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You are Dave motherfucking Strider, and you cannot open this door.
It’s not like you don’t know what’s in there, lurking behind the brass number plate: shitty swords, puppets, copies of months-old magazines all over the floor, and booby-trapped smuppet porn around every corner. It’s what’s not there that’s important, which is usually the case, you’ve found. No matter how many plush rumps you accidentally blend, no one will ever be around to post them to the web. No more rooftop strife, or Cal visiting you in the shower, or three AM dinners because the guy who was supposed to be your guardian, barely older than you, forgot that kids need to be fed too. Bro is gone, and no matter how many times you scratch the record, you can’t bring him back.
So you won’t go in. You don’t know where you’ll go instead, but it’s definitely not inside the old apartment. It’s too shitty to sustain life, anyway. You don’t know how you lived there for so long. You jam your hands a mile deep in your pockets and descend the flights upon fucking flights of stairs to the street. Bro’s car – nobody’s car now – the very ironic Prius that used to be Bro’s is languishing in a parking garage across the street. You jaywalk over there and stare at the car for a while. It’s silver. You’re pretty sure the tank is full, since everything either of you ever needed is within walking distance. Bro just didn’t know what to spend his shitloads of money on, and he was weirdly focused on teaching you how to drive - when you would tell him there was no possible way you would need to drive in Houston when you can’t swing a dead crow without hitting three grocery stores and a park, he would only say just in case, little bro, you never know. And then he’d take you out to the middle of nowhere and make you drive back home.
The car has a bumper sticker that says “HONK IF YOU LOVE SPONGY DONG.” There’s a picture too, but it’s pixellated out, thank fuck. You open the driver’s door with the car keys that have been languishing in your sylladex the entire game. When it swings open, suddenly all you can smell is Axe and puppet and that fucking hair gel he always used, and your knees buckle like someone just halved you with a ninja sword. You kneel there in the parking garage with your face buried in the seat, arms folded around your head, and every time you try to catch your breath so you won’t cry, you’re hit with another cannonball in the chest. You will not cry. Cool guys do not cry. And it’s hard to drive if you’re crying.
Not that you would know.
You get a hold of yourself after a minute or two and berate yourself for losing it like that as you climb into the car and shut the door behind you. Then you spend a while longer staring at the steering wheel and remembering his hands there. Or his feet on a couple of occasions. Or Cal’s hands. That one keeps showing up in your nightmares. You put your hands at ten and two; they look so small there, so different from his. You drum your fingers. You don’t know where you’ll go, but anywhere is better than here, in the shadow of a fallen giant.
So you start the car, and you drive. You almost knock one of the side mirrors off as you’re driving out of the parking garage, but from there it’s clear enough going that you feel pretty good about turning on the radio. He never listened to the radio much, just CDs of his own music and recordings of your hashrap battles. You don’t think you’re ready to listen to that stuff yet. You turn the radio to a classical station, and, surrounded in the safety of strings and woodwinds, you start to wallpaper over your pain with sick beats.
You rap until your mouth and throat get sore, which is a good forty-five minutes of boots and cats. By then you’re way out of the city limits and cruising along the highway, low rolling brushland hills on either side of you. The Prius’ clock says it’s a little after ten AM; the highway is mostly empty, leaving you with your thoughts and music and the rush of the car’s wheels. Your head rings with call in violins and answer in flutes, call in bass and answer in bassoon, call and answer, call and answer, and you think about your calls and how they were answered.
John.
EB: dave!
EB: dave, you’ll never guess where karkat ended up!
TG: no no let me guess
TG: with your pasty nerd ass up in the corner of the country nobody gives the fractionalest shit about
TG: until some new band gets famous for using the harpsitheremin as a backup instrument
TG: whereupon every poser in glasses with no lenses flocks up there and clogs the farmers markets
TG: the tinny strains of some shoegazing bullshit nobodys ever heard of floating through the streets
EB: yeah, here!
