Work Text:
He breaks into a full-tilt run when he sees it: an explosion that punches through the atmosphere, rolling mushroom clouds of bright barium-green, dry lightning that burns forks into the back of his eyes. His pant legs are soaked and the mist bites him deep and every breath feels like daggers, and it doesn't matter because he has to find her, has to find out if the way he feels her timeline slipping is just his imagination or--
The shockwave tosses him aside like he’s paper and skin, whips him back with a carpet of snow and dirt. No time to exhale like Bro taught him; his lungs lock, but he swallows the panic, scrambles to his feet again with his chest paralyzed and body burning cold.
(No time to recover. Has to find her, has to get to her, has to know. Even when he can breathe again, he can't.)
He sees the crater. Then he sees her, nestled in the coils of her sprite, that long, spiraling dragonthing. Not quite a dog, but all dog still in the way he protected her--and he isn't stopping, hackles raised, an unspoken perimeter that makes Dave slide to a stop (heart pounding, the whole of him heaving, she's alive, she's fine. Relief buries the fear. Only thing killed here is time, and he’s got so much to spare.)
She notices him in moments. He watches her turn, run fingers through the tufts of fur at her guardian's cheeks, lips moving with something he can't hear but looks a little bit like “stay.” Then she turns to him with a smile that lights her whole face up.
And then she bolts for him.
He's braced for impact, this time; she plows into him, wraps her arms around his stomach and squeezes like she's just making sure he's real, laughing and giggling and grinning, nuzzling her face into his neck. The frames of her glasses jab into his collarbone and he doesn't have the heart to say anything, even if he could manage half a sentence between deep, greedy gasps for air.
“Dave!” she bubbles, pulls back, takes him by the wrists and leads him with light steps through the snow. He can almost hear the curlicues and the little hearts in the way her voice dances through pitch, weaves around full vowels. Like there was never any fighting. Like she was never in any kind of danger. She isn’t even shaking. “Why didn't you say anything? I didn't think you'd come visit so soon or I would've cleaned myself up a little or waited for you at the house or--”
She stops, runs her eyes over him like she finally notices his thin lips, his white knuckles, his breath in long, controlled clouds. “You weren't worried, were you?”
“Nah,” he says. (Shouldn't be here, he thinks. Should've waited it out. It was fine. It was fine.) “Just in a hurry and you weren't answering. Time to get moving, Annie Oakley.”
Tongue between her teeth, she grins at him, bites her lip--then ducks in and pecks him on the cheek like it's the easiest thing in the world. “Right!”
And then she's off, running ahead of him, laughter like music and dangling crystal as she slips into the mist and the trees. He can only rub his cheek and steel himself against her.
(He wants to run after her, more than anything, but this fucking planet is going to be the end of him, cold like he’s never known. He’s got better shit to do than slog through snow up to his thighs until half of him turns black and falls off. It’s time to go back.
Besides, she's doing fine without him. He'd rather be gone than irrelevant.)
-----
It was easier in text, having that distance. 6000 miles between him and cheerful less than threes and asterisked hugs--he could handle that. Easier to ignore, easier to brush off, pixels and data and the knowledge that if it wasn’t said aloud, it wasn’t real yet. He took it in stride--what else could he do, being him?--until it only ever existed in the future, a possibility of a possibility: he’d deal with it later, tomorrow, next month, next year. Someday.
And it’s “someday” right the fuck now, 6000 miles closed in the space of a dream. No chance to prepare or puzzle out how he’s going to handle it. He’s flying blind and it’s just her and her flash bomb grin and the way she has no fucking sense of boundaries in any atom of her.
His skin bristles with the feel of her, unfamiliar and oversensitive. Bro taught him how to drown out pain until the crest of it passes, how to keep his tongue sharp, how to put distance between himself and an enemy; there were never any lessons on what to do when it's already too late. It's not pain, but he treats it the same: he endures, sets his jaw, tightens muscle like he's about to take a punch.
