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Well fuck.
What's a guy gotta do for a satisfying death around here?
Just when you think you've finally got shit locked down, that everything's going to come together, it all slips away again.
You finally got what you wanted. And you'd be done.
Then for once everything works out in everybody's favor, except yours of course.
You'd fall to your knees if you still had any to fall to. You'd harakiri like nobody had hara'd their kiri before, if your gut wasn't already a sheath. You'd weep, if you had ever deigned to learn how.
Okay, dude, hold on. You're getting carried away. Let's back up here.
After all, you just met this chick like an hour ago.
The Battlefield wasn't exactly your first choice for retiring from the ring, after getting your clock cleaned in the championship. After what happened, you would've flown up away to the sun like a fucknig piece of garbage and end it all if there were any suns handy. LoHaC might have done the trick, but you spent too much damn time not getting roasted in a crocodile infested EasyBake oven to go out that way.
At least, that's what you decided after you got there. Maybe instead you'd take another crack at that quest thing, as long as you're in the neighborhood.
It doesn't really matter why you decided to do it. The Dave from this time had bigger things to worry about, from his perspective. You know how he thinks. The sprite part of you wanted to help him out, but the you part of you wanted to help him out too, he was going to need it. You couldn't fight anymore, but with Jade's volcano up and running ol' Hephaestus probably had more to say than all that ranting he did last time around.
Failing that, maybe he'd obliterate you. It wouldn't be more useless than anything else you could do with yourself.
Now you've got your trans-time copy of Caledfwlch fixed up, the only thing you'd kept besides your sweet iShades, so your past self would still know what he was supposed to be doing. For an encore you learned a bunch of stuff about the goal of the game you never had the chance to see with two missing players. You just had to get it to Dave.
Not that you knew where he was anymore, which was weird in itself. So you headed to the Battlefield, since that depopulated dump would be a natural place for a busy guy to go, right?
No, you heard something calling, didn't you? A cry of destiny, a feeling of purpose. It was probably just more sprite business horning in on your brain again. For how much you wanted to stop this game from fucking with your head, you sure picked the awesome way to do it. But it's not like you had anything better to do.
Maybe Dave reached Skaia somehow without telling you. Maybe you could kill some time and braincells hanging out with John's granny or Rose's cat, shoot the shit NPC style. You don't know what you were expecting really, but any distraction from your latest string of failures would be welcome.
You certainly weren't expecting to see Jade... There's a lot of ways to finish that sentence, but “you weren't expecting to see Jade”, period, is what's important.
But there she was. Alive. Your friend, not even alive again but alive still. At least that much had paid off, right?
Except she wasn't Jade. Not your Jade anyway. For starts, your Jade wasn't a sprite with dog ears. That was pretty whack.
And your Jade wouldn't be gushing shoujo firehoses over the futility of existence. Nobody knows futility like you do, and your eyes couldn't be drier. Parched even. Ain't shed a tear.
Not since the last time you talked to her.
Not since she gave you a first hand account of your world ending.
She sure sounded optimistic then. She knew everything was going to work out right in the end. Even if she didn't know what the real end might be.
Ten seconds of stating the obvious later and the introductions were over. She was Dog Jade, to compliment the Real Jade you still hadn't met. A Jade made out of dreams and a Klein-husky that'd flip Stephen Hawking's bionic lid. The more she talked about being dead, the more you let yourself have one slight hope that somehow, someway, she was the Jade you'd left behind in your old timeline.
At this point, that was kind of her defining characteristic.
She wasn't your Jade, of course. Your Jade never really died, never really existed, for what it mattered here. Your Jade was a memory. Maybe not even that. Your Jade was a snapshot collage of a girl you'd never met, ideas frozen in time from when her signal cut out. An imagination, a dream, just enough to give you something to hope for, to work up the strength to go back for.
To give up being Alpha Dave for.
Whatever, doesn't matter now. All salty water under the memorial bridge.
How lucky could you be, coming back to find a complimentary non-Alpha Jade?
You'd always thought you'd have a world of things to say in person, but she wasn't exactly the person you'd meant to talk to. There wasn't much time anyway. Both being slaves to the game now, the first thing on your minds was the game and the players. They deserved their props, you supposed. You told her about what you'd learned, since you knew Jade had some idea of how the game would play long before it started. You talked about your mistakes with the Denizens, and what you knew your Alpha counterparts must have figured out, now too late to do anything about it.