EB: i don’t see any hipsters here, though. maybe you’re thinking of houston.
EB: but i think karkat is getting used to washington. and, uh, earth.
EB: i finally had to explain to him what lawn ornaments are.
EB: he thought they were invading monsters, haha.
EB: i guess they don’t have gnomes on alternia.
EB: or didn’t.
EB: but it was a good excuse to improve his handwriting with apology notes!
TG: so what are you two shacking up together now
TG: does he bring you your slippers in the morning
TG: good karkat, best fudgepacker
EB: well…
EB: i don’t know!
EB: he does need a place to stay.
EB: and i am pretty much his best friend.
EB: i think i might like him to… you know…
EB: stay for a while.
TG: well whatever floats your dick egbert
TG: not my place to judge
EB: hey, it’s not like that!
TG: yeah whatever
EB: dave, what’s wrong?
TG: nothing
TG: im just fine egbert
TG: enjoy your alien boning
TG: peace
Rose.
TT: You’ll be glad to know that at least one of your wildly-flung predictions has found its bullseye.
TG: does nobody open conversations with ‘hey sup’ anymore
TG: god damn
TG: so what you decided to become a nudist dominatrix lalonde
TT: Close enough.
TT: Your furious pleading for Freudian attention is falling on deaf ears now, I’m afraid.
TT: Miss Maryam paid me a visit last night.
TT: I believe this is what it feels like to “go steady.”
TT: Also to be… let me think for a moment, I need to translate into a language you’ll understand.
TG: i swear if you finish that fucking sentence im going to flip my shit so far off the handle ill burn up on reentry
TT: Thoroughly acquainted with the little man in the boat.
TG: fucking hell
TT: I hope you flip close to New York so I can catch Dave ashes on my tongue.
TT: Or perhaps I can build a snowman of you and tenderly place aviator shades on its stern and ironic countenance.
TG: nah the ones im wearing now are awesome enough to survive without heat shielding
TG: theyll be your last memento of your hunk of an ectobrother
TG: youll walk out in the middle of the night just to weep at the feet of your dave snowman
TT: Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Fine, Dr. Freud.
TG: no im a fine jung man
TT: ...
TT: I can’t believe you just said that.
TG: cmon i always know the right button to push
TT: You really are laying it on thick, Strider.
TT: Are you jealous?
TG: what no
TG: youre my fucking ectosis
TT: Please, tell me what you know about the Westermarck effect. I have my notepad ready.
TT: Would you like a couch to lie down on?
TG: fuck you
TT: You truly are a master of subtlety and the sleight of implication.
TG: youre only a master of evil darth
TT: Oh no, I’m thrown off your scent by the obfuscatory ink clouds of the Stridopus.
TG: dont you have a naked alien chick to get to
TG: im sure her wrists are starting to hurt from being tied to the bed for so long
TT: Yes, I had forgotten to think of Kanaya as though she were an oven I had inadvertently left running while taking a jog.
TT: Watch yourself, Strider.
TG: dont puke up all your freaky tentacle guts guts in girlfester throes lalonde
Terezi.
TG: hey sup
GC: C4NT T4LK NOW COOLK1D
GC: 1M HUNT1NG TH3 SP1D3RTROLL!
GC: 1V3 4LMOST C4UGHT H3R
GC: 1D S4Y ‘1N MY W3B’ BUT TH4TD B3 G1V1NG 1N TO H3R R1D1CULOUS SP1D3R F1X81ON
GC: 1 M34N F1X4T1ON
GC: 4NYW4Y BY3!
