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I've been having the sort of creative crisis for the past few weeks where "writing" becomes a word that means "the process of tabbing between approximately 4 google docs, muttering Why Do I Suck So Hard At Everything I Attempt Forever as an incessant mantra, daily, for hours at a time".
And as much as I feel a twinge of guilt for ignoring my Dreamwidth but for silly request memes, WHO IS IN THE MOOD FOR A SILLY REQUEST MEME?
Specifically this one, because I'm still fond of the results:
Give me a pairing (or a 3+some) and I will give you a brief summary of their totally overwrought love story! It will be like a Harlequin romance, except I have very little idea of how Harlequin romances actually work, so probably it won't be like that at all.
Fandoms are anything I'm familiar with, and if I'm left staring blankly I'll ask for a new prompt. (Strong contenders include Homestuck, Spin State & sequels, subsections of the DCU, Good Omens, incomplete swaths of Trekverse... but this is not an exhaustive list. Eg, I listened to Welcome To Night Vale yesterday, and completely forgot until this sentence.)
And as much as I feel a twinge of guilt for ignoring my Dreamwidth but for silly request memes, WHO IS IN THE MOOD FOR A SILLY REQUEST MEME?
Specifically this one, because I'm still fond of the results:
Give me a pairing (or a 3+some) and I will give you a brief summary of their totally overwrought love story! It will be like a Harlequin romance, except I have very little idea of how Harlequin romances actually work, so probably it won't be like that at all.
Fandoms are anything I'm familiar with, and if I'm left staring blankly I'll ask for a new prompt. (Strong contenders include Homestuck, Spin State & sequels, subsections of the DCU, Good Omens, incomplete swaths of Trekverse... but this is not an exhaustive list. Eg, I listened to Welcome To Night Vale yesterday, and completely forgot until this sentence.)
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From:
p1
And now, to draw the triangle.
Let’s try this in stages: Start with a line segment.
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1
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At about 5 sweeps is where things get interesting.
The trials are long over, and so the slow wave of settlement. There are enough resources to go around; bloodlust is falling out of fashion with the inexorable change of brain hormones. Suddenly, everyone is interested in figuring out the *rules*.
They're all so bad at it! Not at all like Terezi, who was raised in large portion by a library encompassing such subjects as law, psychology, and how to knot rope. She makes a hobby of tangling her age peers in their own novice logic until they are as bug-eyed and speechless as if she had tightened her physical rope around their necks. (As sometimes she does.)
It's the grey text itself that first strikes her attention. What it says to her is that Karkat Vantas has comprehended one fundamental system their society is built on (Which is a better feat than, eg, Sollux Captor, an otherwise favourite conversational partner) well enough to *reject it*.
He's doomed, of course. But more brazenly and more interestingly (she thinks!) than the vast majority of her peers.
(Eventually, when she discovers the truth, Terezi is angry. As though the betrayal was purposeful and personal.)
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0
ok then, let’s make it easier.
Start with a blank canvas on which to draw.
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There's not a hole at the bottom of paradox space. Nothing "leaks". Nothing is caught in the dark flow's current to spiral helplessly down.
But there are places where the membrane between universes is thin enough that objects larger than photons can pass themselves through. "Membrane" is an imprecise metaphor, but so is "tunnel" or "wormhole" or even, perhaps, "travel". The wandering object *must* fold itself into one of the higher, *hidden* dimensions (explain troll physicists who sneer disdainfully at the phenomenon) because the unfolding into the next universe results in a chiral inversion impossible in the standard 3 dimensions. Imagine a permeable mirror.
It's not hard to initiate travel across, if only one way. The motive force is simple will, and many trolls have a natural sense for the threadbare portions of reality (largely - but not entirely - in proportion to psychic affinity). But doing so is deeply censured** by their society, condemned as the most cowardly option, an escape far more humiliating than facing one's demise honourably and head-on.
(Why so taboo? I might speculate that psychic activity is largely weighted towards the lower castes, and having a path where the arbitrators of society cannot so easily follow might be a destabilizing force to those who hold power.)
(But perhaps there are other reasons, long forgotten. *Which* dimensions must one pass through?)
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1
Now. Draw a single, starting point.
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For the first week, Vriska goads her from the other side of the room, where Terezi has tied her with Terezi’s most unbreakable chains. Vriska thinks Terezi has used justice as an *excuse* to chase her down and capture her, and she thinks that eventually Terezi will let her go so that they can start the game once more.
She is very wrong.
And Vriska realizes it late, not late enough, and treats all observers to a self-pitying, narcissistic rant about even Terezi turning against her (well, *yes*, that’s been a thing since Terezi took on the case!) and since no one wants her here anymore…
And pops out of the universe.
Terezi knows what happened - she smells the breech in the universe, spiderweb cracks like sharp sunlight licking the edge of a knife. A cowardly move! But Terezi has been on the chase for sweeps. She jumps after.
Terezi has travelled often through the medium, the membrane between existence and other and not, but always wrapped carefully in the protective hull of spacecraft. There is sight static - flashes of non-reality - and a sensation of being unmoored. But in a ship, only the navigating helmsmind must transverse the light lines, jumping through tangles of space and time. Terezi remains, herself, stable.
When Terezi was 5 sweeps old, she dreamed she stared into the sun. Not Alternia's sun, cradle warmer, but the true sun at the center of existence, the root from which all branching possibilities grow. All of meta-meta-infinity collapsed into one bright point...
