Chapter Text
The quality of the static scenery is oddly gouache, unfinished, distant shapes fading and blurring into each other with irregular shade and light. If I had to put my entirely speculative un-finger on a post-impressionist’s technique to stylistically describe the shit going down in the middle distance, it would probably be a Cézanne painted over by an epileptic toddler with a watercolor set missing every color but murky yellow and blue, for some fucking reason.
Looking out at it for too long is dizzying, but looking down at myself isn’t much better. I’m oddly hazy, because he hasn’t noticed my presence here yet, which really diminishes the quality of my lineart.
John is dreaming in anime again, and per the usual level of metaphysical competence exhibited by literally anyone who isn’t me - it’s hardly vainglory if it’s objectively true - he’s doing a shit job of it.
He watches as distant figures flicker across the tangle of nauseating colors.
Despite the actual visual assault of his artistically amateurish subconscious, it’s peaceful here. I can see the allure of this kind of existence, frankly, or I wouldn’t bother hanging around in this backwater pseudonarrative in my copious free time. Really, I get it. The total meaninglessness of it. Not giving a fuck is a luxury I can’t currently afford in reality proper, but this depressed piece of shit is practically swimming in it. John can’t even muster up the sense of purpose necessary to pay his dream-animators a living wage. They’re unionizing in his fucking cerebellum, organizing a John’s Stupid Dreams boycott on Twitter, the hashtag is trending and the picket line is singing a Pete Seeger lineup and conspiring with the IWW and he’s just out here sitting on a poorly drawn rock watching an effigy of Lord English tear through an indistinct army of his doomed friends, completely unperturbed.
I clear my throat. He doesn’t look up, so I do it again.
John flinches like he’s seen a ghost. I can’t really blame the guy. If my math is right, and it is, the version of me that he knows wrecked his shit less than a few hours ago. The funeral will be tomorrow. For all those temporal designations mean a goddamn thing.
“Sup,” I say.
“You’re dead,” he replies, with consummate eloquence.
I don’t actually trust my audience to interpret that ironic dialogue tag accurately. If I were trying to describe the tone with which he made a basal yet completely useless observation as to my ‘being alive in his meaningless timeline’ attribute or lack thereof, the descriptor ‘puzzled’ would come to mind, along with a number of less flattering adjectives. I’ll trust my readers when I’m dead and in hell. You need me to spell this shit out for you, like everything else. This isn’t my first fucking rodeo. Get the fuck off the mechanical bull, fix yourself a shitty margarita, and try to keep up.
The bar is pathetically low, but I’ve yet to encounter a group of assholes with a basic grasp of the connection between parseable symbolic depictions of familiar parts of speech and contextually significant vocalizations that couldn’t muster up a few idiots capable of tripping over it. I’ve got to keep this shit locked the fuck down in what ancillary ways I can.
I don’t make the rules, here.
This isn’t my dream.
I’m just an internarrative tourist. In reality, I’m the God among gods, for now, presiding over a divine assembly of overpowered young adults with the approximate self-deterministic capacity of a flock of pigeons. Here, John is still running what’s left of the show.
Not much, to be clear. I’m slumming it in the filthy cesspool of what remains of any kind of independent will outside of my own universe. The slack-jawed dipshit who still hasn’t managed to stand up from his watercolor-rock seat is almost definitely the last person who actually could have stopped me.
Frankly, I’m the one who’s seeing a ghost. If John could squint a little harder, if the shapes of his visions weren’t so vague and under-analyzed, he’d see himself getting ripped to pieces out there. The real him. The one that matters to anyone of even marginal importance, the one whose corpse is conveniently stored in Terezi’s appallingly sticky sylladex.
“Sorry,” he says, after a second. “That’s probably really insensitive. My bad. Uh. You’re. Alive?”
I shrug deftly.
“Head still attached last time I checked. Of course, with me, it’s only ever a matter of time.”
As I expected, he doesn’t laugh. Winces, instead, the way you’d anticipate someone might shortly after bearing witness to the scene of a graphic decapitation and immediately enduring a tone-deaf joke about the subject matter.
To clarify, I’m not tone deaf. My pitch is excellent. The effect was intentional.