That wasn't what she was crying about by any means, but it was some of it. She'd forgotten how to be herself, but she remembered what she was supposed to be. Brave, cheery, helpful. All that stuff written into the Prospitian DNA.
Goofy she still had down pat. Refreshing.
All she really needed was something to do. She seemed to know the sword was important, whether from her dreams or being a sprite. Like you did. You'd gone to the relatively minor trouble of getting it, and you remembered what Jade used to say about her magic devilbeast pet.
It was worth a shot, and lo and behold, she could do it. You could both feel in your digitized bones that the game session was coming to a critical halt, which made the whole idea about as pointless as getting the damn sword in the first place. But it was all you could do. And it made her feel better.
Dave had his legendary not-so-POS sword, wherever he was. Job well done.
Then you talked.
She told you about her half-life before her long death, life as a waking dream, before she had to save John from sleeping then being crushed by a meteor. You told her about coming back from the future to become a bird and save John from his own naivete, so you wouldn't have to replay Real Jade being crushed by a meteor.
Not that you had long to talk, as you both narrowly avoided being crushed by meteors.
Big flaming rocks have it in for this girl. It keeps happening, what's up with that?
There was nothing else for it. You didn't agree to stop running. There was nowhere to go.
Nothing to save yourselves for.
Maybe it was a past conversation, or your knowledge as sprites. Or maybe just all the desperate hopes finally being smashed apart by a new and very special one. The sky was filled with flying death, and the wavy 2D lightshow of The Scratch initializing beyond it. One way or another this was the end.
She wasn't afraid of it, really. She'd been waiting for it. Hoping for it even. Hoping for the end to her short exile from paradise, knowing her job was done.
It was all the excuse you needed to hope along with her.
Hope for an end.
You didn't say anything, nothing came to mind. You thought about holding her hand, but it didn't feel right for some reason. Like you hadn't earned it yet. Or like death was still enough moments away that the embrace would have time to turn awkward. Stupid shit like that.
Looking at her was enough. It felt like you'd been waiting ages to do it. To see her. Really see her.
You were plenty familiar with the feeling of time going out of synch, but you weren't going to let this slowdown not be special. It wasn't your life flashing before your eyes. You didn't see a damn thing, except her.
What in your life would you want to see again? Want to see more than this?
No, you dropped the beat because spacetime fell apart between you. Her infinite gravity dragging you over the horizon, falling forever into those huge green stars. If it stretched enough, the end would never even come, just an eternity in empty space before her core.
That'd be pretty nice. There'd be time enough to hold her hand. Maybe in the world's last moments, you'd even kiss her just for the cliched hell of it, if you worked up the nerve fast enough.
Welp, you had it all figured out about as right as usual, didn't you birdbrain?
Okay fine, so you didn't see this one coming. Who would have?
It's hard not to wonder what happened to her. Both of her, all of her. One blinding flash and she's standing on her own two feet, catching meteors like tennis balls. She's up and out and gone with a smile before you even process what the fuck's going on. Just her style.
It's obvious enough. She said she was Jade's dreamself, thrown into her expositionkernel. Something bad must have happened to Alpha Jade, and she tunneled right through all the crap on top of her revived expendable superego for an upgrade. At least you think that's how it works, since you and Rose never had the nads to take the plunge and find out.
Which is pretty ironic, all things considered.
And leaves you with some questions you'd really like to not be mysteries right now, and would really suck to answer the hard way. First and foremost being, how much of Jadesprite is in her now? Has to be some, just look at her. She sure has powers like you'd think her devilbeast probably had, but that could just be the Space Witch part. Fuck.
But no, really. How much of her dreamsprite is up there in her fuzzy new godhead? Does she know what her dreamself knew? Anything it learned after being turned into a ghostly chatterbox? That would save you a lot of trouble having to explain stuff to her, if she ever looks down here.
Does she remember anything?
Does she remember you?
At least she knows you're here. Didn't seem too concerned about it.
Which doesn't answer the question by any means, but ain't too promising either.
Because that would really suck.
Okay, you can't hold it against her for not wanting to hang around and chat about ascending to the Furry Tiers, she's got more important orange flying things than you to deal with. (Note to self: that was a stretch.) She certainly saw you on her way up. And Dave told you he met her in person, so he might have told her about you already.