But it doesn't really matter what he does and he knows it, not when reactions become answers. He can't hide a padlocked skeleton or coiled ligaments, can't hide the stories in the webs of his scar tissue. She dissects him with her hands: the ghosting of fingerpads over his knuckles, turning his hand over, tracing his life- and love- and head-lines like a palmist, rubbing at his sword-calluses, learning him all over again from the outside in. And when she's done pulling apart great, half-welded chunks of his armor, she can reach for his hand and read the heat of him like braille without a word.
He doesn't like it, but he can stand it, and he learns in time that it goes both ways. He can start to feel the desperation in the way she's always reaching for skin, the coyote curiosity in the butterfly touches on his jawline, his forearm, the nape of his neck, like she needs the reassurance that he's real and he's there. (And doesn't it feel nice to be needed?) Endurance becomes habit and sensitivity dulls with expectation and eventually, he realizes he's so used to it that his own hands don't even feel right without the weight of hers.
(It's not even just that; it's the way he doesn't even notice anymore. It made him cringe at first, that two degree difference in temperature, the meeting of hot and cold. He'd flinch at her hands until she made him cool or he made her warm, whichever happened first, except he's pretty sure it always happens at the same time.
She only addresses it once: “It’s like thermodynamics.” That’s it, three words, the end, like maybe she thinks it doesn’t even need any more explanation than that, rocketing off into her brilliance and leaving him behind. She forgets, eventually; he never does. Science puts his shit to sleep, but this one keeps his mind churning.
He likes it more than he'd ever say.)
He stands shoulder to shoulder with Terezi, watching Jade take Vantas' hand with the same considerations: the ghosting of fingerpads, examining the whorls and arcs of prints, tracing the skin and finding stories in the scar tissue.
Terezi huffs an exaggerated sigh. “Ugh. There are rooms for that, you know,” she says, a little overloud like she wouldn't mind if they heard her, black tongue lolling from her mouth. He assumes she's tasting the scene--peaches and charcoal and key lime--but it looks so much like textbook disgust that he can't even be sure. “Don’t humans get culled for public indecency too?”
“Sounding kind of jealous, T-Z. Get in line and I'm sure she'd give you a once-over too.” He shrugs. “She’s like that with everyone.”
(But Vantas is just a half-assed match, he thinks. They’re flat together, like watching some kind of goddamn vintage comedy duo; they lock horns and rage at each other, fire matching fire, until the scene ends and someone exits stage left and it’s so fucking cold in the room he keeps expecting to wipe rime off his shades. It could’ve fooled him months ago, maybe, when he thought her baseline temperature was a comfortable tropical warmth, but he’s not stupid. They all carry their planets with them. He’s magma and she’s tundra and Karkat and his blood don’t stand a fucking chance between the two.
Or maybe that's how it's supposed to go. Maybe he's the bad match here. Fire melts ice makes water smothers fire. He might burn her. She might drown him.
He grits his teeth and steels himself.)
-----
Music has always been sort of “their thing,” a bond forged in swapped project files and conversations lasting until one of them (usually her) fell asleep. For the longest time, it was him just getting her up to speed; her knowledge fell off sharply at around 1960, which just happened to coincide with the end of her grandpa's vinyl collection, all Crosby and Sinatra and Fitzgerald. (The smattering of j-pop in her library was as annoying as it was inexcusable, so he pretended she didn't listen to it.)
It was a tragedy and an affront to everything he believed in, so he took her hand through the decades, showed her damn near anything anyone considered musically relevant. Then he tossed her out into the internet, armed with a rudimentary knowledge of pop culture, and waited for her to come back with wide eyes and questions for hours. He told her about the British invasion, the emergence of rock, proto-punk and the punk movement, hip-hop in the 80s and alternarock in the 90s. She gave him youtube links and he'd dissect the artists, or the genre, or the song, even if he'd never cared about them until then. (He could play the arrogant douchebag indie magazine critic all he wanted, but she bolted for horizons he couldn’t see and he had no choice but to run after her. Her enthusiasm was too infectious not to.)