I glance down, and find that I’ve solidified into a convincing if somewhat stylized depiction of myself. He thinks I’m slimmer than I actually am. My hands, as he remembers them, are smooth and almost disorientingly soft. The effect is classically bishie if I do say so myself.
John and I have never been especially close. I wish I hadn’t been obligated to regard him as such a significant threat, because I truly wouldn’t mind ignoring him completely, permitting him to go about his business as he likes. Left to his own devices, he probably wouldn’t leave the house.
There is possibly some evidence to suggest that I wouldn’t, either, so I can’t really hold that against him.
For his lack of certainty, though, as a potential mitigating factor, and for the bizarre tendency of the narrative to warp around him like some kind of inverted black hole of inexplicable relevance, he had to die. It was part of the story, yes, but at the same time, there are workarounds to most mid-tier unpalatable narrative certainties.
It just would have meant a lot of work for me.
Decency forbid I make something easier on myself.
“Yeah,” he sighs, after an inordinately long pause, face clearing. “Same Dirk.”
“In the anime flesh.”
“Well, uh, make yourself comfortable in my subconscious, I guess. I haven’t really messed around with the mechanics of this stuff much, but I could probably get you a glass of water or something like that if you want?”
“Nah, it’s all good.”
John sighs, a muscle in his jaw tightening as he considers what he actually wants to say to the recently deceased brother-father of his best bro. I can’t tell exactly what he’s brewing up in there, which is almost exciting. To be, perhaps, a touch too real with you for a second, it gets exhausting, knowing literally everything so fucking always.
‘Literally’ is one of those words that’s been overused into near-meaninglessness, or at least forfeiture of its potential utility as a term. Etymologically, ‘literally’ comes from the Latinate ‘littera’, or ‘letter’. One might as well say ‘to the letter’, or ‘textually’, if one was looking to reclaim the symbolic meaning of a really fundamental piece of language, but digging too explicitly into metanarrative concepts in casual conversation has the tragic side effect of scaring the hoes.
I know everything, to the letter.
The everything of it ceases to be absolute when someone else is writing the scene and the wording of it all is partitioned safely within Egbert’s thick skull. I’m actually very excited to see what Rose does with the capacity once I take the tiara off her corpse someday. Nothing about John screams or even subtly indicates a capable writer, but beggars can’t be choosers.
I’m tired.
No harm in admitting that here, where nothing matters.
“Did you talk to Dave, before you..? Uh, if that’s something you know, if you’re… you know,” he finally says.
“I can’t say I did,” I say.
“Oh. That kind of sucks, man. I mean, this all kind of sucks a lot, but especially that, and… wow, I don’t really want to bitch you out, but…“
“I didn’t have to do it,” I concede. “There’s a universe where I don’t.”
“Oh.”
“Can you guess what you ate in that one?”
“You can’t blame me for...”
“I don’t blame you. Blame is a useless concept in a universe in which no one has any kind of causal autonomy. You accepted both, and you accepted neither, and conditionality was fulfilled for the cluster of timelines to progress, and everybody goes home happy, except for a couple of pathetic splinters who went to the top of a bell tower instead. Aren’t you happy, John? You’re all set up to get the girl. Your post-game domestic bliss AU is in the works. Sounds pretty fuckin’ choice by most people’s standards. Not even you should be able to fuck this up.”
He sputters futilely. It took some processing for me to come to terms with it as well.
“How could you do that to Dave?” he demands. “Dude, that’s not… I mean, no matter how many words you say, it’s still… didn’t you fuck him up enough already?”
An expert twist of the knife by one John Egbert, who is not quite as completely useless as he prefers to appear. I can’t entirely bite back a smile. When I’m right, I’m right.
“Tell me to do something,” I say, changing the subject only slightly. “I want you to understand your part in this before you cast aspersions on me.”
“Take off your shades,” he replies, without so much as missing a beat, his brow still creased with disapproval.
Really takes to the spirit of this shit like a fish to fucking water, but the dude’s no savant.
“Not quite,” I tell him. “You’re used to doing this unintentionally. Conscious control is going to take some effort. For now, repeat after me. I take off my shades. Try to mean it.”
“I take off my shades,” he says, his frown deepening despite the curious glint to his eyes.
I take off my shades.
“It’s going to take some getting used to,” I say, stilling the shiver that crawls down my spine at the brief feeling of pure weightlessness.
