Chapter Text
There is no sound but the crackling of flames and the distant shriek of collapsing metal; Lord English takes horrible, shuddering breaths. The veins on his neck pulse oddly, a step out of beat with your own. Tick, tock, tick, tock. A tiny piece of ceiling detaches, falls, clatters against the golden floor.
The bubble is horribly hot, and deathly still.
"When I say now," you mutter, out the corner of your mouth, "dive left."
"What?" Karkat sputters. "Hold on -"
You smell ozone, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Rainbow static crackles over English's teeth. "Now!" you yell, and dive right.
Lord English's laser tears a long, jagged crack across the far wall. The golden bricks dissolve instantly under the onslaught, and a fresh wave of tremors wrack the bubble. Shrapnel flies everywhere. You dodge, roll and come up running, reach wildly into your specibus and pull out Caldescratch. You duck around rubble and flashstep to the door - but Lord English is faster, he's already there, and when you make a grab for the handle he backhands you across the room.
You hit the wall with a sickening crunch, and see stars. Cartoon sparrows circle around your head. Godhood may grant you conditional immortality, but it doesn't promise anything about injuries. You think you might have broken a rib, or a couple.
A chat window opens up on your shades. Then another, then another.
TT: On our way.
TT: ETA seven minutes.
GC: W3 4R3 COM1NG TO G3T YOU
GC: ROS3 1S N4V1G4T1NG US THROUGH TH3 BUBBL3S
GC: VR1SK4 1S C4RRY1NG M3
GC: 1M NOT V3RY H4PPY 4BOUT TH4T >:[
GC: BUT 1 W1LL SUFF3R THROUGH 1T FOR YOUR S4K3
GC: ST4Y 4L1V3
GA: We Are On Our Way
GA: Rose Is Leading Us
GA: Please Try Not To Die In The Meantime
GA: Stall Him If You Have To
GA: Just Stay Alive
TG: roger that
Your shades blink off, just in time for you TO see Karkat dart behind a pillar. Lord English snarls, and rips the whole thing from the floor, Karkat clinging to the pillar's side like one of those window Garfields. Fuck no, you think, and wobble shakily to your feet.
You try to walk and can only manage a slow limp, so you fly instead. Rooting around in your sylladex yields nothing more useful than a coffee mug (World's Coolest Knight) and half a dragon plush. You throw the former at English and yell "hey asshole!"
The mug bounces off his weird, veiny skull and shatters on the floor. English turns and glares at you with his scary pool-ball eyes, his maw curled into a snarl. Jesus Christ, he's scary. You have to suppress the urge to turn tail and flee.
"Yeah, you! You're ugly!” You flounder wildly for an insult. “You look like a garbage truck had a one-night stand with the swamp thing and forgot to wrap up first!" It’s not your best, but, well, you’re not exactly operating at 100% right now.
Lord English roars. Good going, Dave. A+ survival instincts. Provoke the all-powerful skeleton monster, what a good idea. You're definitely going to die now, and it'll be a Just death because you totally deserve it.
He heaves the whole pillar at you, which is exactly what you didn't want to happen. You catch a brief glimpse of Karkat's terrified face as it accelerates towards you. Caldescratch flies up, your hands moving of their own accord, and you're a hair's breadth from slicing it in half before you realize that the cut would get Karkat as well. You manage to abort the slice but it's too late to dodge, and the pillar hits you with the force of a massive, cylindrical, golden brick bus.
Rubble flies everywhere, and you go flying. You hit the floor heavy and see stars, again. This time the birds circling your head are as big as hawks. You can hear Karkat groaning from somewhere to your left, and the ugly laugh of Lord English as he stomps closer. Black spots pop in the corners of your vision.
Something springs unbidden to your mind - a time when you hurt like this, but worse. You think of the cawing of crows and a slouched man in a hat, and a heat just as intense as this one. Your arms and your legs were wrecked, and his last punch has sent you tumbling down the stairs. You can even visualize one of the crows that was there, laughing at you - through your blurry vision you see it perched on a broken pillar, then taking flight through a hole in the roof, cawing...
And the dreambubble changes.
Grey concrete blooms in monochrome arcs across the temple’s floor, spilling like watercolor paint, chasing away the dirty gold bricks, smearing the temple with grays and blacks. The air is filled suddenly with a rancorous cawing, and a swarm of black birds appear on the floor, on the walls, in a ragged flock loitering on the center dais. Through a crack in the wall, you can see a familiar skyline beginning to take shape on the horizon. There is a distant, ghostly noise of honking horns, and the merest whisper of sirens.
“Holy shit,” you breathe.