A trick! But now, it feels like she's leaped into the heart of that star. Tangled world-lines crossing and knotting until Terezi cannot tell which are true and which are not. Shadow timelines. West is Vriska never jumping, and instead dying at Terezi's swordpoint on capture, on escape, on verdict. A noose around her throat. Vriska loosed to be chased again, her black proposal accepted.
East, and Terezi has chosen differently long ago. She has not been blinded, and her lifeline is steady and more accomplished, but risk averse, dull. She is standing next to friend-presences on an old ship, slow rot at the edges of miscoloured patches in the walls: not a fleet ship. The troll in front of her turns, and starlight shines on his eyes in dream-bright red. That’s a timeline tasting like satisfaction - much more than the one almost parallel to hers, where she never followed, turned home, stamped Vriska as dishonourably erased - but the knot ahead of it splits into endless branches, always disaster, disaster, disaster, disaster.
She is six and fighting a monster in a strange coloured world, and Vriska's blood spilling down from the future, a stain, and she dies at four in an Flarping accident. Her lusus, beloved dragon, never speaks to her after she loses her eyes, and she's culled at eight sweeps when they come for Sollux early (he’s ruined the wrong network line, not as good as he thought and) *Hide* he tells her, but she doesn't, standing by his side. But she does, and they find her. But Sollux refuses her, pushes her outside, where she is caught fully by the morning. But she dies slowly, later, hungry and and angry and useless.
Terezi yanks back, and her sword spills red, not cerulean blue. Spills teal. Hers or not hers. Terezi stares through at her co-descendant and one of them is dying because the legislacerators only make open one position per sign, and in this timeline they had both *wanted* Redglare’s legacy. A heir and a spare...
Terezi is sitting in a stolen throne. Terezi is rich, has power, has an empire, commands and is obeyed.
She could spend an eternity here, tracking down the best choice. All worlds possible. All worlds untrue. But Terezi is on a mission! She ignores the other possibilities around her and runs forward on the one path she knows must be real, the one comprised of every decision she herself has made, the one on which she's travelling. Forward, and on to the next scene. Forward, straight, and *through*.
--------------------
2
Lift the pencil. Draw a second Point, some distance from the first.
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When Dave was a kid, he used to joke - and here I mean "ironically" joke, making a statement while keeping plausible deniability about any level of true belief - that his Bro was a demon hunter.
Well, Bro had the weapons, skills, and scars for the job, plus a handy (& exceedingly rare) Skaianet device to track intrusions to the plane. Well, the things Bro tracked down had the right look for it: horns and claws and laser glow eyes. You can watch youtube videos of them growling and hissing, saliva droplets glinting from fucked up, dentist’s heart attack teeth. Shrinking from the sun.
So yeah, let me be more precise, Dave'd tell whoever that his Bro was an awesome ventriloquist rapper with a sideline in hunting demons, and no one ever once got confused what he meant about that *last* part.
When Dave was 16 or so Bro decided he was trained up enough to come with, and the stakeout started with Dave nervously blocking off an alleyway, fingering the hidden, reassuring grips of his gun and his sword and his extra strength mace ("If the situation calls for one - Pick the right one"), and the stakeout ends with a small creature - a child, that's what it's gotta be, years younger than Dave - bleeding dark from a blown out eyesocket and backed into a corner as far away from Bro as it can shuffle. It moves wrongly, not like a spider crawly movie ghoul, limbs with the wrong sorts of hinges, but like a broken thing. One leg dragging, the hand covering its elbow dripping, and it's *small*. Smaller than Dave, and he's just hit average for his age with the last growth spurt. He's seen how the adults measure up in the news, or standing next to Bro as he looks down from the window, and they get bigger than this. It's hurt and terrified and so very *young*.
Bro is making strange soothing noises at it - words he made Dave memorize, repeat over and over because he never quite got the yawning vowels - but it screeches when he inches closer, hissing through bared fangs *just like* on the youtube horror clips, but it twists his heart in a different direction than he'd expected. His hand drifts over sword gun mace, and he pulls it from his pocket, feeling ashamed.
Bro calls him forward. Say “hrauuuughtkahp”, he says, and Dave says “hrauuuughtkahp”, vocal chord memory taking over. The kid looks at him. “hrotcap”, he says again, inching forward. It means something like, "Not gonna hurt you." Maybe closer to, "Don't want to hurt you". Kid stares at him in incomprehension, he must be fucking up the words pretty bad,
"That was a bad one," Bro says, after the alien's been deposited with the alien processing people, who've been waiting a safe distance radius away. (Crowd too many interested minds too close, and things go badly.)
Because that's the thing, 90% of the bleedthroughs are kids, scared, confused, very often injured, *always* out of options. They don't know where they are, half the time they don't know *how* they got here: It's some kind of instinct, Rose says, some kind of last gasp for survival, nonsensical since they can't *breed* here, and thank fuck to that. Earth is Alternia’s reject dumping grounds.
It's the adults who arrive prepared. They’ve made the cost/benefit analysis and decided they'd have more power or more lifespan or just more fun in human-land. And from what Dave's understood of the flip side culture, people who opt out because it’s not *permissive* enough, not open enough to violent tendencies… people are willing to go into self-exile... Yeah.
From:
p2
2.5
Connect them into a line segment.
