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Being a sprite is different. Maybe the endless kick-snare-kick kick-snare-kick drumbeat of time has faded out of his mind, but now he sees numbers and shit. Like the goddamn Matrix code scrolling everywhere outside his shades. It's annoying as hell because it's so damn lame. He can see the game code. So original.
He tries not to focus on it. Yeah, it's coded into his very being now so it never really disappears entirely, but he doesn't look at the specifics. No, he doesn't want to know how close to the end they are. He doesn't care about Dave's exact to-the-decimal progress along his dumbass quest of victory. He's got his back, but Dave knows what he's doing and he doesn't need his sprite riding him every second along the way.
So Davesprite spends most of his time floating in the background, craving birdseed like a motherfucker and kind of hating himself for that, but what is a guy supposed to do when half of him is a dead crow?
To be perfectly honest, he's tired. He wouldn't admit it if anyone asked him, but no one does. Everyone is too busy with the game, up to their eyeballs in playing it because it's what's keeping them alive. He's alone in only giving the game half of his attention, but that's because he's the one it fucked over royally the first time through. Him and Rose, though she doesn't remember every detail. She doesn't remember knowing where John's body was but not being able to retrieve it, or reading Jade's last green words as the meteors rained down. She didn't live those months of nothing but killing imps and coasting on pent-up emotions, his fingertips twitching every time they brushed over rough vinyl grooves and itching to just spin back back back forever—
He's had enough of playing this damn game.
He's not sure if the numbers are worse than the breakbeat metronome in the back of his head, but if he squints hard enough he can still make sense out of the timestream. He's always had a gift for melody and this is just another flavor. He tries not to look too hard at the code but on occasion some shiny snatch of data just catches his eye and it takes actual effort to rip himself away.
That's what happens now.
A tidbit of information from the future slips in sideways behind his shades. It stings his eyes a little and he winces, feeling like he's been kicked in the gut by what he suddenly knows. He'd been floating around knocking imps into the lava out of sheer boredom, but this snaps him to a halt and leaves him hovering over the burning landscape, his orange ass cooking as the data sinks in.
Shit.
He doesn't even hesitate for a second. Dave is off somewhere talking with his BFF Terezi, John's fucking murderer, and it doesn't take long for Davesprite to find him. He floats down from the phosphorus sky and gives his alternate-past-self a nod to get his attention.
"Sup?"
"Lemme borrow your tables for a second."
He cocks an eyebrow but doesn't argue. They both know a second means a second when Daves are involved, no matter how long it'll take. The tables come out and Dave hands them over, and it surprises him a little that it's so damn calming to feel the vinyl under his hands again. But he doesn't pause; he spins, not back like Dave was probably expecting, but forward.
It's freezing when time stops spinning, a fucking slap-in-the-face contrast to LOHAC's neverending heat. Everything is white, even the ash, and it takes Davesprite a long moment to realize it's not ash; it's snow. Land of Frost and—something. He doesn't feel like staring at the world code long enough to learn the name. Better if he doesn't know everything that's happened since he spun those tables. He's here for one thing and one thing only, and he stretches his wings and sets off into the wind.
Jadesprite, brought back from the dead; though how she died he doesn't want to know. There's a lot of things he doesn't want to know, but what he does know is that she isn't thrilled to be stolen away from her daisy pushing. And who can blame her? This shit gets damn exhausting after so long.
He finds her on a snow covered hill somewhere, sitting curled into herself on a rock and frosted with the white stuff, and even from up in the sky he can tell she's crying. It's just the inward slump of her shoulders and the subtle way they shake. That and the laid back doggy ears. He swoops in from behind, flapping his feathers loudly so that she'll hear him and he won't startle her too badly.
"Hey." It comes out more softly than he'd intended.
She sniffs and doesn't even look up until he floats over to her rock seat.
But then she does look up and he sees the tears spilling down her green face, entirely unattractively, and the sheer soul-breaking grief in her eyes. She looks like she's been gutted, or that everyone she knows has been killed and she's been left behind in the sea of their fucking corpses. It makes him pause. It occurs to him that he's never even met Jade in real life before, and maybe she wants to be alone.
