Also random thought: Does Kanaya not strike you as the type of person who would be really into Lady Gaga? All I know is that I don't know enough about Lady Gaga to let this plot bunny loose and I really don't care to find out.
Well, she would either be so into it, or really repulsed by it. On extreme or the other, really. I guess it would all depend on whether she takes Gaga's 'fashion sense' as a complement or insult to the trade of fashion.
My sig-quotes:
Originally Posted by Dastreus
ToreaderTornado is Lord English and LE is busy being Spades Slick, who is everyone. ToreaderTornado is everyone because ToreaderTornado is the dreamer.
Originally Posted by Varkarrus
IT'S FUN TO STAY AT THE
Originally Posted by MayorSillyBiscuits
Originally Posted by Tesseract
Y
Originally Posted by Varkarrus
M
Originally Posted by ToreaderTornado
C
Originally Posted by The One Guy
A
I am the bullhornedAirman .
Avatar courtesy of apatheticZombie
Took me about a year to notice the typo. How long did it take you?
Jade never wanted to hear that phrase again, she thought, hugging her knees to her chest and staring blankly into the dark. If that was dreaming without a dreamself, she never wanted to sleep again. Ever. Her heart was pounding as she remembered the dark shapes she'd seen, lunging out of an inky void with gaping maws and massive teeth and oh god she was going to see this every time she slept.
Her breath quickened as she looked to the foot of her bed and saw a once-innocuous Squiddles plush sitting there. A gaudy shade of yellow, she knew that it would quote the show when she squeezed it. As it was, Jade simply slapped it off the bed and winced as it rolled down the hill. She missed Prospit. Every time she closed her eyes she saw it again - the massive beaked abomination, staring at her with every single one of its malevolent eyes.
No more sleeping. No more sleeping. No more sleeping.
Jade never wanted to hear that phrase again, she thought, hugging her knees to her chest and staring blankly into the dark. If that was dreaming without a dreamself, she never wanted to sleep again. Ever. Her heart was pounding as she remembered the dark shapes she'd seen, lunging out of an inky void with gaping maws and massive teeth and oh god she was going to see this every time she slept.
Her breath quickened as she looked to the foot of her bed and saw a once-innocuous Squiddles plush sitting there. A gaudy shade of yellow, she knew that it would quote the show when she squeezed it. As it was, Jade simply slapped it off the bed and winced as it rolled down the hill. She missed Prospit. Every time she closed her eyes she saw it again - the massive beaked abomination, staring at her with every single one of its malevolent eyes.
No more sleeping. No more sleeping. No more sleeping.
*pops in for a moment*
This excerpt sounds incredibly sinister if you bare in mind she's narcoleptic and imagine after that thought she fell asleep again.
Hay can I jump on the new update shortfic bandwagon
The Grin
She had no idea what was going on. The world around her had long ago shredded itself into rainbow-colored confetti. The only concrete figure was floating in front of her, and even it was bending and warping beyond recognition.
It look pale, ashen. Two long horns (or were they ears?) sprouted out of the top of its head. It wore garish colors, dovetailing nicely with the surroundings.
It grinned. But this was not a normal grin. It showed rows of shark teeth, and where there a human looked for camaraderie, Jade only saw bloodthirst.
")(ello, Jade," it said.
"It's been so ---EXCITING, waiting for you to get )(ere..."
I am in a bizarre mood today, so here's something bizarre.
Shuteye
He/she/it is an incomprehensible, inscrutable entity from beyond time, more of a force than a being.
But even he is not immune to dreams.
A shriek that shatters galaxies resounds through nothingness. Oglogoth has awoken, startled, from his timeless slumber. Servants flinch; the god has had a bad dream.
The eye that scrutinizes universes trembles. Entire body, a sinuous coterie of tentacles and shapeless flesh, quails. The intellect that thinks up and just as easily destroys multiverses shudders before the imagery that filled the recent nightmare.
An unending parade of testosterone. Shadows nameless yet recognizable. "Castor Troy", "Randall Raines", "Benjamin Franklin Gates", "Johnny Blaze". And eventually the piece de resistance.
Countless copies of Nicolas Cage, jeering. In garish colors clashed together.
Universes shake and stars fall as the scream of divine fright echoes through worlds.
Last edited by JudgeDeadd; 11-11-2010 at 01:16 AM.
Morthol Dryax on Formspring / My chumhandle's hourslongBrouhaha, have fun "talking" to me since I'm never online!
Haha, I want in on this.
Unformated shortfic is a go!
Not So Bad
She had expected this really. Creatures that were never meant to be seen by the eyes of the living blurred past her vision, faster and faster until there was nothing but tentacles. High screeching sounded within her head. They wanted to be tangle buddies. She closed her eyes, but they were there, under her eyelids. Some creature somehow bigger than those before it apeared. She had expected theese creatures, but she has not expected this.
"mot)(er! you're alive!"
So I'm going to give a try at writing something up for Christmas and I was wondering if I could get some feedback on this, especially with character accuracy. So yeah, sneak preview/draft one time?
Snowflakes fell from the grey sky, slowly filling the holes in the snow left by Gamzee’s boot-covered feet. He was running a little late, and the snowfall wasn’t exactly helping matters. He was completely lost in the blizzard, and, having no means of contact, utterly alone. At the very least, he was keeping warm with his red polka dot fat suit. He couldn’t quite remember what the kids called him. Mana Falls? Miss Mingle? It didn’t matter at the moment. By some miracle, he would make it to the party.
About a week earlier, a certain troll with short horns decided to take a stroll around a crater in a checkered planet. He had known a planet very similar, once upon a time. However, high jinks caused him and his eleven…friends, for lack of a better term, to meet four youngsters from another universe. Karkat felt something moving in his sylladex. Instinctively, he took out his computer and noticed John was pestering him.
CG: WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?
EB: hey karkat!
EB: i was wondering what you wanted for christmas.
CG: WHAT THE FUCK IS CHRISTMAS AND WHY WOULD I WANT SOMETHING.
EB: you don’t know what christmas is? really?
EB: okay, i guess you answered that. christmas is the day where everyone is nice to each other and stuff. it’s the season of giving and joy!
CG: OH OKAY.
CG: I WANT A GIANT STATUE IN MY LIKENESS.
CG: EVERY PIECE OF IT WOULD BE EXCRUTIATINGLY DETAILED AND LIFE-LIKE. ALL OF YOU, AS LIFE-SIZED STATUES, WOULD FORM A CIRCLE AROUND ME, BOWING TO MY VERY PRESENSE AND THE FACT THAT MY STONE BONE BULGE BARELY FITS INTO MY ROCK HARD PANTS.
EB: umm…okay?
CG: OH WAIT.
CG: I CAN JUST ALCHEMIZE IT.
CG: IN FACT, I JUST DID. I’LL SEND YOU A PICTURE, IT’S PRETTY FUCKING GLORIOUS. IT SOMEHOW MANAGES TO CAPTURE THE PURE AND UTTER HATRED I HAVE FOR EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU.
EB: yeah, but that’s not the point.
CG: THEN WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT OF THIS.
EB: well
EB: say someone worked really hard on making something for you.
CG: IT WOULD BE A FUCKING WASTE OF TIME.
EB: bluh! fine! i’ll figure it out. later karkat!
CG: WHATEVER.
While I think Karkat would probably ridicule a "season of giving and joy" before immediately demanding a statue, that was pretty cool- more, more, longer please!
And oh man what is up with all the Jade: Wake up fics? Do we really need even more of this? I already can't sleep.
Originally Posted by XFactorInfinity
I really, really hate the way you type. That's an impossibly mean thing to be honest about, but it's true, and I wanted you to know it. It's nothing against you, and I'm sure you're a pretty okay person, I think?