You'd like to think you're a tight enough bro to mention yourself, since talking about yourself is one of your best skills. Not that not mentioning it wouldn't be stone cold chill too.
Yeah, there's no use mentally dancing around it like this. She might not remember anything. She might have kicked her dreamself to the existential curb when she rolled in and took her place. Knocked her right out of the picture, maybe to wherever dreams go when they... Does ceasing to exist count as dying? Or do you just cease to exist?
Kinda like your Jade. Your old Jade, the one you left behind. Replaced with a new track, a new story. Rewound, overwritten, and erased. Not dead. Not just dead. Gone completely.
Jade vs Meteors: One to two, but the game's been called on account of Dog.
Jades replaced by an Alpha Jade: Two. Ironically.
Is she sleeping now, out there in the endless Somewhere?
Will she dream?
Eh, fuck it Shakespeare. You guess it doesn't really matter what happened to her. Either of her. Dog Jade turned into Real Jade, and now she's a thousand miles tall and a million miles away, with a universe of problems and the power to solve them with a flick of her wrist.
In some corner of the session you can't see, you know there's a Real Dave for her to face it with. You busted your ass for that, and you couldn't be happier for him.
You have to be. You're not Real Dave, fuck getting all the tight loot and putting up with that goddamn puppet for four months and watching Jade and John die the first time around. Jadesprite may or may not be up there in Real Jade, but there's no back door for you. You're not Alpha Dave, none of these people know you, not as well as they know him. Fuck, you don't even look like him. The only one who knew you at all was Jadesprite, and then only from crossing paths in death with all the poor bastards you'd left behind in unstable time loops. Half of them were Alpha Dave anyway.
At least you'd had time to get to know her. Sides of Jade you'd never known. A Jade who never had to pretend to be a normal person, who had even less fear of speaking her mind if that were possible, and who had long since decided you were important to her.
A Jade waiting for the end to come, with nothing to do but bawl over her futile existence.
Cry for everyone's futile existence, because she thought she had already seen the end.
Maybe she did, and no one knows it yet.
But you shared it with her. You knew what it was like to have played your part and failed. To want in your heart to hang it up and go home. To pick up where you left off, and leave all this Earth-shattering horseshit behind.
You couldn't be Real Fucking Dave anymore, you just had to be Bird Dave. But she wasn't Real Jade either, she was Dog Jade. Everything to like about the real one, without any of that real baggage. So what if she wasn't your Jade if you're not really you anyway. She could be Bird Dave's Jade.
Together you could be fuzzy fakes. You could be melodramatic and ridiculous. You could be honest. More honest than Real Dave could ever afford to be. So what if neither of you were real? You were real enough for each other. And with one more destiny-guided boulder none of it would matter anymore.
You'd both be done. Done for real. She'd go home and you'd go with her.
But wherever she is now, that's not how it happened. It's never that easy.
This is it now. Looking up at her. You're a songbird in a cage. You're a particularly badass butterfly under glass. You're an overpriced little orange betta in an empty tank with nothing to fight. You're a mote in god's big beautiful green eyes.
One blink, and you could be gone.
It'd be a fitting way to go. You might be selfish enough to ask, if you didn't know it would break her heart.
Probably not as much as you'd hope though. Would have hoped. She already has one good Dave. Is one Dave not enough? Does this godforsaken world really need your forsaken existence anymore? You did your job, it's over.
Your Jade knew that, and if any of her is still up there, Jade knows it too.
Alright, one minute is kind of a short time to be expecting an answer on whether she's forgotten about you. Forsaken even.
You just had to go and think that, didn't you? Mortal wound or not, you're going to spend the rest of your life pondering that word.
This godforsaken existence.
What the fuck does that even mean? That shit's not working out the way you wanted? Take a number Job, it's a long-ass line.
It's not like there's anyone to bitch to anyway. No denying that now.
You never bothered thinking about the whole religion question before the game. The idea of an omnipotent invisible dude silently judging you over your shoulder your whole life really cramped your “don't give a fuck” style. Besides, you got enough of that headgame bullcrap from your Bro.
It was always Rose who was obsessed with the question of life larger than you mere mortals. You were never totally sure if she believed it or not, or just pretended to, or really did and couldn't admit it. The scope of it might have scared you off, the way she talked. You didn't need a frame of reference bigger than The Life Of Dave Strider.