It wasn't meant to last forever, him teaching and her learning, him leading and her following; she took to independence eventually, turning over stones all on her own, digging into her findings like she'd been doing it all along. So he tried something new. He sent her pirated sequencing programs, swallowed his pride, and asked:
wanna record some bass samples for my next track?
(And it was so fucking bizarre to remember what it meant to actually enjoy something, to quit hating what he loved, but more bizarre was the way he’d trapped himself in a corner: he taught her how to know good music when she heard it. Faking it wasn’t an option anymore.
Being genuine itched like new skin, but he could handle it if it meant she’d keep coming back.)
There are times he regrets teaching her. Those times are when she sings.
He starts expecting it eventually, and then planning for it, snapping headphones over his ears. It’s for protection; she doesn’t fill silence so much as attack it, divebombing with Billie Holiday like the most aggressive songbird he’s ever suffered through. It’s not that her voice is bad--three or four years and some voice lessons and he thinks he’d like to have her do vocals--but she puts too much effort into sounding like some smoky chanteuse and shredding her vocal cords in the process.
Let her have her fun, he figures, but the longer it goes on, the more he feels like there’s not something very fun about it, though she laughs when she does it. Her accent warps words in strange and unpredictable ways; she misses cues, forgets lyrics and forges onward, somewhere between determined and compulsive. She takes her voice like a sword and the bloody swath she cuts through Summertime seems gentle compared to the way she murders the quiet.
He doesn’t say anything, just slips on headphones and cranks the volume on his ipod. Let her have her fun. It doesn’t bother him.
(It drives him fucking insane. Nothing sounds right anymore. She sings in cross-rhythm with the ticking of time, turns pop ballads into funeral dirges and bluesy lamentations into glees; she can switch words and twist the sound of them weirdly with her voice and the whole song changes. He makes a grab for solid ground in shit he never listens to, volume maxed for immersion until his ears hurt. Never really seems to help. He hears the world in all sharps and flats now and he doesn’t know how to feel about that except that it’s wrong. Between strains of Love Me Do and Ain’t That a Kick in the Head, he starts to wonder if it’s not the silence she’s waging her war against, but him.
Either way, she’s winning.)
-----
She's with him when he finds out about his brother. He doesn't know why her face looks taut and pained at first, or why she just spent half an hour trying to trick him off the path, but at some point he realizes what's happening. The blood catches his eye before the body, the stark Wrongness of it against the primary school blue of John’s planet, abstract flowers of foreign red. But then he sees the crusted polo shirt and the splay of blond hair (just like his) and the sword planted like a banner and a challenge--and he forgets Jade’s there at all.
There’s a moment where he’s not sure what to make of it, a little hiccup in time. Nobody is saying anything. He listens, turns the world into a sour soundtrack: His heartbeat. Breath sucked in through cracked lips. The whisper of cloth and faint tinkling of metal clasps as he walks toward his brother. Jade, a ghost at the perimeter. He closes his eyes behind his shades and listens to the sound of wind in the mouths of pipes, nothing but pale sharps and flats somewhere between sighing and singing. He waits for complexity; he waits for the music to tell him how to feel.
(It does, but it’s wrong, because strange and acerbic is bullshit and not what he wants to hear right now. He wants white keys and major notes telling him it’s fine, business as usual, carry the fuck on, so he keeps trying, fumbles for his ipod, wants to listen to music from when the world wasn’t so completely fucking on its head.)
He flinches when she slips her arms around him, feels like a goddamn kid in a thunderstorm as she cradles him against her chest. He tries to push her away, fight out of her grasp, but it’s a formality and they both know it; she just squeezes harder until he feels like he’s about to snap like partridge bones and vinyl. He can feel her heartbeat against his cheek.
(She feels cold to the touch. Or maybe that's just him, burning from the inside.)