"What?" Karkat yells.
You crawl over to him, wincing at the pain in your ribs. He's buried under a pile of rubble, and so you wedge Caldescratch under the bit of pillar that's pinning him down and throw your weight on it. The thing rises and Karkat rolls out and fuck, that’s a lot of blood.
"Dude," you say, "you’re injured." His suit is soaked through with red, and you realize that yours is probably just as bloody. Shit. Kanaya is going to kill you.
"It's nothing," he says, sitting up. He looks at you, and your heart sinks when you realize that his eyes are unfocused and glassy. “What’s going on?”
“We have to get out of here,” you say. “Can you move?”
Karkat tries to stand. You see what’s going to happen before it does, and when his legs collapse you dart forward to catch him. He’s heavy, fuck, and you almost drop him, but manage to orient yourself into something like a standing position. His head ends up tucked just underneath your chin. You try to juggle him and Caldescratch for a minute, and eventually give up and dump the latter back into your sylladex. “This is, like, the eighth time I've carried you today,” you mumble into his hair.
“Sorry,”
“No, dude, fuck,” you heft him higher in your arms and take an experimental step - still no better. Hovering it is, then. “I’ll always carry you.”
“Dave,” he laughs into your chest, “that’s the most stupidly romantic thing you’ve ever said.” And then he faints, all at once, and you’re left clutching him to your chest amid the shattered memory of a dead city’s rooftop.
* * *
TEREZI: MOV3 F4ST3R!
TEREZI: 1F W3 DONT G3T TH3R3 SOON TH3YLL PROB4BLY B3 D34D!
VRISKA: I'm flying as fast as I can, Pyrope!
VRISKA: May8e if you hadn't forgotten your rocket wings........
TEREZI: WH3R3 3LS3 WOULD 1 L34V3 TH3M?!
TEREZI: 1 W4SNT 3XP3CT1NG TO B3 4 P4RT OF 4 CR4ZY R3SCU3 M1SS1ON TOD4Y!
VRISKA: Well neither was I, so may8e you can excuse my apparently shitty flying????????
KANAYA: Can You Two Not Do This Now
KANAYA: Or At Least Have Your Pale Arguments More Quietly
KANAYA: Rose Is Trying To Concentrate On Divining Our Path Forward
KANAYA: As Well As On Carrying Me
KANAYA: And I Fear That If You Distract Her She Might Lose Concentration On One Of The Two
KANAYA: And I Have No Desire To Become A Green Stain On The Side Of A Dreambubble
VRISKA: Mind your own fucking 8usiness!!!!!!!!
* * *
The ghostly city on the horizon is covered in tiny lights. A plan is starting to take shape.
You float your way towards the door, Karkat unconscious in your arms, the toes of your sneakers brushing against the floor. Lord English watches your approach, silently.
When you get close enough you set Karkat down gently, and make him as comfortable as you can. You brush the hair from his face and kiss his temple, once. Then you turn and face Lord English.
“I’ve figured some things out,” you tell him.
You take a step forward.
Lord English says nothing, just as you suspected he would. You’re mostly just talking to yourself. “Dreambubbles are just memories, yeah? And the thing about memories,” you hold out an arm and flick your sylladex open, and with another flourish pull a sword out of thin air. “Is that they show up when you least expect it.”
“I think that’s probably what ruined my date,” you continue. “I got anxious and, boom, the bubble manifested as the place that I felt anxious in the most. Well, second most.” You gesture to the mishmash of temple and Houston rooftop around you, to the broken skyline and the smog rising out of the lava outside. “But I guess that ship has sailed, huh?”
Lord English waits.
You move closer.
“Anyway, enough about my problems.” You’re close enough that you can see every vein on his face, every chip on his teeth, every bubble of light caught in his weird, flashing eyes. His appearance is weirdly comical, but you’re not laughing.
You close your eyes.
One night when you were little your brother stood before you, him in the stupid polo shirt that he wore everywhere and you in your little dinosaur footie pajamas, and he wordlessly offered you a sword. Ever since that moment you've known nothing but the flash of blades, the clanging of metal, and the sting of a katana. You have scars on your legs, arms, chest. And, you're coming to realize, scars in your mind.
So you don’t think of that. You think of John. Of Jade. Of Rose, Terezi, Kanaya, even fucking Vriska. Aradia, too, when she shows up. Memories swirl around you, scenes from your life: staying up ‘til midnight talking to John on Pesterchum, hanging out with Rose in your room on Derse, stacking cans with the Mayor while Kanaya knits in the corner. Karkat - the first time you talked, the first time you met, pulling pranks on him when you had just gotten to the meteor, eating dinner one night and noticing how he chewed his food, like he had a personal vendetta against every inch of the meat and wanted to see it pummeled into the flattest possible form. The way he glowers, in the halls, the way he concentrates intently during movie nights. Your disastrous date, carrying him through the air to your room, holding hands with him on your bed.