But it's also been so damn long since he's spoken to his Jade; so long since he'd screamed at her chat window after her countdown had ticked to zero, just clinging to hope that she'd come back and talk to him. That despite it all she'd be alive.
He doesn't even realize he's done it until he's sitting on that rock next to her, one wing curled around her protectively and both arms pulling her into the biggest goddamn hug of her life.
"Sorry this game is so shitty," he whispers into her hair, and he's too cool to cry but she's practically bawling into his shoulder. She just sobs for a while, her whole body shaking and Davesprite not going anywhere. A green-on-orange blur in the middle of a blizzard.
"Oh Dave, you're not supposed to be here," she says eventually, wiping at her eyes and her furry face and not looking any happier than when he got here.
"I jumped forward in time, don't worry."
"Oh, everything has gone wrong. This is terrible!" She shakes a little, his one wing still wrapped around her to cut down on the wind. "I can't stop remembering things, Dave. It just keeps coming! Why won't it stop?"
He guesses that maybe she's just entered spritehood and the game is still doing its massive data dump on her brain. He remembers how that felt. It felt like it was trying to take over and force him to do crap he had no desire to do. And he has no idea how long she's been dead, but learning about the things that went horribly wrong after that has got to be pretty emotionally crippling for a girl as sweet as she is.
"Calm down. It's okay."
"It's not okay!! How could it ever be okay? I'm stuck here and people keep telling me I have to help, and all I want is to go back. I can't fight him! I can't do it! Why is this happening?!" she sobs, and she sounds as close to panic as he's ever heard anyone before.
"Stop it." He grabs her shoulders again and shakes her to try to get her attention. "Jade, stop it."
"I can't do this! Oh, why?! It's all so horrible!"
Something snaps in him and all of a sudden he's talking:
"Yeah, it's fucking horrible. It's a motherfucking world-ending sky-rending tragedy, in the classical Shakespearean sense of the word where entire nations fall because of the colossal fuck-ups of one asshole who thought he was so flawless that nothing could touch him. Or, shit, I dunno. I only read half of Macbeth." God, what is he even saying? "Guess what, Jade? The game is that asshole and it's gonna ride us for every mile we've got and then some, because I've been through the Sahara Desert four fucking times by now and I can already feel the sand coming up on the horizon again. It's hot and it's in my goddamn eyes and it's not gonna stop until we're all dead and broken on the ground and then it's just gonna find some other world to fuck with afterward. Because that's what it does. That's what it—"
Damn.
Jadesprite is just looking at him and somehow he manages to reel in the directionless stream of words. He's got thousands more flailing against the floodgates but he holds them fast and shuts his eyes, shaking his head and trying to push it away.
He's got so much shit inside his head and it's not like he's ever been a stranger to expression, but he's sure as hell not going to tell his crapass life story to Dave or John or someone. It's his own business. They've got a game to play and his now-pointless trauma of dead friends and cold abandonment has no place in that.
Doesn't stop it from building up and wearing on him, though. Feels like a goddamn hangman's noose half the time.
"You don't want to be here either," Jadesprite says, amazed and a little hurt that she'd forgotten her friends' feelings while so wrapped up in her panic; or maybe that's just what her face does now that she's dead. "And you've got things you don't want to think about, too. How do you do it?"
"Do what?"
"How do you keep all the thoughts and all the scary things from overwhelming you?"
He shrugs. "I dunno. Don't think about it. Do something else to distract yourself. The scary crap you can't do anything about. You just gotta stand with the rest of us and trust we'll have your back."
She squeezes her eyes shut and for a long moment she doesn't say anything. "I'm just so scared, though."
"You think John and Rose aren't scared? We're all up against the same exact thing you are."
"Are you scared, Dave?"
His coolkid nature kicks in and he tries to say no, he's never scared, are you kidding? Only wusses get scared and he's no wuss. But the words stick in his throat because that's a boldface lie. Yeah, he's scared. He's damn near terrified of getting stuck in some doomed reality again with John and Jade dead and Rose asleep ninety percent of the time, fucking abandoned with that goddamn puppet laughing at his misfortune every step of the way.
