Chapter Text
John and Jade have been holding hands on and off all day. He keeps reaching up to prod at her ears, as if to make sure they’re real, and every time he does the two of them dissolve into giggles, like a couple of little kids instead of superhero demigods.
When he saw Rose, he went bouncing over to peer under her hood and check she wasn’t grimdark any more. Rose pranked him by garbling out something with too many consonants and John fell for it until she laughed and told him he was an idiot. Then they hugged.
When he saw you, he said, “Haha, Dave, you look like the Blue Beetle.” Then he went and poked Jade’s ears again.
There is no cool way to say this. You are feeling kinda left out.
The truth is that you’ve imagined this meeting way more often than you’d admit, and in your head, you and John were always, well, pretty much the main event. Long-distance best bros hug-bumping for the first time and... whatever, really, it was just supposed to be a bit more heartwarming than this, is the point.
John has, in fact, spent more time talking to Karkat than you. You wish you could say you’re not keeping track, but your awareness of time has grown into a brand new sense, almost physical, and trying not to notice it would be like trying not to notice that the rain on Rose’s miserable soggy planet is currently seeping down through every layer of your clothes.
You are trying to remember the last time you actually spoke to John. LOHACSE? That seems like years ago. You guess everyone just got caught up in getting shit done for a while, but back when you started out this endless day, telling John that you found some apple juice in your closet seemed genuinely important. Because you told John about everything.
You’ve had a lot on your mind, sure, but in between all that time-hopping and frog-breeding and dying and so on, you probably should have made more of an effort to keep him in the loop. You wouldn’t blame him for being a little mad at you about that.
Wait, no, that’s bullshit, it’s not like he went out of his way to pester you either. He was busy getting bossed around by Karkat and Vriska. Fuck, everyone’s been busy. John’s way too reasonable a guy to hold that against you. Just like you’re way too chill a guy to be overthinking things to this degree.
But even Karkat got a hug when John first met him. It looked sort of like John was trying to hug a stormcloud, a stormcloud with glaring yellow eyes and sharp teeth and stiff, angry limbs, a stormcloud that was yelling at John to get off, get off me now, John Egbert, remove your spongy flesh-draped boneframe from contact with my person right the fuck now.
Yeah, the stormcloud simile didn’t really hold up, but what the fuck, you never claimed to be Shakespeare.
This is dumb. You’re being dumb. It’s John, for fuck’s sake. He probably doesn’t even register that this is the first time you’ve met in real life. In his sentimental little nerd brain, that isn’t even a thing, because you’ve been best friends for years and why should a little physical proximity make a difference. If he’s not talking to you, that’s because you’re sulking silently in the background. Just say something to him, god damnit.
That’s when you realize something is terribly wrong.
You can’t think of a single thing to say. You are brainfrozen, throatlocked, gawpmouthed, wordstumped. You are, in short, tongue-tied.
You realize something else. Every time John half-turns in your direction, every time you catch the sideswipe of his toothy grin, every time you hear him laugh, your stomach does this way uncool thing that feels like falling. You’re pretty sure you know what Rose would make of that. And you’re pretty sure she’d be right.
Well. Shit.
***
You’re playing out timelines in your head. They spin through your mind the way vinyl did beneath your hands, only now you’re not just the DJ but the needle as well, reading what’s coded in the grooves, understanding it. You’re following the post-Scratch universe along its delicate path through time, trying to figure out where the divergences are, so that you’ll have some idea what to expect when you get there.
You’re supposed to be doing this with Aradia, but her style was different enough to make your head hurt, and you decided to work separately for now and compare notes later.
There’s a little whoof of air around you, eddying the rain into ghostly shapes for a moment, and then John is hovering in front of you, upside-down and grinning. Your stomach drops. You have got to figure out how to make it stop doing that.
“What the hell are you doing, Peter Pan, get down from there.”
“No way!” He does this stupid little twirl in the air and his ridiculous fucking hood gets wrapped around your head. By the time you’ve fought loose your shades are askew and he’s laughing his ass off at you. Smooth. So smooth.
“Kinda busy right now,” you tell him.
“Hey, you owe me money! You promised you would give me my boonbucks back. Where are my boonbucks, Dave?”
“You’re not serious.”
“No, not really. I just wanted to see how you’re doing mapping the new universe!”
“I’m working on it, but I can’t make much headway, because this hurricane-force farting asshole keeps distracting me.”
“Gross, dude!” he says cheerfully, flipping rightway up to sit beside you. It’s so effortless, the way he flies; you and Rose and even Jade fly with purpose, but he flies like it’s a game, a really easy and fun game. You would really like to not be noticing that, but you can’t help it.
“I’m just thinking about what it’ll be like to meet alternate versions of ourselves,” he says. “I mean, what if we are totally different? What if in the Scratch universe you are actually cool?”
“That’s so funny. I’m laughing on the inside. Really.”