“What the fuck, dude. What the fuck? This is so messed up. Oh my god. This is so messed up.”
“Dave will be fine,” I add. “If you’re worried about him, maybe consider coming through for him even slightly yourself, given that you’re so convinced the poor dude is on the precipice of a breakdown. I know, a lot to ask from the guy who can hardly summon up the narrative agency to make himself take a fucking shower occasionally, but you could try.”
“Hey,” he protests weakly, but he can’t bring himself to argue. I’m right, aren’t I?
“Keep practicing,” I suggest, sliding my shades back atop the bridge of my nose. “You’re punching outside your weight class, for the moment. I gave you that one.”
“Hold the fuck on! Just tell me what’s happening, what did I… what did I do to you?”
“In your universe? Easy. You stopped me. Congratulations.”
“Stopped you from doing what? Dirk!”
“You’re smarter than you let on, John,” I say, leaning in just slightly. “Think it over. And then, wake up. It’s time for my funeral. You’ll have to tell me how it goes.”
He reaches for me. For all this figurative clown has been vegetating, stuck in his own decaying home, for the last five years, he’s still god-tier-fast. So am I, obviously, but I’m not interested in debasing myself with a game of John’s-dream-tag. His hand closes around my shoulder.
“Please,” he says. “Nothing makes sense anymore. It seems like you might actually know what the fuck is happening, and I can’t… I can’t just… you love Roxy, don’t you? Roxy’s acting insane. And so is everybody. I need help. This is only going to get worse, I can feel it.”
I lean in even closer.
“You’re right,” I murmur, millimeters from him, close enough to actually hear his heartrate spike when I say it. “You’re boned, man. Everyone is. And the best part of the whole shitshow is that it’s literally your fault. Not in the diluted sense. Down to the fucking letter. C-A-N-D-Y. I have nothing to do with this clusterfuck. This one’s on you.”
He inhales sharply, but doesn’t pull away. If anything, his grip on my shoulder tightens.
“And that’s all for now. Later, dude,” I tell him, disappearing before he can reply.
...
We’re somewhere in the inky depths of paradox space, this time, or at least, a van Gogh-reminiscent approximation of the scene outside the portholes of my ship. The multidimensionality of simulated freefall is interesting, to say the least. It figures that this is where he’d be the most comfortable.
Beneath us, Earth-C glows like an impressionist’s neon-streaked bad trip.
It looks about as big as a marble from this vantage point. Paradox space is impossibly vast. Any anime-esque facsimile of a recognizable narrative, any characters or storyline that could conceivably be populating the void, are all unreachably distant.
The configuration really should convey a near-rapturous sense of power. John is the last true God of the planet flickering beneath his feet. He even knows it, since I’ve deigned to let him in on our little narrative confidence, and he can remember that, here, in this dreamspace between truths.
But as the light from his version of the world filters through the inky blackness of the nullity separating him from the pathetic automatons left behind on Earth-C, his expression is completely disaffected.
He’s a goddamned virtuoso when it comes to disconnecting from the people he says he cares about. It’s one of the few things I admire about him even marginally.
“So,” I prompt. “How was it?”
I’ve always figured that the absolute pinnacle of Roxy’s bizarre fixation on mortuary ritual would be planning my funeral specifically. Kind of the best gift I could give him, a timely hara-kiri. I do love that incomprehensible son of a bitch.
“Awful,” he says accusingly, spinning to face me with an unnecessarily dramatic flourish of his god tier cape, which wouldn’t be possible in the vacuum of space if this wasn’t a wind-god’s dream. “It was fucking awful! And I don’t get it, how you could just… how could you?”
So we’re back to that old saw. I can’t help but sigh. The expression of any sort of nuance is a lot to expect from someone of John’s mental caliber. Interpreting nuance, even more radically unlikely.
“Still fresh, then.”
“Uh, yeah, dude, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be, considering it was yesterday!”
“Time isn’t real,” I tell him, despite the fact that there’s absolutely no iteration of any universe where he picks up on what that actually means.
I’ll be honest, here, because I can’t very well be honest traipsing around on my own spaceship with my just-shy-of-omniscient robot daughter and a disturbingly perceptive and clinically depressed teenage troll girl.
I’m not sure when my tagline became ‘making judgements as to the realness properties or lack thereof inherent to various descriptions of time’. I don’t really give a shit.
