feel a sort of cold fury rising up in your gut, old and familiar because that's just always how it starts with you, ice first and fire later. “Finish that thought,” you say, and you know she will, because she doesn't back from a challenge. She's dating you, after all. “Go ahead.”

“Wait, I'm sorry. She has her hair cut short now, doesn't she? I think I saw her in Forbes last month. Cute. Like a pixie. Shame you won't let me meet her.” She follows you as you stalk down the dark hallway, into the living room, where you swipe your keys from the coffee table. “Or maybe she just hasn't come back into town yet. Is that it? I wouldn't know, you never talk about her.”

She's on your heels even as you grab your jacket, and you still don't have your tie but fuck it, better to buy a new one than put up with this bullshit. “Poor you, all lonely because your rich little heiress girlfriend left you behind. Do you miss her? Is that why you said her name?”

You'd never hit a woman, not in a thousand goddamn years no matter how much she might deserve it, but as she blocks the doorway, sheet pulled around her and that fucking scowl on her face as poisonous as the rest of her, you come so, so close. “Get the fuck out of my way,” you say, and it's all you have to say, because--

Well. She liked you because you were a little dark and intense and broken, but actually seeing you like that isn't something she can handle.)

“Dude,” John says and he doesn't even try to hide his amusement as he chews on his straw, the smug bastard; you regret calling him even though it's what you always do when you have a problem. “Your life's kind of gone to hell you're trying way too hard to compensate.”

“Bullshit. I'm not compensating for anything,” you say, but you aren't so good at lying anymore, because John only laughs at you, at your half-eaten plate of sorted, organized food.

six.

Okay, so you have some fucking control issues. You get it. People can just get off your dick about it already because you know, they don't need to keep reminding you. You're enough of a reminder to yourself. Yeah, so you had kind of a crappy childhood and a brother who was never home, and when he was, he was putting you through shit a kid shouldn't have to go through, all 'it's for your own good's and 'you'll thank me when you're older's and 'pay attention, you're gonna need to know this someday's. And yeah, maybe it affected you more than you'd like to admit, and yeah, maybe you didn't have any control at all and you reacted with trying to force everything around you to make sense.

And there's that other part of your title that still rides along with you, the one that was so fucking cool until you learned what happens when you have to become the get out of jail free card for your friends. (It's almost hilarious, you think, striving all your life to be the best and then finding out that only the best are ever offered up for sacrifice.) You were the one who made it through the game, but you can't help but think of other timelines, all the other pockets of failure that another you had to fix at his own expense. If you were another man, it might make you bitter, but you're not. You're more bitter at yourself and how you're dealing with the leftovers.

You still feel time a little too intimately than you'd prefer, but it's not under your control anymore, so you force it in other ways; you went after music with a kind of terrifying fervor as soon as you realized your personal timeline was static again, learning instruments, collecting vinyls and samples by the thousands. It's that rhythm, you know, and they call it keeping time but it means something entirely different to you; it's the way you can sit with your mixing equipment for hours, making tiny, exacting changes for perfectionism's sake, finding what's wrong and fixing it, making sense out of the chaos. And when you're on that stage with that guitar and that microphone, you've got a crowd's attention locked onto you, a show of force through skill and determination. You're not the golden boy and you never will be, not like John, but you can make people listen.

And you'd say it's fine but it's not, not really, when every night you get all dressed up with nowhere to go but around, around, around, the dance that went out of style years ago with partners who don't know what's going on until you're gone. You don't enjoy it, and maybe that's what scares you--that you faced an image of yourself when you were thirteen that you swore up and down you'd never become, only to become it anyway. Metronome for a hammer and here you are, hunched over joyless and solemn for all the beautiful things you make.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You're not a drinker--control issues, the voice of Rose echoes in your head, and you've been drinking just enough to laugh at that, just enough to flick through your phone's address book, looking for a name and a number and a reason. Around the middle of the list you realize you've only come up with two out of three, and that'll have to be enough.

As you listen to it ring, and ring, and ring, and ring, you become dimly aware that it's 3 AM and you're kind of an asshole when a groggy, girlish voice picks up.

“Dave?”

You lick your cracked lips, close your eyes, and your voice curls her name into a question: “Jade?”

“What's wrong?”

Your shoulders shake in a chuckle made out of pure fuck it, and from the silence on the other end of the phone, you can't help but wonder if she thinks you've gone crazy, and--well. Shit, maybe you have, and maybe that could be a good thing if you let it.

“Everything,” you say, and it's not the whole truth, but it's a start.

Aw man, poor Dave . He's always been the Chum I've had the most trouble identifying with, but the light you've put him in here makes me empathise a lot more. Liked the bit about him being a closet bibliophile especially.

My theory on why the thread's so busy right now is that all the writers who really love the trolls are writing fic for them and all the writers who miss the chums are writing fic for them and the people in the middle are mixing the two. As the emotional torque in Hivebent gets ever more tightly wound, it's leading to even more fics on both sides of the fence. Granted, this is a good thing.

Really, with your having John know Jade's a relative from the beginning, I'm kind of fascinated by the implications as far as how John would react to, 'One of my best friends has been alone on an island with her dog for YEARS and me, one of her two living relatives, had no idea.' once he got a chance to really process that.

Yeowch, I hadn't thought of that. I'd pondered the implications of Jade finding out that she has a genetic brother after living alone on an island with her dog for years (mostly that she'd be excited as all hell), but hadn't quite made the link-through with my "John and Jade already know that they're second cousins" theory or the fact that John, Rose and Dave don't know that Hass is dead.

Now I kind of want to write John having his first look around Jade's house and noticing the stuffed Hass.

[breccia]

@sarasvati: that was really just superb. Second person can be a holy bitch but your fic is SO well done and awesome; I'm super inspired. I want MORE! Seriously, how can I convince you to write more?

[yellowwedge]

@sarasvati: that was really just superb. Second person can be a holy bitch but your fic is SO well done and awesome; I'm super inspired. I want MORE! Seriously, how can I convince you to write more?

I agree! Write more or we will find you. Then beg you in person! :3