But the way you string sentences together sounds like a mad libs from a buffy factory took all of the worst parts of the nineties and internet culture and condensed it into an impossibly unpleasant grammatical structure. It's like what an intern at Game Bro Magazine writes like, probably. Before editing. It has so much bullshit, why I gotta read -Benedict try to form a coherent sentence dude
lurk here all the time, because the stuff here is awesome (particularly any pesterlogs because goddamn I love pesterlog fics) and you guys are awesome. Just HAVE to delurk to join in on the horrorterror fic-wagon because writing overwrought dark fic is one of my favourite things. Not being an angsty 12 year old any more has failed to change that.
You never knew what a nightmare was before today. You didn’t understand a lot of things, before today. Dreams and clouds and visions all seem meaningless now.
You should have outgrown them years ago, really. You haven’t, but you can’t look at them anymore. You can only continue playing and smiling and pretending nothing has changed.
You pile them up, all of them, touching them as little as you can. Beady eyes and fixed smiles stare back as you destroy them all, blackening and twisting and you have to look away because your head feels funny again. You feel like you're going to fall asleep and
You start noticing shadows more. You hesitate less with your rifle. You feel sleep tugging on everything inside you, and you resist resist resist because you know that the eyes are still watching and waiting for you to come back. You strike harder and faster because you just don’t care. It has made you a better player, you know it has. It’s a good thing. You couldn’t be that silly forever.
You keep playing, keep fighting, keep laughing. You’ll be the cheerleader the boys need. You can’t pass two words with her anymore, and you’re sorry. You try and try but there’s something wrong, something clouds your vision and you can’t breathe and the darkness tugs and tugs and tugs until
It won’t be long now. The Rift looms before you, vast and terrifying but you keep grinning and laughing because that is your job.
Something stirs. You lift your rifle. A face turns to you, smiles, and for a second you see tentacles and darkness.
Your bare finger pulls on the trigger.
and Rextly, this looks like it has potential to be adorable, and your handle on John and Karkat's voices is pretty solid. Look forward to seeing it finished~
um yeah let me just vanish into quietly cheering you guys on from the other side of my monitor again
@spacetimeCounselor that's a good point. I can already see what Karkat should say about it.
@Bufu I'm leaning towards that. And I'm really liking the sense of fear you put into that. I'm picturing Jade wincing as she smiles with the outline of something with tentacles creeping up behind her as I read it.
Well, Icu2jimy said he needed a background for my Fantroll, so here it is:
Snakes and ladderss
Isolated variable
-- endworldNexus [EN] began pestering blackenedHarbinger [BH] at 7:54 --
BH: HeySSTOP
EN: Fuck offSTOP
EN: You can leave my quirk aloneSTOP
BH: *hiissssess iin amussement*
BH: SSo what do you want?
EN: I #ave a game we need to playSTOP
BH: Ooh.
BH: Well, when you put iit that way...
EN: Bro, come on.
EN: T#is is serious.
BH: How sso?
BH: Look, jusst becausse you drrop yourr quiirrk doessn't mean II beliive you.
EN: I #ave detected radiation fluctuations in t#e exosp#ere of Promet#usSTOP
EN: And fuck youSTOP
EN: And don't fucking #iss againSTOP
BH: *hiissssess iin amussement*
EN: Ga## you're impossibleSTOP
BH: To rread?
BH: II get that alot.
EN: No doubtSTOP
EN: #ow many times #as your lusus broken looseSTOP?
EN: A #undred and twelveSTOP?
BH: You betterr SSTOP talkiing about my lussuss asssshole. that wass a iissolated varriiable, ass you would ssay.
BH: beforre II tearr you liimb frrom liimb and usse yourr rrottiing carrcassss ass a matrressss.
BH: II wiill wassh mysself iin yourr blood.
EN: *YawnSTOP*
BH: II wiill make yourr lussuss my thrrone
BH: And yourr sskull wiill be my cup.
EN: Are you done, snakeboySTOP?
BH: You don't beliive me?
BH: Maybe my lussuss needss to go forr a walk iin the orrange neiighborrhood.
EN: Or a slit#erSTOP
BH: You know my lussuss iiss a sspiiderr, rriight?
EN: W#at, reallySTOP?
BH: Yeah. II dunno how orr why though.
EN: T#at's depressing.
BH: don't doubt iit.
BH: Jusst ssend me the fiile and II'll play, mate.
BH: IIn fact, II command you.
BH: Blood sstatuss.
EN: My blood or yoursSTOP?
BH: II'll sspiill yourrss beforre you can bliink.
EN: *blinkSTOP*
Smash
"What the fuck did you do to it?" Saxx hissed. Arigan shrugged.
"I may 'ave dropped a prgramming book or two on it."
The grub that was supposed to hold the game inside it was hanging by a thread, litterally. It's head had been smashed in by a trio of heavy books on programming.
"What the hell, you may have just cost us the game, you asshole! I'll rip you apart!" and to his credit, Saxx moved to do just that. Saxx was a bit violent, even by troll standards. He called a huge rock from his strife deck and swung it. His aim was off though, and he almost hit the Sgrub grub. He took a few deep breaths, weighing his desire to kill something with his desire to continue living. Just this once, the latter succeeded.
A empty crown
They combed the battlefield for days. When they slept, dreamselves took over. When they were awake, they wandered about looking for the black king. Eventually Agrian asked one of the pawns, who responded with confusion. It would take days to figure out that he simply never was.
The crown they had so long saught simply didn't exist. Without the crown, they could not win the game. Their session was null.
Land of Leaves and Feathers
The planet was covered in forests. The ones near the equator were close to becoming rainforests, but they weren't quite there.
It was on this aboreal planet Saxx lived for seven sweeps of his life. For those humans among you, this is the equivilent of fourteen years. For the first two or three he lived alone. Finally he latched onto a tribe of the native Birds, his consorts.
At first, during the time of lonelyness he would cry out for his lost matespirit, Estress. But she had died first, victim of a Kismessitude gone wrong. Saxx had killed the peratrator, but his heart never seemed to heal, even after he slaughtered whole villages. He withdrew into exile, living a life of harvesting and gathering. He never hunted. The last time he killed something another had run out screaming. He had seen himself in their eyes, and he decided never to kill again.
His days in exile were uneventful. His entrance to the tribe was great to him, but the Birds were so accepting it was hardly a good story. He lived fourteen years on that planet, with twelve of them in the company of the warlike Birds. But they were not without honor. They respected not only their dead, but their enemies dead as well. From the birds he learned to respect not only those who took what they needed, but those who gave what the had in excess.
From the birds he learnt of grief, and how to deal with it. Slowly, the gaping wound that Estress had left scarred, and healed. It still hurt him, but not as bad as it did in his time as exile.
And to the birds he taught how to wage better war. He taught them to fight not only with beak and talon and spear, but to flank, to ambush. They taught him to make peace with himself. He taught them to make war short with others.
In time, his tribe spread across the planet. The other tribes were conquered, and then others migrated, seeking place in the glory. There were no more tribes. There grew cities. There grew nations, but only one survived.
From the birds Saxx learned compassion. To the birds he gave the gift of civilization. But still, he was lonely. The birds were not very smart, and Saxx could not speak to them as trolls. He had to speak to them as parrots, not as separate beings. They were simply too dumb.
And then he found a computer, not made of biological, fragile things, but of sturdy steel, gold and copper. On this computer he found a link to the server of the outer ring. And for the first time in years he smiled.
Um, just a quick drabble thing I felt like writing a ways back. :/ Kinda eh, but!
Diamonds Droog centric.
He ain't Slick.