GC: DONT D13 TOO H4RD
TG: have fun with that
Later,
TG: how you liking our brand new little blue dot pyrope
TG: freshly minted and ready to get fucked up all over again
TG: wonder if our thick protective coating of old shitty space junk is still there
TG: or if everyones gps will show a barren fucking wasteland
GC: 1 DONT W4NT TO T4LK NOW D4V3
GC: GO 4W4Y
TG: woah what
TG: why the hostility pyrope im the coolkid right
TG: you should be begging for me to lambast you with rhymes
GC: 1 S41D 1 DONT W4NT TO T4LK
TG: is this another spidertroll thing
TG: are you guarding her cell or some shit and you have to keep your tongue on her at all times
TG: that came out wrong
GC: >:[
GC: SH3S D34D D4V3
GC: 1 K1LL3D H3R
TG: oh
TG: fuck
TG: uh
TG: do you want a get well soon card or
TG: fuck
GC: 1 W4NT YOU TO GO 4W4Y
GC: 1M NOT 1N TH3 MOOD
TG: you should talk to somebody i think thats how this grief thing goes
TG: lalonde says bottling is bad
GC: YOUD KNOW 4LL 4BOUT TH4T HUH
GC: M1ST3R 1M TOO COOLK1D TO CRY 4BOUT MY HUM4N BROTH3R CR34TUR3
TG: thats not the same
GC: OR 4BOUT MY D34D 4LT3RN4T3 S3LF
TG: also not the same
TG: look you should like
-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] has blocked turntechGodhead [TG] --
TG: fuck
Some asshole behind you honks their horn for about thirty straight seconds, and you’re so startled you almost swerve into the highway wall. A grey pickup zooms past you with someone sticking half their upper body out the passenger window, grinning and waving. You wonder what the fuck as you watch them go; the guy pulls himself back in before he’s cut in half by another passing car. You feel pretty skeeved out and turn off at the next exit, just in case the guy doubles back at the state line or something.
There’s a 7-11 at the exit. You fill up and take out your phone, bringing up the map app. Mapp. According to the shitty GPS, you’re only like fifty miles away from Houston. You decide to go further north.
And that, essentially, is your next few days. You drive, you sleep in your car in parking lots, you eat shitty gas station food, but mostly you drive. There’s a lot of driving and a lot of asphalt ribbon to chew up. The farther you get from Houston and from your apartment, the better you feel, but somewhere around the middle of your journey it wraps around and you desperately, desperately want to turn around, drive back, rip the apartment door open and fling yourself into your bed and listen to Bro mixing in the other room and...
...oh.
So you keep driving. You lose count of the states, but eventually you see a billboard on the side of the highway advertising something called the House on the Rock. It doesn’t look like the typical “largest dildo in the world carved out of a solid block of butter” roadside attraction, so you head there. Not like you have anything better to do. You drive the fifteen or so miles left there and park. A ticket to the attraction is easily negotiated with the money you withdrew from Bro’s old account, and soon you are wandering through the biggest collection of shit you ever saw. You feel a weird kinship with these rooms full of garbage. There are automated musical instruments, collections of armor, swords, planes, everything you could possibly imagine being collected and some stuff you would never believe anyone could want - and you come from an apartment full of fucking puppets. You’re reminded of Jade and her weird lab house full of her dad’s adventure trophies.
And in the depths of the House, in a room full of ships in bottles, you find what you least expected. She’s standing in front of a large ship with her nose pressed to the glass, her red shades reflected in the bottle and the bottle reflected in her shades, the dagger corners of her mouth tilted down in a small frown. You almost drop your Dr. Pepper.
“Hush, coolkid,” she says without turning, holding a palm up to you. “I am remembering.”
You cross the room to her more quickly than is probably dignified. “What? What? What the hell? Remembering what? What are you doing here? What the fuck is going on?”
“I said hush.” She presses her forehead closer against the bottle and sighs. You look at the ship inside - it seems big, but you don’t know anyfuckingthing about boats. The sails are a golden-yellow color, one of them emblazoned with a symbol you’ve never seen before. “We sunk this one,” she says softly, and drags the claws of one hand over the glass. “I remember. I hated it when we had to do sea battles. The nautical combat rules were horrible, and I always got seasick. She would laugh when I threw up.”