For whatever fucking reason, though, it keeps coming up. The problem with the use of words like ‘timeline’ when someone is really trying to describe a ‘narrative’, a mistake as common as it is moronic, is that linear stories are stupid. It’s not that they can’t exist; it’s more that they don’t matter. They contribute nothing of even the most limited interest to the native flow of Time and Space and Being. It just keeps happening?
Groundbreaking.
The mundanity of time leads to some truly brain-meltingly stupid takes on the subject by approximately everyone who has ever given it a try. I can’t explicitly distinguish myself from that number, precisely because I have less than zero interest in picking the issue up for myself. My takes, for now, are as icy-cold as anyone else’s, and the take microwave in my spaceship is currently occupied with ‘literally every more important thing in the multiverse, which is most of them’, which prohibits any potential endeavor to thaw that particular metaphysical hot pocket.
If I did, though, you can bet that shit would be scalding the whole way through.
What was I saying again?
Time isn’t real.
For now, that’s where I draw the line.
“Sure, man, whatever,” John says, turning slowly back to face the faraway planet we mutually created, once.
“Don’t tell me my passing rattled you more than you were expecting,” I say.
“Uh, obviously it did! It rattled everybody so hard that their brains have come loose or something! Everything’s falling apart. I don’t… I don’t even really know why.”
“You absolutely do.”
“Stop saying it’s my fault! How can it be my fault? I don’t do anything!”
“Have you listened to a word I’ve said? Be honest, no hurt feelings on my end, I’m curious whether the disconnect is owed to a deficit in attention span or if you fundamentally lack the cognitive function God gave a salamander.”
“What do you want?” he demands, glancing up again to face me, expression more pained than genuinely angry.
“Same as you, if the dream is any indication. Some peace and quiet, mostly,” I say, perhaps more frankly than usual.
He sighs.
“Roxy proposed.”
John gets a limited edition boxed set view of my eyebrows over my shades, here. Sometimes, even knowing the twist - and everything, in general - in advance, the insane bullshit going down in his narrative still hits like a goddamned thunderbolt.
“I know,” he continues, not waiting for me to respond. “I know, I should be… like, uh, I should be really excited. She’s so… um, I mean, she’s great. Like she’s really. Funny. And nice, but not too nice, usually, and… a lot like Dave, I guess. Man, I gotta be careful not to say that in front of Rose.”
“Wow, this is physically painful,” I say. “Tell me you’re writing this shit into your vows.”
He laughs uneasily.
“Come on, dude, what am I supposed to do, say no? To Roxy?”
I shrug. I’m probably not the guy to ask about anything Roxy-related, for a growing pile of reasons I’d rather not consider too extensively, thanks.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, huffing out a sigh. “Like you would have handled it so much better.”
“I’ll be real with you, man, been there, done that, and I did, actually. Different circumstances, though.”
“Oh, yeah, right. Well, you have an excuse. You’re all…”
My eyebrow-raising muscles are getting a real workout, and he flushes as he realizes exactly what he’s said, a beat too late to change course.
“All what?”
“You know.”
“Hey, this is your dream. I’m whatever you want me to be. Apparently that’s the elegantly bishounen centerfold of Earth-C Doushinji Monthly, and I’m not fighting it, but you gotta be straight with me, dude. I can’t read your mind, huge loss though that is.”
“Fine! I can’t just tell her I’m gay. Because I’m not. I like, I want to - I did...”
“First of all, if you’re going to start talking about nailing Roxy, I’m going to have to ask you to mercy kill me first, since hemorrhaging from my ears isn’t the way I want to go. Second, you seriously think that’s the reason I wasn’t hopping on the Roxy train?” I say.
Probably a mistake to bring that dimension into it, but nothing matters here, so I might as well. Whatever Roxy’s deal is, whatever actually makes him him, or a him, or whatever the hell, I have to take the word of a shitty skeleton with a would-be god complex that’s frankly pathetic compared to my own with approximately a post-diluvian ocean’s worth of salt.
But that’s the problem with the whole Roxy business. I seriously don’t know what makes him tick, which would bother me (which doesn’t bother me at all, but theoretically would) if he wasn’t one of the people I love most in the world.