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Terezi regains consciousness in a strange wet smelling air. Tinge of bitter grey sharpness; There's a sword at her throat. Someone has been paying attention!
Under the hand holding the hilt, the pulse beats bright cherry. For a moment Terezi’s unsure she made it through; the smell tangles with left-behind maybes.
“Are you fight?” says the alien. Terezi thinks still, unconscious thoughts. The alien knocks her in the boot. “I see you, bad pretender.” His Alternian pronunciation lacks cadence, but he’s obviously familiar with Terezi’s species. Why wouldn’t he be? Vriska is hardly the first to escape so dishonourably.
“Then you have the advantage,” Terezi lies, and flings open her eyelids.
The sword remains steady. The alien doesn’t stumble back in surprise at her roasted oculars, although he allows a: “Fuck that's creepy.”
So this is the part where Terezi pleads her case, asks for a stay of jurisdiction while she hunts Vriska down. Asks if Dave has noticed any clues on Vriska’s entry.
He's very cooperative, it's like he was *seeking* an excuse not to skewer her. That, Terezi’s happy to provide.
It turns out that if someone steels themselves before jumping, they can get Earthside and sometimes even run away before Dave gets a chance to explain the situation. Jumping in blind like she did - (Objection!) - she did well to keep her wits. Shit, Dave says. If this bitch is as dangerous as Terezi says, and she's running loose in his city...
Obviously Terezi can't go hunting after Vriska on her own. She doesn't know how the rules work. Especially the No Killing rules, which Dave insists are pretty essential. But Dave doesn't know the quarry. So instead of handing Terezi over to the troll refugee people, where she'd vanish for months in red tape, Dave takes her back to his apartment. Together they compare notes, case the area, ask all kinds of interesting people all kinds of interesting questions.
They hit dead end after dead end.
Although the trolls keep coming. The incursions are more frequent than usual, at least from Earth's perspective. Almost every week. There's some mathy stuff behind that: assume that troll departures are a random distribution, save the blip every couple decades at Drone time, but the universes aren't seamlessly hooked together, temporal-wise. There are tides - right now time is passing faster in Alternia-verse, but give it a few months and - if the pattern holds same as the centuries since someone noticed it - it'll flip around.
To cheer her up, he invites her on retrievals... and learns pretty quick that however unhappy the kids are to see him, especially since he turned 22ish, having an adult of their own species grinning down at them being the first thing they see of this world does *not* help with getting everyone to be cooperative and calm. (Terezi has no idea what else he was expecting?) It’s hard enough trying to keep them from panicking when they don't know where they are. Half the time they're not solid on *who* they are.
The new deal is that Terezi will wait a block away, backup. He calls her in once - on a full grown troll, not a kid, as if that makes things uncomplicated - and she acts immediately, neatly bisecting the neck. She wasn't to be tried, no sense in taking her alive. Was it necessary? D's throat thinks so, where the wild eyed troll had been digging a collar of bruises around his windpipe.
It deepens over the night into a half-circle of blue/brown. Where claws had punctured over the center over his windpipe, his skin scabs into twin garnet red gems. Afterwards, unwinding over delivery pizza (half meat lovers extra meat, extra tomato sauce, all the cheese piled on the left) Terezi keeps staring - yes, with her nose, sniffing audibly whenever she's turned to him - and edges closer on the couch as dinner finishes. She faces him with bright, empty eyes.
Terezi runs a thumb over the dark line, thumb tracking bump bump over the scratches. Her own claw is angled carefully away from his throat, and her knee rests against his thigh. There’s no spot of warmth from her flesh but Dave has an awareness of all the wrong angles, wrong bones, wrong sort of edges pressing in. "Dave." Her tongue exits her mouth momentarily, testing the air, and Dave follows unconciously. Licks his lip. "Dave, can I taste it."
It's not like Dave hasn't thought about... But he's not used to living in close quarters with another living being, told himself that's all it is, under each other's defenses all the time. What else can it be - she's such a bizarre roommate. Of course he can't help wondering. Mysteriously appearing, shallow scratches in door frames, her favourite kitchen chair. Carelessness or territory marking or a nervous instinct. (Probably that last one, Dave thinks, she gets embarrassed when he notices.) Dave slides his fingers in the shallow lines and wonders if his damage deposit is moot yet, wonders if he's offended enough to tell her off, wonders what those claws would feel like, running over his skin.
He panics, reacts like she was joking even if her amused cackle was, for once, nowhere in her question. High giggle in Dave's throat as his metaphor gets lost somewhere between "walking bag of ketchup" and "creamy Strider filling." And then Terezi mouth grows tight and she pulls her hand off him, shifting away on the couch and he’s losing this... "Yes," Dave says. "If you want.... Yes."
Lips cool on his throat, head back to bare himself, but no hard hint of teeth. He swallows, tight, and she kisses him higher, on the side of his jaw.
Commence slow, exploratory makeouts. Dave feels a bit like he’s making out with a set of Ginsu knives, but the flesh is willing. Perhaps he should be concerned about that?
It’s Terezi who pulls away. She prods him gently in the jugular notch - where she has protective bone - and laughs nervously. ”Humans are so weird,” she decides, and it could be an apology.
The moment passes. The alarm goes off.
The breakthrough's on the outside of the county, and by the time Dave and Terezi get there, the quarry has escaped. *Shit.* Terezi’s sniffing the air, what is it? She's not sure.