The feel of his lips on yours.
You open your eyes.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” you say, “or even if I’m going to make it out of this. But let’s get one thing straight” - and here your draw your sword level to his eyes, vertical - “I’m not going down without a fucking fight.”
You drop into a stance. “Let’s dance, motherfucker.”
English roars, and charges.
* * *
Lord English moves with all the grace, fluidity, and force of an oncoming train.
Fighting a god - or whatever English is, whatever mutant half-life he’s carved out for himself - means you can’t make any mistakes. When he lunges forward, claws raking across your front, you have to move in perfect time to dodge. When his weird energy-breath dissolves a wall, you have to step quickly enough to avoid getting cremated. When you launch yourself into the air, a half-formed plan racing through your brain, you fly so perfectly that he can’t gain any ground.
You lead English away from Karkat, away from the door, through jagged holes in metal scaffolding and across bubbling pools of molten fire. Lord English is fast, but you’ve spent the past twenty-seven months racing Rose in laps around the meteor’s gloomy halls, and so you manage to stay one step ahead of him.
The first part of your plan - getting him away from Karkat - completed, you screw up your eyes in concentration and begin to enact step two.
Dreambubbles are malleable by nature. It only takes a minute or two of reminiscence before the jumbled skyline of LOHAC and Texas disappear, replaced by the soft white curves of the Land of Frost and Frogs. Jade’s planet stretches before you, forested and frozen, the surface steaming where recalcitrant bits of LOHAC meet fresh snow, the tall blob of the Forge stretching high and proud at the very center.
You’re really, really bad at plans.
Lord English is a machine, basically, a super buff skeleton machine with a weird coat and bad teeth. You can’t beat him, and you can’t kill him, but if you want to get him to stop you’ll certainly have to injure him. The best way you can think to do that is something big, something powerful. Like a nuclear bomb, or a volcano.
You swoop low over the bright circle of the Forge's crater, and when you’re low enough that you can feel the heat of it seeping through your clothes you reach blindly into your sylladex and pull out a cherry bomb. It vanishes into the lava with a short blurp, and the surface of the volcano starts to boil.
It takes two more passes, Lord English raging behind you the whole time, before the Forge has been stoked to peak instability. Lava churns and laps at the crater's rim. You slow, float to a stop above the mouth, and turn to face Lord English.
This is the crucial part, the timing. You wait. English is 80 feet from you, then 40, then 20, then 10-
You reach into your sylladex, fling a cube of shaving cream into the volcano's mouth, and shoot off as fast as your can towards the temple just as Lord English skids to a stop, directly above the volcano.
There is a massive noise, like a thousand cannons firing at once, and the volcano explodes.
* * *
TEREZI: WO4H
TEREZI: WH4T TH3 FUCK W4S TH4T
* * *
Everything is black.
You open your eyes to a grassy field, a picturesque vista covered in beautiful horses. Their manes ripple in a nonexistent breeze. You're siting on the top of a hill, the soft earth comfortable beneath you. It's quiet. Quiet and peaceful.
"Fuck," you say, "I'm dead."
"Not quite,” says a voice, “but you came close."
You turn and there's Aradia, sitting on a bolder beside you, her knees pulled up to her chest and arms wrapped around them. Light glances off the curve of her fairy wings, reflecting the faint sun above you. "That's not nearly as comforting as you think it is," you say, and throw up.
But of course you're in a dreambubble, so what comes up is a memory of vomit, a viscous fluid that burns your throat and comes out looking more like yogurt than yesterday's lunch. Afterwards you wipe your mouth on the torn sleeve of your suit and turn to face Aradia.
She’s just like you remember, with her ram’s horns and her creepy smile and her bright red godtier outfit. “So what,” you say, “I’m dreaming? In a coma? Bleeding out in that dreambubble?”
“Yes to the first one.” She gestures to the bubbles black, wavering sky, where in the distance you can faintly see a tiny red dot. “Watch.”
You get to your feet (you don’t feel any pain, which is either a good sign or a bad one) and hop onto the bolder next to her. For a long while the two of you sit there, staring out into the blackness, watching as the red dot trembles, glows bright, and finally explodes. Bright white cracks arc across the furthest ring.