“You’re in the middle of some tourist attraction in the shit-squirting sphincter of fucking nowhere and you’re talking about your roleplaying game?”
She turns to you and crosses her arms over her chest, staring blindly up at you. She somehow looks even thinner than the last time you saw her in person, and the dark circles around her sunken eyes are even deeper. “I’m reminiscing. There is always a time for reminiscence, especially reminiscence of game-playing, which you should well know, Strider!” Her cheer is a little forced. She looks so tired. “What I mean is that there are things here that should not be here. Some of our old weapons. Things from Earth and Alternia. Haven’t you noticed?”
Not really, no. You started thinking about Bro as soon as you saw one of the swords hanging up, and you just wandered around in a one-track fugue after that. “Uh, no. Are you sure you didn’t just mis-smell? Got a little blueberry gum stuck up your nose or something?”
“I never mis-smell!” She flexes her bony arms and you crack a smile. “I’ll show you these strange things. But now I want to know why you are here! This is very far away from your hive, isn’t it? Did you feel the call from there?”
“I didn’t feel any call. I’m just up here trying to get away from all the ladies hounding after the Strider love pump.” This answer apparently doesn’t satisfy her, because she keeps watching you like you’re a cat that’s about to escape to above. “I was... trying to get away from shit I didn’t want to think about. Being here has apparently not fucking helped.” Now you’re thinking, though. After the game you’re no stranger to destiny, and you didn’t really have any adequate explanation for taking the exits you took and deciding to drop off at one random tourist destination on a list of hundreds. “By the way, are you going to tell me why you blocked me, Pyrope? Everyone knows that chatting on the internet is serious business, and you don’t pull shit like that lightly.”
That makes her stop. “I was trying to get away from shit I didn’t want to think about,” she says, her face falling. “And you wouldn’t leave me alone, coolkid. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts.”
“I needed some fucking help too. I mean, I was lonely. I mean... I wanted to help. No, no. Fuck. I mean...” God damn it. “I’m sorry.”
“...me too.” She twists her mouth back and forth, then takes a step forward and embraces you with her gangly scarecrow limbs. You hold her to your chest like you’re never going to let her go again. She smells kind of dusty.
“You are crushing me, coolkid,” she says in short order. You take your arms back, but she doesn’t step away; instead, she leans up and sniffs your face a little, grazing her nose over your cheek. You let her. This is the first time you’ve touched a living, breathing being since the game ended, and you wouldn’t have minded Pyrope all up in your business even if you were allergic to color-clashing outfits. She sniffs under your shades some. That’s alright too, you figure. “Now. I don’t understand this place or why it has so many of our things in it, but there is something you need to see. Come with me.” And then she’s gone, scurrying off into the mazes of hallways. You follow her at a leisurely pace; eventually she slows down enough that you can watch her scrambling this way and that. Several times you think she’s about to knock over a stand of priceless Dong-era vases or whatever, but she always misses them by tiny inches.
Eventually you come into a huge room dominated by a thing full of lights and animals and shit. It takes you a minute to parse that it’s a carousel, full of more animals than you can count. Terezi grabs you by the hand and yanks you so close you almost fall into the grinding horror of weird monster feet. “What do you see, Dave?”
“I see a bunch of lights and animals and shit.”
“What animals do you see?”
You describe them as they go by. “Uh, there’s some kind of kangaroo goat thing, a bull with wings, a two-headed guy, a white dog, a bird guy, a four-eyed cat... a... dragon and a spider... oh. Shit. Shit, TZ, what the hell?”
“I don’t know what the hell!” She grabs you by the shoulders, spinning you away from the carousel. “I read the history of this place! The man who made it didn’t know what the hell, either. This is us, coolkid! He must have tasted the echoes. He tasted our echoes. And...” Her voice crackles like old autumn leaves. “...and now we can remember her. And the rest of them, but... her, mostly.”
“Your spider girlfriend?”