If a troll recovers that quickly, they were prepared for trouble, and that means they were most likely planning it. So now there's another troll-hunt. They are back to asking interesting questions. At least this one is bringing up *some* clues? Which implies... this dude doesn't have psychic mind-erase powers, that’s all. Whoever they are, they're skilled at hiding.
But Terezi's skilled at seeking. They track him down to an ancient warehouse eventually, squatting. Pile of blankets where he nested: they're empty even though it’s day. He must have woke up to confront the trespassers and. Oh look everyone, it's Karkat.
Well, thank fuck. He had to get into this ramble somehow.
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3
Now mark a third and final point.
The rest follows.
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Terezi vouches for Karkat, which is good enough, Dave supposes, since he didn't *seem* to be causing issues left to his own devices. They bring him back to Dave's apartment though, because c'mon Dave's apartment is a POS but at least it has not being a damp abandoned warehouse going for it. Also this way Dave can keep an eye on him right? Sure, but Dave wasn't gonna mention that part, only heavily imply it.
His other option is to go through the standard refugee process? Like they'll both have to anyway, eventually? Oh well.
If troll's are going to keep following Dave home though, he's going to require bigger digs. It was amazing how much smaller his apartment was with just Terezi all up in his grill, but now it's like a whole van full of cranky assholes decided to move in.
And it's *nice* that Terezi vouched for him, that he's a "good guy" or whatever, but... he isn't? Not in the usual troll "what does 'ethics' have to do with 'murder' way" fair enough, like Dave hasn’t caught him going around kicking puppies or anything. But he resents Dave being in his space, which btw is actually Dave's space btw btw thx. And he's a jerk specifically to Terezi, which may be because she's a huge jerk to him first - not in the inexplicable alien sexy way, either.
It's... Dave knows how it works, right? Earth gets *runners*, kids who can't cut it (growing up fighting and never being good enough, and deciding *fuck it* deep enough inside, Dave kinda wishes someone'd told him that was an option), adults who do the coward thing, pick dishonour over death. And Terezi... yeah, she vouched for this dude, and yeah she's told Dave stories about him before he ever touched Earth-side (Dave thought he'd be shorter), and *yeah*... but there's this undercurrent. *You are smaller than I thought*.
Dave's pretty sure she feels personally betrayed Karkat didn't choose *death*, and it's like a 3d magic book flipped around inside his head, and now instead of a choose your own psychedelic hallucination all he can see is the smuppet dick jutting out impudently into his face.
Because lone of any troll he's met, Terezi never made that choice. She's here on a mission - or she thinks of herself as here on a mission, despite being just as self-exiled as any of them. She never repudiated troll society in whatever branching pumping organ serves as her heart. She still considers herself part of it, an agent of its law and value systems and suddenly Dave can't stop *getting* that, what that means.
She's followed the rules he laid out to the letter, but she's playing along, never going to internalize them. Maybe he should have turned her in to begin with.
Dinner time, and Dave ordered pizza, and Karkat is glaring at his pile of red drenched meatballs (fished out of Dave's now traditional tomato sauce lake order) like that'll mask how sad he looks, answering Terezi's questions about mutual acquaintances. The time's still faster in troll-land - a couple "sweeps" passed in the months between Terezi and Karkat's arrivals. A lot of apparently hilarious hook-ups went down.
A lot of apparently hilarious *non* hookups went down, but at the end of the story about how some aristocratic douche named "Eridan Ampora" ended up suddenly single and refusing to take up any one night stands even, Terezi and Karkat both stop laughing and get very pensive. Dave stops laughing after them, trailing off awkwardly. What is he missing. "Nothing! You are right! Eridan's demise was hilariously self-involved!" Wait, his *demise*?
Uh, yeah. He stood there with his cape whipping dramatically in the wind he created himself from shooting out the airlock, and gave himself up to the Drone.
Karkat snickers. Karkat and Terezi stand laughing again. Dave understands nothing at all.
After the Eridan story they're both silent a minute, then Terezi squares her shoulders like she's bracing against a blow. What about Latula? (A name Dave's never heard.)
Karkat takes a sharp intake of breath, like he's been waiting, like he's got the speech prepared and had weighed out how much oxygen it's going to take in advance, and Terezi nods to herself - sharp and efficient, ticking off a list entry with her chin - she's already got her answer.
Then she cackles. "I hope she went out riding something rad!"
"How does Her Imperial Condescension’s personal spaceship rate," Karkat says, and Terezi manages to affirm that is exactly how she would have wanted to go before they dissolve into giggles. Dave doesn't get the joke, but he is pretty sure if he inquires it will be something horrifying again. (He is 100% correct.)
"What about my lusus?" Terezi asks, "Did it finally hatch?" No. Or not that Karkat knows of.
Dave deals with scared troll kids, Dave knows what a lusus is. He even knows the story with Terezi's - a dragon! The last dragon! Or it will become the last dragon when it hatches, as it will only do for a member of her specific bloodline. In her universe, she had spoken to it, soul to soul, every time she dreamed, and okay sure Dave will believe her dragon dream telepathy yeah that is not nearly the craziest troll brain power he has been faced with this week.
"When Latula, uh..." Oh sure, *now* she's squeamish. "Was it before or after the Collection?"
You mean the Drone Collection, Karkat asks, and Terezi snaps at him. Should she type it out, so he can shove the capital letter into his eyeball?