“You’re lucky you made it out,” Aradia says. “He was probably toying with you, or maybe he didn’t expect you to fight back. Anyhow, you’re asleep and alive, which is pretty much the best you could have hoped for.”
“I don't remember making it out,” you confess. “I remember blowing him up, but nothing after that.”
“The explosion knocked you back down to the temple,” Aradia says, “after which you picked up Karkat's unconscious body and carried him through the door. Very romantic! Nine out of ten for style. I can't account for anything after that, but neither of you are in the bubble anymore. You put up quite the impressive fight!”
“My date was ruined, though,” you grumble, scuffing at the desert sand with your heel.
“Yes, I saw that,” Aradia says. “You realize that you could have asked him out at any point in the past sweep, right?”
“Yeah,” you sigh, “I do.”
“Then why,” she asks, as the dreambubble begins to fade, “did you wait?”
* * *
When you come to it is to the sight of the meteor's drab, grey ceiling. You're not sure if this is an upgrade or not.
“Fuck,” you say, “my ribs hurt like a mother-”
And then Rose is there, suddenly, seizing you by your arms and sweeping you into a crushing hug. “Dave,” she says, her voice choked, and then she's clutching you tightly and sobbing into your shoulder.
“It's okay, Rose,” you mutter, patting her hair awkwardly. “I'm fine, I'm okay.”
“I thought,” she gasps, “I thought you died, I, I, I thought we, we lost you, God, don't ever do fucking do anything else like that again.” She squeezes your waist like she's reassuring herself that you're still there.
“Rose,” you wince, “my ribs - if you could stop squeezing, maybe -”
“Oh!” she says, and backs off. “Um, how are you feeling?”
“Terrible,” you say, sitting up. “Where am I? What happened? Where's Karkat?”
You look around. You're lying on your bed in your room, which looks exactly as messy as you remember. You notice that there's a chair next to your bed you're in, and a book propped open on the arm. Has Rose been sitting and waiting for you to wake up? You're filled with a sudden flood of affection for your sister.
“You've been unconscious for fourteen hours,” Rose tells you. “We found you and Karkat passed out on the floor of one of the lower corridors. You've got some nasty burns and a bunch of your ribs are broken.” She bites her lip and gives you a worried look. “What happened in there?”
“I'll tell you later,” you say quickly. “Where's Karkat?”
Rose, maybe sensing your anxiety, says “he's fine. Resting. Kanaya's with him, I think.”
You lever yourself out of your bed. “Take me to him.”
“Dave,” Rose objects, “I don't think you should be walking around - ”
But you're already limping out the door. Rose catches up with you halfway down the hall and follows you to Karkat's room. She looks worried, but raises no more objection, for which you are grateful.
You're halfway to Karkat's room, dizzy with panic, when you hear a voice wafting through the corridor in front of you: “I'm fine, Kanaya, stop fussing, all I want to do is see -”
You skid to a stop and stare frozen down the hallway.
“ - Dave,” Karkat finishes.
Time slows down.
For a moment the two of you just stare at each other, unmoving; then you're running and he's running and you sweep him into your arms, and he leans in and pulls you into a kiss.
You can hear Rose and Kanaya giggling behind you, but you don't care – Karkat is warm and real and alive, so alive, and you want to stay there and hold him forever and never let go.
“Dave,” Karkat says into your mouth, “this has simultaneously been the worst and best date I've ever been on.”
And then you're laughing, and he's laughing, and the two of you stand close together in that hallway; both in burnt and ragged clothes, both dressed to the nines, holding onto one another as tightly as you possibly can.
You stay like that for awhile. You have all the time in the world.
* * *
Afterwards the two of you sit alone in the common room. Some movie is playing on the TV, but you're barely paying attention.
“So,” Karkat says, “Kanaya said she made you a list?”
“Fuck off,” you groan, sinking back into the cushions of the couch. He laughs and steals your shades.
“It's cute, kinda,” he says. “You're really bad at this, aren't you?”
“I'm – yeah, I guess.”
He silent for a moment. “Well,” he says, finally, “I guess you'll just have to do better next time.”
You sit up in your seat. “Next time?”
“I'm not very good at it either,” Karkat admits, “Romance, I mean. But I think we could figure it out, between the two of us. If we worked together.”
And he leans forward and kisses you.
* * *
You have a new list.
It's not done yet – you're still working on it. You haven't gotten Kanaya's help with it, or Rose's, or Terezi's or Vriska's. It's a list you're compiling yourself, through trial and error, discovery and experimentation.
The list is entitled “reasons why being karkats boyfriend is awesome.”
It's currently thirty-three items long, and growing.
And you've never been happier.