You knew it wasn't really about finding a higher purpose for her. She was looking for proof of life grander than violin lessons and waspy dinner parties. Nerdy(er) guys might have looked for aliens, Rose went the middleschool girl route (ironically of course) for syphilis-induced stories of hentai gods. A few years later, and it might have been bookstore-Wicca for all it really mattered.
Damn did she get more than she bargained for. Hope she's enjoying herself.
Of course, she may have been right, but she couldn't have been more wrong either. No human prognosticator could. Every prophet in the wasted history of mankind would have holy shit holy bricks if they knew the great power beyond the stars was a halfass-coded MMO heralded by the blasphemous pages of Game Bro Magazine. That the supreme purpose of life was to invent computers, so a handful of tweens could go fight demonic chess pieces while the Earth gets pounded into a golfball.
With the sky peeled away you find out there's no one to answer the prayers, and by the looks of it there never was.
And yeah, it's ironic too, since there's hentai gods in space and now a couple of “god tier” players and other stuff the game names after gods, but that's different. And sure as shit the world is working by an ordained plan, but nobody knows better than you where it leads. You've ran up and down the whole thing.
It's a plan that gives absolutely no fucks about the people spawned to follow it.
All the great secrets of life, dolled out one quest marker at a time.
Why are we here? What does it all mean?
Just like the dreadlocked yogis of the halfpipes always said, you had to find your own meaning in life.
They never had good advice for when the answers you find piss you right the fuck off. Like how apparently your purpose in life was to watch your friends die, then turn into a bird and get your ass kicked so you can watch another version of yourself hit the reset button on the whole thing anyway.
Nobody worth listening to knew what to do with a Divine Plan that went nowhere.
And the worst part about it is, you can't even drop a well-worn “god works in mysterious ways” for the ice cold irony of it, because nobody but you players are working at all. Just life barreling down a space-bending track with some clueless kids at the wheel. The closest guy you have to blame for destiny running around in paradoxical circles like this is...
No, even you can't dump all this on yourself. For once, you're thankful enough that this shit is way bigger than you.
You're almost proud you never looked up into the sky to ask “Why?” now, knowing you'd never get an answer.
Irony of ironies, if you tried it now, you just might.
She's probably just as confused as you right now though. She always was good at rolling with crazy, but there's no reason to think she's gotten (more) brilliant in the last few seconds. It would be a dick move to expect Jade to know the mysteries of the universe just because she can suddenly move planets around. Yeah, you're still pretty dead set on not asking her any existential questions that might upset her.
Suppose she'd be embarrassed if you called her a god? She's taking to it quick.
She can tell you whatever she wants on her time. She always does.
Which is kinda worrying that for once she's not saying anything about something this huge.
It's probably just your bleeding knotted emulated guts talking again, but it's easy to think she's not too happy right now. Any memories she did or didn't absorb from Jadesprite can't be pleasant, and... Fuck, no reason to avoid it.
Seeing Jade in a habit doing the Superman thing means you and real you couldn't protect her, whatever happened out there. Whatever indeed. The dreamsprite's gone, so the real one, the Real Alpha Jade, died. No surprise real you still managed to fuck something up.
Can you blame yourself for another you's screw ups? Sure it reflects badly on you, since you're (almost) the same guy and all. If you had feet to put in his sweet kicks, wouldn't you make the same mistakes that let this happen? Through a feathery mirror ironically, and all that jazz.
Moot point, his problem. You haven't been in shape to save somebody's life for hours.
Not since that last time you tried.
No. No, you're not doing this. No weeping and gnashing of beaks over this one. You're not gonna drag your ass all over his non-existent grave by mourning. You both went in knowing it'd be the rumble in the jungle, the rage in the cage, the realest of deals. Then the game changed halfway through, and there was no getting away from it.
You both gave it all you had, and you both had to make a choice. He died, you lived, because you could escape from above. Simple as that. That nod was all the epitaph you needed from him. He broke character long enough to give you one serious look, tell you to take the fucking chance he was giving you and bounce. No hard feelings, just the way it worked out. He didn't go to all the trouble of raising your ass to lose you to his own grand finale, no matter how many of you there are.
He saved you. That's why he was here. That's why he was always here.