He doesn't get as kiss close, in your face, personal. Slick's a knife attack personified, remixed, set to an old jazz tune; that warm gush of blood against the black shine of carapace, that shlick slip slide sound upon entrance to some sod's bucket of innards. He's everything plus the screams that accompany the few last breaths of a dying victim, and Droog, Droog just ain't that type of guy.
No, Droog is the bullet to the face, the slowly declining shoe to the side of skull placed against a concrete curb, crushing, crushing, crushed. Quick, precise, rage condensed to a smoking bullet hole or splattered mess smeared across the sidewalk with the help of a large blunt object.
--
"You're a cold blooded guy," someone tells him one night at the pool house. Droog only rolls one shoulder nice and slow, pops his neck like it ain't nobody's business. The slit eyed look Droog gives him says, you have ten seconds to say something relevant before I pop you so hard in the mouth you shit a whole fuckin monologue, and the tap tap tap of his fingers against his cue stick counts down the numbers to the death sentence.
"You're a cold blooded guy, but you play a mean sax," that someone finishes in a hurry. The heat that boiled in Droog's veins calms at that, and he gives the man a nod, takes a drag and sends a cloud of smoke his way. "I'd like to play against you."
And that gets Droog's attention pretty quick.
--
Droog ain't Slick - he doesn't get all romantic about his music like how Slick does, doesn't pour out his heart disguised as notes and stanzas onto a pretty white page like how Slick does.
He ain't Slick, but he has just as much passion behind his music, puts just as much pride in his ability as a craftsman.
So when that nobody from before tries to one up him by cheating and pulling out the microphone plug in the middle of Droog's song, Droog goes beyond anger. The liquid black(darker than black) emotion seeps into his tunes like booze into a bloodstream; but Droog works with it, keeps tearing up his set, professionally, like how a real man of class should go about it. The audience gives him a standing ovation; and the nobody just kinda stands there and sweats.
Droog looks at him.
Smiles, sweet like molasses.
The rat might as well just kill himself now. It'll save him the trouble of going through all that pain Droog's about to put him through.
--
crickity crack crack
snap snap
if you cry for me pretty-like, maybe i'll go faster.
hisssssssssssss
--
"Boss."
"What."
"I took a few hundreds from the safe."
"What the fuck, the hell did you do that for?"
"Got blood on my suit."
"Fucking shit, you are such a little bitch for your suits."
He ain't Slick, cause Slick ain't got half the class Droog has.
Spellbinding Reiteration There My Chumly Companion
Okay, that was the best. Diamonds Droog kicks ass and you put the difference between him and Slick perfectly. Whatever a "kudo" is, you deserve all the kudos. All of them.
Originally Posted by XFactorInfinity
I really, really hate the way you type. That's an impossibly mean thing to be honest about, but it's true, and I wanted you to know it. It's nothing against you, and I'm sure you're a pretty okay person, I think?
But the way you string sentences together sounds like a mad libs from a buffy factory took all of the worst parts of the nineties and internet culture and condensed it into an impossibly unpleasant grammatical structure. It's like what an intern at Game Bro Magazine writes like, probably. Before editing. It has so much bullshit, why I gotta read -Benedict try to form a coherent sentence dude
Well I'm bored. lets roll with grimdark on the new update!
Are you there, Skaia?
I remember now. I remember what I made myself forget.
The whispers are back now. I've been ignoring them for a while, but they keep returning. If only I had a way to make them stop, make them freeze. The whispers I ignored, thanks to my dreamself.
I wonder how she's dealing with it. The other girl who was there. The one who didn't understand, who didn't know the truth. I don't think I know the truth anymore. I collected these... demons as a child, and I don't understand.
I don't understand why they're still here, watching. I burned them several times, but they always returned, hiding at the edge of my vision, watching, waiting.
Are you there Skaia? You did this to me. You brought me from my small, pure worldlet, into this living hell. You forced my hand, the hand of a Witch.
Are you ready Skaia? For the eternal torment you're about to suffer? Or... did you not know? Know the true meaning of these... creatures? Beings? Abominations? I'm not sure I know anymore.
I think Skaia... It's time someone showed you that there are two sides of every coin. Two sides to every story.
Two sides to every death. Because Skaia, it seems that you killed me. Not literally, not my dreamself, but metaphorically.
You killed my childhood Skaia. The one I'd treasured for so long. None of my friends know. I'd be an idiot to explain to them what happened. What went on when I slept.
I don't think I've slept for days now. John says it's bad in the Dreamworld, but I should still sleep. Because he doesn't know what I saw. What I will see. I think...
I think I should be dead now. I want to die, but not because I can't sleep.
But because I can't dream.
Blarg, I hate writing grimdark. It makes me sad.
And other people get freaked out when they go through the story section on my laptop.
Ah, good. The horrorterrors are on the site. The serendipity is palpable, the stars must be right.
(I had to split this chapter up into two because it was too long.)
A Hand in Holding Hands
Part 5a (1, 2, 3, 4, 5b, 6, recap1, 7)
The roof fell in, and all Aradia could be sure of was that Tavros had died at once. Equius had been adjusting his legs in hopes of detaching the magnetic clamp but it had not been enough, and though she knew from poor-earned experience that he would never once die easy, he had been too close to the edge of the rubble and no stretch of stone or steel in the lab normally struck so blue. Kanaya’s leg was pinned, though the rest of them had gotten out from under the collapse, only for John to be brained by a shaft of rebar. Karkat shouted orders with no direction, Rose looked like she was going to vomit even more than when she had arrived through the transportalizer, and Nepeta would not stop crying, not even to breathe at times, such that she sounded less like someone wailing and more like the breath was being forced out by dim necessity. Each time she pulled away from Jade she made a deeper dent in the ground, in the concrete ankle-deep, and there were claw-marks on the desk. She did not have a target for her tears and no one to contain her, so she lashed out at random. She would have a target soon enough.
“Eridan, you’re with Vriska and you’re both point. Terezi, get down here and bring Strider with you! Feferi, you and… Harley, get her up I need a flank!” Karkat did not shift from his spot, a step from John, though his eyes wavered towards the hole in the ceiling that reached storeys above. “…’Rezi…” he said, unwilling to force out another shout.
Rose was watching Aradia, hands clutched about her stomach as she squatted useless on the floor, and Karkat met her eyes across the room, as the others scrambled about him, his scythe their standard raised above his head. There were no orders for her. Karkat would never surrender. His scythe was held high, not shaking, but his eyes were sunken and without hope, and Aradia could read that well enough. She raised an arm behind her, waited for a moment for Sollux to take a hint and back away, and then blew a hole in the wall, and headed off as fast as she could handle, back towards Time.
“Where’s she going?” she heard Eridan shout behind her.
“Where do you think, shitscarf? Where’s your damn gun?’
There was no sign of the demon via her new exit, and no sign was the best sign she could have hoped for considering the circumstances. Aradia headed off as fast as her body could bear back out into the game, away from her allies, into the safe embrace of fast-flowing Time.
-------------------------
Dave shadow boxed to wait up the time, because anything was better than jumping in short hops out of simple impatience as it only led to everyone being there late. Then again, maybe he just wanted to pretend to hit something. It was one of those days where hitting something would have really, really appealed to him. In fact, why not? It really struck him that hitting something really hard might just start to balance things out a little. There were plenty of rocks on this asteroid, and he could see plenty of other time-locked asteroids if he needed them. Barring that, he could just swing harder punches at nothing. That seemed best. Straight, hook, kick for good measure, maybe set things straight again in his head. Roundhouse, roundhouse, left, right—
Clang.
He looked at Aradia past his fist and her palm, and she looked back with her usual blank of emotions.
“…Ow.” he greeted.
“Day twenty-two, hour nine,” she replied.
“Yeah, me too,” he said. “Did you see anything?”
