Chapter Text
Dave: Give up.
Laughter rings in your ears as you sit down. After so long, you can’t tell if it’s echoing across the gears and towers, or just bouncing around in your head like some shitty rubber bouncy ball. Stupidest parent in the world goes to whoever gave it to that damn kid, throwing his ball around and breaking shit, bothering not just downstairs neighbors but also every neighbor sharing a wall with this little chump and the simplest, dumbest toy in existence.
Anyway, the metaphor’s gotten away from you. And a lot sooner than it used to. Used to be you could keep a metaphor like that going for fifteen minutes, but not anymore. Point is, you’re tired.
You call Rose, opening your mouth the moment you hear the call go through, not even letting her say hello. It’s the least you can do, since you certainly won’t be the one to say goodbye.
“That’s it, I can’t take it anymore,” the words spill out, a mess of feelings you won’t and don’t know how to examine. Relief? Guilt? Doesn’t matter. Won’t matter much longer. “I’m going back.”
Rose asks you a question and you only half listen, responses flowing almost on autopilot. There’s some back and forth, but it’s all just a formality. A final courtesy to your sister who is about to do something worse than die.
“We don’t know Jade is dead for sure,” manages to break through your wall. A new emotion joins the mix now, anger. What does it matter if Jade lived? Alpha timeline still isn’t this one, there’s nothing either of you can do about that. Jade either died in a horrible explosion or she’s about to stop being Jade, so what? Who cares? She’s gone and John’s gone and even those fuckass aliens are gone. You tell Rose as much, assuring her you know the plan. It’s simple, you leave and it all gets better.
She expresses worry, you wave it off. She doesn’t reply. A long, drawn out silence filled with tension you could cut with a shitty sword.
You aren’t used to hesitation from Rose. You manage to fully tune in to what she says next, quiet, voice wavering and almost stuttering as she asks, “After you go... What do you think will happen to me?”
You don’t answer.
“Will I just... cease to exist?”
“... I don’t know,” you lie.
She knows you’re lying. You know she knows. And you both know you can’t lie to save your life, let alone the entire universe.
“I mean, your whole timeline will. Maybe.” It’s a weak consolation, but it’s all you can offer.
“... Is there a chance it’ll continue to exist, and I’ll just be here alone forever?”
You give her the only piece of advice that’s kept you moving these last four and a half months, “The thing with time travel is... You can’t overthink it.”
Can’t overthink, can’t think about it at all. Just block it out a little longer, ignore the growing mix of emotions until you’ve done what you need to do.
You stop thinking about the call, autopilot back on. When it ends, you don’t say goodbye. You don’t hang up, either, letting time travel disconnect the call for you.
Rose: Cease to exist.
It’s strange. In a way, you find yourself having difficulty missing Dave. He left you, barely paying attention to anything you had to say, refusing to engage in the last human contact you will ever experience. It had been like that for a while now, him pushing you further and further away. If you had not already dedicated all your free time to compiling a secondary GameFAQ walkthrough for him to inevitably forget about, you could easy fill pages and pages of scholarly research on his emotional constipation.
You could say the same of your own, but at least now you can acknowledge, just for a moment, that he pissed you off. You don’t even know if Dave is aware of everything he told you. If he’s aware that somewhere in the half truths and avoidant excuses that made up your final conversation, he gave you a genuinely heartfelt and well thought out plan to assuage what came next.
He had told you to try going to sleep, giving you solace in the incredibly misunderstood mechanics behind the connection between dreaming and waking, between past and present, doomed and alpha.
There is so much you never managed to learn about Prospit and Derse. Dream selves seemed almost extraneous, a convolution in an already needlessly complex world, serving very minor or circumstantial purposes. An extra life? You never used it. Dave lost his dream self, but not his waking self. John and Jade’s both went missing after Prospit’s moon fell to Skaia.
The now apparent influence your dreams have on the waking world were even less illuminated. Code written on your wall, childhood trauma or coping mechanism on the others’. All of it for some grander purpose, all of it rendered obsolete in the wake of a doomed existence.
So you mentally thank Dave, the solace of ignorance proving to, for once, be a comfort you can enjoy rather than a challenge to overcome.
Despite it all, you still find yourself contemplating what the end will be like. Perhaps a dimming of the lights, your mind growing foggy as you struggle to recall why everything seems so far away. Perhaps it will simply feel like falling asleep, as you managed just moments ago. A deeper dream awaiting in the void beyond the Furthest Ring as your memories are siphoned away to another Rose. It is futile to speculate, however. You already know what happens at the end. It’s simple.
One moment you sit, waiting for a telltale sign that you won’t be Rose, won’t be anything anymore, and the next-