Work Text:
Dave shifts behind you. You know this because you can smell the colors shifting, drawing out the shapes of his clothes clearly in your mind, just like you can smell the tight knot of licorice-and-charcoal curled on its side with its head in Dave’s lap. The advantage of using scents instead of sight is that you can see in 360 degrees in every direction. Sollux once told you that you probably saw the same way Fleet 3D scanners used to, back when Sollux was willing to bury his head against your belly and let you rub his head and kiss his neck when his headaches got too bad, before he’d gone off with his no-longer-dead girlfriend. The memory tastes like bad coffee, too bitter and not enough sweet.
Dave shifts again, knocking you out of your thoughts. This time you concentrate further and realize Dave’s stroking Karkat’s hair. His shades are on the ground beside them - there’s no point in keeping them on since Karkat can’t see him and you can smell under them anyway - and it seems like he’s staring at Karkat. You can smell the uncertainty and nostalgia and bitterness, a constant undertone of Dave’s scent, rolling off him in unusually thick waves. It smells like almonds and human sweat. Gross.
“What’s wrong, coolkid?” you ask.
He twitches, his version of a full-bodied flinch, and stammers. “What? Nothing.” Supreme knight of cool, that’s definitely him. “I’m finer than my choice ass, Terezi, can’t you tell? Might wanna get that sniffer of yours checked out, or maybe your head, aren’t you supposed to be able to read my mind or something? Must just be my coolkid swag overwhelming you-”
He notices that he’s rambling, cuts himself off, and his cape swishes against the floor in such a way that means he’s shaking his head. “I’m fine, ‘Rezi,” he mutters.
Any other time, you’d try to bring him back to normal by picking up the banter, but you can tell that’s not what he needs right now. You always were a wonderful moirail. Thinking of which, what you’re about to do is completely, 100% cheating on Sollux. But you know what, he left without so much as saying goodbye and he’s probably off jamming with one of his two dead girlfriends, he’d always been tinged pale for both of them and it’s a perfectly logical conclusion to come to, so you send a silent “sorry” out into the void for your long-gone moirail and scoot backwards to rest your back against Dave’s. He sighs and settles against you.
He’s still staring at Karkat. No, not staring, gazing. Darling Karkles would be so pissed off if he were awake to see his kismesis being so gentle, and Dave would claim he was doing it for the irony and just to piss Karkat off, but you know that Dave just doesn’t have it in him to hate Karkat the way Karkat wants him to. Dave’s feelings for Karkles are a tumultuous swirl of what you would call pale, red, and black, but Rose would probably just call “affection”. That, or “Dave being Dave”.
It takes a long, long time for Dave to relax enough to speak again. Your butt’s gone numb from sitting so long, and it sucks. You will probably be cranky about this later.
“I’ve been thinking,” Dave starts, and then cuts himself off again. You bite back a “what, really?” and wait for him to continue.
Eventually he starts up again. “Something Rose said the other day. The way my Bro trained me, the way Jade’s Grampa made sure she would always be armed, the way Rose’s Mom made sure she’d be sharp - it’s like they knew. Even John’s dad, making sure he was strong enough. The Game boosted his strength, yeah, but he was still swinging giant hammers around really early on. The adults, they- they probably- they must’a- just how goddamn much did they know?”
His voice rises and his strange accent thickens until he stumbles over his words and his voice cracks on the last word. Karkat grumbles and shifts on Dave’s lap. Dave freezes, and you can hear his hand twitching slowly towards the shades at his side. Thankfully, Karkles does you all a favor and stays asleep.
Eventually, Dave becomes convinced that Karkat really is still sleeping and slumps back against you again with a sigh. For a moment you think the moment’s passed and he’s not going to keep talking, but he surprises you.
“It’s not the fact that they knew that really gets to me though, y’know? Not even that they knew and never warned us, that makes sense, can’t have four obnoxious munchkin assholes running around thinking they’re gonna save the world or anything, that’d just get us locked up in a loony ward in no time, zero to crazy in 6.9 seconds, whoops, gotta catch those crazy kids. See, that shit makes sense.”
“What bothers me is...” He pauses and tips his head back to take a deep breath. He manages to bonk you on the head in the process. “Shit, ow, sorry ‘Rezi. Anyway. What bothers me is, everyone hates the Game, right? And I know a bunch of people, like my dear sweet sister and this dipshit,” he says, ruffling Karkat’s hair affectionately, “think we’d’ve been a fuckton better off if it’d never happened.”