“I was in the lab,” she said. “Tavros: dead. Equius: dying. Kanaya has a wound in a major artery and is not receiving proper treatment due to a misunderstanding regarding the gravity of her wound and she is suffering in in-admirable silence. She will be dead within the minute—”
“Past tense!” Dave snapped.
Aradia shrugged. “Considering all of this yet again has yet to happen, I’d say the tense is wrong in a different way. Which would you prefer? John’s condition is going to devolve into a coma but he’ll be all right assuming proper medical care—”
“Oh yes, definitely assuming proper medical care.”
Aradia ignored his tone only after a quick scan. “Did you see anything?”
“No, I was in Terezi’s room,” Dave replied, kicking up dirt with the toe of his shoe.
“And she…?”
Dave looked over his shoulder, towards the lab, but mostly to avoid looking her in the eyes. “What’s the organ that looks kinda like a sock do?”
Though they had lowered their hands, Dave’s fist was still more or less in contact with Aradia’s palm, and he felt her fingers close around his hand, warm through some ungodly heating system Equius had installed for some reason Dave did not really want to think about. “You’re allowed to… feel sad, you know,” she said in one of her off-tones, not quite the comfort of a living Troll but not a lecture either, some tone uniquely her own through vocalizer and ghost together and struggled loose from under the clawed feet of the horrorterrors over the course of the game. Dave turned back to her.
“Look, it’s a bad day. And to be honest, it’s worse to leave them dying than dead, okay? They never get it. That doesn’t mean I don’t need a freaking hug and cry about it, though. Would you?”
Aradia’s fingers flexed about his fist, found better grip and squeezed, and he reached up and brushed his thumb to grasp along her finger, but she should not have and did not expect any more from Dave Strider. He pulled away and faced the lab in the distance, stepping atop a high point on the asteroid and set the small thing, no bigger than a large room, spinning slowly on its axel from his momentum. “Let’s figure out what happened, shall we?”
His turntables were summoned, and he waited until Aradia stepped beside him and brought out her own, and soon they were fast-forwarding time, each in their own bubble, until the telltale blast shot past. Dave for one almost missed his stop, but after some fiddling seemed to have gotten the right second again, and set himself just before. He found Aradia waiting for him.
“Day twenty-two, hour nine,” she said as he arrived and started to find his feet on an asteroid that, in the hours that had passed since they had gathered for their initial conference, was spinning comparably faster.
“Still me, Aradia,” he said, giving it a counter kick.
“Of course it’s still you. the purp0se 0f the time stamps is t0 inform the other of when you came from as 0pp0sed t0 the what gene—”
“Yeah,” Dave said, reaching over with the table still hovering under his hand to pat her on the arm. “I know what the time stamps are for.”
She made a buzzing sound that Dave felt fairly confident was the output of an attempted annoyed grunt, and then pointed to the upper-left their point of view. “There we are,” she said. Dave squinted, setting off the magnify feature of his shades, and saw himself and Aradia dodging and parrying in a fight against what appeared to be nothing but space. The demon, flickering its characteristic green, had not manifested in the time stream of the observing Dave and Aradia, so could not be seen. It was an annoying little trick it used to ensure that, when not fighting masters of the time stream, it only ever fought each opponent alone. Still, he recognized the predicament.
“That’s an early one,” he concluded.
“Day two, hour sixteen,” Aradia replied. “Yet, one of our first battles with no – ribbit – need to go back and correct ourselves.”
“Well that’s about to change, the question is just when… wait, isn’t this the end of the fight?”
“Yes,” Aradia said. Her eye colour changed: she was no doubt accessing her archives. “I drew his fire, you struck him about the head from behind, and he broke off pursuit. It was fairly cut-and-dry.”
Sure enough, past-Aradia broke away in what, from this angle, was clearly the direction of the lab, and beams of green power began to follow her, and at once the both observers understood.
“He… he missed?” Dave said, watching, completely perplexed. “Is that possible? He missed and… four people died?” There was no need for Aradia to reply, for it happened right in front of their eyes. A blast went wide and forever out into space, beyond the chrono-line, beyond the sight of anyone in the battle that – from Dave and Aradia’s perspective alone – had occurred six days prior, and the lab ruptured below. A moment later, a wall burst, and out came a tiny dot of past-Aradia and Dave not far behind.
“Can you fix that?” Dave asked as the wall fell further down.
“There… will be a paradox,” Aradia said after some analysis.
But as their past selves vanished to sync up the timeline, the battle did not cease. Aradia, as they had arranged at the time, turned on a point, and reached out towards the next shot, catching it square on her palm and sent it to each side with a burst of energy she had prepared for exactly such a purpose. That was the signal, and as he saw her block instead of dodge, past-Dave struck the demon square across the neck, and it broke off his assault. Satisfied, the two warriors of time vanished into the safety of the past, but behind the former site of past-Aradia, the energy went wild in a spinning conflux. To the horror of the observers, a lance of it shredded through the lab a second time.
“…two paradoxes,” Dave muttered. “Poor time stream.”
“I will deal with the blasts,” Aradia said, “you deal any repercussions my interference causes with the demon, and I’ll join you—”
And then the woman’s scream hit them. It had covered the whole stretch of space between to reach them but hard, and they realized at once that while their past selves had disappeared, for the first time they could recall, the demon had only physically fallen away, and had returned at once.
“Damn it, no!” Dave shouted toward the lab.
“I…” Aradia blinked repeatedly, the colour of her eyes flicking from system to system as she analyzed something from her archives. “I hadn’t realized...”
“It’s all right,” Dave said.
She shook her head. Her eyes flicked back and forth so fast it seemed as though they were simply flashing. “It is not, this is the exact 0pp0site of all right…” At last, they stopped back on red, and she shook her head. “They were all over her. They were all over her and I didn’t even think…”
Another scream, and with a wrench, the ruins of the lab lifted into the air and sundered into a thousand heavy boulders as a wave of dark purple light flashed out from out of them and spread in every direction like an uneven sphere of power. The sphere crawled toward them, and the demon crawled towards the sphere, where Rose waited for him.
“Why do all her spells sound like screaming these days?” Dave muttered, not really expecting an answer.
“She is screaming,” Aradia said.
Dave shook his head at once. “I’ve seen her in person when it started to happen,” he explained. She just gets a stubborn look on her face, she’s definitely not screaming.”
“No,” said Aradia. “Not present-her.”
And at one end of the bubble, purple light struck green, and a sickly glow spread across as power scorched against power. Boulders flew, spells lashed, until the empty universe was filled with the screaming of a grown woman locked in forever-torment as the bubble seeped closer to the edge of the universe. And when it touched, the whole of the Incipisphere heard the biological tear as the universe rent into the void of horrors and split wide like an eyelid, but it was the eyes that looked in. A million eyes, peering in at every angle, the million eyes of a single god, for only one god of many minds had any interest in the affairs of the little things within.
Both Dave and Aradia turned away at once. “Don’t even look at the edges of your glasses,” Aradia cautioned. “even an inch of the reflexi0n…”
“Yeah, not interested in the gibbering insanity game.”
“We should go,” she cautioned.
“No!” Dave said, surprised by his own urgency. “You go. I… can you imagine how fast that thing can move? If it wants to grab Rose, pull her out with it, even the death of the timeline won’t stop it!”
Aradia turned toward him, trying to gauge on his face if he meant exactly what she thought he meant. After a moment of her probing response, he kept his straight face and whispered: “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”
“Strider…” she said, at what for her accounted for a whisper. “I’m not going to cover you all day against a demon and just walk away when you’ve got a different kind of trouble.”