They sit there in silence, and he can handle that. He can handle staring a hundred feet off into nothing, lost in the space between his hands. His headphones hang at his neck and he never quite manages to click off the lock on his ipod, fingers numb for a reason he can’t fathom, but it’s fine because nobody is saying anything and the quiet is something he can handle. Give him time enough and he can choke the whole thing down like a cyanide pill, all bitter and numb; he can come out of this limping, easy. He can carry the fuck on. Not a problem. He can do anything.
But then she starts singing.
He doesn’t know why she does it--maybe thinking it might be a comfort, some lullaby to soothe the kid he stopped being eight years ago; maybe it’s just her taking up a sword again, stabbing through the silence that threatens her. She sings with a crystal-clear, music box soprano wandering through a melody he’s heard a thousand times--because he helped create it. She sings one of theirs, music from when the world was right; it’s wrong now, black keys that strike at the nerves of him, make him want to jump out of his skin that itches and itches and itches and he doesn’t know why.
(They only made real music together, so his only choice is to be real in this one singular moment when he wishes to god that he could be anyone but Dave fucking Strider. She sings off-rhythm with her heartbeat and he can feel it, the vibration and the pulse and he clenches his jaw against it, against her.
It doesn't really change anything. He chokes into the fabric of her dress, yells half-words and filthy, explosive curses--some at his brother, some at her, some at Jack and John and Rose and the trolls and this stupid fucking game. Still she hums, lips pressed against his hair, arms locked around his shoulders, a fortress of a girl he yells at and yells at and yells at until all the fire's gone and she's still standing.
“It'll be okay, Dave,” she whispers. “It'll be okay, I promise.” He doesn't believe her, but the only protest he can give is a low, pathetic keen, face buried in the wet mess of her jacket.)
-----
He thought she was just being a bitch when they first met, the way she bounded in out of nowhere showering him with what he thought was the most insane attempt at trolling he'd ever had the shitty luck of handling. He was ten and just getting into making his own music and yeah, he kind of blew at it, and people were complete assholes, so he made crap music on purpose because it was ironic (because it was never a real failure if he never tried his best). He'd make real music, too, but that was just for him, and he kept it drowning in the depths of his harddrive for the most part. Sometimes, though--just sometimes--he'd toss one out into the world, as long as it was under a different name.
And then she showed up, friendly and weird and gushing like the happiest severed artery he'd ever seen. so good, she said, and he braced himself for another person who didn't “get it”; but no, she pressed, not that stuff, that other stuff you do--and then she started naming things that never even made it out of his project folders.
Words were exchanged. She blocked him. That was that.
(Except it wasn't, not when the curiosity and something that might've been need chewed away at his insides. No one had ever told him he was good--or great or incredible or talented or fantastic--and there she was, flitting in and out like a myth, a storm of sweet and bitter that upended him, and part of him needed to know if she was real.
Besides. She knew his name; it was only fair that he find out hers.
So he chased her. And it wasn't for the last time.)
She looks for all the world like a glittery something stolen out of a storybook, blue ribbons in her hair and barefoot and a swishy white dress that she twirls just to watch the fabric move. Rose's world suits Jade, in a way; she unfurls like a flower in the tropical heat, all parts of her grown to sway in the trade winds.
They stand together on a small cliff carved out of soft pink limestone, the tallest out of the sad little sandspit of an archipelago. Except “together” isn't the right word; she perches on the edge like some kind of seabird, toes curling down to grip the rock. He stands behind her, hands in fists in his pockets, counting out minutes in breaths.
“This is just like home, Dave.” She closes her eyes and makes a low, pleased sound in her throat, face tilted up and body stretching to meet the light. “The best weather ever and nothing around for miles. I used to go swimming when Bec slept. He’d get so mad.”
Yeah, he can see that. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Probably!”
And he should've seen the next part coming, too, because there's never anything that comes out of her mouth that doesn't carry an edge of crazy. Should've, but doesn't, which is why his brows scrunch and he gives her a withering look when she says, “Want to jump? It'll be fun!”