It’s probably the most profound compliment I can offer him, that I don’t get his thing, that I’ve never been able to account for the way he feels about me (or anything, in a more general way), though honestly, John’s a step up from shitty green skeleton-martinet, so maybe his taste is improving. He’s not stupid. I can’t believe he’s stupid. Just gives too many chances, cuts too much slack, something like that.
Easy to take advantage of. Really easy. But even at my most borderline-sociopathic-teenage-self, I couldn’t take more from him than what he was fucking giving me with both hands. Like the fucker had never heard of game theory, and decided to take it out mercenary-style, machete to the throat, in the form of overabundant and unconditional love.
Or something.
Every time I try to explain it, I come up with something different. I should really stop trying. If he wanted me to know what the fuck was up with him, he’d have told me. He’d have said something. I wouldn’t have had to hear his fuckin’ he-him journey bullshit from a despotic hypocrite of a cherub performing a so-bad-it’s-suicide-inducing two-bit knockoff of my fucking schtick.
John is looking at me strangely.
More strangely than usual. He’s not a man of great tact when it comes to expressions, or anything.
“Roxy’s… what?”
“Oh, fucking please. He’s told you, what, two separate times about his gender shit? Tried, at least.”
My tone is still even and measured, but I’m actually annoyed enough by the fucking ignorance wafting off this interaction to miss the lede, here, which is that John, when he’s making any effort whatsoever, can hear my thoughts.
Luckily there isn’t much to censor. Less than nothing he could do about any of them - anything I’ve said, anything I’ve done - in any way that matters. And I’ve got nothing to hide.
“What are you talking about?”
“It clearly doesn’t matter. Your dream, your rules, your fiancee. Mazel.”
“Everybody wonders about that stuff,” he says, frowning deeply. “You know. All that kind of thing. It’s… it’s a what-if kind of scenario. Right? I figured that was what it was.”
I look away, halfway back into my corporeal body and a marginally less stupid narrative, when he shakes his head like he’s clearing the cotton-fucking-stuffing out of it and says, “wait.”
The command is rough-edged. There are ways to approach this kind of thing with finesse - admittedly, that’s not really my style, either, but this is a hammer to the metaphysical face.
I wait. Suspended in the dreamlike facsimile of paradox space, I stand by as John collects his thoughts.
This, predictably, takes a while.
“I don’t want to fuck Roxy up. You - you know how this ends. How it goes. How can I not… how can I fix this?”
He waits, now, and it's as though an invisible band has loosened from around my chest.
“You can’t,” I say. “You won’t remember this. It isn’t really happening.”
“I know, I know that,” he insists, raking his hand through his hair in agitation.
“Don’t…” I wait again, this time on my own terms. “Don’t let Roxy name your kid after me.”
“What? Okay, seriously, dude, I’m getting a really powerful ‘being fucked with’ vibe here, and it’s kind of not doin’ it for me!”
“I’m serious,” I say, seriously.
See, it’s right there, in the text. Twice.
Silence is absolute in paradox space, and for an achingly long moment, we seem to be at an impasse. Finally, he sighs and gestures an invitation to elaborate.
“It’ll just make things worse,” I continue. “Roxy’s always gotten carried away with that kind of stuff. I don’t want to be complicit in fucking your kid up from beyond the grave.”
“Worse for who?”
For whom, I think, but that level of pedantry is beyond the pale, even for me.
“Not just for Egbert Junior. For both of us,” I say instead. “For all of us.”
“Look, it isn’t actually that bad, anyway. I mean, now that I really think about it - aren’t you the one who said I should just, like, be happy with this stuff? I’m getting married. That’s one of the first steps to dadliness, and, fuck, I mean, is Roxy…? Can you tell? This doesn’t just sound like a hypothetical, dude. And how else am I supposed to live up to... literally, you said...”
He trails off.
My speech on the subject was indeed literally so, but my meaning was, as the kids say, ironic. John won’t be happy with anything. There aren’t many people sufficiently practiced at self-imposed isolation and masochistic-or-just-stupid denial of their own suffering to descend into debilitating depression on a paradise planet, surrounded by their closest friends and a sprawling, economically unsound nanny-state of mental health resources, but suffice to say, he’s one of them.
“Nice spiel. That’s exactly how healthy relationships start.”