“Your human system of romance is so uncivilized,” she says, the kneejerk reaction to your inferior human word. Then she pauses. “...yeah,” she sighs, slumping against your chest anyway. You had long ago managed to piece together that Vriska was why she never seemed to want to be anything more than whatever bro-type thing you had going on. It’s not like your biology is incompatible. You’ve seen the pictures of Rose and Kanaya arm in arm at the zoo. It’s just that you don’t have mismatched horns and thirty pounds of black hair. And you were okay with that, you had gotten over her when she blocked your sorry ass. Or at least you thought you did. But dust isn’t a bad smell, and you’re wondering if her hair tastes as licoricey as she always said it does. “My spider girlfriend. We were sisters, Dave. She was my other half. I know sisters aren’t the same to you, but...”
Looks like it’s feelings time. You loosely wrap an arm around her and guide her to a seat, sitting down with her half in your lap and her knees making a valiant assault on your ribcage. “Nah,” you tell her. “I think I know what you mean.”
She doesn’t say anything for a while. She doesn’t even really move at all, just laying there on your chest with her skinny body all scrunched and her face outdoing even the tiniest-ass babies in its bunched-up misery. You can’t figure out where to put your hands, and you’re glad she can’t see you waving your arms around like you’re trying to summon a demon along her bumpy spine. “Do you think she’d understand?” she says with chest-heaving effort while your ham mitts are still swirling around in orbit.
“What?”
“I killed her. I had to kill her to save our friends. That was... the only choice.” Her voice wavers for a brief moment. “If I could talk to her, do you think she would understand why?”
“I don’t, uh... you didn’t... you thought she would come back, didn’t you? You didn’t know it’d get rid of her for good.”
“I don’t know.” She says it flatly, like a mausoleum door swinging shut. “I thought she might get up again. But I didn’t know if it would be a... heroic death. She... tried to pull everyone’s strings and she got them all tangled up. She was a villain, and she had to be put down.” There’s that finality again.
You would tell her that not everything is black and white, but her claws are awfully close to your chest and you like your skin unflayed. Luckily, she starts talking again before you can wedge your foot into your mouth. “Even then, I wanted to apologize to her. We could have made it work. It’s... not fair, Dave. Nothing is fair.” She shifts, but only to face the other way. You really wish there was a manual for this shit.
“Yeah, nothing’s fucking fair, but what the hell are you going to do about it, Pyrope? She’s gone, and you can’t bring her back. Best you can do is keep on keeping on.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“I know. Fuck, do I ever know.”
“You’re not very good at this.” Even as she says it her voice is a little lighter, a little less worryingly monotone.
“Yeah, I know. Want a slurpee? They come in red.”
---
You eat your gas station bounty in the car, four cherry slurpees that she eats the dragon’s share of, and she smiles for real when she’s finished, with sticky red all over her mouth. She looks like a bloody-toothed shark, with you the unwary diveow ow ow fuck brain freeze.
You check into a nearby motel when you’re done, the sun dangling over the horizon like a shitty Christmas ornament on the lowest branch of a half-dead tree. You’re not sure what the receptionist sees, but you’re pretty sure it’s not a short grey girl with horns and serrated curves. He gives you your room key without comment, and you lead her out and up the creaky metal stairs into your love nest. She curls up in her bed and you in yours, and you turn out your light, and she turns out hers. You lay there, thinking about her in the other bed, all by herself, and you all by yourself. You hear her sniffle, just once, muffled in the pillow. Fuck.
“sup,” you say as you sit on her bed next to the lump in the middle. “Delivery for a T. Pyrope.” She pokes her head up, then wriggles her way out of the blankets and sits facing you. Something teal glistens on her cheeks in the dark.
“What are those on your pajamas?” she says, throaty-voiced.