"Don’t bother. I've seen you type - it's all capital letters," Dave says, and Terezi startles, whole body springing in place, like she's forgotten he was sitting there in his own living room.
"Sorry," Karkat says, softer than Dave thinks they've ever said anything to each other, and Terezi gets up and goes to... the bathroom, the only walled off room other than Dave's bedroom, because she probably wants to be alone for a while, and *now* Dave's bladder chooses to bring his attention to the fact he just guzzled down 2 litres of caffeinated orange soda.
"Who's Latula?" Dave asks Karkat. Latula *Pyrope*. As in Terezi Pyrope, as in they shared a lusus for a brief period of overlap, except Latula couldn't communicate with it more than rudimentarily. As in the only other Pyrope born in the last thousand sweep's, and with both of them culled before Collection, who the fuck knows if there'll ever hatch another one.
So that dragon's screwed, huh?
Pretty fucking much.
--------------------
What happens next is the breech alert goes off because come on of course it does. Since Terezi's busy sulking, Dave takes Karkat for backup. Maybe having a spare freaky alien is handy after all.
And it's a kid that came through, barely conscious and startled and lost like any of them, and not one of the bad ones either, not hurt, not like the ones that spend their last energy clawing Dave away from them until it's too late to help.
But this kid is big and came supplied with Gamzee-type mental abilities, which play out in a scene where Dave is suddenly terrified of all the shit around him, resolving when Karkat comes in to take over (oh, and we get to see him through Dave’s fear-goggles, that would be cool. Teeth and unnatural springy movements and big glowing eyes, grey skin melting into concrete alley shadows, city-evolved predator. Demons in youtube videos.)
And then everything slowly resolves back into Karkat talking at the new arrival, not touching her, carefully positioned between her and the back of the alley so that he's not blocking her in. Snippets of conversation. "I couldn't kill him. I couldn't kill him, and I knew." and "Yeah, you're right, you're -" that troll word that means dead and means gone and means failed too, like there's no difference. Well, maybe there's not. Unlike humans, they've got no reproductive future here (and Dave can't be sad about that). "So what, so it's fucking over. Now you get to see what else there is."
The kid calms down and Dave retrieves his weapons from where they're scattered all over the alley and they bring the troll to the troll drop off place, even though she’s reluctant to leave Karkat which hasn't happened to Dave since he grew up and never to Terezi.
From:
p3
(Weird that their teeth didn't evolve to tear through mammal flesh, despite the unanimous results of the mammal instinct survey.)
A couple of drinks in, and Dave tells Karkat that Karkat was really good with that kid, talking her down like that, it was amazing. And Karkat takes it badly, dude cannot take a compliment.
Does Dave want tips on how to be a piece of shit who tells untruths about the world to babies (this is not a guy who's going to appreciate where we're going with the Santa Claus story. You teach kids lies about the way the world works, and you set them up for dying *unfairly*). He needed to get her to stop, that's all. Telling her what she needed to hear, even if it was bullshit.
Was it though? There are worse places for a new start than Houston.
(And Karkat snarls at him, even though: Fuck dude, can't you see I'm trying to have a moment with you here.)
--------------------
Would Terezi have chased Vriska if she had not known Latula would have been around as a spare to carry on the name? In all significant likelihood! She didn't give the matter much consideration at the time, after all.
And now here she is, no leads on the Vriska trail, which there really should have been by now - Vriska is neither patient nor good at hiding. And even if Terezi had found her, what would have changed? She'd still be just as stranded and *failed* as all of Dave's beloved orphans, as the older troll's she's helped Dave slice to their final and most absolute of deaths, as Karkat Vantas. It is like paradox space knew it was the Pyrope line's last chance for continuation, and shot twice. Both misaimed.
Okay, says Dave. Fine. But one question. How the fuck did you get stoned on soda? Dave is not being helpful. He kicks Karkat in the shin, isn't it time for some comforting lies or whatever? "No." Oh. well then.
This is the first time Dave's seen this brand of crisis of faith from the "before" condition. He asks her if she’d undo her coming here, if she could, and tries to convince himself that he won’t be hurt by the “yes” coming.
But he doesn't get an answer out of Terezi, because *Karkat* takes offense at the hypothetical. What would she have to come back to, everyone *knows* she's dead. And if 2-way transit was possible between Earth and the Alternian Empire, it would make this escape route a *theat* to the Empire's supremacy, and Earth would shoot straight to the top of the enslave and demolish list. Does Dave understand that's what he's asking.
What does it matter, if it's impossible, just a mental experiment? But something in the way Karkat's eyes as he doesn't answer, freezes, scowls, and then leaves the appt in an angry huff...
It's a lot easier to track Karkat down this time. Mostly because they don't try, and he returns on his own, just before sunrise. So even with you in it, your apartment still rates better than a cardboard box pile under a bridge somewhere, good to know.
Turns out that, not too long after ending up here, Karkat saw a few troll's using a handheld game technology that was just barely developed when he exited. Couldn't it have been from someone who came by after him? No, because Karkat tracked them down, and it was a yellow blood who's been living here since he was a kid. But he's found a way to go back, and he’s gotten good at it. He doesn't even make big enough ripples to alert Dave's tech.
And you think he'd drop Terezi back home if she asked nicely?
Karkat is silent because no, at least most of the troll population in the city knows a good thing when they've got it (when they've got no *choice*), but Karkat's was right about what would happen to Earth if there was a 2-way passage.
