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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:
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*.
--------------------
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.
--------------------
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.
--------------------
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!”
--------------------
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.