Dave did not really know what to say in response to that. His mouth just hung open for a moment when the purple bubble reached them at last and crawled over them. It pulled him and Aradia into a world of dark imaginings painted over the real. A drop of burning cold slipped down his neck and spine, as a hissing swirl of whispers filled his ears interrupted only by the screams of the magical fight. He could not imagine what Aradia was going through, but did not for one second think that the horrorterror looking in would have excluded her on such pithy grounds as robotics. He was right.
“Look at the both of you. You look like you’re about to drop. Nothing about this says you can’t at least sit down, you know.”
“Aradia…” Dave said, trying with all his might not to even glance in his friend’s direction for fear of the reflection of the elder god. “Do you… see an alcoholic on a barcalounger?”
“Is a barcalounger a type of chair?”
“…Yes, then,” Dave said, wondering exactly why Rose’s mother had just appeared in front of him, in expensive-looking furnature. She did not sound one bit like he had imagined.
“I’m serious, you know,” said Mrs. Lalonde, swirling a martini in one hand. “You’re both about to be off patching up all the damage to this poor universe, the last thing you really need is stress.”
“Look, lady, what do you want?” Dave asked.
“Can’t a woman be good natured?” There was a scratching sound, just to the chair’s right, which Dave managed to pick up despite the sounds emanating from the horrors that he was blocking out for dear sanity. He looked and saw, drawing a pattern in the ground, the tip of a sword coming in off the edge of the bubble. The sword continued its pattern unseen, not capable of touching the dirt, back beyond the borders, but those very borders followed it, and soon it reappeared. Dave saw the drawing lay split in the middle by the delay, and the sword attached to the hand of his brother.
“And as soon as you all finish your patch job,” the woman continued, “you’ll have to plop down to rest right in the middle of the day at that lab, and goodness knows you’ll be back at it only a few hours after noon. The demon is completely relentless.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Bro, and Dave was taken immediately aback. Bro sounded nothing like he should, not in the slightest. He tossed his sword to the other hand. “We get it,” he said to the woman. “You’re ‘Sloth.’ And it’s not working on these workaholics.” He snapped up the martini, which tore away from Rose’s mother as though her hand were made of smoke, and both she and the bacalounger faded away into the snarling hellscape about them. Things were starting to grow on the asteroid, things that looked like they had been born with the pall of death already crisscrossing their every part.
“So which mind of the octopus back there are you?” Dave asked, pointing toward the rift and elder god beyond, “and do you realize you sound nothing like my bro?”
“Oh, I’m just me, same as her. Many minds, but the same mind in the end. We’re just all trying things from different angles is all, using whatever Rose gives us to work with. She’s cute, Dave.”
“Sure, Rose is okay, but if you’re trying to set up some sort of mind game—”
“Her, Dave.” The demon Bro tilted his head towards Aradia and took another step closer to Dave, who responded not by drawing a weapon but by setting his hands again on the timetables. The demon stopped. “’Course, we both it’s too bad that she’s a robot. Equius did do his best but you’ve got to admit there’s a little something lacking for the imagination… or the hands… in the middle of the night.”
Dave just laughed at him. “Man, my bro could really teach you a thing or two about tricking people. What kind of god are you?”
And the fake bro laughed right along with him. “That’s some ego you have there, Dave. A teenaged girl’s inner lust walks up to you and you think he’s there to tempt… you.”
Dave glanced worriedly towards Aradia but before he could even take her in he had been cuffed by the side of her hand. “He’s trying to get you to look at the reflection!” Aradia hissed at him. Dave caught his breath and, in the shade of her hand, looked up at her face and saw no sign that the demon was getting to her at all. The demon clucked his tongue down at Dave.
But then there was a new screaming, one that seemed to come straight out of the demon. It clashed with the one coming from behind, but was not the scream of the insane woman from behind, but the scream of a girl afore, shouting out in pain alone.
“Ooh, tick tock, tick tock.” The demon shook his head. “I’d give her about twenty seconds, wouldn’t you, Maid of Time?”
Dave decided not to even entertain that thought. “You’re leaving your ugly personality here pretty far from the void,” he said, taking back to his feet from the crouch he had taken after Aradia’s blow. Her hand stayed in place next to his temple. “How would you feel if we shut this timeline and see how you deal with a broken mind?”
The demon shook his head. “You’d both have to leave pretty much at the same time to end the timeline, Dave, or I catch the other one. Your solidarity’s not actually helping you very much.” And the younger screen shot through the demon, howling in a way Dave had not heard before, not in all the times he had been back and forth, watching his friends die. The demon lowered its shades to look at him over the tops, and Dave saw that his eyes sizzled like coals in their sockets. “You should really see this one. I think I can manage that.”
“N-not cool man.” Dave did not need a visual. It was already running through his head. He had seen too many horrible deaths not to imagine them if the situation called for it, and Rose’s voice, like all of his best friends’, had been burned into his mind, and there was no mistaking her suffering. What love could give in reading secret troubles in a wavering intonation wrought nightmares on the little details of true pain. There was everything he could do, an infinity of opportunities, and it was becoming harder and harder to remember that they were all dead ends. No way to face the demon single-handed. No way to face the horrors. If he moved, Rose would be plucked out to become the woman in her spells, to suffer forever out of space and time. But Aradia, with her hand on her music boxes and the other blocking Dave’s vision, pinched his ear gently between her littlest fingers, and he kept his hand firm on the timetables.
Then, from the demon, the screams ceased with a snap that cut through him, deadening. It cut the flow of emotion in its tracks, and he looked up at the demon, who simply smirked as the bubble of purple receded into nothing, and said: “You lose.”
And the demon looked out from beyond the patches that had formed in it as the bubble fell away. “Did we?”
They stood alone for a moment, as the world around them began to fall into a pall of hideous green. “Come on,” Aradia said. “She’s not with them. You did it.” He nodded, and together, she guiding his hand, they rewound time until they were once again safe on the tiny rock, alone, with the lab standing far beyond them intact and silent. As far as the rest of the universe was concerned, nothing else had ever happened.
Dave’s head fell forward as she let him go. “…Aradia.”
“I’m not worried about it,” she said. “i sp0ke with them when i was a living teenager as well i kn0w what they can say” She held out a hand to him, which he took. “And I know that if you had any feelings for me you would be more direct with me than some have been in the past, as I would be for you.”
In spite of himself, Dave laughed. “I was going to say thank you, first.”
“Oh,” said the robot, touching a hand to her face. “Then… I suppose he did get under my skin.” Dave smiled, trying to look as charming as he could, perhaps to compensate for moments before in another timeline, and she flicked his hand away. “Come! We have work to do. After that, Terezi will wipe that smile off your face for me.”
“Ooh… right,” Dave said.
“What is it?”
“It’s nothing. Nothing that stands up to anything that just happened.”
And they set their hands on their timetables and disappeared, to set things right again.
-------------------------
Rose reappeared in the central lab shaken and nauseous. The Trolls around her did not notice her arrival. They were spread out as it needed, most of them still at their film, including Nepeta who perched her front arms on the back of the couch, but Tavros and Eridan and to Rose’s additional dismay, Vriska were hunched intensely over their monitors. Aradia worked silently in her own corner of the room, and there was no sign of Dave and Terezi. Equius stepped through the transportalizer just behind Rose, and immediately set to work on Tavros, muttering as he went, as Tavros tried to continue his conversation on the side. It was a sorry display, an ordinary day.
Since this and his appearance in 5b is the last we’ll be seeing of Dave for a few chapters, I just wanted to say as I should have done in the first place how much I owe to Raequiem’s PTSD. Dave’s ability to tell the time out of his head is straight from there, and while I came up with the idea of him operating to keep everyone from their doom independent of PTSD, it was done better there.
Did I just imply that Trolls have no barcaloungers but do have alcoholics?