“How would you know?” he shoots back, uncommonly terse, with a flicker of something that reminds me that he’s still something slightly more than a human-shaped sack of meat.
“You got me there,” I concede.
“I’m sorry,” he says, unaccountably.
“Don’t be. Not on my account, anyway. Call it like you see it. I can respect that.”
“No, you’re trying… you’re trying to help me, aren’t you? To not suck. Or to suck less. I’m pretty sure I will anyway, but I… I definitely owe it to Roxy to give it a try. A real try.”
“Noble of you, in a strikingly quixotic way. That windmill ain’t coming down, John. In the spirit of the open-book honesty that we so clearly have going on here.”
I’d pull some kind of older-brother card from one of the hackneyed movies that John loves so much - break Roxy’s heart, I’ll break your narrative - but that kind of dick-measuring shit really wouldn’t be fair to him when I have absolute metanarrative authority over the being-property of all things, including dicks, save for within this tiny sliver of unreality.
He sighs.
“Well, I want to think you’re trying to help, at least, because, not to speak ill of the dead or whatever, but otherwise you’re just leaning into the asshole tough-guy deal for no reason!”
“I have layers, you know,” I complain. “Just because you’re incapable of viewing me in more that one or two dimensions - literally, this fuckin’ dream-art, man - doesn’t mean I’m not complicated.”
“Believe it or not, I wasn’t actually denying that you’re a complicated dude, Dirk. I don’t want to… I don’t want to deny you your personal autonomy or whatever either. Am I keeping you here, somehow? Would you rather be somewhere else? Maybe a dream with better production value, ha ha.”
“Autonomy, huh? Real million dollar word, there, and intriguing concern from the guy playing fast and loose with his narrative jurisdiction in the interest of prolonging a chat about his fiancee.”
He flushes, opens his mouth and closes it again. Of course, I’m a relentless hypocrite myself. But there’s a difference between a surgeon’s scalpel and a fucked-up paradox hammer, and the fact that I’ve been known to overuse the tools of my trade has nothing to do with his blundering lack of self awareness.
“I tried to bring you back.”
That one actually is out of left field.
“What?”
There’s no triumphant smile to clue me in on whether or not he’s fucking with me, now.
“I tried. I really tried to retcon you back. It didn’t… work. But I tried. I just want you to know that. I feel kinda shitty about it, actually. It just seemed like you being gone was making everything fall apart. It still is, and I tried to fix it, and it didn’t work, and I’m sorry anyway.”
“I’m the last person anyone should be apologizing to,” I say, furrowing my brow, trying to delve back into the narrative I’ve thumbed through idly, though never really gotten into. The Candy narrative is an aspect of the truth, yes, and like many aspects of the truth, it’s fucking depressing.
I’m not stalling. But I don’t remember what he’s describing, and at least from within the dreamscape, he’s walling me away from his storyline. Again, power move coming from the alleged head of the Society for the Protection of Dirk’s Narrative Autonomy.
Fuck, for all I care, the pages got stuck together and I missed it.
“Do us all a favor, John,” I say. “Move on. Don’t make things weird.”
“I didn’t make anything weird!” he insists. “You’re the one who keeps sticking his fingers in my brain! It’s so fucked, dude, I can feel you trying...”
“Take a closer look at your universe if you think that’s even marginally true,” I say, ignoring the rest of that statement.
“Fuck you,” he says. “I don’t need your help. I shouldn’t have tried. I need to stop… I can’t...”
“Stop, then,” I tell him. (Easier said than done.) “Go back to your beautiful blushing spouse. Lose my invitation to the wedding of the century in the mail. I’ll be here when you want me.”
I don’t have much of a choice. Some splinter of me will unerringly be present, though the timing is up in the air. But I can choose whether or not to directly inhabit it, to make the few calls John subconsciously leaves for me. If he wants to play dolls, he’s welcome to insist, but he’ll have to get better at exercising his narrative control. In the meantime, I’m bored with this game, and I’m ready to take my ball and go home.
Rose is probably almost done with my laundry.
“I’ll be seeing you,” I tell him.
“No, you won’t,” he insists.
This is an inane hill to die on, so I shrug and disappear. If John were as attuned to the narrative as I am, he’d be able to tell that we have at least four chapters yet to go.
…
You can tell, though, can’t you?