I can't go back, Terezi says. Karkat's right. I'm *dead*. There’s no place for me anymore.
But... there's one thing she could do. Karkat had a friend with access to the mother grub, and he's pretty sure that she'd help them, no matter what she's heard. It's a gamble, but what isn't.
--------------------
Skip over the bit where the three of them corner the troll in question in his place of residence, blocking off the exit, the back exit, the hallway to the staircase to the roof exit. It's not relevant, the confusion in in psionic, grey-static eyes when Dave reveals himself with a " 'sup"; that turns to calculating panic at Terezi's sharp clicking footsteps, Dave's human-thin hair lifting with the build of electrostatic potential; the slow, despairing fall of his shoulders when Karkat steps out of the somehow-even-deeper-than-the-rest-of-this-shithole shadows (*trolls*).
Does it matter *how* Karkat's met this guy in the few scant weeks he's been on the planet? What promises he's made, that this kid (well, adult really - the mindless panic's worn off him - but the youngest person in the room) looks gutted with betrayal.
Nah to all of the above. He's not a character, just a plot gimmick with a useful skill. The question of whether he pushes Terezi into the medium between universes or the Void matters - this can't be the first time he's slipped up, and how many trolls must have their own reasons for wanting to go back, much more compelling than Terezi's lusus-related womanpain? How many would be eager to trade the way back for the off-chance of being accepted back into the swarm? A psionic who’s so gifted a navigator, and who has chosen self-exile over another future, would not contribute so easily to his own capture.
But then Terezi is good at saying the right sort of thing to get people to do what she wants.
Skip over the next decision - it's just Terezi with cause to go back, right, so it's just Terezi *going* back... until it's not. She is afraid, and is betrayed by the too-rigid set of her shoulders, the momentary waver of her grin, and maybe Karkat's life is over for any useful action, but he can make sure she doesn't go into this (death) alone. Maybe Dave steps up after - he's always been curious how the other side lives and insert ramble here and keep it going until space flips like a rubber band turned inside out, organs blood brain viscera on the outside, galaxies gravity time infinity wrapped within (and there's three of them, three outsides, one inside... is the topology trick possible however many dimensions up you go?) and then the next impossible origami transformation snaps them *though*.
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Terezi's path was easy to recognize the first time, instinct building her a useful metaphor out of raw metaphysics, a branchway through the tangle of non-real worlds. It's easy, when you're on a mission: go forward.
She has less practise at going *backwards*. She turns around and peers behind her, but everything is tasteless, blankness, like mid dim season fog. A flash of memory - hers? A sniff of outside perhaps-ness? - and she's staring out her window using her eyes, and cannot see the next tree trunk. The chill seeps into her hive, making her sluggish, sleepy even in the darkest hours of night. A dozen stuffed dragons, waiting for their judgements, watch her from the corner, but Terezi ignores them.
Outside the window of her hive, Terezi sees a flash through the fog: gold eyes and blue grin. Terezi realizes she’s been waiting, *expecting*... She hurries after the apparition, and the tree-hive melts back away.
When Terezi catches Vriska - hand closing on metal shoulder - Vriska turns to Terezi as though she couldn't place her. But then she smiles sharp and single eye bright - how she'd looked when Terezi nabbed her during a small-time smuggling operation. Vriska's less solid somehow, but it *is* her, Terezi knows. She'd never found Vriska on Earth no matter how much she looked because Terezi overshot, overestimated.
Vriska was distracted by a shiner path, a promise of ever-brighter futures. But they are only windows: glimpses, possibilities, potentials. Not doors. Terezi looks behind her for the more well-trod (real) path and can't see it. She's lost. Chasing Vriska has never gotten her anywhere else.
We have to go back, Terezi tells Vriska. Come with me. It's a bad idea, considering how dangerous Vriska has always been, but: I'll lead you home.
But Vriska refuses. Look! She tells Terezi, who cannot look, but knows nonetheless that Vriska is urging her to notice a delicate unfurling non-verse where Vriska sits as reigning Empress, Terezi standing tall to the side of the throne. This is a *new* possibility, because now Terezi knows how to flit back and forth. Vriska's strong enough to control that psionic who wasn't worth bestowing a name, 6 character keyboard smash identifier, and together, finally, they could rule. It smells like power.
Let's go, Vriska says, younger than Terezi remembers. Maybe it's only that she's been arrested here while Terezi's gained months.
It's not real. Sure, it could be, all the pieces are in place for that future, you could get there from here. But they'd have to start from the real path and build it themselves.
Vriska's not listening, doesn't care. She pulls away (a jibe back at Terezi about not caring enough to go after her) and chases her own immortality.
And Terezi's alone, and she's wandered from the path. She's no less lost than Vriska's ghost.
There must be some time where Terezi tries to return to the path, realizes her assumptions of "most likely" are leaving her astray, and stops for a while, resigning herself to an eternity of wandering. But then Dave and Karkat find her - a warping like gravity, in a place of no mass (a pun on the laws of *meta*physics to be inserted here).
"There you are," and Karkat reaches for her shoulder, and Terezi realizes suddenly that what she’d been thinking of as static, slow possibility branches are living, changing, arteries feeding life into the worlds. The universes are connected more than they’d guessed, the multiverse part of one great megaverse and she can almost understand it...