Any feedback on this and 5b once I've posted it is critical to me because these chapters are important but also potentially confusing. You've all been following along great, I just want to make sure we can keep following along from here!
Last edited by SkaianRedeemer; 11-25-2010 at 04:30 PM.
Ahhh, Skaian, I just love your fic so much . Always a nice little treat to stumble across~. I liked the interaction between Aradia and Dave, and the "Don't peer into the abyss!".
I had to go back over the portion just after the timestamps, and a little before the meeting with "Mom" a few times to get everything straight. But, I think it's just because I always have the worst time with.. time! Hehe.
Also like how you just slipped in the end of chapter 4 with that little twist- one crisis averted, but for how long?
She wakes, eyes wide, body trembling. Jade
Around her, the plush bodies stare, silent, motionless as she calms her frenetic heartbeat. Drawn by pale, shaking arms, the squiddles gather to her, ending up in a pile in her lap, looking up at her with blank smiles. Jade
"That's what dreams are like when you're asleep," she murmurs, recalling the short time before she woke up on Prospit. "I don't think I like those kinds of dreams." The squiddles remain wordless. "They don't make any sense." Jade, don't worry about it. It was just a dream.
She giggles, holding her plushes close. "You're right, Squiddle Sapphire. Just an asleep dream."
And she lies back and closes her eyes, reveling in the cold, slick flow of hundreds of writhing tentacles.
"Gl'bgolyb wasn't even in the Rainbow Rumpus episode. What a silly dream."
EDIT: Ninja'd by an update, the best thing about fanworks.
@Nanakii: I fixed up the time stamp things a bit! As for "Mom" I think I will consider it but I'm going to have to clear my head. Waiting one day for an edit is fair for fanfiction, but more is always better. I might also want to better imply that the voices speaking to Rose are familiar voices (seeing as how the idea occurred to me in Chapter 4), and maybe specifically that Sloth is "Mom". If the reader associates Mom with the elder god I keep not naming out loud because I'm weird like that, maybe it would make more sense when Rose's power "crawls" her into existence.
A Hand in Holding Hands
Part 5b (1, 2, 3, 4, 5a, 6, recap1, 7)
“How’s the movie?” Rose asked Jade after a few minutes of deciding what to do. She kept an eye on Tavros as he was repaired, but Tavros was too busy monitoring his computer like his life depended on it to really talk.
“They’re pretty good!” she said, passing Rose the popcorn. “I mean, I don’t really get them all the time, but I get that she’s trying to save him from exposing himself to the empress so that he’ll be culled. I mean, I don’t get why but that’s still what’s going on.”
“If this is anything like the ones on earth?” Rose said, “There might not be an actual reason.”
She looked around the couch. Feferi watched with continued interest, Karkat with big, puffy eyes. Nepeta, who had never seen it, chewed on her hat enough that if she was scared she might very well bite through the thing. Kanaya watched still distant, and John last of all sat with the biggest grin on his face Rose had seen since the day he had slipped Karkat a joy buzzer.
“Hah! Oh my god Tavros, could you be more adorable?”
Rose shuddered. Vriska, and she could not have been more cutting in how she said it. She turned slowly back towards the room, and saw Tavros turning his monitor away from a curious Equius. Eridan snarled at her from across the room. “Vris, don’t make me come over there.”
“I’d love that, Eridan.”
Eridan’s eyes went wide. “Would you? …Really?”
Kanaya and Sollux, who had otherwise been ignore the whole affair, slowly looked up and stared with incredulity. Rose was aghast, and it was only worse how he did not seem to realize how he sounded. She set her head in her hands and hoped that maybe that would hide her from the world.
But then the roof shook above them. They all jumped in their spots and looked straight up, no one with more urgency than Aradia. They waited, wondering exactly what it was they had heard when suddenly the muffled sound of voices picked up on the floors above them. It continued until the point that everyone was listening, even Gamzee, who had otherwise slept through even the shaking. The kept listening until for a moment, it appeared directly below them, in the transport hub, and then last of all when it picked up at full volume right in the middle of the lab.
“You are shit! I don’t believe you, you little piece of… argh! This isn’t over. You just wish this was over. 1 W1LL M4K3 YOU HURT FOR TH1S.”
Rose had seen many terrible things in the games, horrifying things, but nothing had struck her as dangerous as Terezi did at that moment, as she corralled Dave against a desk with her one finger. She was covered in dirt and dried paint, but she emanated pure Troll rage in every muscle, and though her hands were bare Rose would not have said much for Dave’s chances if she decided to attack him bare handed. A teal streak cut through the grime on one side of her face.
“YOU DONT H4V3 TO… damn it. You don’t have to even put up with me! But once you’ve fucked with my feelings, it’s over, Dave! And it is over!”
Rose took a check of the room and was appalled to see first Vriska, who looked like Chrismas had just dropped into her lap, and then Karkat, whose face had gone from weeping over the plight of his fictional stars to ecstatic joy. Dave, on the other hand, had said nothing in his defence but to raise his hands up between he and Terezi.
Terezi glared at him for quite a while, before it seemed that she felt she had said all she had said, and simply whispered “FUCK YOU” before turning about and leaving via the transportalizer. The room was left in silence, a sepulchral pall that hung over all of them. Dave looked about the room, and cast a meaningful look towards Aradia before settling on the couch area. He met Rose’s eyes in particular for a particular look she could not make out with his shades in the way. It was Vriska who took it upon herself to break the silence.
“Oh my god Strider! What did you do?”
Dave picked himself up and dusted himself off, as though trying to regain his cool. “Not much,” he said, “I just took a friend’s advice to have a talk with Terezi.”
Rose’s heart sank and she fell back against the couch with a thump. Vriska, it would seem, thought this was the funniest thing she had ever heard, and began to break out in a fit of Terezian laughter.
“Hah hah hah,” Dave said, bland as could be. “And I’m out.”
“Dave, wait!” Jade shouted.
“Yeah, dude!” John said, scrambling to take to his feet. Dave ignored both of them, but they followed him through the portal. The room was again silent, except for Vriska, and the low sound of Gamzee’s horns as he settled back in for his late-morning nap. Rose turned her astonished face up to Kanaya, but her interest was immediately drawn past, towards Karkat, who had laid back down and restarted the movie. She took angrily to her feet, and Kanaya slapped Karkat across the shoulder.
“What?” he said. “What’s with those looks?”
“Aren’t you going to…?” Kanaya suggested.
“What? …Terezi?” He looked back and forth between them. “You guys are nuts. Look, look at this this way. You want me to go up there and go ‘There, there you big blubbering idiot,’ but guess what? Terezi is not my matesprit. No no! I know exactly what you’re going to say. But the fact is, she and I have been on the rocks for weeks now. Big, sharp pointy rocks!”
He held up a hand flat against the other’s fingers to indicate. “Now, if I go up there right now after she’s been having a fight, she is going to press me down on one of those rocks,” he did so with his hand, ‘impaling’ it on the fingers, “until I’m feeding Nepeta’s rats in a trough! Now, the alternative is for me to sit down here, basking in the idea that Terezi and Strider hate each other! In the first scenario, I get screwed over, while in the second scenario, my life is stu-pendous! This is the best news I’ve had since you punks showed up! You actually want me to go up and step in it?”
“…I’ll go,” Rose said, and she sighed. “This is my fault too. I shouldn’t have said anything to Dave, I…” She looked up and saw the transportalizer glaring at her in the distance. “I’m just going to take the stairs, is all.” She stared at the teleporter, wondering exactly what it was that was bothering her. She reached out a hand and brushed Kanaya’s shoulder “I’ll see you tonight,” she said.