You think maybe you are compensating for your undignified squishy feelings by being a bit too standoffish and cranky, because he gives you a sort of confused look, like he thinks he made you mad. You try to pull yourself together.
“I just thought you would be the one to talk to about it,” he says, “since you actually did meet yourself from different timelines. What’s it like?”
“Fuck, man, I dunno. It’s just, like, me. Only two of me. Or sometimes ten of me. But still me. These guys in the new universe, if there even are versions of us there, they’re different people. They just have our DNA is all. If we ever meet them I wouldn’t read too much into things, you know?”
“I guess.”
He’s playing with the breeze as he talks to you, the way someone might fiddle with their cuffs or pick at their nails, and little skirls of air keep darting around you, chilling your skin until you feel like shivering, and messing up your hair (you waited a suitable interval after the Blue Beetle comment and then turned your hood down, rain or no rain). You wonder if he even knows he’s doing it. His hood keeps trying to curl around you like a cat’s tail.
You look up to tell him to quit that irritating bullshit, and find him already looking at you with this pensive expression on his face. Your stomach does that downward lurch again. Whatever you were going to say goes out of your head. This is pretty much the worst thing ever, why the fuck do people write songs about this.
“Rose says that the other us... usses... might not even know each other,” he says.
“Yeah, well, Rose probably just wants an excuse to write really depressing fanfiction, because Rose is a sick fuck. Look, it’s not like they’ll even remember that things were ever different, kinda the nature of a reset. And we know each other now, so who cares?”
“It just makes me sad to think about, is all. You guys are my best friends.” He reaches over to squeeze your arm or something, and you don’t even think about it, you pull away before he can touch you, like he’s got high-voltage warning signs all over, and leave him with his hand hanging in the air.
He stares at you. You stare back. The wind goes quiet, and suddenly there’s a whole lot of silence out here.
“Anyway,” he says, “I guess you are probably wanting to get back to your timeline thing, so I’ll go. Good luck!”
He gives you a grin that looks a bit sideways and strained, and then he’s off, cutting up into the pastel sky before you can tell him to wait.
That was a weird moment, wasn’t it. Yeah, you think that counts as a weird moment. Fuck.
You have no idea how you’re supposed to concentrate on timelines now.
***
Rose’s house is the only one that still has any food in it, so everybody gathers there to sit down and eat together, like some kind of really big fucked-up family. John and Jade, by their powers combined, manage to create something edible, although the trolls don’t seem to share your opinion on that; Karkat spends the meal absently swinging one wretched spaghetti noodle back and forth in front of his face, Terezi attempts to separate the tomato sauce from the minced beef, Aradia picks at a head of raw broccoli she found in the fridge, and Gamzee watches Karkat’s noodle like it’s a Fourth of July fireworks display. Kanaya just sits in the living room, reading one of Rose’s books. You assume she will eat later, and you are comfortable not knowing the details.
Afterwards you reconvene with Aradia to discuss your timeline findings. You’re not surprised to find she got further than you, but once you’ve figured out a way to talk about specifics that makes sense to both of you, you learn that your impressions match hers. Neither of you can pinpoint why the fuck Betty Crocker, of all things, seems to have become such a big deal in the new universe, but at least it won’t blindside you when you arrive there.
You think about mentioning to John that his silly arch-nemesis might have become his scary arch-nemesis. But that would involve talking to John. Which you are not doing so much right now.
This really, really sucks.
You all agree to get some sleep. Even Karkat agrees, and he is easily the most high-strung fucker you’ve ever met. Rose’s house has plenty of rooms, and you wonder what they used all the space for, given that it was just her and her Mom. You speculate that wars of passive-aggression require lots of breathing-room, unlike wars of freaking your little bro out with puppets, which work better in a more claustrophobic setting. If you were Rose, you would now come up with a theory of living spaces and the dysfunctional relationships they spawn, apply it to Sburb and make a fortune. But you’re not Rose, and it just seems depressing to you.
John and Jade have claimed a room together – they’re being kind of embarrassingly clingy with each other at the moment – and you pause outside in your search for a place to crash. There’s light coming from under the door, and you can hear them talking.
“And oh man,” John is saying, “this one parent-teacher evening – that is where the parent goes into school to talk to the teacher about how the kid’s doing – he got all my teachers with, like, this, I don’t even know what it was, it was kind of this powder that only showed up on dark clothes? So all night he had this stuff on his hands, and he was shaking hands with the teachers, and by the end all of them had white streaks on their suits and they had no idea why. Some of them, he shook their hands five or six times, they just thought he was really polite, I guess! And the whole time Dad was just completely poker-faced. It was the best ever.”
“Bec used to play pranks too! Or not pranks exactly, but sort of these games with me. When he wanted me to hurry up sometimes he’d transport everything in my room outside, or to different parts of the house. I used to think it was him disappearing my pumpkins, but it wasn’t. Ohhh, and when we had hurricanes, I always used to want to go out and watch, and I probably would have died! So he wouldn’t let me, but sometimes he’d make a sort of window, and I could watch what was happening even when I was in the basement, because he knew I wanted to be outside, even though he couldn’t talk.”
