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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.)
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.
--------------------
3
Now mark a third and final point.
The rest follows.
--------------------
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.