It took forever to actually walk anywhere in the lab. It was not built for that sort of access, except for maintenance, and the maintenance hallways had not been well maintained in their own right. In time, Rose found her way into Terezi’s sector and began the long climb of the stairs. As she went, she followed the half-finished mural Terezi and Dave had been drawing, which equal parts impressed and detracted her. As she went, she eventually came upon the end of the mural and the sound of the crack both. Embedded knee deep in the floor, along a massive gash in the floor, was Terezi’s cane. Rose was not entirely sure she wanted to go past that point, the literal line in the ground between her and Terezi. She could not imagine the sheer force that had gone into the swing. She was starting to regret coming up here with no information. What on earth had Dave done?
Terezi sat perched on the opposite edge of the lab’s roof, one hand limp in her lap and the other held clutched to her face, grasping over mouth and eyes, though her fingers were pried apart enough to reveal a shadow-cast socket and the faintest outline of a scorched eye beneath. Terezi lifted her hand and took a sniff of the air as she heard Rose approach. Her face screwed tight with anger at first, but it was lost in a breath, when an uncontrolled look of misery passed over her face, and all she ultimately did to communicate with Rose was to look in the opposite direction. Warily, Rose stepped forward and sat down beside her, legs overhanging the rock below. Above them the sky struck black in all directions.
After a time, Terezi must have realized there was nothing she could do, and she let her hand fall down to touch the other tip of her shades in her hands, fiddling with the arms and shaking her head. Those simple gestures, eyes shut, only came in extended moments of calm, but most of the time she was bracing. She would clutch her glasses towards her lap and flinch, trying to gently suffocate her own cries and block her tears. They sat there as the minutes passed by, night immeasurable, as Rose made no move further away or closer, save to set her hand beside her on Terezi’s side, and Terezi made no attempt to shoo her away.
And then a pale tear slipped past, and in surprise, Terezi’s lips parted and she took in a gasping cry, and shook from head to toe, shades clutched so close Rose thought she might break them. Her arm came up to cover her mouth and she pushed it all down again, as the tear fell down her cheek and out of sight. Once she had buried it deep, she spoke at last.
“So what did that bastard say as soon as my back was turned?”
Her voice was incredibly rasp. The young Trolls had always struck Rose as a little deep-throated, even the females, but crying had turned Terezi’s piercing voice to a rumble that would have done her well in a future as a judge.
“Which one?” Rose asked. “The one who just pissed you off or the one who didn’t come as soon as he knew what happened?”
Terezi laughed, not her usual cackle if only because it had cut into barks of laugh and cry intermingled, and she soon called it off. “You really know how to cut to the heart of it, don’t you? Maybe if you knew not to say it after you might just be a pathetic auspistice instead of…” But whatever she had been trying to do was swept up in a sudden cry that she tried at once to disguise as another broken laugh, and turned away, and soon enough, had began to cry in earnest.
Rose reached over, to put an arm around Terezi, who without her normal personality suddenly seemed very small indeed. Terezi swiped away her arm at once and with no break in her voice at all snapped: “Don’t touch me!” and gave her a look that asked just where Rose had gotten the impression that hugs were even on the table. “Dammit, don’t you know you look like him?” Terezi had opened her eyes to shoot her the glare, and it took all her reserves to keep from backing away at the sight of them. Like two open wounds on her face, tinted in a faint teal of her tears, shooting a look of anger at her, it threw Rose completely off whatever silly plan that might have occurred to her before she sat down.
Terezi closed her eyes and scooted a step away, taking ahold of her own arm, just a normal girl again. No, Rose thought. Don’t start it, don’t say 'normal'! This is Terezi: she’s a teenager, a Troll, and a horrible little monster some times, and she is your friend and if you can’t like her for... how she is... then what are you doing here?
“You shouldn’t,” Terezi said.
“Shouldn’t… what?”
“Vriska,” Terezi said, spitting. “I know he’s asked you. Don’t. Take it back if you have to. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
Terezi shook, this time with rage. Rose was astonished to see it. Thanks to the tears, she had seen Terezi go on longer than she had ever remembered her going without her tone, that manipulative, charismatic sneer she loved to use when things were going just her way. But this anger, callous and unprepared, was the opposite of that tone.
“‘We should be partners,’” she recited, “‘Oh man, you’re the best moirail ever, did you know that?’ FUCK YOU!” And suddenly Rose placed the new tone. “Murdering innocents on my watch. Pushing Tavros off a cliff on a blackcrush impulse, and then just when I’m trying to pull everything together, Aradia… Aradia…” She shook her head, again and again. “Tell Kan she’s an idiot! Picking up Vriska right after that just because she felt a little flushed one afternoon and didn’t know how to say. Fucking idiot.” Terezi looked up again, straight in Roses’s eyes, arms clutched around her chest in a protective hug. “Don’t help her, Lalonde. Everyone and their consorts has a reason to hate Vriska. But she doesn’t deserve someone to hate.”
Terezi returned to looking out over the edge when all of a sudden, she laughed again. “I don’t even hate him!” she shouted. “Just my luck. That shit comes up here and says ‘Wait, aren’t we just friends?’ ‘I never thought you meant it, I thought you were just playing.’ ‘No, Terezi, I can’t just...’” That break was hers, the quote just fell apart. “‘Of course I love you, I just… I don’t love you like that.’ Well what the fuck did you mean, you big dope? Just my luck.” And she sat still again, curling her legs up to her chest.
“And now…” Terezi said. “When do…when you think the bomb’s going to fall?” Terezi asked, pointing up in the direction of lost Skaia. “Do you know why I came up here?” she asked. “It’s because when I was little, and I was sad, I used to go up into my hive, and I would talk to my lusus. And even though she’s been gone, I just had to come up.” She looked out over the horizon and shook her head, seemingly at the wrongness of it all. “I used… to read her stories, once she had taught me how to read. I used to have this one…” Terezi held up her hands casually to indicate a book, about the exaggerated length and height of a children’s picture book on Earth. “It was about this Troll, who lived way back before we had interstellar ships.
“One day, the Troll’s kismesis dies fighting in the wars. And even as he just gets this news, his auspistice comes in and tells him that he’s leaving, because he has no more reason to stay. And the guy is so upset that his hobby, these, uh, woodcarvings that show up all over the book, just start to fall behind. And his matesprit says ‘You used to be full of so many ideas and…’ and… ‘we used to make so many beautiful things together, but now you just sit and do nothing.’ And after a few days, she leaves. And he goes looking for a new matesprit, and a new kismesis, but no one wants him because he’s so sad, and in the end the drones come.”
Terezi still looked breathless from her crying but her narration continued with a certain sense of grand theatrics to her limited audience. She even had a special voice for the next character: “And his moirail comes to him and says: ‘I have to go. You’ve made a fool of yourself and I won’t have any part of this.’ And so he’s all alone, as the drones go from door to door. There’s no one for him in the whole world except his carvings, so he looks through them and remembers all the days when he was strong and happy. And finally, he sees… he sees the drones through his window, coming over from the next house, and…”
She blinked out at the sky. “And he goes out to meet them with a smile on his face.”
The ending took Rose by surprise. She had previously been picturing something akin to one of her own children’s books, the kind these sort of deep stories had, always with the lovingly painted set of pictures at the top, but the moral struck her too hard to belong to that set. But as Terezi paused in a certain sense of relish, it sank in for Rose that, for a Troll, that was almost certainly what the sort of book it was, an important life lesson bundled tight with detailed pictures to draw the eye and simple words to guide the reader.
“And I never understood, when I was little, why someone like that that would fall aside so easily. Why he’d get so depressed because of their kismesis. Why he’d let his life fall apart when he was so strong in the end. He died like a Troll. And now…” She looked up again, towards Skaia, and the doom unseen, and began to cry anew. “And now I don’t know how he did it alone!”