Turned out to be a pretty shitty lot in life for him too, but he was too chill to let that get him down.
Bros dying for bros, as mad fair as it gets. He probably would have liked to know he'd die in a sick fight to the finish against the ultimate badguy to save his little bro. The compound banality was his swan song. Dulce et decorum est to die a mainstream hero's death.
He saved you. Died to do it.
Because he knew you couldn't save him.
At least you got to see him, in top form. Doing what you never had the guts to.
Almost makes up for completely losing him the first time around.
Got some motherfucking closure this time. To go with everyone else you couldn't save.
You couldn't save John, then you couldn't save Jade. Who knows if you actually saved Rose. Sure, Alpha Rose said she remembered “some things”, but you might still have ditched your sister in the future with no flux capacitor.
She's a big girl, she'd know what to do. You're not that different, after all.
So yeah, came back and gave yourself everything you'd need to New Game Plus this shit. Then you couldn't save Bro. Or save John from getting his ass kicked again, going by what Dave said about the lightshow earlier. Or save Rose from herself apparently, that was a crazy scene. Or save yourself, or your real self, whichever one you mean, neither of you are in great shape at this point, since your real counterpart went incommunicado. And even if she did get the superpower revive, Jade still died somehow.
Okay fine, you did some stuff right. You finished part of Dave's quest, after messing it up for him. You talked an inconsolable side of Jade's personality into something like normalcy, by getting her to deliver your mail, right before she got replaced. And technically you did save Jade, the real Jade, enough to get her to a beneficial death at least, by saving John from listening to leetspeak bearing gifts.
Schmuck always expected the best out of everyone. Not that you wouldn't be here if he wasn't right some of the time.
Then of all people, that cackling little fairylight latches onto you. Real you, whatever.
Which is worse, that John believed GC sight-unseen, with the best of intentions and it killed him? Or that you, a you who didn't know better, didn't have time to stew over it for months, doesn't believe GC has the best of intentions by a long shot, and then keeps talking anyway?
Cavorting around having the time of a life you didn't get with some wannabe scriptkiddy who cost your two best friends their lives, cost all four of you your lives in the end, with a couple seconds of snickering. You know Dave's still at it too, makes you fucking sick.
You busted your ass to give everyone a second lease on life, and this is how real you spends it? You can't believe four months ago you were desperate enough to be trailed around by any random Pesterlink calling itself a girl. So they both turned out to be true, somebody call the commissioner, you won the Internet Jackpot. Oh wait, one of them is a god and is the other is a murderous scumbag, you know what commish, you can keep that powerball to yourself. This is one double-or-nothing you don't need.
You gotta give Dave credit for staying focused on killing Jack, but its ridiculous watching him do it. You can't blame him for not knowing about the Denizens and whatnot, stands to reason he'd make the same mistakes you did. But you thought you knew yourself better than this. He won't admit it of course, you're too proud for that. You've gotten lying to yourself down to an artform after all this time. He won't even tell you what he's up to after he finally met Jade face to face, except that he's on point with The Plan.
He got the opportunity you never did.
He'd better not fucking blow it. If he fucking blows it, you'll offer up supplication to your new god for a gift. Something like an Archimedean lever, long enough to move the world. 'Cause no lesser handle could withstand the flying off you'll be doing if Dave manages to fucking blow his chance after all the shit you've been through for them.
Jade would appreciate a request like that, now that she could probably make such a thing. She'd love to watch the physics in action. Maybe it'd make up for whatever boneheaded stuff real you says, in this hypothetical handle-dive consequence.
Yeah. Knowing you, and until you became a samurai crow today you were pretty sure you knew you, you wouldn't say anything to her. Not in the hypothetical or for real. Not anything worth saying at least, just everything that isn't.
Just blathering to keep her entertained and interested, so you don't accidentally say anything you might mean.
Hell, maybe Dave's scared of her. You kinda are, looking up at her from down here. Seeing her, really and truly seeing her, for the first time.
It's easy to forget after a few months of thinking about her, but you remember being Real Dave, and for him the idea of ever actually seeing her in person was fucking remote until earlier today.
Heck, this is the first you've seen of her yourself.
Let's be honest here, you were scared of this moment for a long damn time.
It's not that you were more intimidated by her the more she talked to you. You were exactly as intimidated by her from day one, when your worlds collided in a blinding explosion of smilies.