Dave takes her opposite hand - RUDE HUMAN! though at least it is not her favoured sword hand, and perhaps there is no *external* danger in this non-place - and Terezi notes the hummingbird heartbeat of time, ticking forward, possibilities rooting and sprouting like the single great organism of her home forest, the real and non-real as trunks sprouting from the same tangle of roots and. to understand. to *see*...
How do they find their way back, Dave asks. He’s overwhelmed. His mind can’t wrap around this mixed up input, and Terezi grins a shark toothed metaphor. The timeline is not the path. *She* is (or Dave is, or Karkat), and now it's easy. There is no back. You just decide where forward is going to be.
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They emerge on Alternia. And why not, since the other way dumps every traveller onto *Earth*.
Skip over the hard journey across a sun-broiled mountain, over the battle with spitting-venom spider-wolves. The first day they take the only refuge around - the hive of a thin shouldered, bent horned kid who Karkat and Terezi disarm neatly and toss without fanfare into a storage room with only the one exit and no windows.
After the initial terrified screaming, it's quiet for long stretches, the morning punctuated only occasionally by sounds of muffled sobbing. Karkat and Terezi raid the thermal hull like they have any right to it, and Dave knows them well enough by now to see they are *feigning* indifference but he can't stand it. It's cruel. Who knows what she's imagining in there; they should at least explain to her they're not planning to hurt her. “Hrotcap,” right? That's Dave's entire job back on Earth. Getting kids to trust him long enough to save them.
But they aren’t *on* Earth, and -- “Do you think it would be more merciful to teach her that adults are to be trusted?” Terezi's going for "mocking", ironic. But she moves guiltily, and her voice is tight.
They're right. That child needs to survive in *this* world, and this is the same sort of deal as why you try not to let coyotes acclimatize to humans, it ends badly all around, the fear's there for a reason.
But none of this can be worth it, for a stillborn dragon. But they're already here, and Dave's got no worthwhile options other than tagging along.
Okay so if Dave wasn't there, *would* they hurt her? And Terezi hesitates. Hesitates and justifies: she's not in the way, she hasn't done anything to deserve it, it wouldn't be just. The answer is *no*, and it worries her.
Yeah, sorry, that was one of the parts I meant to skip. The cost-benefit or assholism-result ratio is too high as it stands. I still think it will wash out in the end, but not from here.
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The troll who meets them at the base of the mountain is taller than Karkat or Terezi, narrow of nostril and distant of gaze, and cloaked in fabric with actual colours, *pleural*. Dave had always assumed that was a serious troll-universe faux-pas.
Her hand darts out several times towards Karkat, then tucks itself back into her gown when she realizes, before it touches. (Dave pegs it as the awkwardness of ex-lover. He is both infinitely and not-at-all wrong.)
So it's true that he's returned from the (Troll Word That Means) Dead. (And if Karkat offered his blood to her to drink would be even more a Jesus metaphor than the rest of his story.)
Karkat always threatened it. That everyone else would fuck things up so badly without him he'd have no choice but to crawl out of the sewer hole the empire uses to dispose of its biggest rectal overgrowths and go on an head smacking parade.
(Karkat looks at the ground, Kanaya looks at the dimly-glowing sky. They’re at the edges of each other’s personal space, and when Terezi interrupts, jumping between them, she's suddenly too close to both of them.) “Kanaya!” she says. “It has been a while!”
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The plan is Terezi gets her freak on and Kanaya slips the result into the mother grup slurry collection. Her freak on with *who* is the question, but it's a question with a pretty easy answer, since I must assume that you read the endgame relationship before clicking the readmore. Honestly, Karkat, why are you acting so angry and surprised. Were you expecting Terezi/Kanaya maybe?
It’s because Terezi made it clear she doesn't respect him for choosing survival beyond relevancy! Why would she want to chain her genes to... that. Is it because she doesn't have a choice (well, out of *what*, dude. Terezi/Kanaya?).
It's not *like* that, though. If Terezi is honest, having little other alternative at this juncture, she was having some issues of transference from issues she was having with her own life choices. And not knowing how to quit is not a bad quality in a matesprit! And she has seen glimpses of *his* potential lives too, endless renditions of determination to get shit accomplished. They were most clear when he came for her.
Of course he came for her. He always would. He would have lost himself on Earth except that she'd been there.
Yay happy ending they're gunna frick.
And then Dave is backing away, giving them some room for all this sappy shit, and Terezi's arm snaps out alien-fast and snags his elbow. Karkat: Where are you going, shitstick?
Okay, they follow it up with some sappier and more convincing dialogue than that, so.
Yay happy ending they're ALL gunna frick. Just Dave'd better not aim for the bucket, that's all.
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Skip over the sex scene; confusing tangle of limbs and pronouns.
Congrats, you did it, you drew the whole triangle!
It's all denouement from here.
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Kanaya takes the bucket from Terezi and, not knowing any better, Dave follows her. (Terezi and Karkat give him bemused looks - their part in this process is completed after all - but they follow *him*.)
She dumps the contents of the bucket into a frothy sea of thick, slimy brown - kinda like the colour you get squirting all your paints together, and also you started out with a lot of brown. (Usually, if it comes up in rare movies, the mix will be jade green because jade green is in the middle, so wouldn't it make sense to average out? Not even a little, but the blue blood's take less offense that way)
The added volume does not raise the collection a millimeter. So then what happens?