He pauses again. You’ve rarely seen Dave be so careful with his words - no, not careful, deliberate. Recently he’s started to think more about the way he speaks, the words he chooses, and the grand scheme of things, and he catches and cuts himself off when he rambles more often than not. 2 years holed up on the meteor’s started to do that to all of you. He still wields speech like a shield most of the time, he and Rose both do, but that requires him to be fast on his feet. This he’s taking time to construct, analyze, and reconstruct before he allows the words to leave his mouth. It worries you a lot.
“Thing is,” he finally starts up again, “we were all raised to play the Game, and I know you guys, living on that piece of shit planet you called home where you could get killed any day for sneezing at the wrong asshole, were pretty much made for the game, so...”
He pauses again. His hesitations make you worry and wonder what he could possibly have to say that unsettles him this much. Finally he speaks again.
“Would we really have been any better off, if we hadn’t fucking played?”
The question catches you off guard, and your mind jumps into Seer mode without your permission. You’re suddenly caught up in a million billion timelines that never were, whirling and spinning themselves out before your eyes like strings caught in whirlpools.
You see a timeline where the four humans are united after their schoolfeeding and grow up and stay in contact, and another, and another. But for every one of those there’s a million others where they don’t ever meet in person, or only two of them do.
You see a timeline where somehow they end up going to school together, where John’s friendly demeanor and Jade’s exuberance get them swept into the popular clique and Rose and Dave are left behind. You see a thousand timelines where Dave grows distant and Rose grows bitter and the four break apart.
You see a set of timelines where Rose’s mother drinks herself to death when Rose is 15, and another where Dave is taken from his brother when he is 14. In both, they don’t take the changes well. Daves and Roses end up dead or in situations their alpha-timeline selves would’ve tried to avoid.
You see a timeline where Rose falls in with a bad crowd and drinks and smokes her way into a hospital. You see a timeline where Dave falls in with bad people and is shot and adds to the pile of dead Daves before his 22nd birthday.
You see timelines where John catches snippets of the alpha timeline through the gaps in the universe and is locked up for having maggots in the brain. You see timelines where Jade is discovered by governments that take her from her island and her lusus so she can be made normal and boring.
You try to wrench yourself away from the ghosts flashing in your head and only halfway succeed. Instead of timelines filled with the doom of the humans, you find yourself surrounded by doomed timelines of you and your cohort. You see timelines where Eridan becomes a successful general, you see timelines where Gamzee inherits the Dark Carnival, you see timelines where Equius is hailed as the greatest inventerrorist of your generation, you see timelines where Aradia never dies.
But you also see timelines where Aradia is killed anyway or dies early from other events, timelines where Equius is restricted to tasks below his station because of his freakish strength and where he is separated from his moirail, and timelines where Eridan gets himself killed in lovers’ spats and in battles early in his career. And you see worse things.
You see Tavros being culled for his disability, Vriska dying in a fight with an indigo troll three times her height, Nepeta culled for treading the border on being feral.
You see yourself being culled for being blind.
You see Feferi losing her attempt at the throne, in a hundred thousand timelines, and ends up skewered on the Empress’s culling fork at only 9 sweeps.
You see that in a couple of timelines, Karkat survives ascension. He tricks the drones, he tricks the tests, he makes it out alive.
But in a million timelines, he doesn’t. He’s ratted out, or he’s found out anyway. And he dies fighting, every time. And sometimes, one of the rest of you - Sollux, you, Aradia, Kanaya, even Eridan in a couple of timelines - dies fighting with him.
You finally jerk back to reality with a gasp. Dave is still sitting behind you, his back solid and oh-so-warm against yours. You can smell Karkat with his head in Dave’s lap and hear his breathing, quiet and smooth. The floor beneath you is cold and real and the numbness in your butt has spread up your thighs, but it’s all real and you’ve rarely been so grateful. You’re alive. Karkat’s alive. Dave’s alive.
You sniffle and push your glasses up to swipe the tears furiously from your eyes. It’s only been a couple of seconds in reality, and you can smell Dave still lingering on his question, not really expecting a response.
You reach back and cover his hand with yours where it rests next to his shades. “I don’t know, Dave,” you answer, voice thick with stifled tears, “I really don’t know.”