Jadesprite looks down at her hands and he knows he doesn't need to voice it. She changes the subject instead.
"I see numbers everywhere, Dave. Any time I look at anything they fill me in on the terrible things that have been going on."
He can't help but smile a little at that. "Yeah, it's really obnoxious isn't it?"
"I don't want to be here!!" she suddenly explodes. "I was happy where I was! Everyone was happy and I didn't have to know how wrong everything went!" She starts sobbing again, her fuzzy face buried in her hands and her shoulders shaking.
As down as he feels, Davesprite shakes his head. "I'm glad you were happy."
It comes out so quiet and soft and with a hint of a smile; totally foreign in his mouth, but he means it. It had really torn him up, back in his own timeline, knowing the exact moment when she died and then the gigantic void of her smiley green text afterward. Knowing his Jade was happy even then helps.
The soft tone catches her attention, and she keeps sniffling to herself but she does look up and meet his gaze. She looks a bit guilty for the explosion, but at the same time almost seems worried about him.
Shit, way to open up, dude. She's the one falling apart here. He's supposed to be comforting her. And, yeah, the spritecode wants him to tell her to man up and serve her purpose as a guide, but he's pretty good at ignoring its word-for-word advice at this point.
"Look, I know it sucks being yanked out of that clouds-and-angels bliss. I'm sorry about that. You don't deserve it. But the game's still playing and as much of a damn drag it is, maybe eventually we can pull a win. After that you'll probably dissolve back into wherever you were before this. But you gotta help. You do. I don't know where the hell I am at this point, but I can only do so much. I don't want this to last another four months of headache-inducing impossible timeloops and dead friends left and right."
He can't do that again.
"You gotta be strong, Jade. We need you to help us do this. I—" Say it man, say it. "I need it."
Her eyes are filling up with tears again, but at least she's looking at him this time. "Oh Dave," she says quietly as she throws her arms around him and holds on to him like he's going to fall apart. Which he totally isn't. He's totally chill here. As chill as the snow settling down all around them.
Okay, maybe he's not that chill.
"You won't have to do this alone again."
Ouch. Way to kick him in the heart, there.
All he says is, "Thanks," though, as composed as he ever is. Flustered or not, he's too cool to show it.
She smiles at him with those sad doggy ears and as freaky as it is that she's one of her beloved furries, she's adorable at it. He has no idea why whoever prototyped her sprite after she died would have chosen a dog to add to the mix, but he can't help but enjoy the irony of how fitting it is. She wipes at the tears on her face and takes the first deep breath in what's obviously been forever. "I'm so scared and sad. I don't want to do this. But I can try. I know all of you need me and I do remember being brave before I died. I can try to be brave again."
That sounds more like the Jade he knows.
"Chin up, Lassie."
Past-Jade would have giggled but it at least nets him a tiny smile. "Oh, I should probably go look for my house. Get back to doing my sprite job. Oh my." She gets up slowly, looking off into the distance and turning, getting her bearings in this endless white blizzard.
Davesprite shakes snow off his feathers and gets up too. He moves a bit closer to her and holds out a fist, because like hell he's just letting her wander off without a goodbye. "You ever want to talk again, send me a note through the game code. I'll pick it up eventually."
She looks back at him, at the proffered fist, and she doesn't move at first. There's something sad in her eyes, sadder than a second ago. She watches him and he has no idea what she's thinking until suddenly something clicks in his head and he just knows. For that long moment he struggles with the need to ask what's happened to him. Where is he? What has he missed that current-him isn't here now, and that he had to jump forward in time to make this meeting possible?
"Good luck, Dave," she says sadly, bumping her fist to his.
"Yeah, you too."
The silence hangs again, so many words left unsaid, and then Jadesprite turns into the whirling snow and starts on her way back home. Davesprite stretches his wings and takes out Dave's tables, his fingers hesitant on the vinyl and his eyes stuck on that slowly disappearing smudge of green in the distance.
His sprite pops back into reality a second later and Dave sees how crestfallen the guy suddenly is. He sees it, but he knows better than to ask questions.