The mindnumbing girlpower didn't intimidate you, retards come and go by the summer. It was the way she talked about you like she knew you.
The way she talked like she really did know you.
Nobody likes hearing shit from other people that they don't want to hear from themselves, especially not with so many exclamation points. Running didn't work, she recognized you everywhere. You still crack an invisible grin remembering, how eventually you turned her loose on /b/ for the hell of it, to scare her off. They thought they were being raided, and she came back a furry, begging for something else to chase.
She was a keeper alright. And not a damn thing ever changes.
John's fantastically shitty taste in television soaked into her every pore. Rose's thesaurus barrage glanced away harmlessly. She could do whatever she set her mind to, absorb whatever she wanted like a sponge, but only if she wanted. And if she didn't want it, it had to be pointless.
She gave you two of your best friends. She gave you an ear that could really hear you. You gave her a window, a map to the world outside. Bootleg mixer software, the lowest down of hookups, and all the memebase she could want.
It sure felt like an empty exchange, heartfelt friendship for advanced googling. But it was what she wanted.
Because it was the only way to open up your thick skull, and she knew it. The only way to get past your walls was to impress you enough to want them down, ironically. Not beat you at your own game, she is (was) only mortal. She wanted to show you she could learn.
She wanted to show you she already knew you.
She's a dynamo, the perpetual engine. She's a white hole in cold space. Anything thrown at her is either obliterated or comes back tenfold.
There's a purity to her. Anything she wants, she does. Maybe not right, but she doesn't care about doing it right. Whatever way she wants it becomes right. With no hesitation, no complication, and only just a little fear.
She's been a deity for about a minute, and she's juggling planets without a second thought. Give her six days and everyone will see a real god can do.
Of course Dave's scared of her, why shouldn't he be?
You sure as hell were, and he's right where you left off. Long before shit got real in a hurry, you were afraid of her. In those dark and quiet moments, when you let yourself hope, in your head where no one could hear you and you could just about convince yourself it was romantic instead of creepy in an ironic sort of way, that you'd be the first guy to win the Nerd Gold Medal and meet the girl of your dreams on the internet. Someday somehow you'd come sliding in on your white horse and save her from her wacky tower, to ride off into the rent-controlled sunset together.
You let yourself think it, because it was stupid enough to be funny. Getting a head start on being a teenage dweeb, like a budding master of the sardonic should. That you'd even be entertaining such case-study bullshit was worrisome to say the least. You were too good for that.
All at once, someday was right now, and somehow was a magic program that got one point five of five bro-hats. Jade cast her sight down on you with supreme power over your little world, getting her first eyefull of Dave Strider and turning his kickin' bachelor pad upside down. It was the most terrifying feeling you'd ever had, knowing she could see you. Then that bighearted doofus John had to get himself killed before anybody could return the favor, and before you could find a way to fix it all.
She died watching you listen to her die. Seeing you hearing.
You've soliloquized that part enough times already.
Where were you? Right, being amazed by a match made in internet-dating heaven, like always.
You tried to ward her off, but your moves were irresistible to her. Every barrier you threw up to preserve a distance you thought you needed just gave her another puzzle to disassemble. She was careful at first, looking back on it. Careful to test you, to see how you'd respond. Dancing around at arms reach to get familiar. Soon enough, having your ego stroked and caressed by endless waves of Unicode affection put you off guard, and she had your scent.
And when she knew you weren't really going to bite back, she pounced. She sniffed out buttons you never knew you had, and hammered them like only a mad scientist girl could, until she learned on her own to stop. But never with a barb, to keep you hooked in by tricking you into fighting it. Not like Rose.
Always, always, like a friend. With just a hint of “more than a friend” friend.
It was her most dangerous skill really, the power to beat your facade into submission without leaving a bruise. It was far too late to ignore her by the time you thought she was doing it on purpose. She was just too fascinating. She was the perfect critic and perfect foil for your act. A paying audience that knew all the tricks and loved to see them performed with skill. A connoisseur with taste for the exactingly terrible, a nose for was going down in the kitchen. The Most Dangerous Game in a wilderness of chumps. Fey with no fear of cold irony. A thing that crippled your ability to make clever metaphors, and you didn't even care.
A metaphor crippling thing that reminded you what honesty sounded like, even if it wasn't your own. She and John were great at that, and she wasn't a dude.
