Work Text:
They make for an amusing sight, the two of them – one running along and pulling the other, who walks with unhurried steps down the suburban streets to whatever unfortunate destination that awaits them. They carry on like this, Dave Strider and Jade Harley, until one day Dave’s languid coolkid manner is the death of him.
It’s not the stairs. That would’ve been too good and just too bad to even be any kind of joke. It’s a hit-and-run accident, but the worst part is that he doesn’t go quickly, neatly; he doesn’t get away with just a strange twist to his neck and the end of his time.
No, there’s the awkward angle of his back, and the abrupt passage of a construction rod through his chest. It’s terrible when Jade gets there less than a minute later, with the crowd kept back by a radius of splattered red. His mouth is gaping slightly, and she almost tells him to shut his mouth before grabbing his cooling hand and almost crushing it in hers.
Life goes on. Nothing gets better, but it keeps going. Jade returns to her life as well as she can, but there’s really no way for it to be the same with a tall, sunglasses-wearing void by her side. It’s about a month later when she logs into her laptop again, ready to face the grayed-out screen name in her list.
Who is she kidding? She’s not ready. She’ll never be ready. She’ll never hear –
Ping.
----- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gardenGnostic at 10:25 PM -----
Everything seems to stop, at that moment, and she stares at the line of text for several seconds.
It can’t be, she thinks, and because thinking doesn’t seem to be enough –
“No way.”
The text stares back at her, and as the time ticks by she remembers to breathe and lean back in her chair. Someone’s probably just using his computer, she reasons carefully. They’re cleaning up his things and there’s no way that he’s really there, that there’s some way for her to talk to him just one more time, because he’s dead.
But still, she sits there, watching the IM window, waiting for a single line of red text, for an hour. She scarcely moves, only shifting to allow Bec onto the sofa with her.
After that she slaps herself (lightly) for being so stupid, and puts away her laptop without doing what she meant to do. She doesn’t log off, though, and leaves the window open.
She can’t let go just yet.
The next day, she comes home from a walk with Bec to find a package on her doorstep. It’s not very large – just about the size of her laptop, but thick enough for her to have difficulty wrapping her hands around it. Bec immediately bounds into the house to vanish into some unknown part of the mansion, so she sits down alone with her computer to try again.
When the screen lights up, though, she kind of wishes Bec was still there. Then she’d at least have someone with her when she sees the five lines of red text in the chatlog.
----- gardenGnostic [GG] is now an idle chum! -----
Timestamped at 11:40, when she’d gone to bed – and then, at 11:42 –
TG: hey harley did you really think anyone could get into this fortress of cool
TG: its password protected as shit like turrets full of randomly chosen letters and numbers and punctuation marks
TG: the towers of captcha
TG: anyway open the package already
TG: its for you
---- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering gardenGnostic [GG] at 11:45 -----
She reads the words over and over again, until they start to look blurry. She raises a hand to her glasses to take them off and clean them, and instead finds warm tears running down her face.
“Dave, you fuckass,” Jade whispers. She’s crying – actually crying. She hasn’t really cried since the accident, not even when she wouldn’t let go of his hand. Only during the funeral, when John was openly bawling and Rose was tearing up a little, did she manage a few sobs. She couldn’t let go, because it was still Dave there in the open coffin, looking naked even in a black suit and white tie, because he didn’t have his shades on. Crying there would be just weird, because Dave didn’t look dead. Just stiff and a little strange because she could actually see his eyelids.
(They cremated him, after the funeral. Dave had always told her that he’d like to be ‘turned to nothing but flaky ashes, in memory of my sick burns,’ and his bro had known that. Approved of it, even.)
But she hadn’t cried. Not like this, with her shoulders jumping with every inhale and knowing that he’s actually dead.
Still, the laptop is put to one side as she rushes for the box and a knife to cut it open. It takes a few tries, but soon the packing peanuts and cardboard are lying to one side and the other contents of the package are in her lap.
It’s Dave’s headphones. Red, printed with white and black markings and a gear-shaped symbol on either side, familiar as his hands, worn with use and one side’s earpiece a little wobbly from being pressed to one side of his head as he mixed and the weight of the other half hanging down –
She’s still crying silently as she holds them to her stomach, curling in on herself, on her knees in the living room. It’s just past four o’clock in the afternoon, and the golden sun pours in through the skylight as she quiets.