You look down. “ALF,” you tell her. “It was an old TV show about an alien who eats cats. Kanaya might like it, I think she’d relate.” While you’re talking, Terezi climbs into your lap again and wraps her arms around you without saying anything. Up close you can see the teal streams trickling from her red eyes. Suddenly you understand the whole romantic pity thing a lot better. You hold her head to your shoulder and rock her back and forth in your arms; you think you make a pretty shitty mom, but she doesn’t pull away. She cries a little into your pajamas. You don’t really know what to do with her like this; you nuzzle her hair some, avoiding her horns, and somehow while you’re pressing your nose into her temple to try and get her to calm down and stop digging her teeth into your shoulder, you get some teal tears in your mouth. They taste just like yours, that sharp salt-wet taste; you know because your own started spilling down your face sometime shortly after the addition of a Pyrope polyp to your chest. Her tears are a little startling. You thought they’d taste like copper or dirt or something weird, not like regular old garden-variety human saline.
She turns her head and her lips bump your cheek, followed shortly by her tongue, and she mumbles against your face. “They taste like troll tears.” Then one of you shifts in just the right shitty-romance-novel way and your lips are grazing together in the worst kiss in history. She makes a sound, not a bad sound, and you think this might not be so awful after all, just for a little while. You’ve never made out with anyone but your pillow, but you’re pretty sure most mouths aren’t full of saw blades. You damn well learn to work around them.
One thing turns to another, like usual, and then another and another, and you’re doing things you’ll both regret in the morning but her skin is so warm. You won’t ever tell anyone how her breath on your skin makes you sob like a kid with skinned knees. You think you call her Rose at least once, and her moans of Vriska, Vriska, Vriska aren’t exactly what you wanted from a first time, but you can’t blame her, and she sighs Dave a few times so that’s alright in the end too. After it’s all said and done and you know what all the pop songs are about, you fall asleep wrapped up around each other, like you were when you finished. She drools on you and you snore in her ear, and neither of you moves at all. You sleep like a man whose head has recently made friends with a frying pan.
In the morning, you’re surprised to find that you can look at her without hating yourself. You locate all your clothes without much hassle - you thought they were supposed to get flung around the room in throes of passion, but yours and hers are just sort of dumped on your respective sides of the bed.
“Your human underwear is ridiculous,” she tells you as she hops around the space between your beds, pulling her pants on over bare hips.
“It keeps my dick safe from sarlaccs.” You don’t talk about the really pretty good sex you had, but you don’t not talk about it either. She smells your face again once you’re both dressed, staying carefully away from your lips, but you turn and kiss her and you stay like that for a while, just kissing, you sitting on the bed and her grabbing your head in her horrible claws. Once you finally pull away, your smiles coincide for the first time you can remember. “Come on, Pyrope,” you say, standing up and taking her hands. “Let’s blow this tree and leave.”
“I don’t think that’s a real saying, Dave!”
“How the hell would you know?”
You extricate yourself from the hoary grip of motel living and get out of there as fast as you can, as if leaving quickly will prevent you from catching any crud. You’re both probably going to become mushrooms over the course of several days. She doesn’t need any help getting in the passenger seat of your car or buckling herself in, or, apparently, fucking up your rear view mirror, but you still hover around just in case, because really what if she falls out or something and you have to find somewhere to bury the body?
“I don’t think you can pilot your human stupid van from out there!”
“Fuck you, I’m trying to help.”
“You are not very good at helping.”
“You’re not very good at shutting up and letting me drive.”
“You’re not very good at driving. Is this contraption even on?”
“No, because some asshole is keeping me from turning it on because she won’t shut up.”
“I wonder who that could be!”
You bat her hands away from the dashboard and turn the car on. It comes to life with a rumble, and Terezi looks surprised and delighted, settling back into the passenger seat. “Yes, this is good,” she says to nobody in particular.
You look at her for a while, studying her face and jaw and nose. You think about how both of you got here, and the House on the Rock, and the carousel spinning your history to anyone who pays for a ticket. You think about the world you created and the one you left behind. You think about Vriska. And then you flip the radio to the tape deck, and play one of Bro’s old recordings.
It’s a long drive back to Houston.