Everything you wanted in a friend, and you loved how corny that sounded. Sounds.
That's why you believed her when she started telling whoppers about her home life. Was living in the Fortress of Solitude with Sir Dr. Bruce Armstrong Roosevelt really that outlandish, compared to how easily she could demolish every layer of ironic indifference and blatant patsy play you turned towards her? Was a magic teleporting dog so weird, when she instantly recognized every drawing and beat you released under any name, including the ones you hadn't? And she would know you by your works and so on.
Is it that hard to believe someone knows the future, knows your dreams, knows you, when they're never wrong?
All she had to do was talk about you, and you had to learn everything about her. You believed her, then you believed the others for her. You hung on her every word, and it was all you could do to uphold your honor as a disaffected iconoclast to pretend either of you didn't already know it.
And she just wanted you to believe in yourself. That was the hard part.
The part she never got to finish.
Until maybe now.
By the time you understood her power over you, you had to pray to the Awkward Gods of the Pubescent Ring for her to be magnanimous. She could unmake you with a word if ever she so wished. For the first time, you got to look into those eyes through her furry doppelganger, and she destroyed you with a glance without even trying.
Making you an inch tall with a wave of her hand doesn't compare. She could always do that.
Now the rest of this ungrateful, uncaring, too-cool-for-school existence will get a taste of that power.
Which just might make up for all the shit you put up with to get here.
Maybe even the shit from the past couple minutes.
You're going to miss Jadesprite sure, especially if you don't like what you hear if and when Jade decides to give you run down. At least you won't have to pine for much longer, the way you're bleeding out. That already makes it one of your lesser mistakes, especially since the rest of the world got Jade Prime out of the deal.
Can you really say it wasn't worth it?
She has to have a plan. Scratch or not, there's no way she'd let it all come to an end now. Not like this. You might not have actually seen her face before, but you know exactly what that look means.
Purpose.
It's a look you've imagined on her a hundred times. She wants something, something important. And she's going to get it.
Of course it's worth it. She's going to make it worth it.
Hell, she already did. For you at least, seeing her writ large and in charge. After all you went through to bring her back from a death out of time, you get to live long enough, enough, to see the payoff.
A front row seat to a new beginning. You always wanted to be on stage, but knowing the show gets to start is enough.
Enough, to make you believe.
That's really why you did it, isn't it? Just to see her once. Shaking off your city-forged armor of anonymity, believing her like no one should ever believe anyone, chasing her name across the internet, and eventually your three-piece ninja bogus journey through time to become a bird. And losing a gift-wrapped chance at a happy ending. You did it all for this.
Just to really see her for one moment. Alive, and shining brighter than the sun.
It was all you could think about for an hour. A day. Four months.
Years.
That one moment would give your whole life meaning. And in this moment, she'll give life meaning.
What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? Why are you here? So you could play the part you always wanted to? If there ever were answers before, they don't matter.
Now you have the answers. You're not alone in the universe, not even counting those shitheads in the Trollslum. There is someone Up There looking down on us all. No Virginia, there ain't no Santa Claus, or a North Pole for that matter. But totes def there is a god. You watched her being born, as creepy as that sounds.
A just and loving god at that. And considerate and sympathetic, if a little scatterbrained at times. Not to mention hilarious, excitable, adorably gormless, a halfway decent bass player, a disgusting whirlwind of giggles, well versed in the science of emotes and reaction images, careless enough to be just this side of hip, and even with dog ears drop dead pretty to boot. Only she could make them work, she'd been waiting for them long enough.
And a minute ago, she was your best friend in this or any world.
And if you're feeling particularly generous and/or sorry for yourself, maybe even your girlfriend.
Why? Why not? From here on out, she can say why.
The answer is whatever she wants it to be.
And making it happen was all you ever wanted.
You suppose all the ass-busting and handle-flipping and mistakes and failures and fucking heartache was worth it, if this is where it got you. So you're the debris of a new raven haired paradigm in the order of the cosmos, at least you helped. You did your job, so she can do hers. It's all gonna be okay now.
For them, all of them.
You can feel it in your hollow orange bones, looking up at a bucktoothed sky.
Existence isn't futile. Not anymore. Not with her in charge.
Not all of existence anyway.
Just yours.
Now.