“Yeah, sure.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Sec, let me write down my last will and testament. 'And. Egbert. Can't. Have. My. Consoles.' There. Good to go.”
She mock rolls her eyes, grinning. “Are you sure you don't want to?”
“Why don't we walk back down to the beach and actually, you know, get back to work?” (It's not a no.)
“Come on, Dave!”
“Jade, this is kind of a really fucking stupid idea. There’s probably half a dozen fruity pink rocks down there waiting to bust your skull open.” He doesn't like the grin on her face, stretched wide and playful and just a little korrigan-devious. It unsettles him. It makes him want to say yes and no until he forgets what the words mean, if they ever mean anything at all to her.
She holds her arms out to him. “Don't you trust me?”
(Yes. No.)
There's no chance to answer. He starts to lunge for her, action without thinking, knowing with that pit of horror growing deep between his ribs that she's going to do it, that he's going to have to fish a body out of the water and explain to John and Rose that it's all his fucking fault, but even he isn't fast enough.
And his feet keep going even as she poises, practice-perfect diving posture, and his feet keep going as she takes a step and pushes off, and his feet keep going as she cuts a beautiful arc in the air, arms spread and black curls fluttering like feathers. He's chasing her (doesn't he trust her?), and he could reach her as she falls (yes), and--
He skids to a stop, windmills once for balance as he tilts dangerously over the edge, heart hammering hard enough to feel it in his hands. (Her name rings in his ears and he thinks he might've been the one to scream it, but he can't be sure.) She falls like a drop of water through the mist and he watches the ocean swallow her.
And he doesn't know what's more terrifying: the fact that he'll get down there and she'll be floating limp and red in the shallows, or the fact that he would've been right there with her for all the wrong reasons if he hadn't remembered it at the last second.
He can't swim.
(It may have been her who cut communication those years ago, but he was the one who was scared that night, all the way down to his city-bred, don't-take-candy-from-strangers-who-know-your-name bones. It sounds so stupid in his head but there was something magic about her, something in the sweetness and the shadow that eclipsed her; it was push and pull, yes and no, until he broke down and registered a new name just to find her.
And it’s fucking terrifying, hearing the song and knowing what it is and chasing after it anyway. It’s amazing and terrifying and he wants to fight it, because she’s always blurred the line between girl and witch, between maiden and lorelei, but knowing it never stops his feet from walking to the edge of that cliff. He's always seconds off from drowning.
This is how heroes get killed.
And there’s a part of him that’s fine with that.)
He scrambles down the scree slope, stumbles on loose stones and spits of dry beach grass, skids on the coquina outcropping where rock gives way to great tongues of white sand. When he hits the shoreline, he kicks off his shoes and socks and keeps running, long, willowy legs lancing through the waves and seafoam.
But he has to stop there, when he's chest deep in warm water and getting tugged by the gentle undertow, because he can't chase her any further--can't go where she is, or where she's going, or where she wants to go.
All he can do is wait with his heart in his throat and trust that she’ll come back.
(She does, forty-nine agonizing seconds later, arms laden with seashells.
When she takes his hand, feels the stiffness and the tension and the cold, reads him like braille, she dumps the shells into the sand and weaves her arms around his stomach and he finds himself doing the same.
“You can’t just run off and do that kind of shit,” he whispers half-breathless, threading fingers through her damp hair.
“I can,” she clarifies, giving him a smile that is not quite a smile, somehow considering and regretful and chiding all at once and he doesn’t know how she makes her face look so complicated. He’s so used to looking in the mirror and seeing straight, unimpressed lines. “But if it hurts you, I won’t. I’m sorry. I never used to have to think about other people.”
He wants to protest, it didn’t hurt him, she can’t hurt him, that’s ridiculous, but he looks for the effort it would take to say it and he can’t find it anywhere. In the end, it’s good enough for him. In this world, good enough is the most he can hope for.
“Yeah,” he says instead. “Me neither.”)