“It sounds like he was such a good dog, I wish I could have met him! Dad never really talked much either – I mean, not that he was a dog, but you know – so he used to leave me notes everywhere. I have still got the note from the time when he...”
You walk on silently, leaving them to it. You could go in and get your reminiscence on, if you wanted, but somehow you don’t think it would fit the tone of the conversation to tell them about the time you and Bro spent the whole of summer vacation in a battle to see who could fuck up the other’s computer in the most ironic way (it ended when he somehow managed to get yours to run nothing but DOS, and you had to buy a new one; you still have no fucking idea how he did that), or the six months when he got a little obsessed with setting up elaborate, dangerous parkour scavenger hunts for you across the rooftops of Houston. It’s too bad. You think those are actually pretty sweet stories. Rose would understand.
You’re almost at the end of the corridor when you hear the door snick open and Jade calls after you.
“Dave! I thought I heard you. You should come in here! We can’t just all be spread around the house!”
Of course. Dog ears.
“Come on, think of my reputation. If I spend the night with you everyone will know I’m a woman of loose virtue.”
“Nooo, it’s okay! John’s in here too!”
Oh, she’s just so fucking adorable and you are so fucking screwed. She’s getting closer, or the corridor is getting shorter, or something. Jesus, it’s like she and John are virgins at a strip club and unnatural powers are dollar bills they’re just throwing around all over the damn place. She’s reeling you in, and you can either go quietly or flop around and gasp on the floor and still get netted. You follow her inside.
John looks like a bent paperclip, all scrunched-up limbs on a beanbag in one corner. You take the wicker chair in the opposite corner, real casual. Jade flops on her stomach on the floor and rests her chin on her arms. Before very long, she’s got you telling the story about the parkour scavenger hunts anyway, and then Rose arrives with blankets, and you bundle up and mumble a few more stories and end up falling asleep halfway through whatever you were saying.
***
There’s no morning here, no sun, only Skaia in front of you, the Green Sun behind. Still, you know when it’s time to wake.
None of the others seem to share your opinion. They’re still fast asleep when you open your eyes. Rose is using John’s beanbag as a pillow, and he has one arm around her. Jade is curled up with her head on his lap. You’d think it would make you jealous, but it doesn’t, except for how you kind of feel like a giant loser sitting here in your chair on your own while they’re all cuddling.
You’re still feeling pretty dopy and out of it, and you end up just staring at John for a while. How his hair sticks up in a way that makes your fingers itch to comb it down; how his teeth jut out just a little bit when he’s relaxed, resting against his lower lip, making you think things about lips and teeth and biting that should be left under cover of narrative ambiguity; how he and Jade both have these insanely long, thick eyelashes, only on him it’s different because he’s not a girl; how his eyes are the exact same blue as his pesterchum text, and how oh, by the way, he’s looking right at you.
Fortunately he’s not very awake yet. Not awake enough to notice that his best friend was just totally creeping on him. He just smiles his goofy half-asleep smile and says, “Hey,” very quietly. Apparently now your insides are capable of turning into mush – mush with tentacles, judging by the way they seem to be writhing. There’s not one single thing about this that’s cool.
“So I guess we really are in an alternate universe,” you say. “Where John Egbert is the one who’s covered in ladies, even though there’s a perfectly good Dave Strider right here.”
He blinks at you stupidly for a minute, then looks down at Rose and Jade. “Oh yeah,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “I do not remember this happening.”
You start to get up, and grimace as all your joints protest in harmony. “Fuck. Next time I get the beanbag and someone else can take the muscle-petrification chair.” You put up a hand to rub your eyes and discover that someone took your shades during the night. You’ve been without fucking shades this whole time and you didn’t even notice.
“Take it easy!” John says, chuckling at the look on your face. “Jade stole them while you were all tuckered out. She wanted to see if you had eyebrows. Rose thought you’d wake up, even if Jade only teleported them, but you were so asleep, dude, you didn’t even move. It was adorable.”
“Ironically adorable.”
“No, the regular kind.”
You just look at him. After a moment, he seems to realize that weirdness is happening again, because he looks down and pats Jade’s shoulder gently. Pretty soon everyone’s awake, your sunglasses are back where they belong, Rose has mentioned coffee, and things are back to normal again. Except for the twelve-year-old girl in your mind, who’s climbed up on a parade float to scream, He said I was adorable! at the masses while the remainder of your sanity watches in disgust and wants to fucking die.
As you go downstairs – you make sure to go first, so that you won’t have to catch yourself watching the back of John’s head – you decide there’s really only one thing that can make you feel better.
Today, you are going to bully the shit out of Karkat Vantas.