Rose started. “Terezi, we’re not—”
“Yeah, I know,” Terezi said. “We’ve all seen you running around, testing the w-waters, like you’ve still got time to live it from start to finish." She sniffed and wiped her nose. "Call me a pessimist. I just wanted someone to be there with me. Doesn’t everyone want someone’s hand to hold at the end of the world? But I guess that’s past. Your friend and I just don’t see eye to nose, I guess. And Karkat… well I think the only one that doesn’t realize he’s a lost cause is him. And now I’m all alone again.”
“But… Terezi,” Rose said, touching the other girl’s arm. Terezi looked up at her, red eyes leering out from under heavy lids. “I… it’s not just optimism. Not on its own, I mean. I can’t say anything about where you’ll be in your life when the demon comes, but haven’t you seen? Didn’t he tell you anything either?”
“Tell me what?”
“Aradia and… and Dave. They’ve been going out, day in and out, to buy us more hours, days… Terezi, didn’t you ever wonder what we were doing sitting here week after week?” Rose stretched out her hand toward the voice. “Did you think he was admiring the scenery? They’re not just going to let us go if we’re going to die. Not like that. We might still get out of here. There might still be a chance, a good chance, to…”
Whispering voices calling at the back of her memory, the voice that sounded like Jade's grandfather in her mind, but Rose snuffed them. She would not listen to that one again, not when there were other ways to seize what he promised. “…to live.”
Terezi stopped almost totally still for a moment, taken utterly aback. She looked back to the sky, and out. Her eyes stared dark as the sky she could see through other means, and her arms slid back, lying part-way to the ground, as if she wanted to see the whole sky, and nothing came to meet her gaze. She shook her head, eyes closing as she took full to her back and lay in the dust and rubble. Reaching up, she brushed her hair out of her face as her an indiscernible look crossed her lips.
“…Rose?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“Do you think you ever… stop liking someone? I mean, do you think you ever look at them and say ‘I guess his eyes aren’t really that cute’ or, ‘You know, he doesn’t make me laugh any more.’”
Rose was not honestly sure what to say. “Maybe. If they change.”
“If they change…” Terezi said, like a sigh. “Don’t you wish… you could just go up the next day and say ‘I’m sorry! It was all a mistake! I was pale for you all along! We’ll be the best moirails, the b-best…’” Terezi reached up and wiped a tear from her cheek, in the process replacing her shades.
Rose shook her head. “‘But I hope we can still be friends.’”
“Is that what you humans say?” Terezi asked. She had sat up, and was slowly taking to her feet.
“It’s what we shouldn’t,” Rose admitted.
“Heh,” Terezi said. She was grinning, but ruefully, and Rose looked up at a wary mouth full of shark-teeth wide and terrifying. Rose felt her stomach sink as she looked up at Terezi and her sad eyes still not hiding the truth for all her marvellous façade.
“Do you…” Rose said, eyes lowering as she did. “Do you think you might take a chance to talk to him?”
Terezi’s smile faded back behind her lips. She reached into her sylladex and pulled out a piece of paper, which she looked at, sighed, and crumpled it into a ball. Then, she looked down at Rose, hefted the ball and bounced it gently off of Rose’s face.
“Bonk,” she said on impact, and turned to leave the roof behind.
Rose reached over and took up the wad of paper and unfolded it carefully, discovering a print out from a laser printer, with a pen signature indecipherable in the corner. She leaned in to read the contents. She wanted to laugh but really, the whole thing just caught in her throat.
“…okay, TURN the spoon first you shit…”
Rose returned to the ground the way she had came, and made her way back to the lab. She ignored everyone that talked to her, pressing on without a word. Rose had never really imagined what it would be like to break up with someone, but she was imagining now. She could only imagine Terezi’s hurt if she saw Dave in the next few days, and could not imagine what nonsense Dave would go to bury the same because she knew that when Dave said he was your friend, he meant it so adamantly that it could never have been a lie. There was nothing to bridge that gap now.
Terezi had wanted some support when things were at their worst. But there was no one to do that if they did not fill a quadrant, and now Dave was out, and Karkat was one the exact rocks he had predicted. Had it had to come to this? Had it had to have even begun? If Terezi had been a human, wouldn't they have had a chance to be friends? If Dave had been a Troll, would they have hit a heart or a diamond running? All the time they had been together, they had been at simple odds with one another, assuming a default they had not shared. When the demon came, Dave would have her, John and Jade, and for all Rose knew, Aradia on some level. Terezi, as it stood, would have no one. Rose wished she could change that without spitting on the Troll’s culture, or her own. No one would win for that.
But maybe she had too much of Kanaya in her after all, because Rose could not find it in her to sit still. Not while there was still work she could do. Not if she could still, just maybe, build some bridge, bring some joy. Not if she could be the one to help someone else hold hand in hand together at the end of the world.
“Tavros,” she said to him, just above a whisper. “Are you maybe still interested in having a little talk about Eridan?”
The following notes explain why I consider this chapter important in the long run, so it can sort of be considered spoilers. But only sort of. Also, I don't like that these notes explain something I was trying to get across in the text, so there's that too. To that end, nested spoiler.
The reason chapter 5 is split instead of simply being chapter 5 and 6 is because they're both about "the stakes", and because hopefully some of the readers will feel that the budding relationship between Aradia and Dave plays off of the dying relationship between Dave and Terezi. It is also there to remind you that Terezi's behaviour, and her being conscious of the Troll's apparent imminent doom, is perfectly rational, since you saw what could happen just moments ago. Whether or not you share Rose's optimism is a different matter entirely.
And yes. The title means something. It’s not just some words I mashed together. I’m shocked too. This wasn’t where I planned to mention it at all! Originally the title appeared in a later pesterlog where Kanaya tried to equate auspistice with "A hand holding holding hands." Trying to get across the that auspistice was supporting but not really a part of the relationship in the visual just kept coming out garglemesh.
Last edited by SkaianRedeemer; 11-25-2010 at 04:30 PM.
God I can't stay mad at Noir.
He's just.
He's like when a tiny puppy murders a squirrel and brings the corpse into your house as a present to you and it's wagging its tail and is SO PROUD of itself.
Then it goes into your house, tears your couch apart, and shits on all of your carpets.
Am I weird that after reading all these fics I'm actually excited to go to sleep? Because if I am, That's another 5 bucks I owe myself (which i can't pay, by the way - stupid self-debt).
Also, I'm thinking of trying my hand at fanfiction for the first time. A kind of And Then There Were None kind of story, but with pranks, irony and trolling instead of murder. I'm planning on rereading the book before I start, but does anyone have any ideas/advice/"THIS MUST HAPPEN OR YOU DIE!!!!!!!!" things to say? As I said, it's kinda gonna be my first actual piece of writing I cared to put work into, so any hints/help/advice/warnings/etc. would be helpful.
If you feel that there's no way things could get any worse, that means things will only get better!
...That, or you're possibly being fed on by a dementor. Eat some chocolate, stat.
Red Pen: Yes. I was so afraid you would discontinue this! I liked the bit with Rose messing around in her office; it's good to see that for all her cold-blooded badassery (Archagent Lalonde indeed!) she's still the thirteen-year-old girl who take a moment to indulge in refrigerator magnet mustaches when there were forest fires stirring all around her house.
conceptofzero: Loved it. Gushed on AO3 already. Will probably gush more when you reply to me there.
emesis: ...guh. The tone is perfect for a Midnight Crew story, the characterization is spot-on, and reading through this is intensely satisfying in the same way that blaring a good murder ballad is. But what was that poor stupid bastard thinking?
Originally Posted by KarneWarrior
. Always a nice little treat to stumble across~. I liked the interaction between Aradia and Dave, and the "Don't peer into the abyss!".