Karkat explains troll-reproduction to Dave, in detail. (Dave has regrets.) And one day, serendipity permitting, decades or centuries from now, another Pyrope will crawl out of the caves, and spark the development another dragon lusus. Or even the same one. (Which… should they go visit? no, she's sleeping too deeply, Terezi can barely touch her in her dreams.)
What. You mean the kid isn't coming out for decades or *centuries*?
Yes that is what Karkat said which part of it was unclear?
...This is just like that episode of Futurama, Dave announces.
“Yes,” says Terezi and Karkat says "What's Futurama?" so at least they've got a plan what to do on going back to Earth but...
Dave had actually resigned himself to having a vicious little pointy-toothed alien blob monster running around his apartment eating his vinyl and keeping the mice away. He'd resigned himself so hard he came out the other end and started looking forward to it. If only because it would be nice to see one of those kids find safety without being broken first.
Terezi and Karkat react like Dave had admitted he gets sexually aroused by carpal tunnel syndrome, but Kanaya watches him consideringly. "You feel urged to raise a troll to adulthood?" Well, Dave knows it wouldn't have been his, but if they'd needed help.... he's gotten fond of them. Anyway adoption is a thing for humans?
And then Kanaya brings them to a suite that is probably her home. The stone walls (and floor) are strewn with various, semi- matched sheets of fabric. Terezi cackles approvingly.
She goes to - is that a treasure chest? what? - in the corner and, after digging through it, emerges with an, uh. Pointy toothed alien blob monster. It has a piece of yellow fabric stuck in it's teeth, and after a moment of sleepy mastication it appears to realize it is hovering a metre and a half in the air. It screeches, windmilling six pointy limbs in the air and trying to twist back on itself to bite Kanaya's hands.
Terezi and Karkat run back out of the room in something not unlike terror - good to know the kid-adult phobia goes both ways? Although Dave can understand the impulse though because, What the hell?
“WHAT THE HELL, KANAYA?” Oh, it's Karkat again. He's back in the room, although his eyes are still wide and he's shaking halfway into panic. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?”
Dave looses a giddy giggle. Thought she explained it was a troll wiggler dude what part of that was unclear?
“No, but it's, it's…”
Something that can only be communicated via uncontrolled hand gesturing? Better watch out those digits keep fluttering you're going to achieve liftoff hit the ceiling bang your horns back down into your skull and sorry bro but you don't have the inches to spare.
Terezi comes to *his* rescue this time, inching in around the doorframe. “It's bright candy apple red!”
Karkat, still tongue twisted speechless, points at Terezi with the force of his whole arm.
Kanaya sighs. “Karkat,” she says, “your mutation is not as unique as you seem believe. It’s only unusual that you had the opportunity to mature until adulthood. We’re supposed to destroy off-spectrum eggsacks when we find them.”
Yeah? So what is she going to do with that one?
“I haven't decided yet,” Kanaya tells him, prim and careful and not meeting his gaze. “There are no more red-blood lususes-” quick glance at Dave “-but there's precedent…”
“Fuck no!” She’s doing something important, that *matters*. “It's not worth it.”
“I know,” Kanaya says. Then she takes off her cloak and swaddles it around the furious wiggler in efficient folds. It goes quiet, not seeming to mind being cocooned in the dark. She hands the tidy package to Dave, who never actually *agreed* to take it but come on, who is he kidding.
Getting back isn't such an ordeal, now that Terezi knows the trick, and Alternia to Earth is downhill. Move forward in every dimension: the inner, personal ones especially. Time is still smooshed Earth-side They were hardly gone at all. (The squirming bundle in Dave's arms chitters to itself; Dave will have to invest in an aquarium and a *really big* hamster wheel... He'll have to investigate the diaper selection for giant 6 legged hell babies and. Shit. What if it doesn't eat pizza and orange soda?)
Dave's staring at the bundle in growing, utterly belated horror. He realizes Terezi's grinning at his distress. Karkat groans. “I can't believe we're going to be living with a *grub*, like a pair of shameless lusus-fuckers. Get that thing away from me!”
Dave doesn't know what he's doing.
Well that much is obvious but Karkat will shove Terezi’s canesword up through his wastechute before he will help.
--------------------
(What a terrible liar.)
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Skip over Terezi's visions on return: Dave lying on his side in a nest of childsafe toys. Some are cute and fluffy things, although his adopted daughter doesn’t have much interest. A good two thirds of the toys are in segments; the teething stage has been hell, but right now she’s curled in the space between his arm and chest and snoring tiny hiccupping breaths into his shirt. Dave half-dozes over the soothing strains of Terezi and Karkat arguing in the kitchen.
Skip over the point that all the pieces are in place for a troll-civilization to take root outside of the Empire, finally. A static-eyed gatekeeper for the path back, a jade-blood troll who's been keeping a matriorb locked away with her other secrets.
The politics are too complicated for the exercise, and it requires one to imagine the possibility of being born into (relative) freedom without having to *suffer* for it. And from there, the waiting further branches leading an interspecies allegiance to the stars, or to a midnight Earth sky where dragons fly, are born, are real.
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Really, I read this entry with interest because "brain cloud," so obviously I should ask for a pairing of Abe Vigoda's character from JVtV and somebody--possibly named Irene Adler--but that might be asking too much.
(This is a joke. I am joking when I say this. So you understand.)
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