She says his name again, and then straightens to stare at the laptop sitting still on top of the sofa. “You’re dead. You’re dead, you idiot, and you can’t just send things to me from beyond the – the fucking grave, Dave, you know that.” Her words come in rushes and pauses, and the ones in the pauses are just as important as the ones that come most easily.
Wiping her eyes, Jade stands again and walks over to the laptop with the headphones in one hand. It’s got to be some sort of well-meaning gift that simply feels cruel. It has to be, because, well – he’s dead.
But she remembers the three levels of logins that he has to access his computer (one of his friends, a skinny kid with a lisp and strange eyes, had helped with it), and the next two for his IM account, and the words in the log, so ridiculously cool that no one else would say them.
Towers of captcha. Really.
But it just isn’t possible, she tells herself carefully. She thinks of drying her eyes, getting a drink for her aching throat, and straightening her clothes, and does exactly none of those things. Instead she cradles the headphones in her hands, staring at the screen.
The time passes slowly, but nothing more appears in the IM log. Finally, she rises to her feet. She’ll ask around tomorrow, and see if anyone knows what happened to Dave’s headphones, and maybe figure out how they ended up on her doorstep. No one knows how they ended up on her doorstep.
Jade is an expert in interrogative questioning, a lesson passed down from her grandpa, but it’s pretty obvious that everyone chalks the disappearance of his headphones down to a mixup in the packing. Jade doesn’t tell anyone that she has them, even though she knows that they wouldn’t blame her – he was hers, after all, and they shared almost everything.
It’s about a week before the next package arrives. She catches sight of it as she leaves the house, meaning to take Bec for a walk (it had usually been Dave’s job when she was busy, even though he really hated that dog). It’s as innocuously brown and cardboard-y as the first one, but the lack of markings is strange.
She picks it up, letting Bec sniff around in the front yard, and turns it over in her hands. It’s smaller, this time, and the item inside seems to leave a lot of room to spare. Then, leaving Bec outside, Jade enters her home and rushes for the scissors.
When the cardboard is cut free, contents are revealed to what looks like a plastic bag wrapped around a flash drive. She knows what to do with this one, and when it plugs in, the loading bar fills up too slowly.
There are two songs – sweet beats v 4 and hella tunes.
She listens with Dave’s headphones, and they make it just a little bit better.
A summary of the next seven months:
April 20th – another package, this time full of photographs he took of himself and of her and of them together. She remembers each moment, but can’t quite recall when he had time to take these pictures. They’re all hand-developed, and she pins them to her wall in chronological order.
May 13th – a box. Inside is a neatly taxidermied crow, complete with an identification tag around its foot. Corvus brachyrhynchos, it reads, and below that, so fly. (She can’t tell if it’s meant to be a compliment or a command.)
June 28th – another flash drive, with just one song named hey there harley. There’s a message on her IM client that shows up just as she prepares to play it – just for you jade – and when she hears his voice, singing along to a pop song (ironically, and yet sincerely), she’s a little surprised that she doesn’t cry.
August 10th – a package, padded with crunched up paper and packing peanuts. Inside is a glass bottle marked with a smiling apple on the label. She turns it over, and on a hunch, starts up her IM client again. for my best bro you-know-derp, Dave says. think you can pass it on for me (She passes it on, and Dave’s best bro comments that she looks better than she has in months.)
October 12th is when the last package arrives. She knows it the way she knows other things, like what other people give for presents and when things arrive in the mail (but these packages – the ones from Dave, she’s sure of it now – have been unpredictable). Jade opens it slowly, but with hands that don’t shake in the slightest.
Jade never understands how Dave was able to arrange it – she guesses that he’s somewhere else but not nonexistent, and that if Death has a fondness for Monopoly like he does in that webcomic that John always liked, then he maybe he does in this world, and needs some deputies for when he’s busy with board games. Dave was always good with time, so of course he’d be great for the job. She thinks of him, busy with his new job, and she feels… proud, for him. But what will she do?
She needs to make a new space and fill it with something new, because she can’t replace him. But even if that place where Dave was will be empty except for his ironic as fuck shades and every last memory of him that she’ll never forget, she’ll be okay.
---- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gardenGnostic [GG] at 5:23 AM ----
TG: hey jade you got everything right
TG: i guess youre not here
TG: youre all right harley
TG: youre going to be all right
TG: you know it
---- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering gardenGnostic [GG] at 5:29 AM ----